Author: sarahwp

JUDGING A BOOK BY ITS COVER

JUDGING A BOOK BY ITS COVER is an occasional series where I bring to your attention dreadful looking books I see in Nairobi’s better bookshops. How do you like this one’s title?

Drums on the Night Air: A Woman’s Flight from Africa’s Heart of Darkness

You have to assume it is either:
-some sort of strange Victorian travelogue
-an ironically comic version of same. (ie. please god,let it be a joke)

However friends, apparently not. Apparently this is an entirely un-ironic title for a book about ‘real’ experiences in contemporary Africa. Try not to puke now, before you read the back, so you save going to the bathroom twice. Here it is:

Veronica Cecil was twenty-five years old when her husband was offered a job at a large multi-national company in the Congo. Filled with enthusiasm for their new life, the couple and their eleven-month-old son set off for an African adventure. Very soon, however, Veronica began to realise that life in the Congo was not what she had imagined. Food shortages were an everyday occurrence; she felt like an outsider at the club in Léopoldville, which only the Belgians and other expats frequented; and flickers of violence were starting to erupt everywhere. Six months later Veronica and her family were sent to Elizabetha, a remote palm oil plantation on the banks of the Congo River. But even here paradise didn’t last. Civil war broke out, and the rebels captured the neighbouring town of Stanleyville and took all the whites hostage. Despite the fact that Veronica was on the verge of giving birth, the situation was so dangerous that she and her toddler had to be evacuated. Leaving her husband and all their possessions behind, she and her son began on a two-day journey through the jungle. But on the plane back to Leopoldville, the first labour pains began…

Oh didums! Food shortages! Shame! What, no nutella? And you weren’t as popular at the club as you thought you’d be? No wonder you had to flee!

Also, as a sidepoint, why did she think Congo would be paradise? I mean, I’m not saying DRC doesn’t have many good qualities, but paradise? Does this woman not have Wikipedia?

Now, please, if you have actually read this book, don’t be coming crying to me in the comments. I don’t want to get bogged down in actual content.

THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway

This book makes you want to run away to be a writer in Paris. It is full to the brim with the romance of Paris by night, and later with the romance of rural Spain. It is also full to the brim with alcohol.

The central character, an American journalist named Jake, has a serious genital injury, received during the Second World War. A British woman named Brett is madly in love with him, but is in fact engaged to someone else, though it is never quite clear what role the injury plays in this complicated situation. Brett meanwhile is also most cruelly leading on a young American named Robert, who, Hemingway never ceases to remind us, is Jewish. These central characters booze their way across Paris, until the festival at Pamploma begins, at which point they move to Spain to continue boozing. It’s all terribly tortured up to this point; but after the arrival in Spain the book becomes an account of what Hemingway did on his holidays. This is primarily watch bull fights, talk to the locals, and of course, booze. The genital injury abruptly disappears as a thematic point.

So, from the stand point of plot, certainly on odd book, veering weirdly between sexual drama and travelogue. However one can’t help but be impressed by Hemingway’s lovely clean, spare prose. I particularly liked:

The taxi rounded the statue of the inventor of the semaphore engaged in doing same . . .

and

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

Occasionally however even this can be too much of a good thing. Here he is at the end of a paragraph in which he is collecting worms for fishing:

Digging at the edge of the damp ground I filled two empty tobacco-tins with worms and sifted dirt onto them. The goats watched me dig.

Ah, the goats watched me dig. For some reason I find this strangely amusing. I keep thinking about it, and it keeps making me laugh.

THE EUSTACE DIAMONDS by Anthony Trollope

It was admitted by all her friends, and also by her enemies – which were in truth the more numerous and active body of the two, – that Lizzie Greystock had done very well with herself. We will tell the story of Lizzie Greystock from the beginning, but we will not dwell over it at great length, as we might do if we loved her.

This is the beginning of THE EUSTACE DIAMONDS, which I find to be quite charming,and absolutely vintage Trollope. It is all total lies of course – we do dwell on Lizzie’s story at great length, not just because Trollope can’t do anything except at great length, but also because really he loves a bad girl, as do we all.

