Category: Uncategorized

THE DRIVER’S SEAT by Muriel Spark

Here is good writing put to little effect. It tells the story of a woman called Lise who goes on a mini-break, hoping to meet ‘the one.’ The author tells us from the beginning that Lise will end up murdered. The ‘one’ she is looking for is the one who will kill her, as she wants to die. Eventually, she lucks out and meets a man recently released from an asylum. Here they are shortly after meeting:

“Sex is normal,” he says. “I’m cured. Sex is all right.”

“It’s all right at the time and it’s all right before,” says Lise, “but the problem is afterwards. This is, if you aren’t just an animal. Most of the times, afterwards is pretty sad.”

Yes, it’s red flags galore.

She tells him she just wants to be murdered, not raped; he can do that ‘after.’ However, once they are alone in the dark park, he does his raping first. As to why, there I can’t help you. Men will need to be explaining their issues on that one.

Anyway, I found it kind of lame, despite objectively being unable to deny it was wonderfully written. Partly, not to be all woke about it, but all of this begging to die seemed a bit victim blame-y. You can die on your holidays without going looking for it. I think though my issues were less socio-political than artistic. The whole book was written at a sort of bizarre kind of remove. I think the introduction has it:

. . .the great flaw in post-modernism, however, has always been that the writer’s freedom to expose the fictionality of fiction tends to be precisely paralleled by the reader’s freedom not to care what happens in the book.

I mean, yup.

A BURNT-OUT CASE by Graham Greene

Here is an architect who decides that the best place to handle his existential crisis is a leper colony in the DRC.

I love Graham Greene. Going backwards through my blog, I realize this is my ninth book of his. And I’m sorry to say my least favourite. He is all about lost men racked with guilt (which usually, for some reason, I apparently love) but this one was really a bridge too far.

First of all, I’m not going to say the DRC is like an ideal holiday location, but he comes it a bit strong here, calling it ‘a continent of misery and heat.’ Second of all, it is a bit hard to sympathise with you about losing your faith when you are going on about it among lepers who have lost their hands and feet.

WAR AND TURPENTINE by Stefan Hertmans

Here a man uses his grandfather’s actual diaries to recreate life in the early twentieth century.  It starts off interesting – for example, we learn how many very specific scents are lost to us.  Here he is on his great-grandmother:

Her black apron – he called it a pinafore – smelled like the offal of young rabbits

Horrifyingly specific.  Then we get into flashforwards, where we follow the author around modern day and very dull city of Ghent.  Things go rapidly downhill. It is not easy to write about the book you are writing.  Emmanual Carrere manages it, but few others can, and certainly not this writer.  Enjoy:

. . . I would scarely recognize the area.  Wild geese, a few sluggish swans in the polluted riverside mud, nervous moorhens in the black, oil-soaked mire.  Damaged nature, memory.  Pom-pom-pom, pom-pom-pom.  Humming, I walk out of the old cemetery.  But in the twilight, as I revel in the adagio strains of Edvard Grieg’s ‘Ase’s Death,’ that superlative mourning music for a dead mother, I see, in my mind’s eye, the old phantoms far above me, flickering titanically on the walls of a cave, blown up into eerie shapes by the light of a fire beyond my ken.

This is where I stopped.

YOUR BEST YEAR YET by Jenny Ditzler

A re-read of a book from a couple of years ago. I read it again to help me get some discipline and produce some new year’s resolutions. 2021 has to be a better year than 2020, just vaccines alone, but I’m hoping to give it a push. The blog of last time I read it is here. It’s a pretty good book, I recommend it.

MONOGAMY by Sue Miller

All I have to say to this novel is OK BOOMER. 

