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.

DEPT OF SPECULATION by Jenny Offill

Here is someone who has a mental breakdown because she gets cheated on.  I don’t know, I know it’s not very nice, but my view is: toughen the f**k up. 

Partly this view comes from the fact that this novel refuses to give any character a name, calling the main one ‘the wife,’ and the other one ‘the husband.’ I always find this profoundly pretentious.  Even worse, at the end, it abruptly shifts to using the first person singular.  I mean: VOM.   And all this to mostly tell the story of this couple who moves out of Brooklyn to the suburbs because it is cheaper. 

That said, here are two things I did like:

One, a quote from an 1896 book on advice for brides:

The indiscriminate reading of novels is one of the most injurious habits to .which ‘a married woman can be subject.  Besides the false views of human nature it will impart . . . it produces an indifference to the performance of domestic duties, and contempt for ordinary realities

I have long wondered why I am indifferent to domestic duties.

Two, this which I find sadly and profoundly true:

But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

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.

FAMILY LIFE by Akhil Sharma

You wouldn’t think there was any more space left in the world for another novel of the American immigrant experience.  Apparently there is, and here it is. 

FAMILY LIFE is about a boy who moves from India to the US with his family as a child. 

The charm of the novel is Sharma’s creation of a child’s eye view of the world, direct, assured, sometimes kind of racist.    Here’s two pieces on his father:

I used to think my father had been assigned to us by the government.  This was because he appeared to serve no purpose. 

And:

While my mother was interested in status, being better educated than others or being considered more proper, my father was just interested in being rich . . . Because of my grandfather’s problems, my father had grown up feeling that no matter what he did, people would look down on him.  As a result, he cared less about convincing people of his merits and more about just owning things.

The family are on the path of hard work and immigrant grit when his SPOILER ALERT older brother is in an accident that leaves him brain damaged.  Things get much harder from there.   Side point,  I love this:

Weeks passed.  The weather got colder.  The days tipped backward into darkness.  Some evenings our house and street appeared dark while the sky was light.  In October the trees shed their leaves, and our houses stood undefended on its lawn.

He works hard in high school, has a girlfriend, goes on to university, and becomes a miserable investment banker (is there another kind?).  I liked this thought on his girlfriend:

Minkashi lives in Texas now.  She is an accountant.  This surprises me because you always expect people who matter a great deal to you to end up leading glamorous lives

A really good book. I shall look for his other novel. 

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.

PREP by Curtis Sittenfeld

This book reminded painfully me of the nightmarish self-involvement that is adolescence.  It tells the story of a girl, Lee, who gets a scholarship to a posh boarding school and spends the entire time behaving as if it is a concentration camp designed for in-depth examination of her choices by everyone concerned.  I mean check it out kids: you are not that interesting.  No one cares. 

PREP covers Lee’s four years of high school, and is an exhausting accounting of all the stupid things she worries about.  This includes even positive interactions with others:

This anxiety meant that I spent a lot of time hiding, usually in my room, after any pleasant exchange with another person.  And there were rules to the anxiety, practically mathematical in their consistency: the less well you knew the person, the greater the pressure the second time around to be special or charming, if that’s what you thought you’d been the first time; mostly it was about reinforcement.  Also: the shorter the time that elapsed from your first encounter to your second, the greater the pressure; . . . And finally: the better the original interaction, the greater the pressure.  Often, my anxiety would set in prior to the end of the interaction – I’d just want it to be over while we all still liked each other, before things turned.

Eventually as a senior she starts to hook up with a guy she has had a crush on for a long time.  It remains ‘secret’ for reasons that are unclear to her. 

Before and after I was involved with Cross Sugarman, I heard a thousand times that a boy, or a man, can’t make you happy, that you have to be happy on your own before you can be happy with another person.  All I can say is, I wish it were true. 

This did make me laugh.  It’s a lot of peoples’ experience, but it’s not something often admitted.

I enjoyed the book, it was very more-ish, but quite interestingly it didn’t actually go anywhere.  She got older, but no wiser.  I guess we typically assume that books have a shape and some kind of resolution (especially when they appear on the surface to be coming-of-age stories) but in this case, there was none.  For a while I found it annoying, but perhaps it’s just honest.  Sometimes I guess it’s true you just don’t change, but stay trapped on the same old hamster wheel. 

WHAT I READ IN 2020

I read 66 books this year, more than any year since 2011.  A pandemic will do that for you, I guess.  That said, given I read 60 books last year, I’m surprised this year isn’t more.  I seem to have had nothing but time, so I’m not sure what I filled it with.  Some serious wall staring, probably. 

I’m half half male and female writers this year, so that’s a positive.

