Author: sarahwp

MY SISTER, THE SERIAL KILLER by Oyinkan Braithwaite

I’ve never read a novel told from the perspective of the accomplice before, and it was weirdly compelling.  For Korede, that her sister is a serial killer is buried in a complicated mass of other feelings.  I can kind of believe it: how can the fact of some recent and anonymous killings compare to the complex mass of sibling rivalries?  It’s not even a contest.  Thus Korede spends much more time worrying about her how much prettier her sister is than how about much more homicidal she is.

Korede is the older child and the good one.  Here’s what’s in her handbag:  

One first aid kit, one packet of wipes, one wallet, one tube of hand cream, one lip balm, one phone, one tampon, one rape whistle.  Basically, the essentials for every woman.  

That’s a high bar: I only own one of these things.  

Her younger sister is wild, and pretty, and very dangerous to men.   It all gets personal for Korede when the man she has a crush on falls for her sister, putting him in imminent danger.

It’s a fun, twisty killer, and remarkably enough is marketed as such.  That it is advertised as a genre novel is I think a testament to its quality.  I say this because it is set in contemporary Lagos, so it ran a very serious risk of being consigned to the world literature shelf.  This is the death knell.  So well done Oyinkan Braithwaite!

TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT by Graham Greene

TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT is a rollicking comedy about realizing you have wasted your life. 
It’s as if Greene somehow put his writing through some kind of lens to find the funny side of his classic themes: guilt, secrets, Catholicism, Sierra Leone, sexual hangups. They’ all there, but somehow hilarious.  
I found it quite disorienting.  Counting back over the blog I seem to have read a lot of Greene (7! THE END OF THE AFFAIR, THE HEART OF THE MATTER, OUR MAN IN HAVANA, BRIGHTON ROCK, A SORT OF LIFE, WAYS OF ESCAPE, THE QUIET AMERICAN) and it was strange to see the other side of his typical neurotic style.  Here for example he is having fun with funerals:  

People are generally seen on their best on these occasions, serious and sober, and optimistic on the subject of personal immortality.

I am not sure I will ever be able to go to a funeral again without laughing about that last phrase.

TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT is about a man who has lived a safe suburban life as a bank manager.  His disreputable elderly aunt appears in his life, and she whisks him away on a wild series of journeys.  Much of the joy in the novel is in the character of the aunt. Here, for example, she gives her reason for choosing a particular hotel by a bus station: “I like to be at the centre of all the devilry, with the buses going off to all those places.”  
Or here she is on saving money: 

. . I am not interested in economy.  . . I am over seventy-five, so that is unlikely I will live longer than another twenty-five years.  . . . I made many economies in my youth and they were fairly painless because the young do not particularly care for luxury.  . . They have little idea of real pleasure: even their love-making is apt to be hurried and incomplete.  Luckily in middle age pleasure begins, pleasure in love, in wine, in food

Or, when he shows her his prize dahlias in his garden, she comments only:  “I have always preferred cut flowers”  I find this most hilarious of all, though I can’t say why. 
In any case, the aunt has had lots of love affairs (some of them for money) and involves him all sorts of crime and drama, which is he thoroughly enjoys, though it takes some adjustment.  Here he is at a strip club on his first journey with her: I wondered what all the men here did for a living.  It seemed extraordinary that one could watch such a scene during banking hours. 
It is fun to see the banker change his life, but it is also, this being Greene, rather sad.  This is in small ways – for example he notes a thin dog following him and comments: I suppose to that dog any stranger represented hope.   God Graham!  You are trying to write a COMIC NOVEL. Or worse yet, here he is on Christmas:  Christmas, it seems to me, is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling

Mostly the sadness comes from he dark shadow of the life it becomes clear he has wasted on following rules and doing what other people think he should.  It’s a lesson that you can’t learn too often.

DELIVERANCE by James Dickey

DELIVERANCE is about how horribly wrong camping can go.  It tells the story of four suburban businessmen whose weekend canoe-ing in the country goes life-changingly bad. 

