Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin

Just for the record, I will read pretty much any biography written by Claire Tomalin; she has got to be one of the most thorough researchers on the planet. You definitely get the sense with this book that she spent a LOT of time tracking down 450-year-old pieces of paper, some of the details of which get only the briefest most casual of mentions, but if it was relevant/entertaining/interesting, dammit, she was going to make sure she tracked down that 450-year-old bit of paper for you. I read her Jane Austen biography a few years ago as well and really enjoyed it. I kind of want to write to her and suggest other interesting people that I think she needs to write a biography of for me.

So, wow, Samuel Pepys, so so so interesting. The most obvious thing that is wildly unusual about him was the social mobility aspect of his life: he was born, dirt poor, to a tailor and a laundry maid, and by the time he died, had risen to become head honcho of the English navy, regularly hobnobbing with kings and getting asked for advice by all kinds of important Personages, which speaks to a combination of tremendous luck and ferocious ambition that probably didn't come along very often in seventeenth century England. And while the political machinations that are the backdrop of the story, the reason why he is such a fascinating character is of course his diary and the record of his personal life, which (at least in Claire Tomalin's telling of it) reveal to him to be by turns clever/self-deluding, arrogant/curious, sympathetic good company with a love of music and books/a narcissistic corrupt abusive bastard, etc. Claire Tomalin I think likes him, which is good; I couldn't decide. The thing that's hardest, of course, for modern readers (by which I guess I mean me) to get over is his relationship to women; it's hard to remember that it was completely normal then to beat your wife and regularly molest any/all of your female servants, as anyone who did that today would automatically fall into the Major Creep category. (He also had, apparently, no problem describing other people's mistresses as "poxy whores" while enjoying frequent episodes of R&R with a bevy of his own "very agreeable" lady friends.) The family relationships are also very weird by our standards: at one point he hired his sister as a servant and insisted on treating her as such; she wasn't allowed to sit down at the table with them, for instance, and he beat her regularly, and it's quite difficult to wrap your head around how that might possibly have been considered a reasonable thing to do not that long ago.

I read a bit of the Diary as a teenager; this biography made me want to go back and reread it, if only because the Tendency of Mr. Pepys to Capitalization, according to the particular Fashion in Language of the time is so Quaint and Appealing, &c. and also because he discusses all his sexual exploits in this hilarious naughty-schoolboy-hodgepodge of French, Spanish, and Italian.

Ooh, speaking of naughty schoolboys, I also recently reread Stephen Fry's memoir, Moab is My Washpot, and also his novel, The Hippopotamus, which I had accurately remembered as sort of a raunchy version of P.G. Wodehouse. Which made me want to reread some P.G.Wodehouse; you can't pretend that P.G.W. books are in any way consequential, but he has a delicious loopy perfection all his own, and the English language would be the poorer for it without him.

Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World

WOW, I am totally pathetic - I can't believe it's been nearly four months since my last blog entry. I promise I have actually been reading quite a lot in that time - notable faves that stick out in my mind were

1) _Olive Kitteredge_ by Elizabeth Strout (interconnected short stories are totally brilliant: you feel completely not guilty if you can't remember what was going on the last time you picked the book up, and you get a little zing of delicious smugness when a seemingly peripheral character pops up in a story and YOU KNOW ALL ABOUT THAT PERSON and their deepest darkest inner thoughts from a previous story)

2) I did like the Khaled Hosseini, _A Thousand Splendid Suns_ - it's a good story and I also liked the fact that a male writer recognizes the importance of feminism enough to write a whole book about how completely shitty life is for most women in Afghanistan. I did think that the book suffered very slightly from Western preachiness, if that's the right term - there are a few bits in which the women express opinions about their situation in very modern-American-psychotherapeutic terms, which didn't quite ring true (of course I can't remember specific examples, but words like "self-esteem" or "self-sabotaging" - terms that I would bet (even if there is an accurate translation into Afghan) would be outside the literal/conceptual vocabulary of the average uneducated Afghani peasant woman).

3) _Cutting for Stone_ by Abraham Verghese, another story about how indiscriminately rotten life is in other parts of the world (this time in northeast Africa.) I am always wary of books about/by doctors, since I spend enough time in conversations that start, "OMG, I had this crazy/interesting/horrible/brilliant patient who...." and doctor-centric books often feel a bit like that, with a bit of "wow, look at what a wise compassionate healer I am" thrown in, but the story definitely took front seat to all that, so, you know, good for him. (Ironically it was recommended to me by a woman in a landscape painting class I took who inspired neither wisdom nor compassion in me but instead irritated/bemused me by talking the entire time about how she ran a failing maple-cookie mail order business out of her house and how amazingly difficult it was for her to lose weight.)

