Pedro Mairal is a notable writer and poet from Argentina. The press release that came with my review copy tells me that he's a professor of English liPedro Mairal is a notable writer and poet from Argentina. The press release that came with my review copy tells me that he's a professor of English literature in Buenos Aires, that he won the Premio Clarin in 1998 and that in 2007 he was included in the Hay Festival's Bogotá 39 list, which names the best Latin American authors under 39. From what I can make out from his bio in Spanish, he has won prizes, had a book made into a film, been translated in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany and now English, and had his own TV show about books called Printed in Argentina. (Did I mention that he's also rather telegenic?) Amongst other accomplishments, in 2013 he published a novel in sonnets, “El gran surubí” which strikes me as being a very difficult task.
First published in 2016, The Woman from Uruguay was a bestseller in Latin America and Spain, and has been published in twelve countries. I think it's a book that can be taken in different ways by different readers. The blurb tells me that it's an unforgettably poignant story of two would-be lovers. Colm Tóibin says it's a picaresque comedy and a penetrating study of a man on the verge of middle age. Sigrid Nunez says it's a searing tale of seduction and betrayal, both wryly comic and deeply serious. Me? I think it's black comedy at its best.
The novella is the story of a day in the life of Lucas Pereyra, an unemployed writer in his forties. He is being supported by his long-suffering wife who may have found ways to enliven her days. They have a young son called Maiko who Lucas uses as an excuse for not having got any writing done. On the day in question Lucas has hatched a rudimentary plan to collect an advance on books he hasn't written yet, travelling to Uruguay to collect it in cash so that he doesn't have to pay Argentinian taxes and kickbacks. Oh, and the other reason he sets off on this risky enterprise is because he hopes to catch up with a Uruguayan women who he met some months ago at a conference. His fantasy of a passionate rendezvous in Montevideo is a mid-life crisis waiting to happen.
>Such an arresting image on the cover of the latest edition of the Griffith Review! It makes me think immediately of the Challenger tragedy and the r>Such an arresting image on the cover of the latest edition of the Griffith Review! It makes me think immediately of the Challenger tragedy and the risks taken when mere mortals try to escape their earthbound existence...
As editor Ashley Hay says in her introduction to Escape Routes, 'getting away' has come to have a loaded ambivalence in our new normal. This is the blurb from the publisher's website (where you can buy it and other issues in the archive):
Sometimes, we all need to get away…
Griffith Review 74: Escape Routes plots the course of our daydreams, our transformations and our jailbreaks. It takes us across borders and through open minds to places once out of reach, lighting out for the territory to access new worlds.
Edited by Ashley Hay, Griffith Review 74: Escape Routes features the winners of our Emerging Voices competition – Delcan Fry, Alison Gibbs, Vijay Khurana and Andrew Roff – plus new work from Behrouz Boochani, Madeleine Watts, Kim Scott, Peggy Frew and Beejay Silcox, among many others.
I've decided to focus first on the poetry in this edition. 'Soap' by Jodie Lea Martire is a startling set of verses about an artist called Walter Inglis Anderson who apparently escaped from the Mississippi State Insane Asylum in 1939.
i. hold, he prayed, and wrenched the sheet into a rope. heft, and twist. heft, and twist. tie a knot when the fear is greatest; loop when thinking of elegance. (p.25)
He takes some soap and makes art with it against a red brick wall as he slides to the freedom close below. Do have a look at some of his work at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art and consider the circumstances which led him to make this perilous escape.
Harlem Nights, the Secret History of Australia's Jazz Age is a book for anyone interested in yes, of course, jazz, but also the history of Australia'sHarlem Nights, the Secret History of Australia's Jazz Age is a book for anyone interested in yes, of course, jazz, but also the history of Australia's entertainment industry; the delayed take-up of modernism in the arts in Australia; the pernicious influence of the White Australia Policy beyond immigration issues; the impact of an unholy alliance of unionism and opportunist politics; and the surprising difference that could be made by just one man. And for anyone interested in the politics of race and power...
And that's just what I've absorbed from reading one-third of it.