Their friend Lewis convinces them all to go on a white water rafting trip, despite the fact that they don’t hardly even know how to paddle a canoe.  Even before they get on the water, things don’t look good.  They met a feeble old man, and the narrator reflects:

There is always something wrong with people in the country, I thought.  In the comparatively few times I had ever been in the rural South I had been struck by the number of missing fingers. Offhand, I had counted around twenty, at least. There had also been several people with some form of crippling or twisting illness, and some blind or one-eyed. No adequate medical treatment maybe. But there was something else. You’d think that farming was a healthy life, with fresh air and fresh food and plenty of exercise, but I never saw a farmer who didn’t have something wrong with him, and most of the time obviously wrong.The catching of an arm in a tractor park somewhere off in the middle of a field where nothing happened but that the sun blazed back more fiercely down the open mouth of one’s screams. 

He is right to be concerned.  I won’t give too much away, but SPOILER ALERT suffice to say that someone gets anally raped.  Or ‘corn holed,’ as the author calls it.  It’s curiously dated; because the victim is male, there is a strong subtext that he ought to be ashamed, which seems very wrong to a contemporary reader.  Also dated, but more hilariously, is the discussion of some old bottles they see in the river:

‘Plastic,’ he said, ‘doesn’t decompose.’
‘Does that mean you can’t get rid of it,’ I said, ‘at all?’

And this is 1970! Anyway, back to the corn holing.  They kill the rapist and then must flee down through the rapids pursued by his scary hick friend.  One man in particular, our narrator, risks his life to save the others.
At the beginning, Lewis, who works hard to be buff and outdoorsy,  encourages the others to be ‘real men’.  (I mean, immediate RED FLAG).  Mostly the other men roll their eyes at this.  As one says:  ‘I’ll take what I’ve got.  I don’t read books and I don’t have theories.  What’d be the use?  What you’ve got is a fantasy life.’  Lewis replies:

‘That’s all anybody has got. It depends on how strong your fantasy is, and whether you really – really – in your own mind, fit into your own fantasy, whether you measure up to what you’ve fantasized.’  

The book is I guess a twisty scary thriller, but it is also somehow something bigger than that.  I am not quite sure how Dickey manages it, but in the midst of white water and shotguns and rape he manages to make this story about that – about who you are at the most basic level, and how quickly you can go there if you need to.  I recommend it. 

THE PURSUIT OF LOVE by Nancy Mitford

This blog seems to think I have only read this book three times.  I am sure I have read it many more times than that, and indeed I hope to read it even more times.  I really, really, really, love this one.  And I believe it is one of those books, like I CAPTURE THE CASTLE (but much better) that inspires this kind of gnaw-your-own-arms-off devotion among some.  Others, and I see on Goodreads this is a large majority of readers, give it just 4 out of 5 stars.  This shows why democracy can’t work, why breaching the 2% on world climate is inevitable, and in general why we are all going to hell in a hand basket.  What is wrong with everyone?

I suspect the key issues here are as follows: 1) Sexism: Read in the wrong way, you could think this was chick-lit 2) Classism: Mitford was rich, and I mean really unearned income, gross kind of rich.  So are the characters.  I see where this could enrage you.  But even the Guardian was still forced to give it major props, and you know that runs counter to everything the believe in. 

It’s a hilarious and secretly rather sad story about an extended family and in particular one of its members, Linda, who goes through a number of unhappy marriages and one happy affair.  I’ve blogged it before here, but I am feeling the enthusiasm this morning, so let me give you some of my best snippets.

