Here in a deeply charming elderly edition is a book that assumes a lot of background knowledge about Brazilian land ownership in the 1930s. Lacking this, it was slightly puzzling. But I can say it was bleak. Apparently a classic in Brazil, it tells about a man who pulls himself up from poverty to ownership of a large rural estate. He marries a woman who he thinks is too good for him, and proceeds to make her life hell. She kills herself. Then he feels sort of bad but not that bad and keeps building his estate. Not sure what the political context was in Brazil at the time, but I can say that this was probably not intended as a ringing endorsement of landowners.
Category: fiction
PLAYWORLD by Adam Ross
I had a lot of contradictory feelings about this lengthy book. On the one hand it was full of incident, covering a year in the life of a fourteen year old child actor, who is being groomed by a family friend, while his parents consider divorce. On the other hand it was kind of dull. And yet I read the whole thing. And I guess I’m happy I did, it was so detailed and fully realized, I feel like it was a kind of vacation in 1980s New York adolescence. Mostly it made me glad to be an adult in London in the 2020s.
IN CHANCERY by John Galsworthy
This is the second book in the Forsythe saga, a story of wealthy British family in the early twentieth century. The first one was about a man whose wife falls in love with someone else. As divorce was very hard to achieve, cue a lot of being tormented. In this second book, everyone gets their acts together and does what they should have done in the first place, i.e: ignore the haters and just get a divorce! Meanwhile some other characters die in the Boer War. I am not sure how many more of these books I am going to do. The wife character is really an insufferable ‘perfect fantasy’ and it’s really irritating me for some reason.
YOU DREAMED OF EMPIRES by Alvaro Enrigue
This is a fictional account of the first meeting of Cortes and Moctezuma. I really enjoyed its effort to deeply imagine the Aztec empire. It is a book very much about daily life, e.g., how did the Spanish trim their toenails? But what I mostly liked was the freedom of the author, who brought a very contemporary voice to these historic figures. I can’t think when I’ve seen that before. Try this: “Inside each of us is a skull,” Enrigue writes, “and that’s all that will be left of us when we’re gone; thanks for your participation.”
We did get into slightly dicey territory at the end, when the author inserted himself in the present day into the story (snore) but overall I found it an unusual and interesting take on a famous moment in history.
BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA by Dorothy Allison
This novel is about a girl born to a 14 year old waitress. The waitress has a big family, who help her with child care, so it is a lot about that family. It is kind of an uplifting story of small town life, until the waitress marries a man who starts sexually abusing the child. The child eventually tells an aunt, so the mother removes them from the man; but then he ‘promises’ not to do it again, so they go back. The mother tries to make sure they are never alone together. Great solution! Then he rapes her really brutally, and the mother walks in on it. The child goes to hospital, but her mother DECIDES TO MOVE TO CALIFORNIA WITH THE MAN (!?!).
This just seems so awful as to not really be believable, but I’m sorry to tell you that apparently this is a lightly fictionalized version of the author’s life. To be fair, her mother never actually left her, but she did make them all live together even once she was aware of the ongoing abuse. He even gave her an STD, which left her permanently infertile. Sounds like a gruelling read, and it sort of was, but it also wasn’t, because I guess of the courage of the author, who has rebuilt her life with amazing courage. I learn from the Introduction that the book has been banned from schools on many occasions. I know that people who make sure bans like to claim they are protecting children, but I think we all know who this actually protects.
There was an interestng line to a character recently bereaved: Now you look like a Boatwright. Now you got the look. You’re as old as you’re ever gonna get, girl. This is the way you’ll look until you die.
FELICIA’S JOURNEY by William Trevor
A very compelling story about a young Irish girl who gets pregnant and comes to England to find the father with whom she had a holiday romance. She doesn’t find him, but she does find what we slowly conclude is some kind of SPOILER ALERT serial killer. This makes it sound like it’s cheesy, but it’s really not. Trevor is a really gifted writer and tells the story from both POV in a very compelling way. My main take away is, THANK GOD FOR FEMINISM. This poor girl is so messed up that she really is barely able to advocate for herself in even the most basic ways, and that’s before she meets the serial killer.
