This novel tells the story of a woman whose father and then sister commit suicide. It is apparently somewhat autobiographical, as the same thing happened to the author. It is a quite horrifying read, sort of car crash literature, a horrible way to see from a distance what it looks like when the worst happens.
The father kills himself quite quickly and unexpectedly, while the sister makes many attempts and is frequently stopped. She ends up in hospital, begging her family to let her die. They refuse. She eventually seems well enough to be allowed home, where she immediately succeeds in killing herself at last. I have heard that one of the commonest responses to suicide is anger, and I can absolutely see why that would be so. I felt really furious with the sister by the end of the book. Quite how you could force your family through that kind of grief, I can’t understand. But then I suppose I’ve also never considered suicide, so no doubt there are whole swathes of human experience outside my knowledge. Thank goodness.

REUNION tells the story of a two boys in high school who become friends. It’s Germany in the 1930s, and one of the boys is Jewish, so we’re clear from the beginning that it’s not going to end well. This is a near perfect little novella, that had me blubbing at the dinner table at the end of its 90 pages.
The Jewish boy had never thought of his ethnicity as being any more important than his hair colour, and had rarely faced any issues with racism. The story shows how over the course of two years this changes, till he is being beaten up by his classmates, lectured in history class about ‘dark forces’ set on destroying Germany, and most painfully of all, abandoned by his friend.
His parents have been in Germany for many generations, and cannot quite believe which way things are going, particularly as his father is a veteran of WWI, a war in which 12,000 Jews died for Germany. The parents refuse to leave the country, but send their son to America. After he leaves, a Nazi comes to stand in front of the parents’ house, holding a sign that says: “Germans beware. Avoid all Jews. Whoever has anything to do with a Jew is defiled.” Then:

My father put on his officer’s uniform together with his decorations, including the Iron Cross, First Class and took up his stand beside the Nazi. The Nazi got more and more embarrassed, and gradually quite a crowd collected. At first they stood in silence, but as their numbers increased there were mutterings which finally broke into aggressive jeers. But it was at the Nazi that their hostility was aimed and it was the Nazi who, before long, packed up and made off. He didn’t come back nor was he replaced. A few days later, when my mother was asleep, my father turned on the gas; and so they died. Since their death I have, as far as possible, avoided meeting Germans and haven’t opened a single German book, not even Holderlin. I have tried to forget.

Leaving aside the fact that wives should probably be consulted before murder-suicides, this is a truly terrible and wonderful story. It’s written with total simplicity, the simplicity of really great art, that looks so easy but is in fact so difficult. I highly recommend it.

I do not usually read summer pulp, but never let it be said that I am a literary snob: observe me reading summer pulp. I even read this on the beach, the correct place to read a book that proudly/shamefully advertises itself as a beach read. I chose this book because I have been reading Jessica and Heather’s blog gofugyourself.com for a long time, and because it was 99p on Amazon.
Gofugyourself.com is fantastic blog, allegedly about fashion but mostly about wasting time, with a huge readership. Heather and Jessica began it as a joke in the early days of blogs and it is now their full fledged career, and I became a reader somewhere towards the beginning. It never ceases to amaze me how similar the two womens’ voices are, so you can never pick apart who has written what, and I was curious to see how this would work in a book.
THE ROYAL WE is an imagining of the Prince William and Kate Middleton story, somewhat fictionalised, with a young American inserted in the Kate Middleton role. It’s a fairly fun read, with a good attempt at a believable array of characters, and a central protagonist you care about. We run into trouble when they try and write about feelings, e.g.,: “(he). . . traced my jaw, the line of my neck, my arm, the whole time looking at me with a blazing, intimate intensity” but other than that I enjoyed it. I was sorry when it was finished to close my sandy Kindle, and what more really can you ask than that?

This is a book about the dangers of putting all your eggs in one basket, especially if that basket is your husband’s. The main character here, Olga, has been married fifteen years and has two small children. One day after lunch her husband tells her suddenly that he is leaving her. Thus begins a massive and not very proudly feminist meltdown.

The husband doesn’t come back for thirty four days, and Olga starts to come apart. She has moved many times for her husband’s job, so has few friends nearby, and gave up employment at his request. She’s therefore left with not too much to fall back on, and she falls hard. She does some ordinary post break-up things (e.g., propositioning the neighbour for anal sex), and then moves on to the less ordinary. On one terrible day she seems to be losing her sanity, almost drowning her little girl while trying to wash her and unable to focus long enough to phone a doctor even though the little boy appears dangerously ill. It’s all told from her perspective, as she tries to hold on to her mind, and it’s very frightening. We’re definitely on the edge of Medea territory:

The children hadn’t eaten anything. I myself still had to have breakfast, wash. The hours were passing. I had to separate the dark clothes from the white. I had no more clean underwear. The vomit-stained sheets. Run the vaccuum. Housecleaning.

