Author: sarahwp

ROBINSON CRUSOE by Daniel Defoe

How much do you love the chapter titles of this book? A representative sample:

I GO TO SEA
I AM CAPTURED BY PIRATES
I ESCAPE FROM THE SALLEE ROVER
I BECOME A BRAZILIAN PLANTER
I GO ON BOARD IN AN EVIL HOUR
I FURNISH MYSELF WITH MANY THINGS
WE MARCH OUT AGAINST THE CANNIBALS
WE QUELL A MUTINY
I FIND MY WEALTH ALL ABOUT ME

I mean, this is not messing about. This is stuffing your book as full of plot as possible. Daniel Defoe would have done well in the twenty first century, working on BOURNE IDENTITY and REAL HOUSEWIVES OF WHEREVER THE HELL. Though I’m not sure he’s bothered, as he did pretty damn well in the seventeenth century too. This book is a big part of his life’s achievement, as ROBINSON CRUSOE has a place in history as being the first ever novel in English.

It’s a curiously modern piece of work, not least because Defoe pretended it was ‘based on real events’. He even put in a preface from ‘the editor’ assuring readerss of its veracity. This is not too surprising when we learn that Defoe was described by one contemporary as“ a shrewd, shifty, ingenious man, much mistrusted and frequently imprisoned.” According to the introduction:

He was imprisoned for debt as well as for his satirical writing, and his reverses including bankruptcy and the failure of get-rich-quick schemes, of which raising civet cats (their glands were used to produce perfume) for quick cash was just one. He was a journalist, publisher, poet, businessman and sometime secret agent

In another very modern turn of events, the book, which was huge bestseller, was immediately widely pirated.

You may not know that Robinson Crusoe was in fact Robinson Kretuznaer, a German immigrant to York, who anglicized his name; but you probably know much else about him. Essentially the story is he is shipwrecked on an island where he lives for over twenty years on his own, until he saves a local man from ethnic warfare (okay cannibalism), names him after a day of the week, and is eventually rescued.

Learning how Cruose teaches himself to survive – how he makes cheese, and tries to build casks, is very compelling. So to is his description of the loneliness, which must surely be a far greater challenge than diary or storage. Here he is at dinner:

. . .then to see how like a king I dined too, all alone, attended by my servants; Poll, as if he had been my favourite, was the only person admitted to talk to me. My dog, who was now grown very old and crazy, and had found no species to multiply his kind upon, sat always at my right hand; and two cats, one on one side the table and one on the other, expecting now and then a bit from my hand, as a a mark of special favour.

Poll is the parrot he spends hours teaching to talk so he can hear some kind of voice.

Of course when he finally does get to meet a human, and thus hear a voice, I think we can be pretty confident that the main thing he’d be doing is blubbing and shaking. However Defoe seems to feel that in fact he would be delighted to have extra domestic help, name him FRIDAY, and get the poor unfortunate to call him MASTER.

You can see why this book is often read as a metaphor for colonialism, and that’s certainly one way to understand it That said, it has many themes, and even the naughty-western-hegemony-naughty thing can be overstated. Crusoe is very upset by having to watch cannibalism on his island, and is tortured by feeling he ought to save the victims. There follows then a really interested and complicated debate about what constitutes ‘right’ in other cultures, which struck me – again – as curiously modern.

. . .who, however they were isolators and barbarians and had several bloody and barbarous rites in their customs, such as sacrificing human bodies to their idols, were yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent people; and that the rooting of them out of the country is spoken of with the utmost abhorrence and detestation by even the Spaniards themselves, at this time, . . . as a bloody and unnatural piece of cruelty, unjustifiable to god or to man . .

So, curiously modern. So too is the ending:

All these things, with some very surprising incidents in some new adventures of my own, for ten years more, I may perhaps give a further account of hereafter.

Sequel anyone? He needs something to fall back on if the whole civet cat thing doesn’t work out.

