Category: fiction

O CALEDONIA by Elspeth Barker

Here is a book in which someone is very, very angry about their Scottish childhood.  It opens with the tombstone of a teenage girl that reads:

Chewing gum, chewing gum sent me to my grave

My mother told me not to, but I disobeyed

This gives you a taster of the extremely bizarre world of this book.  From page one, you get the feeling you are in the hands of someone who knows what they want to say, and is going to go ahead and say it.  And indeed the introduction tells me that this was the author’s first and only book, written in her fifties, and when it arrived at her agent:

It needed no editing.  It was simply there in all its dark and glittering glory. 

It’s a story of a girl growing up, and is almost painful to read, reminding you how incredibly difficult it is to grow up.  Some of it is just a bit LOL, as when her breasts start to arrive, and her mother tells her that “a bosom is a beautiful and natural thing.” Her parents then “went away on a spring holiday, leaving Janet a small book to read.  It was an account of more of the beautiful and natural things which lay in store for her. Janet was appalled.”

But much of it is just much harder and sadder.  Her mother does not much like her, she is not very popular at school, and the amount of non-consensual groping that apparently went on in the first half of the twentieth century is honestly astounding. She is later badly affected by Hiroshima (you can see she is not the most ordinary little girl):

She could no longer have faith in God or man.  She transferred any religious impulse which might yet linger within her to the Greek gods who did not even pretend to care especially for humanity or to value its efforts and aspirations, being far too busy with their own competing plots, feuds and passions. 

I found this interesting.  Indeed, life being so unfair and random, you can see where the idea of the Greek gods does kind of make more sense than the Christian god.  It is interesting Western culture has gone for the latter. 

MAN TIGER by Eka Kurniawan

Here is a book by a famed Indonesian author that I read in Indonesia.  This will be hard to believe, but truly it was conincidental.  So desperate am I for reading matter that I bought this on some New York Times recommendation, and only vaguely noticed where it was set till I began reading it.  It is at first all about this guy who has a white tiger living inside him.  I was all set for a great heaping dose of magical realism.  But in fact this is a delicate little story about an unhappy family.  It set in a rural location, and charmingly assumes a lot of knowledge of Indonesian small-scale farming.  Here we are in one character’s backstory, about his rice farm, on page one:

Jahro, who had never heard of Orion – the short season cultivar – replaced his rice with peanuts, which were more resilient and less trouble.

Imagine never having heard of Orion (!).  There is one line that haunts me, nothing to do with rice farming, all about the old father looking back:

The years had gone by so quickly, life receding in the distance like a train narrowly missed

It was a sweet and sad little book.  The white tiger really was neither here nor there.

DRIVE YOUR PLOUGH OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD by Olga Tokarczuk

This book has been much admired. I can say it was okay. The most effective part is the narrative voice, which is of an eccentric old lady who loves animals, astrology, and the Czech Republic, and is given to charmingly erratic capitalization. Try this:

The path in front of Oddball’s house is so very neatly gravelled that it looks like a special kind of gravel, a collection of identical pebbles, hand-picked in a rocky underground factory run by hobgoblins. Every fold of the clean curtains hanging in the windows is exactly the same width; he must use a special device for that. And the flowers in his garden are neat and tidy, standing straight and slender, as if they’d been to the gym.

There are a series of murders of hunting men, in the area, and in a very predictable turn of events it is SPOLIER ALERT BUT SURELY YOU FIGURED IT OUT it is the old lady.

RIDDLEY WALKER by Russell Hoban

Here is a novel of the post-apocalypse. It is all written in a strange made-up mashed up language, like language might be thousands of years and a few nuclear bombs into the future. It is extraordinarily believable and clever, also very annoying. A sample:

If the way is diffrent the end is diffrent. Becaws the end aint nothing only part of the way its jus that part of the way where you come to a stop. The end cud be any part of the way its in every step of the way thats why you bes go ballsy

I couldn’t finish it. As a younger, more eager person I probably could have. I can’t figure out if that is my loss or my gain.

NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS by Angela Carter

I loved this book but also did not love it. It tells the story of a woman born with wings. This is the nineteenth century, and she is female, so this means she ends up almost immediately in a brothel, and then in some kind of creepy situation with a man who is going to kill her. Maybe you don’t even need wings for this to happen for you, maybe it’s enough just to be poor.

In any case it is full of wonderful images. Here we are on her underwear: “elaborately intimate garments, wormy with ribbons, carious with lace, redolent of use, that she hurled around the room apparently at random. ” Or here she is talking about what she saw in the air: “the great dome of St Paul’s until it looked like the divine pap of the city, which for want of any other, I must needs call my natural mother” I never thought before how much St Paul’s looks like a breast, and now I will never be able to think of it any other way.

On the other hand, the book did kind of feel like it was going nowhere. It went from image to image and at some point I was just like SNORE. Probably I should have kept pushing through, but what can I say. Time is short.

FOSTER by Claire Keegan

It is tempting after you enjoy a book by a new author to immediately read another. I know this is a big mistake, and I have a rule never to do it. I broke my rule, and indeed: it was a mistake.

