“Where there is milk, there is hope.” (Dum lacto spero?) A (fellow 40-year-old) friend effusively recounted the entire plot of this illustrated middle“Where there is milk, there is hope.” (Dum lacto spero?) A (fellow 40-year-old) friend effusively recounted the entire plot of this illustrated middle-grade novel for me over dinner a few weeks back, but that didn’t stop me from finding it hilarious when I read it for myself from the library. I love that it’s the mum who goes off to a zoology conference, leaving the dad to keep the household going. He soon fails his son and daughter by forgetting to get more milk before breakfast (“he remembered that, without milk, he couldn’t have his tea. He had his ‘no tea’ face on”). Never fear, he tells them; he’ll go to the corner shop for some more.
It’s ages before he gets back, but he has many a tale to explain why, involving aliens, pirates, dinosaurs, vampires and more. Basically, it took Indiana Jones levels of adventurousness for him to return with the milk intact. Are these stories just excuses, or did he really fight off grave peril? The dad is an Arthur Dent (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) type of antihero, and Gaiman is riffing on the traditional “Fortunately … unfortunately” storytelling method. He also wrings a lot of laughs from characters’ habit of referring to things by a drawn-out description instead of one word. Great fun!...more
My husband and I both agreed with pretty much all the self-test statements in the Introduction. And I imagine it’s similar for many others in our geneMy husband and I both agreed with pretty much all the self-test statements in the Introduction. And I imagine it’s similar for many others in our generation. The main argument here, in opposition to Gretchen Rubin et al., is that happiness is not the right aim but, instead, flourishing, which is a sign of good mental health. To flourish, he says, you need to remain curious and learning, have warm and trusting relationships, have a spiritual practice, live with purpose, and have play activities.
An odd point: he denies that there is any evidence of chemical imbalance in mental illnesses. (But he’s a sociologist, not a medical doctor/researcher.)
Some good quotes:
“Some of us must face the fact that we made all the ‘right’ choices—we have everything we thought we wanted—yet we still feel unfulfilled.”
“If you follow your own instincts rather than someone else’s idea of what you should do, purpose can sometimes turn up when you least expect it. But you have to be open to it. If you put yourself into the right places, a time might come when something calls to you—this is why you’ve been placed here, on this earth, at this moment. Be ready when the call comes.”
“you will be lucky if work is the place where you find your cause, your most authentic expression of your purpose. Unfortunately for the vast majority of us, the scientific data suggests that it is rare for work and purpose in life to merge, to be on the same page.”...more
I was wary of reading this because I feared it would be all about food issues. I have a childhood friend whose parents nicknamed her Piglet, and my siI was wary of reading this because I feared it would be all about food issues. I have a childhood friend whose parents nicknamed her Piglet, and my sister suffered from eating disorders in high school, so it was kind of a case of worrying that I'd feel triggered on their behalf, or think that Hazell handled sensitive issues clumsily. In the end, it was okay because food is both literal and a metaphor here. The protagonist works for a cookbook publisher. Yes, she loves to cook and eat and yes, she has a history of overeating at times of psychological distress, BUT food is much more than that for her. It's a sign of her education and class pretensions: her Midlands family think Nando's is the perfect place for a celebration meal, whereas she cooks them a Middle Eastern feast from scratch and bakes croquembouches for her own wedding instead of a cake. Preparing food is a hobby as well as how she loves and cares for herself and other people. But when her fiance Kit blindsides her with a confession 13 days before their wedding, she returns to binge eating, dress fittings be damned. Most of the book is devoted to this final countdown.
Hazell has made the very interesting decision to not reveal exactly what Kit did wrong. All we know is that it was a betrayal and involved lies. The greatest clues come from others' reactions: (view spoiler)[his wealthy parents stand by him and don't seem to think it's a big deal, her father is embarrassed but not outraged on her behalf (though the fact that the groom's family are paying for everything but her dress does factor into his thinking), while Piglet's married lesbian friend Margot, who is about to give birth, thinks it's relationship-ending stuff and she can't respect her friend if she goes ahead with the marriage. Something the woke would find unforgiveable but older generations think deserves just a slap on the wrist ... so, I dunno, embezzlement? Or going with prostitutes? Simply cheating doesn't seem like enough. But readers can imagine their own wedding-endangering scenario. This, too, struck a little close to home for me (hide spoiler)].
