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GIVING UP THE GHOST by Hilary Mantel

I am on a memoir kick at the moment, all handpicked for me out of here.  This one is by a famous writer, Hilary Mantel (author of e.g., WOLF HALL).  It’s not much about her fame, or writing, but more about her rather mysterious inner life.  It has the gorgeous language I expect of her: my blog tells me I’ve read fully five (!) of her books.  She really is the master of transforming the ordinary into the marvellous. Here she is walking up to her back door in the dark:

 But just as feet know the path, fingers know the keys.  Fifty yards from the market place there is no light pollution, no urban backwash to pale the sky; no light path, no footfall.  There is starlight, frost on the path, and owls crying from three parishes

The book has three main focuses: her childhood, her illness, and bizarrely the process of buying her house.  She grew up in a working class family, and is one of that group of English writers whose whole life was changed by passing the 11+ exam.  It’s all very hard scrabble, especially the part where her mother leaves her husband for another man but they all continue to live together, but not in a cool menage-a-trois kind of way, more in an economic necessity kind of way. 

Then she goes to university and gets married, but this is largely summarized in a couple of lines.  The main focus is on her illness.  She has endometriosis, which is famously an under-diagnosed disease among women.  It’s still so today, but back then it was really bad: they sent her to a lunatic asylum rather than believe her symptoms. (I said it was better today, but not a lot better.  Ladies: if you have really bad period pain don’t let anyone tell you it’s not really bad).   

Now, all that said, let me clarify that I’m not saying she’s not crazy.   There are some pretty questionable parts.  She was very frightened once when she saw something creepy in the garden when she was eight.  It’s not clear what it was, possibly a ghost, possibly just a quality of the light, but she emphasizes repeatedly how frightening this was.  I would never tell people about such a thing.  I’m just not ready for the mockery.  Same with the last memoir, about the aunt who was just too charismatic.  I’m beginning to conclude that writing a good memoir means not worrying about mockery.

And now onto the third section, the most profoundly British section, which is all about house buying.  Weirdly, this is also about ghosts.  I enjoyed this view of your past homes:

You come to this place, mid-life.  You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face.  When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led.  All your houses are haunted by the person you might have been.  The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of your curtains, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer liners. 

She moves to a new housing estate, and I enjoyed her account of her young neighbours:

They were not . . . the sort for adulterous upsets, for drunken fumbles, for spring folie, for subterfuge and lies.  They were grounded infotec folk, hardware or software people. .  They were mobile in their habits till their children fixed them; keen, pragmatic, willing to defer gratification . . . Men and women met each other halfway, gentle fathers and defined, energetic mothers. . . They had parents, but they had them as weekend accessories, appearing on summer Saturdays like their barbecue forks 

 Her endometriosis, being treated very late, means she can’t have children, and these almost-children also haunt the book. 

Even adulterers have their ghost children. Illicit lovers say: what would our child be like?  Then, when they have parted or are forced apart, the child goes on growing up, a shadow, a half-shadow of possibility.  The country of the unborn is criss-crossed by the roads not taken, the paths we turned our back on.  In a sly state of half-becoming, they lurk in the shadowland of chances missed.

So GIVING UP THE GHOST is an unusual memoir, in not being just the story of her life, but the story of all the lives she didn’t get to lead.  It’s sad really, it seems unfair: how come we only get to live the one life.  Seems like we should get a second chance.

THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA by Stendahl

I keep meaning to read Stendhal.  I got a good distance into this book before I googled myself (by means of this blog) and found out I have in fact already read Stendahl.  

And not just Stendahl, but THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA.  In my defense, last time I apparently gave up on p225.  This time I got to p265.  

Yes, I’m not into it.  It’s just sort of hard going with lots of silly swashbuckling.  This blog is now almost ten years old and I see it is such a long time period that I have forgotten entire books, but not such a long time that I have changed as a person.  Creepily, not just my verdict and quit point are about the same, but so too are the parts I enjoyed.  Both this time and last I noted this rather fun line, which shows cities don’t change so very much:

In front of each of these cafes, crowds of the inquisitive are installed on chairs in the middle of the street, eating ice-cream and criticizing the passers-by. 

