male writer Archives -

OH THE GLORY OF IT ALL by Sean Wiley

In this memoir we see what happens when selfish people get divorced. The book is by the son, who was nine when his parents split up. His father was immensely wealthy, and did a good job of making sure his mother (third wife) got very little. She responded with high drama, asking Sean (the son) to DOUBLE SUICIDE WITH HER, and then GUILITING HIM when he didn’t. You would think his weeks with his father could only be better than this, but the new wife, the step-mother, is Snow White levels of bad. As a small example, at the dinner table, she has herself, the dad, and her kids sit at one end, and then leaves some chairs before Sean’s chair on his own. There are much more, and much harsher rules for him, and she tells Sean a lot about how his father doesn’t love him.

Predictably, Sean explodes as an adolescent. He is clearly a loving person, and this book is as much about the friends who get him through it, as the parents who are the ‘it’. The book in my view was a little long – we could have lost 100 pages without trouble – but I still enjoyed it, and admired the author rising above his childhood so magnificently.

DREAMSTATE by Eric Puchner

In this novel a woman scraps her wedding after falling in love with the best man. JUICY! Interestingly though, this exciting premise only takes up the first maybe 20% of the book. Then we follow the main characters – the ex-groom, the wife, the best man, through what turn out to be long and interconnected lives. It’s pretty sad at the end. This is not because they lead sad lives. It’s full of all the stuff lives are full of, children, jobs, crises, etc. It’s not even sad because at the end they are old, and deal with the stuff that comes if you are lucky enough to get old, dementia, cancer, etc. It’s more just a feeling of: so that was that. All that drama, changing husbands, breaking hearts, and you all end up at the same place in the end.

I really loved some of the descriptions. We’ve got a child “seven years old and preposterously beautiful, like a child in a French movie;’ we’ve got chimpanzees “lounging around their enclosure like Romans after an orgy;” or this, on Haloween: “Occasionally someone executed a costume so perfectly that it made you wonder whether you’d undersold what life had to offer. ”

Or this, from when the bride first meets the best man, Garrett:

“He had one of those pitiable mold-length beards, less a fashion choice than a flag of surrender. . . . Charlie had said Garrett was having a bit of a hard time – what that meant exactly, Cece wasn’t sure, except that in guy-talk ‘a bit of a hard time’ generally meant something much worse. It meant depression or addiction of both.”

LOL. Well done this author. This must have taken some serious work.

SAO BERNARDO by Graciliano Ramos

Here in a deeply charming elderly edition is a book that assumes a lot of background knowledge about Brazilian land ownership in the 1930s. Lacking this, it was slightly puzzling. But I can say it was bleak. Apparently a classic in Brazil, it tells about a man who pulls himself up from poverty to ownership of a large rural estate. He marries a woman who he thinks is too good for him, and proceeds to make her life hell. She kills herself. Then he feels sort of bad but not that bad and keeps building his estate. Not sure what the political context was in Brazil at the time, but I can say that this was probably not intended as a ringing endorsement of landowners.

PLAYWORLD by Adam Ross

I had a lot of contradictory feelings about this lengthy book. On the one hand it was full of incident, covering a year in the life of a fourteen year old child actor, who is being groomed by a family friend, while his parents consider divorce. On the other hand it was kind of dull. And yet I read the whole thing. And I guess I’m happy I did, it was so detailed and fully realized, I feel like it was a kind of vacation in 1980s New York adolescence. Mostly it made me glad to be an adult in London in the 2020s.

THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY by Erik Larson

Here’s a piece of non-fiction about the 1893 World Fair in Chicago and the ‘Murder Hotel’ a serial killer set up to profit from it. Clearly anything called a Murder Hotel is going to be pretty interesting, but to my surprise the World Fair was even more so.

Paris had just had a spectacularly successful World Fair (for which the Eiffel Tower was built!), and Chicago was determined to better it. They only had 2-3 years to pull it off, and they had an unhinged level of ambition. As the organizer, Burnham said: “Make no little plans; they have no power to stir mens’ blood’ (which btw I have always found to be very good advice).

They built an entire display city, that used THREE TIMES the electricity of all of Chicago. For many people, it was the first electric lighted streets they’d ever seen. They also had a wild array of displays from all over the world, even sending an explorer out to Africa who was ‘confident he could acquire as many pygmies from the Congo as he wished’ (spoiler alert, he died of fever almost immediately because Africa does not play). They had new products – it’s where Juicy Fruit, Cracker Jack, and Shredded Wheat come from. And then they had what their competitor to the Eiffel tower – a structure designed by a young engineer called Ferris – which seemed so dangerous and insane it nearly did not get built at all.

The highest point of the Ferris Wheel was as high as the highest occupied floor in the highest skyscraper in the world; the axel alone at 142K pounds was the heaviest thing ever lifted into the air, and that was only the beginning of their problems. Ferris’ wife took the first ride in the wheel, to prove his confidence in it. The fair ended up being a huge success, with more people gathering in one place than ever before in the world in peacetime.

All these people were obviously a gold mine so lots of hotels were built to accommodate them. One of these was by this HH Holmes. Holmes did not like to pay his workers, so they would often walk off the job, which was good for him because it kept the costs down and because it meant no one really knew what he was building. Because what he was building was a murder hotel. Some of the rooms were airless, with gas jets he controlled in them. Some were soundproof. There was a chute from the top floor to the basement, and in the basement was a FURNACE. He was especially fond of killing young woman, of which there was a large supply, because girls were getting their first freedom and excited to come to the big city. He also managed to convince four different women to marry him (none survived). Estimates of how many he killed range from 50-200. He was eventually caught when he killed – for zero reason – the three children of one of his accomplices.

