THE VET’S DAUGHTER by Barbara Comyns

A mysterious little gothic novel about an abusive father and levitation. The arc of the story did not really work for me, so I won’t go into it, but the joy is in the world. Let me quote extensively from the first page, where the main character, a young woman, meets a strange old man on the street:

. . . I saw he was a poor broken-down sort of creature. If he had been a horse, he would have most likely worn kneecaps. We came to a great red railway arch that crossed the road like a heavy rainbow; and near this arch there was a vet’s house with a lamp outside. I said, “You must excuse me,” and left this poor man among the privet hedges. I entered the house. . . . In the brown hall my mother was standing; and she looked at me with her sad eyes half -covered by their heavy lids, but did not speak. She just stood there. Her bones were small and her shoulders sloped; her teeth were not straight either; so, if she had been a dog, my father would have destroyed her.

What a wonderful writer she is! I am totally inspired by her biography too. Unlike many other writers, this is not because of the number of books she wrote, or the contributions to literary salons, or the generally impressive CV, and etc, but because she was poor (in the introduction she tells us what the flat she is living in costs to rent, I LOVE this) and married the wrong people and had tons of jobs and lived in multiple countries and wanted to be a painter not a writer. I just find it inspirationally and wonderfully messy.

A GLASS OF BLESSINGS by Barbara Pym

This is my fourth novel of Pym’s, and some say it is her best. It was I am afraid too subtle for me. It tells the story of a fairly contented married woman, who half-considers an affair. It turns out that the guy she considers is actually gay. Or at least that is what I think might be being implied.

It was kind of a funny book. Here is the woman, sitting in a beautiful house in a bombed out area:

It made me sad to think of the decay and shabbiness all around, and the streamlined blocks of new flats springing up on the bombed sites, although I supposed it was a good thing that children should now be running about and playing in the square gardens, their shouts and laughter drowned by the noise of the machinery that was building hideous new homes for them

And yet it was also kind of sad. Here she is wondering about her proposed lover’s ‘roommate’ who she had been told is his ‘colleague.’ She starts to wonder in what sense he is a colleague.

I remembered with a pang Piers saying that we were all, in a sense, colleagues in the grim business of getting through life

I have enjoyed all Pym’s other books, and think she is a wonderful writer, so this book worries me. I feel like there is something profound in it, but I seem to have missed it.

SINS OF MY FATHER by Lily Dunn

Here is a memoir by someone whose father joined a cult. It is a lot less interesting than it sounds. I am often surprised by how little the circumstances of someone’s life seem to affect how involving their memoir is. This one I found quite dull. I feel bad to say so, because it was clearly deeply felt. Most troubling for the author was her father’s late descent into alcoholism. The degree of surprise and helplessness she feels was – I hate to say it – especially dull. Many people have done the hard miles on writing about being an addict, and loving an addict, and it’s not very easy to add anything to this, no matter how strongly you feel it.

Also annoying was some gentle name-dropping. This is always bad, but it’s particularly bad when you don’t even know who they are dropping. I find this to be a particular affliction of upper and upper-middle class British writing, and speaks to the narrow provincialism of that demographic. Antonia Fraser’s MUST YOU GO remains the high water mark of this kind of thing, and I highly recommend it if you want to LOL.

THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles

This is a novel about what happens when you take bohemianism that bit too far. Three vaguely artsy Europeans parade around Morocco in the late 1940s, sleeping with each other and others, staying in really horrible rural hotels, and exploring their existential dread.

I read it while in Morocco, so it was an interesting parallel kind of vacation. Mine was hair-raising in its own way (how much is too much wine at the all-inclusive?) but theirs was pretty intense too (at one point the protagonist complains about being offered a seventeen year old sex worker (i.e., trafficked child), because she is ‘probably at least twenty-five’).

The protagonist dies of typhoid half way through. He is too bohemian to have bothered to be vaccinated, so this is richly deserved. His wife then loses her mind and ends up getting raped and voluntarily joining a harem.

In summary, what drivel. I kind of enjoyed this book while reading it, but in retrospect I guess I sort of hated it. I can’t fault Paul Bowles for sincerity though; apparently he spent much of his life being bohemian in just this way, spawning many imitators, and died poor in Tangier in 1999.

KLARA AND THE SUN by Kazuo Ishiguro

In this book we get to see a little too far behind the curtain. I have loved all three of Ishiguro’s other books, which broadly deal with the-one-that-got-away, in various guises. I would absolutely love to know what break-up he is working through because it must have been a real doozy. This book is a similar sort of story, but for me did not work nearly so well as the others. Perhaps I’m just too familiar with its tricks?

It is about an AF (artificial friend) who is bought to be a companion to a little girl. It is told through the AF’s AI powered understanding of the world. This was sort of interesting, but to my view has been done better. More effective was the little girl herself, and her friends. In this near-future, no one goes to school, so the children are forced to have ‘interaction meetings,’ where they learn to behave ‘normally.’ Clearly this is inspired by the pandemic, but I did enjoy it. I feel like we could all use a pretty stiff course of interaction meetings.

LADDER OF THE YEARS by Anne Tyler

Here is a book about a woman who walks away from her husband and her three children. She has been feeling unloved and unneeded, and on impulse leaves and starts a new life elsewhere. Boringly, she ends up going back to them. I wanted the worm to turn, but it kind of just took a detour.

