Expats Writing: On the Prowl in Africa

Norman Rush: Mating, 1991.

This is an interesting book about cultural differences, white privilege and domination in post-colonial Africa, but it’s also a love story told from the point of view of a young(ish) brainbox of a female anthropologist. She is completely insufferable and elitist, and has built up a cynical and manipulative shell around her heart, but she can also be very funny and at times quite vulnerable and oddly innocent.

The narrator’s voice is so loud and unique in all its contradictions and complexities, that it’s hard to believe it was written by a man in his late fifties – closer to the age of the narrator’s paramour in the story. It’s an ambitious endeavour – but works well.

The unnamed narrator finds herself somewhat adrift – she has had to abandon her Ph.D., her relationships and friendships are unfulfilling, she does not want to return to the US, she feels twice as intelligent as most of the people she meets (fluent in several languages, well-read, able to quote literature and philosophy at the drop of a hat), and she has quite strong opinions on the types of people she meets in Botswana.

There are more whites in Africa than you might expect, and more in Botswana than most places in Africa… Parliament works and the courts are decent, so the West is hot to help with development projects, so white experts pile in. Botswana has almost the last hunter-gatherers anywhere, so you have anthropologists like me underfoot. From South Africa you get fugitive white and black politicals… And then Botswana is a geographical receptacle for civil service Brits excessed as decolonisation moved ever southward. These are people who are forever structurally maladapted to living in England. This is their last perch in Africa…

The novel is set in the 1980s, so South Africa is still under the apartheid regime, and the Boers and spies play a part in the narrative. The narrator’s thoughts about love and sex are equally unfiltered:

Love is strenuous. Pursuing someone is strenuous… Of course it would be so much easier to play from the male side. They never go after love qua love, ever. They go after women. And for men love is the distillate or description of whatever happened with each woman that was not actually painful in feeling-tone… I don’t know if getting love out of a man is more of a feat of strength now than it used to be or not, except that I do: it is. It’s hideous. It’s an ordeal beyond speech.

Despite her cynical pronouncements about love, she has not quite lost hope of finding a worthy partner – and the one she has decided is worth pursuing is Nelson Denoon, a fellow academic on the cusp of getting divorced, who has established a utopian female-led community called Tsau somewhere in the desert. She embarks upon a somewhat dangerous solo crossing of the desert to find this closed community and is not above resorting to all sorts of lies and subterfuge to be allowed to stay in the community and win this man over.

I had to realize that the male idea of successful love is to get a woman into a state of secure dependency which the male can renew by a touch or pat or gesture now and then while he reserves his major attention for his work in the world or the contemplation of the various forms of surrogate combat men find so transfixing… Equilibrium or perfect mating will come when the male is convinced he is giving less than he feels is really required to maintain dependency and the woman feels she is getting more from him than her servile displays should merit.

My utopia is equal love, equal love between people of equal value… Why is it so difficult? Assortative mating shows there has to be some drive in nature to bring equals together in the toils of love, so why even in the most enlightened and beautifully launched unions are we afraid we hear the master-slave relationship moving its slow thighs somewhere in the vicinity?

The bulk of the book is set in Tsau, which of course is not as idyllic a community as it describes itself (and Nelson believes it to be), and covers her burgeoning relationship with Nelson. The contrast between ideal and reality is present in both their community and in their love affair. I did feel this part of the book got a little bogged down in detail and in the lengthy conversations between the two main protagonists (about right versus left-wing politics and economics and all sorts of topics). Nevertheless, I loved the dry asides – and there were bound to be some on virtually every page:

Even when a woman gets her own order authorized, like Mother Teresa, it’s women who end up doing the cooking and cleaning and nursing and little detachments of men who get to do the fun proselyitzing.

This was an example of not knowing you were having a peak experience at the time you were having it and mistakenly assuming that it was the forerunner of many equal experiences waiting for you onward in life.

…if I died there, no one in his right mind would regard it as a tragedy. I would be in the category of an aerialist falling to her death. Or I would be entitled to the species of commiseration people get who show up at parties on crutches but who got injured skiing at Gstaad… It would be sad but not that sad.

