Tag: male writer

THE DEVIL IN THE FLESH by Raymond Radiguet

This guy has an affair with a married woman when he is 15; writes a book about it at 17; and is dead by 20. Now this is what I call living. That said, I am grateful for the vaccination against Typhoid.

This lightly fictionalized story caused a scandal on publication because the husband being cheated on is away from home because he is serving in the frontlines of the First World War.

The woman is 19, and she and the author have an affair of high passion and higher risk. He goes to visit her to talk about literature (a gossamer thin excuse). Here we are:

She liked going to sleep in front of the fire with her hair unpinned. Or rather I thought she was asleep. In fact, her sleep was only an excuse to put her arms around my neck.

They end up making out, and eventually, after she gives him a bit of help, having a lot of sex. However, they know their love is doomed. Not because she is married, but because she is apparently too old for him:

In fifteen years life would still be just beginning for me, and women of the age that Marthe was now would be in love with me. . . . I was too well aware of the attractions of youth not to realize that I would leave Marthe when her youth was beginning to desert her and mine was still at its height

Truly, we have no idea how long an uphill battle feminism has had to fight in the twentieth century. Meanwhile he has some other interests. Try this on for an extra taste, when he is alone with a friend of hers :

I did not assume from her silence that my kisses had given her any pleasure; but she was incapable of indignation and could think of no polite way of rejecting me in French. I nibbled at her cheeks, fully expecting a sweet juice to squirt out, as from a peach. . . . Her only gesture of refusal was to move her head feebly from left to right, and from right to left. I did not delude myself, but my mouth took this t be the response it desired . . . I was naive enough to imagine that things would continue in the same fashion and that I would succeed in raping her without difficulty

I don’t even know what to comment on this.

In an unrealistic and abrupt turn of events the woman he is having an affair with dies. In real life, she lived, and her husband spent the next fifty years trying to prove to everyone the book was fiction. He was eventually buried with his wife’s letters and a book that celebrated the heroism of the soldiers of WWI. I feel bad for him, but then on the other hand he did get that extra fifty years to protest his wife’s virtue, while the author got fifty years of being dead.

ALL MY CATS by Brohumil Hrabal

I can’t think I’ve ever read a book before about our love for cats. Or pets in general. This is strange, because there are books about love for people, for money, for landscapes, for cities, and etc; and I think domestic animals are as much beloved as any of those things, and perhaps more.

I suspect this reticence all comes down to our guilt about meat, but that’s a post for another time. In any case, on this book, which I think is non-fiction, the author truly loves his cats. His problem is, where the line should be. In summary, he goes deep.

He starts off with just a few cats. His favourite is Blackie:

I never tired of looking at her and she was so fond of me she’d practically swoon whenever I picked her up and held her to my forehead and whispered sweet words in her ear . . Whenever I’d look at her, she’d go all soft and I’d have to pick her up and for a moment I’d feel her go limp from the surge of feeling that flowed from me to her and back again, and I would groan with pleasure

The problem comes when these cats start having kittens, who have kittens themselves. The house is overrun. Eventually he decides he has to kill them. He does it himself, and buries them, covered in geraniums. And then the meltdown starts. He killed them by bashing them to death inside a mailbag, and he develops a real mania about this mailbag. It sounds like of laughable written down but it is gruesome and sad to read. His problem is that he can’t decide at what level it is appropriate to love animals. He wants to love them how he loves them, which is a lot, but the world is not set up that way.

He is having some kind of breakdown when he gets into a car accident, which he accepts as some kind of cosmic justice from the mailbag. It’s hard to explain but it makes him feel better. Then he chances upon a swan, stuck in a rapidly freezing river, and is unable to save it. It’s a tribute to this strange book that again, it’s hard to explain, but you somehow feel that this is a truly appalling event, and a fitting finale, to whatever it is that this book is about.

A BURNT-OUT CASE by Graham Greene

Here is an architect who decides that the best place to handle his existential crisis is a leper colony in the DRC.

I love Graham Greene. Going backwards through my blog, I realize this is my ninth book of his. And I’m sorry to say my least favourite. He is all about lost men racked with guilt (which usually, for some reason, I apparently love) but this one was really a bridge too far.

First of all, I’m not going to say the DRC is like an ideal holiday location, but he comes it a bit strong here, calling it ‘a continent of misery and heat.’ Second of all, it is a bit hard to sympathise with you about losing your faith when you are going on about it among lepers who have lost their hands and feet.

UNDER THE SKIN by Michael Faber

Here is a fantastically wonderful book with an amazing twist, so I recommend stopping reading this post right now and getting the book, because this is going to be full of SPOILERS.

The book begins with a woman picking up hitchhikers. This is so abnormal in the modern world that you can only assume she must be a serial killer. The hitchhikers do indeed die, and there is an extremely clever, slow reveal as to why. SHE’S AN ALIEN AND SHE’S ABDUCTING THEM AS A CULINARY DELICACY FOR HER HOME PLANET.

