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The book is written in Germany of 1932. One year before Hitler came to power.

I first read this in Swedish a few years ago. The Swedish title, What'll Become Of The Pinnebergs? is a bit cheesy; it sounds a bit like a 30s comedy, which of course it is in a way, but it doesn't seem to have the weight of the original's Little Man, What Now? At the same time I can't help but like the title, as if it's setting us up less to see a warning (which it is) and more to see the people in it, as a (which it also is) nice, low-intensity but increasingly desperate story about a young family just trying to get along.

Start from the beginning: Johannes Pinneberg marries Emma "Lämmchen" ("Little lamb") Mörschel. They hadn't really planned to get there this quickly, but they're young, they forget about contraception, and whoops. No big, these are modern times and it's not that much of a moral issue. They're well into their 20s, they already have jobs (though of course she'll have to quit hers), they were going to end up here anyway, now they just have just under 9 months to get their proper adult married lives in order before the little one arrives. They're in love, they're willing to work hard, they don't demand any luxury... What could possibly go wrong?

Well, there's the bit about getting started. If you want to feed three mouths on one salary, you need to save money. To save money, you need to have money. If you can't afford to buy your own place, you need to rent expensive furnished rooms, and they don't want squalling newborns. You need a fixed income, but the economy is hurting and if you don't like the deal, there are thousands of others who want your job, and...

(...and there's political unrest brewing in the background, communists and Nazis fighting in the streets, and say what you want about the Nazis, they may be violent thugs but at least they're OUR violent thugs, good German boys who are bound to grow up if we just show them some respect, and let's be honest, nobody likes the Jews, so we'll see after the election...)

The book is written in Germany of 1932. One year before Hitler came to power.

And Pinneberg works and toils but he can't get ahead, he clings to any job he can get by his fingernails, locked in competition with his co-workers. They're in a recession, and you know the business owners are hurting too, what with the taxes and all, and they'd love to offer better wages but &c. Don't cause any trouble, keep your head down, don't come across as political by demanding more than what we say is your share, you'll get pie in the sky when you die. Emma's class-conscious worker parents sneer at her for "marrying up", Johannes' aging madam of a mother can't understand why they're so hung up on something as hopelessly common as money. All Johannes and Emma ask is to love and earn their keep, but anything they can say or do is turned against them. Pride fucks with ya; nobody likes a beggar, but what to do when you're reduced to asking for mercy? The harder society becomes, the more we hate the weak, the weakness in ourselves.

Down the slippery slope, sunk without trace, utterly destroyed. Order and cleanliness, gone; work, material security, gone; making progress and hope, gone. Poverty is not just misery, poverty is an offence, poverty is a stain, poverty is suspect.

And yet Fallada describes them with such warmth and wide-eyed optimism, as if he can't bear the thought that it's hopeless even as he piles on the misfortune and they increasingly lose their grip on that steep, slippery slope. He describes their lives so simply, so matter-of-factly that he never lets us forget that this is happening NOW - in the 30s, sure, but that wasn't long ago, this isn't some weird mediaeval Dickens world, these are two young people in 20th century Europe. They're in love. They have no money. They're slipping, and they can't hold on. And they're not alone, and fear and paranoia is spreading, and SOMETHING is going to happen to society very soon.

And it breaks my heart, and leaves me fucking furious that I know what'll become of the Pinnebergs. Whatever they ended up doing over the next 15 years, they became part of that thing that we've been so busy arguing that it can never happen again that we completely ignore any hint that it can, as if "Never Again" were some magical formula. Nobody saw it coming that time, so common wisdom states... Except for Fallada and other writers, obviously... So clearly we'll see it coming next time, right? Increasing inequality, rising unemployment, fear, xenophobia, more people running to extremist parties, that's all stuff that just kind of happens in 2014. Germany of 1932 was long ago.

And yet I read this book and I love it, I can almost forget what I know, I can read it and see that question mark at the end of the title. The book is so now, and the Pinnebergs so multi-faceted and so trusting in each other and believing that somehow it has to work out, there's simply no other option, that I want to believe it. Fallada didn't know; he could suspect, but he could hope. He could be as naive as Johannes and Emma are at the start. Because really, what else is there?

The book is written in Germany of 1932. It sold massively, was serialized all over Europe, became the 1930s version of Orange Is The New Black, was discussed everywhere. Then Hitler took over anyway. The pen didn't stand a chance against the sword.

