FRIDAY’S CHILD by Georgette Heyer

I have really fallen down the Georgette Heyer pit this year.  I’m not sure why.  I tend to blame it on a rainy afternoon in the seaside town of Lyme Regis, and a certain dusty old bookstore there.  But this can only be half the truth, because after reading my way through the couple I bought there, I went to the other end of the technology spectrum and bought a couple more on Kindle for my iPhone. In my defence, I had thoroughly run out of things to read, and was facing two days staring down the barrel of the city state of Luxembourg.  So: FRIDAY’S CHILD.
I understand from my friend the internet that this is among the most popular of all Heyer’s books, and I would say deservedly so.  Heyer really churned these things out, and I sort of like this idea I have of her, ferociously cynical, chain smoking, turning out these frothy romances by the dozen.  I am even therefore quite fond of the ones where she is obviously re-working an old theme and can hardly wait to be done and get back on the golf course or whatever.  This is not one of those. 

I need hardly describe the plot, but I will anyway. This is one of the ones where a couple has to get married for not very believable non-romantic reasons (in this case an inheritance) and end up falling in love after all.  They joy of this one is that the many characters are entertainingly well-drawn and a real spirit of fun animates the writing.  Heyer would be ashamed of me were I to go so far as to quote the drivel, but it did make me laugh. 

What also made me laugh was a strange feature of Kindle which is called ‘X-Ray’.  I have no idea what this is supposed to be, but it seems like it is intended to provide some kind of summary of the main characters.  Some are described as if a human read the book (e.g. ‘Ravensby: a friend of Sherry’s’) but others clearly just pull some text from wherever the name first appears (e.g., ‘Ferdy: Ferdy looked at his watch’).  But enjoy this one:

God: God is often conceived as the Supreme Being and principal object of faith.  The concept of God as described by theologians commonly includes the attributes of omniscience. . .  

Clearly at some point someone says ‘God’ so the algorithm goes to the dictionary.  It’s hilariously machine learned.  I also very much like the vision of some man sitting at a desk having got to the ‘G’s and having to come up with a definition of God.  

I’m not sure how this blog post ended up with God, but there you are: I guess this time he’s the Omega. 

THE DEATH OF REX NHONGO by CB George

“This is a story of five marriages and one gun.”  A great tagline for the cover, if not totally accurate, as the focus of this book is much more on the former than the latter.  

A character in the book makes an observation that could also have been a great tagline: ‘It is hope that causes most of the problems.’  The bonus of this is that it would have worked not just for this Zimbabwean novel but for most Zimbabweans’ lives for the last twenty years.  
Rex Nhongo was the nom de guerre of Solomon Mujuru, an important liberation era military leader, who unlike many important leaders around the time Mugabe wanted to become President actually managed to survive beyond the liberation era.  He went on to become a fabulously wealthy businessman, whose wife remained in politics, and died in mysterious circumstances in a fire.  This being Zimbabwe, for mysterious circumstances obviously read murder.  
In any case, this is all by-the-by, as THE DEATH OF REX NHONGO has next to nothing to do with Rex Nhongo, and is not at all what this book is about, though I am sure it helped get international reviewers interested, because the outside world always assume that people who live in dictatorships do nothing but think about dictators day and night.  What this novel is actually interested in is marriages, and how they work.  The first marriage we meet is that of a taxi driver called Patson, who finds the gun in the back of his car; and then we learn of the marriage of one of his riders, who is part of the British embassy; then there is an American businessman; and a domestic worker.  They’re variously happy and unhappy; honest and dishonest; sexual and not; just as real relationships are.  
The end is sort of unsuccessful, with lots of highly dramatic narrative telescoped into a few pages, plenty of death, and a very dubious ‘supernatural’ plotline that for some reason has to do with West African folklore. The end didn’t matter though; this was still for me a very successful novel.  It was an impressive feat of imagination across contemporary Zim, delivering a believable range of characters across race and income levels.  I’m wild to know who wrote it, as CB George is a nom de plume.  Despite how accurate it is about Zim, I’m going to say it’s not a Zimbabwean.  It has a very precise feel for the expat world, so that’s my guess; but I’ll have to wait till I’m back in Harare to sniff it out a bit further. 
Well done to them, whoever they are, for creating the city so well; I’m proud my relatively small, currently unlucky hometown has so well been immortalized in literature, not just in this book but in many others.   (This year, see Petina Gappah’s ROTTEN ROW).  Our authors have served us better than our politicians. 

