Tag: male writer

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.

GIOVANNI’S ROOM by James Baldwin

Here is a completely searing 149 pages about the consequences of cowardice. A young American man meets a young American woman in Paris. He then meets an Italian waiter who he greatly, greatly prefers. It is the 1940s and he has spent many years trying to convince himself he is straight. Then he meets the waiter, Giovanni, and that’s all over: they move in together the first night. The agonizing that ensues is just horrifying. Baldwin is an AMAZING WRITER. Lets enjoy this conversation with his father, after a car accident:

“You’re going to be on your back for awhile but when you come home, while you’re lying around the house, we’ll talk, huh? And try to figure out what the hell we’re going to do with you when you get on your feet, OK?”

“OK,” I said.

For I understood, at the bottom of my heart, that we had never talked, that now we never would. I understood that he must never know this.

Eventually the American beaks the waiter’s heart, and his own, by deciding he can’t face what constituted gay life at that time. It was sad, but then try this, his last big speech to the waiter:

What kind of life can two men have together, anyway? All this love you talk about – isn’t it just that you want to be made to feel strong? You want to go out and be the labourer and bring home the money and you want me to stay here and wash the dishes and cook the food and clean this miserable little closet of a room . . and be your little girl. That’s what you want. That’s what you mean that’s all you mean when you say you love me. You say I want to kill you. What do you think you’ve been doing to me?

It’s interesting how clearly men knew how really bad patriachy was. This was a huge personal cost to the man, but he was willing to do it: anything, anything, rather than be female. I get it.

THE CHRYSALIDS by John Wyndham

In this novel of the far future, a small rural community has made a religion out of ensuring that all human beings are recognizably human. This means some tough decisions about newborns with too many toes. That’s right, it’s the post-nuclear future!

I read this first as a teenager, and I note I feel much less worried now than I did then about the nuclear apocalypse. Largely because I am pretty sure we will get to a climate apocalypse long before a nuclear one. So that’s good.

CARNIVAL OF SNACKERY by David Sedaris

These are David Sedaris’ dairies from 2003 to 2020. This is not very personal stuff; clearly he is doing this more or less professionally, as prep for his essays. In his first diaries, he is poor and struggling; in these he is wealthy and successful, moving between his different homes around the world. Astonishingly, they are just as likable. It’s interesting to see what someone’s daily life is made up of, but it’s also interesting to see how much less enjoyable these are than the essays. It’s weird to see the magic that moves daily experience into dairies and then essays.

THE MINISTRY OF FEAR by Graham Greene

I am passionately fond of Graham Greene. I have in fact been rationing his books to myself, so I don’t run through them too quick in my lifetime. I picked this one up at random, and was excited, but had to stop reading it part way through. This was not because it was so bad – many parts of it were very good, because Greene can’t help to be good – but because it was not as good as he can be, and I did not want my admiration for him spoiled. The story got a bit silly – I think he was trying for a spy novel? But I’ll never know because I stopped before I could find out.

Greene lived for a long time in Clapham in London, where I also live. He also lived a good amount of time in Freetown in Sierra Leone, as I did. The overlap of people who know both must be pretty small. I enjoyed his HEART OF THE MATTER, a great novel of Freetown, and this one was very much a Clapham book. I enjoyed the insight into the war in particular:

London was no longer one great city: it was a collection of small towns . . . Knightsbridge and Sloane St were not at war, but Chelsea was, and Battersea was in the front line . . In Clapham where day raids were frequent there was a hunted look which was absent from Westminster, where the night raids were heavier but the shelters were better

THEIR SOULS AT NIGHT by Kent Haruf

The title – THEIR SOULS AT NIGHT – was a massive red flag. But I thought it cant possibly be as pretentious as it sounds. But then it really was. Now let me admit I am alone in this view, as this book is beloved by many. But myself I just though it was VOM.

It tells the story of two old people who get together despite some mild disapproval from their neightbours. Later they break up because the woman’s son, for no reason I can understand, wants them to. It’s all very spineless but apparently we are supposed to find it tragic.

I think my problem no. 1 with this book was it’s almost aggressively plain and simple language. Please enjoy the below and then gouge your eyes out:

In the evening they made another small fire and Addie cut up onions and peppers and put them in butter in the iron skillet and put in the ground-up hamburger and tomato sauce and a spoonful of sugar and Worcestershire sauce and a quarter cup of ketchup and salt and pepper, a sauce she’d made before they left home, and now stirred it all together and laid a lid on the pan.

My problem no. 2, probably my biggest problem, was how utterly humourless it was. I can’t tell you why, but somehow it just dripped with the idea that it was great art, and that really irritated me.

THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles

This is a novel about what happens when you take bohemianism that bit too far. Three vaguely artsy Europeans parade around Morocco in the late 1940s, sleeping with each other and others, staying in really horrible rural hotels, and exploring their existential dread.

I read it while in Morocco, so it was an interesting parallel kind of vacation. Mine was hair-raising in its own way (how much is too much wine at the all-inclusive?) but theirs was pretty intense too (at one point the protagonist complains about being offered a seventeen year old sex worker (i.e., trafficked child), because she is ‘probably at least twenty-five’).

The protagonist dies of typhoid half way through. He is too bohemian to have bothered to be vaccinated, so this is richly deserved. His wife then loses her mind and ends up getting raped and voluntarily joining a harem.

In summary, what drivel. I kind of enjoyed this book while reading it, but in retrospect I guess I sort of hated it. I can’t fault Paul Bowles for sincerity though; apparently he spent much of his life being bohemian in just this way, spawning many imitators, and died poor in Tangier in 1999.

KLARA AND THE SUN by Kazuo Ishiguro

In this book we get to see a little too far behind the curtain. I have loved all three of Ishiguro’s other books, which broadly deal with the-one-that-got-away, in various guises. I would absolutely love to know what break-up he is working through because it must have been a real doozy. This book is a similar sort of story, but for me did not work nearly so well as the others. Perhaps I’m just too familiar with its tricks?

It is about an AF (artificial friend) who is bought to be a companion to a little girl. It is told through the AF’s AI powered understanding of the world. This was sort of interesting, but to my view has been done better. More effective was the little girl herself, and her friends. In this near-future, no one goes to school, so the children are forced to have ‘interaction meetings,’ where they learn to behave ‘normally.’ Clearly this is inspired by the pandemic, but I did enjoy it. I feel like we could all use a pretty stiff course of interaction meetings.