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THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK by Doris Lessing

I am thoroughly confused as to how I actually feel about this book. On the one hand, I found it annoying and boring. On the other, I found it profound and enlightening.

The first level on which I feel divided by it is on the level of culture. Doris Lessing grew up in Zimbabwe, and lived there till she was about thirty. The book is full of her memories of Zim. She even went to my high school! I feel like I therefore ought to feel the kind of fondness for her I have for Bryony Rheam, but I can’t. We’re from the same physical location, but it’s a very different place, because while I’m Zimbabwean, she’s southern Rhodesian.

In this case, let me assure you, the past really is a foreign country. Apparently, it’s one where they eat steak and kidney pies, and say ‘I say old chap’ and feel that they are strangers in a strange land (DESPITE IT BEING WHERE THEY ARE ACTUALLY FROM). But anyway, shame. She’s a woman of her period, and we none of us escape our period.

And that’s another point. She keeps going on about her periods. The book is very much about the dawn of the feminist movement, about her relationships with men, about opportunity for women, and so on. Also her periods. You get the impression no one had ever written about periods before. Which, thinking about it, maybe they hadn’t. She seems to spend a lot of time agonising about feminist issues which now seem so obvious; but probably they are only obvious now because women before us did a lot of agonising. I think I might be irrirated with her in the same way you can be irritated with your mother; with someone to whom you owe a great deal.

Okay, what the book is actually about. It’s more or less six books. There is one overarching novel, called FREE WOMEN, and the novel is interspersed with sections from the notebooks of the author of the novel, Anna Wulf. The notebooks deal with various aspects of Anna’s life (politics, private thoughts etc etc), and as the novel is also autobiographical you feel you are hearing the same story from many different perspectives. I found it very interesting in terms of seeing how ordinary experience is filtered and reshaped to become fiction – what is excluded and what included.

The basic story, told in its many versions, is of a woman (Anna, or Ella as she is sometimes called) living in London in the mid 1950s, with her small daughter (Janet/Michael) her female friend (Molly/Julia) and her friend’s teenage son. Both women struggle with being divorced, and thus ‘free’ and are constantly sleeping with, and having their hearts broken by, married men. Anna is living off the royalties of her first novel, and Molly is an actress; both are initially committed socialists. Anna moves out eventually, after a failed relationship, and her daughter goes to boarding school. Living on her own, she begins to unravel mentally; but in the end you get the sense there she is going to be able to hold it together. There is a strong sense of what is learnt over a long life.

In an interview, Lessing said she wanted to capture London as it was in the middle of the twentieth century (as the great nineteenth century novelists did) and I feel she has succeeded. A mark of a great novel is I think when you really feel like you sort of know a place or a time as if you have been there, and this novel absolutely fills that requirement. (Let’s also give a shout out to A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS on this front).

You learn a lot about what it was to be a communist in the middle of the twentieth century, just as news of Stalin’s crimes was being released. Read from the perspective of today, the idealism is really heatbreaking; they honestly believe communism will genuinely make a better world. It made me think how very cynical we are today; I don’t think hardly anyone believes there is a solution to the world being a mess – I think we just think that’s it’s natural state.

She’s in psychoanalysis, so you learn a lot about that too. She endlessly goes on about her dreams, and I skipped these parts, much as you switch off when people tell you about their dreams in real life. . . . . I was in a golden hall with a box, and in the box was a crocodile, and people were . . . SHUT UP Doris.

The book also really helps you understand what it was to live before the sexual revolution. It’s obssessed with sex as a deeply meaningful element of life in a way I find really foreign. You must prepare yourself for lines such as “Integrity is the orgasm” and strange, over intellectualised scenes such as:

“Anna, we have nothing to say to each other, why not?” “Because we aren’t the same kind of person” “What does that mean, the same kind of person?” he asked, injecting the automatic irony into his voice – a sort of willed, protective, ironic drawl . . . Then he said, “Come to bed.” In bed, he put his and on my breast and I felt sexual revulsion and said: “What’s the use, we aren’t any good for each other and never have been?” So we went to sleep.”

She has so much heartbreak and despair in her attempt to make sex meaningful, it is sort of astonishing. You honestly just want to take the character and sit her down in front of the SEX AND THE CITY. What a brave new world we live in.

I admired the central character Anna/Ella very much (Though she is probably I think Anna/Ella/Doris really). She was making such a noble struggle against so many massive odds: the partriachy, capitalism, commercialism, etc. They frequently return to the idea that there is a dark mountain, called human ignorance, and that great men stand on top of it, making great discoveries. Others, less great, work on pushing the boulder of humanity up the mountain. They keep trying, putting all their lives and talents into making small changes, and moving it a few inches forward. She is, she says, one of the boulder pushers.

On the other hand, she acts offended when people want to buy the movie rights to her book, because she is so horrified with commercialism. Get a GRIP, woman.

So the book while irritating, opened a window to me on to a particular era, and by so doing helped me understand my own time. And while the central character was irritating, she was also genuinely inspiring. There is a sense that what is worthwhile is the struggle – the struggle to live your own life in your own way – whether you are successful or not.

