Tag: male writer

AN OBEDIENT FATHER by Akhil Sharma

I had to give up on this book because it was just too believable. It tells the story of a child abuser, from the perspective of the child abuser. Fiction exists to help us understand others. This is a noble goal. But I guess I just don’t really want to understand all others.

In theory, I suppose we all agree that everyone’s human. Like, even Hitler. And Ted Bundy. And I guess I’ve read quite a few books from the perspective of dictators and serial killers, which I’ve never found it too revolting before. This one though: wow. It’s enough to make me wish there is a hell, so that fathers who rape their children can go there.

As I debated whether or not to give up on this book , I spent quite some time thinking about why it was so unreadable. I think its because at least a serial killer, you think, okay, you are crazy. You are working out some mania. And dictators, okay, they kill people, but at least they are like obsessed with a greater Deutschland or whatever. This guy: he rapes her for a while, and then when he gets caught he stops. So he’s not a maniac. He just wanted to rape her and so he did.

Anyway, I feel gross just writing about it. If you think you can stomach it, though, I will say it is startlingly well written, just like Akhil’s previous book FAMILY LIFE). It’s set in India and in addition to the abuse is also a grim look at how unavoidable petty political corruption is. God no wonder I had to quit.

FIND ME by Andre Aciman

Never ever read the sequel to any novel you have loved.  I take this as a general rule. There’s a risk that what you found heart-breakingly unique is in fact a tired old trick of that particular author, and the novel you love will be tainted in retrospect. I broke this rule by reading FIND ME, a sequel to the wonderful CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, and yes, it was a big mistake.

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME is the story of  Elio, and his teenage infatuation.  It a powerful and terrifying story of the one who got away.  In FIND ME, the father of Elio, who is in his fifties, meets a beautiful twenty-something woman on a train, and they begin a wild romance. 

I mean, okay.  I’m not saying this could never happen, but for sure in this telling it seems unlikely.  Even if you assume a lot of unspoken daddy issues, there is just no way a 24 year old is referring to some old guy’s penis as a ‘lighthouse’ and listening to him talk awkwardly about Goethe.  I don’t want to be super harsh, but it kind of read like an extended and slightly pitiful exercise in wishful thinking by a middle-aged man.

Part way through the book we go back to Elio himself, who is now in his thirties.  And there I had to stop.  So far it had just been such a lot of unmotivated and unlikely drivel, I just couldn’t face the character being polluted by more of the same.  So luckily I can’t tell you how it turned out.

WAR AND TURPENTINE by Stefan Hertmans

Here a man uses his grandfather’s actual diaries to recreate life in the early twentieth century.  It starts off interesting – for example, we learn how many very specific scents are lost to us.  Here he is on his great-grandmother:

Her black apron – he called it a pinafore – smelled like the offal of young rabbits

Horrifyingly specific.  Then we get into flashforwards, where we follow the author around modern day and very dull city of Ghent.  Things go rapidly downhill. It is not easy to write about the book you are writing.  Emmanual Carrere manages it, but few others can, and certainly not this writer.  Enjoy:

. . . I would scarely recognize the area.  Wild geese, a few sluggish swans in the polluted riverside mud, nervous moorhens in the black, oil-soaked mire.  Damaged nature, memory.  Pom-pom-pom, pom-pom-pom.  Humming, I walk out of the old cemetery.  But in the twilight, as I revel in the adagio strains of Edvard Grieg’s ‘Ase’s Death,’ that superlative mourning music for a dead mother, I see, in my mind’s eye, the old phantoms far above me, flickering titanically on the walls of a cave, blown up into eerie shapes by the light of a fire beyond my ken.

This is where I stopped.

FAMILY LIFE by Akhil Sharma

You wouldn’t think there was any more space left in the world for another novel of the American immigrant experience.  Apparently there is, and here it is. 

FAMILY LIFE is about a boy who moves from India to the US with his family as a child. 

The charm of the novel is Sharma’s creation of a child’s eye view of the world, direct, assured, sometimes kind of racist.    Here’s two pieces on his father:

I used to think my father had been assigned to us by the government.  This was because he appeared to serve no purpose. 

And:

While my mother was interested in status, being better educated than others or being considered more proper, my father was just interested in being rich . . . Because of my grandfather’s problems, my father had grown up feeling that no matter what he did, people would look down on him.  As a result, he cared less about convincing people of his merits and more about just owning things.

