Tag: Female writer

OCTOBER’S CHILD by Linda Bostrom Knausgard

Linda Bostrom Knausgard’s husband, Karl Ove Knausgard, wrote six horrifyingly honest volumes about his life. Of course, you cannot write about your life without writing about the people around you. So despite my never having read a book by this woman before, I know a lot about her. More about her than most people I know in real life. For example: Karl Ove had such an enormous crush on her that when they kissed for the first time he embarrassed himself by FAINTING WITH JOY.

This book is about her time institutionalized for depression, and especially about her electroconvulsive therapy, which is as bad as it sounds. I didn’t know people still did this at all, but apparently Sweden is an outlier globally in using it heavily. It was a gripping little book, about the institution, and about the fragments of memory left to her by the treatment. It was interesting to hear the other side of Karl Ove’s version of their marriage.

Let me end with this fun aspect of their apparently very artsy marriage. They are on vacation:

When we finally got to the hotel all we saw were palm trees and greenery, endless shadows and hills. You looked over the landscape and said, What the fuck is this?

It turned out we were in Mauritius and not in the Maldives, your dream destination, and I spent the entire vacation in the shade with the children saying, Oh, how lovely it is here in Mauritius. Mauritius. Mauritius. It served him right.

How do you not find out you are going to Mauritius not the Maldives until you actually get there?!?

SISTERS BY A RIVER by Barbara Comyns

I am really getting into this writer big time.  This book is apparently semi-autobiographical and if so: wow.  It tells about a family of sisters growing up in a crumbling mansion who are left pretty much to their own devices.  Try this story of how their parents got together:

. . .  he thought she looked very nice so he said ‘When you grow up I will marry you ask your Mother to teach you how to cook’ He bought her a goat and a white kitten to remember him by, but the goat burst and the kitten was run over by a train . .

The book is full of strange, fanciful stuff, a weird evocation of childhood, where you don’t know quite what is real and what is not.  And when you accept what is happening around you is normal:

Once when Beatrix was a baby he (their father) got so furious because of her crying her threw her down the stairs, fortunately a cook called Harriat caught her . . after that Harriat kept her in her bedroom at night so that he couldn’t hear her crying which was a good thing in case there hadn’t been anyone to catch her the next time, but Harriat had to leave soon after because her feet smelt.

I mean: ?!?  Comyns went on to have an inspirationally varied life: lived everywhere, worked multiple jobs (many of them bizarre), struggled with the rent, failed as a painter, succeeded as a writer.  What a woman, what an example to us all. 

QUARTET IN AUTUMN by Barbara Pym

Here is a novel about how you ought to love your co-workers. It tells the story of four older people, two men and two women, working in an office together. None have any close family, and all live alone. They spend all day together, do not have much use for holidays, and yet do not make much effort to get to know each other. They begin to retire, and are at a loss without work and each other. Okay, that’s not really true: it’s far more subtle and sad than that sentence suggests; but it’s more or less what happens.

It’s a remarkably good novel about many things, among them lost opportunities and what your life amounts to. Pym is an amazing writer, and it’s mind-blowing that this novel, written in 1977, just before her death, was her first to be published in 16 years. Her agent had rejected her last, and this had apparently silenced her for a couple of decades. She got her own back, getting a Booker nomination, so BOOM.

SELECTED STORIES by Dorothy Parker

Surprisingly feminist set of short stories, written in the 1930s. Not so fun as I thought they would be. I thought Parker was supposed to be a comic author but in fact these are acidic and rather sad, and deal with difficult subjects (like really difficult, like backstreet abortions), almost as if being female in the 1930s was not always all that easy.

ACTS OF INFIDELITY by Lena Andersson

ACTS OF INFIDELITY is the sequel to the wonderful WILFUL DISREGARD, and the central character, Esther, is once again in love. It’s totally scarring. As the author says:

What has happened will happen again sooner or later, somewhere, sometime. And it’s likely that it will happen again to the same person because people have their patterns.

Esther is once again in love with an unavailable man, who acts as if he might be available. Putting it like this, you feel like you wouldn’t have sympathy with her, but you totally do. She tries so hard not to make the same mistakes as last time, but she does.

Friends always told Esther that men don’t leave their wives, but things had to change for her at some point. No two people were identical. If she kept trying, one fine day the course of events would align with her view of how the world should be.