My favourites:

CHERRY, by Nico Walker.  A wonderfully hilarious and strangely poetic story of military service and heroin addiction.  The girl he has a crush on, who was “either a slut or just real down to earth;” the starling with big dick energy; the time he vomited down the front of his shirt while trying to rob a bank.  Amazing. 

THE COPEHAGEN TRILOGY by Tove Ditlevsen.  I’ve never read a memoir so totally without justifications or excuses.  Creepy but brilliant.  Covers her life from childhood rickets to poetry to drug addiction.

SOLITARY by Albert Woodfox.  The only non-fiction on the list. It is not a book about which it my business to say if it was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but rather just to be astonished at what Albert Woodfox has achieved, which is surviving forty years in solitary confinement with his sanity intact. 

NOTHING TO SEE HERE by Kevin Wilson.  A near miraculously clever, bleak book, about a poor girl who “isn’t destined for greatness but is figuring out how to steal it from someone stupid enough to relax their grip on it.”  Also involves children who bust into flames.

NOTES ON A SCANDAL by Zoe Heller.  A taut and exciting book about loneliness.  Let me quote at self-indulgent length: 

Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world . . . You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths.  You make out To Do lists – reorganize linen cupboard, learn two sonnets.  You dole out little treats to yourself – slices of ice cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall.  And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this any more.  I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.

And that’s the perfect ending I think for a roundup of this plague year, during which, more than ever, my books have been a delight, a consolation, and an escape. 

The list:

THE GLASS CASTLE by Jennette Walls

CREATE DANGEROUSLY by Albert Camus

SEA WIFE by Amity Grainge

WRITERS & LOVERS by Lily King

COOL FOR AMERICA by Andrew Martin

HOUSE OF HUNGER by Dambudzo Maruchera

MR SALARY by Sally Rooney

SEVERANCE by Ling Ma

MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION by Ottessa Moshfegh

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND by Rumaan Alam

EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT LOVE by Dolly Alderton

TOPEKA SCHOOL by Ben Lerner

AUGUSTUS by John Williams

THE ROOMMATE by Rosie Dannan

THE GREENGAGE SUMMER by Rumer Godden

THE NONESUCH by Georgette Heyer

LEOPARD IS A NEUTRAL by Erica Davies

ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner

OHIO by Stephen Markley

THIS MOURNABLE BODY by Tsitsi Dangarembga

HONS AND REBELS by Jessica Mitford

SATISFACTION by Gillian Greenwood

THE CONFESSIONS OF MAX TIVOLI by Andrew Sean Greer

THE YELLOW HOUSE by Sarah M Broom

CHERRY by Nico Walker

INTO THE WILD by John Krakeur

THE HUMAN STAIN by Philip Roth

THE GREAT BELIEVERS by Rebecca Makkai

I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS by Maya Angelou

THE DIARY OF A NOBODY by George and Weedon Grossmith

THE UNKNOWN AJAX by Georgette Heyer

THE BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN by Wallace Stegner

WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES by David Sedaris

EXCITING TIMES by Naoise Dolan

NOTHING TO SEE HERE by Kevin Wilson

THE THORNBIRDS by Colleen McCullough

NIGHT BOAT TO TANGIERS by Kevin Barry

CARRIE by Stephen King

A GIRL’S STORY by Annie Ernaux

RUNNING WITH SCISSORS by Augusten Burroughs

NOTES ON A SCANDAL by Zoe Heller

 A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR by Daniel Defoe

MAGICAL TIHNKING by Augusten Burroughs

HALF EMPTY by David Rakoff

AND QUIET FLOWS THE DON by Mikhail Sholokhov

DEPENDENCY by Tove Ditlevsen

I WAS TOLD THERE’D BE CAKE by Sloane Crowley

TO CALAIS, IN ORDINARY TIME by James Meek

MY MISSPENT YOUTH by Meghan Daum

HOW COULD SHE by Lauren Mechling

ON WRITING: A MEMOIR OF THE CRAFT by Stephen King

YOUTH by Tove Ditlevsen

THE SECOND SLEEP by Robert Harris

PRIESTDADDY by Patricia Lockwood

I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY NECK by Nora Ephron

A PERFECT SPY by John Le Carre

INDONESIA by Elisabeth Pisani

CHILDHOOD by Tove Ditlevsen

CALYPSO by David Sedaris

EXPECTATION by Anna Hope

THINGS WE DIDN’T TALK ABOUT WHEN I WAS A GIRL by Jeannie Vanasco

SOLITARY by Albert Woodfox

COST OF LIVING by Deborah Levy

LUCKY JIM by Kingsley Amis

MOUNTAIN LION by Jean Stafford

THE GLASS CASTLE by Jeannette Walls

In this memoir, a wealthy gossip columnist lives on Park Avenue while her parents live on the streets.  Bizarrely, your sympathies are 100% with the gossip columnist.

