Reviews and Comments

(I read this book in the Italian translation by Lorenzo Flabby). In this memoir, Annie Ernaux focuses on two years in her life - starting just before her 18th birthday, in the France of the 1950's. Her struggles to fit in, her tormented enconters wih sex, passion and abuse, her eating disorder, her becoming aware of her class. After reading some reviews that characterised the book as 'shockingly honest' I was a bit surprised: if anything, what is shocking is the extent to which her experiences resonate for me with the ones of many women I know. The pressure to 'be cool' before one understands what that means oneself, the conundrum that casts every woman as either slut or nun, the aura that, in many circumstances, still surrounds the act of 'losing one's virginity' (aargh). As Ernaux spells out in the book, the point of writing the story is that some readers might find it familiar.

The story proceeds hesitantly, because the author has to reconstruct it through objects, photos, field visits and, above all, long immersion in her memory. Some books represent, and some books explore, and this one belongs to the latter category (and openly so, since this sentence is an almost direct quotation).

On another level, the book is also a reflection on the impossibility to recount the past. Or, rather, on the inevitable gap that opens up between the past as we lived it, and the version of it that we tell. And, therefore, between 'us as we were', and 'us as we are'. Ernaux formulates this reflection in plain words, in a sort of dialogue with the reader: should I use the third person when I write about my 19yo self? Should you trust what I say? What am I making up to fill the gaps? I lately grew mildly allergic to this sort of literary meta-meditation on the power of literature, but I'm positive that it's a phase, and I still could appreciate the fact that it was sensibly done.

hese 10 short stories add up, sketching the life of Yunior, his family, and a few other recurring characters. The central theme is the experience of migrants, in particular Dominicans, both at home and in the States. The various narrators all come from this perspective, and seem to leave in a state of discomfort and watchfulness, as if they were expecting something (bad) to happen to them. Longing is also something they do a lot of, whether for their fathers, a woman, a friend, or maybe a home place.

My favourite stories are Drown, and Ysrael. Not so relevant, but for some reason I really loved the epigraph to the book, by Gustavo Perez Firmat, which stuck with me:

“The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you.

My subject: how to explain to you that I don't belong to English though I belong nowhere else”

A classic I had read before, when I knew even less about colonialism, It's a fantastic book, pointing its fingers at the patriarchy and colonialism in one gesture, and managing to be more insightful and original of much of the contemporary pop postcolonial stuff. There are no good guys in the story, with most characters being troubled, grotesque and unhappy. History is not being kind to anyone in the book, not even the privileged white man (Rochester), who is tricked into marriage and clearly would not have come to Jamaica, if he has been free to choose. And yet there are oppressors and there are oppressed, and then those oppressed by the oppressed - still in no way purer or 'nicer' than the other. The writing sometimes verges on the obscure, but given that madness is a theme, it seems fitting. It also does something very clever with its orientalising of both the Carabbeans and the UK - each turned into a (magic, sinister) place that doesn't really exist, by the fantasy of Rochester and Antoinette, respectively.

White Houses is the first-person fictional biography of Lorena Hickok, Eleanor Roosevelt's lover. The book interweaves several narrative strands - Eleanor's childhood and youth, her relationship with Eleanor and the time after Franklin Roosevelt's death - the point in time from which the story is told. The three strands catch up with one another, but not quite: a certain lack of coherence is perhaps the book's major flaw. Some characters come and go and it's not clear who they are or why they matter, some bits of the story seem 'thrown in' and don't quite fit with the rest...especially Hick's time in a moving circus appears as a sort of squalid dream in retrospect.

Nevertheless, I liked the book a lot. I remain of the opinion that Amy Bloom is a terrific writer and is great at writing about love, particularly between women. She describes the affection, the reckless passion, the friendship, the irritation, the longing...The early chapter about Hick and Eleanor's road trip is one of the most romantic, sexiest portrait of blooming love I have read.

Another interesting aspect of the book was the description of Franklin's presidential "court", a whirlpool of skillfully sketched characters: Franklin - a charming womaniser in spite of his illness, Eleanor, principled and stern, secretaries and assistants, in love or simply devote to their bosses, closeted politicians and greedy cousins. All living under the same roof, hiding, knowing, tolerating - I read a Goodreads review complaining that the White House sounds like a suburban home in Bloom's telling, but I think that's what is terrific. It actually sounds like a whole American suburb out of a convoluted TV series - a mix of House of Cards and Desperate Housewives.

It is no secret that self-help books are my guilty pleasure, and in this respect I felt a sense of kinship with Oliver: he too loves a new to-do list managing system, and is not above the occasional descent into mindfulness, yet holds on to scientific reasoning to mantain a sense of mild superiority. Snap. Also, appreciates dad's jokes.

The book it' s packed with fun facts, such as the news that Thoreau paid someone to come and do his laundry while in his Walden "exile".

It is also a source of references that will make you sound smarter at dinner parties, when you'll be able to casually bring up the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) - the human tendency to assume that behaviours are influenced by personality more than by circumstances, for everyone but ourselves (when we lose our tempere is because the situation is unbearable, when others do is because they are neurotic). Or, even better, the Ben Franklin Effect, which refers to the fact that people will like you more after doing you a favour than they will do after receiving one. Perhaps because we dislike feeling in debt, or because we want to align our thoughts to our actions.

Perhaps the most mind-boggling study reported is the one explaining why, statistically, you are likely to have less friends than your friends, be less in shape than the people you see at the gym, and have dated less than your dates (‘Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do'). The reason being that you are more likely to be friends with people with many friends than with solitary wolfes, encounter gym enthusiasts rather than couch potatoes at the gym, etc.

I liked the book's emphasis on common-sense solutions rather than life philosophies. Here are my facourite examples:

The AA urges its members to memorise the acronym HALT: ‘never too hungry, never too angry, never too lonely, never too tired’, because these are the conditions that can trigger a relapse - and generally make us all feel like something is deeply wrong

The science of to--do lists, condensed in 3 principles, according to Burkeman:

Don’t use one list for multiple purposes (eg for general reminders and for things to do right now)Use ‘will-do’, not ‘to-do’ lists (keep your list realistic and do everything on it)The daily list should be a ‘closed list’ (add to it only if it' absolutely necessary)

The best way to time plan (assuming time planning is helpful or necessary in the first place), is to base estimates on past experiences, not on rational calculations, since projects ALWAYS overrun.

And here is a random, beautiful quote by Leonard Cohen that I mean to remember: ‘Forget your perfect offering/There’s a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.’

Help! is not a reading that will leave you feeling whole or transformed - I'd go as far as to say that it's the perfect bathroom book, in a positive way, but then again, I doubt Oliver was under the illusion of writing the new War and Peace.

Ultimately, the most useful piece of advice for me is probably this one:’(...) we don’t need new information on how to be happy anywhere near as much as we need a dose of perspective. Advice on how to get more done, feel better, find a soulmate, etcetera, can be useful, but it subtly reinforces the notion that achieving such goals is overwhelmingly important, which fuels stress. Sometimes it’s more helpful to be jolted into remembering that we’d be OK without those things, and that most things we worry about seem absurd a few weeks later.’

These stories are quite sad, ranging from the melancholic to there is perhaps a dim light at the end of the tunnel to straight up devastating. Domestic violence, tumoultous parents-daughter relations, loaded with guilt, resentment and love. The first stories are set in Nigeria, the other in the States.

It is one of my current personal reading struggles that attempts at reading women of colour in the name of diversity always lead me back to US educated ones, generally who have been to the Iowa writing workshop or Standford, before taking on a teaching position at some prestigious institution. So how diversity do we get in this category? Okaparanto is no exception here but at least it seems to me that her main characters (presumably some form of herself) have gone through different experiences - and overall it does not feels like reading a story I already know. Also, she is at least a bit queer and her description of the challenges for Nigerian lesbians come across as convincing and nuanced.

Diversity goals aside, the writing is convincing and her women character are strong if broken.

America, Grace and Shelter are perhaps my favourites.

Gone Went Gone is a very Berlin book, in many respects: it is charming, a bit clunky, principled and with a German depth to it. Well, I realise most people would not associate these qualities with Berlin, but I do.

When I say clunky, I mean its style and plot. It isn't as perfectly-engineered and polished as ‘Iowa-literature’. Some paragraphs seem to reoccur twice, unintentionally. Not everything ties together perfectly, characters come and go and do not necessarily have a clear narrative purpose. Above all, there isn't really a narrative arch, though I don't mean it as a flaw. But it isn't clunky at all when it comes to what I interpret as an open reflection on the refugee crisis and our role as cynical, well-fed onlookers.

Richard, the protagonist, is a former university professor, a bit self-absorbed, who is trying to find a new purpose in life now that he is retired, his wife died and his lover has gone. To my mind, Erpenbeck manages to paint his character with a great sense of measure: he starts off being just as 'good' as I assume most of the readers are (I read some reviews who seemed to think he was the embodiment of selfishness, but actually he is arguably more engaged than the average person) and evolves to be just a bit better. What I find compelling about this delicate evolution is that it avoids falling into the simplistic view that if we only we were more loving on an individual level we could save the world, while suggesting that there are things we could do. Open our houses won't solve the problem, but will save some people from sleeping on the street as well as restore some humanity in our own world.

Another thing that made the book very strong is that it shows that it is based on research and conversations with refugees. It doesn't claim to speak from their perspective (hence Richard), the richness of details makes the stories of every migrant come to life.