Non-fiction Archives -

LILIANA’S INVINCIBLE SUMMER by Cristina Rivera Garza

This book is sub-titled ‘A Sister’s Search for Justice,’ and I’ll tell you right now she does not find it. Her sister was murdered by her ex-boyfriend in the 1990s, and the Mexican state has made approximately zero headway in finding him. In any case, I do not think that is what this book is about and I suspect it was sub-titled by the Marketing Dept. What it really is, is the author with the distance of thirty years trying to re-create the last summer of her sister’s life.

She goes through her letters and diaries, and she interviews her friends. It is extremely beautiful, a close reconstruction of few months in the life of an ordinary university student thirty years ago. In fact she focuses very little on the murderer. I did note though how the relationship had all the hallmarks of domestic violence (suicide threats, stalking, etc); but I guess in the ‘90s no one had the language/structures to identify that . No one helped her; she did not seem to think she needed help. I hope now the culture would do better at identifying early that she was in a dangerous pattern. In any case, it’s too late now. I found this epigraph very beautiful.

“They, like us, are alive in

hydrogen, in oxygen; in carbon,

in phosphrous, and iron; in sodium and chlorine”

(Christina Sharpe)

She won the Pulitzer. It’s a lovely tribute. She feels guilty it took her thirty years to do it, but I admire her courage; I can’t imagine opening those letters, even with many more years distance.

THE SHELTERING DESERT by Henno Martin

I always like to read a book from the country I’m visiting, so here is a piece of non-fiction telling about the author’s two years he spent hiding in the Namib desert 1940-1941. He went with a friend/lover(?). He claims the goal was to avoid internment by the Namibian authorities as an enemy national (as they were Germans) but I have the strong suspicion they also thought it would be kind of baller.

They drive out in a truck, and have some supplies, so at the beginning it was easy. They did have to give up their rifles to the police when war began, and came to regret this a lot, as apparently it is very difficult to shoot something at a distance with a handgun. There first Christmas was pretty good, but here is their second:

“We allowed ourselves a double portion of maize, and we made it tastier with a teaspoonful of sugar that we managed to shake out of the fabric of our long-empty sugar sack. And then we heated all our empty dripping tins and collected about two teaspoonfuls of fat. It was rancid, but to us, who had eaten nothing but fatless zebra meat for a couple of weeks, it tasted wonderful.”

And he’s underselling the zebra part. One time they are so hungry that after they manage to shoot it they don’t even wait to cook it and just eat some raw.

They do have a wireless, and so are able to listen to classical music, and to the progress of this “lunatic war,’ as he called it. Apparently they had left Germany for Namibia in the late thirties, even before war broke out, as they could see it coming and wanted no part of it. I find this cool. Talk about just opting out, even if it ends in raw zebra.

Some of the book I skipped, I have to admit, as it was long discussions between him and his friend on various philosophical topics. I recall this from another African book, LONG WALK TO FREEDOM. Clearly desert and prison are not too different and you don’t have much to do other than philosophize.

Eventually his friend gets beri-beri, so they have to go and hand themselves in. They are fined but not interned (after all that!). He ends the book with a rather sad coda, telling how his friend died in a car accident. Wikipedia tells me he was an alcoholic who suffered from depression who likely drove himself off a bridge intentionally. Also very sadly, he reflects on how much less wildlife there already is, ten years later. He notes: “no man will ever again see a head of four thousand springboks in the neighbourhood’. I had wondered about this myself; driving through the Namib I did not see anything like this. It’s sad how an apparently wild environment is already so degraded by us. Of course if we enter WW3, as we seem on course to do, maybe they will have a rebound

MAURICE AND MARALYN by Sophie Elmhirst

Called A MARRIAGE AT SEA in the US, not sure why in the UK it has this name, this is the true story of a couple who spent 117 days in a lifeboat after their sail boat went down.

Lots of SPOILERS. The husband was a pretty rigid and eccentric character, and was fairly lonely till his late thirties, where he met his wife, who was ten years younger. They did not come from money and saved hard to have the chance to go on an epic sailing trip. They made it across the Atlantic okay, but in the Pacific, a few days away from the Galapagos, a dying whale sank their ship. They scrambled onto the lifeboat with what they could, and Maralyn (the wife) took a photo of the tip of its sail as it went down.

Then began 117 days. They saw 8 ships, none of who saw them, before they were rescued. They got through their food in 20 days, and then started on what they could catch. They fished with safety pins, and caught turtles and sharks (!) with their bare hands. They sometimes caught birds too, and ate not just the birds but the fish the birds vomited back up. They were thirsty enough to think fish eyes were delicious water source. Hardest of all was the despair. Maurice was willing to give up, but Maralyn insisted they would live. Towards the end the raft started deflating, so they had to pump it back up EVERY HALF HOUR. They were near death (and I’m talking pressure sores that reached to the bone) when a South Korean ship rescued them.

They are (get this) eager to get back on the water again and use the money they make from selling their story to buy another boat and sail on. Eventually though they run out of money and are forced to go home. I felt bad for them that YouTube was not invented yet. They would have raked it in. They are less happy on land, but still extraordinarily happy together, until Maralyn dies at 61. Maurice is bereft.

Bizarrely, the author begins the ending of the book with this:

“There are many ways to take the measure of a life. In the linear version, Maurice’s life had a hard beginning, a dramatic middle, an isolated end”

Yikes. Imagine thinking it’s your business to take the measure of a life. What does that even mean? Luckily she takes a steer from Maurice, from his self-published autobiography (which, charmingly, only begins on the day he meets Maralyn), where he says:

“Although I am wary of accepted truths, I believe in all human beings there is a desire to love and be loved, to experience the full fierceness of human emotion, and to make it a measure of the success of one’s life.”

So she concludes with the idea that you could “measure (a life’s) success by the extent to which you have loved and been loved. On that count, his life had been a triumph”

CATLAND by Kathryn Hughes

This one’s an odd piece of non-fiction telling about about the famous cat illustrator Louis Wain and in parallel the slow evolution of cats into pets.

Some of it was interesting. First off, it is interesting to find out that while dogs were domesticated 25,000 years ago, cats were only 8,000, with the coming of agriculture. This is why they have so much less variety than dogs do. It was also interesting to learn that even into the early nineteenth century cats were not particularly loved; in fact, they were considered working animals, and had a reputation for cruelty. It was considered quite okay to torture them, apparently. It’s pretty stomach churning.

Side bar, on phosphorous. I knew that 180,000 mummified cats were found in Egypt, and shipped to England to be used as fertilizer in 1888. I always thought this was rather sacriligeous, but in this book I found out that in fact these cats were not especially special, but were kind of factory farmed to be sold to ancient Egyptian tourists!

After a while we got a bit becalmed in the history of cat illustration, so I gave up, but I’m still enjoyably bristling with cat-related facts

CATAPULT: HARRY AND I BUILD A SEIGE WEAPON by Jim Paul

Here is a book about a two guys who decided to build a medieval catapult. It is a story about many things, only one of them being catapults. But let’s start with them. Apparently when the catapult was first invented (by Archimedes!) it was a major shift in warfare. Fortified cities, for centuries the height of defense, were suddenly useless. At first, people though it must be gods sending bolts from heaven, because they could not imagine humans moving objects so large. One Roman commander is said to have cried “Oh Hercules! Human martial valor is of no use anymore.” This guy needs to get a load of the atom bomb.

Side bar, I also learnt that there are iron tools from 4000BC, about 2500 year before humans invented iron. GET THIS – It’s because early people learnt to carve iron out of meteorites! One community in Greenland used to pilgrimage annually to one they called ‘the mother.’

It’s not all about medieval weaponry. It’s also, probably more, about male friendship. It’s sort of charming the bloke-y way they build this catapult. And it’s kind of disturbing how amazed they are that they are managing to have a functional platonic relationship. Truly, men are lonely.

CATAPULT was first published thirty years ago; I have read it in re-issue. This has added another layer, because this means they are trying to build this catapult before the internet. I was alive before the internet, and I guess even I have forgotten what it was like. They go to the library to look at old pictures of catapults. They draw the catapult on paper. They look in the YELLOW PAGES for suppliers. They ask their friends for ideas. It’s just incredible how slow and how human the whole process is.

RANDOM FAMILY by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

I cannot now recall how I decided that what I needed to read was 400 pages of reportage of a family in 1980s Bronx, but I am glad I did. This was really banging, and unlike anything I have ever read.

The author embedded herself with a single family and tells about their day to day lives over the course of about a decade. I don’t think I’ve ever read a piece of non-fiction before that totally avoided commentary or context. It just plunges you right into the day-to-day of these peoples’ lives, and tries to very deeply understand the inter-personal dynamics that are driving the decisions they make. And by deeply, I mean DEEPLY. It’s clear she has interviewed people about stuff like how they first started having sex, and who was cheating on who and why, and so on. It’s interesting to read about any family’s interpersonal dynamics in this degree of objective detail, but this one is particularly so, because there is almost nothing else going on. Almost no one has a job, and many are in jail. All the family’s girls are pregnant at 14. 14! And then go on to have at least one more child before they are 18. They are caught in a very, very difficult spiral, and they handle it with extraordinary courage and good spirits. What I found particularly astonishing was how open they were to helping each other. One woman (Jessica) has 5 children before she is 21, and then goes to jail at 23. All of her children are absorbed by her family, rather than being put into care, despite the fact that her family really has no space or money for more. I was also astonished how appalling the prison system was. Apparently a single 15 minute call cost $4! And this for people who are often trying to make $10 do for two weeks of groceries.

One side point is I read this over the course of a delayed flight – MUC-LHR – and I note I read continuously for 4.5hrs. This makes me happy: clearly the phone has not totally eradicated my attention span.

A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN by David Foster Wallace

I guess other people have noticed that David Foster Wallace is a good writer, but damn. I don’t even especially like essay collections, and still: damn. To be fair, I did skip a couple of the essays that seemed boring, but the ones I read were wonderful, especially the one about his time on a cruise ship.

Some of his descriptions are so perfect I think of them often. As for example a wide sky with “one or two clouds always in the distance, as if for scale,” and then later in the day the clouds “begin very slowly interacting like jigsaw pieces, and by evening the puzzle will be solved and the sky will be the colour of old dimes.” Or Montreal’s “EKG skyline.” Or when he could not see a powerpoint presentation because the room he was in was “so abundantly fenestrated.”

When are descriptions ever so interesting!?! This cruise essay is chock a block with ideas. Cruises he says “appeal mostly to older people. I don’t mean decrepitly old, but I mean like age-50+ people, for who their own mortality is something more than an abstraction.” As someone nearly 50+, I can only say: ouch.

And on the ship itself:

“It’s not an accident they’re all so white and clean, for they’re clearly meant to represent the Calvinist triumph of capital and industry over the primal decay-action of the sea”

It’s also very funny. Try:

“Since so many of my shipmates shout, I make it a point of special pride to speak extra-quietly to crewmen whose English is poor”

I had a vague memory that he killed himself, and Wikipedia tells it was even before he had a chance to get to that 50+. I couldn’t tell you why, but as well as being clever and funny and beautifully written this essay was just overwhelmingly sad.

A WOMAN IN BERLIN by Anonymous

I am amazed I never heard of this book before, and had to randomly come across it in a secondhand book store. It’s a the real diaries of a woman in Berlin over three months in 1945, as the Russians invaded. AS Byatt called ‘one of the most remarkable war diaries ever kept’ and she is not wrong.

The first few weeks are spent in the basement, as Berlin is pounded with artillery, and they are cut off from water, from electricity and from news. And then the Russians arrive. I’m sorry to say she gets raped multiple times. Here she is waking up one morning:

“I felt rested and refreshed after five hours of deep sleep. A little hungover, but nothing more. I’d made it through another night.”

This was how bad it was; that just being alive was an achievement. She speaks a little Russian so manages to identify the highest-ranking Russian she can, in the hopes this will ringfence her from the others. The guy she finds is not nearly so bad as some. He does not ‘force’ her physically, and he apologizes, as he has not ‘had a woman’ in so long. She is so touched to be spoken to gently that she bursts into tears in his lap.

One thing I found interesting was that the experience of rape was so widespread, that the women all talked to each other very openly about it. She said it helped a lot, that it was a common experience and there was no shame. But get this: when he fiance comes home, she lets him read his diary and he is SO DISGUSTED BY HER RESILIENCE in the face of the sex violence that HE LEAVES HER. I mean: I can’t.

And this despite these sort of heart-breaking sections:

“I don’t want to touch myself, can barely look at my body. I can’t help but think about the little child I was, once upon a time, the little pink and white baby who made her parents so proud, as my mother told me over and over. . . . So much love, so much bother with sunbonnets, bath thermometers and evening prayers – and all for the filth I am now.”

Apparently there was a very bad reaction when it was published, as ‘people’ (men) thought it besmirched the honour of German women. So she insisted it not be published again till after her death, and never with her name. Her name came out eventually, and guess what: she lived till she was ninety, in 2001. She made it.

JOURNEYS OF A GERMAN IN ENGLAND: A WALKING TOUR OF ENGLAND IN 1782 by Carl Philip Moritz

Okay this one killed me. It was just so incredibly charming. It is the real letters of a young German who visited England in 1782. And et me tell you, he is LOVING it. Sample this from the day of his arrival:

“How different did I find these living hedges, the green of them and of the trees – this whole paradisical region – from ours and all others I have seen! How incomparable the roads! How firm the pathway beneath me!”

It rejoices in chapter headings like “Richmond: A Perfect Town.” He finds the street lighting amazing; though apparently this wasn’t just him – a German prince who was there shortly before found it so unusual that he assumed they had illuminated the town just for him.

Weirdly I just read another book by a young man who went on a long walk – Laurie Lee’s WHEN I WALKED OUT ONE MIDSUMMER MORNING, and it has just the same vibe. While I was impressed that Laurie Lee could relax just by looking at the view (no podcast, nothing), I was even more impressed by Moritz who relaxes by reading Milton. What could make you chill out like PARADISE LOST?

It was a deeply charming window into 18th century London. For example, apparently it took so long to get from the mouth of the Thames to London that most travellers got off at the coast and took a carriage. The river was so busy that you always knew where it was because of the forest of masts.

But to be honest the appeal was not so much the historic fact, as it was the joy and enthusiasm of this young man, dead these two hundred years.

JOE CINQUE’S CONSOLATION by Helen Garner

Apparently I’m on a real Helen-Garner-true-crime kick. This one is another account of a real trial. It is about a university student who hosts a dinner party to celebrate the fact that she is going to kill herself and her boyfriend. The boyfriend is not aware that this is a farewell party, but – get this – most of the other people there are (?!?). She goes on to kill the boyfriend but, in true cowardly form, not herself.

It is really a jaw-droppingly weird story. The girlfriend seems to be pretty sane-ish, but struggling with self-obsession. The judge believes she has some kind of personality disorder, which I could kind of believe, except for that part where she doesn’t even try killing herself, but stands over her boyfriend while he dies slowly over the whole weekend (heroin, rohypnol). She only get four years. Her best friend 100% knew what she was planning, is 100% sane, and gets off scot free. It’s wild. Only of their friends, a 21 year old, gets even close to calling the police, but is shamed into thinking they are not serious. This was in many ways the most interesting part of the story, how none of these students had the courage to follow their gut.

This was an earlier piece of reportage than THIS HOUSE OF GRIEF, and I did not like it as much. It was, for my taste at least, a little bit over-written and overwrought. It was still interesting though, and I don’t doubt that if she has written more of these I will read them.