As I am on a Nile cruise I thought it was a good idea to read a novel about someone dying on a Nile cruise. DEATH ON THE NILE was written while Christie was on a cruise, and you can exactly see what inspired her. I even visited the hotel in which she stayed. I read quite a bit of Christie as a teenager, and still admire the clockwork neatness of her plotting. But for me there’s not much beyond that; but just that alone is a big achievement.

I’m not a great reader of biographies, but I do love Anthony Trollope, so was tempted by this charity shop find. It’s a biography almost as long as one of the subject’s novels, and it needs to be, because Trollope lived a long and full life. I love him for his extraordinary energy. He wrote his many novels while working full time at the post office, and is responsible for such fine novels as SMALL HOUSE AT ALLINGTON as well as the establishment of the postbox. It inspires me. He would wake up early in the morning and write for four hours before going to work a full day, which often included personally walking postal routes to see how they should work. He once said: “The whole success of my life I owe to early hours.” He is for me a prototypical Victorian, that couple of generations that made the industrial revolution happen and in whose long shadows we are all still standing.

Trollope’s family was among the gentility who lacked money, and his early life was fairly difficult. He was socially awkward, middling at school, and not his parents’ favourite. Interestingly, his life only really turned around in his twenties, when he got an opportunity to get away from his family and go to work in Ireland. From then on it was pretty much up, up, up. I was also interested to learn he travelled a great deal, going to America, Australia, and Africa. What a fabulous man. Pity about the horrible beard.

I am not sure if this book is a tragedy or a comedy. On the one hand it is a searing tale of the extremely poor in the South in the 1930s, on the other hand it is a hilarious tale of the extremely poor in the South in the 1930s.

Here, for example, is a man who has married a 13 year old girl because he finds her hair pretty. She refuses to speak to him.

Lov asked Pearl questions, he kicked her, he poured water over her, he threw rocks and sticks at her, and he did everything else he could think of that might make her talk to him. She cried a lot, especially when she was seriously hurt, but Lov did not consider that as conversation.

The book focuses on a single family, which is close to starving. An older preacher woman gets the 16 year old son to marry her by promising to spend all the money she has on a new car for him though this will leave them penniless. They marry and buy the car, which the teenager does not really know how to drive, and spend much of the book driving around hooting, eventually destroying the car. At the end they run over the starving old grandmother and don’t bother to check if she is alive or not. It was sort of hilarious. Now to google it and find out it is supposed to be comic or not.

I loved Shute’s ON THE BEACH as a teenager, so was excited when I found this in a second hand bookstore. It has a great premise. A man arrives back at his parents’ home in Australia after fighting in the Second World War to find that their maid has just killed herself. He regards this as mostly inconvenient – until he finds out that this woman is in fact the former fiancé of his dead brother, for whom he has been searching for years. Where is this going to go! Why was she there? Why did she kill herself?

The answers are not as interesting as the questions. After the war, the woman was overwhelmed with grief, and with guilt about her role in the war, and so wanders the world, vaguely suicidal, until she decides to go and visit her dead fiance’s family. For reasons I couldn’t follow, but seem to be mostly about embarrassment, she doesn’t introduce herself, but rather signs up to help them as a housemaid. British people are sometimes truly inscrutable. Then, when she learns that her fiance’s brother is coming back, who she knows will recognise her, she decides to kill herself rather than face a reveal she thinks will be traumatic.

I don’t know. It was hard to relate. Maybe it’s a profound story of PSTD and I’m just not following.

The title tells it all. Basically this old man drives around with his dog. Not much happens. Steinbeck has written some really great books, but this is not one of them. We are very much in late-life-crisis country, with Steinbeck banging on about what it means to be a man, and somewhat pointlessly embarking on a voyage of discovery in a homemade camper van.

He does not discover too much. He has some small talk with strangers, which he reports verbatim. His dog needs to pee a lot. He is deeply impressed by vending machines.

Suppose you want a soft drink; you pick your kind – Sugargrape or Cooly Cola – press a button, insert the coin, and stand back. A paper cup drops into place, the drink pours out and stops a quarter of an inch from the brim . . . . Coffee is even more interesting, for when the hot black fluid has ceased, a squirt of milk comes down and an envelope of sugar drops beside the cup.

It’s like going on holiday with your Grandpa. If your grandpa had written Of Mice And Men. Because some bits are quite well observed. In a café:

The customers were folded over their coffee cups like ferns.

Or on turkeys:

To know them is not to admire them, for they are vain and hysterical. They gather in vulnerable groups and then panic at rumours. They are subject to all the sicknesses of other fowl, together with some they have invented. Turkeys seem to be manic-depressive types, gobbling with blushing wattles, spread tails, and scraping wings in amorous bravado at one moment and huddled in craven cowardice the next.