[image]Some may not know that I have a (very) minor role in broadcasting jazz on a community radio station. The Spouse (whose impressive professional CV includes what started as a hobby i.e. being leader and arranger of the Australian Cotton Club Orchestra) has been presenting Swing and Sway on 3CR for decades, and he has recently stepped into the shoes of the late Ralph Knight who presented Steam Radio for over forty years. Since he's also presenting a jazz program on Radio 3RPP in Mornington, and all this has to be prepared offsite since the pandemic, I have resumed doing the very occasional program to give him a break. I mention this because my interest in jazz is specific to big band jazz of the 20s, 30s and 40s, and although this is heresy to aficionados, I prefer the melodic style and rhythms of British Dance Bands to hot jazz from America. One of the aspects that I've found interesting in Harlem Nights is the way these differences have been framed in terms of race.
This fantasy of Blackness found voice in the literary prose of a generation of White bohemians and cosmopolitans who experienced Black music as a psychodrama where primitive 'African' musicians rescued 'over-civilised' White dancers from generations of Victorian sexual repression. Black rhythm, in this formulation, was a brand of bodily and psychic liberation— a Freudian antidote for a generation of Whites crushed and constrained by the narrow rules of 'correct' behaviour. But what felt and looked like 'the new' reprised old familiar themes, grounded in dubious theories of biologically inscribed racial difference.
Music critic Roger Pryor Dodge, for instance, believed that 'Negro' jazz players did 'not consciously' plot and compose, but derived their musical inventiveness from 'uncontrolled frantic moments of 'subconscious improvisation'. In other words, an ability independent of artistry and skill but contingent on the spontaneous outpourings of an inescapably primitive Black essence. (p.31)
As O'Connell explains further in the chapter 'The Jazzing Spheres', when the Australian promoter of Sonny Clay's Colored Idea subscribed to the fashionably cosmopolitan view that 'jazz as played by a European' and a 'real Negro' were 'entirely different' he was conforming to this primitivist fantasy.
'It's all in the syncopation,' he explained. 'One, brought to America by the original African Negroes—is natural—the other, as acquirement, is artificial'. (p.76)
If you pay any attention to the zeitgeist, you know that (noun-turned-verb) parenting is as contentious a topic as ever. From Leunig cartoons to the If you pay any attention to the zeitgeist, you know that (noun-turned-verb) parenting is as contentious a topic as ever. From Leunig cartoons to the school staff room—and in social media, of course—judgements are made about parents who don't conform to The Right Way, but there is no consensus about what that might be.
Kate Ryan's debut novel The Golden Book interrogates parenting styles in a story that explores responsibility and blame in the context of a child's life ruined by a single reckless moment.
In the NSW regional town of Bega in the 1980s, best friends Jessie and Ali come from different backgrounds. Ali is an only child with a controlling mother called Diana and a compliant father called David. They are teachers, they are middle-class, and their child lives in an ordered household with predictable routines, nutritious meals and good results at school. Jessie is 'free-range', with three brothers, all four of these children from different fathers. Jessie's mother Aggie is anti-interventionist, haphazard, cheerfully disorganised, and fleetingly interested in causes and half-baked efforts at crafts. Her latest bloke is the unpleasant Claudio, and she is often stoned on weed. Jessie is highly intelligent with a phenomenal memory but she is illiterate, probably dyslexic. Her prospects at high school don't look good, and she is often hungry.
Beginning to chafe at the loving but strict regime in her home, Ali is attracted to freedom and adventure with Jessie. Together every day, they share a love of epic adventures in stories of the Greek heroes and the Knights of the Round Table. Ali reads these books at home and retells them to Jessie, and at Jessie's place, she also reads these stories aloud. Jessie dreams up the idea of a series of covert quests to be undertaken before they turn thirteen. These quests are really dares, and they buy a Golden Book to record the dare and its execution. Ali does the writing, and Jessie cannot read what is written in this journal of risk-taking. Some of these quests are semi-reproduced in the writing class that Ali attends as an adult, and this is how the reader recognises the risks being taken as well as the emerging fissures in the children's relationship.
The structure of book, which nods at Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, is fragmentary, moving backwards and forwards in time and place as the adult Ali confronts her memories of the tragedy that befell Jessie.
If there's one thing I've learned from reading Gerald Murnane, it's that it's impossible for me to write the kind of review that writing of this calibIf there's one thing I've learned from reading Gerald Murnane, it's that it's impossible for me to write the kind of review that writing of this calibre deserves. And this is just as true of Last Letter to a Reader as it is of his enigmatic fiction.
Last Letter to a Reader is not like Murnane's other books. Murnane is addressing his own legacy as a writer...
In the essay about his book Invisible but Enduring Lilacs, he explains the obligation to compose something worthwhile, something worthy of the attention of the personage that I know only as my Ideal Reader, one of a select band of those that I call readers of good will.
