Tag: male writer

MICHEL THE GIANT: AN AFRICAN IN GREENLAND by Tété-Michel Kpomassie

Here is a book about how you can live the life of your wildest and most eccentric dreams.  In this memoir, a Togolese teenager in the 1950s discovers a book about Greenland in the only book store in his village.  He is inspired, and spends the next seven years travelling slowly up Africa and through Europe, raising money as he goes, till he gets to live in Greenland. 

Someone asks him how he will benefit financially from spending his early adulthood on this project, and like iconoclasts everywhere he is appalled anyone could ask a question so crass.  There is also a whole thing about how he nearly dies after getting bitten by a snake, but is saved by a priestess of a snake cult, so his family wants him to join this snake cult.  This I think also came into the whole run away to the Eskimos idea, but so wildly weird is this book that this is the least strange part of the story.

One reads many travelogues where Europeans travel to Africa and are titillated by its foreignness or disappointed it is not more foreign.  It is really fun to read it the other way round, and Kpomassie has plenty of both experiences.  These Greenlanders are just leading incredibly rough lives.  Take this:.

“Hans and Cecilia took me to dinner with Augustina and her husband Jorgensen, their neighbours and friends.  When we reached the house no meal was ready, but a whole seal, caught by netting, was waiting for us.   . . . As soon as we sat down at the table, Cecilia (went to the seal and started cutting it up pretty efficiently.  And then using her hands). .  . tore out bits of the lungs and then the liver.  These were the hors d’oeuvres.

BLEARGH!  They often eat raw food, still frozen.  Apparently you come to like the ‘crunch’ of ice crystals.  It is also very cold, so they keep the bucket to poop in in the living room, and don’t even pause their conversations while they use it.  BLEARGH!  He also finds out that the huskies, far from being the noble animals he imagined, are kept half-starving through the summer, when they are not needed, and only barely fed in winter.  Drunk people often get eaten by dogs, which is fair enough, as people often eat the dogs too.  BLEARGH!

On the upside, there is a lot of free love.  Married women offer themselves to him, or are offered by their husbands.  Apparently this is partly considered insurance, in case your own man does not make it back from the hunt.

I can hardly do justice to this strange book. I love this guy.  He is wildly original and did all of Africa incredibly proud. I think I am fondest of this part. When he first crosses into the Arctic circle, everyone gets a certificate.  You’d think he’d be excited, after working seven years to get there. But here he is:

This distribution of printed forms struck me as so grotesque that I didn’t bother to collect mine, preferring to savour the strange thill of that striking landscape.

What a man!

HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY by Richard Llewellyn

Here is a classic novel of the Industrial Revolution.  It is a coming-of-age story set in the early twentieth century in a small Welsh mining village.  It captures a prelapsarian time of community and honest work that from our current perspective seems wildly imaginary.  Some light Googling tells me it is kind of imaginary, as apparently this famously Welsh story was written by an Englishman with only tenuous links to Wales.  Still, it works. It really works.  It is a little dated today, but I can still see why it was a huge bestseller. 

Most effective for me is the creation of an entire community.  The story is written by an older man, re-creating his boyhood and early manhood.  It oozes loss.  Whether he was Welsh or not, he was clearly struggling to find a way to keep alive the people he has lost.  Here is the last paragraph, remembering his father who died in a mining accident:

Did my father die under the coal?  But, God in heaven, he is down there now, dancing in the street with Davy’s red jersey over his coat, and coming, in a moment, to smoke his pipe in the front room and pat my mother’s hand, and look, and O, the heat of his pride, at the picture of a Queen, to his eldest son, whose baton lifted voice in music fit for a Queen to hear. 

. . . For if he is dead, then I am dead, and we are dead, and all of a sense of mockery.

How green was my Valley, then, and the Valley of them that have gone. 

It was crushing.

However, side point, I do always find it difficult when people who live in communities totally dependent on one thing (coal, copper, whatever) act all surprised and betrayed when that one thing ends.  Like what did you think was going to happen?  How did you think this was a good idea? DIVERSIFY PEOPLE DIVERSIFY.

DID YOU HEAR MAMMY DIED by Seamas O’Reilly

Here is a memoir by a man with TEN SIBLINGS.  For added drama, he grew up in Ireland during the Troubles and he lost his mother when he was five.  You can see where the pitch for this book wrote itself.

It had some funny parts.  For example, the title  DID YOU HEAR MAMMY DIED?, refers to the question he kept asking people at his mother’s wake. He was too small to understand what it meant, and was rather enjoying being the bearer of important news.  He was bouncing on his bed when he told his aunt:

“‘If you want to see her, she’s in the dining room,’ I added helpfully, punctuating this sombre death notice with a commemorative belly flop”.

He also described one Irish village as so picturesque it was as if it had been ‘bitten by a radioactive postcard’ which I found hilarious.   This book has been something of a bestseller, and I can see why.  And yet somehow it did not quite work for me.  I am not sure how to explain.  I think it was because it lacked heart.  In some ways, this does not make much sense, as there is much here that is sincere.  He talks a lot about his grief for the mother he hardly remembers. He is still ashamed, strangely, of his behavior at the wake.  And yet still, I could not really enjoy it.  Perhaps it is just that bit too polished?   It’s was a bit like reading a few hundred pages of a dinner anecdote that has been told once too often. 

STOLEN FOCUS by Johann Hari

It is a lot harder to concentrate than it used to be.  For example, as a child I used to read for hours at a time, but now I almost never do. I wasn’t sure how widely shared this experience was, but I learn from this book it is very widely shared, and gain some ideas on what to do about it.  

There are some obvious culprits, like social media, and how more-ish our phone are generally. There are some less obvious ones too.  One is instant messaging: did you know the average American worker is interrupted on average every three minutes?  Once you learn to be interrupted, he argues, eventually you start interrupting yourself.  Another is the sheer volume of information we face, which means we feel we have to move quicker from thing to thing.  Apparently the time things trend on Twitter has reduced a lot just in the last five years.  Hari argues that this is why we aren’t pulling together as a society to ‘focus’ on climate change, like we did on the ozone layer, but this I think is a bit of a stretch. One very worrying point he raised was about how our constant need to be entertained means we almost never sit with an empty mind, and how damaging that is to our creativity.

The solutions are in part individual (set timers for apps, turn your phone to greyscale (I can attest, this one REALLY works)), and in part societal.  If social media was subscription, for example, it would be more about making us happy (e.g. helping us meet our real friends in real life) and less about making advertisers happy (i.e., keeping us on our screens). He may have had more solutions but I don’t know because I had to quit before the end. 

Clearly at journalism school you are taught that readers can’t relate to conceptual thinking, but rather need individual stories they can feel something about.   This book takes it to the extreme.  When representing certain ideas, even very obvious ones, he continually relates them to various dull stories about peoples’ personal lives (e.g., how my struggle with obesity inspired my ideas about how to swear off my phone).  Now that I right it down this seems kind of minor, but apparently it was enough to make me quit the book.

OF LOVE AND HUNGER by Julian MacLaren-Ross

In this book we learn all about being a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman.  It involves a surprising amount of day-drinking.  The author, Julian McLaren-Ross, was apparently a true bohemian, and had much experience as a door-to-door salesman, and also of day drinking.  This book captures a certain seedy life in the early twentieth century very well, all petty debts, horrible rooming houses, and trying to avoid buying your round.  It is structured around a love affair the salesman has with a colleague’s wife.  He is not that into it, at first, and then gets super, super, into it.  Then she goes off him.  It’s sad, as love affairs that peter out always are, not helped by all the debt.  It has a kind of uplifting side though, in that she encourages him to write, and to think about politics, and to generally better himself.  People roll their eyes about crushes, but I think they can sometimes be powerful engines for growth.  People are always joining the drama club to meet girls, or joining the gym so boys will look at them, and etc.  At least it keeps us going forward, even if it all blows up in the end.

EMPIRE OF PAIN by Patrick Radden Keefe

A thoroughly depressing book about what money can buy. It tells the story of the Sackler family. They are personally and primarily responsible for the opiod crisis, and have faced no significant penalty for it.

The story begins with Arthur Sackler, born early 1900s, the only one of them who could be said to have earned his money. He was smart, inventive, and pathologically hard-working. He basically invented modern pharmaceutical advertising. He generated the idea of marketing directly to doctors; of data management, so they knew who was prescribing what (for better advertising); and of advertorial. He got very rich off Valium and Lithium.

One of his many business ventures was a small pharmaceutical firm. They produced a kind of covering that allowed a slower release of medicine. They used this covering on a very strong opiod, twice the power of regular morphine, called Oxycodene. As everyone has known for centuries that opiods are extremely addictive, the demand for this drug was naturally limited. Once Arthur was dead, Richard took over and directed his team to a) claim, without any proof whatsoever, that <1% of patients would become addicted to it; b) incentivize reps to always push doctors to prescribe the absolute highest dose for as long as possile and c) ignore the data systems of his uncle which clearly showed exactly what doctors were massively over-subscribing because they were selling direct to the street

More people died from opiods in America last year than from guns or traffic accidents. Despite clear and extensive evidence of criminality, the Sacklers have managed to pay <1% of their fortune in reparations. I won’t go into it, it’s a long story, but basically it’s a lesson for all of us: you can do whatever you want, as long as you have the right lawyers

THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED BY F Scott Fitzgerald

I have not read this book for about thirty years, and it certainly has changed.  It tells the story of a married couple who spend a lot of money and have a lot of fun.  They claim this is because of some life philosophy they have about living for the day and damning tomorrow.  In fact, it is because they expect a large inheritance. I used to think this was wondefully romantic; now I just think it’s amazing how many philosophies you can come up with if you expect to inherit.

It begins to look as if they will not receive the inheritance, and they descend pretty quickly into drinking too much and cheating, having now boxed themselves into a corner.  Here is the husband, having made the mistake of looking at the alumni magazine of his university (always a mistake when you are feeling low):

He laid down the magazine and thought for a while about these diverse men. . . (In the past) he would as soon become a churchgoer because the prospect of immortality gratified him as he would have considered entering the leather business because the intensity of the competition would have kept him from unhappiness.  But at present he had no such delicate scruples.  This autumn, as his twenty-ninth year began, he was inclined to close his mind to many things, to avoid prying deeply into motives and first causes, and mostly to long passionately for security from the world and from himself. 

Then they sue, and get the inheritance after all; but by then they have already learnt some rough lessons about what happens when you damn tomorrow. I mean on the one hand I feel sorry for him but on the other hand BOO HOO I AM SO SORRY YOU ALMOST DIDN’T GET AN UNFAIR GODDAMN ADVANTAGE. 

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.