OUR HUSBAND HAS GONE MAD AGAIN by Ola Rotimi


I was fortunate to be taught by Ola Rotimi at university in the US. He appeared at that time entirely circular, due to the huge number of layers he wore against the Minnesota cold. He was a charming and intelligent man, with a fiery passon for African theatre, and a great many opinions on all subjects from the World Bank (very negative) to palm wine (very positive). He once bought me a theatre ticket, and signed the card to ‘his little African sister.’ A lovely man. He passed away in 2000.

OUR HUSBAND HAS GONE MAD AGAIN is my favourite of all his works. It carries a genuinely crazy West African energy, and you can’t help but adore it’s fine disregard for Western realism. The play tells the story of one Major Lejoka-Brown, who despite having left the army many years ago, and made a fortune in cocoa, still carries himself as a miltary man, and now that he is entering politics is organising his campaign on bizarrely miliatry lines.

Before the play begins, he has married a Kenyan woman, Liza, who has since been studying medicine in the US. She is now on her way to live with him in Nigeria, and is unaware that he has not one, but two other wives, and the Major is determined to keep it that way. Really he loves Liza, and the two wives are sort of unintentional: one is much older, his late brother’s wife, who he had to marry as per Muslim custom, and the other much younger, who he married to advance his political career. Liza arrives and predictably discovers the two other wives; but from there on it all becomes more and more unpredictable. Liza forges allegiances with the wives, teaching the older about supply and demand, so she becomes a chicken magnate, and inciting the younger to oppose the Major in his ludicrous election.

There’s a wild mix of ideas here, about gender equity, old and new Nigerias, bikinis and hijabs, etc etc. It’s a lovely little show. The plot is maybe a teensy bit weak, but somehow I really don’t care.

HARPERS December 2010


My Harpers is here!

There is always something interesting I didn’t know about in this magazine. For example, who knew that there were ‘content mills’ for the internet. From the Dept of We’re-All-Going-to-Hell-in-a-Handbasket:

“. . . consider the example of Demand Media, a so-called content-mill, which uses a vast collection of Web-recruited freelancers to generate articles for about $15 per 300-word item; copy editors are said to get $2.50 for each piece they correct. The outfit’s editorial direction is chartered by what the company’s prospectus calls “our propeitary algorithms,” which is to say, equations that mainly weigh two factors: what perople are searching for on Google and what advertisers might pay to associate themselves with a given topic.” (EASY CHAIR by Thomas Frank)

Even more proper newspapers, like USA Today, have used these mills. Journalism is dead and we are all totally screwed.

Let me just close off by saying something that is not strictly relevant, but has been bothering me for some time. What is going on with Julian Assange’s hair? Is it prematurely white? Or is it white in the usual way, but his face is freakishly young? Or what? These journalists keep reporting on Wikileaks, but no one is asking the real questions.

NATIVE SON by Richard Wright


According to the back: “NATIVE SON follows the fortunes of Bigger Thomas, a young black man who is trapped in a life of poverty in the slums of Chicago. Unwittingly involved in a wealthy woman’s death, he is hunted relentlessly, baited by prejudiced officials, charged with murder and driven to acknowledge a strange pride in his crime.”

Well, sort of. But actually this undersells this novel, making it sound like a straightforward condemnation of racial attitudes in America in the twentieth century, with Bigger the innocent victim of an evil system. In fact, Bigger is a complex character. He is presented as violent, and frustated, and I’m not sure we can describe his murder as entirely unwitting. He most wittingly continues by burning the lady in a furnace, to cover up his crime, and demands a ransom from her parents. He then goes on to rape and murder his girlfriend when he fears she will expose him. When the white woman’s bones are discovered in the furnace, he goes on the run, and is eventually captured, tried, and sentenced to death. However, without making Bigger in any way a saint, or implying he is not responsible for his actions, the book still manages to put Bigger’s society on trial, rather than Bigger himself.

