Sam Zell - Am I Being Too Subtle

This is a book about the life and career of Sam Zell, an American real estate operator and investor.  One talent that Zell obviously possesses is the ability to time the market.  His entry into a deal usually comes in distressed circumstances when fear outweighs greed as the dominant market sentiment.  This aspect of his character earned him the moniker, ‘The Grave Dancer,’ and it’s one he revels in.  Conversely, he also seems to be very good at detecting when competition has become too intense, valuations too high or credit conditions unsustainably easy.  He seems to have embodied the principle of ‘be greedy when others are fearful, be fearful when others are greedy’ during his career.

RISK

Zell also has an excellent understanding of risk.   He is always focused on reducing risk and understands it simply and wonderfully well.  Zell’s father, a Polish grain trader who successfully fled before the Nazi’s occupied his country and killed most of his friends in the Jewish community, is obviously a constant reminder to Zell that things can go badly wrong while one waits.  He writes that his father tried to convince many of his friends and family to flee with him but that they preferred to wait and see.  Risk, to Zell, is losing money and not some convoluted rubbish like volatility of returns or performance versus some arbitrary benchmark.  He is laser focused on the risk presented by uncertainty and how delays in the timing of a deal can increase this.  A good example of his understanding of time as a risk is the choice he makes between a deal he can sell for a higher price, but with competition hurdles that will take 6 months to overcome, vs. a lower priced, quicker deal.  He chooses the lower priced, quicker deal because no one knows what’s going to happen in those intervening 6 months.  

By the same token, he gives an example of 2 investment choices (p198):  7% for 5 years or 7.5% for 10 years and says most people choose the shorter term one because future inflation won’t erode their returns as much over 5 years plus the optionality of a shorter term.  He disagrees because of the reinvestment risk.  If rates rise the 5 year choice would look clever, but of course rates can fall as well as rise.  He calls this risk by omission rather than commission.  Another phrase he uses, ‘liquidity equals value’ (p104), pithily encapsulates a similar principle and demonstrates how nothing is more important than liquidity in chaotic market conditions when the best opportunities typically present themselves.  

Unlike a lot of investors and businessmen who write books like this, Zell does talk about some of his failures.  He also doesn’t try to pretend that he’s always known everything and writes, ‘nothing refines your understanding and assessment of risk better than experience.’ (p160)  As someone who started doing property deals while still at university, it’s obvious that Zell is constantly doing deals and has learned to view failure as an opportunity to learn - which can be hard psychologically! Zell is a consummate do-er and, as he rightly points out, “trying to be right 100% of the time leads to paralysis.” (p187)

Zell has excellent discipline in selling, which isn’t easy.  Often there’s a type of inertia associated with things you’ve owned for a while and Zell advises an attitude of constant reassessment, ‘I have always believed that every day you choose to hold an asset, you are also choosing to buy it.’ (p136).  Provided the asset is in any sense liquid, I totally agree with this, as it could be sold and the money used for something else.  However, I think it’s difficult not to slip into some form of the inertia mentioned earlier as it often saves the tricky business of really having to think about all of your holdings, all the time.  It’s easier just to think about exciting new buys or about selling horrendous performers and forgetting about them or selling good performers and congratulating yourself on a job well done, which it ultimately may prove not to be!  The important thing is to think about the valuation. Zell gives a good example of how he goes about this when describing having dinner with his big shot mates. ‘I looked round the table and asked them a simple question: “Yahoo’s market cap today is $100bn.  If I gave you $25bn in cash, is there any of you who doesn’t think you could reproduce what Yahoo has done to date?”  The conversation validated that market valuations had completely disconnected from reality.’ (p127) This reminded me of Charlie Munger’s same question about Coca-Cola, although Munger obviously gives the opposite answer! 

Zell has the ability to understand the crux of a deal or a situation. I totally agree with his assertion that this central assumption cannot be figured out using modeling or numbers.  In this sense, risk management is far more akin to an art than to the pseudo-scientific which it’s presented as in concepts like VaR (Value at Risk) Zell recalls an example:

“I remember walking into the office one night around 8.00pm to find a guy working on a ten-year projection for a real estate project we were considering buying.  I looked at what he was doing and I realized how many hours he’d spent laboring over his calculations.  His approach was ass-backwards.  I said, ‘You’ve got to be able to look at the deal and know what it hinges on to know whether it works or not.  If you realize that the key component works, then you use the numbers to test it.  You don’t do the numbers to find out eight hours later whether it was worth starting.’ I’m sure his IQ was higher than mine.” (p182)

For me, this addresses something fundamental about the future.  The world is too non-linear to model and the numbers models and forecasts contain are mere guesses about a future that Keynes tells us is not just unknown but unknowable!  Modern finance likes to focus a lot on statistics and probability but, as Keynes tells us, and surprisingly few people are prepared to admit:

“By ‘uncertain knowledge’....I do not mean merely to distinguish what is known for certain from what is only probable...The sense in which I am using the term is that in which the prospect of a European War is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the obsolescence of a new invention, or the position of private wealth holders in the social system in 1970.  About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever’” - my italics, ‘The General Theory of Employment’ (1937)

