male writer Archives - Page 5 of 14 -

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

THE MARCH by EL Doctorow

THE STRANGER IN THE WOODS by Michael Finkel

Here is the true story of a man who camped in the woods, completely without human contact, for 27 years. I take it back: in the 1990s, apparently, a hiker said ‘hi’ to him.

This is a mind-boggling story. This guy from Maine, one year out of high school, leaves work one day and drives to Florida. Then he drives all the way back to Maine, past his childhood home, and keeps driving, deeper and deeper into the woods, until he runs of petrol. He puts the keys on the dash, and heads into the woods with nothing. And then he just doesn’t come out again.

I don’t want you to get the impression that he was there, wandering through glorious vistas and living off the land. He essentially found a small clearing, behind some rocks, that was minutes away from holiday homes, and just stayed there. All winter, he did not move. Even in summer, he only left to go steal necessities form the holiday homes. He just sat there, in this clearing, for 27 years. Once finally caught, police noticed how pale he was, and he accounted for this as follows: ‘I’m from the woods, not the fields.’ His main concern once police were in his camp seemed to be for his mushroom, that had grown from being coin-size to dinner-plate-size while he sat there. He apparently concluded he could not have a mammal pet, because he did not want to have to ever be forced to eat a pet.

This was a possibility, because every winter he got close to dying. He stole as much as he could in the summer, but it was hard to make it through the whole winter on that. He woke up every night at 2am to walk around so he didn’t freeze to death. And all the time there was a convenience store not 10 minutes away.

Probably the weirdest part of this whole story is that this guy does not seem to be crazy. In the woods he listened to the radio, and read books. After getting out of prison he went back to live with his family (who btw he did not tell that he was leaving). It just seems he did not much like human interaction, so he cut it out. He opted out.

He spent a lot of his time in the clearing apparently not fixing stuff, or reading, or whatever, but just sitting there. He cannot well describe it, but it is clear he had the experience of going out of himself. Because you don’t need a self when there is no one else to have a self for. He just listened to the wind and looked at the leaves. And then there was the pet mushroom.

I mean it does make you doubt your own choices. Somewhere the author quotes the line, attributed to Sophocles, of ‘Beware the barrenness of a busy life,’ and I’ve been thinking about that.

BURMA BOY by Biyi Bandele

This is a comic novel that is described in reviews as ‘vivid’ and ‘horrifying,’ and it certainly is. It tells the story of Nigerian soldiers fighting in Burma in WWII. There is a lot of joy in it, and especially in the dialogue, which bounces along with the kind of fun I recognize from my Abuja days. Try this, when one man finds he has been assigned as muleteer rather than a soldier:

“‘Mules?’ Ali gasped as if he’d been stung by a driver ant. ‘Do you know who I am? I’m the son of Dawa the king of well-diggers whose blessed nose could sniff out water in Sokoto while he’s standing in Saminaka. I’m the son of Hauwa whose mother was Talatu whose mother was Fatimatu queen of the moist kulikuli cake, the memory of whose kulikuli still makes old men water at the mouth till this day. Our people say that distance is an illness; only travel can cure it. Do you think that Ali Banana, son of Dawa, great-grandson of Fatima has crossed the great sea and travelled this far, rifle strapped to his shoulder, to look after mules?'”

It is a very accomplished book, but I could not finish it. It was just too sad. People’s heads explode mid-sentence, people are left to die on death marches, you get the idea. I am hesitant about if you should ever die in any war, even a just war, even a war for your own country. I am not sure there is ever victory in death. And certainly, these Nigerians dying in Asia, for a European war: I just couldn’t handle it.

THE WAGER by David Grann

A tale of shipwreck and cannibalism to at beat all stories of shipwreck and cannibalism. In 1742, thirty men wash up in Brazil in a makeshift open boat. They have travelled an astounding 5000kms up the coast of South America after being shipwrecked.

It is a totally astounding story. Their ship, the Wager, left the UK to go fight the Spanish. They had been desperate for sailors, so had pressganged anyone, and by anyone I include limbless invalids. They go down the coast of S America (“below the forties there is no low; below the fifties there is no god”). They are running out of food and have scurvy, so in addition to losing their teeth they are losing their minds. They shipwreck and about 140 of them make it onto a desert island, with the limbless ones drowning in their hammocks. The island has nothing much on it but seaweed, which is not so bad because at least it has Vitamin C in it so some sanity returns, but then they face the very real prospect of starving. It all goes on: manslaughter, cannibalism, and eventually mutiny. The captain has a mad plan to save them, so they go with the plan of the lowly gunner. 80 survive to get on the lifeboat, of whom 30 make it to Rio.

A few months after they arrive, 3 more make it: the captain’s mad plan did indeed fail, but then some local people agreed to walk them half way up the continent to the Spanish. On the outskirts of the city, a free Black British man who made it all this way, is kidnapped and enslaved: horrifying.

