I listened to these while driving around the South African province of Mpumalanga over the course of two months, along with THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, reviewed previously.

ETHAN FROMME
God, what can I say. I read it when I was about fifteen, and I still haven’t recovered. It’s no less painful on a second reading twenty years later.

CRANFORD
A rare case where the TV show is better than the novel. I usually love Elizabeth Gaskell, but this I found a bit sentimental. Yes I blubbed, but I did not respect myself for blubbing. It was interestingly modern, in that it was more a series of interconnected stories than a novel.

FAREWELL
I mean, we know I like the Victorians, but this was too much even for me. It’s a bizarre and sexist novella, in which some woman loses her lover to war. Her last word to him is the creative ‘farewell,’ and the loss is so great she loses her mind, only retaining that one word. The lover survives a Siberian prison, and comes upon her by chance. He is so upset when he cannot make her sane that he decides to kill her, and it all gets more inappropriate from there. The best part was the scene where she loses her lover. It’s during Napoleon’s slow retreat from Russia during the winter, and is unbearably sad, with men so exhausted that they choose to lie down to rest despite the fact that the Russians are coming and they will surely freeze to death.

Thanks to Librivox

Montaigne was a Frenchman of the eighteenth century , who wrote a series of essays with titles such as:
OF FRIENDSHIP
OF CANNIBALS
OF THE CUSTOM OF WEARING CLOTHES
HOW WE CRY AND LAUGH FOR THE SAME THINGS
OF NAMES
OF SMELLS
OF CRUELTY
OF THUMBS
HOW OUR MIND HINDERS ITSELF
OF DIVERSION
OF COACHES
OF EXPERIENCE

He wrote 107 of such essays, and on these his reputation rests. This is in part due to the content of the essays, and in part due to their form. Montaigne joins Shakespeare as being among the first to write directly of our divided experience as individuals, to express what now seems to us self-evident – the contradictory inner life of each person. Bakewell explains: “Montaigne and Shakespeare have each been held up as the first truly modern writers, capturing that distinctive modern sense of being unsure where you belong, who you are, and what you are expected to do.”

How modern is this:

I have seen no more evident monstrosity and miracle in the world than myself. We became habituated to anything strange by use and time; but the more I frequent myself and know myself, the more my deformity astonishes me, and the less I understand myself.

He describes much that is common human experience, such as finding famous sites, when they are at last seen, almost imaginary:

Something similar happened to Freud in Athens when he saw the Acropolis. ‘So all this really does exist, just as we learned at school!’ he exclaimed, and almost immediately thereafter felt the conviction: ‘What I see here is not real.’

This book is more or less a biography of Montaigne, but the author has attempted to make it more appealing by framing it in terms of questions as to how to live, answered from his work. This is only intermittently successful. Montaigne had a distinctly odd childhood, having been spoken to only in Latin up to the age of six, which meant that pretty much only his tutor could speak to him. He went on to be a magistrate, before at the age of 37 ‘retiring’ to his father’s estates to write his essays. He was actually supposed to be managing those estates, but he mostly left that to his mum.

He is very much interested in being free of constraints, such as estate management:

No prison has received me, not even for a visit. Imagination makes the sight of one, even from the outside, unpleasant to me. I am so sick for freedom that if anyone should forbid me access to some corner of the Indies, I should live distinctly less comfortably

One of this primary suggestions as to how to live comes from Montaigne’s close brush with death, which he was surprised to find was in fact a gentle and easy experience. From then on, he “tried to import some of death’s delicacy and buoyancy into life. ‘Bad spots’ were everywhere, he wrote in a late essay. We do better to ‘slide over this world a bit lightly and on the surface.’”

The book’s charm comes in part from the window it provides onto his period. He saw the plague whip through rural France, so quickly and fiercely that he often saw sick people dig their own graves and lie in them awaiting death. It was a time of great religious warfare:

For today, to mug one’s neighbor, massacre ones’ nearest relatives, rob the altars, profane the churches, rape women and young girls, ransack everybyody, is the ordinary practice of a Leaguer and the infallible mark of a zealous Catholic; always to have religion and the mass on one’s lips, but atheism and robbery in one’s heart, and murder and blood on one’s hands.