THE BLIND ASSASSIN by Margaret Atwood

I am insanely far behind in blogging my books for 2012, so without further ado lets turn to the appalling BLIND ASSASSIN by Margaret Atwood.

This dire book won the Booker, which after this and the THE FINKLER QUESTION, I’m beginning to regard as a mark of shame.

It tells the story of two young women whose father is slowly going bankrupt. The oldest one agrees to marry a rich man to save the family. She lives a terribly constrained life, which she enlivens with an affair. Her sister comes to live with the family and eventually kills herself.

The story is told primarily from the perspective of the older sister, as an old woman in the present. She lives a very dull life, and this is for some reason detailed for us in excruciating detail. If you have any familiarity with the tastes of the Booker committee, you won’t be surprised to hear that this is not the only narrative voice. The story is interwoven with a science fiction story (how innovative, I could just puke) and a pretentiously third person account of the affair.

Here’s a representative extract, a description of a man in an old photograph:

. . .he’s holding up his hand, as if to fend her off in play, or else to protect himself from the camera, from the person who must be there, taking the picture; or else to protect himself from those in the future who might be looking at him, who might be looking at him through this square, lighted window of glazed paper. As if to protect himself from her. As if to proect her.

I mean honestly. And to think I used to like this writer. Who was I?

THE MAPLES STORIES by John Updike

THE MAPLES STORIES is an unusual format, being a string of short stories following one long marriage, of Mrs Maple to Mr Maple.

Updike is an immensely accomplished author. Try this wonderful description of a cabbage:

. . . the pure sphericity, the shy cellar odor, the cannonball heft. He chose, not the largest cabbage, but the roundest, the most ideal, and carried it naked in his hand to the checkout counter . . .

Note how he describes the cabbage as naked. I have never thought of any vegetable as naked, but these are the kind of lines along which Updike’s mind runs. He is well obsessed with sex, as we observed last year on reading RUN RABBIT RUN.

It is Saturday; the formless erotic suspense of the afternoon – the tennis games, the cartoon matinees – has passed.

The erotic suspense of cartoon matinees?

Anyway, the Maples have a very depressing suburban midcentury American marriage. They are constantly going to suburban cocktail parties and having affairs with their suburban friends. It is all very repressed and alcoholic and dramatic. I had to say: get a divorce. Or at least take make every third drink a soft one. Beautifully written, deeply felt, I just found it all very difficult to relate to.

RICH DAD, POOR DAD by Robert Kiyosaki

Robert Kiyosaki is a self-made millionaire who in this book shares with us his ideas about making money. If you can look past some terrible writing, childish views about tax, and many awful golfing anecdotes, it is an interesting book.

His primary point is that one does not make any serious money as an employee. The idea of getting good grades and a good job is he feels painfully old-fashioned; all it means is that the profits do not come to you but to your employer. You ought, he argues, to be your own employer.

He thus recommends owning an array of business ventures, investments, real estate, and so forth. In order to do this, he believes you should ‘pay yourself first.’ This means that you pour your income into your own projects, even when money is tight. This may mean not paying your rent, your creditors, etc etc, in a timely fashion. This idea makes me very nervous, though perhaps that supports his point: he feels most people make decisions about money based on emotion, or family history, not on reason. I do see the value of paying yourself first – it means your own projects are never allowed to be optional or to remain in the realm of theory.

Clearly, investing your own money carries risk, but as he points out: “I have never met a rich person who has never lost money. But I have met a lot of poor people who have never lost a dime.”

One thing you do not expect from a low brow financial self-help book is Freudian dama. RICH DAD, POOR DAD is an exception. It literally drips with Oedipal anxiety. The poor dad is Kiyosaki’s real father, who is a teacher on a low income and does EVERYTHING WRONG. The rich dad is a friend’s father, who is WONDERFUL. Seriously, Mr Kiyosaki, sit down with your dad at the dining room table. You don’t need to write a book to get to the bottom of your issues.

