THE SMALL HOUSE AT ALLINGTON by Anthony Trollope

Yes, I’m on a massive Trollope kick. There’s no denying it. He’s just orderly. His world is rational. I LOVE it. I specifically saved this book for a long plane ride I had, and it was awesome. It’s just amazing how a book with a strong plot can erase an airport, annoying seat mate, etc etc. Not that I also didn’t watch 3 movies (Dear John – AVOID!, Remember Me – Robert Pattison and 9/11 – nuff said; and Green Zone – MOSTLY AVOID!) Anyway, in the small house at Allington lives a young lady called Lily Dale, apparently one of Trollope’s best loved heroines. Her cousin brings a young man Mr Crosbie down to stay, and the two fall in love. He asks her to marry him and she accepts.

This is usually where most Trollope novels end, but with this one our problems are only just beginning. Mr Crosbie is much admired at the Civil Service, where he works, and uses his small income to impress. He realises that if he gets married he’ll be trapped in a small house with babies and have hardly any income at all. A very modern worry really. So like two weeks later he asks this titled lady he’s known for some time to marry him instead. She also doesn’t have much money, but he thinks a titled connection will be good for his career, and he likes her well enough. She’s been on the market 14 years, so decides to cut her losses and accept.

Lily is made totally miserable by this desertion. Interestingly, so is Crosbie. He finds he has nothing in common with his new wife, and is expected to keep up a way of life way beyond his income. In addition, his social circle are not impressed with him for jilting Lily. He gets attacked at a train station by one John Eames, who is in love with Lily, and wants to avenge her. He asks Lily to marry him, and she refuses, saying she is married to Crosbie in her heart. Which is a bit bizarre.

What I loved about this book was the writing style (smooth as butter!), the dilemma of Crosbie (it was very interesting to see someone make personal calculations of that kind) and of course meeting people from the other novels in the series. It’s like coming across a different period in your life, quite unexpectedly, because I read some of these novels ages ago.

Last: did you know Trollope wrote every day for three hours, without fail? 250 words every 15 minutes, and he said he didn’t understand all the agonising and wall staring; it’s just discipline. He said he attributed his whole success in life to the discipline of early hours. Let’s put that in our lazy pipes and smoke it.

CIDER WITH ROSIE by Laurie Lee


This is an apparently quite famous memoir of a childhood spent in the Cotswolds immediately after the First World War. This guy is one of the youngest in a family of eight. His father has taken a job in town, and never comes to the country, simply sending money (and not exactly tons of it) to his wife to look after the children. Not all of them are hers; some are his from a previous marriage. But luckily for him he is not too bothered by any of them.

The book is quite poetic in style, and evokes quite beautifully the country life. It’s also quite interesting from a historic point of view. On the one hand, everyone seems very happy, in a sort of wasn’t village life wonderful kind of way, but then on the other hand people keep killing themselves. So that was weird.

Anyway, it was a good book I guess and has sold 6 million copies but it didn’t do much for me.

GLOBALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS by Joseph E Stiglitz


This book could also be called WHY I FUCKING HATE THE IMF by Joseph E Stiglitz. This guy but really hates the IMF. He goes through various economic crises – the East Asian one of the 90s, and the end of Communisum in Eastern Europe being the main ones, and castigates the Fund’s mindset, policies and practices. In short, there’s nothing he doesn’t fucking hate about the IMF.

Basically, the Fund was set up to ensure that if any country got into deep economic trouble, there would be a body that existed to help it out. In the Great Depression of the 1930s, it was found that government spending helped resuscitate the economy. I guess that’s kind of Economics 101. The Fund was supposed to help countries stay stable, and when they weren’t, help them out.

According to Stiglitz, the IMF was run by fundamentalist free market thinkers. Thus, their definition of what was best for a country was always less government, no matter what the circumstances. This worked well when the Fund dealt with some South American countries, which had massive governments and bloated budgets, but not so well in many other countries, especially when their economies were having a downturn. They’d insist on less government, and less government spending, which tended to make everything worse. They’d also try and prop up the exchange rate through billions in loans (which the residents of say, Indonesia, had to pay back in the end). However, they’d somehow only manage to prop it up for long enough for foreign banks and local fat cats to get their money out and then the whole place would fall apart, with the poorest hardest hit.

So anyway, the problem I have is that I don’t much about economics, and he doesn’t present the opposite view, so I’ve no idea how right he is. I have to say, it sounds pretty right to me. One thing he points out is that most of the people who run the IMF are from a very small group – finance ministers and bankers, who all tend to have very similar ideas about what is best. Apparently it’s common to go from the IMF right to a major global bank and back again. I mean, even if you’re not a monster or whatever, it’s clear whose interests you’ll be serving. Certainly not the starving village guy in Indonesia. And despite the IMF being a public institution, there’s not much accountability to any public, or much public debate. Thus, while a guy in a village in Indonesia is paying, for sure, he doesn’t have a say.

