Green and Fabulous

If you want to be green but can’t face wearing hemp, if you get frozen in the supermarket deciding whether to buy the organic Italian apples wrapped in plastic or the non-organic apples that are loose and local, and if you feel guilty every time you let the tap run but still have to bath now and again, then Christie Matheson’s book Green Chic: Saving the Earth in Style is the book for you.

As Matheson says in the introduction, ” … we need to embrace the fabulousness of green living. And it is fabulous. Being green can help you look gorgeous, have a killer wardrobe, feel amazing, travel in style, create a home that’s an oasis, host fun parties, eat incredible food, and drink phenomenal wine, all while feeling more connected to your friends, family and nature.” She says that while buying an eco-friendly cashmere jersey will not stop global warming, it is the change in mindset, in starting to become conscious consumers, that will help us to reduce our individual contributions and encourage systemic change.

This week I bought some clothes for my kid, who needed shorts and T-shirts for summer. I have heard that you should wash new clothes before wearing them because of the chemicals shops spray on them to make them hang nicely, but I had never believed it until now. He put on one of his new T-shirts and within an hour had a rash across his neck. Cue parental guilt and vows only to purchase organic cotton tees from now on. Green is clearly not only good for the planet, but good for our health too.

Matheson’s book is clearly divided into useful chapters, from being green at home, to eating and drinking green, beauty, fashion, transportation and travel. There’s even a chapter on how to throw a green party. When I read blogs on the environment, like the No Impact Man or wonderful books like Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, my main reaction - apart from being grateful that there are people out there who are actually doing something about the environment - is to be intimidated and then feel guilty. Although in many ways we are a fairly green household, there is still room for improvement: we run two cars, still sometimes buy food in plastic wrapping, drink bottled water, forget to switch our computers off, even (aargh, pains me to admit) use paper napkins sometimes. Once I feel guilty, I get overwhelmed and can’t imagine how I could even start to change these things that prey on my conscience.

What Matheson does so well is to praise the baby steps. She’s not saying we all need to get solar panels tomorrow, but she is saying that we should be aware and start to make small changes in our lives. Very kindly, like a lovely big sister, she points out the small changes we can make. Here are some that resonated with me:

* Time how long your standard shower takes and then challenge yourself to cut it down

* Keep a full fridge (if you don’t have a large family like mine, fill it with organic wine instead of food) and only run a full dishwasher

* Avoid PVC in any form - it is evil

* Choose local and non-organic over organic food that has travelled a long distance (but long-distance organic is better than long-distance non-organic)

* Eat more whole food - it puts less strain on the environment than processed food (bye-bye chilli rice cakes … sniff)

* Cut back on meat - it is also a strain on the environment

* Use chemical-free lipsticks - the chemical ones contain a long list of hideous ingredients which we eat since they are on our lips. Yuck!

* Edit your closet so that you only shop for clothes you need

* Buy organic rather than conventional cotton, which is the most pesticide-intensive farming in the world

* Drive smoothly (no abrupt braking) and stick to the speed limit

* Switch the car’s air conditioning off and open a window

* Use the car wash instead of washing it yourself (or you could leave it dirty, like mine)

I have cherry-picked (ahem, nature pun alert) the tips that I can actually imagine myself doing, but there are many more which might resonate with you in this excellent book. For US readers, Matheson includes a long list at the end of her favourite eco-friendly retailers, many of whom have websites.

To celebrate all that is green, I would like to offer Green Chic to one of my fabulous readers. Just put your name in the comments if you’re interested, and in the course of this week I will draw a winner.

Now I’m off to town (on foot) to return some books to the library (borrowing, not consuming)!

A Woman in Berlin

Französiche Dom, Gendarmenmarkt, Berlin

I love Berlin. It is so fresh, vibrant and exciting that you feel you are soaking up innovation, ideas and history through your pores as you walk the streets. Berlin has not papered over its cracks, so you see remnants of the Second World War (the bombed-out carcass of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche) and the Cold War (the long, chilly footprint of the Wall) everywhere. I learned that none of the trees in the Tiergarten are more than sixty years old, because the previous forest was razed for firewood in the dying days of the war, and in the freezing winters afterwards.