Let’s just start by quoting extensively from the beginning:

There is a photograph in existence of Aunt Sadie and her six children sitting round the tea-table at Alconleigh. The table is situated, as it was, is now, and ever shall be, in the hall, in front of a huge open fire of logs. Over the chimney-piece plainly visible in the photograph, hangs an entrenching tool, with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew had whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out. It is still covered with blood and hairs, an object of fascination to us as children. In the photograph Aunt Sadie’s face, always beautiful, appears strangely round, her hair strangely fluffy, and her clothes strangely dowdy, but it is unmistakably she who sits there with Robin, in oceans of lace, lolling on her knee. She seems uncertain what to do with his head, and the presence of Nanny waiting to take him away is felt though not seen. The other children, between Louisa’s eleven and Matt’s two years, sit round the table in party dresses or frilly bibs, holding cups or mugs according to age, all of them gazing at the camera with large eyes opened wide by the flash, and all looking as if butter would not melt in their round pursed-up mouths. There they are, held like flies in the amber of that moment—click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from that happiness and promise of youth, from the hopes Aunt Sadie must have had for them, and from the dreams they dreamed for themselves. I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.

I think of this bit often when looking at family photos.  It is very true.  Someone is always dead.  Or here we are on the fiance of one of the sisters in the book:

Linda pronounced the summing-up. ‘Poor old thing, I suppose she likes him, but, I must say, if he was one’s dog one would have him put down.’ Lord Fort William was thirty-nine, but he certainly looked much more. His hair seemed to be slipping off backwards, like an eiderdown in the night, Linda said, and he had a generally uncared-for middle-aged appearance. Louisa, however, loved him, and was happy for the first time in her life. She had always been more frightened of Uncle Matthew than any of the others, and with good reason; he thought she was a fool and was never at all nice to her, and she was in heaven at the prospect of getting away from Alconleigh for ever. I think Linda, in spite of the poor old dog and the eiderdown, was really very jealous

Okay, let me restrain myself or I will just type out the whole book

FREDERICA by Georgette Heyer

Honestly I am starting to worry I am going into some kind of a decline.  Why am I reading so much Heyer?  Clearly my brain is tired, but is this just a passing phase or is this what aging is?  I am not sure if I am joking or not.  Perhaps I need to be grateful I knocked off the biggies in my twenties: your WAR AND PEACE, your MOBY DICK, your REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST.  What if I have lost my mojo?  Comfortingly I note that about half the FREDERICA posters on Goodreads struggle with exactly this question, while the other half have basically no shame.

That said, FREDERICA is a cheerful Regency romance.  It has some good points: there is lots of fun with new inventions – hot air ballons, and the ‘pedestrian curricle’ also called the ‘ladies accelerator’, which is the very first version of a bicycle (internet blackhole on this here, do feel free to click if you have as poor internet discipline as I do). 

Overall though, I did not enjoy it very much.  Unusually for Heyer, the dialogue between Frederica and her love interest was sort of repetitive.  Also, I found it (again unusually for her) a bit anti-feminist.  Frederica is so ludicrously innocent that she doesn’t notice she is in love with the love interest until the last page.  It is hard to admire some one so totally disconnected from the guidance of their crotch, which in my experience is usually pretty clear.

Also, though this is not Heyer’s fault, I read this on Kindle, and really the publisher has gone for a most depressingly tasteful cover.  You know what I want, and it is total contempt for female readers, and it is here.

DAISY JONES AND THE SIX by Taylor Jenkins Reid

This book is curiously more-ish.  It’s the story of a band’s ascent to stardom and then immediate implosion, mixed up with a couple of love stories. 
The author presents the story as a series of snippets from documentary interviews with the band.  I found this a little gimmicky.  I also didn’t think it was used as well as it could have been.  Everyone’s story was inconsistent, but not nearly as interestingly inconsistent as it would actually be in real life, when we all remember the version of the story that makes us look either best or worst (depending on our specific hang-ups). 
That said, as I said: it’s more-ish.  Like a packet of Java Cakes, I kept on going when I should have stopped, for example to go to sleep in a hotel room in Madrid so I could wake up early to work.  It made me realize how fabulously elemental the classic rock’n’roll story is.  Your classic rock star story, which this is, is a mash up of some the great achetypes.  It’s almost always an underdog story; it involves a steep unexpected rise, and a satisfying fall; usually it involves a comforting homily of the dangers on getting what you wish for (which is very nice for the rest of us, who haven’t managed to be rock stars.  Makes us feel like we’re not missing out, though of course we are.  I’m sure large quantities of transactional sex must be really fun for at least the first decade).  Add to this that this novel also had a couple of interesting love stories, and no wonder Reese Witherspoon has optioned it for TV.
One of the interesting love stories was about a woman who decides to work through infidelity with her husband.  I can’t think when I last read a contemporary American novel in which any one was so sensible.  It’s always a load of nonsense about once-a-cheater-always-a-cheater as if life was an after-school special you could manage with rules, instead of a chaotic mess. So I liked that too.
In summary, a great book for a long flight.

