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.

The Police Reunion Tour, Mannheim

Despite cultivating the look of a hoary old sea-dog (perma-tan, salt and pepper beard, piercing blue eyes), Sting remains a very good advert for yoga and graceful aging. Not many 56-year-olds can wear a tight T-shirt and look that good. Oh, and he can still sing. 

Sting and his Police cohorts, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland, gave a great concert last night. Their music (damningly described by one friend of mine as “all those slow dances”) doesn’t always rock everyone onto their feet, but they are all such superb musicians and the songs off their five albums are so strong, that the Mannheim audience were happy to sit, sway and let Sting’s voice wraith around them. 

Did I mention the piercing blue eyes?

A couple of songs did get me dancing: Message in a Bottle, Walking on the Moon, Roxanne and Lonely. But it was fabulous to hear other anthems of my teenage years like Wrapped Around your Finger, Every Little Thing She Does is Magic, Don’t Stand So Close to Me and De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da. There is something about the purity of just three musicians - two guitarists and a drummer - on stage giving their all in their last-ever tour (The Police will play their final concert in New York in May) that gave the concert an added dimension. Compared to many contemporary bands that need backing singers, dancers, additional instruments and distracting videos on the screens in order give good concert, their show is simple, straightforward and dedicated to the music. Also, Sting is a great lyricist and is not scared of words with more than two syllables.

Someone in the crowd behind me described it as “minimalistich, aber supergeil” which pretty much sums it up. It’s minimalist in that they do nothing else but play great songs for one and a half hours, but supergeil (a word I struggle to translate into English - my inadequate offering is “mega-hot”) because (a) it’s the Police, (b) that’s Sting, right there on stage in front of you, (c) the music does remind you of a hundred teenage slow dances, (d) the songs are fabulous, and (e) my God, that really is Sting, isn’t it?

It was supergeil! And Sting really does have lovely blue eyes.

 

 

Petite Anglaise - a Review

I think this book is the reason why personal blogs shouldn’t become books. Catherine Sanderson is a good writer, her story of falling in and out (and in and out) of love is interesting enough, as is her love affair with Paris and her adorable-sounding daughter. But to me, and I found the same with Julie and Julia, as a memoir/autobiography/blook - whatever category this kind of writing falls into - it doesn’t have the same seat-of-the-pants edge as the blog from which it originates.

Sanderson is engaging and frank about the nature of blogging and how that has had an impact on her life. She says Petite Anglaise (her blogging alias) was more confident and assertive than her offline self, and that she enjoyed having the ability to take an ordinary incident from her day and craft an amusing post from it that would generate interest and reaction from her readers. She also readily admits to taking incidents from the past and pretending they were more current, working out issues in her failing relationship online rather than with the person who mattered and ignoring her real-life friends for her online ones. As someone who has blogged for two years, has occasionally preferred blogging to talking and who has watched blog friends leave relationships for people they have met online, I can understand and see what Sanderson went through. Lonely and alienated, she found the online world an oasis of friendship and support.

However does it make a book? Clearly Penguin thinks so. Petite Anglaise is marketable - almost anyone who occasionally reads a British newspaper will have heard of her, how she left her boyfriend of seven years for someone she met online and then was fired from her job for “gross misconduct” (blogging at work occasionally, identifying herself and thus her company online - not surprisingly, she sued). She’s famous and fame sells. The trend for bloggers to get book deals is growing: Dooce is publishing a book, one I will read because she is hilarious - she makes David Sedaris look like a wet blanket - and her blog is growing boring with all those pictures of her dogs and retro design objets. I keep going back though because one in ten posts is coffee-snortingly funny. Dooce is an exceptional writer, and deserves the success she gets.

Petite Anglaise the book, however, is not exceptional. It’s a quick and easy read. Catherine is likeable and frank. She is honest about her failings, though I was disappointed that, presumably for legal reasons, there is no mention of the firing. The book, in effect, is less than the blog.

I remember being disappointed with Julia Powell’s Julie and Julia that the book wasn’t a series of her best blog posts. I didn’t ever follow her experiment (to cook her way through Julia Child’s massive tome Mastering the Art of French Cooking) online, and I expected the book to be a series of vignettes charting her progress. Instead, it was fluffed out with less fascinating personal detail. The same is true with Petite Anglaise: the blog itself was gripping in a reality TV, slice-of-life, car crash kind of way, and the book itself isn’t. It’s fluffy, and like candy floss, doesn’t satisfy.