But this is not about me. During my last visit, I fell upon an amazing book - A Woman in Berlin - a diary of a woman who details her life in the falling city as it was sacked by the Russian army. It starts on 20 April 1945 and ends on 22 June 1945. The writer, who has recently died, chose to remain anonymous when it was published, and the book received controversy, especially in Germany where it was accused of “besmirching the honour of German women.” As you read, you understand why the book might have been hard to swallow in the 1960s. Not only does she describes in exact and excruciating detail what it is like to live in a city under attack: the scrabbling for food, the nauseating fear of being bombed, the chilling anxiety of waiting for the Russians to arrive, but she deals very frankly with the mass rapes that took place, saying that the women began to ask each other not “Were you … ?” but “How many times … ?”.

According to the introduction, over 160 000 Berlin women were raped as the Russians swept through the city. They were considered an acceptable booty for the travails of being a soldier, and all women of all ages are targetted. People in the writer’s apartment building spirited their daughters away in crawl spaces, while only the oldest women ventured out into the streets to fetch water. The writer herself is not spared, and she finally makes a Faustian pact, singling out the most senior - and potentially most cultured and gentlemanly - Russian officer she can find to act as protector. In exchange for sexual favours, she receives food which she shares with the elderly and ailing residents of the building. What Berlin’s liberators come to call “forced intercourse” becomes her only method of survival.

The writer is a journalist and photographer, and her prose builds unforgettable images of war. This means the book can be hard going, since the subject matter is almost unbearable, but it is leavened with her salty sense of humour and astonishing courage.

Here is one excerpt that moved me with its prescience:

I barely glanced at the news from the western front. What does it matter to us now? Our fate is rolling in from the east and it will transfer the climate, like another Ice Age.

On hunger:

I found a letter wedged inside a drawer, addressed to the real tenant. I felt ashamed for reading it, but I read it all the same. A passionate love letter, which I flushed down the toilet. (Most of the time we still have water.) Heart, hurt, love, desire: how foreign, how distant these words sound now. Evidently a sophisticated, discriminating love-life requires three square meals a day. My sole concern as I write these lines is my stomach. All thinking and feeling, all wishes and hopes begin with food.

On the futility of technology:

Our radio’s been dead for four days. Once again we see what a dubious blessing technology really is. Machines with no intrinsic value, worthless if you can’t plug them in somewhere. Bread, however, is absolute. Coal is absolute. And gold is gold whether you’re in Rome, Peru or Breslau. But radios, gas stoves, central heating, hot plates, all these gifts of the modern age - they’re nothing but dead weight if the power goes out. At the moment we’re marching backwards in time. Cave dwellers.

This is a powerful and heart-rending book. It’s also an amazing piece of social history and now that Germany has learnt to be more open about its past, now that other countries have faced up to their roles in the making of war, this is a good time time to be reading this book. It may deal with a very short and very specific period in German history, but it talks to all of us about how far we will go when we are starving, about the bleak impact war has on civilians and about the small sparks of humanity that help people to survive when that seems impossible.

Friday ‘Fessing

I went on a writing retreat and wrote 12,000 words.

But you already know that.

Instead of reflecting this Friday, I am going to state my goals for the coming week. These are:

1. Plug the gap in Chapter 8 and send it to the cheerleaders

2. Start Chapter 9

3. Refrain from indulging in negative thinking

4. Keep exercising

Simple isn’t it?

So while I don’t have anything more to say about the writing process, I do have something to say about reading. Writing fulltime (or as fulltime as a mother-of-three with freelance writing gigs and a gym habit can be) has turned me into a Very Intolerant Reader. A book that I would usually persevere with gets tossed aside if it doesn’t hit buttons in the first few paragraphs.

