Really Good, Actually | Monica Heisey | Book review

Bearing in mind that this book could well be about me, the claim that it is depressingly relatable may not be universally true. Nevertheless, with a female protagonist of 29-30 who fills over 300 pages with mostly self doubt, for me, Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey was unputdownable. 

I've read too many books with female protagonists whose support group is more than believably supportive, living in London yet somehow managing to be at said protagonist's house in a crisis within 20 minutes. Honey, if you live in Woolwich and she in Wandsworth, that ain't happening. Not even if you're loaded, which these clichéd, adoring friends somehow normally are. The forceful cheeriness of fictional WhatsApp groups who love each other oh so much are so done in my opinion.

Fortunately, that's not the case here - in fact, I felt it was a bonus that this book is set in Toronto, giving enough colour to make it feel more warm and true but removed from the metropolis that I'm familiar with. The support group is present, but no friend gets more, or less, characteristics pinned on them than is needed, and in fact they manage to act like normal people most of the time. (Okay, fine, one character's message does read 'Be there in 20' as if people have nothing to do all day but respond to friend emergencies, but as we learn in the book Toronto is small, and I can overlook it this one time anyway.)

The story can be summed up simply: Maggie, 29, is a very normal main character. She is an adjunct professor, teaching and working on her PhD. ('Jon had joked about me stepping forward on an airplane: 'Are there any doctors on board?' 'Yes! What part of Coriolanus is he struggling with?') Crucially though, she is going through a divorce. And losing custody of her cat. When you open the cover of this book, you grab your suitcases and march on into her head, where you'll be making a home until the end, including hilarious lists of Google searches and hypothetical scenarios which end each chapter, adding that touch of lightness. 

Maggie's internal monologues are self-deprecating, biased against herself: negativity piles about her body, her actions, her entire being as a person (bad daughter, bad friend, bad everything). And although yes, she has flaws - as we all do - it is weirdly uplifting to read such a negative view of another's self and be able to think, 'don't be so hard on yourself'. Perhaps this is what is so loveable about this book: by cultivating compassion for someone who is just like us, we as readers can stop and imagine being this compassionate towards our own selves as well. Just imagine!

Importantly, Maggie is not kooky, or depressed in a cute way, and her friends only tolerate her meltdowns up to a point. She is sometimes rude, sometimes insensitive, and this is what makes her believeable and a pleasure to spend time with.

Although the novel follows the simple story arc where things go from good to bad to really bad to hopefully better, it is full of bittersweet surprises and human decisions, interactions and occurrences. It is a story of a divorce that somehow manages to avoid melodrama, even when things don't go as originally planned - the amicable, reasonable breakup we'd all want but none of us can make happen in the end. In fact, refreshingly, the ex-husband barely features in person, and is more hinted at through memories and second degree interactions. 

The only slight crime, if we need to poke holes, is the overuse of the word 'bashfulness', but if that's all, believe you me we're in good hands.

Ultimately, this is easy reading that still manages to make you feel like your heart is broken (I kept reaching over and grabbing my husband's hand for reassurance). I loved Maggie and I will miss her honest rambles, and her 3am burger deliveries, and her therapeutic online shopping, and her too many hashbrowns for breakfast. In fact, I'm slightly annoyed I can't get a McDonald's breakfast delivery right now.

Strangers by Rebecca Tamàs | Essays on the Human and Nonhuman | Book review

Strangers by Rebecca Tamàs first grabbed my attention when I saw it exhibited as part of The Nature Library at one of their locations in Glasgow. Our shared Hungarian background immediately obvious from her name, I was pleased to recognise a writer who, despite coming from my much-despised and begrudgingly admitted to birth country, creates and thinks in English. What's more, it was clear from a variety of aspects - the design of the book, the first few pages, the location where I was encountering it - that she wrote deeply, interestingly, informed. 

Strangers is a collection of essays, pleasingly formatted and designed throughout this short book, with a focus on the connection between human and nonhuman entites, the climate crisis, nature and existence. In a nutshell. (Naturally, from the very beginning of the book wakes a lurking feeling of guilt for having given up my vegetarianism.) But it is also a book that reaches further than its covers, inspiring thought without piling you with information. 

The first three essays in the book - On Watermelon, On Hospitality and On Pansychism - are very strong. They set the mind buzzing immediately.

On Hospitality, for example, discusses a novel, The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector, regarding an encounter between a human and a cockroach. 'What G.H. reaches in her experience with the cockroach is an understanding that human ideas of reason and progress are only casings around the unspeakable purposelessness of existence. ... Purposeless, but not pointless. Into this ambient purposelessness comes an understanding of our radical interdependence and intimacy with nonhuman forces; viscerally and urgently alive in a space of constant becoming.'

What is interesting about this recurring idea of the interdependence of human and nonhuman beings is that only one side is consciously aware of it, and this same side is consciously trying to suppress the other's existence. Is the bargain then equal? Or rather than trying to simply accept our interdependence with all living ('living' the key word) beings, should we also be aiming to become guardians, leaders for a positive coexistence? Or is that too 'blue sky'?

'Can anyone really deny that thought and thinking comes from the outside as well as the inside? That when the outside is terribly damaged, the inside will be also?'

Simple idea, yet reading On Pansychism, I feel the metal bands of my mind popping as they expand. The image of a lake driven insane, or the simple fact, presented plain and simple, that the world isn't just a bakcdrop to our lives: it is part of them, influences them, drives them. And yet, nonhuman beings exist on the outside of our infinite feedback loop. This idea reminds me of Robert Macfarlane's thoughts about the indifference of mountains to our struggle to climb them, similar to the river is quoted in this book, not as a metaphor to the author's feelings, but as an indifferent, cool entity - and it is that detachment that ultimately helps soothe the author's soul.

Then follow two essays which are more deeply art criticisms or analysis, introducing the artworks of Ana Mendieta and a poetry collection by Ariana Reines. The latter feels slightly weaker in that it gives less insight, I felt, into the work, but Mendieta's work, upon Googling, is hauntingly beautiful. An essay on climate grief versus climate despair quietly meditates on the difference. And the final essay, On Mystery, remains just that - it feels like reading a stream of consciousness, surprisingly well crafted nevertheless.

My copy of Strangers happened to be an uncorrected proof, which meant I had to contend with typos and guesses throughout - something that added to the strangeness, perhaps. It was a pleasure to come across a book that discusses unusual questions around the climate crisis, and offers a completely fresh perspective on human and nonhuman existence on Earth. Somehow this book manages to inspire without sounding the doom alarm too much, and it left me with fresh thoughts and feelings about my own role in changing the world a tiny bit.

I certainly look forward to reading more from Rebecca Tamàs.

Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them | Dan Saladino | Book review

 

Ah, glorious food. Living on a sailboat with a fridge that is currently out of order, food is indeed a key consideration from day to day. Fresh vegetables go mouldy quickly, so I have a list that I update daily, prioritising what needs eating first. Tinned things - pulses, beans and the occasional fruit - last forever, so are a godsend. Rice, bulgur wheat and the recently discovered giant couscous are all staples.

To be honest, I think about food most of the time anyway, don't you? So does Dan Saladino in his book Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them. He goes in search of some of the most ancient staple foodstuffs on Earth, and presents them here as case studies for a trend that is taking over our food chain globally - namely, that traditional values, methods and food varieties are being supressed in favour of productivity, coupled with global homogeneity. 

Eating to Extinction is divided into ten sections, such as Vegetables, Meat, Cheese or Fruit. Ten?, you might ask. Indeed - because although Saladino has dug admirably deep and traveled the world in search of these rare foods, and has carried out in-person research that is hugely valuable, there is a lot of ground being covered here. Each of the ten sections is further divided into at least two, more often three varieties: four cereals, six sea-based foods, and the stranger categories - such as stimulants or cereal - also include at least two varieties each. 

Each individual item is covered in a chapter, including the author's experiences, as well as covering local food-based traditions, personal histories, or initiatives to save said food. This, unfortunately, does mean that the pace of the book is a bit slow. In the first few sections, lots of short chapters cover a wider variety of grains and pulses than my brain can't store (unlike the fascinating grain stores we meet along the way), and the snippets of various people trying to salvage heritage breeds often doesn't give a deep enough insight to make us care. Later, a chapter about bison especially stood out for me as not really finding its place in this book, barely touching on the topic of food. These chapters read almost as if the author is trying to meet the minimum of three varieties per section.

Among the many varieties of not-so-interesting grains and cereals I trudged through, however, there were a lot of interesting nuggets of information in other parts of the book. I never knew oyster stout was called that due to brewers plopping oysters into their dark porters for added flavour; and reading about Georgian wine and its mystical fermenting in clay pots underground felt like reading fantasy. Black Ogye Chicken is a breed exclusively found in Korea, and is black from beak to toe, absolutely worth a look. Most fascinating to me was a chapter about fermented, wind-dried meat (Skerpikjøt) produced on the Faroes as a delicacy, painting vivid images of meat hanging in sea-wind battered wooden sheds called 'hjallur', and providing a fantastic glimpse into island culture and history.

By the end of the book, a picture does build up slowly, as the patterns too often repeat: a depressing present time of traditional values and methods disappearing in favour of globalised, homogenous food supplies. Chapters do tend to finish on a somewhat hopeful note that the individual forerunners and preservers might be able to hang onto, or bring back, traditional methods and varieties once again.

After all that, I feel I sound quite negative about this book. I can only praise the author's effort and knowledge that has gone into such a wide-ranging, colourful collection of stories. I do think it could have done with some trimming down here and there, but on the whole it is a fascinating discussion of what we eat, how much of it is our decision, and how these choices influence the planet and us as people. It's less of a foodie book, more of a food book - if that makes any sense at all - but the message comes through loud and clear.