I suppose the function of books like Julie and Julia and Petite Anglaise is to bring the best blogs to people who don’t read or know about blogs (if such people exist). If that’s the case, then I feel sorry for those people, because what they will find is an anodyne, watered-down version of an exciting new literary form.

Half of a Yellow Sun

Shortly before Christmas, the charismatic Jacob Zuma won the leadership of the ANC from under the nose of South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki. Where Zuma is a people’s person, educated by the university of life and a champion of the poor, Mbeki is cold, intellectual and apparently incapable of showing compassion to those who suffer. Zuma is also a Zulu, South Africa’s largest ethnic group, while Mbeki is Xhosa - the same tribe as Nelson Mandela. Zuma was acquitted of rape in 2006, but is due to stand trial for corruption later this year. It has not taken South Africa’s political analysts long to begin imagining the worst case scenarios should the popular ANC leader be found guilty. Taken alongside the violent protests against Kenya’s apparently rigged elections, it is clear that in Africa tribal loyalties are not to be taken lightly.

How strange then, to have this so acutely in mind as I read Chimimanda’s Ngozi Adichie’s brilliant Half of a Yellow Sun. The novel takes a group of characters through the Nigerian-Biafran war of 1967-70, where after a short-lived coup by Igbo officers in the Nigerian army, Igbo people living in the north of Nigeria were sought out and massacred. The Igbo responded by declaring their southern part of the country an independent state, which they called Biafra. Blockaded and bombed, they were eventually overpowered and Biafra was returned to Nigeria. However, the Nigerians’ most powerful weapon against the Biafrans was starvation, and the enduring image of that war is of tiny children, with the sticklike limbs and severely bloated bellies that denote kwashiorkor, or malnutrition.

While Adichie admits in the author interview at the back of my copy of the book that she changed certain small details, she remains true to the central events of the time. In this way, Half of a Yellow Sun was a history lesson for me - it brought to life a war that was happening as I was conceived and born, a war that for me was more the haunting eyes of starvation than the attempts of a people to create their own nation. But it is so much more than the dry bones of history. Adichie fleshes out her story with a set of characters as different from each other as their human need to survive is the same.

The story is largely seen through the eyes of three people. There is Ugwu, the houseboy brought in from the country to tend to the needs of the professor Odenigbo. Ugwu is about thirteen (no-one is really sure) and has passed the equivalent of Grade Four, but shows such a natural intelligence in his tasks that the professor allows him to continue his education. While this education happens largely offstage, Ugwu’s growing understanding of the world around him, of people, his compassion and love for the family that he serves clearly indicates his progression. Late in the novel, he joins his mistress Olanna in teaching children in the refugee camp where the family work - a development that shows he is no longer servile but a beloved equal.

Olanna, daughter of a chief, is the novel’s second main protagonist. She disdains the wealth and rarefied social life her parents offer her to live in the provincial town of Nsukka with her “revolutionary lover” Odenigbo and teach in the university there. She swallows her pride to adopt Odenigbo’s love-child, Baby, to whom she and Ugwu both become devoted slaves. While she adores her husband, she watches with a distaste that is hard to contain as his revolutionary fervour becomes fervour for alcohol. Odenigbo, it seems, is one of those hardline theorists whose theories drift away like gunpowder after the first shots are fired. It was not that she wanted him to go to war to prove his love for her, but that the war, and Biafra’s losing of it, took away from him the strength and manliness that in peacetime he appeared to possess.

The third protagonist is the Englishman, Richard, who drifts to Nigeria in the guise of being a writer. He very soon becomes enamoured of Olanna’s powerful and enigmatic sister Kainene, and shifts away from the superficial expat world of parties, cocktails and sexual favours to be her live-in lover. They never marry, but he turns to calling her his wife. Richard loves the Igbo, their culture and customs, and during the war is used by the army as a one-man propaganda machine. He is the outsider dying to be the insider, and he proves his devotion by staying the course of the war instead running away with the other expats. He speaks the language of the Igbo and speaks for the Igbo as a writer.