Uncomfortable themes, then, but I kept reading in a kind of fascinated horror because Hazell writes absolutely incredible scenes: (view spoiler)[the burger restaurant, where Piglet orders one of everything and then abandons the table full of food when her colleagues walk in; Margot going into labour at the dress shop; assembling the croquembouche on the morning of the wedding; her family stuffing her into her too-small gown; and the wedding reception, where Piglet gets her revenge by eating all she wants, divulging Kit's secret to the whole room, and then smashing the croquembouches (hide spoiler)]. This final one reminded me of my all-time favourite short story, "Medusa's Ankles" by A.S. Byatt (from The Matisse Stories), in which an angry woman runs amok, yet everything is strangely okay at the end. The little asides from the waitstaff at the reception are hilarious, too.
While this is about food and marriage, it is also about what women are allowed to want, and how they are expected to settle for less. It has a very satisfying ending and I like that friendship and family are presented as things that last. I was really impressed with Piglet as a debut novel, even while I wish it could have had a different, less confronting title and cover. It reminded me most of Supper Club by Lara Williams and Small Fires by Rebecca May Johnson. The way the main character's first name is not revealed until right towards the end is also reminiscent of Mrs. March by Virginia Feito....more
An excellent memoir of an event, tracing the lead-up and aftermath; the unexpected echoes, symbolism and ironies. Although Rushdie goes into some mediAn excellent memoir of an event, tracing the lead-up and aftermath; the unexpected echoes, symbolism and ironies. Although Rushdie goes into some medical detail about his recovery, you get the sense of him more as an unchanging mind and a resolute will than as a fragile body. I remember hearing the news of the attack and being astonished that, so many years after the fatwa, someone still wanted to kill him over ideology. He was lucky, he was told, that the person who tried had no idea how to kill someone with a knife.
The most remarkable section of the book is imagined (Rushdie's previous memoir, Joseph Anton, is in the third person, so in both cases he's drawn on a novelist's skills as well as personal experience): in Chapter 6, "The A.", he imagines a series of dialogues between him and his imprisoned assailant, probing his beliefs and motivations. It almost feels more real than the reported facts, because those have the dullness of the everyday on them. There are tributes here to other ageing literary lions, such as his friends Martin Amis and Paul Auster, both felled by cancer; he is grateful to friends and family for their support but the greatest debt he expresses is to his (third) wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths, an African American poet 30 years his junior.
I've not had much success with Rushdie's fiction - I did eventually read Midnight's Children, but it took two attempts, was an almighty slog and didn't feel worth the effort in the end - but this was great, very readable with all kinds of intriguing side tendrils and lots of quotable lines.
"that Chautauqua morning I experienced both the worst and best of human nature, almost simultaneously"
"I believe that art is a waking dream. And that imagination can bridge the gulf between dreams and reality and allow us to understand the real in new ways by seeing it through the lens of the unreal. No, I don't believe in miracles, but, yes, my books do"
"anger felt like a wasteful luxury to me. It wasn't useful, and I had more important matters to attend to."
"art challenges orthodoxy. To reject or vilify art because it does that is to fail to understand its nature."
Celebrities! They're just like us: He's a wimp about pain (having a facial wound cleaned and a catheter inserted); he had to pay $20K for a dental implant his insurance didn't cover.
Or are they? Eliza dropped another $20K on a private plane to get to his side before what looked like his inevitable death.
Oh, the irony! "Two nights before I flew to Chautauqua, I had a dream about being attacked by a man with a spear, a gladiator in a Roman amphitheater."
"Many readers of Victory City have wondered if the scene in which the heroine is blinded was written, or rewritten, after the August 12 attack. Some have found it hard to believe that it wasn't. But it wasn't."
He also recounts knife attacks on two other authors, Naguib Mahfouz and Samuel Beckett....more
(2.5) Retired bookseller Carl Kollhoff takes it upon himself to continue distributing books to his usual customers, all of whom he knows by nicknames (2.5) Retired bookseller Carl Kollhoff takes it upon himself to continue distributing books to his usual customers, all of whom he knows by nicknames taken from fiction – “To him, the city was populated with characters from books”. But when nine-year-old Charlotte, aka Schascha, starts following him on his round, he comes to see deeper than appearances and detect people’s problems (and learns that ice cream cheers up any situation). Instead of delivering the books they ask for, he starts bringing the ones they actually need, and engineering healthier situations. (view spoiler)[He and Schascha work out that a builder is actually illiterate and subtly team him up with a tutor. They try to get help for a victim of domestic violence, push lonely people into each other’s orbit, and see the best in the late bookstore owner’s daughter even though she’s quite mean in how she cuts Carl off (hide spoiler)].
I should have known from the marketing and blurb how twee this would be. It threatens to get really rather dark when Carl ends up in hospital. But never fear, a happy ending is a sure bet! I did love that there was a three-legged cat named Dog....more
