An electrifying memoir/novel about what is now called bi-polar disorder but in the 1980s was called manic depression. The first half of this excruciatAn electrifying memoir/novel about what is now called bi-polar disorder but in the 1980s was called manic depression. The first half of this excruciating account of the author’s own tribulations gave me a brilliant picture of a man in the grip of the manic upswing of this disorder. He thinks he’s God, maybe Christ, and there are all these codes and secret messages embedded into the banalities of everyday life – colours, shapes, what is in a junk shop window, the first word a person says to him – all these things take on enormous meaning. He has to immediately see an old friend NOW even though it’s two in the morning because now he knows that guy will have a very important message to give to him – so off he goes. That kind of thing. Totally exhausting.
The second half of the book is a bit of a rinse repeat experience, except for the failed suicide attempt. The way he failed was that he lost an arm and a leg by jumping in front of a train.
Companion books
(from ones I've read, there will be jazillions of others)
Henry’s Demons by Patrick Cockburn – the book that give me a similarly gripping account of schizophrenia.
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen – an interesting but flawed memoir
The Room by Hubert Selby Jr – a disastrous unreadable novel about insanity by the author of the brilliant Last Exit to Brooklyn
And let’s not forget the grand-daddy of all “trapped in the head of a madman” novels :
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky ...more
There were too many sentences in this book. This is a hefty 436 page very long very autobiographical novel which tells a straightforwardly miserable sThere were too many sentences in this book. This is a hefty 436 page very long very autobiographical novel which tells a straightforwardly miserable story about an alcoholic mother and her youngest son. It’s the Shuggie and Agnes Show but there are no laughs and any dancing is a pure embarrassment. Instead there is a whole lot of effing and blinding and throwing things, and enough tears to float a flock of geese. Not only is nobody laughing, the only smiling is of that ghastly fake sort when Agnes is trying to pretend she’s sober.
This is Glasgow in the 80s and 90s, wall to wall unemployment and life lived through a thick fog of cigarette smoke and Stella Artois. All the welfare benefit payments dished out to Agnes go swirling down her throat and the two kids she has left have to find their own food. Leek, Shuggie’s older brother, has only one word of advice to him – leave as soon as you can.
The heartbreak is that Shuggie loves his fall down drunk mother to distraction, and as is the way these things go sometimes, between the age of 10 and 15 he becomes her parent, and finds himself having to do a lot of nasty stuff that no kid should ever have to do for his mother. All of which we get in great detail.
Since this book gets nothing but 4 and 5 stars and as you know it won the big bad Booker Prize it’s clear that readers appreciated the banquet of human unhappiness that is this forlorn relationship. After his brother and sister escape, Shuggie is on his own with his terrible mother. If this was a movie, a Lowest Point would be reached but then some glint of light would appear in the form of a decent man, finally, after all the drunken one night stands. He would find Agnes sparked out on the floor and discover there was no food in the house (“What’s this? Nothing to eat all day Shuggie?”) and he would stick around and some tiny unextinguished spark of humanity would begin to grow in Agnes’ mind.
But this is no movie script so that doesn’t happen. There are hundreds of pages in this novel where not only do things not get any better, they never even look for a minute as if they could possibly get better, and Shuggie Bain turned into johnny one-note.
About a month ago I found myself beginning to read out this whole book to Selma, what a crazy idea. I didn't mean to, but you know how one thing leadsAbout a month ago I found myself beginning to read out this whole book to Selma, what a crazy idea. I didn't mean to, but you know how one thing leads to another. She is in Istanbul and I am not by the way. I started with just a few passages. And they were so delectable and moreish. I guess people say this usually about crack cocaine but here in Goodreads we say this about relatively obscure authors from the 1940s. Anyway it was such fun I ended up doing the whole thing. You should try it sometimes. But don't start with The Brothers Karamazov. So compelling was this one-man-audible experience that as I was reading the heartbreaking-but-funny final chapters I completely failed to hear the frantic ringing of the doorbell last night when the Sainsburys guy was trying to deliver my groceries. So now on Sunday morning I have nothing to eat except three dubious mushrooms and some out of date sausages. Thanks, Selma, and thanks, Patrick Hamilton.
Anyway over the month we were knocked out by Patrick Hamilton's dead-eyed humour, and cringe-inducing painful honesty about his characters and blah blah.
We recommend Patrick Hamilton heartily to everyone out there in Goodreadsland. He will make you laugh, cry, etc etc. And he made me really hungry.
Elizabeth Hardwick’s short memoir/novel has pages about Billie Holiday, and jazz clubs, and more pages on some American Communists, and yes, we’re in Elizabeth Hardwick’s short memoir/novel has pages about Billie Holiday, and jazz clubs, and more pages on some American Communists, and yes, we’re in New York, which is never ever dull, and plus, all my GR friends adore it – so, in the words of one beloved tv personality, what could possibly go wrong? But the prose so purple the Pope would think twice about wearing it and the mood is so doggedly gloomy that by page 50 I needed a ventilator.
I slept with Alex three times and remember each one perfectly. In all three he was agreeably intimidating, and intimidating in three ways….2. A seizure of spiritual discontent and a grave asceticism, mournfully impugning.
And later also about Alex
Worst of all was my ambivalence over what I took to be the inauthenticity of his Marxism.
So for those wishing to read about somebody’s ambivalence over somebody else’s inauthenticity, this is your book.
And now I feel I have been a bit unfair to Sleepless Nights. Let’s just open it at random… page 89…:
She drew on cigarettes as if they were opium, an addition to the opium within her, the narcotic of her boredom, that large, friendly intimate, so dear and faithful. An immaculate drug the boredom seemed to be, with its hazy drift of dreams, its passivity pure and rich as cream.
Dostoevsky did five years of hard labour in a Siberian prison for being in the wrong room at the wrong time. When he was released in 1854 he had to seDostoevsky did five years of hard labour in a Siberian prison for being in the wrong room at the wrong time. When he was released in 1854 he had to serve time in the Siberian army and he was still banned from publishing anything. This memoir of his time in the joint finally came out in 1861 and it was a big hit. It was the first book to reveal all the horrors of life inside. Dosto said to his brother
there will be the depiction of characters unheard of previously in literature
Maybe he had in mind the prisoner he called Sirotkin. Prison homosexuality isn’t a modern invention (I know you didn’t think it was) but Dosto couldn’t address this subject directly, so he very delicately sketches one particular prisoner, Sirotkin - how handsome he is, how he looks well in a woman’s dress, how he provides (unspecified) services to other prisoners. I wasn’t expecting that. I thought – wait, what was that again?
