THE MIGHTY FRANKS by Michael Frank

It is amazing what different worlds books can take you in to.   The last one was all about the challenges of being an Icelandic sheep farmer.  This one is all about the challenges of having a charismatic aunt.

It’s an odd memoir, almost a misery memoir, except the misery is of so very niche and specific a kind it’s hard to take it seriously.  At the nub of it is his aunt, who is not just the sister of his father but also the wife of his mother’s brother.  That is, siblings married siblings.  One couple had three children (including Michael, the author, the oldest), and the other none.  The mothers of both pairs of siblings live together, and everyone lives walking distance from each other. 
Now that I write that, it’s clearly a recipe for trouble. The trouble comes in the form of this aunt, who is a very successful and wealthy screenwriter, very charismatic, and very obsessed with Michael.  She constantly singles him out for attention, non-sexual but very intense, and the only thing is, he needs to agree with her.  This is okay when he was younger, though a measure of the bizarreness is that she recommends to him – when he is just eight – OF HUMAN BONDAGE and SONS AND LOVERS. “Take my word for it, Lovey, between (them) you’ll learn everything you need to know about what it feels like to be a certain kind of young person.  Your kind, if I may say.”  These are not child appropriate books, unless of course that child is tortured artistically and sexually. 
Anyway, as he heads to adolescence he naturally rebels, and in parallel his aunt becomes increasingly unstable.  Nothing actually specifically bad really happens; no one even gets a slap.  The most extreme is someone going home from holiday in Paris early.  This is not exactly the high water mark of human suffering.  But clearly Frank was troubled enough to write a whole book about it.  And his parents agree: in later life, they apologize for not protecting him from whatever it was his aunt was. 
There’s an interesting side point on his mother being involved in early feminism, where suburban women held “CR groups” that is, consciousness raising groups.  One result of this is that she stops allowing the aunt to decorate their house – which indeed was a weird part of the family dynamic. 

In writing this post it sounds rather as if I didn’t enjoy this book.  However I did.  It’s always interesting to see the specific craziness of someone else’s family.  And I’m always amazed by memoirs: who even remembers their past that clearly?  My theory is, nobody does; but I always admire the boldness of someone willing to write up their fantasy of what happened

INDEPENDENT PEOPLE by Holdor Laxness

Guys, I’m now fully informed about the life of subsistence sheep farmers in Iceland in the early twentieth century, and let me tell you it is not pretty.   I’m so fully informed I am hoping Icelandic shepherding will somehow come up in dinner party conversation so I can impress others with my incredibly niche knowledge.  This seems unlikely. 
This book is a good corrective to any idea we might have in the modern day about how ‘busy’ and ‘stressed’ we are.  Truly stressed people make their children work sixteen hour days in the rain, because they need to or else they will starve.  Also, they don’t think rain is a big deal.  Here’s the main character:

And if Bjartur heard them complaining about the damp he would reply that it was pretty miserable wretches that minded at all whether they were wet or dry.  He could not understand why such people had been born.  “It’s nothing but damned eccentricity to want to be dry,” he would say.  “I’ve been wet more than half my life and never been a whit the worse for it.”

You would think he must be joking, but no.  When looking for sheep on the mountains he often sleeps out in a cave even when there is snow on the ground.  All you have to do, I learn, is wake up four times a night to turn the boulder you are sleeping on over sixteen times.  Then you are quite warm, and even if not you are so tired you don’t notice it.  Handy tips, if ever my life goes so horrifyingly wrong I have to be an Icelandic sheep farmer.  Then I can look forward to rye bread with a ‘lump of tallow and cod liver’ for breakfast, and salted fish for 100% of other meals, though in spring that should read ‘meal’ as you only get one of those a day.  Brjartur’s elderly grandmother in fact does not like fresh food, arguing it makes her ill. 

The main message of this book, other than to make you very, very, very grateful for your own circumstances is that one life is not long enough for the poor man to ever get out from under.  It’s a bleak, but probably true, opinion, and the central tragedy of the story is Bjartur’s effort to be ‘independent’.

He works 18 years for someone else to afford a small piece of land, and then works himself and his sickly family astoundingly hard, to build a flock (“Whatever happens you can always comfort yourself with the thought that the sheep are in the home pastures,” he helpfully comments when someone dies).  That flock is then occasionally wiped out, by worms, or storms, or on one weird occasion by ghosts (?). 

They have one piece of luck: the First World War!  It drives up prices for Icelandic lamb. 