Well, I like Murnane's books, and he has my enthusiastic attention, and I have the good will. But I am not his Ideal Reader, and I approach his work well aware of my limitations. This is partly because in his previous fiction he has been explicit about what he expects of his readers. He is unabashed in his scorn for most reviewers and for a certain sort of reader. In his essay about Velvet Waters, he writes:
A certain sort of reader of these paragraphs might have cause to complain that an author of my sort denies him or her what readers of fiction have traditionally sought and obtained: meetings-up with complex but credible characters ; insights into human nature. My reply to such a complaint would be the claim that the alert reader of my fiction obtains therefrom an extraordinarily detailed knowledge of its implied narrator, the personage who created it. The mouse behind the mesh, the grey-gold monastery/brain, and the sky of melting colours — each of these and of the host of their counterparts throughout my fiction is an item of evidence, no matter how fragmentary, of the workings of the mysterious invisible entity that we call Mind. (p.54)
What might distinguish me from that certain sort of reader is that while I do like fictional meetings-up with complex but credible characters and insights into human nature, I don't complain about fiction that offers something else. I often relish it.
This is what happens when Murnane reads:
The reading of a work of fiction alters — sometimes briefly but sometimes permanently — the configuration of my mental landscape and augments the number of personages who are its temporary or permanent residents. Morality, social issues, psychological insight — such matters seem as fanciful and inconsequential to me as my talk of shapes and dissolving imagery might seem to my conjectured reader. (p.53)
Again, although I generally find commercial and genre fiction disappointing, I enjoy complex novels that explore morality, social issues, and psychological insights. But equally, I like reading books that reconfigure my mental landscape in the way that Proust, James Joyce, Borges and Murnane do.
Finer minds than mine have raved about the brilliance of this book, and Soyinka is a Nobel Prize winner and all, but … it took ages for me to read thiFiner minds than mine have raved about the brilliance of this book, and Soyinka is a Nobel Prize winner and all, but … it took ages for me to read this book and even now I'm not sure that I've made sense of it.
You will have noticed that both Okri and Habila are Nigerian, which means they are 'closer to home' so to speak, about some of the satirical elements in the novel, elements which might pass some of us by. But then there's this one by
Juan Gabriel Vásquez in the NYT: Vásquez is from Colombia so he also knows what it's like to live under poor governance. He writes that the novel is a caustic political satire, a murder mystery, a conspiracy story and a deeply felt lament for the spirit of a nation.
He also identifies the problem that I had with keeping track of proceedings:
The plot — convoluted, obscure at times, often tying itself in too many knots — turns on the aptly named Human Resources, a sinister online business that sells human body parts for private use in rituals and superstitions. As often happens in satire, the outrageousness of the fictional premise comes from its proximity to the truth: The belief that human organs have magical properties, leading to business success and political power, has been known to lead to ritual murders in Nigeria...
But, he says, the real interest in the novel lies elsewhere: it interrogates the state of a nation where these kinds of things can happen. That makes Chronicles more than just a satire, but for me, it got lost along the way.
Written in an approachable style that is easy to read and digest, Janet McCalman's book focusses on what became of the Vandemonians, the much despised emancipated convicts from Tasmania who populated Victoria once settlement had reached its limits in Tasmania. But as she explains, the problem of researching this group is that they had every reason to hide their personal histories. They became invisible, just as they are in paintings of the era, which often depict Aborigines, who mostly weren't working on the farms of early settlers, and not the convicts, who were.
Her method, therefore, was to utilise a community genealogy project with volunteers from all over Australia and overseas, to use what limited documentary evidence there is for individuals, and to interrogate large scale statistical patterns for evidence of lineage. How well families survive and produce descendants, she says, is a test of society.
Settling meant finding a place to live, an income and perhaps a family. Indeed, we can measure the success or failure of Australia's convict pioneers by the basic milestones of establishing and maintaining a family, which then produces a lineage. Creating a lineage means more than simply reproduction. It necessitates a household that can nourish and protect children so that in their turn they can produce their own offspring. And that is a test of the society and the economy in which they live, as much as it is a test of the individual. Happy families flourish on security; unhappy families too often are precarious. Thus, while happy families, as Tolstoy said, are alike and in that sense unremarkable, unhappy families are troubled each in their own way, or at least are more likely to leave traces in the historical record of their offences against society, their problems and their griefs. On the other hand, they are less likely to leave descendants, either because they never partnered to have children or because their children perished. They are the losers of history, which is written by the winners, the descendants of the founders who became survivors. (p.186)
(This is doubly interesting because in our more individualistic, and I would argue more pessimistic age, many people choose not to partner and not to have children and that has nothing to do with individual shortcomings or a lack of societal support. But in the era of women's economic dependence on men and the absence of effective birth control, partnering and having children was, for many, an inescapable norm. So the absence of a lineage dating from that earlier era is a potent indicator of societal failure to support its underclasses.)
McCalman demolishes many of the myths Australians have about themselves. There is a widespread narrative about convict ancestors who stole 'just a hanky' or 'bread to feed the starving children' but the reality is that very many of the convicts who were transported came from families of career criminals.
At the jetty all these years later, something long past seemed to ripple through me in the same way a skimming stone sends waves long after it sinks. At the jetty all these years later, something long past seemed to ripple through me in the same way a skimming stone sends waves long after it sinks. (p.143) Skimming Stones is a beautifully written novel about the childhood experience of a sibling's potentially fatal illness. If you know anyone who's had this experience, you probably know something of the conflicting emotions that siblings feel, long after the event. Maria Papas captures these emotions superbly in a thoughtful, wise and wholly engaging story.
Grace, an oncology nurse in Perth with long suppressed memories of her little sister Emma's leukaemia, finds these memories resurfacing when a child called Zoë has a medical crisis on the ward. Grace takes a rare day off afterwards, to confront her demons and also to make a difficult decision about her current messy relationship. So the narration and the settings alternate with ease between Grace's childhood and her adult life.
She drives south from Perth to Lake Clifton, one of her childhood haunts, near the home where her parents' fragile marriage was tested by Emma's cancer. At the very beginning the family all went to Perth for the initial diagnosis and the harrowing treatment. Later, Grace went home with her father — a selfish, irresponsible, lazy man who put his own needs ahead of his family's. What really struck in my craw was that on her return after months away, the mother has to spend her days cleaning the grubby, neglected house because it was so crucial that the immuno-compromised Emma was not exposed to germs at that time.
What this mother could not restore was Grace's equanimity.
Grace at this time lost all her certainties. During the long absence she lost touch with her mother and missed the daily tenderness that she had always had. She lost her language, the Greek mother-tongue that she heard and spoke only with her mother. She lost the easy intimacy she'd had with Emma, and she lost faith in her father as well. At school, she lost her identity: she was 'the girl whose sister has cancer'.
Grace loves her little sister dearly, but she is frightened, alone and burdened with too much responsibility. She also felt resentful and guilty...
There must be thousands of Australians whose travel plans went awry with the arrival of Covid in 2020, but few can have turned an accident of timing iThere must be thousands of Australians whose travel plans went awry with the arrival of Covid in 2020, but few can have turned an accident of timing into an extraordinary adventure the way that Ken Haley did.
Haley's plans were to do island-hopping through the Caribbean, and then explore Central America. In February 2020, three weeks before his departure date, Covid had emerged in Australia with 21 infections. But nobody had a clue about what was in store, Australia's borders were still open, and so he flew out to Canada, that being the cheapest option to get to Cuba.
Each chapter is prefaced by a brief summary of the Covid situation in the relevant country. Canada, on February 21st 2020, had 9 infections and no deaths. There was no curfew, no quarantine and everything was open. Needless to say that the situation was entirely different when, having accomplished two-thirds of his journey, he flew back into Toronto in November 2020. Then, there were 297,390 infections, and there had been 10,953 deaths. No wonder he writes in his final chapter:
Closer to home, Australia's death toll was 909, rising to 910 in April 2021. As a spreader of death, that constant companion on my tortuous route through the Caribbean littoral had met its match in very few parts of the world. Although a belated and comparatively slow vaccine rollout lay ahead, the Australian people had shown a maturity and collective will that might have surprised them and certainly impressed my overseas friends. (p.310)
But though Haley calls Covid his constant companion, (even nicknaming it Covey), this is not a book about the pandemic. It's about how, with a mixture of chutzpah, stubbornness, luck and courage (sometimes crossing over into foolhardiness) he managed to negotiate ad hoc variations in travel restrictions, quarantine, closed hotels and eateries, plus the constant threat of flight cancellations and closed borders, to have a surprisingly great trip. Reading about it in this book, we learn all kinds of interesting things about the Caribbean, its colonial past and its hurricane-ravaged present.
