Ian Jack (1) (1945–2022)

This was one of those books I found a joy to read. Of the seventeen stories, essays, and articles, I can call only two of them duds. The rest I’d rate four to five stars. All of them dealt with India and/or Pakistan: rural villages, big cities like Mumbai, memoirs of travelers to both. The India/Pakistan conflicts were touched upon in several, a subject which I didn’t know much about; one excellent article, “Jihadists” was about the conflicts that led to the 9/11 attacks and what was show more going on in Pakistan and Afghanistan afterward. Although the political commentary was outdated (most of the book’s material was from the 1990s) most of the writers were from India or Pakistan and so it was interesting to hear their viewpoints. The fiction was mainly slices-of-life from the lives of ordinary Indian people, like a businessman who is embarrassed by, but also enjoys, his wife’s singing talent (“White Lies” by Amit Chaudhuri).

Other favorites of mine were “What Bengali Widows Cannot Eat” by Chitrita Banerjee, in which an Indian-American cookbook writer describes her mother’s Indian widowhood customs, one of which is not eating any meat, ever again. According to custom widows are treated as bad luck in India among all classes and the older generation of women, at least, is still buying into this. It could have been another “Gee-it-sucks-to-be-woman-in-[name of country]” story that usually pops up whenever some Asian country in essayed, but the descriptions of the food were truly sumptuous.

The other article I enjoyed, also about a woman, was “Little Durga” by Shampa Banerjee (not related to the author above, Banerjee is something of the “Smith” of India). This was the adult recollections of the child actress who had played the role of older sister to Apu, the main character in the Apu movie trilogy of acclaimed director Satyajit Ray.

The other was the recollections of the actress who became famous for playing a little girl in an acclaimed Indian movie.

The two duds were an incoherent article/memoir about dervishes and a story about an Indian tutor, Ivy League educated, who agrees to ghost-write a college entrance essay for an unmotivated American girl living in Bombay with her expat father. The tutor has a bit of a crush on the girl. This wasn’t badly written, but just rubbed me the wrong way. First, the main character knowingly participates in fraud, second, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for spoiled teenage girls who can’t be assed to write their own essays, no matter how young and rich and beautiful they are.

The story just sort of… ended, without much of a conclusion, as most of the fiction did, and not a few of the essays. Which wasn’t necessarily bad, I enjoyed reading them. But I do wonder if that is considered the thing to do now when writing modern essays. I was raised, for example, to write a beginning, a middle, and an end, and if not handing the conclusion to the reader, point them to it with some very strong hints. But a lot of the material forced me to draw my own. show less

That rarest of books - the one where, when you've finished reading it, you immediately start to re-read it so that you can enjoy the word-pictures painted by the author again.

The title here may mislead. This collection of articles by the late Scottish journalist Ian Jack has nothing to do with oil - its abundance or its scarcity. It is, rather, a look at the state of the nation of Britain and abroad in the period from 1977 to 1986: what was happening in Britain and further afield, in other show more words, before the question of oil even arose.

There are sixteen well-written articles here which take as their starting-point an aspect of life in Britain in this period. They include : the end of the age of steam, as reflected in the life of a Glasgow engine-driver; a comparison of the working-class districts of Liverpool and Turin, seen through the eyes of their football supporters; a snapshot of a day in the life of the honorary secretary and co-founder of the Society of Advanced Meccano Constructors; and race-relations in Bradford, as witnessed by the former head of Drummond Middle School, Ray Honeyford.

In a nice touch, the author references two earlier 'state of the nation' books by JB Priestley and Louis MacNiece as he tours Yorkshire and the Hebrides. He also recounts what was probably one of the last interviews with Priestley when the latter was 88 years old.

This is a delightful collection of pieces by Ian Jack which show real insight into the lives of those he writes about. You would be hard-pressed to find a better description of life in the Falkland Islands in the 1980's, for example, than the beautifully-crafted chapter here titled "Don't cry for us, Argentina".

Sadly, this book is out of print. However, it's worth tracking down a copy if you can find one. show less

Granta 71 Shrinks opens with Elliot Perlman's "The Emotions Are Not Skilled Workers", perhaps intentionally undermining the analysis/analyst it draws so wonderfully; for if, as the title suggests, the emotions are not skilled, that they are messy and unruly, it raises the question whether a science of their explication is ever really possible. It is a story that knows in its heart the impossibility, the unknowableness, of unhappiness and its amelioration. Edmund White, whose beautiful prose show more style is as evident here as always, describes how the urge of psychoanalysis to define (in his case to define his homosexuality as a disease) is always dangerous--surely to be human, to be the eccentric collection of (self-)obsessions we are, is to be indefinable. He sees gay liberation as the death knell of Freudianism but others have seen it only as the death knell of a particular kind of response to Freud's writing.

Granta once again has provided us with some fine pieces by, among others, Justine Picardie, Paul Auster and Ian Parker to accompany the pieces by Perlman and White. Roy Hattersley adds an interesting article about the Third Way and Antony Gormley's bodies photographed by Gautier Deblonde fills the rest of a very fine package. This issue examines the experience from the patient's couch and the psychiatrist's chair, in both fiction and non-fiction. The contributors include Elliot Perlman, Patrick McGrath, Edmund White and Ved Mehta. show less

A collection of extracts, short stories and articles with an African connection. The book covers many topics, from race and nationality to the very different countries in Africa. I enjoyed the variety of the book, and will definitely look out more by some of the authors.

I got a page into the first story, The Master, when I clicked why it was so familiar, it was part of Half of a Yellow Sun, an excellent book I read recently. Adichie is a great writer, so this is a good way to sampler her show more work. I would also recommend "Policeman to the World" by Daniel Bergner, a non-fiction piece with great insight into working in Liberia. "Passport Control" by Kwame Dawes is about the more and more common situation of dual nationality, how the individual feels and is perceived by those around them. There is also a photo essay, pictures of the Ogiek people, they are stunning pictures.

Recommended for people looking for a taster of a vast and varied continent. show less