Also, let me just mention again, she went to my high school, and is a Nobel Laureate. Well done Convent! Yes Chisipite? Yes Arundel? Any Nobel Laureates? No? No? Any other major international prizes of any kind? No? I guess that means it’s time to SUCK IT!

(And you can start sucking it without even getting on to Kirsty Coventry)

OUR HUSBAND HAS GONE MAD AGAIN by Ola Rotimi

I was fortunate to be taught by Ola Rotimi at university in the US. He appeared at that time entirely circular, due to the huge number of layers he wore against the Minnesota cold. He was a charming and intelligent man, with a fiery passon for African theatre, and a great many opinions on all subjects from the World Bank (very negative) to palm wine (very positive). He once bought me a theatre ticket, and signed the card to ‘his little African sister.’ A lovely man. He passed away in 2000.

OUR HUSBAND HAS GONE MAD AGAIN is my favourite of all his works. It carries a genuinely crazy West African energy, and you can’t help but adore it’s fine disregard for Western realism. The play tells the story of one Major Lejoka-Brown, who despite having left the army many years ago, and made a fortune in cocoa, still carries himself as a miltary man, and now that he is entering politics is organising his campaign on bizarrely miliatry lines.

Before the play begins, he has married a Kenyan woman, Liza, who has since been studying medicine in the US. She is now on her way to live with him in Nigeria, and is unaware that he has not one, but two other wives, and the Major is determined to keep it that way. Really he loves Liza, and the two wives are sort of unintentional: one is much older, his late brother’s wife, who he had to marry as per Muslim custom, and the other much younger, who he married to advance his political career. Liza arrives and predictably discovers the two other wives; but from there on it all becomes more and more unpredictable. Liza forges allegiances with the wives, teaching the older about supply and demand, so she becomes a chicken magnate, and inciting the younger to oppose the Major in his ludicrous election.

There’s a wild mix of ideas here, about gender equity, old and new Nigerias, bikinis and hijabs, etc etc. It’s a lovely little show. The plot is maybe a teensy bit weak, but somehow I really don’t care.

HARPERS December 2010

My Harpers is here!

There is always something interesting I didn’t know about in this magazine. For example, who knew that there were ‘content mills’ for the internet. From the Dept of We’re-All-Going-to-Hell-in-a-Handbasket:

“. . . consider the example of Demand Media, a so-called content-mill, which uses a vast collection of Web-recruited freelancers to generate articles for about $15 per 300-word item; copy editors are said to get $2.50 for each piece they correct. The outfit’s editorial direction is chartered by what the company’s prospectus calls “our propeitary algorithms,” which is to say, equations that mainly weigh two factors: what perople are searching for on Google and what advertisers might pay to associate themselves with a given topic.” (EASY CHAIR by Thomas Frank)

Even more proper newspapers, like USA Today, have used these mills. Journalism is dead and we are all totally screwed.

Let me just close off by saying something that is not strictly relevant, but has been bothering me for some time. What is going on with Julian Assange’s hair? Is it prematurely white? Or is it white in the usual way, but his face is freakishly young? Or what? These journalists keep reporting on Wikileaks, but no one is asking the real questions.

NATIVE SON by Richard Wright

According to the back: “NATIVE SON follows the fortunes of Bigger Thomas, a young black man who is trapped in a life of poverty in the slums of Chicago. Unwittingly involved in a wealthy woman’s death, he is hunted relentlessly, baited by prejudiced officials, charged with murder and driven to acknowledge a strange pride in his crime.”

Well, sort of. But actually this undersells this novel, making it sound like a straightforward condemnation of racial attitudes in America in the twentieth century, with Bigger the innocent victim of an evil system. In fact, Bigger is a complex character. He is presented as violent, and frustated, and I’m not sure we can describe his murder as entirely unwitting. He most wittingly continues by burning the lady in a furnace, to cover up his crime, and demands a ransom from her parents. He then goes on to rape and murder his girlfriend when he fears she will expose him. When the white woman’s bones are discovered in the furnace, he goes on the run, and is eventually captured, tried, and sentenced to death. However, without making Bigger in any way a saint, or implying he is not responsible for his actions, the book still manages to put Bigger’s society on trial, rather than Bigger himself.

This book was written in 1940, and made Wright the first best selling black novelist in the US. I think it was remarkably brave at such a period to present such a negative portrait of a black man, and a remarkable feat of writing skill to ensure we feel sympathy for him. This reader, at any rate, found it easy to understand his frustration, and even the sense of joy and freedom he felt once he had committed the murder. He finally feels as if he has some sort of control over his own life, and is at last a person to be reckoned with.

The first two sections, ‘Fear,’ about his life before the murder, and ‘Flight’ about his life after it, are beautifully written. Clear, compelling, gorgeously unpretentious (save for one terrible sex scene). The last, ‘Fate’ is not quite up to this standard. It covers his trial, and has some dreadful unconvincing set pieces, in the way of speeches to the jury, and a heroic but misguided attempt to have Bigger realise what has been wrong in his life in his last moments.