Little man... what now?

Lou Reed - New York Telephone Conversation

I'm honestly not sure if I love or hate this novel. (And I just mistyped "love" as "live". Synonym of some kind, I guess.) It's at once so unbelievably clever, and so unbearably conscious and smug about it.

Whenever someone has been quite struck down, lost faculties, members of his family, he is said to have "joked with his nurses" quite a lot. What a mine of humor every nurse's life must be.

I won't try to summarize it; there's either nothing or everything to summarize. A series of hundreds of loosely connected episodes, most of them just a single paragraph, all of them immensely quotable to the point where I dogear every other page, while at the same time stabbing the self-absorbedness of clever New Yorkian artsiness through the kidneys with a sharp but rusty blade.

The chancellor of our branch of the university once asked me what I thought of the head of our division now. I said I thought he was a thug. "Ah," she said, with a chiming laugh and a lilt, clapping her hands just once. "You writers! What a way you have with words."

When I read Stoner recently I was intrigued by the question of what made that forgotten novel so timely now. No need to wonder with Speedboat, which reads like a twitter novel but very obviously isn't. It's a critic's novel, in the way it scrutinizes its own characters, pouncing on every malapropism, cliche and awkward social interaction of the characters, but also in the way it challenges the reader to piece it together. Several different storylines chopped up and stitched together - this must be what it's like to be a character in a Pynchon novel - in a way that begs to be diagrammed (though I actually like it the way it is). It's also very obiously a work of the 70s, the leftovers of the Vietnam protests, civil rights movements, women's lib and political conviction left flopping on the sidewalk of the 1970s.

It turned out that every single child on the school bus had known that one of their Kevins was missing. They had not mentioned it to the driver, or their teacher, or each other. They took it that Kevin had been left, forever, for some reason, which would become clear to them, with patience, in the course of time.

A recent New York Times article (which is what the characters of this book would discuss ad nauseam) argued that the last literary taboo is boredom. Bull. Speedboat, while never boring, is definitely a novel of boredom. Lots of stuff happens; none of it seems to matter much, it's all just words, words, words. The narrator observes, snarks, rolls her eyes and scatters witticisms around herself like a shotgun designed by Woody Allen. There's real life somewhere in it, but every crack is quickly and deliberately glossed over.

When I wonder what it is that we are doing - in this brownstone, on this block, with this paper - the truth is probably that we are fighting for our lives.

Etc etc. I can't out-clever Adler. I can't point out anything about this novel it doesn't itself do, with a dismissive "darling" tacked on at the end.

Lloyd Cole - Speedboat

OK. So this is one of my most formative reading and re-reading experiences... 30 years ago. I hadn't read it in at least 20. Does it hold up?

...Kind of? Don't get me wrong, what I used to think was King's magnum opus is flawed as hell in a lot of ways. King's strength, in addition to all the horror stuff, was always empathy; his characters may not be enormously different from book to book, but they always worked. If The Stand really had been a 1990 novel it might have been a different book (for better or for worse), but in reality it is juvenalia - really impressive juvenalia, but still very obviously a 1975 novel by an aspiring writer, and then dug out of the desk and quickly dressed up for halloween 1990. For all that King tries to make it up-to-date, his America full of hippies, young Vietnam veterans, Nixon references and white blues singers is very obviously from another era. And that carries over to his character work; as much as he puts into most of his characters, he still has problems not writing women, POC, LGBT folk etc as anything but shallow stereotypes. Not insurmountable ones, especially in a cast of hundreds, but they're there. Good ol' boy from Texas? You get to be the hero. Demon from the depths of hell? You get a personality. Teenage girl? You get to be shrill. (And in fairness, King's own author avatar gets to be a pathetic wannabe villain, but at least one with depth.)

That said, the first 2/5ths or so of this book, where he kills off 99.4% of the US population, is still a stunning piece of work, no less so in the middle of an actual pandemic. Starting with a dozen or so characters and through them showing us society breaking down as things go from denial to panic to madness to silence, going into endless detail about all the mundanities of trying to survive in the middle of an apocalypse where there's nothing but your own and each other's demons to fight... It's so good it's almost a pity when the back half of the book turns into a big showdown between good and evil with more overt Christianity in it than King would ever have again. I say "almost" because it's still good (if obviously derivative of the hobbit books); Randall Flagg is one of his most memorable monsters, and the way he uses it to actually present a somewhat hopeful view of society, one where people don't necessarily want to be evil, and the lies they tell themselves to get through it only last so long, really works. In a way I find myself wishing this 1420-page book had another 200 pages of just random people in Boulder and Las Vegas finding their place in a new society.

