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
Tag: fiction
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.
CALEDONIAN ROAD by Andrew O’Hagan
I liked the epigraph of this book, from RL Stevenson: “After a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through.”
I also liked the first sentence: “Tall and sharp at fifty-two, Campbell Flynn was a tinderbox in a Savile Row suit, a man who believed his childhood was so far behind him that all its threats had vanished.”
It sort of went dowhill after that, though I did managed about 400 pages. The idea of the book is cool, being a sort of state-of-the-nation, if the nation was North London. The main character is an author who married into the upper classes, though not unfortunately into money, who develops an unlikely friendship with a half-Ethopian student. And the word ‘unlikely’ here is kind of key. I liked the effort to show all London, from top to bottom, but I found half the characters unlikely (e.g., a poor student from an immigrant background goes to a cocktail bar ?!? has the author never been poor?), and the politics rather trite and poorly thought through. I guess the author is trying to say something about inequality, which is nice of him, but let’s do some research. For example, a news report is quoted as saying that ‘migrant children are doing worse than any other group in the UK,’ which is just factually untrue. I think it’s pretty well proven that the academic success of immigrants is why London has the beset school results in the country. ANYWAY.
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.
MARTYR by Kaveh Akbar
Reviewers loved this book, calling it a ‘dazzling debut.’ I call it annoying. I feel bad to say it, because it is so hard to get published, and I don’t doubt it has many merits, but it just wasn’t for me. I pushed on for about 200 pages but then I just had to bail.
It’s about a man in Indiana who is loosely aspirational in academia but is not getting anywhere because he is drinking too much. He is toying -i n an annoying, apathetic way – with writing a book on martyrdom, because he wants his eventual death to ‘mean something.’ Leaving aside this is a stupid goal right off the bat, it is all wrapped up with the fact that he was born in Iran. He has never lived in Iran, mind you, but still much of the book is given over to his various thoughts about his ‘heritage,’ intercut with descriptions of the experience of his immediate family in Iran. Usually if you read a book about a country by someone from that country, it increases your understanding of it; this was just the reverse. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book by someone ‘from’ a country that actually went ahead and exoticized that country. Perhaps it’s because that ‘from,’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Let me stop typing though, this post is already bad-tempered enough, which is probably not very fair.
FAT CITY by Leonard Gardner
I read this book because it was recommended by Denis Johnson, whose TRAIN DREAMS I so admired. It’s about small-time boxers, trying to ‘make it’ in the ring in the 1940s. I can’t deny it’s extraordinarily well-written. Characters are evoked in just a couple of lines of dialogue and the arc of boxing failure is heart-breaking. What I didn’t like about it though was exactly that: it was heart-breaking. There was not a single character who was not very obviously doomed to disappointment. It wasn’t just the boxers (who were going to fail + have brain injuries) but also their promoters, and their variously pregnant or alcoholic girlfriends, and also random people they met in bars. I mean: okay? I am not sure what I am supposed to get from this? It was just dreadful and sad.
I DELIVER PARCELS IN BEIJING by Hu Anyan
I am always surprised there a so few books about working life, given that by some measures it is the majority of many peoples’ lives. But here is one. And work is definitely the majority of this guy’s life. It’s a memoir of him trying to find a way to make a living at the bottom end of the economy in China. He has done many roles: not just parcels, but nightshift in a sort center, selling bubble tea and bikes, etc.
He doesn’t complain, but he does drop some horrifying facts, in an almost off-hand way. E.g.: he has to deliver a parcel every 4 minutes to cover his expenses; he only gets the Spring Festival off (I don’t know what the Spring Festival is, but it doesn’t sound long); and in one mall job he had for two years he only saw daylight for 15 mins a day.
It’s unclear to me if he actually thinks this is bad, or if he just thinks it is what it is. Maybe both. One thing I found interesting, and I remember from when I was a new immigrant, is how he knows the price of everything, and feels telling you about it is important information. In this day of nepo-babies, it’s incredibly refreshing to read a book where you are never unaware of what his rent is at any time. And I get it: I guess I’ve never thought about it before, but the amount of the rent is probably the single most defining piece of information about what your life will be like. In his case, it means he has to work his ass off.