CULTURE

Another area where Zell is extremely strong is his understanding of the importance of culture.  In Zell’s own words, ‘Culture is king’ (p180).  A lot of what I’ve covered so far in this summary has very obvious links to culture, but it’s so important it certainly deserves a section of its own.  First, the culture of ownership.  Zell is an owner, acts like an owner and wants everyone working for him to be an owner too:

‘From the very first deals we did at EGI, I have spread the opportunity - both the risks and rewards.  We co-invest, side-by-side, and I often provide a “promote” to my people, allowing them to share in the profits on a portion of my invested capital.  That means I put my money behind theirs (say $150,000 of my money to $30,000 of their money), and if our investments or funds achieve their minimum target metrics, my people get returns based on the aggregate ($180,000).  In effect, we’re all invested in each other’s success.  It’s not only about motivation; it’s a mandate to collaborate.  Deals and opportunities are discussed, questioned and probed by the team at large because everybody has a piece of everybody else’s deal.’ (p183/4)

He also extends this understanding to his philanthropy.  I think the point is just as important in that context where there’s no profit motive, ‘to make meaningful impact, a philanthropic program - just like an investment - needs an owner.  Someone who has a vision, is paying attention, asking tough questions, challenging, and pushing for results.  That’s why I’ve always hesitated to provide endowments.’ (p198)

Secondly, Zell seems to foster a culture that is driven and energetic almost to the point of hyperactivity.  In his college days, Zell couldn’t be bothered with academic work because he was too busy doing deals and making money and he seems to have retained this youthful enthusiasm, undimmed, in later life.  He nevers makes himself out to be a genius and doesn’t value academic intelligence in and of itself:

‘There’s a baseline IQ level needed to work at my firm, but I don’t need rocket scientists.  After that, what best predicts your success in my world is drive, energy, attitude, judgment, conviction and passion.  And an ability to cut to the center of an issue.  I’d trade another twenty IQ points for those qualities any day.’ (p182)

Thirdly, Zell wants a culture that is more or less ‘flat’, which is to say having minimal hierarchy.  In his typically indelicate way, Zell calls this the ‘“open kimono” policy.  No secrets, no whispers, no closed doors.’ (p180) The point is absolutely crucial.  So many organisations operate via politics. Zell seems to be doing his utmost to reduce this tendency to a minimum. He also says, ‘I constantly challenge my people to “take me on”’ (p183), indicating that no one is above scrutiny, although I did wonder how many people had taken him on and won!

This leads on to the fourth observation about Zell culture: it is extremely Zell-centric.  It could never be replicated without him and everything depends on him to a certain extent.  I suppose this could be seen as a weakness but I was more inclined to see it as a strength.  Zell knows himself well and knows what he needs around him to succeed.  Just because that can’t be repeated without him doesn’t necessarily make it a bad thing.  He seems to have been able to strike the balance between control and delegation well enough to achieve enormous scale in his operations.  On this subject, he writes:

‘I believe in the radius theory of business, where your ability to succeed is ultimately limited by the number of people between you and the decision.  That’s because the farther from you the decision is made, the less you control the risk.  History shows that businesses get buried when they don’t delegate enough - but also when they delegate too much.’ (p179)

Zell also seems to be a mercurial hirer and firer depending on how new recruits take to the singular environment he’s created.  ‘I don’t write a job description and then look for someone to fit it.  I find talented people who fit my organization and then look for ways to use them.’ (p181)  This kind of approach seems to only work when there’s a conductor at the centre of the orchestra who knows exactly what they’re looking for.  As he says, ‘I’m chairman of everything and CEO of nothing.’ (p179)  It also seems that Zell is capable of inspiring incredible levels of personal loyalty amongst his staff and, especially, his chief lieutenants.  Some of the most emotional parts of the book, of which there are very few, relate to losing his closest business mentors and, more often, underlyings.  I’m sure Zell would prefer to have them called partners but I got the distinct impression that there’s only ever one boss in a Sam Zell show and no one is ever in any doubt who that is!  The man is a born leader and barely seems capable of collaboration if it isn’t on his terms.  As he writes himself, quoting Robert Benchley, ‘If you ain’t the lead dog, the scenery never changes.’ (p215).  

A fifth aspect of Zell culture is an emphasis on personal connections and environments.  A great example of this is his preference for visiting people for meetings rather than relying on ‘roadshows’.  ‘I love meeting people on their own turf…you tend to spend more time together when you’re a guest.  And the conversations range broader and go deeper…people share their thoughts in a remarkably candid way.’ (p173)  My old boss used to say exactly the same thing and I think both of them are totally right about this.  On a roadshow, the script is set and rehearsed and one meeting is exactly the same as another 8 meetings a day for 8 cities in a row for the poor person regurgitating the same thing to investors who haven’t done any homework.  Far better to meet someone in their own environment, during a normal working day and to turn up prepared so they know you’re respectful of their time!  

