The Woman Destroyed (Simone De Beauvoir)

The Mandarins was my first foray into Simone de Beauvoir's writings - a thwarted foray, as it turned out, because my charity shop copy was already worse for wear, and was worsened yet further by its own forays in a steamy bathroom, which is often the most serene place to devour a book but not an atmosphere much beloved of paper!

Yet, I knew from my meagre sampling of The Mandarins that I wanted to delve further into de Beauvoir's literary contributions. I was to wait some years before the opportunity presented itself... in one of those non-coincidental happenings, I came upon the second volume of her autobiography, and was settling down to learn about her early life with Sartre in Paris, only to then find a copy of The Woman Destroyed some weeks later.

Comprising three short stories, of which the opening and closing ones are the most accessible, The Woman Destroyed opens a dystopic window onto the lives of middle-aged women. That at least seems to be its intention. Certainly, the stories are moving: charting the desperation to cling on to past life, love and vigour, they bring to mind a sympathetic image of fingernails clinging on to a crumbling cliff side that is inexorably falling into the yawning abyss of post-menopausal life.

Goodness, the stories are sad. But "woman destroyed"? No, not really. Ultimately, the significant others of these women come off no better, no less destroyed by the loss of past certainties, the loss of youth. Here then, is a version of how some of us may face advancing age.

And in fact, this tracing of a particular milieu, this fictionalised spotlight on the observed realities of her times - fictionalised ethnography, if you like - is ultimately what makes Simone de Beauvoir so accessible and so very worth reading.

What's going on? The meanderings of a comic mind in confusion (Mark Steel)

Steel's comedy comes from a place that only fellow socialists have visited. But it's nice to know that staunch Thatcherites like Bob Monkhouse found it engaging, raging political gulf notwithstanding.

I came to Steel's "Reasons To Be Cheerful" in my late twenties, by way of an inspiring socialist mentor who, to my great chagrin and inconsolable disillusionment, was exposed as a champagne socialist... luckily only after they also turned me on to Dylan and Gramsci.

RTBC felt like speaking with an old friend - the best friend who knows your heart and your mind, and can finish off your sentences with pleasing accuracy while saying much more than you were even able to formulate in your own head. I think that I owe my ability to look back with wryness on my Thatcher-infested youth to...well, Mark Steel.

And with "What's Going On?" he releases the same genius: managing to make a very astute social and political point, while giving it depth through irrefutable argument and fact, and drawing you to tearful laughter. But what really blew me away is how once again Steel managed to restore that sense of conversing with an old friend, and tapped into precisely the confusion assailing me as a socialist.

After a very Citizen Smith-like youth - carried through with probably more gaucheness and less panache than Robert Lindsey - Steel is ensconced in life as a Middle Englander approaching a mid-life crisis. And he begins to question his relationship with socialism. It's a truism that we become more conservative s we get older, and while I read the book willing Steel not to adhere to this trite cliche, somehow I knew it was coming.

Steel closes with a scene in which he's on the phone to the bank to cancel his subscription to the Socialist Worker, following which end to life as he's known it, his daughter reminds him of a promised shopping trip, and he dutifully takes her to Woolworth's to buy colouring pens. As I write this, I have to pause for a moment - just as I did when I first came to the passage in the book.

Why should one man's waning relationship with socialism - if that is in fact what it is - touch me so fiercely? Precisely because he seems to be telling me his story as an old friend might; precisely because he enunciates every twist and turn I've experienced in my relationship with socialism.

I had just come to the end of "What's Going On?" when an old friend - real, rather than imagined - sent me a facebook message detailing the inspiration they'd found in Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged". He'd long promised to write at length about the book, and suddenly here it was, the deliverance of his promise. I felt betrayed. I felt that this old friend's sense of social justice should have been beyond corruption, yet here he was spouting about the beauty of capitalism.

I was less understanding perhaps than I should have been, more intransigent to be sure to the sudden streak of capitalism. But Steel does this to you; he digs deep into the well of your socialist belief and brings it rippling out to the surface, like a splash of cold invigorating water. I wouldn't have it any other way. Nor, I think, would Mark Steel.

