Tag: male writer

LOVE IN THE BIG CITY by Sang Young Park

An interesting series of essays about attempting to be gay and bohemian in Seoul, covering roommates and menial jobs and heartbreak.  His first roommate, despite being female, is closest to being his soulmate.  Read this recipe for house-sharing bliss:

I was an expert at washing dishes spotlessly, and Jaehee’s courageous soul allowed her to swipe the shower drain clean of clogged hair. 

And

Like most people’s parents, (Jaehee’s parents) constantly nagged their children about propriety and how one should behave, but in their private lives joyfully indulged in affairs, excess religion, the stock market, or pyramid schemes.  I had a real parasitic streak in that as much as I hated my parents, I felt completely entitled to ever coin they gave me . . . Jaehee, however, cut off contact with her parents after their blowout and refused any form of financial support thereafter. She really did have the heart of a lioness.

He has (of course) a tough relationship with his mother, who is very involved, and very religious.  She dies slowly of a heart issue.  Enjoy this:

. . .  she asked the doctors not to anesthetize her because she wanted to participate in the pain of Jesus Christ, a declaration that (finally!) prompted her doctors to add some psychiatric treatment to her prescription . . .

That ‘(finally!)’ really made me laugh. 

It is not easy being gay and bohemian anywhere, but apparently especially not in South Korea.  This books paints a pretty homophobic, classist, and sexist society.  At one point, for example, everyone accepts that the author will get a job purely because all the other applicants are female.   It’s an interesting take on the traditional story of the artist vs the man.  Apparently the man in Seoul is really not kidding around.

THE VIRGIN SUICIDES by Jeffrey Eugenides

I like Jeffrey Eugenides’ MIDDLESEX, and to a lesser degree THE MARRIAGE PLOT, so I was a bit surprised to be so underwhelmed by this one.  

On the surface it seems like it should be interesting, being the story of how five daughters in one family came to all commit suicide.  Somehow however, from this promising material, a very boring book is written. I think part of the problem is the attempt at formal inventiveness in the narrative voice.  The story is told by some undefined ‘we’ who are apparently the neighbourhood boys, who are apparently recounting this story many years later. I just found this dumb.  Also I didn’t really like the heavy emphasis on how inscrutable females are, that inevitably came with it.  No doubt that is what teenage boys really do feel but so does most of western literature, and so it is a bit SNORE.  Probably they had mental health issues or were being abused or something, like Jesus guys it’s not that complicated.  Anyway I did like this sex scene, so I’ll leave you with that.  Don’t say I never do anything for you:

Two beasts lived in the car, one above, snuffling and biting him, and one below, struggling to get out of its damp cage.  Validanlty he did what he could to feed them, placate them, but the sense of his insufficiency grew and after a few minute, with only the words “Gotta get back before bed check,” Lux left him, more dead than alive. 

THE BEST OF ME by David Sedaris

Some writers create books. David Sedaris does this, but first he had to create a genre, in which his books could fit. I find this amazing. It puts him in the illustrious company of historical romance writer Georgette Heyer. (THOUGHT: Am I the first person ever to compare Sedaris and Heyer? I hope so. Let’s not google it though, becuase the inevitable outcome of that, is finding out you have nothing new to offer. FOLLOW-ON THOUGHT: Maybe this is why baby boomers are so insufferable, because they did not spend their youth finding out that every ‘great’ idea they had had already been had by somebody else)

THE BEST OF ME is a collection of what Sedaris thinks are his best pieces of writing. As I have read (I think) all of Sedaris, it was a re-read for me, but it was interesting to see this cut of what he thinks is good. Here he is in the introduction:

I’ll always be inclined towards my most recent work, if only because I’ve had less time to turn on it. When I first started writing essays they were about big, dramatic events, the sort you relate when you meet someone new and are trying to explain to them what made you the person you are. As I get older, I find myself writing about smaller and smaller things. As an exercise it’s much more difficult, and thus – for me anyway – much more rewarding.

I found this sort of interesting, becuase I am often struck by how much meat he manages to find in his one life, and I wonder where it comes from. Surely, so much of life is like grocery shopping and brushing your teeth, I would have thought by now he was down to the bits of the bird where there is mostly gristle. But still he keeps them coming.

He notes that the “pieces in this book – both fiction and nonfiction – are the sort I hoped to produce back when I first started writing, at the age of twenty. I didn’t know how to get from where I was then to where I am now, but who does?” I found this sort of inspirational. Imagine being able to say, this is what I wanted at twenty, and I have got it! Typically, in myexperience you don’t get it. Or if you do, the odds are you no longer want it.

FOUR THOUSAND WEEKS by Oliver Burkeman

FOUR THOUSAND WEEKS is the average human life span, and this book deals with how it is we can accept this horrifying fact. 

