Tag: non-fiction

Book review: Sex and Lies by Leïla Slimani

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sex and lies book cover

I like essay collections but I tend to buy them at a faster rate than I read them. I fear they’re going to be less gripping than a novel or deal with serious subjects with less levity than fiction usually adds. Neither of which was a problem with Sex and Lies by Leïla Slimani (translated from French by Sophie Lewis).

I first heard about Slimani when her her novel Lullaby was published in English in 2018 and everyone was recommending it. I took one look at the synopsis and decided it was far too dark for me. That novel won Slimani the Prix Goncourt, making her the first Moroccan woman to do so. But it was actually her previous novel Adèle that triggered the conversations that led to Sex and Lies.

Adèle is about a woman living with sex addiction. When it came out in France, there was publicly expressed surprise that a Moroccan woman could have written on that topic, or indeed anything related to sex. Slimani didn’t set out to be shocking or controversial. She was after all following a centuries-old tradition of Arabic-authored literature that is frank about sex. But she acknowledges that in recent decades, things have changed on that front in her native country.

On her two-week Moroccan book tour for Adèle Slimani found that women and young people were keen to discuss sexual topics. But the conversations kept turning to the lack of freedom in modern Morocco. So she kept the conversations going, meeting people – mostly women – who were willing to be interviewed, albeit anonymously for the most part.

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Book review: Boy Friends by Michael Pedersen

boy friends book coverThe world is hardly lacking stories about male friendship but we rarely hear about those friendships in romantic or passionate language. There are plenty of examples of female friendships that are romanticized, passionate, even obsessive. But I think society pushes us to believe men don’t experience friendship like that. Michael Pedersen is here to show that society is wrong on that point.

He wrote Boy Friends: a Memoir of Joy, Grief and Male Friendship in the months immediately following the death of his best friend Scott. Scott isn’t actually named until the final line of the acknowledgements at the back of the book, because the entire memoir is written directly to him. Emotions don’t get much more intense than in a letter to a loved one who’s just died and this book certainly has intensity and passion. It also has humour and quiet contemplation, self-scrutiny and hope.

“More than missing dinner, eating dinner with you, sharing dishes and stories, cocooned in, is the thing I will miss most of all. Just me and you and scran and sincerity and silliness and smut…A scientist working with gorillas in the Congo has discovered that these great apes hum and tunefully exhale while eating, composing hoppity food songs. Via euphonic noise-making, and body percussion, we did the very same – composed mealtime melodies. Dinnertime has been an awful lot quieter since you left.”

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Book review: Occupation Diaries by Raja Shehadeh

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Occupation Diaries

Palestinian author, lawyer and human rights activist Raja Shehadeh has won prizes for his writing and his humanitarian work. Occupation Diaries is one of several non-fiction books he has written about Palestine through the lens of his own life. Born in Ramallah, he attended law school in the UK, then moved back to Ramallah to join his father’s law practice. To the best of my knowledge he still lives in Ramallah now and certainly that’s where he was living in 2012 when he published this book.

As the title suggests, Occupation Diaries is a series of diary entries covering the period December 2009 to December 2011. Shehadeh writes about his daily life but adds in historical and political detail.

In the opening entry, Shehadeh travels with a group of friends to a countryside spot called Wadi Qelt. As they spread out their picnic on a rock next to a picturesque pool, a large family arrives and settles on a rock on the opposite side of the water. Shehadeh’s group are Christians and/or foreigners dressed in Western clothes; the family group is local and Muslim, with the women in hijabs and long black skirts. Mutual suspicion quickly grows and there is a brief shouting match, though it is quickly defused.

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Book review: The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule by Angela Saini

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The Patriarchs book coverHow did men become dominant in human society? When did patriarchy begin? Was it inevitable or could the world have been different? Angela Saini looks at all the available evidence to answer these questions in her book The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule.

Having read (and loved) her previous books Inferior and Superior, I knew I was in safe hands as I embarked on this journey to discover how human inequality began. To begin with two of the few solidly definite answers Saini can provide: no, patriarchy was not inevitable and no, it has not always been the way most human societies are structured. Reaching those answers required sifting through centuries of research, a task at which Saini excels.

Societies that are matrilineal (where family lines are tracked through the mothers) and/or matrilocal (where women stay in their childhood homes to raise their own children – sometimes with husbands going to live with them, sometimes without co-parents ever co-habiting) have existed as far back as prehistory and still exist now in pockets all over the world. Matriliny and matrilocality don’t necessarily equal matriarchy but they do lend themselves to more equal society overall, in which women can hold positions of power, own property and receive education at parity with men.

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Book review: A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea: the Journey of Doaa Al Zamel by Melissa Fleming

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A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea book coverI’m a little unsure how to feel about this book. Melissa Fleming is a UNHCR bigwig and she wanted to draw attention to the plight of refugees by highlighting one true story. The one she chose is a doozy. A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea: the Journey of Doaa Al Zamel is an action-packed and informative tale. But right from the start I had some concerns.

Doaa Al Zamel had certainly been through the wringer by the time Fleming met her. She is Syrian, an educated young woman from a middle-class family. She had a place waiting for her at university in Damascus and took place in anti-government demonstrations during the Arab Spring, until the civil war made life intolerable in her home city Daraa.

The Al Zamel family fled to Egypt, where they were initially well looked after, before the sheer number of refugees turned the tide of public opinion and national policy. Doaa and her fiance – a fellow Syrian refugee she met in Egypt – tried to escape across the Mediterranean via people smugglers no less than three times before her final horrific journey ended in one of the worst shipwrecks in the Mediterranean. Doaa became a minor celebrity as the Italian press lauded her role in saving a baby.

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Book review: One More Croissant for the Road by Felicity Cloake

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One More Croissant for the Road book cpverIt’s a few months since I read One More Croissant for the Road by Felicity Cloake, but it had such a large effect on me that I felt I really should write a little more than the brief paragraph in my June reading round-up.

I’ve followed Cloake’s food writing for years. Her “How to cook the perfect…” column for the Guardian hits just the right practical, experimental note and her sense of humour makes for fun reading even when it’s not a recipe I’m likely to ever make. And her Instagram account is an excellent mixture of cookery, food markets, restaurants and her dog Wilf. It’s probably the account I pay most attention to that doesn’t belong to someone I know in actual real life.

This is the first of Cloake’s food-and-travel memoirs, based on her 2018 journey around France by bike and train. Her aim was to sample the best versions of her 21 favourite French foods, while keeping to a fairly tight schedule. She packed her panniers and jumped on the Eurostar with her bike. Over the next two months, she cycled a circle around France (roughly) – sometimes accompanied by friends, sometimes alone. And occasionally jumping on a train. France is a big country, after all.

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Book review: The Biscuit: the History of a Very British Indulgence by Lizzie Collingham

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The Biscuit book cover

I love a biscuit and I love well-written social history, so I was pretty keen to read The Biscuit: the History of a Very British Indulgence by Lizzie Collingham. It’s a fascinating book that had me frequently spouting interesting nuggets at anyone who happened to be around.

Collingham tracks the history of the biscuit from its Roman Empire beginnings as twice-baked bread, to being a culinary centrepiece for the super rich of the 17th century, to becoming a factory-made staple of every British household (and indeed much of the rest of the world). There are recipes dotted throughout, several of which I bookmarked.

The definition of biscuit is fairly wide here. In one chapter, Collingham explains how wafers and waffles can trace their origin to unleavened bread. In the first and second centuries CE, Jewish bakers began pouring unleavened batter into tongs to create thin wafers decorated with animals and flowers for Passover. Soon after, Christian bakers copied the idea but replaced the designs with their own religious imagery. As the practice spread of churches handing out wafers at Easter, over centuries they became a staple at bakeries, especially after sugar and spices spread to Europe and became part of the wafer recipes.

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Book review: Around the World in 80 Trains by Monisha Rajesh

Around the World in 80 Trains book coverThe book club at work picked Around the World in 80 Trains by Monisha Rajesh for our December meeting and I’m so glad I was encouraged to read it. It’s a travel memoir where (almost) all the travel is by train and was actually already on my TBR.

Rajesh has a chatty, witty, conversational writing style, coming across as very open and honest from the start, where she shares the discussions she and her fiance Jem had about the trip before deciding to travel together. This was Rajesh’s second epic train adventure, as she had previously travelled alone around India (also in 80 trains). But that was before she met Jem and in a country she knew at least a little. This time, most of the countries she was heading to would be new terrain for her, and of course it would be nice to share the adventure.

So the couple hop on the Eurostar armed with Eurail passes and a fairly detailed plan for travels through Asia and America – but for some reason almost no plan for Europe, which quickly causes them problems. Perhaps it was a simple misunderstanding, but Rajesh had failed to realise beforehand that Eurail passes only really save you money if you make a plan and stick to it. Otherwise, in most of Europe outside the UK, trains are cheap enough that you may as well pay as you go. With their attempt to be spontaneous, their journey gets off to a rocky start of fines and fees that makes her writing about Europe decidedly gloomy.

This was not a good start. I have never in my life travelled for more than three weeks at a time, but even the first time I took the train alone to the south of France, aged 18, I had done more research and enjoyed a smoother experience than this supposed travel writer. I certainly know not to go to a dry cleaner with my dirty clothes, but instead find a self-service laundry, if I want to have any money left.

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Book review: Fire: the Unexpurgated Diaries 1934–1937 by Anaïs Nin

Fire by Anais NinI spent six months reading Fire: the Unexpurgated Diaries 1934–1937 by Anaïs Nin, which is just one volume of Nin’s massive collection of diaries. I kept the chunky tome on my bedside table, reading a few pages at a time. It took me a while (clearly) to get into the flow of it and I am still torn as to whether I want to hunt down the several other books that would complete the story.

This is not volume one (it’s books 48–52 of the hundreds of handwritten diaries Nin left behind). It’s not even the first part of the most famous trilogy of Nin’s diaries, known as A Journal of Love. But a loose note in the front of my smart hardback copy confirms that I ordered this from a secondhand book dealer in 2011, so I clearly wanted this specific volume and can only speculate that I had read a recommendation somewhere. I had read a few collections of Nin’s short stories and one of her novels, so I knew that I liked her writing. And her life is certainly a fascinating one to me.

Nin wrote diaries from a young age and edited her adult diaries for print during her own lifetime. Initially published from 1966 onwards, the first public versions of these books were cut heavily, removing all mention of her husband Hugh Guiler and several other of her more prominent lovers; changing names and details of other characters in her life. After the deaths of both Guiler and Nin, her long-term partner Rupert Pole took on the mammoth task of editing a new set of “unexpurgated” diaries, restoring those deleted details. His preface states “nothing of importance has been deleted”.

Obviously, this being Nin, this book is very sexually explicit (though I suspect that’s not what was cut first time round). It’s also probably worth knowing before you read this that she struggles with depression at times. Her mood swings wildly, and she acknowledges this. She is also unpredictable beyond her state of mental health. At times Nin will do everything she can to keep everyone she loves happy, pushing herself so hard it seems inevitable she will snap. But at other times she seems wilfully cold and cruel, refusing to acknowledge how her actions must affect her beloveds.

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The years slip by, stealthily, on tiptoes; they whisper behind our back, making fun of us

The Sum of Our Days book coverThe Sum of Our Days
by Isabel Allende
translated from Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden

This is the third volume of memoir that Allende wrote, which is perhaps an odd place to jump into someone’s life. When I bought this I was attracted purely by her name, after having read and loved House of the Spirits. But it was made extra odd by the circumstances in which this book was written. Allende’s daughter Paula died in 1992. The following year she published her second memoir Paula, mostly written while Paula lay in a coma that they knew she probably wouldn’t wake up from. She started writing this third memoir after Paula’s death and addresses it directly to her daughter, updating her on the extended family as if she had moved away rather than died.

Allende talks candidly about her writing process, her relationships, her hopes and fears, along with all the details of her life. And Allende’s life is surprisingly eventful. Admittedly, this book covers 13 years but the big stuff all happens in the first couple of years following Paula’s death.

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