BUT this blog post is supposed to be about the Fareed Zakaria book, which I am reading for an unofficial one-off book club to which I was invited about a month ago. I accepted the invitation on the grounds that it would be Good For Me (this is exactly the kind of book that I never, never read. Well, maybe that's not quite true. I am more likely to read popular economic/political analysis books than I am self-help books for business managers, but I think that might be the only genre that clocks in lower on my appeal list. Which is not to knock popular economic/political analysis books at ALL - it's more a comment on what an uneducated big-picture ignoramus I am, so signing up to read this book (along with _Against the Dead Hand: The Uncertain Struggle For Global Capitalism_ by Brink Lindsey) was an effort to become a better person. We'll see if it works.)

On the plus side, you get the sense that Fareed Zakaria is probably a very nice, good guy with ideals who might be quite fun/interesting to chat to in person (I have never seen him on CNN, so for all I know he might be an arrogant berk with a distracting facial tic and a scrapey voice, but based on his prose, you get the sense that he's generally a good dude.) The book is for the most part very readable, and he makes a (much-appreciated) effort to stick to the big picture and not be too jargony (although he did lose me a bit during one section where he was talking about how the US stock market is stronger than everyone else's in derivatives and hedges and something else that I forget, and I was like, OK, wait, what is a derivative? and how exactly do hedge funds work again? isn't it a bet that things will go badly? and if so, why is it good that we're strong in that?)

However, I got to the end of the book, and realized that despite the readability that I didn't actually have a clear sense of what the big picture _was_. On the one hand, China is poised to take over the world and kick everyone's ass and specifically they already hold gajillions of dollars of IOUs signed by the US (oops). On the other hand, the US is still way the biggest game in the world, and China is a long way off from even coming close to posing any real economic threat to our wellbeing. On the one hand, the US is uniquely positioned for success because we have done such a good job of forging close ties and becoming every developing country's best friend and we are such an open civil society that has a huge diverse hodgepodge of immigrants. On the other hand, we are on the brink of disaster because we don't spend enough time/energy/money on diplomacy and we are close minded and don't pay any attention to other cultures. On the one hand, our problems stem from arrogance; on the other hand, the solution is to become more confident in our actions on the global stage. And so on. I did like the fact that he sums up what he thinks we should do about our situation at the end of the book in clear bullet points (love bullet points!) and in his list was 1) reduce our nuclear arms and 2) work on practicing what we preach in terms of foreign policy. Yessss! It's totally clear and I agree with it! Three cheers for me and Fareed Zakaria!

I still haven't been able to get more than a few pages into the Brink Lindsey book because he contradicts himself massively within the first two pages and it drives me crazy: my thesis, he says, is that globalization is not some thing that was forced on us, but a carefully chosen response to the failure of the collectivist mentality that drove politics for most of the 20th century. On the VERY NEXT PAGE (we're still in the preface, here) he says that we didn't have a _choice_ about globalization because it was the only option available to us blah blah blah... in other words, it was a carefully chosen response that we didn't have a choice about. Hunh. Anyway.

I think I am going to go back to reading novels now, since I don't have conclusive proof that reading anything, really, will make me a better person...

muriel sparks, the prime of miss jean brodie

So I had a miniature revelation with this book, which is this: a lot of books written around the early to middle part of the century seem, despite the almost entirely modern use of language, very dated, specifically because, despite some very lyrical and/or precise and/or witty descriptions of _scenarios_, the characters themselves remain shadowy and imprecise, and you never get a sense of any of them as real people, and the words spoken by any one of them (no matter how ironic/clever) could have been spoken by any of them. In some of them, I think this is definitely a purposeful narrative trick, for instance the character of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby is sort of unknowable because it's not him that's important, it's Gatsby. Likewise in the Good Soldier, I never really felt that the narrator was a real person, and the whole thing consisted of these four interchangeable cardboard cutout rich disaffected people hanging out making comments about the weather to each other into which you were meant to read all sorts of hidden meaning about the unhappiness and pointlessness of modern life. (This may not be fair, since I read both Gatsby and the Good Soldier a long time ago, and I do remember quite liking bits of the Good Soldier in terms of the prose style; it's just specifically a lack of clarity when it comes to characterization; none seem to have a consistent individual _voice_ about which you can confidently say, aha, that's so-and-so's sense of humour/pessimism/obsession/whatever, I recognize that character by what they have to say, not just because the author has told me that that person just walked in the room.

I liked The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - there are some funny and perceptive bits in it, but it was like Muriel Sparks couldn't decide what she wanted Jean Brodie to be and I never felt clear about who this person was. In some bits, she is a slightly fruity but actually quite wise teacher who absolutely deserves the loyalty of her 'girls' (e.g. teaching them about Italian art history and taking them to the theatre on her own dime against the disapproval of the narrowminded headmistress) and who doesn't deserve the tragedy of not being able to be with the unsuitable man she loves; in the next scene she is a caricature of a harmless and slightly vain woman who plays favourites from pique; in the next she is a self-deluded monster who endorses fascism and naziism out of (you hope) total ignorance, and the headmistress is quite right to be trying to oust her from the school. It wasn't that these different inconsistent pictures of Jean Brodie presented an evolution of the character, either, which might have explained the girls' gradual shift from loyalty to her to disinterest to actively despising her; Miss Brodie alternated seemingly at random between fruity/wise/vain/self-deluded/ahead of her time/politically appalling throughout the entire book. The girls, likewise, were more or less interchangeable, and the one character trait that each was assigned (and that was insisted upon throughout the book) seemed totally artificial. Rose was 'famous for sex,' Monica was good at maths, Mary was lumpish and blamed for everything... etc. but at no point did any of the girls say anything that could not have been said by any of the others, and none of them was ever given any character traits above and beyond their one officially assigned one, which felt unconvincing and gimmicky anyway. What kind of character trait is 'being good at maths' if it doesn't actually make a difference to the story? Hm. Which is not to say that I didn't _like_ the book; there were some phrases that made me giggle out loud, and others that seemed peculiarly perceptive (especially in relation to the cruelty that adolescents use to mask insecurity about adult love affairs); some of Miss Brodie's battinesses were disarmingly sweet; and the plot took me by surprise in places; but the characters never properly solidified for me.

Next up... Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and Rebecca Goldstein, The Dark Sister. Also, I reread (ha!) Anne Fadiman's Rereading, but I was jetlagged while I read it and I think some of that "reading" actually consisted of my lying with the left side of my face squashed up against the page drooling into the binding, so I can't count it. (Can I count Time Out Tokyo and Tokyo: A Bilingual Street Atlas?)

Mason, Martinez, Batuman, Ransome

Books read:

Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey

Nick Hornby, Slam

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures in Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

Arthur Ransome, Swallowdale

Eduardo Martinez, Memoirs of a Medico

Rudyard Kipling, Stalky & Co and Puck of Pook's Hill

Books attempted and failed:

Javier Marias, Tu rostro manana

D.F. Wallace, Infinite Jest

yes yes yes i'm behind, whatever, get over it. I'm still reading, it's just that it gets too painful to admit to the rest of the world that a) I spend so much time rereading children's books when things aren't going well (it helps me to sleep, what can I say) and b) when I do read adult books, I can't for the life of me think of anything intelligent to say about them. I am reminded of Sarah Vowell's frustration trying to write a music review at one point: she listened to the album she was supposed to be reviewing, decided she 'quite liked the ballads,' wrote down that she quite liked the ballads, and then thought, crap, I have to come up with another five hundred words worth of stuff to say.

I'm disguising Infinite Jest as being by "D.F." Wallace, rather than "David Foster" just so you think it's a whole new book that I got stuck on. Hopefully it'll fool you.

Javier Marias was a recommendation from my sister's boyfriend, and I made the cocky mistake of thinking that I could read just fine in Spanish, thanks very much, and it turns out his prose is just slow moving enough that the addition of my slow reading, (combined with trips to the dictionary, or more usually, skipping over of words I don't know) makes the project look, well, doomed. It's still next to my bed, but I'm not holding my breath.