 “Oh let them squabble, damn them,” said Bjartur.  “I only hope they keep it up as long as they can. . . . I only hope they go on blasting one another’s brains out as long as other folk can get some good out of it.  There ought to be plenty of people abroad.  And no one misses them

Poor old Brjartur does well off this, but them overreaches to build a house, which plunges him into debt again.  This does not deter him. He is a battleaxe of a man.  When his only remaining son plans to emigrate to America, leaving no one to take over the shabby field that is his life’s work

He made no further attempt to talk his son over; it is a mark of weakness to try to talk anyone over.  An independent man thinks only of himself and lets others do as they please.  He himself had never allowed anyone to talk him over.

This gives you a flavour.  It’s a sort of sad novel, but also quite funny.  Here is a local middleclass landowner

Now the Bailiff’s nature was such that had he been accused of theft or even of murder he would have preserved an unruffled exterior and have seemed, indeed, to be quite gratified.  But with one crime he would not have his name connected: if anyone insinuated that he was making money the ice was broken and his tongue was loosened, such a slander was more than he could stand. 

You also learn the fate of Bjartur’s whole family, who do all sorts, get pregnant out of wedlock, die in snowstorms, etc.  There’s much wisdom to it, often of the melancholy kind:

 But the first days are always the worst, and there is much comfort in the thought that time effaces everything, crime and sorrow no less than love. 

Poor old Bartjur.  He loses everything anyway, not in the end because of the worms, or the storms, or even the ghosts, but because of the debts.  The tagline of the novel might as well be: You can’t fight city hall.

DEVIL’S CUB by Georgette Heyer

A Duke elopes with the wrong sister.  He’s got a temper that in a modern novel would be a red flag for domestic violence, so when he finds out his mistake determines to carry on anyway.  Then he falls in love with her but not before a visit from the characters of the previous novel THESE OLD SHADES. 
This is the second novel of the series, and the second of the new genre of historical romance, invented by Heyer for THESE OLD SHADES and now with literally thousands of novels in its wake.   It’s interesting to see the birth of a genre, and it’s hard to believe it didn’t exist before: the love story in the historical setting.  I guess it’s like Facebook.  Now its hard to imagine why no one thought of it before.  Why are all the best business ideas so obvious once someone has thought of them?  Brownie mix is the one that really tortures me.  Who would have thought people would pay for pre-mixed flour and cocoa powder?  I can’t believe someone got rich off that one.

THESE OLD SHADES by Georgette Heyer

This was Heyer’s second book, and her first big success.  The first, BLACK MOTH, was apparently written to amuse her sick brother, and was something of a melodrama.  In this one, she hit on the formula that was to make her a fabulously wealthy woman and invented a genre at the same time.  It came out during the General Strike, and thus had no publicity.  The fact that it was still a best seller confirmed Heyer in the idea that she did not need to do interviews.
In this one, a Duke takes on a new page, and over time we learn she is in fact a girl, and through a series of unlikely events in fact the legitimate child of his greatest enemy.  They fall in love and etc.  It’s a reasonable book, and you can see she still thought of it as a book, rather than as a formula.  Next up, the sequel, DEVIL’S CUB. 

DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? By Philip K Dick


I had to give up on this one.   Let me give you a sample: 

After parking the department’s speedy beefed-up hovercar on the roof of the San Francisco Hall of Justice on Lombard street, bounty hunter Rick Deckard, briefcase in hand, descended to Harry Bryant’s office.  

I mean, snore. Let me tell you he even uses the term ‘beefed-up hovercar’ more than once.  The book is all about trying to tell who is human and who is cyborg, and focuses much on tests to tell who is which.  I propose one additional test: 100% of humans will be able to identify that the above sentence is written by a man.  And indeed the book is full of things men, particularly middle aged men, are interested in: looking tough, ignoring your wife, making tough choices where you may not be a good guy but we understand why, etc.

That said, I did enjoy learning about Philip K Dick, who led a fully bonkers life.  He was on amphetamines for years, so he could turn out books at speed.  He also had various out-of-body experiences, the most important of which was one time when sunlight hit the gold necklace of a delivery girl and he saw a ‘pink beam’ that gave him wisdom. Things go downhill from there.  As Wikipedia enjoyably puts it: “At one point, Dick felt that he had been taken over by the spirit of the prophet Elijah.”  And “In 1974, Dick wrote a letter to the FBI, accusing various people . . . of being foreign agents of Warsaw Pact powers.  He also wrote that Stanislaw Lem was probably a false name used by a composite committee operating on orders of the Communist party . . “