It’s a book about time management, but not in the usual sense, of how you can fit more into the time you have.  Rather, he says what is important is to accept that you will never do everything, and learn to find that a relief, rather than a regret.  Here he is:

. . . philosophers from Ancient Greece to the present day have taken the brevity of life to be the defining problem of human existence: we’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action. 

He thinks that our usual approach to time management, which is to be as productive as possible, is essentially us running away from the great truth that no matter how hard we work, or how much we want to, we will never get round to even a tiny fraction of everything that is possible for us.  It is much better, in his view, to accept this up front:

Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather then letting them get made by default – or deceiving yourself that, with enough hard work and the right time management tricks, you might not have to make them at all.

He advises us, to ‘pay ourselves first,’ that is, do what you want to do first, and be comfortable that other things will slip (e.g., spend the first hour of the day on whatever is your most important priority). Second, he advises us to limit our ‘to-do’s, so we don’t kid ourselves we can do everything; and third, and most challengingly, to avoid our ‘middling’ priorities.  If you made a list of 1 to 25 of your priorities, he thinks you should focus on numbers 1 to 5, and then carefully avoid numbers 6 to 25, because they are the really dangerous ones – the ‘second-best’ options that could end up eating up your life. 

There is clearly much to think about in this book, but it was this observation that really struck me:

One of the puzzling lessons I have learned is that, more often than not, I do not feel like doing most of the things that need doing.  I’m not just speaking about cleaning the toilet bowl or doing my tax returns.  I’m referring to those things I genuinely desire to accomplish. 

 In his view, a lot of what feels unpleasant – for example, boredom, or procrastination- comes from the fact that we do not like to encounter our finitude.  He thinks that often when we are struggling to concentrate on something we want to do, and turn to our phone, it is because it is deeply unpleasant to face up to the fact that this thing that matters a great deal to you is now real: like, it may not be as good as you hoped, it might fail, etc etc, and that is very painful. 

However:

If you plan to spend some of your four thousand weeks doing what matters most to you, then at some point you’re just going to have to start doing it. 

And:

You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results

There you have it. This book certainly gave me plenty to think about, and unfortunately I seem to mostly think about it when I wake up at 3am.  Always a great time for considering your life choices. 

Side point, he refers to a fantastic time management book from 1908, called HOW TO LIVE YOUR LIFE ON TWENTY FOUR HOURS A DAY.  I loved this book in my early twenties. If you’d still like to take a go at fitting everything in, then I recommend it. 

MAYFLIES by Andrew O’Hagan

This book got rave reviews. Myself, I could not see it. It begins as a story of teenage boys going to a concert. I could see that it was well-written, but I found it hard to follow: it was so very, very deep in British culture, in the 1980s, and in men, that it was almost incomprehensible. I suspect the rave reviews come from older men who remember this world?

The second half of the book is about the same group of men, but thirty years on. So I hear: I didn’t get there.

BABURNAMA by Babur trans. Annette Beveridge

Here are the memoirs a 15th century Mongol warlord.  I can’t believe this actually exists. 

You might think this would be kind of bloody, and you would be right.  It is incredibly violent.  Every other page he is either sacking or being sacked.  Straightforward sample:

Those our men had brought in as prisoners were ordered to be beheaded and a pillar of heads was set up in our camp

A few pages later, after a battle, their Afghan enemies put grass between their teeth, which apparently means ‘I am your cow’ and is a sign of surrender.  In response:

Some heads of Sultans and of others were sent to Kabul with the news . . some also to Badakhshan, Qunduz and Blakh with letters of victory

It is not all beheadings.  He gives us many interesting descriptions of the peoples, animals, and landscapes he sees during this orgy of violence.  He tells us that the elephant is “an immense animal and very sagnacious” but warns us that one can eat “the corn of two strings of camels.”  He also describes his friends. How sweet is this guy:

He used to wear his tunic so very tight that to fasten the stringe he had to draw his belly in and, if he let himself out after tying them, they often tore away. 

Or this guy:

He was extremely decorous; people say he used to hide his feet even in the privacy of his family

Or this one:

He danced wonderfully well, doing one dance quite unique and seeming to be his own invention

Imagine, five centuries later, this is all that persists of you in the world.  And its more than most people get.   

Later Barbur falls in love, with a local market boy:

I could never look straight at him: how then could I make conversation and recital?  In my joy and agitation I could not thank him for coming; how was it possible for me to reproach him with going away?

You almost start to like him, partly because heis also charmingly pre-modern.  The sun, we are told, is ‘spear-high’ and he once swims with his horse ‘as far as an arrow flies.’    Then you are reminded who we are dealing with.  He meets some locals:

Snow fell ankle deep while we were on that ground; it would seem to e rare for snow to fall thereabouts, for people were much surprised. 

How charming! Villagers in their first snowfall.  Then he kills them all too.  

This makes me feel modern life not all bad after all.

THE PROMISE by Damon Galgut

Here is a spectacularly well-written book that I admired, but did not enjoy. It tells the story of a South African family, across four funerals, where the supposed engine is a promise made to the domestic worker to give her the deeds to the house she lives in on their property.

