Author: sarahwp

THE SECOND SLEEP by Robert Harris

I rarely read thrillers, but this came up on a lot of ‘best of 2019’ lists so I gave it a try.  It was fun.  The cover screams ‘book for boys,’ complete with stupid gold font for the author’s name, while the name itself sounds like it could have been created by some kind of generic best-selling-man-name generator. 

It begins with a priest going to bury another priest, who was a noted antiquarian.  You think at first it is set in the medieval period, SPOILER ALERT, but then when he gets to the dead priest’s house, he examines his collection of antiquities and you find it is lots of bits of plastic and glass, and one smooth and shiny box, with “on the back the ultimate symbol of the ancients’ hubris and blasphemy –  an apple with a bite taken out of it.”

BOOM! That’s right, it’s not the far past, it’s the far future, and my particular favourite far future, which is the post-apocalypse.  Side point, it’s interesting how no one ever calls the present day the pre-apocalypse, even though that’s clearly what it is. 

This setting is so fun that it triumphantly carries us through the book.  These future people are so mystified by  our leavings – the concrete pillars that supported motorways; an item which:

 opened like a book.  A pane of glass on one side; on the other, squares of black plastic, each inlaid with a letter of the alphabet. 

It makes you see the modern world in a whole new way. 

That said, I can’t say the book exactly went anywhere.  There was a lot of plot, but not to very much effect, and the author at the end clearly recognized his difficulties and without shame SPOILER ALERT randomly killed off everyone in a mudslide. That’s what I call efficiency in novel writing.  

PRIESTDADDY by Patricia Lockwood

This memoir got a lot of good reviews, and it seemed like I would like it.  It tells about the author’s family, and in particular her father, who is a very eccentric Catholic priest..  Some of it was very funny.  Try this: 

(My father) seems overjoyed to see me.  Has he forgotten what I’m like?

And

When we came home later, my father was wearing his most transparent pair of boxer shorts, to show us he was angry, and drinking Bailey’s Irish cream liquer out of a miniature crystal glass, to show us his heart was broken

And

My father despises cats.  He believes them to be Democrats.  He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur

Though I must comment: surely everyone knows cats are Republicans. Also, why the pretentious failure to capitalize Hillary Clinton’s name?

The book was sometimes beautiful.  Here is a night time drive in the American South: 

Through our rolled down windows we could hear the round rattle of the palms, crickets applauding, bullfrogs belching out their personal ads

But overall I found I couldn’t really connect with it.  This is partly a matter of style – it is so intensely poetic, my query would be, why not just write a poem?  Example:

Tomorrow, in that church, the songs I like best will flame out their brief lives, there and then gone, while the people hold soft and slumping candles under their chins and circles of cardboard catch the notes of hot wax.  They will return again next year.

I know some love this sort of thing, but for me, I am like: M’KAY.

But a more profound problem for me was what seemed to me a lack of heart.  Truly her family were strange and her path odd.  Her father chose to buy a guitar rather than pay for her college.  She ran away to marry a man she met on the internet back when the internet was just message boards.  And yet somehow I don’t feel I understand how she felt about any of it.  Everything is filtered through a distant ‘amusement’ which is no doubt where many people eventually get to with their families.  But for me, for a book so ‘revealing’ I didn’t think it revealed much of anything.  

 

LADY OF QUALITY by Georgette Heyer

In this novel, Georgette Heyer largely dispenses with having a plot and just goes full on in enjoying her supporting characters.  And I enjoyed them too.  I bought this at the last minute when I made the discovery that books about solitary confinement (SOLITARY) and rape (THINGS WE DIDN’T TALK ABOUT WHEN I WAS A GIRL) were not the most ideal for when you are trying to relax on holiday.  You really shouldn’t be lying in your hotel bed blubbing gently about systemic racism in Louisiana while on vacation. There’s plenty of time to do that at home.

