Tag: Female writer

THE CLAW by Cynthia Stockley

Here is some pulp fiction from 1890s Africa! This is not a sentence you write every day. It is by Cynthia Stockley, whose VIRGINIA AMONG THE RHODESIANS I just read. I’d never heard of her, but she was a very successful Zimbabwean novelist of the nineteenth century, whose books got made into many silent films.

The story is straight up romantic melodrama, but I enjoyed it in anyway.  Partly this is because is strong on plot, as melodrama must be.  Partly because it is funny, which melodrama usually is not.  At one point she is telling us about the very un-funny plan the white men are making to go and destroy Lobengula’s kraal.  But here’s the elderly doctor, refusing to go: “He was not looking for any Lobengulas, he said. He had not lost any Matabele impis, so why should he go and search for them?”

But mostly I enjoyed it for a rare chance to learn about life in Zimbabwe in this period, by someone who was there.  It all goes on: using anthills as ovens; marching once boots run out with your feet stuffed into wallets; and etc.  I was struck by how the white Zimbabwean culture of that time seems pretty continuous with this one.  There is still today a similar frontier spirit, I think, and a love of country. There are lots of sections dedicated to the beauty of the veldt, which if you are sad can make you happy, and if you are happy can make you sad.   The ‘claw’ of the title is the claw of Africa, that would not let the main character (an American girl) leave, because she loved the place too much. Also very Zimbawean is that she never uses the term home (for either America or Zimbabwe) without quote marks around it. For some reason that really struck me. 

MAURICE AND MARALYN by Sophie Elmhirst

Called A MARRIAGE AT SEA in the US, not sure why in the UK it has this name, this is the true story of a couple who spent 117 days in a lifeboat after their sail boat went down.

Lots of SPOILERS.  The husband was a pretty rigid and eccentric character, and was fairly lonely till his late thirties, where he met his wife, who was ten years younger.  They did not come from money and saved hard to have the chance to go on an epic sailing trip.  They made it across the Atlantic okay, but in the Pacific, a few days away from the Galapagos, a dying whale sank their ship.  They scrambled onto the lifeboat with what they could, and Maralyn (the wife) took a photo of the tip of its sail as it went down.

Then began 117 days. They saw 8 ships, none of who saw them, before they were rescued. They got through their food in 20 days, and then started on what they could catch.  They fished with safety pins, and caught turtles and sharks (!) with their bare hands.  They sometimes caught birds too, and ate not just the birds but the fish the birds vomited back up.  They were thirsty enough to think fish eyes were delicious water source.  Hardest of all was the despair.  Maurice was willing to give up, but Maralyn insisted they would live.  Towards the end the raft started deflating, so they had to pump it back up EVERY HALF HOUR.  They were near death (and I’m talking pressure sores that reached to the bone) when a South Korean ship rescued them. 

They are (get this) eager to get back on the water again and use the money they make from selling their story to buy another boat and sail on.  Eventually though they run out of money and are forced to go home.  I felt bad for them that YouTube was not invented yet.  They would have raked it in.  They are less happy on land, but still extraordinarily happy together, until Maralyn dies at 61.  Maurice is bereft. 

Bizarrely, the author begins the ending of the book with this:

“There are many ways to take the measure of a life.  In the linear version, Maurice’s life had a hard beginning, a dramatic middle, an isolated end”

Yikes.  Imagine thinking it’s your business to take the measure of a life.  What does that even mean?  Luckily she takes a steer from Maurice, from his self-published autobiography (which, charmingly, only begins on the day he meets Maralyn), where he says:

“Although I am wary of accepted truths, I believe in all human beings there is a desire to love and be loved, to experience the full fierceness of human emotion, and to make it a measure of the success of one’s life.”

So she concludes with the idea that you could “measure (a life’s) success by the extent to which you have loved and been loved.  On that count, his life had been a triumph”

VIRGINIA OF THE RHODESIANS by Cynthia Stockley

I read a piece of non-fiction called SALLY IN RHODESIA by Sheila MacDonald, set in 1910, which mentioned how Rhodesian women were considered ‘fast’ because of the novel VIRGINIA OF THE RHODESIANS. I was naturally agog and have been looking for this book for two years. I finally found an amazing edition on Ebay. It’s so old I cannot figure out its year, but it’s some time 1903-1911

It tells the story of a young woman living in Rhodesia in the late 1890s, and is (I assume) based on the real experiences of the author, who was a young woman living in Rhodesia in the late 1890s. Especially dramatic is the period she spends barricaded into the town that is now Mutare in 1896. I know this as the period of the first Chimurenga (i.e., uprising against the colonialists), and assumed they were all terrified/traumitized/etc. Apparently no: they were mostly drinking gin, cheating on their husbands, and gossiping?!?

On reflection though, I can’t deny this does sound pretty Zimbabwean, especially when it comes to the gin and the gossiping. Every day she says ‘brings five fresh scandals,’ and this sounds pretty close to Harare today. The story itself was kind of a melodramatic romance, pretty silly, but I enjoyed it. I googled the author and found out she had a completely amazing life. I can’t get into it all – it involves the Boer war and bigamy and New York and suicide – but I did find out she was actually an extremely successful author of 22 books, many of which were made into silent films! And they’re all available online, so I didn’t even need to go on Ebay. But I’m so glad I did!