It tells the story of a marriage between two older people, and about their circle of friends.  We learn a lot about their daily lives, their dinner parties, their CD collections.  Enjoy this sample:

She had already prepared the white beans with thyme and olive oil for tomorrow’s dinner, and the plan was to put the lamb in a marinade tonight.  But she still had some shopping to do – last minute things.  Back in Cambridge, she stopped at Formaggio, the fancy neighbourhood shop, for cheeses – cheeses and crackers and several kinds of olives.  They had cherry tomatoes that looked nice in the produce section . .

I’m not even going to get into the ‘frisee salad with new potatoes and bacon’ incident. 

The husband is a book store manager, the wife a very under-employed photographer.  What we don’t learn is how they are funding two homes, and two kids, and daily fancy meals, on those salaries!?!  This is the kind of lifestyle you only get to have if you were born in the 1940s or 50s. MONOGAMY was like having my nose rubbed in inter-generational economic unfairness for 336 pages. I already have had quite enough of it from when those selfish people voted Brexit, secure in the knowledge that they would not be the ones working to pay their fat pensions.

The hook of the book is that after the husband dies the wife finds out he had a brief affair.  Rest assured, there is nothing revelatory in this.  Everyone acts like they can’t imagine why someone married thirty years might have an affair and yet still love their wife.  I mean, snore. 

There was only good part, which was where we learn about how the husband gave up on writing a novel:

It had felt liberating to acknowledge this to himself and others, to shed his painful sense of the obligation to be somehow remarkable; but it left him with the unanswered question of what to do with his life, and simultaneously the realization that working on the novel endlessly had been a way to avoid facing that question.

I like the idea of giving up on being remarkable.

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND by Rumaan Alam

Everyone knows it’s much easier to write the set-up of a sci-fi novel than it is to satisfyingly resolve it, so in this book the author des not even bother to try.  Surprisingly, it works.

A family of four head to a rural Airbnb outside New York.  They go grocery shopping and we learn a bit too much about their sex lives.  Then in the middle of the night an older couple knock on their door.  It is the owners of the Airbnb, who have fled New York because ‘something’ has happened.

SPOILER ALERT: you never find out what the something is, and it doesn’t matter.  Things get very creepy.  For one thing, the deer start to mass into huge herds.  For another, there is an incredibly loud noise.  And then some flamingos arrive and the childrens’ teeth start falling out. 

I wish LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND had been longer. I wanted to know where it was going, because while it did mounting terror very well, it was strange for it to end, as it did for me, mid-mount. 

I also struggled slightly with how literary it was.  I love the author’s twitter feed (you should follow @rumaan) which is hilarious and contemporary and unfussy.  The novel had a bit too much philosophizing for me, basil chopping, and etc. 

And yet I would indeed feel very proud if I had written it.  Strongly recommend.  Makes you feel COVID’s not that bad. 

EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT LOVE by Dolly Alderton

Here is a book to make you really feel like an immigrant.  You live in London for a majority of your adult life, you think you fit in, then you read a book by an actual Londoner and you realize you’re still and always a visitor. 

It’s not so much the extremely specific London references she makes, but the confidence with which she makes them: as if she is sure that many people share the same experience as she does. I can only ever aspire to feel that way.  (That said, I did laugh at those references I did understand. When her friend gets married she fears she will end up having to go out with the husband’s “friends and their wives at barbeques in bloody Balham.”  But this is not funny to you if you don’t know London, which is my point)

The book is a series of essays about various relationships that the author had in her twenties.  As befits any even half-feminist writer, these are not all romantic.  Despite the book’s title, they are not even mostly romantic.  Much of the book is about the various female friends she lived with in houseshares across North (of course) London. 

I always find something creepily hetero-normative about people who only have friends of their own gender.  But I still found this part of the book quite touching.  It reflects what is true, is that unfortunately Prince Charming may come late, and even when he does, he can only do what he can do.

