These are David Sedaris’ dairies from 2003 to 2020. This is not very personal stuff; clearly he is doing this more or less professionally, as prep for his essays. In his first diaries, he is poor and struggling; in these he is wealthy and successful, moving between his different homes around the world. Astonishingly, they are just as likable. It’s interesting to see what someone’s daily life is made up of, but it’s also interesting to see how much less enjoyable these are than the essays. It’s weird to see the magic that moves daily experience into dairies and then essays.
Tag: male writer
THE MINISTRY OF FEAR by Graham Greene
I am passionately fond of Graham Greene. I have in fact been rationing his books to myself, so I don’t run through them too quick in my lifetime. I picked this one up at random, and was excited, but had to stop reading it part way through. This was not because it was so bad – many parts of it were very good, because Greene can’t help to be good – but because it was not as good as he can be, and I did not want my admiration for him spoiled. The story got a bit silly – I think he was trying for a spy novel? But I’ll never know because I stopped before I could find out.
Greene lived for a long time in Clapham in London, where I also live. He also lived a good amount of time in Freetown in Sierra Leone, as I did. The overlap of people who know both must be pretty small. I enjoyed his HEART OF THE MATTER, a great novel of Freetown, and this one was very much a Clapham book. I enjoyed the insight into the war in particular:
London was no longer one great city: it was a collection of small towns . . . Knightsbridge and Sloane St were not at war, but Chelsea was, and Battersea was in the front line . . In Clapham where day raids were frequent there was a hunted look which was absent from Westminster, where the night raids were heavier but the shelters were better
THEIR SOULS AT NIGHT by Kent Haruf
The title – THEIR SOULS AT NIGHT – was a massive red flag. But I thought it cant possibly be as pretentious as it sounds. But then it really was. Now let me admit I am alone in this view, as this book is beloved by many. But myself I just though it was VOM.
It tells the story of two old people who get together despite some mild disapproval from their neightbours. Later they break up because the woman’s son, for no reason I can understand, wants them to. It’s all very spineless but apparently we are supposed to find it tragic.
I think my problem no. 1 with this book was it’s almost aggressively plain and simple language. Please enjoy the below and then gouge your eyes out:
In the evening they made another small fire and Addie cut up onions and peppers and put them in butter in the iron skillet and put in the ground-up hamburger and tomato sauce and a spoonful of sugar and Worcestershire sauce and a quarter cup of ketchup and salt and pepper, a sauce she’d made before they left home, and now stirred it all together and laid a lid on the pan.
My problem no. 2, probably my biggest problem, was how utterly humourless it was. I can’t tell you why, but somehow it just dripped with the idea that it was great art, and that really irritated me.
THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles
This is a novel about what happens when you take bohemianism that bit too far. Three vaguely artsy Europeans parade around Morocco in the late 1940s, sleeping with each other and others, staying in really horrible rural hotels, and exploring their existential dread.
I read it while in Morocco, so it was an interesting parallel kind of vacation. Mine was hair-raising in its own way (how much is too much wine at the all-inclusive?) but theirs was pretty intense too (at one point the protagonist complains about being offered a seventeen year old sex worker (i.e., trafficked child), because she is ‘probably at least twenty-five’).
The protagonist dies of typhoid half way through. He is too bohemian to have bothered to be vaccinated, so this is richly deserved. His wife then loses her mind and ends up getting raped and voluntarily joining a harem.
In summary, what drivel. I kind of enjoyed this book while reading it, but in retrospect I guess I sort of hated it. I can’t fault Paul Bowles for sincerity though; apparently he spent much of his life being bohemian in just this way, spawning many imitators, and died poor in Tangier in 1999.
KLARA AND THE SUN by Kazuo Ishiguro
In this book we get to see a little too far behind the curtain. I have loved all three of Ishiguro’s other books, which broadly deal with the-one-that-got-away, in various guises. I would absolutely love to know what break-up he is working through because it must have been a real doozy. This book is a similar sort of story, but for me did not work nearly so well as the others. Perhaps I’m just too familiar with its tricks?
