Tag: male writer

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.

OHIO by Stephen Markley

I guess I’m not the first person to notice this, but these opiods are a real problem, huh?

I feel like I’ve really been wallowing in the lives of disaffected Americans. It’s remarkable how miserable people in small towns in the Midwest are. Everyone’s a failed high school athlete, a drug addict, a confused lesbian, etc. No wonder they voted for Donald Trump.

OHIO tells the story of four friends from high school who happen to return to their home town on the same night. The reasons are not super believable, but it’s a fun device for having long distant lives intersect, full of drugs and lesbianism, this book being what is it. There is also murder.

This part bothered me. One girl was drugged and raped in high school as a virgin, and developed a searing case of Stockholm Syndrome, which involved her becoming his girlfriend and ‘consenting’ after a bit of beating to all sorts of terrible things. She plots and successfully executes his murder. It is great. Then she gets caught. I can only assume this is because the author is male. I don’t think a female writer could have brought herself to it.

It’s a great in-depth, super specific tour of small town Ohio life. I recommend it.

THE CONFESSIONS OF MAX TIVOLI by Andrew Sean Greer

We are each the love of someone’s life.

I wanted to put that down in case you become so disturbed by the facts of my confession that you throw it into the fire before I get to tell you of great love and murder.

An amazing beginning. I loved Greer’s Pulitzer winning novel LESS, so had great hopes for this book, which is the story of a man who ages backwards.  Set in the early twentieth century, some of it was charming. Lightbulbs are described as “. . . resting on a bed of cotton like the newly deposited eggs of a glass lizard.” Or here is Max’s mother:

She sat sideways in her chair as if she still wore a bustle; she was of a generation that had learned to sit this way in their youth, so she still did it out of habit and out of a sense that this antique pose was the essence of beauty.  The women who sat this way are all dead now. 

Leaving aside how poignant this is, how do you even do the research to know this is a thing of that period?  This sounds like a rave review, but in fact, surprising myself, far from actually really liking this novel, I could not even get up the enthusiasm to finish it. 

The key story is supposed to be his love for some girl.  He barely knows her, and lots of the novel descends into overwrought imaginings of her as the ideal woman.  Somehow this just struck me as very boring.  I’ve don’t know if it was because I had just finished THE HUMAN STAIN, but I just felt like I didn’t need any more of mens’ internal struggle with the idea of women who never actually appear. 

I don’t know if I’m overly woke, or what.  I don’t thinks so though.  I think I’m just very much feeling life’s brevity at the moment, so I’m all about quitting what I’m not enjoying.  So quit it I did, without worrying too much about my reasons.  That I’m not having fun is enough.  I strongly suspect that that, my friends, might be the beginning of adulthood.    It’s been a long time coming.

 

CHERRY by Nico Walker

Emily used to wear a white ribbon around her throat and talk in breaths and murmurs, being nice, as she was, in a way so you didn’t know if she were a slut or just real down-to-earth. And from the start I was dying to find out, but I thought I had a girlfriend and I was shy. 

This is the amazing opening of this amazing novel.  It’s the story of an Iraq veteran with PTSD who pays for his opiod addiction by robbing banks.  It’s semi-autobiographical, as you can tell by the fact that the author is currently in jail for robbing banks.  It sounds bleak, which it is, but it’s also very funny. And so apparently raw that I can only wonder at the huge artistry that went into it.

Let’s enjoy first his descriptions.  A frat house basement:

 done out in plywood, some kind of beer-pong sex dungeon, everything dismal as murder

His fellow recruits in the army:

. .  there was a lot of inadequacy to be seen in the big room.  Fat kids. Acne.  Acne on the face.  Acne on the body.  Skinny kids.  I was a skinny kid.  I wasn’t strong.  We looked like shit.  We’d grown up on high-fructose corn syrup, with plenty of television  . .

He has a terrible time in Iraq, reminding us that while it was not Vietnam it was bad enough.  He’s a medic, so there is a lot of putting corpses in body bags.  It’s so bad his relaxation is looking through the IKEA catalogue to decide what he will buy when he gets home.  In fact, when he gets back he does not buy furniture but OxyCotin.  He ends up robbing banks to pay for his habit, offering good advice:

One thing about holding up banks is you’re mostly robbing women, so you don’t ever want to be rude. 

And

I don’t imagine that anyone goes in for robbery if they are not in some kind of desperation.  Good or bad people has nothing to do with it; plenty of purely wicked motherfuckers won’t ever rob shit.  With robbery it’s a matter of abasement.  Are you abased?  Careful then.  You might rob something. 

Things are really bad; he is so sick from withdrawal that he repeatedly pukes into his own shirt while waiting in line to show his gun to the teller. He is almost relieved when he hears sirens as he leaves the bank and knows he is caught.  He waits for them:

There’s a fuckload of starlings gone to war over a big wet juicy bag of garbage – look at them go!  The big swinging dick starling’s got all the other starlings scared.   He’ll be the one who gets the choicest garbage!

I had no reason to add this last quote, just only I thought it was so wonderful

INTO THE WILD by Jon Krakaur

This is the true story of a young man who died trying to live out his dreams.  The dreams were kind of stupid, but it’s still kind of sad. 

Chris McCandless acts normal around his parents at his university graduation.  They don’t hear from him again till he is dead of starvation two years later.  He has plotted this from the start. Here is a letter to his sister:

. . .  once the time is right, with one abrupt, swift action I’m going to completely knock them out of my life. I’m going to divorce them as my parents once and for all and never speak to either of those idiots again as long as I live.  I’ll be through with them once and for all, forever. 

His parents haven’t abused him or anything.  They are very normal but he is kind of a little bitch.  The author includes a great quote from GK Chesterton:

For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy

Chris wants to be in touch with nature using his own two hands and such implements as he finds romantic (e.g., rifles).  He wonders the country for a while until he decides to backpack into Alaska where due to some blunders (e.g., deciding maps are not romantic) he starves to death. 

Krakeur puts Chris into context with the various other dreamers, such as a climber named Waterman, who spent 145 days alone climbing some mountain and then lost his mind attempting to climb the next mountain with just a tub of margarine as supplies.  Krakeur outlines the type, young men with a monomaniacal bent, of which he says he was one, nearly dying himself in Alaska as a “self-possessed young man inebriated with the unfolding drama of his own life”  As he says:

It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it . .

I don’t know who this ‘you’ is he is addressing but I don’t think they’re probably female.  It is quite sweet though that he thinks this is a universal experience. 

In any case, I have made a little bit of fun of McCandless, which is not perhaps very kind.  I admire his idealism, and his attempt to do something unusual with his life.  It is just very tough to swallow how illogical and contradictory it all is.  The love of Tolstoy, for example, who everyone knows talked a big talk about altruism while frogmarching his unwilling wife through 13 children and into poverty.  This idea that ‘man vs nature’ could involve a gun but not a map.  The idea that living without government is a great idea, as if millions of Somalians aren’t fully available to tell you that it’s not.  It’s all so silly, I struggle to be sympathetic.