Tag: Female writer

MARIANA BY Monica Dickens

First of all let’s try to come to terms with the fact that Dickens was only twenty-four when she wrote this novel. And it wasn’t even her first, but her second, the first having been a BESTSELLER.

I can’t comfort you with the reflection that it is not good, because it is really rather good. It’s a coming-of-age story that mostly mirrors Dickens’ own. The section on her childhood is particularly impressive. I love this:

Mary climbed into the neat little cattle-pen and pretended she was a horse, which meant standing quite still and feeling like a horse inside, without any outward pantomime

Her early adulthood is interesting too, especially her unsuccessful stint at drama school. I suspect many can relate to her bleak summary of what happened to those who did not give up on that particular dream early enough:

(They) battered out their youth against the doors of agents, did crowd work for films or sacrificed their so-called innocence for a walking-on part or chance in Cabaret.

There is a particularly wrenching scene where she realizes the boy she has had a crush on for years is not seriously interesting in her, but has just been enjoying her devotion. The quality of the book takes an abrupt nosedive when, in her early twenties, she meets the man she will marry, Sam. Dickens has these two characters ludicrously simpatico. Allegedly even when apart they wake at the same time, eat the same food at the same time, speak the same words and even hear the same songs (?). Clearly this is drivel. Also imagine anyone you know getting a new boyfriend and having this view about a night out with friends:

Mary was longing to get away with Sam and discuss them all. That was the only point now for her, of going to any party.

I can only assume that the first part of the book was based on her actual experience, and this last part is what she hoped real love would be like. I googled it and indeed she did not get married till her late thirties. I can only imagine her views evolved. On my side I observe people in love can often hardly agree on the same way to load the dishwasher, never mind have the same sleeping/eating/ghostly song (?) hearing schedule.

THE ANIMALS IN THAT COUNTRY by Laura Jean McKay

This book has an amazing sounding premise:

. . . a strange pandemic begins sweeping the country, its chief symptom that its victims begin to understand the language of animals. Many infected people lose their minds . . .

No one doesn’t wonder what their cat thinks of them, and I loved the idea of finding out. Unfortunately I sort of struggled with this book. What the animals have is say is stuff like this:

My front end

takes the food

quality.

Muzzle

for the Queen

(Yesterday).

I’m not sure I’m much the wiser. More than that though, I found the protagonist almost unbearably annoying. She lets her obviously infected son into their compound, and doesn’t feel any guilt about it. She loves her granddaughter, but in a creepily sentimental way. She contracts everyone’s names (‘Ange’ for Angela, etc). She is often described as ‘gulping’ her drinks. These are things I don’t like. It’s not super defensible, but okay. I maybe could have handled it, but then she rear-ends a truck full of factory farmed pigs. I couldn’t face hearing what they think of us, so I quit.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS by Alison Lurie

Here is a Pulitzer winner, pitched as a novel about the love lives of plain women. I was ready to love it. It even had a very excellent opening sentence.

On a cold blowy February day a woman is boarding the ten A.M flight to London, followed by an invisible dog.

But things go down hill from there. It tells the story of two American professors on sabbatical in London. One is a handsome man, the other a plain woman. The man has some romantic problems, but basically everything works out great.

The woman finally meets someone to fall in love with but is so hung up on past rejections that she doesn’t even notice. I don’t know. I just found it super bleak. I guess I don’t really believe there is any such thing as ‘plainness,’ outside of edge cases (e.g., extreme obesity). Some people are pretty, that’s for sure, but even the not-that-pretty can make themselves appear at least reasonably decent enough for some other reasonably decent person to want them. The competition’s just not that steep. Even if you don’t look that good, it’s not as if most of the others do either. I guess I just found the whole idea of some unchangeable quality of ugliness kind of distasteful and ridiculous.

WOW, NO THANK YOU by Samantha Irby

For some reason I had the idea I wouldn’t like this lady’s work, and had put off reading anything by her for months. Big mistake. Turns out I LOVE HER.

