Author: sarahwp

MONEY IS EVERYTHING is the title of the first chapter of this book, and from this we already know we will enjoy it.  It tells the story of an immigrant woman in Paris who figures out how to briefly become a drug lord/lady.

Schnookie was the dog who had drowned in ’38 when she and her family were crossing the Danube in a dinghy to escape the Germans.  The fox-terrier had panicked and leaped overboard, to be swept away by the current before the eyes of my powerless mother.   It’s the only time in my life I cried, she would add, in a quavering voice to whomever was listening at the time.  Needless to say, I would feel like killing her whenever she put on this display.   

Amidst this defeated humanity, I would find my mother strapped into some sort of a capsule, her blind, staring eyes like saucers, fixed on the ceiling, waiting for the heavens to open like the doors of a store on the first day of the sales.

There we all were, part of that great, middle-class mass being strangled by its elderly. It was reassuring.

Among that entire domestic fauna, the only one to have any importance in the collective memory of the family was a rabbit Miguel had once brought home, a poor ordinary rabbit that the dogs had constantly licked until all its hair fell out and it became the only bald member of its species, boasting an iridescent coat that gave it the appearance of a large-eared reptile.

The rabbit is never mentioned again.  Also why were the dogs licking it so much? No one knows.  The book is full of stuff like this.  Someone dies, and here is the response:

“You can bury her now,” I said.  “And while  you’re at it, I added, you might as well bury my mother-in-law’s head.  It’s been gathering dust down in the basement since God knows when.”

I mean: ?

It makes for a strangely absorbing, and very dense book, full of characters and ideas.  It covers about a hundred years from the  late 1800s up to a unnamed dictator’s rise (i.e., Pinochet).  From a Zimbabwean perspective, I note once again how glad I am to have only a relatively inefficient dictatorship.  Apparently you can really torture a lot people once you get organized.

It was mostly enjoyable for its lush bizarreness, but I did enjoy this perspective on why it can sometimes be better not to actually get to be with the one you love:

Apparently Marias is an acclaimed Spanish author, and a likely Nobel winner.  All I can say, based on the evidence of this one novel, is that he sure knows how to make a spy story boring. 

A very odd book about how hard it is to forgive unless you forget.  It also includes dragons.

It’s set (sort of) in an imagined Britain after the fall of the Roman empire.  An elderly couple set out on a journey to see a son they have not seen in many years.  The complication is that they can hardly remember him, or much else, as they and everyone they meet is affected by a strange forgetfulness.  There are some other complications too, including elderly knights, pixies, fanatical monks, and so on.

It has that sense of dread that fantasy novels usually have, the idea that ‘something’ is coming for you.  But the ‘something’ is not like Gollum, or a cenatur, or whatever; it is the past.  Or more specifically, the memory of the past.  The elderly couple are deeply in love, but there is a terrible sense that if they could remember everything they knew about each other, from a lifetime together, they would not be.

I found it bleak and depressing, despite the faeries and the dragons.  The basic message seemed to be: who would love anyone if they knew it all?   I mean, I am feeling it.  I get it.  This might perhaps be because I read most of it when I couldn’t sleep in the very early hours in a hotel room in Luxembourg.  That’s really a setting to make you consider what bad choices brought you there.

In this novel a man is surprised to find that Pandora’s box is full of bad things.

Horrifyingly, it is the story of the author’s actual marriage.  It is TMI and yet strangely transfixing.  This guy is the editor of Karl Ove Knausgaard, and like him his novels are based on making his personal life public.  In this case he gives himself the project of trying to imagine his wife’s affair from her perspective.  It’s a premise both bold and stomach-churning.

This protaganist/author and his wife are both in relationships when they meet, and they leave their partners for each other.  The marry and have children and are pretty happy for ten years.  The husband is kind of titillated by the idea of his wife with other men, and likes to involve her in fantasies about this.  He also tells her their marriage is so strong that he feels she can be free to explore within their relationship.  It is all almost creepily modern, like so much about Scandinavia.  Then the wife starts to spend a lot of time with one of her colleagues at work, and all of this modernity goes straight to the wall, replaced with rage and jealousy.

He does kind of an interesting job trying to imagine what his wife thought, though some of it is very clearly a man imaging what women think.  E.g.: “He was taller than me, she’d noticed that immediately.”.  It also has moments of unexpected comedy:

Paul Edvin and I were left to cultivate that male form of human interaction which involved giving each other brief lectures on one thing or another. 

