I love Elizabeth Taylor’s books usually. MRS PALFREY AT THE CLAREMONT was one of my favourite books of recent years. So I was surprised to find that this one just sucked. I need to google it and find out: was it maybe her first book? Or her last? Or perhaps I just didn’t like the subject matter? It was a rather bleak story about a community in a fading seaside town. Lots of moaning about how the ‘funfair doesn’t come anymore’. I mean JUST LEAVE THEN GOOD GOD. Other people be parading half-way round the world I think you can get off your asses and go to Milton Keyes. The other annoyance was that one major strand was about a couple having a very dramatic affair. JUST GET DIVORCED FOR GOD’S SAKE IF YOU’RE THAT UNHAPPY.
Category: fiction
THE CLAW by Cynthia Stockley
Here is some pulp fiction from 1890s Africa! This is not a sentence you write every day. It is by Cynthia Stockley, whose VIRGINIA AMONG THE RHODESIANS I just read. I’d never heard of her, but she was a very successful Zimbabwean novelist of the nineteenth century, whose books got made into many silent films.
The story is straight up romantic melodrama, but I enjoyed it in anyway. Partly this is because is strong on plot, as melodrama must be. Partly because it is funny, which melodrama usually is not. At one point she is telling us about the very un-funny plan the white men are making to go and destroy Lobengula’s kraal. But here’s the elderly doctor, refusing to go: “He was not looking for any Lobengulas, he said. He had not lost any Matabele impis, so why should he go and search for them?”
But mostly I enjoyed it for a rare chance to learn about life in Zimbabwe in this period, by someone who was there. It all goes on: using anthills as ovens; marching once boots run out with your feet stuffed into wallets; and etc. I was struck by how the white Zimbabwean culture of that time seems pretty continuous with this one. There is still today a similar frontier spirit, I think, and a love of country. There are lots of sections dedicated to the beauty of the veldt, which if you are sad can make you happy, and if you are happy can make you sad. The ‘claw’ of the title is the claw of Africa, that would not let the main character (an American girl) leave, because she loved the place too much. Also very Zimbawean is that she never uses the term home (for either America or Zimbabwe) without quote marks around it. For some reason that really struck me.
VIRGINIA OF THE RHODESIANS by Cynthia Stockley
I read a piece of non-fiction called SALLY IN RHODESIA by Sheila MacDonald, set in 1910, which mentioned how Rhodesian women were considered ‘fast’ because of the novel VIRGINIA OF THE RHODESIANS. I was naturally agog and have been looking for this book for two years. I finally found an amazing edition on Ebay. It’s so old I cannot figure out its year, but it’s some time 1903-1911
It tells the story of a young woman living in Rhodesia in the late 1890s, and is (I assume) based on the real experiences of the author, who was a young woman living in Rhodesia in the late 1890s. Especially dramatic is the period she spends barricaded into the town that is now Mutare in 1896. I know this as the period of the first Chimurenga (i.e., uprising against the colonialists), and assumed they were all terrified/traumitized/etc. Apparently no: they were mostly drinking gin, cheating on their husbands, and gossiping?!?
On reflection though, I can’t deny this does sound pretty Zimbabwean, especially when it comes to the gin and the gossiping. Every day she says ‘brings five fresh scandals,’ and this sounds pretty close to Harare today. The story itself was kind of a melodramatic romance, pretty silly, but I enjoyed it. I googled the author and found out she had a completely amazing life. I can’t get into it all – it involves the Boer war and bigamy and New York and suicide – but I did find out she was actually an extremely successful author of 22 books, many of which were made into silent films! And they’re all available online, so I didn’t even need to go on Ebay. But I’m so glad I did!
SO OLD, SO YOUNG by Grant Ginder
Here is a book about a group of friends from when they meet in university on until their mid-forties. In short, catnip for me. I read pretty much the whole thing on one pretty sleepless night. Let me give you a flavour. Here is a man’s response to a cheerful text message from his university girlfriend:
“in this text her tone was buoyant, if not overly friendly, which hurt Marco in a way that he hadn’t expected. He thought their history precluded an excessive use of exclamation points.”
This sounds like I enjoyed this book, and I did, but I can’t say it didn’t have it’s issues. I found some of the characters kind of unlikely, the bad boyfriends were extremely bad, the one-who-got-away clearly got away, and etc. But it was still very more-ish.