I loved this little part:
“I would while away the remaining hours at the Jingtong Roosevelt Plaza, to take advantage of the air conditioning. I liked to sit in the employee dining area, behind the Acasia Food Court on the basement floor, where delivery drivers waited to pick up order and take breaks. The mall stacked spare tables and chairs there, as it was a dead end only dimly lit with what little daylight filtered in through the south-facing wall. After being under the glaring lights of the shopping area, entering that space was like stepping backstage, with the curtains drawn. The time I spent back there was very meaningful to me. I will always remember it and how I felt then.”
His parents can’t help him financially, but more than that they also can’t help him with advice. He tells us they have spent all their lives in the managed economy, so how he should survive ‘capitalism’ is something they can’t help him with. He does not (of course) make any commentary on what life was like under communism but still there are some interesting pieces. Let’s end with this part, where we can ponder our own ‘freedom’:
“Consumerism is the new ideology, a different kind of lifelong imprisonment, which only gives the appearance of freedom. Compared with restricting you from doing everything you want, it is certainly the more stable and lasting way to maintain social order – instilling in you a sense of what you need and providing the means to achieve it. But this is still a form of enslavement, one in which the individual’s main route to self-realization remains through work. ”
THE EVENING OF THE HOLIDAY by Shirley Hazzard
I really hated this book. Why did I finish it? I guess it was only 149pages. And I have been feeling guilty about how many books I have given up on this year. But god I should have given up on this one. It was some kind of love story where a married (but separated) Italian man has an affair with an English woman on holiday. They part because they cannot face the difficulties of his not being able to divorce. I mean I guess that’s why they part? I don’t know, because most of the novel was descriptions. Descriptions of landscape (bad) but also descriptions of unimportant moments (e.g., woman gets briefly lost in church). I fear this was supposed to be poetic but I just found it DUMB.
THE LAST SAMURAI by Helen DeWitt
This is a famous book I had never heard of. First off, this is not the (I have never seen it, but probably) problematic film with Tom Cruise. It is about as far from Hollywood as you can get. The author is a total rebuke to all of us weak people, having half-written an astonishing ~50 other novels before finally completing this one. During that time she worked as doughnut salesperson, dictionary text tagger, copytaker, fundraiser, night secretary etc.
The book was a huge hit, being a crazy, baggy, comic story about a single mother with high ideals. She got pregnant on a one night stand, and refuses to tell the father because she does not admire his writing. She manages the heating bills by spending their days riding the Circle line.
I found it funny and clever, but I gave up about 300 pages in. We got to a part where the child was trying to find his father and it became kind of like a series of short stories about the various potential fathers, and it just felt like it wasn’t going anywhere. I felt bad, because I just love this author’s guts. She went on to write other strange books, and struggle to find a publisher, eventually only publishing one twenty years later. What a life!
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN by Thomas Mann
I thought I would give myself the challenge of this 700pg nineteenth century novel. Well, challenge failed. I got about 250pgs in before I decided to bail. There was just way too much undirected babbling about some seriously bullsh*t theories and I just couldn’t handle it. This sort of thing is fun at a party when you are drunk and you are doing the babbling but listening to someone else: no thank you.
I’m disappointed, because I enjoyed his other book, BUDDENBROOKS. It was his first, and seethes with the kind of rage at the bourgeois you only have when you are extremely bourgeois. I read it by the pool in Jordan, and maybe that was what I needed for this book too – long uninterrupted stretches of time where I could get into whatever nonsense everyone wants to talk about ‘art’ or whatever. But I didn’t have that kind of time.
One thing I did enjoy was being reminded of the horrors of TB. It takes place in a TB sanitorium, when they had no treatment other than ‘better air’. I just want to say how EXTREMELY PRO-VAX I am.