THE MAKIOKA SISTERS by Junichiro Tanizaki

Regarded by many as the finest novel of twentieth century Japanese literature, THE MAKIOKA SISTERS is the story of four sisters in the years leading up to World War II.

It’s really a rather sad book, though based on the plot alone I wouldn’t be able to say why.  The plot is: they want to get the two younger sisters married. And I guess it ends happily, with both sisters on their way to the altar.  This is the traditional happy ending.  But here you go with the bizarrely anti-climatic last line of the book:

Yukiko’s diarrhea persisted through the twenty-sixth, and was a problem on the train to Tokyo.

That gives you the flavour.  This book is much less about plot, than it is about all the many ordinary days that make up all our lives between plot points.  You meet the love of your life; then you still go to the dentist that afternoon. You still go to work. One day he will propose and on that day you might be wearing tight pants or a kimono that creaks. 

Based on my summary above, giving the dates it covers, you’d think it might be a book about politics, but it is almost defiantly not.  It’s purely, almost aggressively, about domestic life, and life before the war.  Tanizaki was writing it during the war, so my theory is that this is why; he wanted to recreate a world that was already decaying, and that is what gives it is sadness.

The sisters themselves (I am sure not coincidentally) capture this movement from past to future, with the one unmarried sister a classic Osaka lady (which I now know means reserved and delicate), and the other more modern, wearing Western clothes and even having her own business making dolls.  The family is going down in the world, and the reason they are struggling to marry is they are overestimate who they can get. At the beginning they decline a perfectly nice man because his mother might be mentally ill; at the end they are glad to accept a guy with no money and a sketchy past. 

It’s done with a light hand, but it’s very successful; at the end I was left feeling almost homesick for pre-war Japan.  That’s if you exclude all the Beri-Beri.  I wasn’t so keen on that.  (I had no idea it was such a big issue in Japan.  Click here for very interesting history, one of the few where the rich get what they deserve)

THE LESSER BOHEMIANS by Eimear McBride

I gave up on this book within the first page.  Here’s the opening:

I move.  Cars move.  Stock, it bends light.  City opening itself behind.  Here’s to be for its life is the bite and would be start of mine.
Remember.  Look up.  Like the face of god was lighting me through these grills above, through windows once a churn this hall, and old men watching below. 

Oh dear.  Regular readers will know I abhor this sort of thing.  Listen, if you want to write poetry, I have a suggestion for you: don’t write novels.

Luckily however about three weeks later I ran out of things to read.   Faced with the terrible alternative of being alone with my own thoughts I picked up this book again.  I’m glad I did, because the story was an interesting one – a love affair that takes the participants (one being 18 and the other 38) entirely by surprise.  It was interesting to see them struggle against how improbable the affair is.  I also enjoyed the mis-en-scene, being the 90s, and drama school, a period and a world that I remember and which alternately makes me feel soft on the inside and sweaty with shame on the outside.  I also came round to enjoying the writing.  Try this, when she is waiting for him at his local:

LaterBreath of winter on me, brain crawling little from drink, I sit where he was with The Devils that nigh and read my book like pub doors are quiet and will not look up for him.  Then at my shoulder Women in Love? – stoops to my cheek but gets an earlobe – Thought you’d be long past the Lawrence phase.  Well, hello to you too, I lifting my eyes to him, damp and cold-faced from the wind.  Have a few in you already?  I do.  Better catch up, and to the barmaid – rubbing heat in his hands – Two, when you’re ready, and a salt and vinegar please.  Come on, that table’s free.