WOW, NO THANK YOU is a series of comic essays about her daily life, covering such topics as ageing, irritable bowel, social awkwardness, and her love for her phone. One essay begins:

I once starred in a horror movie called I Was Caught Waiting, Alone, in a Public Place, without my Fucking Cellular Phone

She is enthused by it’s “cracked screen and lightly buttered handfeel.” Lightly buttered exactly describes my phone too.

She is hyper conscious of others’ feelings about her. Here’s an example, where she is being wheeled down the hospital corrider by a nurse on the way to a serious surgery:

And because my brain is a nightmare, I kept thinking, “Is this bed too heavy for her to push? Is this the heaviest bed she’s ever pushed? Is she going to need help to take that sharp right corner? Maybe I should just get up and push her in the bed instead,” and thank goodness I signed that DNR because what is the point of living like this? Anyway, we made it to surgery

What I found most interesting about this book though is the author’s casual attitude to achievement. She had a rough start in life, and struggles with depression, and generally she aspires just to get through the day. I found this kind of an inspirational approach. I wonder if when one has an easier start in life, one sets a higher bar on achievement to be ‘happy,’ and maybe that’s a trap.

SEGU by Maryse Conde

A novel about Africa before colonialism that does not act as if before colonialism Africa was just hanging around waiting for colonialism.

Maryse Conde, a writer I have never heard of, has clearly done an incredible amount of research about historic West Africa. We are plunged into the life of an African family in Segu, a city-state that dominates the surrounding peoples through good old-fashioned violence. The main patriarch and protagonist thinks he is madly in love with his second wife who turns out to be a slave (?). The first son converts to Islam. The second one goes hunting when he isn’t supposed to and is picked up as a slave by their competitors. I mean it ALL goes on. And they still haven’t met any Europeans. Eventually this happens and then we get into Brazil, catholicism, and all sorts.

It maybe doesn’t have a ton of narrative drive, being a multi-generational, multo-decade story, something that is always hard to keep moving along, but I enjoyed it all the same.

ZINKY BOYS by Svetlana Alexievich

An unexpectedly topical read about military misadventure in Afghanistan. There are many to choose from; this is the Soviet one in the 1980s. Alexievich, a Nobel winner I had never heard of, puts together first hand accounts from the Russians who served. It is exceedingly gnarly. At least the American soldiers were provided with the basics. Here is a Russian nurse:

Our boys sold (their hospital camp beds). And I couldn’t really blame them. They were dying for three roubles a month – that was a private’s pay. Three roubles, meat crawling with worms, and scraps of rotten fish. We all had scurvy, I lost all my front teeth. So they sold their blankets and bought opium, or something sweet to eat, or some foreign gimmicks . . . . . the officers drank the surgical spirit so we had to use petrol to clean the wounds.

Almost all the soldiers were exceedingly young recruits, sent with little training, who were told they were going to build a glorious socialist future for their Afghan brothers who welcomed them.

When they died, sent back in Zinc coffins (thus their nickname) no one was allowed to say where they died, or that it was even a war. Later, the survivors were blamed for being involved. The extent of their disillusion is perhaps the most depressing part of this book.

I’m ashamed that in my finals I got an ‘A’ in Scientific Communism for my critique of bourgeois pluralism. I’m ashamed that after the Congress of People’s Deputies pronounced this war a disgrace we were given ‘Internationalist Fighters’ badges and a Certificate from the Supreme Soviet

Putting you life on the line to end bourgeois pluralism. You want to laugh. At the same time, it’s sad how difficult it would now be to convince anyone to die for an ideal. And especially me. I can’t think of any concept for which I’d be willing to lay down my life.

LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I listened to this book, which is about a long journey by wagon from Wisconsin to South Dakota, while making a make shorter journey by car from Wisconsin and South Dakota. ALL HAIL THE COMBUSTION ENGINE! I thought ten hours was a lot, but that was as nothing to the multiple weeks it took, Pa, Ma, Mary, Laura and Baby Carrie Ingalls.

Not much has improved in terms of entertainment. I googled ‘things to do off the I-90’ and the most helpful suggestion was from a trucker who said people do like to laugh at the ‘Kum and Go’ gas station (this I had already done), and maybe eat some pancake-wrapped sausages there, but there is not much else to do unless ‘you like the smell of pig sh*t.’

