MOTHERHOOD by Deborah Orr

I spent this entire memoir waiting for the other shoe to drop.  It’s written with the strong implication that the author has been profoundly traumatized by her childhood, so I kept waiting for the trauma to happen.  There are many times when she tells us she doesn’t want us to think too harshly of her parents, and indeed she succeeded, because as far as I can tell they were pretty good. 

Here is a comment from her mother, that she regards as scarring:

“When I was having you, Deborah, your dad said to me, ‘As far as I am concerned, the chicken comes before the egg.’  Wasn’t that a lovely thing to say?”

I really don’t see it.  What husband wouldn’t prioritize his wife over a fetus? 

She finds out her parents don’t have much sex.  This is not any of her business, in my view.  But it in her view:  “It’s the shocking secret at the heart of my existence.” 

I can only say: ? 

Perhaps the problem is this is my second memoir of a de-industrializing Scotland in the seventies in under a month, and the first was the magically good SHUGGIE BAIN.  They are really not in the same league.  Let me give you a sample of some insight from this one:

People.  We are so tough and so fragile, both at once, we humans

OKAY.  I don’t want to be mean.  But it really wasn’t my favourite.

LITTLE EYES by Samantha Schweblin

In this novel, a company comes out with a small toy. It is special because each toy is controlled by another customer somewhere else, who can see through its eyes and move it around. It can’t speak. It’s a series of vignettes of the toy’s owners and the toy’s controller.

It sounds like an interesting premise, all about disconnection, technology, our loss of physical contact, etc. However, for me, it ended up not very interesting. Every story ends badly. In a shock finding, having an anonymous stranger in your house is not a great idea. In another amazing insight, we find out technology is not always positive.

I mean: really? That’s it?

I guess I shouldn’t say every vignette ends badly, because I didn’t get to the end. Maybe there was some kind of reversal, some how. However life is short so I didn’t find out

UNDER THE SKIN by Michael Faber

Here is a fantastically wonderful book with an amazing twist, so I recommend stopping reading this post right now and getting the book, because this is going to be full of SPOILERS.

The book begins with a woman picking up hitchhikers. This is so abnormal in the modern world that you can only assume she must be a serial killer. The hitchhikers do indeed die, and there is an extremely clever, slow reveal as to why. SHE’S AN ALIEN AND SHE’S ABDUCTING THEM AS A CULINARY DELICACY FOR HER HOME PLANET.

You’d think, based on this, it would be a science fiction story. It’s not at all. Mostly you are in head of the woman. Like many non-aliens, she hates her job, hates her boss, has a crush on someone who isn’t interested. At one point, some of the captured hitchhikers escape. They have been with the aliens for a month:

Removed from the warmth of its pen, it was pathetically unfit for the environment, bleeding from a hundred scratches, pinky-blue with cold. It had the typical look of a monthling, its shaved nub of a head nestled like a bud atop the disproportionately massive body. Its empty scrotal sac dangled like a pale oak leaf under its dark acorn of a penis. A thin stream of blueish-black diarrhoea clattered onto the ground between its legs. Its fists swept the air jerkily. Its mouth opened wide to show its cored molars and the docked stub of its tongue.

  ‘Ng-ng-ng-ng-gh!’ it cried.

She has occasional moral scruples about how they are treating the humans. But as she explains at one point, they “couldn’t siuwil, they couldn’t mesnishtil, they had no concept of slan . . . And when you looked into their glazed little eyes, you could understand why.” It’s clearly, among many, many, other things, a meditation about vegetarianism, and how we train ourselves to not have compassion. And not just for animals, but for sweatshop employees, for children affected by air pollution, and all the other things that make the world go round.

At one point we do visit the processing plant, where one of the recently de-tongued hitchhikers writes the word MERCY on the ground. The alien pretends to a wealthy visitor that she does not know what it means, as she does not want do-gooders getting hysterical. And indeed there is no such word in the alien language in any case. Later, when things go wrong with a hitchhiker, and he is trying to rape her (luckily she lacks human genitals), she is terrified, and tries to remember the word. “Murky!” she screams. It’s not everyday you laugh at a rape scene.

The aliens’ home planet is some kind of toxic stew, where oxygen and water are expensive and must be fought for. Thus, much of the book is spent with the alien marvelling at beauty of the countryside around the A9 highway. It is tragic to see our ‘ordinary’ world through her eyes. She is amazed we have still got sky and sea to enjoy. For a little while, anyway.

COMING UP FOR AIR by George Orwell

This is a book about a man who does not succeed in blowing up his life.  He is an insurance salesman, married with two children, and labouring under a mortgage.  (In a sign that things were better back then, the mortgage is only for sixteen years.  WTF is up with London housing)

One day he conceives a desire to go fishing, as he was an avid fisherman as a boy. He has not however fished since he was sixteen.  Here’s why:

In this life we lead – I don’t mean human life in general, I mean life in this particular age and this particular country – we don’t do the things we want to do.  It isn’t because we’re always working. . . . It’s because there’s some devil in us that drives us to and fro on everlasting idiocies.  There’s time for everything except the things worth doing.  Think of something you really care about.  Then add hour to hour and calculate the fraction of your life that you’ve actually spent doing it.  And then calculate the time you’ve spent on things like shaving, riding to and fro on buses, waiting in railways junctions, swapping dirty stories and reading the newspapers. 