This time around I also enjoyed the first hand account of the battle of Waterloo (as Stendahl marched with Napoleon – including on the way back from Moscow – yikes).  I also really enjoyed learning more about the world pre-democracy, where the ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ was considered a passing ‘cult.’  Here is someone telling the main character, a nobleman called Fabrizio, about a government functionary who greatly respects the nobility:

“But when he is front of the prince, or even in front of me, he can’t say no.  Truth to tell, if I’m to produce my full effect,  I have to have the big yellow sash on over my tunic.  In a frock-coat he’d contradict me, so I always put on a uniform to receive him.  It’s not for us to destroy the prestige of power, the French newspapers are demolishing it quite fast enough.  The obsession with deference is hardly going to survive as long as we do, and you, nephew, will outlive deference.  You will simply be a man!

At one point, Fabrizio considers running away to America, and his aunt (with whom he is in an incestuous relationship, but don’t worry about that): “explained to him the cult of the god dollar, and the respect that must be paid to merchants and artisans in the street, who by their votes determine everything.”  What a nightmare!

THE BEGINNING OF SPRING by Penelope Fitzgerald

This is the story of a man whose wife leaves him, with the children.  She returns then returns them at the first opportunity.   It is set in Russia in the early twentieth century.
I was stunned by Fitzgerald’s THE BLUE FLOWER, which mysteriously out of a few bits of nothing created a profound meditation on life’s brevity.  This was also a few bits of nothing, but somehow it didn’t quite come together in the same way.  Like THE BLUE FLOWER, those bits of nothing are in their own way remarkable.  Based on the last book, I thought she must be some kind of expert on domestic life in eighteenth century Germany, so specific and detailed was the world.  THE BEGINNING OF SPRING makes me think that in fact she must be an expert on twentieth century Russia.   Really I guess she is just some sort of magician. 

ZORBA THE GREEK by Nikos Kazantzakis

Here is a novel on the exciting subject of dealing with your philosophical problems while also mining lignite in rural Crete.  In my endless quest for something to read I often pick up books in the category of minor modern classic, having finished all the major ones long ago, and usually it’s a good call.  This one: jesus. 
Some tortured young man is off to mine lignite.  (What is lignite?  Nobody knows.  But strangely it also came up in this book that I read this year).  He spends a lot of time writing tortured letters to some friend about a set of what we would today call #firstworldproblems about the meaning of life and the nature of Greek identity.  Then he meets this man Zorba, a peasant who tells him all about his love of a musical instrument, the santuri:

If the wife says one word too many, how could I possibly be in the mood to play the santuri?  If your children are hungry and screaming at you, you just try to play ! To play the santuri you have to give everything up to it, d’you understand?

Yes, I understood.  Zorba was the man I had sought so long in vain.  A living heart, a large voracious mouth, a great brute soul, not yet severed from mother earth.

He’s profoundly inspired by Zorba’s connection to the earth and ability to live in the moment.  It’s so classist I can’t tell you.  It’s a really laughable version of the myth of the noble savage that goes completely unexamined.  Or I assume goes unexamined, because I didn’t get to the end. It was just too stupid.  And the misogyny was hard going.  Regular readers know I give a pass to lots of misogyny, because otherwise there’d be hardly anything left to read from the western cannon.  But this one was tough.  You may have noticed how unreasonable Zorba’s wife was to mention the children starving.  He has lots of other strong ideas like this.  Here is how nefarious of us it is to have children when birth control hasn’t been invented yet.

 

What can you expect from women? He said. That they’ll go and get children by the first man who comes along.  What can you expect of men?  That they fall into the trap.  Mark my words, boss!

And here’s the part where we enjoy getting raped in war zones. 


How they had entered Novo Rossiisk; how tey had looted shops; how they had gone into houses and and carried off the women.  At first the hussies cried and scratched their own faces with their nails and scratched the men, too, but gradually they became tamed, they shut their eyes and yelped with pleasure. They were women, in fact. . .

I just couldn’t do it.  Indeed, if this is a classic it is extremely minor.  Or perhaps it is a major classic, but of a quite different kind than I had been thinking.

ARABELLA by Georgetter Heyer

I really enjoyed this one.  It had a kind of standard Heyer plot, though the romantic lead is a bit more of a bad boy than usual; but it struck me as funnier than the others.  Here is an older lady, about who she comments: “Time had done more to enlarge her body than her mind,” and . .. provided she was not expected to put herself out for them, or to do anything disagreeable, she was both kind and generous to her friends.”
Or perhas I was just in the mood for Heyer.   Apparently I am on a real kick in 2019, and I blame is all on Bognor Regis.