O PIONEERS! by Willa Cather

Fourteen days, ten flights, four continents, seven countries. The beginning of January gave me lots of time to read, and also to regret poor scheduling choices.

Let’s have WHITE WHALE’S only annual airline awards!

BEST UNIFORM
Usually a cinch for KLM, I have to go with Indigo, a small Indian airline with these super cute retro outfits. The narrow belt is killing me.

MOST PAINFUL CHECK IN
Kenya Airways is a shoo-in here, with a two and half hour queue. Other airlines can only gape at this impressive level of incompetence. I certainly hope none can compete.

MOST LIPSTICK
Ethiopian Airlines usually has this one in the bag, hot pink being very big with their cabin crew. However, this time it also goes to Indigo! One hostess was wearing so much red lipstick I didn’t know if she wanted to eat me or nurse me. Revolting and yet titillating.

And now let us turn abruptly to Willa Cather’s masterpiece of nineteenth century American life, O PIONEERS! Some people will suggest this is Cather’s best work, but all this shows is what a real afflication crack smoking must be among readers of early American fiction. MY ANTONIA is much better.

This is not to say I did not enjoy O PIONEERS! I particularly like it’s musical theatre title. It is set in the early days of immigration to Nebraska, and follows one particularly bright young woman as she builds a healthy farm. She however is unlucky in love, with her brothers chasing her only suitor away.

Her suitor, poor man, leaves rural Nebraska for the big city of Chicago, hoping to hit the big time as an engraver. Sadly for him, photography is invented. Here’s his heartbreaking, and very modern, account of his time in the city:

Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to ay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.

WHAT I READ IN 2011

It has been strangely touching collecting the list of what I read this year.

MY KENYA DAYS, for example, took me right back to the bottom of my parent’s closet in Harare where I found it in January; the seventeen books of June reminded me of how little I slept that month; LOST IN TRANSLATION took me right back to my cousin’s bookcase in Nairobi.

I read exactly 100 hundred books in 2011.

The best:
–ABSENT by John Eppel, a hilariously sad satire of contemporary Zimbabwe, and that rarest thing, a coherent account of white African identity
–FREEDOM by Jonathan Franzen, a fabulously Victorian novel of contemporary America
–THE BRIEF AND WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO by Junot Diaz, a brilliant and funny account of a multinational dork’s life
–GONE WITH THE WIND by Margaret Mitchell, an oldie but still a goodie
–MY ANTONIA by Willa Cather, on the romance of the Midwest
–PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth, on masturbation as a major philosophical event.

Some books I thought I loved, have somehow receded for me (such as THE IMPERFECTIONISTS by Tom Rachman) but the above have stayed with me as special, secret gifts that have enriched my life.

Let’s draw a discreet veil over THE FINKLER QUESTION and I DREAMED OF AFRICA.

Here’s my 2011:

1) MY KENYA DAYS by Wilfred Thesiger
2) ABSENT by John Eppel
3) THE BOY NEXT DOOR by Irene Sabatini
4) FREEDOM by Jonathan Franzen
5) THE FINKLER QUESTION by Howard Jacobson
6) THE SELFISH GENE by Richard Dawkins
7) BILLY BROWN I’LL TELL YOUR MOTHER by Bill Brown
8) FEAR OF FLYING by Erica Jong
9) THE ART OF FIELDING by Chad Harbach
10) GONE WITH THE WIND by Margaret Mitchell
11) HAIRDRESSER OF HARARE by Tendai Huchu
12) THE LACUNA by Barbara Kingsolver
13) LETTERS BETWEEN A FATHER AND SON by V.S Naipaul
14) CAN YOU FORGIVE HER? By Anthony Trollope
15) BLACK BOOK by Ian Rankin
16) BLEEDING HEARTS by Ian Rankin
17) IT’S OUR TURN TO EAT by Michela Wrong
18) THE CORRECTIONS by Jonathan Franzen
19) KNOTS AND CROSSES by Ian Rankin
20) THE BRIEF AND WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO by Junot Diaz
21) THE FIFTH WITNESS by Michael Connelly
22) JULIET, NAKED by Nick Hornby
23) FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD by Thomas Hardy
24) THE MOON AND SIXPENCE by W. Somerset Maugham
25) THE ENGLISH PATIENT by Michael Ondaatje
26) TWILIGHT by Stephenie Meyer
27) RABBIT, RUN by John Updike
28) VANITY FAIR by William Makepeace Thackeray
29) LOST IN TRANSLATION by Nicole Mones
30) EAST OF EDEN by John Steinbeck
31) GOODBYE TO ALL THAT by Robert Graves
32) THE LAST RESORT by Douglas Rogers
33) I DREAMED OF AFRICA by Kuki Gallmann
34) BOSWELL’S LIFE OF JOHNSON by Boswell
35) THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET by David Mitchell
36) THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
37) NOT ANOTHER DAY by Julius Chingono
38) HISTORY OF A PLEASURE SEEKER by Richard Mason
39) HOUSE OF MIRTH by Edith Wharton
40) NEVER LET ME GO by Kazuo Ishiguro
41) PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth
42) THINGS FALL APART by Chinua Achebe
43) BLACK DAHLIA by James Ellroy
44) I AM AMERICA (AND SO CAN YOU!) by Stephen Colbert
45) REUNION by Alan Lightman
46) ARE YOU THERE VODKA? IT’S ME, CHELSEA by Chelsea Handler
47) BABBITT by Sinclair Lewis
48) THE EAST OF EDEN LETTERS: JOURNAL OF A NOVEL by John Steinbeck
49) NAKED by David Sedaris
50) ALL THE PRETTY HORSES by Cormac McCarthy
51) OUT OF AFRICA by Karen Blixen
52) PHINEAS FINN by Anthony Trollope
53) FEVER PITCH by Nick Hornby
54) FLY FISHING FOR SHARKS by Andrew Alexander
55) IN THE MIDST OF LIFE by Jennifer Worth
56) PERSONAL MBA by Josh Kaufman
57) MY ANTONIA by Willa Cather
58) THE GOOD COMPANIONS by JB Priestly
59) THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED by F. Scott Fitzgerald
60) ADRIAN MOLE: THE WILDERNESS YEARS by Sue Townsend
61) BURNT TOAST ON SUNDAYS by Roland K Hill
62) JOYCE GRENFELL REQUESTS THE PLEASURE by Joyce Grenfell
63) KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST by Adam Hochschild
64) THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE by James Cain
65) A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ by Walter M Miller
66) BABYVILLE by Jane Green
67) LONESOME DOVE by Larry McMurtry
68) IF THIS IS A MAN by Primo Levi
69) I DO NOT COME TO YOU BY CHANCE by Adaobi Tricia Nwuabani
70) THE SANTALAND DIARIES by David Sedaris
71) BRIGHT SIDED: HOW THE RELENTLESS PROMOTION OF POSITIVE THINKING HAS UNDERMINED AMERICA by Barbara Ehrenreich
72) ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN by Keith Gessen
73) THE IMPERFECTIONISTS by Tom Rachman
74) LIT by Mary Karr
75) PRIVATE LIFE by Jane Smiley
76) THE CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE by Michael Faber
77) NERVOUS CONDITIONS by Tsitsi Dangarembga
78) TRUCKERS by Terry Pratchett
79) WE ARE ALL MADE OF GLUE by Marina Lewycka
80) WHITE MISCHIEF by James Fox
81) AGNES GRAY by Anne Bronte
82) A WALK IN THE WOODS: REDISCOVERING AMERICA ON THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL by Bill Bryson
83) SAY YOU’RE ONE OF THEM by Uwem Akpan
84) BEFORE I FALL by Lauren Oliver
85) SKIPPY DIES by Paul Murray
86) THE RIVER AND THE SOURCE by Margaret A. Ogola
87) THE MARRIAGE PLOT by Jeffrey Eugenides
88) BARREL FEVER by David Sedaris
89) ONE DAY I WILL WRITE ABOUT THIS PLACE by Binyavanga Wainana
90) WHO KILLED PALOMINO MOLERO? By Mario Vargas Llosa
91) DRESS YOUR FAMILY IN CORDORY AND DENIM by David Sedaris
92) THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway
93) THE EUSTACE DIAMONDS by Anthony Trollope
94) ECONOMICS: PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE (Standish et al)
95) STRATEGY SAFARI (Mintzburg et al)
96) DEAD SOULS by Nikolai Gogol
97) ADOLF HITLER: MY PART IN HIS DOWNFALL by Spike Milligan
98) PALACE OF DESIRE by Nagoub Mahfouz
99) ROME: A CUTLURAL, VISUAL AND PERSONAL HISTORY by Robert Hughes
100) KOKORO by Natsume Soseki

