Deciding what to read next is difficult. I don’t know personally very many readers who like what I like, so actual people are not much use; even apparently intelligent people will genuinely suggest that you should try THE DA VINCI CODE. Of late I have been using – though I feel like a capitalist lackey – Amazon’s suggestion based on “other people bought.” This is proving very successful, especially when tested against what the Guardian/Telegraph/NYT think. And so I found: A MAN IN LOVE by Karl Ove Knausgaard. I thought I would like it when I saw that Karl Ove’s inspiration was Proust, and like it I do. It’s 6 volumes across about 4000 pages, and his subject is his daily life. And despite the fact that he is not a super spy or international man of mystery, its engaging and charming, and I think I’m going to read it all over the next few years.

A MAN IN LOVE is Volume 2 of his series, which is bizarrely called MY STRUGGLE. It covers his move from Norway to Sweden, his marriage and first children. He gives you a detailed account of absolutely everything, and as with Proust, this is both boring and strangely comforting. The older I get, the more I coming to the conclusion that everyone’s life, when closely examined, is weird and embarrassing, and virtually nobody is leading the life we all feel we ought to be: rational, well thought out, properly managed. So for example, when Karl Ove (one can’t possibly call him Knausgaard) first meets his wife to be, she shows little interest, and he drinks too much and gets cuts from a broken mirror all over his face, and everyone knows why, and it’s horridly awkward. Then when they do get together, he is so happy when she kisses him for the first time that he actually faints. But then he still can’t help ogling women on the sidewalk, even while madly in love.

He explains what has pushed him to memoir: “Over recent years I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought this is something someone has made up. Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with fiction and stories. It had got out of hand. Whereever you turned you saw fiction. All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs and TV series, they were all about made-up people in a made-up, though realistic world. And news in the press, TV news and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether whether what they told had actually happened or not . . . … The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person? Not directed above us, nor beneath us, but at the same height as our own gaze. Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can, art is something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone.

This is all very well, but sometime it degenerates into this: “I went into the supermarket down in the Metro station by Stureplan, bought a grilled chicken, a lettuce, some tomatoes, a cucumber, black olives, two red onions and a fresh baguette”. No, this is going anywhere. That’s his grocery list. There’s also a good hundred pages on a child’s birthday party during which he is bored. Yes, a hundred pages on a boring party. That takes balls.

On the other hand sometimes this daily detail is very fun, when he gives you a view of normal life in Sweden. Apparently, normal life in Sweden is mind bogglingly safe and controlled and modern. Karl Ove’s wife looks after the kids while he finishes a novel, and then he looks after them while she finishes drama school, and apparently he is just one of many men with hipster glasses pushing prams around Malmo. He hates domestic work, finds it boring and frustrating in a way I would say that women are not ‘allowed’ to, and as he puts it – re: the pram – “I was bound to it like Odysseus to the mast: if I wanted to free myself I could do that, but not without losing everything. As a result I walked around Stockholm’s streets, modern and feminised, with a furious nineteenth century man inside me.” Hilariously, for someone not from Scandinavia, one of Karl Ove’s biggest issues how foreign he feels as a Norwegian living in Scandinavia. Let’s try not to fall apart laughing, but as he puts it: “I know nothing about life here. Everything is deeply alien.” I hope in some later section of this project he has to go STRUGGLE with Mogadishu. I can’t wait to find out.

What I think is interesting, is how one book about a man’s life can be totally different from another. STONER, one of this blog’s favourite books, is all about work and failure; ALL THAT IS is all about sex. Now, my question is, is this a product of the fact that art projects need themes, and so themes are selected; or is it that people’s live themselves, inherently, have different themes? I suspect its the latter.

If so, James Salter’s theme is sex. Here we go:

“They made love as if it were a violent crime, he was holding her by the waist, half woman, half vase, adding weight to the act. She was crying in agony, like a dog near death. They collapsed as if stricken.

I can only say: half vase?