So I went to Heyer, as I so often do at such times, and she provided just the gentle cheering up I needed.  Apparently this was her last Regency romance, written in 1972, and I think it shows: she can hardly be bothered to go through the motions.  Oddly, I read her first, REGENCY BUCK (written 1935, and which invented the genre) the last time I was on holiday.  By the end, apparently she was only churning them out to pay the bills (mostly tax) while she worked on what she thought would be her ‘magnum opus’: a medieval trilogy covering the House of Lancaster from 1393 to 1435. 

She died before she could finish this, which she thought would be her most important and serious work.  Perhaps there’s a lesson for us there, that we better get busy with what’s important before it’s too late.  Though on the other hand, apparently what she did manage to finish of the trilogy was totally panned when it came out. Her romances, trash though she clearly thought they were, solider on: REGENCY BUCK is nearly a hundred years old and still in print.  So perhaps there is still a lesson there, but it’s going to take a little thought to find out what it is.

I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY NECK by Nora Ephron

This book of essays contains some profound truths about the female experience.  Here for example is an extract from an essay about maintenance, specifically as it refers to your appearance:

We begin, I’m sorry to say, with hair.  I’m sorry to say it because the amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming.  Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death. 

She also has some wise words on aging, and particularly (and unfortunately) raised my consciousness about my neck:

Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth.  You have to cut open a redwood tree to see how old it is, but you wouldn’t have to if it had a neck . . . Every so often I read a book about age, and whoever’s writing it says it’s great to be old.  It’s great to be wise and sage and mellow; it’s great to be at the point where you understand just what matters in life.  I can’t stand people who say things like this. What can they be thinking?  Don’t they have necks? 

She doesn’t enjoy aging, but, in what could be a watchword for us all at every birthday, her last essay is called ‘Consider The Alternative,’ which is good advice.

I laughed a lot in reading this book, but what surprised me is how much I thought about it afterwards.  It was full of interesting ideas.  Here she is on the end of her second marriage:

Why hadn’t I realized how much of what I thought of as love was simply my own highly developed gift for making lemonade?  What failure of imagination had caused me to forget that life was full of other posibilities, including the possibility that eventually I would fall in love again?

I love that – I often, when I feel trapped, ask myself what my ‘failure of imagination’ is that I think I have to stay where I am. Self-indulgently, let me end with her celebration reading.  It’s pretty much how I feel, and it’s rare I hear someone else express it.   I say rare: in my real life, with people I actually know, I guess it’s pretty much never. 

Reading is everything.  Reading makes me feel I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person.  Reading makes me smarter.  Reading gives me something to talk about later on.  Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself.  Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. 

x

A PERFECT SPY by John Le Carre

Some call this Le Carre’s greatest novel.  These people need to smoke less crack.  What they really mean is that it’s not ‘just’ a spy novel, but a spy novel with daddy issues.  Great, heaping masses of daddy issues.  This is Le Carre’s most autobiographical novel, and my god but it shows.
 
The story is about a British spy who suddenly disappears, leaving his wife and his posting in Vienna.  Very swiftly his employers begin to suspect he has been a double agent for decades.  The novel has three strands; first, an account of where the spy has disappeared to; second, the text of a long letter about his life he is writing to his son; and third, the search of his wife and his employers to find him.  Most of the novel is the letter, which is very much about his very tough childhood, with his conman father, and leads to the revelation of whether he is a double, a triple, or perhaps just a single agent.

To me it seemed kind of slow, with a bit too much repetition of the same themes: the loveless child, the danger of lying, etc.  I guess in that way we can see it was based in life.  In general one’s own life does seem to go on and on with the same rather boring themes you can’t seem to break free of.  I guess that’s what therapy is for.

INDONESIA, ETC: EXPLORING THE IMPROBABLE NATION by Elizabeth Pisani

I read this book while on holiday in Indonesia, as I am too much of a good girl to enjoy a vacation without attempting to learn something about the country I am visiting.   What it made me feel is that even after three weeks in Indonesia I have barely been to Indonesia at all.

This is largely because it is enormous, the 4thmost populous country on earth (Jakarta tweets more than any other city!), 5000km from end to end, and made up of thousands of islands, each of which have a very different way of living.  I enjoyed learning lots of stuff about Indonesia, and will even more enjoy telling people this stuff later at dinner parties so I look well informed. 