KRISTIN LAVRANSDATTER by Sigrid Undset (Trans. Tiina Nunnally)

This book is a story of a 14th century woman, from birth to death.  It’s a thousand pages of incident, but as always with books of this historical distance all you come out of it thinking is THANK GOD FOR BIRTH CONTROL. 

Kristin is born to a well-to-do family in Norway.  She is a major daddy’s girl, and bar one unrequited love affair with a servant boy leads a pretty ordinary life until she falls in love with a handsome older man named Erland.  Unfortunately she is already betrothed.  She sleeps with him anyway, which I did not find an especially big deal, but this is because I am not from the 14th century.  Guys, it’s a really big deal for everyone but especially for God. 
Eventually she is able to marry him, and go on to have seven sons in eight years.  But this is only the beginning, and I won’t try and summarize further, because the book is really the story of her whole life, and as such is packed with all kinds of things: the ups, the downs, all the in-betweens. It is like a real life and thus hard to summarize neatly.   Lives, I notice increasingly as I get older, really have no thematic unity – this is one thing that makes them so difficult.  The problem you are solving keeps changing.

I was struggling with myself to describe the appeal of the book, but the Introduction did it well, I think:

(It) achieves an exceptional sense of accumulating dailiness, of momentous actions concatenating  in all sorts of minute and unexpected evolutions

Also very appealing is the level of research, that creates in intense domestic detail a really distant world, of dogs, and mead, and un-medicated births.  In addition to birth control you thank god for vaccination and antibiotics, because people die at incredible speed and in large numbers. One major character gets a minor cut from a blade, and his arm swells up, and everyone knows: that’s it.  Quick as that.   
Side bar on the author: Sigrid Undset was an impressive workhorse.  Her father died at 11, pushing them out of the middleclass, and so she abandoned her dreams of university to take at 16 a job as a secretary, that she held for ten years.  She wrote furiously at night, stories as she put it about  “you or myself or any of us office-worms”.  She then went on to fall in love with a much older married man, take on board his 3 children as well as have 3 of her own, 2 of whom were disabled, and get divorced, all while pumping out multiple books and winning the Nobel. 

KRISTIN is thought to be her masterpiece. The introduction comments on the special sadness that comes from leaving a long book you know you are unlikely to read again.  I feel that way now.  It was a success at least for this office-worm.

TESTAMENT OF YOUTH by Vera Brittain

This is a story that you wish wasn’t true. 
It’s the memoir of a nurse in the First World War, and is an awful journey from innocence to experience, so perfectly archetypal you almost can’t believe it’s real.  The poor woman is just 18 when the War begins, and her contemporaries are exactly that group who enlisted immediately, in a sort of ludicrous innocence that today is almost unimaginable.

Also unimaginable is her adolescence, brought up to be a Victorian lady, a nightmarish condition I am glad I will never have to experience.  She fights hard to be allowed to go to University, and eventually makes it there, so:

 When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans
 She only stays a year.  She can’t bear to be safe while her boyfriend, brother, and friends are risking death, and decides to join the military as a nurse.

