Tag: fiction

KLARA AND THE SUN by Kazuo Ishiguro

In this book we get to see a little too far behind the curtain. I have loved all three of Ishiguro’s other books, which broadly deal with the-one-that-got-away, in various guises. I would absolutely love to know what break-up he is working through because it must have been a real doozy. This book is a similar sort of story, but for me did not work nearly so well as the others. Perhaps I’m just too familiar with its tricks?

It is about an AF (artificial friend) who is bought to be a companion to a little girl. It is told through the AF’s AI powered understanding of the world. This was sort of interesting, but to my view has been done better. More effective was the little girl herself, and her friends. In this near-future, no one goes to school, so the children are forced to have ‘interaction meetings,’ where they learn to behave ‘normally.’ Clearly this is inspired by the pandemic, but I did enjoy it. I feel like we could all use a pretty stiff course of interaction meetings.

LADDER OF THE YEARS by Anne Tyler

Here is a book about a woman who walks away from her husband and her three children. She has been feeling unloved and unneeded, and on impulse leaves and starts a new life elsewhere. Boringly, she ends up going back to them. I wanted the worm to turn, but it kind of just took a detour.

What I did find interesting was that the woman is only in her early 40s. I had heard before that in the past you were considered largely useless at that age as a woman (having done all that was required of you, i.e., reproduce) but this was a particularly sad and stark example of the problem. She really seems to feel her life is over. Today, most people of that age I know are just gagging for their kids to grow up enough so they can begin getting really crazy.

YOUNG MUNGO by Douglas Stuart

This author’s first book, the wonderful SHUGGIE BAIN, was all about being poor, gay, and Scottish, while also being a mummy’s boy when that mummy is an alcoholic. This book, YOUNG MUNGO covers the same ground. I often think that if, as they say, we all only have one story to tell, most of us have decided what that story is by the time we are sixteen. It’s interesting also that while the first was lightly fictionalized memoir, this one is clearly more of a novel – and you can tell – because in this one we have PLOT.

Fifteen year old Mungo is forced to go away on a fishing weekend with two strange men his mother meets at AA. They go to a loch which is “as near tae heaven as you can get on three buses.” Things get progressively more dangerous and creepy and eventually SPOILER it emerges they are recently released sex offendors, who end up assaulting Mungo. This is all intercut with flashbacks of the development of Mungo’s relationship with his first boyfriend, and the two stories intertwine, both escalating, one in a horrifying way (SPOILER Mungo kills them, but its not as soap opera as it sounds), and one in a very sweet way.

I just love the writing . . . three examples. Here his mother coming back from her boyfriend’s:

Every five days or so he would return her like an overdue library book, and she would reappear so dog-eared, so sodden with drink, that it looked like she had been dropped in the bath

And:

There was a rasp at the bottom of her breath now, a sandpapery sound that said it was too late to stop smoking.

And, on the eyes of a deer:

As dark and wet as two peeled plums

IN THE DISTANCE by Hernan Diaz

In this book a man attempts to walk from San Francisco to New York.  It does not go well.  It is the nineteenth century, and he is a young Swedish guy called Hakan, who intended to go to New York with his brother to make their fortune.  Unfortunately, he became separated from his brother on a city street (they had never seen a city before). He assumes they will meet on the boat they are supposed to take, and asks for the boat to ‘America.’  Sadly this is boat to the west, not the east coast. 

On arrival he decides just to walk it, like you do when you miss the night bus.  And so begins a bizarre odyssey.  He first joins up with a deranged gold digger, and then is captured, held hostage, and raped by a toothless prostitute, and then when he escapes, meets a naturalist obsessed with finding the very first creature to come out of the primordial swamp, then we have a con man who may or may not be leading a caravan to their deaths, then we have got some kind of murderous cult, and I’m only about two-thirds of the way through but I will stop. 