I loved SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE, a very brief novel about a moral decision faced by a middle aged man in a small Irish town. It’s a miracle of brevity and impact. This next one, FOSTER, is similarly very brief. And maybe it’s also a miracle; but somehow I didn’t get it. It just seemed short. Maybe it’s not as good as the other, or maybe, which is what I suspect, the first time you read a writer you don’t see their ‘tricks,’ and the second time you do. I don’t know.

BURMESE DAYS by George Orwell

Here is a novel about the British Raj in Burma in the 1920s. You would think if you are going to go to the trouble of colonizing a place you would at least enjoy yourself. Here, they do nothing but bitch. It’s too hot, we don’t like the food, there aren’t enough sidewalks and etc. I just finished THE GREAT FIRE, where they did some similar whining, but about Australia. I don’t think this happened as much in Southern Africa (e.g., ‘Happy’ Valley), possibly because it’s just a better place. SHOUTOUT TO THE SUBCONTINENT!

The story is around a man named John Flory, who particularly suffers with the narrow-mindedness and (though he does not call it this) racism of his colleagues. He falls madly in love with a young woman who is as narrow-minded and racist as any of them, but he is frankly desperate. Meanwhile, his only real friend, an Indian doctor, is at risk from a corrupt Burmese official. Unsurprisingly, it all ends badly.

It’s in that ‘unsurprisingly’ that my issue with this book sits. The whole thing drips with doom from the beginning. It’s like a morality story, in which the good die young, told very slowly. I don’t know too much about the British in Burma, but it also strongly has the vibe of being written by someone who wasn’t there for very long but still has a lot of opinions. And yet, I still enjoyed it. Orwell’s a good writer, and this was an interesting window into a certain kind of (thankfully) lost life.

THE GREAT FIRE by Shirley Hazzard

I nearly gave up on this book multiple times. I found the style kind of hard to read, and the dialogue fake-y. And then at some point I sort of clicked into it, and it started to fly by. I worry that the older you get, the less wiling you are to enter into things on their terms, rather than your own. Anyway, I managed it on this one.

The main interest of this story was the setting, which was post WWII Japan/China/Australia. It drips with loss and longing. This is not to say the plot was not interesting: barring some side points about polio and Hiroshima, the main story is about a 16 year old girl and a 32 year old war man who fall madly in love. The girl’s parents, totally understandably, think this is not a good plan, and move her to New Zealand. He eventually follows her there and the novel ends with them having sex.

I did wonder why the girl’s parents were painted as such villains, and some Googling reveals that this story is pretty close to Hazzard’s own life. She too fell in love with a much older man right after the second World War, and was also removed from him. However, in her real life, they eventually broke up by letter, and never actually hooked up. This novel was written some forty years later, after she had gone to visit this guy on his Welsh farm. I guess there is a lot of comfort in fixing history, even if only in the imagination.

SMALL THINGS LIKE THIS by Claire Keegan

I read this 110 page novel in almost a single sitting. It has featured on a lot of BOOK OF THE YEAR lists, and I can see why. It’s remarkably densely packed, creating a whole world of snowy working-class Ireland. I read it on Christmas Eve, and luckily it was also set on Christmas, which added to the charm. However the story is not very Christmas-y. It’s about guilt and what you should sacrifice for people you’ve never met. Okay, maybe it is kind of Christmas-y.

It tells about a man who while making a delivery of coal to a Convent gets some sense of what is actually happening to woman in it’s Magdalen laundry. This deserves a googling, if you’ve never heard of these institutions. Essentially they began as places for sex workers to be ‘saved.’ They were saved by working for free fifteen hours a day as laundry workers. This worked so well (for the church’s bottom line) that soon all sorts of women were interned, including orphans, the flirtatious (?), and in general any woman who it was convenient to get rid of.

This poor coal delivery guy is then faced with a very specific moral problem, as it is made very clear to him how little he can do to help, and what the consequences will be for him if he tries. It’s gripping, I recommend it.

MY FATHER’S DIET by Adrian Nathan West

I bought this book because Andrew Martin (whose book EARLY WORK I adore) recommended it. I can see why he likes it. I liked it too. But I can’t say I really understand it.

It is written from the perspective of a college aged man, who tells us about his father’s efforts, after a divorce, to win a bodybuilding competition. That’s it: that’s what it’s about. A really detailed account of watching his fat, 55 year old father engage in this probably impossible undertaking.

Some readers might think the father a sort of pathetic figure (and indeed the Guardian review thinks this book is about failure), but I did not. I rather admired him. At least he was out there, taking the big swings. The son, on the other hand, mostly sits in his room and tries to skate through college doing the least work possible. He’s a classic narrator of the modern novel, directionless and annoying. Go to therapy already! Or become a drug addict. Enter a body building competition.

I did really admire the super careful use of language in this book. It must have taken huge work. There were many moments when I stopped to admire the specificity of the writing. One time he mentions ‘a procession of eighteen wheelers entering and exiting the pale radiance of a service station.’ Pale radiance! I love it