An inveterate traveller and travel writer (see my review of Europe @2.4km/h), Haley had wanted to test the stereotypes of the Caribbean:
...we have vivid pictures in our heads of places unvisited long before they get replaced by pictures on a handheld device.
The Caribbean: cool daiquiris. Central America: rank sweat. The Caribbean: rich. Central America: poor.
I already perceived how simplistic my notion of these imaginary worlds must be. Everything I had ever seen in two-thirds of a century told me that for a few, or a few thousand, to be wealthy in any economy, most of the population must be worse off. So the underside of the Caribbean and the opulence that sustains the Spanish inheritance in that region between North and South America were going to be worth travelling halfway round the world to see, if only to correct my vision. (p. x)
But Haley does more than address the stereotypes. If the Caribbean has never been on your bucket list, you will discover from this book that there are historic city centres to rival what's in Europe.
Readers may remember that I featured the author Delia Falconer and her new book of essays Signs and Wonders after the Melbourne Writers Festival was cReaders may remember that I featured the author Delia Falconer and her new book of essays Signs and Wonders after the Melbourne Writers Festival was cancelled, alerting you to the book's forthcoming release. What I didn't know then was that Signs and Wonders is a stunning book, and it is is going to walk off the shelves when it's released in October so if you don't want to miss out, best to pre-order a copy now. I don't like to promote FOMO but booksellers are already warning us about both shortages of Christmas stock and expected delivery delays due to pressure on Australia Post because of the explosion in online sales. Signs and Wonders is exactly the kind of book that's a perfect Christmas present for the hard-to-please, so don't be disappointed...
There are thirteen essays but it will come as no surprise that I opted to read 'The Disappearing Paragraph' first. This fascinating essay explores the impact on thinking of the way print has been altered in the age of screens. It begins like this:
A new breath. A macro-punctuation mark. A flash of lightning showing the landscape from a different aspect. A collection of sentences with a unity of purpose. A new neighbourhood made up of 'streets' of sentences. These are some of the ways writers have described the work of the paragraph. And yet, among the many unsettling phenomena of our age, I have noticed that paragraphs have been disappearing — at least paragraphs as I once knew them. This may not amount to much amid the greater unravelling of our world but it is a significant disturbance within my own small literary ecotone. (p.155)
Falconer learned to type as I did, on a typewriter, (though hers was electric, and the one at the State Film Centre where I worked, was not. ) But before that, as I did, she had absorbed the small visual rhythms of paragraphing by reading everything that came my way as a child. (For me, my grade 6 teacher Mrs Sheedy who was a stickler for writing conventions, reinforced the message with a red pen.) But now paragraphs are often not separated by the conventional indent, but by a double-line space. You see it here in this and all my reviews but it's also emerging in books. When I inspect my current TBR of books for review, three of the seven use double-line spaces. The publishers aren't consistent: Emily Bitto's Wild Abandon (A&U) has double-line spaces but also from A&U, Nellie, the life and loves of Dame Nellie Melba by Robert Wainwright, doesn't. Upswell publications The Dogs by John Hughes and Belinda Probert's Imaginative Possession have double-line spaces, but Monique Truong's The Sweetest Fruits has conventional indents. So does Transit Lounge's The One that Got Away, Travelling in the Time of Covid by Ken Haley, as does The Dancer by Evelyn Juers from Giramondo. And even Delia's own book isn't consistent with itself: 'Terror from the Air: Fire Diary 2019-20' has double-line spaces, but 'The Opposite of Glamour' has conventional indents. What's going on?
Reading this lively biography of Australia's first international superstar, Dame Nellie Melba, made me realise how far society has come in just over aReading this lively biography of Australia's first international superstar, Dame Nellie Melba, made me realise how far society has come in just over a century. Whether we browse the so-called women's magazines at the hairdresser with bemusement, read the scandal rag headlines surreptitiously in the checkout queue, or just puzzle over the #TwitterHashtags that are trending — celebrity culture is all around us. Paradoxically, because we are inured to it, it takes a good deal to scandalise us, and it enhances some careers rather than otherwise.
But it was a different world when Nellie Melba was forging her international career. Scandal in high society could be disastrous in all sorts of contexts, more so in stuffy turn-of-the-century London than more tolerant Paris. Europe, however, had its own political minefields for a naïve Australian to negotiate when she (imprudently married to a wife-basher called Charles Armstrong) embarked on an affair with a playboy claimant to the French throne.