It is about an AF (artificial friend) who is bought to be a companion to a little girl. It is told through the AF’s AI powered understanding of the world. This was sort of interesting, but to my view has been done better. More effective was the little girl herself, and her friends. In this near-future, no one goes to school, so the children are forced to have ‘interaction meetings,’ where they learn to behave ‘normally.’ Clearly this is inspired by the pandemic, but I did enjoy it. I feel like we could all use a pretty stiff course of interaction meetings.
YOUNG MUNGO by Douglas Stuart
This author’s first book, the wonderful SHUGGIE BAIN, was all about being poor, gay, and Scottish, while also being a mummy’s boy when that mummy is an alcoholic. This book, YOUNG MUNGO covers the same ground. I often think that if, as they say, we all only have one story to tell, most of us have decided what that story is by the time we are sixteen. It’s interesting also that while the first was lightly fictionalized memoir, this one is clearly more of a novel – and you can tell – because in this one we have PLOT.
Fifteen year old Mungo is forced to go away on a fishing weekend with two strange men his mother meets at AA. They go to a loch which is “as near tae heaven as you can get on three buses.” Things get progressively more dangerous and creepy and eventually SPOILER it emerges they are recently released sex offendors, who end up assaulting Mungo. This is all intercut with flashbacks of the development of Mungo’s relationship with his first boyfriend, and the two stories intertwine, both escalating, one in a horrifying way (SPOILER Mungo kills them, but its not as soap opera as it sounds), and one in a very sweet way.
I just love the writing . . . three examples. Here his mother coming back from her boyfriend’s:
Every five days or so he would return her like an overdue library book, and she would reappear so dog-eared, so sodden with drink, that it looked like she had been dropped in the bath
And:
There was a rasp at the bottom of her breath now, a sandpapery sound that said it was too late to stop smoking.
And, on the eyes of a deer:
As dark and wet as two peeled plums
IN THE DISTANCE by Hernan Diaz
In this book a man attempts to walk from San Francisco to New York. It does not go well. It is the nineteenth century, and he is a young Swedish guy called Hakan, who intended to go to New York with his brother to make their fortune. Unfortunately, he became separated from his brother on a city street (they had never seen a city before). He assumes they will meet on the boat they are supposed to take, and asks for the boat to ‘America.’ Sadly this is boat to the west, not the east coast.
On arrival he decides just to walk it, like you do when you miss the night bus. And so begins a bizarre odyssey. He first joins up with a deranged gold digger, and then is captured, held hostage, and raped by a toothless prostitute, and then when he escapes, meets a naturalist obsessed with finding the very first creature to come out of the primordial swamp, then we have a con man who may or may not be leading a caravan to their deaths, then we have got some kind of murderous cult, and I’m only about two-thirds of the way through but I will stop.
On the one hand, this sounds kind of unlikely. On the other hand, perhaps not so. You have to wonder who decides to do anything so insane as move to a foreign country with a one-way ticket. You would for sure get a much higher proportion of nut-jobs, and lets face it that proportion is not low even today. Hakan eventually gives up, and spends many years alone in the wilds, before eventually deciding to find a way to walk from Alaska back to Sweden. Clearly while he learnt a lot over the decades, his geography did not improve. I want to laugh, but really it was kind of a sad book. The part that I think about the most is not strangely all the crazy incidents once he got to America, but the very beginning, in Europe – that first mistake – losing his brother on a city street. Imagine a world without internet, and without much literacy, where you could – completely believably – lose someone like that, and then never, ever find them again.
MICHEL THE GIANT: AN AFRICAN IN GREENLAND by Tété-Michel Kpomassie
Here is a book about how you can live the life of your wildest and most eccentric dreams. In this memoir, a Togolese teenager in the 1950s discovers a book about Greenland in the only book store in his village. He is inspired, and spends the next seven years travelling slowly up Africa and through Europe, raising money as he goes, till he gets to live in Greenland.
Someone asks him how he will benefit financially from spending his early adulthood on this project, and like iconoclasts everywhere he is appalled anyone could ask a question so crass. There is also a whole thing about how he nearly dies after getting bitten by a snake, but is saved by a priestess of a snake cult, so his family wants him to join this snake cult. This I think also came into the whole run away to the Eskimos idea, but so wildly weird is this book that this is the least strange part of the story.
One reads many travelogues where Europeans travel to Africa and are titillated by its foreignness or disappointed it is not more foreign. It is really fun to read it the other way round, and Kpomassie has plenty of both experiences. These Greenlanders are just leading incredibly rough lives. Take this:.