Anyone would have found nursing really horrific at that time, but due to her upbringing it is particularly hard for her.  For example, she does not know what venereal disease actually is until “1917, when in a Malta hospital I watched a syphilitic orderly die in convulsions after an injection of salvarsan”

Her boyfriend is given leave for the 24th of December, and she waits for him excitedly on Christmas Day, but instead of him she gets a telegram, telling her he died on the night of the 23rd.  It’s something you would rule out of a novel, as too melodramatic; it’s her misfortune it is her real life.  She then loses two of her friends, back-to-back.  Her brother lives on till almost the end of the war; but then she loses him too.  How is this for horror: after her boyfriend dies, she receives many notes of condolence, but after her brother almost none.  This is partly because people are exhausted by death, but also because potential letter writers are already dead themselves: Didn’t get any letters partly because fellow officers had ‘gone west’ before him in previous offences – the Somme, Arras, the Scarpe, Messines. ..
She tries to find out every detail of his death, but the only other officer in his battalion who survived with him from 1914 to the end is strangely uncommunicative.  Later she learns that this is because the military got hold of a letter of her brother’s that made it clear he was in a relationship with one of the guys in his battalion.  He was likely to be court-martialed,so he may have chosen death on the battlefield rather than the ‘shame.’
No surprise then that she never, at any time in the book refers to ‘winning’ the war without quotation marks.  Eventually she has to leave nursing because her mother becomes unwell, and her father, a healthy retired man in his fifties feels he cannot possibly run a home without her, ‘servants being hard to find’.  Thus she leaves men dying on the front to tend to him.  What’s truly bizarre is that no one finds this bizarre.
Her life after ‘victory’ is bleak. 
However deep our devotion may be to parents, or to children, it is our contemporaries alone with whom understanding is instinctive and entire, and from June 1918 until about April 1920, I knew no one in the world to whom I could speak spontaneously, or utter one sentence completely expressive or what I really thought or felt. 
She pays no attention to the peace negotiations. 
I was beginning already to suspect they my generation had been deceived, its young courage cynically exploited, its idealism betrayed, and I did not want to know the details of that betrayal. 
In the end she returns to University, changing her degree from English to History, out of a desire to understand how Europe had ended up in this slaughter, and to see how it might be prevented in future.  She finds it almost impossible to relate to either those just younger than her, or just older, who never saw combat.  She graduates, and becomes a writer, and a feminist.  Your hair curls to be reminded of what women went through for suffrage, and then everything else (who knew the age of consent for girls used to be 13!).  Just as 2018 is the centenary of the end of War, it is also the centenary of women getting the vote; and apparently it was ‘granted’ to us in a wave of appreciation of women’s war work.  It’s amusing to read how politicians suddenly jumped about like cats as they realized that they suddenly had to appeal to the female voter.
Eventually, she marries.  You’d think it would be strange for her husband for her to write a book that is so deeply about her first boyfriend.  Let me note, that while my summary may make you think there is plenty of incident across the 600 pages of the memoir, actually at heart this book has only a single theme, and that is the deaths of her boyfriend, her brother, and her two friends. As she said in a letter: If the War spares me, it will be my one aim to immortalise in a book the story of us four – which she has clearly done.  Her poor boyfriend, dead at 20, has a road named after him in the French town where he died (the Allee Roland Leighton). Her book made him famous, though even as she writes it she tells us: It is years now since I have been able to recall his face, and I know that, even in dreams, I shall never hear the sound of his voice again

Her husband however, is a veteran; and clearly she is right that we who are not cannot understand what it is like.  She chooses to carry on her wedding day the type of bouquet her boyfriend used to give her, and her husband is completely unconcerned: That it is I, he wrote to her, who shall stand there is but the end of a long story.
And it has been a long story.  What a life, and what a woman.

