Author: sarahwp

ROME: A CUTLURAL, VISUAL AND PERSONAL HISTORY by Robert Hughes

This book is less interesting than it sounds. There are a lot of dates, and a lot of sweeping overstatements. However, there were some interesting elements. I learnt, for example, that Provence in France is called that because Julius Caeser referred to as ‘the Province,’ and that the name ‘plumber’ is based on the Latin for lead, because that’s what early Roman plumbing pipes were lined with. Caligula’s name means ‘bootikins’ apparently, as he was a child mascot for Roman armies, and you use to wear mini legionnaires’ shoes. Everyone knows that Caligula was bonkers, and this snapshot of his childhood maybe helps us understood why (battlefield + child = adult issues)

I also learnt that one major impetus for the conversion of Rome to Christianity was the conversion of the wives of important men to Christianity. I think it’s quite interesting that women were the first converts in ancient Rome, because I recently read THE RIVER AND THE SOURCE, which talked about the speed with which women converted in contemporary Kenya. (Indeed, the author’s great grandmother first heard of Christianity as ‘a god who cares for widows.’) Little religions are popping up all the time, and I think it’s quite interesting to think about what it is that gives a religion major staying power – what about the story is so compelling that it changes peoples’ lives. So I’m wondering: does Christianity speak to the oppressed first, and thus its power? Same with Marxism?

Speaking of oppression, Hughes is clearly not female. He discusses a statue showing a woman being raped by a Roman god, which famously shows the tear drop on the poor lady’s cheek. This he calls ‘very sexy.’ I feel oppressed right now.

KOKORO by Natsume Soseki

KOKORO is apparently universally agreed to be “the great Japanese modern novel,” and has been read by generations of Japanese schoolkids. Never having read much from Japan, I decided to join these children. I don’t know how they find it, but I think it’s a very weird little book.

It tells the story of an unnamed young man who begins a friendship with an unnamed older man. The older man suffers under some kind of disillusionment, or regret, which is constantly hinted at but never expressed. The young man’s father is dying, so he leaves his friend to go back to his rural home. Once there, he receives a letter of confession from his friend, which is also a suicide note, explaining how his life has gone wrong. I won’t spoil it for you, but suffice to say this big reveal is odd, confusing, and did not explain to me at all what his problem was.

This may be at the heart of it; it is one of the old man’s elliptical descriptions of his trouble:

We who are born into this age of freedom and independence and the self must undergo this loneliness. It is the price we pay for these times of ours

. He is referring to the end of the nineteenth century, an apparently turbulent time in Japan, referred to as the Meiji period. Japan had been entirely insular for many centuries (a period I just read about in THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET and then, in the course of a very short period, the country was opened up to the West. Thus came a rush of new ideas – for example about being an ‘individual.’ This may seem an obviously ‘true’ idea to us, but to the Japanese was apparently deeply disturbing. I find this fascinating. Perhaps this is why the novel speaks so to Japanese audiences, but was slightly mystifying to me?

I should say that this is often a very funny novel. Here is the young man, back home in the rural areas:

My parents discussed together the idea of inviting guests over for a special celebratory meal in my honour. I had had a gloomy premonition that this might happen ever since I arrived.

Clearly, students in Japan, as elsewhere, have similar issues with their parents.

I know we are just supposed to pretend that we don’t notice, but I have to say it’s also endlessly sexist. Soseki keeps banging on about ‘womens’ ways,’ and eventually just gives it to us straight:

When it comes down to it, I told myself, she’s acting this way because she’s a woman, and women are stupid.

Ah ha! I see now why I didn’t quite follow this novel . . .it’s because of being so dumb. All clear now!

PALACE OF DESIRE by Nagoub Mahfouz

How charming is this author bio?

Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911 and began writing when he was seventeen. A student of philosophy and an avid reader, he has been influenced by many Western writers, including Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Camus, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and, above all, Proust. He has more than thirty novels to his credit, ranging from his earliest historical romances to his most recent experimental novels. In 1988, Mr Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in the Cairo suburb of Agouza with his wife and two daughters.

His most famous work is probably THE CAIRO TRILOGY, three books tracing a single Egyptian family across the twentieth century. I have reviewed the second here, for Africa Book Club.

This is a wonderful series of novels. In fact, I think I’m going to go out on a limb here and declare the TRILOGY the best work of fiction ever produced on the African continent. Sorry, Chinua, Wole, et al.

THE ART OF FIELDING by Chad Harbach

I finished THE MARRIAGE PLOT in the middle of Tsavo National Park, the biggest natural preserve in Kenya. I was staying at a beautiful lodge, the view of which was 360, as you see.

