Tag: male writer

THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS by William Maxwell

In case you feel like you have not had enough pandemic content, here is something for you. It’s about the 1918 flu, and is based on the author’s own experience of losing his mother to it when he was just 10 years old.

After the loss he was made to go and live with his aunt, so he lost not just his mother but his whole world. For this reason, the book is actually less about the flu itself and more a sort of memorial to the ordinary days of his childhood just before it.

What is particularly interesting is to be reminded of what childhood was like when boredom still existed. They spend hours in this book doing nothing much, being with their own thoughts. It’s strange to think what childhood is like now, when children have so many books and activities and phones and television. Imagine having to generate your own content!

POOR THINGS by Alasdair Gray

Here is an very fruity book about SPOLIER ALERT someone creating a living woman from the body of a dead woman and the brains of her fetus. 

It was pretty interesting as a concept, but I found I struggled to care on some level.  Everything was so wild and magically real that it was hard to feel that anything meant anything or would have any consequences. It made me think about FRANKENSTEIN, and especially why the monster in that book is male and not female.  Because, let us face it, if some mad scientist in the nineteenth century thought he could bring someone back to life he would 1000% have tried with a woman because, obviously, sex slave.  Perhaps because Mary Shelley was female it did not go in that direction, but you know realism-wise it ought to have.  Also, I’ve just been in a Wikipedia deepdive about Mary Shelley, and let me give you the sobering reflection that she wrote FRANKENSTEIN when she was just 19! However she had already led a big life, having got together with Shelley when she was 16 (and he was married), after meeting him secretly at her mother’s grave (why), and then running away with him because even though it’s 1819 she believes in FREE LOVE.   What a baller. 

STAY TRUE by Hua Hsu

Here is a book about grief. It is written by someone born in the same year as me, and tells about his best friend in university, who died when he was a junior. It was eerie to read a book so exactly of my time-and-place. That rarely happens for me. I enjoyed this for example, something I had forgotten about:

Back then, years passed when you wouldn’t pose for a picture. You wouldn’t think to take a picture at all. Cameras felt intrusive to everyday life. It was weird to walk around with one, unless you worked for the school paper, which made picture taking seem a little less creepy.

I’d forgotten about a time before photos were the default.

The story was a sad one. What struck me was how much I now recognize what grief looks like: the guilt about what you could have done differently (oh GOD, the guilt), the retrospective wondering what your relationship meant, and etc. I can’t imagine how the author got together the emotional resilience to write it. I barely had the resilience to read it.

One thing I have been thinking about recently is how anytime someone dies, you read about them in the paper after a stabbing or whatever, there is almost always really bereft family and friends left behind. It’s kind of beautiful to think that every random person you see in the street is so surrounded by love.

MONKEY BOY by Francisco Goldman

It is strange how few books there are by immigrants, and how many by immigrants’ children. My theory is we immigrants are busy, trying to assimilate or live the capitalist dream or whatever, and it’s the children who have the free time to try and understand what just happened.

In this book an American man, the child of a Guatemalan and a Ukrainian Jew, puts the effort in. Some parts of it I found pretty interesting, like his flashbacks to middle school, and a particularly epic high school crush. Other parts were less interesting, like where he visits his mother in her retirement home, tirelessly grilling her about Guatemalan history despite her advancing dementia. I mean I get it: he is deep in middle age, and wants it all to have some meant something. Good luck with that I guess.

MOSCOW STATIONS by Venedikt Yerofeev

It boring to listen to other peoples’ dreams. It is also boring to be with drunk people babbling away while you are sober. This book is kind of a mix of these two kinds of borings. I feel bad to have to say it, as this is a famous classic of 20th century Russian literature, and the author had an eccentric, impressive, and difficult life. Like GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, it circulated on samizdat for many years before the government allowed it to be published (appearing in a magazine dedicated to education on the evils of drinking, though its unclear if the editor meant this as a joke or not). It tells the story of a man getting progressively drunker as he rides the train from Moscow to the suburb where his son lives. One interesting point to learn was how really rough Soviet alcoholism was. At one point the narrator tells us about one drink he makes, called ‘Dog’s Giblets,’ which involved mixing floor varnish and brown beer. This is not an exaggeration – apparently the author’s girlfriend used to hide her perfume when he came round, for he would drink it. I literally can’t imagine that status you have to reach to seriously consider the floor varnish, let alone the perfume

