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.
Tag: male writer
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.
THE SINGULARITY IS NEARER by Ray Kurzweil
This book is a fantastically named sequel to his first, THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR. The Singularity is moment at which our brains are able to meld with a computer, so we will – according to him – be able to be fantastically more intelligent. A bit like the leap from Neanderthal to today.
It’s a book absolutely bristling with ideas – I highlighted lots of it. Like, for example, do you know the odds of the sperm and egg meeting to make you was 1 in 2 million trillion? And then go back through all the people who had to meet and mate to produce your parents, to see how lucky you are to be alive. Even wilder, he talks about how many things had to go right for life to have emerged on earth at all; apparently it is the same likelihood as a tornado blowing through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747.
He has lots of big ideas for the future – for example, for when nanotechnology will be able to print anything, because it will be able to assemble stuff at atom level. So lithium will no longer be precious; nor will diamonds. He believes the world is getting better (did you know deaths from war in prehistory were about 500/100K; now they are 4/100K, even counting nuclear weapons?), and will continue to get better quickly. He makes some good arguments, pointing out how unimaginable landing on the moon was in the early 1900s, when no one had even flown yet.
I struggled a lot with all this talk of the ‘one way march of progress.’ I see what he means, but on the other hand, I’m not sure I do. What about the fall of Rome? What about the dangers of AI? I hate to say it, but all this boundless optimism just said one thing to me, and that one thing was: boomer. I get it, your life has just been one long upward swing. Here’s fingers crossed for the rest of us.
PRIVATE CITIZENS by Tony Tulathimutte
This book is very more-ish and seethes with verbal energy. Try this:
“If you preferred the indoors, everyone assumed you were scared of life and emotionally stunted. That wasn’t it. . . . Sure, it was nice to have some fresh air while he smoked. But he was myopic, hard of hearing, congested – reality was lo-fi, slow and obstructing, too cold or too bright, filled with scrapes, sirens, hidden charges, long distances, pollen, and assholes”
It was also kind of hilarous; one character, we are told, has seen ‘most of’ the porn on the internet. Given that this is set in 2007, what is eerie is I guess this might just conceivably be possible. Today I suppose it would take several lifetimes. The book tells the story of four friends living in San Francisco a couple of years after they graduate from Stanford. About two-thirds of the way through, I started to get exhausted. Everyone was so self-harming! There was anorexia, self hatred based on race, failing to take your anti-psychotics, lying about rape, and that’s just the first few I can think of. And of course there was no redemption: it was just self-harm and self-harm some more. But weirdly I still enjoyed it.
TROUBLES by JG Farrell
This author was kind of a jock at university. Then he caught polio, poor guy, just a couple of years before the vaccine was invented, and had to abruptly enter an iron lung to stay alive. Sport’s loss was literature’s gain, because he’s a wonderful writer. This book tells the story of a WWI veteran who goes to visit a woman he met in Brighton during his leave. She says she is fiance; he can’t remember if she is or not. It gets weirder from there. The alleged fiance lives in an enormous decaying hotel in Ireland, and dies almost immediately after he gets there. For some reason he stays on, while the hotel crumbles around him. A bunch of stuff then happens that has something to do with Irish political history, I could not follow all that. But I enjoyed it nonetheless. Here is a taste, when they brought in the family dogs to try and chase out the huge family of cats who were living in abandoned rooms:
“But it had been a complete failure. The dogs had stood about uncomfortably in little groups, making little effort to chase the cats but defecating enormously on the carpets. At night they had howled like lost souls, keeping everyone awake. In the end the dogs had been returned to the yard, tails wagging with relief. It was not their sort of thing at all.”
THE SEIGE OF KRISHNAPUR by JG Farrell
I found this book in my house, but have no idea where or when I got it. It’s part of the EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY series – a fantastic series I used to read a lot of back when I haunted the Harare City Library – so I assume I picked it up based on that alone. And once again EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY has come up with the goods. I’d never heard of this JG Farrell, but this is a banging book. It is a fictionalization of the Siege of Lucknow in 1857, which I’d also never heard of, in which a group of English colonials withstood a long siege by the rebellious Indian army. It is a hair-raising story of delicately brought up people reduced to eating rodents, but it is a also a hilarious book of ideas. Try this description of a young man:
“From the age of sixteen when he had first become interested in books, much to the distress of his father, he had paid little heed to physical and sporting matters. He had been of a melancholy and listless cast of mind, the victim of the beauty and sadness of the universe. In the course of the last two or three years, however, he had noticed that his sombre and tubercular manner was no longer having quite the effect it had one had, particularly on young ladies. They no longer found his pallor so interesting, they tended to become impatient with his melancholy. The effect, or lack of it, that you have on the opposite sex is important because it tells you whether or not you are in touch with the spirit of the times, of which the opposite sex is invariably the custodian.”
This gives you a flavour. It would have been really easy to write a book of stereotypes, because these poor starving people are so obviously getting what they richly deserve, but somehow he avoids it. Strongly recommend! So strongly in fact that I immediately read his next book TROUBLES. Of which more shortly.
THE EMPEROR by Ryszard Kapuscinki
Here is a book in which a journalist seeks out and interviews members of the court of Haile Selassie, the last emperor of Ethiopia, immediately after he is deposed. This is not too easy, as they either dead or in hiding. He is mostly able to find the most junior servants. The guy whose job was to put the pillow under his majesty’s feet; the guy whose job was to clean up after his majesty’s dog; the guy whose job was to bow every hour on the hour, so the emperor could keep track of time passing. It’s an interesting picture of what power does to people. Some say that the interviews are a bit too on the nose, and that in fact the whole thing is a commentary on the dictatorship in Kapuscinki’s native Poland. I don’t know that it makes that much difference; one great truth in life is that one autocrat is much like another.
Particularly interesting was how Selassie lost power, in inches, to the military council named the Derg, which itself became a pretty robust dictatorship basically immediately. I have been to a museum about this in Addis, where they directly display some of what they dug up from mass graves of the period, including heart-breaking passport photos of hopeful students with enormous 70s hair who laid down their lives for a better Ethiopia. I’ve also been to Selassie’s palace, where you can see the his-n-hers bathroom set up he had (pink and blue) complete with bullet holes in the mirrors from when things got real at the end.
A sad and weird read.