PRIVATE CITIZENS by Tony Tulathimutte
This book is very more-ish and seethes with verbal energy. Try this:
“If you preferred the indoors, everyone assumed you were scared of life and emotionally stunted. That wasn’t it. . . . Sure, it was nice to have some fresh air while he smoked. But he was myopic, hard of hearing, congested – reality was lo-fi, slow and obstructing, too cold or too bright, filled with scrapes, sirens, hidden charges, long distances, pollen, and assholes”
It was also kind of hilarous; one character, we are told, has seen ‘most of’ the porn on the internet. Given that this is set in 2007, what is eerie is I guess this might just conceivably be possible. Today I suppose it would take several lifetimes. The book tells the story of four friends living in San Francisco a couple of years after they graduate from Stanford. About two-thirds of the way through, I started to get exhausted. Everyone was so self-harming! There was anorexia, self hatred based on race, failing to take your anti-psychotics, lying about rape, and that’s just the first few I can think of. And of course there was no redemption: it was just self-harm and self-harm some more. But weirdly I still enjoyed it.
TROUBLES by JG Farrell
This author was kind of a jock at university. Then he caught polio, poor guy, just a couple of years before the vaccine was invented, and had to abruptly enter an iron lung to stay alive. Sport’s loss was literature’s gain, because he’s a wonderful writer. This book tells the story of a WWI veteran who goes to visit a woman he met in Brighton during his leave. She says she is fiance; he can’t remember if she is or not. It gets weirder from there. The alleged fiance lives in an enormous decaying hotel in Ireland, and dies almost immediately after he gets there. For some reason he stays on, while the hotel crumbles around him. A bunch of stuff then happens that has something to do with Irish political history, I could not follow all that. But I enjoyed it nonetheless. Here is a taste, when they brought in the family dogs to try and chase out the huge family of cats who were living in abandoned rooms:
“But it had been a complete failure. The dogs had stood about uncomfortably in little groups, making little effort to chase the cats but defecating enormously on the carpets. At night they had howled like lost souls, keeping everyone awake. In the end the dogs had been returned to the yard, tails wagging with relief. It was not their sort of thing at all.”
THE SEIGE OF KRISHNAPUR by JG Farrell
I found this book in my house, but have no idea where or when I got it. It’s part of the EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY series – a fantastic series I used to read a lot of back when I haunted the Harare City Library – so I assume I picked it up based on that alone. And once again EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY has come up with the goods. I’d never heard of this JG Farrell, but this is a banging book. It is a fictionalization of the Siege of Lucknow in 1857, which I’d also never heard of, in which a group of English colonials withstood a long siege by the rebellious Indian army. It is a hair-raising story of delicately brought up people reduced to eating rodents, but it is a also a hilarious book of ideas. Try this description of a young man:
“From the age of sixteen when he had first become interested in books, much to the distress of his father, he had paid little heed to physical and sporting matters. He had been of a melancholy and listless cast of mind, the victim of the beauty and sadness of the universe. In the course of the last two or three years, however, he had noticed that his sombre and tubercular manner was no longer having quite the effect it had one had, particularly on young ladies. They no longer found his pallor so interesting, they tended to become impatient with his melancholy. The effect, or lack of it, that you have on the opposite sex is important because it tells you whether or not you are in touch with the spirit of the times, of which the opposite sex is invariably the custodian.”
This gives you a flavour. It would have been really easy to write a book of stereotypes, because these poor starving people are so obviously getting what they richly deserve, but somehow he avoids it. Strongly recommend! So strongly in fact that I immediately read his next book TROUBLES. Of which more shortly.
WIGS ON THE GREEN by Nancy Mitford
I love Mitford’s THE PURSUIT OF LOVE. According to my blog I’ve read it an embarrassing 7 times. I was thus delighted to come across this book, her third and a very obscure one, quite accidentally. (By accidental, I mean in the Waterstones in John Lewis, when I was looking for a laundry hamper. Why is there a Waterstones in John Lewis? Why is it by the laundry hampers?)
I don’t like any of her other books, but hope springs eternal I guess. Hope was misplaced. It’s dated and awkward. Of interest though is that she was worried about being sued by her sister, the famous fascist Unity Mitford, as it is in part a satire of Unity’s strange, jokey right-wing sensibility as the ‘greatest heiress in England’ (she was 6 ft 1).
As a child, apparently, Unity shared a room with her other sister, Jessica, a committed communist. They divided the room in half with chalk, one side with pictures of Lenin and the other with swastikas. In later life, Unity travelled to Germany where she got a lot less jokey. Apparently she actually dated Hitler, or was at least used by Hitler to make Eva Braun jealous. She later shot herself when war was declared, which I for one am not at all sorry about.
What does inspire me about this book, in a strange way, is how bad it is. The style is close to THE PURSUIT OF LOVE but also very far away. It’s inspiring to see how someone can work through from this very uneven early work to that classic.