THE HOUSE BY THE DVINA by Eugenie Fraser

I found this book yellowing in the bookcase of my childhood home. I would say I have read every book we own, so I was surprised to find this one, and in a spirit of completeness decided to read it.

It is a memoir written by a woman with a Russian father and a Scottish mother. She was born and grew up in Russia, and was only eventually forced to leave as a teenager by the economic collapse of the Russian revolution.

It’s an interesting account of the earliest days of globalization, and what it is to be a child of hybrid culture. It’s also a romantic picture of traditional Russian life. Most interesting though of course, is the collapse. They descend very quickly into hunger and tragedy. I was particularly struck by when the narrator, as a child of the bourgeoisie, goes to beg a peasant woman for milk. The woman tells her about how she used to have to rush home during her short breaks at their mill to breastfeed her baby, and never managed to feed him for long enough. She asks why she should give her any milk. A tough question indeed.

MY FIRST THIRTY YEARS by Gertrude Beasley

Get ready for how this memoir begins:

Thirty years ago, I lay in the womb of a woman, conceived in a sexual act of rape, being carried during the prenatal period by an unwilling and rebellious mother, finally bursting from the womb only to be tormented in a family whose members I despised or pitied, and brought into association with people whom I should never have chosen.

If first paragraph not enough, let’s go to the second one:

Sometimes I wish that, as I lay in the womb, a pink soft embryo, I had somehow thought, breathed or moved and wrought destruction to the woman who bore me, and her eight miserable children who preceded me, and the four round-faced mediocrities who came after me, and her husband, a monstrously cruel, Christ-like, and handsome man with an animal’s appetite for begetting children.

BOOM. This lady born very poor in Texas in 1892, and only wrote this one book, a memoir of her life up to age 30. It is a story of titanic will power, courage and rage. It’s also possibly the only book in English I can think of, other than LARKRISE TO CANDLEFORD, written by a poor woman born in the nineteenth century.

It;s is an account of what Gertrude calls her family’s “horryifying and disgusting domestic relations,” where her mother sleeps with a shovel to fight her father off, so she can stop having children. Gertrude is raped by all three of her elder brothers, who also have sex with the cows. Her mother comments: “I was just scared nearly to death before that old cow’s calf come . . ” .

She is the only one of her 12 siblings to make it through high school, and she goes on to University in Chicago. As she put it: “I was getting jollier and jollier and going to the devil as fast as I could go.” The books ends with her contracted as a journalist to go to Japan. It’s an uplifting story about triumph against unimaginable odds. However, on reading the Introduction, I found out she didn’t in fact triumph. The book is banned – apparently you can’t just say exactly how things actually are – and a few years later she is put in an insane asylum, at a time when that was a common thing to do to troublesome women. It does not seem at all likely she was insane. Just belligerent, and with good reason. She dies there thirty years later.

That’s it ladies: these are giants on whose shoulders we stand. I’m so glad she got out this one short book on her life, and on her astonishing achievements, before the patriarchy closed her down.

OCTOBER’S CHILD by Linda Bostrom Knausgard

Linda Bostrom Knausgard’s husband, Karl Ove Knausgard, wrote six horrifyingly honest volumes about his life. Of course, you cannot write about your life without writing about the people around you. So despite my never having read a book by this woman before, I know a lot about her. More about her than most people I know in real life. For example: Karl Ove had such an enormous crush on her that when they kissed for the first time he embarrassed himself by FAINTING WITH JOY.

This book is about her time institutionalized for depression, and especially about her electroconvulsive therapy, which is as bad as it sounds. I didn’t know people still did this at all, but apparently Sweden is an outlier globally in using it heavily. It was a gripping little book, about the institution, and about the fragments of memory left to her by the treatment. It was interesting to hear the other side of Karl Ove’s version of their marriage.

Let me end with this fun aspect of their apparently very artsy marriage. They are on vacation:

When we finally got to the hotel all we saw were palm trees and greenery, endless shadows and hills. You looked over the landscape and said, What the fuck is this?

It turned out we were in Mauritius and not in the Maldives, your dream destination, and I spent the entire vacation in the shade with the children saying, Oh, how lovely it is here in Mauritius. Mauritius. Mauritius. It served him right.