Sex aside, ALL THAT IS is an entertaining book. It covers the life of a man from his time in the Second World War through to his career in publishing and on to retirement. It’s unusual formally, as while it is focused on the central character, it actually very largely a collection of vignettes of his acquaintance, making a sort of kaleidiscope of mid twentieth century America, which I enjoyed and found interesting.

Apparently I have entered the phase of re-reading the books of my youth. Does this mean I am old? No. Probably it is my actual age that means I am old. Anyway, on to an iconic text of my pimply youth: NORTH AND SOUTH by Elizabeth Gaskell.

As you can perhaps guess by its title, this is a novel of the Industrial Revolution. But, as so often with female authors of this period, it’s wrapped up in a love story. The main character, Margaret, is a young woman living with her parents in the charming countryside in the SOUTH. She helps the elderly, darns clothes, is surprised by an offer of marriage, etc. Then her clergyman father loses his faith, and feels he can no longer preach. Hello modernity! The family are forced to scrape about for a new income, and her father is offered a tutoring position in a large city in the NORTH. It’s called Milton but I think we all know its Manchester. And so begins Margaret’s education in industrialisation. She is horrified by the filth and the noise, but slowly she comes to understand the life, and to value it. It’s an interesting transition, but it’s hard to get past how Gaskell really goes to town with the workforce. Here’s a worker, whose son his going hungry while he is on strike: ” Our lil’ Jack, who wakened me each morn wi’ putting his sweet little lips to my great rough fou’ face, a-seeking a soft place to kiss – an he lies clemmin'”. It’s not nice to laugh at starving children, but what can you do?

Margaret also meets a dark and louring young man, a captain of industry, and it’s very obvious where this is going. It’s not obvious to Margaret though, who is once again surprised with an offer of marriage. I mean: it’s one thing to be demure, it’s another to be a dumbass. Anyway, he is rejected and becomes even more dark and louring, while breaking the strike and leaving the children to clem a bit more. Eventually after much tortured distance, they finally get together.

He clasped her close. But they both kept silence. At length, she murmured in a broken voice:”Oh, Mr Thornton. I am not good enough!”
“Not good enough! Don’t mock my own deep feeling of unworthiness.”

Honestly. I don’t know who has been re-writing this novel in the twenty years since I last read it. I don’t remember it being like this at all.

This book tells the story of some Malaysians trying to make it in China. The stories are largely separate, with only occasional overlaps, apparently a most fashionable form at the moment.

What can I tell you? I kind of hated it. The characters are very varied – a migrant factory worker, a successful business woman, a pop star – but they are also all very similar. They all want money, or, perhaps to put it more fairly, they all want the symbols of money. They all find solace in the internet. They all think Shanghai is big. I can’t tell you too much about it as I’ve already forgotten most of it.

FIVE STAR BILLIONAIRE has received some good reviews, so perhaps I am being uncharitable. I guess it was sort of interesting to learn about contemporary China, but if that’s what China is like – dull and money grubbing – I’m not sure I’m very interested.

THE AFRICA HOUSE tells the true and bizarre story of one Stewart Gore-Browne, who arrived in Zambia in 1910, fell in love with a lake in the middle of nowhere, and dedicated the rest of his life to building an English country estate there. Over the course of his long life he went from wildly colonial figure – the local people used to lie face down when he walked past; his first act was to shoot a rhino – to someone who Kenneth Kaunda would describe as: “one of the most visionary people of Africa – He was born an English gentlemen and died a Zambian gentlemen.”

The book itself is perhaps not impeccably written – here’s a sample of the kind of cliché you need to wade through: “Above us the equatorial sun beat down from an endless blue sky” – but it’s a very interesting story, and one I found oddly inspirational. This is not so much because Gore-Browne did everything right, but because he really did so many things – packed so much in – and because so many of those things were plainly crazy. He was an original thinker, as many people are, but where he differed from most was in his willingness to actually do what he dreamed. And what he dreamed was pretty crazy: he was going to have a country estate, in the best tradition of the English country estate, in the middle of darkest Africa, by the lake where Livingstone’s dog had recently been eaten by a crocodile.