The books that have hit buttons this week:

1. The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam by Lauren Liebenberg

A poetically-told tale of two sisters growing up on a Rhodesian farm at the height of the bush war. Funny observations of adults by children. Ends with a dark twist. Beautiful.

2. The Chameleon’s Shadow by Minette Walters

A return to form from this writer of superb psychological thrillers. A soldier disfigured by a bomb in Iraq returns to London and is under suspicion for a number of violent rage-filled crimes.

3. The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy by Fiona Neill

Reading popcorn that provoked the question, am I a slummy mummy? Are any of my friends? And if so, do we care?

Books that have failed to push buttons:

1. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

This has been given to me twice by people whose reading tastes coincide with mine, and both times I couldn’t get beyond the first paragraph. For another day, no doubt.

2. Personality by Andrew O’Hagan

The story of a little Scottish girl with a big voice who goes on the talent circuit and finds fame. The premise doesn’t really interest me, but I picked it up at book-club and am persevering with it out of literary interest. O’Hagan uses a variety of perspectives to tell his story: first person, third person, letters, screenplay-style dialogue. It has not caught me emotionally and if the person I borrowed it from wanted it back tomorrow, I wouldn’t feel deprived, but I am studying his shifting perspectives to see if the novel works as a whole.

3. Teacher Man by Frank McCourt

I lasted about 40 pages. This is another exercise in ego from McCourt - his third book All About Himself, with frequent faux-modest references to his own fame. If you’d like to read the “Irish yokel done good in NYC thanks to naked talent” story all over again, then read this book. If you want insights into the teaching process and sensitive remarks on the making of teenage minds, then don’t.

Good luck with your writing week, dear writer friends. I will be trolling past, via the lovely Literate Kitten, to see how you have been doing.

Berlin Diary

Please may I interrupt my writing schedule (8,000 words and counting) to tell you a few things, about me and about Berlin.

Firstly, if I lived alone permanently I would talk to myself out loud and eat straight from the fridge without bothering to use a plate, so I am very grateful to my darling family for keeping me on the right side of civilised.

Secondly, I like to shop but very large department stores confuse me and I have to head for the coffee-shop for recuperative chunks of cake. Yesterday, however, I found the perfect department store - just one size up from bijou, it has an excellent mixture of designer wear to just look at and more affordable street-wear from a mixture of French, British and German designers. The Galleries Lafayette on Friedrichstrasse is beautifully designed around a central glass cone, so I couldn’t get lost. It was also conveniently having its summer sales, so I found one or two lovely items at seriously reduced prices. Having enjoyed that success, I then went down to the foodhall and discovered to my absolute joy, that they have a concession for the Laduree macaroons which are, frankly, the most delicious things I have ever eaten in my life, ever. I ordered four small ones - rose petal (!), salted butter caramel (!!), chocolate and pistachio - but only ate the first two and took the other two home. They are a pastel taste sensation. I love this city!

Then I went into bookshops and flirted dangerously with buying more books than I could carry. Next, I walked up Unter den Linden to Bebelplatz - scene of the Nazi’s first book-burning in 1933 - where there was an open-air book fair. I bought some more books, this time for my kids. There were white marquees up, with writers giving readings, and a children’s tent with books to read, pictures to colour in and a man doing a reading from a pirate-book. I also picked up a flyer to LesArt, a centre of literature for children and young people based in Berlin, that arranges literary events for kids and trains adults, whether parents or professionals such as librarians, how to foster a love of literature in the young. Did I mention that I love this city?

Then I went for a very long walk to the Jüdisches Museum in northern Kreuzberg. It chronicles 2000 years of Jewish history in Germany, and is stunningly detailed, with interesting multimedia effects that even the youngest visitors could enjoy. There is one section dedicated to the Holocaust, and this is reflected in the architecture - an imposing steel-clad building designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind. Inside, the building is divided into three axes - the Axis of the Holocaust, which leads to the empty and haunting Holocaust Tower; the Axis of Exile which leads to a garden of tilting concrete columns that left me feel nauseous and anxious and which is supposed to evoke the discomfort of exile, and the Axis of Continuity, which leads to a very long, steep staircase and the rest of the exhibition. It was very impressive, and tiring.

This morning I took a walk along the Landwehrcanal, zigzagged through various Kreuzberg streets, and ended up in the Hasenheide park on the border of Kreuzberg and Neukölln. Then I strolled back to my favourite Kreuzberg hangout, Bergmannstrasse, for an early lunch of salad, carrot juice (we writers have to keep our strength up) and hummus at Knofi.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some writing to do …

International Harry Potter Day

OK, it wasn’t, it was International Workers’ Day and in Germany, Father’s Day, but somehow the theme of our day was Harry Potter. Today, the girls mixed magic potions which they poured into little glass jars and threaded onto string to wear around their necks. Lily’s was a potion for luck, and Daisy’s was a multi-functional “do-everything” potion. Then they saddled up the broomsticks for a lively game of Quidditch in the garden. Lily was the Seeker.

At some point, I was up in the bedroom with Ollie, and we had the following HP-related conversation:

Ollie (pointing to a Harry Potter paperback which I have been reading to Daisy at bedtime): That’s my Harry Potter.

Mummy: Oh, do you like Harry Potter?

Ollie: Yes.

Mummy: Is Harry Potter a wizard?

Ollie (laughing): Nooooooo.

Mummy: Oh. My mistake.

Ollie: He saw his Mummy and Daddy in the mirror.

Clearly, he was taking in some of the story as I read it to D. And it would be hard to forget the scene, as both Daisy and I cried when we read it. Then Lily joined us and took part in the crying. As a family, we are very moved by Harry’s orphan status.

This evening, while I was reading a far less interesting book to Daisy, Lily - who is now on HP and The Half-Blood Prince came in and noted that all the baddies in the Harry Potter books are known by their surnames: Voldemort, Snape, Malfoy, Quirrell. She’s right, of course. I forsee a great future for her as a book blogger.

Tomorrow, I’ll be posting on the Literate Kitten’s writing challenge Fess-Up Friday, where writers confess to how much or how little they have written that week. I’d better go and tackle the monster that has become Chapter Five. I call it Voldemort.

Project FGN

Before I give you a brief update, let me just note that after a talking-to from my husband, the project will no longer be known as Thin, Grey Novelist but Fit, Grey Novelist. Being thin is not a good goal, but being fit is.

Being Fit

I ran five kilometres for the first time last week. I liked it so much I ran the distance three more times during the course of the week. The key to my running success: an iPod! Having pooh-poohed them, I was surprised at what a huge difference music of my own choice made to my stamina and enjoyment. Thanks to the above-mentioned husband for a wonderful present and my fabulous gym playlist. You are a superstar. I also attended a yoga class and a fitness class with Tommy “Teletubby” Fitness Instructor. Today, I have a sick child and a nauseous headache so no gym attendance happening.

Being Grey

I went for my annual haircut on Saturday and refused highlights. Very empowering.

Being a Novelist

I’m stuck on Chapter Five. There’s not much more I can say about that, except that this novel is exactly at the point where it died three years (the 30 000 word point) and I’m having a mini-crisis. However, my lovely writing cheerleaders stepped in and said inspiring words to me about Chapter Four, so as soon as I post this, I’m heading off to face the unlovely protagonist of Five.

I’m having some very entertaining email contact from the 70-year-old father of a friend of mine. He (the father, not the friend) lives on a yacht in Malaysia and is a writer. We are sharing information about agents and publishers, but he is much further down the line than me, having had a novel published in the Seventies and with a completed manuscript now. He asked me if Commonwealth writers can approach US literary agents and while I saw no reason why not, I mailed an agent in San Francisco just to check. His response was:

You’re not under obligation to query British agents
exclusively.  I would take a close work at your work to see where you
think its natural home market lies, since each market has different
tastes, and then query based on that.

So watch out, all you US agents. You’re going to be hearing from me and my yacht-living writer friend! I may be grey, but I’m getting fit and I’m coming at you, unpleasant protagonist and all. Now I really must go and drown her, or something.

The EcoJustice Challenge

Today, as many bloggers have noted, is Earth Day. I have been guiltily noticing some of the bad things I do, including the environmentally not-friendly practice of driving to the gym in order to run on the treadmill. Bad Charlotte.

Then I chanced upon Emily’s EcoJustice Challenge, launched today! It’s a challenge that hopes to get us to change bad habits like the one mentioned above. I quote verbatim:

So, here is how this challenge will work. The first step is for anyone who wants to participate to pass the link onto at least five other people (or even if you don’t plan to participate, if you like the idea, please pass it on). If you have a blog of your own, this can easily be accomplished merely by linking to this site in a post on your own blog. Below is a list of things you can choose to do. Once every quarter between now and April 21, 2009, I will add to this list. Your challenge is to choose something from this list, to experiment with it, and to post about it here. Or, if you’d rather not post, that’s fine. You can just choose what you want and leave comments on this blog. You can choose to implement as many or as few from the list as you would like. You can choose to stick with one (or more) for an entire quarter, or you can mix and match (one — or more — this month, a different one next month, etc.). My hope is that by the end of the year, at least one item from the whole list will have become a way of life for you and your family. And if you’re already doing some or all of these things, come up with others you want to do, share them with us, and post on them instead.

To join the blog as a posting member, please send an email to: ecojustice08 AT gmail DOT com with your user name and the email address you’d like to use for the purposes of this blog. I will add you to the list of users. Also, please post on your own blog, if you have one. That’s it. And now, here are your choices for this quarter:

1. Choose one day a week in which you will not use your car at all (barring a major emergency, like having to drive your spouse/child to the hospital for stitches). Before you immediately dismiss this one, because you have to drive to and from work every day, please think about it. Is there no one with whom you could carpool two days a week? If so, the day you’re not driving would be the perfect day not to use your car at all.

2. Choose one “black out night” per week. All lights and all electrical appliances are off by 7:30 p.m. and don’t go on again until the next morning. What will you do without lights, television, your computer? Well, the weather’s getting nice where many of us live. Sit out on the porch/deck and tell stories. Read by candle light. Write letters by candle light. Play games by candle light. You know, people did this sort of thing for thousands of years. My guess is that if you have kids, this will be an exciting and fun challenge for them.

3. Choose two days a week in which you are only going to eat organic and/or locally-grown food. Do you know that inorganic farming is one of the best examples of evolution that we’ve got going these days? All the pesticides that have been used to grow our food have helped to create “super bugs” who are becoming more and more resistant to our chemicals. We’re definitely losing this battle in more ways than one. Talk to the people at your local farmer’s markets. Many of them are growing their food organically anyway; they just aren’t certified, because it’s a difficult and expensive process to be so. Buying locally, of course, cuts down on the oil used to transport food long distances.

4. If you need to go anywhere that’s within a 2-mile round trip radius of your home, walk or bike. Where might this be? The first place that springs to mind for me is your children’s school bus stop. Perhaps the post office is close to your home. The library? For me, it’s both the post office and the bank. If you’re super lucky, maybe you have a farmer’s market that’s close by. Or maybe you don’t live close enough to anything, but you do work close by to that deli, say, where you always drive to pick up lunch.

5. Read that challenging book about the environment that you’ve been putting off reading, you know the one you don’t want to read, because it might make you a little uncomfortable (e.g. The World without Us, Diet for a Small Planet, Affluenza). Read it. Post about it. Maybe implement an idea or two based on what you’ve read.

6. Buy only those things sold in recyclable packaging and make sure you recycle that packaging.

Hooray for Emily. My plan for this quarter is to do 1 and 6. I will choose and commit to a non-driving day (and jog out from house rather than on a treadmill) once a week. Also, I plan to read and post about Affluenza and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, both of which I already own.