Now this is a book I’d be interested in reading

THE GRADUATE by Charles Webb

This book was made into a much more famous movie.  Apparently it made $100m at the box office, but poor old Charles Webb who was 24 at the time had sold the rights for just $20,000.  Apparently (according to Wikipedia) he felt the movie took away from his status as a serious artist, so he was ‘glad’ it worked out that way.  You need to tell yourself what you need to tell yourself I guess.  
In any case, it’s a great little novel, and I’m surprised that its original reviews were not good.  It tells the story of Benjamin Braddock, who comes back from university to his parent’s home in the suburbs with a good degree and everything in front of him; the only hitch is he doesn’t want everything.  Or indeed anything.  He doesn’t care about traditional success, but then he can’t seem to find anything else he does care about (even ‘travelling,’ which he briefly tries).  Then he is seduced into an affair with the wife of his father’s business partner, Mrs Robinson.  This at least arouses his interest (among other things) but then very unfortunately he meets her daughter who he falls in love with.  YIKES.
I won’t tell you how it all works out, but I will tell you this daughter is only like 22 and has had 3 marriage proposals!  People did not waste time in the 1960s.  Based on how that worked out for Mrs Robinson, who had to drop out of university to get married because she got pregnant, this is not the smartest move.  Better to do what we do today, date for like 10 years and then change your mind at the last minute in the hopes of finding someone ‘better’

THE BLUE FLOWER by Penelope Fitzgerald

A bizarre, hilarious, and bleak book.  It’s a fictionalization of the life of an obscure eighteenth century German philosopher and writer. Don’t let this put off.  It focuses particularly on the part where he falls madly in love with a twelve year old.  Don’t let this put you off either.  The thing’s a masterpiece.  

It was written when Fitzgerald was seventy-eight years old, and it shows: this lady is no longer playing.  I can’t quite tell you what is so wonderful about this book, and I also can’t tell you how she does it, but I think it has something to do with the rigour and honesty that can come with old age, if we are lucky.  First, there is the joy of the way she creates the eighteenth century.  The food is horrifying. Here is a dinner: 

 . . . the soups, one made of beer, sugar and eggs, one of rose-hips and onions, one of bread and cabbage water, one of cows’ udders flavoured with nutmeg.

It sounds like a hipster restaurant in Haringey.  Or here is whats on offer at a fair they have been looking forward to – “Kesselfleish – the ears, snout and strips of fat from a pig’s neck boiled with peppermint schnapps.”  One young lady has no one to take her to the fair, and is commiserated with:   

A fine young woman still, what a pity she had no affianced to treat her to a pig’s nostril!

Or here is a mother and her daughter, talking about a guest’s room: 

“And there is no chair in the room where he might put his clothes at night.”  “His clothes! I have not undressed myself at night, even in summer, for I think twelve years.” “And yet you’ve given birth to eight of us!” cried Sidonie.  “God in heaven spare me a marriage like yours!”

In the midst of all this domesticity is the protagonist’s (Fritz) idealistic young desire to be free of earthly things and to find a logic that unites all things. He is inspired at university by the philosopher Fichte:

Fichte was speaking of the philosophy of Kant, which, fortunately, he had been able to improve upon greatly.  Kant believed in the external world.  Even though it is only known to use through our senses and our own experience, still, it is there.  This, Fichte was saying, was nothing but an old man’s weakness

He is a talker and a dreamer, who thinks he can see beyond the everyday reality of things.  Here he is talking away to a busy young woman:

…all though he could live without love, he told her, he could not live without friendship.  All was confessed, he talked perpetually.  Neither the sewing nor the forewinter sausage-chopping deterred him. 

So extreme an idealist is he that somehow when he falls in love with this twelve year old, who is not very pretty nor very bright, you somehow believe in his sincerity.  It is gross, but to be fair he does not attempt to sleep with her and in any case most women were married at fourteen.  It makes no odds, in any case, because she is dead of TB before she is fifteen, after some operations without anaesthetic that are almost as horrifying as the soups above.  Fritz marries someone else, but is dead himself in under three years, also of TB; and so are almost all his siblings. 

I mean, thank god for BCG.  I have not done a good job of explaining this novel, but that is I think because I cannot.  I need to re-read it to try and understand it.

