Regular readers of this blog may recall the period in which I was not sleeping, and so I took to my Sedaris. I started with a large print copy of WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES, which someone gave me, and then moved through all sorts of other Sedaris, from SANTALAND DIARIES to DRESS YOUR FAMILY IN CORDUROY AND DENIM. I decided recently to try LET’S EXPLORE DIABETES WITH OWLS, his latest, and OH DEAR. On my Kindle, if you go MENU – VIEW NOTES AND MARKS – the damning statement comes up: THERE ARE NO NOTES OR MARKS. David! What’s gone wrong! The master of the witty phrase and killing insight! Here’s what I think. His other stories were about his drug addicted, waster youth, and his messed up family. They were thus charming and comforting. Now, what does he have to write about? How he’s a best selling novelist? How he stays in chic hotels? How he has a stable relationship? I don’t think there’s any writer that could turn that kind of happy success into interesting material. However, I have hope. If he keeps writing like this he won’t be successful for too much longer . .

Christopher Isherwood is an English novelist who lived in Berlin as Hitler was coming to power, and these two novels capture that uncertain time. They tell the story of the various friends of one Christopher Isherwood, though he assures us that just because he has given his own name to the first person narrator “readers are certainly not entitled to assume that its pages are purely autobiographical” . Whatevs, Christopher Isherwood.

The “Christopher Isherwood” of the novels is struggling with his writing, and you can tell this in Christopher Isherwood’s novels. MR NORRIS CHANGES TRAINS is a rather dull story about a friend of the author’s who turns out to be a minor con man, while GOODBYE TO BERLIN is a lovely, acutely observed portrait of a lost world. It’s sort of frightening one person could have written them in a short period of time, showing how unreliable is inspiration, how unsteady talent.

Here is the description of a rich man: “ He was vague, wistful, a bit lost; dimly anxious to have a good time and uncertain how to set about getting it. He seemed never to be quite sure whether he was really enjoying himself, whether what we were doing was really fun. He had constantly to be reassured”

Or, on one of his friends whose boyfriend was leaving: “The afternoon he came to say goodbye there was a positively surgical atmosphere in the flat, as though Sally were undergoing a dangerous operation” This Sally is Sally Bowles by the way, as GOODBYE TO BERLIN is the basis of the musical CABARET.

Or, on a deer: “the roe went bucketing over the earth with wild rigid jerks, like a grand piano bewitched”

Or on an old woman “She sat on the edge of her bed with the photographs of her children and grandchildren on the table beside her, like prizes she had won”
Okay, I’ll stop there, but suffice to say I liked this novel.

Curiously, pre-war Berlin reminded me constantly of today’s Harare. I suppose this is not so surprising, as both places had faced catacylismic inflation, though as yet this has not resulted in the wholesale execution of minorities, at least in the latter. Just as street signs disappeared in Harare, to be used as coffin handles, the leather arm rests disappeared from German trains, as they were sold for leather, and people were to be found dressed in train upholstery. Christopher’s landlady recalls the days she would have “slapped the face” of anyone who suggested she scrub her own floors, which she now does happily, which reminds me of many a Zimbabwean reduced further than they ever thought possible. How awful is this: “The whole district is like that: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class”

And I don’t know if its just because I have taken 8 plane rides in the last fourteen days, but this part also struck a sad chord for me: “Where in another ten years, shall I be, myself? Certainly not here. How many seas and frontiers shall I have to cross to reach that distant day; how far shall I have to travel on foot, on horseback, by car, push-bike, aeroplane, steamer, train, lift, moving staircase and tram? How much money shall I need for that enormous journey? How much food must I gradually, wearily, consume on my way? How many shoes shall I wear out? How many thousands of cigarettes shall I smoke? . . .What an awful tasteless prospect!”

As you can see, it’s dark days here at WHITE WHALE. I’m trying not to panic, but I’VE LOST MY KINDLE. And I’ve been travelling a lot, so it could be in any one of three countries. It wouldn’t be the end of the world, except I’m stranded in the literary wasteland that is the Abuja Hilton. A sampling of my choices is in the picture here. Inspirational business books, introductory primers on weird subjects, vanity project histories of Nigeria.
I would almost start to consider the inspirational business books, but really: I have total contempt for people who read inspirational business books. It’s one of those things when glimpsed on someone’s lap on a plane, or on their bookcase, consigns them immediately to always being an acquaintance, never a friend. Thus, this current book. When that’s all that’s on offer, CONFESSIONS OF A SHOPAHOLIC starts to look pretty good.