However what I found most interesting was not the social or economic history but the author’s travel itself.  She tries to say with ordinary Indonesians everywhere.  Indonesia is not  a very wealth country, so  most of those people are quite poor.  She spends a good amount of time telling you about individuals and their personal lives, and I can’t think when else I have read a book that genuinely tries to cross the class gap.  At first I was rather suspicious of this effort, as it could very easily turn into that creepy ‘poverty tourism’ of some township tours, but she is herself aware of the danger of becoming “one of those slightly earnest foreigners who has gone native.”  At some point she has a melt down, and after that I liked her much better:

I closed my door and suddenly seven months of staying in damp, windowless flea-pits, or being woken at four by the mosque, five by the chickens and six by the school kids, seven months of defending my childlessness, being asked why I didn’t have any friends. . . seven months in a world without loo paper, alcohol or English conversation, seven months of wearing the same six pairs of knickers, . . . of getting over foot rot only to come out in a mystery rash, . . . seven months of trying to fit into a world that was, quite simply, not my world. .

She bursts into tears and then pulls herself together (as she needed to go and see the crocodile shaman), but after this point I realized that she was trying to do something in this book beyond an ordinary travelogue.  Or perhaps that’s just it, she is trying to do a travelogue of the ordinary. I’ve never read anything quite like it. 

CHILDHOOD by Tove Ditlevsen

Here’s a book that makes you realize why there aren’t very many female authors in history.  Tove grows up poor in Copenhagen in the early twentieth century. However such is her love of writing that she can say:

. . on my fifth birthday (my father) gave me a wonderful edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, without which my childhood would have been grey and dreary and impoverished

I would think with the rickets and the diphtheria and everything you can still qualify as having an impoverished childhood. (Side point: It’s quite refreshing really to realize anyone was ever poor in these Scandinavian countries; on my side I am quite exhausted by all this blond hair and equality and hygge.).

She is, as are it seems many aspiring writers, a misfit. (Why is nobody’s memoir ever about how popular they were?). Far from school days being the best days of your life, she says that:

Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own.

The point is anyway that she is desperate to be a writer, and as this is the first of a trilogy, we can only assume she succeeds, but I can’t imagine how, as the books ends with her being forced out of school at fourteen (reason: she is female) and starting work as a child minder. I couldn’t help but think of the many thousands of girls of limited means in centuries past who longed just as passionately as her and didn’t make it.  And that’s only thinking of the tiny subset who lucked into literacy and so could even consider a writing career.  I will read the next two books in the trilogy and let you know how she managed it.

CAYLPSO by David Sedaris

What I got from this is that David Sedaris is older and sadder than he used to be.  In 2011 I went on a big Sedaris binge, and read almost everything he ever wrote.  This year, on an unexpected holiday in Barcelona, I borrowed his first book THE SANTALAND DIARIES. So it is especially jarring to read his latest.  In the first he is poor and young; in this one is rich and old.  I’m not quite sure how you contrive to be unhappy when you have enough money to buy a second home (by the beach) or Japanese trousers that‘cost as much as a MacBook Air,’ but he is managing it.

Perhaps it is just him.  Or perhaps it just shows that, horrifyingly enough,  money really doesn’t make you happy.  Or perhaps, even worse, it’s shows that to get older is to get sadder.  You have more time for sad things to happen to you, so the odds are against you.  His sister, from whom he was estranged, killed herself. His mother is dead, his father is ninety-one and doing some serious hoarding.

You feel him sort of flailing for his old style, trying to have last lines that neatly and unexpectedly complete every essay (a miracle of his past books) but somehow, at least for me, it all seems a bit effortful.  That said, Sedaris not at his best is about ten times better than most.  A small sample:

I started seeing people wearing face masks in the airport and decided that I hated them.  What bugged me I realized, was their flagrant regard for their own lives.  It seemed not just overcautious but downright conceited.  I mean, why should they live?

This really made me laugh.  I feel this way about people with their raw/paleo/whatever diets, but I’m not ballsy enough to say so.

EXPECTATION by Anna Hope

Apparently once you reach your late thirties you lose your sense of humour.  Or at least that is what I get from this book, which targets my demographic with a surgical precision that is almost embarrassing. 