Let’s start with what was great. Here’s a description of the family home:

Beyond it, a diorama of white South Africa, the tin-roofed suburban bungalow made of reddish face brick, surrounded by a moat of bleached garden. Jungle gym looking lonely on a big brown lawn. Concrete birdbath, a Wendy house and a swing made from half a truck tyre. Where you, perhaps, also grew up. Where all of it began.

BOOM. Amazing, and if that does not speak to my minority I do not know what does.

The cast of this book is large, and it’s amazing how the author seamlessly moves between perspectives. He also has a lot of fun poking holes in his own illusion. One lonely woman sits with a cat on her lap, and then he tells us maybe she doesn’t; maybe he will leave her truly all alone. This is both annoying and fun.

Given this mostly seems to be compliments, I struggle a bit to tell you what I didn’t like about this book. I think, first off, it annoyed me that everyone in the book was either mean or sad. That’s just not true of real life, and it seemed kind of self-indugently despairing. Like everything is hard enough, I don’t need to deal with this ludicrously bleak world also. Omicron is quite enough right now. Also, it’s probably not fair, but this conflict about the domestic worker’s land never really got off the ground for me. It just seemed a sort of cliche attempt to make some kind of commentary (that other people have made far better) about South African inequality. Maybe he felt he couldn’t write a white domestic drama without foregrounding this issue? Maybe he is one of these old white people who mostly relates to race-based issues through the only back people they know, i.e., domestic workers? Okay, now that’s getting really unfair. I’m getting as mean as the people in this book. I blame it on Omicron.

MODERN ROMANCE by Aziz Ansari

Here is an audiobook about dating. It is written by a comedian, Aziz Ansari, so I thought it would be funny. It’s not especially funny, but it is very informative about dating. And specifically how-to, as studied by actual scientists. I get the impression that Ansari thought this would be a good way to get fact-based advice on how to improve his odds.

Here is the most interesting part: indeed, having lots of choice does make it harder to make a choice. In one famous study, some researchers went to a grocery store offering jam to sample. Some days they offered six, some days they offered twenty-four. On the days when they had six, they had far fewer people sampling, but . . get this . . about ten times more people actually buying. This has obvious implications for Tinder. And also for why I don’t seem to get further than ten minutes into most shows on Netflix.

Second most interesting: indeed, texting someone unpredictably does make you more interesting. As we long suspected, game playing works.

So there you go. Keep a short list and don’t text them very often.

ONE FAT ENGLISHMAN by Kingsley Amis

I found Amis’ LUCKY JIM to be both hilarious and liberating. This story, like LUCKY JIM, is about an angry and selfish university professor, but this is where the similarity ends. LUCKY JIM was a cheerful and basically optimistic book about blowing up your miserable life. This is a bleak book about doing the same.

I did not enjoy it, but I admired it. Amis sticks doggedly to having a thoroughly unattractive protagonist. Self-involved, over-weight, anti-semetic, and those are just the headlines. He particularly dislikes women, despite spending most of the book trying to sleep with them. Here’s a sample:

A man’s sexual aim, he had often said to himself, is to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature that is the opposite of these; to demonstrate to an animal which is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal.

I struggled a bit with how it is that this unpleasant man managed to sleep with so many women over the course of the book. Perhaps standards were lower back in the day. Apparently Amis himself was a major philanderer, which occasioned the end of his first marriage. Interesting trivia, his second was to Elizabeth Jane Howard (whose Cazalet Chronicles I am so fond of, what was she thinkng ?!?), and when that ended he wound up living out his old age with his first wife and her third husband. These people GOT AROUND.

SWEET SORROW by David Nicholls

Here is an enjoyable book that made me wonder what is the difference between commercial and literary fiction. These are some first world problems, but what can I say. I did really spend quite some time trying to think how it was that this engaging, servicable story about first love so was utterly competent and so completely forgettable. I think it is on some level because the author is not actually fighting any battle with himself in writing it. There is no vulnerability. It is almost clinically well paced and emotionally balanced.

Perhaps though vulnerability is overrated. It was very funny. Try this, from the teenage boy who is our narrator:

As with people who had good teeth and confident smiles, I was instinctively suspicious of people who got on with their parents, imagining that they must have some secret binding them together. Cannibalism perhaps.

Or this, from him again when a new theatre troupe is introduced at a school assembly:

As we feared, it was another attempt to convince us that Shakespeare was the first rapper.

That ‘as we feared’ really made me laugh. These was one interesting insight in it though. It’s about how madly he fell in love with this girl:

I had never in my life, before or since, been more primed to fall in love. . . If I’d been busier that summer, or happier at home, then I might not have thought about her so much, but I was neither busy nor happy, so I fell.

I bet if we look into when we have most painfully fallen in love we might find that what drove it was less that the person was actually perfect and more that the circumstances of our lives made us need them to be perfect.