Yeah. She hates him. It is exaggerated for comedic effect but the marriage isn't going to last. the thing is that she probably hasn't been in this situation before and thinks she can art her way out of it

This is the best model for what is going on

https://www.amazon.com/Passion-Trap-Right-Unbalanced-Relationship-ebook/dp/B003HGGI2S

"It's the catch-22 or romantic relationships: The more deeply one partner falls in love, the more distant the other becomes. This is the passion trap, an emotional dynamic that results in increasing desire and desperation in the "one-down" lover, and dissatisfaction, often mingled with guilt and withdrawal, in the "one-up."

It is brutal because there is always going to be a partner who desires the other partner more

When I first got to the Sydney part, and she's rhetorically saying "Who put up with [X}? Who put up with [Y]?", I thought she was leading up to the answer being, "My devoted husband! See, he also has to have amnesia to be able to be married to me. It cuts both ways!" But nope. There was no cutting any other way.

I think in all relationships, there's a balance between togetherness and independence. Frequently one partner tends to express a need for one more, and the other partner expresses the need for the other. But in a healthy relationship, these don't become ruts, and sometimes the partners switch which one they are expressing. And sometimes you're in a plateau for awhile where it's comfortable and neither person is feeling much of a problem either way.

That was to 2.

4

I think you need to alternate who is more attracted to who. this is hard.

The other darkly funny thing about the situation to me is how physically attractive the husband is https://www.instagram.com/p/CBtj-dgBOIT/

Obviously if half of the couple is a puppy, they're going to be the more attractive one.

Ouch. The Sydney bit shades into contempt. I don't see how they survive that.

Marriage is like a box of chocolates. If you take one to Australia in the summer, it will probably melt.

As I progressed through the article, I kept expecting there to a part where she points out her own flaws, but it never came. Through the whole account of their trip, he is annoying and useless, and she is awesome.

6.2: That seems to me the whole point of the essay. On the surface, he is a catch -- attractive, smart, kind etc. Over the years she has discovered that he's actually an unpleasant person to be around, kind of a pompous idiot, a lousy dad, etc -- but to keep the marriage going she has to forget this from time to time and focus on his surface qualities.

It's like when everyone tells kids to judge books by their covers.

Is there any indication in the piece that he had advance warning of its publication?

That piece sparked a lot of queer triumphalism on Twitter, on the premise that straight couples all despise each other and only queers can be actual pals with their partner.

She probably just assumed that he'd never know because respectable people don't read the NYT.

Respectable straight people. I'm not aware of all norms in every community.

Also, I just clicked on the author's last name in this here Unfogged sidebar and am very confused by what her blog has turned into. I can't tell if it's spambots or performance art.

My guess would be a content farm that's illegally using her name.

That's a lot of copy about penises.

Maybe her husband wrote it and that's why she's mad.

The mixture of contempt and self-pity looks quite toxic to me -- and recognisable from introspection when I was unhappily married: I don't want to claim moral superiority.

It is interesting that she's so deep in it that she doesn't recognize her state. White knuckling is awful and awful to be around. I agree they won't make it. Also that they'll both regret that she published this piece.

When she has half-time custody, she'll get the silence she wants half-time.

Seems worth noting that this is an excerpt from a book.

An illuminating, poignant, and savagely funny examination of modern marriage from Ask Polly advice columnist Heather Havrilesky

If falling in love is the peak of human experience, then marriage is the slow descent down that mountain, on a trail built from conflict, compromise, and nagging doubts. Considering the limited economic advantages to marriage, the deluge of other mate options a swipe away, and the fact that almost half of all marriages in the United States end in divorce anyway, why do so many of us still chain ourselves to one human being for life?

In Foreverland, Heather Havrilesky illustrates the delights, aggravations, and sublime calamities of her marriage over the span of fifteen years, charting an unpredictable course from meeting her one true love to slowly learning just how much energy is required to keep that love aflame. This refreshingly honest portrait of a marriage reveals that our relationships are not simply "happy" or "unhappy," but something much murkier--at once unsavory, taxing, and deeply satisfying. With tales of fumbled proposals, harrowing suburban migrations, external temptations, and the bewildering insults of growing older, Foreverland is a work of rare candor and insight. Havrilesky traces a path from daydreaming about forever for the first time to understanding what a tedious, glorious drag forever can be.

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/foreverland-heather-havrilesky?variant=39344373497890

Alternate take, she's knowingly cartoonizing for the clicks.

It's the kind of cartoonising that is less fun for the cartooned character.

