Author: sarahwp

I DELIVER PARCELS IN BEIJING by Hu Anyan

I am always surprised there a so few books about working life, given that by some measures it is the majority of many peoples’ lives. But here is one. And work is definitely the majority of this guy’s life. It’s a memoir of him trying to find a way to make a living at the bottom end of the economy in China. He has done many roles: not just parcels, but nightshift in a sort center, selling bubble tea and bikes, etc.

He doesn’t complain, but he does drop some horrifying facts, in an almost off-hand way. E.g.: he has to deliver a parcel every 4 minutes to cover his expenses; he only gets the Spring Festival off (I don’t know what the Spring Festival is, but it doesn’t sound long); and in one mall job he had for two years he only saw daylight for 15 mins a day.

It’s unclear to me if he actually thinks this is bad, or if he just thinks it is what it is. Maybe both. One thing I found interesting, and I remember from when I was a new immigrant, is how he knows the price of everything, and feels telling you about it is important information. In this day of nepo-babies, it’s incredibly refreshing to read a book where you are never unaware of what his rent is at any time. And I get it: I guess I’ve never thought about it before, but the amount of the rent is probably the single most defining piece of information about what your life will be like. In his case, it means he has to work his ass off.

I loved this little part:

“I would while away the remaining hours at the Jingtong Roosevelt Plaza, to take advantage of the air conditioning. I liked to sit in the employee dining area, behind the Acasia Food Court on the basement floor, where delivery drivers waited to pick up order and take breaks. The mall stacked spare tables and chairs there, as it was a dead end only dimly lit with what little daylight filtered in through the south-facing wall. After being under the glaring lights of the shopping area, entering that space was like stepping backstage, with the curtains drawn. The time I spent back there was very meaningful to me. I will always remember it and how I felt then.”

His parents can’t help him financially, but more than that they also can’t help him with advice. He tells us they have spent all their lives in the managed economy, so how he should survive ‘capitalism’ is something they can’t help him with. He does not (of course) make any commentary on what life was like under communism but still there are some interesting pieces. Let’s end with this part, where we can ponder our own ‘freedom’:

“Consumerism is the new ideology, a different kind of lifelong imprisonment, which only gives the appearance of freedom. Compared with restricting you from doing everything you want, it is certainly the more stable and lasting way to maintain social order – instilling in you a sense of what you need and providing the means to achieve it. But this is still a form of enslavement, one in which the individual’s main route to self-realization remains through work. ”

THE EVENING OF THE HOLIDAY by Shirley Hazzard

I really hated this book. Why did I finish it? I guess it was only 149pages. And I have been feeling guilty about how many books I have given up on this year. But god I should have given up on this one. It was some kind of love story where a married (but separated) Italian man has an affair with an English woman on holiday. They part because they cannot face the difficulties of his not being able to divorce. I mean I guess that’s why they part? I don’t know, because most of the novel was descriptions. Descriptions of landscape (bad) but also descriptions of unimportant moments (e.g., woman gets briefly lost in church). I fear this was supposed to be poetic but I just found it DUMB.

THE LAST SAMURAI by Helen DeWitt

This is a famous book I had never heard of. First off, this is not the (I have never seen it, but probably) problematic film with Tom Cruise. It is about as far from Hollywood as you can get. The author is a total rebuke to all of us weak people, having half-written an astonishing ~50 other novels before finally completing this one. During that time she worked as doughnut salesperson, dictionary text tagger, copytaker, fundraiser, night secretary etc.

The book was a huge hit, being a crazy, baggy, comic story about a single mother with high ideals. She got pregnant on a one night stand, and refuses to tell the father because she does not admire his writing. She manages the heating bills by spending their days riding the Circle line.

I found it funny and clever, but I gave up about 300 pages in. We got to a part where the child was trying to find his father and it became kind of like a series of short stories about the various potential fathers, and it just felt like it wasn’t going anywhere. I felt bad, because I just love this author’s guts. She went on to write other strange books, and struggle to find a publisher, eventually only publishing one twenty years later. What a life!

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN by Thomas Mann

I thought I would give myself the challenge of this 700pg nineteenth century novel. Well, challenge failed. I got about 250pgs in before I decided to bail. There was just way too much undirected babbling about some seriously bullsh*t theories and I just couldn’t handle it. This sort of thing is fun at a party when you are drunk and you are doing the babbling but listening to someone else: no thank you.

I’m disappointed, because I enjoyed his other book, BUDDENBROOKS. It was his first, and seethes with the kind of rage at the bourgeois you only have when you are extremely bourgeois. I read it by the pool in Jordan, and maybe that was what I needed for this book too – long uninterrupted stretches of time where I could get into whatever nonsense everyone wants to talk about ‘art’ or whatever. But I didn’t have that kind of time.

One thing I did enjoy was being reminded of the horrors of TB. It takes place in a TB sanitorium, when they had no treatment other than ‘better air’. I just want to say how EXTREMELY PRO-VAX I am.

A MOTHER’S RECKONING by Sue Klebold

Not sure how I got into this, but here is a memoir by the mother of one of the shooters at Columbine High School, Dylan Klebold. First thing to note, which really astonished me, was that school shootings were extremely uncommon at the time of Columbine. Imagine how bad it would be to find out that your son is a school shooter, without even having a model of what a ‘school shooter’ is.

This woman’s experience is truly jaw-dropping. Dylan, far from the bullied outcast I always thought he was (trenchcoat mafia etc), had in fact a bunch of friends and had been to the prom a few days before. He was also a perfectionist who was the child they ‘never had to worry about’. I guess I should not be surprised: teenagers lie to their parents. It is just astonishing how people do not know each other, even if they see each other every day.