As with all these memoirs, there is some fictionalising, shaping, rearranging, but the point of The House of the Dead was to tell the truth. So there is no plot. It’s not a novel. Many chapters are
loose assemblages of anecdotes and essayistic fragments
(Max Nelson in the Paris Review)
Well, there is one thin framing device used for the book, it’s supposed to be the memoir of a fictional character who got ten years for murdering his wife. But that was included to avoid trouble with the official Russian censor. Contemporary readers took the book as “more or less a faithful account” of Dosto’s own experience.
LIFE LESSONS FROM SIBERIA
1) The prisoners long for meaningful work, most of them have a trade. The way to destroy their spirits is to force them into work with no point. 2) Prison tries to crush the inmates into total conformity but only succeeds in making their rebellious inner lives more real. 3) Anything can be a prison, the mind, the body, religion, your class, your nationality, anything. Who keeps you in those mind-forged manacles? Only you.
THE ANGUISH AND SOLACE OF FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
Although there is no plot at all, this is the story of an intellectual whose radical politics in support of the lower classes forced him (by accident) into unsought and unwelcome intimacy with those lower classes, in the course of which he discovered an emotional and spiritual love for those he had only previously considered to be part of an abstract political theory. Before prison he had thought that the alleviation of the suffering of the peasants was the problem. As an effete literary journalist, prison reality hit Dosto like an express train. At first he hated all the other prisoners and they hated him because he was a “nobleman”.
After prison he thought the peasants themselves, their intense spiritual realities and their stoicism, were the solution. He slept and ate and lived each miserable moment with them for five years, his prejudices melted away, and this was how it changed him.
Joseph Frank says in prison he finds
a new understanding of the intense humanity and particular moral quality of those he had at first regarded with loathing and dismay
THIS MAY NOT BE THE DOSTOYEVSKY BOOK FOR YOU
I must admit even given that stark horrifying nature of the world described, the narrator can be waffly, repetitious and a little annoying. You will meet a parade of extraordinary characters but you know they aren’t going to come together into any kind of drama. Just like real life, people come and go and our narrator has no idea what happened to them.
I do not think Petroff can have ended well, he was marked for a violent end; and if he is not yet dead, that only means that the opportunity has not yet presented itself.
Fortunately we know what happened to Dostoyevsky. Four years after this he wrote Crime and Punishment....more
Djuna Barnes was quite obviously a tremendous person and lived a fairly spectacular life – born in a log cabin on a mountain (!) – father was a polygaDjuna Barnes was quite obviously a tremendous person and lived a fairly spectacular life – born in a log cabin on a mountain (!) – father was a polygamist and lived with two women and produced many children – four of her brothers were named Thurn, Zendon, Saxon and Shangar so Djuna fit right in there – she hardly got any education at all but in her 20s moved from upstate to NYC and very swiftly broke into journalism and THEN became the hot-shot reporter/feature writer – she interviewed James Joyce for example (Writing about a conversation with James Joyce, she admitted to missing part of what he said because her attention had wandered). After ten years in NYC she did ten years in gay Paree and after a lot of high living she hopped over to England in 1932-3 and wrote Nightwood, a profoundly weird novel.
I am gonna read a biography of Djuna Barnes, she sounds like Rebecca West’s fascinating gay sister. She sounds like a total scream. Alas then that Nightwood nearly made me scream. As I read it I could feel parts of my mind shutting down, like when they switch the lights off section by section in a large auditorium. Sentence by sentence the conviction grew upon me that I couldn’t understand more than ten percent of every page. For instance – some guy says :
Those who love everything are despised by everything, as those who love a city, in its profoundest sense, become the shame of that city, the détraqués, the paupers; their good is incommunicable, outwitted, being the rudiment of a life that has developed, as in man’s body are found evidences of lost needs.
What even does that mean? Those who love a city become the shame of that city? Huh?
The narrator and the characters are fond of head-scratching aphorisms such as
A Jew’s undoing is never his own, it is God’s; his rehabilitation is never his own, it is a Christian’s.
Finally I’m way too dim-witted for this book. I can tell Djuna Barnes has a grand style and we would hope she probably knew what she meant at the time of writing, but maybe you had to be there. Try this single sentence – if you like it, you could be the next Djuna Barnes fan :
As the altar of a church would present but a barren stylization but for the uncalculated offerings of the confused and humble; as the corsage of a woman is made suddenly martial and sorrowful by the rose thrust among the more decorous blooms by the hand of a lover suffering the violence of the overlapping of the permission to bestow a last embrace, and its withdrawal: making a vanishing and infinitesimal bull’s eye of that which had a moment before been a buoyant and showy bosom, by dragging time out of his bowels (for a lover knows two times, that which he is given, and that which he must make)—so Felix was astonished to find that the most touching flowers laid on the altar he had raised to his imagination were placed there by the people of the underworld, and that the reddest was to be the rose of the doctor....more
Several short stories about an absent minded professor rammed together and called a novel (but that’s okay, people do it all the time), Pnin is almostSeveral short stories about an absent minded professor rammed together and called a novel (but that’s okay, people do it all the time), Pnin is almost beloved by readers who aren’t me. Professor Pnin with his hilariously broken English is allegedly endearing but I was not even slightly endeared. This was footling stuff. He gets on the wrong train. He nearly misses giving an evening lecture. He buys a football for a kid who doesn’t like football. He doesn’t realise his job is on the line. He talks to people. Some of them like him.
[image]
So that’s how Pnin sank down to the two star basement. But of course Vlad the Impaler is one of the all time English language stylists, so he could be writing about - oh, say, the experience of getting all your teeth pulled out – and it would be heavenly :
It surprised him to realize how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft but now not a landmark remained, and all there existed was a great dark wound, a terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate.
But there is not enough of this grotesquerie and way too much description of rooms. My God, writers love to describe rooms! Describing rooms must be as good as sex for writers.
VN wrote Pnin while he was stuck toward the end of writing Lolita, as a kind of holiday from the horror, which is like if the Beatles stopped recording "A Day in the Life" to knock off "Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da", and if the melancholy uncomedy of Pnin gave VN the break he needed to complete his masterpiece, then I celebrate this very thin novel for that reason alone.
2.5 stars, rounded up to 3 to make me not look like an idiot - this is Nabokov!...more
Place: some middling city in Germany still full of bomb sites and ruined buildings
Characters: Fred and Kate
Subject: theirTime: about 5 years after WW2
Place: some middling city in Germany still full of bomb sites and ruined buildings
Characters: Fred and Kate
Subject: their falling apart marriage
Method : alternating first person narratives
Mood : extremely depressed
Religion : Catholic – there is a great scene where Kate is seized by a violent urge for confession; a priest hears her and is staggered and appalled at the ghastly vistas of misery she then rolls out for his absolution
Situation: they have three kids and a one room flat; he has a rubbish job; they are so poor they can’t afford a bigger place to live; he can’t stand it so he’s moved out and drifts around finding odd place to sleep at night; occasionally they meet up at a cheapo hotel to spend the night together, but this makes her feel like a prostitute
Best scene : a mate of Fred’s is caretaking the empty mansion of some rich guy and letting him sleep in a small room there. Fred describes the vastness of the empty rooms in great and excruciating detail to Kate – thirteen rooms, all larger than the one Kate & the kids live in, all empty for 9 month of the year.
Rating : Three stars… Ingmar Bergman and Thomas Bernhard fans may find this a four star experience ...more
As I entered my kitchen the smell of the cat poo was not wholly unpleasant but not wholly pleasant either, it was one of those things that are not whoAs I entered my kitchen the smell of the cat poo was not wholly unpleasant but not wholly pleasant either, it was one of those things that are not wholly unpleasant or wholly pleasant, like receiving a bill you know you can pay immediately, or a kiss from a relative you don’t really like too much because you’ve noticed she’s not that kind to your children. I cleared up the cat poo and reflected that cats are poo machines, we buy them cat food, they shovel it in at one end, then all the time we are stroking them and admiring their lovely fur and supple frames, they are creating poo, which is not so pleasant really, although not completely unpleasant….
Stop, stop, please don’t carry on with this … I suppose it’s one of your parodies?
Well – his style does lend itself…
Yes, but please, the actual Knausgaard is bad enough! Anyway, a parody version is too easy – it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
Well, okay… no need to get tetchy. Parodies are fun! You know, Murakami, Sebald….
Ah yes – I’m glad you mentioned him…. I thought this Knausgaard book reminded me of a much less well-read kind of non-intellectual Sebald –
With an admixture of Nicholson Baker’s Room Temperature and some seasoning from Rousseau and Emerson, all that nature nature nature -
Well, that’s his thing….
It’s not my thing. You seen one leaf, you seen them all. Also, what was with this Don’t Give Anyone Any Names business? I am fed up with books with Unnamed Narrators – here we had unnamed everybody. His wife and four children – no names! One time the depressed wife addresses him by HIS name (Karl Ove) so he gets his own name and everybody else is “the siblings” “your younger sister”, “my nearest neighbour”…
I’m getting the idea that this wasn’t your cup of tea either.
Once again I seem to be immune to everybody’s current crush.
Ah don’t look so woebegone, you love it, you old curmudgeon! You can do one of your one star specials!
No, not really…. I can’t deny he’s got…. Soul. His writing is like a spaniel with huge eyes full of love looking at you, defying you not to love it back. It’s all children, and nature, and intimacy, and wife, and wondering about Life Itself, and the aggravations of pettiness (no petrol!) and the wonder of the entire cosmos (look at the ocean! And that castle! And that ant!)
He got on your nerves didn’t he.
Yeah…. Yeah….
So give me an example of all this then…
Okay… here :
The silence reigning there, so specific to sun-filled afternoons in late summer, how the sounds that breach it all seem so far away, almost dream-like, even the sound of the children splashing about in the plastic pool, making a racket, as if the sky is too deep, the world too vast for something as small as a voice to find a foothold in.
It’s like …. “you are getting sleepy…. Your eyes are so heavy…. You are eleven years old…. You will buy my next book…”. There’s one part on page 64 and 65 where he describes being jetlagged as if we need a slow mournful meandering description of what jetlag is because we will never have known such a thing.
Even though I knew I was in Australia, on the other side of the globe, in Sydney, it was as if the sensation of being in Bergen trumped reason… it was almost as if I was sleepwalking.
And I was thinking…No kidding, Karl Ove!
All right, all right. So this three star rating, what – another cop-out?
Ah, the loose and baggy monster that is the three star rating. Some people think it just means “yeah, well, whatever” but it’s more interesting than that. It also means “really excellent but badly flawed” and in this case “I think this guy’s got something, he’s not bad, he’s just…. look, if he rings me again, tell him I’m out. In fact, tell him I’ve emigrated…”.
Does this mean you'll not be reading Min Kamp this year?
As you know, in white bread the germ, with its wonderful health-giving properties, is eliminated – extracted, I should say – and put into chicken foodAs you know, in white bread the germ, with its wonderful health-giving properties, is eliminated – extracted, I should say – and put into chicken food. As a result the human race is becoming enfeebled, while hens grow larger and stronger with every generation.
This little book is stuffed with people who have the most curious opinions of everything. They’re all aristocrats, Lord this, Lady that, the Honorable whatever. And the family Nancy is telling us about – a version of her own, of course – is even more reactionary and peculiar than most. On the subject of holidays, for example :
It would never have occurred to the Alconleighs to visit the Continent for any other purpose than that of fighting.
And here’s one I loved :
His general attitude to what he called the man in the street was that he ought constantly to be covered by machine-guns
There is no plot here, just the tumultuous lives and loves of some of this outrageous family progressing from the 20s all the way to the end of World War II and in particular following Linda.
Linda took no interest in politics, but she was instinctively and unreasonably English. She knew that one Englishman was worth a hundred foreigners.
First she marries a banker. That doesn’t go well, and she runs off with a stern communist and immediately changes her politics.
Linda threw discretion to the winds; she became an out-and-out Communist, bored and embarrassed everybody to death by preaching her new-found doctrine , not only at the dinner-table, but also from a soap-box in Hyde Park, and other equally squalid rostra
(You don’t get that plural rostra used much these days.) Linda finds herself having to run a household all by herself – no servants allowed for Communists! She exclaims :
I think housework is more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened.
(She means foxhunting with hounds, by the way.)
And she comes up with this pearl of wisdom
Left-wing people are always sad because they mind dreadfully about their causes, and the causes are always going so badly.
How still true is that, alas!
The Communist doesn’t last the distance either but to find out what happens next to the lovely Linda, you have to read this beautiful affectionate satire.
Three years ago two of my close friends died of cancer within four months. It was really a terrible year. With my friend Jim, it was a long drawn-out Three years ago two of my close friends died of cancer within four months. It was really a terrible year. With my friend Jim, it was a long drawn-out affair. He’d beaten lymphoma 25 years earlier. Then it came back. But the cancer didn’t kill him directly. It broke his immune system so that repeated exhausting bouts of infections and pneumonia finally did. He had been in & out of hospital for months.
With my friend Nick (previously the healthiest of us all, the one who was doing the half marathons and working up to a full marathon) it was fairly rapid.
Gruesome health message for men :
(view spoiler)[ If you see any blood in your pee, go to a doctor. My friend Nick ignored this symptom for 6 months. He saw online that runners sometimes get blood in their pee after being dehydrated during a long run. So he always put it down to that. It wasn’t that, it was bladder cancer. Maybe they could have removed the tumour if he’s have gone straight away. (hide spoiler)]
During the last month Nick had a hospital bed installed in his home. He lived in a town 30 miles from here so I visited several times. During this last month his poor wife was almost crushed by his care. Sure, nurses would visit twice a day. But it wasn’t enough. He needed various meds every 4 hours, 24 hours a day. In his state he could not see she was at the end of her tether. One time I visited she began telling me her problems looking after Nick and didn’t stop for over an hour. There was a blithe disregard of her situation by the medical personnel and by her husband. This short novel is exactly about that. Really, this is one of those memoirs published as a novel. Helen Garner even calls herself Helen in the book.
So Nicola, a friend of Helen comes to stay for three weeks while she undergoes a course of alternative therapy. She has bowel cancer. Helen asks a medical guy about Nicola’s situation:
”You work with cancer patients,” I said. “Does this sound bad?” He shrugged. “Pretty bad. Stage four.” “How many stages are there?” “Four.”
Naturally (is that a cruel word?) the alternative therapy turns out to be well-meaning (is that the right word?) nonsense. Aka borderline-fraudulent. But Nicola is wearing the fixed smiles and glassyeyed expressions of the true believer & so drags herself off for daily intensive vitamin C infusions which leave her wracked with pain for hours. Her care is a 24/7 thing (multiple changes of bedclothes required each night) and her friend Helen is rapidly pushed to the edge, pulled every which way by her love of her old friend and her hatred of the old friend’s crazy denial and willingness to be defrauded.
My two friends never had any alternative therapy notions, so at least spared their families that heartache.
This is a strong no nonsense read-in-a-day book that puts you right in the middle of a nightmare I hope nobody reading this finds themselves in, ever....more
If Celine had shut his trap around the 300 page mark he might well have clung on to that elusive fifth star, but as it is, finishing his amazing horriIf Celine had shut his trap around the 300 page mark he might well have clung on to that elusive fifth star, but as it is, finishing his amazing horrible novel composed of ten thousand variations on the theme of human life being 95% unbearable misery and 5% boredom and everybody smells bad becomes an exercise in readerly self-flagellation.
How many times do we need to be told this doleful message? Around 15 times per page. The industrial-strength vitriol keeps us awake, though. There’s no nodding off with Celine.
This is the grand original of all those novels where guys rant and rage about how terrible everything is – it’s a whole sub-genre – we have most of Philip Roth, a world-class ranter, there’s William (The Tunnel) Gass, there’s Michel Houellebecq, and Thomas Bernhard, and when the unending unedited vomited-forth stream of volubility is not as rancid and bitter because more drunk or stoned, it’s there in Jack Kerouac’s and William Burrough’s books. Will Self wrote an article for the NYT saying he learned everything he knows from Celine. Catcher in the Rye is a rich teenage Celine. It goes on - in the first section of Journey, the hundred pages that deal with World War One, you can hear Catch-22 clearly – he’s the only guy that realises that everybody is trying to kill him. He knows it’s nothing personal but that really doesn’t help.
"I reject the war and everything in it… I don’t resign myself to it… I don’t weep about it… I just plain reject it and all its fighting men, I don’t want anything to do with them or it. Even if thee were nine hundred and ninety-five million of them and I were all alone, they’d still be wrong and I’d be right. Because I’m the one who knows what I want : I don’t want to die.” “But it’s not possible to reject the war, Ferdinand! Only crazy people and cowards reject the war when their country is in danger…” “If that’s the case, hurrah for the crazy people! Look, Lola, do you remember a single name of any of the soldiers killed in the Hundred Years War? Did you ever try to find out who any of them were? No! As far as you’re concerned, they’re as anonymous, as indifferent, as the last atom of that paperweight, of your last bowel movement… Get it into your head, Lola, that they died for nothing! For absolutely nothing!”
Via a period skulking in a veteran’s hospital he gets discharged and signs up to a company running one of those colonial outposts in darkest Africa (Cameroon). He’s in for a different onslaught of ghastliness, this time from nature in all its insect life and unpleasant diseases. He attempts to flee from the horror, the horror ™ and gets captured and sold into slavery on a galley ship just like he might have in the second century BC. This was the part I thought did not ring entirely true – galley slaves in 1917? Seriously?
Anyway, up to that point Journey is a stone classic, wonderful frothing at the mouth page after page and exactly the kind of thing you would froth about, too. Here’s one of my favourite Sayings of Ferdinand :
When you stop to think about it, a hundred people must want you dead in the course of an average day, the ones in line behind you at the ticket window in the Metro, the ones who look up at your apartment when they haven’t got one themselves, , the ones who wish you’d finish pissing and give them a chance, your children, and a lot more.
Then, with his brother galley slaves (!) (they also had sails on this boat) he reaches New York. His miserable existence improves greatly. He travels to Detroit and gets a job there. But he’s still ranting about the hideousness of everything. He decides to go back to France and complete his medical studies and become a doctor. Still ranting and frothing and badmouthing everything in sight,
Still further down, it’s always the Seine, winding from bridge to bridge like an elongated blob of phlegm.
he becomes the poorest general practitioner ever and so bumbles along for the rest of the book, the same old sour-minded misanthrope we know and love by now,
My patients were mostly people from the zone, that village of sorts which never succeeds in picking itself entirely out of the mud and rubbish, bordered by paths where precocious snot-nosed little girls play hookey under the fences to garner a franc, a handful of french fries and a dose of gonorrhoea from some sex fiend.
a few anecdotes here and there, a few “characters” to entertain us (mostly unhinged) but no improvement in our guy’s attitude to life even though his situation has improved from catastrophic to dire to scraping a living. He slouches and slimes his way around France spewing forth maledictions and depressing maxims like an out of control I Speak Your Doom machine.
As for sick people, patients, I had no illusions… in another neighbourhood they’d be no less grasping or jug-headed or weak-kneed than the ones here. The same wine, the same movies, the same sports talk, the same enthusiastic submission to the natural needs of the gullet and the arse would produce the same crude, filthy horde, staggering from lie to lie, bragging, scheming, vicious, brutal between two fits of panic.
Are there any chinks of light at all? For a few pages, not more than five at a time, he hooks up with a woman and blow me down, arch-cynic Celine serves us up not one but two examples of that most familiar of bit parts, The Tart with the Heart of Gold. That surprised me.
Well – fans of this book, and there are a great many, will disagree with me when I say that there is just TOO MUCH of it, and 99% of it is one long monotone, one endless screech, so sorry, I have to say 4 stars only. But, you know, hell of a book. Man!...more
I ran into Arthur Machin in a pub in Rotherham one night in 1964.
I bought him a pint and said “Arthur, I’m really sorry but I can’t finish your book.I ran into Arthur Machin in a pub in Rotherham one night in 1964.
I bought him a pint and said “Arthur, I’m really sorry but I can’t finish your book.”
It took some nerve. I mean, it’s well known he has a violent streak and he’s a big bloke. Could knock me right through the window and never even notice.
He looked down at me and said “Oh and why is that then?” He was staring gloomily into the mid distance. He did a lot of that. Along with slowly drinking a pint of beer. And also fast drinking a pint of beer.
“Well,” I said, “it’s all about a tough uneducated working class lad who has only one ticket out of his hopeless grim Northern English slough of despond, his two fisted aggression and enormous bulk. So he gets to be a local rugby star.”
“Well, I know that, it’s my story. It’s a true story. What was wrong with it?”
“Well, yes Arthur, I know it’s all true, but…. sorry to say your voice got on my nerves. All that first person noticing. People just don’t notice as much as that. I could take any page … here for instance : She got off her knees and lifted a large bowl of dough on to the table. The smell of it leavening filled the room. She dusted the baking board with flour and pulled the dough out of the earthenware bowl and began to cut it."
“Well, that’s exactly what happened.”
“Ok here’s another bit – I dropped off the bus… I got off half-way up the hill to Primstone, just when the lights were pricking the valley, making it bleed with its slow night glow. I mean, really, making it bleed. What kind of talk is that from an uneducated lout? "
“Well, okay, I admit David Storey made me put that stuff in. I didn’t want to. I never talk like that.”
“Ah, that makes more sense."
“He said all those London types would love it, and he wasn’t wrong. They like working class bruisers to have an unexpected poetic side. Look at Mellors the gamekeeper in D H Lawrence’s notorious 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”
This conversation was going nowhere. I scrabbled around for something else to day.
“Oh by the way, Arthur,” I said. “Here’s something you might find interesting. You know that actor who plays you in the movie?”
“Yes - Richard Harris – playing me propelled this brooding young actor into a well-deserved international career.”
“Yes … you won’t know this but he gets to be best friends with a songwriter called Jimmy Webb in a couple of years and this Webb guy persuades him to record a whole album of his songs, one of which is a seven minute elaborate kitsch masterpiece called “Macarthur Park” that many people in future decades think of as the worst record ever made.”
“Wait a minute, how do you know that then ?”
“I come from the future, Arthur, where there are way too many highly unlikely first person narrators just like you.” I finished my pint and said. “I’m sorry I didn’t like your book, no hard feelings. And don’t tell anybody, but “Macarthur Park” is one of my favourite records.”
I came away from my chat with Arthur thinking I probably needed to sign up for a suspension of disbelief training course....more
Although there may be human limits to pain or to pleasure there are apparently no limits to banality.
- Arnold Schnabel
****
It’s 1963 and Arnold SchnabeAlthough there may be human limits to pain or to pleasure there are apparently no limits to banality.
- Arnold Schnabel
****
It’s 1963 and Arnold Schnabel is a 42 year old virgin living with his mother & aunts trying to recover from a nervous breakdown, as they called it then. He used to work as a brakeman on the railroad but now he’s living on disability pay. He gives us the impression that aside from a psychotic episode that hospitalized him, nothing has ever happened to him. He’s a social disaster and knows it
I have felt awkward for approximately 95% of my waking life, and for a not insignificant percentage of my sleeping life.
This first volume of his memoirs describes in excruciating detail the week or so when everything changed for Arnold. The caterpillar became a butterfly. The 42 year old virgin suddenly became a Total Babe Magnet, much to his embarrassment.
So detailed are Arnold’s memoirs that the account of one day and evening lasts for 137 pages.
Even though Arnold’s life has suddenly changed from black & white to technicolor he is still a creature of habit.
WHAT ARNOLD MOSTLY DOES
1) HE SEES JESUS
He’s a doubting Catholic who regularly confesses to the sin of onanism (but finally he has some new sins to tell the priest, that has to be some kind of progress). He sees visions of Jesus, who turns out to be an annoying wise guy who smokes Pall Malls. (see What Arnold Mostly Does No 2.) Like most self-appointed gurus this Jesus speaks in tedious riddles or non-sequiturs or tiresome stonewalling (“Well, what do you think, Arnold?”) and mostly you just want Arnold to toss him out of a speeding car, but this does not happen.
2) HE SMOKES OR HE WISHES HE WAS SMOKING
You knew you were smoking something when you smoked one of these babies. You could almost feel the cancerous nodules popping up merrily inside your freshly blackened lungs.
As it’s 1963, everyone smokes in this novel, all the time. They set their alarm on for two, then four in the morning so they can wake up and smoke another cigarette. They smoke while they are swimming. They smoke when they are dead. The undertakers prise open coffins of the recently deceased to jam another Chesterfield between the cold thin lips. If all references to smoking were deleted from Railroad Train to Heaven it would be considerably shorter, maybe by about 50, maybe 70 pages. Nowadays people fiddle with their phones and get scammed and bullied instead of smoking themselves to death. You got to have something to do with your hands.
3) HE HAS TO GO TO THE TOILET
I made it safely down to the hall but here the faithful reader will not be surprised to learn that I suddenly felt an intense need to go to the bathroom.
Not quite as frequent but almost as the need to smoke is Arnold’s need to urinate. He drinks quite a lot so this is understandable, but I think most memoirs tend to gloss over this element of daily life. But Arnold’s toilet requirements loom large over the hectic week described. I wonder if he is developing a prostate problem.
4) HE HAS INCONCLUSIVE CONVERSATIONS WITH WOMEN
Arnold is the innocent who falls into experience in a big way. Within a very busy week, he acquires a hot girlfriend and at least three other “very attractive” women want to feel his biceps. It seems he looks like Gregory peck or one of those tall handsome self-effacing types – and yet no other ladies noticed this during the previous decades. Oh well, life is funny. So there’s that, then he takes up smoking marijuana and oh yes, he meets the Rat Pack, the one with Sinatra and Sammy Davis. We have been here before a few times – Arnold is the square guy who is so square the hipsters think he is deeper than they are. There’s a short story called The Watchful Poker Chip of H Matisse by Ray Bradbury where this happens with hilarious consequences. Arnold should read it.
5) HE IS RELENTLESSLY FANTASTICALLY BANAL
Men on the other hand seem happy to go through life not asking questions. I know I myself rarely ask a question. In fact it’s more than I can do even to bring myself to ask myself why I don’t ask questions. Just the thought of it makes me sleepy.
I put my damp wallet on a ledge and showered myself off, keeping my swimming trunks on, and I rinsed off my sandy flip-flops under the shower head. I got my wallet and walked dripping wet to a clothesline and hung up my sodden and sandy towel.
AND IN THE END
Well, there is no end – this is only volume one! One of the best jokes comes in the “Editor’s Foreword by Dan Leo” :
The volume you now hold is only the first in a planned series of a dozen or more, comprising a massive opus which is surely destined to become recognized as one of the great classics of world literature.
Eat your hearts out Marcel Proust and Karl Ove Knausgard....more
In Britain these things are called corner shops, even if they aren’t on a corner. My local convenience store is really not convenient at all. It’s smaIn Britain these things are called corner shops, even if they aren’t on a corner. My local convenience store is really not convenient at all. It’s small and cram full of groceries and all kinds of crap in teetering towers so you can hardly edge your way inside. When you are in if there’s anyone else there it becomes an uncomfortably intimate experience if you try to get past that person to the thing you want. Then there is the owner. He fixes you with a baleful death-glare from the moment the broken bell goes click clack as you shuffle inside. He is expecting you to rob him or shoplift or perhaps just knock down one of these towering piles of crap. When you make it to the fridge and grab the only thing you ever want from this shop (milk) he switches from baleful to mournful in a second and pours on the how can my family hope to survive when all you loathsome creeps only buy milk or a packet of biscuits or a packet of chewing gum? Do you consciously want us to starve to death? Is this your desire? He sighs sorrowfully over your single purchase. Then while cashing up he will begin his monologue which is entitled Why I Hate Running this Corner Shop. (You have to work 26 hours a day and it’s frankly no longer worth it but as he’s being doing this for 28 years now he’s not fit for anything else anyway no one will buy this business, he’s tried selling it, no takers, so this is his living death prison). You will stumble out (over the bags of cat litter by the door expressly put there to trip up the unwary) into the daylight swearing never to go back. But you do, when the milk runs out. It’s convenient.
Corner shops in Japan are not like this, not at all. They have aisles and are well lit and have friendly staff and special promotions which the friendly staff have been told to announce regularly throughout the day in loud but jovial tones : “10% off white chocolate all day today! Thank you for your custom!” with manic big smiles. Actually I’m not sure what’s worse, my miserable corner shop or the enforced Brave New World utopian stores of Japan.
In this teeny novel which I read in one day and still had time to do other things we have an Eleanor Oliphantish mid-30s woman called Keiko who finds she needs the rigid cultlike structure of her stupid dead end job in order to provide an exoskeleton of normality as she was born without the ability to figure out how to be a human being. Eventually though her family decides she has to grow up, get a proper job and get married. That part of normal is not, unfortunately, addressed in the Store Manual and so the fun begins. It’s a sad kind of fun.
But I do like novels I can read so quick that I finish them before I've listed them as "Currently Reading". Tolstoy could have taken a leaf from Sayaka Murata. ...more
I don’t mean to put the boot into this slightly funny but not that funny wisp of a novel but there were two things about it which got my goat, and my I don’t mean to put the boot into this slightly funny but not that funny wisp of a novel but there were two things about it which got my goat, and my goat was just standing around chewing on an old rusty tin without a thought for tomorrow when this book got it. The first was that this book is about a foodie, so she is forever going on about her food show on tv, her cookery books, and shoving in recipes, and using many words that I must assume refer to something people eat but I don’t know what they are, like Hamantaschen pastries, tzimmes, rumaki, kreplach, arugola, radicchio, grieven and many others.
I never think about food unless I’m eating it or with reluctance shoving bits of it together so I can then eat it, so for me this was just like the irritation I often encounter when switching on the tv or radio in Britain to be deluged with foodie tv and radio rubbish which are second only to programmes about selling your house or buying a house in Australia or the countryside or to do it up and sell it again. House programmes account for about 50% of tv programmes in this country with food programmes around 45%. Just so you see I’m not exaggerating here’s a little list of current programmes
Saturday Kitchen The Hairy Bikers’ Asian Adventure Edwardian Farm Million Pound Menu Best Bites Best Of British Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares Come Dine With Me My Kitchen Rules The Food Programme
Ugh. So that was one thing, then there was the other thing. Here’s another little list
1. Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) 2. Fear of Flying (1973) 3. Most of Woody Allen’s movies (1969-2018) 4. Heartburn (1983)
Yes, these are all comedies, all fictional representations of Jewish American middle class angst, and all really similar, with endless jokes about food, sex, adultery, being Jewish and what appears to be the central feature of modern Jewish American life – no, not religion, how quaint would that be – it’s analysis – therapy – shrinks.
Nora Ephron's problem was that she came after Erica Jong and Philip Roth for me. Actually, Roth was the Jewish American rantmeister par excellence, and I can't really see why anyone else would bother with this kind of stuff, he owned it. His direct-to-the-reader rants are miles above all these others.
The analysis aka therapy thing is never explained. It is like golf. Very mysterious for an English person. In this country we don’t do analysis, instead we insist that everyone should have counselling. Did someone look at you funny in a supermarket checkout queue? Get counselling! I imagine this to be a very very poor miserable embarrassed broke down version of analysis conducted by people who have never heard of the concept of the unconscious or anyone called Freud. Counselling must be like a car that’s been jacked up and had the wheels stolen. It’s still a car but it won’t go very far.
Maybe analysis is not necessarily Jewish American, maybe it’s something you automatically do in America if you can afford it. Like golf seems to be a pursuit every man is totally desperate to do just the minute their income gets to a … certain… level… NOW! Dash to the golf club! Made it! Poor people do not seem to play golf at all. Instead they can become caddies, which I believe are people who traipse round after the rich golfers pretending wildly that they don’t ever hate or resent them and the golfers affably go along with the blatant pretence.
So in America the main motivating factors impelling people up the greasy poles of their careers is analysis and golf.
Given that I am very profoundly indifferent to the joys of therapy, golf and cooking I can only give this novel 2.5 stars, rounded up to three because I feel rather mean....more
There are so many many many many novels which are really memoirs and this is another. I guess they are all published as novels because
a) If you make uThere are so many many many many novels which are really memoirs and this is another. I guess they are all published as novels because
a) If you make up stuff in a memoir and you get found out you get nailed to a wall and crows peck out your eyes
b) People buy novels, not memoirs. A memoir screams MY LIFE IS REALLY INTERESTING WHILST YOURS FRANKLY ISN’T and a novel is like, I ain’t saying nuffin, I’m just here to cheer you up on a cold wintry evening, pull up a chair, light the light, it’s just you and me for an hour or so sugar, whaddya say?
So some time in the early 70s a hippy family jaunts off to Morocco then the dad falls out with the mum and goes back home and the mum then drags the two kids all over from Marrakesh to Algiers as she vaguely decides to be a Sufi or whatever else has flitted into her peripatetic brain that day. It’s all filtered through the alleged 5 year old girl but this is a 5 year old going on 11, I liked the voice of the narrator but it weren’t no five year old I ever met. That was more than a little bit of a stretch.
The stuff they did was more of a problem. It was just the kind of crap anyone would do. You know, buy stupid bits and bobs, eat weird meals, meet random persons and be best friends for 48 hours then catch a bus to somewhere else. Go to a bank and hope the ex hubby or rich daddy has wired some money. It was What We Did on Our Holidays. It was like The Florida Project (great recent movie) – look, kids are good at finding fun almost anywhere. Kids are great at surviving the stupidest parents, and this parent was really most aggravatingly extra-stupid.
Note for Kate Winslet fans : after Titanic, in 1998 Kate starred in the movie version of this book, so she plays a young woman wandering around trying to find spiritual enlightenment in Morocco. Immediately after she made Holy Smoke, in which she plays a young woman wandering around trying to find spiritual enlightenment in India. The way to tell them apart is that that which is merely hinted at in Hideous Kinky is fully revealed in Holy Smoke. ...more
Only today 30 June 2020 I discovered that Jade Sharma died nearly a year ago, on 24 July 2019 and this was a shock, first because she died at PART ONE
Only today 30 June 2020 I discovered that Jade Sharma died nearly a year ago, on 24 July 2019 and this was a shock, first because she died at age 39, second because it took me a year to find out – why was that? It seems it wasn’t very widely noticed, this death, and I still can’t find any kind of obituary, there’s no cause of death mentioned anywhere, there’s very few mentions anywhere, and this is very bad, she was a fierce funny devastating writer of one single splendid must-read novel. I was waiting for the second one. Well I can stop waiting now.
****
PART TWO - ORIGINAL REVIEW
This is disgusting, funny and totally compelling, and also, frankly, it’s fairly disgusting too. 3.5 stars rounded up to 4. I loved it and I had to finish it all in one day, which in this case was aided greatly by insomnia, which is not so enjoyable. You really need a writer like Jade Sharma if you have a case of bad insomnia, so thank you Jade, your timing was perfect. You get fixed in the cold laser beam of her endless waste-of-space sour, surly junkie self-loathing and the tone never wavers from page first to page last; although it is a bit disappointing that towards the end she seems to cheer up a bit and get her life back on track. Oh, sorry, spoiler!
Well, not really a spoiler, because this is another of the seemingly unending stream of NOVELS WHICH ARE REALLY MEMOIRS and we already know that at some point Jade Sharma was compos mentis enough to write this very book.
Also, Problems fits into some other categories – heroin chic literature (like Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson or Trainspotting & many others); novels of female self-loathing (see below); and great new American voices (so many of those).
I’ll give you a flavour of Jade Sharma, taken at random :
The children looked like trophies. The women were mocking me. Haha, we got a man to have a baby with us!
Find a dude, fall in love, and then slowly start to see whatever special, unique fucked-up hell starts to show itself.
The middle-aged man who interviewed me leered. He asked me personal questions (“Do you live alone. Or?”), made stunted small talk (“I used to live in the city”) and periodically checked to see if my breasts were still where they were the last time. He was one of those old, gross men who went through life trying to muster the courage to commit to sexually harassing someone instead of just being a slimy perv. I took the place of a woman who had kept a calendar with cats that had very unoriginal things to say about Mondays.
So this whole novel is just 90% of whining and moaning about earning money to buy more bags to smoke to get the strength up to go and earn more money to buy more bags and 10% of hey look, I didn’t OD and I bet you thought I was gonna.
