house of meetings

House of meetings, by Martin Amis, is a story about fraternal and triangular love. It is written as the recollections of the narrator, who has travelled back to Russia to revisit the gulag in which he was imprisoned in the 1950s.

With him in the gulag was his brother, Lev, married to the girl they both loved, Zola.  The book uses love triangle between Lev, Zola, and the narrator to explore the love between the brothers and their attempts to re-establish their lives once released from the gulag. The title refers to a house near the gulag where wives of prisoners came for conjugal visits.

The book is in turn funny, sad, grim, and revolting.  At times the smells and violence of the gulag were enough to make me stop reading and look away.  What is interesting about House of Meetings compared to other gulag books such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, is that the descriptions of life in and after the gulag are written not from the perspective of an intellectual, but that of another class of prisoner.  It describes well the relentlessness and helplessness of life under Soviet Communism, but does not offer hopes of redemption through art.

Amis manages to give his writing a Russian feel without resorting to imitation.  I thought the characters of Lev and the narrator were well developed across the course of this short book, but I found Zola a bit one-dimensional, especially considering she is so pivotal to the plot.  Having read House of Meetings I would be keen to read more of Martin Amis.

the thoughtful dresser

The Thoughtful Dresser by Linda Grant, is a thoughtful and readable discourse on the cultural importance of clothes and dress.  While it covers a lot of topics, from the old testament to shoes and Suzi Quattro, ultimately it is about how fashion and clothing can be used to create and express a self.

Grant draws on her own experiences, and on those of her parents, East European Jews who emigrated to Britain just prior to WWII, to explore how important clothing can be as a social marker, and as remnants of culture for immigrants (she also explores this in more depth in her novel The Clothes on Their Backs*).  Each chapter can almost stand on its own as a mini essay.  Three chapters, spaced at the beginning, middle and end of the book, document the life of Catherine Hill, a Holocaust survivor who tells the story of modifying her striped Auschwitz uniform as a defiance against a concentration camp system that defined her only by the number tattooed on her arm. Catherine Hill went on to be one of Canada’s most successful fashion buyers.

The writing is a bit uneven in this book, and some sections seem to have been less thoroughly worked and researched than others.  I felt I’d read some parts before, possibly because they were ideas that she explored in her column for The Guardian or on her blog.  But it was enjoyable and somewhat thought-provoking.  If you’re interested in clothing and fashion from more intellectual standpoint, but enjoy the frivolous side of it to, this is the perfect book for you.

*I should disclose that I won an autographed copy of  this book prior to publication through a competition on Linda Grant’s blog. I enjoyed the book, but was surprised that it was nominated for the Booker.

goodbye columbus

Goodbye,Columbus (1959), is a novella with five short stories attached, and was Philip Roth’s first book.

The novella is set in 1950’s New Jersey, and describes a romance between an idealistic and disaffected young librarian, Neil Klugman, and Brenda Patimpkin, the spoilt daughter of a wealthy family.  Theirs is essentially a summer romance which is ultimately not strong enough to withstand the reality of their different outlooks and backgrounds. In parallel the story also explores assimilation and class issues in the emigrant Jewish community to which they both belong; and the dynamics of families.

In some ways Goodbye Columbus is a little dated – it’s easy to forget what a big deal sex outside of marriage was in the ’50s before the advent of contraception. But it’s still a really well written story, especially for a first-time author.  It describes beautifully the fragile and tentative beginnings of falling in love with someone, and the way this love is a creation of the lovers, talked into being and made more concrete than perhaps it is.  It also describes really well how people in a relationship can talk past one another and completely fail to communicate.  Neil Klugman is more likeable than many of Roth’s later male protagonists, and the thread of misogyny that runs through his other books is mostly absent from Goodbye Columbus.

The five short stories are also concerned with Jewish-American themes, but don’t sit well with the novella, I think because it isn’t possible to develop characters to the same extent in the space of a short story.

It’s worth reading just for Goodbye Columbus, which is thoughtful and satisfying, and shows Philip Roth’s talent as a writer.

crabwalk

Gunter Grass is a major player in Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), a thorn in the side of the establishment, part of the establishment, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, and a former Waffen SS member.  Like most of his books, Crabwalk explores the impacts of the past on the present.  the book is narrated by Paul Pokriefke, a journalist who is struggling to understand his relationships with his mother, his ex wife, and his son, who has committed a terrible crime.  As with all of Grass’s book the root of all these problems lie in past events that have been repressed or ignored.