My bet is that, all things considered, no woman would have voted to have the washhouse, the stores house, the central kitchen and the Sekopololo offices located at the top end of a long though gentle ramp. We inhabit male outcomes.

The book was more interesting when it dealt with the tensions and subtle shifts in power within Tsau, and issues of race and gender. Despite the narrator’s understanding of Setswana language and culture (and often trying to educate Nelson about it), most of the couple’s references remain resolutely Eurocentric. The author did spend five years in Botswana, but you know my feelings about ‘it’s not the length, it’s the intensity’ of experience, as I know many expats who spent over twenty years in a place and still didn’t really understand the culture.

I liked the fact that Norman Rush did not feel the need to dumb down his ideas or his prose – this is a very dense piece of work, full of historical and political detail, full of literary and philosophical allusions. It also contains very frank descriptions of sex – although the true seduction here is of two minds in conversation. It feels like a novel in which the author has, just like his creation, poured out the best of himself – everything he had.

The Kalahari Desert, from müvTravel

This unusual book won’t be for everyone: it has an overabundance of style and content. I suppose the best way to think about it is that the narrator is making field notes – that indispensable element in the anthropologist’s toolkit, which is at once an observation of the external – the people around you, the rites and habits and patterns – but also of the internal: how you interact with your surroundings and how you are changed by what you observe. Rush seems to adopt the ‘impressionist’ style of ethnography, i.e. holding back on his own selection and interpretation, and simply giving us the unvarnished writings of the narrator, leaving it to the reader to make of it what they would. I understand why he does that, but I do wish he could have exercised some editing on occasion.

I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.

Expats Writing: Mischa Berlinski’s Fieldwork

After complaining that all of the expat novels I read this month were not anthropological studies (or rather, not exactly complaining, but feeling they were lacking a sense of curiosity about the people they were living amongst), I finally read a novel that is about an anthropologist in the field who ‘goes native’ (i.e. gets too close, too involved and is no longer able to maintain any objectivity). Well, I certainly got more than enough detail and curiosity about people in this novel!

I suspect that I am the perfect audience for it, and that most people will consider it too long, too detailed, and containing too much secondary material about the history of evangelical missionaries in Asia, anthropological methodology for fieldwork and American academic departments. The author is a journalist who spent some time in Thailand, so he is not an anthropologist himself, but he has clearly developed a passion for the subject and immersed himself in the topic – to the point where he can not resist showing off the amount of research he has done, even if it is not entirely necessary to the plot or characterisation. In fact, in the afterword he admits that he originally intended this to be a non-fiction work – a history of the conversion of the Lisu people of northern Thailand to Christianity. However, I am fascinated by all of these subjects, and I enjoyed the set-up of the story as a mystery to be explored.

The narrator, also called Mischa Berlinski, although not to be confused with the actual author, is approached by one of his old college friends while they are both living in Thailand. His friend is puzzled about the suicide of a mixed-race anthropologist Martiya van der Leun in a Thai prison, where she was incarcerated after being charged with murdering a young Christian missionary. The narrator becomes obsessed with delving deeper into the background of these two apparently really nice people, to discover what could have led to this immense fall-out. After reading Martiya’s letters, other documents and interviewing people who knew her, as well as spending time with the missionary’s family, he solves the mystery but along the way he has exposed the power dynamics of First World vs. Third World, the dangers of the ‘anthropological gaze’ and the unknowability of the human heart and mind.

So quite an ambitious endeavour! In essence, this book tries to capture four separate stories, in a system of interlocking boxes: the story of Martiya, who started off as a promising star academic but then loses her way; the story of multiple generations of the Walker family – convinced but pragmatic missionaries; the global nomad existence of the narrator himself, who claims he wants to know the real Thailand and live there forever, but in fact exists largely within an expat bubble; and finally the ‘people being studied’, the fictional Dyalo community, who are ‘having things done to them’ by those outsiders coming and visiting, staying, studying, converting.

By bringing in many different voices and opinions, often contradictory ones, about Martiya, the author can take a swipe at the academic approach to anthropological research:

The department had the attitude that nothing much could prepare you for anthropological fieldwork, and if you couldn’t do fieldwork, then you had no business being an anthropologist. It was a real rite of a passage. If you couldn’t figure out how to get out to the jungle, the desert, or the savannah; if you couldn’t figure out what to ask the natives; if you couldn’t figure out how to build rapport with recalcitrant and suspicious locals – perhaps, the department implied, it was time to think about a nice career in sociology, where the data were unlikely to carry a spear.

To be fair, the author is setting these practices in the 1970s – by the time I encountered anthropology in the 1990s, it was a far more reflective, self-critical discipline, and there were plenty of confessional accounts of fieldwork and its challenges from which we could all draw strength. Also, I suspect this is all tongue-in-cheek. I take a bit of umbrage at the implication that anthropologists study ‘primitive tribes’: first of all, who has the right to label things primitive and how do they define it? Besides, there have been anthropological studies of subgroups within our own societies for many decades (the difference between sociology and anthropology is less to do with the ‘degree of civilisation’ that researcher attribute to their subjects, and more with methodology – and the borders have become more porous nowadays.) And there is the occasional sentence that shows the author really does get it.

The field did to Martiya what the field always does: it scoured her and revealed the person underneath the encrusted layers of culture and ingrained habit and prejudice

Impressionistic travel writing too: lots of local colour, appealing to all the senses, conveying the beauty of the area (and sometimes its more sinister aspects, the inaccessibility, the isolation). It is very evocative, though a tad overwritten at times (and at other times simply an enumeration of things), but it certainly brings a flavour of those places for those of us who have not yet visited them.

Itinerant peddlers pushed handcarts along our suburban streets or balanced long bamboo poles across their narrow shoulders, selling brooms and fans made from wild mountain grass, medicinal herbs, think panccakes, splotchy speckled egges roasted over a charcoal fire, lacquerware pots from Burma, tin locks and metal pans from China and fruit – rose apples, lychees, pineapple, and mango. I woke up one late afternoon to the musical tinkle of the fruit man’s bell.

Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand.

Some of the characters the narrator interviews also capture the exhilaration and addictive nature of anthropological research (which I thought Lily King’s Euphoria also captured in spades):

…they asked her why she had wanted to go and live with a tribe of nomadic boat dwellers in the island of the south Philippines. ‘You mean other than because it’s incredibly fun?… I guess because it pays off for your psyche when you are able to tear down your own system of belief. You’ve got to undo your preconceptions about the world, about who you are, about yourself, about community, about everything. Because when you study a foreign tribe, you’ve got to leave your world behind, you have to be totally open and empty which is – almost impossible.’

In the very next paragraph, however, this exuberance and euphoria are tempered by a harsh return to the reality of academic recognition and progression:

Three years in the Philippines, two years grinding out the dissertation, a few years in a tenure-track job which doesn’t pan out, a bad marriage… what they don’t tell you in grad school is that the free and open empty feeling when everything about humanity seems like grist for the anthropological mill is just temporary, that it’s on loan and goes away… Then throw a divorce into the mix and step just slightly off that pedestal from hot-shot student under hot-shot adviser at a hot-shot university to lecturer with limited publications at a second rate school – and watch how fast a career in anthropology no longer seems like a liberation but like a trap.

What I really liked about the book is the author easily moves from the personal to the political, from satire to controversy, from dark and dangerous to completely relatable and funny. For example, this passage about Martiya starting to get fed up with the 24/7 nature of research, which is certainly one of the greatest challenges of fieldwork.

It wasn’t that the Dyalo weren’t nice. They were very nice… Martiya was quite sure that had a Dyalo anthropologist showed up at her little apartment in Berkeley, camped out on her couch, and aksed her a lot of dopey questions on the order of ‘Why do you close the bathroom door when you defecate?’ she wouldn’t have been half as nice about it… But what she hadn’t thought about back in Berkeley was that there would be Dyalo around all the time, doing tribal things all the time, talking in their weird language all the time. And she could hardly blame them, really: they were here first. This was, after all, their home.

[I remember desperately heading to a McDonald’s after a few months of eating misoshiro and rice morning, noon and night in Japan – and I don’t even like McDo!]

Stephen King loved this novel when it came out and thought the publishers had missed an opportunity to market it properly, claiming they had let it ‘go to waste’. I did not think it was quite as riveting as King says or that I couldn’t stop reading – there were certainly passages that could have done with some pruning in this very small print 372 page edition that I had – but I liked it a lot. If you are interested in the whole issue of ‘othering’ and exploitation, social justice and white privilege, but also want a good story rather than a treatise, this is the book for you.

Expats in Berlin

This month my reading will be focused very much on (mainly but not exclusively Anglo) expats. I don’t know if it’s my own plans for eventually moving to Berlin that have made the subject particularly pertinent and visible, or if it’s a publishing trend, but quite a few recent books seem to be dedicated to life in Berlin. The city that no one wanted to move to before 1990 and which then became super-trendy (and increasingly expensive). It’s the trendiness, a young person’s view of Berlin, that I found in the first three books I read: they talk about relatively recent periods in the town’s history rather than the more edgy grunge and squatter heaven of the early 1990s. None of these books struck me as being truly preoccupied or interested in the city itself – instead, these people were looking for their own selves or for connection or love or to fuel their addictions. They all made me feel tired and old.

Oscar Coop-Phane: Tomorrow Berlin, transl. George Miller, Arcadia, 2015.

Three young men, each with a complicated back story (and the first part of the book dwells perhaps a little too much on their back stories before it brings them all together in Berlin), find themselves couch-surfing and partaking in the crazy 24 hours drinks, drugs, sex and club culture of 2000s Berlin. Tobias is originally German but has spent most of his life outside his country of birth; abused by a family member in his childhood, he has now turned to prostitution and fleeting affairs until he discovers he has AIDS. Armand rebels against his bourgeois family by becoming an artist, and leaves Paris for Berlin when the great love of his life doesn’t quite turn out the way he envisaged it. Franz thought he could pull himself up by his bootstraps by excelling at his studies, but discovers he will always be looked down upon by high-class Germans, so he starts dealing drugs instead. I wasn’t entirely convinced we needed three main characters in this quite short novel (170 small pages) – their experiences and voices did not seem that differentiated.

With graphic descriptions of drug-taking and of homosexual and heterosexual encounters in grimy toilets, it is very much a ‘hedonism as a desperate cry for escape from one’s own trauma’ sort of book – and at times it almost succeeds in convincing me of this. The chapters alternate between the three men, who finally meet up and become friends – or at least, fellow consumers of the Berlin nightlife circa 1998-2008. You might almost describe this as Trainspotting with a more glamorous backdrop. There are some acute observations about Berlin (the author lived there for some time), but perhaps not nearly enough to give me a strong sense of place.

What saves the book from just being a blow-by-blow account (pun intended) of random encounters and excessive clubbing are the moments of reflection. Armand keeps a notebook, and we are often privy to Tobias’ innermost thoughts. Every now and then we get some passages about the city itself, which might be the author intervening or could be written by one of the characters – these passages were my favourite to read:

The streets are wide and people walk around, as though nothing could happen to them, as if here more than elsewhere people take time to live. People are a bit skint but they get by. The soups are good. People smoke in the cafes since it would be crazy not to. They work away on a laptop at some obsession. You sense Europe is around you, all its languages mixing and answering each other.

This contrasts a bit with Tobias’ first impressions of the city when he arrives fresh from Paris:

The sky’s so grey here. No sun or clouds. And buildings, so shiny and low! It’s a far cry from Baron Haussmann’s embellishments. Everything looks like it has a use. It’s sad all the same, a city where everything is useful. What about poetry, where do they put that? Maybe they have little parking lots for sonnets and hangars and factories for ballads.

I particularly enjoyed the description of winter in Berlin:

For several weeks, the street has lost its old appeal. Its heart is frozen, its surface covered in snow… No one panics; people here are used to putting on boots, taking a shovel to clear their doorways. It’s as though a parallel life is activated: bikes and tables outside cafes are put away, hats and tights are taken out, daylight becomes unfamiliar, there are invitations to people’s flats for soup or a cup of tea.

But there simply weren’t quite enough of those passages. Instead, we witness the car crash of people sabotaging their own lives.

Calla Henkel: Other People’s Clothes, Sceptre, 2021.

The queue to get into the legendary Berghain Club in Berlin, which features in all three books. Often dubbed the most exclusive or notorious of techno clubs, with parties continuing non-stop from Friday night until Monday morning.

Calla Henkel is an American writer and playwright/director living in Berlin and in her debut novel she shows us the hedonistic side of Berlin from the point of view of two American students on their year abroad. Rather than a ‘running away from’, this is a novel of ‘running towards’. Zoe and Hailey are art students in New York, who are keen to reinvent themselves, desperate to be hip and memorable in a city that doesn’t seem to be that welcoming to them. Their art classes are virtually non-existent, but they manage to find a sublet in a grand old building where nothing seems to work properly. So they spend their days trying to track down the cool crowd and their nights being refused entry to Berghain.

Drug-taking, drinking, bulimia and sexual encounters are abundantly described, but there is an added twist to keep the story from becoming a wearisome episodic account. They suspect that their landlady, a prolific novelist, is spying on them to write a novel about them, so they decide to put on a show for her – give her something to write about. Set in 2008/9, the novel is full of references to the Amanda Knox case, with one of the main characters following it quite obsessively, so it’s no surprise when the novel takes a darker turn… but perhaps a little too late for my patience.

While the dialogue is often very funny and compelling, it feels to me like the author is trying to squeeze too many strands into this novel, or else couldn’t quite figure out what, if any, genre it was supposed to fit. It has it all: social media feeding frenzy, life as art, female friendships, envy and jealousy, gay and straight relationships, partying lifestyle, obsession with celebrity, being a babysitter in a wealthy family, plus the chilling feeling of being spied upon. If the men in Coop-Phane’s novel filled me in equal measure with disgust and pity, these girls annoyed me with their self-absorption, their spoilt and pretentious attitudes. Yet in both cases, I was pained to see how disinterested they were in getting to know the life of real, everyday Berliners outside their drug-taking or artistic bubble.

Which makes me wonder if the backdrop of Berlin was essential – it felt like this story could have taken place in any other big city with a lively nightlife. Occasionally, however, there is a rather more vivid description to convey the atmosphere:

The dance floor was filled with languages and English accented in French, Italian and others I couldn’t place, everyone expertly stepping to electronic music in quick sharp movements, all dressed in layers of black… A Venezuelan girl starting a gallery. A Croatian dancer making work-out tapes with artists. A spiky-haired guy in a black hoodie talking about Marx… It reminded me of the bar in Star War, all those outer-space creatures from planets I had heard of grinding on each other and smoking cigarettes.

Amy Liptrot: The Instant, Canongate, 2022.

At least this book has no aspirations to be fictional, but is a memoir of the year that the author moved to Berlin. After ten years of living in London and descending into alcoholism and drug-taking, Liptrot had reconnected with nature and herself in Orkney in her much-lauded first book The Outrun. However, after a while the island isolation becomes too much for her and she goes to Berlin on a whim, without speaking the language or a job or place to stay.

I didn’t choose Berlin for a particular reason… You are free to invent your identity in a new city. I want to act like I’m still in my twenties, maybe get a nose-piercing and an undercut, start beng polyamorous, making scultpures. I’m attracted to what I think of as Berlin style: Cabaret-via-Cold War, bicycles, minimal techno, black clothes.

Ah, there come the clichés again! The elements which resurface in both of the books above. Liptrot too goes to Berghain, but she writes about it with more lyricism than the others. She compares it to diving into the sea.

Entering that place is like entering a huge echoing cliff cave and, once my eyes have adjusted to the dark, finding it full of rock doves and black cormorants, on shadowy ledges, darting past. I’ve found a complete ecosystem. Five hundred people or more, a bloom of jellyfish, are drifting with the tide of music… I am reminded of the exquisite illustrations of Ernst Haeckel, the German naturalist and philosopher who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, made detailed studies of sea life, including technical drawings of jellyfish and anemones, beautiful and weird.

You might think that she would fall once more prey to her demons in this partying city, but Liptrot is in her thirties rather than her twenties. Although she longs to find love, she is still fascinated with the natural world around her. Even in the big city, she finds (or rather, hears about but doesn’t see) raccoons, and goes birdwatching. She manages to be poetic about traffic islands. And, for a few short months, she does find love – or so she thinks. And when she discovers it wasn’t quite what she hoped for, she is disarmingly frank about the vulnerable aftermath.

Yet once again I find that odd lack of curiosity about the ‘natives’ of the place where she has chosen to spend a year – even though her boyfriend is German. Many of the activities she pursues in Berlin are either solitary ones: going to swimming pools, walking, trying an immersion tank; or else sticking to the English-speaking foreign community. Even museums: it’s only in the last few weeks of living in the city, that she actually visits any museums – obviously, I don’t expect everyone to want to explore the same things about a foreign city that I do, but it did strike me as odd. Yet the author seems to be quite aware of the privileges of the ‘digital nomad’ anywhere or nowhere culture.

There is growth of this ‘sublet’ or ‘freelance’ culture: people always keeping their options open, skimming the surface of other countries, digitally fragmented, never committing… Move between the cool districts of international cities and the currency and time zone change but the people are the same. The only language you learn is how to ask for a coffee and the Wi-Fi password.

Berlin’s Landwehrkanal hints at a more peaceful way of life. A.Savin, WikiCommons.

If I had no prior knowledge of Berlin and read just these three books, it might put me off moving to that city. I would consider myself too old and uncool. But I have friends who have grown up there while the city was divided, or who moved there in 1995 and raised a family there, so I know it can look and feel very different too. I have just embarked upon a more thoughtful memoir of living in Berlin, which looks at the layers of Berlin (both geological and historical ones) – and that is much more my speed (pun intended). More about that in my next review.

Summing Up the Decade: Blog Posts

I’ll have a separate blog post for my favourite books or cultural events of the decade, but first for something rather personal. It’s been a long, hard old decade for me. I started off with a moribund marriage but tried desperately to keep it alive for another 4 years or so. Then to hide its disintegration from the children for two more years. Then another 3.5 years to finally untangle property and finances. So you can imagine I will not be looking back fondly upon this decade. However, there have been good moments, mostly relating to the five years we spent in my beloved Geneva area.

So I’ll start with my favourite posts from the blog I started in Geneva in February 2012. Not quite 10 years old, but boy, has it accumulated a lot of material! Expect a mammoth post:

My very first book review – because it was a book about expat experience https://findingtimetowrite.wordpress.com/2012/03/15/book-review-the-expats-by-chris-pavone/

A rather uncharacteristic short story https://findingtimetowrite.wordpress.com/2012/05/26/the-washing-machine-chronicles/

My reaction upon reading Knausgaard for the first time https://findingtimetowrite.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/a-man-a-writer-in-love/

A brief essay about motherhood and what ifs https://findingtimetowrite.wordpress.com/2014/04/30/my-life-isnt-open-to-revision/

My series of interviews What Got You Hooked on a Life of Crime?

Reading Habits and Resolutions https://findingtimetowrite.wordpress.com/2014/09/25/changing-my-reading-habits-part-1/

German Women Writers Fighting Against National Socialism https://findingtimetowrite.wordpress.com/2014/11/14/german-women-writers-fighting-against-national-socialism/

Rereading The Tale of Genji https://findingtimetowrite.wordpress.com/2015/06/29/the-tale-of-genji-readalong-2/

A political piece and plea for sanity just before the 2016 Referendum https://findingtimetowrite.wordpress.com/2016/06/12/i-wasnt-going-to-enter-the-debate/

I visited the Quais du Polar Crime Festival in Lyon several times and wrote a series of posts about it

The most popular post I ever wrote – about The Handmaid’s Tale and what it brings back to me https://findingtimetowrite.wordpress.com/2017/06/05/why-its-painful-to-watch-the-handmaids-tale/

Reunited with the books in my loft and rediscovering the most obscure on my bookshelves

Possibly the best holiday I’ve had this decade https://findingtimetowrite.wordpress.com/2018/11/04/romanian-road-trip-little-house-in-the-forest/

The Victor and His Family. This is a bit how this decade has felt like for me.

Before I started this blog, I had a professional blog for my business as a coach and trainer for all matters intercultural. Some of the posts were quite business-like, but some wittered on about expat experiences and my family. Here are a few posts that bring back fond memories:

The Racism of St Nicholas – this one is from December 2009, but just about fits into the decade, with a bit of indulgence https://sandaionescu.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/st-nicholas-is-an-unfair-racist/

British Heritage and Stereotypes – oddly prescient that, although it dates from March 2010 https://sandaionescu.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/british-heritage-and-stereotypes/

The Dramas of Being an Expat Light Wife https://sandaionescu.wordpress.com/2010/11/17/the-dramas-of-expat-light/

Remembering my first stint on the border of France/Switzerland (this article first appeared in the expat section of The Telegraph) https://sandaionescu.wordpress.com/2010/11/02/and-now-for-something-completely-different/

Trying to make light of relocation problems https://sandaionescu.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/househunting-abroad-art-science-or-pain/

I wanted to close this post with a picture of the Mont Blanc peak, which has been such a huge part of my decade. But when I did a search for Mont Blanc through my saved pictures, I found this special edition Virginia Woolf pen by Mont Blanc instead…

Reading Summary for September

It’s always a bit of a surprise when I sit down at the end of the month to do a proper count of the number and types of books I’ve read. This month, I only managed to read 8 books, which might in part be explained by the fact that it has been a month full of travelling and other cultural events, as well as the back to school rigmarole.

More surprising and disappointing, by far, is the fact that of those 8, only 2 were in translation, both from Spanish, both winners of the biggest literary prize in Spain, the Planeta Prize. These were Alicia Gimenez-Bartlett’s subversive Naked Men and Dolores Redondo’s gripping (although at times long-winded) psychological thriller All This I Will Give to You. 

So perhaps NOT the best month in terms of diversity. I found myself reaching for authors where I know what to expect, such as Rachel Cusk, Tana French or Sarah Moss, whose Night Waking brings back many, many memories of failed attempts at being a good scholar and a good mother simultaneously. And, if the author wasn’t known to me, I stuck to situations that would be familiar, such as expat life (Singapore is only slightly more of a police state than Switzerland) in Jo Furniss’ The Trailing Spouse. I cannot stop myself from reading these sort of books, but I do wonder why in so many books about expats, the main female character is often annoyingly self-absorbed, entitled and thoughtless (even when the writers are women, such as Janice Y.K. Lee, Nell Zink, Jill Alexander Essbaum, or more recently Louise Mangos with Strangers on a Bridge.) Nice cover, though!

The only two male authors I read this month were Michael Redhill: Bellevue Square, which left me somewhat perplexed, and Leye Adenle’s When Trouble Sleeps, which left me depressed about corruption, politics and vote rigging, although it takes place in Nigeria rather than in the UK. I’ll be reviewing the book and interviewing the author for Crime Fiction Lover very soon.

The Return

It’s been five but only to me.
To others it’s three, or two,
if they remember at all.
Life moves on, distance no friend,
search for shared words or memories,
fall back on blandness that cannot offend.
Smiles a little too fixed,
eyes darting to others for rescue.
My stories too long, your chambers too full,
no room at the inn for the perpetual wanderer.

The Expat Experience: Hausfrau

There is a quote that does the rounds of expat circles: a man once said that when he dies, he wants to come back as an expat wife. It’s an understandable (if tactless) remark. There is a perception of an expat life of privilege in exotic locations, on a generous salary and benefits package, sitting around sipping cocktails and with nothing else to do except hatch intrigues.

While there may still be some such ‘expat bubbles’ out there, in most cases the reality is quite different. In many cases the so-called trailing spouse (most of them still remain women in this day and age, although there are some men too following the careers of their wives) has had to give up her own career, is lonely, frustrated, resentful and isolated. The expat packages have been reduced, they do not speak the language and they have to adapt to a completely alien culture, where even doing the supermarket shopping or installing a telephone line becomes an epic battle.

This is the case with Anna, the self-destructive protagonist of Jill Alexander Essbaum’s novel Hausfrau, set in a suburb of Zürich. Anna is an American woman who thought she had chosen order and reliability when she followed her Swiss husband back to his home country. Instead, she feels dead inside. Whether we can empathise with her or not, Essbaum describes Anna’s circumscribed lifestyle, her feeling of entrapment, very clearly. Anna is only just learning the language. She doesn’t have many friends, certainly not among the Swiss, and her banker husband is cold and distant. She doesn’t drive, so she is dependent on trains or on her husband’s or mother-in-law’s willingness to give her a lift.

Anna was a good wife, mostly… It’s not just an adage, it’s an absolute fact: Swiss trains run on time… From Pfäffikon, the train made sixteen stops before it reached Dietlikon, the tiny town in which Anna’s own tiny life was led… the ordinary fact of a train schedule modulated Anna’s daily plans… Boredom, like the trains, carried Anna through her days…

From Fodors.com

Visitors to Switzerland revel in the quaint, chocolate-box prettiness, tidiness and order, but, just as there is a malaise beneath the politeness and well-functioning machinery of Japanese society, there is something sinister about the myriad of rules and regulations in this Alpine country. Outwardly, Anna follows her rules: goes to German language classes, picks her children up from school, dutifully goes to see a psychoanalyst to deal with her depression. She is infuriatingly passive and accepting, a passenger in her own life.

Allowing Bruno to make decisions on her behalf absolved her of responsibility. She didn’t need to think. She followed along. She rode a bus that someone else drove. And Bruno liked driving it. Order upon order. Rule upon Rule. Where the wind blew, she went… it grew even easier with practice.

But of course one will suffocate under all those rules at times. Swiss youths rebel through drug-taking and suicide; Anna rebels by having reckless flings. The book has been compared (even by myself) with those other novels about adulterous women Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, but Anna is much less guided by passion and idealism. If anything, she is far too self-aware, self-critical and analytical. Every phrase she learns in German class, every discussion with her analyst is dissected and applied to her life.

Love’s a sentence. A death sentence… The body would become ravaged. And the heart will become broken… ‘To become’ implies motion. A paradoxical move toward limp surrender. Whatever it is, you do not do it. It is done to you. Passivity and passion begin alike. It’s only how they end that’s different.

Jill Alexander Essbaum, from bookpeople.com

Her behaviour becomes increasingly erratic, her risk-taking reaches endemic proportions… and then tragedy strikes. I won’t say more, except that Essbaum is a poet and her fragmented prose style may not be to everyone’s taste, while the descriptions of sex are anything but poetic. I was initially sceptical of just how relevant the German class or psychoanalyst discussions were to the main story, but they provide surprising analogies to the banality of marital breakdown and adultery. I personally loved the mix of barbed observational wit, philosophical ruminations and poetic despair. In some ways, it reminded me of Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, but I liked this one more, even though it’s longer. It has a well-defined story arc, it’s raw and emotional and very, very honest, with none of the cold detachment of Offill’s book.

I’ve mentioned previously how excited I was to receive this book for review from Penguin Random House. A great addition to my collection of novels about expats – and a timely one, given that I am currently writing a novel about expats. Below is a list of my personal favourites among this type of novels, and the countries in which they are set. The protagonists may feel at first like fish out of water but end up being forever changed by the countries they live in. Word of caution: none of them seem to end well!

Glamorous expat life? From The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Chris Pavone: The Expats (Luxembourg)

Hilary Mantel: Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (Saudia Arabia)

Somerset Maugham: The Painted Vale (China)

Patricia Highsmith: The Talented Mr. Ripley (Italy)

Christopher Isherwood: The Berlin Stories (Germany)

Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano (Mexico)

Lawrence Durrell: The Alexandria Quartet (Egypt)

Graham Greene: The Quiet American (Vietnam)

Joseph Conrad: The Heart of Darkness (Congo)

Henry James: The Ambassadors (France)

Elsa Marpeau: L’Expatriée (Singapore)