Pretty often I hate this kind of thing – insanity being as difficult to write about as dreams are – but the extraordinary Ferrante of MY BRILLIANT FRIEND manages it.

Olga comes through it in the end, more or less unscarred, particularly after she finds out that her husband has left her for a twenty year old he used to coach when she was a teenager. This is hardly the calibre of man for whom its worth losing a mind.

The only false note, for me, was the resolution, where Olga ends up with the neighbour she previously propositioned. I’m not sure a new man is a good cure for having been too hung up on the old one – but there it is. At least she’s not trying to drown the children any more.

I’ve been thinking about Franzen of late because his new novel PURITY has just been released. I don’t think I’ll be reading it till I’ve seen a few reviews, as it is the dreaded book-after-the-successful-book, and I suspect a wobble. You’d have to be a titan to not overthink and overwrite after the massive hit that was FREEDOM. So I ended up reading this instead, largely because it was only 99p.
It’s a memoir of Franzen’s early life, and is often very amusing. Here he is on his efforts to sell his mother’s house after her death:

I felt some additional pressure to help my brother Tom, the executor of the estate, to finish his work quickly. I felt a different kind of pressure from my other brother, Bob, who had urged me to remember that we were talking about real money. (“People knock $782,000 down to $770,000 when they’re negotiating, they think it’s basically the same number,” he told me. “Well, no, in fact it’s twelve thousand dollars less. I don’t know about you, but I can think of a lot of things I’d rather do with twelve thousand dollars than give it to the stranger who’s buying my house.”) But the really serious pressure came from my mother, who, before she died, had made it clear that there was no better way to honor her memory and validate the last decades of her life than to sell the house for a shocking amount of money.

Or here he is on his adolescence: “I spent morbid, delicious amount of time by myself, driven by the sort of hormonal instinct that I imagine leads cats to eat grass.”
Hilarious. And yet I can’t say that overall I admired it. There’s some truly leaden writing, including a long section on Charles Schultz, for no real reason, and some truly horrifying dull discussions of what he thought about German literature during his undergraduate degree. Sample “ . . as Goethe put it, in his gendered language . . “
I do wonder a bit if I’m ruined for this kind of memoir by Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose MY STRUGGLE has comprehensively closed off the area of late twentieth century male memoir, making everyone else who attempts it seem a rather sad shadow of that wonderful project.

Watch out literature! The Africans are coming. Chigozi Obioma’s THE FISHERMEN is nominated for the Booker, and is a fine and frightening novel about the power of suggestion.

It tells the story of four brothers living in a high density area of a small town in Nigeria. Though it is expressly forbidden by their parents, they take to go fishing in the local river, and on one of their trips there the local madman tells the oldest son that he will be killed by one of his brothers. The idea slowly grows in his mind, and he begins to be angry with his brothers for their future treachery. Eventually a fight goes too far, and SPOILER ALERT the two youngest brothers find him dead in the kitchen apparently killed by the next oldest brother. This brother cannot be found for days, though eventually the taste of the well water reveals where he has ended his own life.

The two youngest brothers then hatch a plan to kill the madman they view as the source of all their troubles, and the novel proceeds down an ever darker pathway.

It’s a compelling read, with the horrible sense of doom of a Greek tragedy wrapped up in a very believable version of a corner of contemporary Nigeria. The writing itself is also unique, sounding as if it might be written by someone who does not have English as quite his first language, and all the more interesting for that. I’ll leave you with his description of the madman, who is the beginning and end of all their troubles:

I observed that he carried on his body a variety of odours, the most noticeable of which was a faecal smell that wafted at me like a drone of flies when I drew closer to him. This smell, I thought, might have been a result of his going for so long without cleaning his anus after excretion. He reeks of sweat accumulated inside the dense growth of hair around his pubic regions and armpits. He smelt of rotten food, and unhealed wounds and pus, and of bodily fluids and waste. He was redolent of rusting metals, putrefying matter, old clothes, distched underwear he sometimes worse. He smelt, too, of leaves, creepers, decaying mangoes by the Omi-Ala, the sane of the riverbank, and even of the water itself. . . But these were not all; he smelt of immaterial things. He smelt of the broken lives of others, and of the stillness in their souls. He smelt of unknown things, of strange elements, and of fearsome and forgotten things.

This is an absolutely fantastic series of three novels following a pair of female friends from their childhood in Naples through to their thirties. They grow up poor, in the 30s in Naples, and their lives take very different paths: one leaves school at 14, marries early, and divorces straight away; the other stays in school and becomes an author. Interestingly though it is the former that is the brilliant one, and her more successful friend feels permanently under her shadow.

It’s hard to say what makes these novels so compelling. I didn’t note down any particularly clever quotes, I can’t remember any brilliant concepts; and yet I inhaled these books in a single week. They’re so real that I feel as if I have friends from Naples; as if I can talk knowledgably about gender in pre-war Italy. There’s one more book to complete the series, and I can’t wait.