And this, right after they first sleep together:

Silent in his room.  Cigarette.  Sit of shift?  I halfly dress.  Stay or leave? What do men expect?  What would I like?   To know exactly what he considers to be the right what now. 

On the sex, there is a lot of it.  And really this I admired, because it is well done and I think that’s very difficult to do.  It was probably (brace yourself) the most beautiful anal sex scene I’ve ever read.  I know.  Not that list is long, but there you go.  Second runner up I actually read a few months ago;  A SPORT AND A PASTTIME.

Get on Amazon fetishists: here and here. 

EDUCATED by Tara Westover

Tara Westover has an upbringing ideal for the dinner party anecdote.  Her family are Mormons so Mormon that other Mormons think they have gone off the edge.  The first very dubious sign is when the father decides, based on a line in Isaiah, that milk is evil, so they all have to eat their cereal with molasses.  It’s all downhill from there.  He gradually pulls the children out of school, till by the time it is Tara’s turn (she is the youngest) she doesn’t get to go at all, and her ‘homeschooling’ curriculum is 100% to do with how to work in a scrapyard without safety equipment.  Her father does not believe they need safety equipment, because they are under the Lord’s protection.  The same logic apparently holds after a major car accident, in which her mother incurs what appears to be brain damage.  She is treated not at a hospital but in their own basement, where the medicine is lying in the dark.  Eventually she emerges, allegedly not that much different, except for the occasional inability to tell her children apart. 

One of Tara’s older siblings decides he wants to go to high school, and is allowed to enroll and eventually goes to University.  Tara is inspired also, and while she does not go to school, she teaches herself enough to get into the big Mormon school, Brigham Young.  This is a bigger achievement than it sounds; though she can read, she has had little access to books other than nineteenth century Mormon prophecy.  Scale of her ignorance is shown by the fact that she has never heard of the Holocaust before it comes up in Art History class.   From here the book follows the classic arc of the poor kid makes good, with Tara going on to Cambridge and to Harvard. 

Oddly however, interesting as the above triumph-over-unusual-personal-circumstance was, what was more interesting to me was Tara’s struggle with whether or not she even wanted to triumph.  While her parents don’t object to her going to school, and even are proud of her for it, they don’t actually want her to learn anything there.  Or get vaccinated, for example; or wear a tank top; or question whether or not her brother should beat his wife.    The relationship with her family eventually breaks down, and her father sincerely offers her a way back in if only she will agree with everything he thinks.  Tara has to make a terrible decision between her own mind and her family.  She choose her mind.

For me, this is clearly a mistake.  Just lie!  But somehow she feels she can’t do that; and so the book is rather bittersweet, and I think therein lies its power.  It’s a bestseller, which I think is partly down to the fun of rubbernecking survivalists (who can resist?) but in larger part down to its odd divided nature, as an elegy to something the author is glad to have lost.  

EARLY WORK by Andrew Martin

Let’s begin with this book’s beginning:

 Like most people trying to get by in something like the regular current of American life, I don’t act like a total asshole to most people I meet, and am generally regarded as pretty nice, mainly because I leave myself vulnerable to hearing out other people’s crises and complaints for longer, on average, than would be merely polite. And the fact is, I do tend to like people in practice, even though I’ve built an airtight case against them in principle. It’s a natural response, I guess, to being raised by relatively kind parents who taught me to be polite and decent and to rely on the company and help of others, but to also consider myself smarter and, on some fundamental level, more deserving of complete fulfillment than anyone in the world besides maybe my sisters.

I mean, how can you not love it already?  What a fabulous pair of sentences, packed with interesting ideas, and written in a contemporary voice that remarkably doesn’t seem pretentious.  This sets the tone for what is a wonderful book about cheating on your girlfriend.  I particularly enjoyed its fun dialogue:

“What do you do, Gil?” I said.

“I work for ThinkBright?” he said  “We do design and tech consulting?”

