#21 in 2024
She refuses to charm you.
What a surprise this was to me, that I longed to be back in the place that I came from, that I longed to sleep in a bed I had outgrown, that I longed to be with people whose smallest, most natural gesture would call up in me such a rage that I longed to see them all dead at my feet.
Lucy is not an easy person to be with. Lucy refuses to read her mother’s letters. Lucy likes sex. Lucy has few illusions. Lucy is class conscious. Lucy knows who is exploiting her. Lucy seethes. After reading two coming-of-age novels in which the protagonists are financially secure (by Colette, by Fischer), this novel Lucy was a bracing description of what it means if you are born without privilege and must work very hard for a living. Anything Jamaica Kincaid writes will be superb and this novel is rooted in her experience of leaving Antigua to be a teenage au pair for a New Yorker writer. Lucy never pulls her punches.
…the first thing she said to me “So you’re from the islands?” I don’t know why, but the way she said it made a fury rise up in me. I was about to respond to her in this way: “Which islands exactly do you mean? The Hawaiian Islands? The islands that make up Indonesia or what?”
How to end a book: “I wish I could love someone so much that I would die from it.” And then as I looked at this sentence a great wave of shame came over me and I wept and wept so much that the tears fell on the page and caused all the words to become one great blur.
#22 in 2024
My friend Anna Badkhen who is a great writer and philosopher recommended Love's Work by Gillian Rose. Rose was a star academic in philosophy in England, one of a number of Jewish intellectuals invited to advise on the future of Auschwitz. This slim volume is her reckoning with life, a taking stock when she finds out in her early forties that she has terminal cancer.
So what if I die. Let me discover what it is that I want and fear from love.
I couldn’t predict which way Rose’s mind would veer. The book begins with her arrival in New York in 1991 to be with a friend who has AIDS, and whose circle of friends includes a 96-year-old woman who is missing a nose and first had cancer when she was sixteen. How can she still be here, Rose asks? Could it be because she has lived skeptically? …She has certainly not lived a perfected life. She has not been exceptional. She has not loved herself or others unconditionally. She has been able to go on getting it all more or less wrong, more or less all the time…
The rest of the book mixes thoughts on Auschwitz, facing up to cancer, and her philosophy of love. There were a few pages that I did not understand because I am very bad at philosophy. Those of you who are better at it will relish Rose’s last book from cover to cover. But I liked being reminded that life itself is a privilege; as is love.
#23 in 2024
I’ve been thinking a lot about collaboration or what is called transitional justice and Native Realm by Czeslaw Milosz kept cropping up as recommended reading. Yes, I know, another memoir. However, this Nobel prize winner doesn’t like to get personal. Instead he tries to define his life by sketching his experience of history, and since Milosz was born in what is now Lithuania and lived in Poland during the First World War and the Second, guess how tumultuous and terrifying that history was. From 1945 to 1951, Miłosz served as a cultural attaché for the newly formed People’s Republic of Poland — hence the theme of collaboration — and this section of the book feels woolly and defensive and for that reason, especially interesting.
This is a dense memoir, perfect for the historically minded, and here are three things I liked particularly:
his reminder of how vast the Lithuanian-Polish kingdom was
his calling the Balts ‘the last pagans of Europe’
his validation of the East European struggle for survival: physically, morally, mentally
Lying in the field near a highway bombarded by airplanes, I riveted my eyes on a stone and two blades of grass in front of me. Listening to the whistle of a bomb, I suddenly understood the value of matter: that stone and those two blades of grass formed a whole kingdom, an infiinity of forms, shades, textures, lights. They were the universe.
The translation is by Catherine A. Leach.
#24 in 2024
What if the afterlife was actually a giant bureaucracy consisting of queues and Ear Checks? Photo-journalist Maali Almeida can’t roam outside of Sri Lanka after he is murdered. He has seven moons in which to find the culprit and I had a lot of fun — and a lot of horror — figuring things out along with him and the other ghost-bureaucrats.
You dumped everyone who ever saw you naked. Abandoned every cause you ever fought for. And did many things you can’t tell anyone about. If you had a business card, this is what it would say.
MAALI ALMEIDA
Photographer. Gambler. Slut.
Part ghost story, part whodunit, part political protest, part love story — The seven moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka is unlike anything I’ve ever read. Though the slain photographer documents massacres, torture, and arms deals, Karunatilaka knows when to pull back from the gore to get funny, or romantic. His ghostly protagonist is beautifully flawed, queer in a country where this is a problem, a gambling addict always calculating the odds, and you’re rooting for him all the way through the moons.
History is people with ships and weapons wiping out those who forgot to invent them.
All the most powerful forces are invisible. Love, electricity, wind. And the waves following a bomb blast.
The book won the 2022 Booker prize though apparently many publishers passed on it because of the Sri Lankan politics which would be “difficult for Western readers” and it’s true that I wearied of googling Sinhalese and Tamil expressions. I know these days it’s fashionable not to italicize non-English words and not to provide glossaries , but, sheesh, guys, here are some words I had to guess at: Putha, kolla, gotu kola, malu paan, varam, walauwa, hamu, suddha, beedi, henaraja thailaya, yaka, pittu, apale, rahu, haansi, bheeshanaya. That’s my sole complaint. Most of the time I was on the edge of my seat.
From Karunatilaka’s Booker Prize acceptance speech: I was going to read the names of all the journalists, the activists, the politicians and the civilians, innocents, who have been murdered by the state, or by those opposing it in my lifetime in Sri Lanka, but if I had done that we would be here all night.
#25 in 2024
After immersing myself in carnage, it was such a relief to dwell with the journal Derek Jarman wrote in his last home, Prospect Cottage. He too, died young, age 52. Film-maker, artist, queer activist, in Pharmacopoeia : a Dungeness Notebook, Jarman makes his love of flowers a shield against the onslaught of illness. The book is beautiful to look at and the words are genuine helpmeets. I’m not an avid gardener, but I could feel the energy of this special place he’d found with Tilda Swinton, a point of encouragement and metaphysical enlightenment.
There is more sunlight here than anywhere in Britain; this and the constant wind turn the shingle into a stony desert where only the toughest grasses take a hold — paving the way for sage-green sea kale, blue bugloss, red poppy, yellow sedum.
This not a journal of an illness. Instead it’s a love letter to herbs and flowers; an invitation to a meditative state.
DILL
Dill, like its cousin fennel, has a strong sweet taste used in pickling and with vegetables. The seeds have a soporific effect and were eaten in church to dull the agony of listening to sermons. Dill sent the witches flying.
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Three memoirs this month, and two by authors facing up to their early death. Given that my reading is randomly selected, there are times when I feel that the books I come upon are secretly talking to each other, like trees do via their roots, and that sometimes they gang up on me. Anyone have that experience? Stay vigilant, my bookish friends.
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Here are the books I abandoned:
Too daunting: Andrew Solomon, The noonday demon : an atlas of depression
Too labour-intensive: Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees : over thirty years of conversations with Robert Irwin
Life is too short: Henry James, The American Scene
Currently reading: Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851 (because you insisted, Pauls, thank you)
Still to go:
Featured Author: Colette, Barks and Purrs 1904
Oldest Title on the List: Jenny Lawson, Let’s Pretend this never Happened (a mostly true memoir), 2012 ( the last title in a series of whimsical books)
The Random List:
Megan Nolan, Ordinary Human Failings, 2024 (brand new, on order at the library)
If you’re wondering how this list is put together, check out my system here