There were diversions: he fought in the First World War, for example; but he went on with his plan, slowing building an eccentric mansion, and trying to create an estate that might eventually make the place economically self sustaining (orange orchards, perfume oils, cattle: all failures). He loved the place, but he was lonely, and madly in love with a woman twenty years old than him who was unfortunately married. Even more unfortunately, she was also his aunt. Eventually he married a young girl he barely knew, which marriage ended in two children and floods of tears.

Gore-Browne, while never a liberal in the way we would recognize today, understood the local people very well, and increasingly found himself their protector. For example, here he is to a British policeman trying to shut down an illegal shebeen “While you are stuffing your fat faces with beer and chicken and slurping your whiskey sodas, they are surviving on one bowl of watery porridge. And you begrudge them one bowl of millet beer you wouldn’t even let your dog drink!” He knew Kenneth Kaunda, who often stayed at his house, and when Independence came, renounced his British citizenship for Zambian.

He was disappointed to have no role in the state after independence, Kaunda finding him inconveniently white, and he spent his last years alone in his house with his servant and friend Henry. His house now is crumbling, and his son, interviewed by the author, called in a monument to one man’s suffocating vanity. What a whiny little bitch. Children are so uncharitable to their parents. Here’s the end of Gore-Browne’s last letter: “Yes, 84 years are plenty . . . I find my memory is quite childishly feeble now. . . However I’ve had a good life and lots to be thankful for. Henry sends his respectful regards.” This is a great epitaph, and I hope I can say the same for myself at 84. So what that his house is crumbling, and the idea never really worked out. He had a great time trying.

As a side note, here’s a little selection of the handwritten notes I found on the last pages of this book, which I bought in one of Joburg’s many second hand book shops: NO TV ON THE WARD
My bed neighbor ‘hears voices’
4 ward mates have been to Sterkfontein
1 young chap (30) has tried to kill himself 8 times in the last year (certified twice)
FOOD AWFUL
B/fast – warm sweetcorn, porridge awful

Oh Beryl! Beryl! Here I was all ready to be in love with you and read everything you ever wrote. I very rarely read the same author back to back, or even close together, but MASTER GEORGIE was so wonderful and so short I decided to risk it, and picked up AN AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE. It’s not awful, but it’s no adventure, and it’s certainly not GEORGIE.

The novel tells the story of a young woman apprenticed to a theatre repertory company in the 1960s. It’s a world not so much changed today, and is one I know well. The young woman is in love with the company’s director, who is, not amazingly, not interested in women. She engages in an affair with the star of the show (Captain Hook, in a lackluster PETER PAN), and there’s a strange twist at the end, which I won’t give away, involving this relationship. So it sounds like it should be pretty interesting, right? But it gets bogged down in a sort of heightened poetry that drains it of character of incident.

The gorgeous Bainbridge style is still there, but someone I just don’t care. Try:

The dance floor, wreathed in blue smoke, was crowded with revellers foxtrotting to the magnified beat of the paper-hatted band perspiring beneath a trembling canopy of holly boughs and mistletoe

Lush, isn’t it? Or this, the description of her first time with the star. Note she had just been in a play about Cleopatra:

It was unusual, that was for sure. She felt a certain sad excitement, a little discomfort and much embarrassment, the latter concerned with the removal of clothing. I am dying, Egypt, dying, her mind gabbled when (her) brassiere fell to the dusty floor. She hadn’t been prepared for the way poetry came into this fitting together of parts, Shall I believe that unsubstantial Death is amorous, and that the lean abhorred monster keeps Thee here in dark to be his paramour, she recited in her head, as O’Hara climbed on top and humped her beneath the rude unshaded bulb.

Okay typing this out is making me feel like I liked it. But really I didn’t. Sorry Beryl!

