Category: fiction

GERMINAL by Emile Zola

I thought I’d give this novel a bash to see how far my attention span has degraded.  In my teens and twenties the vast majority of what I read was massive 19th century novels, and I was curious if I still had the appetite for all that tiny text,  description of landscape, and casual misogyny.  Good news: yes I do! 

This one tells about a man walking through 19th century France looking for a job. He is facing starvation when he lucks into work in a coal mine.  Cue a lot of interesting detail about 19th century mining practices.  As you can imagine its not good: while they don’t get to have much to eat, they do get to have coal lung, and lets not even get into the ponies permanently trapped down there.

I was kind of hoping this story might be about how this guy was delighted to escape from starvation to near-starvation, and went on to build a happy family life in the mines.   LOL no.  He is inspired by the idea of communism and eventually convinces everyone else to strike.  At this point, it started to feel very much like THE JUNGLE by Upton Sinclair (same story, except 1930s/America/ abbatoir), a book that wrecked me in a Chicago airport maybe twenty years ago.  I could just see where we were going with idealism crushed, people starving, immortal logic of capitalism triumphant and etc, and I just couldn’t bring myself to go through it.   So I guess the good news is my attention span’s fine, but the bad news is my emotional resilience is SHOT. 

THE MAN OF PROPERTY by John Galsworthy

This is the first in a series of novels which is part of how Galsworthy won the Nobel.  I enjoyed it, but I am not sure if I will read the whole 1000 page saga which I am told is ‘three novels and two interludes,’ wtf is an interlude.  Anyway, this first novel tells about the unhappy marriage of Soames Forsyte and his wife Irene.  Forsyte comes from a robustly bourgeois background, while Irene is poor.  I have not googled it but I am 100% sure Galsworthy comes from a family with money, because he spends a lot of time banging on about how awful families with money are, how obsessed with property, etc

The couple have little in common and she SPOILER ALERT begins an emotional affair with her husband’s architect. She had already ‘locked her door’ to Soames, and eventually he becomes so enraged that he ‘asserted his rights and acted like a man’.  I was really impressed that a book written this early takes marital rape so seriously.  Irene is extremely distressed, and the architect is too, ending up killed in a carriage accident.  Soames meanwhile is upset too, but mostly because he can’t understand why Irene won’t just accept that she, just like their big house, is his property.

TOM LAKE by Ann Pratchett

I wanted to like this book because Pratchett is a good writer and it’s about productions of OUR TOWN, a play I love.  I got about 200 pages in but I just had to quit.  The story is set on a cherry farm, and involves this woman telling her three grown daughters the story of her early life, in which she considered being an actress and dated someone who went on to be a movie star.  I don’t like books where we have to believe someone is telling someone else a book length anecdote, but okay, I was willing to get past it (see HEART OF DARKNESS and etc).  I even enjoyed the flashback parts where she was young and dumb.  But the current-day parts were so gruellingly annoying I just couldn’t.  It was a really creepy, the nuclear-family-is-all-there-is, the mother-wants-to-eat-her-young, kind of vibe.  At one point, the woman is saying how she allows her eldest daughter to have her phone on at the dinner table in case she has to go deal with an emergency, as she is a veterinarian.  However, she proudly tells us: “My husband and I turn off our phones because everyone we want to talk to is here.”

VOM! That was when I put it down.  My blog tells me I had an equally violent reaction to Pratchett’s BEL CANTO. I’m not sure if there is something wrong with me or with Pratchett.

INTERMEZZO by Sally Rooney

I am a mega-fan of Rooney’s first book, CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS, which is one of the handful of books I have ever read twice in a row. I have been less of a fan of her other books, and especially of the last one BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU? Much of what I enjoyed about the first one was the comic and contemporary spirit, and as we went along I felt we were getting more and more miserable. This one is a return to form. It tells the story a pair of brothers and their various romantic entanglements, and is exceedingly more-ish. I enjoyed it a lot, especially the journey of one character who has to slowly give up his implicit assumption that he is and can be ‘normal,’ which I found to be quite liberating.

