nonfiction Archives -

LILIANA’S INVINCIBLE SUMMER by Cristina Rivera Garza

This book is sub-titled ‘A Sister’s Search for Justice,’ and I’ll tell you right now she does not find it. Her sister was murdered by her ex-boyfriend in the 1990s, and the Mexican state has made approximately zero headway in finding him. In any case, I do not think that is what this book is about and I suspect it was sub-titled by the Marketing Dept. What it really is, is the author with the distance of thirty years trying to re-create the last summer of her sister’s life.

She goes through her letters and diaries, and she interviews her friends. It is extremely beautiful, a close reconstruction of few months in the life of an ordinary university student thirty years ago. In fact she focuses very little on the murderer. I did note though how the relationship had all the hallmarks of domestic violence (suicide threats, stalking, etc); but I guess in the ‘90s no one had the language/structures to identify that . No one helped her; she did not seem to think she needed help. I hope now the culture would do better at identifying early that she was in a dangerous pattern. In any case, it’s too late now. I found this epigraph very beautiful.

“They, like us, are alive in

hydrogen, in oxygen; in carbon,

in phosphrous, and iron; in sodium and chlorine”

(Christina Sharpe)

She won the Pulitzer. It’s a lovely tribute. She feels guilty it took her thirty years to do it, but I admire her courage; I can’t imagine opening those letters, even with many more years distance.

THE SHELTERING DESERT by Henno Martin

I always like to read a book from the country I’m visiting, so here is a piece of non-fiction telling about the author’s two years he spent hiding in the Namib desert 1940-1941. He went with a friend/lover(?). He claims the goal was to avoid internment by the Namibian authorities as an enemy national (as they were Germans) but I have the strong suspicion they also thought it would be kind of baller.

They drive out in a truck, and have some supplies, so at the beginning it was easy. They did have to give up their rifles to the police when war began, and came to regret this a lot, as apparently it is very difficult to shoot something at a distance with a handgun. There first Christmas was pretty good, but here is their second:

“We allowed ourselves a double portion of maize, and we made it tastier with a teaspoonful of sugar that we managed to shake out of the fabric of our long-empty sugar sack. And then we heated all our empty dripping tins and collected about two teaspoonfuls of fat. It was rancid, but to us, who had eaten nothing but fatless zebra meat for a couple of weeks, it tasted wonderful.”

And he’s underselling the zebra part. One time they are so hungry that after they manage to shoot it they don’t even wait to cook it and just eat some raw.

They do have a wireless, and so are able to listen to classical music, and to the progress of this “lunatic war,’ as he called it. Apparently they had left Germany for Namibia in the late thirties, even before war broke out, as they could see it coming and wanted no part of it. I find this cool. Talk about just opting out, even if it ends in raw zebra.

Some of the book I skipped, I have to admit, as it was long discussions between him and his friend on various philosophical topics. I recall this from another African book, LONG WALK TO FREEDOM. Clearly desert and prison are not too different and you don’t have much to do other than philosophize.

Eventually his friend gets beri-beri, so they have to go and hand themselves in. They are fined but not interned (after all that!). He ends the book with a rather sad coda, telling how his friend died in a car accident. Wikipedia tells me he was an alcoholic who suffered from depression who likely drove himself off a bridge intentionally. Also very sadly, he reflects on how much less wildlife there already is, ten years later. He notes: “no man will ever again see a head of four thousand springboks in the neighbourhood’. I had wondered about this myself; driving through the Namib I did not see anything like this. It’s sad how an apparently wild environment is already so degraded by us. Of course if we enter WW3, as we seem on course to do, maybe they will have a rebound

MAURICE AND MARALYN by Sophie Elmhirst

Called A MARRIAGE AT SEA in the US, not sure why in the UK it has this name, this is the true story of a couple who spent 117 days in a lifeboat after their sail boat went down.