He bunks off from his family to go and spend a week in the village in which he grew up, which he has not seen in twenty years.  In his mind ‘as permanent as they pyramids,’ he arrives to find it now just an outer suburb of London, and not an especially nice one at that.  He buys a fishing rod and does not use it.  He sees an old girlfriend, and is horrified and how old she looks.  Fat and with false teeth himself, he assures us that men never go so far downhill as women do.  Sometimes the patriarchy is really adorably deluded.

He ends up going home, concluding there is no escape from his life.  The year however is 1938, and the book has hanging over it very explicitly the coming war.  You feel he will almost welcome it.

Side point. Orwell published a bunch of books you’ve never heard of, including this, and then in 1945, Animal Farm; and in 1949, the novel 1984.  Then in 1950 he was dead, at 47.  Imagine: he managed to squeeze in two seminal classics just before the end. Imagine what would have come next.  Imagine how close to the wire he cut it. 

THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P by Adelle Waldman

My third time through this excellent book, and I like it even more on the re-read than I did before.

It’s the story of a four month relationship between two New York hipsters, both aspiring writers. It tries to answer the age-old question, is it you or is it me, and the answer is, as it always is, that it’s both. Or it’s neither.

Part of the power of the book is that it is written from the man’s perspective, but the author is a woman. I have tried and tried to figure out what is so powerful about this book, and I think somehow this is part of it: there is a giant effort of imagination to see it from the other side. I note I am struck once again, as I was when I first read it in 2013, by this:

As they were getting into bed, she told him that he was treated like a big shot because he was a guy and had the arrogant sense of entitlement to ask for and expect to get everything he wanted, to think no honor too big for him. The funny thing was that Nate thought there was a great deal of truth in this. But he thought she could stand to ask for more. His main criticism of her, in terms of writing, was that too often she wasn’t ambitious enough. She should treat each piece as it if mattered, instead of laughing off flaws proactively, defensively, citing a ‘rushed job’ or an ‘editor who’d mess it up anyway’ . . .”

I’m also struck this time through by the complexity. He meets the girl randomly at a party, some time after breaking up with her, and drunkenly goes home trying to figure out why he dumped her. He wakes up feeling happy. The last few lines are:

In a few days, it would be as if this night never happened, the only evidence of it an unsent email automatically saved to his drafts folder (“Dear Hannah … “). He’d no more remember the pain – or the pleasure – of this moment than he would remember, once he moved into the new apartment, the exact scent of the air from his bedroom window at dawn, after he’d been up all night working.

I love this. It’s so true how hard it is to figure out how you really feel.

SHUGGIE BAIN by Douglas Stuart

About ten pages into this book, I felt like I was getting into a hot bath. I just got ready to seriously relax. It’s exactly the sort of book I like: one that gives you a break from your own life, by deeply involving you in someone else’s.

It tells the story of a little boy being raised on some quite rough council estates by his alcoholic mother. I would bet heavy money that this book, while marketed as fiction, is based on the author’s own childhood. There is a certain subset of books in which the detail of daily life is so vividly captured that it can only come from a child’s eye, and ideally a child with a ton of trauma. It’s Glasgow in the 1980s, a place and a time I’ve never given a second thought to, and now I feel like I have a real experience of it. It joins such bizarrely disparate periods as Trinidad in the 1950s (courtesy, A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS) and the Dominican Republic in the 1960s (courtesy, FEAST OF THE GOAT read on a particularly hallucinatory 12 hour bus ride to Acupulco).

I won’t go on about everything I thought was wonderful about this book, but let me just leave you with this:

The other taxi drivers had taken on that familiar shape of men past their prime, the hours spent sedentary behind the wheel causing the collapse of their bodies, the full Scottish breakfasts and the snack bar suppers settling like cooled porridge around their waists. Eventually the taxi hunched them over till their shoulders rounded into a soft hump and their heads jutted forward on jowled necks. The ones who had been at the night shift a long time had turned ghostly pale, their only colour was the faint rosacea from the years of drink. These were the men who decorated their fingers with gold sovereign rings, taking vain pleasure from watching them sit high and shiny on the steering wheel

And that’s just taxi drivers! Imagine everything else that’s in there

THE ENDS OF THE EARTH by Abbie Greaves

Here is a book where everyone involved urgently NEEDS TO GO TO THERAPY.

It begins with a journalist discovering a woman who has been sitting at Ealing station every night for seven years, with a sign reading ‘Come home Jim.’ Clearly, this woman is the first person who needs to go the therapy. The journalist gets unhealthily involved in the story, and you better believe she also really needs to go to therapy.

