SMALL FRY by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

To say this is a memoir by the daughter of Steve Jobs does the book a disservice. It certainly is that, and you do learn some scuttle-butt about Steve Jobs (who does seem to be a really weird guy), but what is mostly interesting is the very real, detailed effort to re-create a specific childhood.

It is a real mystery of the memoir form how any life – no matter how foreign – told with enough specificity, becomes relatable. This specific child was born to a pair of hig school sweethearts. The mother decides to keep her, and is a loving parent, but also struggles very much with what she has given up in doing so. The father eventually accepts paternity after a DNA test, and agrees child support amounts just days before a little computer company he founded goes public, making him a multi-millionaire.

This makes it sound like a bitter book, but it’s not really. I enjoyed it.

PROMISE AT DAWN by Romain Gary

There are plenty of memoirs from people with daddy issues; here is one from someone with mummy issues. To give you a sense of the scale, please enjoy this section, which is where the book’s title comes from:

“In your mother’s love, life makes you a promise at the dawn of life that it will never keep.  . . You will go hungry to the end of your days.  Leftovers, cold tidbits, that’s what you will find in front of you at each new feast.   . . You will walk though the desert from mirage to mirage, and your thirst will remain such that you will become a drunkard, but each sweet gulp will only rekindle your longing for the one and only source. “

I have not Wikipedia-ed Gary, but I will be amazed if he has been married less than three times.  His mother is truly a titanic figure.  A penniless Jewish actress from Lithuania, she got pregnant outside of marriage, then drags herself and him across Eastern Europe for many years, determined that he will become a Frenchman, and not just a Frenchman, but a famous Frenchman in the best tradition of the nineteenth century novel: a famous artist (exact artform TBD), a decorated soldier, and a diplomat.  Incredibly, he is all those things, winning both the Prix Goncourt (best possible literary prize) and also the Croix De Guerre (major military medal). 

She is so sure of his destiny that I can only call her unhinged.  At one point, when the neighbours in their dodgy tenement in Poland get her in trouble with the landlord, she drags her son around to each one, haranguing them about how sorry they will be when this 9-year-old is an Ambassador.  Can you imagine: he has to go to school the next day with these people!  She is just utterly sure that his success will make up for all she has suffered.  He says:

“I had always known that my mission on earth was one of retribution; that I existed, as it were, only by proxy . . “

There is much to enjoy outside his mother.  At one point, he gives a little girl he has a crush on three apples, without ever having spoken to her, and then:

“She accepted my surrender as though it was the most natural thing in the world, and announced: ‘Janeck ate his whole stamp collection for me.’

Such was the beginning of my long martyrdom.  In the course of the next few days I ate for Valentine several handfuls of earthworms, her father’s collection of rare butterflies, a mouse, a good many decaying leaves, and, as a crowning achievement, I can say that at nine years of age . . . I took my place among the greatest lovers of all time and accomplished a deed of amorous prowess no man, to the best of my knowledge, has ever equaled.  I ate for my lady one of my rubber galoshes!”

I can’t even get into his time in the WWII AirForce, it being utterly hair-raising as he lays out how all his friends die in various crashes.  He also gives this awful snippet of the red-light district in Marrakesh, where he says it was not unusual for women to be subjected to a hundred men a day; and that “sometimes a girl, half-hysterical from over-work or hashish, would rush naked, screaming, into the alley .”  This is haunting, and I can only hope he is exaggerating.

SPOILER ALERT.  All through his three years in the war, he gets undated letters from his mother.  After the liberation, he goes to see her as quickly as he can, so she can see he is returning a second lieutenant, with a medal, and a book deal (i.e, he has finally succeeded, her life has meaning, etc). He finds she has been dead almost all the three years, and spent the last days of her life writing him hundreds of letters that could be sent on, so he wouldn’t know she was gone.

SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING by Alan Sillitoe

I am always struck by how vanishingly rare it is to read a book by a working class person before about 1950.  Here is one.  It’s a hair raising account of heavy boozing and factory work in Nottingham, and you know all you need to know when I tell you this book is where the expression ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down’ comes from.  Try this sample:

“Factories sweat you to death, labour exchanges talk you to death, insurance and income tax offices milk money from your wage packets and rob you to death. And if you’re still left with a tiny bit of life in your guts after all this boggering about, the army calls you up and you get shot to death. . . .  Ay, by God, it’s a hard life if you don’t weaken, if you don’t stop that bastard government from grinding your face in the muck, though there ain’t much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow their four-eyed clocks to bits.”

‘It’s a hard life if you don’t weaken!’  I love that

This author began life as a factory worker, but then married a poet and used his army pension to move to Spain to write.   I was touched to hear he wrote this under a lemon tree at Robert Graves’ house, who was the person who encouraged him to write the life he knew.  I love Graves’ GOODBYE TO ALL THAT,  a wonderful book about binning your life and becoming a bohemian, and it was sweet to meet him at second-hand through this other writer. 

THE WALL by John Lanchester

In this book set in the far (near?) future, England is surrounded by a wall which is perpetually guarded against ‘the enemy’ who are desperate to get in. 