MISS LONELYHEARTS by Nathaniel West

Many reviewers call this book ‘comic.’ What is wrong with these people? I found it almost unmanageably bleak. Written in the 1930s, it tells about a man who has a job replying to agony aunt letters in the newspaper. This would be rough at any time, but can you imagine the kinds of problems that you are getting written about in the 1930s? It’s mostly women, and it is hair-raising stuff: abuse, unwanted pregnancies, and etc. The man is busy having a religious crisis and is in no state to handle this kind of content. Almost worse than the letters are his friends at the bar, who joke about women in ways that I can only hope are exaggerated and not a real reflection of men a hundred years ago.

I did find this interesting, a description of some of his writer colleagues: “At College, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything. Money and fame meant nothing to them. They were not worldly men.”

I found that an interesting idea, that some people are worldly and some are not.

BUDDENBROOKS by Thomas Mann

This major German classic was the first novel of Thomas Mann (at just 26!) Like many first books it is based on his own life, and let me tell you, he is coming out with all sorts, working through the issues, and etc. It covers three generations of a family, who start off as wealthy merchants and end up SPOILER ALERT kind of poor and certainly bitter.

It is an incredible feat of creation, with an extraordinary number of characters, swiftly created. Try this old lady, who only appears for a half page:

. . . a little wrinkled creature, rich in the grace of God and knitting patterns, who lived in the Holy Ghost Hospital and was named Himmelsburger. She was the last of her name – “the last Himmelsburger,” she called herself humbly, and ran her knitting-needle under her cap to scratch her head

Sometimes it does get a bit carried away, with one long section being a single day in the life of one small boy who has not done his homework. I learn from Wikipedia that this has sometimes been translated as a separate work, and Mann considered it as such. Am not too clear why then it was in this work, as it was exceedingly random, but there you go.

Sometimes though I found all that detail quite charming, as a window into nineteenth century German life. Try this, where they go to a restaurant. First of all, bizarrely, the group orders ‘one beer and six milks,’ but then the waiter asks the obvious question: “sweet milk, buttermilk, sour milk, or clotted milk?” Disgusting and fascinating.

THE PRIVILEGES by Jonathan Dee

I’m really reading intensely and fast at the minute. For unclear reasons my attention span seems to be BACK. This one was about a couple who get married and get rich the gross way, i.e., banking. I wish I could get rich the gross way. I enjoyed the early part, where they are young, but once they got their millions, I felt the book sort of turned moralistic, like it couldn’t just let rich people be happy. Like somehow it wouldn’t be right to have book about how people got really rich and that was great. I have news: I think many rich people are really happy.

AN INSTANCE OF THE FINGERPOST by Iain Pears

I am apparently well mad for the seventeenth century at the minute. Here I am with another book about the English Civil War. This one is a murder mystery. It tells the same story from four different perspectives. It’s a really fun mishmash of all kinds of ideas: Venetian travelers, cadaver acquisition, Royalist plots, Quakers, mental health problems, you name it. The part I found most striking was the fierce debate about whether experimentation was the right way to build scientific understanding. This sounds bizarre: like, obviously it is? How else are you supposed to know anything? But in the seventeenth century this was a revolutionary idea, with most people thinking it was presumptuous to question the wisdom of the ancients. It’s a bit like when I found out that people used to object (!) to handwashing. There is something so fun about finding out how constructed your worldview is.

THE MARCH by EL Doctorow

A novel showcasing a really remarkable skill. It tells the story of Sherman’s march south during the American civil war through many tiny vignettes of people of all kinds. What artistry! What ability! I don’t know who this EL Doctorow is, but he is amazing.

Writing aside, it was also interesting to learn more about the war. Sherman apparently went along burning down houses and towns to get the South to surrender, only not burning them down if the Southerners had already done it themselves. Particularly extremely heart-breaking to read about is how the slaves waited on their plantations for Sherman to arrive, and when he did, simply followed him away. It is just wild and sad and happy to read about their first days of freedom