What I did find interesting was that the woman is only in her early 40s. I had heard before that in the past you were considered largely useless at that age as a woman (having done all that was required of you, i.e., reproduce) but this was a particularly sad and stark example of the problem. She really seems to feel her life is over. Today, most people of that age I know are just gagging for their kids to grow up enough so they can begin getting really crazy.

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 14th 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.

YOUNG MUNGO by Douglas Stuart

This author’s first book, the wonderful SHUGGIE BAIN, was all about being poor, gay, and Scottish, while also being a mummy’s boy when that mummy is an alcoholic. This book, YOUNG MUNGO covers the same ground. I often think that if, as they say, we all only have one story to tell, most of us have decided what that story is by the time we are sixteen. It’s interesting also that while the first was lightly fictionalized memoir, this one is clearly more of a novel – and you can tell – because in this one we have PLOT.

Fifteen year old Mungo is forced to go away on a fishing weekend with two strange men his mother meets at AA. They go to a loch which is “as near tae heaven as you can get on three buses.” Things get progressively more dangerous and creepy and eventually SPOILER it emerges they are recently released sex offendors, who end up assaulting Mungo. This is all intercut with flashbacks of the development of Mungo’s relationship with his first boyfriend, and the two stories intertwine, both escalating, one in a horrifying way (SPOILER Mungo kills them, but its not as soap opera as it sounds), and one in a very sweet way.

I just love the writing . . . three examples. Here his mother coming back from her boyfriend’s:

Every five days or so he would return her like an overdue library book, and she would reappear so dog-eared, so sodden with drink, that it looked like she had been dropped in the bath

And:

There was a rasp at the bottom of her breath now, a sandpapery sound that said it was too late to stop smoking.

And, on the eyes of a deer:

As dark and wet as two peeled plums

IN THE DISTANCE by Hernan Diaz

In this book a man attempts to walk from San Francisco to New York.  It does not go well.  It is the nineteenth century, and he is a young Swedish guy called Hakan, who intended to go to New York with his brother to make their fortune.  Unfortunately, he became separated from his brother on a city street (they had never seen a city before). He assumes they will meet on the boat they are supposed to take, and asks for the boat to ‘America.’  Sadly this is boat to the west, not the east coast. 

On arrival he decides just to walk it, like you do when you miss the night bus.  And so begins a bizarre odyssey.  He first joins up with a deranged gold digger, and then is captured, held hostage, and raped by a toothless prostitute, and then when he escapes, meets a naturalist obsessed with finding the very first creature to come out of the primordial swamp, then we have a con man who may or may not be leading a caravan to their deaths, then we have got some kind of murderous cult, and I’m only about two-thirds of the way through but I will stop. 

On the one hand, this sounds kind of unlikely.  On the other hand, perhaps not so.  You have to wonder who decides to do anything so insane as move to a foreign country with a one-way ticket.   You would for sure get a much higher proportion of nut-jobs, and lets face it that proportion is not low even today.  Hakan eventually gives up, and spends many years alone in the wilds, before eventually deciding to find a way to walk from Alaska back to Sweden.  Clearly while he learnt a lot over the decades, his geography did not improve. I want to laugh, but really it was kind of a sad book.  The part that I think about the most is not strangely all the crazy incidents once he got to America, but the very beginning, in Europe – that first mistake – losing his brother on a city street.  Imagine a world without internet, and without much literacy, where you could – completely believably – lose someone like that, and then never, ever find them again. 

THE IDIOT by Elif Batuman

In this book, a girl at university gets all het up about the philosophy of language, about whether words have meaning, and if so if we can ever understand them.  Of course it all boils down to some guy.   

She meets this guy in Russian class, and he begins to write her terribly clever emails. She replies with terribly clever emails.  It is all very intellectual but also very boring, just like it always is to be up close with someone’s crush. 

The things kept accumulating – the stars, the atoms, the pigs, and the cereal.  It was decreasingly possible to imagine explaining it all to anyone.  Whoever it was would jump out of a window from boredom.  And yet here I was, watching the accumulation in real time, and not only was I not bored, but it was all I could think about.

Eventually it emerges that he for real has a girlfriend, but somehow all this suffering carries on, and this is when she starts to have problems with the structure of reality and what it all means.  The solution is offered to her on a plate, by the crush.  Here he is, talking to her:

“My friend Imre said I was behaving really badly towards you.  He said I was – what was it, it was a funny expression.  Leading you on.  He said I was leading you on.” 

It felt like being hit again, this time in the stomach. 

.. . .”I tried to explain to Imre that it’s not like that, but was really dismissive.  He said I was starting to sound banal, and like a real asshole.”

Like seriously what is up with this girl?  Words do have meaning, and here he is explaining everything pretty clear.  No need to worry about the structure of the universe, this guy just an asshole.

Sidebar, the epigraph of this book is Proust on adolescence.  I’ll just end by quoting it at length because it is so fantastic:

But the characteristic feature of the ridiculous age I was going through – awkward but by no means infertile – is that we do not consult our intelligence and that the most trivial attributes of other people seem to us to form an inseparable part of their personality.  In a world thronged with monsters and gods, we know little peace of mind.  There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul.  Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them.  In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.