#26 in 2024
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke.
I used to belong to an elite club of people who were proud of never having read Moby Dick by Herman Melville. There are similar clubs of people who refuse to read Austen or Joyce. Emboldened by a fine claret, one night I made the mistake of bragging about this club to my friend Pauls, a passionate and studious reader who insisted that I abandon this scurvy association and put Moby Dick on my list.
Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that’s tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity.
You can’t squeeze this book into any category — it starts as a riveting adventure with a striking exotic character, a ‘noble savage’, yet after a few chapters, Melville loses interest in his set-up and turns the book into a creative non-fiction study of whales down to minute anatomical detail. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Now and then the story takes off again with maniacal Captain Ahab and the rest of the crew (the sensible one is called Starbuck, in case you didn’t know), but the writing is never consistent — whole sections are written like monologues for the stage, while others are like sermons preached in a tavern. I eventually moved to an online text so that I could follow all the references. If Melville was alive today, he’d have to write one hell of a query letter to prospective agents; there’s no genre to fit him in. In fact, Professor Google tells me the book didn’t sell well in his lifetime. Melville stopped writing and eventually drank himself to death.
So what made Moby Dick a classic after 1920? Maybe one of you bookish know-it-alls can tell me. For my part, ahoy me mateys, glad to be back on land. And it’s okay not to be part of the Melville-proof club anymore, though I found the descriptions of whale-hunting deeply depressing. I might even sling my arm around your shoulder and, gently squeezing, encourage you to read Melville’s opus. Because a. it’s funny and b. the language is a feast. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught — nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!
Here she blows!—there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!
But suddenly as he peered down and down into its depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom.
#27 in 2024
Since my last newsletter, I have come and gone to Italy. Before I departed, a fine and truly omnivorous bookish friend (yes, you Myles) waxed rhapsodic about Ravello and insisted that I read Michael Holroyd’s A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers so that I could fully appreciate the Amalfi coast. I didn’t make it to the coast but I read the book. Holroyd is fascinated by the British aristocracy, the would-be aristocracy, and the Bloomsbury group. His paramount goal, he says, is to write about the mistresses, women who had no settled professions, with lives that were fluid and vulnerable. I now know more about the sexual affaires (‘affaires’ with an ‘e’ as Holroyd spells it) of these people than I really need to: it’s like finding out that a Prince wants to be someone’s tampon, know what I mean?
This is a very straightforward non-fiction narrative and if you’re not going to Italy, you will still find it fascinating because you are an aficionado of all things Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, or D.H. Lawerence, or Rodin, or because you would like to read a mini-biography of Violet Trefusis, who is distantly related to Camilla Parker-Bowles.
#28 in 2024
After Daddy had his leg cut off, I didn’t see him laugh again until the pope died.
Not all grief memoirs are the same; few surpass Joan Didion’s; but this one is in its own league. Séamas O’Reilly lost his mom when he was five years old. That fact in and of itself might not lead me to read this book, recommended by my dear more-filmish-than-bookish Alan. Even the fact that O’Reilly was one of eleven children might not pull me in or that he grew up during the violence of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. No, the thing O’Reilly knows how to do in Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? is to be hilarious and sad at the same time.
‘Auntie Aileen,’ I said gravely, ‘I have some very bad news for you.’
‘Have you?‘ she ventured.
‘Mammy’ s dead,’ I said, with a solemnity that would have been slightly more impactful had I not been bouncing up and down on the bed. ‘If you want to see her, she’ s in the dining room,’ I added helpfully, punctuating this somber death notice with a commemorative belly flop.
NB this is not the first time I have read in the acknowledgments that the book came to be because of the author’s Twitter account and Facebook posts, but it still seems worth noting.
#29 in 2024
“Please remove your grenade while we eat, Okeoma,” Olanna said.
Sibling rivalry plus love triangles plus revolution — mix it all up and you have a thundering good novel. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has said that she had no choice but to write Half of a Yellow Sun, given that she was born seven years after the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Biafran war 1967 - 70. Both her grandfathers died as they battled in vain for an independent Biafra, and her parents lost everything they owned. Though their child Adichie grew up in privilege, Biafra was always knocking at the door.
Did you see photos in sixy-eight / Of children with their hair becoming rust / Sickly patches nestled on those small heads, / Then falling off, like rotten leaves on dust?
As a kid I was raised with warnings about the starving children of Biafra but I knew nothing about the politics of the Igbo. Many writers try to capture a conflict in their novels — think Tolstoy, think Zola, and yes, this novel does the same for Nigerian history. The story is told via several viewpoints: that of a dirt poor houseboy; that of an ineffectual white expat writing a book entitled The World Was Silent When We Died; and most importantly, that of fractious twin sisters, born into wealth and extremely competitive. Their love stories are as compelling as the storms of political ambitions and violent greed. The personal dramas keep you hoping for the best as everything turns to shite.
Late at night, after Master was in bed, Ugwu would imagine himself speaking swift English, talking to rapt imaginary guests, using words like de-colonize and pan-African
Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silence? Is it this belonging, this completeness?
The echo of unreality weighed each word down; he clearly remembered what had happened at that airport, but to write about it he would have to reimagine it, and he was not sure if he could.
Adichie was named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2015.
#30 in 2024
On November 2, 2004, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was knocked off his bicycle, then shot several times, and while he pleaded for his life, slashed with a knife. His murderer Mohammed Bouyeri was a Muslim extremist. He pinned a letter to van Gogh’s body with his weapon, and was arrested after a shootout with the police. Bouyeri was sorry to survive; he wanted to die as a martyr to his faith. He is in prison for life.
Ian Buruma is a veteran journalist who takes this event apart and scrutinizes it from all angles. It’s uncomfortable to read that multiculturalism has collapsed in Europe; that the sweet dream of tolerance and light has ended. There’s a lot of hatred described in this book: hatred for Muslims, atheists, women, Christians, Jews, including Van Gogh’s often venomous polemics. Van Gogh was an attention-grabbing celebrity who was steeped in a Dutch literary tradition called “abusive criticism” — an effective way to ritualize animosities in a tight circle. It was serious, but never deadly. His memorial party ran according to his specifications: there was a rock band, cabaret acts, pretty cigarette girls in miniskirts, and two stuffed goats since Theo loved to call Muslim’s ‘goat fuckers’. And there’s the line he crossed. When I read about the extreme abuse Van Gogh hurled against Muslims and Jews alike, I am glad that I live in a country with laws against hate speech.
I wrote about the murder after it happened in an opinion column in Latvia, and I know I didn’t do a good job. I was struggling with Buruma’s central issue: the limits of tolerance. No one should be murdered for something they wrote, not van Gogh, not the satirists of Charlie Hebdo, let alone Palestinian journalists or Anna Politkovskaya. The question is, do you know the power of your words? It’s a vital discussion, given the toxic state of public discourse. The Prime Minister of Slovakia was shot five times this week, and in response, the editors of the main Slovak media wrote a joint letter to say: “If hatred is released into the public space, it cannot be controlled and we are all at risk.”
If the name Buruma seems familiar, he lost his job as editor at The New York Review of Books because of an ill-advised interview with sexual predator Jian Ghomeshi. Should he have lost his job? Probably not. He, too, met a limit of tolerance.
*
This month I read three books recommended by others: that’s a coincidence, and a delightful one.
Last night at a party a very smart person asked if anyone is still reading books at all. We talked about attention deficits, and how heavy books are, and how you can’t click on a word to find the definition if it’s on a printed page. How annoying to have to consult a dictionary… Personally, I still prefer the heft of a physical book. I do remember a time when I read much less than I do now, and I have to say, now is better.
Here are the books I abandoned:
Some minor works are too minor: Colette, Barks and Purrs
Not in the mood for Jenny Lawson, Let’s Pretend this never Happened (a mostly true memoir); Megan Nolan, Ordinary Human Failings
Currently reading: Aube Rey Lescure, River East, River West
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The New List:
Featured Author: Colette, Retreat from Love, 1907 (the last of the Claudines)
Second Latest Title Saved: Aube Rey Lescure, River East, River West, 2024 (currently reading)
Reader Recommended: Seamas O’Reilly, Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? 2020 (see above)
Oldest Title on the List:
Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, 2019 (I’ve wanted to read this for a long time)
The Random List:
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Life of Monsieur de Molière, 1933 (intriguing)
Bernardine Evaristo, The Emperor’s Babe, 2002 (tell you about it next time)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, 2007 (see above)
Francine Prose, Reading like a writer: a guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them, 2006 (what can she tell me?)
Samantha Irby, Meaty: essays, 2013 (new to me)
Ernest Hemingway, A moveable feast: the restored edition, 1964 (I think I’ve read this before - all about Paris in the 1920s)
If you’re wondering how my list is put together, check out my system here