Author: sarahwp

THE SEIGE OF KRISHNAPUR by JG Farrell

I found this book in my house, but have no idea where or when I got it. It’s part of the EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY series – a fantastic series I used to read a lot of back when I haunted the Harare City Library – so I assume I picked it up based on that alone. And once again EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY has come up with the goods. I’d never heard of this JG Farrell, but this is a banging book. It is a fictionalization of the Siege of Lucknow in 1857, which I’d also never heard of, in which a group of English colonials withstood a long siege by the rebellious Indian army. It is a hair-raising story of delicately brought up people reduced to eating rodents, but it is a also a hilarious book of ideas. Try this description of a young man:

“From the age of sixteen when he had first become interested in books, much to the distress of his father, he had paid little heed to physical and sporting matters. He had been of a melancholy and listless cast of mind, the victim of the beauty and sadness of the universe. In the course of the last two or three years, however, he had noticed that his sombre and tubercular manner was no longer having quite the effect it had one had, particularly on young ladies. They no longer found his pallor so interesting, they tended to become impatient with his melancholy. The effect, or lack of it, that you have on the opposite sex is important because it tells you whether or not you are in touch with the spirit of the times, of which the opposite sex is invariably the custodian.”

This gives you a flavour. It would have been really easy to write a book of stereotypes, because these poor starving people are so obviously getting what they richly deserve, but somehow he avoids it. Strongly recommend! So strongly in fact that I immediately read his next book TROUBLES. Of which more shortly.

WIGS ON THE GREEN by Nancy Mitford

I love Mitford’s THE PURSUIT OF LOVE. According to my blog I’ve read it an embarrassing 7 times. I was thus delighted to come across this book, her third and a very obscure one, quite accidentally. (By accidental, I mean in the Waterstones in John Lewis, when I was looking for a laundry hamper. Why is there a Waterstones in John Lewis? Why is it by the laundry hampers?)

I don’t like any of her other books, but hope springs eternal I guess. Hope was misplaced. It’s dated and awkward. Of interest though is that she was worried about being sued by her sister, the famous fascist Unity Mitford, as it is in part a satire of Unity’s strange, jokey right-wing sensibility as the ‘greatest heiress in England’ (she was 6 ft 1).

As a child, apparently, Unity shared a room with her other sister, Jessica, a committed communist. They divided the room in half with chalk, one side with pictures of Lenin and the other with swastikas. In later life, Unity travelled to Germany where she got a lot less jokey. Apparently she actually dated Hitler, or was at least used by Hitler to make Eva Braun jealous. She later shot herself when war was declared, which I for one am not at all sorry about.

What does inspire me about this book, in a strange way, is how bad it is. The style is close to THE PURSUIT OF LOVE but also very far away. It’s inspiring to see how someone can work through from this very uneven early work to that classic.

THE EMPEROR by Ryszard Kapuscinki

Here is a book in which a journalist seeks out and interviews members of the court of Haile Selassie, the last emperor of Ethiopia, immediately after he is deposed. This is not too easy, as they either dead or in hiding. He is mostly able to find the most junior servants. The guy whose job was to put the pillow under his majesty’s feet; the guy whose job was to clean up after his majesty’s dog; the guy whose job was to bow every hour on the hour, so the emperor could keep track of time passing. It’s an interesting picture of what power does to people. Some say that the interviews are a bit too on the nose, and that in fact the whole thing is a commentary on the dictatorship in Kapuscinki’s native Poland. I don’t know that it makes that much difference; one great truth in life is that one autocrat is much like another.

Particularly interesting was how Selassie lost power, in inches, to the military council named the Derg, which itself became a pretty robust dictatorship basically immediately. I have been to a museum about this in Addis, where they directly display some of what they dug up from mass graves of the period, including heart-breaking passport photos of hopeful students with enormous 70s hair who laid down their lives for a better Ethiopia. I’ve also been to Selassie’s palace, where you can see the his-n-hers bathroom set up he had (pink and blue) complete with bullet holes in the mirrors from when things got real at the end.

A sad and weird read.

GERMINAL by Emile Zola

I thought I’d give this novel a bash to see how far my attention span has degraded.  In my teens and twenties the vast majority of what I read was massive 19th century novels, and I was curious if I still had the appetite for all that tiny text,  description of landscape, and casual misogyny.  Good news: yes I do! 

This one tells about a man walking through 19th century France looking for a job. He is facing starvation when he lucks into work in a coal mine.  Cue a lot of interesting detail about 19th century mining practices.  As you can imagine its not good: while they don’t get to have much to eat, they do get to have coal lung, and lets not even get into the ponies permanently trapped down there.

I was kind of hoping this story might be about how this guy was delighted to escape from starvation to near-starvation, and went on to build a happy family life in the mines.   LOL no.  He is inspired by the idea of communism and eventually convinces everyone else to strike.  At this point, it started to feel very much like THE JUNGLE by Upton Sinclair (same story, except 1930s/America/ abbatoir), a book that wrecked me in a Chicago airport maybe twenty years ago.  I could just see where we were going with idealism crushed, people starving, immortal logic of capitalism triumphant and etc, and I just couldn’t bring myself to go through it.   So I guess the good news is my attention span’s fine, but the bad news is my emotional resilience is SHOT. 

