Tag: USA

I’m apparently really feeling shipwrecks at the minute.  I just finished THE WAGER, a total shipwreck shocker where a rich guy makes bad decisions.  Today, and on dry land, those people usually get promoted.  Back then and when the ocean is involved, outcomes are harsher. In this mind-bending novel, THE MOOR’S ACCOUNT, based on real events, a Spanish expedition lands in Florida in 1527.  The genius running it, Nantes, decides it will be a good idea to send all the ships onward to a bay (that he assumes probably exists) while he leads 300 people to find a lost city of gold that he has tortured some native Americans into telling him exists.  No surprises, everybody dies, and cannibalism absolutely plays a role.  Only four people are ever heard from again.  They turn up eight years later, having completed an incredible tens of thousands of miles to end up all the way at Mexico City. 

This story is told from the perspective of one of the four, an enslaved man called Estebianco. The other three all wrote accounts of their journey, but he is only known from one line, which lists him as one of the four survivors.  The novel is a really impressive feat of imagination, taking him from Morocco through enslavement and on to this truly wild journey.

I just want to say one thing that really made me LOL, and gives one more sympathy for this Nantes. You will recall (maybe) that Cortez conquered the Aztecs and became fabulously wealthy, finding so much gold that he crashed the value of gold in Spain.  Apparently Nantes was supposed to have lead that expedition, but Cortez just basically got organized and left before they could make it official.  Poor guy. I just love his bad temper and his feeling that he somehow deserved a city of gold.   Don’t we all.

This is a book about a recession. In it, a young woman works a job she hates and is extremely grateful for. It’s a story humming with economic anxiety.  This part made me laugh:

Early on he (her boss) called me his rock star.  This was funny to me, since in actuality rock stars get onstage, perform, fuck many girls, wreck the hotel room.  I, meanwhile, sweated competence, a hungry efficiency. 

How often have I sweated competence!  OFTEN.  It’s curious how very few books are written about office jobs, given so many people spend so much of their lives in them.  It’s like we don’t think it’s a real part of our life.

I also really like this part:

All my life, when I imagined the future, I thought of each of us as small atoms, individuated, settling down, getting a flat somewhere, wearing out one job and then another, like successive pairs of shoes.  You grew up, you were found a person to marry, you went sullenly to work, you kept a house running, you did the requisite paperwork or paid the price, and then for two hours of the day you might cultivate a pastime, like yelling at sports on the television or forcing the lawn into submission.  It took bravery to imagine something even slightly different, let alone follow that imagining through.

Ouch. 

One piece of whining, there was a lot of weirdly specific descriptions of food.  Try this:

Some people find it harder to forgive you for not actually being wrong, Tig had said in her Tig way over bowls of bisque served with ragged pieces of country loaf.

?!? ragged pieces ?!? country loaf !?!

A readable little book about a marriage between a young woman and a much older man that goes very wrong. I whipped through it, but somehow it didn’t touch me. I think maybe there was too much drama? I have always struggled to understand tortured relationships.

A wonderfully fun, salty novel, written from an unusual perspective: that of a woman in her late fifties.  I don’t want to get all identity-based about everything, but wouldn’t it be interesting to know how many more books have 50-something male narrators than female ones?  I bet it is like minimum 10x

Anyway in this book, enjoyably, the woman has a huge crush on a much younger man.  He dresses well:

(I) had forgotten the specificity and light irony of urban style.  My husband wore what he wore because he believed in it – he had lost the sense of costuming and presentation that well-dressed city dwellers naturally possessed. That perambulating sense of always being on display.

“Specificity and light irony” – I love it! She worries about her wrinkles, stops eating carbs, gets him drunk, and then goes direct to drugging him and tying him up. I had great hopes for where this was going.  Then it took an abrupt left turn into much more ordinary territory. But I still had a lot of fun.  Try this, when she is angry at her husband:

. . . lightning bolts of anger shot from my vagina to my extremities.  I’ve always felt the origin of anger in my vagina and am surprised it is not mentioned more in literature

And this, when someone compliments her for all the art and poetry on her walls, and she replies:

But does one always want to be surrounded by so much culture? There’s something exhausting about being constantly bombarded by everyone’s best efforts

It was very pithy and interesting, even if I would have preferred the plot to go another way. I even liked this last reflection on what she had or hadn’t done:

Getting away with something, not getting away with something, moral retribution. I don’t matter, you don’t matter.  To think we do is just marketing.  It’s this cult of personality.

This bestselling book was very more-ish. It was at the same time kind of forgettable.  It was like a nice glass of water on a hot day.  Or perhaps I just think that because I read it in a really hot country during a heatwave.

It is about a family of very wealthy people, and was an interesting window into what your problems are once the money one is solved.  Boo-hoo, etc.   One thing that did surprise me was the idea that employment in banking is heavily dependent on pedigree.  In my experience, it seems to be a lot more meritocratic than that, and mostly dependent on hard slog.  I was also struck, once again, by how much some people, especially thin people, seem to worry about their weight. 

But that’s about all I have to say. I did read it in a single day though, so I must have enjoyed it