Cuba, 1989. A high-level government official is missing and pressure is coming down from the top: Find this guy. He wheels and deals on important tradCuba, 1989. A high-level government official is missing and pressure is coming down from the top: Find this guy. He wheels and deals on important trade negotiations for Cuba with foreign countries. Maybe the missing man has been kidnapped? Maybe he fled the country on a boat to Florida? He cuts financial deals, so could money be involved? Women?
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SPOILERS FOLLOW about the general story, but not about the investigation.
Police detective Lieutenant Mario Conde is assigned to the case. And guess what? He went to high school with both the missing man and his wife. In high school this couple was the superstar couple and every guy was in love with beautiful Tamara including Mario. In fact, fifteen years and two marriages, two divorces later, he’s still in love with her. Yes, he’ll take on this case.
The really interesting question, though, is does ‘The Count� really want to find him? That’s Mario’s nickname and it’s how he thinks of himself. (Conde means count in Spanish.) Maybe he’s happy with the chance to make a move on the not-too-terribly-distraught Tamara? Maybe he should be thinking of her as a ‘person of interest� in the case?
Mario and his side-kick partner go through all the motions of interviewing the missing man’s friends, women friends and co-workers. But most of the story is not about the case, but about The Count.
All fictional police detectives have to have quirks. One of the Count’s main quirks is that while he may be the best detective � that’s why he’s leading this important case � he frustrates his superiors with his lackadaisical attitude. He can’t tell you why he became a cop. He really wants to be a writer. Now and then he rolls a blank sheet of paper into a typewriter but nothing comes out.
Maybe the Count needs another drink? During the day the Count and his partner can’t pass a bar without running in for a few straight shots. Don’t they have rules about drinking and driving in Cuba? Oh, that’s right - they’re cops. Never mind. (I'm sure the Count would take offense but I put this book on my 'alcoholism' shelf.)
We learn a lot about class distinctions in Cuba. Does it surprise us to learn that communist Cuba has a whole class of people, often government officials (like Tamara and her husband), who live in fancy houses in fabulous neighborhoods while most people live in shanties in the barrios? No, we’re not surprised.
The Count lives in a dump � dead dogs in the street. But he has most of his meals and spends most of his time with another old high school buddy, Slim. Slim of course is a huge man, confined to a wheelchair. Just about every day the Count visits Slim. The Count eats meals cooked by Slim’s mother and then he and Slim drink themselves into a stupor on rum. The Count will be late to work again tomorrow.
The book doesn't give us a lot of local color in a geographical sense but we learn some about Cuban culture. Lines around the block to buy potatoes, coupon ration books, apartment complexes run by ‘revolutionary committees,� mass meetings at the workplace where people come ‘under criticism� and ‘party cell� meetings. Officials often refer to each other as ‘Comrade.�
And I guess some might call it ‘stereotypical Latin American culture� when the Count calls his partner at home, his wife answers the phone, and his wife tells him that his partner is at his partner's girlfriend’s house. Women have a hard life. The Count looks at Slim’s mother slaving over the stove and tells us ‘she’s 60 but looks 80.�
Overall, the story is more about the Count than it is about the police investigation and the mystery of the man’s disappearance. There aren’t a lot of twists and turns to the plot. Current events are interspersed with flashbacks to the Count’s high school days with Tamara, her missing husband and Slim, who was also in the high school group.
While the writing style is mainly straightforward, it’s very much a mixture. There are long passages of both prose and dialog. Sometimes the prose is Saramago-style full-page paragraphs with only commas as punctuation. When the Count listens to taped interviews conducted by his partner, those are presented, like a tape, as a run-on paragraph with no indication made of questions vs. answers. I’ll give it a 3.5 rounded up.
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The author (b. 1955) has written about 15 novels, nine of them in the Mario Conde investigator series of which Havana Blue is the first. (It turns out this first one is one of the lower-rated ones on GR.) All nine appear to have been translated into English. Padura won Cuba’s highest literary prize in 2012.
Top photo in Havana from time.com The author from cubastudies.org
A French man is traveling by train to Versailles. It’s just before Christmas and he has come to bury his mother. The impending holiday and the ice havA French man is traveling by train to Versailles. It’s just before Christmas and he has come to bury his mother. The impending holiday and the ice have delayed the funeral. By coincidence one of his mother’s neighbors turns out to be an old flame, his first love from his teenage years. She lives with her blind brother, across the hall from his mother’s apartment.