The first childhood-regression, insomnia-battling books were the Kipling (which I'm not going to talk about except to say that they hold a completely peculiar hold over me, like nostalgia for something I never experienced - is that possible? somehow I feel it was simply an oversight on the part of Fate that I didn't actually attend a boy's boarding school in Devon around the turn of the century. I should have. I would have been fine. Cigar smoking and pantomimes and evil games masters and all. I would have ate it up. (Totally coincidentally, I was given an actual cigar the other day by a proud new father, which left me quite nonplussed. Are there any female family medicine doctors who smoke cigars? If so, I would like to meet them. I gave it to a male family medicine doctor who apparently does smoke cigars.) Next the J.K. Rowling, which I am also not going to talk about, except to say that I now class Harry Potter in the same category as the Beatles, in that I can't even think about whether objectively like them or not, they are just sort of absorbed into my consciousness because I have used them as insomnia-battlers so many times. It's a little embarrassing, so we'll move on.

Much less squeamish talking about the Arthur Ransome books - so, so, so lovely. I didn't like them particularly when I was little, and I can't remember quite why - did I not get all the references? did my father fall asleep half way through sentences while reading them to us? (yes)

were they insufficiently dangerous? (probably). The thing that's nice about them is that they consist of plausible adventures that normal kids could have that do not involve losing parents in tragic accidents/smugglers/spies/saving the planet at the end of the day. They go camping, they accidentally hit a rock and sink their boat and all their stuff gets wet, their mum lets them continue to camp in a cave they find nearby, their uncle helps them repair the boat, they have tea. You feel as if it wouldn't be all that difficult to pull off, and yet it's all just adventure enough that you think, yeah, that would be fun to do that! I'd like to go sailing and then have tea and crumpets!

The Elif Batuman book is quite fun, although I will say that a) the cover is misleading, and makes it looks like a laff riot, which it is not and b) you have to cross over to the dark side and Believe, as all literature majors seem to, that Obscure Literary Topics have real meaning and weight in the world today, and that the symbolism of garden spades in Chekhov's writing during the time period January 1891 to April 1892 is a Totally Reasonable thing to write a 300+ page Ph.D. about. That said, she's appealingly goofy and seldom takes herself too seriously, and the book zooms around between her disastrous love life, her disastrous academic career, and her disastrous dayjobs that she does to support numbers one and two.

Most recently, I read my great-uncle's memoir of his career during the Civil War in Spain with bits of WWII thrown in for good measure. It was interesting, up to a point: his daughter had recently published a biography of him, touting him as the latest unsung WWII hero for having helped establish an escape route through Spain for war refugees escaping from France, as part of his work as a secret service agent for the British M6, (and the snippets of her book which I read were so painfully badly written I couldn't get beyond halfway through chapter 1, so I'm not counting that), but the story itself sounded interesting enough to be worth reading a (slightly) more literary and hopefully less biased account of it, so I found his book online and ordered it. At least as a young man, he seems to have been quite open to different grubby experiences (at one point he volunteers in the coalmines, helping keep the fires or something going in support of the striking miners so that they won't have too much work to do when they go back to work), and mucking about in boats in his native Galicia, but a tremendous portion of the book is dedicated to how incredibly important he is, and what a famous surgeon he is, and how many people are so tremendously grateful to him, and how buddy buddy he is with the Spanish royalty, etc., which gets seriously icky after a while. The part that takes place during the Spanish civil war is also massively uncomfortable to read; his sympathies are quite clearly with Franco's government (representing order and civilization) and against the Republic (wild-eyed communists who rape/pillage/burn/destroy everything they come across) and it was uncomfortable on two counts: one, that someone I am related to could be so right-wing and two, that there must have been at least a small amount of truth in some of the incidents that he describes, because he was, after all, there: the republicans probably _did_ do their fair share of raping/pillaging/burning/destroying, and just because history has chosen to remember them as the virtuous losers and Franco as an evil git, doesn't mean that the republicans didn't behave badly at the time. If nothing else, the book is a lesson in how not to write a memoir, anyway: if you tell anything but horrible stories about yourself, you come off sounding completely conceited, and if you tell horrible stories about yourself, you come off sounding completely conceited anyway because chances are it's probably false modesty. I mostly ended up feeling sorry for my great-aunt and my mother's cousin, who somehow bought in to the whole facade of what a Great Man he was, and you just think, oh dude, get over yourself. We're none of us that special. And even if the queen of Spain did think you were the cat's meow (which she probably didn't, she was probably just being polite), guess what? She's not actually that special, either.

Anyway. Enough ranting and raving from the proletariat. It's time for this pleb to have a bath and go to bed.