The family are on the path of hard work and immigrant grit when his SPOILER ALERT older brother is in an accident that leaves him brain damaged.  Things get much harder from there.   Side point,  I love this:

Weeks passed.  The weather got colder.  The days tipped backward into darkness.  Some evenings our house and street appeared dark while the sky was light.  In October the trees shed their leaves, and our houses stood undefended on its lawn.

He works hard in high school, has a girlfriend, goes on to university, and becomes a miserable investment banker (is there another kind?).  I liked this thought on his girlfriend:

Minkashi lives in Texas now.  She is an accountant.  This surprises me because you always expect people who matter a great deal to you to end up leading glamorous lives

A really good book. I shall look for his other novel. 

CREATE DANGEROUSLY by Albert Camus

Camus has clearly never heard the advice that you ought to begin a speech with a joke. In this collection of three short speeches he dives right in with the super serious thoughts on the big topics: art, politics, relationship between art and politics.  As always, when reading from this period I am surprised, and almost ashamed, by the sincerity with which people speak.  We seem to be many miles away from feeling we can speak with authority today on any subject. 

He has a lot to say about Soviet realism, and how impossible ‘realism’ really is:

But under what conditions is such a (realistic) film possible?  Under purely imaginary conditions.  We should have to presuppose, in fact, an idea camera focused on the man day and night and constantly registering his every move.  . . (and such a film) could be seen only by an audience of people willing to waste their lives in watching someone else’s life in great detail.    

Best he not know about BIG BROTHER and SUN, SEX AND SUSPICIOUS PARENTS.  He has a lot to say about the responsibility of the artist in the post-WWII world:

An Oriental wise man always used to ask the divinity in his prayers to be so kind as to spare him from living in an interesting era.  As we are not wise, the divinity has not spared us and we are living in an interesting era. 

I love this.  I don’t especially admire Lord of the Rings, but I often used to think of this bit when I was feeling depressed about the Zimbabwean situation:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Last point, I was interested to learn in writing this blog that in fact Camus was not French but Algerian.  I mean he held the former passport, but he was born in and spent the majority of his life in Algiers.  Interesting that I’ve only ever heard him described as French. Also, he was the second youngest person ever to win the Nobel, at 44, and was dead at 46 in car accident.  A sentence the first part of which makes me feel rather disappointed in my life, the second part of which makes me feel very grateful.  Rollercoaster.     

COOL FOR AMERICA by Andrew Martin

I adore Andrew Martin’s first book, EARLY WORK, in a way that makes feel gnaw-my-own-arm-off crazy.  I’ve read it twice, here and here.  So when his second book COOL FOR AMERICA came out, I bought it straight away, even though I don’t really approve of buying hardbacks, because it is decadent.

I don’t love these short stories as much as EARLY WORK, but let’s face it, there is almost nothing I love like I love EARLY WORK.  The stories are sort of similar to EARLY WORK (I just like typing the name) being about writing, and drinking, and cheating. 

As one character puts it:

The pursuit of unavailable women was the closest I could get to a life’s passion.

And the book is much about the beginning of relationships, and about their endings, often overlapping.  Try these various thoughts about possible romantic partners:

. . . .maybe it was his lack of anxiety about his literary status that made him so good in bed.  Leave it to somebody else to pierce the human heart with punctuation

Or this, about an effort to write a grown-up email to an ex:

. . . these thoughts wouldn’t form themselves into coherent sentences on the screen, maybe because she wasn’t sure they were true.  She hadn’t forgotten the ugly melodrama of their final months together and she hadn’t forgotten the ugly melodrama of their final months together and she hadn’t forgiven him for going off to Italy for a fellowship without her, like a punk-ass.  The worst thing about studying art history was the artists.

There is lots of other stuff I love.  Here a character is going home:

. . .he wished he could justify not returning to the primodial slop, which, no matter how hard he tried for it not to, left him dizzy with despair every time he was re-immersed in it.

I don’t especially like short stories. I don’t like being pulled into something just in time for it to end, and I don’t like that very often that ending feels awkward and forced, trying to squeeze out meaning like a difficult pimple.  But despite all this I still enjoyed COOL FOR AMERICA.   I can’t wait for him to write something else

HOUSE OF HUNGER by Dambudzo Maruchera

Dambudzo Maruchera lived a short and remarkable life.  He was born in Rusape (a small town in Zimbabwe) to a mortuary attendant and a maid, and had a rough childhood.  He excelled at school, and went to the Universities of Rhodesia and then Oxford, neither of which worked out.  He drank a lot, maybe had some mental health challenges, and was dead of AIDS at 35.  And somewhere in there, he wrote a handful of books that revolutionized African literature

HOUSE OF HUNGER is his most famous book.  It begins with this amazing first line:

I got my things and left. 