Lizzie is a fabulous bad girl. She marries Lord Eustace even though (or perhaps because) she knows he is very frail and soon to die. As the widowed Lady Eustace she claims to have been given as a gift by her husband, a diamond necklace worth ten thousand pounds. His family say this is a family heirloom, and thus not hers to keep, and so begins protracted legal wrangling in the midst of which the necklace is stolen. Cue drama! I won’t give the rest away, as it’s a fun and unpredictable plot.

Lizzie is helped throughout by her cousin, Frank Greystock. Frank is in love with a governess called Lucy Morris, and is engaged to her, but slowly comes under Lizzie’s spell, and stops seeing or writing to his fiance. Eventually he comes back to his sense and Doormat, sorry, I mean Lucy, accepts him back without a murmur.

This is the third book of the Palliser series (the previous ones are here and here) and as always with Trollope this book has an exciting plot, fun characters, a gently comic narrative voice, and the fun of meeting characters from the other novels. I loved this description of Conservatives, who feel always that Britain is on the verge of ruin:

And yet to them old England is of all countries in the world the best to lie in, and is not the less comfortable because of the changes that have been made. These people are ready to grumble at every boon conferred on them, and yet to enjoy every boon. They know, too, their privileges, and, after a fashion, understand their position. It is picturesque, and it pleases them. To have been always in the right and yet always on the losing side; always being ruined, always under persecution from a wild spirit of republican-demagogism, – and yet never to lose anything, not even position or public esteem, is pleasant enough. A huge, living, daily increasing grievance that does one no palpable harm, is the happiest possession a man can have.

It’s the TeaPartiers to a T.

OUR MONTHLY MARCEL

“It is as good a way as any of solving the problem of existence to get near enough to the things and people that have appeared to us beautiful and mysterious from a distance, to be able to satisfy ourselves that they have neither mystery nor beauty. It is one of the systems of mental hygiene among which we are at liberty to choose our own, a system which is perhaps not to be recommended too strongly, but gives us a certain tranquility with which to spend what remains of life, and also – since it enables us to regret nothing, by assuring us that we have attained to the best, and that the best was nothing out of the ordinary – with which to resign ourselves to death.”

Marcel Proust, IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME.

BOOKS I’VE ABANDONED

I don’t know if there’s something wrong with the books at the moment, or something wrong with me, but I seem to be abandoning literature left and right.

I feel somehow I ought to finish books I begin, but then I’m overwhelmed by how very short a time we get to live, and I throw them gleefully aside.

SONG OF SOLOMON by Toni Morrison
This woman has won the Pultizer, and I was all ready to love her work. I found this one however to be in essence a fakey pastiche of Zora Neale Hurston. Here’s the paragraph that broke this camel’s back:

I worked right alongside my father. Right alongside him. From the time I was four or five we worked together. Just the two of us. Our mother was dead. Died when Pilate was born. Pilate was just a baby. She stayed over at another farm in the daytime.

TULIPOMANIA: THE STORY OF THE WORLD’S MOST COVETED FLOWER AND THE EXTRAORDINARY PASSIONS IT AROUSED by Mike Dash

Reinforcing my prejudice against books with colons in the title, I found this to be a dull book on a promising subject. The promising subject was the fact that in the eighteenth century there was a bubble, not so much in tulips, as in tulip futures, with single bulbs changing hands for vast fortunes, This struck me as an interesting paradigm for thinking about our various contemporary bubbles, but no such luck. The only interesting thing I learnt from this book was that in the nineteenth century the Ottoman Emperors used to let a condemned run a race of half a mile with their executioner. If you won, you lived; if not, you died.

GERALD DURRELL: THE AUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY by Douglas Botting

I read the first eighty pages of this over someone’s shoulder. It’s a pretty interesting book about a very successful life. He doesn’t pull any punches, either, about how successful:

All the Indians agreed that I was a special baby, and that I had been born with a golden spoon in my mouth and that everything during my lifetime would be exactly as I wished it. Looking back at my life, I see that they were quite right.

