Author: sarahwp

STAY TRUE by Hua Hsu

Here is a book about grief. It is written by someone born in the same year as me, and tells about his best friend in university, who died when he was a junior. It was eerie to read a book so exactly of my time-and-place. That rarely happens for me. I enjoyed this for example, something I had forgotten about:

Back then, years passed when you wouldn’t pose for a picture. You wouldn’t think to take a picture at all. Cameras felt intrusive to everyday life. It was weird to walk around with one, unless you worked for the school paper, which made picture taking seem a little less creepy.

I’d forgotten about a time before photos were the default.

The story was a sad one. What struck me was how much I now recognize what grief looks like: the guilt about what you could have done differently (oh GOD, the guilt), the retrospective wondering what your relationship meant, and etc. I can’t imagine how the author got together the emotional resilience to write it. I barely had the resilience to read it.

One thing I have been thinking about recently is how anytime someone dies, you read about them in the paper after a stabbing or whatever, there is almost always really bereft family and friends left behind. It’s kind of beautiful to think that every random person you see in the street is so surrounded by love.

MONKEY BOY by Francisco Goldman

It is strange how few books there are by immigrants, and how many by immigrants’ children. My theory is we immigrants are busy, trying to assimilate or live the capitalist dream or whatever, and it’s the children who have the free time to try and understand what just happened.

In this book an American man, the child of a Guatemalan and a Ukrainian Jew, puts the effort in. Some parts of it I found pretty interesting, like his flashbacks to middle school, and a particularly epic high school crush. Other parts were less interesting, like where he visits his mother in her retirement home, tirelessly grilling her about Guatemalan history despite her advancing dementia. I mean I get it: he is deep in middle age, and wants it all to have some meant something. Good luck with that I guess.

THE ART OF SCANDAL by Regina Black

This book sounded like it was going to be fun. A politician’s wife finds out her husband has been cheating on her, and agrees to a payment of $1M to stick with him till the next election cycle. It didn’t quite work for me though. I thought it was going to be fun and silly but in fact it was rather bleak and sad. And there was quite a lot of therapy speak. Not my kind of book I guess.

MOSCOW STATIONS by Venedikt Yerofeev

It boring to listen to other peoples’ dreams. It is also boring to be with drunk people babbling away while you are sober. This book is kind of a mix of these two kinds of borings. I feel bad to have to say it, as this is a famous classic of 20th century Russian literature, and the author had an eccentric, impressive, and difficult life. Like GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, it circulated on samizdat for many years before the government allowed it to be published (appearing in a magazine dedicated to education on the evils of drinking, though its unclear if the editor meant this as a joke or not). It tells the story of a man getting progressively drunker as he rides the train from Moscow to the suburb where his son lives. One interesting point to learn was how really rough Soviet alcoholism was. At one point the narrator tells us about one drink he makes, called ‘Dog’s Giblets,’ which involved mixing floor varnish and brown beer. This is not an exaggeration – apparently the author’s girlfriend used to hide her perfume when he came round, for he would drink it. I literally can’t imagine that status you have to reach to seriously consider the floor varnish, let alone the perfume

BOOK LOVERS by Emily Henry

This lady has been writing back-to-back New York Times’s bestsellers. This is her third (!) This one is a rom-com about a literary agent who gets together with an editor. It was sprightly and fun and ideally suited to my Covid daze. It was interesting to read about the editing process, because I am very confident this book has been through a very rigorous editor. It is sharp as a tack. Like YOU, AGAIN, another rom-com that I read during Covid, it has been edited to within an inch of its life. Not a single piece of flab: just a machine for delivering plot. That’s hard to do and I admire it hugely.

THE ENCHANTED APRIL by Elizabeth von Arnim

Here is a highly season appropriate novel, about escaping the English winter. Four middle-class English ladies, all strangers, decide to spend a month in Italy together. The beginning is really fun, as the first of the ladies decides, in the depths of February, to blow her entire nest egg on the escape. Only those who have attempted to survive a London February can understand the urge to get CRAZY.

