Holiday reading

(Another post sitting unfinished in the drafts, so I have to get it done so I can move on to the next one, which was most infuriating.)

'Lilian's Story' by Kate Grenville was in the charity shop pile (author previously reviewed here and here).  It follows Lil through life a ups and downs, from a childhood heavy with parental expectations to an adulthood of disappointment and an old age of couldn't-give-a-damn. I liked her because of her refusal to conform to society's expectations, but I pitied her because those expectations still managed to hang over her.

Here, an example of how she evokes the place they live (Australia) so vividly, something I loved about previous books, after their slightly deranged father has harangued her and her brother John at the dinner table:

"Some bird flew in and perched on the branch over our heads, blinking at us out of one eye, then the other. When the sun had slid behind the roof of Miss Gash's house and the sky began to turn pink, the bird flew away with a twitter and insects began to croak. Out of the lantana bush Miss Gash's tabby crept, stared at us with a paw raised, and crept on. John lay in his vomit and I watched pink dusk die into grey. Somewhere, streets away, someone was practicing the bugle, sending sad, random notes into the shallow pink sky like something lost." (p.86)

It is just a life, which she tries to create for herself, in spite of the world around her. This sums it up. She meets Jewel again, a woman from when she had been institutionalised, and she asks her about her regrets:

"She nodded seriously as I spoke, as if taking notes. I regretted almost nothing. There was a leather-bound copy of William that Father had given me long ago, before he knew that William was not just words. I regretted that, and it must have bubbled heavily, like a desperate drowning person, as he dropped it over the stern of the boat, but it had already been too late, I had already learned enough to keep me going. There were a few people I regretted not hitting. They might have thanked me for it in the end. I regretted not having said yes to F.J. Stroud, all those years ago. And of course I regretted the islands in the sun, the jungles, the gibber deserts, Niagara Falls, sleds drawn by reindeer, the feel of whale lifting my boat into the air under me. Naturally I regretted all that." (p.256)

I often find myself drawn in by books like this, that just follow a life. I don't need anything very much to happen. In fact some of the best books have very little happen in them. You just let yourself get attached to the person, wonder sometimes at their choices, but in the end a life is just a life, it matters whatever.

'No one is talking about this' by Patricia Lockwood was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Women's Ficton prizes last year. I started out not sure if I liked it; I almost gave up on it quite quickly thinking it was some kind of gimmicky 'internet generation' novel, but it turned out to be something else and I loved it. It is written in these weird disjointed paragraphs, that don't follow on from one another or flow like a story in any meaningful way. It could be described as stream-of-consciousness except it is third person. At times it feels like it is the woman writing, it is so immediate and intimate and often inside her head and her feelings, so it feels unsettling that it is third person. 

Here is an example of the early part, and why it made me cringe. I find that people who are obsessed with their 'online existence' think that it is real, when it's not. And the superficiality of it all makes me nauseous. ('This' refers to a post she had made that went 'viral'):

"This had raised her to a certain airy prominence. All round the world, she was invited to speak from what felt like a cloud bank, about the new communication, the new slipstream of information. She sat onstage next to men who were better known by their usernames and women who drew their eyebrows on so hard they looked insane, and tried to explain why it was objectively funnier to spell it sneazing. This did not feel like real life, exactly, but nowadays what did?" (p.13-14)

I liked this one because it is astute and perceptive, and witty:

"White people, who had the political education of potatoes - lumpy, unseasoned, and biased towards the Irish - were suddenly feeling compelled to speak out about injustice. This happened once every forty years on average, usually after a period when folk music became popular again. When folk music became popular again, it reminded people that they had ancestors, and then, after a considerable delay, that their ancestors had done bad things." (p.33-34)

I think what makes me bored by the internet is that people 'discover' stuff, but you know what, mostly it is not new stuff, it's stuff we already knew, it's just a new generation getting all excited about old stuff. But then I am an old fuddy-duddy who is confused when her kids are familiar with music that I listened to as a teenager. So this one too:

"Modern womanhood was more about rubbing snail mucus on your face than she had thought it would be. But it had always been something hadn't it? Taking drops of arsenic. Winding bandages around the feet. Polishing your teeth with lead. It was so easy to believe you freely chose the paints, polishes, and waist-trainers of your own time, while looking back with tremendous pity to the women of the past in their whalebones; that you took the longest strides your body was capable of, while women of the past limped forward on broken arches." (p.86)

So then her sister gets pregnant. And life changes. The baby has Proteus Syndrome, and her presence in their lives just takes over. And it is beautiful. Because you see the transformation of a person totally obsessed with herself into someone who comes to see someone else as the most important person on the planet. The style of the book remains the same; disjointed paragraphs, but they are telling someone else's story instead; it documents a tiny life in its entirety and established once and for all what really matters:

"On New Year's eve, she leaned over the baby with a glass of champagne and sang 'Bali Ha'i' right next to her ear and the baby's eyes flew wide, she went to the island. She sang 'Do Re Mi' and the baby followed up and down the stairs; she sang 'Over the Rainbow' and the rainbow went round. She sang 'If I Were a Bell' and that really did it; the baby pedalled her legs with excitement, she gripped her fingers with both hands, she cooed and cooed on the same pitch, she pushed the oxygen mask away and then clutched it to her face; if I were a bell I'd go ding dong ding dong ding.

Why not, she thought, and began to read the baby Marlon Brando's Wikipedia entry. Maybe it was the champagne, but it suddenly struck her as a democratic principle, that everyone should get to know about Marlon Brando: how he looked like a wet knife in a t-shirt, the cotton balls in each cheek when he talked, rumours of him wearing diapers on the set of Apocalypse Now. Nothing useful, but one of the fine spendthrift privileges of being alive - wasting a cubic inch of mind and memory on the vital statistics of Marlon Brando." (p.177-78)

Stay safe. Be kind. Enjoy the privilege of being alive.