This semi-autobiographical story is a pretty interesting account of the settler experience. It is quite amazing to see how they managed to create a homestead out of an axe, a gun, and the prairie. It was also interesting to see that they clearly understood that they were taking land from the Native Americans. I would have expected some kind of soft-soaping, but it is exceedingly clear that they are in conflict with people already using the land, and understood themselves to be in conflict with them. They are essentially waiting for the government to hand the land over to them. I learn from Wikipedia that Ingalls daughter, who owned the rights to this story, was a raging libertarian, so I find this hilarious.

What I will probably most remember about this book is it’s success in capturing a small child’s view of the world. Many books try this, and very few succeed. It was really elegantly done here. I expected a much less sophisticated book, for some reason. I now understand why it’s a classic.

THE LYING LIFE OF ADULTS by Elena Ferrente

Gianni is a girl in her early teens who suddenly begins to feel bad about her appearance, her friends, her parents, and her school. In short, she is becoming a teenager. She says:

I felt like a failure, like a cake made with the wrong ingredients

I think I’ve largely forgotten how excruciating it was to be an adolescent, but this book made me remember.

Guiliana turned and whispered: Gianni, what are you doing, come on, you’ll get lost. Oh, if I really could get lost, I thought at one point, leave myself somewhere, like an umbrella, and never have anything more to do with me.

Oh god! Poor girl. She is having a particularly rough go of it. Her parents are getting a divorce, and not in a kind of lets-all-go-to-therapy kind of way, more in a lets-scream-a-lot kind of way. She responds by wearing black clothing, giving blowjobs to unsuitable much older men, etc. She also relentlessly pursues her cousin’s fiance, with no guilt at all, as only the profoundly insecure can do.

Finally she runs away on a train with her best friend’s annoying younger sister. This last line killed me:

On the train, we promised each other to become adults as no one ever had before.

Everyone thinks they are going to break the mould.

FALSE COLOURS by Georgette Heyer

I’m starting to wonder if I’ve read all the good ones of these, because the last few have been pretty rope-y. In this one, a twin substitutes himself for his brother and ends up falling in love with his fiance. It feels like it’s going to be classic Heyer, everyone has grey eyes, the hero wears tight white breeches and etc. But it kind of gets derailed into strange ‘mystery’ plot twists. However it put me to sleep in many an overly air-conditioned motel room, which is what I asked of it.

THE PURSUIT OF LOVE by Nancy Mitford

The blog leads me to believe this is my sixth re-read, but I think it is more than that. I turn to this novel when I need something soothing, so it is often read late at night. I don’t very often recommend it to other people, though I love it, because I struggle to articulate what it is that I love about it so much. I think it’s partly that I find it funny; it’s partly that I can’t yet quite understand what it is about it that I find funny, so it’s mysterious; it’s partly a kind of robust pragmatism in the authorial voice that I find reassuring and that bucks me in when I feel like whining.

I did not especially like the recent TV version. I thought they softened it till it wasn’t funny any more, which was strange: a book from the 1940s is apparently too edge for the 2020s.

Let’s enjoy the first para together:

There is a photograph in existence of Aunt Sadie and her six children sitting round the tea-table at Alconleigh. The table is situated, as it was, is now, and ever shall be, in the hall, in front of a huge open fire of logs. Over the chimney-piece plainly visible in the photograph, hangs an entrenching tool, with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew had whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out. It is still covered with blood and hairs, an object of fascination to us as children. In the photograph Aunt Sadie’s face, always beautiful, appears strangely round, her hair strangely fluffy, and her clothes strangely dowdy, but it is unmistakably she who sits there with Robin, in oceans of lace, lolling on her knee. She seems uncertain what to do with his head, and the presence of Nanny waiting to take him away is felt though not seen. The other children, ….. all of them gazing at the camera with large eyes opened wide by the flash… There they are, held like flies in the amber of that moment – click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from that happiness and promise of youth, from the hopes Aunt Sadie must have had for them, and from the dreams they dreamed for themselves. I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.