It focuses on three women in their late thirties in London, and is in some cases uncomfortably close to the bone.  One of them is a struggling actress, one is a successful but personally unfulfilled businesswoman, and one is some kind of flake who gets pregnant by mistake and moves to the provinces (or, as I like to call it, that place where they voted for Brexit and now I hope get to experience the full consequences they so richly deserve).

You can tell it is a book about London from the very first page, that builds up a picture of a house on the edge of a park in which the women live.  Outside is a gorgeous summer’s day with lots of picnickers:

Every so often one of those people will look up towards the house.  They know what the person is thinking – how do you get to live in a house like that?

Yes, house prices are indeed the main thing you do think about at such a moment, I can myself confirm. 

These ladies go through various ups and downs, and I did enjoy the great specificity of a moment and a place that I know well.  But for me it had an over-arching sense of sadness and compromise (no, you can’t be an actress, no, you can’t be pregnant, etc), that I can’t say I recognize as part of middle age.  I also was mystified by the great emphasis put on the achievements of women of the previous generation.  One older woman (apparently un-ironically) asks:

We fought for you.  We fought for you to be extraordinary.  We changed the world for you and what have you done with it?

I would have thought the case against the baby boomer fat cats was well established.  Mostly what we are doing is cleaning up the mess they made. 

Lastly, there was lots of stuff like this. 

Bitter red leaves mixed in amongst the green, walnuts and goat’s cheese crumbled on the top.  There is olive oil in a separate bowl, with a pool of balsamic at the bottom.  Good, chewy bread with salty butter. 

It made me want to beat them to death with their own Waitrose bags. 

THINGS WE DIDN’T TALK ABOUT WHEN I WAS A GIRL by Jeannie Vanasco

In this memoir a woman interviews the boy who raped her in high school.  It’s very interesting, as while we have all read many accounts of what it is like to be raped, I can hardly think of any accounts of what it’s like to be a rapist. 

This guy was her good friend in high school.  One night when she was back home from college, she got drunk with some of her high school friends.  She was taken down to his basement room to sleep it off.  Once there he took her clothes off, fingered her, and then masturbated over her, all the while murmuring about how she shouldn’t worry and it was all a dream.  She cried throughout. 
A few days later he called her to apologize.  She said it was okay and said he should red FRANNY AND ZOOEY, which was one of her favourite novels at that time.  She then didn’t speak to him for the next fifteen years.

The book is structured around her decision to try and write about this event, and the series of phone calls she had with her rapist about how he thought about that night.  Remarkably, despite the fact that the statue of limitations has not run out on the offense, he agrees to talk to her.  It appears that the event has troubled him for years, and particularly he is haunted by the sound of her crying.  However, unsatisfyingly, he can’t really say why he did it, other than that he wanted to. 

He’s currently a thirty-five year old virgin, and doesn’t have many friends.  He was smart in high school, but found college tough, and now works at a camera shop.  (Here he is on life at university:

I mean, did I have a hard time re-conceptualizing myself as a not-genius?  Yeah, that took some processing. 

This sort of confidence is why men are men and women are not men).

He talks about how he used to shoplift as a young man, just to see what he could get away with, and what I concluded in the end is that this was probably what was going on with the assault. 

I felt rather sorry for the author herself by the end.  She has had what seems a remarkably large number of non-consensual sexual experiences (her first boyfriend, four years her senior, forced her into oral sex; she was date raped; she was fondled by a high school teacher); and seems to have a lot of issues around men in general (she is glad her father is dead at the time of this rape because she doesn’t want to make him unhappy by telling him about it (?!?)).  I can’t think of a single significant non-consensual sexual experience I’ve had (I mean other than groping or whatever, but that’s just being alive and female).  Also if something did happen to me I would tell my dad about it ASAP because he would sort it out immediately. 

Also depressingly, it seems to me clear she lives in ‘cancel culture’ because she spends much of the book worrying that people will critique her for giving her rapist so much of a voice in her book.  I mean jesus lady, it’s your rape.  You do what you want with it.