Lots of SPOILERS. The husband was a pretty rigid and eccentric character, and was fairly lonely till his late thirties, where he met his wife, who was ten years younger. They did not come from money and saved hard to have the chance to go on an epic sailing trip. They made it across the Atlantic okay, but in the Pacific, a few days away from the Galapagos, a dying whale sank their ship. They scrambled onto the lifeboat with what they could, and Maralyn (the wife) took a photo of the tip of its sail as it went down.

Then began 117 days. They saw 8 ships, none of who saw them, before they were rescued. They got through their food in 20 days, and then started on what they could catch. They fished with safety pins, and caught turtles and sharks (!) with their bare hands. They sometimes caught birds too, and ate not just the birds but the fish the birds vomited back up. They were thirsty enough to think fish eyes were delicious water source. Hardest of all was the despair. Maurice was willing to give up, but Maralyn insisted they would live. Towards the end the raft started deflating, so they had to pump it back up EVERY HALF HOUR. They were near death (and I’m talking pressure sores that reached to the bone) when a South Korean ship rescued them.

They are (get this) eager to get back on the water again and use the money they make from selling their story to buy another boat and sail on. Eventually though they run out of money and are forced to go home. I felt bad for them that YouTube was not invented yet. They would have raked it in. They are less happy on land, but still extraordinarily happy together, until Maralyn dies at 61. Maurice is bereft.

Bizarrely, the author begins the ending of the book with this:

“There are many ways to take the measure of a life. In the linear version, Maurice’s life had a hard beginning, a dramatic middle, an isolated end”

Yikes. Imagine thinking it’s your business to take the measure of a life. What does that even mean? Luckily she takes a steer from Maurice, from his self-published autobiography (which, charmingly, only begins on the day he meets Maralyn), where he says:

“Although I am wary of accepted truths, I believe in all human beings there is a desire to love and be loved, to experience the full fierceness of human emotion, and to make it a measure of the success of one’s life.”

So she concludes with the idea that you could “measure (a life’s) success by the extent to which you have loved and been loved. On that count, his life had been a triumph”

CATLAND by Kathryn Hughes

This one’s an odd piece of non-fiction telling about about the famous cat illustrator Louis Wain and in parallel the slow evolution of cats into pets.

Some of it was interesting. First off, it is interesting to find out that while dogs were domesticated 25,000 years ago, cats were only 8,000, with the coming of agriculture. This is why they have so much less variety than dogs do. It was also interesting to learn that even into the early nineteenth century cats were not particularly loved; in fact, they were considered working animals, and had a reputation for cruelty. It was considered quite okay to torture them, apparently. It’s pretty stomach churning.

Side bar, on phosphorous. I knew that 180,000 mummified cats were found in Egypt, and shipped to England to be used as fertilizer in 1888. I always thought this was rather sacriligeous, but in this book I found out that in fact these cats were not especially special, but were kind of factory farmed to be sold to ancient Egyptian tourists!

After a while we got a bit becalmed in the history of cat illustration, so I gave up, but I’m still enjoyably bristling with cat-related facts

CATAPULT: HARRY AND I BUILD A SEIGE WEAPON by Jim Paul

Here is a book about a two guys who decided to build a medieval catapult. It is a story about many things, only one of them being catapults. But let’s start with them. Apparently when the catapult was first invented (by Archimedes!) it was a major shift in warfare. Fortified cities, for centuries the height of defense, were suddenly useless. At first, people though it must be gods sending bolts from heaven, because they could not imagine humans moving objects so large. One Roman commander is said to have cried “Oh Hercules! Human martial valor is of no use anymore.” This guy needs to get a load of the atom bomb.

Side bar, I also learnt that there are iron tools from 4000BC, about 2500 year before humans invented iron. GET THIS – It’s because early people learnt to carve iron out of meteorites! One community in Greenland used to pilgrimage annually to one they called ‘the mother.’

It’s not all about medieval weaponry. It’s also, probably more, about male friendship. It’s sort of charming the bloke-y way they build this catapult. And it’s kind of disturbing how amazed they are that they are managing to have a functional platonic relationship. Truly, men are lonely.