I read 33 books in 2013, which is less than at any time since I started this blog four years ago. It’s a quarter of what I read in 2011! Pesky, pesky real life, getting in the way of more important activities. Here’s the 33:

HALF A LIFE by VS Naipaul
NW by Zadie Smith
GONE GIRL by Gillian Flynn
MIDDLEMARCH by George Elliott
PERSUASION by Jane Austen
THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER by Junot Diaz
SWIMMING HOME by Deborah Levy
PENELOPE by Rebecca Harrington
THE PRIME MINISTER’S CHILDREN by Anthony Trollope
SWEET TOOTH by Ian McEwan
YOUNG BLOOD by Sifiso Mzobe
CONFESSIONS OF A SHOPAHOLIC by Sophie Kinsella
CLOUDSTREET by Tim Winton
THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD by John Le Carre
LET’S EXPLORE DIABETES WITH OWLS by David Sedaris
MR NORRIS CHANGES TRAINS and GOODBYE TO BERLIN by Christopher Isherwood
A PLACE OF GREATER SAFETY by Hilary Mantel
DEATH OF THE ADVERSARY by Hans Kneilson
MAY WE BE FORGIVEN by AM Holmes
THE WAPSHOT SCANDAL by John Cheever
STONER by John Williams
MOON TIGER by Penelope Lively
THE FLAME TREES OF THIKA by Elspeth Huxley
MASTER GEORGIE by Beryl Bainbridge
LOVE, NINA by Nina Stibbe
THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P by Adelle Waldman
THE INTERESTINGS by Meg Wolitzer
ROSEMARY’S BABY by Ira Levin
STEPFORD WIVES by Ira Levin
COCKTAIL HOUR UNDER THE TREE OF FORGETFULNESS by Alexandra Fuller
A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING by Ruth Ozeki
CHESS by Stefan Zweig
THE SON by Phillip Meyer

Highlights include STONER by John Williams, which tells the story of the ordinary life of a mediocre university professor. If it’s true that simplicity is the most difficult thing to achieve, then this book must have been incredibly hard to write. It is perhaps the simplest, and certainly close to the most perfect novel I’ve ever read. It made the the three or four novels after it – all quite serviceable – seem hokey and overwritten. Also wonderful was THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P, about the dating life of a New York writer, which gave me much to think about and saw me recommending it repetitively and boringly at social events. GONE GIRL by Gillian Flynn also gets an honourable mention, for being a genuinely thrilling thriller. Of course I do not include the Austen or the Elliot here – it’s hardly fair to put them into the competition.

Lowlights were HALF A LIFE, with our old friend VS Naipaul even more far gone than ever, with his weird novel involving African child prostitutes, and CLOUDSTREET, which was as complex and baggy as STONER was neat and simple.

For the first time ever, over half the books I read – 17 of the 33 – were by women! This is a big improvement on any year previously. I guess this is pretty obviously because I’m reading more contemporary writing now, and it’s only in recent years that women have been able to look up from the cooking/washing/birthing long enough to dream up a plot.

So that was 2013. 2014, let’s be having you!

I read this book in honour of being in Austria, as Stefan Zweig in a notable Austrian author. CHESS tells the story of a man on a cruise ship who witnesses a match in which the world chess champion is beaten by an amateur. The amateur then reveals that he was kept in solitary confinement during WWI, and for many months played imaginary chess to keep himself sane. The one match he plays on the cruise ship almost destroys his sanity, taking him back to his old chess mania. There’s not much too it, really, being a novella; and I always struggle to enjoy very short books – they are over before you really start to care, like bad relationships.

