Tag: male writer

THE CITY AND THE STARS by Arthur C Clarke

Here is a book set in the incredibly far future. I was not too sure on the plot, but the vision was interesting. It shows a city governed by a huge Central Computer that generates all their needs and keeps them all eternally young. This is what humans think is the only place left that humans live, but then the protagonist finds another settlement of humans, who have decided to accept mortality. This sounds like it is going to be an interesting discussion of the question of : would you like to live forever if you could? To me the answer is OF COURSE.

Anyway, that is not where the book goes, it goes into robot worms and stuff. But I still enjoyed it. And I loved learning about the life of Arthur C Clarke, who peaced out of the UK at forty to go live in Sri Lanka and scuba and be gay and write books.

MAN TIGER by Eka Kurniawan

Here is a book by a famed Indonesian author that I read in Indonesia.  This will be hard to believe, but truly it was conincidental.  So desperate am I for reading matter that I bought this on some New York Times recommendation, and only vaguely noticed where it was set till I began reading it.  It is at first all about this guy who has a white tiger living inside him.  I was all set for a great heaping dose of magical realism.  But in fact this is a delicate little story about an unhappy family.  It set in a rural location, and charmingly assumes a lot of knowledge of Indonesian small-scale farming.  Here we are in one character’s backstory, about his rice farm, on page one:

Jahro, who had never heard of Orion – the short season cultivar – replaced his rice with peanuts, which were more resilient and less trouble.

Imagine never having heard of Orion (!).  There is one line that haunts me, nothing to do with rice farming, all about the old father looking back:

The years had gone by so quickly, life receding in the distance like a train narrowly missed

It was a sweet and sad little book.  The white tiger really was neither here nor there.

RIDDLEY WALKER by Russell Hoban

Here is a novel of the post-apocalypse. It is all written in a strange made-up mashed up language, like language might be thousands of years and a few nuclear bombs into the future. It is extraordinarily believable and clever, also very annoying. A sample:

If the way is diffrent the end is diffrent. Becaws the end aint nothing only part of the way its jus that part of the way where you come to a stop. The end cud be any part of the way its in every step of the way thats why you bes go ballsy

I couldn’t finish it. As a younger, more eager person I probably could have. I can’t figure out if that is my loss or my gain.

BURMESE DAYS by George Orwell

Here is a novel about the British Raj in Burma in the 1920s. You would think if you are going to go to the trouble of colonizing a place you would at least enjoy yourself. Here, they do nothing but bitch. It’s too hot, we don’t like the food, there aren’t enough sidewalks and etc. I just finished THE GREAT FIRE, where they did some similar whining, but about Australia. I don’t think this happened as much in Southern Africa (e.g., ‘Happy’ Valley), possibly because it’s just a better place. SHOUTOUT TO THE SUBCONTINENT!

The story is around a man named John Flory, who particularly suffers with the narrow-mindedness and (though he does not call it this) racism of his colleagues. He falls madly in love with a young woman who is as narrow-minded and racist as any of them, but he is frankly desperate. Meanwhile, his only real friend, an Indian doctor, is at risk from a corrupt Burmese official. Unsurprisingly, it all ends badly.

It’s in that ‘unsurprisingly’ that my issue with this book sits. The whole thing drips with doom from the beginning. It’s like a morality story, in which the good die young, told very slowly. I don’t know too much about the British in Burma, but it also strongly has the vibe of being written by someone who wasn’t there for very long but still has a lot of opinions. And yet, I still enjoyed it. Orwell’s a good writer, and this was an interesting window into a certain kind of (thankfully) lost life.

MY FATHER’S DIET by Adrian Nathan West

I bought this book because Andrew Martin (whose book EARLY WORK I adore) recommended it. I can see why he likes it. I liked it too. But I can’t say I really understand it.

It is written from the perspective of a college aged man, who tells us about his father’s efforts, after a divorce, to win a bodybuilding competition. That’s it: that’s what it’s about. A really detailed account of watching his fat, 55 year old father engage in this probably impossible undertaking.

Some readers might think the father a sort of pathetic figure (and indeed the Guardian review thinks this book is about failure), but I did not. I rather admired him. At least he was out there, taking the big swings. The son, on the other hand, mostly sits in his room and tries to skate through college doing the least work possible. He’s a classic narrator of the modern novel, directionless and annoying. Go to therapy already! Or become a drug addict. Enter a body building competition.

I did really admire the super careful use of language in this book. It must have taken huge work. There were many moments when I stopped to admire the specificity of the writing. One time he mentions ‘a procession of eighteen wheelers entering and exiting the pale radiance of a service station.’ Pale radiance! I love it

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD by Richard Yates

I always heard this book was about an unhappy marriage. In reality, it’s about the importance of legal abortion. It tells the story of a young man in 1950s America of whom everyone expects great things, himself included. He is not too sure what these things are, and certainly doesn’t work on anything in particular, and so ends up long-term in an office job he started as a stop gap. So far, this is pretty much the story of 50% of humanity.