“Hans and Cecilia took me to dinner with Augustina and her husband Jorgensen, their neighbours and friends. When we reached the house no meal was ready, but a whole seal, caught by netting, was waiting for us. . . . As soon as we sat down at the table, Cecilia (went to the seal and started cutting it up pretty efficiently. And then using her hands). . . tore out bits of the lungs and then the liver. These were the hors d’oeuvres.
BLEARGH! They often eat raw food, still frozen. Apparently you come to like the ‘crunch’ of ice crystals. It is also very cold, so they keep the bucket to poop in in the living room, and don’t even pause their conversations while they use it. BLEARGH! He also finds out that the huskies, far from being the noble animals he imagined, are kept half-starving through the summer, when they are not needed, and only barely fed in winter. Drunk people often get eaten by dogs, which is fair enough, as people often eat the dogs too. BLEARGH!
On the upside, there is a lot of free love. Married women offer themselves to him, or are offered by their husbands. Apparently this is partly considered insurance, in case your own man does not make it back from the hunt.
I can hardly do justice to this strange book. I love this guy. He is wildly original and did all of Africa incredibly proud. I think I am fondest of this part. When he first crosses into the Arctic circle, everyone gets a certificate. You’d think he’d be excited, after working seven years to get there. But here he is:
This distribution of printed forms struck me as so grotesque that I didn’t bother to collect mine, preferring to savour the strange thill of that striking landscape.
What a man!
HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY by Richard Llewellyn
Here is a classic novel of the Industrial Revolution. It is a coming-of-age story set in the early twentieth century in a small Welsh mining village. It captures a prelapsarian time of community and honest work that from our current perspective seems wildly imaginary. Some light Googling tells me it is kind of imaginary, as apparently this famously Welsh story was written by an Englishman with only tenuous links to Wales. Still, it works. It really works. It is a little dated today, but I can still see why it was a huge bestseller.
Most effective for me is the creation of an entire community. The story is written by an older man, re-creating his boyhood and early manhood. It oozes loss. Whether he was Welsh or not, he was clearly struggling to find a way to keep alive the people he has lost. Here is the last paragraph, remembering his father who died in a mining accident:
Did my father die under the coal? But, God in heaven, he is down there now, dancing in the street with Davy’s red jersey over his coat, and coming, in a moment, to smoke his pipe in the front room and pat my mother’s hand, and look, and O, the heat of his pride, at the picture of a Queen, to his eldest son, whose baton lifted voice in music fit for a Queen to hear.
. . . For if he is dead, then I am dead, and we are dead, and all of a sense of mockery.
How green was my Valley, then, and the Valley of them that have gone.
It was crushing.
However, side point, I do always find it difficult when people who live in communities totally dependent on one thing (coal, copper, whatever) act all surprised and betrayed when that one thing ends. Like what did you think was going to happen? How did you think this was a good idea? DIVERSIFY PEOPLE DIVERSIFY.
DID YOU HEAR MAMMY DIED by Seamas O’Reilly
Here is a memoir by a man with TEN SIBLINGS. For added drama, he grew up in Ireland during the Troubles and he lost his mother when he was five. You can see where the pitch for this book wrote itself.
It had some funny parts. For example, the title DID YOU HEAR MAMMY DIED?, refers to the question he kept asking people at his mother’s wake. He was too small to understand what it meant, and was rather enjoying being the bearer of important news. He was bouncing on his bed when he told his aunt:
“‘If you want to see her, she’s in the dining room,’ I added helpfully, punctuating this sombre death notice with a commemorative belly flop”.
He also described one Irish village as so picturesque it was as if it had been ‘bitten by a radioactive postcard’ which I found hilarious. This book has been something of a bestseller, and I can see why. And yet somehow it did not quite work for me. I am not sure how to explain. I think it was because it lacked heart. In some ways, this does not make much sense, as there is much here that is sincere. He talks a lot about his grief for the mother he hardly remembers. He is still ashamed, strangely, of his behavior at the wake. And yet still, I could not really enjoy it. Perhaps it is just that bit too polished? It’s was a bit like reading a few hundred pages of a dinner anecdote that has been told once too often.