But that’s about it. There you go, you can skip it. I’ve read it for you and picked out the best bits.

As I am in Egypt I am making an effort to read Egyptian books. Helpfully, the tour company gave a suggested reading list. Horrifyingly, not one of these was by an Egyptian. This is particularly appalling, as Egypt is one of the few African countries to have a Nobel Laureate in Literature – Naguib Mahfouz (along with Zimbabwe – thank you, Doris Lessing). I’ve read Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, so I decided to go with another Egyptian, Aswany, whose THE YACOUBIAN BUILDING was a huge best seller in the Arab world at the turn of this century.

The books centres on the inhabitants of a single building in Cairo, from the poor people who live in slum conditions on the roof to the somewhat wealthier people who live inside the building itself. I was described as Dickensian in scope, so I was all ready for a really good long read. In the end, it was hardly more than a tasty snack. A huge cast of characters was introduced, I was just getting interested in them – and then it was over. What there was I enjoyed – the hard working poor young man who becomes an extremist, the dissolute old man who surprises himself by falling in love, the businessman who gets in too deep with the military – but I wish there had been much much more.

This is a great book about something we all have to face at some point: death. It’s written from a doctor’s perspective, which is interesting, because you would expect doctors to be experts on the subject. Gawande however makes it clear that they are not. Doctors are really focused on life – on sustaining it at all costs – and really have little training on what to do about death. It’s unfortunate then that death in our culture is now very much in their hands, as the end of lives are increasingly medicalised.

And the end of our lives are getting longer and longer, with us all facing decades of frailty. Incredibly, average life expectancy in the Roman Empire was just 28, and in the US in 1900 it was still under 50, and its only recently that the 80s have been reached, so really we are very new to all this. Right now our solution is: hospital. As recently as 1945, according to Gawande, most deaths in the US occurred at home, but now they mostly happen in hospital.

The book really made me think about what I hope will be my long old age. Currently many care homes ‘protect’ the elderly to the point that they rob them of all the things that make life worth living – they are not allowed to dance, to keep pets, sometimes even to walk. For the terminally ill, there is very little understanding of how to talk about the inevitable, with many patients not entering hospice when they probably should. Amazingly, studies are now showing that those entering hospice sooner actually live longer than those who are ‘treated,’ reporting greater levels of happiness – and – get this – their relatives reportingt a more manageable level of grief after they die.

I highly recommend this book. We’re all likely to live a very long time, which means we have a lot of years to be old and ill. As Philip Roth cheerfully put it: “Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.”

Here is a book about Estonia during the second world war. First question: where is Estonia? It’s one of these little countries, always about to be gobbled up by larger powers, and this is pretty much what their war was about. They support the Germans, because they don’t want to be subsumed by Russia, and it’s interesting to read for once a book in which the Germans are the heroes. It’s all extraordinarily Eastern European. Enjoy this:

Maybe life was so fragile and meaningless that there was no need to add to their troubles. There was headcheese to be made, lard to be rendered; there were intestines to be salted for next year’s sausage – so much work to do, all to maintain the fragile lives of others.

I love it! The despair, the disgusting food, it’s everything you want from that part of the world.

The story is about a family in which one cousin fights for Estonian independence (does not go well) while the other strategically flip-flops from Communism to Fascism, depending on who is winning (goes very well). It’s very well written, and very engaging, but left me with sort of a bad taste in my mouth, as the traitor/pragmatist succeeds at every turn, with the final wages of sin for him being a nice lifestyle (which in this context is access to restricted shops, where the mincemeat is not mixed with rat). I guess in fiction we expect the triumph of the underdog; I found it upsetting to see the underdog executed.

Oksanen is a gifted writer, though for me her style is sometimes overblown. Here is a good sample, which moves from the ridiculous to the sublime:

The stars sifted through the clouds into her eyes, and her eyes were like forest doves bathed in milk. Darkness covered my awkwardness; I didn’t open my mouth. Tender feelings didn’t fit the time. I put my hand on her neck and wrapped a curled wisp of her hair around my finger. Her neck was soft, like peacetime.

These are the diaries of a woman from her adolescence to her old age. They are a record of her entire life, across 60 years. They are therefore almost impossible to review, being a comprehensive picture of a life as it was actually lived. I had a bit of a weep in Luxor airport after I’d finished all 700 pages. Not because she died in the end, obviously. This being real life and not fiction that was how it was always going to finish. It was also not really because of how she lived; she didn’t really achieve anything major. She was not heroic in the war. She always wanted to be a writer, but the one book published in her lifetime did not sell well and was remaindered. It’s the very ordinariness of her life that made this book so touching. At its heart was an extraordinary struggle to lead a life of meaning, which is at the heart I suspect of every life, however ordinary. We just don’t usually get a chance to get such a close up view of it.