In 1936, a Nazi party functionary, Wilhelm Gustloff, was killed by a Jewish student in Switzerland. He becomes a ‘martyr’ for the Nazi party, and a ship in the Strength Through Joy fleet is named after him. Paul Pokriefke’s mother, Tulla, has happy memories of cruising the Baltic on the Wilhelm Gustloff, but her obsession with the ship has deeper and darker origins.  In January 1945, when Danzig was surrounded by the Red Army, a heavily pregnant Tulla was one of over 10,000 refugees and soldiers who crammed aboard the ship to escape. The ship was torpedoed shortly after leaving shore, and over 9000 people died.  Paul was born, or so his mother tells him, at the moment the ship sank, his first cries mingling with those of thousands of children drowning in the freezing sea.

As Paul grows up in East Germany, his mother tells this story over and over.  The teenage Paul  thinks he has escaped his origins when he moves to West Berlin not long before the borders are closed.  But after German reunification in 1989, his mother is back, and so is the story.  By this time he’s married, has a son Konrad, and has divorced.  Konrad becomes Tulla’s audience for the telling and retelling of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, and he becomes obsessed with it, setting up a website chronicling the full story and calling for  recognition of the tragedy as a war crime.

On the site, Konrad debates with another young man, Wolfgang, who assumes the persona of the Jewish student who shot Wilhelm Gustloff. They agree to meet, in Schwerin, where Wilhelm Gustloff is buried.  Wolfgang spits on the memorial.  Konrad shoots and kills him.

During the trial, Paul Pokriefke struggles to understand how this happened.  His ex-wife blames him for being an absent father.  He blames his ex-wife for being too liberal.  Tulla defends Konrad’s actions and blames West Germany for ignoring the suffering of its citizens during the war, especially those like her who were permanently displaced from what is now Poland.  Paul, his ex-wife, and the dead boys parents meet in a bar after the verdict, collectively and awkwardly wondering how, when they thought they were doing everything right as parents, it seems they were doing everything wrong.

At the very end of the book, Paul visits his son in a juvenile detention centre several times.  Konrad has been building a model of the Wilhelm Gustloff, supplied by his grandmother.  On the last visit, he deliberately smashes it until his hand bleed, asking “are you happy now, dad?”.  On returning home and switching on his computer, Paul comes across a neo-nazi website that exalts the ‘martyrdom’ of Konrad Pokriefke. It doesn’t end, he thinks, it never will.

The title Crabwalk is a reference to the process of moving forwards while appearing to move backwards or sideways.  It echoes the way the characters need to scuttle back and forth across the wreckage of the past in order to understand the present disaster they find themselves in.  The German title is Krebsgang, and Krebs is also the German word for cancer.  I don’t know if that was a deliberate play on words by Grass, but it may well be a reference to the way that Germany’s continuing uneasy relationship with WWII and the divided years that followed, is eating away at the society from the inside.

Crabwalk is an enjoyable book.  The characters all have their flaws – Konrad is self-righteous, Paul is a bit of a loser, Tulla is slightly nuts – but they are well drawn.  Unlike Grass’s earlier books, which are very allegorical to the point of being slightly irritating, the metaphors and symbolism in this book are more subtle which allows the characters to shine through and be more like real people than are many in his earlier books.  The only slight wrong note was Grass inserting himself into the narrative as an unnamed older figure that Paul occasionally seeks guidance from in his writing.  I didn’t think this was needed.

in search of a competent writer

In Search of an Impotent Man (Suche Impotenten Mann Fürs Leben) should be a refreshing change from the usual chick-lit plots.  Its heroine, Carmen, is smart, successful and gorgeous.  Tired of being treated as a sex object by her boyfriend, she gives him the boot and places an personal ad looking for an impotent man to share her life.  She gets an overwhelming response, but discovers that having given up on sex, she now really wants it.  In an added twist, the impotent man she’s most keen on turns out to have been faking his impotence all along.  And after many hi-jinks, they live happily ever after.

In Search of an Impotent Man has sold over a million copies, but this is in despite of, not because of, the poor execution of this great idea.  The book has two completely superfluous subplots involving a jewellery heist and a pregnant best friend; and the main plot has holes in it that warp the space-time continuum.  But mostly, the writing is just really bad.  At first I thought it was suffering from over-literal translation, but having read the German version of the book, I can confirm it’s bad in the original too.  Gaby Hauptmann will spend five paragraphs describing Carmen cooking some frozen calamari, and then in the next paragraph move the action on to the office a week later.  The dialogue is wooden and cheesy and the few attempts at scene setting are flat and commonplace.  It’s really clunky writing that made me want to get my red pen out and begin editing.