Who knew Chicago in 1893 was so interesting!

IN CHANCERY by John Galsworthy

This is the second book in the Forsythe saga, a story of wealthy British family in the early twentieth century. The first one was about a man whose wife falls in love with someone else. As divorce was very hard to achieve, cue a lot of being tormented. In this second book, everyone gets their acts together and does what they should have done in the first place, i.e: ignore the haters and just get a divorce! Meanwhile some other characters die in the Boer War. I am not sure how many more of these books I am going to do. The wife character is really an insufferable ‘perfect fantasy’ and it’s really irritating me for some reason.

YOU DREAMED OF EMPIRES by Alvaro Enrigue

This is a fictional account of the first meeting of Cortes and Moctezuma. I really enjoyed its effort to deeply imagine the Aztec empire. It is a book very much about daily life, e.g., how did the Spanish trim their toenails? But what I mostly liked was the freedom of the author, who brought a very contemporary voice to these historic figures. I can’t think when I’ve seen that before. Try this: “Inside each of us is a skull,” Enrigue writes, “and that’s all that will be left of us when we’re gone; thanks for your participation.”

We did get into slightly dicey territory at the end, when the author inserted himself in the present day into the story (snore) but overall I found it an unusual and interesting take on a famous moment in history.

SUMMER OF BLOOD by Dan Jones

Here is a piece of non-fiction about the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381. I’d never heard of it. Apparently after the plague, there were so few working people that they were able to up their day rates, which the nobles didn’t like. Hilariously, they therefore tried to fix prices at the pre-Plague rates. In addition to this great idea, they were also busy trying to rule France by means of an expensive war, and decided that peasants should accept the introduction of taxation to pay for it.

This did not go down well. Inspired by a priest called John Ball, who was basically miles ahead of Marx with the communism (and from who the famous line “When Adam delved and Even span, who then was the gentleman?” comes), the peasants marched on London, killed a lot of nobles who deserved it (and some who potentially did not), and took the Tower of London. Richard II, then fourteen, granted them all their demands, and the revolt started to ease. So then he set up vindictive kangaroo courts and had thousands of peasants executed in revenge. Rich people got to rich I guess.

THE LAST DAYS OF THE INCAS by Kim McQuarrie

Due to being an insufferable swot I always like to read a book from a country I am in when I am in it. Thus THE LAST DAYS OF THE INCAS by Kim MacQuarrie while I was in Peru. This was some hair-raising non-fiction. I knew very little about South American colonialism, and now I know a little more all I can say is YIKES. These sixteenth century Spanish were intense. However so also were the Incas.

Basically the tiny amount of contact the Incas had had with Europeans had spread smallpox, which the Inca Emporer (Sapa Inca) died of. This triggered a civil war between two of his sons, and when I say a civil war, I mean the winner (Atahulpa) aimed to exterminate his brothers whole blood line down to hanging the unborn babies BY THEIR UMBILICAL CORDS. Then the Spanish turn up. There were only 163 of them, and Atahulpa had a victorious army in the tens of thousands. So you can see where he was not worried. He went to meet them the day after he found out his brother was dead, so he was really finally the Sapa. He was mostly just interested in seeing the horses, as they did not exist in his Empire and he saw how valuable they could be. They immediately kidnap him. Poor guy: one day as the Sapa. So unconcerned was he about the capacity of the Spanish (who he thought were strange savages, which is of course exactly what they thought of him) that from his prison he ordered the continued execution of senior figures in the Inca opposition, instead of – for example – asking them to rise up and save him. You can see where he is coming from: there are only 163 of them! But what he did not bargain on was that they had iron. I guess I did not appreciate the importance of iron, but it meant that their armour made them basically invincible, especially with the horses.

It just gets worse and sadder from there on all sides. These Spanish were not representatives of the Crown but really just independent entrepreneurs, who risked their lives on the chance there was gold somewhere out there in places they did not even know existed yet. Pizarro, the main one, grew up really poor, as did most of the others. I guess you need to be really desperate to get on one of those ships. I got the impression that these were some seriously traumatized people before they even left Spain, and it went downhill from there.

There are about a million more things I learnt, like how the Incas kept everything the Sapa touched (eg., left over food) and burnt it once a year, or how the Sapa executed a whole batallion once for flinching the first time they saw a horse, or how this poor 19 year old the Spanish put in place as a puppet emperor grew into a guerilla leader, or how his wife was tortured to death in public but shamed the Spanish by not saying a word, but anyway I guess you will just have to read it.

It was strange to read so much history while in a country. I had a coffee in a central square about which my only context was that 3000 Incas died defending it.

FELICIA’S JOURNEY by William Trevor

A very compelling story about a young Irish girl who gets pregnant and comes to England to find the father with whom she had a holiday romance. She doesn’t find him, but she does find what we slowly conclude is some kind of SPOILER ALERT serial killer. This makes it sound like it’s cheesy, but it’s really not. Trevor is a really gifted writer and tells the story from both POV in a very compelling way. My main take away is, THANK GOD FOR FEMINISM. This poor girl is so messed up that she really is barely able to advocate for herself in even the most basic ways, and that’s before she meets the serial killer.