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME by Andre Aciman

I decided I needed to re-read this wonderful book.  Reading it this second time I am struck less by the immediate story – the painful first love – as by the background story: the many years there were to mourn that first love.  I am surprised the first time I did not get that so clearly.  Here Elio is, for example, at the war memorial where he first (sort of) told Oliver he was interested in him: 

I wondered how many people here still remembered the young men they’d lost on the Piave River.  You’d have to be at least eighty years old today to have known them.  And at least one hundred, if not more, to have been older than they were then.  At one hundred, surely you must learn to overcome loss and grief – or do they hound you till the bitter end? At one hundred, siblings forget, sons forget, loved ones forget, no one remembers everything, even the most devastated forget to remember.  . .  In thirty or forty years, I’ll come back here and think back on a conversation I knew I’d never forget, much as I might want to someday.  I’d come here with my wife, my children, show them the sights, point to the bay, the local caffes, Le Danzig, the Grand Hotel.  Then I’d stand here and ask the statue and the straw-backed chairs and shaky wooden tables to remind me of someone called Oliver. 

I was also struck again with how wonderfully the summer was evoked, and an overwhelming urge to move to Italy and ideally to wherever this book takes place specifically.  This is what comes of reading in winter.  Let’s just quote a length again, because it’s my blog and I can do what I feel like: 
I look back on those days and regret none of it, not the risks, not the shame, not the total lack of foresight. The lyric cast of the sun, the teeming fields with tall plants nodding away under the intense midafternoon heat, the squeak of our wooden floors, or the scrape of the clay ashtray pushed ever so lightly on the marble slab that used to sit on my nightstand. I knew that our minutes were numbered, but I didn’t dare count them, just as I knew where all this was headed, but I didn’t care to read the signposts. This was a time when I intentionally failed to drop bread crumbs for my return journey; instead, I ate them. He could turn out to be a creep; he could change me or ruin me forever, while time and gossip might ultimately disembowel everything we shared and trim the whole thing down till nothing but fish bones remained. I might miss this day, or I might do far better, but I’d always know that on those afternoons in my bedroom I had held my moment
God it’s an amazing book.  I don’t think I’ll read anything else by Aciman.  I see his next most popular book has a similar theme, and I don’t want to be able to see through his tricks.  (I learnt that lesson when BLOOD MERIDIAN destroyed THE ROAD).

APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA by John O’Hara

I read this in my most absolute favourite format: an out of circulation library book.  Even better, it had a torn dust jacket.  I just love that dirty smell and the feeling that a book has passed through many hands. 
This is a story about a man who destroys his life over the course of a few days. It’s not totally clear why, but as a starter for ten I’d say he’s an alcoholic with untreated depression.  He offends a major customer, cheats on his wife, and etc.  In a way it looked kind of amazing.  He absolutely burns his bourgeois life to the ground. 

What I found especially interesting was how explicit it was, for a book written in 1934.  Try this, the opening paragraph:


 OUR STORY opens in the mind of Luther L. (L for LeRoy) Fliegler, who is lying in his bed, not thinking of anything, but just aware of sounds, conscious of his own breathing, and sensitive to his own heartbeats. Lying beside him is his wife, lying on her right side and enjoying her sleep. She has earned her sleep, for it is Christmas morning, strictly speaking, and all the day before she has worked like a dog, cleaning the turkey and baking things, and, until a few hours ago, trimming the tree. The awful proximity of his heartbeats makes Luther Fliegler begin to want his wife a little, but Irma can say no when she is tired. It is too much trouble, she says when she is tired, and she won’t take any chances. Three children is enough; three children in ten years. So Luther Fliegler does not reach out for her. It is Christmas morning, and he will do her the favor of letting her enjoy her sleep; a favor which she will never know he did for her. And it is a favor, all right, because Irma likes Christmas too, and on this one morning she might not mind the trouble, might be willing to take a chance. Luther Fliegler more actively stifled the little temptation and thought the hell with it, and then turned and put his hands around his wife’s waist and caressed the little rubber tire of flesh across her diaphragm. She began to stir and then she opened her eyes and said: “My God, Lute, what are you doing?” “Merry Christmas,” he said.

This is more middle aged sex than I was ready for.  It also gives you a good sense of the energy of the writing. There are a huge range of characters who the protagonist annoys or upsets, and they are all drawn with vigour. I’m surprised neither this author nor this book are not more famous. 

BAD BLOOD by Lorna Sage

A pregnant teenage girl in the 1950s made a lot of people very angry. Most particularly, in the case of this autobiography, the teenage girl herself.  Written when Lorna Sage was an old woman, this memoir of her early life still burns with rage, and I found it wonderful and curiously inspirational. 

