Bookless in Gaza

Mantel Pieces
Read by Olivia Dowd, Length:~11hours
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher
Read by Jane Carr, Length: ~4 hours

I decided to review these two books together, as both contain Mantel’s stories, literary articles and reviews. Also I read them consequently so they have morphed into my mind as one long Mantel description of the real and literary worlds. Both truly excellent, though I preferred Pieces.

One of my favorite Pieces is “On Jane Boleyn” (2008) which starts with the so-Mantel remark that You may fear from the title of this book that they’d found yet another Boleyn girl. , which is a review of a book written by Julia Fox. Of course there wasn’t another Boleyn girl in the true sense, although another prolific writer, who Mantel refers to as “the energetic Philippa Gregory” has also written a Jane Boleyn biography.

Mantel is concise, full of humor, and is historical accurate. She expects other historical fiction writers to be the same. Unfortunately they are not, as Mantel has so much fun in acidly pointing out.

Another favorite was “Royal Bodies: from Anne Boleyn to Kate Middleton” (2013). At a writers’ festival in Hay-on-Wye Mantel was asked to name a famous person and to choose a book to give them. Not surprisingly Mantel hates such questions, but she had to answer. She chose Kate Middleton Duchess of Cambridge as the famous person, and the book to give her, the cultural historian Caroline Weber’s Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution. Need I say more. You can read this essay in the London Review of Books Feb 2013 Royal Bodies.

Another London Review of Books Essay, “Marie Antoinett” (1999) published in Pieces published under Fatal Non-Readers shows us how pamphlets in the 18thC were as vicious to Marie Antoinette as was the press to Diana Spencer. The similarities between the two blue-eyed, porcelain-skin, Marie Antoinette and Princess Di had more in common than their love of clothes and their need for them.The similarities in how they were treated is striking. Both were the subject of extreme misogyny and a hungry press.

In “Bookshop Shopping in Jeddah” (1988) we get a memoir snippet of Mantel’s life in Saudi. Bleak and bookless. Mantel concentrates on the lives of the women. In her own words.

“Housewives whose mothers sat in tents spend the days in their urban apartment blocks watching Egyptian soap-operas on TV. Students at the university would not buy books, their European teachers said: it was necessary for a department to buy enough copies of the standard texts, and place them in the library. My closest Muslim friend, a well-travelled and articulate woman, had a degree in English from a college in Pakistan. She mentioned one day that since her marriage, three years previously, she had read only one book.” - London Review of Books, March 1999

The stories and essays are undated in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. I sense they are on the whole a bit older. Two stand out. “How Shall I know You” is an amusing story of Mantel’s overnight stay in the insalubrious Eccles House, a small seedy hotel in a remote town somewhere in the UK where she was obliged to go for a talk. The conveyor was as hopeless as the hotel, but Mantel makes it an amusing tale.

In “Sorry to Disturb” we get a look at her life as an expat in Jeddah, but a more intimate look than in Pieces’ “ Bookshop Shipping in Jeddah”. “Sorry to Disturb” is a story about her pointless friendship with a fellow expat, a rather dismal Pakistani accountant. Both of them are lonely but Mantel can enjoy her solitude. She feels duty-bound to invite her acquaintance to her home, though she becomes wary of his intentions. It’s worth reading if only to get an idea of Mantel’s silent husband.

I recommend both books, and hover between 3.5 and 4 in my rating. The individual stories served welcome break between my reading of full-length novels. ( )

OK after reading the first few stories and not liking it I decided I'd finish it and I sort of came around to it? Best are probably...

Harley Street, which has a sort of obvious ending that I rolled my eyes at a little but after thinking about a little found really satisfying good version of a vampire story and connecting it to the seeming vampiric nature of doctors seeing steadily declining health wise patients in a private practice... it works well and feels very satisfying, How Shall I Know You? - a little bit weird but the feelings of isolation and failure come through well - pitying and being pitied and how we judge other people as lower than us, The Heart Fails Without Warning touching story about living with a sibling with an eating disorder

The School of English is depressing but mostly I felt a little weird about her writing a story about a live in maid who doesn't speak English very well given she's obviously... not anywhere near that - attempting to mimic the slightly different style of an ESL speaker is something hard to do well anyway. There's actually a couple bits of racism put in the mouth of this person who clearly isn't white too - it's definitely uncomfortable. Also major trigger warning for rape

Terminus doesn't really work - hard to say what she was going for but nothing really comes through

Comma feels like it's missing a lot as explained below, Sorry to Disturb feels like I'm missing a lot.