You’d think, based on this, it would be a science fiction story. It’s not at all. Mostly you are in head of the woman. Like many non-aliens, she hates her job, hates her boss, has a crush on someone who isn’t interested. At one point, some of the captured hitchhikers escape. They have been with the aliens for a month:

Removed from the warmth of its pen, it was pathetically unfit for the environment, bleeding from a hundred scratches, pinky-blue with cold. It had the typical look of a monthling, its shaved nub of a head nestled like a bud atop the disproportionately massive body. Its empty scrotal sac dangled like a pale oak leaf under its dark acorn of a penis. A thin stream of blueish-black diarrhoea clattered onto the ground between its legs. Its fists swept the air jerkily. Its mouth opened wide to show its cored molars and the docked stub of its tongue.

  ‘Ng-ng-ng-ng-gh!’ it cried.

She has occasional moral scruples about how they are treating the humans. But as she explains at one point, they “couldn’t siuwil, they couldn’t mesnishtil, they had no concept of slan . . . And when you looked into their glazed little eyes, you could understand why.” It’s clearly, among many, many, other things, a meditation about vegetarianism, and how we train ourselves to not have compassion. And not just for animals, but for sweatshop employees, for children affected by air pollution, and all the other things that make the world go round.

At one point we do visit the processing plant, where one of the recently de-tongued hitchhikers writes the word MERCY on the ground. The alien pretends to a wealthy visitor that she does not know what it means, as she does not want do-gooders getting hysterical. And indeed there is no such word in the alien language in any case. Later, when things go wrong with a hitchhiker, and he is trying to rape her (luckily she lacks human genitals), she is terrified, and tries to remember the word. “Murky!” she screams. It’s not everyday you laugh at a rape scene.

The aliens’ home planet is some kind of toxic stew, where oxygen and water are expensive and must be fought for. Thus, much of the book is spent with the alien marvelling at beauty of the countryside around the A9 highway. It is tragic to see our ‘ordinary’ world through her eyes. She is amazed we have still got sky and sea to enjoy. For a little while, anyway.

COMING UP FOR AIR by George Orwell

This is a book about a man who does not succeed in blowing up his life.  He is an insurance salesman, married with two children, and labouring under a mortgage.  (In a sign that things were better back then, the mortgage is only for sixteen years.  WTF is up with London housing)

One day he conceives a desire to go fishing, as he was an avid fisherman as a boy. He has not however fished since he was sixteen.  Here’s why:

In this life we lead – I don’t mean human life in general, I mean life in this particular age and this particular country – we don’t do the things we want to do.  It isn’t because we’re always working. . . . It’s because there’s some devil in us that drives us to and fro on everlasting idiocies.  There’s time for everything except the things worth doing.  Think of something you really care about.  Then add hour to hour and calculate the fraction of your life that you’ve actually spent doing it.  And then calculate the time you’ve spent on things like shaving, riding to and fro on buses, waiting in railways junctions, swapping dirty stories and reading the newspapers. 

He bunks off from his family to go and spend a week in the village in which he grew up, which he has not seen in twenty years.  In his mind ‘as permanent as they pyramids,’ he arrives to find it now just an outer suburb of London, and not an especially nice one at that.  He buys a fishing rod and does not use it.  He sees an old girlfriend, and is horrified and how old she looks.  Fat and with false teeth himself, he assures us that men never go so far downhill as women do.  Sometimes the patriarchy is really adorably deluded.

He ends up going home, concluding there is no escape from his life.  The year however is 1938, and the book has hanging over it very explicitly the coming war.  You feel he will almost welcome it.

Side point. Orwell published a bunch of books you’ve never heard of, including this, and then in 1945, Animal Farm; and in 1949, the novel 1984.  Then in 1950 he was dead, at 47.  Imagine: he managed to squeeze in two seminal classics just before the end. Imagine what would have come next.  Imagine how close to the wire he cut it. 

SHUGGIE BAIN by Douglas Stuart

About ten pages into this book, I felt like I was getting into a hot bath. I just got ready to seriously relax. It’s exactly the sort of book I like: one that gives you a break from your own life, by deeply involving you in someone else’s.

It tells the story of a little boy being raised on some quite rough council estates by his alcoholic mother. I would bet heavy money that this book, while marketed as fiction, is based on the author’s own childhood. There is a certain subset of books in which the detail of daily life is so vividly captured that it can only come from a child’s eye, and ideally a child with a ton of trauma. It’s Glasgow in the 1980s, a place and a time I’ve never given a second thought to, and now I feel like I have a real experience of it. It joins such bizarrely disparate periods as Trinidad in the 1950s (courtesy, A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS) and the Dominican Republic in the 1960s (courtesy, FEAST OF THE GOAT read on a particularly hallucinatory 12 hour bus ride to Acupulco).