Check out the bookcover though. I can’t believe that turned out exactly as he wished it.

THE NAME OF THE ROSE by Umberto Eco

A murder mystery set in a monastery. Dull and self-consciously postmodern.

WE ARE ALL MADE OF GLUE by Marina Lewycka

WE ARE ALL MADE OF GLUE tells the story of a middle aged woman whose husband has just left her. She meets an elderly neighbour who is living in a decaying house, which estate agents are attempting to get their hands on in anticipation of a juicy sale. This elderly neighbour is charming and fun and apparently a Holocaust survivor. The odd job man she finds for the house is a Palestinian.

At this point, though I know it is mean, I can only say: blah blah blah. Insights into other cultures, religion in the modern world, ad?@sldiafaseijrtwe. I’m sorry, I just feel asleep on my keyboard.

Here are a couple of searing insights our central character has for us about the Middle East Peace Process:

Zion was their big dream. It was a good dream too. But they found you can’t build dreams with guns. Just nightmares.

Profound. Try also:

Maybe forgiveness isnt’such a big deal, after all. Maybe it’s just a matter of habit. All this mental activity was making me thirsty. I put the kettle on and nipped down to the bakery for a Danish pastry.

That faux naif narrative voice alone is enough to make my eyeballs bleed.

I read Lewycka’s A BRIEF HISTORY OF TRACTORS IN UKRANIAN some time ago, and found it to be a charming and funny book with a heart of gold. I’m even fond of the author, who sounds charming in interviews, and was rejected 36 times before TRACTORS was published. I really can’t imagine what’s gone so totally wrong in the writing that turned out this dreary and simplistic novel. Sorry Marina!

WHITE MISCHIEF by James Fox

I’ve reviewed WHITE MISCHIEF for Africa Book Club here.

It tells the story of one of Africa’s most notorious unsolved murders, and revolves around the tiny white community in Kenya in the 1930s and 40s, known as the Happy Valley.

I’d heard a lot about the gin-guzzling, wife-swopping, bed-hopping ways of this wealthy and leisured group, and assumed it was mostly myth. From WHITE MISCHIEF I learnt it was not myth. In fact, it was a all good deal grosser than I heard (vaginal juices on corpses: I’ll say no more). Basically, these people needed to get out and find JOBS.

AGNES GRAY by Anne Bronte

Based on AGNES GRAY I am forced to conclude that poor Anne was the untalented Bronte.

I had high hopes initially, as AGNES begins very much in the vein of the quality Bronte novel: lone governess, new location, lots of likely looking young men. Excellent.

Anne herself worked as a governess, and god, it shows. This book might well be titled GOVERNESS TELLS ALL. Or HOW I HATED BEING A GOVERNESS. Or maybe, THESE VICTORIAN KIDS ARE ALL BRATS.

The first third of the book is spent with one family of badly behaved children, and constitutes Agnes (ie Anne) explaining how poor parenting creates a horrible home environment. She then leaves this house, and it is never referred to again, and has no bearing on the rest of the novel at all. In her next home, the children are also badly behaved, but somewhat less so. She makes the whole situation worse by seeming to have a point of policy whereby she never, for any reason, expresses her actual feelings to anyone. Thus, she spends all her time seething, and no time at all attempting to honestly resolve her difficulties. It’s a textbook case of building your own prison, by means of your own wilful silence, and makes it hard to care what happens to Agnes.

She is introduced to the local rector, and after speaking to him three times (two of these about the weather) she falls madly in love with him. Eventually, but by then you are so bored you just don’t care, they get together.

Here’s him asking her to go to the shore with him, so he can propose. Hold on to your hats, ladies, this guy knows how to work it:

“I see by those light clouds in the west, there will be a brilliant sunset, and we shall be in time to witness its effect upon the sea, at the most moderate rate of progression.”

Nuff said.

MID WEEK METRICAL

Okay, let’s have another Larkin. Very different from last week’s, but lovely I think.

An Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd –
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would no guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigures them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

Philip Larkin