There are many memoirs of rough childhoods.  Usually, this comes from some clear cut cause, as for example addiction, mental illness, etc.  Here, it seems to come from an over-abundance of romance and self-indulgence. 

The dad kind of has a semi-excuse, being an alcoholic.  But first, weren’t most peoples’ dads alcoholics in the 1970s?  I’m not really sure that that cuts it. And second, he declines the most basic of help (e.g.,food stamps) even when he is sober.  And this is when these small kids have not had anything other than popcorn to eat in three days. 

The mum meanwhile is a whole other story.  She refuses to work, despite being a trained teacher, for the strong reason that she does not want to.  She wants to paint, write novels, and eat chocolate. When they do get her to briefly work, she complains every morning: “I’m a grown woman now.  Why can’t I do what I want to do?”  

I mean I can’t say I don’t see where she is coming from.  Less attractive is when she tells her daughter, who has been groped, that sexual assault is a “crime of perception,” and even less attractive is when she hides a family size Hershey bar from her very hungry children so she can eat it herself.

The parents are well educated, and so early on, while they are still young and maybe classifiable as ‘alternative,’ they do provide the children with lots of excitement and interesting experiences.  Over time though, without money, ‘alternative’ becomes ‘gross.’  Their children escape them to go live in New York, where they mostly thrive. The parents follow, and weirdly decide to be homeless, despite the offer of help from their (remarkably forgiving) kids and – strange twist – the revelation that the mother owns very valuable land in Texas, and has done for their entire, impoverished lives.

The book has a highly suspicious amount of detail about the author’s life before the age of ten.  I googled it when I was done, fully expecting lots of libel suits, but apparently her family agrees that this is indeed, really bizarrely, how this all went down.   I finished the whole thing in a night, something I haven’t done in a while.

CREATE DANGEROUSLY by Albert Camus

Camus has clearly never heard the advice that you ought to begin a speech with a joke. In this collection of three short speeches he dives right in with the super serious thoughts on the big topics: art, politics, relationship between art and politics.  As always, when reading from this period I am surprised, and almost ashamed, by the sincerity with which people speak.  We seem to be many miles away from feeling we can speak with authority today on any subject. 

He has a lot to say about Soviet realism, and how impossible ‘realism’ really is:

But under what conditions is such a (realistic) film possible?  Under purely imaginary conditions.  We should have to presuppose, in fact, an idea camera focused on the man day and night and constantly registering his every move.  . . (and such a film) could be seen only by an audience of people willing to waste their lives in watching someone else’s life in great detail.    

Best he not know about BIG BROTHER and SUN, SEX AND SUSPICIOUS PARENTS.  He has a lot to say about the responsibility of the artist in the post-WWII world:

An Oriental wise man always used to ask the divinity in his prayers to be so kind as to spare him from living in an interesting era.  As we are not wise, the divinity has not spared us and we are living in an interesting era. 

I love this.  I don’t especially admire Lord of the Rings, but I often used to think of this bit when I was feeling depressed about the Zimbabwean situation:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Last point, I was interested to learn in writing this blog that in fact Camus was not French but Algerian.  I mean he held the former passport, but he was born in and spent the majority of his life in Algiers.  Interesting that I’ve only ever heard him described as French. Also, he was the second youngest person ever to win the Nobel, at 44, and was dead at 46 in car accident.  A sentence the first part of which makes me feel rather disappointed in my life, the second part of which makes me feel very grateful.  Rollercoaster.     

SEA WIFE by Amity Gaige

In this novel a man goes off to live his dreams.  He ends up dead.  Why is this so often the way?  I suspect on some level we don’t want to read about someone leaving their life to do something crazy and it ending well.  Because that raises questions about our own life.

Michael convinces his wife to go sailing for a year with their small children.  He does not know much about sailing, and his wife is resistant at first, and also at last.  But they do it. As the husband says, to the many people who raise objections:

. . I think there’s something wrong with the line of thought that it’s reasonable to defer your modest dream for several decades.  What are we, characters in a Greek myth?  Waiting for the eagle who comes to our liver every day because in a Greek myth, that’s normal?

SEA WIFE is about their year at sea, but also about their marriage.  At first your sympathy is with the wife, because truly the husband does seem kind of crazy, and he apparently voted for Trump.  Over time though, I had to say I came round to his side, because the wife really is useless and whiney.  She is horrified to find they are in debt, because as she explains:   

I never asked questions about money

As if this is a reasonable excuse!  How about you are an adult?  Like what is the guy supposed to do? She also is relentlessly lazy about learning to sail, and then when the husband gets Dengue fever mid-ocean she acts like a lost puppy.  I mean why did Emmeline Pankhurst even bother?