This section of the review is going to focus on the hypocritical aspects of Zell, as he presents himself.  To be clear, I don’t view this as anything particularly negative - especially when it comes to fund managers and investors.  I’m yet to come across a successful fund manager who isn’t in some way hypocritical or doesn’t somehow break their own rules!  Perhaps it’s a necessary constituent of a mindset that has to deal with constant flux.  It’s also my belief that we’re all hypocrites in our lives, but very few people can deal with that truth psychologically so prefer not to examine it. 

In any case, Zell makes a point about not talking about his personal life.  Except for the fact he does, when it suits him!  He barely mentions his four wives except to say he is getting divorced from them and that one of them is a former Miss USA, which gives some indication what Zell thinks is important in a wife! The current model gets a glowing review on how knowledgeable she is about art and how great a collector she is.  For me, Zell should either leave his family out of the book entirely or include far more information about them.  As it stands, he says he won’t talk about them, and then does every now and then in a way that makes it seem like he’s cherry picking the stuff that shows him in a good light - getting married to Miss USA, adopting one of his ex-wife’s children from a previous relationship, how great his current wife is etc.  We certainly never hear anything negative about Zell or any kind of explanation for the multiple divorces.  For such a shrewd operator in business, I thought it showed a remarkable lack of awareness.

By the same token, Zell makes a big song and dance about loyalty - even going so far as trotting out phrases like ‘loyalty defines your character’ and ‘I am who I say I am.’  (p221)  Maybe this is true when it comes to business, although obviously you’re not going to find any dissenting voices in this book!  However, I wondered what his ex-wives would make of these kinds of statements? 

Even regarding business, I thought there were some sections that smelled strongly of hypocrisy.  ‘Everything I do is predicated on the assumption that there’s another deal.’ (p218) is probably an accurate reflection of how Zell likes to see himself.  However, a blow by blow account of how he sold one of his large listed businesses shows him mercilessly playing one side against the other in order to get the best price.  Obviously, he can claim he’s under obligation to his shareholders to do so but I still thought that the statement, ‘I don’t squeeze out the last nickel’ (p220)  smelled a bit fishy in this context.  Equally, Zell writes about how there are some businesses he won’t invest in on ethical grounds:

‘I finally said, “It’s a fine business model, and probably very profitable, but I can't put my name on this.  I can’t be in the payday lending business.  I can’t charge a laborer 300 percent to borrow money for two weeks and live with myself.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a good deal.  It’s not the business I’m in.” p218 

This much is admirable, lending to working class people at exorbitant rates feels like a shitty business for a billionaire to be involved with. But there is a huge grey area between payday lending and a business that, for example, provides homes with drinking water at a fair and regulated price. Real estate definitely falls into this grey area.  For example, Zell is certainly not afraid of aggressive tax structures, which some would say are essential to success in real estate investment, and even recounts a tale of how his tax lawyer, who is also his brother-in-law, and him got indicted by the IRS over the structure of one of his deals.  Although Zell ends up getting dismissed, his brother-in-law ends up getting convicted (p68-69)!  Again, Zell justifies himself by saying he was only taking tax advice from a professional but I found this hard to swallow from a man who clearly knows every part of every deal intimately.  I’m sure Zell is right when it comes to the letter of the law, but I couldn’t buy the deeply ethical version of himself he seems to be selling at some points.  Zell cares primarily about money and success, not ethics, or else he would have chosen a different career!  To quote the man himself, ‘When people show you who they are, believe them’ (p218)!  

The depiction of himself as whiter than white both in life and in business, which seem to be almost synonymous for him, extends into a slightly unsettling mixture of the two.  ‘My business and I are like a brand, and I’m always thinking about protecting the brand’ (p220).  He enthuses about Sam Zell - the man, the business, the lifestyle! I thought this was probably true, but I asked myself, what are the core values of the Zell brand?  As with any well run brand, there’s a good deal of marketing spiel, talk about ethics and the literary equivalent of photos of smiling children. But when push comes to shove, Zell is about success and getting things done successfully in a world where success means MONEY.  I’m not trying to judge Zell or look down on him - it’s probable he’s done more for the world than thousands of worthy types, but I think he’s getting a bit carried away with himself when he tries to portray himself as a billionaire AND a saint!

Another passage I found hard to swallow was his motherhood and apple-pie patriotism:
  

‘America is the great equalizer.  You can come from nothing, you can come with no pedigree, you can be the son or daughter of immigrants, and you have the opportunity to be successful.  There’s no other country that doesn’t require some kind of birth heritage, or inheritance, or ingrown advantage.  Here everybody has a shot at being the lead dog.’ (p217) 

It’s understandable why Zell has such a positive perspective on America with the success he and his family have enjoyed since his father’s brave and prescient emigration.  However, I found myself wondering how an African-American with antecedents who were brought to America as slaves would feel being told this coming from a white, European, man from a well educated and cosmopolitan background.  Obviously he faces all the challenges of an immigrant but culturally, racially and genetically he seems to enjoy a lot of privileges.