WHAT I READ IN 2018

It’s very strange to look back over this blog.  I’m like: who is this person who wrote this blog? She seems to have a lot of energy and a lot of free time.  Also, she has a lot of funny things to say.  I guess we each have our own sense of humour, so it makes sense that reading what I wrote, I often think: that’s exactly what I would have said!  What is really disconcerting is to read a blog post about a book I have entirely forgotten.  It’s like time travel to a former self, and offers the rare opportunity to look at myself at a strange kind of remove.
Other books I remember well, and reading the blog takes me back not just to the book, but to where I was when I read it.  SOMETHING IN THE WATER, I’m sick in a hotel room in Napa.  GRANT I’m on the beach in Mauritius.  NORMAL PEOPLE it’s the sofa of my living room in the middle of the night   If I ever re-read this post, let my future self note: it’s a hotel room in Wisconsin at  4am. 
Best of the blog: CONVERSATIONSWITH FRIENDS by Sheila Rooney, a story of love and friendship I’ve read three times this year already; EARLY WORK by Andrew Marr (just getting in under the bar as I read it in December), which is a hilarious tale of infidelity and procrastination;LESS by Andrew Sean Greer (give him another Pulitzer); and MEMOIRS OF ANINFANTRY OFFICER by Siegfried Sassoon, a memoir of the First World War it is not one’s business to like or dislike but just to respect. 
2019 will the ten year anniversary of this blog, and I’m toying with the idea of re-reading all ten years and 500+ books that went into them.  I’m not sure I have the energy – or the courage.  If I’m surprised by who I was this year, what will it be like to meet that stranger who started this blog in 2010 in a tree house hotel in Kenya?
FAMILY LEXICON by Natalia Ginzburg
BARACOON by Zora Neale Hurston
COUNTRY DARK by Chris Offutt
FRIDAY’S CHILD by Georgette Heyer
THE DEATH OF REX NHONGO by CB George
THE MAKIOKA SISTERS by Junichiro Tanizaki
THE LESSER BOHEMIANS by Eimear McBride
EDUCATED by Tara Westover
EARLY WORK by Andrew Marr
COTILLION by Georgette Heyer
LOLLY WILLOWES by Sylvia Townsend Warner
WAYS OF ESCAPE by Graham Greene
THE END by Karl Ove Knausgaard
CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS by Sally Rooney
THE WINTER SOLDIER by Daniel Mason
CIVIL CONTRACT by Georgette Heyer
WAR WITH THE NEWTS by Karel Capek
THE KINGDOM by Emmanuel Carrere
SYLVESTER by Georgette Heyer
REGENCY BUCK by Georgette Heyer
NORMAL PEOPLE by Sally Rooney
EMPIRE FALLS by Richard Russo
A SORT OF LIFE by Graham Greene
STANDARD DEVIATION by Katherine Heiny
GOODBYE VITAMIN by Rachel Khong
TALENTED MR RIPLEY by Patricia Highsmith
LESS by Andrew Sean Greer
A SPORT AND A PASTIME by James Salter
HOW TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee
NEWLYWEDS by Nell Freudenberger
THE AWAKENING by Kate Chopin
ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN by Mark Twain
SOMETHING IN THE WATER by Catherine Steadman
THE MALAY ARCHIPELAGO by Alfred Russel Wallace
GRANT by Ron Chernow
THE PATRIOTS by Sana Krasikov
LIKE SODIUM IN WATER by Hayden Eastwood
FROST IN MAY by Antonia WhiteA WHOLE LIFE by Robert Seethaler
MEMOIRS OF AN INFANTRY OFFICER by Siegfried Sassoon
CHERRY by Mary Karr
TIES by Domenico Starnone
THE ADVERSARY by Emmanuel Carrere
IS EVERYONE HANGING OUT WITHOUT ME (AND OTHER CONCERNS) by Mindy Kaling
MEMOIRS OF A FOX-HUNTING MAN by Siegfried Sassoon
THE HISTORY OF PENDENNIS by William Makepeace Thackeray
HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE? by Sheila Heti
CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS by Sally Rooney
SEALED by Naomi Booth

COTILLION by Georgette Heyer

The Heyer kick continues.  When will it end?  When will I be too ashamed to continue to record it in my blog?
In this one, that clearly she was just churning out to pay the bills, we see a reversal of her usual plot.  Here a couple pretends to be engaged (for reasons of inheritance), while the lady tries to make the gentleman she is actually interested in jealous.  

The man she is actually interested in is a classic Heyer hero (dark, brooding, etc) and the one she is just pretending with is the type that’s usually the comic sidekick.  Thus you think it is going one way, but instead – fairly cleverly – it goes the other.  She realizes the man she thinks she is loves is selfish and difficult, whereas the the one she is sure she does not love is in fact the very man for her.  Hurray!