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S by Truman Capote


Well, you won’t be surprised to hear that this is not very much like the movie. I seem to recall the movie is some kind of half love story or something. Yes, well, the short story is not. In fact, it’s quite a sad meditation on feelings of belonging and home. It’s about this writer, whose upstairs neighbour, who he becomes friendly with, is a young woman who is sort of high class prostitute. She doesn’t feel at home anywhere, and is looking for a place where she feels safe, like Tiffany’s. It is sad, and kind of literary. Not so much like the movie.

There were other short stories in this book, which were enjoyable too, if slightly odd. One was about a Haitian child/teenage prostitute who falls in love and gets married. Honest to god, what is Truman Capote doing writing about this? Wasn’t he like mega wealthy and as gay as possible? How did he hit upon this as a subject about which he knew something? Anyway, it was sort of weirdly romantic tale of child abuse. Now that’s not something you get every day.

WOLF HALL by Hilary Mantel

This one won the Booker this year. It got quite famous as far as literary novels get famous. The sides of buses carried adverts for it saying ‘Stop talking about it and start reading it’ which I thought was quite funny. So anyway, I’ve read it. It’s about an assistant of Cardinal Wolsey’s, called Thomas Cromwell, who, after Wolsey’s fall from grace, takes over as a helper to Henry VIII in his attempts to ditch Katherine for Anne Boleyn.

On the one hand, it was kind of a ye-olde-strong-on-the-plot historical novel; on the other, it was kind of literary. The plot part told how Thomas Cromwell was a blacksmith’s son who ran away to fight in wars on the continent. He got all tough and brilliant and spoke a ton of languages and got very close to the king. This was kind of fun front seat of history stuff, it was interesting how they loved to eat thin sliced apples in cinnamon, and how people dropped dead of various diseases left and right. I found it a bit dubious that everyone was supposed to be terrified of our hero, but then he was as written totally sympathetic. But the literary-ish stuff was lovely. Here’s a good bit – mid historical drama, it’s suddenly: “He stares down into the water, now brown, now clear as the light catches it, but always moving; the fish in its depths, the weeds, the drowned men with bony hands swimming.” It’s also kind of a love letter to London, in the way she writes about it.

One thing I found very weird was that it’s called WOLF HALL, right, but we never get to freaking Wolf Hall. It’s mentioned, but it’s not even important. Not even metaphorically. Not so far as I can tell. Maybe I’m missing something.

MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS by Tracy Kidder


This one was a true story about a man called Paul Farmer who has had a lot of success in improving public health for the poor. It all began when he went to Haiti during college, and was appalled. Impressively, bit by bit, he managed to set up an extremely good public health system in a very poor area in Haiti. His work spread to other countries, and he’s had a wide impact. Apparently the way in which TB was being treated globally was encouraging the development of MDR (multiple drug resistant TB) which is obviously very dangerous. The central problem in treating it was that the drugs were deemed too expensive, and managing patient lifestyles (food security, etc etc) too difficult. He managed to get the drugs made cheaper, and also entirely shift the paradigm for what was possible in monitoring patient lifestyles.

So all very impressive. He is really dedicated to the idea that you ought to work for the poor, because that’s a good in itself, a clear area of moral clarity. He doesn’t think you should work for money, or even for a feeling of personal efficacy (which was interesting, as I’d just been feeling jealous of just that aspect of his life!). In fact, he himself feels deeply guilty when not focused on working for the poor. I have often noticed that when Americans come to Africa they are amazed by the poverty. They can’t believe it is possible, or should be allowed. They just think it shouldn’t be possible, and is some kind of insult to the world. Which is maybe the right way to see it, but it’s also a very first world, naïve view. But whatever. He still saved thousands and thousands of peoples lives. You can’t argue with that.

Well maybe you can a little bit. It was an interesting book, but I had a couple of difficulties with it that made it a slightly uncomfortable read. For one thing, I’m not really sure I think that much money should be being spent on health. I’m not sure that there’s any point in just keeping people alive, basically through donations, without creating jobs, environmental sustainability, political stability etc. You shouldn’t just be pumping up population levels, because that will just make all the other problems worse, which will mean more issues for health, and thus more donations etc etc. So I’m not sure it’s actually the right priority. I know it sounds really cold, but if I was running a government, I’d spend much more money on education than on health. I think education starts to feed back and fix problems on its own, in a way improving health just doesn’t. Though then the books tells how one of Farmer’s clinics was bombed by the Shining Path guerillas, because they thought that these small improvements of the poor’s life just delayed the necessary revolution. I can’t deny I do sort of see the logic. So that made me feel a bit Pol Pot.