“The Lord’s work,” I said. 

I urgently need an opportunity to say this in normal conversation.  People are always telling they are bankers and such like.  I also liked this:

“Okay, but do you like living in Virginia?” she said pointedly.  “Is living in Virginia lowering or heightening your sense of existential dread?” 

“My basic status is medium-happy,” I said. “We’ll have to move when Julia gets the next thing, so it’s not useful to analyze it too much.  Do I need to have a position?  I’m not running for office.  I’m not trying to be the president of selfhood.”

And this:

“We’re adults,” I said, the universal marker of childish behaviour.  “This doesn’t have to be a big deal.”

It wasn’t just the zippy dialogue I enjoyed (though that’s enough).  It was also a thoughtful story about about choosing between two good options, as even while cheating on his girlfriend he continues to really like her:

I still loved Julia.  That wasn’t really in question.  I had plenty of love.  It was, I was realizing, a callous kind of love.  That seemed to be all I had to give.  Anyone I was with would realize that eventually, I thought, with my feet in the water, so really the goal was to create the illusions of depth for as long as possible.  Not for the sex, no.  For the company.  Other people were interesting, and the more privileged time you had with them the less bored you would be.  They would teach you how to live, or at least entertain you while you failed to learn.  And it wasn’t entirely selfish, because, to other people, you were someone else, too, someone interesting, even if you knew you weren’t.

And it wasn’t just about romance, either.  Both of the women he is involved with are writers, as is he; and one of the more interesting parts of the novel are his efforts to write, at which he is failing.  He procrastinates, he deletes, he makes excuses, while both the women who are waiting on him continue to work: they write, and he doesn’t.    I found it a striking part of the story; you’d think he has all the power, because frankly he is the one doing the choosing, but somehow he doesn’t; he’s winning in terms of other people, but somehow losing in terms of himself.

FAMILY LEXICON by Natalia Ginzburg

Natalia Ginzburg had a very interesting life, but you’d never know it from reading this memoir.  She had an impressive career, a husband who died resisting the Fascists, and knew many interesting people.  The book is heavy on the latter.  And by interesting, I mean racist.  This is only partly a joke.  FAMILY LEXICON is a love story to Ginzurg’s immediate family, who have all the embarrassing quirkiness of true blood relatives. 

Her father in particularly has a deliriously good time, accusing everyone of being nitwits and identifying ‘nitwitteries’.  He likes spending weeks in the mountains, and insists the whole family come too: “You lot get bored,” my father said, “because you don’t have inner lives.”  He  has – as many older men do, having been so fortunate as to be born into the heyday of patriarchy – strong ideas on food, and on how it should be served to him and what other people should do with it.  

If we used our bread to mop up pasta sauce, he yelled, “Don’t lick your plates! Don’t dribble! Don’t slobber!”For my father dibble and slobber also described modern painting, which he couldn’t stand.
He would say, “You have no idea how to behave at the table!  I can’t take you lot anywhere.”

I would like to have enjoyed it more, and I did at first; it was kind of like looking through someone else’s family photo album.  It’s fun at first, the hairstyles, the puppy fat, but after a while you get bored and just keep going to be polite. 

LOLLY WILLOWES by Sylvia Townsend Warner

In desperation I did a line-by-line review of this blog post at BookRiot, looking for things to read, and bought a lot of second-hand books on Amazon.  This one is a real find. 

Set in the 1920s, it tells the story of an unmarried woman who after her father’s death moves in with her brother’s family, moving from the countryside into London.  She lives with them for some twenty years, until suddenly, after a visit to a florist shop where she is utterly beguiled by some foliage (yes, really) she insists on moving back to the countryside.  It is a sort of terrifying story, because once back in the country she realizes how very unhappy she has been in the city; and it makes you think how easily you can let the decades slip by without noticing how you really feel.  