You will note a distinct absence of book stores in that photograph. I almost panicked. Some people would say: relax! Enjoy the view! Etc! These people have reserves of inner peace quite unknown to me. Thank god for the internet. I looked at the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2011, and on seeing THE ART OF FIELDING described as Franzen-like, like a cat to catnip, downloaded that shit. The Kindle is, frankly, sweet.

Franzen-like is a bit strong, but THE ART OF FIELDING is certainly a big, contemporary American novel, and I enjoyed it. It tells the story of a young man called Henry who has an immense natural talent as a baseball player. He is given a scholarship to a university, Westish, and the novel follows the various characters he meets there: his gay roommate, his university’s president, the university president’s flaky daughter, etc etc. the stories are engaging and nicely observed.

Some of it I found very funny, possibly because it recreates an American college experience I remember vividly. Here is one Henry Schwartz on his back hair:

“I hearken back to a simpler time. A time when a hairy back meant something. . . . Warmth, survival. Evolutionary advantage. Back then, a man’s wife and children could burrow into his back hair and wait out the winter. Nymphs would braid it and praise it in song. God’s wrath waxed hot against the hairless tribes. Now all thats forgotten. But ill tell you one thing: when the next age comes, the Schwartzes will besitting pretty. Real pretty.

Occasionally, Westish is however like no college I’ve ever heard of. For example, everyone is totally not homophobic, and fine with the roomate who is an athlete being gay (?) and the chef of the college kitchen is really talented (?). Also, sadly, the novel did rather drown in baseball towards the end. Let me give you a taste of a typically incomprehensible paragraph:

Starblind walked, Sooty Kim bunted him to second, Henry roped a single past the pitcher’s ear. Schwartz crushed a moon shot into left-centre field.

Excellent, excellent, good to know. I skipped the entire climactic National Championship chapter, as it was all in this mysterious vein. Also mysterious, to me at least, was the male bonding and male catharsis that went with all this sporting effort:

He dented the metal, bloodied his knuckles. ”Anyone who thinks otherwise, anyone who’d rather go paly for McKinnon . . .Can clear the hell out. I’m winning a regional title, and then I’m winning a national championship. And guess what? You motherfuckers are along for the ride!”

The above is all written, as far as I can tell, in total seriousness, and all the characters take it that way. People need to work on being less stupid.

Fear not, readers. I did not of course spend all my time reading at Tsavo. I drank lots of wine and looked a the view, and went on lots of drives. I saw a hyena out hunting baby impala, and, one night, a tiny baby scrub hare. Jambo, little man, jambo, said our sweet, very Christian guide, quietly. I really only read THE ART OF FIELDING in bed.

THE RIVER AND THE SOURCE by Margaret A. Ogola

This has been a school set book in Kenya for many years, and oh lord, you can tell from the copy I read. It is seriously mangled, and covered with youthful writing which indicates ‘metaphors’ and ‘similies.’ It was sort of charming. Part way through, a photograph of a girlfriend even fell out.

I’ve reviewed it here for Africa Book Club.

THE MARRIAGE PLOT by Jeffrey Eugenides

This book was four hundred pages long, and I only wish it was four hundred pages longer. This is because it is fabulous.

It is a classic boy-meets-girl-who-then-meets-this-other-boy story. It is however also very much concerned with what it means to write such a ‘classic’ story.

Our girl is Madeleine, who is attending a good university in the US, where she is studying Victorian literature under a certain Professor Saunders.

In Professor Saunders’s opinion, the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance.  In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about.  The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage.  Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel.  And divorce had undone it completely.  What would it matter whom Emma married if she could file for separation later? 

Eugenides attempts to answer this question by charting our contemporary Emma’s path through love and marriage. She has always been considered pretty and popular, and thus it is a shock to her when her first college boyfriend, Dabney, is better looking than she is:

Underneath this pleasure . . . was a fierce need to enfold Dabney and siphon off his strength and beauty. It was all very primitive and evolutionary and felt fantastic. The problem was that she hadn’t been able to allow herself to enjoy Dabney or even to exploit him a little, but had had to go and be a total girl about it and convince herself that she was in love with him. Madeleine required emotion, apparently. She disapproved of the idea of meaningless, extremely satisfying sex.

She meets a boy named Mitchell, who falls madly in love with her. One night she comes and sits on his bed, hoping he will make a move, and when he is too frightened too, is rather hurt, and decides to keep him at arm’s length. Some time later, after one very flirtatious night, she picks a fight with him.