This novel should have ended up on the Booker long list at the very least (now they are including American writers) but of course instead there was the latest predictable excretion by Julian Barnes and his ilk.
PART THREE – YOU CAN SKIP THIS, I JUST LIKE TO MAKE LISTS
The novel this most resembles is the brilliant Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce. Read that one too! But there’s a wider context too. After many pages of junkie moaning and groaning, our heroine (geddit?) gets fired and begins to turn tricks via Craigslist. Then comes the pages of true masochism and self-loathing.
Two lists:
NOVELS OF FEMALE SELF-LOATHING BY FEMALE WRITERS
Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino – the unnamed un-beautiful older sister spends her whole life hates everybody especially herself
A Day Off by Storm Jameson – the unnamed middle-aged alcoholic frump spends a day hating everybody especially herself
Dietland by Sarai Walker – the heroine spends her entire life loathing her own plus size body
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh – She spends her life looking after her alcoholic father and loathing herself
NOVELS OF FEMALE SELF-LOATHING WHICH ARE REALLY MEMOIRS BY FEMALE WRITERS
All of Jean Rhys’ novels except Wide Sargasso Sea - the variously named alcoholic heroines, all of whom are Jean, spend their allotted few months in each book totally hating themselves and pretty much everything else (the curtains, the breakfast egg, etc)
Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill – the unnamed wife spends a solid year or so hating mostly herself
Love me Back by Merritt Tierce – waitressing, drinking, drugging, having a lot of dodgy sex and a lot of yes, self-loathing
The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek – the gold standard of female self-loathing against which all other self-loathers are to be judged – Erica Kohut spends her entire waking moments hating herself and everything else to such a level of frenzy that the women in the above-mentioned books would only look on in envy, and loathe themselves a little bit more because they couldn’t quite get to the level of loathingness Erica Kohut achieves with seeming ease.
Problems by Jade Sharma – the latest piquant addition to this list...more
Note : every possible plot spoiler included here... but I don't care. Let's go.
So let me get this right. This miserable sourpuss atheistic type authorNote : every possible plot spoiler included here... but I don't care. Let's go.
So let me get this right. This miserable sourpuss atheistic type author guy Maurice meets this hot slutty (their word) woman Sarah who is married to England’s most boring civil servant Henry. They have a full on steamy affair right under Henry’s nose for four years and are very happy, except Maurice gives the impression that even when he’s happy he’s miserable. Like Morrissey. Similar name. Anyway, it’s World War 2 and there’s a big air raid and the guy goes downstairs to check on the cat or something and WHAM a great big German missile hits the building and a door falls on him. Sarah runs downstairs and sees his arm sticking out and thinks he’s dead. She runs back upstairs and prays to God. So far so reasonable. But actually she doesn’t believe in God. Well, people do strange stuff when they think their true love is dead under a door. She says if God makes Maurice not be dead then she will a) believe in God and b) give up Maurice. So when he wanders into her room all covered with dust and saying wow I just got hit by a door, I thought I was a goner but I just got a headache, how about that, she immediately thinks that God did it. She instantly takes it for a Miracle and not just a near-miss. And that’s the last she sees of him, she cuts him off without a word of explanation, thus plunging them both into suicidal despair. (What she says is “Love doesn’t end just because we don’t see each other.” Well, maybe, but shagging surely does.) (Sample quote from Maurice after Sarah dumps him :
I thought : hating Sarah is only loving Sarah and hating myself is only loving myself.
Yes, it’s psychobabble 20 years before the term was invented. )
I suppose Sarah thinks that if she breaks the promise to God not to see him, then God will smite him completely dead with another door or handy piece of furniture. But this is not explained.
But hey, this was a promise made under duress. And anyway, if she just takes a moment to think, she will surely realise that during any air raid on London in the War, and any air raid anywhere at any time, many people will have prayed to the God they actually believed in that their loved ones would not die and many people will then have found their loved ones had died in horror and agony nevertheless. And some like her would find their loved ones had survived. So where’s the logic in that? Well, there isn’t any. It’s just human nature. Unless we can conjecture that God sits there saying oh, that’s a good prayer, very well expressed, very sincere, I’ll answer that one. But those prayers are rubbish, cliché ridden, boring, really very bad, so those loved ones will have to fry.
So I figured that this dame was not at the front of the queue when they were handing out brains.
Actually, all these reasonable points are made by a Rational Atheist character who she goes to see to try to get him to argue her out of this insane piece of magical thinking. Oh the vow, the vow to the non-existent God! But it doesn’t work : “his fanaticism fixed the superstition deeper”. By the way, the Rational Atheist has a big Facial Disfigurement, which has Blighted his Life. I think this is some kind of symbol.
Then we get Sarah’s diary and the full horror of her mind is laid bare. She loves Maurice, no, actually, she hates him. No, she loves him. But she hates God. No, she doesn’t believe in him. Oh wait, she loves God, who she doesn’t believe in. And she thinks she’s a Catholic (no other varieties are available in Graham Greene’s universe – Methodism or Zoroastrianism don’t get a look in). She thinks she might be a Catholic but she doesn’t believe! Hold the phone, yes she does. God! No God! Oh the pain! The pain! Love, hate, hate, love, belief, maybe – wah wah wah. Wah Wah.
It becomes really tiresome.
Sample diary quote:
How good You (=God) are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain…. Dear God, you know I want to want Your pain…
So eventually this majorly troubled woman ends up saying “I’ve caught belief like a disease” and then dies.
I see that many people think The End of the Affair is a very beautiful meditation on love and faith but it seemed to me as if it was presenting religious faith as if it’s something lying in wait to trap the mentally exhausted person at their lowest point. Really quite nasty. If that was the end of The End of the Affair I could have been okay with this novel, and tried to overlook the tedious love-hate-pain-God loop tape playing throughout, but uh-oh, Greene gives his tortured tale a totally tendentious twist right at the end, where the Rational Atheist is CURED of his facial disfigurement because he snipped off a lock of the hair of the dead Sarah and slept on it. Now really, Mr Greene, pull the other one. It’s got bells on.
Conclusion: a mixed-up mess that doesn’t work on any level which inexplicably gets included in 100 Best Novels lists, proving, once again, yes, I’m on the wrong planet....more
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