She's his Boswell.

peep beat me to pointing out that this is an excerpt from a book that presumably provides more context and nuance. But also, this sort of hyperbole is kind of her thing.

Definitely feels like shtick, and I assume he understands what's going on.

I do think it's important to be able to hate your spouse occasionally, without that making you think that you've made a horrible mistake.

Unless you know them through work or some social organization, hating someone else's spouse feels like cheating.

27.1: The parts about him being a barely sentient pile of dirty laundry, and his deafening sneezes and throat-clearing was recognizably shtick for me. The parts that made him seem like a stupid, self-centered, whining bore, I saw as revealing genuine contempt.

29: Not to say that I agree with those saying the marriage is doomed. I definitely don't know. Maybe being able to handle being written about that way makes up for everything.

I also blame the expectation in marriages that each partner must be the other's whole world.

I agree w 29. I was with it until the sydney trip. That just felt biting. And the lack of reciprocity was weird.

I hated this piece, and I usually like Havrilesky. It was so mean! (Mind you, I've probably said things this nasty, to trusted friends, but I haven't, er, published them.) If someone wrote to Ask Polly years ago and described anything at all like this, I can imagine the advice she'd hand out. In fairness, I'm not married, but I can't imagine being in a relationship that took that much effort. She sounds like she's entirely lost her bearings. I can't believe she'd publish something that seems so cruel and instantly regrettable, even if her book sells a bajillion copies.

Even Truman Capote just threatened to publish his cruel and regrettable book.

Unless you count In Cold Blood.

I'm sure I've read something by Havrilesky -- I just don't remember what/when/where. Paywall, so didn't read the piece. But is it possible that this is one of a genre of stand-up comedy bits about the demon spouse? I mean, there are ton of those out there, most by male comics, but sometimes female, maybe this is another ? I have to believe that those comics' spouses all know the material and are OK with it ..... though hey, maybe not, who knows.

2 is a huge theme in The Bridge of San Luis Rey and it really stuck with me.

"Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but there may never be two that love one another equally well."

Esther Perel has an interesting way of putting 4, "And in every relationship, you will find that there is one person that is more in touch with the fear of losing the other and one person who is more in touch with the fear of losing themselves."

Sometimes when we touch, the honesty's too much.

36: Her thing when she's writing advice columns is to be kind and supportive, slightly hyperbolic, not terribly comic. This piece is kind of jarring next to the archive.

https://www.thecut.com/tags/ask-polly/

even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other

This is the kind of "love" that people who've never had a turn changing the kids' diapers like to write about.

They probably have help.

I'm wondering if the Sydney bit is patched in from later in the book (like following a discussion of parenting roles where it fits in with more context). The first part is hyperbolic and kinda charming, and relatable.

"In love there is always one who suffers and one who is bored." de Rochefoucauld, I think, but some french writer anyway.

Il y a toujours l'un qui baise et l'un qui tourne la joue, I think, but I only know the line from The Cruel Sea where it's poor Sublieutenant Morell's last thought before he dies of hypothermia.

I don't know if the marriage is doomed or if something went wrong editing the piece. It absolutely reads as if the marriage is doomed, but it's only a paragraph or so away from something that would read much more gently -- if the final conversations from the vacation made him sound as if she saw him as anything but completely worthless (she says she loves him but she doesn't write anything about him that explains why she would), it'd turn the whole thing around. But as it's written, things sound very bad.

Now I'm curious about the book. I'm not going to buy it because it's not generally the kind of thing I enjoy, but this is either consistent throughout the book, or the book makes it apparent that this piece doesn't really represent her feelings.

I thought this essay by Jill Filipovic was more thorough and kinder than any of the several Whither Marriage? essays that just went round.

The thing with marital malaise is that in the United States, women's lives have changed tremendously, and men's lives haven't changed nearly as much, and we still have an ideal in which all of us pair off together in happy twosomes. I'm not convinced that women were happier in the old days when women's roles within the family were clear but constrained, but I am convinced that married women now have both the opportunity for happier marriages and a much higher chance of profound marital dissonance.

Whoops! Blew the link.

https://jill.substack.com/p/the-straights-are-not-ok

Supposing that the marriage is not doomed and the excerpt is very misleading, then that's not that something "went wrong" editing it, it's that it was purposefully put into a form where it would draw a maximum of controversy to sell the book.

Yeah, could be -- it did make me curious about the book.

I read lots of books on many topics, from ones about Swedish cops investigating murders to ones about Icelandic cops investigating murders. But this didn't make me want to read her book at all.

52: What if the husband is murdered in Chapter 6, and the rest of the book is the investigation?

52: What if I got the number right and made a funny joke?

52 is a Mobyus strip of a comment.

Here's another memoir that made me wonder about the state of the marriage. The author is a friend of a friend, though, so I have not wanted to inquire too closely.

https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/28/names-for-the-sea-by-sarah-moss/

Threw me off for a second before I realized that's not the Sa/rah Mo/ss I know.

I'm not reading six chapters before there's one murder.

from ones about Swedish cops investigating murders to ones about Icelandic cops investigating murders

My sister has a little free library near her house that is always full of Nordic mysteries. She thinks that publishers for that kind of book live right by it or something. Always Nordic mysteries, always lots of them, never any other type of book.

There's not many other books written.

I started a Swedish cop book recently (Faceless Killers), but it was too dreary for me and I didn't finish it.

That's Wallander, which does take some getting used to.

45: Ajay another fan! The Cruel Sea is one of the most unjustly unfashionable books I know. I was put off reading it for years because it looked like more Dambusters-style war porn and I had War Picture Library for that at school.

In real life it is extraordinarily subtle and well-written, a book in which the pain is suffered by real people who are on our side. IN war porn, it's the other way round.

I have come to hate scandi noir as it's progressed. Mankell/Wallander marks the point where it collapsed into self-parody. The Bridge is just horrible, full of gratuitous cruelty which managing to avoid any of the real problems of Swedish society and crime. It's all quite as unrealistic as Golden Age detective stories set in the English countryside, but they could at least be enlivened by flashes of observation and social comedy, even in Ngaio Marsh.

Ume and I, though, are presently binge reading Ben Aaronovitch, who is thoroughly unrealistic in most things -- a touch too much Charlie Stross -- but elegantly written and extremely more-ish. The plots make no sense at all.

Ben Aaronovitch is highly readable and so far has avoided the Stross-Herbert Curve in which each novel is 2/3 as good as the one before. (Stross is now well into "Sandworms of the Laundry" territory.)

YEs, the last good Stross was the one in which Leeds gets largely demolished.

I haven't read the article, but this seems like a bad time to introspect about anything domestic. I might have made very different choices if I had known we'd both work from home full-time indefinitely. Not to sound too down about my marriage, I'm thinking of living space and storage space more than anything else, but still... a bad time.

I would like to read "Sandworms of the Laundry."

I'm pretty sure that if you told Aaronovitch that his plots made no sense, he would reply, "And your point is?" But I too would pay good money to read Sandworms of the Laundry.
Am I unique in having found The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo completely unreadable from page 1? If I'd been the guy's executor and I'd found the manuscript, I'd have pulped it, which would have been a staggering commercial mistake, but still.

I read them, but I wasn't particularly entertained.

"extremely more-ish" - I like this phrase, although I'm not sure how it would be defined. Am I correct that this is auto-correct for "extremely noir-ish"?

I haven't read the Dragon Tattoo books and probably won't. I've moved on to Iceland.

Extremely Moorish.

There's a great Scandinavian mystery set in picturesque countryside with entertaining characters, Independent People. Some digressions about farming and the hassles of selling stuff in rural Iceland, but it's worth it.

I see that won a Nobel Prize. Probably too literary for me.

I'm looking for the middle ground between actual literature and a middle-aged man writing out his fantasy about being a hero who heals young women by having sex with them.

Be the change.

There's already Martin Beck.

The young women heal him by having sex, which seems more realistic.

74. That was a phase in the prize committee's activity characterized by heavy drinking early in the day, don't be put off, it's a rollicking fun read. Are there Scandinavian sea stories? The Aubrey/Maturin books might work for 75.

Alternately, the nonfiction Worst Journey in the World

68: I bounced off The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo pretty early on, though I am not sure it was the very first page.

I enjoyed several of Mankell's Wallander books, but I read them in German.

Has anyone read Stross' current or previous New Management (i.e., not quite main-sequence Laundry) books? Mainly I am wondering whether they are fun.

When I was 12 or so, I thought The Worst Journey in the World was the best book in the world. I don't know if I'd still think so, but it should definitely be read.

71. The daughter of a friend of mine in Barcelona somehow acquired an Icelandic boyfriend and apparently they've opened a Catalan restaurant in Reykjavik. Which sounds like the perfect scenario for a series of whodunnits. Endless variations suggest themselves.

Are there Scandinavian sea stories?

Yes, they're called "sagas."

They have a lot of murders but not a lot of mystery.

There is a fantastic looking graphic novel of The Worst Joureny in the World coming out this year - highly recommended.