This book was written in 1940, and made Wright the first best selling black novelist in the US. I think it was remarkably brave at such a period to present such a negative portrait of a black man, and a remarkable feat of writing skill to ensure we feel sympathy for him. This reader, at any rate, found it easy to understand his frustration, and even the sense of joy and freedom he felt once he had committed the murder. He finally feels as if he has some sort of control over his own life, and is at last a person to be reckoned with.

The first two sections, ‘Fear,’ about his life before the murder, and ‘Flight’ about his life after it, are beautifully written. Clear, compelling, gorgeously unpretentious (save for one terrible sex scene). The last, ‘Fate’ is not quite up to this standard. It covers his trial, and has some dreadful unconvincing set pieces, in the way of speeches to the jury, and a heroic but misguided attempt to have Bigger realise what has been wrong in his life in his last moments.

The back again, from David Mamet: NATIVE SON is, in addition to being a masterpiece, a Great American Novel”. Mr Mamet, you are still a mysoginist. But you are right about Native Son.

BRITAIN’S WORLD CUP BID or, Being Safe in Elevators


In an unexpected departure for this blog, let’s talk about football for a moment. This doesn’t really count in a blog about reading, expect in so far as if you are literate you cannot fail to have read about the UK losing the World Cup. In fact, even if you aren’t literate. Even if you are living in a box, pretty much.

Now I don’t care at all about the World Cup. But, what makes me cross is the fact that apparently the British bid team were told that it was the British media that hurt the bid’s chances. This is clearly a thinly veiled reference to the allegations on Panorama about the World Cup bidding being totally corrupt, which no doubt were entirely correct.

So who do they give it to instead? RUSSIA. Which is certainly not going to have it’s bid effected by any small inconvenience such as a goddamn FREE PRESS. No, no, if you had anything to say about the World Cup in a Russian newspaper, you better watch out next time you get into an ELEVATOR. Let’s take a moment here to salute ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA! (If you don’t know who you are saluting: here)

It makes me proud to be British. Or 30% British. Or whatever I am.

WHITE MAN’S BURDEN by William Easterly


I’ve only just begun this one but I just had to give you an update. So far it’s very interesting, mostly it seems an attempt to discredit THE END OF POVERTY, which I blogged about earlier this year here. However, he makes some incredibly quaint statements, such as positing that markets are – get this – “the ideal vehicle for feedback and accountability”.

How charmingly pre-credit crunch! The sweetly naïve good old days of 2007. I am very much not noticing the jails overcrowded with AIG employees, or the unemployment queues full of traders from Goldman Sacs. Feedback. Ha ha. Accountability. Ha bloody ha.

THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA by Stendhal

I kept meaning to read something by Stendhal, ever since I learnt about Stendhal Syndrome. Quite different to Stockholm Syndrome, this is when you are so overwhelmed by the beauty of a place or event that you become ill. Apparently, this happened to Stendhal when he first went to Florence. It makes me feel a bit inadequate. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so overcome by beauty that it made me ill. Though actually, come to think of it, I was sick in Florence. But that had more to do with an quaint traditional sandwich I had than with great art. The filling was all juicy and . . . bouncy. I don’t eat much meat, so I just thought, maybe I’ve just forgotten what meat tastes like. But then I looked at the filling itself, and immediately feeling some serious concerns, looked it up in the phrase book, and found out it was SHEEP STOMACH.

So that was more sheep stomach syndrome than stendahl syndrome. Though I did learn a valuable lesson: do not eat apparently quaint and traditional foods in foreign countires without doing your research.

Anyway, THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA. First of all, extra points for a great title. This book tells the story of one Fabrizio del Dongo, the younger son of a wealthy nobleman, who is inspired by liberal ideals runs away to support Napoleon, arriving just in time for the walloping defeat of Waterloo. He is then in trouble with his very conservative father and has to go on the run, escaping various perils from treacherous courtiers to enraged actors. He is sheilded by his aunt, with whom, in a bizarre turn of events, he starts to have an incestuous relationship. I can’t tell you what happens after that because I kind of gave up on page 225. It was just ridiculous, he kept going from one swashbuckling adventure to the next and I got bored. Either there is something wrong with Stendhal or with Sarah.