YOUR BEST YEAR YET by Jinny Ditzler

Regular readers will know I am on a self-help kick.  A friend of mine recommend this one to me, and I found it pretty good – it’s a straightforward guide to trying to decide on your goals.  As Ditzler puts it:

After the initial spurt of growing up and becoming an adult, most of us don’t stop to think about goals in the same serious way we did when we carefully planned our education, our career, our first place away from our parents.  We begin to ‘follow our noses’, reacting to circumstances . . . Time goes by and soon we begin to feel our lives are out of control and there’s nothing we can do about it.  Things which matter most to us aren’t getting enough attention and life gets frustrating.  We feel we are no longer in charge of our own lives. 

It’s broadly framed as a workshop to do at new year, though you can do it anytime, and is structured around ten questions.  The first are about reviewing the year past.  She claims:

Almost without exception, people’s initial thoughts about the past are negative.  . . Unless we stop to think about what really happened, we assume that there is far greater cause for disappointment than celebration

I found this to be shockingly true.  I was amazed to see how much more I had achieved in the last year than I had failed at.  Indeed, one of the more interesting parts of the book is not just doing the questions but hearing the author’s review of the many people she has seen answer the questions. 
She provides a structured set of ways of thinking about your life, which I found quite useful, and various examples of how people succeeded by being pragmatic in their approach.  I was tempted to eyeroll, but was stopped by:

. . . take note if you find it much harder to believe these experiences than the earlier examples of peoples’ problems

Her guidance to getting your goals is something she has rather clunkily branded “Gold Time” self management, where you carve out time to focus on what is important but not urgent, which she argues is the stuff that most frequently drops off our list, but is in fact the stuff we should absolutely be doing to actually be in charge of our lives.  

To my mind, figuring out what you want in the first place is much harder than actually executing it, but still, it was an interesting way of thinking about your priorities. 

I recommend this book and have tried to put some of its steps into practice.  It is remarkably difficult to give up one’s prejudice against self-help.  The author notes:

Most of us trap ourselves by not being willing to take the necessary steps to be the master of our own lives, yet we’ll be damned if we’ll let anyone or anything serve as our master in the meantime!  The result- no one’s in charge.  We get nowhere.  Every bit of true progress I’ve made in my life has come from really listening to a teacher or an author and having the discipline to practice his or her lessons until I have learnt them.  Action and follow-through are everything.  

I may as well try someone else’s approach.  It’s not as if mine is working so well. 

THE MIGHTY FRANKS by Michael Frank

It is amazing what different worlds books can take you in to.   The last one was all about the challenges of being an Icelandic sheep farmer.  This one is all about the challenges of having a charismatic aunt.

It’s an odd memoir, almost a misery memoir, except the misery is of so very niche and specific a kind it’s hard to take it seriously.  At the nub of it is his aunt, who is not just the sister of his father but also the wife of his mother’s brother.  That is, siblings married siblings.  One couple had three children (including Michael, the author, the oldest), and the other none.  The mothers of both pairs of siblings live together, and everyone lives walking distance from each other. 
Now that I write that, it’s clearly a recipe for trouble. The trouble comes in the form of this aunt, who is a very successful and wealthy screenwriter, very charismatic, and very obsessed with Michael.  She constantly singles him out for attention, non-sexual but very intense, and the only thing is, he needs to agree with her.  This is okay when he was younger, though a measure of the bizarreness is that she recommends to him – when he is just eight – OF HUMAN BONDAGE and SONS AND LOVERS. “Take my word for it, Lovey, between (them) you’ll learn everything you need to know about what it feels like to be a certain kind of young person.  Your kind, if I may say.”  These are not child appropriate books, unless of course that child is tortured artistically and sexually. 
Anyway, as he heads to adolescence he naturally rebels, and in parallel his aunt becomes increasingly unstable.  Nothing actually specifically bad really happens; no one even gets a slap.  The most extreme is someone going home from holiday in Paris early.  This is not exactly the high water mark of human suffering.  But clearly Frank was troubled enough to write a whole book about it.  And his parents agree: in later life, they apologize for not protecting him from whatever it was his aunt was. 
There’s an interesting side point on his mother being involved in early feminism, where suburban women held “CR groups” that is, consciousness raising groups.  One result of this is that she stops allowing the aunt to decorate their house – which indeed was a weird part of the family dynamic. 