THIS SEPTEMBER SUN by Bryony Rheam


I realised a couple of years ago that your average American and I were very different, in that a 30 year old American has seen versions of themselves and their lives in books, and in films and TV, thousands of times. In fact, they rarely see anything that isn’t about some version of their life. Whereas, for a Zimbabwean, I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen me or someone like me represented in the arts, or in media. In fact, as a Zimbabwean in the diaspora, I can’t think when I’ve ever seen me. Until I read THIS SEPTEMBER SUN.

Ms Rheam was born in 1974, and thus this is, thankfully, not another how-we-survived-the-war white person story, because like me she doesn’t really remember the war. This book is about life in Zimbabwe since Independence, and then about life in the diaspora – London to be exact – with a classic what-am-I-doing-with-my-life story line, that I am familiar with not from fiction but from the actual diasporic Zimbabweans I know.

Basically, the book tells the story of a young girl, Ellie, who is very close to her grandmother. She leaves Zimbabwe to got to university in the UK, and her gran dies. She comes back and gets involved in reading her gran’s letters and diaries, and the second half of the book is largely flashbacks to her grandmother’s early life, when she moved to Zim from the UK and had a tortured romance. It ends in the present, with the young woman getting married and moving from London to Mocambique.

The book is in general very well observed. At one point, for example, Ellie rejoices in sleeping in a Zimbabwean bed, noticing particularly how the sheets smell of sunlight, from being dried outdoors. Occasionally there did seem to be a little too much tolerance of the sentimental cliche; she closes one chapter by saying something along the lines of how she loved her daughter, but just didn’t know how to show it. Oh dear.

I went to a talk with the author, who seemed a very nice woman. She said that she is struggling to get her book published outside Zim, and she thinks it is because no one wants personal stories, or romances, from Zim – they only want political tales, and the obviously topical. There was a Shona man there who lectures I think at a University in Zim, and he said he had never really read any white Zimbabwean literature before, and how he felt it ought to be on the syllabus, as minority work. It was very sweet, because he was explaining to us what he learnt from the book about the white community; that it’s a very small one, and that people are constantly leaving it.

GULAG ARCHIPELAGO (Contd)


This book has taken me months to read. This is not because it is boring, but because it is so sad it is hard to keep going. It is sad like real life is sad, because the sadness has no rhyme or reason or moral. If you didn’t read my earlier post, GULAG ARCHIPELAGO tells the story of the death camps that existed in Stalinist Russia from the 1930s onwards, and is written by a man who survived them. Obviously, the state was not keeping good records of what was going on – indeed, they were trying to cover it up – and most free people did not know what the camps were like. Solzhenitsyn clearly strongly felt that all the people he met should not have died entirely unmourned and in vain, so he set to record as much of it as he could, based on the people he himself met, and those others met.

The cover has a quote from the Preface “For years I have with reluctant heart withheld from publication this already completed book: my obligations to those still living outweighed my obligation to the dead. But now that State Security has seized the book anyway, I have no alternative but to publish it immediately.” It got seized because a woman he entrusted part of the manuscript to broke down after A HUNDRED AND TWENTY HOURS of interrogation without sleep, and revealed its location, and the poor woman was so distressed by the betrayal that she killed herself.

What’s perhaps saddest about the book is the way in which he’s clearly writing about events that are so current. He gives lots of tips about how to survive prison – like practical stuff about surviving the thirst when they feed you only very salty fish and a half mug of water a day, and about how you must give away anything of value right away, as a man who has something to lose is a man who fears, and that’s lethal – really sort of awful grim advice – and it’s clear he’s doing this because many of the people reading will be going to prison themselves.

Guess how many people were in the Gulag at any time? Answers on a postcard. Oh, okay, I’ll just tell you. SIX TO TWELVE MILLION. And this is not prison, this is death camps. Often, you’d spend a month in a transport, with a hundred people in a railcar meant for twenty, and corpses thrown out at every stop (this is when you get the fish and water and nothing else), and when you get to the end of the line in Siberia, there is nothing there. Nothing at all. You are just going to build the camp right there. But it’s -30C, so you can’t dig into the ground, you just lie under tarpaulins in thin clothes (the guards steal all your warm clothes) and are sent to work everyday. And all you get to eat is fish, and just flour, that you wash down with SNOW. So obviously, almost everybody dies.