On the one hand, this sounds kind of unlikely.  On the other hand, perhaps not so.  You have to wonder who decides to do anything so insane as move to a foreign country with a one-way ticket.   You would for sure get a much higher proportion of nut-jobs, and lets face it that proportion is not low even today.  Hakan eventually gives up, and spends many years alone in the wilds, before eventually deciding to find a way to walk from Alaska back to Sweden.  Clearly while he learnt a lot over the decades, his geography did not improve. I want to laugh, but really it was kind of a sad book.  The part that I think about the most is not strangely all the crazy incidents once he got to America, but the very beginning, in Europe – that first mistake – losing his brother on a city street.  Imagine a world without internet, and without much literacy, where you could – completely believably – lose someone like that, and then never, ever find them again. 

THE IDIOT by Elif Batuman

In this book, a girl at university gets all het up about the philosophy of language, about whether words have meaning, and if so if we can ever understand them.  Of course it all boils down to some guy.   

She meets this guy in Russian class, and he begins to write her terribly clever emails. She replies with terribly clever emails.  It is all very intellectual but also very boring, just like it always is to be up close with someone’s crush. 

The things kept accumulating – the stars, the atoms, the pigs, and the cereal.  It was decreasingly possible to imagine explaining it all to anyone.  Whoever it was would jump out of a window from boredom.  And yet here I was, watching the accumulation in real time, and not only was I not bored, but it was all I could think about.

Eventually it emerges that he for real has a girlfriend, but somehow all this suffering carries on, and this is when she starts to have problems with the structure of reality and what it all means.  The solution is offered to her on a plate, by the crush.  Here he is, talking to her:

“My friend Imre said I was behaving really badly towards you.  He said I was – what was it, it was a funny expression.  Leading you on.  He said I was leading you on.” 

It felt like being hit again, this time in the stomach. 

.. . .”I tried to explain to Imre that it’s not like that, but was really dismissive.  He said I was starting to sound banal, and like a real asshole.”

Like seriously what is up with this girl?  Words do have meaning, and here he is explaining everything pretty clear.  No need to worry about the structure of the universe, this guy just an asshole.

Sidebar, the epigraph of this book is Proust on adolescence.  I’ll just end by quoting it at length because it is so fantastic:

But the characteristic feature of the ridiculous age I was going through – awkward but by no means infertile – is that we do not consult our intelligence and that the most trivial attributes of other people seem to us to form an inseparable part of their personality.  In a world thronged with monsters and gods, we know little peace of mind.  There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul.  Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them.  In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything. 

HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY by Richard Llewellyn

Here is a classic novel of the Industrial Revolution.  It is a coming-of-age story set in the early twentieth century in a small Welsh mining village.  It captures a prelapsarian time of community and honest work that from our current perspective seems wildly imaginary.  Some light Googling tells me it is kind of imaginary, as apparently this famously Welsh story was written by an Englishman with only tenuous links to Wales.  Still, it works. It really works.  It is a little dated today, but I can still see why it was a huge bestseller. 

Most effective for me is the creation of an entire community.  The story is written by an older man, re-creating his boyhood and early manhood.  It oozes loss.  Whether he was Welsh or not, he was clearly struggling to find a way to keep alive the people he has lost.  Here is the last paragraph, remembering his father who died in a mining accident:

Did my father die under the coal?  But, God in heaven, he is down there now, dancing in the street with Davy’s red jersey over his coat, and coming, in a moment, to smoke his pipe in the front room and pat my mother’s hand, and look, and O, the heat of his pride, at the picture of a Queen, to his eldest son, whose baton lifted voice in music fit for a Queen to hear. 

. . . For if he is dead, then I am dead, and we are dead, and all of a sense of mockery.

How green was my Valley, then, and the Valley of them that have gone. 

It was crushing.

However, side point, I do always find it difficult when people who live in communities totally dependent on one thing (coal, copper, whatever) act all surprised and betrayed when that one thing ends.  Like what did you think was going to happen?  How did you think this was a good idea? DIVERSIFY PEOPLE DIVERSIFY.

GONE WITH THE WIND by Margaret Mitchell

GONE WITH THE WIND is a book both profoundly woke and un-woke.  The un-woke part is very famous.  The main characters are slave owners and slave apologists, and it is fascinating to see how they construct a world in which they can still live with themselves. It’s wild to see people living their daily lives while committing atrocities.  The woke part I rarely see discussed, but for me it’s pretty woke: and that’s the character of Scarlett O’Hara. I can’t think of a book previous to this that has a female character who clearly and explicitly manipulates being female to her advantage.  I also can’t think of an earlier female character who makes her own money and is proud of it.