And actually, it was okay. It was quite readable and entertaining, though clearly the author has very little respect for the reader’s intellect or attention span. It was also quite fun to read a novel set in 2000. People spend a lot of time calling each other on landlines, and very little time stalking each other on Facebook.

It did cost some 2500 Naira, which is about $15, and I whisked through it in two days of running on the treadmill. So now I’m back to square one and I still have to live through another five days. I don’t think I’ve been without access to reading material for that long in my entire adult life. I’m trying not to panic.

This is a book that is largely made up of fleeting poetic impressions, loosely grouped around a storyline. In other words, I wanted to kill someone while reading it: either myself or Tim Winton, I’m not sure which. Possibly both.

Because on the one hand, I feel bad. It is sometimes very elegantly and beautifully written, and I was sort of interested in the characters, and maybe I am just missing something, as other people seem to like it. On the other hand: OH MY GOD. Just say what you want to say. Not everything has to be shadowed by the strange and wonderful other realities. I can think of many bathroom trips I have made, that were singularly unshadowed. Also, it was rather in the modern vein, in that sorrow and futility were clearly very much on the menu, and speech marks were very much not.

I read to the end of the book, but there’s the bit where I gave up, about two-thirds of the way through the book, or at Location 2996 as my Kindle helpfully tells me: “She felt pity and misery and hatred and she knew this was how it would always be. . . What are we supposed to do? he said. I dunno, she said.

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD is the victim of its many imitators. It seems today rather cliché: the disillusioned government operative, the brown raincoat, the double (or perhaps it’s a triple) cross, the drinking, the idea that everybody loses: so far, so spy novel. This is a literary world very familiar to me, because my father was a great reader, and a great lover of a certain kind of dog-eared paperback, and I am a veteran of my father’s bookcases. As my parents always let me read just what I pleased, the alcoholic double agent alone in his Berlin apartment was a relatively major feature of my early internal life (no wonder I have problems).

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD only seems cliché today because it was so massively influential in its time. What it presented was shocking then: international affairs with no goodies and no baddies, and no victory possible. Today, this is the default position of virtually every high schooler; but at that time it was revolutionary, and the book has cast a long shadow over the spy novel ever since.

The story is focused on one Alec Leamas, who is a spy near the end of his career. The book does not quite reveal all to the reader, till right near the end, so I don’t want to spoil it for you; but essentially he accepts a mission which involves convincing the East Germans that he has been fired by MI5, and is now a disillusioned drunk ripe for turning. There a two wrinkles: one, that he actually is a disillusioned drunk ripe for turning, and two, that he falls in love. He travels to East Germany with his new communist handlers, and cross and double cross abound, drawing in his lady love, and ending in a sad non-victory on all sides.

The book is well written and keeps you guessing, and I enjoyed it. Here’s a sample: “The airport reminded Leamas of the war . . Everywhere that air of conspiracy which generates amongst people who have been up since dawn – of superiority almost, derived from the common experience of having seen the night disappear and the morning come.”

Curiously however what I most enjoyed was the Afterword, in which Le Carre talked about the process of writing the book. He was a quite unknown staffer in the secret service at the time: “I had been poor too long, I was drinking a lot, I was beginning to doubt, in the deepest of ways, the wisdom of my choice of job. The familiar process of embracing an institution, then fighting my way clear of it, was taking over my relationship to my marriage and my work”

He was just thirty years old, and interestingly he rapped the book out in just six weeks, the dark world of the novel reflecting his dark internal state. The book was a massive success, and changed his life overnight: “My marriage broke up, I went through most of the withdrawal symptoms that fame instills in writers, even if they pretend it doesn’t. I found a new wise wife and put myself together . . .But of course I will never forget the time when a disgusting gesture of history coincided with some desperate mechanism inside myself, and in six weeks gave me the book that altered my life”

I found it all rather an interesting insight into how one bumbles into life change.

I am now way, way, behind on this blog. As a result, I must tell you now I will not be able to do YOUNG BLOOD by Sifiso Mzobe full justice, despite the fact that it is an interesting debut novel with a distinctive voice, as I read it months ago.

As I vaguely recall, YOUNG BLOOD follows the story of a young man in Durban’s townships, who, failing at school, allows himself to be drawn into the world of car theft. A initially innocent young soul, he is, in the fine tradition of such novels, very soon in way over his head, and learning moral lessons left right and centre.

The story is by turns boring (drink-sleep-do small time drugs) and terrifying (stealing cars, bribing police, etc); which is I suspect very much what it is like to be a small time car thief.