Esther is a serious person, not a pathetic teenager, despite the fact that she acts a bit like a pathetic teenager. Please enjoy this sample of her misery, where she is thinking of giving up on a book she is writing

The world had enough books already and even if excess was a prerequesite for exceptional specimens she didn’t have to contribute to the rubbish so that the flowers of others could grow on the dump. She pushed through and stayed her course a little longer. Nothing ever got done if you thought it was meaningless. In order to have the energy to care about life itself, you had to exaggerate its importance.. . . When no reply came, she fell into a torture chamber. From down there, she called Olaf and asked how he was doing.

“Fine thanks. Just great. The birds are chirping, it’s spring”

MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY by Winifred Watson

In this book a woman finally gives up on her childhood dreams. It is inspirational. The woman was brought up strictly, in a vicarage. She has never married, and is now a governess. She leads a rather joyless, but rigidly upright, life. Then she is sent in error to a job interview for a maid, and meets a young woman who is cycling through a large number of wealthy men, looking for love and backing for her theatre career. It’s amoral but apparently a lot of fun. Here is a sample of one of the women she meets, a beautician, telling about her late husband:

“If you act “ marriage or nothing” they generally give you marriage. I was very lucky. I went to his head, but he couldn’t stand the pace. He got a nice tombstone and I got the parlour.”

The governess gives up her old ideas, throws herself in a life of nightclubs and hair dye, and is much happier. It’s a silly, sort of dated book, but I enjoyed it as a story about how it’s never too late to find your own personal freedom.

CODES OF LOVE by Hannah Persaud

I found this in a second hand shop for £1. It is a never-ending chore, finding something to read, so sometimes it is nice to not have a preference and rely on chance. It turned out to be a pretty interesting book about a failing marriage. This couple agreed to have an open marriage, though this was really the wife’s preference rather than the husband’s. It ws supposed to only imply anonymous one night stands. The husband however falls in love with a woman named Ada, and they start an affair. Meanwhile, Ada is busy falling in love with the wife. Drama!

I admit though I just couldn’t get into it, and the reason is not very attractive: it filled me with class rage. I was feeling okay about the story until the wife casually mentions that their children go to DULWICH COLLEGE. And this while complaining about the traffic as she DRIVES FROM DULWICH TO PECKHAM. Shut the f*ck up. If you live in London these indicators will tell you that these are revoltingly upper middle class characters, and that shouldn’t be a problem except it is. Also I thought it was strange that the author seemed to think the characters main problem was their marriage. They also don’t really have any friends and barely speak to their teenage children. Like I think their problems run deeper than their marriage, probably having their roots in all that UNEARNED INCOME.

MARY BARTON by Elizabeth Gaskell

Appallingly, I may have become too woke for Victorian literature. I hope not, because I have always liked Elizabeth Gaskell. But this book, MARY BARTON, I had to give up. The title character is a young seamstress who it is clear is about to be led astray by a wealthy man. There are lot of warnings about getting puffed up by vanity and etc. I just couldn’t slog through to where this poor girl gets her just deserts. Her aunt had followed the same path and there is a gross/laughable section in which we meet her as a despondent prostitute.

That said, Gaskell was woke by the standards of her day. In the introduction, she speaks about how she wrote this book to speak for the working classes, who she unself-consciously calls ‘this dumb people’. She is making a valiant effort to capture the lives of the poor, and It is interesting to reflect that even so recently as 1848, working class people had so little access to literacy, or leisure for writing, that indeed they had no hope of writing their own story.

WILFUL DISGREGARD by Lena Andersson

This book shows how love is a madness, and not in a cute fun way. This woman meets this semi-famous artist (I mean, let’s not be silly: artists not famous, except in a tiny bubble, but anyway she lives in that bubble). They go out to dinner a lot, talk a lot, but nothing HAPPENS. Then finally things HAPPEN, like three times, and then doesn’t call her very much and she loses her shit.

Thank god she does not do anything publicly embarrassing (e.g., cry at party) but she is a mess: thinking about him obsessively, changing her life to be nearer him, writing him lengthy and shameful emails about ‘their relationship’ Most harrowing is how the cycle repeats: every time she is about to break free, he offers her a little hope, and it begins again. To me it is obvious that he is enjoying the attention, and does not care what it costs her. (You can tell it is a good book because I am talking about it like I know them).

It’s a really unsettling book, because it shows how easy it is to slip into mania, be it about hand washing, about the second coming, or, as here, about a boy.