When it comes to successful businessmen writing about how successful they’ve been, a certain amount of self-congratulation is to be expected.  Zell is no exception and is insufferably pleased with himself.  He is obsessively driven, loves to do deals and knows his own strengths and weaknesses intimately.  His gifts seem to be for leadership, timing and structuring deals, and for setting the cultural tone of an organisation.  He also loves to tell you about how amazing his parties, friends, holidays and corporate gifts are, which is a bit grating, and a lot of his jokes and ‘Sam-isms’ are hackneyed, to put it mildly.  However, this book is also full of wisdom.

At the end of the day, I’m probably complaining too much about a book which more or less does what it says it’s going to do.  As Zell says, ‘with today’s access to an overwhelming amount of information, most of it drivel, you have to focus on what’s meaningful.’ (p215)  This is a book about being successful and making money and contains a lot of good advice to that end.  He doesn’t gold plate the crowbar and is pithy and straight forward when it comes to business:   ‘I stay true to the fundamental truths:  the laws of supply and demand; liquidity equals value; limited competition; long-term relationships….they offer a framework through which I view potential opportunity.’ (p211)  

I could have done with a bit less of the ‘Brand Zell’ PR schmooze towards the end of the book, some of which felt a bit hypocritical.  Nonetheless, I ended up liking Zell for his irreverent attitude, his drive and his honest and sensible investment advice.  Of course he’s pleased with himself and self-possessed to the point of egotism, but that’s almost a prerequisite for the kind of success he’s had.  I would certainly recommend it to those interested in the subject of investment. 

Natalia Ginzberg - A Family Lexicon

It feels like this book was written for the author and not for the reader.  A huge cast of family and friends are introduced without any context or continuity.  I found it nearly impossible to keep track of them all and the author does nothing to aid the reader.  I suppose the intended effect is one of familiarity and intimacy but my overwhelming feeling was one of confusion.

The prose is good, straightforward and uncomplicated.  Occasionally it captures the feeling of family life so perfectly it’s impossible to say the author isn’t an extremely gifted writer.  However, there is absolutely no structure to speak of.  There are no chapters and the double spaced line breaks that provide the only pauses may as well have been placed at random.  The narrative, if there is one, is jerky and staccato.  Characters and themes are introduced and then dropped again after a few sentences without rhyme or reason.  A typical section might run something like, “My father had a lab assistant who liked fish on a Friday.  My father called it nitwittery.  Mario was never a nitwit.  He once moved to Pisa to sleep with his friend’s ex.  Mother never liked communism but used to have a dress maker on so-and-so street.”  It’s more or less a stream of consciousness.  The text does have a feeling of intimacy and authenticity, as well it should given the author says she is writing from memory, but ultimately I found it sloppy and self-indulgent.  I wanted someone to think about the characters and present them to me in an intelligible way, not just dump out the waste paper basket of their memory onto a page.

The family seems to have lived an interesting life, collectively, in Italy during the run up to WW2 and its aftermath.  Nonetheless, I would struggle to tell you even how many brothers or sisters the author has after nearly 300 pages (4?).  It’s a chaos of loosely connected associations and is barely comprehensible as a novel, which is how the author claims they want the book to be read.  

The book also had the annoying habit of repeating family jokes, catch phrases and poems ad nauseam.  I felt like I would have preferred it if the author could have reminded the reader who’s who a bit more often and left the hackneyed jokes unrepeated.  There was also a huge amount of name dropping, presumably to show how important and wonderful they all are.

Another aspect of the book that really pissed me off was the disrespect the author has for the privacy of her family.  She writes uncomplimentary things about all of her family and never writes anything about herself.  Given she was already a successful author by the time she wrote it, I felt like she is using the lives of people she allegedly loves to draw attention to herself, further her career or earn money - which is pretty shitty in my view.  If one of my siblings had written a book like this about my family, I’d give them a good slap!  Why not change the names and say it’s a novel?  This seems to me to be what many other authors do, with good reason! 

A final gripe is why Daunt books chose an American translator, with all the consequences this entails for vocabulary and syntax, when it’s a British shop and Ginzberg’s father is stated to be an Anglophile.  I felt it would have been much more appropriate to the book’s nature to have a British translator.  What kind of Anglophile would ever use a word like ‘jackass’ for heaven’s sake?! 

I didn’t get much out this book at all and didn’t enjoy reading it.  I suppose I could have gone through the book and constructed a family tree or list of characters but I felt, ‘why should I bother if the author can’t even be fucked to organise their own thoughts?’ It was more or less a waste of time.  I think it would take someone with a colossal ego and extremely high opinion of themselves to write a book like this, which made me like it even less!

Neil M. Gunn - The Silver Darlings

The author creates a rich and detailed world, with lots of important 19th century historical themes.  It touches on the economic and social anatomy of an export-led fishing boom, the aftermath of the Highland clearances, the relationship between lords and crofters, the plague, evangelicalism and religious fervor.  This was well done and never felt heavy handed with the author choosing poignant vignettes to illustrate the wider point.  

This book is a bildungsroman set in coastal, north-east Scotland during the 19th century, after the Highland clearances.  The region undergoes a fishing boom centered on herring, which are called ‘the silver darlings.’   

The protagonist is a young boy called Finn, although the story begins with his father and mother.  His father is one of the first men in their village to buy a boat and begin fishing but, very soon after, he and his crew are captured by a naval press gang while at sea and forced into naval service.  Finn’s mother, Catrine, has a dream that her husband is dead.  

She is pregnant with Finn at the time and decides to move away from ‘Dale’ to ‘Dunster’ to stay with an old woman called Kirsty and her husband.  The family grows up here, plague comes to the village, Kirsty dies and Finn’s mother, who cared for her, becomes ill but survives.  Kirsty leaves her croft and some money to Catrine and Finn and they continue to live there. 

Finn eventually becomes a fisherman in the crew of a local hero called Roddie.  Catrine and Roddie fall in love and get married and Finn comes of age, becoming the captain of his own boat and falling in love with a woman called Una.

I really enjoyed the narrative pacing and structure of the book.  To be sure, there are a fair number of exciting events that take place over the 20-30 odd years the book covers but it never felt outlandish or melodramatic.  The feeling of the plot is quotidian and realistic.  Just as exciting as the tales from the high seas are the internal, emotional storms that the characters navigate and often these are better and more clearly sketched than the physical adventures of the fishermen.   The best of these were Finn’s struggles to come to terms with his mother’s relationship with Roddie, his captain, and his attempts to understand his own emotions about Una - a popular fish gutter who has many suitors in the village.  The book’s dialogue is also generally strong, which is an achievement.

I did not like the book’s tendency towards romanticism and sentimentality.  This was most obvious in the prose, which could be florid and verbose.  In stark contrast to the dialogue, which is pithy.  There’s no economy to the writing whatsoever and huge numbers of words are used to achieve underwhelming results.  Often, so many words are thrown together haphazardly it’s quite hard to work out what the author means.  I suppose it’s supposed to be poetic but I sometimes found it unclear and prattling.  

Take this example describing waves. It begins, ‘no poem could describe them all’ but unfortunately that doesn’t stop the author from trying: ‘Take this one coming in at them now - now! - its water on the crest turned into little waters, running herding together, before - up - up! Over its shoulder and down into the long flecked hollow like a living skin.  Or that one steaming off there! - a great lump of ocean, a long-backed ridge overtopping all, a piled-up mountain.’ (p298) I found myself wondering if any of it added much or described waves meaningfully.  

Another passage, where the prose is equally purple, includes no less than 8 gerunds - ‘during the long, dark hours, an awakened ear had heard the booming, the ravening roaring winds, as if held to security by a miracle in the centre of a crashing hell.  And more than once the mind had rushed wakefulness in a vast upheaving and plunging recession, a tearing loose, with a blinded moment of dread that could feel no more as it waited the smashing obliterating impact.’ (p325) 

Sometimes sentences can run to 100-odd words and 16 commas (p368/69), which is too long for me especially when coupled with flashy prose.  Sometimes it’s just too romantic: ‘her shoulders and head uprose like an obstruction, a smooth rock, in the river of time running round and past her.  It was shape in the void, it was constancy in the flux, it was beauty’s still flower in eternity.’ (p370)   The author never seems afraid to use three descriptions where one would suffice!  

This tendency towards overly-elaborate and ‘poetic’ prose, perhaps understandably, is at its worst discussing romance.  ‘He let the dark girl - brown in her darkness, a mouse brightness - fade from his mind, pass away into the outer ring of eternal beauty and eternal sorrow, the dark outer ring of the song, where it is lonely to wander’ (p400). I thought it was high falutin and ineffective.  It is coupled with a weird sort of prudishness when it comes to sexual matters.  Where other matters can be described in candid terms, if the author isn’t gripped by the desire to be poetic, sex is always dealt with in breathless witterings.  It’s all, ‘crash through the barrier of strange reluctance’ and ‘find peace for herself and her body inside the circle of his strength’ (p230).  Given Roddie’s violent outburst in a bar in Stornaway, I’m not sure getting fucked by him would be such a peaceful experience!  Catrine, an otherwise highly pragmatic and strong woman, seems to turn into a giddy schoolgirl, rather than a middle-aged mother of an adult child, when she eventually gets it on with Roddie. ‘“Roddie, no!” she said, feeling the dark force of his body coming at her, pleading wildly out of the weakness that was melting her flesh.’ (p478)  The appearance of sex is always the prompt for ugly and circuitous prose!

There is also a very annoying amount of repetition, which really starts to grate after 600 odd pages.  Everytime a fisherman swears to God at sea he must touch cold iron. This made an appearance every 20 pages or so whenever anyone is in a boat - which is a fair amount!  One of Roddie’s crew called Henry is never mentioned without the word ‘satiric’ being used.  Finn’s biggest adventure, an ill fated trip to Stornoway in foul weather with Roddie, is related at great length and is then more or less repeated when Finn recounts the story back on dry land.  

It now feels like I’ve written a lot more about how I disliked the prose than I’ve written about how much I enjoyed the setting, feel and plot of the story, which were all really good.  Even though the prose really pissed me off at points and the book has an unmistakable leaning towards sentimentalism, ultimately, there’s a lot more to enjoy than there is to feel upset about.  It’s a good book and I would definitely recommend it.

Saki (H.H.Munro) - The Best of Saki (Picador)

There’s a lot to like about Saki’s extremely short stories.  They juxtapose buttoned up, conventional Edwardian upper-middle class society with unexpected savagery and brutality.  Amusing hi-jinx and practical jokes abound with varying degrees of success but I think most people would find something at least mildly enjoyable in this collection.

Saki creates credible scenes and characters with incredible economy and was obviously a shrewd and critical observer of the society around him.  Tyrannical aunts, busy-body society housewives and put-upon children are all sketched with ease and elan.

After a while, the stories become a bit formulaic.  A lovely, posh, jolly hockey sticks sort of weekend house party, or situation, is disrupted by a reminder of the savage side of life.  Very often, this is an actual animal.  The more ferocious or exotic the better.   The prim and proper veneer of social convention disappears and chaos duly ensues.  Usually, everything is alright in the end and it transpires that a child has got one over on the adults or that a witty man-child like Clovis has played a hilarious practical joke on the stuffy elders.  It's true that not all the stories have a happy ending and some finish with people dead or dying.  However, orders are inverted and conventions overthrown with such regularity that the impact becomes somewhat diminished.

By the end of the book, in spite of the fact that I was bored and found the stories a bit repetitive, it’s undeniable that the best ones were enjoyable and pleasing.  My favorites were ‘The Stake’, about a young gambler who loses access to ready funds and secretly gambles away the family’s cherished cook, and ‘Fate’ about a billiards player who invents a crisis to avoid finishing a game he is about to lose.  All told, I wasn’t a huge fan of Saki.  I really liked a couple of stories but, in the end, his prose style is a bit prim and proper and even though he is sending up the society he lives in, I feel like he does so in a way that’s a bit twee and formulaic.

Marcus Threscothick - Coming Back To Me

This was an interesting book about the psychological difficulties of a cricket obsessive.  Everything about his upbringing is focused on cricket, with his Dad playing a major part in the local club side and his Mum making the teas.  The pinnacle of happiness for him appears to be making a lot of runs and winning a cricket match, followed by beers with the lads down the club.  Teenage seasons are remembered minutely and anything to do with cricket appears to have been recorded in near photographic detail.  The consequences of this incredible focus have clearly been impressive on a professional level.  However, on a personal level, it at least seems possible that it made life problematic.  The first inkling of this comes when we learn about how he met his wife.  While Trescothick might spend several pages, or even a whole chapter, discussing a match or individual innings, meeting the love of his life is recorded in less than half a page.  At this relatively early stage in the book, I thought perhaps he might be reticent about discussing his private life when it had been under such scrutiny in the past.  

However, as the book progressed I formed an image of Trescothick as someone who isn’t much interested in life outside of cricket.  We learn about how he is unwilling to return home from tour in Pakistan after his father-in-law is seriously injured, leaving his wife distressed.  To his credit, this is recognised as a shocking error of judgment with hindsight and he takes full responsibility for his mistake.  In his defence, as vice-captain standing in for the absent Micheal Vaughan, he may have felt a heightened sense of responsibility.  Nonetheless, the incident could be viewed as evidence of a dangerous cricket myopia.  

This total obsession with cricket seems to have been a mixed blessing for Trescothick.  He gets so good that he plays internationally, which means he is touring for extended periods throughout the year. This is a lifestyle that he doesn’t seem constitutionally suited to, with some of his earliest and most traumatic childhood memories related to being separated from home and family life.  Nonetheless, the excitement and desire to play cricket gets him through the endless hours of traveling and being bored in hotel rooms.  Until they don’t.  

Trescothick talking about his mental problems is undoubtedly the highlight of the book.  He has a breakdown while on tour and needs to return home, but wants to keep it hushed up.  Owing to the mystery surrounding the circumstances of his departure, the press becomes very interested in what’s going on.  The most distressing part of the book is when he returns to the UK.  Given that his psychological issues relate to separation from home and family, it seems sensible that he would go straight home.  However, this isn’t possible because of all the paparazzi at his house, so he has to go into hiding in Devon.  It really rams home to me how being a sportsman in the public eye effectively robs you of a private life.  In fairness, Trescothick and his advisors are themselves somewhat to blame for the situation, for not being more forthcoming about the circumstances of his departure from the tour.  

It seems like Trescothick, as a man who really just wants to play cricket and eat sausages, is deeply confused and worried about what’s happening to him.  He doesn’t want to talk about his problems because they might threaten his international cricket career.  He continually hopes that they’ll be a short term problem and go away with the right therapy or medication.  It’s hard to blame him for this kind of wishful thinking.  In the end, as media speculation reaches fever pitch about the reasons for his absence (including rumours that Vaughan is sleeping with his wife - which he flat out denies), his advisors set up a friendly interview with Sky Sports with pre-planned questions and answers so he can reveal his mental struggles and end all the speculation.  Trescothick botches this and doesn’t say his lines about his psychological issues, rendering the whole thing a waste of time.  I feel this shows just how scared and ashamed Trecothick was of what had happened to him.  