The exact situation is not described, but you get the impression there has been a massive raise in sea levels globally, and that the enemy is desperate climate migrants.  Much of the book is a straightforward adventure / romance story, focused on one man who is serving his mandatory two years on the wall.  SPOILER His unit allows an incursion, so they are all set adrift in the ocean.  Despite it not really going anywhere in terms of plot after this, I still found it a compelling story of an all-too-possible world.  Probably my favourite part was how it was well understood by the entire culture that the older generation was entirely at fault and they were ostracized appropriately. 

FUNNY STORY by Emily Henry

This is fun genre romance. I have never been much of a reader of genre fiction, but I like this lady Emily Henry. She writes quick, funny novels that make a vacation fly by. She is an enormous best seller, and I was interested to read how she thinks about the ‘romance genre’ tag. See below, from CBC. It is continually weird that somehow Stephen King (genre: thriller) is so much more respectable than any female genre writer I can think of

For Henry, it’s important to call herself a romance writer because she’s tired of people looking down on the genre and dismissing its value. 

“There is still a lot of snobbery around the genre and I find it really bizarre because it’s one of the very few genres that is so centered on women,” she says. “Obviously, it’s not just for or about women, but the authorship is dominated by women, the readership is dominated by women and I just don’t think it’s really a coincidence that it’s the genre that gets dismissed so readily…. Romance is so significant because it values women’s stories.”

MONEY by Martin Amis

This was one of the more famous books of the 1980s. I cannot say I am feeling it. It tells the story of an author whose book is being made into a movie. He has an alcohol problem and rolls joyfully/miserably through various excesses of his private and professional life. It is a novel of voice, the exuberant voice of the alcoholic, and I think we are supposed to be shocked and titillated by how transgressive he is. A woman at a bar is a ‘big bim,’ he has lots of thoughts on black New Yorkers, etc. I just found it kind of snore.

SIDE BAR: I am 100% sure that this author has daddy issues, just on general principles, because men like this always do. I note that Martin’s father, Kingsley Amis, was also an author and wrote the book LUCKY JIM, also a novel in the voice of a disillusioned man. This one, just as transgressive, is wonderful and heart-warming and made me feel free to hate my life. I am sure these two books are in some kind of dialogue, but can’t be bothered to Google to find out how.

ADVENTURES IN MASHONALAND by Rose Blennerhassett and Lucy Sleeman

Clearly I did not really understand what total ballers some Victorian woman were.  This book is the first-person account of some young nurses who decided to come to Mashonaland in the 1890s, and it is some hair-raising stuff. I thought they were all at home wearing corsets and having vapours, but apparently not. 

This was when Florence Nightingale had made nursing acceptable for Victorian women, and what I got from this book is that girls who wanted out grabbed this opportunity with both hands. In this case, the nurses are asked to go to Mashonaland when there is no road or train, and after various efforts by boat, (and being abandoned by the Bishop), they get tired of waiting and decide to walk – from Beira!  Here is a discussion with the various men telling them not to try it:

No women he had known had ever walked in Africa; even men found it trying, and sometimes died on the way.  We told our excellent advisors that we could only  die once, and that dying was just as disagreeabale in a room as on the veldt.  If women had never walked in Africa there was no reason why they should not begin

It’s an extraordinary walk, and when they get there the hospital is hardly a hut.  They spend two years dealing with ‘fever’ (I assume malaria?), and with all kinds of other wild problems, lions, etc.  One of them finds someone to marry.  I liked this line:

Africa is the land of the unforeseen. . . ‘Questions,’ ‘wars,’ ‘difficulties’ spring up at an instant’s notice.

So true still today, though we call them ‘challenges.’  So tough are the conditions that when the next batch of nurses arrive to take over (a road having been built) half of them turn around and go back to Beira! 

An amazing story of people leading big crazy lives against the odds.

COLD CREMATORIUM by Jozsef Debreczeni

Here is a really stomach-churning account of the Nazi death camps.  It is written by a Hungarian journalist, who brings his professional eye to describing how he survived.  I was amazed it is not more famous. The Introduction tells me this is because it has only recently been translated from the Hungarian.  The book begins with the author, Jozsef Debreczeni, being captured in June 1944. Arriving at the first of the camps, the old, young, and female are separated out to the left.  Then the Nazis say that those on the left will get to ride in a truck up the hill, so anyone who feels they cannot walk up the hill should also go to the left. Debreczeni nearly takes the offer, but is fortunate to hear an existing prisoner whisper to him to stay.  Of course all those on the left go directly to be gassed. 

Those on the right go on to hard labour, which is pretty horrifying, but not nearly so bad as what happens when he is somehow sent on to a hospital camp.  Here he lies naked, 2-3 to a bunk, in huge dormitories with almost nothing to eat, and with no one clearing up the sewage, so it is ankle deep at all times.  They do hear news of the front, so they understand that the Nazis have lost, but the question is if they can stay alive long enough for the Russians to get to them.  When the Red Army appears with sausages and throws it on his bed I felt like weeping. 

One thing that really surprised me in this story was his account of how much of the camp order – and how much of the decisions on who and how to deprive of food – was made by fellow prisoners. Apparently the Nazis created a hierarchy, and those prisoners at the top were, in his view, quite merciless to those below.  They loom as much larger villains than their actual captors.  Once the Nazi soldiers decide to run away, what is interesting is the prisoner hierarchy run away too, and while none are caught in the author’s camp, in others they were hanged by the other prisoners.