But I think this lengthy extract from the end, when its practically over, will best capture what is most eyeball peeling about this book:

I am holding my penis, the thought occurs to her that she is seeing this for the last time, it goes white and then red then white then red again, I pull the foreskin back and forth, slowly at first and then faster, rhythmically, in a movement somehow disconnected from any other in the world.  Soon I’m just a man she has known, one that she lived intimately with, once in an earlier life.  She looks at my hand as it moves . .  in that unique way that resembles nothing else.  Well, yes, it resembles a body itching, a dog scratching behind its ear, its tail slapping rhythmically against the floor.  And that’s it precisely, she thinks. I’m having a scratch, it’ll soon be over, I’m trying to rid myself of a dreadful itch.  

Officially, more than I ever wanted to know about anyone’s divorce.  And yet it was refreshing to find someone willing to be this honest about how wrong it all went, foreskin and all

This guy has spent a LOT of time thinking about zombies.  He reminds me of someone who has set themselves the task of making an entire cookbook using, say, guavas.  It is guavas stewed, guavas fried, guavas fricassed, but instead of guavas, zombies. 

I chose to read this book because of its amazing sub-title: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE ZOMBIE WAR.  Let’s face it that is sweet as hell and I wish I had thought of it.  Boldly, this book has no central character or continuous plot.  It presents a series of imagined interviews with people all over the world and different stages of the aforementioned zombie war.

I enjoyed his idea that one reason for the spread of the zombie virus was the large scale organ transplant tourism industry in China.  I was horrified to find that this is quite true: China has a thriving industry, and very short wait times, because China is removing organs from prisoners involuntarily (see here).  I can’t believe it, but apparently it is true.  I can’t quite think what to do with this information.  I guess I will start to take leaflets from the Falun Gong protestors outside the British Museum, for one thing, pathetically small though it is.

This view, of how societal issues today could let the zombies in was a theme throughout: there were false cures, and fake news, and unexpected nuclear wars.  Eventually humanity is saved when South Africa develops a plan to save only some people, leaving the rest as ‘bait’.  This works, and is adopted globally, but is not pretty.  Horrifyingly there is much about how the zombies don’t even die in water, so those who escape in submarines often surface to find themselves covered in the living dead. 

So all in all an uplifting read, reminding you that if nothing else, at least you’re alive.

I don’t comment on books by authors I know, so this one is just for the record.

I chose this book for two reasons.

One, I wanted to read something by Didion, but couldn’t face her most famous book, THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING because I feared the subject of recovering from her husband’s death was too grim. I have lost my youthful ability to feel invincible while reading about death.

Two, Bret Easton Ellis, is on the back cover, saying “for a few decades,this was my favourite American novel .. revelatory.”  Now usually I take a writer’s recommendation of a book because I admire them. In this case it was morbid curiosity.  Let’s be clear, Ellis is obviously a misogynist, and anyone who admires the drivel that is AMERICAN PSYCHO probably is too.  So how can it be that he admires a woman’s book so much?  That’s very unexpected.

Having read the book, it is fully to be expected.  It is about a lady who is so unhappy that she will agree to have sex with anyone, even if actively unpleasant.  Ideal for Ellis, it’s no wonder he loves it. It’s basically all the rape with none of the questions.

That said, I’m glad to have read it.  It’s remarkably cleverly done, with fragments of chapters that go back and forth in time, evoking a mid-twentieth century Hollywood that is unnervingly believable, and cohering into the story of a woman’s crumbling life.  But at least some men got to have sex with her on the way.  That’s all that really matters.

I have been on a big re-reading kick recently.  It’s not something I’ve ever been in to before, but all of a sudden: CALL ME BY YOUR NAME twice, CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS four times, and now EARLY WORK a second time.  

This is a book I really, really like, and even more the second time around.  With CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS, there is something in the way the way she structures the plot that I find strangely interesting, like a clock I could take apart.  This one, it’s not so much the plot or the language or anything that I can say I so much admire. It’s more there is something about it that feels deeply familiar.  As if it was written out of my own consciousness, in some creepy way.  I couldn’t say why, as in theory the story has little to do with me, being about an American man making poor decisions about his love life.  But there you go, that’s the mystery of literature.  

I find this to be so utterly true, from Alan Bennett’s HISTORY BOYS:

The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours