User Profile

After starting and failing to read to an end five different fiction books, seven in total (lockdown, work stress, general restlessness), I took a stab at this one. Admittedly, it is just over 100 pages, but I started at 8am and by 12 I was finished, with a break in between for breakfast.

A family escaped from the DDR. The mum and two teenage kids are waiting for the dad to come back from a business trip - ready to celebrate his promotion with a mussel feast. The time passes, but the dad does't arrive - and the more he's late, the more we learn about him; the more we learn about him the less we like him: tyrannical, unsympathetic, arrogant, abusive, even violent.

At breakfast, T and I argued over how to interpret it. She remembered reading it's supposed to be a critique of the West, or the East, or an allegory, East vs West. Judging by the author's quote on the publisher's site, it is the story of a revolution: ‘I wrote this book in August 1989, just before the Fall of the Berlin Wall. I wanted to understand how revolutions start. It seemed logical to use the figure of a tyrannical father and turn the story into a German family saga.’ It's also 'just' a family portrait: convincing, detailed, heart-breaking.

I loved this one. A novel that reads like a memoir (I thought it was), about a woman taking care of the dog of a friend who has killed himself. On the one hand there is the love story between her and the dog, the getting to know and trust each other, their growing dependent on one another. On the other, the one between her and the dead friend: not quite a romance, but affection, admiration, respect, sexual tension.

Grief, love relationship and writing are the three main themes. As she overhears at the memorial, her friend is now another dead straight white man, a womanizing and non PC one at that. It is implied that one of the reasons he killed himself is that he felt the chasm between him and today's intellectual climate had grown too wide: in a world where people want to read 'politically constructive' stories from 'the oppressed', what place is there for the historical writer - relatively privileged, often morally reprehensible, not too concerned about offending people? It could be a very annoying line of thinking, but because the narrator herself is not fully on board (a progressive woman, concerned about who should she write about and for, aware of her privilege...) it is easier to listen to. I'm not making much sense, and maybe it doesn't matter, I think the main reason I liked the book is her soothing tone, erudite but full of humor and, above all, love and sadness for the loss of two loves.

Not really a mystery novel, but a sort of choral intrigue. The story revolves around a financial fraud, a Ponzi scheme to be precise, orchestrated by Jonathan Alkaitis, who took money from investors and used it to maintain the appeareance of high returns while actually not investing in anything, which I believe is the definition of a Ponzi scheme. The book explores the perspective of many of those involved: large, rich investors, smaller, midlle-class investors, complicit colleagues, their wives and husbands, Alkaitis himself and, at the centre of all, Vincent, Alkaitis pretend trophy wife, a charming but-lost young woman that comes dangerously close to a stereotype (perhaps my main criticism of the book). The novel is well written and does a very good job of keeping you hooked, weaving together all the different threads to build a very complex picture but without resulting difficult to follow. It has also a certain depth, in that it explores the question of responsibility, in the sense that all the characters are responsible for something: doing the wrong thing, not doing the right thing, pretend not to know what they are doing, getting someone else to do the wrong thing...

The book's narrator is a single mum, abandoned by her husband but nevertheless held responsible for wanting a divorce, for not welcoming here ex's wishes to father their daughter without contributing to supporting her or taking care of her. It is a very moving portrait because neither the mum nor the daughter correspond to ideal types. The mum is exhausted, seeks comfort in casual sex and drunkenness, sometimes cannot find the force to get out of bed and yells at her kid for having needs. Her daughter ( I am not sure we learn her name?) is often grumpy, clearly distressed by the rough break up if her family, wets herself, craves time with her friends' parents who can offer more stability. A cute, imperfect, realistic duo.

If single mothers and children are often portrayed in very stark terms (victims/irresponsible/sluts - victims, innocent, helpless), the book restitutes them complexity through details: the joy of jointly splashing into rain puddles, irascible hang over mornings, the changing of peed-on sheets in the middle of the night, the relatable cruelty of refusing to change peed-on sheets in the middle of the night.

After transitioning, Thomas undergoes a new gender-identity crisis, as he realizes that some of the 'masculine' behaviors he adopted as a lesbian and/or non-binary person take on different meanings, and have different effects, now that he passes as a man. Many of these behaviours used to help him to demonstrate competence and assertiveness, which are things he no longer needs to work as hard for. In other words, some things that seem integral part of the 'man package' do not appeal to him at all.

Encouraged by his partner, Thomas decide to explore this dark side of masculinity by tackling it heads on, and signing up for a charity boxing event. This environment interestingly brings together two toxic sides of masculinity: the physical violence for which certain working-class men of colour are trained (Tyson towering over the book as a tragic example), and the social violence of the Wall Street type that most often joins this kind of scheme, taking clients to boxing gyms the same way in the 1980s they would have taken them to do coke (sic).

The account of his experience is interspersed with bits of information from social science books and interviews with experts on masculinity, which I didn't think added much. For me, the strength of the book lies in Thomas' desire to engage and see the humanity and tenderness in the macho men he encounters.

For background, like many readers of this book, I'm a great fan of Josie Long as a comedian. I find her standup funny, and her politics good and genuine. I first saw her performing around 2014 at a benefit show for an anti-eviction campaign in East London, and have nurtured my friend crush ever since. Contrary to many celebrities and comedians' books, this is the book of someone who approaches writing as its own thing, and aspires to be taken at face value as a writer. By which I mean: the stories here are not merely a different format for her standup, which is a brave thing to do. They allow readers to see a different (but coherent) side of her.

Some of the stories read like well-observed vignettes. I'm not sure if that was intentional, or if maybe they needed some more developing to have a full narrative arch. The fact that I'm not sure is probably not a good sign. At several points, though, the book 'changes gear', offering some truly excellent stories. Some of my favourites:

2021, 20/21 - A survivor of an abusive relationship is forced to interact with her abuser, who has moved in her neighborhood with his family. Twenty years after the break-up, she can finally see the abuse for what it was, but still feels the irresistible urge to know what is going on in his life, and that of his new partner. The not-quite-irrational anxiety at the the thought she may meet him at any point, the conflicting feelings of hoping his new relationship doesn't follow the same pattern, but also not wishing him to be happy... Poets rise - A black-mirror-esque story about a woman working for a surveillance / sabotage agency that targets left-wing people, trying to break down their spirit to prevent them to engage in activism. (the next time I forget my phone code, I'll know who to blame). Poets rise again - A funny-sad story about scammers getting scammed, that is mostly about how class-based societies are the real scam. (Only now do I notice these two stories form a series).

One thing for which you cannot fault this book is not making its point clear: wealth inequalities are bad for society, and are especially outrageous when one considers the differences between the 1% and everyone else.

Each chapter looks at a different facet of the problem: education, taxes, health. Some are better than others, presumably reflecting Dorling's greater expertise and experience in some of these fields (for example, he's especially passionate and knowledgeable about education). There are a lot of figures and fun facts supporting the argument, and I wish I could impress them into my memory for future conversations, mixed in with some anecdotes and tirades that verge on the simplistic. I thought it was a great read, but maybe an editor could have cut it by ca 30%, removing secondary points and repetitions to turn it into a really sharp pamphlet that could be given also to people who are not already convinced.

Some of those useful numbers and facts (even considering that the book is from 2014): * To qualify to be a member of the top 1% in the UK, you need a total household income, before tax, of about £160,000 a year - making it into the top 1 per cent in the US requires an annual income of at least $394,000. This is higher than the £160,000 in the UK because inequality in the US is greater. Getting into the top 10 per cent in the US requires an annual salary of at least $114,000 – more similar to that required to enter the UK top 10 per cent, but a little higher in real term. The average annual UK salary in 2013 was £24,596; but for the top 1 per cent their mean average was fifteen times as much: an average take-home income of £368,940.15 That is more than twice as much as the least well-off of the 1% received.

• An investigation by the general practice magazine Pulse found that one in five of the GPs who sit on the boards of England’s 211 Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) – the boards that decide how NHS budgets are spent locally – also had a stake in a private healthcare firm that was providing services to their own CCG.21

• Among the 1%, 80% of those who are rich because of earnings (as opposed to inheritance) are men

• When people try to argue that rich people are doing their share by paying more taxes, it is worth noting that the government currently collects only 26 per cent of its revenue through direct income tax. Value Added Tax and National Insurance account for 35 per cent of government revenue (which weigh more heavily on lower incomes).

• On meritocracy, or rather (not unrelatedly), the extent of Boris' ignorance: <>

Set in 1986, this is the non-love story between an aging 'queen' (only known by her stage name, the Queen of the Corner) and a young Marxist rebel, Carlos. She comes from a working-class background, has survived with sex-work until another queen taught her to embroid for wealthy ladies. Now takes advantage of the general misery to get sex out of poor men in need of money, food, or shelter during the curfew. We don't learn much about Carlos, except that he genuinely comes to care for the queen, but at the same time is taking advantage of her, using her as cover-up for as he's part of a plot to assassinate Pinochet (the book is set against the backdrop of a real ambush, that left seven bodyguards dead while Pinochet managed to drive back to his villa in Cajon del Maipo). Like the queen, the book is delightfully camp, poetic and smutty, dreaming and political. I really loved it.

It must be said that the representation of cis-women is not great, verging on sexist: going from the annoying, farcically entitled wives of the military hierarchies, to the gossipy and simple-minded women from the neighbourhood.