The diaries start in 1925, when Jean is 15. She studies architecture and journalism in college, but has a small amount of inherited money, and so never really sets to any work with great seriousness. One of the fun aspects of the book is seeing how, as with everyone, Jean’s judgement of herself changes drastically day to day. Here she is:

For the sort of jobs I am after I lack, at the age of 33, experience.Oh God, those wasted years! If this is ever read by posterity, let posterity ponder on this: You cannot run away from life. If you try, life will only catch you in the end, and the longer you’ve been running the more it will hurt. Learn to be hurt as early as possible, welcome being hurt; face pain, humiliation and defeat in your teens; accept them, let them go through you, so that you cease to be afraid of them.

Then a day later she quotes from a letter from a friend: Lot of nonsense about your wasted years. No such thing if carefully analysed.

We can’t all be ready to make a spring off the board on leaving college. Think of all the advantages of the spirit you have had in the past years

.

It’s also enjoyable to be part of her private moments:

Alone again. Curtains drawn. Little cat out saying hullo to the new moon. Some woman drivelling on the radio.

Or the mix of her tiny life with the big world:

A light fall of snow and Japan’s declaration of war surprised us on Sunday night.

Jean never marries, and what she sees as a failure worries her very much for a large part of her life, though she is aware that she was of a generation where two world wars left too few husbands to go round. Weirdly it is only when the money runs out that she really starts to find contentment. She is forced to find an income, and so opens a book store. This draws her into the life of the community, and the happiest portion of her life is that after fifty. She gives up the idea of writing, she realises how much she likes to live alone, she develops a great love for her cats and for her garden – here she is on her gardening:

This sort of thing is what delights me and make me feel fulfilled – I am ‘creating’. A slow developer, but now at last coming into full flower. And to discover, you silly young idiots, that sex does not matter!! Shut up, you argumentative neurotic lot. One can live a full and joyful life without it and still stay reasonably unshrivelled and unembittered. Believe me!

I really recommend these diaries. They powerfully reminded me of that Alan Bennett quote, which is to the effect that when we read we feel a hand reaching out across history to touch our own; we read to know we are not alone.

If you are Zimbabwean it is really pretty rare to read a book, or see a film, that is of your experience. I’m quite jealous really of Americans, and Indians, and Nigerians, with their Holly, and Bolly, and Nollywoods.

So I particularly enjoyed this book, which is not just a story of Zimbabwe, but a story of my Zimbabwe; it’s the the story of a girl who went to my high school, Harare’s Donimican Convent, and ended up in Chikarubi, Harare’s largest prison. Luckily I can only relate to the first part of the sentence. But if I could not relate to any of it, I would still have enjoyed the book, for it is a complex and interesting work.
Memory is an albino woman who at nine years old leaves her poor black family to live with a wealthy white man. Many years later she is falsely convicted of his murder, and ends up in jail. The book is her account of her life, in which we learn that all is not what it seems, both about her old family and her new father. More than the plot, I enjoyed the twisty, elaborate dialogue, which is specially Zimbabwean. I’ll quote at length – here’s a woman telling how she came to be in Chikarubi:

I was just coming from the shops, ndazvitengera zvangu yekera yangu, ndazvitengera drink yangu, it was the first time that I had seen Cherry Plum in ages, from the time I was a girl I have always liked it even though it makes your tongue purple, so I bought some and I was so happy, and I bought it with my own money, and I was drinking it and laughing with my friend Shupi who lives in Jerusalem when this woman called Rosewinter who lives in Canaan walked past us, and I know her because she tried to take my boyfriend, he used to live close by Shupi in Jerusalem, in fact that is how we met until his landlord kicked him out for not paying rent on time, but I can’t really say that he was my proper boyfriend as such because he was married even though his wife lived at their village. So as she passed us she was talking and I heard her say to her friend, ndiye uya anoroya, and I said what did you say, and she said, ehe, I said you are a witch who eats people, what are you going to do about it, you witch? And I said, what, what do you mean I am a witch, and I said to myself, no, I cannot allow this, how can I allow this Rosewinter person, mumwewo mukadzi zvake akabarwa seni, to call me a witch while I just stand here drinking Cherry Plum like nothing is happening, and she said again, you are a witch, and then I took my bottle even though it still had some drink in it and I took it and I hit her with it and she screamed maiwe, the witch is killing me, and that made me even angrier so I hit her again and the bottle broke on her head; you have never seen anything like it because the bottle broke and there was this blood now mixed with the Cherry Plum and I turned to Shupi for help but she and the other woman’s friend were busy fighting, but when the police came, they both of them managed to run away even though Shupi left her new wig behind, it was a boy-cut style, which was a pity because kanga kakmufita zvisingaiti kawig kacho, and this woman was now shouting my head, my head, my head, kani my head, like I had killed her.

Now I’m homesick.