The Human Stain (Philip Roth)

It's difficult to argue unequivocally either for or against reading an author's series of books in order: the implication of doing so is that you 'get' the whole story, are able to contextualise and approach a fuller appreciation of the characters, and can maybe even fulfil an inner emotional imperative to form attachment to characters through being able to read them through the course of their lives. Certainly, familiarity with a character across each instalment of a trilogy triggers precisely the safe yet somehow real depersonalisation between reader and read that a lot of book lovers thrive upon. The trilogy is the equivalent of the unwieldy 600 page plus novel that is some readers' idea of heaven.

If you don't come to The Human Stain with knowledge of its predecessors - or indeed of Roth's writing -  however, the loss of context and character familiarisation are minor things to bear compared with the richness of writing and Roth's unflinching determination to scratch away at issues of identity in modern America. Set against the rise in public consciousness about race and ethnicity which have dominated the rights and identity politics agenda since the waning years of European colonialism, Roth gives us Professor Coleman Silk - a man whose identity is shaped and determined through the activity of the self, as embodied in the American dream.

In Coleman Silk we have a black man who 'passes' (for white), who abjures his racial identity in order to avail himself of the fruits of the American dream. It is a simple enough literary premise that discourses cuttingly on the existential self versus groupism and that retains an almost uncomfortable focus on how pivotal are secrets to sustaining the fiction of the self. Should Professor Silk have been 'true' to the cause of Blacks in America? Or was he right to shed those aspects of identity that would have hindered the attainment of his own goals?

The irony of a black man who has successfully passed as white for the last six decades of his life referring to a couple of absent (and never seen) students - black students it turns out - as 'spooks' and being labelled racist as a result won't help make up your mind one way or the other.. you will already have done that. What such irony does help elucidate is how crucial are secrets in the ongoing creation of the fiction of self.

A change of climate (Hilary Mantel)

You'll be deafened by the cacophany of politely repressed emotions in this book: all the more so because it is enveloped in writing of such lightness, such deftness of touch, that on one hand Mantel's style reinforces the injunction not to explore or feel too deeply while on the other hand it provides such a stark contrast to issues of injustice, family, faith and loss that you can't help getting out of your depth.

A prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)

A Prayer for Owen Meany is an examination of faith and fate set in an outlandish narrative. The Owen of the title has a high-pitched child's voice set in a childlike physique; he disdains the Catholic Church for refusing to believe in his virgin birth or in his being God's instrument; and he is obsessed with practising basketball shots with his best friend John.

Through John's narration, splicing past and present, we know that Owen dies exactly per his dream and in the course of being God's instrument, though tantalisingly - and necessarily, if there aren't to be plot spoilers halfway through the book - the dream doesn't provide the full-blown details of how his death comes about.

And we learn that in the fact of Owen's death - the fact of its occurring much as Owen has dreamt - the previously non-religious John turns to religion and offers up an unrelenting prayer for God to return Owen Meany to him.

The story of faith is made more palatable by the fact that it is intertwined with subsequent anti-war sentiment. Thus, Owen's role as instrument of God doesn't include lynching non-Whites, an interpretation of God's will that we are all too familiar with. No, Owen must save Vietnamese children (as well as John) from certain death at the hands of a man grieving for the loss of his brother during the Vietnam war, and brandishing a gun to help him quell his anger towards the "dinks".

Thus, Owen Meany the physically stunted virgin baby who must do God's will is transformed into a hero. His best friend owes his life to Owen - if not to his bravery, then at least to his acceptance and embracing of his own fate - and is disgusted with the American foreign policy that led to the war that forged Owen's fate. So much so, that John decamps to Canada and lives the rest of his life praying to God to return Owen Meany, a life of silent prayer that is punctuated only by his teaching English to schoolgirls.