She has an intense and lengthy online relationship with a man, who she meets for one remarkable late night date, and then never hears from again.  She is upset, but as she puts it: .. like a child mourning the loss of an invisble friend. None of it was real. . . We played intensity chicken with each other, sluts for overblown, artificial sentiment and a desperate need to feel something deep in the dark, damp basement of ourselves

This I thought was interesting, as was this:

To be an empirically attractive young man, you just have to have a nice smile, an average body type (give or take a stone) a bit of hair and be wearing an all-right jumper. To be a desirable woman – the sky’s the limit. Have every surface of your body waxed. Have manicures every week. Wear heels every day. Look like a Victoria’s Secret Angel even though you work in an office. It’s not enough to be an average-sized woman with a bit of hair and an all-right jumper.

I don’t think this is true anymore.  These days, younger men face just the same body fascism as women do, and possibly more I think.  They have to find a way to fit in those skinny jeans. I feel sorry for them but also like hahahahahahhaa welcome.

AUGUSTUS by John Williams

John Williams wrote the novel STONER, a novel that this blog tells me I read in 2013. So profoundly wonderful is this book that the author’s biography is called THE MAN WHO WROTE THE PERFECT NOVEL. You will note that it does not refer to perfect novel(s) and this is because AUGUSTUS is unfortunately not a perfect novel.

Don’t get me wrong, it is much better than what most people could achieve on their very best day after a lifetime of trying, but still in comparison to STONER it can only be meh.

It is a deeply researched account of the life of Augustus Caesar, told through the letters of his contemporaries. Apparently ancient Romans were great letter writers – Cicero wrote eight to ten a day (did he not have a job?) – and so this is not as unlikely a device as it at first seems.

It is an interesting story, but for my taste a little bit too much sandals and togas and boys impressing each other. But perhaps it’s just that it’s not STONER. Sadly nothing can be STONER.

Sometimes one regrets seeing how high the bar can go, because it makes one realize how low it is usually set.

THE ROOMMATE by Rosie Dannan

I bought this as a beach read because the New York Times called it a great beach read.

I rarely read straight up romances, but this was indeed ideal vacation reading. It tells the story of an uptight wealthy young woman who moves to LA to chase a man who she has had a crush on since high school. He ends up having to go on tour, so she has to live with his roommate, who turns out to be a . . . porn star.

So this is the romance, and it was fun. Though also very interesting it learn about the economics of the porn industry. They have some very serious labour rights issues. I can’t believe I am such a dork that I walk away from some beach reading with concern about civil rights in pornography.

THE GREENGAGE SUMMER by Rumer Godden

Here is a novel about getting your period.  It also involves some jewelry theft and desecration of the Glorious Dead.  

It’s 1923 and a single mother of five children gets so tired of their sass that she decides to take them to a First World War battlefield so they will be shamed into good behavior. Once in France she is bitten by a horse fly and nearly dies because before antibiotics everything was apparently serious. She spends the summer in hospital while her children run unsupervised around an elderly hotel that smells of “warm dust and cool plaster… Gaston the chef’s cooking, furniture polish, damp linen, and always a little of drains.”  The hotel makes a business of the battlefields. They re-bury a soldier’s skull in the garden for the dogs to dig up before each group of tourists arrive, and make sure the machine gun holes are never painted over. Good behavior from the children does not markedly improve. 

Instead they spend the summer exploring their budding sexuality (older children) and the greengage orchard (younger children).  The oldest girl has a romance with someone who turns out to be a murderer and a diamond thief, which sounds about right for the judgement calls you make when you are 16. Our narrator, her 13 year old sister, is very jealous, through the thief kindly helps her getting her the female sanitary products she needs.  

This also sounds wildly unbelievable as I write it, but was in fact based on the author’s own experience.  What I really enjoyed about the book in fact was not so much the lurid plot, as the great charm of her vivid recollection of her siblings and the French countryside. It was somehow very sweetly melancholy as a bottled memory of a time and a place, that is now slipping out of human memory.  Only the very oldest people still recall that summer of 1923, and it was touching to hear about it as we approach 2023.