She loves the landscape, but more than that, she loves being the master of her own time.  In London she was ‘busy’ with the family; in the country she is not busy at all, though at first she tries to be, reading the guide book and going on walks to landmarks.  As she puts it:

She knew in her heart that she was no really enjoying this sort of thing, but the habit of useless activity was too strong to be snapped by a change of scene. 

Chilling.  I am sure much of most of our lives can be described as useless activity.  

In any case, she is much happier, rambling, eating meals at odd times, and so on.  Then one night she finds a kitten in her rooms, and while she is playing with it it scratches her, drawing blood.  Her heart pounds, and she makes a sudden realization:

She, Laura Willowes, In England, in the year 1922, had entered into a compact with the Devil.

To which I can only say: ?

Indeed, the book has taken a turn.  We learn that her enjoyment of the night, and the wild places; the fact that she can turn the milk sour with her mind; all this is due to the fact that she is indeed being pursued by the Devil.  She is delighted, meets the local coven, communes with the night, etc.  It sounds crazy, and it is, but is has its own sort of internal logic. 

When she does eventually meet Satan, we sort of understand her embrace of him as having to do with what today we would boringly call gender issues.  As she puts it to him, speaking of her relatives (who she is very fond of):

They say: “Dear Lolly! What shall we give her for her birthday this year?  Perhaps a hot water bottle.  Or what about a nice black scarf?  . ..  But you say: “Come here, my little bird!  I will give you the dangerous black night to stretch your wings in, and poisonous berries to feed on, and a nest made of bones and thorns, perched high up in danger where no one can climb to it.” . . .  

. . . One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick.  It’s to escape all that – to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many ounces of stale bread of life a day . ..

She wants to avoid the fate of most women, who are, despite their endless domestic activities, fundamentally unimportant. 

Respectable countrywomen keep their grave-clothes in a corner of the chest of drawers, hidden away, and when they want a little comfort they go and look at them, and think that once more, at any rate, they will be worth dressing with care

Given the date (it’s funny to think the author didn’t even have the right to vote) I understand this gender lens on the topic.  But for me, who has had privilege of suffrage from birth, what I more took from the book is the importance of not leading your life by other peoples’ standards – that is, the importance of your own daily freedom. 

I also took from it a profound admiration for the writer as a writer.  Enjoy this, on her mother who was kind of neglectful, in a gentle way:

During the last few years of her life Mrs Willowes grew continually more skilled in evading responsibilities, and her death seemed but the final perfected expression of this skill.  It was as if she had said, yawning a delicate cat’s yawn, ‘I think I will go to my grave now,’ and had left the room, her white shawl trailing behind her. 

Or this maid:

The maid who brought her morning tea. . . had an experienced look; when she drew back the curtains she looked out upon the day with no curiosity.  She had seen it all already

Or her rather religious sister-in-law

Laura . . . had commented upon the beautiful orderliness with which Caroline’s body linen was arranged therein. ‘We have our example,’ said Caroline.  ‘The grave-clothes were folded in the tomb. . ..

The introduction calls Townsend ‘one of the most shamefully under-read great British authors of the last hundred years’ and I am shocked I never heard of her before; huge thanks to BookRiot for sorting me out. 

WAYS OF ESCAPE by Graham Greene

A few months ago I read the first part of Greene’s autobiography, A SORT OF LIFE, that covered his upbringing, first job and first novel.  The picture that emerged was of a rather sad young man.  WAYS OF ESCAPE is the second installment, and here we find a rather sad middle-aged man.

It’s yet another depressing example of the fact that success apparently doesn’t make you happy.  BUT WHY NOT?  It seems so unfair.  Also a life of glamour and incident doesn’t work, as both of those Green had in spades.  He was a successful novelist, and a journalist, and a spy, spending his life in many interesting locations (Vietnam, Sierra Leone, Liberia) among many interesting people.  And yet he seems to frame it all as various escapes; he writes books to get away, he goes to dangerous places to get away, but all the while you can’t tell what it is he is trying to get away from. 

