Girl, Balancing (Helen Dunmore): This book, published in 2018 – a year after her death – is a collection of short stories. It came about as a result of a conversation with her son in November 2016 (when Dunmore was already very unwell) regarding the management of her literary estate after her death. She wondered about the possibility of putting together a number of short stories – she’d written a number (never published) over the previous 20 years or so – and, after her death, her family duly edited the collection (not a simple task). Most of the stories are written in the first person and I frequently found myself reading a story through the eyes of a woman – only to discover when the character was male… and vice versa! I found the resulting book rather lovely and often quite moving - invariably focussing on the individual and with wonderful observation and sense of curiosity.
South And West (Joan Didion): I first came across Joan Didion’s writing some five years ago and think that this is the fourth book of hers I’ve read. I’ve found her an utterly compelling writer and love reading her observations and insights (from the time she was in her late 20s until the present day). She’s now 85 years old and no longer the elegant beauty of her younger days, but she’s still writes brilliantly (I loved her ‘A Year of Magical Thinking’ book, published in 2005). I particularly like her essays. This book is compiled from her field notes and essays dating back to the 1970s of her journeying through America’s ‘deep south’ with her husband… and is quite remarkable for its apparent ‘power of prediction’ and ends with her recollections on her ‘home State’ of California, compiled in 1976. She writes with an insightful frankness about the things she observes and the people she meets (and what they say). Wonderful observations of an America of 50 years ago. I particularly liked these descriptions: of the South being a “time warp: the Civil war was yesterday, but the 1960s is spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago”; of being collected and taken to dinner by a successful southern businessman who “picked us up and there was the ubiquitous glass on the dashboard, the road glass, in this instance a martini; and of her walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, wearing her first pair of high-heeled shoes (they were 3” heels!). A fascinating book.
The Last Love Song (Tracy Daugherty): I’m a great admirer of Joan Didion’s writing (see above!)(well, her non-fiction, observational stuff anyway) and so was easily tempted to buy this hardback for £2.50 from ‘The Last Bookshop’ (published in 2015). The book describes itself as ‘A Biography of Joan Didion’ but, actually, it’s a RIDICULOUSLY long, obsessively-researched account of Didion’s life – which left me with the very firm belief that Daugherty himself was worryingly over-obsessed by Didion (it runs to more than 700 pages – including well over 100 pages of notes and references)! Although I admire her as a writer, I’m not sure I’d get on with her in ‘real life’ (fine chance!). The book is also something of a biography of her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and, to some degree, of their adopted daughter Quintana Roo Dunne who died in 2003. The memoir contains lots (and I means LOTS!) of background about Didion’s childhood, marriage and her development as a writer (including references to the frequently drug-induced Hollywood/political world of California in the 1960s/70s and Dunne’s/Didion’s worrying tendency of ‘farming out’ their daughter, when she young, to parents, housekeepers, PAs, friends to enable to sustain their own whirlwind lifestyles). An interesting, but ultimately irritating book. I found it excessively (and needlessly) long – with the author apparently determined to show off just how many people he’d interviewed and how many background books he’d read in producing this ‘masterpiece’. Frankly, I was pleased when I’d finished it!
Little Boy (Lawrence Ferlinghetti): I’m rather embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t come across Ferlinghetti before this (he’s an American writer, poet, painter, social activist, publisher – including many of the Beat poets - and bookseller – but you probably knew that!). This short book (some 190 pages long) was published early in 2019, when he was 99 (he’s still going strong, aged 100), and it constitutes something of a novel-cum-memoir – wisdom, ramblings and reflections. No chapters, just a flow of writing… and virtually all of it unpunctuated. Very much ‘stream of consciousness’ stuff and fascinating for the breadth of history and for the wide range of subjects covered. Despite its lack of punctuation, I found myself frequently reading it aloud – it’s quite poetic in character. A fascinating, rewarding (almost magical) book – despite, for me, the frustrations of not having a chapter end or even full stop at the end of a sentence to help determine when to stop reading!
That's it for 2019!
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