Author: sarahwp

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.

THE REST OF OUR LIVES by Ben Markovitz

This book was shortlisted for the Booker, which made me hesitant. Typically the Booker indicates a book I will hate. But I decided to give it a go, because I loved the pitch: a man goes to drop his daughter off at college, and then just keeps driving.

It’s turns out to be a book about how weirdly free you are in the second half of your life; probably free-er than you were when you were young, and were burdened by having to make money and be a success and get married and oh god I feel stressed just thinking about it.

There was tons of stuff I really liked about this book. Here’s the daughter, arriving in her college town for her first day:

The city she had visited once before was about to become a permanent four-year landmark in her life story, and in the face of that fact you’re kind of helplessly the person you were beforehand.

And here is the dad, meeting a friend who he hasn’t seen in years:

If I looked hard I could see, under his old face, the shape of someone more elderly starting to push through

And here was one that made me really laugh, about what happened to be on the TV:

. . . Friends seemed to be on back to back. It’s like the weather these days, always going on in the background.

I’m sorry to tell you that he does actually escape SPOILER ALERT because he gets weird chest pains and it turns out he has a heart issue so his wife flies out to get him. And then the book abruptly ends. I’m not sure what that is supposed to mean, but it’s been haunting me.

A WOMAN IN BERLIN by Anonymous

I am amazed I never heard of this book before, and had to randomly come across it in a secondhand book store. It’s a the real diaries of a woman in Berlin over three months in 1945, as the Russians invaded. AS Byatt called ‘one of the most remarkable war diaries ever kept’ and she is not wrong.

The first few weeks are spent in the basement, as Berlin is pounded with artillery, and they are cut off from water, from electricity and from news. And then the Russians arrive. I’m sorry to say she gets raped multiple times. Here she is waking up one morning:

“I felt rested and refreshed after five hours of deep sleep. A little hungover, but nothing more. I’d made it through another night.”

This was how bad it was; that just being alive was an achievement. She speaks a little Russian so manages to identify the highest-ranking Russian she can, in the hopes this will ringfence her from the others. The guy she finds is not nearly so bad as some. He does not ‘force’ her physically, and he apologizes, as he has not ‘had a woman’ in so long. She is so touched to be spoken to gently that she bursts into tears in his lap.

One thing I found interesting was that the experience of rape was so widespread, that the women all talked to each other very openly about it. She said it helped a lot, that it was a common experience and there was no shame. But get this: when he fiance comes home, she lets him read his diary and he is SO DISGUSTED BY HER RESILIENCE in the face of the sex violence that HE LEAVES HER. I mean: I can’t.

And this despite these sort of heart-breaking sections:

“I don’t want to touch myself, can barely look at my body. I can’t help but think about the little child I was, once upon a time, the little pink and white baby who made her parents so proud, as my mother told me over and over. . . . So much love, so much bother with sunbonnets, bath thermometers and evening prayers – and all for the filth I am now.”

Apparently there was a very bad reaction when it was published, as ‘people’ (men) thought it besmirched the honour of German women. So she insisted it not be published again till after her death, and never with her name. Her name came out eventually, and guess what: she lived till she was ninety, in 2001. She made it.

BUCKEYE by Patrick Ryan

Here is a classic American novel set in a small town in Ohio. It follows two married couples across a few decades. I was enjoying it, until I wasn’t. I got to page 382 and then abruptly decided to quit. It’s hard to explain why. It was well written, it had a plot, but somehow it just seemed very ordinary, and like my reading time would be better spent elsewhere. Can’t think when else I’ve quite a book this late on this slender a reasoning.