Tag: male writer

SURPRISED BY JOY by CS Lewis

Here is an unusual memoir: a memoir of a religious conversion. There is a prologue, apparently designed to put us off, in which he describes this – his first attempt at memoir – as the most ‘suffocatingly subjective’ book he has ever written. I loved this phrase. Everyone acts like our subjective experience is so important, like we should try and understand ourselves, and etc etc – and I just love how he sort of dismisses this whole idea out of hand, as if your own personal experience is self-evidently extremely limiting.

He has other interesting observations. Try:

“Dates are not so important as people believe. I fancy that most of those who think at all have done a great deal of thinking in the first fourteen years.”

And, on what drives some people to fear insects:

“we see fully realized the two things that some of us most dread for own species -the dominance of the female and the dominance of the collective.'”

That’s more ‘interesting,’ than interesting, perhaps.

Let’s get into how much sex there was happening at his high school. The older boys were called Bloods, and we got into a long discussion of a second group, the Tarts:

“A Tart is a pretty and effeminate-looking small boy who acts as a catamite to one or more of his seniors, usually Bloods. . . They were not like slaves, for their favours were (nearly always) solicited, not compelled. Nor were they exactly like prostitutes, for the liaison often had permanence, and far from being merely sensual, was highly sentamentalized.”

He does note how, given he is known as a religious writer, people might be shocked that he is writing of these “impure loves” without condemning them. However, he says “the sin in question is one of the two (gambling is the other) which I have never been tempted to commit. I will not indulge in futile philippics against enemies I never met in battle.”

I love the generosity of this idea, that he won’t comment on sins he has never had to fight against; its unexpectedly humble. He has a lot of bad things to say about the Bloods, who were mostly bullies, but ends the chapter with something rather unexpected. I was not paying attention to my dates, nad did not realize we were in 1914:

Peace to them all. A worse fate awaited them than the most vindictive fag among us could have wished. Ypres and the Somme ate up most of them. They were happy while their good days lasted.

You will see we have not even got to the conversion yet. In the prologue, he says: ‘”I never read an autobiography in which the parts devoted to the earlier years were not by far the most interesting,” and I guess he’s correct. The conversion was in itself quite unspectacular, happening on the top floor of a bus in London one evening in the 1930s. I find something rather beautiful about that. I am sure that bus route is still running. It should get its own blue plaque. I just love the idea of how full London is of dead people’s personal history. I am sure every square of sidewalk has its story of heartbreak and first kisses and murder and etc.

HEAVY by Kiese Laymon

This memoir is much beloved, but not by me. I’m sure there is an interesting life story in here somewhere, but I couldn’t find it. For me it was kind of buried under style. For example: he addresses the whole thing to his mother ‘you wanted me to be a strong man’ etc. Which I guess sounds cool in theory but I wasn’t feeling it. One thing I will recall from this book though is the one day when he came home from school and drank an entire bottle of ranch dressing in one go. I’ll leave that with you to think on.

IMAGINE ME GONE by Adam Haslett

Honestly readers are just so difficult. Here is a work of great artistry that I whipped through. It’s a sad story about the long shadow of a father’s suicide. And yet I hardly remember it. I mean honestly I feel the author: what is it readers want!! I did like this part, where a thirty something is reflecting on the Ansel Adams in his New York apartment:

“I was reminded how little I done to make (the apartment) my own . . One of thousands of adult dorm rooms in Manhattan, where credentialed children performed their idea of adult lives.”

THE WRECK OF THE MENTOR by Eric Jay Dolin

I am just massively into shipwreck non-fiction. Who knew. This one is not so much about the shipwreck, which happened in Palau in 1832, but more about what happened after: I’m sorry to tell you the survivors were enslaved. The island was struggling with food insecurity (unclear why) so they weren’t fed very much, but they sure were tatoo-ed a whole hell of a lot. Eventually they were rescued.

Two things I found interesting. One, the Europeans conclude that the locals must have met Europeans before, because they know exactly what they want to get from the wreck: iron. I found this fascinating. I was obssessed with THE LAST DAYS OF THE INCAS, where I learnt that one of the most important advantages the Spanish had was iron (armour, swords, etc). It’s interesting now we don’t really think of it as ‘precious.’

Two, and this really blew my mind: apparently the whole South Pacific was just absolutely bristling with Robinson Crusoes. I always thought that lone shipwreck survivors were a rarity, but apparently not! Even more interestingly, quite a lot of them had actually chosen to stay on the islands. I guess I can kind of see it – you’re a 14 year old from Glasgow pressed into service as a cabin boy; I can well imagine a tropical paradise dripping with coconuts looks like a pretty good option.

Enjoy this vignette, of someone the enslaved men meet in Palau:

“The old man, who was entirely naked and barely five feet tall, walked briskly with an upright, almost regal bearing, “indicating that he felt himself a person of not a little importance.” He looked to be around sixty years old, with long gray hair, and tatoos covering his legs, arms, and breast. He had no teeth, and his very dark red, almost black, mouth – the result of chewing betel nuts incessantly – appeared like a void in his head. While the whalemen were trying to figure out who this specter was, he exclaimed, “My God, you are Englishmen, are you not?” Barnard quickly corrected him, and then the old man asked: “What year of the Lord is it?””

CONTRAPPOSTO by Dave Eggars

I spent the first 150 pages of this book mildly bored and the last 250 entranced.   The last 250 I read straight through, on a night when I couldn’t sleep, which raises the worrying idea that the quality of my attention is what is driving my perception of the quality of the book. 