Apparently things haven’t changed as much as we would have liked.

Apparently at that time they believed that sex with your wife should be as cautious as possible. Montaigne quotes Aristotle: “A man . . . should touch his wife prudently and soberly, lest if he careeses her too lasciviously the pleasure should transport her outside the bounds of reason.” They also believed that too much pleasure for a woman could make the sperm curdle within her. I just love it that they have such confidence in their powers. That probably is my problem, that sex has just transported me beyond the bounds of reason that once too often.

The closest that Montaigne came to in terms of an answer of how to live was in his last essay, which apparently Virginia Woolf was fond of quoting (though it seemed to do her little good):

Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself.

Bakewell comments, interestingly:

Either this is not an answer at all, or it is the only possible answer.

Anyway, Montaigne has been much loved through the centuries, with one critic commenting:

His book is the touchstone of a sound mind. If a man dislikes it, you may be sure that he has some defect of the heart or understanding

.

I feel that way about quite a few books. Some random person opens their mouth at a party about one of these books, to say something stupid, and I just have to cross them right off the list.

SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END begins in an easy chatty manner, with Athill looking out the window, watching dogs play. She comments:

I have always wanted a pug and now I can’t have one, because buying a puppy when you are too old to take it for walks is unfair.

Then she talks about having recently ordered a tree fern, which turned out to be just a seedling:

Whether tree ferns grow quickly or slowly I don’t know, but even if it is quickly, it is not possible that I shall ever see this one playing the part I envisaged in our garden

.
Athill is clearly an elderly lady, and this it emerges is her theme:

We have, however, contrived to extend our falling away so much that it is often longer than our development, so what goes on in it and how to manage it is worth considering. Book after book has been written about being young, and even more of them about the elaborate and testing experiences that cluster around procreation, but there is not much on record about falling away. Being well advanced in that process, and just having had my nose rubbed in it by pugs and tree ferns, I say to myself: ‘ Why not have a go at it?” So I shall.

It’s true there is little in literature about being old, despite the fact that this will soon be a very long period of our ever longer lives, so I was interested to hear her perspective.

The main thing I gained from this novel is that, at least for Athill, as we grow older, we grow more accepting of death, which is comforting. I did struggle somewhat with the extent to which she drew on her response to her parents’ death as a model. Both her parents died when she was in her sixties and they in her eighties, so with respect I think she has little idea as to what early loss of those two people can be.

I strongly suspect Athill was a bit of a looker, because much of her book is taken up with her lovers. One, for a relatively brief period, was a man Sam, and she comments: “after his death Sam became more vivid in my mind than many of my more important dead. I saw him with photographic clarity – still do.” I love that phrase – ‘my more important dead’ – it seems to me to really capture what it means to have lived a long time. Thankfully my list of important dead is short, and I am not sure if I want to live long enough for it to become long.

Curiously, as with Montaigne, a biography of whom I will review next, she seems to come to some sort of conclusion around life being worth living in and of itself. At the end, of the fern, she explains that it is growng fast, and comments:

I was right in thinking that I will never see it being a tree, but I underestimated the pleasure of watching it being a fern. It was worth buying.

SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END begins in an easy chatty manner, with Athill looking out the window, watching dogs play. She comments:

I have always wanted a pug and now I can’t have one, because buying a puppy when you are too old to take it for walks is unfair.

Then she talks about having recently ordered a tree fern, which turned out to be just a seedling:

Whether tree ferns grow quickly or slowly I don’t know, but even if it is quickly, it is not possible that I shall ever see this one playing the part I envisaged in our garden

.
Athill is clearly an elderly lady, and this it emerges is her theme:

We have, however, contrived to extend our falling away so much that it is often longer than our development, so what goes on in it and how to manage it is worth considering. Book after book has been written about being young, and even more of them about the elaborate and testing experiences that cluster around procreation, but there is not much on record about falling away. Being well advanced in that process, and just having had my nose rubbed in it by pugs and tree ferns, I say to myself: ‘ Why not have a go at it?” So I shall.