Then they make it back to Britain and there is much argument about who ate who and who mutinied when. What I found overall hilarious about this story was that a few days after the shipwreck the men were in fact found by some locals, who gave them food and tried to help. The men harassed the local women and tried to steal their boats. So the locals went away and left them to it. Can you IMAGINE? All of this was completely unnecessary. All they had to do was behave relatively normal around the locals and nobody would have had to get eaten! And still they could not do it. Colonialism was sometimes pretty intense.

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY by John Le Carre

I loved Le Carre’s most famous novel, THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, and so expected to enjoy this, his second-most-famous. Instead I was just confused. It just seemed like there were a lot of names and a lot of middle-aged men talking to each other sweatily. I think this is not the author’s fault, but mine, for reading it in tiny snippets while falling asleep over a long period.

I learnt later that the book is based on the real story of how Kim Philby, one of the most important people in MI5, was eventually unmasked as a Soviet spy in 1963. I was required to dive deep into the Wikipedia, where I was most enthralled to learn that he was turned to the Soviets while at Cambridge, and spent his whole early career attempting to get into MI5, solely for the purposes of being a traitor. Once he had fled to Moscow, he said his ‘purpose in life was to defeat imperialism.’ What a baller, bizarre statement! Can you imagine being so entranced by something in university that you would stick to it single-mindedly for the rest of your life, lying to every single person you know for decades? Can you imagine spending years sending people to their deaths for a ‘concept’? I can barely commit to a haircut!

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES by Jane Austen and Seth Graham-Smith

Here is a book based on a hilarious idea for a title. I just love the fact that this title exists, but more than that, that someone decided to make a book of it, and more than that, that it became a best seller.

This is the first line: “It is a truth universally recognized that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”

And it goes on from there, cutting back and forth between the original and scenes of bloody violence. I read an interesting article with the contemporary author, who said it seemed to him obviously very adaptable to zombies, because it involved so much going about the countryside, and a whole platoon encamped nearby for no real reason. I had never thought of this, but it’s true, and I guess a great book contains multitudes.

Towards the end I just started skipping the zombie bits and enjoyed a re-read of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. It’s just extraordinarily, intimidatingly good, and funnier even than zombies.

AKENFIELD by Ronald Blythe

A brilliantly weird effort to capture the entire life, top to bottom, of an English village. Written from interviews made in the twentieth century, and lightly fictionalized, it focuses on their memory of life in the nineteenth, and captures the collapse of a certain rural way of being.

That collapse was no bad thing, because let me tell you, these people WORKED. Here we learn that it was not the Industrial Revolution that created exploitation. Agricultural laborers had four hours off a week, 10-2 on Sunday (i.e., just enough time to go to church). As one man, the grandson of a laborer puts it:

They bought their life’s strength for as little as they could. They wore use out without a thought because, with the big families, there was a continuous supply of labour

There is a kind of tragic over-emphasis on the quality of work, with people taking what seems to us now a really bizarre amount of pride in their work, because as another worker says:

A straight furrow was all that a man was left with

Apparently it was a very silent world, though “Television is now breaking down their silences. They are getting accustomed to the idea of dialogue”

It is perhaps no surprise that given half a chance, lots of people fled. I was stunned to learn that from from 1871, 700,000 British left for the colonies, and “It was the not the idlest and wastrels who sailed,” leaving lots of land effectively empty. As a child of the former colonies I am very familiar with what it was like for those who left, but I never thought about what it was for those who stayed.

It captures a world so small it can only boggle the mind:

Pub men stayed loyal to one pub for maybe the whole of their lives. . . now they will drive down to Southend or Clacton and let off steam

I also learnt more than I ever wanted to about agriculture in Suffolk. For example, East Anglia had 17 different types of apples (WHY?), all harvested at different times. And that sheep used to be managed by having their tails cut off with a hot iron and “the balls nicked out with the shepherd’s teeth. He ate well that day.”

I enjoyed all this interesting-slash-disgusting agricultural information, but even more I enjoyed a window into many individuals lives. One guy goes to London briefly and works in the railway:

There is a place in Broad Street Station where you can stare through the arches and see the stars, an and they were the only things I can remember seeing in London. That is the truth.

Ronald Blythe left school at 14 and taught himself from public libraries and it shows. It’s a wildly ambitious, beautiful book. I could go on and on, and be grateful you were not with me while I was reading it, because I did go on and on. I’d love to read it for lots of different communities. I can only imagine how interesting it would be if you took a single street of vendors in Harare, for example, or a Convent in HoChiMinh City.

THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder

In this strange book, a bridge collapses in 18th century Peru. The focus is on the lives of the five people who die, which, according to the author is trying to answer the question: “Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will?”

This is hardly a burning question, you don’t need a whole book, answer is clearly no.

In any case it won the Pulitzer in 1929, showing people had some very different concerns back in the day. That said, it does have some gorgeous bizarre writing. I know Thornton Wilder as the writer of the exceedingly sweet, very American, and rather wonderful play OUR TOWN. Clearly I had no idea of the scope of his interests, because this one is a real wild ride through metaphysics, South America, twins, nuns, and smallpox ridden actresses.