LOVE LESSONS and LOVE IS BLUE by Joan Wyndham

I REALLY loved this one. I have already recommended it to about five people, none of whom seem enthused.  It is the real dairies that the author kept as a 19 year old in London during WWII.  They brought her huge fame when published in the 1980s, after her granddaughter found them in her attic. 

Part of the interest is a day-by-day account of what it was like to live in London during the war.  But, curiously, that’s not really most of what it focuses on.  She’s a 19 year old girl, so mostly it’s focused on BOYS.  She is desperate to lose her virginity, and then when she does, desperate to have an orgasm (takes 4-5 boys, all of whom we learn about).  She is very jealous of her friend, who claims she can have one just by leaning on a railing (!)  I don’t know what I thought a diary by a wealthy teenage girl in the 1940s was going to be like, but I did not expect it to include the taste of semen (bitter almond, in her opinion)

There is also something exceedingly touching about hearing about someone’s daily life long ago in a city you currently live in.  One night, for example, just before the Blitz begins she tell us they: “climbed the hill that looks over Highgate and lay in deck chairs at the top, smoking in the moonlight.”

Or once, when she is with her friend they see an old man on that street

“Dorothea said, ‘That is Professor Freud.’  Back to Chelsea in a tube like an oven.”

Living in Chelsea she meets many artists – Julian McLaren Ross (read his OF LOVE AND HUNGER here), Augustus John, and Dylan Thomas, who gropes her.  She volunteers for the WAAF, where she has a job tracking planes.  She meets a man who has managed to get out of Poland, and, awfully, no one believes him when he tells them about the concentration camps, thinking it is too dreadful to possibly be true.

I find in writing this summary I struggle to capture what I loved in this book so much. I think it is partly the dailyness of it (cold peas for supper!) and the indomitable spirit of the young woman, who seems to find so much to enjoy in those days. 

SALEM’S LOT by Stephen King

This is an imagination of what would happen if a vampire moved into a small town in New England. It’s was fun and very easy-reading, but I find I kind of forgot about it seconds after reading it. It’s King’s second novel, after CARRIE, which is a book that I find I often still think of even years later. I guess it’s because there are tons of vampire stories, but not too many about period-power. Though curiously both involve a lot of blood 🙂

DIRTBAG MASSACHUSETTS by Isaac Fitzgerald

This book of personal essays was reviewed rapturously in the New York Times. I did not quite get it. You don’t need to have had an ‘interesting’ life to write interesting essays about that life. But this is not his problem – Fitzgerald does seem to have had an interesting life : Catholicism, bar work, porn work. And yet the essays were, for me at least, rather vanilla. It’s hard for me to imagine how you write a tame essay about your time in porn, but there you go, seems to have been done. I guess others loved this book, but it wasn’t for me.

WEIRDO by Sarah Pascoe

Here is a book in which the worm refuses to turn.  It starts off as kind of a love story, with a girl running into a boy she used to have a crush on in a London pub.  You find out that the crush was so large that she followed him – without his knowledge – to Australia, so she could manufacture an accidental meeting.  This is crossing a line, but okay, maybe it’s a quirky love story.  Then you find out that once she got there, she was very worried that Australia – the whole country –  might be being staged for her benefit.  Things get weirder from there.  It’s a really compelling, and claustrophobic narrative voice. 

I know it doesn’t sound it, but it’s very funny.  For example, at one point she says: “If there’s anything I’ve learned in my thirties, it’s don’t cut your hair while crying.”   It’s also an interesting meditation on obsession.  At one point, there is a parable about a monkey who puts his hand in a jar to get a treat, and then, because his hand is full, can’t get it out again.  The lesson being: 

“If you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.” 

I like this.

THE MANDIBLES by Lionel Shriver

A fun novel of the near future, in which America slips into hyperinflation and then economic collapse.  It was written with real joyful sizzle of wide-eyed surprise and horror, with a  strong vibe  of this-could-never-happen, which is quite fun for a Zimbabwean, to whom it has already happened. 

I have not Wikipedia-ed the author (who I know from the wonderful WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN) because I am a little worried about how much time she spends on Twitter reading about questionable topics like Replacement Theory (snore). That said, there were lots of fun parts of this book. I really enjoyed imagining a world in which the young work low-level jobs (the rest taken by robots) and pay 90% tax so the old can live lives of luxury.  That feels uncomfortable close to likely to me.     

There is lots of juicy writing here.  Try this couple, who are well-off but love to bargain hunt:

Which is how they ended up in a pretty drab apartment in Florida: it was a steal.  Caught up in money-as-a-game, they mistook their raffle tickets for the prize.  Because the only thing that bargain hunting ‘won’ was more money.

Or this, about looking after grandparents:

After all, old people have a horrible habit of kicking it right after you ducked seeing them at the last minute with an excuse that sounded fishy, or on the heels of a regrettable encounter in which you let slip an acrid aside.  To be dutiful without fail is like taking out emotional insurance.

Or this, about someone regretting her choices before the collapse:

But assumptions about her angelic nature were off-base.  After she’d scraped from one poorly paid, often part-time position to another, whatever wide-eyed altruism had motivated her moronic double major in American Studies and Environmental Policy at Barnard had been beaten out of her almost entirely.

I love that phrase –  ‘moronic double major.’  This book is full of the author proving to us how wrong we all are and how stupid.  I really enjoyed picturing her banging away at her keyboard.  Every page absolutely pulses with the rage of the well-fed.  It made me LOL.

