Category: fiction

POOR THINGS by Alasdair Gray

Here is an very fruity book about SPOLIER ALERT someone creating a living woman from the body of a dead woman and the brains of her fetus. 

It was pretty interesting as a concept, but I found I struggled to care on some level.  Everything was so wild and magically real that it was hard to feel that anything meant anything or would have any consequences. It made me think about FRANKENSTEIN, and especially why the monster in that book is male and not female.  Because, let us face it, if some mad scientist in the nineteenth century thought he could bring someone back to life he would 1000% have tried with a woman because, obviously, sex slave.  Perhaps because Mary Shelley was female it did not go in that direction, but you know realism-wise it ought to have.  Also, I’ve just been in a Wikipedia deepdive about Mary Shelley, and let me give you the sobering reflection that she wrote FRANKENSTEIN when she was just 19! However she had already led a big life, having got together with Shelley when she was 16 (and he was married), after meeting him secretly at her mother’s grave (why), and then running away with him because even though it’s 1819 she believes in FREE LOVE.   What a baller. 

DON’T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT by Diana Athill

Athill’s writing is just so completely clean and unpretentious it feels like a near-miracle. I am close to having read all her books, and am going slow, because I don’t want them to be over. Her memoir INSTEAD OF A LETTER was a searing story of getting dumped, while SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END is an only slight more searing story of what it is like to get old. This is not memoir, but fiction, and I did not like it quite as much.

It tells the story of a young woman who gets to move to London after the second world war. The freedom that I, fifty years later, take for granted, is for her and her friends completely unexpected and thrilling. She gets a job (!), has sex (!!), and meets immigrants (!!!). She is also a pretty cold-hearted tease. She’s a very pretty woman, and is not too bothered about making it clear when she is not interested. I don’t want to be too judgmental, but I found it really pretty mean.

Let’s close with a lovely snippet, about her arguing with her mother as a child: “If I sulked and cried I could usually make my mother cry too – during our rows we would sob rage and frustration at each other – but she always won because an adult’s tears are more frightening than a child’s . . “

GREAT GRANNY WEBSTER by Caroline Blackwood

It’s incredible how any time a book is really weird you can tell it is written from life. This one is really loopy, being a thinly fictionalized account of the author’s great-grandmother and grandmother. The great-gran is pretty intense, being a rigid and lonely old woman who spoke to no one but her one-eyed servant for months at a time. Eerily she spends most of all day in a hard-backed chair, in total idleness, not even reading a book. Her grandmother meanwhile appears to have had some kind of post-partum psychosis, believing in fairies and elves and trying to kill her son who she thought was a changeling. A lot of the action of the book takes place in a crumbling Irish stately home, which her grandfather does not have the money to keep up. I find it strange how many books there are about how difficult it is to have an inheritance. I’d like to give it a try.

This book apparently was denied the Booker because Philip Larkin, chair of the committee, thought it could not be classified as fiction. I have no evidence but you just know he thought women talking about their own lives was low value. It’s a good thing I love AN ARUNDEL TOMB so much or I would have a lot more to say on this.

MONKEY BOY by Francisco Goldman

It is strange how few books there are by immigrants, and how many by immigrants’ children. My theory is we immigrants are busy, trying to assimilate or live the capitalist dream or whatever, and it’s the children who have the free time to try and understand what just happened.

In this book an American man, the child of a Guatemalan and a Ukrainian Jew, puts the effort in. Some parts of it I found pretty interesting, like his flashbacks to middle school, and a particularly epic high school crush. Other parts were less interesting, like where he visits his mother in her retirement home, tirelessly grilling her about Guatemalan history despite her advancing dementia. I mean I get it: he is deep in middle age, and wants it all to have some meant something. Good luck with that I guess.

THE ART OF SCANDAL by Regina Black

This book sounded like it was going to be fun. A politician’s wife finds out her husband has been cheating on her, and agrees to a payment of $1M to stick with him till the next election cycle. It didn’t quite work for me though. I thought it was going to be fun and silly but in fact it was rather bleak and sad. And there was quite a lot of therapy speak. Not my kind of book I guess.