I love this. I don’t know why.  Humour me by letting me quote extensively. Here he is talking to his mother and his brother:

That hoarse bass voice of hers had not always been like that.  She blamed it on the way she had ‘come down in the world;’ which was merely a euphemism about her excessive drinking. . . She liked nothing better than to nag me about how she had not educated me to merely sit on my arse. And when nagging me her language would take on such an earthy hue it made me wonder why I ever bothered to even think about humanity. . .

“I sent you to University,” she said.  “There must be big jobs waiting for you out there.”

“Tell that to Ian Smith,” Peter butted in maliciously.  “All you did was starve yourself to send this shit to school while Smith made sure that the kind of education he got was exactly what has made him like this.”

I did not like this so I began to whistle ‘Little Jack Horner Sat in a Corner.’

Peter, as usual when something indistinct disgusts him, farted long and loudly and spat in my general direction, and muttered something about capitalists and imperialists. 

“And the bloody whites,” I added, for this trinity was for him the thing that held the House of Hunger in a stinking grip. 

One of the most interesting things about the world is how he inhabits two worlds, local and global at the same time.  Try this, on the local prostitutes:

Most of them had nowhere secret to take their numerous clients.  They used the bush instead.  The countryside, up to then, had left me cold and indifferent; later a hasty affair with Wordsworth’s Prelude swung me to the opposite extreme.

An amazing mashup.  It’s a bold, weird, exciting book, and makes me proud to be a Zimbabwean. 

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND by Rumaan Alam

Everyone knows it’s much easier to write the set-up of a sci-fi novel than it is to satisfyingly resolve it, so in this book the author des not even bother to try.  Surprisingly, it works.

A family of four head to a rural Airbnb outside New York.  They go grocery shopping and we learn a bit too much about their sex lives.  Then in the middle of the night an older couple knock on their door.  It is the owners of the Airbnb, who have fled New York because ‘something’ has happened.

SPOILER ALERT: you never find out what the something is, and it doesn’t matter.  Things get very creepy.  For one thing, the deer start to mass into huge herds.  For another, there is an incredibly loud noise.  And then some flamingos arrive and the childrens’ teeth start falling out. 

I wish LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND had been longer. I wanted to know where it was going, because while it did mounting terror very well, it was strange for it to end, as it did for me, mid-mount. 

I also struggled slightly with how literary it was.  I love the author’s twitter feed (you should follow @rumaan) which is hilarious and contemporary and unfussy.  The novel had a bit too much philosophizing for me, basil chopping, and etc. 

And yet I would indeed feel very proud if I had written it.  Strongly recommend.  Makes you feel COVID’s not that bad. 

THE TOPEKA SCHOOL by Ben Lerner

Here is a book that confirms abundantly my suspicions about books with long sections in italics. Authors seem to feel like as long as it is in italics it is going to be okay for it to be sort of rambling and non-rational. There is only so much of this kind of thing I can take.

These italics parts are reserved for a developmentally disabled teenage boy who is being treated cruelly by the cool kids. The main character is one of these cool kids. Or maybe not that cool, because he is a debate star, and debate is not cool. On the other hand the whole thing takes place in Kansas, so who knows, the bar may be lower there.

In any case, THE TOPEKA SCHOOL is very much a boys’ book, packed full of boys’ issues. It was rapturously reviewed, so maybe I am missing something, but I just couldn’t get into it. Apparently the fact that in high school debate you are rewarded for building arguments you don’t believe in is problematic and speaks to larger issues in America. Or similar. I don’t know.

AUGUSTUS by John Williams

John Williams wrote the novel STONER, a novel that this blog tells me I read in 2013. So profoundly wonderful is this book that the author’s biography is called THE MAN WHO WROTE THE PERFECT NOVEL. You will note that it does not refer to perfect novel(s) and this is because AUGUSTUS is unfortunately not a perfect novel.

Don’t get me wrong, it is much better than what most people could achieve on their very best day after a lifetime of trying, but still in comparison to STONER it can only be meh.

It is a deeply researched account of the life of Augustus Caesar, told through the letters of his contemporaries. Apparently ancient Romans were great letter writers – Cicero wrote eight to ten a day (did he not have a job?) – and so this is not as unlikely a device as it at first seems.

It is an interesting story, but for my taste a little bit too much sandals and togas and boys impressing each other. But perhaps it’s just that it’s not STONER. Sadly nothing can be STONER.

Sometimes one regrets seeing how high the bar can go, because it makes one realize how low it is usually set.