Half of a Yellow Sun is a hard book to read in that the descriptions of suffering are acute and painful. Rape - a ghastly tool of war - is also present, as are starvation, tragedy and deprivation. But Adichie’s characters are redemptive as they survive and cope, by helping others and receiving help from those more fortunate than themselves. Olanna and Kainene start the book disengaged from each other, become estranged during the course of the story and then are bound together once again in twinship and kinship. They build around themselves a small tribe of husbands, children and servants, as well the desperately ill and dying for whom they care in the refugee camp. I hope I’m not misrepresenting the book: while the subject matter is tough and Adichie does not flinch from addressing it, it is thread through with a sly and teasing humour. (At one point, Kainene says of Harrison, her houseboy, who cooks up some lizards for the family: ‘”You’d think it was roast beef, the way he’s going on about it.”‘)

Adichie is a powerful writer. Her prose never flags; it is glittering and strong. Here is a passage where Alice, a neighbour, discovers that her family have all been killed in her hometown:

She was strengthened, emboldened, by the madness of grief and she fought off everyone who tried to hold her. She rolled on the ground with such force that the stones cut her skin in tiny red gashes. The neighbours said oh and shook their heads. Odenigbo came out of the room then and went over and picked Alice up and held her, and she stayed still and began to weep, her head resting on his shoulder. Olanna watched them. There was a familiar melding to the curve of Odenigbo’s arms around Alice. He held her with the ease of someone who had held her before.

There are two things happening here. Firstly, the tiny gashes on Alice’s skin echo the machete wounds which Olanna witnesses when members of her family are murdered in the north at the beginning of the novel. The horror of war is underscored once again for Olanna, while simultaneously she realises that her husband has been sleeping with Alice. For Olanna, the degradation of war and the humiliation of her husband being unfaithful to her are one.

Aidichie says fiction is the soul of history, and this is what she achieves in her wonderful book: bringing humanity and soul to an African conflict that has long been relegated to the history books. She wraps and envelops you in her story, and sweeps you along inexorably to the end. I had the shivery feeling throughout that I was watching the birth of a classic, and I am delighted beyond adequate expression that Africa has produced another writer of her calibre and sensitivity. I think this book will be taught in schools and universities along with other classics from the continent such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing and JM Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. I hope that one day a writer with as fine an eye, as clear a voice and as great compassion will write a book about South Africa’s recent past, bringing soul and humanity to my country’s history.

This is my first book of 2008. I have no doubt that at the end of this year, it will be one of my favourites.

2007 in Books

100: the number of books I fondly imagined I would read this year

81: the number of books I actually read

60: books of fiction

32: books by US writers

22: books by British writers

22: books that were new in 2007

21: books of non-fiction

8: memoirs

6: books by African writers or about Africa

6: books by Canadian writers

5: business books

3: sets of short stories

3: books by Indian writers

2: classic novels (one French, one Russian)

2: books by Afghani writers

1: book by a Libyan writer

1: book by Turkish writer

0: books by German writers

Books That Made Me Cry:

28 Stories of AIDS by Stephanie Nolen, Babylon’s Ark by Lawrence Anthony, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, A Special Relationship by Douglas Kennedy, Two Lives by Vikram Seth.

Books That Made Me Laugh:

Eating for England: The Delights and Eccentricities of the English at Table by Nigel Slater, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, Mother’s Milk by Edward St Aubyn, Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips, Darkmans by Nicola Barker, A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian by Marina Lewycka, everything by Janet Evanovich

Books That Scared Me:

The Road by Cormac McCarthy, In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar, A Thousand Splendid Suns and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walsh, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin, The Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer, The Ice Storm by Rick Moody

Books That Left Me Gasping in Admiration and Thinking That’s There No Point Even Trying to Be a Writer:

Darkmans by Nicola Barker, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, Empire Falls by Richard Russo, The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers, Runaway by Alice Munro

These five also constitute my favourites for the year. You might notice that I haven’t reviewed them either, because they all left me stunned, too stunned to feel I could say anything of meaning or add to the body of words already committed to their superlativeness. I loved and admired their vast sweep, their intimate characterisations, their humour, their compassion, their politics and the way each and every one reflected the truth of the human condition.

Reading Goals for 2008:

* Even out the imbalance between classics and contemporary

* Even out the imbalance between Anglo-American writers and everybody else

* Attempt to read a couple of books in German

* Focus less on the prize-winners, and more on books recommended by bloggers and friends whose opinions I respect

* Read more Alice Munro

* Read with a pencil

* Aim for 100!

I wish you all a happy reading 2008. I have my nose in Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie right now, and I know already it’s going to be on my favourites list for next year.

Mother’s Milk

I devoured Edward St Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk in one sitting yesterday, so brilliant and unputdownable it is. I knew from the opening paragraph that I was going to love it:

Why had they pretended to kill him when he was born? Keeping him awake for days, banging his head again and again against a closed cervix; twisting the cord around his throat and throttling him; chomping through his mother’s abdomen with cold shears; clamping his head and wrenching his neck from side to side; dragging him out of his home and hitting him; shining lights in his eyes and doing experiments; taking him away from his mother while she lay on the table, half-dead. Maybe the idea was to destroy his nostalgia for the old world. First the confinement to make him hungry for space, then pretending to kill him so that he would be grateful for the space when he got it, even this loud desert, with only the bandages of his mother’s arms to wrap around him, never the whole thing again, the whole warm things all around him, being everything.

What St Aubyn does here, and throughout the book, so brilliantly is see things from a baby’s and a child’s perspective. I have never read another book about families that inhabits everyone’s viewpoints so well: either you have the adults being well-represented and the children depicted at a distance, or vice versa, but St Aubyn gets into everyone’s heads so convincingly that as a reader you feel not only that you know everyone, but that they are your family too. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that does this so effectively, but also movingly and with humour. I snorted in recognition throughout, so that Lily, who was beading next to me, eventually asked me to stop.

The story takes a look at the Melrose family over a period of four Augusts, from 2000 to 2003. The family usually holiday in France at Patrick’s - the father’s - childhood home, which his mother Eleanor has recently ceded to a New Age foundation. The family now only have rights to spend August there, and they have to tolerate the presence of foundation director Seamus, who is aggressively touchy-feely, believes he is a shaman and prefers having rituals to conversations. Patrick, a London barrister, is filled with rage that his mother has given his home away, that it is now taken over by Seamus and he is a mere disinherited visitor. He mocks Seamus privately, and to his face:

“Did you know,” said Patrick, addressing Seamus again, “that among the caribou herdsmen of Lapland, the top shaman gets to drink the urine of the reindeer that has eaten the magic mushrooms, and his assistant drinks the urine of the top shaman, and so on, all the way down to the lowest of the low who scramble in the snow, pleading for a splash of twelfth-generation caribou piss?”
“I didn’t know that,” said Seamus, flatly.

Patrick’s rage not only stems from his feeling that his mother has taken away his birthright, but also that his wife Mary - offspring of the virulently self-regarding Kettle - is being consumed by their children. Having been emotionally cut off by her mother as a child, Mary is making it up to her children with a devotion that, while not martyrish, is slavish in its totality. Patrick, making the logical connection that so many men do, uses his feeling of being ousted from Mary’s affections to develop a violent depression, a major drinking habit and an affair with an old girlfriend. Mary, aware of the affair, grows colder to her husband and ever warmer towards her children until Patrick eventually accuses her of using Thomas, three, as a “lover”.

While the bare bones of the story may seem melodramatic at first telling, this is leavened by St Aubyn’s piercing sense of humour and his tenderness with all his main protagonists. Of all the books I’ve read this year, this would be the one I would most want to have written: it is funny, moving and insightful.

For Litlove, I would also like to point out that it has at its heart the question of motherhood. There is Mary, the ur-Mother, giving her all, at the expense of everything including her marriage, to her children; there is the dreadful Kettle (”a lonely martyr to her own high standards” - don’t we all know a few of these?); and the poor crippled Eleanor, who by selecting oily Seamus as the recipient of all her earthly possessions, has alienated her family and impoverished herself. The nature of all three is encapsulated here, an early part of the book before Patrick is eaten by his own rage:

As usual, Mary had gone to sleep with Thomas, leaving Patrick split between admiration and abandonment. Mary was such a devoted mother because she knew what it felt like not to have one. Patrick also knew what it felt like, and as a former beneficiary of Mary’s maternal overdrive, he sometimes had to remind himself that he wasn’t an infant anymore, to argue that there were real children in the house, not yet horror-trained; he sometimes had to give himself a good talking-to. Nevertheless he waited for the maturing effects of parenthood. Being surrounded by children brought him closer to his own childishness.

The last sentence, to me, says it all. Being a parent gives you the stark choice of having to grow up or regress. However, although you may choose to be the grown-up, you do also get given the wonderful opportunity to play with being the child. You can share childlike emotions, games and inhabit their world, but you also have to take yourself in hand and be the one on whose shoulders the responsibilties lie. That is the crux of St Aubyn’s book: how we all cope in our different ways with the terrifying choices that parenthood presents.

Memoirs

While sick, I’ve caught up on my reading, including two memoirs that are very different from each other. Both try to tease out the past, but one takes a journalistic approach and aims for veracity, while the other floats in and out of what I guess is creative non-fiction territory. In her foreword to The View From Castle Rock, a collection of stories about her family and herself, Alice Munro says:

I was doing something closer to what a memoir does - exploring a life, my own life, but not in an austere or rigorously factual way. I put myself in the center and wrote about that self, as searchingly as I could. But the figures around this self took on their own life and color and did things they had not done in reality.

Her book is divided in two parts: one dealing with her Scottish ancestors and why they might have come to Canada, and the other with her own childhood and girlhood in Fifties Ontario. In the final section of the book, Messenger, she visits countryside near Chicago as an adult to seek out the cemeteries where family members who did not settle in Canada are buried. So she looks at her family’s past, her past and her present.

The book is beautiful; lively with attractive prose and depictions of settler life. I particularly enjoyed the part that dealt with the family’s sojourn on board ship - how fears of the youngest child’s being tossed overboard meant that they had to “tether” him at night (I think I would have done the same), the imagined relationship between an elderly and self-indulgent father-in-law and his matter-of-fact and acerbic daughter-in-law, hints of a love affair, dances and sightings of whales. While not wealthy or able to secure upper deck berths, the family are luckier than most and survive the journey intact and and well. It is only once they hit the shores of their new land, that their tragedies and dramas - possibly imagined by Munro, possibly not - unfold.

I also loved the section dealing with Munro’s childhood and girlhood in backwoods Ontario. The imagined and the real were threaded together imperceptibly, but I still desperately wanted to know which bits were fiction and which were true. While I enjoyed what she was doing, there was a part of me wanting clarification. She provides that in the foreword, saying that some characters “did things they did not do in reality”:

They joined the Salvation Army, they revealed they had once lived in Chicago. One of them got himself electrocuted and another fired off a gun in a barn full of horses. In fact, some of these characters have moved so far from their beginnings that I cannot remember who they were to start with.

Perhaps it is the journalist in me that wants to separate out fiction and non-fiction, or I must read more creative non-fiction and learn to go with the flow. As Munro asserts, they are just stories. Let me say, they are lovely stories, full of candid humour and insights into the oddness of the human condition. I’ve never read any Alice Munro short stories, but I guess they are full of the same.

I have also just finished reading another memoir, the craply titled Ja No, Man, by a young Canadian ex-South African called Richard Poplak. I sighed a little when I picked this book up. You know how movies set in the Eighties always have the same signifiers: someone playing with a Rubix Cube, people wearing day-glo clothing while Flock of Seagulls plays in the background? This book is covered with the same signifiers that shout Eighties South Africa to me, and its tag is A memoir of pop culture, girls, suburbia … and Apartheid. I thought it was going to be superficial, mindless and vaguely celebratory of what was really a horrible time to live in South Africa.

I’m glad to report that it isn’t. Poplak’s book is darkly funny, disturbing, and very well researched. He backs up his memories of growing up in Johannesburg in the Seventies and Eighties with acid offensives against the Apartheid state. He presents the eerie strangeness of being a child who only knows black people as servants, the indignities of Veldskool where he learnt about the immiment Communist threat and how to fold a flag, and the barbaric discipline of South African schools, where he was regularly sent for “six of the best”.

Poplak’s family left South Africa only a few weeks before Nelson Mandela was freed, so his book does not contain any reference to the miracle of the Rainbow Nation. While this might have eased his vituperative edge, it also means that the memoir is very specifically of its time and of its place. There is no sentiment, no schmaltz; Poplak addresses those two decades starkly. He makes no apology for not including black experience in the book - this is his experience and he presents it frankly, sometimes so frankly that I squirmed in uncomfortable recognition.