THE MAN OF PROPERTY by John Galsworthy

This is the first in a series of novels which is part of how Galsworthy won the Nobel.  I enjoyed it, but I am not sure if I will read the whole 1000 page saga which I am told is ‘three novels and two interludes,’ wtf is an interlude.  Anyway, this first novel tells about the unhappy marriage of Soames Forsyte and his wife Irene.  Forsyte comes from a robustly bourgeois background, while Irene is poor.  I have not googled it but I am 100% sure Galsworthy comes from a family with money, because he spends a lot of time banging on about how awful families with money are, how obsessed with property, etc

The couple have little in common and she SPOILER ALERT begins an emotional affair with her husband’s architect. She had already ‘locked her door’ to Soames, and eventually he becomes so enraged that he ‘asserted his rights and acted like a man’.  I was really impressed that a book written this early takes marital rape so seriously.  Irene is extremely distressed, and the architect is too, ending up killed in a carriage accident.  Soames meanwhile is upset too, but mostly because he can’t understand why Irene won’t just accept that she, just like their big house, is his property.

DINNER WITH VAMPIRES by Bethany Joy Lenz

The sub-title of this book is ‘LIFE ON A CULT TV SHOW WHILE ALSO IN AN ACTUAL CULT,’ which pretty much sums it up.  If you watched ONE TREE HILL in the early 2000s, you will know this lady.  Her story of how she got sucked into the cult is very compelling, because she really talks you through how gradual it is.  I guess the point is, no one wakes up and decides ‘today I’ll join a cult.’  It really teaches you to be on your guard. I think the primary point they pushed was for her to not listen to herself, and her own judgement, but rather to god/the cult leader/her doubts.  Once you have conceded that your opinion is unimportant, you are basically 90% of the way there.  This poor woman had her life really wrecked.  She talks about how she decided to be public – not just in the book, but in daily life – about being in a cult, and about how embarrassed she is that hers was not even one of the big, weird cults.  She’s ashamed to have to say there was no KoolAid or judgement day.  It was just a small, Bible-based group. But it did the business anyway.  And it’s still out there in Idaho, ruining people’s lives.

TOM LAKE by Ann Pratchett

I wanted to like this book because Pratchett is a good writer and it’s about productions of OUR TOWN, a play I love.  I got about 200 pages in but I just had to quit.  The story is set on a cherry farm, and involves this woman telling her three grown daughters the story of her early life, in which she considered being an actress and dated someone who went on to be a movie star.  I don’t like books where we have to believe someone is telling someone else a book length anecdote, but okay, I was willing to get past it (see HEART OF DARKNESS and etc).  I even enjoyed the flashback parts where she was young and dumb.  But the current-day parts were so gruellingly annoying I just couldn’t.  It was a really creepy, the nuclear-family-is-all-there-is, the mother-wants-to-eat-her-young, kind of vibe.  At one point, the woman is saying how she allows her eldest daughter to have her phone on at the dinner table in case she has to go deal with an emergency, as she is a veterinarian.  However, she proudly tells us: “My husband and I turn off our phones because everyone we want to talk to is here.”

VOM! That was when I put it down.  My blog tells me I had an equally violent reaction to Pratchett’s BEL CANTO. I’m not sure if there is something wrong with me or with Pratchett.

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK by Joan Lindsay

The author described writing this book very quickly after a particularly vivid dream, and I totally get it.  It tells about some girls at an Australian boarding school in the late nineteenth century who go to a picnic at a local beauty spot.  Three of them plus a teacher go on a short walk, and SPOILER ALERT   only one of them returns. They are searched for, but never found.  That’s pretty much it.  

This sounds kind of annoying – you never find out what happened, it is like an open-ended mystery – but it is actually weirdly compelling, and the images have stuck with me for a long time since reading it.  Kind of like a dream. 

WILD by Cheryl Strayed

For some reason I thought this was going to be kind of cheesy – maybe because it was made into a movie that was marketed as ‘inspiring’? – but in fact I did find it kind of inspiring.

It tells the true story of a woman in her 20s whose life has spiralled since her mother’s death, with divorce, heroin usage, and etc. She therefore decides to walk thousands of miles along the Pacific Crest Trail, which goes up the West Coast of the US, from Mexico to Canada. She is ill prepared; she does not try out her pack before she begins, and once there finds out she cannot even lift it off the floor. She gets stronger as she goes along, losing 6 of her 10 toenails to the trail. She comes across coyotes, elks, and bears multiple times. She is threatened with sexual assault, but only the once, which is I think surprisingly good going for 3 months on your own, even if it is in the wilderness.

I was especially struck by how distant the 1990s felt. She does not have a phone, which seemed to me incredibly and impossibly lonely. I don’t know this surprises me so much: I was an adult before I had a phone myself, and I don’t remember being lonely without it.

I guess there is some deep evolutionary drive behind the long walk, because so many human societies have sanctioned it with the idea of a pilgrimage. It was interesting to read this very personal, spontaneous version of this idea, and to see how, toenails aside, it helped this lady get a handle on her life.

INTERMEZZO by Sally Rooney

I am a mega-fan of Rooney’s first book, CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS, which is one of the handful of books I have ever read twice in a row. I have been less of a fan of her other books, and especially of the last one BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU? Much of what I enjoyed about the first one was the comic and contemporary spirit, and as we went along I felt we were getting more and more miserable. This one is a return to form. It tells the story a pair of brothers and their various romantic entanglements, and is exceedingly more-ish. I enjoyed it a lot, especially the journey of one character who has to slowly give up his implicit assumption that he is and can be ‘normal,’ which I found to be quite liberating.

My only issue with it was tbh a bit of a political one. In all Rooney’s books there is a strong perspective that anyone who works in any area of commerce is obviously some kind of sad, dead-eyed zombie in slave to our capitalist masters. Apparently the only acceptable professions are like lawyer, journalist, arts administrator. You can work as e.g., a barista, but only if you feel utterly polluted by it. I just find this bizarrely decadent. As if any of these delightful professions would exist without this economic model. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.