It’s true there is little in literature about being old, despite the fact that this will soon be a very long period of our ever longer lives, so I was interested to hear her perspective.

The main thing I gained from this novel is that, at least for Athill, as we grow older, we grow more accepting of death, which is comforting. I did struggle somewhat with the extent to which she drew on her response to her parents’ death as a model. Both her parents died when she was in her sixties and they in her eighties, so with respect I think she has little idea as to what early loss of those two people can be.

I strongly suspect Athill was a bit of a looker, because much of her book is taken up with her lovers. One, for a relatively brief period, was a man Sam, and she comments: “after his death Sam became more vivid in my mind than many of my more important dead. I saw him with photographic clarity – still do.” I love that phrase – ‘my more important dead’ – it seems to me to really capture what it means to have lived a long time. Thankfully my list of important dead is short, and I am not sure if I want to live long enough for it to become long.

Curiously, as with Montaigne, a biography of whom I will review next, she seems to come to some sort of conclusion around life being worth living in and of itself. At the end, of the fern, she explains that it is growng fast, and comments:

I was right in thinking that I will never see it being a tree, but I underestimated the pleasure of watching it being a fern. It was worth buying.

This is African sci-fi. Its set in a future dystopic Johannesburg. The premise is brilliant: certain people, who have committed crimes, have seen their guilt suddenly become manifest in the shape of animals. They need to remain close to these animals, or they suffer excruciating pain, and they develop close relationships to these creatures.

These people are known as the animaled, and some of the best parts of the book are the Wikipedia and IMDB entries inserted at random on the subject. We learn that one Aghan warlord has a penguin, a famous rapper has a hyena (later revealed to have just been a prop, intended to make him seem dangerous), and that as punishment in Indian jails, the animals are separated from the animaled.

Our lead character is a woman who is animaled with a sloth. She travels through Joburg trying to find a lost teenager she has been employed to locate, and we get to see much of Joburg re-imagined. Here is on one thing that has not changed in this imagined future: the walls of middle class homes

Not so much keeping the world out as keeping the festering middle class paranoia in.

The difficulty in this novel is unfortunately the plot. It’s long and complex, and full of characters we don’t care about. It’s an unavoidable truth that premises are often easier than plots, and it’s a truth that often trips up the sci-fi writer. Lauren Beukes creates a great world, with interesting characters, but, in may opinion, fails to string them together. All the same, I very much admire this book. It’s an attempt at a difficult genre in an unusual setting, and is a real contribution to the contemporary literature of our large continent.

Hilary Mantel won the Booker prize two years In a row, first for WOLF HALL, and then for this novel, BRING UP THE BODIES, which is the sequel.

The books follow the story of Cromwell , a man of lowly birth who rose to be one of Henry VII’s main advisers, helping him from one wife to the next. WOLF HALL covered the rise of Anne Bolyen; BRING UP THE BODIES tells the story of her fall.

One thing I find very enjoyable about these novels is the way in which they grow out a single national sensibility. They are just drenched in a kind of Englishness, a single way of looking at the world, which is I think – with international travel, immigration, and all the other flotsam and jetsam of globalization – growing increasingly rare. Here she is on the spring:

We are coming to the sweet season of the year, when the air is mild and the leaves pale, and lemon cakes are flavoured with lavender: egg custards, barely set, infused with a sprig of basil; elderflowers simmered in a sugar syrup and poured over halved strawberries.

It’s just gorgeously written, sentence for sentence; here’s shutting up the house

And now night falls on Austin Friars. Snap of bolts, click of key in the lock, rattle of strong chain across wicket, and the great bar fallen across the main gate. The boy Dick Purser lets out the watchdogs. The pounce and race, they snap at the moonlight, they flop under the fruit trees, heads on paws and ears twitching. When the house is quiet – when all his houses are quiet – then dead people walk about on the stairs.

It’s a beautiful evocation of a very detailed imagined world, Cromwell providing a kind of window on the sixteenth century. If I have a difficulty with the book it is that the world is better imagined than Cromwell himself. He really is a window, with little internal life – or little that I cared about. These ‘dead people on the stairs’ are his deceased children, who we keep going back to, and about whom I did not care. This is a rare false note in a very lovely novel.