My only issue with it was tbh a bit of a political one. In all Rooney’s books there is a strong perspective that anyone who works in any area of commerce is obviously some kind of sad, dead-eyed zombie in slave to our capitalist masters. Apparently the only acceptable professions are like lawyer, journalist, arts administrator. You can work as e.g., a barista, but only if you feel utterly polluted by it. I just find this bizarrely decadent. As if any of these delightful professions would exist without this economic model. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

A CONSPIRACY OF PAPER by David Liss

This book sounded great: a historical fiction set among the coffee houses of eighteenth century London in the lead up to the bursting of the South Sea Bubble. Ooh obscure early stock market drama! Count me in.

It is that, but it is also a detective story. I am okay with a detective story but it needs to move quick. And this one moved kind of slow. So I enjoyed all the fun research, maybe there was a bit too much research – there was certainly an awful lot of exposition – but anyway: I had to quit at about 150 pages.

I don’t always record books I don’t finish, but I can just imagine that in 10 years I will be looking for something to read, and think: oh, this looks good! So, here’s something for me in 2034: Sarah, you did not like this book.

THE MARS ROOM by Rachel Kushner

This is a very more-ish story about a woman serving a life sentence in an American jail. It was very absorbing, and very deeply researched.  Here, for example, is the recipe for prison alcohol “. . . juice boxes poured into a plastic bag and mixed with ketchup packets, as sugar.  A sock stuffed with bread, the yeast, was placed in the bag for several days of fermentation.”  Good to know. 

Somehow how though it left me curiously unmoved.  Maybe because I have recently read some really toe-curlingly magnificent memoirs from actual prisoners – e.g., SOLITARY by Albert Woodfox, which tells of his forty years in solitary confinement in Louisiana. It somehow made it hard for me to take this fictional version seriously, which is strange, because I usually find fiction much more compelling than fact.

NEVER LET ME GO by Kazuo Ishiguro

I loved this book the first time I read it, but on the re-read I was less impressed.  It made me realize I guess that it actually functions very much like a thriller/detective story, and thus once you know what the mystery is, it is much less interesting.   I also found it extremely depressing that SPOILER ALERT the clones don’t even consider fighting against their destiny – to have their organs slowly harvested.  Why is that? What is the message?  That we all are so deeply trapped in our worldview we can’t ever throw it off for any reason?  I don’t know, maybe that’s true, but damn. 

TOWELHEAD by Alicia Erian

I was really impressed by this one.  It’s a coming-of-age story which, despite the title, is far more about sex than about race.  A woman decides her boyfriend is too interested in her 13 year old daughter.  Rather than dump the boyfriend, she sends the girl to live across the country with her ex-husband.  There, she gets very into masturbating and then SPOILER ALERT is raped by the 37 year old man next door.

What makes it successful is that nothing here is black-and-white.  For example, the father, despite he sometimes hits the girl, is somehow not portrayed as a monster.  The girl thinks she has a crush on the man next door, even after the assault.  It sounds bleak, and it is, but it is also not. You’d think this girl is a victim (because she is), but somehow, triumphantly, despite these very bad things that happen to her, she retains agency and energy.  I don’t quite know how to describe it, somehow it was a fundamentally hopeful book. I guess you’d have to read it. 

DOGGERLAND by Ben Smith

Here is an eerie story of the near-future.  Two men live on a decaying wind farm, trying to keep it going with limited supplies.  They are only very irregularly sent food from wherever the mainland is, and that food is all canned.  The younger man in particular does not seem to have ever eaten any food that was not canned.  It’s unclear what exactly is going on in the wider world, but whatever it is, it’s not good.  Probably the most striking part of this book for me was the evocation of the ocean itself, which is empty of fish but full of garbage.  It’s the logical and even likely conclusion of the current direction we’re in, and I just hope I don’t live to see it.  Try this:

“The boy sat in the galley and unpicked the last tangle of plastic from his line.  He’d gone out to check on it, to pass some time, and found a huge shoal of bags that had drifted in overnight – a dark mass, silent and heavy, hanging in the fields as if they were waiting for something.” 

One of the men is constantly ‘fishing,’ but not for fish (there aren’t any) but we guess for signs of the cities now submerged.  I didn’t quite get into the plot, which was mostly focused on the younger man, who had apparently been forced to come to the wind farm when his father ran away.  A lot went on about how he found out his father didn’t really abandon him, and how the older man is a beloved father figure in any case, and etc etc.  Various versions of daddy issues in other words.  But I didn’t really care, the setting was so frightening and fully realized.