There were a few great bits. The French Revolution has only taken place some fiftly years before, and there is a very interesting series of discussions about what the end of reverence for nobility means for nobles such as Fabrizio. There are some hilarious minature pen portraits, such as, on the people of nineteenth century Parma: “they sat on the pavement eating icecream and criticizing passersby;” or, on discussing rural peoples’ superstitions – “What do you expect! These people had hardly read four books in their whole lives!”

HARPER’S – November 2010


As you can see, I am catching up with my HARPERS addiction . . .

From the Dept. of Well Okaaaay :

“Also a Western conceit is a vampire’s pallor; whereas female vampires are beautiful and white robed, most firsthand accounts indicate that male vampires are ruddy, corpulent peasants, whose affect – once unearthed – is that of a freshly gorged mosquito. In animal form, the vampire is not strictly limited to the bat but can appear to its victims as a cat, a dog, a rodent or even a butterfly. These manifestations are not to be confused with vampires that were never human in the first place, which may even assume a vegetal guise (among numerous indignities through history, the Roma suffered the obscure nuisance of vampire watermelons).”
Twilight of the Vampires: Hunting the real-life undead” By Tea Obreht

In other news, from the Harper’s Index:
Percentage increase since 1960 in the average weight of a farm-raised US Turkey = 72
Chance that an American couple who met since 2007 met online = 1 in 4

HARPER’S October 2010


This is the only magazine I read regularly, Harper’s. My lovely friend Dio gave me a subscription. My favourite bit is the Index, which is a page of sobering statistics. A sample:

Percent of the entire national income taken by the wealthiest 10% of Americans in 2007 = 50

Chance that a Chinese criminal prosecution will result in a guilty vedict = 9 in 10

And, one to think about when next you have a drink or two:

Chance that a Briton who has sent a sexually explicit text message has sent it to the wrong person = 1 in 5

BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES by Tom Wolfe


This is a famous novel of 1980s New York.

It’s main character is Sherman McCoy, a fabulously wealthy bond trader with a fashionable wife and a younger mistress. It’s all feels very apropos our current obsession with filthy bankers. There’s lots of shouting and making huge amounts of money for not too damn much in the way of actual work. However, they occasionally break off from this mythic money making to use a pay phone, or to send a fax, which gives the whole thing a sweetly quaint air.

One day, Sherman picks his mistress up at the airport in his Mercedes sportscar, and they get lost in the Bronx. They hit a young black man and leave the scene. The story follows the collapse of Sherman’s life as this incident is investigated and prosecuted.

It’s an immensely cynical novel. There is not a single character in it who is no driven by ulterior motives: the criminal case is twisted by all sorts of people (journalists, ministers, judges) for their own personal gain. This dark view of the city and the era is so insistent, and so powerfully stated, and re-stated, and stated again just in case we missed it, that I kept expecting Sherman to finally change, to grow, to provide some kind of climax or rebuke to this world, if only because it seemed artistically necessary, after 713 pages of gloom. Not so: Sherman is crushed by events, no doubt just as he deserves.

There are women in this book, and they come in two varieties: no, not the usual madonna or whore, but pretty or ugly. That’s pretty much it for the women. All the men, no matter how differently their characters are drawn, share the same view of women. That is, they like to view them, but only if they are under 25. All married men are by definition unhappy apparently. I think I can guarantee that Tom Wolfe is unmarried, or if he is married, that the lady is a good bit younger than he is.

VICTORIANA ALERT! Apparently Wolfe was inspired to write this book in part by Thackeray’s VANITY FAIR. He wanted to write a great novel of the city, of New York, and was inspired by the older novel’s presentation of London. This gives us an interesting perspective on the title. Extra points for naming main female character in Vanity Fair. NO GOOGLING.