The plot doesn’t precisely work out, but who cares, it is such a fun novel of getting your life changed. One thing I did find weird, is I was thinking these ladies were old, based on the extraordinary dullness of their lives, but then it emerges they are only in their thirties! It’s amazing how many novels, even quite recent ones (this one is 1922), have this as the key takeaway: if I have to be born female THANK GOD it’s now and not earlier.

YOU, AGAIN by Kate Goldbeck

I had Covid (second time round) and felt dreadful, so decided to read this fun romcom recommended to me by Instagram. I’ve never read anything quite like it before. I think it is what is called commercial fiction, and I am ready for MORE. It was a sort of classic friends-to-lovers story, and it was a towering achievement of EDITING. There was nothing in it that was not fun, funny, or moving the plot forward. The time flew by. TOLSTOY TAKE NOTE. It is not easy to cut a story down to only the parts you want to read. Now to be fair, I cannot any more recall much about what it was about, or the characters, or anything, but it passed the time most delightfully

ANGEL by Elizabeth Taylor

This book tells about a teenage girl who becomes a writer. I have read an awful lot of books that could be described as being that, as obviously: writers write what they know. This though is something different. The girl is a horrifying, self-absorbed anti-hero, or, in summary, #goals. Here she is on getting married: ” . . . she had thought of love with bleak distaste. She wanted to dominate the world, not one person.”

We follow her through a life of bestsellers and terrifying selfishness. It’s eerie and frightening. Elizabeth Taylor is just a fantastic writer. Her MRS PALFREY AT THE CLAREMONT was one of my favourite novels of last year, and while I did not like this one as much it is still objectively better than most things I read this year. Let me end by giving you this flavour, of her on a car ride:

She would have liked to drive on for ever, peacefully, jolting along in the warm air until it grew dark. The great brass lamps would be lit, drawing pale moths out of the blackness, bringing one tree forward after another, shining on closed flowers, on owls sitting on posts and cats’ eyes among the tall grasses.

MISS LONELYHEARTS by Nathaniel West

Many reviewers call this book ‘comic.’ What is wrong with these people? I found it almost unmanageably bleak. Written in the 1930s, it tells about a man who has a job replying to agony aunt letters in the newspaper. This would be rough at any time, but can you imagine the kinds of problems that you are getting written about in the 1930s? It’s mostly women, and it is hair-raising stuff: abuse, unwanted pregnancies, and etc. The man is busy having a religious crisis and is in no state to handle this kind of content. Almost worse than the letters are his friends at the bar, who joke about women in ways that I can only hope are exaggerated and not a real reflection of men a hundred years ago.

I did find this interesting, a description of some of his writer colleagues: “At College, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything. Money and fame meant nothing to them. They were not worldly men.”

I found that an interesting idea, that some people are worldly and some are not.

BUDDENBROOKS by Thomas Mann

This major German classic was the first novel of Thomas Mann (at just 26!) Like many first books it is based on his own life, and let me tell you, he is coming out with all sorts, working through the issues, and etc. It covers three generations of a family, who start off as wealthy merchants and end up SPOILER ALERT kind of poor and certainly bitter.

It is an incredible feat of creation, with an extraordinary number of characters, swiftly created. Try this old lady, who only appears for a half page:

. . . a little wrinkled creature, rich in the grace of God and knitting patterns, who lived in the Holy Ghost Hospital and was named Himmelsburger. She was the last of her name – “the last Himmelsburger,” she called herself humbly, and ran her knitting-needle under her cap to scratch her head

Sometimes it does get a bit carried away, with one long section being a single day in the life of one small boy who has not done his homework. I learn from Wikipedia that this has sometimes been translated as a separate work, and Mann considered it as such. Am not too clear why then it was in this work, as it was exceedingly random, but there you go.

Sometimes though I found all that detail quite charming, as a window into nineteenth century German life. Try this, where they go to a restaurant. First of all, bizarrely, the group orders ‘one beer and six milks,’ but then the waiter asks the obvious question: “sweet milk, buttermilk, sour milk, or clotted milk?” Disgusting and fascinating.