Plus, y'know, it's probably one of the best bicycle novels written by an American who unironically uses the term "Detroit iron" for cars.

The Stand, in a weird way, is King's first stab at a Great American Novel, full of small towns and big cities, interstates and interior states (sorry)... And if its villain these days feels more like a populist politician convincing half the population they have to kill the other half in the face of a deadly pandemic, I'm not sure that makes this ol' 70s throwback any less timely. So I have to knock this down from the five stars my nostalgia gave it, but my inner teenager would kill me if I knock it down any further.

I'd like to help him but everything's become so difficult to explain, the things I say are neither accepted or dismissed, they're just something an old person said.

When Tove Jansson visited the US in the early 70s she saw a Florida retirement community and was astonished by it; an entire holiday resort where old people come to conserve whatever life they have left in a place where sunshine was guaranteed and the outside world wouldn't intrude. The Saint Petersburg she sets Sun City in isn't the real Saint Petersburg, FL, anymore than Moominvalley is the real countryside outside Helsinki; it feels more like a dream, like life suspended while waiting for the inevitable. The old women and men in the retirement home, carefully weighing their words to try and forge some sort of connection to the others (or avoid it, in some cases) without breaking the illusion that everything is perfect, are contrasted by Bounty Joe, one of the few young people around, who missed out on the hippie era and now only hopes for confirmation that Jesus is returning so he won't have to grow up.

Jansson's prose is beautiful as always, and the way she sketches characters more by what they don't say or remember than what they do, as if they've spent their lives walking on eggshells and can't bear to break them now. (Two characters are strongly hinted to be gay, as Jansson was and had to keep an open secret for years.) At the same time, while I don't really mind that the plot feels sort of non-existent, there's something about the setting that just feels ... off. I don't know if it's just that Jansson's experience with America is only barely more substantial than Kafka's was, or if it's deliberate to emphasize how artificial this sort of community comes across to an outsider.

Sleep is a blessing you can meet in many different ways.

Really enjoyed this. The story of a female Iranian professor of literature returning to her home country around the time of Khomeini's revolution and staying for 18 years, trying to do what she wants to do - teach literature, without being censored or oppressed. Which isn't easy in a very hard-line religious dictatorship.

It's part memoir, part literary criticism (her analysis of Lolita is fascinating - I just wish I had read all of the books she discusses) and part analysis of what it means to live in a country where individuality, imagination and personal freedom are frowned upon, to put it mildly - especially as a woman. It's a furious defense of human rights and of the need for fiction, a book where I find myself wanting to quote something every other page. (And considering the current trend of growing moral censorship and hunt for "true stories", not just relevant in Iran.)

I'm not completely bowled over by her writing style, though; her observations are astute, but she veers back and forth in time, dipping in and out of monologue and dialogue in a way that doesn't always do her any favours. It doesn't really bother me, but it's enough to make the book less than a masterpiece. Still, very recommended.

It's an adapted 30-minute TED talk so it's all very basic, but then it's a pretty basic question, isn't it? Yet it's funny how controversial it's (once again) become...

She sticks the word "feminist" right there in the title, then begins with a story about how when she was 14, a boy she knew called her "feminist" - "the same tone with which a person would say, 'You're a supporter of terrorism.'" So she goes back to the very simple (and very current-whatever-wave) question: Just how are gender roles formed, anyway? Why do we feel this need to protect them as if they were natural laws without which reality itself might break apart? Why do we pretend not to notice that the current situation hurts women and men? Why do we think "feminism" is a threat to "masculinity", when it's the current situation that's led to this brittle, desperate definition of a man as "Well, at least he's stronger than his woman"?

Not long ago, I wrote an article about being young and female in Lagos. And an acquaintance told me that it was an angry article, and I should not have made it so angry. But I was unapologetic. Of course it was angry. Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change. In addition to anger, I am also hopeful, because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to remake themselves for the better.

It is scary that such a simple concept needs to be reclaimed again and again and again. But it's nice to, now and then, see it spelled out this simply.