Perhaps because of this horrendous experience, Trescothick is very open about what happened to him in the book.  A cricket dressing room, the place Trescothick lived his entire adult life, is probably not the most understanding environment to talk about difficult psychological issues.  His nickname amongst his teammates after his breakdown is ‘Madfish’.  So it’s clear to me how much he’s had to overcome to get to the point of writing a book about the experience.  One of the most positive aspects of the book was the fact that Trecothick makes many mistakes, admits that he’s made them, learns from them and improves afterwards.

There is some evidence that his cricket career followed some similar stages.  Early in his professional career, he has issues leaving the ball outside off-stump, which Peter Carlstein helps him solve in Australia.  He also has some issues facing spin, which he solves by ‘pressing’ a half step forward at Duncan Fletcher’s request - ‘Duncan’s theory was that, when batting against spinners, if you made a small but positive move onto the front foot before the ball was released, you would put yourself in a better position to go either fully forward or fully back depending on the length of the ball…”if you are going to catch a bus, it is better to arrive at the bus stop early enough to read the the number on the front, rather than at the last moment when you have no choice but to get on and find out later if it is going where you want to go.”’ (p81-82)

Of course, no sporting autobiography would be complete without the obligatory score settling!  Trescothick gets going early by putting a certain Nick Speak (Lancashire batsman) to the sword for saying, ‘this bloke is shit’ (p36) to him as a 17 year old debutant.  Trescothick classifies this as bullying rather than sledging.   Former England captain Nasser Hussain gets a very tepid review.  Trescothick claims he never said anything to him before his England debut until they were in the middle together.  He also tells an unflattering story about him smashing a fridge window in the changing room after he was given out to bad decision.  The most serious allegations are that he put his own batting interests above those of the team during a ODI (p110) and that he was a self-interested captain (p122) - perhaps Trecothick has something of a vendetta against him?  Shane Warne is also slated for writing an article saying he should be dropped from the England team (p143-144).

Alongside these attacks, explicit or veiled, are some more enjoyable titbits.  For instance,  apparently Caddick and Gough used to bicker constantly in the England dressing room.  I also learned that Nathan Astle once went from 101 to 200 runs in 39 deliveries in a test vs England in March, 2002 (p105).  Overall, Astle’s double hundred took 153 balls.  Perhaps most enjoyably we learn that Trescothick is a big Eminem fan and says he was rapping ‘Lose Yourself’ during his test double ton vs SA.  He also gives shout outs to Snoop Dogg and Warren G!

 If Trescothick had never had any of his problems I imagine this would have been a boring read.  Owing to everything that’s happened to him, and the fact he suffered from not being open about it, he’s remarkably candid about his struggles and the mistakes he made trying to manage them.  I also couldn’t help but feel like the professionalization of cricket and the structure of the international game were partially responsible for his issues.  Of course, you could respond, ‘well, he shouldn’t have played then’ but that was never really an option for an obsessive like him.  In my mind, Trescothick’s life might have been a lot more simple and straightforward if he had less talent and was a club cricketer like his Dad without any of the stress that comes with playing for money in the media spotlight.  Whether it was all worth it in the end is anyone’s guess.

Ben Lerner - Leaving Atocha Station

An American poet has received a prestigious scholarship to Madrid for a year.  The book’s opening finds him there, studiously avoiding any contact with the university department he’s supposedly connected to and, instead, smoking lots of hash on the roof of his apartment and going to The Prada to look at a picture for half an hour everyday.  So far so good!  After this daily ritual he writes poetry by copying out bits from Lorca and interpolating them with his own associations.  I really enjoyed his honesty about his professional life and his truthfulness about whether any of it was meaningful.

I became less enamored with the stoner-poet lifestyle when I discovered the poet is also taking unidentified anti-anxiety drugs and suffers from panic attacks.  Smoking a lot of weed seems an odd choice in this context.  He also chooses to multiply his anti-anxiety dose after some negative event or other, to the extent he appears to be losing touch with reality.  I was left with the image of a talented poet, behaving strangely and perhaps unraveling around the edges for unexplained reasons.

The story begins to draw in more characters when the poet makes some friends in Madrid, most prominently a young, fashionable gallery owner and his sister who move in artistic circles and like his poetry.  Or the status his poetry scholarship confers on him.  The poet tells outrageous lies in order to get attention or try to sleep with people –  this was probably my favourite part of the book.  He tells the gallery owner’s sister, who he is perpetually trying to sleep with, that his Mum is dead.  Later, he confesses it is a lie but replaces it with another one about his Dad being a tyrannical fascist.  I loved the way these shady acts are reported without any self-sympathy or attempt to justify his shittiness!  It was also amusing to read in places.

Apart from the central pillar of the Atocha terrorist attacks, the narrative is quotidian and enjoyable.  Visiting the relatives of Spanish friends, going to gallery events, house parties, the odd university conference or symposium and visits to other cities.

The prose was pithy and enjoyable but, perhaps inevitably, given to flights of poetic fancy where the texture of forgiveness or the heart rate of sanctimony are referenced.  Even though I couldn’t find much to enjoy in the less prosaic passages, I was very taken by the fact that the author gives credit to other people’s ideas and phrases in his footnotes.  It seemed like a manifestation of the same instinct towards honesty I found in other parts of the book.  An instinct that is almost entirely contradicted by his reported behaviour during the story!