The rest is all pretty decent, not top tier and maybe missing that sparkle but I thought they were pretty enjoyable thinking on it. If I read it again I might give it 4 stars - it's hard to explain but the first two stories really put me in a bad mood reading the rest .

-old stuff below-

Got this out the library but don't know if I'll finish, I feel like I'm missing something - only read the first 3 stories so far but I was left thinking "huh?"

EG first story is a British woman in Saudi Arabia with her husband who is working there. And then there's some guy who's pretty pushy about being social with her. And well. The plot doesn't really go anywhere from there. Apart from being pushy and therefore kind of creepy nothing he does is actually sinister in any way yet the narration implies it is. You could interpret this as her own fear of being out of control in a deeply patriarchal society, her own subconcious racism (he's not white) or something, I don't know. Except... she finds her furniture constantly moves in the night?? It's implied maybe the drugs she's on make her cotton headed and maybe she does stuff in the night without realising it but it doesn't really connect together or say anything. And the story just ends with her husband writing a letter to the guy telling him to stop, he does, and she goes "well that thing back then was weird". Weirdest part is he kind of pressures her to reveal where the publisher of her novel is, she says it's near Trafalgar Square, later he goes off to London and when he comes back he says he was in that area and it's like oh I was so shocked... but nothing happens?? That was it?? I just felt like I was missing something - there were pretty obvious themes around being a woman in a very patriarchal society but it felt like it was setting stuff up that didn't happen and it didn't really connect.

The next story Comma is also weirdly insubstantial. It conjures up the image of hot summer days well and then the title "Comma" is a baby who looks a bit weird? and then the friend of the narrator throws a rock *near* it, as far as I can tell not hitting the baby, and that's... it. And then there's an "epilogue" where the friend is now 30 years older and... has kids of her own? And her face is a full stop? And narrator's parents say the house which has the baby is bad but don't expand? And the narrator's parents say not to hang out with narrator's friend - presumably because she's unclean or something but it's not clear. Just none of it makes sense, there's no satisfying conclusion and none of the parts fit together plot wise or thematically - there's no suggestion of something that jars it's just. Nothing. ( )

A set of fairly generic short stories that look to have been written over a period of about twenty years, but with a few nice, unexpected touches. "Sorry to disturb", for example, a story about an expat-wife in 1980s Saudi Arabia who gets involved in a misunderstanding-laden friendship with an Asian businessman, looks deceptively like a simple reworking of the plot of A passage to India, but comes with so much unexpected detail that you have to assume that there is a real personal experience behind it. "Harley Street" and "Offences against the person" both recast conventional workplace dramas in witty ways to show us what they might look like from the receptionist's desk (and the latter, in particular, has some clever lines of Mancunian dialogue that wouldn't have been out of place in a Victoria Wood script). "The heart fails without warning" picks up the theme of eating disorders that Mantel used in a different way in her novel An experiment in love, and "How shall I know you?" is a clever take on the writer-on-tour theme. And that title story: well, it poses the reader with an interesting moral challenge. What would you have done if someone had barged into your apartment with a sniper rifle in 1983, intent on shooting the Prime Minister from your window? In the abstract, I'm sure many of us would feel as though we might have said "go right ahead", but of course it's not so straightforward when you actually imagine yourself in that situation... ( )

This is a collection of short stories from a wonderful novelist. All the stories are good, several are great and they all have a level of menace or creepiness about them that is occasionally quite unsettling. ( )

Wow, great writing! Never read her before, but I want to read more. Good mixture of funny and creepy and the writing is almost musical. ( )