I quite enjoyed, or at least finished, the first Dragon Tattoo book - unnecessarily grim and too many brand names but a competent locked room mystery. And then I read the second which, frankly, loses its grip on reality pretty soon.

It's only the worst journey in the world until someone does it again but adds a connection through ORD.

I had to read all of them, from my period of judging a prize for literary translations from the Swedish. They are better -- but still not very good and entirely ludicrous -- in the original.

I remember Martin Beck's girlfriend as rather older. Wasn't she the one who responded to a policeman coming round to interview her by saying "let's fuck. It's always easier to talk afterwards"? Thus, I suppose, setting a standard for unrealism for all subsequent Scandi police novels.

She was slightly less direct in my recollection, but of a more appropriate age.

I've never read the Dragon Tattoo books, but years ago I had a music teacher who went on and on about how much the girl character reminded him of me. So I skimmed through the first book, and as far as I could tell, I had absolutely nothing whatsoever in common with this character. Also, what the fucking fuck? I quit music lessons soon after.

Recently I was browsing through local therapists on the Psychology Today website, and welp, I guess my creepy former music teacher is a therapist now.

On the plus side, he can't hit on his music students if he's a therapist.

I haven't read much Scandinavian noir, but I remember a long time ago I read Smilla's Sense of Snow and really liked it. As I recall it starts out as a detective mystery and ends up being about

***
SPOILER
SPOILER
SPOILER
***
killer worms from outer space?

I was never going to read that, but I had no idea there was a twist.

Smilla's Sense of Snow is definitely two entirely different books smushed together. I liked the first one.

The movie poster should have had both Smilla and a space worm.

80. I've read all of his Laundry books, including the first of his Peter Pan/Wendy Laundry Trilogy. It had some good bits, but honestly it was more of a slog than a pleasure, and I'm unsure if I will read the next one. It's out soon. His problem at this point is that (not a spoiler) the bad guys have won (a few books ago) and we expected there to be a gigantic, explosive, gut-wrenching Lovecraft-fest finale. Instead we got UK politics and oligarchs. Alas.

86: Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority boarding....

I thought books 6-9 were engaging enough, I bought them in quick succession as the action mounted, but I was a little annoyed at his blog recounting that for #9, part of the criteria by which he wrote a (completely fictional) US President was avoiding anything that would piss off Trumpist readers.

93: Sounds like the movie was a faithful adaptation of the book. The first story was also much, much better onscreen.

I do respect that he hasn't yet returned to the "main sequence" Laundry because, basically, he's not feeling it, so he's taking the setting some other directions.

The last whodunit I read was set in 1940s Manhattan, and my only engagement with Scandinavian culture beyond Ikea is my crush on Andreas Viestad, so I'll return to the OP.

I saw the same journey as most of you--cute, Bombeckian domestic grumbling to seething, relentless resentment--and it reminded me of something I wrote elsewhere recently: the ratio of smart, self-respecting women to smart, women-respecting men is quite high, and so the choice for those women is to wait, potentially forever, or to accommodate a guy who will never accommodate himself to them. You can also luck out, but that's not a choice as such.

The fact that relationships are hard on top of all that just lowers the odds that much farther. Like, "I can compromise on bedroom temperature or on my career, but not both." I'd guess that this conundrum is what HH is trying to get at in the book, without being completely honest about the bleakness of it all.

Given how many men and women are actively invested in patriarchy, I don't think that ratio is coming down any time soon.

On a related note, I always conflated HH with Virginia Heffernan. I knew that AB went to college with one of them, and I couldn't recall whether it was the one who, absurdly, went to a school she shared a name with, or if it was the other one (it was the absurd one; AB found her unimpressive).

Who's calling me absurd? It's a good program and in-state tuition.

|| After a week off and a sprint to catch up, I was rewarded with an Ekranoplan article. |>

95: Wm. Gibson's two most recent books give readers an apocalypse of sorts with a side order of oligarchs and the barest echoes of UK politics, and do it more enjoyably than the last two main Laundry books. I'm not nearly as interested in the New Management as he seems to be.

97: part of the criteria by which he wrote a (completely fictional) US President was avoiding anything that would piss off Trumpist readers

That was just dumb, because it is an impossible hurdle. If the gibbering horde of madness decides that C. Stross is the shiny object they are going to hate today, no objective content is going to stand in the way of that hatred happening, as Stross should very well know.

Especially since he had no qualms about writing a British PM who is very clearly a (fairly crude) Blair satire. But I suppose Blairites don't take it so seriously. Or have guns.

