#11 in 2024
I’ve been brushing up on my French. That’s why Santa Claus brought me this book by Leila Slimani, and what better way to improve your plume de ma tante than to read about Sexe et Mensonges, i.e. Sex and Lies and learn how to say things in pardon my French. I found this a relatively easy read, though I’m not the target audience: the subtitle is Histoires vraies de la vie sexuelles des femmes au Maroc ( the English publications says True Stories of Women's Intimate Lives in the Arab World). Slimani has had a spectacular career and last year became the chair of the Booker prize, so we can thank her for liking Prophet Song as much as I did.
This book is written for Moroccans and, as the English title suggests, for the Arab world in general. It aims squarely at the hypocrisy of a society that values an intact hymen above all else. Repression leads to fascination and it is no surprise that Moroccans are amongst the top consumers of pornography, men and women.
Only five books ago, I read a story set in Morocco in which the women living there were a mere backdrop. This was a look behind the veil, and I felt very sorry for my sisters and took Casablanca off my bucket list.
#12 in 2024
If I am to be Mr. Hattersley’s wife, I must try to love him; and I do try with all my might; but I have made very little progress yet; and the worst symptom of the case is, that the further he is from me the better I like him: he frightens me with his abrupt manners and strange hectoring ways.
Carpal tunnel syndrome comes to mind whenever I read novels from the nineteenth century, when they couldn't cut and paste like we do, or at least use white-out and literally cut and paste like we did in the typewriter era. No, they wrote by longhand by the dimming twilight and the flickering flame and jumpin jehosaphat were their sentences ever long. I marvel at the stamina of those delicate wrists that rolled out a romance like The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë.
Starting from my seat in a frenzy of ardour, I seized her hand and would have pressed it to my lips, but as she suddenly caught it away, exclaiming in the bitterness of intense affliction —
No one in this story can say what they mean; romance is governed by suspicion and societal pressures much like restrictive, judgmental Morocco. A twenty-four year old widow shows up in a small village with her son and tries to avoid all social contact, yet, alas, this is not possible, because church attendance is de rigueur, and pretty soon it turns out the widow has terrible secrets. Yet love must prevail. The scenes of male drunkenness and domestic abuse are so vivid that I imagine Anne Brontë running weeping to her attic and scribbling it all down, word for word, exactly as it happened, with only the names of the culprits changed, and here it is for us to read, 200 years later.
Jan. 10th 1827. While writing the above, yesterday evening, I sat in the drawing-room. Mr. Huntingdon had risen, unknown to me, …. and when I had laid aside my pen, and was about to close the book, he suddenly placed his hand upon it, saying — “With your leave, my dear, I’ll have a look at this,” forcibly wrested it from me, and, drawing a chair to the table, composedly sat down to examine it — turning back leaf after leaf. Unluckily for me, he was more sober that night than he usually is at such hour.
“It’s well you couldn’t keep your own secret — it’s well these women must be blabbing— if they haven’t a friend to talk to, they must whisper their secrets to the fishes, or write them on the sand or something.”
If this was a contemporary novel, I don’t know if I would enjoy it, but since it isn’t, the wordiness casts a spell and the struggles of all the characters to overcome their social conditioning had me reaching for my social media accounts.
#13 in 2024
Seeking: former Stasi officers and unofficial collaborators for interview. Publication in English, anonymity and discretion guaranteed.
The Stasi were the secret police of East Germany and their network was vast: there was one Stasi officer or informant for every 6.5 people.
When Anna Funder’s Stasiland was first published, in 2002, I wasn’t that interested. The stories were too familiar. I’d spent decades crossing the Soviet border and visiting West Berlin; I knew a guy who was jailed for smuggling people out of the German Democratic Republic to the West, making them hide in the false bottom of his car.
Reading the book now, I’m so glad Funder captured that particular moment in time, 1996. She dives deep into her ‘horror-romance’ with East Germany, drawing us into her rented apartment with the five different types of linoleum and her mysterious landlady. As she interviews perpetrators and victims alike, I am saddened to recall the enormous suffering wrought by a controlling state, and the terrible Wall, which is now an object for museums, but which caused people to lose their lives when they tried to cross over or tunnel under it.
She ends by visiting the ‘puzzle women’, the people who are working to stitch the shredded Stasi files back together. Given the size of the team, and the average number of pages they can put together per day, it will take 375 years to reconstruct that past.
I have to admit that the cover really bugged me. You couldn’t buy make-up like that in the Soviet orbit. Maybe the picture is supposed to represent the sixteen-year old girl whose life was ruined when she tried to cross the Wall. I’m sure she didn’t look like this. The predominant colour in the GDR was gray. Yes, it’s an obvious marketing ploy. Don’t like it.
#14 in 2024
Oh to write a diary like Charles Ritchie’s: every sentence is as tailored as a sharp suit at a dinner party. The Siren Years: A Canadian Diplomat Abroad 1937 -1945 was one of those unlikely treasures that I picked out from a streetside library box. It made me so nostalgic: winner of the Governor General’s Award in 1974, the diary was published in that period when everything now called Canadian culture starts to happen. As Second Secretary at the Canadian High Commission in London, England, Ritchie served as private secretary to Vincent Massey, whose second-in-command was Lester B. Pearson, future prime minister of Canada. Potentially stuffy, but Ritchie doesn’t mince words.
What happens to them at Eton? However innocent, stupid or honest they may be they always look as though they had passed the preceding night in bed with a high-class prostitute and had spent the earlier part of the morning smoothing away the ravages with the aid of creams, oils and curling tongs.
His diaries give you a front seat to how people were feeling from one month to another during WWII, beginning in 1938 when the Germans applauded Hitler’s cockteasing oratory…If they do not have their grand orgasm of war soon they will burst, and on to the point of no return.
We are now on the very edge of war. …The war offers us no ideal worth dying for. …We re fighting because we cannot go on any longer paying blackmail to a gangster.
I forgot that that there was a point in 1940 when it seemed inevitable that the Germans would win; inevitable that Nazis would occupy the United Kingdom. The possibility of defeat appears in whispers and averted glances. Ritchie lives through the Blitz while dining with the upper crust of England. He is brutally candid regarding his love affairs with ballerinas and the writer Elizabeth Bowen, and he waxes philosophical when his apartment gets bombed.
Things one will forget when this is over — fumbling in the black-out for one’s front door key while bits of shrapnel fall on the pavement beside one — the way the shrapnel seems to drift — almost like snow-flakes through the air in an aimless, leisurely way and the clink of it landing on the pavement.
Though Ritchie is the guy at the desk stamping visas to Canada for terrified Jews —- my office is the door of escape from hell — the one glaring absence in the diaries is any mention of the Final Solution, and that may very well be because the worst camps were not discovered until the end of the war. Instead, he mentions how you get tired of feeling sorry for people.
#15 in 2024
The Jew of Malta should be re-titled Bloodbath Bonanza the Serial Killer Mastermind Jew of Malta, or Bamboozled Jew on the Rampage or Screw With Me I’ll Screw You … to Death. This is a fiesta of violence, concocted by Christopher Marlowe, and the man you’d compare him to these days is Quentin Tarantino.
The play was a stage success in 1592 and is set amidst the conflicts between Christians, Jews and Ottoman Turks vying for power on that small Mediterranean fort-island. Malta was the most desirable military target in the entire Mediterranean, and a focus for pirates unloading slaves. Chock-full of nasties is this play. As proof I offer this bad joke:
Abigail. …Ah, gentle friar, Convert my father, that he may be saved, And witness that I die a Christian. [Dies.]
2 FRIAR. Ay, and a virgin, too: that grieves me most.
Abigail’s father is the Jew of Malta, Barabas, the very rich Jew of Malta, with merchandise in Alexandria, Florence, Venice, Antwerp, London, Seville, Frankfurt, Lübeck, Moscow. He loses all of it when the Christian Governor divests him of it in order to pay a debt to the invading Turks. Okay, so he has good reason to want revenge. But one of the first people he kills is his only daughter. Why? because he’s mad at her. Also he kills all the nuns. From that point on he’s on a killing spree which includes strangling two friars to death and pretending to be a French musician. Everyone has their off days. T.S. Eliot called the play a farce — the farce of the old English humour, the terribly serious, even savage comic humour, and I know why.
By the end you’re hanging on to see what — and who — Barabas will do next.
Barabas (as he boils in a cauldron): I would have brought confusion on you all, Damned Christians, dogs and Turkish infidels!
…so I live, perish may all the world.
The cover of this edition is totally misleading: the Jew of Malta isn’t weighing pounds of flesh and his hero is Machiavelli, who doesn’t care about justice, only power. Also, fun fact, Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice after, and in response to, Marlowe’s farcical tragedy.
I'm currently reading: Colette, The Complete Claudine
Some books I abandoned because:
Too druggie, too cruel: Edmund St. Aubyns, Patrick Melrose series
Too many apostrophes: Eliza Minot, The Tiny One
Too Catholic: A. J. Symons, The quest for Corvo: an experiment in biography
All diatribe: Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation
Stay bookish everyone! Thanks for keeping me company.
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The new list:
Featured Author: Colette, The Complete Claudine (a collection of all of Colette’s early novels, 1900-1907)
Lauren Groff was suggested as my Featured Author and I’ve put this author high on my list. However, Groff is an American and after a year spent with Percival Everett, I need a different perspective.
We watched a not-bad biopic about Colette the other day, which made me wish to spend 2024 in her company.
Second Latest Title Saved: Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, ca. 1590 (re-reading the play)
Reader Recommended: Barry Lopez, Horizon (thank you, Marny)
Oldest Title on the List: Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members, 2014 (novel, know nothing)
The Random List:
Klaus Mann, Flucht in den Norden: Roman, 1934 (Thomas’s brother)
A. J. Symons, The quest for Corvo: an experiment in biography, 1934 (know nothing, but the date is interesting)
T. Coraghessan Boyle, Drop City, 2003 (American counter-culture)
Elaine Equi, The intangibles, 2019 (poetry)
Emmanuel Carrère, Yoga, 2020 (biography)
Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation (a riposte to Camus)
If you’re wondering how this list is put together, check out my system here.