BURMESE DAYS by George Orwell

Here is a novel about the British Raj in Burma in the 1920s. You would think if you are going to go to the trouble of colonizing a place you would at least enjoy yourself. Here, they do nothing but bitch. It’s too hot, we don’t like the food, there aren’t enough sidewalks and etc. I just finished THE GREAT FIRE, where they did some similar whining, but about Australia. I don’t think this happened as much in Southern Africa (e.g., ‘Happy’ Valley), possibly because it’s just a better place. SHOUTOUT TO THE SUBCONTINENT!

The story is around a man named John Flory, who particularly suffers with the narrow-mindedness and (though he does not call it this) racism of his colleagues. He falls madly in love with a young woman who is as narrow-minded and racist as any of them, but he is frankly desperate. Meanwhile, his only real friend, an Indian doctor, is at risk from a corrupt Burmese official. Unsurprisingly, it all ends badly.

It’s in that ‘unsurprisingly’ that my issue with this book sits. The whole thing drips with doom from the beginning. It’s like a morality story, in which the good die young, told very slowly. I don’t know too much about the British in Burma, but it also strongly has the vibe of being written by someone who wasn’t there for very long but still has a lot of opinions. And yet, I still enjoyed it. Orwell’s a good writer, and this was an interesting window into a certain kind of (thankfully) lost life.

THE GREAT FIRE by Shirley Hazzard

I nearly gave up on this book multiple times. I found the style kind of hard to read, and the dialogue fake-y. And then at some point I sort of clicked into it, and it started to fly by. I worry that the older you get, the less wiling you are to enter into things on their terms, rather than your own. Anyway, I managed it on this one.

The main interest of this story was the setting, which was post WWII Japan/China/Australia. It drips with loss and longing. This is not to say the plot was not interesting: barring some side points about polio and Hiroshima, the main story is about a 16 year old girl and a 32 year old war man who fall madly in love. The girl’s parents, totally understandably, think this is not a good plan, and move her to New Zealand. He eventually follows her there and the novel ends with them having sex.

I did wonder why the girl’s parents were painted as such villains, and some Googling reveals that this story is pretty close to Hazzard’s own life. She too fell in love with a much older man right after the second World War, and was also removed from him. However, in her real life, they eventually broke up by letter, and never actually hooked up. This novel was written some forty years later, after she had gone to visit this guy on his Welsh farm. I guess there is a lot of comfort in fixing history, even if only in the imagination.

SMALL THINGS LIKE THIS by Claire Keegan

I read this 110 page novel in almost a single sitting. It has featured on a lot of BOOK OF THE YEAR lists, and I can see why. It’s remarkably densely packed, creating a whole world of snowy working-class Ireland. I read it on Christmas Eve, and luckily it was also set on Christmas, which added to the charm. However the story is not very Christmas-y. It’s about guilt and what you should sacrifice for people you’ve never met. Okay, maybe it is kind of Christmas-y.

It tells about a man who while making a delivery of coal to a Convent gets some sense of what is actually happening to woman in it’s Magdalen laundry. This deserves a googling, if you’ve never heard of these institutions. Essentially they began as places for sex workers to be ‘saved.’ They were saved by working for free fifteen hours a day as laundry workers. This worked so well (for the church’s bottom line) that soon all sorts of women were interned, including orphans, the flirtatious (?), and in general any woman who it was convenient to get rid of.

This poor coal delivery guy is then faced with a very specific moral problem, as it is made very clear to him how little he can do to help, and what the consequences will be for him if he tries. It’s gripping, I recommend it.

EAT PRAY LOVE by Elizabeth Gilbert

I don’t know why this bestseller has such a terrible reputation. I quite enjoyed it. It is a memoir of a woman whose marriage, and then affair that ended that marriage, both explode spectacularly. She decides to heal herself by going on a year long holiday. What is really impressive about this is she sells a book proposal about this and so funds it upfront.

It is maybe a little obvious that this book was written off the back of a book proposal, and not one for a very sophisticated audience. She plans to travel to three countries: Italy, to explore pleasure: India, to explore religion; and Indonesia to explore balance (?). I’m amazed in 2006 someone could with a straight-face describe whole countries as representing things, but here we are, and it was a bestseller. Let us just be grateful she did not get around to Africa.

I was very interested by her time in the Indian ashram, and her sincere attempts to meditate for hours every day. I try for ten minutes and that is tough enough. I liked this as an explanation of silent retreats:

The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendance emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I’m a failure . . . I’m lonely . . . I’m a failure . . I’m lonely . . ) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.

Now I just need to find a way to fund my holidays with book proposals.

MY FATHER’S DIET by Adrian Nathan West

I bought this book because Andrew Martin (whose book EARLY WORK I adore) recommended it. I can see why he likes it. I liked it too. But I can’t say I really understand it.

It is written from the perspective of a college aged man, who tells us about his father’s efforts, after a divorce, to win a bodybuilding competition. That’s it: that’s what it’s about. A really detailed account of watching his fat, 55 year old father engage in this probably impossible undertaking.

Some readers might think the father a sort of pathetic figure (and indeed the Guardian review thinks this book is about failure), but I did not. I rather admired him. At least he was out there, taking the big swings. The son, on the other hand, mostly sits in his room and tries to skate through college doing the least work possible. He’s a classic narrator of the modern novel, directionless and annoying. Go to therapy already! Or become a drug addict. Enter a body building competition.