CATAPULT was first published thirty years ago; I have read it in re-issue. This has added another layer, because this means they are trying to build this catapult before the internet. I was alive before the internet, and I guess even I have forgotten what it was like. They go to the library to look at old pictures of catapults. They draw the catapult on paper. They look in the YELLOW PAGES for suppliers. They ask their friends for ideas. It’s just incredible how slow and how human the whole process is.

RANDOM FAMILY by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

I cannot now recall how I decided that what I needed to read was 400 pages of reportage of a family in 1980s Bronx, but I am glad I did. This was really banging, and unlike anything I have ever read.

The author embedded herself with a single family and tells about their day to day lives over the course of about a decade. I don’t think I’ve ever read a piece of non-fiction before that totally avoided commentary or context. It just plunges you right into the day-to-day of these peoples’ lives, and tries to very deeply understand the inter-personal dynamics that are driving the decisions they make. And by deeply, I mean DEEPLY. It’s clear she has interviewed people about stuff like how they first started having sex, and who was cheating on who and why, and so on. It’s interesting to read about any family’s interpersonal dynamics in this degree of objective detail, but this one is particularly so, because there is almost nothing else going on. Almost no one has a job, and many are in jail. All the family’s girls are pregnant at 14. 14! And then go on to have at least one more child before they are 18. They are caught in a very, very difficult spiral, and they handle it with extraordinary courage and good spirits. What I found particularly astonishing was how open they were to helping each other. One woman (Jessica) has 5 children before she is 21, and then goes to jail at 23. All of her children are absorbed by her family, rather than being put into care, despite the fact that her family really has no space or money for more. I was also astonished how appalling the prison system was. Apparently a single 15 minute call cost $4! And this for people who are often trying to make $10 do for two weeks of groceries.

One side point is I read this over the course of a delayed flight – MUC-LHR – and I note I read continuously for 4.5hrs. This makes me happy: clearly the phone has not totally eradicated my attention span.

THIS HOUSE OF GRIEF by Helen Garner

I chose this book on impulse because Amazon recommended it to me. I had just read a book by the same aurhor, her first, which is why the algorithm though I might like it. That one was a deeply personal memoir of her life in a commune with her junkie boyfriend. This one is wildly different, being a straightforward piece of courtroom reportage.

It was pretty interesting. It tells the real life trial of an Australian man who drove his three children into a dam. They were drowned, but he survived. He claimed he had a coughing fit. His ex, and his family, all testified in his defense, saying he loved his children and would never have killed them. He was also however in the middle of an apparently amicable divorce – his wife was leaving him for the contractor who was doing up their house – and it became increasingly clear over the course of the trial that this mild-manner man in this polite divorce had actually murdered the children to get his revenge.

The story in itself was pretty interesting, but what really elevated it was Garner’s clear, lucid writing, and her close observation of how ‘justice’ actually gets served. The part that I can’t get over is that these poor kids were found unbuckled. It looks like the five year old unbuckled the two year old’s car seat, and the eight year old actually managed to get the window down; but just not quite in time to escape.

THE POWER OF NOW by Eckhart Tolle

This is the second time I have started this book, and the second time I have not finished it. Weirdly, both times I have got something out of it. It is a quite famous self-help book, and I think is the basis for some somewhat culty organizations. I don’t hold this against it, indeed I would query how good your self-help book is if no one can get a good cult out of it.

In the Introduction, Tolle tells us how he was suicidal one night, and thought he just couldn’t stand himself anymore. Then he wondered who was this ‘he’ who was experiencing himself. He had a sort of major insight, where he was able to see that his thoughts and feelings were not his inherent self. He then went to sleep, and woke up in such a state of bliss that he spent the next three months on park benches.

