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THE TWO KINDS OF DECAY by Sarah Manguso

A fine memoir about a rare illness. The author has an autoimmune disease which begins by paralyzing your feet and slowly moves up your body, killing you if it gets to your diaphragm (so you can’t breath). As treatment she has all the blood in her body replaced every other day (!!!). This goes on at various periods for years, until she goes to a new doctor who prescribes her massive doses of steroids. This stops the problem but gives her profound depression.

It’s a pretty horrifying story, especially as it begins pretty randomly, with a head cold, in her early 20s, and then dominates the next ten years of her life. What I particularly enjoyed was the fact that she avoided giving it a clean ‘narrative’ – she writes it to us sort of in bits, as she remembers it, which I found very affecting. It was less factually true but seemed closer somehow to how real experience is.

REALLY GOOD, ACTUALLY by Monica Heisey

This is a comic novel about a short marriage and a long painful divorce. The writer has previously written for TV shows (Schitt’s Creek) and magazines. You can kind of tell: this novel is absolutely packed with jokes and cleverness. It’s like reading an entire novel of one liners. I can only imagine the immense effort this must have taken. Here for example is her taking up buying self help books:

I would open one and put a flower on top of it, then take a picture and imagine changing everything about my personality and core friendship group to allow myself to post that image online.

Or at one of many efforts to have hobbies or interests – at a gaming arcade:

. . . I watched a group of twentysomething girls cheering while one of their friends whacked a pinball machine. They were having a level of fun I’d never seen outside of a commercial for a chain restaurant.

I have read three novels recently about women and breakups and I am delighted once again to have not grown up in the developed world. I’m not saying I feel amazing about my body, but I just can’t get over how much women from developed countries seem to worry about how they look. Truly I wonder if it is patriarchy at work – how much mental real estate is being used on Spanx rather than on seizing the means of production.

I’M SORRY YOU FEEL THAT WAY by Rebecca Wait

Speaking as a middle class person who lives in London I think I have had about as much as I can handle of novels by middle class people who live in London. I know this is not fair, but this book annoyed me. London has 10 million people in it, more than some countries (less than mid-sized Chinese cites), all of whom are I am sure very interesting and worthy of novels and etc. In any case, to this book.

It tells the story of a couple of generations of a family, each from their own perspective. This isa promising idea, and some of the he-said she-said of this I enjoyed. One sister in particular is uncertain of herself and yet helpful to everyone, without getting much appreciation. The framing was that we were supposed to feel for her, but I just wanted to smack her. I don’t know if this makes me a bad person, but honestly here’s how I feel: it’s not everyone else’s problem if you choose to be a doormat. That’s on you.

TRESPASSES by Louise Kennedy

I had for some reason failed to finish four books before this one. I was starting to wonder if there was something wrong with me. Then I went through this one at speed, how I like to read, like an experienced runner. So I guess it was the books, not me.

This book was a straightforward love story, complicated by the lovers being on either side of the religious divide in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. I have yet to understand all the strong feelings in Ireland, and especially what it has to do with religion, but certainly I got that there was a lot of trauma. Perhaps unsympathetically, or just because I am an immigrant, I just kept thinking: why don’t you just leave? Sometimes geography really is the answer

I note that this book is the first from a woman who spent the last thirty years as a chef. I love that, people who reinvent themselves so dramatically.

ACTS OF DESPERATION by Megan Nolan

I read this book in a single day. It is the story of a relationship that begins badly and ends worse. This young Irish woman feels lost in her life and is drinking too much. What makes her feel whole and special is “love,” and she duly falls in love, or maybe something worse than that, with a guy called Ciaran.

She gets pretty crazy, though to be fair he does ask for it. After they have been sleeping together for like 6 months he give her a gift and and a piece of paper on which he writes that she is beautiful and he loves her. Then he just does not contact her for a week (!), and when after multiple missed calls she threatens to come over, he tells her it is over. That’s it! No explanation. I challenge anyone to not lose their mind over that. In any case they do end up getting back together because she basically eliminates all aspects of her self and becomes a receptacle for what she imagines he wants. This is a glib sort of summary, and she struggles over how to explain what she is doing:

I hate to write (her explanations), to put my facts in the hands of people who will sneer and feel annoyed by their tawdry debasement.

I can’t lie, she is debasing herself. I felt for her. It is pretty bad. She goes home to the countryside:

When I go home to Waterford to try to even out and reconnect with myself and my past, people seem to be dying all the time all around me, and I argue with my parents about my reluctance to engage with them. I don’t want to hear about the illnesses and tragedies, and am amazed by their ability to keep attending funeral after funeral.

Somehow this wakes her up. Eventually she starts cheating on him a lot, asking creepy men to be rough with her. When Ciaran finds out he is pretty rough with her too. She runs away to Greece where she – not totally believably – finds some ability to be on her own. Mostly, this last part made me angry about Brexit. These old people and their conservative enablers have made it impossible for me to go to Athens to sort out my man issues!