Onwards and upwards.

ECONOMICS: PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE (Standish et al) and STRATEGY SAFARI (Mintzberg et al)

I have a new job, and I read these books in preparation. They are text books from my cousin’s MBA at the University of Cape Town.

The ECONOMICS book was essentially a first year university text book, and I found it very interesting. Our old friend the global recession meant that the sections on economic fixes was particularly illuminating. Here basically are the two options to get a market going: increase demand, or increase supply.

Keynesians think the best idea is to increase demand; that is, to give people more money, so that they will buy more stuff. This you will recognise as the New Deal approach – spend money building roads, and so on, so there are more jobs, and thus more consumers have more money to spend. Classical economists take the view that it is a better idea to increase supply; that is, to free up businesses to succeed, thus creating more products and more jobs.

I was struck by how very theoretical both approaches were, and, for a field so full of numbers, how little quantatative evidence there seemed to be for either side.

DEAD SOULS by Nikolai Gogol

Creepily, the Russian nobility of the nineteenth century did not refer to themselves as owning serfs, but rater as owning souls. Eg: I own three hundred souls.

Let’s just file that under: no wonder there was a revolution in Russia.

This book tells the story of one Chichikov, who goes round Russia trying to buy dead souls. This represents a saving for their owners, who have to pay tax on them as if they are alive until the next census allows them to die. It enables Chichikov to increase his social standing, as no one needs to know that the hundreds of serfs he owns are only technically alive. In short, it is a scam.

Chichikov is apparently an embodiment of poshlost ‘an untranslatable Russian word which is ‘best rendered as “self-satisfied inferiority”, moral and spiritual, with overtones of middle-class pretentiousness, fake significance and philistinism.’ I mean, honestly, what a great word. Sometimes I love Russia.

I feel Russians also might love Kenya. We learn early on that Chichikov began his career in corruption in local government:

When strict inquiry had begun to be made into the whole subject of bribes, such inquiry failed to alarm him – nay, he actually turned it to account and thereby manifested the Russian resourcefulness which never fails to attain its zenith where extortion is concerned.

His career as a corrupt customs official is hilariously described:

. . . he would try every button of the suspected person, and yet preserve, throughout, a deadly politeness and an icy sang-froid which surpass belief. And while the searched were raging, and foaming at the mouth, and feeling that they would give worlds to alter his smiling exterior with a good, resounding slap, he would move not a muscle of his face, nor abate by a jot the urbanity of his demeanour, as he murmured, “Do you mind so far incommoding yourself as to stand up?” . . . he was a devil at the job, so perfect was his instinct for looking into cart-wheels, carriage-poles, horses’ ears, and places whither an author ought not to penetrate even in thought – places whither only a Customs official is permitted to go.