Towards the end of the book, he says:

It is a strange thing to be severed from the community of man - to be an island - as we were in South Africa. Isolation, both cultural and geographic, causes a certain kind of backwardness. The pastiche you create of the world, assembled from snippets of popular culture, hearsay, half-true news, and folkloric assumptions, is a patchwork quilt. Adrift, you create a world that only nominally hints at civilization. We were a quasi-democratic quasi-dictatorship, with a culture as anemic and as weirdly translucent as those deep-sea species of fish seen on the Discovery Channel. The flag Oom Piet raised with such reverence, the national anthems we sung with such forced gusto at assemblies - these were dead symbols for a dead country.

Richard Poplak and I and many millions of others are the products of Apartheid, and this dead culture. Thank goodness it is dead, and a new South Africa is rising from the ashes, but many are still paying the price of that cold grey time.

Poplak’s approach is very different from that of Munro. He says in his author’s note that it is both an act of memory and a work of journalism - if he remembered a certain tree as a jacaranda, he went back and checked that it was a jacaranda. He changes the names of teachers, certain schools and schoolfriends, and also clearly states that there are no composite characters, fictional places or made-up situations. His book is rigorous and factual, while Munro’s is swirling and exploratory.

It was an interesting experience reading these two different approaches to the memoir, neither better than the other, back-to-back. I would really appreciate any tips on good creative non-fiction, as it’s clearly a genre I want to explore more.

Poets and Politics

When I was studying English Literature at U of Cape Town during the last dying gasps of the Nationalist government, there was an ideological battle going on between two poets on the department’s staff. One, Stephen Watson, advocated that poetry and literature can stand on their own and need not refer to politics, or the struggle for liberation, in order to be valid. The other poet, Kelwyn Sole, believed that if you live in South Africa it is your responsibility as a public voice to use polemic to educate people and open their minds. It was a debate that I, as an undergraduate, never resolved for myself. All I learnt is that if I wanted to get good marks from Stephen I should leave politics out, and that if I wanted to get good marks from Kelwyn I should put politics in. An object lesson in pandering to academic agendas.

However, the argument itself is a valid one, and it continues to inform South African literature now. The new government is in place, say some, liberation has occurred, so literature is free to soar without the shackles of having to be politically right-on. Others say, hang on, we may now have a legitimate government and one of the most humane constitutions in the world, but does that mean that women are free from sexism or that people on the poverty line have been liberated? Perhaps we still have a duty to point out the inequalities that have not gone away with our longed-for freedom.

I have just finished reading a novel called Strange Nervous Laughter by a young South African writer, Bridget McNulty. Set in Durban’s hottest summer, the plot swirls around six main characters, all of whom are eccentric, to say the least. There is Harry a dustbin man, to whom broken things, including broken people, attach; Mdu who is talented at everything he does, but only finds joy in speaking to whales; Meryl who wears an invisible corset that reigns in her feelings, and Beth, cashier turned motivational speaker who levitates when she is happy. There is also Pravesh, an undertaker obsessed with painting corpses’ toenails and Aisha, a withdrawn and silent orphan. All are seeking romantic love.

Every word I think of to describe this book sounds like I’m damning it with faint praise - it’s delightful, whimsical and quaint. It would make a great date movie. I could see Drew Barrymore as Beth, being cute and levitating. The process of reading it was satisfactory - I wasn’t gripped enough to stay up all night, but I wanted to finish it. I wanted to know if Beth would dump the self-centred Pravesh, if Harry could actually bag the glamorous Meryl.

In any other context, I would love the whimsy. If it were an Irish novel, or a Canadian one, I’d be yelling yay for the whimsy and the bits of magical realism, which I really rather like (the pearls that Aisha cries when Mdu rescues her from the ocean, for instance). But there is a part of me that still wants my South African literature gritty and that’s because life there is gritty. Durban is the epicentre of the AIDS epidemic, most of it is poverty-stricken and crime-ridden. Life there is dangerous, even if you have tall walls and trellidoors to live behind, and far more deadly if you don’t.

I realise that this is my need, and that, for South Africans who actually live in Durban rather than in the European diaspora like me, maybe it’s great to read escapist literature set in your home town. Maybe if you see the gritty realities on a daily basis, you want to read something that takes you away on a magic carpet ride. Maybe there’s room for literature of gritty reality and of charming whimsy and neither need cancel the other out. I’m sure that’s the case.

However, don’t read Strange Nervous Laughter as your guidebook to Durban and KwaZulu-Natal. You’d be in for a shock.

(Bridget McNulty blogs here. Apparently she’s attempting to break a Guinness Record by baking a one-metre wide cupcake. Sounds like my kinda gal.)