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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This book presents an alternate reality in which the Germans and Japanese won the second world war. It has some interesting parts: for example, it imagines the internal struggles after Hitler dies (who would it have been: Goebbels? Speer? The mind boggles); it imagines what the Nazis would have done to African people; it imagines what it would have been like if Japanese culture became American culture; and so on. Sounds like a good book, right? But actually it turned out kind of boring. It covers a bunch of characters who are doing a bunch of things, but you don’t really believe in any of them and they all seem kind of the same person.
While the book was dull, the Wikipedia entry on it was certainly not. Philip K Dick led a wild life. First off, there is the five wives. That is always a red flag. The third one (who he later involuntarily confined to a psychiatric institution, but never mind that), was the one who inspired this book, largely because he needed her to think he was working, so he needed her to hear him typing, so he started typing, and ended up with THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE. He never made much money, and took a lot of speed, and then when he tried to get off speed didn’t go to NA or whatever like a normal person but entered a sort of cult (Syanon), and all this was before he started to have religious visions (triggered by light glinting off a stranger’s necklace). When he died he was buried under the tombstone pre-prepared for him 53 years before by his parents, who determined he should be buried next to his twin who died in infancy. None of the wives ojected. I mean: it all went on.
Okay: I am about ready to give it up for Jonathan Franzen, and concede he may indeed be America’s greatest living novelist. Because this thing is LIT.
It tells the story of a nuclear family, over a period of about a year, from each of their perspectives (mom, dad, son, daughter, other son). From pg1, I was in. We open in
. . . the nursing home in Hinsdale, where the mingling smells of holiday pine wreaths and geriatric feces reminded him of the Arizona high country latrines. .
MWAHAHAHA. The father is a deputy minister at a Protestant church. He feels a sad kinship with the “dusty creche steer,” and is conducting an awkward flirtation with a parishioner. He is generally terrible at it, though he does get her to accept some vinyl records from him.
“He was not so bad at being bad as to not know what sharing music signified.”
Later he finally manages to get it together with his parishioner.
With a sigh, she closed her eyes and put her hand between his legs. Her shoulders relaxed as if feeling his penis made her sleep. “Here we are.”
It might have been the most extraordinary moment of his life.
The book is so incredibly well observed (‘that type of disinfectant unique to dentist’s office’ I mean god does he carry a notebook EVERYWHERE), so impressive in its creation of different points of view, so successful in concluding everyone’s arcs, I am just like DAMN
According to my blog, when I read a previous novel of his, FREEDOM, I was so overcome that I stopped on p38 to write a blog post about how much I already loved it. This was back in 2011, and it’s probably a good thing it was a while ago, because that book, like this, is a novel of a single nuclear family. I’d probably be able to see more of the authors tricks and obssessions and so be less impressed. As it is, let me just say again, DAMN.
In this book I supported someone in monetizing his Twitter feed. I didn’t object. I’m always in favour of people other than Twitter making money off Twitter.
The author of this book got unexpectedly dumped, and so did what you get to do if you are not an immigrant: move back in with his parents. He was inspired to start a small Twitter account for his friends where he posted various things his dad said, and it went viral. Publishing deals followed. Meanwhile, in London, the Amazon algorithm noticed I had been buying lightly comic books, and here we are.
The book was funny, and I often laughed reading it. Most appealing, however, was the obvious love between father and son. The dad’s advice is blunt but caring.
“Sometimes life leaves a hundred-dollar bill on your dresser, and you don’t realize until later it’s because it fucked you.”
And:
“The baby will talk when he talks, relax. It ain’t like he knows the cure for cancer and just ain’t spitting it out.”
It’s a perfect mix of chuckles and heart. Well done Amazon algorithm, well done.
Here is a story about being poor on the outskirts of Luxembourg. Though let’s not get carried away: no one in Western Europe is poor by global standards. Perhaps it’s better to say, here is a story about perceived inequality on the outskirts of Luxembourg, but that’s not quite as snappy.
Anthony had just turned fourteen. He could devour an entire baguette with Vache qui Rit cheese as a snack. At night, wearing headphones, he sometimes wrote songs. His parents were idiots.
This is the first paragraph, and I’m already loving it. Here is a description of Anthony’s community:
The men said little and died young. The women dyed their hair and looked at life with gradually fading optimism.
The story covers four summers in the late nineties as Anthony, his friends, and his frenemies, grow into adulthood. It provides a microsm of a small French town that is struggling with de-industrialisation. Like kids everywhere, they are convinced against all evidence that they will lead big lives, unlike those fools their parents:
She couldn’t grasp how much determination and humble sacrifice was required to keep an average existence afloat, to bring home a salary, plan holidays, maintain the house, cook dinner every evening, and be present and attentive, while still giving a novice teenager the chance to gradually earn her autonomy
One of the kids gets out of their small town, but the rest get conventional jobs and are on course for conventional lives. Here’s Anthony:
(His mother) believed in killing herself working. . . . An idea Anthony was starting to subscribe to. At least he had right on his side. It was now his turn to complain about taxes, immigrants and politicians. He didn’t owe anyone anything, he was useful, he complained, he was exploited, he was dimly aware of being part of a vast majority, the mass of people who could do everything and were sure there was nothing to be done.
