A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life - Robert McGill

My second post-pandemic themed book, this is a dark look into the future where a plague can only be avoided by being "flatpacked"  --- preserved alive for future inflation (as in literally being inflated like a balloon), albeit without memories.  The main character, Regan, is thoroughly unlikeable, even to herself, and the flatpacks she orders to end her life lead her to an alternative she'd not imagined.  Is obliviousness a true escape from death?  

I felt the story was contrived and incomplete, posing questions without answers.  I can't say I recommend it though I think it will be sticking with me for awhile.

Published: 2022   Read: January 2023  Genre:Science Fiction

Upstate - James Wood

Picked this up in the library on the New listings shelf.  A quiet, thoughtful story of a father and his daughters dealing with the fall out of his long ago divorce from their now deceased mother.

Quotes:

[comment on nursing home] "It was all pretty good, or as good as it can be when one's whole life has been reduced to souvenirs of selfhood."

"Wel, religious is just someone else's definition of what is sacred"

"You're only as good as your suppliers, all the way down the chain.  Sort out who supplies you, find the people you can really trust, and that's half of the work done there." 

 

Published: 2018  Read: November 2018   Genre: fiction

The Girl Below - Bianca Zander

Did you ever start reading a book and thought, "I don't like this character" but kept reading to see if it got any better?  Well this one didn't.  It's a story about a self-indulgent, whining, wimpy, poor-me 30 something with flashbacks to falling into a air-raid shelter before being pulled out by her father.  She keeps screwing up her life; drink, drugs, men, insomnia.  Yes, she's depressed, I get it, but she does nothing to help it.  The reader's guide reveals its partly auto-biographical so there's a real person walking around.  A wasted read, don't bother.

Published:  2012  Read: June 2018  Genre: Fiction

H is for Hawk - Helen Macdonald

This is the best book I have read in a long, long time.  It's a memoir of an English woman studying at Cambridge.  Her father dies suddenly and to deal with her grief, she decides to train a goshawk, a large predatory bird.  She was fascinated with birds from an early age and had become a falconer and trained other hunting birds in the past.  The goshawk is considered difficult to train and she wanted a challenge.  She interweaves the writings on the subject of training a goshawk by the author of The Once and Future King, T. H. White with her journey through her grief accompanied by the goshawk.  
Her book is part memoir, part natural history lesson, part biography.  It sounds strange and odd and even unappealing.  Yet the way she describes the world after losing her father, her relationship with the goshawk, who she names "Mabel", and her analysis of T.H.White's book, The Goshawk, are remarkably rich fascinating and moving.

Some quotes I marked that illustrate her power of description.

"I thought about the book [The Goshawk] cautiously, ran my feelings over it the way you feel for a hurting tooth with your tongue."

"The hawk is on my fist.  Thirty ounces of death in a feathered jacket..."

[On her child-age reaction to reading a critical review of The Goshawk and T.H.White by the falconers' community]

"I was on the right side, was allowed to dislike this grown-up [the author] and consider him a fool.  It's painful to recall my relief on reading this [the review], founded as it was on a desperate misunderstanding about the size of the world.  I took comfort in the blithe superiority that is the refuge of the small."

"Now that Dad was gone I was starting to see how mortality was bound up in things like that cold, arc-lit sky.  How the world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might see them.  Once, twice.  Perhaps never again."

She isolates herself from other people and submerges in the hawk's world.  She is suffering and wants to be more hawk-like:  aloof, unmovable, independent.

" 'We are outsiders now, Mabel,' I say, and the thought is not unpleasant.  But I feel ashamed of my nation's reticence.  Its desire to keep walking, to move on, not to comment, not to interrogate, not to take any interest in something peculiar, unusual, in anything that isn't entirely normal."

She begins to realize she is slipping, depressed, unable to shake her sadness.

"We carry the lives we've imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost."

As she gets help and begins to see a way forward she reflects:

"There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things.  And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all.  You see that life will become a thing made of holes.  Absences.  Losses.  Things that were there and are no longer.  And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are."

The hawk has taught her things:

"Of all the lessons I've learned in my months with Mabel this is the greatest of all: that there is a world of things out there - rock and trees and ...all the things that ...fly.  They are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own view of the world.  In my time with Mabel I've learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not."

A wonderfully written, different and daring book.

Published: 2014  Read August 2015  Genre: Memoir

ISBN: 9 780802 12341

Same Time Next Week - Leo Gutkind

Sub-title: True stories of working through mental illness

Leo Gutkind is the editor of this group of essays from therapists and patients dealing with mental illness that I picked up from the library.  I want to see if I can take a class from Gutkind since he teaches at ASU, one motivation for reading this book.

I found the contrast of the therapist's viewpoint and the patients worthwhile insight and would recommend the book for anyone touched by mental disease.  One theme is clear; regardless of the therapy, therapist, patient or diagnosis, dealing with mental illness is most successful when compassion and human connection is the priority.

One therapist early in the book sums it up, saying:

"...some people benefit greatly from a good therapist; some from finding the right medication; some, from a seemingly spontaneous improvements; some, from a combination of the above.  Having a loving and responsive mother or significant parental figures seems to be preventive, having a loving and caring adult partner is restorative.  Progress seldom comes in a straight line: courage determination, and patience are required in large measure."

I learned from another writer that a mother having the flu during pregnancy is a risk for schizophrenia:

"...up to 14% of schizophrenia cases would not have occurred had influenza in early to mid-pregnancy been avoided, and the viruses and other infections in the first trimester of pregnancy could increase schizophrenia risk as much as 700%."

Some authors provided suggestions for connecting to someone suffering with mental illness that I thought was good advice for any interaction when trying to empathize:

"When John introduced himself by saying, 'I am not a schizophrenic,' I didn't confront the odd statement by saying, 'Are you concerned about being called a schizophrenic?'  Instead, I attempted to join him by saying, 'I am not a noun either.'  I wanted to relate rather than confront." [my emphasis added].

There was a story about the effects of exposure to violence, even on TV or video games is harming because the "images seem to remain long active in the brain:

"...watching horror films lead to symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in many young persons.  Many of these symptoms can linger for decades."

One of the last stories makes a meaningful point:

"every time we fall in love or make a friend, hold someone tight or choose a muffin, get pregnant or buy new underwear, paint a room or eat a sandwich; every choice we make to stay, to treat ourselves as valuable people, to connect more and more with this thing that can end only in loss, in death, loneliness, holey underwear or shit; every time we choose connection, we are risking loss.  But every time we do not chose connection, we are ensuring it."


Published:     Read: June-July 2015  Genre: Non-fiction

ISBN:9 781937 163198

Adeline - Norah Vincent

Sub-title: A Novel of Virginia Woolf

This is the story of the last years of writer Viriginia Woolf's life before her suicide at 41 by drowning. The author, Nora Vincent, was unknown to me though when I researched after finishing the book, I remember hearing of her early work, "Self Made Man" where she had posed as  a man for 18 months in an immersion journalism style of research.

Her research for this book appears extensive as she weaves the lives of Virginia, who's given first name was Adeline, and her Bloomsbury group of intellectuals of the late 1800's into an interpretation of how and why Woolf ended her own life.

I had read and applauded Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of Her Own years ago but had never delved into her other books.  This story makes me want to read more of her writing to see what she produced from a tortured mind.  

Vincent's prose is lyrical, written I'm sure with a thesaurus by her side.  It can be distracting admiring the writing without remembering the flow of the story but not to where I quit reading.  I knew what happened in the end but how the characters got there and what they thought and felt kept me engaged. 

The relationship between Virginia and her former child self, who she refers to by her given first name, Adeline, is a technique that gets a little awkward at points, over-stressing the impact of childhood abuse on the future mood swings of the adult Virginia.  

I enjoyed the book for the beautiful use of words, the portrayal of this famous group of people through believable dialogue and descriptions, and the admiration of the genius of Virginia Woolf.

A couple quotes: 

[Virginia explaining to her husband her thoughts on writing]

"She [Virginia] said that perhaps every writer is meant to express only one idea, one mood, one version of what this strange human experience is about, and that he spends his life and work repeating it over and over.  If he is fortunate, once or twice he gets it absolutely right."

[Virginia contemplating suicide and bemoaning the difficulty of death]

"When a fetus comes alive in the womb," she'd asked, "what tells its heart to start beating?"..."and when it does begin," she'd added..."why then?  Why exactly then and not a moment before or after?" ... "And why cannot death be a painless as that?  Or as timely?  The music simply ending, as it began, without struggle, without knowledge, without thought.  Why must the life be shaken out of us when it has been so softly, so smoothly put in?"

Published: 2015  Read: May 2015  Genre: Biographical fiction

ISBN:  9 780 544 470200