Please post about this, pass it on and commit to one or two of Emily’s challenges. Together, we can do it!

Sharing the Love

I have to celebrate the fact that three of my blogging friends, none of whom I have met I must add, but one can hope, have had good news recently with regard to forging relationships with publishers and literary agents. This is so exciting, not only because I have been on the blog trail with the three of them for two years now, not only because I have shared the ups and downs of being a writer with them, but also because all three are superb writers and deserve to be published, lauded and admired for their efforts. Unlike some, who become famous for blogging and then write unremarkable books, but who am I to quibble?

First up is Nova, who lives in New York, and who writes about writing and her struggles to be published with wincing, gut-wrenching frankness in her blog Distraction No. 99. Nova pitched her tween novel to an editor at Simon & Schuster based on “30 pages and a plot summary” and has received an offer. She is now busily writing the rest of the novel, while still holding down her day-job, also in publishing. Nova, your dedication to and love of writing and books inspires me.

Then, there’s the incomparable Litlove, a UK academic who blogs at Tales from the Reading Room. Litlove has created a wonderful salon for people who love to appreciate, think about and discuss books. She is kind, inclusive and writes beautifully and incisively about the books she reads. Litlove’s idea for a book on representations of motherhood in literature has been accepted for representation by an agent in London, and I can’t wait to read it once it is finished.

Flushed from hearing that news, I wondered over to another favourite and long-term blog-pal of mine, BlogLily, to hear that her thriller set in Germany during the Cold War has also been accepted for representation by an agent. Lily is a mother of three energetic boys and is a full-time lawyer who wrote her novel in the cracks and interstices of her life, and she is my hero. She has just made herself a writing-space at home, and look what happened! She found an agent!

If you haven’t already, please visit these three writers and shower them with congratulations. I am so thrilled and delighted for them, and also for us, knowing that there are going to be three superb new books on our Christmas lists in the next couple of years. Who knows, I might even get a signed copy.

**********************************

On the topic of sharing love, I was bending down in a late-spring snow storm this morning zipping a six-year-old’s coat, when she whispered tenderly to me, “Do you know what, Mummy? In your ear, you have lots of little hairs!”

Hairily yours,

Charlotte

Sizwe’s Test

I’ve just finished this book by prize-winning South African journalist Jonny Steinberg in less than a day, and I have to confess I’m stunned by its vision, intelligence and compassion. Marketed in South Africa as The Three-Letter Plague (a title I prefer), Sizwe’s Test is subtitled A Young Man’s Journey Through Africa’s AIDS Epidemic. What Steinberg does is to follow two people - spaza shop owner Sizwe Magadla and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) doctor Hermann Reuter - during a two-year period in which the former tries to decide whether to test for AIDS or not, and the latter does his utmost to provide AIDS testing and treatment in Lusikisiki, one of South Africa’s poorest and most remote districts. What Steinberg does so well is to empathise with both men and the adversity that they face, so that, as a reader, I understood both Sizwe’s intricate cultural difficulties with acknowledging AIDS and Hermann’s Herculean challenge in ensuring adequate services for the poverty-stricken people of Lusikisiki.

A third character who Steinberg encounters during his visits to the area is self-appointed community health worker Kate Marrandi. Unlike the two men, Kate is not young. She is not rich like Sizwe (he runs a small shop out of his two-roomed house and is considering buying a car, which makes him a wealthy man in his village), nor highly-educated like Hermann, but she is singled-handedly getting the people of her village who are HIV-positive onto antiretrovirals (ARVs) and watching them come back to life. Kate’s success is due, much like Hermann’s, to the fact that she is an outsider. She is a Zulu, not Xhosa, and has stayed behind in Lusikisiki to serve the people after her devout husband has returned to KwaZulu-Natal to proselytize for the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Sizwe, on the other hand, is not an outsider. He grew up in the village where he now lives. For him to take an HIV test and to live with the potential outcome of that would be a threat to everything he is: a self-made man, a father, a husband, a son. Throughout the book, Sizwe’s intelligence shines through. Steinberg says of him:

His interest in me was neither watchful nor suspicious; I had arrived from a world he knew little about, and he wanted to imagine the place I had come from. By the time we reached his parents’ homestead I liked him. He possessed a curiosity both rare and distinctive; one recognizes it the moment one sees it. It is the curiosity of a person who has no interest in confusing the boundaries between himself and others, who does not identify or envy too much.