Sage spent much of her childhood with her grandparents, a vicar and his wife.  Here are the opening two paragraphs:

Grandfather’s skirts would flap in the wind along the churchyard path and I would hang on.  He often found things to do in the vestry, excuses for getting out of the vicarage (kicking the swollen door, cursing) and so long as he took me he couldn’t get up to much. I was a sort of hobble, he was my minder and I was his. He’d have liked to get further away, but petrol was rationed. The church was at least safe. My grandmother never went near it – except feet first in her coffin, but that was years later, when she was buried in the same grave with him.Rotting together for eternity, one flesh at the last after a lifetime’s mutual loathing. In life, though, she never invaded his patch; once inside the churchyard gate he was on his own ground, in his element. He was good at funerals, being gaunt and lined, marked with mortality. He had a scar down his hollow cheek, too, which Grandma had done with the carving knife one of the many times when he came home pissed and incapable.

Yikes!  Indeed, this is a non-traditional vicarage.  The vicar hates his humdrum life and fills it with liquor and (when he can) with women.  Here’s his first affair, with the local nurse: 

He and Nurse Burgess, now MB for short in the diary, pedal to paradise every day of the week, including Sunday. Trailing a cloud of midges, they’d hump their bikes off the road, through some muddy gateway and, behind the hedge, hug and knead each other among the mallows and Queen Anne’s lace and nettles dusty with pollen.

(Side point: she does actually have her grandpa’s diaries, which are bizarrely covered in comments from her Grandma!).  Anyway, let me say: God, I love the writing.  Regular readers will know how I like to quote at length from books I really like, and I am really having to restrain myself from just typing out the whole book into this post.  In any case, the affair comes out, acrimoniously; but this is a small town in the country so they all are trapped together.  Indeed, when the grandpa is long dead the nurse starts visiting the grandma everyday for her insulin injections. Sage comments:

This is another aspect of rural life that’s lost now that the middle-class diaspora has populated the countryside with property-owning vagrants: the peculiar hell of having to live with such substantial ghosts from your past. 

She is hilarious on the countryside in general.  Here’s an interesting insight, from her time helping out on local farms: 

Farming life seemed a perpetual-motion machine, or an effect of gravity, something cyclic and unstoppable.  Actually, it was because this kind of small-scale tenant farming was vanishing that the impression was so strong.  Ways of life have been dying out in rural England time out of mind, at least for two hundred and fifty years since the great wave of eighteenth century enclosures.  It’s the sense of an ending that’s timeless.  The best symbol of this version of pastoral is a rusting and discarded piece of farm machinery in the corner of a field. 

The book is fully of interesting views on the world.  Here she is on her grandparents, for example, and the fact they mostly lived off their son-in-law:

The grandparents weren’t grateful.  They both felt so cheated by life, they have their histories of grievances so well worked out, that they were owed service, handouts, anything that was going . . . . Did they love me?  The question is beside the point, somehow.  Certainly they each spoiled me, mainly by giving me the false impression that I was entitled to attention nearly all the time.  They played.  Theywere like children, if you consider one of the things about being a child is that you are a parasite of sorts and have to brazen it out self-righteously. 

But leaving aside the quality of the writing, and the interesting view on the world, mostly what I love is the temper.  You don’t often get to hear the true voice of women of that period.  Here she is, once she gets pregnant:

My parents’ plan was that I should go to a Church Home for Unmarried Mothers, where you repented on your knees (scrubbed floors, said prayers), had your baby (which was promptly adopted by proper married people) and returned home humble and hollow eyed.  Everyone would magnanimously pretend that nothing had happened, so long as you never seemed to be having a good time or  developing too high an opinion of yourself – from now on you could count yourself lucky if they let you learn shorthand and typing.  . . My father was appalled and also triumphant.  Just as in the old days he’d done his best to beat vicarage corruption out of me, now he righteously denounced me for my scandalous offence against decency, monogamy, and my mother.  He galloped off on his high horse, chivalrously saving her once again from the horrible past. . . .

Rest assured, she does not go to the Church Home. Her boyfriend rather heroically marries her, so she can still go on to university, and they both get Firsts.  But this triumph over adversity is less interesting than the adversity, and the fury with which she meets the adversity.  Here, for example, is her experience of a cosmetics demonstration at school:

. . make-up that made you look neat, presentable, vulnerable; serviceable make-up that once you’d left school would last all day behind a secretary’s desk with judicious touching-up; make-up for getting engaged, with pink nail varnish to math the lipstick when you showed off your ring.  And above all prophylacticmake-up.  That particular shade of pink lipstick, the hint of turquoise in the awful eyeshadow, were contraceptives.  They spelled heavy petting, waiting, saving for a semi.  The only contraception available to adolescent girls was mythological, back in 1957, so why not Pond’s Vanishing Cream?  Gail and I held hands throughout this scary demonstration of Whitchurch sexual realpolitik. 
Okay I’ve got to stop.  But really it’s hilarious and brilliant and made me feel less alone in the world.