It’s also very funny. Here we are on a scandal:

And if all the people who say they were there had really been there, then the dregs of London would have drained to the one spot, the goals emptied of thieves, the beds empty of whores, and all the lawyers standing on the shoulders of the butchers to get a better look.

And here’s a random man:

. . a man who stands by, smirking and stroking his beard; he thinks he looks enigmatic, but instead he looks as if he’s pleasuring himself

This novel is about a lawyer on the last day of her life. She plans to commit suicide, and one strand of the book follows her through that day with that knowledge within her. The other strands are contributed by the people who know her, who talk about the day in retrospect.

The main strength of this book lies in the powerful imagining of Joy’s internal life. It’s is as depressing a subject as HOPE: A TRAGEDY, which I read last, and yet it is at least as much about human endeavor, and possibility, as it is about meaningless and failure.

The other strands were less successful. She has a long on-and-off relationship with a man named Peter, who is presented as more or less a horrible manipulator. There is a particularly unsuccessful character, called Samir, who works in her office gym, and is an immigrant which apparently means he is an idiot. It’s interesting that the novel is written by a man, yet the best imagined character is a woman.

So some issues around caricature, but overall an enjoyable and engaging novel. There is also a rather charming evocation of office life. Here’s Peter:

. . . seeing the office as a sanctuary, a place where the wider world was both abbreviated and improved. Beautiful women. Pleasant furnishings. A range of enjoyable biscuits.

Good title, isn’t it? Also, it came highly recommended as one of the best books of 2012. THESE PEOPLE NEED TO SMOKE LESS CRACK.

Sensitive readers may be able to observe from the capitalized sentence that I may not have liked this book. Which I don’t. It involves this Jewish guy (and you will understand by the end of the sentence why I need to mention his ethnicity) who buys a nice farm house, and then finds Anne Frank in the attic. This sounds like it might be a funny set up, huh? WELL IT’S NOT. His middle class marriage is falling apart, and Anne Frank puts great pressure on it. Eventually in a useless way he loses his marriage and his job and dies in a fire. Richly deserved. This is book is possibly the apogee of that strand in contemporary fiction which uses a useless/purposeless/inadequate central character as a metaphor for the human condition. It’s depressing and annoying and more importantly makes for a boring book.

It’s also gratingly irritating that this very well-off middle class person feels that he is having a tough time due to the Holocaust. He’s immensely privileged, which truth he plays lip service to, and yet it never seems to penetrate his self-indulgent obsession with his great-grandparents experience. The part where I really lost my junk was where he asked:

“People in Holocaust books and movies were always worrying about their papers: getting them, not getting them, . . . What were papers anyway? Papers like what, like a passport?”

Also, and this is not entirely fair, he likes to go on and on about his gluten intolerance, an affliction which always annoys me anyway.

Reading back over these last two paragraphs I feel guilty about being so mean about this book. So let me mention some rather good parts. Here’s a reasonable definition about how I feel about god:

Kugel could never believe in God, but he could never not believe in him either; there should be a God, felt Kugel, even if there probably wasn’t

And on death:

Everyone shared the same final thought, and this was it: the bewildered, dumfounded statement of his own disappointing cause of death. Shark? Train? Really? I get hit by a train? Malaria? Fuck off. Malaria?

This is a gripping story about a man doing nothing.

Newland Archer is engaged to be married to a beautiful and innocent young lady, the flower of nineteenth century New York society. Then her cousin Ellen arrives, a slightly older lady with the whiff of scandal hanging on her. Archer begins to fall in love with Ellen, and so pushes forward with speeding up the wedding, so as to be safe. Once married, he realises that he is not at all safe, and is only falling further in love with his wife’s cousin.

I won’t tell you more, so as not to ruin if for you, but I will tell you that basically nothing happens. And so good a writer is Wharton that it is as compelling as watching a car crash. It’s also an awful meditation on what it means to accept what is given to you. Here’s Archer considering his marriage, his career, and his life in New York:

“The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.”