Carmen is a little one-dimensional, but she’s smart, canny and sharp,  and unlike most chicklit heroines she concentrates of having fun and celebrating her success rather than feeling sorry for herself.  The book would be better if there were fewer subplots, and more of Carmen’s inner life.  She deserves to be the creation of a better writer.

in defense of food

Michael Pollan seeks to reconnect humans with their traditional knowledge of diet and the pleasure of eating simple healthy real with the mantra: ‘Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants’.  In Defense of Food is a passionate argument against ‘nutritionism’ – the idea that it is only the scientifically identifiable nutrients on food that determine their value in the diet.

Pollan briefly explores the history of nutritionism, beginning with the first experiments in the 19th Century to identify the so-called magic essentials of food, moving through the discovery of vitamins in the 1920s, and is at pains to emphasise how inconclusive most research into individual nutrients was.  He lands in the 1970s when the US Dietary Goals and food labelling were developed.  Pollan directly links the proliferation of ‘Western diseases’ such as obesity and type II diabetes to these guidelines, arguing that the way they were framed (for example ‘choose meat that will reduce saturated fat intake’ rather that ‘eat less meat’) and presented encouraged people to eat more, not less, and began an eating culture marked by ’speak no more of food, only nutrients’.  I thought this idea could have been explored in more depth.

Pollan goes on to explore several claims about nutrients such as saturated fats that have been shown to be false, baseless or dangerous. I also thought that Pollan let himself down a little in this section, because while he argues against relying too much on science that reduces food down to nutrients, he seemed to me to be a little selective about the science that backed his claims.  He does list all his references though.

The book also has a short history of the industrialisation of food, which Pollan breaks down into five steps:

• Wholefoods became refined foods
• Complex foods became simple foods
• Quality of food was replaced by quantity of food
• Eating leaves was replaced by eating seeds
• Food culture became food science

This last is Pollan’s jumping off point for what to do about the whole sorry mess.  His point is that food is more than just its constituent nutrients, and that the effect that it has on our bodies comes more by culture than by nutrients (my personal favourite piece of evidence for this thesis is the belt bib).  However he doesn’t delve into this idea in depth.  He winds up with the mantra above: ‘Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants’.

As you’d expect for a journalist, Pollan writes cleanly and crisply, so the book is quick and easy to read.  To some extent I probably enjoyed the book because it confirmed my own prejudices.  But it is interesting and informative and reasonably free from politics and blame games.  The day I finished it I had two unfortunate encounters with the industrial food chain.  The first was a Qantas inflight meal of ‘pizza bits with caesar dip’ which resembled neither pizza nor caesar nor dip.  The second was an executive from CSR, speaking at length about CSR’s new sugar-free sugar and low-GI sugar, both introduced in response to the growing incidence of type II diabetes.  Pollan may well be onto something.

This article in the NY Times is a condensed version of In Defence of Food.  You can also read or watch an interview with Michael Pollan and Kerry O’Brien here, or listen to a podcast from the Sydney Writer’s Festival here.

one morning like a bird

In this novel by Andrew Miller, a young poet, Yugi, is adrift in 1940s Tokyo, a city in the grip of increasing patriotic fever in the lead up to Japan’s entry to WWII.  Yugi is caught between two worlds – he is fascinated by Western, particularly French literature yet bound through his family and surroundings to Japan.  He is uneasy in both the traditional and the modern worlds, and cannot reconcile the purity of his art with the need to make a living.

Yugi seems to exist in a sort of floating world – he is outside reality and appears to be a detached observer of even his own life.  Meanwhile around him, life is getting crueler and more brutal.  His friends are off to the Sino-Japanese war in Manchuria, propaganda seems to be the only work available to young writers, and when he falls in love with a French girl, bringing him to the notice of the secret police it becomes more and more difficult for him to remain detached.  It’s not till the very end of the book that Yugi finds the courage to make a decision for himself rather than allowing himself to be pulled along by the currents of others.

Andrew Miller apparently specialises in exquisite reconstructions of other worlds and times, and does so fairly successfully here.  The detached and understated language make it feel very similar to works by Japanese authors, like Kazou Ishiguro or Junichiro Tanizaki, as do the varying length of chapters, some of which are only short descriptive scenes and others which cover months at a time.  There are occasional bum notes where a more western feel creeps in, but perhaps it’s better for a western author to not strive to be indistinguishable from a Japanese one.  Andrew Miller also caught me out a few times with some unusual and striking metaphors – describing summer rain on Yugi’s face as a “blood warm slick of atomised Pacific” was one that stuck in my mind.