It sounds kind of crazy, but the point is very much the basic point of mindfulness – that we don’t have to identify ourselves with our thoughts. He goes on to build out this idea at some length, and I particularly liked some of his ideas – that you really, really, don’t need to think about your past. That it’s largely irrelevant. Also that you can decide not to create more pain for yourself. That you don’t have to accept anything as a ‘problem.’

He then gets a bit loopy, one-ness, Spirit, etc, and that’s where he keeps losing me, though one of these days I will get through it.

THE MERCHANT OF PRATO by Iris Origo

Here is a book to make you feel like indeed all your problems are insignificant and death its on its way. It’s non-fiction, based on the 140,000 letters, 500 ledgers, 300 deeds of partnership, and various other paperwork left behind by a 14^th century Italian merchant named Francesco Di Marco Datini. This is apparently one of the largest records left behind by any medieval person, and it is truly astounding. His business ventures, his house, his food, his clothes, his private conversations with his wife, his worries, his medical problems, his religious crises. It’s all in there. I don’t know what I thought medieval people were doing with their time, maybe like religious mania and starvation, but apparently they were living full and rich lives that are now completely lost.

Let me give you a flavour. He is a super anxious guy, and here he is to his wife:

Remember to go to bed betimes and rise early and let not the door be opened until you have got up. And look well to everything; let them not go a-gadding. You know what Bartolomea is; she will say she goes one place, and then goes elsewhere. Ghirigora, too, has little sense . .

And here is someone else writing to him when he is getting really carried away with renovating his house, something that even today in Tuscany is called ‘rubble disease”:

Other wise and virtuous citizens do some building, but all except you in moderation! One man has a bailiff, another a friend or a paid overseer. But you are so greedy, you will allow no single groat to be misused, nor a single brick to laid lengthways, when it would look better upright – as if your little house where to be the dwelling place of your immortal soul!

I acquired some interesting historical info too. I was surprised to find that Italians had slaves at this time, actively acquired to replace people who died in the Black Death. Then at another point some town is ‘sacked by a company of free lances,’ from which I guess we get the word freelance? Also, how amazing is that it was standard to write on the first page of all your business ledgers: “In the name of god and of profit”

But I think this history stuff I will quickly forget. What I will remember is the density of his life, the huge anxieties and sufferings and drama, him and I suppose millions of other medieval people, and millions since, all forgotten.

STOLEN FOCUS by Johann Hari

It is a lot harder to concentrate than it used to be. For example, as a child I used to read for hours at a time, but now I almost never do. I wasn’t sure how widely shared this experience was, but I learn from this book it is very widely shared, and gain some ideas on what to do about it.

There are some obvious culprits, like social media, and how more-ish our phone are generally. There are some less obvious ones too. One is instant messaging: did you know the average American worker is interrupted on average every three minutes? Once you learn to be interrupted, he argues, eventually you start interrupting yourself. Another is the sheer volume of information we face, which means we feel we have to move quicker from thing to thing. Apparently the time things trend on Twitter has reduced a lot just in the last five years. Hari argues that this is why we aren’t pulling together as a society to ‘focus’ on climate change, like we did on the ozone layer, but this I think is a bit of a stretch. One very worrying point he raised was about how our constant need to be entertained means we almost never sit with an empty mind, and how damaging that is to our creativity.

The solutions are in part individual (set timers for apps, turn your phone to greyscale (I can attest, this one REALLY works)), and in part societal. If social media was subscription, for example, it would be more about making us happy (e.g. helping us meet our real friends in real life) and less about making advertisers happy (i.e., keeping us on our screens). He may have had more solutions but I don’t know because I had to quit before the end.

Clearly at journalism school you are taught that readers can’t relate to conceptual thinking, but rather need individual stories they can feel something about. This book takes it to the extreme. When representing certain ideas, even very obvious ones, he continually relates them to various dull stories about peoples’ personal lives (e.g., how my struggle with obesity inspired my ideas about how to swear off my phone). Now that I right it down this seems kind of minor, but apparently it was enough to make me quit the book.