Harley Loco - Rayya Elias - Day 1/2

From one dysfunctional author to another, Ryya Elias writing has a less writerly, more amateur feel to it, but she tells the story well, and her voice comes through.  Her background is, in the words of a less wordly connected world, exotic - family origins in Turkey which her family fled in 1915 ahead of the pogrom, then Syria and the flight from ethnic/religious conflict to the USA. She has more horror in her life than the poor old cold existentially angsted Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard, but also a lot of fun and, I don't know, more life in her. As ever it's always comforting to read about people who are more fucked up than you, and to find out that they turn out OK. (Whether that's the case with Karl Ove I don't know yet - there are four more books in his "My Struggle" series that haven't been translated into english yet).  

A Man in Love (My struggle book 2) - , day 3

Karl Ove certainly captures the torment of being a man with a toddler in a group of mainly yummy mummies, especially when he is unable to participate very well, is head over heels in instant lust with the fit young guitar playing leader of the session.  It's a symptom perhaps of his malaise that he doesn't lust after the yummy mummies either. It's a terrible shorthand, "yummy mummy", meant to be demeaning, but I see it much more positively.  These young sexually active (well mostly, maybe) attractive women with small children, who hasn't walked behind a woman like that watching the movement of shapely buttocks beneath thin cotton but sensible dresses - or pictured that tired that tired rushed woman who has come out with no make up, hair awry, on the side of the bed instead of at the helm of a pushchair.  It seems like he has cut himself off from the most ordinary of consolations and feels himself diminished and damaged by his poor showing.

He says he wants isolation - that's why he never goes to the same cafe for too long, so as the waiters don't get familiar. I'm beginning to wonder what he would be like to meet - presumably terse, morose and eager to leave. But maybe he's not, maybe this is all a pose, just a description of that set of feelings, that persona that everyone inhabits in some hours, minutes or days of their lives, when they cannot find meaning in contact, only a kind of rough solace in being alone, anonymously in a big city, or alone completely. . 

A Man in Love (My struggle book 2) - , day 2

This man is or was seriously depressed would be my snap diagnosis. He describes the nightmare of the convivial school/ nursery gates world so well - at least I wasn't the only shrinking, horrified scurrier away from the conversations and arrangements that were made.  Usually I had to rush off to work anyway, but I shared the terrible blackness that descended on me whenever I had to attend a school / child focused social occasion. Luckily I was able to palm them off on my wife, but sometimes I had to go. Here's a paragraph from a lengthy and painful description of a four or three years old's birthday that he had to attend with his wife and children:

"The thought of going in and sitting at the kitchen table again was not exactly appealing, so I opened the bathroom door, locked it behind me and stood there motionless for a few minutes. Then washed my face in cold water, dried it carefully on a white towel and met my eyes in the mirror, so dark and in a face so rigid with frustration I almost started with alarm at the sight."


Knausgaard, Karl Ove (2013-04-25). A Man In Love: My Struggle Book 2 (My Struggle 2) (Kindle Locations 694-696). Random House. Kindle Edition. 

It's a point of horrified self-recognition, and it's the second time I've used horrified in this post, because the feeling is that strong.  What have you become when you cannot bear the sight and sound of these good, friendly ordinary people?

A Man in Love (My struggle book 2) - ,

It's a stunning start; probably more so for anyone who has had children and taken them to stay with childless friends.  Perhaps a slightly guilty, but soon shrugged off, sense of recognition from just those same childless recipients of families coming to stay. And maybe a sense of disbelief from those who are childless and don't have families to stay, or have children but don't stay with the childless. And a sense of sadness from those childless who do have children  to stay and love every minute (despite the tiredness), and their visitors who absolutely love going to stay with them and are eternally, and I mean eternally, grateful for their reception.  Karl Ove Knausgaard maybe a bit of a selfish cunt at times, but he's an honest selfish cunt, and there aren't that many of them around, particularly those that can write so well and so accurately. I love reading this book, I have to ration myself so i don't read it all in one sitting.