I did really admire the super careful use of language in this book. It must have taken huge work. There were many moments when I stopped to admire the specificity of the writing. One time he mentions ‘a procession of eighteen wheelers entering and exiting the pale radiance of a service station.’ Pale radiance! I love it

EILEEN by Otessa Moshfegh

It is often a mistake to read a second book by an author you enjoy, because you start to be able to see their tricks. Such is the case with EILEEN. I enjoyed it, and I especially enjoyed her deeply unpleasant female narrator, but I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t just read MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION, which has the same ingredients but done better.

But who cares, I guess. As long as something is still fun. Most of this book is about the many ways the main character is unhappy, and how much she makes it worse for herself. Eventually, she makes a friend at work. This sounds like a positive development but in fact it ends in murder.

One thing I did not especially like was the inclusion of child abuse. Not that this can never be written about, of course it can, but in this case it seemed to me a little too much of a plot device – as if it was included just to ramp up the tension – which I did not think was needed, or earned. Eileen was capable of murder without anywhere near that much motivation.

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD by Richard Yates

I always heard this book was about an unhappy marriage. In reality, it’s about the importance of legal abortion. It tells the story of a young man in 1950s America of whom everyone expects great things, himself included. He is not too sure what these things are, and certainly doesn’t work on anything in particular, and so ends up long-term in an office job he started as a stop gap. So far, this is pretty much the story of 50% of humanity.

In this case it gets really out of hand because his girlfriend gets pregnant. She wants to abort but he makes a big production about it so she doesn’t. They move to the suburbs, which they both regard as a sign of failure. Then she has another child. She tries to convince him to move to Europe, and begin the life they dreamed of (she will work while he becomes great). He is terrified at being given the chance to actually live the life he talks about so much, and so when she becomes pregnant again, and obviously wants to abort as that will end their plans, he talks her out of it again. They don’t move to Europe, their marriage implodes, and this poor woman tries to give herself an abortion at home. She dies. I can only say one more time: THANK YOU FEMINISM.

Side point, please enjoy this description, a warning to us all:

Howard Givings looked older than sixty seven. His whole adult life had been spent as a minor official of the seventh largest life insurance company in the world, and now in retirement it seemed that the years of office tedium had marked him as vividly as old seafaring men are marked by wind and sun.

THE GRASS ARENA by John Healy

Sometimes it feels as if every addict has written a memoir, like it’s one of the twelve steps or something.

I was recently noting how very many there were, and how similar. Here’s the book that shows I was wrong (first time for everything). It also shows something we often forget: how incredibly stitched up the book world is by people who were able to graduate high school.

THE GRASS ARENA is by a man who had an exceedingly tough childhood, became an alcoholic, and spent fifteen years homeless. It makes all sorts of more famous books on alcoholism look like a holiday camp, because they are all written by people who, at the end of the day, had parents in the suburbs to go back to. I have never read an account of what it is to be an addict without a safety net.

The grass arena is public parks, mostly round Camden. This is very much a book of north London. He tells about his daily life. He wakes up blacked out most days, and begins again from scratch to find enough money to drink. Let me give you a sample:

George and Ernie came back with a bag full of chicken bones. They’ve been down the dustbins again, back of the restaurants. Everybody welcome to lunch. Yeah, we’re all going to catch some horrible unspeakable disease. Not today perhaps. But time is on the dustbins’ side

He also tells us about his fellow drunks (not his friends, as he emphasizes: there are no friends in that community):

Alfie used to drink with a guy called Fingers Knox but Fingers got himself killed when he fell from the top to the bottom of the escalator in the tube. Poor old Fingers, that was some drop – he was a good beggar – lost most of the tops of the fingers of his right hand to the frost, a few winters back. He was a middle-aged Jock, used to travel out on the last tube to Edgeware every night to a skipper. He’d beg all the way on the tube going out, get a bottle next morning and beg his way back to the park. He was never without a drink. He used to take fits and get mugged often. He got nicked one time and the computer or something showed he was a deserter from the army in 1939! . . He used to say it was sad to have to creep and crouch and slink next morning after drink and that was why he always done a bit of late night begging. . . He had style. He would not keep jumping up at everyone that went past. He would wait. Then when he sensed the best beg, he’d put on his begging smile, beam in. Nine times out of ten it would be a fiver touch.

I find this very touching somehow, that this is what is left to posterity of Fingers Knox. The author eventually goes to jail for a long period, gets clean, and is eventually rescued from alcoholism by chess. Yes, you read that right. Someone teaches him chess and it transforms his life. He becomes a professional chess player. And then a yogi. What a man! What a life!

MY PHANTOMS by Gwendoline Riley

This one is COMPLETELY SEARING and I can’t recommend it strongly enough. Steel yourself though. I read that the author is surprised people continually assume the book is autobiographical, and I can tell you right now it is because it is so specific and accurate one can only think it comes from someone’s real life.

It is about a woman’s relationship with her mother. She only sees her once a year, so the book is mostly a series of conversations, and it is the dialogue that is so achingly perfect. Here the mother is, welcoming a man she hopes to date:

“And would you like a drink?” my mother said, as Dave handed her his coat and smiled at us. “Or a … radish, or … You want it, we got it,” she said, in her Italian restaurant owner voice. “We gotta the radishes, we gotta the nuts!” she said.

The mother is horrifyingly closely observed, the kind of observation of someone else most people never do, and if they do it is only of close family members. Try this:

My mother loved rules. She loved rules and codes and fixed expectations. I want to say – as a dog loves an airborne sick. Here was unleashed purpose. Freedom, of a sort. Here too was the comfort of the crowd, and of joining in. Of not feeling alone and in the wrong.

I see that I somehow can’t describe this book. But take it from me: it’s chilling