I thought it was a strange decision to put really small photographs in a paperback edition where the quality would always be poor.  Even to someone who knows Madrid well, in heavily pixelated black and white printed on uncoated paper, the pictures add nothing.  

Towards the end of the book, the poet calls his parents and confesses to lying about them.  He also confesses to his friend, the gallery owner’s sister, who variously performs the role of his tour guide, lover and patron.  She more or less tells him it’s OK for him to lie because he’s a poet.  As someone who doesn't like poetry much, I wasn’t so sure!  But I enjoyed the story as an interesting and entertaining glimpse into the life of a poet.   

Elif Batuman - The Idiot

I loved the prose in this book and found it to be, in some ways, one of the most honest renderings of the feelings of attending an elite university I’ve ever read. I felt the book took a turn for the worse when the focus shifted to Selin’s relationship with Ivan. Once Selin is in Hungary and her wonderfully depicted college life ceases it’s essentially just a repetitive, cack-handed and really frustrating love story that goes absolutely nowhere. I ended the book unreasonably upset that so much energy had been expended by all concerned (Selin, Ivan, Batuman as the writer, me as the reader) to no discernable end.


The title of this book immediately made me think of Dostoevsky and that the author must be pretty cocky to invite comparison with it. After reading it, I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with Dostoevsky’s novel about a man who embodies Christian love and the response he evokes in nineteenth century Russian society. Probably the title refers to the protagonist, a naive freshman at Harvard who doesn’t really know anything.


This character is a success as she seems intellectual, clueless, funny and confused in roughly the correct quantities for a Harvard fresher who’s led a sheltered life with her single mother. Her experience of university life is also very well drawn. It mainly consists of going to classes that seem to have little, if any, practical application or purpose, eating in the cafeteria and hanging out with the one family friend she knows who’s also at Harvard. The feel of all this is a weird sort of stressful suspended animation. All the hard work of applying to, and getting into, an Ivy league school has been done. There’s still a reasonable academic workload but also lots of free time. Very few people have that many close friends but everyone has been convinced that this experience is, variously, everything they have been working for up to this point / the best days of their life / the time when they’ll make their friends forever / the beginning of an amazing career of professional success and personal achievement. The fact that, for many people, the Ivy league experience is none of these things is well depicted.


Less successful is the relationship between Selin and Ivan. It all starts out quirkily and innocently enough with some weird flirting over email, when it has just been invented in the 1990s. The levels of social dyslexia and fumbling that follow quickly become intolerably frustrating. It’s true that the prose is always good and can be laugh-out-loud funny, which is rare for me. It’s also true that a lot of the feelings Selin experiences are relatable. However, the sheer monotony of their botched attempts to express their feelings was my lasting impression of the book. Perhaps the turning point is Selin’s trip to Hungary, Ivan’s homeland. Choosing to spend a vacation volunteering in a friend from university’s home country must be as clear an indication of interest as any man has ever received short of a physical assault. For the character of Selin, who is fresher than the sea breeze in terms of any kind of experience, sexual or otherwise, it’s probably the most salacious advance she’s capable of. Ivan, who is older and allegedly has a girlfriend, has absolutely no excuse for his pathetic behaviour. The story drones on through various fumbled emails, phone calls, physical meetings, meals, trips and stays at Ivan’s parent’s house and still absolutely nothing romantic happens at all! ‘What on earth is going on here?’ I found myself asking, but it wasn’t even that the narrative stretched credulity, it was just so boring! Kiss! Fuck! Hold hands! Anything! In the end, there is some sorry excuse for an explanation of the whole debacle, but by that stage I felt like the damage had been done. I don’t even remember the half-baked justifications Ivan and Selin offer each other for their abject failure but I do remember being highly dissatisfied with the book’s ending. My feelings of vexation were probably exacerbated by the fact that Svetlana, a highly amusing college friend of Selin, is in Paris while Selin goes to Hungary and so is cut from the show. I missed her more and more as the Hungarian misadventure dragged on and on.


Someone mentioned to me that they found Batuman’s depiction of Hungarians to be condescending. I also noticed that the book contains the idea that Hungarian people are of Turkic origin, which is apparently controversial for some. It’s true that the Hungarian characters are not very flattering, but nor are the Turkish ones. I also have the feeling that the English classes that Selin gives were more amusing in America than in Hungary but maybe that’s to do with the context of the general deterioration. So, although I doubt the point of the novel was to make an ethnological point, it did spend a lot of time showing how the languages were similar. I suppose it’s justifiable because Selin speaks Turkish and is learning Hungarian, but it was obscure.


If I were the editor I would have suggested an expansion of the Harvard material and a drastic contraction of the Hungary scenes! The early parts of the book did sort of make me want to read the sequel (‘Either / Or’ released May 2022). Surely, as a sophomore, Selin will get it on with someone, hopefully not Ivan, or at least kiss them?! The risk is that it’s just another few hundred pages of tedious, adolescent muddling is currently providing enough of a counter-incentive.