I can't say the same for Candide , which I've always meant to read and am 1/3 way through. It's of its time I guess, and I'm just speed reading knowing what will come next.  It must have shocked deeply at the time - and rightly so, meaningfully so. It does make me reflect on writing that will endure and writing that is of it's time only - both are important.  Maybe the latter are even more important because they pave the way, they split apart the mindsets of the moment and allow something else in.  

My Father's Tears and other stories - John Updike, Zero Point Neal Asher, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murikami, And I forgot Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasan, and the Shining Girls by Lauren Buekes, and Zoo Story by Lauren Buekes

The three books I have been reading, the Asher finished last night, one of those books you could call High Octane because the violence and the battles and the sci-fi are always ramping up the tension. Readable, though, very readable, though nothing much to write about here, except that the language of porn appears to creep into the book - the arch villainess and evil ruler of this dsytopian earth hears that one of her senior staff likes to to have three men at once because she says she "likes all her holes filled at once".  It's a strange unappealing misfire, a cliche in itself.

MY Father's Tears has some outstanding writing, and also some duds. It must have been released after John Updike's death - I'm sure he would have spotted the repetition of "seemed to know the ropes" about two separate groups of tourists in Spanish Prelude to a Second Marriage, only a few pages apart, you would have thought an editor would to.  The Varieties of Religious Experience, doesn't quite work either, it's a little too obvious, but I can see that he had to find some response to 9/11, and parts of it are fine. It opens well with Dan Kellog's revalation that "There is no God", the opening words of the story, but doesn't add anything that Updike hasn't more fully explored elsewhere in The Beauty of Lilies, or A Month of Sundays, or Marry me - the list goes on, the list of Updike's attempts to reconcile belief and the intellectual imperative of atheism.  But  Delicate Wives is a perfectly formed story. I'm about half way through, but have been knocked off kilter by the Varieties of Religious Experience, and Spanish Prelude -  somehow it diminishes the book as a whole to have not so good stories, which is crazy - although maybe not, it makes you start each new story with a little quiver of fear that it may not be up to much.

Murakami's book I bough while walking in the Brecon beacons in a rare moment of 3G access to download it.  I'm glad I did - his I was going to say "flat laconic style" fits this kind of autobiography, but it's not flat, it's not laconic - it is just so well written in a Murakami way that it gives the appearance of flat laconocism (whatever that is, use your imagination) while flexing  and pushing ideas and images out from the prose.

Carl Hiaasen is a rocking read, the synopsis in the Guardian's recommended summer reads sums it up well - disgraced cop, beauteous coroner, monkey fired from the set of the Pirates of the Carribean for unsavoury behaviour. The rest is plot, guts, guns and fat hot Florida.

Lauren Buekes is another great find, after her free book Moxyland, started buying her books, weird crime/sci-fi , post cyber punk mayhem, witty and funny and disturbing in  equal measure.

Well at least I've written something to day.

Crimes & Misdemeanors

Crimes & Misdemeanors turned out to be a much better film than I thought, having watched the first 20 mins or so and got a bit bored some time ago. It does deal with the two worst fears of the liberal conscience - your loved one going off with a complete arsehole and committing a heinous crime for which you know you should be punished.  But there's a throwaway line, when the Woody Allen character's wonderful Bruno Betelheim substitute (warning , small spoiler here) , who is so full of wisdom and  insight, commits suicide, Woody Allen says 
"I grew up in Brooklyn, no-one committed suicide, they were too unhappy"

Depression and misery and a sense of proportion

Hearing about the death of Ian Banks and watching the last episode of Game of Thrones and the marriage at Frey's castle is not a great way to cheer the day.  Sundays malaise, too much over-indulgence over the weekend, all cast a pall as grey as the sky is today. Out in the garden there is a bird singing, counterpointing the greyness, bringing a sense of proportion. It's not me that's dead, Game of Thrones is not real and our capacity to feel is what makes us human. All the same it feels better to hide away in silence, to pull up the covers and listen to this one bird singing an illimitable song.