I enjoyed this book a lot, but I do wish I’d been able to read it at a quieter time – it demands quite a bit of attention and time to absorb and muse on the story, which I just did not have.  Recommended for a rainy weekend when you’ve nothing pressing to do.

the white tiger

So many Indian novels written for the western market have an aspect of poverty porn about them.  The White Tiger avoids this. Instead of relying on a semi-mystical evocation of ‘old’ India and our sympathies for those repressed by the caste system, it’s written as a series of emails from a Bangalore entrepreneur to the Premier of China and  is unashamedly about modern India.  The author is Aravind Adiga.

Balram Halwai is the son of a rickshaw puller, born in what Adiga calls ‘the darkness’ – rural India, where corruption and despotism still rule despite the thin film of democracy layered over the top.  If Rohinton Mistry* had written this book, Balram would have had an extraordinary stroke of luck, made a modest improvement to his life through working hard and being appropriately obsequious, and then had it all ripped away from him by some aspect of the caste system, to live miserably ever after.

Adiga, perhaps more realistically, has Balram better himself by cunning, luck, bribery, blackmail and corruption.  The book builds up Balram’s rage at the society he lives in, a rage that culminates in him murdering his master and escaping with a large sum of money to reinvent himself as one of India’s ‘entreprenuers’ in Bangalore – the symbol of new India, far from the darkness – to live happily (or cynically) ever after.

Balram is a very believable character, though not a sympathetic one, as is the way Adiga portrays Balram’s transformation from servant to master.  The psychology of the book is spot on.  It can be savage and bloody and gruesome sometimes, but the brutality is never overplayed or gratuitous, and is certainly not done to garner our sympathy.

Very enjoyable, and deserved to win the Booker, which it did.

* If you’re the person who borrowed my copy of A Fine Balance before I left Sydney, could I have it back please?

a mixed dozen

Granta is a British literary magazine, published quarterly.  It calls itself  ‘the magazine of new writing’ on a range of topics, and has been the first to publish many later well-known writers.

Granta 103, The Rise of British Jihad, has as usual several interesting pieces of writing and several to take or leave.  The cover story, by BBC journalist Richard Watson, is well worth reading (there’s an extract here).  He investigates the series of events, failures, poor decisions and mistakes  that allowed Britain’s indigenous terrorists to grow and develop.  Going back to the first Balkan war, Watson explores how young Muslim men in Britain became inspired to take part in jihad, ultimately leading to the London tube and bus bombings in 2005.  He also probes how MI5 made a pragmatic but ultimately fatal choice to ignore terrorist organisations to use the UK as a base so long as they were focused on targets elsewhere.  Watson’s piece is neutral and balanced – he makes no calls for heads on platters, but just allows the facts to tell the story.  There is a video interview with Watson here.

east wind melts the ice

Liza Dalby is one of my favourite authors on Japan.  She’s an anthropologist who has studied (and lived) Japanese culture since the late 1960s.  East Wind Melts The Ice is a collection of 72 short essays, based on an ancient Chinese almanac which divides the year into 72 five-day periods.  Each five-day period has its own maxim to describe what happens in nature in those five days of the year.  These vary from the obvious (‘peach blossoms open’) to the obscure (‘moles become quails’).

Dalby explains these maxims and uses them as a jumping-off point for a short essay observing nature either around her home in Berkley, or in Japan.  In Japan, this format is called a saijiki, a “year’s journal” which entwines personal experience, natural phenomena and seasonal categories. She wrote two versions of each essay – one in English and one in Japanese, and often comments on the difficulty of this, observing things that are ‘obvious’ in one culture and obscure in another.

Dalby has has a good eye for what is going on in the natural world as time passe and plants bloom and die, birds migrate, animals appear and disappear and weather changes.  She is also a lyrical and descriptive writer without being effusive and cloying.  She covers an eclectic range of topics and often pokes fun at her own mistakes.

East Wind Melts The  Ice is the sort of exercise I’d love to try myself, as a way of sharpening my observation and writing skills, though I know I’d never have the stamina to keep it up for a year.  The only disappointment I found with the book was the sappy subtitle: ‘a guide to serenity throughout the seasons’.  It’s not.  It annoys me that some publisher somewhere seems to have thought that a book about nature and culture won’t sell unless it’s given some sort of self-help angle.

I enjoyed this book very much, and it would make a great gift for anyone you know who’s into gardening or nature watching.  Liza Dalby’s Geisha and Kimono are also both very good.