In this case it gets really out of hand because his girlfriend gets pregnant. She wants to abort but he makes a big production about it so she doesn’t. They move to the suburbs, which they both regard as a sign of failure. Then she has another child. She tries to convince him to move to Europe, and begin the life they dreamed of (she will work while he becomes great). He is terrified at being given the chance to actually live the life he talks about so much, and so when she becomes pregnant again, and obviously wants to abort as that will end their plans, he talks her out of it again. They don’t move to Europe, their marriage implodes, and this poor woman tries to give herself an abortion at home. She dies. I can only say one more time: THANK YOU FEMINISM.

Side point, please enjoy this description, a warning to us all:

Howard Givings looked older than sixty seven. His whole adult life had been spent as a minor official of the seventh largest life insurance company in the world, and now in retirement it seemed that the years of office tedium had marked him as vividly as old seafaring men are marked by wind and sun.

THE GRASS ARENA by John Healy

Sometimes it feels as if every addict has written a memoir, like it’s one of the twelve steps or something.

I was recently noting how very many there were, and how similar. Here’s the book that shows I was wrong (first time for everything). It also shows something we often forget: how incredibly stitched up the book world is by people who were able to graduate high school.

THE GRASS ARENA is by a man who had an exceedingly tough childhood, became an alcoholic, and spent fifteen years homeless. It makes all sorts of more famous books on alcoholism look like a holiday camp, because they are all written by people who, at the end of the day, had parents in the suburbs to go back to. I have never read an account of what it is to be an addict without a safety net.

The grass arena is public parks, mostly round Camden. This is very much a book of north London. He tells about his daily life. He wakes up blacked out most days, and begins again from scratch to find enough money to drink. Let me give you a sample:

George and Ernie came back with a bag full of chicken bones. They’ve been down the dustbins again, back of the restaurants. Everybody welcome to lunch. Yeah, we’re all going to catch some horrible unspeakable disease. Not today perhaps. But time is on the dustbins’ side

He also tells us about his fellow drunks (not his friends, as he emphasizes: there are no friends in that community):

Alfie used to drink with a guy called Fingers Knox but Fingers got himself killed when he fell from the top to the bottom of the escalator in the tube. Poor old Fingers, that was some drop – he was a good beggar – lost most of the tops of the fingers of his right hand to the frost, a few winters back. He was a middle-aged Jock, used to travel out on the last tube to Edgeware every night to a skipper. He’d beg all the way on the tube going out, get a bottle next morning and beg his way back to the park. He was never without a drink. He used to take fits and get mugged often. He got nicked one time and the computer or something showed he was a deserter from the army in 1939! . . He used to say it was sad to have to creep and crouch and slink next morning after drink and that was why he always done a bit of late night begging. . . He had style. He would not keep jumping up at everyone that went past. He would wait. Then when he sensed the best beg, he’d put on his begging smile, beam in. Nine times out of ten it would be a fiver touch.

I find this very touching somehow, that this is what is left to posterity of Fingers Knox. The author eventually goes to jail for a long period, gets clean, and is eventually rescued from alcoholism by chess. Yes, you read that right. Someone teaches him chess and it transforms his life. He becomes a professional chess player. And then a yogi. What a man! What a life!

THE RUIN OF ALL WITCHES by Malcolm Gaskill

This is a fantastically interesting recreation of a single witch trial in 1651. I am amazed the kind of records exist that enable this level of detailed understanding of individuals so long ago. The trial was of a married couple. The husband had a temper, and was always telling people how he would ‘get even’ with them. This was not smart in a time when people were living in tiny villages, barely scraping a living, and absolutely buck-wild about religion. Meanwhile his wife was exhausted with having babies, resentful of being asked to bring in the maize while also looking after the kids, and seems to have had some kind of breakdown. It all gets out of control from there. Horses buck, ghostly children walk, imaginary dogs appear, and a meat pudding splits in two (a clear sign, apparently).

What I got from this book is that you should 100% not worry at all about anything that you cannot see and touch. It is sobering to see how recognizable these people are, with their problems (e.g., I am sick of these kids), and how very sincerely they really did all believe in imaginary dogs. It makes me wonder what imaginary dogs I am worrying about.

Side bar: I also learnt how incredibly ballsy these early migrants were. The main woman got abandoned by her husband and walked twenty miles with no money to Bristol to get herself on a ship to the ‘new world.’ Can you imagine the courage.

ORIGINAL SINS by Matt Rowland Hill

The field of memoirs on drug addiction is a crowded one. Well done to this guy for getting his book written and published, but I’ve got to be honest and say it’s a story that’s been told before. Not that that makes his suffering any the less real: the stealing, the betraying, the bulging veins, but it’s hard going when it’s been done before. Like I am always impressed by people who sit down and decide they are going to write about the first world war. Check it out: ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT already exists. Best to retreat from that field in good order.

THE KRAKEN AWAKES by John Wyndham

I usually like the author John Wyndham, but here it’s like he was over-tired being his worst self. It’s super wordy, and kind of fakey, and people keep calling each other ‘darling.’ The premise is great, being about aliens hatching out of the deep sea, rather than deep space, a creepy and horrifyingly believable idea, but told so incredibly slowly that I can’t recommend it.