His motives:

What can one do when one is surrounded on every side with roguery, and everywhere there are insanely expensive restaurants, masked balls, and dances to the music of gypsy bands? To abstain when everyone else is indulging in these things, and fashion commands, is difficult indeed!

Now that sounds like everybody’s life in London.

The book is not exactly plot heavy, as it essentially involves Chichikov going around buying these souls from different people, and each new person is basically an opportunity for Gogol to lay into what he thinks is wrong about modern Russia. Here we are in the middle of a conversation about a person overwhelmed with ennui:

“The truth is that you don’t eat enough. Try the plan of making a good dinner. Weariness of everything is a modern invention. Once upon a time no one ever heard of it.”

Wise words, Kurt Cobain et al.

DEAD SOULS is a strange and funny book about a Russia that seems strangely current.

ADOLF HITLER: MY PART IN HIS DOWNFALL by Spike Milligan

This book begins: “After Puckoon I swore I would never write another novel. This is it . . .”

It is a comic recounting of Spike Milligan’s time training as a soldier in the Second World War. It is frequently very funny:

We had ‘Saluting Traps.’ A crowd of us round a corner smoking would get the tip ‘Officer Coming.’ We would set off at ten-second intervals and watch as the officer saluted his way to paralysis of the arm.

There is much of this kind of military fun, including, interestingly, an early and informal Puppetry of the Penis. Penises aside, this is perhaps the saddest comedic book I have ever read. The book is suffused with a sense of loss.

A week’s duty in the hut all centred around the gramaphone lent by Nick Carter, and jazz records I would bring back from leave. Happiness was a mug of tea, a cigarette, and a record of Bunny Berrigan playing ‘Let’s do it.’ Sharing it with a friend like Harry rounded off the occasion. What’s happened to us all since then? The world’s gone sour. Happiness is a yesterday thing.

Spike Milligan suffered profound shell shock during the war, and went on to have multiple mental breakdowns. Often in the book he tells us that he has returned to such-and-such a minor location, in a way that does not strike this reader as terribly healthy. He is quite explicit about all this, early on:

There were the deaths of some of my friends, and therefore, no matter how funny I tried to make this book, that will always be at the back of my mind: but, were they alive today, they would have been the first to join in the laughter, and that laughter was, I’m sure, the key to victory.

My friend and yours Wikipedia tells me that at the end of his life he corresponded frequently with Robert Graves, whose GOODBYE TO ALL THAT I read earlier this year. That book, a grim memoir of shell shock in the First World War, is a perfect partner to this one, set in the Second.

YOU SHALL KNOW OUR VELOCITY by Dave Eggers

I was excited about this book, because I love Dave Eggers. I love his first book, the more-or-less memoir, A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS, and his account of a real life in Sudan, WHAT IS THE WHAT. And oh, how I love his website, MCSWEENEYS. If you have never heard of that last, and if you have a dull desk job, you must most assuredly click on it. It has saved me from many a temping hellhole.

YOU SHALL KNOW OUR VELOCITY is Eggers first novel, and god it shows. A good novel is in here somewhere, and is just screaming to be let out. The book tells the story of a pair of friends who decide to travel around the world, in just a week, personally disbursing a large sum of money to the poor. The reasons for this are mysterious, and I am afraid will remain so, as I gave up long, long, before the end.

There were some funny bits, as here, where they are struggling to get a connection from Senegal to Greenland.

I’d always assumed, vaguely, that the rest of the world was even better connected than the US, that passage between all countries outside of America was constant and easy – that all other nations were huddled together, trading information and commiserating, like smokers outside a building.

However, overall, this faux naif evocation of international travel was annoying, as were the attempts to ‘help’ the poor. The mystery about their reasons was at first engaging and then just irritating. In addition, it was all madly overwritten. Try this description of an ordinary glass of water:

The sunlight over the clerk’s shoulder was white and planed, and when he poured us glasses of water it was clearer than any water I’d ever seen. It was the unadulterated soul of the world.