THE SON is a sweeping novel of the history of Texas. It follows three members of a single family across three generations. The only truly successful character is the grandfather. This is largely because his story is by far the most interesting. As a young man he is captured by the Comanches, who apparently frequently adopted captives into their tribe. He is one of them until they are wiped out by the Europeans, at which point he returns to his people, and becomes fabulously wealthy. I learnt a lot about Native American life from his story. As for example, this, on arrows:

The best shafts were grooved along their length. We used two grooves and the Lapan used four. This prevented the arrow from stanching the wound it had just cut, but it also kept the shaft from warping. The blades of hunting arrows were fixed vertically, as the ribs of game animals are vertical to the earth. The blades of war arrows were fixed parallel to the earth, the same as human ribs. Hunting points were made without barbs and tired tightly to the shaft so they could be pulled from an animal and reused. War arrows had barbs and the blades were tied loosely, so that if the arrow was pulled, the head would remain lodged in the enemy’s body.

It was also interesting to hear a view of what it must have been like to see the entire society collapse. As the white people don’t seem to know anything – about growing maize, or killing buffalo – the Comanche are mystified as to why they are not succeeding in killing them: “Toshaway always said that white women laid crops of eggs like ducks, which hatched every night, so it didn’t matter how many you killed.”

The grandfather character is also successful because it is told in the straight-forward third person. The story of his son is unfortunately in diary format, which is rarely successful in any novel, and is certainly not so here. In addition, the son is suspiciously modern in his views. Here he is on Mexicans: “Nearly pointed out that we are wetbacks, having swum our horses across the Nueces a century after the Garcias first settled here.”

The final character is the granddaughter. Her entire story is a flashback told as she lays dying OH DOUBLE DEAR, IT’S WORSE THAN THE DIARY THING. But I’m glad they managed to squeeze a daughter into THE SON; there is only so much testosterone one can handle in a single book, and this novel is dripping with it. It’s yet another of these laments for a lost West, of which I seem to have read a lot recently, which is deeply tied up with mourning for some kind of idea of masculinity, about which I can only say: meh.

THE FLAME TREES OF THIKA is famous as a memoir of an African childhood. It deserves its fame, I would say, being a simple and heartfelt account of a unique time and place.

The story begins with a five year old girl arriving in Kenya with her parents in 1912. Her father buys some land, on impulse, while drinking one night, and the family bizarrely decides to move out there – to land they’ve never seen – to start farming coffee. Don’t be misled by this into thinking that they are doing this because they have experience in coffee farming; or indeed experience in any farming; these are aristocratic people of very small means but apparently very large balls. One is reminded how insanely brave/stupid early settlers were.

The local Kikuyu certainly lean towards finding them on the stupid end of the spectrum. They can’t understand why the white man thinks they will want to work for him, as they have no use for formal money. They are fascinated however by the paraffin lamps, and eventually agree to work in exchange for a lamp each, after they have been convinced that they are not the spirits of dead men, caged up in glass. The farm slowly takes shape, and we are introduced, through the eyes of the little girl, to the small community, both European and Kikuyu.

Here is one of the first meetings between the Europeans and Kikuyu community, with one English gent very embarrassed by the exposed genitals of the Kikuyu men.

“Perhaps we should not have brought the ladies on this expedition,” he murmured to Alec; but Tilly overheard.
“Perhaps we should not have brought the gentlemen,” she suggested, indicating a number of well-greased, shaven-headed girls who had nothing on but very small triangles of leather and strings of beads . . .

Much of the joy in the book is the evocation of a lost world. Here for example is the child’s account of the response of an old Kikuyu man as he agrees to look after her pony when she eventually has to leave Thika: “Good. When we see this white pony, we shall say: here is the toto of bawana bad hat, she will have this pony in her head as a man herds his cattle there, so we will think of you when we see him.”

Huxley does a remarkable job of creating a believable child’s voice, which is I think quite an achievement, most children in literature being either fakey or annoying. The writing is often very lyrical:

One morning I surprised two dikdik in the glade, standing among grass that countless quivering cobwebs had silvered all over, each one – and each strand of every cobweb – beaded with dew. It was amazing to think of all the untold millions of cobwebs in all the forest glades, and all across the bush and plains of Africa, and of the number of spiders, more numerous even than the stars, patiently weaving their tents of filament to satisfy their appetites, and of all the even greater millions of flies and bees and butterflies that must go to nourish them; and for what end, no one can say.