The man and his old flame share a secret of two hideous crimes they committed in their youth � and got away with. Their love is rekindled.
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It's hard to categorize this book. I think the closest genre might be thriller. It’s certainly noir. Counting the old crimes, and the new ones committed by someone or another, and two semi-accidental deaths, the body count is seven by the end of the book.
A lot of this book is about addiction. The blind brother is huge and addicted to food. The old flame is addicted to cigarettes. She skips meals and fills two ashtrays with butts instead. Our main character was a recovered alcoholic, but the rekindled love, the stress of his mother’s death, and the other events that occur burst the dam. He drinks himself into a stupor with hallucinations and paranoia; so much so, and so well detailed, that I added this book to my alcoholism shelf.
The title comes from the lovers' teenage dreams of going to live on the tropical islands of Reunion and Mauritius. And, in a perverted way, they ultimately achieve their dream. But it’s not pretty.
There is good straightforward writing. A couple of passages that caught my eye:
Of a girl with a shaved head on the train: “…pretty enough to get away with making herself ugly.�
“Jeanne was always on time but since he was always early, it was as if she was always late.�
There’s some local color of Versailles but it’s not tourist Versailles. In fact, the area comes across as kind of dumpy. By coincidence, just a few reviews ago, I reviewed Guys Like Me by Fabre, Dominique (2015) Paperback, and that book was noted in the blurbs for its portrayal of a Paris that tourists never see.
I’ll say a 3.5 rounded up to 4.
I thank my GR friend Glenn Russell for recommending this book via a video interview he had on YouTube.
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The author (1949-2010) wrote about ten novels or novellas, all of which appear to have been translated into English. Mostly they are noir thrillers. His work has been compared to Georges Simenon’s romans durs.
Top photo, street scene in Versailles from heybrian.com The author from criminalelement.com
The author lived the life of his character, Hank Chinaski, and much of that life was as an alcoholic. Bukowski wrote many no[Edited for typos 4/25/22]
The author lived the life of his character, Hank Chinaski, and much of that life was as an alcoholic. Bukowski wrote many novels but was better known as a poet in his lifetime (1920-1994). Someone called him the “Poet Laureate of Lowlife.�
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The main character/narrator is the same one in Factotum, which I reviewed. But in Post Office, Hank is more settled, having worked 11 years in the post office. He’s more settled in his love life too. There are three or so women he’s fairly steady with (steady is a relative word), each over a few years. (view spoiler)[ One young rich woman he marries, although that doesn’t last, and with another he fathers a child, although they shortly separate and he pays child support. His women are all heavy drinkers like him. One of his women friends basically drinks herself to death. ... (hide spoiler)]
A lot of the book, most perhaps, is about conditions and incidents at his job. Initially he is a substitute mailman, appearing each morning to see if there is work for him or not. (When he tells us he is drinking and having sex until 2:00 am and then getting up at 4:00 am to go to work, we imagine he is exaggerating!) When he fills in for people who call in ‘sick� it is often because there is torrential rain or it’s a route with steep hills.
Later, a full-time worker, he is in a truck collecting mail from mailboxes on street corners. Then he passes an exam and graduates to mail sorter where he sorts tubs of mail and puts them into slots for the carrier to deliver. He also distributes big piles of 4th class mail � that’s junk mail (although he never uses that term; it must have come into use after 1971 when this was written).
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The almost-Orwellian environment he works under seems like something out of the 1800s. Did supervisors really time workers with a stopwatch? Did they really send a nurse to your home to do random checks to see if you were actually sick? Hank, of course, is every supervisor’s nightmare. Even if he is sober he’s likely to curse the supervisor out. Hank is constantly ‘written up� for his failures and for his attitude. He’s often sent for job ‘counseling� but somehow he lasts 11 years.
Hank spends a lot of time at the horse track and believes he has a betting ‘system� that works. So we get a few pages that are a primer on picking the nags.
As I said in my review of Factotum, we have some graphic sex, and a bit about bodily functions, that strike me as ‘in celebration' of the fact that it is 1971 and you could write stuff like that now and still get published. Of course Hank’s a misogynist and we hear stereotypes and read inappropriate remarks about Blacks. But as drinking buddies, Hank loves everyone until he decides to slap a woman or punch a guy out.