The back again, from David Mamet: NATIVE SON is, in addition to being a masterpiece, a Great American Novel”. Mr Mamet, you are still a mysoginist. But you are right about Native Son.

BRITAIN’S WORLD CUP BID or, Being Safe in Elevators

In an unexpected departure for this blog, let’s talk about football for a moment. This doesn’t really count in a blog about reading, expect in so far as if you are literate you cannot fail to have read about the UK losing the World Cup. In fact, even if you aren’t literate. Even if you are living in a box, pretty much.

Now I don’t care at all about the World Cup. But, what makes me cross is the fact that apparently the British bid team were told that it was the British media that hurt the bid’s chances. This is clearly a thinly veiled reference to the allegations on Panorama about the World Cup bidding being totally corrupt, which no doubt were entirely correct.

So who do they give it to instead? RUSSIA. Which is certainly not going to have it’s bid effected by any small inconvenience such as a goddamn FREE PRESS. No, no, if you had anything to say about the World Cup in a Russian newspaper, you better watch out next time you get into an ELEVATOR. Let’s take a moment here to salute ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA! (If you don’t know who you are saluting: here)

It makes me proud to be British. Or 30% British. Or whatever I am.

WHITE MAN’S BURDEN by William Easterly

I’ve only just begun this one but I just had to give you an update. So far it’s very interesting, mostly it seems an attempt to discredit THE END OF POVERTY, which I blogged about earlier this year here. However, he makes some incredibly quaint statements, such as positing that markets are – get this – “the ideal vehicle for feedback and accountability”.

How charmingly pre-credit crunch! The sweetly naïve good old days of 2007. I am very much not noticing the jails overcrowded with AIG employees, or the unemployment queues full of traders from Goldman Sacs. Feedback. Ha ha. Accountability. Ha bloody ha.

THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA by Stendhal

I kept meaning to read something by Stendhal, ever since I learnt about Stendhal Syndrome. Quite different to Stockholm Syndrome, this is when you are so overwhelmed by the beauty of a place or event that you become ill. Apparently, this happened to Stendhal when he first went to Florence. It makes me feel a bit inadequate. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so overcome by beauty that it made me ill. Though actually, come to think of it, I was sick in Florence. But that had more to do with an quaint traditional sandwich I had than with great art. The filling was all juicy and . . . bouncy. I don’t eat much meat, so I just thought, maybe I’ve just forgotten what meat tastes like. But then I looked at the filling itself, and immediately feeling some serious concerns, looked it up in the phrase book, and found out it was SHEEP STOMACH.

So that was more sheep stomach syndrome than stendahl syndrome. Though I did learn a valuable lesson: do not eat apparently quaint and traditional foods in foreign countires without doing your research.

Anyway, THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA. First of all, extra points for a great title. This book tells the story of one Fabrizio del Dongo, the younger son of a wealthy nobleman, who is inspired by liberal ideals runs away to support Napoleon, arriving just in time for the walloping defeat of Waterloo. He is then in trouble with his very conservative father and has to go on the run, escaping various perils from treacherous courtiers to enraged actors. He is sheilded by his aunt, with whom, in a bizarre turn of events, he starts to have an incestuous relationship. I can’t tell you what happens after that because I kind of gave up on page 225. It was just ridiculous, he kept going from one swashbuckling adventure to the next and I got bored. Either there is something wrong with Stendhal or with Sarah.

There were a few great bits. The French Revolution has only taken place some fiftly years before, and there is a very interesting series of discussions about what the end of reverence for nobility means for nobles such as Fabrizio. There are some hilarious minature pen portraits, such as, on the people of nineteenth century Parma: “they sat on the pavement eating icecream and criticizing passersby;” or, on discussing rural peoples’ superstitions – “What do you expect! These people had hardly read four books in their whole lives!”

HARPER’S – November 2010

As you can see, I am catching up with my HARPERS addiction . . .

From the Dept. of Well Okaaaay :

“Also a Western conceit is a vampire’s pallor; whereas female vampires are beautiful and white robed, most firsthand accounts indicate that male vampires are ruddy, corpulent peasants, whose affect – once unearthed – is that of a freshly gorged mosquito. In animal form, the vampire is not strictly limited to the bat but can appear to its victims as a cat, a dog, a rodent or even a butterfly. These manifestations are not to be confused with vampires that were never human in the first place, which may even assume a vegetal guise (among numerous indignities through history, the Roma suffered the obscure nuisance of vampire watermelons).”
Twilight of the Vampires: Hunting the real-life undead” By Tea Obreht

In other news, from the Harper’s Index:
Percentage increase since 1960 in the average weight of a farm-raised US Turkey = 72
Chance that an American couple who met since 2007 met online = 1 in 4

PROMISES, PROMISES by Erica James

In the interests of historical accuracy, I must tell you I read the above. For work, please. I don’t think it’s released yet in the UK, so I won’t say anything further.

HARPER’S October 2010

This is the only magazine I read regularly, Harper’s. My lovely friend Dio gave me a subscription. My favourite bit is the Index, which is a page of sobering statistics. A sample: