Tag: UK

NAPLES ’44 by Norman Lewis

I feel like I spend half my time trying to dig up ideas of books to read. Someone gifted me a subscription to the London Review of Books, and it’s proving a goldmine of obscure ideas. This one is non-fiction, a journal of a British intelligence officer in Naples in 1944.

It’s a fascinating look at what it was like for civilians on the losing side. Guys, it was bad. Really bad. No one has anything to eat, to the point that a huge proportion of the female population is having to do sex work. It’s grim.

I don’t know who this author is, but the writing is banging. One small example – he casually describes a minor character has having “a face the colour of a newly unwrapped mummy.” Lol!

LOVE AND SUMMER by William Trevor

I liked another book by this author, FELICIA’S JOURNEY. It was all about a poor Irish girl trapped by her society. It didn’t like this one nearly as much. It was also about a poor Irish girl trapped by her society. It started to make me feel like this guy just likes torturing poor Irish girls. This one was particularly grim. It’s about a girl brought up in a Catholic orphanage who goes out to be a maid and marries her employer and then SPOILER ALERT falls in love with a young man. From page 1 you just know that this isn’t going to be a story about finding happiness or escape. You just know everything’s going to turn out bad. And I just don’t have the tolerance for it. It’s almost like gratuitously miserable.

ADELAIDE by Genevieve Wheeler

In this book we see what happens when you date someone who’s not that into you.

Adelaide is madly in love with her boyfriend Rory. He thinks she is okay. She puts in an incredible amount of time and effort for him, and he enjoys it. To be fair, he does not lie to her. When she tells him she loves him, he explicitly tells her he doesn’t love her back. And yet somehow she just cannot let him go. I get it. It’s sad. She’s drinking too much, working too hard, and not eating enough, and SPOILER ALERT it all goes pretty badly wrong.

One thing I really enjoyed was that this book was set very precisely in recent years in London. The main character and I have been to the same plays, same exhibits, same restaurants. That was kind of eerie and I enjoyed it.

THE PLACES IN BETWEEN by Rory Stewart

In this unhinged memoir, Rory Stewart decides it is a good idea to walk across Afghanistan by himself. In 2002! In winter!

He has already been walking for many months by the time he gets to Afghanistan, and is constantly being told by warlords about how dangeorus the route is he has chosen, as it is across the mountains in the snow. You would think you would listen when TALIBAN WARLORDS are telling you something is dangerous. He does not. We learn a lot of things in this memoir, but not the answer to the most important question: why?

I did find it interesting when he said about how frequently locals sit in silence, especially if nothing interesting has happened of late, because as he notes they have all known each other since childhood, and none of them has read or seen anything interesting (because they can’t read and don’t have TVs). He is often with locals, because his plan for accommodation and food is to ask locals for them. I appreciate that due to the emphasis on hospitality in Islamic culture this is not such a very weird plan, but I personally would have been uncomfortable. The people he is walking among are very poor, and I don’t know if the fact that poor people are willing to give you their food means you should take it.

Also of interest is the fact that he is following in the footsteps of Babur, the 15th century founder of the Mongol empire, and he often refers to his memoir. It started to feel familiar to me, and then I realized this is because I have read it. It is, btw, one of the first memoirs even written. And I was like: DAMN, I am well read. Though I only remember the killing parts, to be honest.

KINGFISHER by Rozie Kelly

I typically avoid books described on the back cover as ‘lyrical,’ and this one sailed dangerously close to that dreaded adjective. I can’t say it was a bad book; it’s just not my kind of book.

It tells the story of a gay man who finds himself falling in love a woman. This part was interesting, actually, about how unexpected desire is and what it means for your life and identity. But then it just got kind of sad, and well, lyrical. A great book for someone, just not for me.

IN CHANCERY by John Galsworthy


This is the second book in the Forsythe saga, a story of wealthy British family in the early twentieth century. The first one was about a man whose wife falls in love with someone else. As divorce was very hard to achieve, cue a lot of being tormented. In this second book, everyone gets their acts together and does what they should have done in the first place, i.e: ignore the haters and just get a divorce! Meanwhile some other characters die in the Boer War. I am not sure how many more of these books I am going to do. The wife character is really an insufferable ‘perfect fantasy’ and it’s really irritating me for some reason.

SUMMER OF BLOOD by Dan Jones

Here is a piece of non-fiction about the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381. I’d never heard of it. Apparently after the plague, there were so few working people that they were able to up their day rates, which the nobles didn’t like. Hilariously, they therefore tried to fix prices at the pre-Plague rates. In addition to this great idea, they were also busy trying to rule France by means of an expensive war, and decided that peasants should accept the introduction of taxation to pay for it.

This did not go down well. Inspired by a priest called John Ball, who was basically miles ahead of Marx with the communism (and from who the famous line “When Adam delved and Even span, who then was the gentleman?” comes), the peasants marched on London, killed a lot of nobles who deserved it (and some who potentially did not), and took the Tower of London. Richard II, then fourteen, granted them all their demands, and the revolt started to ease. So then he set up vindictive kangaroo courts and had thousands of peasants executed in revenge. Rich people got to rich I guess.

FELICIA’S JOURNEY by William Trevor

A very compelling story about a young Irish girl who gets pregnant and comes to England to find the father with whom she had a holiday romance. She doesn’t find him, but she does find what we slowly conclude is some kind of SPOILER ALERT serial killer. This makes it sound like it’s cheesy, but it’s really not. Trevor is a really gifted writer and tells the story from both POV in a very compelling way. My main take away is, THANK GOD FOR FEMINISM. This poor girl is so messed up that she really is barely able to advocate for herself in even the most basic ways, and that’s before she meets the serial killer.

TROUBLES by JG Farrell

This author was kind of a jock at university. Then he caught polio, poor guy, just a couple of years before the vaccine was invented, and had to abruptly enter an iron lung to stay alive. Sport’s loss was literature’s gain, because he’s a wonderful writer. This book tells the story of a WWI veteran who goes to visit a woman he met in Brighton during his leave. She says she is fiance; he can’t remember if she is or not. It gets weirder from there. The alleged fiance lives in an enormous decaying hotel in Ireland, and dies almost immediately after he gets there. For some reason he stays on, while the hotel crumbles around him. A bunch of stuff then happens that has something to do with Irish political history, I could not follow all that. But I enjoyed it nonetheless. Here is a taste, when they brought in the family dogs to try and chase out the huge family of cats who were living in abandoned rooms:

“But it had been a complete failure. The dogs had stood about uncomfortably in little groups, making little effort to chase the cats but defecating enormously on the carpets. At night they had howled like lost souls, keeping everyone awake. In the end the dogs had been returned to the yard, tails wagging with relief. It was not their sort of thing at all.”

THE SEIGE OF KRISHNAPUR by JG Farrell

I found this book in my house, but have no idea where or when I got it. It’s part of the EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY series – a fantastic series I used to read a lot of back when I haunted the Harare City Library – so I assume I picked it up based on that alone. And once again EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY has come up with the goods. I’d never heard of this JG Farrell, but this is a banging book. It is a fictionalization of the Siege of Lucknow in 1857, which I’d also never heard of, in which a group of English colonials withstood a long siege by the rebellious Indian army. It is a hair-raising story of delicately brought up people reduced to eating rodents, but it is a also a hilarious book of ideas. Try this description of a young man:

“From the age of sixteen when he had first become interested in books, much to the distress of his father, he had paid little heed to physical and sporting matters. He had been of a melancholy and listless cast of mind, the victim of the beauty and sadness of the universe. In the course of the last two or three years, however, he had noticed that his sombre and tubercular manner was no longer having quite the effect it had one had, particularly on young ladies. They no longer found his pallor so interesting, they tended to become impatient with his melancholy. The effect, or lack of it, that you have on the opposite sex is important because it tells you whether or not you are in touch with the spirit of the times, of which the opposite sex is invariably the custodian.”

This gives you a flavour. It would have been really easy to write a book of stereotypes, because these poor starving people are so obviously getting what they richly deserve, but somehow he avoids it. Strongly recommend! So strongly in fact that I immediately read his next book TROUBLES. Of which more shortly.