The lady on the bench is called Mary and we learn about her first meeting with Jim, who was her boyfriend for six years before he left. Here is how he talks to her on one of their first meetings:

“You,” he continued. “There’s something . . . enigmatic about you. Quiet but fierce. Yes, maybe that’s it. Beautiful too, which helps, but that’s not it. I want to figure you out. I missed you these last few hours.”

This for me just drips with red flags. Who talks to anyone like that, and especially someone they only just met. Could it be all is not well? And indeed all is not well. I won’t give away any more than that, so as not to spoil it. While I didn’t quite buy the entire premise of THE ENDS OF THE EARTH, it’s a good engaging mystery, and I found myself sort of rolling my eyes but also turning the pages at a great rate.

Though let me say again: let’s all go to therapy sooner rather than later, and that goes double for men and triple for husbands.

THE SUBTLE ART OF NOT GIVING A F*CK by Mark Manson

Here is an example of how a great title does half the work.  Though the author’s point is not so much that we should not give a f*ck, but rather that we should only give a f*ck about what we give a f*ck about.  Easier said than done, in my experience. I often find myself getting riled up about things that I know I do not care about.  In any case, the book is refreshing in its emphasis that there is no life without problems; the point is to choose the right problems. 

I also thought this was useful:

If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.

Here his point is, don’t measure success too much based on things you cannot control, e.g., the approval of others, promotions, etc. Rather focus on things you can control, e.g., doing your best.  Associated with this is what you should measure yourself on:

Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways. Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or an undiscovered genius. . . .  Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator. . . . (You should) define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible. This often means giving up some grandiose ideas about yourself: that you’re uniquely intelligent, or spectacularly talented . .  . This means giving up your sense of entitlement and your belief that you’re somehow owed something by this world.”

I can’t say it’s the best written or most insightful book I’ve ever come across, and admittedly I lost it in an Uber before I finished it completely, but that said I enjoyed it. 

STORM OF STEEL by Ernst Junger

Here is a book about how bad things can get.  It’s the dairies of a man who signed up on the the day the first world war began, and, incredibly, made it all the way through to 1918.  The Somme, Ypres, Cambrai: he saw them all. 

The book was published in 1919, and it shows.  Most of the other books of this period were written at a remove of at least a decade or so, but in this one there has been no time to make sense of the war, or to do anything but just tell us what happened.  It is in parts boring, as war is boring, and in other parts horrifying.  As far as I can tell, no one whom he personally knew with whom he began the war ended it alive with him. 

It is deeply revolting.  Here he is on a patch of land that has been fought over repeatedly:

In among the living defenders lay the dead.  When we dug foxholes, we realized that there were stacked in layers.  One company after another, pressed together in the drumfire, had been mown down, then the bodies had been buried under the showers of earth sent up by shells, and then the relief company had taken their predecessors’ place.  And now it was our turn. 

He is on the German side, and is, as ever, extraordinarily depressing to see how very similar their war was from their alleged ‘enemies’ on the other side.  He is even reading TRISTAM SHANDY in the trenches.  Towards the end, though, his war does differ from that of English accounts I have read, because he is of course, losing, and he knows it.  They start to run out of food; they are no longer sleeping in trenches, but in craters; and still he goes on. 

With every attack, the enemy came onward with more powerful means; his blows were swifter and more devastating. Everyone knew we could no longer win. But we would stand firm.

He is clearly losing it.

A profound reorientation, a reaction to so much time spent so intensely, on the edge. The seasons followed one another, it was winter and then it was summer again, but it was still war. I felt I had got tired, and used to the aspect of war, but it was from familiarity that I observed what was in front of me in a new and subdued light. Things were less dazzlingly distinct. And I felt the purpose with which I had gone out to fight had been used up and no longer held. The war posed new, deeper puzzles. It was a strange time altogether.

It is in this context that he goes into his last battle.  His company takes a direct hit, and twenty some young men are killed right next to him.  Then he goes on for hours, fighting, sobbing, singing.  At one point he takes off his coat, and keeps shouting  “Now Lieutenant Junger’s throwing off his coat” which had the “fusiliers laughing, as if it had been the funniest thing they’d ever heard.”  He cannot remember large stretches of this last battle.  At one point he stops to shoot an Englishman, who reaches into his pocket and instead of bringing out a pistol brings out a picture of family.  Junger lets him live.  He kills plenty of others though, including one very young man:

 I forced myself to look closely at him. It wasn’t a case of ‘you or me’ any more. I often thought back on him; and more with the passing of the years. The state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse; and we must exercise it. Sorrow, regret, pursued me deep into my dreams

And all this while HE KNOWS THEY CANNOT WIN.  Guys, I would have deserted long before, and I am not even ashamed to say it.  Honour, like courage, are concepts generally deployed by rich people to get you to do what they want.  I can’t think of almost anything for which I would die.