Tag: UK

SINS OF MY FATHER by Lily Dunn

Here is a memoir by someone whose father joined a cult. It is a lot less interesting than it sounds. I am often surprised by how little the circumstances of someone’s life seem to affect how involving their memoir is. This one I found quite dull. I feel bad to say so, because it was clearly deeply felt. Most troubling for the author was her father’s late descent into alcoholism. The degree of surprise and helplessness she feels was – I hate to say it – especially dull. Many people have done the hard miles on writing about being an addict, and loving an addict, and it’s not very easy to add anything to this, no matter how strongly you feel it.

Also annoying was some gentle name-dropping. This is always bad, but it’s particularly bad when you don’t even know who they are dropping. I find this to be a particular affliction of upper and upper-middle class British writing, and speaks to the narrow provincialism of that demographic. Antonia Fraser’s MUST YOU GO remains the high water mark of this kind of thing, and I highly recommend it if you want to LOL.

KLARA AND THE SUN by Kazuo Ishiguro

In this book we get to see a little too far behind the curtain. I have loved all three of Ishiguro’s other books, which broadly deal with the-one-that-got-away, in various guises. I would absolutely love to know what break-up he is working through because it must have been a real doozy. This book is a similar sort of story, but for me did not work nearly so well as the others. Perhaps I’m just too familiar with its tricks?

It is about an AF (artificial friend) who is bought to be a companion to a little girl. It is told through the AF’s AI powered understanding of the world. This was sort of interesting, but to my view has been done better. More effective was the little girl herself, and her friends. In this near-future, no one goes to school, so the children are forced to have ‘interaction meetings,’ where they learn to behave ‘normally.’ Clearly this is inspired by the pandemic, but I did enjoy it. I feel like we could all use a pretty stiff course of interaction meetings.

YOUNG MUNGO by Douglas Stuart

This author’s first book, the wonderful SHUGGIE BAIN, was all about being poor, gay, and Scottish, while also being a mummy’s boy when that mummy is an alcoholic. This book, YOUNG MUNGO covers the same ground. I often think that if, as they say, we all only have one story to tell, most of us have decided what that story is by the time we are sixteen. It’s interesting also that while the first was lightly fictionalized memoir, this one is clearly more of a novel – and you can tell – because in this one we have PLOT.

Fifteen year old Mungo is forced to go away on a fishing weekend with two strange men his mother meets at AA. They go to a loch which is “as near tae heaven as you can get on three buses.” Things get progressively more dangerous and creepy and eventually SPOILER it emerges they are recently released sex offendors, who end up assaulting Mungo. This is all intercut with flashbacks of the development of Mungo’s relationship with his first boyfriend, and the two stories intertwine, both escalating, one in a horrifying way (SPOILER Mungo kills them, but its not as soap opera as it sounds), and one in a very sweet way.

I just love the writing . . . three examples. Here his mother coming back from her boyfriend’s:

Every five days or so he would return her like an overdue library book, and she would reappear so dog-eared, so sodden with drink, that it looked like she had been dropped in the bath

And:

There was a rasp at the bottom of her breath now, a sandpapery sound that said it was too late to stop smoking.

And, on the eyes of a deer:

As dark and wet as two peeled plums

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.

MRS PALFREY AT THE CLAREMONT by Elizabeth Taylor

Here is a scarring little book about what is required to survive old age.  It tells the story of an elderly widow, Mrs Palfrey, who moves into a residential hotel.  Some other old people live there also, and I got the impression that some fifty years ago, moving into such a hotel was quite common for older people who did not yet need nursing care.  This is my second book by this author, Elizabeth Taylor, and I am amazed she is not more famous.  She is wonderful at capturing the battles of daily life, and the struggle of keeping yourself in hand.  Here is an older lady while they wait for dinner:

“Well, another Sunday nearly gone,” Mrs Post said quickly, to cover a little fart.  She had presence of mind.

Hanging over the whole book is the loneliness of old age.  I guess it makes sense: the older you get, the more likely you are to outlive the people you love.  I have never seen described in quite so much detail what this is like.  Then there is also of course what is waiting for you: after the hotel, the old age home, if you are lucky, and if not, then death. Here is Mrs Palfrey, answering when someone asks her if she thinks she is an optimistic person:

“Oh I think so.”  She did not explain to him how deeply pessimistic one must be in the first place, to need the sort of optimism she now had at her command.

I’m sorry this is kind of a downer, but there you go. It is at the same time a fairly funny book.  I’m not sure when I’ll recover.

Just as a sidebar, if you’ve ever read the dreadful IN A FREE STATE by VS Naipaul, you should know that  it beat out MRS PALFREY to win the Booker Prize.  This just tells you everything you need to know.  Allow me to remind you of the time when VS Naipaul said he was better than any female writer, even Jane Austen.  Apparently, the 75% male Booker panel of 1971 agreed.  VOM.

IN A SUMMER SEASON by Elizabeth Taylor

Here is a story of a suburbia.  A middle-aged woman marries a much younger man after her first husband dies, and . . . Never mind the plot, because as the introduction tells us, the author is ‘bored by narrative. ‘

Usually this kind of thing is RED FLAG for me, but Taylor is such a fine writer she makes it work.  Try this, of the teenage son coming home late:

Tom walked up the drive, treading silently on the grass verge, let himself in quietly and crept upstairs.  The house was night-quiet.  They were all as fast asleep as innkeepers of an afternoon.  They dreamt their innocent, middle-aged dreams and rested their aging bones

And try this, on his mother’s thoughts when this same son rolls his eyes at her:

They condescend, Kat thought.  They behave like people who are trying hard not to be snobbish.. . They are appalled for us that we are middle aged.

Or this, on a son’s reaction to having to talk about his mother:

His fists seemed to be tightened in readiness, lest anyone should find her as absurd as he did . . .

It’s wonderful, sharply observed writing.  Particularly heartbreaking is our occasional insights into the mind of the family cook, who is really quite despairing on her life, but somehow carries on cooking.  Taylor uses the word ‘courageous’ about how she faces some potatoes in a way that made me want to tear up.

I got up in Wikipedia to try and figure out why a writer of this quality is not more famous.  I found no straightforward answer, but I think it is probably down to her being perceived as too mumsy.  She lived an almost incredibly bourgeouis life in the London suburbs, and I guess being the wife and mother of bankers is not as interesting as being an actual banker.  (Side bar, I am sure this was half the problem for Hilary Clinton too.  Fundamentally, people don’t want their mothers to succeed).  In any case, it is interesting to see about her process (thanks to the Atlantic for the information):

She said “I dislike much travel or change of environment and prefer the days … to come round almost the same, week after week.”. . . That steady rhythm allowed for her regular and admirable output—although she began to publish only when she was 34, wrote “slowly and without enjoyment, and think it all out when I am doing the ironing,” and regularly put her work aside to attend to her children and household (!), she produced 12 novels, four story collections, and one children’s book in 30 years

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.