Out of crazy and improbable scenarios are born the heroes of our time: that's the easiest thing to come to terms with in this novel, the glib summary that rolls off the tongue. More difficult to process is our thinking on issues of faith and fate, with a good measure of social justice thrown in. Would we be joining John in his prayers if Owen had died for a cause we despise? Would Owen have faced his fate with such conviction and enthusiasm if that fate had been to facilitate rather than prevent the Vietnamese childrens' death? Are we really ready to confront our "fate"? Do we even believe in "fate"?

Germinal (Emile Zola)

Germinal is often cited as one of Zola's masterpieces. 13th in the twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle, Germinal follows the thread of Zola's avowedly naturalist approach to themes of heredity and environment within a study of one family (two branches - one enjoying wealth and other poverty),

Germinal is a book that will stay with you forever. It is a seminal study of working class experience and struggle, and of a miners' strike in particular, forged in the mould of Zola's republicanism (in the sense of sharing the 179 ethos of liberty, equality and fraternity), positivism and realism.

Neither a political tract, nor a mirror on contemporary society, Germinal lacks the larger-than-life characters of a Pip or a Hamlet or an Emma. What it does, and successfully so, is to unwrap the quotidian realities - with sheer wealth of description - of a moment in time and experience, in a manner that rendered it enduring and significant some 100 years later when Britain's own miners were forced to strike.

Though Zola is said not to have embraced socialism until later in life and leftist - particularly Marxist - critiques of him supposedly abound, Germinal flirts with socialism and even anarchism in a fairly knowing and empathetic way. It's also a deeply, almost frighteningly, human book - by which I mean that you become so entangled in the lives and experiences and joys and horrors of the striking miners, so engrossed in feelings of outrage on their behalf, that are they rarely less than real to you.

Germinal, then, left me angry, frustrated and sad. I can only assume that Zola was being ironic in choosing the month of Germinal (March-April in the 1792 revolutionary calendar) - the month of hope and germination normally associated with springtime - as the title for this book. Then again, hopefulness is perhaps the fundamental sentiment driving the working-class struggle - hope that is continually thwarted by the reality of greedy, grasping natures but that nevertheless springs eternal.

Without doubt, Germinal ought to be part of the national reading curriculum. Not merely for the fact that it might inspire a generation of right-thinking individuals, but because it lights the torch of outrage against social injustice and is quite honestly a beautifully written book with wonderfully observed descriptions of life in all its quotidian mess.

What the Grapes of Wrath began - if, like me, you read that first - Germinal takes to another level altogether.

We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families (Philip Gourevitch)

Gourevitch - a New Yorker staffer - is not afraid to take sides, pass judgement and pack a punch with his journalese-cum-ethnographic style. If, as happens with most humanitarian incidents/phases and atrocities, you feel that a sense of outrage is appropriate about the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s but are not exactly clear on the complexities of the case then this is the book for you.

Gourevitch offers - albeit perhaps unintentionally - a fantastic beginner's guide to understanding the situation in Rwanda. We're not talking dry facts: we are talking about hearing the crack of dead bodies underfoot, coming to terms with the unbearable truth of your neighbour turning on you with a machete, grasping the understated heroism that saves lives, clenching your teeth at the apathetic shrug of the shoulders by genocide criminals confronted by their actions and... asking why the UN exists when it is so criminally implicated in facilitating genocide.

Which is not to say that you should simply ascribe to the direction that Gourevitch's outrage takes; but you ought to be sustained by some sense of rage as a result of reading his offering. If the subjective, the emotional, the ideological is not for you - well, Gourevitch delivers on the opposite front too. Delving, necessarily, into issues of ethnicity, conflict and the nation there is enough ethnographic substance here to whet your intellectual appetite.

Indeed, Gourevitch's style may mark the beginning of a new way of writing ethnography that demonstrates how disciplines like anthropology can argue their relevance to the "real" world.

Having said all of the above, I found myself in a curious position of not being able to put the book down on one hand, and on the other hand feeling a need to disentangle my own responses and thoughts from what are - to the newcomer to Rwanda - overwhelming revelations and the sometimes overbearing judgement of the book's author.

Read this!