Category: fiction

I loved this book so much I can hardly function. I keep recommending it to people who have not asked for recommendations. Usually the Booker prize actively avoids actually good novels, but somehow this one has got on to the shortlist. I haven not read the others but CLEARLY THIS DESERVES TO WIN.

It tells all about a struggling actor who gets hired to attend university classes in a large black bag, as part of a sociology experiment.  Over time he comes to love being black bag.  Why? I can’t tell you, it’s a profoundly great book in which black bag can mean many things.  As with all books I love, let’s just quote extensively. Here we are on his caring for his elderly parents:

“I would like to be able to look after you, but I can’t because I have stubbornly committed myself to an art and vocation with no future and precious little present., rather than training as an accountant or a stockbroker or maybe a lawyer.  And out of what? Sheer perversity of spirit, encouragement at an impressionable moment (the nineties), and, by this point, sunk-cost fallacy. 
Isn’t it time someone rescued me from the cult of myself for deprogramming?
To trust in the arts is an act of hubris so self-destructive the gods don’t even bother to punish you for it.”

On a swan shaped pedalo: “It’s face, like any swan’s face, real or plastic, resembles that of a man who doesn’t really want to be at the masquerade ball.” Who can ever look at swans the same way again?!

On a rainy afternoon: “The kind of rain that only happens on a Tuesday, heavy like preordained rain, rain augured and written by prophets aeons ago This will be a wet place.”

On entering an audition: “The usual plunging feeling that every human being is real, substantial and well-defined except for me.  I dismiss this. Inverted vanity.  Get over it.  Well, hello, I must be myself, they’re grateful to me for coming in, my experience is impressive, just relax, they’re going to do something a bit different.”

On his friend: “Claudio and I get on well because we have known each other since the age of seven, which is to say thirty years, and we have, at some base level, no respect for one another: we do not fall for one another’s hasty renovations of character or revisionist sophistications; we are not convinced by one another’s adult selves.”

General lols:

“I pick up the collected poems of Frank O’Hara. I have a television.  Sometimes I like to tell people that, in the way other people like to tell people they don’t have a television.”

And

“I worry that I smell of stale cofee but perhaps this isn’t something to worry baout in academia.”

And

“Within black bag I am wearing only a pair of maroon boxer shorts which – I don’t know why – have the words DARE TO WEAR written on the elastic in capital letters.  This is the twenty-first century.  Get on board or your pants will.”.

And then this lovely thought, not even by Kennard but quoted by him from the Pensees by Pascal: “A trifle upsets us because a trifle consoles us.”

This is often called Scotland’s favourite book, and I get it. Published in 1932, it is fiction, but based so heavily on the author’s childhood in rural Scotland that his neighbours complained about it on publication. Like most books about childhood, and particularly rural childhoods, it is very much an elegy. It absolutely aches with a love of the Scottish countryside. It’s also very funny, capturing a wide range of local characters, often not in the most flattering way (thus the complaints)

It mostly tells the story of the coming to adulthood of a young woman called Chris Guthrie. One plot line that really surprised me, given the period, was her mother’s death. They had already four kids when she got pregnant with twins, and after they were born she told her husband she didn’t want any more children. He told her she would be thanking god for whatever ‘she was given.’ She later killed herself and the toddler twins, apparently because she found out she was pregnant again. Poor lady, she just couldn’t face it. And all this just because this guy didn’t want to pull out. Apparently the entire neighbourhood did go ahead and blame the husband, for ‘breeding his lie like a sow.’ This all seems very modern to me now, and apparently it did to people then too, as it caused quite a scandal. I can only say, thank god for birth control and divorce.

One point of interest is that the book is fairly difficult to read, because the author was trying to capture the ‘Scotch language’ in English form (so a ‘braw’ hat becomes a ‘brave’ hat). The glossary is forbidding. But I enjoyed it all the same.

I spent the first 150 pages of this book mildly bored and the last 250 entranced.   The last 250 I read straight through, on a night when I couldn’t sleep, which raises the worrying idea that the quality of my attention is what is driving my perception of the quality of the book. 

On the plot level, this is a book about a boy and girl who get to know each other in high school and are friends (and sometimes lovers) for the rest of their long lives.  On another level, it is a book about what artistic success means.  The girl is extremely career focused, and is a  big success as a curator.  The boy loves to draw, and while he would like to make a big success as an artist, he just doesn’t want it enough to do the non-drawing leg work this requires, such as e.g., making ‘contacts,’ creating things because they are ‘saleable,’ and etc.  He often does not draw for long periods, and she gets very frustrated with him, especially when he, in her view, ‘checks out’ by moving to Thailand. It was an interesting way of thinking about what your life is really for, and what it’s worth spending your time on.

Rather touchingly, he dedicates the book to those friends of his he’s had for ‘forty or fifty years.’  I’ve passed thirty years with some. I hope I get to fifty with them all.