She’d been on the verge of calling Mitchell to apologize when she’d received a letter from him, a highly detailed, cogently argued, psychologically astute, quietly hostile four-page letter, in which he called her a ‘cocktease’ and claimed that her behaviour that night had been ‘the erotic equivalent of bread and circus, with just the circus’

They stop speaking (poor Mitchell! We return to the night she sat on his bed multiple times, with multiple other endings) and Madeline falls in love with the mysterious Leonard. He has serious manic depression, but SPOILER ALERT! she marries him on one of his upswings, immediately after graduation, and then has to live with him through his downswings. He eventually leaves her. Mitchell returns on the scene and – you’ll just have to read the book to find out what happens then.

THE MARRIAGE PLOT is a wonderful, old-school, Victorian novel, which just happens to have been written by someone alive today. I found it very accurate both about awkward modern condom conversations and traditional old heartbreak.

What blows my mind in particular is how well Madeline is drawn – how female she feels – given that Eugenides is a man. It is wildly successful imagining of another gender. The book is also very funny. Here he is, for example, on Madeline’s mother, Phyllida:

Phyllida’s hair was where her power resided. It was expensively set into a smooth dome, like a band shell for the presentation of that long-running act, her face.

On bad dish soap in Paris:

European dish soap was either eco-friendly or tariff-protected

One more, which is painfully true:

Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.

Oh alright, since you are begging, one last little bit, that is not funny, but is I think just lovely, accomplished writing. This is when Madeline’s high school girlfriends are visiting her:

Then the Lawrenceville girls left and Madeleine became intelligent again, as lonely, misfortunate, and inward as a governess. She rejoined Mitchell on the porch, where the sun-warmed paperbacks and iced coffee awaited her.

That’s so good that for some reason it actually makes me feel kind of bad.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

Here is a man I keep meaning to read. Bertrand Russell. Frankly, the mustache is a stumbling block.

Let us be inspired by an extract from his book THE CONQUEST OF HAPPINESS, which I have not read:

In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics. Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more. This is due partly to having discovered what were the things that I most desired, and having gradually acquired many of these things. Partly it is due to having successfully dismissed certain objects of desire – such as the acquisition of indubitable knowledge about something or other — as essentially unattainable. But very largely it is due to a diminishing preoccupation with myself. Like others who had a Puritan education, I had the habit of meditating on my sins, follies, and shortcomings. I seemed to myself — no doubt justly — a miserable specimen. Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to centre my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.

Because I attempt to run a strictly honest blog, I will confess I came across the above, in a Q&A with Billie Piper. I know, the shame. Let’s have a picture of her too.

ONE DAY I WILL WRITE ABOUT THIS PLACE by Binyavanga Wainaina

This memoir has been getting a lot of positive press coverage, and I’ve reviewed it here for Africa Book Club.

Wainaina won the Caine Prize, and I found his account of how he set about doing so hilarious, especially in light of the discussions we’ve been having about the Prize here.

I spent the past few weeks polishing a short story for the Caine Prize for African Writing. It is about a young girl (Girl Child, Gender!) who is questioning the world, and her mother’s values (Empowerment). I mine every sexy African theme I can think of. The Caine Prize, based in England, is worth fifteen thousand dollars, and you get an agent and fame and lots of commissioned work.

We then follow his desperate attempt to meet the definition of ‘published’ by getting it online the day before the deadline.

Though there are certainly important criticisms that can be made of the Caine, I think it’s important that we think about the last sentence of the quote. The Caine more or less made Wainaina’s career, as it has a number of other authors, and that makes up, in my mind, for a multitude of sins.

WHO KILLED PALOMINO MOLERO? By Mario Vargas Llosa

The first book of Mario Vargas Llosa’s I ever read was FEAST OF THE GOAT, a phenomenally wonderful novel about the last days of the dictatorship of Trujillo. The final chapters are so grisly that I actually had to skip pages – like closing your eyes in a movie – something I’ve virtually never had to do with a book. I read it in one sitting, on a twelve hour bus ride to Acapulco, which probably contributed to the intensity of the experience. (What also made for an intense experience was that at hour nine or so, a bunch of armed men in army fatigues got on the bus, and started screaming at us all in Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish, so was reduced to desperately trying to recall if the country people were always getting abducted in was Columbia or Mexico. Anyway, I was not abducted, though some men did get off who never got on again.)

Anyway, this book, read on a plane ride in Ethiopia, is nothing like that one.

It is, bizarrely, a piece of detective fiction, set in 1950s Peru. Palomino Molero is ‘a skinny kid who sang boleros’ who is found brutally murdered. A pair of detectives set off on his trail, tracing the crime right to the highest echelons of the military. The ending is satisfyingly twisted. It is then very much a genre novel, but a very clever one. It manages to trace a strange path through questions of class, race and gender in Peru, and create a very rich picture of a fishing village in that country fifty years ago.

A short and satisfying book.