Tag: male writer

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.

THE SHELTERING DESERT by Henno Martin

I always like to read a book from the country I’m visiting, so here is a piece of non-fiction telling about the author’s two years he spent hiding in the Namib desert 1940-1941.  He went with a friend/lover(?).  He claims the goal was to avoid internment by the Namibian authorities as an enemy national (as they were Germans) but I have the strong suspicion they also thought it would be kind of baller.

They drive out in a truck, and have some supplies, so at the beginning it was easy.  They did have to give up their rifles to the police when war began, and came to regret this a lot, as apparently it is very difficult to shoot something at a distance with a handgun.  There first Christmas was pretty good, but here is their second:

“We allowed ourselves a double portion of maize, and we made it tastier with a teaspoonful of sugar that we managed to shake out of the fabric of our long-empty sugar sack. And then we heated all our empty dripping tins and collected about two teaspoonfuls of fat. It was rancid, but to us, who had eaten nothing but fatless zebra meat for a couple of weeks, it tasted wonderful.”

And he’s underselling the zebra part. One time they are so hungry that after they manage to shoot it they don’t even wait to cook it and just eat some raw. 

They do have a wireless, and so are able to listen to classical music, and to the progress of this “lunatic war,’ as he called it.  Apparently they had left Germany for Namibia in the late thirties, even before war broke out, as they could see it coming and wanted no part of it. I find this cool. Talk about just opting out, even if it ends in raw zebra.

Some of the book I skipped, I have to admit, as it was long discussions between him and his friend on various philosophical topics. I recall this from another African book, LONG WALK TO FREEDOM.  Clearly desert and prison are not too different and you don’t have much to do other than philosophize.

Eventually his friend gets beri-beri, so they have to go and hand themselves in.  They are fined but not interned (after all that!).  He ends the book with a rather sad coda, telling how his friend died in a car accident.  Wikipedia tells me he was an alcoholic who suffered from depression who likely drove himself off a bridge intentionally.  Also very sadly, he reflects on how much less wildlife there already is, ten years later.  He notes: “no man will ever again see a head of four thousand springboks in the neighbourhood’.  I had wondered about this myself; driving through the Namib I did not see anything like this.   It’s sad how an apparently wild environment is already so degraded by us.  Of course if we enter WW3, as we seem on course to do, maybe they will have a rebound

CATAPULT: HARRY AND I BUILD A SEIGE WEAPON by Jim Paul

Here is a book about a two guys who decided to build a medieval catapult. It is a story about many things, only one of them being catapults. But let’s start with them. Apparently when the catapult was first invented (by Archimedes!) it was a major shift in warfare. Fortified cities, for centuries the height of defense, were suddenly useless. At first, people though it must be gods sending bolts from heaven, because they could not imagine humans moving objects so large. One Roman commander is said to have cried “Oh Hercules! Human martial valor is of no use anymore.” This guy needs to get a load of the atom bomb.

Side bar, I also learnt that there are iron tools from 4000BC, about 2500 year before humans invented iron. GET THIS – It’s because early people learnt to carve iron out of meteorites! One community in Greenland used to pilgrimage annually to one they called ‘the mother.’

It’s not all about medieval weaponry. It’s also, probably more, about male friendship. It’s sort of charming the bloke-y way they build this catapult. And it’s kind of disturbing how amazed they are that they are managing to have a functional platonic relationship. Truly, men are lonely.

CATAPULT was first published thirty years ago; I have read it in re-issue. This has added another layer, because this means they are trying to build this catapult before the internet. I was alive before the internet, and I guess even I have forgotten what it was like. They go to the library to look at old pictures of catapults. They draw the catapult on paper. They look in the YELLOW PAGES for suppliers. They ask their friends for ideas. It’s just incredible how slow and how human the whole process is.

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.