Sizwe’s curiosity takes him along on Steinberg’s journeys through the district, sometimes as translator and sometimes as observer. His understanding of the function of ARVs grows and yet he remains reluctant to test. By testing and potentially being found HIV-positive, Sizwe will have to acknowledge his promiscuous past, he believes he would lose his business and not be able to support his family, and thus never be able to pay the bride-price for his lover Nwabisa and give their son his own name. While Sizwe understands intellectually that ARVs can keep the sick alive for many years, his culture provides an impediment to his taking the test.

Steinberg shows how Sizwe sits on the cusp between old and new: he sits between the peasant society his parents grew up in and the modern new world where technology can save lives, between poverty and relative comfort, between the traditional requirements of manhood and a new, more enlightened way. At one point, Nwabisa has to give up work to stay home and care for their child, and Sizwe agrees to pay her the salary she has lost, plus an extra 15%. This is a world where women are changing too. Steinberg describes a support group meeting for people on ARVs where women discuss loudly and in public the nature of female desire, complaining that they may not always have condoms to hand when they are in the mood.

Hermann Reuter’s challenge, on the other hand, is to entrench the services he designs so that when he and MSF pull out and hand over to provincial government, they will continue. His goal is to show that if you provide decent treatment, people will come and get it. His triumph does come: a few months after he leaves, the South African government decides that nurses can dispense ARVs, which means that people can receive their treatment in community clinics and not at far-flung hospitals. At the end of the book Steinberg says his goal was tell a story of AIDS treatment, and that there is no reason to see Hermann Reuter as emblematic of the quest to heal a country of AIDS, nor to see Sizwe’s reactions as typical of ordinary people. However, he couldn’t help seeing the two allegorically - a doctor and a potential patient in the theatre of a battle against a pernicious epidemic.

Sizwe’s Test reads easily and well. It is intimate in its insights, but broad in its perspective. I would strongly recommend it for anyone wanting to see the human side of the AIDS epidemic. I also recommend it for Jonny Steinberg’s superbly strong writing. The dust jacket calls it a “tour de force of literary journalism”, and it is.

Charlotte With An “E”

Six months ago, I was Siddartha, but now I am:

You’re Anne of Green Gables!
by L.M. Montgomery
Bright, chipper, vivid, but with the emotional fortitude of cottage
cheese, you make quite an impression on everyone you meet. You’re impulsive, rash,
honest, and probably don’t have a great relationship with your parents. People hurt
your feelings constantly, but your brazen honestly doesn’t exactly treat others with
kid gloves. Ultimately, though, you win the hearts and minds of everyone that matters.
You spell your name with an E and you want everyone to know about it.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Actually, I have a great relationship with my parents and my emotional fortitude is steely, but I’m still thrilled to be Anne. The entire Anne of Green Gables series is up there with Girl of the Limberlost as the books I drowned in as an 11-year-old when my life as I knew it was falling apart. Anne’s loving nature, her madness and her ability to get lost in books just like me were all comforting and inspirational. And Gilbert Blake, as Susan pointed out, was hot.

The novel itself is 100 years old this year, and to celebrate, Puffin have released a prequel called Before Green Gables. This seeks to uncover Anne’s early upbringing and how she was passed from foster home to foster home. I don’t imagine I’ll be reading it, but I enjoyed hearing the author’s interview on Radio 4. You can listen to it here, on Women’s Hour, source of 90% of my information.

I’m sure Anne would have listened to Women’s Hour.

Wouldn’t she?