It’s a similar theme to the equally scarring ETHAN FROMME. I met someone at dinner last night who told me that everytime things are going well with a girl, he starts to worry there’s going to be a sledding accident. This is the effect this book can have when read at a tender age, and AGE OF INNOCENCE is the same. I can only wonder what awful personal choices Wharton is working through in these books.

Don’t however get the impression from this the book is not funny; it’s often extremely witty. Here is an obese old lady:

“The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosohpically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.”

The book is also interesting on the subject of gender, raising a question I have often wondered about: why did the men of the nineteenth century want innocent virgins so much? Wouldn’t it be boring? Wouldn’t you rather have someone who’d been around the block? I guess there is an evolutionary piece of this puzzle, but it is interesting to see Archer worry about it.

“It would presently be his task to take the bandage from this young woman’s eyes, and bid her look forth on the world. But how many generations of the women who had gone to her making had descended bandaged to the family vault? He shivered a little, remembering some of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance of the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because they had no use for them. What if, when he had bidden May Welland to open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness?”

Edith Wharton clearly fought the hard fight for women of her period, and it’s depressing to reflect that that battle still has to be fought. Google Jonathan Franzen’s barf making reflection on Wharton’s career, in which – believe it if you can – he goes on about . . .HER APPEARANCE. Here’s LA Review of Books reflection:

And later,(Franzen says) “Edith Wharton might well be more congenial to us now, if alongside her other advantages, she’d looked like Grace Kelly or Jacqueline Kennedy.”
Do we even have to say that physical beauty is beside the point when discussing the work of a major author? Was Tolstoy pretty? Is Franzen? Wharton’s appearance has no relevance to her work. Franzen perpetuates the typically patriarchal standard of ranking a woman’s beauty before discussing her merits, whether she is an intellectual, artist, politician, activist, or musician.

I mean, Franzen. Franzen. Be serious. I didn’t even know what Edith Wharton looks like. How you be grading weird old nineteenth century pictures of dead women?

Olive Schreiner was a most interesting woman. Born to a poor and conservative family in 1855, she became a freethinker, a feminist, a vegetarian, and astonishingly, South Africa’s first important novelist. Her claim to fame rests on this book, THE STORY OF AN AFRICAN FARM.

It’a superlatively odd novel. It begins with the story of three children living on a farm in the Karoo, then takes an abrupt left turn into an extended meditation on the existence of god – related bizarrely in the first person plural – and then staggers back to follow up on these children as adults.

The first section is for me the best, with many finely drawn characters, and a lovely depiction of the Karoo in the nineteenth century. Here is the fat and selfish woman who looks after the three kids:

“I know how it was when my first husband died. They could do nothing with me,” the Boer-woman said, “till I had eaten a sheep’s trotter, and honey, and a little roaster cake. I know.

“

And here’s the farm yard chicken:

Even the old hen seemed well satisfied. She scratched among the stones and called to her chickens when she found a treasure, and all the while tucked to herself with intense inward satisfaction.

The existential crisis that is coming casts a shadow over this part of the book, with this a recurring image:

The beetle was hard at work trying to roll home a great ball of dung it had been collecting all the morning: but Doss (the dog) broke the ball, and ate the beetle’s hind legs, and then bit off its head. And it was all play, and no one could tell what it had lived and worked for. A striving, and a striving, and an ending in nothing.

The existential agonising in the first person plural takes up a good third of the middle of the book, and damn, is it boring. I feel bad to say so, because it is also obviously painfully sincere. The child of missionaries, Schreiner clearly had to walk a very long and hard path before she could give up on god, and you do feel sorry for her, though you do wish she wouldn’t go on about it. It’s interesting to read it after MEMOIRS OF A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER, another book about this period. Now we accept that life may well be meaningless, almost as a matter of course, but there was clearly a period during which this idea was first being born, when it was for many people a horrifying and frightening concept. Which I guess it is, if you think about it for too long. But as Schreiner observes, near the end, when one of her characters is in mourning for another, and is sitting in the sun:

There will always be something worth living for while there are shimmery afternoons.

It’s as good a reason to live as any.