Also interesting, and I think something you rarely see written about, is the really horribly mean act of keeping someone dangling.  Ashley Wilkes does it to Scarlett O’Hara, and it’s really sad. I think this happens a lot: you enjoy someone else having a crush on you, because you like the attention, so instead of doing the kind thing (making it clear they have no hope, so they can get over you), you keep it going, enjoying the validation, and making them go slowly crazy.  Meanwhile you act all innocent like they are the pathetic one.

OF LOVE AND HUNGER by Julian MacLaren-Ross

In this book we learn all about being a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman.  It involves a surprising amount of day-drinking.  The author, Julian McLaren-Ross, was apparently a true bohemian, and had much experience as a door-to-door salesman, and also of day drinking.  This book captures a certain seedy life in the early twentieth century very well, all petty debts, horrible rooming houses, and trying to avoid buying your round.  It is structured around a love affair the salesman has with a colleague’s wife.  He is not that into it, at first, and then gets super, super, into it.  Then she goes off him.  It’s sad, as love affairs that peter out always are, not helped by all the debt.  It has a kind of uplifting side though, in that she encourages him to write, and to think about politics, and to generally better himself.  People roll their eyes about crushes, but I think they can sometimes be powerful engines for growth.  People are always joining the drama club to meet girls, or joining the gym so boys will look at them, and etc.  At least it keeps us going forward, even if it all blows up in the end.

MRS PALFREY AT THE CLAREMONT by Elizabeth Taylor

Here is a scarring little book about what is required to survive old age.  It tells the story of an elderly widow, Mrs Palfrey, who moves into a residential hotel.  Some other old people live there also, and I got the impression that some fifty years ago, moving into such a hotel was quite common for older people who did not yet need nursing care.  This is my second book by this author, Elizabeth Taylor, and I am amazed she is not more famous.  She is wonderful at capturing the battles of daily life, and the struggle of keeping yourself in hand.  Here is an older lady while they wait for dinner:

“Well, another Sunday nearly gone,” Mrs Post said quickly, to cover a little fart.  She had presence of mind.

Hanging over the whole book is the loneliness of old age.  I guess it makes sense: the older you get, the more likely you are to outlive the people you love.  I have never seen described in quite so much detail what this is like.  Then there is also of course what is waiting for you: after the hotel, the old age home, if you are lucky, and if not, then death. Here is Mrs Palfrey, answering when someone asks her if she thinks she is an optimistic person:

“Oh I think so.”  She did not explain to him how deeply pessimistic one must be in the first place, to need the sort of optimism she now had at her command.

I’m sorry this is kind of a downer, but there you go. It is at the same time a fairly funny book.  I’m not sure when I’ll recover.

Just as a sidebar, if you’ve ever read the dreadful IN A FREE STATE by VS Naipaul, you should know that  it beat out MRS PALFREY to win the Booker Prize.  This just tells you everything you need to know.  Allow me to remind you of the time when VS Naipaul said he was better than any female writer, even Jane Austen.  Apparently, the 75% male Booker panel of 1971 agreed.  VOM.

LUSTER by Raven Leilani

This started off pretty well, being a story of a young black woman who gets involved with an older white man who is in an open marriage. Here she is, making out with him:

For a moment, I’m sure I’m going to cry, which is not unusual, because I cry often and everywhere, and most especially because of this one Olive Garden commercial.  I excuse myself and run to the bathroom, where I look in the mirror and reassure myself that there are bigger things than the moment I am in.  Gerrymandering.  Genealogy conglomerates selling my cheek swabs to the state. 

She loses her job and then in a not at all believable turn of events is invited by the wife to live with them. We then get into that beloved territory of recent novels, which is the aimless narrator. She hangs about not really looking for a job, doing weird aimless things like taking photographs of their stuff. I gave up with about twenty pages left to go. The book like the narrator where both going nowhere.