MOSCOW STATIONS by Venedikt Yerofeev

It boring to listen to other peoples’ dreams. It is also boring to be with drunk people babbling away while you are sober. This book is kind of a mix of these two kinds of borings. I feel bad to have to say it, as this is a famous classic of 20th century Russian literature, and the author had an eccentric, impressive, and difficult life. Like GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, it circulated on samizdat for many years before the government allowed it to be published (appearing in a magazine dedicated to education on the evils of drinking, though its unclear if the editor meant this as a joke or not). It tells the story of a man getting progressively drunker as he rides the train from Moscow to the suburb where his son lives. One interesting point to learn was how really rough Soviet alcoholism was. At one point the narrator tells us about one drink he makes, called ‘Dog’s Giblets,’ which involved mixing floor varnish and brown beer. This is not an exaggeration – apparently the author’s girlfriend used to hide her perfume when he came round, for he would drink it. I literally can’t imagine that status you have to reach to seriously consider the floor varnish, let alone the perfume

BOOK LOVERS by Emily Henry

This lady has been writing back-to-back New York Times’s bestsellers. This is her third (!) This one is a rom-com about a literary agent who gets together with an editor. It was sprightly and fun and ideally suited to my Covid daze. It was interesting to read about the editing process, because I am very confident this book has been through a very rigorous editor. It is sharp as a tack. Like YOU, AGAIN, another rom-com that I read during Covid, it has been edited to within an inch of its life. Not a single piece of flab: just a machine for delivering plot. That’s hard to do and I admire it hugely.

THE ENCHANTED APRIL by Elizabeth von Arnim

Here is a highly season appropriate novel, about escaping the English winter. Four middle-class English ladies, all strangers, decide to spend a month in Italy together. The beginning is really fun, as the first of the ladies decides, in the depths of February, to blow her entire nest egg on the escape. Only those who have attempted to survive a London February can understand the urge to get CRAZY.

The plot doesn’t precisely work out, but who cares, it is such a fun novel of getting your life changed. One thing I did find weird, is I was thinking these ladies were old, based on the extraordinary dullness of their lives, but then it emerges they are only in their thirties! It’s amazing how many novels, even quite recent ones (this one is 1922), have this as the key takeaway: if I have to be born female THANK GOD it’s now and not earlier.

ANGEL by Elizabeth Taylor

This book tells about a teenage girl who becomes a writer. I have read an awful lot of books that could be described as being that, as obviously: writers write what they know. This though is something different. The girl is a horrifying, self-absorbed anti-hero, or, in summary, #goals. Here she is on getting married: ” . . . she had thought of love with bleak distaste. She wanted to dominate the world, not one person.”

We follow her through a life of bestsellers and terrifying selfishness. It’s eerie and frightening. Elizabeth Taylor is just a fantastic writer. Her MRS PALFREY AT THE CLAREMONT was one of my favourite novels of last year, and while I did not like this one as much it is still objectively better than most things I read this year. Let me end by giving you this flavour, of her on a car ride:

She would have liked to drive on for ever, peacefully, jolting along in the warm air until it grew dark. The great brass lamps would be lit, drawing pale moths out of the blackness, bringing one tree forward after another, shining on closed flowers, on owls sitting on posts and cats’ eyes among the tall grasses.

MISS LONELYHEARTS by Nathaniel West

Many reviewers call this book ‘comic.’ What is wrong with these people? I found it almost unmanageably bleak. Written in the 1930s, it tells about a man who has a job replying to agony aunt letters in the newspaper. This would be rough at any time, but can you imagine the kinds of problems that you are getting written about in the 1930s? It’s mostly women, and it is hair-raising stuff: abuse, unwanted pregnancies, and etc. The man is busy having a religious crisis and is in no state to handle this kind of content. Almost worse than the letters are his friends at the bar, who joke about women in ways that I can only hope are exaggerated and not a real reflection of men a hundred years ago.

I did find this interesting, a description of some of his writer colleagues: “At College, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything. Money and fame meant nothing to them. They were not worldly men.”

I found that an interesting idea, that some people are worldly and some are not.