SO OLD, SO YOUNG by Grant Ginder

Here is a book about a group of friends from when they meet in university on until their mid-forties. In short, catnip for me. I read pretty much the whole thing on one pretty sleepless night. Let me give you a flavour. Here is a man’s response to a cheerful text message from his university girlfriend:

“in this text her tone was buoyant, if not overly friendly, which hurt Marco in a way that he hadn’t expected. He thought their history precluded an excessive use of exclamation points.”

This sounds like I enjoyed this book, and I did, but I can’t say it didn’t have it’s issues. I found some of the characters kind of unlikely, the bad boyfriends were extremely bad, the one-who-got-away clearly got away, and etc. But it was still very more-ish.

CATLAND by Kathryn Hughes

This one’s an odd piece of non-fiction telling about about the famous cat illustrator Louis Wain and in parallel the slow evolution of cats into pets.

Some of it was interesting. First off, it is interesting to find out that while dogs were domesticated 25,000 years ago, cats were only 8,000, with the coming of agriculture. This is why they have so much less variety than dogs do. It was also interesting to learn that even into the early nineteenth century cats were not particularly loved; in fact, they were considered working animals, and had a reputation for cruelty. It was considered quite okay to torture them, apparently. It’s pretty stomach churning.

Side bar, on phosphorous. I knew that 180,000 mummified cats were found in Egypt, and shipped to England to be used as fertilizer in 1888. I always thought this was rather sacriligeous, but in this book I found out that in fact these cats were not especially special, but were kind of factory farmed to be sold to ancient Egyptian tourists!

After a while we got a bit becalmed in the history of cat illustration, so I gave up, but I’m still enjoyably bristling with cat-related facts

MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME by Arundhati Roy

Here is a memoir about the author’s mother. To give you a flavour, let me tell you that the epigraph at the beginning is to the author’s brother: “For LKC: Together we made it to the shore.” Clearly a lot has gone on.

The opening is the author telling us that she wrote this book to deal with her grief, about which she is: ‘puzzled and more than a little ashamed.’

Her mother leaves her husband because he is an alcoholic, and ends up finding a way to go from teaching in one rented room to founding a whole school. It’s a titanic effort. Here is the author:

“It has taken me years to come to terms with the fact that I was a middle child, one of three siblings, not two. My older sibling was a boy, and my younger sibling was a school. There was never any doubt about who our mother’s favourite child was. She loved, fought for and protected her youngest child with everything she had. That kind of focused, ferocious love, regardless of what it may choose as its object, is a blessed love. The challenge for those of us who are not chosen, and instead watch love pass us by, is to learn from it, marvel at it, and not grow bitter and incapable of love ourselves.”

Her mother can only be described as a real piece of work. Both her children ‘go no contact’ (as Reddit would say) for many years. But they can’t escape how much she formed them, and what she achieved for them, and they both get sucked back in. The book gets into the overall life of the author, which is interesting in its own way (who wins the Booker for their first novel?!?) but somehow lacks the immediacy of the parts about her mother. I wonder for how many people it’s true that their entire adult life has less emotional energy than their childhood

THE PIANO TEACHER by Elfriede Jelinek

This is a very sexual book, without being at all sexy. Did I enjoy it? I really have no idea. It’s a super-compressed super-heated story about a piano teacher (you may have guessed this from the title), who has been heavily controlled by her mother. Her adult student falls in love with her and they have creepy sex in a public toilet. She is a virgin but apparently has an active imaginary life where she is a big masochist. The student is surprised to put it mildly. The mother is not too happy about this new boyfriend, so, (spoiler alert) the teacher kind of sexually assaults the mother?!? In summary, it all goes on. I am just kind of surprised people have the time and energy for all this sexual mania. It’s set in Austria, and my theory is this is all down to the social safety net which means people have too much free time

LOVE’S WORK by Gillian Rose

The author wrote this memoir after her diagnosis with cancer at 46. She was dead by 48. It’s a highly compressed, painful read. She was a philospher, and you can tell. It’s not clear if this book is personal story or work of philosophy. Maybe all personal stories are works of philosphy, but not so clearly as this one. It’s remarkably dense:

“My journey to Auschwitz and east across Galicia to Belzec on the border of Ukraine did not affect me in the ways I had expected; it was the unexpected, rather, which provided the. nodes of enigma that compressed incompatible and uncomprehended meanings together.”

What?

Here is some rather beautiful lines from Swinburne. Let’s all think about death:

“From too much love of living,

From home and fear set free,

We thank with brief thanksgiving

Whatever gods may be

That no man lives for ever,

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.”

BLANK CANVAS by Grace Murray

Here is book about lesbians at art school. I am not sure why this sounds dismissive. The beginning was kind of fun, where a young woman lies to her acquaintances, saying her father is dead. It’s not totally clear why she does this, but I guess for attention or sympathy. Then thing went downhill. It is fashionable in modern novels to have protagonists who are apathetic and directionless, and this is unfortunately one of these novels. I just can’t. I just don’t know why I should care about your life if you don’t.

Side bar, the author is 22. Deal with that how you can.

EMMA by Jane Austen

I did this book for A-level, and so read it many times in adolesence. Perhaps as a result, I have not read it in about 30 years.  What I am struck by on this reading is how completely wrong Emma is on every level.  It is a much funnier novel than I recall, and much more damning of Emma.  It is not nearly so good as some of her others, but obviously still head and shoulders above 90% of all other books  GOD this lady was talented.