Mostly I think he is trying to escape that most dogged pursuer, his self.  Also, based on his novels, I’d be willing to bet his marriage is pretty unhappy.  We don’t find out this juicy stuff though, because as he tells us “I felt that the .. years belonged as much to others as to myself.  I couldn’t infringe their copyright.  . . They had a right to privacy, and it was impossible to deal with my private life without involving theirs.”  How charmingly old-fashioned and thoughtful that seems, especially after just reading THE END.  So instead the autobiography is an account of how his novels came to be, which is interesting in itself. 

And in learning about the work, you learn something about the man.  As a former theatre person myself, I was especially touched to see how he came to love the stage – not as an art form, but as an experience.  Let’s end with this rather lovely reflection:

I had imagined that to write a play and to write a film would be very similar: the author, though he could not be excluded from rehearsal, would be an unwelcome stranger lurking ashamed in the studio. . . I had not anticipated the warmth, the amusement, the comradeship of the theatre.  Above all I had not realized that the act of creation, as with the novel, would continue for long after the first draft of the play was completed, that it would extend through rehearsals and the opening weeks of the tour. It is for that act of creation that one lives, and after the author has returned from tour, how empty the hours are, the telephone rings seldom – couldn’t we have delayed launching a little longer for the sake of the fun?

Poor guy

THE END by Karl Ove Knausgaard

This is the sixth and last book of MY STRUGGLE, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s monumental autobiography.  It’s been four thousand pages, and it feels funny to leave him at last.

The series started with his father’s death, and then moved around in time, covering his childhood, adolescence, first marriage, second marriage; and now this one takes us through the early years of his childrens’ lives, the blowback from the publication of the first novels in the series, and the early life of Adolf Hitler.

Yes, for some reason there is a four hundred page sidebar on Hitler. Why?  I can’t say I know.   Let’s get the sidebar out of the way first.  Generally, I think it is creepy to be overly interested in Hitler.  It’s also not very illuminating; Karl Ove is a novelist, not a historian or academic (indeed, he did not work very hard at school, as I know, because I spent six hundred pages on the topic), and it shows.  So while you don’t learn so much about Hitler, you do learn a lot about Karl Ove, and Scandinavia.  It’s funny to see how unimaginable Weimar Germany is to a contemporary Norwegian, and it’s hilarious to see how much emphasis he puts on the character of Hitleer as a driver of the war as opposed to say economic meltdown and hyperinflation, which is obviously by far the bigger issue (I guess a Zimbabwean is always going to think everything is about hyperinflation).  That said, I did find some interest in extracts from MEIN KAMPF.  I mean, you know that book is always going to be crazy, but try this, even the first few sentences are far more batshit than you would ever imagine:

TODAY it seems to me providential that Fate should have chosen Braunau on the Inn as my birthplace. For this little town lies on the boundary between two German states which we of the younger generation at least have made it our life work to reunite by every means at our disposal.German-Austria must return to the great German mother country, and not because of any economic considerations. No, and again no: even if such a union were unimportant from an economic point of view; yes, even if it were harmful, it must nevertheless take place. One blood demands one Reich. 

Okay, Hitler.  This Hitler digression is bizarre, but not actually so bizarre as the rest of the book.  A discussion of Hitler’s life at least fits into a framework with which we are familiar.  What Karl Ove tries to do is something quite out of our experience: actually write about his own life, as honestly as he can.  It’s a truly weird thing to do, and in early books I hadn’t quite appreciated how much he was really telling his life. In this book, he describes how people around him responded to the earlier books coming out.  His brother, for example, who read in the book how he felt about him for the first time; his high school girlfriend; his wife.  In this book he tells us how, after he emails out drafts to them, he lies on his bed and shivers in fear for hours. (Let’s not forget that Karl Ove is not a tough guy: he was terrified as a child of indoor plumbing as I recall.).  

Apparently the whole idea came to him on a dreadful package holiday in the Canary Islands, right after he almost got conned into a timeshare.  He was inspired by the diaries of someone called Gombrowicz.  