In writing this post it sounds rather as if I didn’t enjoy this book.  However I did.  It’s always interesting to see the specific craziness of someone else’s family.  And I’m always amazed by memoirs: who even remembers their past that clearly?  My theory is, nobody does; but I always admire the boldness of someone willing to write up their fantasy of what happened

INDEPENDENT PEOPLE by Holdor Laxness

Guys, I’m now fully informed about the life of subsistence sheep farmers in Iceland in the early twentieth century, and let me tell you it is not pretty.   I’m so fully informed I am hoping Icelandic shepherding will somehow come up in dinner party conversation so I can impress others with my incredibly niche knowledge.  This seems unlikely. 
This book is a good corrective to any idea we might have in the modern day about how ‘busy’ and ‘stressed’ we are.  Truly stressed people make their children work sixteen hour days in the rain, because they need to or else they will starve.  Also, they don’t think rain is a big deal.  Here’s the main character:

And if Bjartur heard them complaining about the damp he would reply that it was pretty miserable wretches that minded at all whether they were wet or dry.  He could not understand why such people had been born.  “It’s nothing but damned eccentricity to want to be dry,” he would say.  “I’ve been wet more than half my life and never been a whit the worse for it.”

You would think he must be joking, but no.  When looking for sheep on the mountains he often sleeps out in a cave even when there is snow on the ground.  All you have to do, I learn, is wake up four times a night to turn the boulder you are sleeping on over sixteen times.  Then you are quite warm, and even if not you are so tired you don’t notice it.  Handy tips, if ever my life goes so horrifyingly wrong I have to be an Icelandic sheep farmer.  Then I can look forward to rye bread with a ‘lump of tallow and cod liver’ for breakfast, and salted fish for 100% of other meals, though in spring that should read ‘meal’ as you only get one of those a day.  Brjartur’s elderly grandmother in fact does not like fresh food, arguing it makes her ill. 

The main message of this book, other than to make you very, very, very grateful for your own circumstances is that one life is not long enough for the poor man to ever get out from under.  It’s a bleak, but probably true, opinion, and the central tragedy of the story is Bjartur’s effort to be ‘independent’.

He works 18 years for someone else to afford a small piece of land, and then works himself and his sickly family astoundingly hard, to build a flock (“Whatever happens you can always comfort yourself with the thought that the sheep are in the home pastures,” he helpfully comments when someone dies).  That flock is then occasionally wiped out, by worms, or storms, or on one weird occasion by ghosts (?). 

They have one piece of luck: the First World War!  It drives up prices for Icelandic lamb. 

 “Oh let them squabble, damn them,” said Bjartur.  “I only hope they keep it up as long as they can. . . . I only hope they go on blasting one another’s brains out as long as other folk can get some good out of it.  There ought to be plenty of people abroad.  And no one misses them

Poor old Brjartur does well off this, but them overreaches to build a house, which plunges him into debt again.  This does not deter him. He is a battleaxe of a man.  When his only remaining son plans to emigrate to America, leaving no one to take over the shabby field that is his life’s work

He made no further attempt to talk his son over; it is a mark of weakness to try to talk anyone over.  An independent man thinks only of himself and lets others do as they please.  He himself had never allowed anyone to talk him over.

This gives you a flavour.  It’s a sort of sad novel, but also quite funny.  Here is a local middleclass landowner

Now the Bailiff’s nature was such that had he been accused of theft or even of murder he would have preserved an unruffled exterior and have seemed, indeed, to be quite gratified.  But with one crime he would not have his name connected: if anyone insinuated that he was making money the ice was broken and his tongue was loosened, such a slander was more than he could stand. 

You also learn the fate of Bjartur’s whole family, who do all sorts, get pregnant out of wedlock, die in snowstorms, etc.  There’s much wisdom to it, often of the melancholy kind:

 But the first days are always the worst, and there is much comfort in the thought that time effaces everything, crime and sorrow no less than love. 

Poor old Bartjur.  He loses everything anyway, not in the end because of the worms, or the storms, or even the ghosts, but because of the debts.  The tagline of the novel might as well be: You can’t fight city hall.

DEVIL’S CUB by Georgette Heyer

A Duke elopes with the wrong sister.  He’s got a temper that in a modern novel would be a red flag for domestic violence, so when he finds out his mistake determines to carry on anyway.  Then he falls in love with her but not before a visit from the characters of the previous novel THESE OLD SHADES. 
This is the second novel of the series, and the second of the new genre of historical romance, invented by Heyer for THESE OLD SHADES and now with literally thousands of novels in its wake.   It’s interesting to see the birth of a genre, and it’s hard to believe it didn’t exist before: the love story in the historical setting.  I guess it’s like Facebook.  Now its hard to imagine why no one thought of it before.  Why are all the best business ideas so obvious once someone has thought of them?  Brownie mix is the one that really tortures me.  Who would have thought people would pay for pre-mixed flour and cocoa powder?  I can’t believe someone got rich off that one.