TRAVELS INTO THE INTERIOR OF AFRICA by Mungo Park

Here are the deliriously wild real-life diaries of an English man’s solo effort to find the source of the Niger.  He does not start off solo, but it goes that way pretty fast.  In 1794 he is employed by some geographic association for the task, after the man who went before him  “had fallen a sacrifice to the climate, or perished in some contest with the natives.” 

He starts off from the Gambian coast, on foot.  He meets a huge variety of people, and is an object of great interest.  In many villages he spends hours taking on and off his coat for an audience who have never a white person, or a coat, before.  In one village the women come in to find out from him if he is truly a man (!) and he volunteers to show ‘the youngest and prettiest one’ his penis.  They find this hilarious.

I had always heard that one reason African people did not unite to fight off colonialisation is that they did not (understandably) immediately realize the threat, being too deeply involved in their own centuries-old conflicts.  This book shows how that could be so, for a huge amount of it is about who is at war with who and what that means for Mungo.  Also shockingly interesting is his estimate that only about one in four of the Africans he meets are free, the rest being slaves.  (Apparently there were two levels, if you were a local, you had some rights, but if you were a foreigner you really had none)

Mungo gets robbed quite a bit, and eventually is actually imprisoned by some Arab nomads. He has more time than he wants to observe them, and notes that “ as (their) pastoral life does not afford full employment, the majority of the people are perfectly idle, and spend their day in trifling conversation . . .”  WHERE DO I SIGN? 

He also notes some pretty interesting female beauty standards: “A woman, of even moderate pretensions, must be one who cannot walk without a slave under each arm to support her, and a perfect beauty is a load for a camel.”  He saw young girls sit weeping over their food, being forced to eat until they vomited, so they could grow fat. Again, WHERE DO I SIGN. 

This part is pretty bleak actually, as the translator (a 9 year old boy) calmly explains to him that his captors are debating between putting his eyes out and murdering him.  Eventually he escapes with only the clothes he is wearing and his horse.  He is lost and has no water.  He lies down to die, first letting his horse go (as the last ‘act of humanity’ he will ever do); and then it starts to rain.  He manages to meet some more people and is able to exchange buttons on his waistcoat for food.  It is hair-raising.   Eventually he makes his way back to the coast, never having got near the source of the Niger, but returning to a hero’s welcome all the same.  On his return, impoverished journey, it is pretty sad to see how who mostly helped him are the poor.  He is grateful to tears when an old slave woman gives him a handful of mush. 

I expected quite a lot of old school racism, but more got this:

“Whatever difference there is between Negro and the European in the conformation of the nose and the colour of the skin, there is none in the genuine sympathies and characteristic feelings of our common nature.”

THE PUMPKIN EATER by Penelope Mortimer

There are many novels about unhappy marriages. This is a particularly good one. I had never heard of THE PUMPKIN EATER before, but I am informed by the Introduction that is among the first and most important of the twentieth century. I don’t know about that, but I thought it was banging.

Try this description: “His eyes twinkled as though hung in his head to frighten the birds away”

The book tells the story of a woman on her third marriage, with a large number of children. She gets pregnant again and her husband is not happy, so she agrees to an abortion and sterilization. The day she gets back from the hospital, she finds out he is having an affair. This is back in the day when cheating was more acceptable, but she does not find it to be very okay. To be fair to him, she herself admits she is unhealthily obsessed with children, and especially babies. She makes this interesting summary:

Now I realized how completely I had been absorbed by Jake. I needed the outside world, but had no idea where to find it. For the first time, I needed friends; there were none.  Over-indulgence in sexual and family life had left us, as far as other relationships were concerned, virginal; we said we had friends much as schoolchildren, busy with notes and hearts and keepsakes, say they have lovers.

I found this so interesting! It’s rare you see this idea expressed, but I think it is in fact very common for married people to be extraordinarily lonely and friend-less, and not even know that they are.

CHARLOTTE GRAY by Sebastian Faulks

Here is a novel about a female spy. It starts as a straight-forward love story, then becomes an espionage novel, and then loses its way for a bit, struggling to connect the plotlines while getting deep into French politics in WWII.

It’s engaging throughout, which is a feat at 500 + pages, and is remarkable for deep research and believable characters, even when the plot is a little shaky. I was especially struck by the presentation of how ordinary French people reacted when their neighbours were collected into railway cars and sent ‘east’. How did they react? Apparently they were not just fine with it, they actively applauded. It is pretty chilling.

Also of interest was the worldview of those who signed up to the ideas of Vichy France: that is, that German was clearly going to win the war, so it made sense to accept this early and get France the best seat possible in the ‘new Europe.’ One can see the pragmatism of this view. It is darkly funny how completely wrong they were. What I learnt from this is that when you are being ‘pragmatic’ (i.e., dividing up your neighbours clothes between yourselves) you better make sure you are making the right bet, because if you are not, you are truly left with nothing, not even your dignity.

THE SUITCASE by Sergei Dovlatov

I picked up this book in the week Alexi Navalny died. It’s like a very tiny tribute to that remarkable and heroic tradition of Russian dissent of which he was an heir.

It begins: “So this bitch at OVIR says to me, “Everyone who leaves is allowed three suitcases.  That’s the quota.” LOL! You know you are in for a good dictatorship story when it begins with encounters with bureaucracy. I myself have fond / horrifying memories of a certain 12 hour long queue to get a Zimbabwean passport in 2010.

The novel is structured around the stories of each of the items he was supposedly allowed to take out of Russia. It is both hilarious and sad. How hilarious is this:

Two hundred years ago the historian Nikolai Karamzin visited France.  Russian emigres there asked him: “What’s happening back at home, in two words?”

Karamzin didn’t even need two words. “Stealing,” he replied.

A great book.