The Spare Room by Helen Garner

Wow, this is an amazing book. It's a quick and easy read but profoundly beautiful and an unflinching look at death and the process of dying. Garner manages to convey the despair and slow loss of hope without being melodramatic or sentimental. The point of view is from a friend of a terminal cancer victim who has come to stay in her spare room while undergoing alternative treatments.

I don't want to say too much about the plot. It's short and compelling - a perfect afternoon book. I found it on the Guardian's list of the best unread books of the decade. It would make a great book club book because it would be excellent to discuss. I'm not quite to the age where this sort of thing is happening in my circle of friends, but it will. No escaping death and all that.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

I am posting this because it is taking me forever to read. Only very rarely do books take me long to read, but I am getting bored of this one and finding it pretentious and want to slap the old woman. Ok, ok, the bit about the last film with her husband made me tear up, but I have pmt and cry at anything.

I will update as events warrant.

update 7 Feb: almost done. It's gotten better; there are fewer parts where I'm rolling my eyes and doing the blah-blah-blah hand motion.

final update: ...and then it got worse again. The ending was deeply unsatisfying and had the "it was all a dream" feel to it.

Smile or Die by Barbara Ehrenreich

I went to go see Barbara Ehrenreich speak at Conway Hall on the myth and tyranny of positive thinking a few weeks ago. I bought her book, Smile or Die. I hadn't known that the positive thinking movement was a reaction to Calvinism in the US but was more familiar with her examples including: the banking industry, mega-churches and pretty much everyone who appears on Oprah and from her own personal experience, the support available to breast cancer victims. All that is well and good, but it's the last chapter in her book is what brings it all together. It applies what she's written to everyday life - as she explains, she is not against happiness or joy or any of those types of things, she just wants them to be genuine and not a result of a deluded mindset. Her suggestion is to deal with life realistically. Coming at this point it time, it almost seems radical.

I've been thinking about this a while, ever since I read War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges. Most of that book is about war, of course, but somewhere in it he says that we have a choice between happiness and meaning. I'm not sure I buy that, but it got me thinking about happiness and this ever present imperative to be happy. Not just to be happy, but to be happy at all times with every other feeling a personal, devastating failure.

My conclusion was "Fuck that". In particular, "Fuck happiness" or perhaps this propensity for people to work themselves senseless to achieve it. I think if you'd like a permanent state of happiness, take the full frontal lobotomy. Personally, I like the description of happiness in Ambrose Bierce's short story Haita the Shepherd. It's transient and not to be looked at directly, simply taken for what it is and appreciated.

A kinder, gentler take on happiness and the pursuit thereof is in this essay by Amy Bloom who finishes by saying :

"The real problem with happiness is neither its pursuers nor their books; it’s happiness itself. Happiness is like beauty: part of its glory lies in its transience. It is deep but often brief (as Frost would have it), and much great prose and poetry make note of this. Frank Kermode wrote, “It seems there is a sort of calamity built into the texture of life.” To hold happiness is to hold the understanding that the world passes away from us, that the petals fall and the beloved dies. No amount of mockery, no amount of fashionable scowling will keep any of us from knowing and savoring the pleasure of the sun on our faces or save us from the adult understanding that it cannot last forever."