This book sounded like it might be good. First published in the 90s, it has recently been re-published, and re-publishing always suggests good things. I hesitated, however, and I should have hesitated some more. The summary told me that there was an unnamed narrator – BEE BAH BEE BAH – warning sign! Another major warning sign: It’s a novel about someone (unnamed) try to write a novel BEE BAH BEE BAH! The novel is about the end of her last relationship, which was, in the way of all tortured modern novels, naturally tortured.

I can’t quite summarise quite everything that annoyed me about this book, but in brief:
a) Narrator unnamed
b) Feelings about last boyfriend complex. So complex (ie. negative) are her feelings that after a while you wonder why she’s bothering to write a novel about him
c) Writing simple. I didn’t think this was possible, but apparently you can strip your writing down so far that all that it becomes irritating

Sorry Ms Davis; just not my sort of book.

Stella Gibbons wrote some twenty novels, but is famous for only one: COLD COMFORT FARM. It a fantastic, hilarious little novel, about finding a peaceable way to live in a complicated world, and I had high hopes for WESTWOOD. WESTWOOD it turns out is a complicated novel about a complicated world, and while I did not really enjoy it while I was reading it, I’m glad in retrospect that I did.

The novel is set in London at the tail end of the second world war, and captures the feel of the city at that time quite remarkably:

The fire-fighting people had made deep pools with walls round them in many of the streets. and here, in the heart of London, ducks came to live on these lakes that reflected the tall yellow ruins and the blue sky. Pink willow-herb grew over the white uneven ground where houses had stood, and there were acres of ground covered with deserted, shattered houses whose windows were filled torn black paper. . . And the country was beginning to run back to London; back into those grimy villages linked by featureless road from which it had never quite vanished, and which make up the largest city in the world. Weeds grey in the City itself; a hawk was seen hovering over the ruins of the Temple, and foxes raided the chicken roosts in the gardens of houses near Hampstead Heath.

The central character is Margaret, a young teacher, and the story is largely about her obsession with the home and family of a famous playwright, Mr Challis, who happens to live near her in Hampstead. On the one hand, this obsession is about a hankering for beauty/meaning/etc; on the other, to a modern reader in any case, it appears to be a weird fascination with the upper classes. Margaret attempts to insert herself into their lives by ‘helping’ the nanny with the children – basically becoming an unpaid nanny herself – which everyone seems to view as extremely normal. She is ‘allowed’ to have tea with the servant as a great favour, while doing lots of manual labour for free; and she is happy about it. Here she is with the playwright:

“Please forgive me for saying it, but I do want you to know that this is the greatest moment of my life.”
“Thank you, my child,” replied Mr Challis, promptly and with grace.

Mr Challis meanwhile is secretly trying to have an affair with Margaret’s very pretty friend Hilda, who he met during a blackout. Hilda however is not interested:

Unlike the working-girl of fifty years ago, whose desire for luxury and comfort was often the cause of her downfall, Hilda was not tempted by luxury. She had as part of her everyday life the cosmetics, clothes and amusements which fifty years ago had been reserved for ladies or unfortunates, and to which poor chaste girls could never hope to aspire to . . .

See what I mean about this being a difficult book for a modern reader?

In an odd twist, Margaret starts looking after the developmentally disabled child of her father’s colleague, and for a while it looks like the novel might resolve into a traditional romance; but this ends in a doorstep kiss, never repeated. Eventually Margaret discovers Mr Challis’ plans for Hilda, which ends her desire for him, but does not stop her desire for some larger and more beautiful life; and that’s where we leave her: still as lost as she was at the beginning, still yearning, though she’s not sure for what. So it’s a very strange book over all, hard to categorise; apparently at first a romance, or coming of age story, but in the end something larger and much more complex.

I’ve read one other book by Vargas Llosa, the wonderful terrifying THE FEAST OF THE GOAT, which I bought because it was the only English language book on sale in Acapulco airport. I then read in one stint over a twelve hour bus ride through Mexico. A book that frightening should not be read on your own, and certainly not without any breaks. It’s about the Dominican Republic, making it my second favourite book about a country I can’t even find on a map. (Favourite: THE BRIEF AND WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO).

THE FEAST OF THE GOAT has that great essential of a good novel: a plot. AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER, unfortunately, does not. It alternates, chapter by chapter, between a quite acceptable premise – 18 year old man falls in love with his much older aunt – with a selection of short stories which are unrelated and annoyingly unfinished. Vargas Llosa is so talented that unwillingly I kept getting interested in the short stories, even though I knew they would not end. I think it’s all just showing off. What’s he trying to say? Surprise surprise, life lacks narrative coherence? WE KNOW THAT. That’s why we read novels.