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I implored Anam not to end it brutally

I finished A Golden Age at 2am yesterday morning.

It's been a journey. Initially, I wasn't engaged. Still I'm frustrated by the fatalism of the main character Rehana, who loses a husband, her children, neighbours, a lover, and a home, some of them permanently. Tahmima Anam, the writer, observers her conflicting emotions acutely, but they don't feel like powerful emotions.

Some beautiful passages (this one too) began to win my over though, and as the book appeared to be coming to a tragic, perhaps sickening conclusion, I implored Anam not to end it brutally.

So, despite my conflicting feelings about A Golden Age, I may well read its sequel, The Good Muslim.

“When I handed it in I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life: to write senior theses. Or, to put it differently: to write books.”

There's an important message in Michael Lewis' address to new Princeton graduates, that success is somewhat arbitrary and it would be easy for those that achieve it, like many members of his audience will, to assume they deserve it.

For all I know, you may.

He says

But you'll be happier, and the world will be better off, if you at least pretend that you don't.

Lewis was lucky. He had supportive parents, an inspiring professor, he drifted into a job as an investment banker that give him the material for his first book Liar's Poker and one of the main theme's of his writing career; that even the 'experts', in finance or baseball (he wrote Moneyball), can't distinguish skill from luck. Back to that professor though, who inspired Lewis to write books...

...at Princeton, studying art history, I felt the first twinge of literary ambition. It happened while working on my senior thesis. My adviser was a truly gifted professor, an archaeologist named William Childs... God knows what Professor Childs actually thought of it, but he helped me to become engrossed. More than engrossed: obsessed. When I handed it in I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life: to write senior theses. Or, to put it differently: to write books.

That story concerns me because I wrote a dissertation at university. I even know what my tutor thought of it because it won a prize. It absorbed me. And I knew I wanted to write. But haven't written books despite a number of attempts. I find it very hard to make the kind of commitment I made then, when I was young, and had few other commitments.
 
Perhaps Lewis was lucky because he found his passion young, when he had time to make a career of it. Or perhaps I just haven't yet found what it is that I really want to write books about.

I don't want to be plugged so directly into the mind of someone experiencing misery

This is how Tahmima Anam describes two refugees in Calcutta:

And everywhere they went their memories argued for space, so that they forgot to cross the road when the lights were red, or over-milked their tea, or whispered into their newspapers as they scanned hungrily for news of home. Rehana found she could not bear to look at them; she was afraid she would see herself; she was afraid she wouldn't see herself; she wanted to be different and the same as them all at once.

The conflict in Bangladesh is second to the perpetual conflict in Rehana.

Some passages are exquisite. It's utterly convincing. But still I feel uninvolved in A Golden Age. The story unfolds relentlessly, it feels as though it might keep going even if I put the book down and I'm wondering, as the novel's quality becomes apparent, whether the fault lies in the writing, or in me. Perhaps I don't want to be plugged so directly into the mind of someone experiencing misery.

Preferring to play with words, to entertain

By coincidence I started a blog about writing books called Fahrenheit 23 a few days before Ray Bradbury, the author of a book about burning books called Fahrenheit 451, died. I haven't read Fahrenheit 451 and didn't finish The Martian Chronicles. The obituaries say he was a master of shorter formats, and the New York Times uses an extract from an autobiographical novel, Dandelion Wine, to demonstrate his child-like sense of wonder.

“Dandelion Wine” begins before dawn on the first day of summer. From a window, Douglas Spaulding, 12, looks out upon his town, “covered over with darkness and at ease in bed.” He has a task to perform. 

“One night each week he was allowed to leave his father, his mother, and his younger brother Tom asleep in their small house next door and run here, up the dark spiral stairs to his grandparents’ cupola,” Mr. Bradbury writes, “and in this sorcerer’s tower sleep with thunders and visions, to wake before the crystal jingle of milk bottles and perform his ritual magic.

“He stood at the open window in the dark, took a deep breath and exhaled. The streetlights, like candles on a black cake, went out. He exhaled again and again and the stars began to vanish.”
Now he begins to point his finger — “There, and there. Now over here, and here ...” — and lights come on, and the town begins to stir.

“Clock alarms tinkled faintly. The courthouse clock boomed. Birds leaped from trees like a net thrown by his hand, singing. Douglas, conducting an orchestra, pointed to the eastern sky.

“The sun began to rise.

“He folded his arms and smiled a magician’s smile. Yes, sir, he thought, everyone jumps, everyone runs when I yell. It’ll be a fine season.

“He gave the town a last snap of his fingers.

“Doors slammed open; people stepped out.

“Summer 1928 began.”

Bradbury didn't take himself seriously, and was sceptical of anyone that did, preferring to play with words, to entertain.

Instead of seeking protection in the law, he sought it by subterfuge

We haven't even got to Farmer Buckley's Exploding Underpants yet, but the book continues to surprise and delight.

Last night Elena and I read a chapter on the invention of a machine to manufacture gold paint, which actually uses brass. For centuries the paint had been manufactured in Nuremberg using a laborious and expensive process. Henry Bessemer, later famous for inventing a process for the mass production of steel,  invented a machine to take out most of the labour cost. Even more remarkable than the machine, were his tactics to keep its design a secret.

He realised that a patent would mean publishing the details of the design, and unscrupulous competitors would copy it and make more than enough money before they were closed down. Instead of seeking protection in the law, he sought it by subterfuge. He used different manufacturers for the parts of the machine and assembled it in three rooms. Crank shafts plunged through holes in the walls keeping it connected. The building that housed it had one door and one window. Nobody could copy it, because nobody knew how the whole machine worked.

An entrepreneurial friend of mine still uses these tactics, ordering parts from various manufacturers at home and in China, and assembling his invention in his windowless garage.

"I'm not shouting and screaming. I'm shouting"

Elena:

It was really funny today. Mum told Giuseppe to stop shouting and screaming and Giuseppe said: "I'm not shouting and screaming. I'm shouting."

Writing as crisp as the air there, which smelled of apples

I said Tahmima Anam's writing in A Golden Age seemed dispossessed yet almost three quarters of the way through the book, as Rehana flees Bangladesh, she describes the hill country of Assam as crisply as the air there, which smelled of apples:

Silchar, Shilliguri, Shillong - hill stations with names like rustled leaves, where clothes did not flap, exhausted, in the humidity, where the air was dry, the lips chapped, the hats possible. It smelled of home.

I'm wondering if Assam is the author's home, and whether the book is as good as they say it is, and I'm simply unprepared for it.

Back to the broadband

Farmer Buckley's Exploding Trousers is a compendium of stories from the fringes of science originally published in the New Scientist 'Histories' column. I'm reading it with Elena at bed time.

Often these mad scientists were ahead of their time. Last night we learned of the Theatrophone, a stereo broadcast system popular around the turn of the nineteenth century in European cities like Paris, London and Budapest.

Customers would dial in to listen to opera, sports and news reports, much as we use broadband now. Theatrophone subscriptions were incredibly expensive though, and radio made it redundant in the 1920's.

Stereo broadcasts wouldn't become the norm again until the FM networks of the 1960's.

The curse of the comic novel

Yesterday the Kindle Deal of the Day was The Graduate Student, a comic novel apparently based on the largely hallucinatory life of an anthropologist in Hollywood. It gets mixed reviews.

I think Catch-22 is the only comic novel I've read that is consistently ridiculous and resolutely real. Maybe comic fiction is the hardest to write.

Put a dollar in front of it

Tycoon:

I could see it was a big number, but it was only when you put a dollar in front of it that I realised how big.

An orange man in a box office. A little top.

An orange man in a box office. A little top. Refuge from the rain. A plastic seat on a circular ringside in front of a burger van and opposite a ten row terrace.

A fanfare, smoke, some light.

Three women skipping around the ring: a fluorescent blonde on legs like stilts, a white mini skirt following on an invisible brunette, her skin browned on the steppes of Hungary, a housewife, gurning and oozing from her skirt.

We see them again, the orange man as ring master, and illusionist. He sells ice cream in the interval.

The housewife swings on a trapeze, and in deference to artistes of old she clambers into a hanging position. We buy a burger from her.

A Russian balances some poles, not Poles, and drops them, and expertly rebalances them.

The blonde in ever-shortening skirts spins countless co-joined hula hoops until the momentum runs out, hides in the illusionist's boxes and emerges whole to clown with a clown while the Hungarians ready themselves for another anatomical and gymnastic display.

And then its over. No lights, no smoke, no orange man, no candy-floss, no refuge, just rain.

The predictably conflicting emotions of Rehana

I'm not warming to A Golden Age, but I am interested.

The conflict in Bangladesh is the backdrop to the conflict in the main character Rehana, whose emotions are rarely in harmony. When her in-laws, who had procured her children by court order, arrive from West Pakistan, she remembers how, when she first won the children back, she wanted to find bruises or some evidence they'd been mistreated. When the sister-in-law visits Rehana's home, she enjoys the deceit that next door rebels are planting guns in the garden. At the market her butcher addresses her in both their native languages, Urdu, now the language of Rehana's enemy, she reminds him there's a war on:

...Rehana could see that he was afraid of her, and she was pleased, and then ashamed to be pleased. She quickly pulled out a five-rupee note and turned, waving away the flies that had suddenly collected around her head.

There's tension, but it's claustrophobic inside Rehana's head and I find her conflicting emotions oddly predictable.

A quarter of the way through 'A Golden Age'

A quarter of the way through A Golden Age, and I'm beginning to feel involved. I want to know what happens to Rehana, a mother who has already lost her children once, and her children, who may be taken from her again, this time by civil war. But I don't really care yet.

Tahmima Anam's writing is a little detached. Things happen, but apart from the exotic names you wouldn't know they were happening in Bangladesh. She documents the back story, how Rehana's in-laws persuaded a court to give them custody of the children after the death of her husband. How Rehana won them back and built the house that seems to be central to the story remains a mystery.