THE PIANO TEACHER by Elfriede Jelinek
This is a very sexual book, without being at all sexy. Did I enjoy it? I really have no idea. It’s a super-compressed super-heated story about a piano teacher (you may have guessed this from the title), who has been heavily controlled by her mother. Her adult student falls in love with her and they have creepy sex in a public toilet. She is a virgin but apparently has an active imaginary life where she is a big masochist. The student is surprised to put it mildly. The mother is not too happy about this new boyfriend, so, (spoiler alert) the teacher kind of sexually assaults the mother?!? In summary, it all goes on. I am just kind of surprised people have the time and energy for all this sexual mania. It’s set in Austria, and my theory is this is all down to the social safety net which means people have too much free time
BLANK CANVAS by Grace Murray
Here is book about lesbians at art school. I am not sure why this sounds dismissive. The beginning was kind of fun, where a young woman lies to her acquaintances, saying her father is dead. It’s not totally clear why she does this, but I guess for attention or sympathy. Then thing went downhill. It is fashionable in modern novels to have protagonists who are apathetic and directionless, and this is unfortunately one of these novels. I just can’t. I just don’t know why I should care about your life if you don’t.
Side bar, the author is 22. Deal with that how you can.
CALEDONIAN ROAD by Andrew O’Hagan
I liked the epigraph of this book, from RL Stevenson: “After a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through.”
I also liked the first sentence: “Tall and sharp at fifty-two, Campbell Flynn was a tinderbox in a Savile Row suit, a man who believed his childhood was so far behind him that all its threats had vanished.”
It sort of went dowhill after that, though I did managed about 400 pages. The idea of the book is cool, being a sort of state-of-the-nation, if the nation was North London. The main character is an author who married into the upper classes, though not unfortunately into money, who develops an unlikely friendship with a half-Ethopian student. And the word ‘unlikely’ here is kind of key. I liked the effort to show all London, from top to bottom, but I found half the characters unlikely (e.g., a poor student from an immigrant background goes to a cocktail bar ?!? has the author never been poor?), and the politics rather trite and poorly thought through. I guess the author is trying to say something about inequality, which is nice of him, but let’s do some research. For example, a news report is quoted as saying that ‘migrant children are doing worse than any other group in the UK,’ which is just factually untrue. I think it’s pretty well proven that the academic success of immigrants is why London has the beset school results in the country. ANYWAY.
EMMA by Jane Austen
I did this book for A-level, and so read it many times in adolesence. Perhaps as a result, I have not read it in about 30 years. What I am struck by on this reading is how completely wrong Emma is on every level. It is a much funnier novel than I recall, and much more damning of Emma. It is not nearly so good as some of her others, but obviously still head and shoulders above 90% of all other books GOD this lady was talented.
MARTYR by Kaveh Akbar
Reviewers loved this book, calling it a ‘dazzling debut.’ I call it annoying. I feel bad to say it, because it is so hard to get published, and I don’t doubt it has many merits, but it just wasn’t for me. I pushed on for about 200 pages but then I just had to bail.
It’s about a man in Indiana who is loosely aspirational in academia but is not getting anywhere because he is drinking too much. He is toying -i n an annoying, apathetic way – with writing a book on martyrdom, because he wants his eventual death to ‘mean something.’ Leaving aside this is a stupid goal right off the bat, it is all wrapped up with the fact that he was born in Iran. He has never lived in Iran, mind you, but still much of the book is given over to his various thoughts about his ‘heritage,’ intercut with descriptions of the experience of his immediate family in Iran. Usually if you read a book about a country by someone from that country, it increases your understanding of it; this was just the reverse. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book by someone ‘from’ a country that actually went ahead and exoticized that country. Perhaps it’s because that ‘from,’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Let me stop typing though, this post is already bad-tempered enough, which is probably not very fair.
FAT CITY by Leonard Gardner
I read this book because it was recommended by Denis Johnson, whose TRAIN DREAMS I so admired. It’s about small-time boxers, trying to ‘make it’ in the ring in the 1940s. I can’t deny it’s extraordinarily well-written. Characters are evoked in just a couple of lines of dialogue and the arc of boxing failure is heart-breaking. What I didn’t like about it though was exactly that: it was heart-breaking. There was not a single character who was not very obviously doomed to disappointment. It wasn’t just the boxers (who were going to fail + have brain injuries) but also their promoters, and their variously pregnant or alcoholic girlfriends, and also random people they met in bars. I mean: okay? I am not sure what I am supposed to get from this? It was just dreadful and sad.