Because of the author’s willingness to use coarse language we get some original one-liners like “Moto was grinning from eyebrow to asshole.� And “I got drunker and stayed drunker than a shit skunk in Purgatory.� He also has an original opening sentence “It began as a mistake.�
I liked the story. It’s an easy read with straightforward writing. Thank you to GR friends Bernard and Mark George who commented on my review of Factotum and encouraged me to read some other works by Bukowski. Considering that I had never heard of this author until I stumbled on Factotum a year ago, I was amazed to see that Post Office has more than 100,000 ratings and almost 5,000 reviews.
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As you can tell from his photo, the author lived the life he wrote about and still survived to age 73 (1920-1994). He was born in Germany but his parents moved to Los Angeles when he was three. Bukowski was a prolific writer. He wrote six novels (three were made into movies) as well as dozens of plays, screen scripts and collections of poetry.
Web sources say his work addresses the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. The FBI kept a file on him as a result of his column 'Notes of a Dirty Old Man' in the LA underground newspaper Open City.
Top photo of LA in the 1970s from bizarella.com Mail sorting in Mobile Alabama in 1956 from about.usps.com The author from bbc.co.uk...more
The author starts the story with the proverbial loaded gun: we follow a hired killer who grew up in an orphanage. (There are a lot of [Edited 3/11/23]
The author starts the story with the proverbial loaded gun: we follow a hired killer who grew up in an orphanage. (There are a lot of orphans in the story.) This character enjoys killing and he refined his skills as a British soldier in Burma in World War II.
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The next chapter shifts the scene from Dublin to San Sebastian in Basque country in Northern Spain. The story is set in the 1950s during the time of Franco’s dictatorship.
We're not supposed to like our main character, Quirke, an Irish pathologist. I certainly didn't. He's a malcontent and a moaner. “…petulance was his pastime� and “He was feeling sorry for himself, and thoroughly enjoying it.� We’re told he gets pleasure from other people’s distress and he sometimes creates that distress, as we see during a key dinner later in the novel.
Quirke’s wife is a psychiatrist. That probably helps her put up with him; that and the fact that she genuinely loves him. She must love him because she doesn't complain about all his moods, antics and heavy drinking. Quirke knows that he is way outclassed by her and he understands how lucky he is to have her. He frequently says a little prayer under his alcohol-laden breath: “Please don't leave me.�
They both have had hard times in the past. He was raised with abuse in the orphanage and was at one time an in-the-gutter alcoholic. He still drinks heavily but his wife keeps him somewhat under control. She's the one who has a lot to complain about, but never does. She had relatives killed in concentration camps during the war and she had a previous marriage where she lost a child. But they both keep these traumas to themselves because they never talk about the past.
I'll limit what I say about the plot to what we know from the blurbs. While vacationing with his wife in Spain, Quirke encounters a young woman doctor - the April of the title. He immediately knows this woman is a supposedly dead friend of his daughter back in Ireland. He calls his daughter to relate this and she sets the plot in motion by informing the woman’s uncle, who is a highly placed political official, and she tells the local Irish police chief.
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Of course, these people back in Ireland know Quirke. They are dubious because they know his past history of severe alcoholism, so they aren’t eager to believe him. If this woman, who goes by a new name in Spain, really is the supposedly dead April from Ireland, she had a particularly harrowing childhood as a victim of child abuse and incest.
I got a kick out of the hired killer character. He has never previously read a book in his life and somehow picks up Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. That's the story of Pinkie, a gang leader and killer in the British resort town of the title. We get Banville's killer’s opinions of what is realistic or not in Greene's novel.
I liked the local color of the Spain setting as it had a realistic flavor in the characters� remarks about language and cultural differences. “The carriage smelled strongly of garlic and sweat and something that she couldn't identify. It was simply, she supposed, the smell of Abroad.�
Here are a few passages I liked to illustrate the author’s writing style:
“Detective Inspector Stratford entered the room and closed the door gently behind him. His manner was abstracted, as if he had wandered in by accident and hadn’t quite realized yet where he was. Phoebe regarded him with candid interest. He was thin to the point of gauntness, with pale, bony wrists and peculiar, pale soft hair. His face was so narrow it seemed that if he turned sideways it would collapse into two dimensions and become a fine, straight line. He wore a three-piece tweed suit. The chain of a fob watch was looped across his concave midriff. He didn't look in the least like a policeman. He might have been a university don, or an unfrocked priest.�
“Phoebe thought she had never known anyone so lacking in affect. That would be the Protestant in him, she said to herself, and immediately felt guilty.�
“Christ almighty, but would that fellow never stop popping up in front of him, like one of those bottom-heavy toys that won't stay down no matter how hard they're knocked over?�
I read this book as a buddy read with Ebba Simone. I enjoyed discussing it with her and I appreciate her insights and comments.
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This book is No. 8 in the Quirke series of crime novels. The earliest ones were published under Banville’s pen name, 'Benjamin Black.' The author is best known for his novel The Sea which won the 2005 Booker prize.
Top photo, an old postcard of San Sebastian from cardcow.com Modern San Sebastian from eater.com The author as a young man from godine.com...more
A Jack Kerouac-type story of bumming across the country. But Hank Chinaski, our main character, started in LA and went east while Jack started east anA Jack Kerouac-type story of bumming across the country. But Hank Chinaski, our main character, started in LA and went east while Jack started east and went west.
Jack would be a fun guy to have a beer with. And so would Hank except that with Hank, at the end of the night, you’d have to call a cab, dump him in the back seat and give the cabbie his address, (to some run-down boarding house with bedbugs). Somehow next morning you’d still end up posting bail for him.
The author lived the life of his character, at least for ten years when he was a raving alcoholic. Bukowski wrote many novels but was better known as a poet in his lifetime (1920-1994). Someone called the author the “Poet Laureate of Lowlife.�
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In the book, Hank is a full-blown alcoholic, working a job now and then to get enough money for his next binge. He loves to travel cross-country by bus and train, his suitcase filled with pints of whisky. In the book he starts out in New Orleans and travels to LA, then Philly and St. Louis, LA again, Miami and back to LA. (Although published in 1975, the story is set in the 1940s just after WW II.)
His parents are in LA. When he comes home, drunk of course, there are tears, screaming, slappings from his mother, and fist fights with his father. Living at home is “not an option.�
He’s constantly hitting on women in low-life bars and has a high success ratio � they are almost always prostitutes. So we have some graphic sex, and a bit about bodily functions that strikes me as almost ‘in celebration' of the fact that it is 1975 and you could write stuff like that now and still get published.
Of course Hank is a misogynist. We also have the occasional inappropriate remarks about Jews, Blacks, Hispanics and gays. When he cleans up his hotel room he thinks “I must be turning fag.� But as drinking buddies, Hank loves everyone until he decides to slap a woman or punch a guy out.
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Hank is an aspiring writer who sends stories out weekly and occasionally has one published for $50. But in the meantime (years) a lot of the story is about the low-level jobs he worked.
This is the only novel I’ve read that gives you an accurate idea of what it’s like to work jobs like these because I did too, and Bukowski tells it like it is. As a kid in high school and college I worked part-time evenings and full-time summers in three grocery stores (meat, produce and stocking shelves), clean-up boy in Woolworths, boxing hot-dog buns in an automated bakery, a hardware warehouse unloading trucks, taxi driver, a soda-canning plant, and three plastics factories (including the Titleist golf-ball factory!) and as a salesclerk in Western Auto (anyone remember those?).
I liked the story and it’s an easy read with straight-forward writing. I’m glad I read something by a new author previously unknown to me. Since then I've also read and enjoyed his novel Post Office.
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[Revised 7/13/23]
The author's grave in Los Angeles from, wikipedia Workers in a Texas onion warehouse in the 1950s from texashistoryarchives.com The author from amazon.com...more
We follow the life of a 30-ish single man in Rome. He’s ambitionless and lost, fighting to stop himself from becoming a total alcoholic. He’s bad enouWe follow the life of a 30-ish single man in Rome. He’s ambitionless and lost, fighting to stop himself from becoming a total alcoholic. He’s bad enough as it is. He has no career but sometimes does editing work for a sports magazine. Most of his friends are adrift in the same boat. I’ll let him speak first:
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“Personally, I would happily have stayed out of the race. I'd known all kinds of people, some who'd reach the finishing post and others who hadn't even gotten off the starting block, and sooner or later they all ended up equally dissatisfied, which is why I’d come to the conclusion that it was better to stay on the sidelines and just observe life. But I hadn't reckoned with being desperately short of money one day at the beginning of spring last year. All the rest followed naturally, as these things do.�
The main character has women, mostly one-night stands. He seems to enjoy even more the morning after, when the woman has left for work, and he can have coffee already made for him, and shower with clean towels.
Now two passages from the introduction:
“[The author’s] characters, unless gainfully employed or blinkered by upward mobility, sit on the brink of despair, condemned, as each is, to a staring contest with the abyss, sensing all along that the abyss is winning. What holds them together, what feeds and enables their internal atrophy, is Rome itself.�
The introduction also tells us that in the original Italian, “…these are signature words in this novel... ‘Sfiga� means bad luck, the way ‘sfigato� means inept, unlucky, loser, downright pitiful, a word that coincides with another word in the novel, ‘sfinocchiato,� meaning dejected, exhausted, f’ked up.�
The main story is that he meets a much younger woman and they fall in love. Happily ever after? (view spoiler)[ Of course not, because they are both so ‘sfinocchiato� that their ability to relate other people is as screwed up as everything else in their lives. (hide spoiler)]
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Rome was mentioned above, so here’s some more from the introduction, saying the book is a love story to Rome. But is it? I’m not sure. “Rome is the lingering, glamorous patina that blinds the characters of Last Summer in the City to the very real fact that they are seriously damaged and marooned. Despite their few moments of mirth and pleasure, each is an emotional cripple. What afflicts them all, if observed from a purely literary perspective, is a classic case of existential anomie.�
Here’s the author on Rome, and catch the punch line at the end:
“Rome by her very nature has a particular intoxication that wipes out memory. She's not so much a city as a wild beast hidden in some secret part of you. There can be no half measures with her, either she's the love of your life or you have to leave her, because that's what the tender beast demands, to be loved. …If she's loved she'll give herself to you whichever way you want her, all you need to do is go with the flow and you'll be within reach of the happiness you deserve. You will have summer evenings glittering with lights, vibrant spring mornings, cafe tablecloths ruffled by the wind like girls� skirts, keen winters, and endless autumns…Every now and again, someone did get the hell out.�
At one point his drunken best male friend sums up their lives with this politically incorrect statement: “If I were a fag, I'd fall in love with you. Wouldn't we make a lovely couple?... We’ll turn gay and then at least we’ll be something. This way, what are we now? We’re nothing, not even fags.�
Do we want to go on this ride? I enjoyed it, but I’m not sure why. First published in 1973 (although dates vary), the novel has become a kind of ‘cult classic,� getting republished in 2010, again in 2016, and in English in 2021. Natalia Ginzburg, one of my favorite Italian authors, has spoken highly of the book. I did like his great writing. And there was a lot of local color. Here are some passages that illustrate his writing style and occasional humor:
“There are people who have the singular characteristic of asking for help while at the same time giving you the impression they're doing you a favor.�
“Books make different impressions according to the state of mind you read them in. A book that struck you as banal on a first reading may dazzle you on a second simply because in the meantime you suffered some kind of heartbreak, or you took a journey, or you fell in love.�
“In the afternoon I went to the movies, to keep warm, but the film was dull as dishwater, and, for the first time, the gaunt faces and secretive shenanigans of the destitute fans that populate theaters in the afternoon made me really sad.�
“It was dawn, and all that remained of the night were two shadows under the eyes of this strange girl by my side.�
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A woman he is with comments after using the bus station toilet: “Maybe they keep it locked because they're afraid someone will go in and clean it.�
�'What was your name again?' 'Leo Gazzara,� I said. ‘It still is.' 'What a sad name,� she said after a while. ‘It sounds like a lost battle.'�
“So this is where you live,� she said again, still looking around. ‘It looks like a shelter.�
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The author (b. 1947) is mostly known as a scriptwriter in Italy for film and TV. He has written seven novels but it appears that Last Summer in the City is the only one translated into English (2021). There are a lot of conflicting info on dates with this author and this book may have originally been published in Italy in 1970 or 1973. I've also seen his birth year listed as 1939.
Photos of Rome in the 1970s: top from hemmings.com, second from vintag.es third photo from wantedinrome.com The author from fazieditore.it
This is my sixth novel by Julian Barnes and I think it is my favorite. The author has a thesis: “…first love fixes a life forever.� All the other thinThis is my sixth novel by Julian Barnes and I think it is my favorite. The author has a thesis: “…first love fixes a life forever.� All the other things that happen to you are ‘events.� Since he is proposing that your first love creates your history, the things you normally think about as 'your background' -- your parents, your social class, your upbringing -- he refers to as your ‘pre-history.�
When he’s nineteen, a young middle-class British man falls in love with a 48-year-old married woman who has two daughters older than he is. (view spoiler)[ They eventually leave the suburbs and move to London to live together. She won’t leave her abusive husband and becomes an alcoholic. (hide spoiler)]
I don’t think I’m giving away plot when I tell you you need to know that this story is as much about alcoholism as it is about first love. I added it to my ‘alcoholism� shelf. (By the way, if you are interested in other books about alcoholism, read Under the Volcano by Malcom Lowry. I read it years ago so I don't have a review.)
Here are some passages on alcoholism:
When the young man confronts the woman about her drinking: � ‘Oh, you’re always going on about that,� she replies, as if this were some tedious and pedantic obsession of yours, nothing really to do with her.�
“You may still desperately want to save her, but at some level of instinct or pride or self-protection, her devotion to drink now strikes you more sharply, and more personally: as a rejection of you, of your help, of your love.�
“Because what she is leaving unspoken is this reply: ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I want. And I am going to destroy myself, because I am a worthless person. So stop bothering me with your well-intentioned meddling. Just let me get on with the job.� �
“…you find yourself thinking: she may be destroying herself in the long term, but in the short term, she’s doing more damage to you.�
True to Barnes� thesis, this relationship is a life-long obsession. Even in retirement he spends all his time thinking about it; what did he do wrong; what did she do wrong; how could it have been changed? “Sad sex is always far worse than good sex, bad sex, self-sex and no sex. Sad sex is the saddest sex of all.�
Despite this somber topic there’s occasional humor: “There was an old char who came twice a week, Mrs. Dyer; she had poor eyesight for cleaning but perfect vision for stealing vegetables and pints of milk.�
The book is structured in three sections, roughly their courtship, their full relationship, and his reflections when he’s approaching old age. There are no chapters, but breaks about every page or so, so at times it reads like a collection of vignettes.
I found the book a good read and it gave me a lot to think about, so I’ll give it a 5.
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Barnes (b. 1946) has written about 20 novels. Four of his books were shortlisted for the Booker prize. He won it in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending, which remains his most popular book by far.
[Spoilers hidden 12/25/2021, edited 4/2/24]
Top photo of Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire from loveexploring.com The author from Ransom Center Magazine at utexas.edu...more
I had heard of this author from her well-known book Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel and a feminist respo[Edited, pictures added, spoilers hidden 1/22/22]
I had heard of this author from her well-known book Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel and a feminist response to Jane Eyre’s ‘crazy woman in the attic.� Although I have not read that book I decided to give this one a try.
Wow, what a surprise! I don’t know what I expected but I didn’t expect such in-your-face language from a woman writer published back in 1938.
A lonely French woman in Paris wanders from dingy bar to dingy bar and from seedy hotel to seedy hotel. She’s getting a change of scenery from London where she did the same thing and had tried to drink herself to death. When she had previously come back to London from Paris, she remembers her ex- asking her “Why didn’t you drown yourself in the Seine?�
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Two phrases recur almost as mantras: variations on: “I have no pride � no pride, no name, no face, no country. I don’t belong anywhere. Too sad, too sad…� and something she overheard in a bar: “Qu’est-ce qu’elle fout ici, la vielle?� Roughly: “What the hell is that old lady doing here?� I should say that those old college French courses are needed because, while you can pick up most meaning in context, there is quite a bit of French and most is not translated.
She lives a sad life. She’s young enough to still be attractive to men in bars and she lets them buy her drinks and dinners, and occasionally brings them back to her room but never has sex with them. Some of them are gigolos and most want money from her. (We don’t know the exact time frame of the story but, published in 1938, it’s probably reflecting times during the Depression.) She dresses well enough that they think she’s wealthy, but she’s not. She has a lot of experience with men like this, so whatever they say, she assumes they are lying.
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In between her bar visits, she drinks in her hotel and reflects back on her life. When very young, her new husband took her to Paris with absolutely no prospect of a livelihood. (view spoiler)[ He went from city to city borrowing money from people who knew. How long could that last? She broods over an infant that died that her husband never knew about. (hide spoiler)]
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Somehow she feels she never figured out how to be like other people and how to lead a ‘normal� life like everyone else: “Faites comme les autres � that’s been my motto all my life. Faites comme les autres, damn you� I am trying so hard to be like you. I know I don’t succeed, but look how hard I try.�
She has a remarkable ability to read what people are thinking into their looks. She can go on for a few sentences about what a waiter thinks of her before a word is spoken. Unfortunately what she thinks they are thinking is always disparaging or reproachful of her. Her mental attitude is such that she is doomed from the start in just about any human interaction.
Another passage that tells us more about the terrible mental state she is in: “People talk about the happy life, but that’s the happy life when you don’t care any longer if you live or die.�
Mental illness? Depression? Alcoholism? What shelf should I put this under? Bleak? All in all, not a pretty story, but fascinating in its way, fast-paced, written in a stream-of-consciousness format. Its deep psychological insight kept my attention all the way through.
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The author (1890-1979) was born on the Caribbean island of Dominica but left to go to school in England when she was 16. She had three husbands and spent much of her life wandering in the European capitals. One husband was a con-man and ended up in prison. She wrote a half-dozen novels, most of which, Wikipedia tells us (like this one), portray a mistreated, dumped, rootless woman inhabiting cheap hotels.
Top picture of Paris in the 1930's from glamourdaze.com The Absinthe Drinkers by Edgar Degas Photo from vintag.es The author from repeatingislands.files.wordpress.com...more
Wikipedia hits the nail on the head for this novel by Trevor: “The characters in Trevor's work are typically marginalized members of society: childrenWikipedia hits the nail on the head for this novel by Trevor: “The characters in Trevor's work are typically marginalized members of society: children, the elderly, single middle-aged men and women, or the unhappily married. Those who cannot accept the reality of their lives create their own alternative worlds into which they retreat. A number of the stories use Gothic elements to explore the nature of evil and its connection to madness.�
The main character is a 47-year old widow in a small English town who is marrying a much younger man, a good-looking bit-part actor who appears across England in a TV ad. Her young-adult daughters are happy for her but her mother has reservations that she (unfortunately) keeps to herself.
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The actor is the protagonist in the story. Let’s make a list. We’ll start off mildly and work our way up the scale: he’s a cad, a con-man, a gigolo, a sponge, a user, a bigamist, a sociopath and maybe a psychopath. He uses women for money. (view spoiler)[ Sometimes he marries them, as he did with an elderly widow; sometimes he gets them pregnant, as he does with the third main character in the story, a young woman who has his now-12-year-old daughter. (hide spoiler)] He flits in and out of their lives causing more damage.
The actor seems to be multisexual. (Yes, that’s a word now.) (view spoiler)[ He’ll go with old ladies and young women and he has sex with men for money. At one point in the story he’s attracted to an underage girl. (hide spoiler)]He’s an equal-opportunity destroyer of lives. This is probably the most sexually-oriented novel of all of Trevor’s that I have read, but there is no joy in any of the sex. It all seems to be survival tactics on the actor’s part.
The latest widow’s honeymoon in Italy (view spoiler)[ (for which she paid) ends disastrously and she never sees him again. (hide spoiler)]Yet she still loves him and through various twists and turns, gets involved in the other people in his life. (Back to the title.) She watches the tragic downward spiral of the mother of the actor’s child; she even gets involved with his parents in an old folks� home.
It’s been said that it’s easy for us to see the flaws in other people’s lives but not in our own. We want to take a few friends and family members and shake them by the shoulders and say: “Stop drinking!� “Leave that abusive loser!� “Get off your butt and get a decent job.� “Pay some attention to your kids!� “Lose some weight and two-thirds of your health problems will go away.� To the widow we want to say “Cut loose from these people! It’s over. Get on with your life.� But then we would have no story.
There are other themes in the story. One is the widow’s overly-caring nature: “…her compassion made a victim of her.� As in many of Trevor’s works there’s a Catholic-Protestant theme. (view spoiler)[ The widow is Catholic, so the con-artist studies up on the religion to pretend he’s Catholic. Meanwhile the local priest is in love with her. (hide spoiler)] With all this trauma, the widow start losing her faith. She tells the priest her feelings now about God: “Is He my own particular illusion, a fog of comfort to be lost in? �.He’s just a wisp of nothing now.�
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I really enjoy Trevor’s work; this one, Other People’s Worlds is my tenth novel by him and I’ve also read a couple of collections of his short stories. A very good story.
Photo of Congleton, Cheshire from alamy.com The author from theaustralian.com.au
The range of good writing by Kingsley Amis (father of the living author, Martin) is amazing. He wrote poetry, short stories and novels that have been The range of good writing by Kingsley Amis (father of the living author, Martin) is amazing. He wrote poetry, short stories and novels that have been classified as travel, humor, alternate history, dystopian, science fiction and spy. His Lucky Jim is one of the funniest novels I have read.
The Green Man is horror, his Stephen King.
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The main character runs an historic British wayside inn, The Green Man. He lives there with his second wife and pre-teen age daughter from his first marriage. His elderly father also lives with them.
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The first level of horror is his behavior. Very early in the story his father dies and in the week following that death, he initiates an affair with his best friend’s wife and then proposes and carries out a 3-way with that woman and his wife.
He sees ghosts. He tears up the floorboards in the inn looking for a magic charm; he digs up a grave with his female friend at night. He travels to All Saints to do research on a mysterious former owner of the inn. He gets in a car accident. He’s a busy, obsessed guy.
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As the story progresses, we have stop-time sequences, a pact with the devil, shape changers, ghosts and a monster that may be after his daughter.
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And did I say the main character is an alcoholic? In fact, I’ll call this one of the “alcoholic novels,� like Under the Volcano by Malcom Lowry. Here are a couple of lines:
“I felt rather strung up, and was on a bottle of scotch a day, but this had been standard for twenty years.�
“…if I had not recently passed from being a notorious drunk to being a notorious drunk who had begun to see things…�
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Other passages I liked:
“They were all talking � but quietened down and stared into their drinks when they saw me, out of respect for the bereaved, or the insane.�
“At All Saints� everybody seems to tend not to be there so much of the time.�
“The librarian came to meet us with a demeanor that managed to tend to be haughty and deferential at the same time, like that of a West End shopwalker.�
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It’s a good story. There is humor in his daily activity, walking through the inn and chatting with staff and customers in his semi-stewed state. In contrast, his relationship with his wife, best male friend and son and daughter-in-law (visiting for the funeral) is tense due to his drinking and the ghost goings-on.
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Translated from the German, the basic plot is that our protagonist is a high class clown. He doesn't do circuses and children's parties, but union meeTranslated from the German, the basic plot is that our protagonist is a high class clown. He doesn't do circuses and children's parties, but union meetings and corporate events. (Must be a German thing!) One of his best shticks, he tells us, is "The Board Room."
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Our protagonist is also an alcoholic and a snotty rich youth who appears to be rebelling against mom and dad by wooing a Catholic girl. They have cut him off financially. But he eventually "loses her to Catholics" - his words. He doesn't see that his own self-centered alcoholic butt might be part of the problem.
By "Catholics" he means the tightly-knit culture of Catholics at this time in Germany. One could interpret this book as an anti-Catholic novel. By calling this work an anti-Catholic novel, I mean the protagonist dislikes, criticizes and makes fun of Catholic theology and religious customs, and even the dress of religious leaders. (I should say I grew up Catholic but I've moved on. I think the operative phrase is 'recovering Catholic,' lol.)
I'm not sure what the point was of the author writing this book in Germany in 1963 so soon after the horrible German persecution of people of another religious faith. I read several reviews on the web to try to figure this book out and with various conceptual acrobatics reviewers suggest that Boll is critiquing the Catholic culture and church hierarchy that dominated German social and cultural life then. I'm not so sure.
The geographer in me wants to say something about religion in Germany. In contemporary Germany, about 25% of the population is Catholic and about 25% Protestant. The largest group, 40% or so, is made up of those with no religious affiliation, especially concentrated in former East Germany. Catholics are concentrated in southern Germany and on the western edge of the country. Protestants tend to dominate in northern and central Germany. About 10% of the population is of other religions and the largest subgroup is Muslims, many from Turkey, who are mostly urban.
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Map above from Wikipedia. Predominant denominations in Germany as revealed by the 2011 Census using the self-identification question. Blue: Protestant plurality Green: Catholic plurality Red: Non-religious / unaffiliated plurality Darker shades indicate a majority between 50 and 75% while the darkest shades indicate a large majority of more than 75%.
Boll had good liberal creds and when he won the Nobel Prize (1972), the award was widely critiqued by conservatives in his own country.
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In a literary sense, it's a book with good characterization and it holds your attention despite the low level of plot.
Top photo of a West German clown mask on reddit.com The author (1917 - 1985) on a German stamp from alamy.com
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