On the plot level, this is a book about a boy and girl who get to know each other in high school and are friends (and sometimes lovers) for the rest of their long lives.  On another level, it is a book about what artistic success means.  The girl is extremely career focused, and is a  big success as a curator.  The boy loves to draw, and while he would like to make a big success as an artist, he just doesn’t want it enough to do the non-drawing leg work this requires, such as e.g., making ‘contacts,’ creating things because they are ‘saleable,’ and etc.  He often does not draw for long periods, and she gets very frustrated with him, especially when he, in her view, ‘checks out’ by moving to Thailand. It was an interesting way of thinking about what your life is really for, and what it’s worth spending your time on.

Rather touchingly, he dedicates the book to those friends of his he’s had for ‘forty or fifty years.’  I’ve passed thirty years with some. I hope I get to fifty with them all.  

LONDON FALLING by Patrick Radden Keefe

I previously read this author’s EMPIRE OF PAIN, an excellent and depressing overview of the corruption in medicine and law that drove the opiod epidemic.  Here we’re on corruption again, this time in London.

It starts with an apparent suicide.  A 19 year old man is captured on CCTV jumping off a 5th floor balcony into the Thames.  He’s from a fairly wealthy English family, and as his horrified parents look into what happened to him, they discover that he has LOTS OF SPOILER COMING being pretending to be a Russian oligarch’s son.  He’d been to school with lots of wealthy Russians, (this being right off the fall of the USSR), spent too much time on Instagram, and I guess gotten the idea that  he needed to get rich fast.  He was a pretty successful conman, sucking in some wealthy businessmen, with the only problem being they were themselves conmen.  They were, unfortunatley for him, in reality gangsters looking to wring some protection money out of an oligarch’s son.   

I was surprised to learn how much gangster activity there is in London.  But that was only by-the-by. What was really surprising, and depressing, was to learn how deep Russian corruption ran in London.  Or possibly still runs.  I knew London was laundering Russian money, but I did not realize the huge number of ‘suicides’ and ‘accidents’ that came with that.  And that they largely went (or go?) almost totally unexamined by the British police.  This poor young man was caught up in that. The Met interviews almost no one.  The Met doesn’t bother to visit the building for a week after the body is found.  The Met accepts that that the gangster ‘doesn’t know’ what he meant by texting an associate that he HEATING UP THE KNIVES right before the young man jumps. (This despite in other court cases it was entered into the record that this particular gangster was well known to torture people with heated kitchen knives).  Anyway, I can’t get into it all.  I’ll give it this tribute: it did change the way this Londoner thinks about London

SONS AND DAUGHTERS by Chaim Grade

Here are 700 pages on Jewish life in Poland. The cover tells me it’s considered the last great Yiddish novel. It has a plot, kind of, or more like multiple plots, not all of which overlap. It also has a truly vast array of characters. Particularly I noted how much he liked to describe people, even minor ones. And then I realized we were in the 1930s, and started to wonder: is the description of the people the point of the book?

The introduction tells me this is indeed the case. This poor guy grew up in 1930s Vilna, where there were 70,000 Jews. After the war, there were only a few hundred. He was extremely fortunate to escape, and when he returned I’m sorry to tell you he found his mother and first wife were in the same mass grave. Here he is in a letter to friend:

“I’ve always found it strange that I have so little faith and yet believe, with complete faith, that Providence saved me and allowed me to live, in order to immortalize the great that generation that I knew”

It was an odd book. At first it was kind of boring, I kept thinking I was going to quit, but the more I got into it, the more I got into it. I felt kind of bereft once it was over, and really weirdly close to Polish Jews of the1930s. I guess that was his goal. For what it’s worth, they live for me.

THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS by Giorgio Bassani

Here is a story about a young man’s first crush.  It’s pretty brutal, because they spend an awful lot of time together as ‘friends,’ and then she tells him she’s not interested.  Ouch.  It’s very much a story of the lost days of our youth, made particularly sadder by the fact that it all takes place in a Jewish community in Italy in 1938.   I don’t know how autobiographical this particular story is, but as the author also lived in that community, I can only imagine what it must feel like for him, memorializing that lost group of people and way of life. 

I feel bad to say it, given the context, but I did not particularly like the book.  The introduction informs us that Bassani has a ‘visual imagination,’ which I guess means he likes to list things, because believe me there a lot of lists.  Don’t wonder what the crush’s bedroom looks like, because you are going to be informed in a LOT of detail.  The author and the editor also assume a lot of knowledge of Italian politics of the interwar years. I particularly enjoyed one foot note that said: “This was a term for fascists from before the March 22 declaration.”   So different from those other fascists!

WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO DIE by Harry Sidebottom

This seemed like such a good idea: a piece of non-fiction about gladiators. I was all ready to emerge bristling with gladiator-related facts to tell people at parties. Also, who could not love this surname!

It was kind of interesting, but also boring. This is partly because he spent a lot of time telling us about his sources, which is in itself kind of boring. But it was I guess educational, because one main fact I learnt is that we really know very little about gladiators and a lot of it is very much cobbled together from like 3 murals.

Also I have to object to the opening of each chapter, which included a small piece of ‘fiction’ about the gladiator experience. Also to an entire chapter on how to interpret gladiators in dreams. Here I learnt that ancient Romans be talking as much nonsense as anyone else.

I did get this interesting fact: “In AD27 an ex-slave called Atilius put on a gladitorial show for profit at Fidenae, not far from Rome. The wooden ampitheatre he constructed lacked solid foundations and adequate materials. During the show it collapsed, killing 50,000 people.”

This is so a movie waiting to be written. Maybe we pitch it for Gladiator 3.