How do you not find out you are going to Mauritius not the Maldives until you actually get there?!?

SISTERS BY A RIVER by Barbara Comyns

I am really getting into this writer big time.  This book is apparently semi-autobiographical and if so: wow.  It tells about a family of sisters growing up in a crumbling mansion who are left pretty much to their own devices.  Try this story of how their parents got together:

. . .  he thought she looked very nice so he said ‘When you grow up I will marry you ask your Mother to teach you how to cook’ He bought her a goat and a white kitten to remember him by, but the goat burst and the kitten was run over by a train . .

The book is full of strange, fanciful stuff, a weird evocation of childhood, where you don’t know quite what is real and what is not.  And when you accept what is happening around you is normal:

Once when Beatrix was a baby he (their father) got so furious because of her crying her threw her down the stairs, fortunately a cook called Harriat caught her . . after that Harriat kept her in her bedroom at night so that he couldn’t hear her crying which was a good thing in case there hadn’t been anyone to catch her the next time, but Harriat had to leave soon after because her feet smelt.

I mean: ?!?  Comyns went on to have an inspirationally varied life: lived everywhere, worked multiple jobs (many of them bizarre), struggled with the rent, failed as a painter, succeeded as a writer.  What a woman, what an example to us all. 

THE KRAKEN AWAKES by John Wyndham

I usually like the author John Wyndham, but here it’s like he was over-tired being his worst self. It’s super wordy, and kind of fakey, and people keep calling each other ‘darling.’ The premise is great, being about aliens hatching out of the deep sea, rather than deep space, a creepy and horrifyingly believable idea, but told so incredibly slowly that I can’t recommend it.

QUARTET IN AUTUMN by Barbara Pym

Here is a novel about how you ought to love your co-workers. It tells the story of four older people, two men and two women, working in an office together. None have any close family, and all live alone. They spend all day together, do not have much use for holidays, and yet do not make much effort to get to know each other. They begin to retire, and are at a loss without work and each other. Okay, that’s not really true: it’s far more subtle and sad than that sentence suggests; but it’s more or less what happens.

It’s a remarkably good novel about many things, among them lost opportunities and what your life amounts to. Pym is an amazing writer, and it’s mind-blowing that this novel, written in 1977, just before her death, was her first to be published in 16 years. Her agent had rejected her last, and this had apparently silenced her for a couple of decades. She got her own back, getting a Booker nomination, so BOOM.

SELECTED STORIES by Dorothy Parker

Surprisingly feminist set of short stories, written in the 1930s. Not so fun as I thought they would be. I thought Parker was supposed to be a comic author but in fact these are acidic and rather sad, and deal with difficult subjects (like really difficult, like backstreet abortions), almost as if being female in the 1930s was not always all that easy.

GIOVANNI’S ROOM by James Baldwin

Here is a completely searing 149 pages about the consequences of cowardice. A young American man meets a young American woman in Paris. He then meets an Italian waiter who he greatly, greatly prefers. It is the 1940s and he has spent many years trying to convince himself he is straight. Then he meets the waiter, Giovanni, and that’s all over: they move in together the first night. The agonizing that ensues is just horrifying. Baldwin is an AMAZING WRITER. Lets enjoy this conversation with his father, after a car accident:

“You’re going to be on your back for awhile but when you come home, while you’re lying around the house, we’ll talk, huh? And try to figure out what the hell we’re going to do with you when you get on your feet, OK?”

“OK,” I said.

For I understood, at the bottom of my heart, that we had never talked, that now we never would. I understood that he must never know this.

Eventually the American beaks the waiter’s heart, and his own, by deciding he can’t face what constituted gay life at that time. It was sad, but then try this, his last big speech to the waiter:

What kind of life can two men have together, anyway? All this love you talk about – isn’t it just that you want to be made to feel strong? You want to go out and be the labourer and bring home the money and you want me to stay here and wash the dishes and cook the food and clean this miserable little closet of a room . . and be your little girl. That’s what you want. That’s what you mean that’s all you mean when you say you love me. You say I want to kill you. What do you think you’ve been doing to me?

It’s interesting how clearly men knew how really bad patriachy was. This was a huge personal cost to the man, but he was willing to do it: anything, anything, rather than be female. I get it.