. .  to go down beneath the surface, beneath the ideologies, which you can only stand up to by insisting on your own experience of reality, and not by denying it, for that is what we do, all the time, deny the reality we have experienced in favour of the reality we have learned, and nowhere was the betrayal of the I, the unique and individual I, greater than in art, as art has always been the privileged domain of the unique.  My hands trembled at the very thought, that I could actually describe everything as it was.  That all I had to do was just go ahead and do it.  What a treacherous thought!‘Just’ my arse!

If he is going to ‘write his life’, he then goes on to wish his life was more interesting, a “sleazy profligate past in the docklands of Buenos Aires” or he had “killed someone with a rock to the head”.  Often in reading these thousands of pages I am sure everyone has had this same wish.  I can’t even count the number of times I have been to the grocery store with him; his children watch  too much television (he agrees); he needs to stop getting little crushes on weather girls.  Also, he really should not tell us his cash card pin: this is a bridge too far, even in art.   Here is a sample of the way he talks about himself:  

. . . because I have always had such a weak ego, always felt myself inferior to all others, in every situation. Not only the brilliant individuals I have met, who with their charisma, intelligence and talent have outshone all others, but also taxi drivers, waiters, train conductors, in fact every kind of person one can possibly meet out there. I am inferior to the man who washes down the stairs and the corridors in the building in which we live, he possesses an authority greater than mine in that situation, so for instance, if he says something about the stroller and the balance bikes left outside our door, in a voice that carries even the slightest hint of annoyance, I tremble.

But somehow the very ordinariness of his life, the grocery store, and the children – the fact that he commits to telling you his ordinary life – is somehow very special.  It makes ordinary life special, and that is I think really threatening.  It’s almost like, who are you, to think your ordinary life should be considered.  But then, who are any of us?  We almost all have ordinary lives.

I also ask myself this:  If I thought to myself, let me ‘just’ tell things as they are, I am not sure I would know what to write.  What are things?  How do I really feel?  How do the people I know feel?  What are their intentions?  What are mine?  

I really don’t know how Karl Ove got the nerve together to write this; this is far worse than indoor plumbing.  He has two explanations; one literary, as below:

. ..if you want to describe reality as it is, for the individual, and there is no other reality, you have to really go there, you can’t be considerate.  And it hurts.  It hurts not to be considered and it hurts not to be considerate.  This novel has hurt everyone around me, it has hurt me, and in a few years, when they are old enough to read it, it will hurt my children.  If I had made it more painful, it would have been truer.   

It has been an experiment, and it has failed because I have never even been close to saying what I really mean and describing what I have actually seen, but it is not valueless, at least not completely, for when describing the reality of an individual person, when attempting to be as honest as possible is considered immoral and scandalous, the force of the social dimension is visible and also the way it regulates and controls individuals. 

And another reason, personal:

The truth was that when I sat down to write the novel I had nothing to lose. That was why I wrote it. I wasn’t only frustrated, the way you can become when you live as a parent with small children and have many duties and have to sacrifice yourself, I was unhappy, as unhappy as I have ever been, and I was all alone.My life was quite dreadful, that was how I experienced it, I was living a dreadful life, and I wasn’t strong enough, I didn’t have the spine to abandon this and start anew.  I often thought about leaving, sometimes several times a day, but I couldn’t do it . . . But that was what made me decide to write a novel in which I threw caution totally to the winds and told it as it was.  Only when the book was ready to be published did I realise what I had done and went through the manuscript and crossed out the worst.  

He is indeed deeply unhappy in this book; his marriage is falling apart, and he is ground down in caring for his three children under five.  (A sidepoint on gender: no woman would be safe writing so much about domestic life as he does; she would be dismissed).  But now I will never know how it goes for him, after this.  I won’t know if he works it out with his wife, or what happens to the kids, brought up on so much TV.  Because it’s over.  Goodbye Karl Ove, it’s been nice knowing you.  Maybe I will try this Gombrowicz.
My other blogs on the previous books are here, here, here, here, and here.