I won’t go on about everything I thought was wonderful about this book, but let me just leave you with this:

The other taxi drivers had taken on that familiar shape of men past their prime, the hours spent sedentary behind the wheel causing the collapse of their bodies, the full Scottish breakfasts and the snack bar suppers settling like cooled porridge around their waists. Eventually the taxi hunched them over till their shoulders rounded into a soft hump and their heads jutted forward on jowled necks. The ones who had been at the night shift a long time had turned ghostly pale, their only colour was the faint rosacea from the years of drink. These were the men who decorated their fingers with gold sovereign rings, taking vain pleasure from watching them sit high and shiny on the steering wheel

And that’s just taxi drivers! Imagine everything else that’s in there

THE SUBTLE ART OF NOT GIVING A F*CK by Mark Manson

Here is an example of how a great title does half the work.  Though the author’s point is not so much that we should not give a f*ck, but rather that we should only give a f*ck about what we give a f*ck about.  Easier said than done, in my experience. I often find myself getting riled up about things that I know I do not care about.  In any case, the book is refreshing in its emphasis that there is no life without problems; the point is to choose the right problems. 

I also thought this was useful:

If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.

Here his point is, don’t measure success too much based on things you cannot control, e.g., the approval of others, promotions, etc. Rather focus on things you can control, e.g., doing your best.  Associated with this is what you should measure yourself on:

Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways. Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or an undiscovered genius. . . .  Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator. . . . (You should) define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible. This often means giving up some grandiose ideas about yourself: that you’re uniquely intelligent, or spectacularly talented . .  . This means giving up your sense of entitlement and your belief that you’re somehow owed something by this world.”

I can’t say it’s the best written or most insightful book I’ve ever come across, and admittedly I lost it in an Uber before I finished it completely, but that said I enjoyed it. 

STORM OF STEEL by Ernst Junger

Here is a book about how bad things can get.  It’s the dairies of a man who signed up on the the day the first world war began, and, incredibly, made it all the way through to 1918.  The Somme, Ypres, Cambrai: he saw them all. 

The book was published in 1919, and it shows.  Most of the other books of this period were written at a remove of at least a decade or so, but in this one there has been no time to make sense of the war, or to do anything but just tell us what happened.  It is in parts boring, as war is boring, and in other parts horrifying.  As far as I can tell, no one whom he personally knew with whom he began the war ended it alive with him. 

It is deeply revolting.  Here he is on a patch of land that has been fought over repeatedly:

In among the living defenders lay the dead.  When we dug foxholes, we realized that there were stacked in layers.  One company after another, pressed together in the drumfire, had been mown down, then the bodies had been buried under the showers of earth sent up by shells, and then the relief company had taken their predecessors’ place.  And now it was our turn. 

He is on the German side, and is, as ever, extraordinarily depressing to see how very similar their war was from their alleged ‘enemies’ on the other side.  He is even reading TRISTAM SHANDY in the trenches.  Towards the end, though, his war does differ from that of English accounts I have read, because he is of course, losing, and he knows it.  They start to run out of food; they are no longer sleeping in trenches, but in craters; and still he goes on. 

With every attack, the enemy came onward with more powerful means; his blows were swifter and more devastating. Everyone knew we could no longer win. But we would stand firm.

He is clearly losing it.

A profound reorientation, a reaction to so much time spent so intensely, on the edge. The seasons followed one another, it was winter and then it was summer again, but it was still war. I felt I had got tired, and used to the aspect of war, but it was from familiarity that I observed what was in front of me in a new and subdued light. Things were less dazzlingly distinct. And I felt the purpose with which I had gone out to fight had been used up and no longer held. The war posed new, deeper puzzles. It was a strange time altogether.

It is in this context that he goes into his last battle.  His company takes a direct hit, and twenty some young men are killed right next to him.  Then he goes on for hours, fighting, sobbing, singing.  At one point he takes off his coat, and keeps shouting  “Now Lieutenant Junger’s throwing off his coat” which had the “fusiliers laughing, as if it had been the funniest thing they’d ever heard.”  He cannot remember large stretches of this last battle.  At one point he stops to shoot an Englishman, who reaches into his pocket and instead of bringing out a pistol brings out a picture of family.  Junger lets him live.  He kills plenty of others though, including one very young man:

 I forced myself to look closely at him. It wasn’t a case of ‘you or me’ any more. I often thought back on him; and more with the passing of the years. The state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse; and we must exercise it. Sorrow, regret, pursued me deep into my dreams

And all this while HE KNOWS THEY CANNOT WIN.  Guys, I would have deserted long before, and I am not even ashamed to say it.  Honour, like courage, are concepts generally deployed by rich people to get you to do what they want.  I can’t think of almost anything for which I would die.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE by Kevin Wilson

This was a re-read of this marvellous book about income inequality and spontaneous human combustion.

I didn’t love this the second time round as much as the first. But this still has me loving it more than most books. This time round what I concluded is that what makes it remarkable is the quality of the voice of the narrator. It’s weirdly, painfully, contemporary and disillusioned.

Try this, about her efforts to get a scholarship to a school for rich kids:

I didn’t know the school was just some ribbon rich girls obtained on their way to a destined future. . . . . I wasn’t destined for greatness, I knew this.  But I was figuring out how to steal it from someone stupid enough to relax their grip on it.

I won’t write up the whole book again; the first read is here. If you are looking for something to read, I recommend it.