The authorities know that the public are aware that there are a lot of arrests, but they want to keep the full scale secret, so when it comes time to transport prisoners – one example given is a thousand a day, from one medium size town – they move them all at night. The government fears there’d be an outcry if the public are able to grasp the full breadth of the arrests. They used to write ‘Meat’ or ‘Bread’ on the cars(of which there wasnt much of either) so people would even be encouraged by thinking there was food in the country. One of the saddest parts of the book is when he tells you all about how once when they were changing trains, he and the others were hidden between two cars, and they got to listen to music from a nearby bar, and hear people laughing, and how they were all so incredibly happy. He goes on and on about this, like it was a highlight, and it was only twenty minutes.

In one cell, before going to the death camp, there were a lot of scientists. The reason for this is lots of intelligensia got sent to death camps authomatically, because they were bourgeoisie traitors etc. But once the government got rid of all the scientists, they realised: fuck, we don’t have any scientists. So they called them all back. Our man Solzhenitsyn only lived to tell the tale because on his prison card for occupation he wrote ‘nuclear phyisist.’ And their records were so bad, they believed him. Their records were so bad they often didn’t know if you were supposed to serve 10 or 25 years, so they just kept you for 25 years on general prinicples. I mean obviously only if you actually managed to live that long. Anyway, so in this cell, they used to have ‘Cell 72 Scientific Society’ that met every day after morning bread ration by the left window. Can you imagine?

Just the only last thing that really killed me, is that lots of people in the cells were WWII veterans. Can you imagine making it through the war to end up in a death camp? Our author was one. And he tells such grim stories about the war – how once he saw a Russian whipping a German who he had roped up to his carriage, like a horse. And he tells us how he did nothing about it. Solzhenitsyn feels that prison purifies, which is interesting. Lots and lots of people went insane, but if you don’t, he says you are purified. When he gets out, he honestly can’t grasp where other peoples’ problems are coming from. He says ‘What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I’ll spell it out for you right now. Do no pursue what is illusory – property and position: all that is gained at the expesne of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life – don’t be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn’t last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don’t claw at your insides. If you back isn’t broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes see,and if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all.’ And I try and hear him, because you get the very clear idea that he’s walked a long hard road to get somewhere.

FRAMLEY PARSONAGE by Anthony Trollope


Oh yes we are back on the Trollope. Book 4 or something or the Barchester series. I woke up at 2.30am the other day, and it was not a good night, so I decided to read and it kept me going till 4.30.

This parson agrees to provide security for an apparently wealthy man he wants to impress and ends up deep in debt and shame. This parson’s sister loses her father and comes to live with the parson. The parson’s good friend, a peer, falls in love with her. He then rescues the parson from his debt. Happy ending!

Fabulous, sweet little book. Everything you need to know about the style is encapsulated in the title of the last chapter ‘How they all got married and had two children and lived happily ever after’

AND you get characters from other books popping up in minor roles. Love it.

THE BOTTOM BILLION by Paul Collier


Subtitled: Why the Poorest Counties are Failing and What Can Be Done About It

Basically, this guy thinks that most peoples’ lives in the developing world are getting better (eg Brazil etc). However, there are about a billion people in the poorest countries whose lives are not improving at all and show no signs of improving. He thinks aid etc should be focused almost entirely on this relatively small group of countries, and its a matter of habit/culture that development assistance is not focused that way.

He argues that these countries are stuck in poverty because of one of more of these traps: conflict, massive natural resources, being landlocked with bad neighbours, and bad governance. He suggests various measures which include assisting elites in these countries to turn things around (by for example producing model charters that can be easily adapted), military intervention (eg Sierra Leone, which was a huge success for British military intervention – saved many lives – and never gets talked about), and removing trade barriers.

He has some amusing things to say about the current state of aid work, pointing out that one reason for the focus outside the bottom billion is that everyone would rather be posted to Rio than Bangui. He spends quite a lot of time bashing on Bangui (extra points if you know where that’s the capital of?). Apparently the World Bank doesn’t have a single person stationed there, though it’s one of the poorest countries in Africa (little clue there for you).

His arguments seem to have plenty of merit, but it’s hard to tell, as I know very little about eg. international trade law, and he doesnt really present the other side of the question at all. Which makes one a little dubious. One feels even more dubious when he declares that the economics department of one university is either niave or ‘has been infiltrated by Marxists.’ What the hell does that mean? ‘Infiltrate’ is quite sort of emotionally laden and Cold War, but it’s better than Marxist! Who even uses that word any more? Why doesn’t he just say . . . has a generally leftist view’ or something.

He tells some sad stories. In 2004, a study was done to see how money was spent in rural clinics in Chad. What the study found was, don’t worry about how it’s spent, less than 1% of it even gets to the clinics in Chad – the rest is pilfered by various officials as it leaves central government. Nice.