More late evening readings

Madhuri’s short reviews on books by: Jon Ronson, Myriam Sagan, Isabella Bird, High Lasgarn, Catherine Cookson, Caitlin Moran, Claude Saks, Stan Jones, Ayya Khema, Thurston Clarke, Helena Merriman

Tunnel 29

by Helena Merriman

Touching, amazing, depressing, jubilant – this is by far the most in-depth look at the Berlin Wall I’ve ever come across. The depth of the insanity it takes for a country to imprison, spy on, torture, its own citizens – and then lie to itself and them about all of it – the very breadth of it all; in the end 275,000 Stasi staff and informants were spying on each other and everybody else – really makes you wonder.

Wonder what?

Well, like a label on a candle in a pic Harideva sent me – it was called WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK? And then underneath it said, Smells like existential crisis!

So it’s just about to that level – an unbelievableness of existence doing to itself some preposterous thing for no reason. Or at least it seems to me like no reason: why not spend all that money on nice food and music schools and concerts, and good housing, and parks for picnics? In the end of course the Wall cost so much money that the GDR was living mostly off selling political prisoners to West Berlin.

This is a really good book. It follows the story of a team of students who’d managed to get to West Berlin and then dug a tunnel to rescue 29 people. It’s the story of the spy who didn’t quite manage to betray them, though he tried. It’s the story of a myriad other tunnels, most of which were betrayed. And of a man at NBC in the States who managed clandestinely to film the digging of this particular tunnel and the escape.

The jubilation comes in when the damned wall comes down – and when hundreds of thousands of citizens rise up and say ENOUGH! And the whole so-called government comes tumbling down.

Weird factoid: when the Stasi headquarters were raided and searched, there was a room with hundreds of bottles containing scraps of cloth. WTF? When prisoners were being questioned, a scrap of cloth would be put in an armpit to absorb sweat. Then the scrap would be placed in a bottle, so that if that person ever needed to be tracked by a hound, the hound would know what she/he smelled like.

Cool, huh?

Really makes you wonder. How plastic we humans are – so biddable – and yet how fundamentally rebellious too.

This is a modern book about something in the past that is not so very far away, unfortunately.

And then, humans being what they are, there was a later movement of nostalgia for the old East – the free healthcare and sense of solidarity and so on.

Ah well.

Equator

A Journey

by Thurston Clarke

Fascinating, hairy, scary, fun. In the 80’s this travel writer – whose book about the San Andreas fault in California I had really enjoyed – travelled around the world on the equator, or as near to it as he could get, and wrote about it all – history, daily life, people, his own adventures. The first 2/3 is pretty much nightmarish – mosquitoes, jungle, penal colonies, bad governments, not to mention massacres not long past, deforestation, heat, moping and moroseness, sweat. Slave trades, vile and vain dictators, the whole bit. It gets lighter in Indonesia when we visit a prosperous matrilineal society, and then in the Marshall and Line islands where groups of grown men get attacks of the sillies and fall off their benches laughing, and people eat the most amazing (and revolting) concoctions of local meats with canned fruits and candy bars – so, a lobster clutching tootsie rolls in its claws.

There are the usual gut bugs, and lots of finely-observed interactions with people. I emerged feeling both hopeless about, and amused by, the human race.

I Give You My Life

The Autobiography of a Western Buddhist Nun

by Ayya Khema

Quite a story! In a brisk yet thorough way, we are led through the first 57 years of her life: cushy, loving childhood, escape from Germany to England on a child-transport ship, parents fled to Shanghai (the only place then accepting Jews). A bad year in Glasgow, then on to Shanghai herself. San Francisco! Marriage, kids, suburban life in San Diego. Escape that, for a commune in Mexico! Then on to South America, adventures on riverboats. Australia! Farming, Pakistan with family, then in her 50s discovers Buddhism, and thus begins an illustrious and benevolent life as a nun who founds convents and teaches worldwide; ending up back in Germany in a beautiful retreat place in the mountains.

The preachy bits weren’t too long. All about non-attachment, since her life was so changeable.

I learned a couple of interesting things: people taking bus rides over high Andean passes start sniffing and licking cut lemons as soon as they board. And then they don’t get altitude sickness (supposedly). I’ve read so many mountaineering books and I never heard that.

And: Buddhism says that when someone is dying, “we should recall to him all his good deeds, so that he can die with a peaceful and happy mind.” (Apparently on the deathbed people are often afflicted with remorse and regret.) If you don’t know them very well you should ask their family for details of their goodness! Also hold their hand and touch them so they don’t feel they are being abandoned. Remember that if they are unconscious they can still hear you, so only say things you want them to hear. And read aloud to them any relevant texts they have affinity with – of course she suggests Buddhist ones.

Frozen Sun

A Nathan Active Mystery

by Stan Jones

A really excellent detective story, set in an Inupiat village in Alaska. A young Native State Trooper searches for a missing ex-beauty queen, who has decamped to the darkness of the bars in Anchorage. As he realises he’s on the hunt for an extraordinary woman, his relationship with his own girlfriend goes through changes.

What I especially liked: my credulity was at no point strained! It was all believable! The story moved through the stark, beautiful scenery of the North, in a calm, processional manner, empathetic and insightful.

The author is a big looming-looking white fellow, an award-winning journalist and an environmentalist. Impressive how he manages the delicate fancy-dancing of getting his female characters to ring true.

This is one of a series, and the second one I’ve read. I found them in the book-trading booth up on the moors, and intend to look for more.

Inescapable Journey

A Spiritual Adventure

by Claude Saks

An earnest, brisk and spare, yet somehow rather inflated memoir by an alpha male ex-commodities trader (coffee) who went on a spiritual journey after having a heart attack at 39. He races expensively from NY to Egypt to Tibet and back again, attending channelings, initiations inside pyramids, and climbing up past 17,000 ft to get the poos and sit in a very special cave where an eminent dakini once lived. Lots of esoteric experiences and scintillating meditations, plus a visit to a sky burial place at a monastery, where vultures, crows, and wild dogs waited to tear, chomp, and lick up human remains. I thought this quite preferable to the western alternatives!

His marriage suffers and breaks and mends again, all of which he describes with the stiffness of the testosterone-gifted.

The action barrels along and the adventures are fairly enjoyable, and I did pick up a Taoist meditation technique here and there

How to Be a Woman

by Caitlin Moran

The funniest feminist book you’ll ever read. An extremely gritty look at extremely gritty things about being female: childbirth, pubic hair, abortion, high heels, fat, cosmetic surgery, the names we give our vulvas (it seems every family has its own, handed down through generations) and more.

The author is ferocious, fearless, brilliant, and hilarious. She just tells it like it is, and ventures practical and yet unconventional solutions and opinions.

Part memoir, part rant, we read of her growing up in a small council house stuffed with a large family, and then her coming-of-age in the late 80’s. Whenever I read about childhoods that took place long after mine did I feel a sort of disconnect – and there are a great many cultural references here that mean zilch to me – but that was a small consideration when the bulk of the book was both so valuable, and so entertaining.

I would recommend this book for men! If you want to know what some things about being female are really like! There is a hair-raising childbirth story, after which the author’s husband says, “It seems wildly unfair that, for US to reproduce, YOU have to go through all this… shit.”

This is not a spiritual goddess-embracing tome – not at all – and some might miss that refining level – but this is a raunchy woman, and her contribution helps to deepen our roots, and somehow spread our wings in the process.

Riley

by Catherine Cookson

This writer, with 94 other books to her credit, goes on amazing me. An excellent novel with originality and richness. It’s about a young and gifted actor who falls in love with a much older actress, and she with him. The characters are convincing and gracefully-drawn, the scope wide, the dramas satisfying. The book was controversial when published because of the much-older-woman thing. I especially was impressed by the presentation of the unusual child they had together. The action takes place in Newcastle, a little town called Fellburn, and Aberdeen.

Vet in a Storm

A sequel to Vet for All Seasons

by High Lasgarn

What a great vet book! I love vet books, and this one is excellent – the writing stately and unhurried and yet moving along well, the characters of human and creature expertly and effortlessly drawn.

The young vet in the Welsh Borders ends up escorting herds of Hereford cattle to faraway countries, via ship or plane, encountering storm and culture-shock and more funny characters.

Loved it!

A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains

by Isabella Bird

I was pretty much astounded by this book. Why had I never heard of it before? It was first published in 1879 and was a bestseller, securing for the author a reputation as an estimable travel writer.

Particularly I think I should have heard of it since the territories described here were stomping grounds of some of my own ancestors, at that very time. So it was touching to read of the natural glories, flora, fauna, mountains, sunrises and sunsets, weathers, that they must have seen, and read accounts of all the horseback riding they also did.

And what treasures there were, and how many have now been killed off – and when you read of the way the settlers behaved, grabbing whatever they could lay hands on and shooting each other up when sozzled… well, it’s no surprise things have unfolded as they have.

A vicar’s daughter from a cultured English family leaves home at 40 to travel: New Zealand, the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) and then California and onwards by rail to Colorado, where she is determined to go to a high mountain valley called Estes Park. Which she does, with huge difficulty, reach; and then proceeds to travel by horseback all over the mountains and nearby plains in all weathers, writing letters home to her sister in England the while. Those letters comprise the book.

Descriptions of characters and scenery and creatures are just superb, the prose is extremely readable even to our eyes, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The intrepid-ness of this woman is simply mind-boggling! And it’s great that she herself never felt in danger from the great many violent desperadoes she met, because there was a code of chivalry operating that actually worked. Instead, she was admired for her pluck.

Of course we read about tragedies – Indian, buffalo, women dying in childbirth, locust swarms despoiling crops. And about so many exquisite sunrises and sunsets we are glutted…

Searching for a Mustard Seed

One Young Widow’s Unconventional Story

by Myriam Sagan

An interesting and readable book. A young wife and mother – and poet and creative writing teacher – loses her Zen priest husband to an autoimmune disease. In clear, lyrical prose she details her quite earthy and pragmatic journey – passionate and human – through grief and into the arms of her very first, teenage love.

It all takes place in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with side trips to the coasts and a Zen monastery in Colorado (with which she is quite annoyed). There is also a surprising account of her own youthful near-death experience. Though esoterica comes in, it’s not primarily an esoteric book at all. Though she does report her dreams.

What I specially noticed: whatever ailments beset people they go on merrily eating pepperoni pizza, candy, ice cream, and cake. And, there is the most amazing amount of socialising – the people seem to be really supportive of each other, while families of them, whether Jewish or Mexican or whatever, and are constantly visiting. Maybe lots of people live like that, I don’t know!

Although the book is about grief, it leaves a lightsome feeling in the heart.

My favourite passage is where she and her daughter have acquired two kittens to make them feel better. A fluffy black one is named Orpheo.

“Orpheo adopted me immediately and followed me around like a dog. He seemed to know I was in terrible pain and would lie on my chest, staring at me encouragingly. In moments of strange fantasy, I would decide that Robert had come back in the body of a cat to comfort me, although on second thought, it seemed unlikely that my husband would have chosen to be a ‘fixed’ cat. I had once heard someone call cats ‘poultices’, and that is exactly what Orpheo was. He lay on my heart until it began to feel a bit better.”

Out of the Ordinary

True Tales of Everyday Craziness

by Jon Ronson

Dryly funny journalist’s regular columns in The Guardian about all sorts of strange things. I like his everyday honesty about his own inner workings – he doesn’t spare himself – and various weirdnesses of the world around him. A diverting and entertaining read.

All reviews previously posted on Facebook

Featured image thanks to Dewang Gupta via unsplash.com