What struck me particularly was that Dylan was not just a murderer, but also a suicide. When they eventually found his journals and went through them, it turns out he had been thinking of ending his life for at least two years. Even the week before the shooting he had been debating with his father on what dorm room to choose. Apparently this kind of apparent ‘planning’ is common in suicides – something for us to bear in mind when deciding how worried to be about someone. Her main takeaway after a decade of agonising is the simple one, that she wished she had listened more and talked less. Poor lady.

I cannot imagine how she survived this level of shock and bereavement. It puts one’s own problems very much into perspective i.e., they are minor.

PIRANESI by Susanna Clark

This is a strange book and FYI this post will be chock-full of SPOILERS.  It opens with a man living in a mysterious flooded mansion that is full of statues.  It is so large that he has never found the end.  There is only one other person who he sometime sees there, who he calls ‘the Other,’ and who sometimes brings him modern items (e.g., sneakers) but everything else he must forage for himself out of the tides that crash into the halls.   There are also thirteen skeletons, in different parts of the House, and he has developed a strange religion involving caring for the skeletons and worshipping the statues.  It sounds sad but actually he is rather happy, and has a full life engaging with the beauties of the House. 

Eventually he is rescued by a police officer, and we find out that he is a journalist, who (in a past he has now forgotten) was trapped by the Other, an occultist, in this parallel universe.  He goes back to the ‘real world,’ and – this is right at the end of the book – this is where I found it really rather lovely.  You’d think he would be happy to be back in ‘reality,’ but he misses the beauties of the House, and he brings to our reality this same kind of simple delight in the beauty of what he sees.  I think this book, while full of plot, is really a triumph of narrative voice, offering us a different, and frankly better, way of living in the world.  A way of loving the streets and trash cans and commuters like they were marble statues.

STOP TIME by Frank Conroy

Do I really need another coming of age story from an American man?  Apparently so. I’ve enjoyed this one.  Mostly, it reminded me of how boring childhood used to be.  I know people talk about it a lot, but this memoir really brought back to me what it was like before phones and television. God, we were bored.  And I had my cousins and a library card, so I was not even as bored as this guy, who had neglectful parents and a shack in Florida. 

I am always awed/frightened by the idea of memoir.  Imagine sitting down and actually trying to recall your childhood?  It feels frighteningly impossible and also frighteningly possible.  This deep in some Pandora box territory.  I also really don’t like the idea of fixing the past into my specific narrative about it.  I think the past does best when it is constantly changing, just like the future.   That said, please enjoy this baller analysis of his step dad:

“Because for all his knocking around his view of the world was incredibly naïve.  He believed important jobs were handed out in nightclubs by impulsive millionaires and that he was the sort of man they might be given to.  Spoiled all his life . . . he deeply believed that the good things in life were given to one.  Food, clothing, and the bare necessities had to be earned, but after that it was a question of being in the right place at the right time, or knowing the right people or simply being lucky.  It never occurred to Jean to work hard anything except menial labour.  He was always above his work, the secret possessor of an inner wealth untouched by the world – his image of himself.” 

I came to this book from seeing that David Foster Wallace said it was the book that made him want to be a writer.  I just love author’s recommendations of other authors.  It’s sad this was only available in second-hand.     

TRAIN DREAMS by Denis Johnson

Well this is an almost depressingly fantastic novella. It’s an eerie and beautiful story about a railway worker in Idaho in the early twentieth century.

It’s kind of frustrating for anyone to be this amazing as a writer. I looked him up and I see that he was widely acknowledged as the ‘big talent’ of his generation of Iowa’s Writers Workshop. I note I must be a bad person because I was almost relieved (!?!) to see he became a drug addict. He still went on to write more though, and apparently this is not even his best book! That is apparently something called JESUS SON. I haven’t ordered it yet because I almost dread finding out how good it is.

DADDY ISSUES by Kate Goldbeck

I really liked this author’s previous book, YOU, AGAIN, which managed the difficult task of novel-as-romcom. This one I didn’t like nearly as much. It’s just wild, and shows you how much of a mystery writing is. Even if you can do it once, it doesn’t mean you can do it again. Or at least not for this particular reader.

A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN by David Foster Wallace

I guess other people have noticed that David Foster Wallace is a good writer, but damn. I don’t even especially like essay collections, and still: damn. To be fair, I did skip a couple of the essays that seemed boring, but the ones I read were wonderful, especially the one about his time on a cruise ship.

Some of his descriptions are so perfect I think of them often. As for example a wide sky with “one or two clouds always in the distance, as if for scale,” and then later in the day the clouds “begin very slowly interacting like jigsaw pieces, and by evening the puzzle will be solved and the sky will be the colour of old dimes.” Or Montreal’s “EKG skyline.” Or when he could not see a powerpoint presentation because the room he was in was “so abundantly fenestrated.”

When are descriptions ever so interesting!?! This cruise essay is chock a block with ideas. Cruises he says “appeal mostly to older people. I don’t mean decrepitly old, but I mean like age-50+ people, for who their own mortality is something more than an abstraction.” As someone nearly 50+, I can only say: ouch.

And on the ship itself:

“It’s not an accident they’re all so white and clean, for they’re clearly meant to represent the Calvinist triumph of capital and industry over the primal decay-action of the sea”

It’s also very funny. Try:

“Since so many of my shipmates shout, I make it a point of special pride to speak extra-quietly to crewmen whose English is poor”

I had a vague memory that he killed himself, and Wikipedia tells it was even before he had a chance to get to that 50+. I couldn’t tell you why, but as well as being clever and funny and beautifully written this essay was just overwhelmingly sad.