O CALEDONIA by Elspeth Barker

Here is a book in which someone is very, very angry about their Scottish childhood. It opens with the tombstone of a teenage girl that reads:

Chewing gum, chewing gum sent me to my grave

My mother told me not to, but I disobeyed

This gives you a taster of the extremely bizarre world of this book. From page one, you get the feeling you are in the hands of someone who knows what they want to say, and is going to go ahead and say it. And indeed the introduction tells me that this was the author’s first and only book, written in her fifties, and when it arrived at her agent:

It needed no editing. It was simply there in all its dark and glittering glory.

It’s a story of a girl growing up, and is almost painful to read, reminding you how incredibly difficult it is to grow up. Some of it is just a bit LOL, as when her breasts start to arrive, and her mother tells her that “a bosom is a beautiful and natural thing.” Her parents then “went away on a spring holiday, leaving Janet a small book to read. It was an account of more of the beautiful and natural things which lay in store for her. Janet was appalled.”

But much of it is just much harder and sadder. Her mother does not much like her, she is not very popular at school, and the amount of non-consensual groping that apparently went on in the first half of the twentieth century is honestly astounding. She is later badly affected by Hiroshima (you can see she is not the most ordinary little girl):

She could no longer have faith in God or man. She transferred any religious impulse which might yet linger within her to the Greek gods who did not even pretend to care especially for humanity or to value its efforts and aspirations, being far too busy with their own competing plots, feuds and passions.

I found this interesting. Indeed, life being so unfair and random, you can see where the idea of the Greek gods does kind of make more sense than the Christian god. It is interesting Western culture has gone for the latter.

MAN TIGER by Eka Kurniawan

Here is a book by a famed Indonesian author that I read in Indonesia. This will be hard to believe, but truly it was conincidental. So desperate am I for reading matter that I bought this on some New York Times recommendation, and only vaguely noticed where it was set till I began reading it. It is at first all about this guy who has a white tiger living inside him. I was all set for a great heaping dose of magical realism. But in fact this is a delicate little story about an unhappy family. It set in a rural location, and charmingly assumes a lot of knowledge of Indonesian small-scale farming. Here we are in one character’s backstory, about his rice farm, on page one:

Jahro, who had never heard of Orion – the short season cultivar – replaced his rice with peanuts, which were more resilient and less trouble.

Imagine never having heard of Orion (!). There is one line that haunts me, nothing to do with rice farming, all about the old father looking back:

The years had gone by so quickly, life receding in the distance like a train narrowly missed

It was a sweet and sad little book. The white tiger really was neither here nor there.

DRIVE YOUR PLOUGH OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD by Olga Tokarczuk

This book has been much admired. I can say it was okay. The most effective part is the narrative voice, which is of an eccentric old lady who loves animals, astrology, and the Czech Republic, and is given to charmingly erratic capitalization. Try this:

The path in front of Oddball’s house is so very neatly gravelled that it looks like a special kind of gravel, a collection of identical pebbles, hand-picked in a rocky underground factory run by hobgoblins. Every fold of the clean curtains hanging in the windows is exactly the same width; he must use a special device for that. And the flowers in his garden are neat and tidy, standing straight and slender, as if they’d been to the gym.

There are a series of murders of hunting men, in the area, and in a very predictable turn of events it is SPOLIER ALERT BUT SURELY YOU FIGURED IT OUT it is the old lady.

RIDDLEY WALKER by Russell Hoban

Here is a novel of the post-apocalypse. It is all written in a strange made-up mashed up language, like language might be thousands of years and a few nuclear bombs into the future. It is extraordinarily believable and clever, also very annoying. A sample:

If the way is diffrent the end is diffrent. Becaws the end aint nothing only part of the way its jus that part of the way where you come to a stop. The end cud be any part of the way its in every step of the way thats why you bes go ballsy

I couldn’t finish it. As a younger, more eager person I probably could have. I can’t figure out if that is my loss or my gain.

NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS by Angela Carter

I loved this book but also did not love it. It tells the story of a woman born with wings. This is the nineteenth century, and she is female, so this means she ends up almost immediately in a brothel, and then in some kind of creepy situation with a man who is going to kill her. Maybe you don’t even need wings for this to happen for you, maybe it’s enough just to be poor.

In any case it is full of wonderful images. Here we are on her underwear: “elaborately intimate garments, wormy with ribbons, carious with lace, redolent of use, that she hurled around the room apparently at random. ” Or here she is talking about what she saw in the air: “the great dome of St Paul’s until it looked like the divine pap of the city, which for want of any other, I must needs call my natural mother” I never thought before how much St Paul’s looks like a breast, and now I will never be able to think of it any other way.

On the other hand, the book did kind of feel like it was going nowhere. It went from image to image and at some point I was just like SNORE. Probably I should have kept pushing through, but what can I say. Time is short.