Much of the writing is quite charming; here is a sample: “The love affair between Mandrax fiends and housebreaking is age old. There is nothing more unreliable than a Mandrax fiend, except perhaps Durban December weather.”

This last part, about Durban weather, encapsulates much of the local charm of this book, which vividly captures a part of South African life that is not well documented. At the end, the central character is redeemed by returning to school, which twist I did not believe for a second; but this was still a worthwhile little book, about a small section of South African society.

You will observe that I am really losing the plot. Spy novels?!? When have I ever read spy novels? And wait, I even just read another one that I’ve haven’t blogged about yet (I’ll give you a clue, someone comes in from the cold). Anyway! Ian McEwan rather bravely decides to write an entire novel as a woman. Impressively, he more or less succeeds. It’s the 1960s, and some young woman is at Cambridge. She has an affair with her elderly professor, and he suggests her for MI5. She is a hesitant and unwilling spy, which is a good thing, because once she passes the rigorous interview process she finds that woman are only allowed to be secretaries anyway. One really forget how much we today owe to our mother’s generation. Eventually she is assigned to liaise with a writer, who the service feels is likely to write the right sort of books. The plan is to give him money, without him being aware where it comes from, so as to encourage writing of his kind, which they believe will foster the right kind of thinking – anti-communist, pro-western values, etc etc. Here is where it gets interesting, because unfortunately she falls madly in love with this writer, and so not telling him who is paying the bills becomes more and more complicated. Eventually he finds out, and a weird sort of double bluff begins, which ends the book with an unexpected twist.

The young woman at the centre of the book is chosen for this project with the writer because she is an enthusiastic reader, and this book is very interesting on the subject of reading as a defining activity. It made me realise I have read many books on what it means to be a writer, but very few on what it means to be a reader. Here’s the woman on he reading: “I could take a block of text or a whole paragraph in one visual gulp. It was a matter of letter my eyes and thoughts go soft, like wax, to take the impression fresh off the page. To the irritation of those around me, I’d turn a page every few seconds with an impatient snap of the wrist. My needs were simple. I didn’t bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them.” This struck me, because it is pretty much exactly how I read. I’ve never understood people who think about what they read; the idea is to not have your own thoughts, but someone else’s.

It was in the very dark and distant old days, before this blog was begun, when the earth was still hot, and etc, that I began on Trollope’s series. I think I started out of order with the Barchester novels, and then moved on to the Pallisers; and THE PRIME MINISTER’S CHILDREN is the last. Now all that lies before me is his stand-alone single books, re-reading of the series in retirement, and of course sad and lonely death.

THE PRIME MINISTER’S CHILDREN is unfortunately the worst of the bunch. Or maybe it’s fortunate, because otherwise it would just be too sad to be finishing them at last. The story follows the main characters into their second generation, with all the romantic entanglements we remember from generation one. The Prime Minister’s children both want to marry people of whom he disapproves. The daughter wants to marry a boy without much income, and the son wants to marry an American. Cue heartbreak and distress. This sounds like the outline of a great and typical Trollope, so I am not quite sure why it is so unsuccessful. Perhaps it is in part because the narrative lacks drive; in part because Trollope struggles to pull together his multi-book themes; and in part because – very, very unusually for this author – a woman who tries to break the mould is bitterly defeated. Essentially the prime minister’s son is in love with this lady, Mabel, and she sort of half turns him down, because while she needs the money, she isn’t quite in love with him; and Trollope makes it all go horribly wrong for her from then on, at every turn.

Though I didn’t quite enjoy the book as a whole, I still enjoyed being embraced by Trollope’s warm and confident writer’s voice. Here he is, top of chapter:

Perhaps the method of rushing at once “in medias res” is, of all the ways of beginning a story, or a separate branch of a story, the least objectionable. The reader is made to think that the gold lies so near the surface that he will be required to take very little trouble in digging for it. And the writer is enabled,–at any rate for a time, and till his neck has become, as it were, warm to the collar,–to throw off from him the difficulties and dangers, the tedium and prolixity, of description. This rushing “in medias res” has doubtless the charm of ease. “Certainly, when I threw her from the garret window to the stony pavement below, I did not anticipate that she would fall so far without injury to life or limb.” When a story has been begun after this fashion, without any prelude, without description of the garret or of the pavement, or of the lady thrown, or of the speaker, a great amount of trouble seems to have been saved. The mind of the reader fills up the blanks,–if erroneously, still satisfactorily. He knows, at least, that the heroine has encountered a terrible danger, and has escaped from it with almost incredible good fortune; that the demon of the piece is a bold demon, not ashamed to speak of his own iniquity, and that the heroine and the demon are so far united that they have been in a garret together. But there is the drawback on the system,–that it is almost impossible to avoid the necessity of doing, sooner or later, that which would naturally be done at first. It answers, perhaps, for half-a-dozen chapters;–and to carry the reader pleasantly for half-a-dozen chapters is a great matter!–but after that a certain nebulous darkness gradually seems to envelope the characters and the incidents. “Is all this going on in the country, or is it in town,–or perhaps in the Colonies? How old was she? Was she tall? Is she fair? Is she heroine-like in her form and gait? And, after all, how high was the garret window?” I have always found that the details would insist on being told at last, and that by rushing “in medias res” I was simply presenting the cart before the horse. But as readers like the cart the best, I will do it once again,–trying it only for a branch of my story,–and will endeavour to let as little as possible of the horse be seen afterwards.

And then there is his wisdom. Here is a letter from poor defeated Mabel: “It is not the presence of the skeleton that crushes us. Not even that will hurt us much if we let him go about the house as he lists. It is the everlasting effort which the horror makes to peep out of his cupboard that robs us of our ease.”

Oh Anthony, I will miss you!

Like Edith Wharton, Junot Diaz is clearly working through some powerful personal issues. Almost every single one of these stories is about regret for infidelity, and is full of a kind of steaming pain, while also being strangely hilarious.

Here, for example, is a brilliantly funny line that I’ve been thinking of often: “Show me a beautiful girl and I’ll show you someone who is tired of fucking her.” Or he is here on his mother: “My mom wasn’t the effusive type anyway, had one of those event-horizon personalities – shit just fell into her and you never really knew how she felt about it.”

Regular readers of this blog may recall my great love for Diaz’s last book THE BRIEF AND WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO, which gave me an entirely new understanding of the possibilities of writing for us confused people of the diaspora. I did not enjoy THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER as much as OSCAR WAO – perhaps because I am not fond of short stories – but I still enjoyed his immensely contemporary voice. Here he is for example, on his mother’s friends, who encouraged her to hate his brother’s girlfriend: “They could have moderated things a little, don’t you think, but they were, like, Fuck that, what are friendships for if not for instigating?” I just love the punctuation around like, I love the sentiment, I love the don’t you think.

That said, I did start to find the obsessive concern with infidelity a bit dull after a while, especially in the last story, which is all about a professor in Boston (very like Diaz) who is busy being miserable about fucking around on his girlfriend. I know it’s charitable, but I started to feel like: dude, get a grip; and my love of his literature wobbled a little.

According to reviews, this novel bridges the gap between poetry and narrative. Clearly, I thought I was going to hate it. The introduction did not help; speaking of Levy, the writer says:

“. . she was a writer as much at home within the fields of visual and conceptual art, philosophy and performance as within that of the printed word. She’d read her Lacan and Deleuze, her Bartes . . Like the emotional and cerebral choreographies of Pina Bausch, her fiction seemed less concerned about the stories it narrated than the interzone (to borrow Burrough’s term) . . . “

Oh god! “Less concerned about stories,” as if that makes you a better writer! GOD. i am glad I did not give up however, because SWIMMING HOME turns out to be rather a lovely novel.

It tells the story of a family who arrive for their vacation in a rented house in France to find another lady there, who says she has confused her dates, and thought she had the house rented. They invite her to stay, and it slowly becomes clear that the lady is in fact there because the father in the family is a famous poet, with whom she is in love. The lady and the poet have a sort of melancholy half-baked affair, and the story ends rather sadly. It’s an interesting plot, with really gorgeous writing. Here is the lady and poet on the way to a hotel:

As they strolled down the Promenade des Anglais in the silver light of the late afternoon, it was snowing seagulls on every rooftop in Nice. She had casually slung the short white feathered cape across her shoulders, its satin ribbons tied in a loose knot around her neck.

And here they are in the elevator up to their hotel room:

She stared at the multiple reflections of Joe’s sweating arm around her waist, the green silk of her dress trembling as they saild silently in the lift that smelt of leather to the third floor.

The book has some light hearted moments, also, as when the poet becomes annoyed with a friend who is acting horrified about someone else’s behaviour. The poet says: “It’s rude to be so normal, Mitchell,” which I found strangely hilarious.

What most impressed me was the author’s ability to weave the various poetic elements in and out of the story, with multiple complex repetitions, in a way that seemed entirely natural and in service to the plot. Really remarkable writing.