97/104/105: to be honest I gave up on the Laundry a long while ago (before my own tuckerization!) as the books got more and more committed to whack-in-the-tropes fan-service pandering, and IIRC Stross has been fairly open in saying that the series is basically fan product now. Of course if you're writing to pander to an audience/market you're going to avoid doing anything to put them off.

91: I did like Smilla a lot. why not hook a well executed nordic 'tec story to a polar sea-story to a bit of postcolonialism and some SF? probably wouldn't have worked more than once, but worth doing.

45/62: The Cruel Sea is a great novel with a lot in there - a surrogate father-and-son relationship, a bildungsroman, intelligent exploration of things like class, responsibility, and leadership, completely unflinching about one of the characters' psychiatric breakdown when that was supposedly something nobody talked about. I re-read it a while ago having loved it as a kid and found it had lasted very well. And you know, a directionless media-nathan hipster with left-wing opinions finding inner resources and a sense of agency during a terrible emergency is a theme with some contemporary resonance!

Like the other great British novel about WW2, Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, it got written essentially twice - Monsarrat wrote most of the incidents and some characters as straight memoir while the war was going on (Lockhart is not exactly a Mary Sue - he's not quite as successful as a naval officer as Monsarrat, who captained several ships, was but perhaps he has more emotional depth than Monsarrat credits himself with?), rather like Waugh writing Brideshead while he was in special forces training, and then came back to the theme with 10 years' worth of reflection (and given the formal and technical ambition of the book, a group biography bildungsroman, I imagine a hell of a lot of reading and fettling). My grandad the corvette sailor, who survived a shipwreck very similar to the one in the book aboard an identical ship, owned basically everything he wrote.

63: something that annoyed me about The Bridge was that so much of the gore-fest plotting is heavily reliant on people just...complying with all sorts of bad actors' absurdly complicated schemes. Perhaps this is a comment on stereotypically sky-high social trust but it felt progressively more like a cheap way of fixing plot holes.

106: ***LOON TRIPLE POST***

there's a hilarious comedy of awkwardness bit in Three Corvettes about the problems of being in command when one of your sailors, who used to work in a bookshop, has gone round the ship with a sack of your book about the ship that he got from the publisher and sold basically everyone a copy.

102: I would not be surprised if some Texas college renames themselves Brandon University/College so they nave a reason to cheer "Let's Go Brandon!" during football games.

108: I had forgotten that, and must go an have a look at it again. The Bildingsroman is "Life is the schoolroom", no? Which made an immense impression on me as a teenager, and was responsible for some rather unrealistically high early ambitions in the way of a soulmate.

It wasn't Beck's girlfriend, who was the unspeakably pious social worker, but, I think, a Danish artist whom Kollberg interviewed, or possibly the Danish cop whose name I have forgotten but says "Fanden renne mig i røven" when woken by a telephone call in the middle of the night. Which may be all the Danish anyone ever needs.

If you have to say "thanks" in Danish, it's "tak".

I see that Google Translate is overwhelmed by colloquial Danish. It is literally "Satan take me up the arse"

this is crying out for a double blind trial.

I'm going to stick with 'tak'. I don't want to irk people.

114 to 115

114 to 115

106 last. No, the other great British novel about WW2 is The Valley of Bones/The Soldier's Art/The Military Philosophers by Anthony Powell, volumes 7 - 9 of A Dance to the Music of Time.

112. When we watch Trapped/Entrapped the Icelanders say "tak" for "thanks" as well. We turn on the CC*, but sometimes you can puzzle out what they are saying in their native tongue. Being Icelanders, they speak English a lot.

*We keep it on for a lot of English shows, too, as the combination of regional accents and terrible sound recording makes un-CC'ed speech unintelligible.

Like the other great British novel about WW2, Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy

Oh, dear, no. The other great British novel about WW2 is CS Forester's "The Ship".

"Tak" is "so" (also used as something like "just so" or "like that") in Czech. People say it all the time, often on its own.

The Ship is very good, but it was written as deliberate propaganda and it shows.

121: That strikes me as how Germans (or perhaps Austrians?) use "doch".

Dead thread, but I'm throwing it up into the sidebar in case anyone wants to talk about how HH is now entering her 3rd month of complaining that people just don't get it, man, and that her witty expose about the reality of marriage is being attacked because she's a woman.

She seems to have completely misjudged the likely effects of publishing that excerpt. Maybe the book as a whole has its merits, but that excerpt was really fucking ugly, and if it wasn't representative, she should have found another.

https://twitter.com/summerbrennan/status/1499389509040893955?s=20&t=QgyiN_T2MNv2oahcEFNHLw