I have previously read Ann Blainey's authoritative biography of Melba and enjoyed it for its insights into the talent, initiative and determination of this Australian musical icon. But, as you can tell from the blurb, Robert Wainwright's bio has a different emphasis...
Danged Black Thing, however, is both speculative and innovative. It’s a collection of short stories that explore love and migration, gender and class,Danged Black Thing, however, is both speculative and innovative. It’s a collection of short stories that explore love and migration, gender and class, patriarchy and womanhood while traversing the West and Africa. Born in Tanzania, Eugene Bacon is an African-Australian writer from Britain who is attracting international attention for her powerfully magical stories which bring the scarred and adrift together with the magical and the mundane. As you can see from her website, her work has won, been shortlisted, longlisted or commended in national and international awards.
The first story in this collection is ‘Simbiyu and the Nameless.’ Written in the second person, it begins in an unnamed African country, recalling the childhood of Simbiyu, at eighteen months, at four, five, seven and nine, continuing to adolescence and migration to Australia on a sporting scholarship. The reader can almost smell the scent of guava and sour yams in the forest and he contrasts his pillow-soft mother with the harshness of Aunty Prim, but this is no sentimental yarn. Children die on the riverbank when a black octopus climbs from the water’s surface. There is a menace approaching, human, nonhuman, waving tentacles. The boy is sent away to Aunt Prim because these repeated tragedies changed how people saw you. Sent on to Australia, he is told to make ‘us’ proud:
Does ‘us’ include your mother? You haven’t seen her in years. Sometimes, you wonder about her, then forget. You lost your mother the day Tatu died. She stopped breastfeeding you that same evening, and her touch hardened. (p.10)
The dark power he wields won’t stand for any difficulties from racist immigration officials or a young woman who will take one look at you and remember to remotely lock her car. or a barman built like a fridge but there’s heat in his dislike. To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/09/05/d......more
When I consulted Tom Chetwynd's Dictionary of Symbols to unravel the symbolism in the title of John Hughes new novel The Dogs, this is what I found:
Do
When I consulted Tom Chetwynd's Dictionary of Symbols to unravel the symbolism in the title of John Hughes new novel The Dogs, this is what I found:
Dogs/Wolves/Jackals
The animal instincts as helpful intermediaries between man and nature; or as negative aggression. Dogs help man hunt the wild animal and round up the domestic animal: So they are symbols of the right inner relationship between man and his animal nature. Their good nose for scenting unseen prey, or intruders: Intuition, which is aware of other people's inner nature, sense when something is wrong, and is not easily deceived by others. (Dictionary of Symbols, by Tom Chetwynd, Paladin, (Grafton, Collins) 1982 ISBN 9780586083512, p.124)
The negative entries about the symbolism of 'dogs' include: male aggression, or to represent the masculine aggression of the Animus in women; associated with the underworld and death via forces which hunt and hound the conscious Ego and tear it to pieces from the depths of the unconscious.
From Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, I found the common allusion to Shakespeare's horrors of war:
Cry 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war. (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, III, i (1599) (Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, p386)
and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's quatrain about the superstitious belief that dogs howl at death:
In the Rabbinical Book, it saith The dogs howl, when with icy breath Great Sammaël, the Angel of Death Takes through the town his flight! (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Golden Legend III, vii (1851), ibid p.385
As you can see from the blurb, all these meanings surface in the terrain explored in the novel:
The Sweetest Fruits, by Vietnamese-American author Monique Truong, is a fictionalised life of Lafcadio HearnWhat a pleasure it was to read this book!
The Sweetest Fruits, by Vietnamese-American author Monique Truong, is a fictionalised life of Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904). Of Greek-Irish heritage, Hearn was born on the Greek island of Lefkada; was abandoned by his father and then by his mother who unwisely left him under guardianship in Ireland. From there he was tutored in Wales and educated in France; but learned the craft of journalism and translation in the US; and subsequently in Japan became a teacher who introduced its culture and literature to the West. As we learn from the Afterword, Truong discovered the bare bones of his life story during research for a previous book Bitter in the Mouth. The novel had to have an authentic cornbread recipe from the South not the North, and the brief but intriguing bio that she found in an encyclopedia of food alerted her to Hearn's La Cuisine Creole: A Collection of Culinary Recipes (1885). As a child refugee from Vietnam, Truong is fascinated by people who choose to live in exile from country, family, language, and the physical and emotional assemblage of home so she had found the topic for her next novel and The Sweetest Fruits is the result.
A deft mixture of fact and imagination, Hearn's story is told in the distinctive voices of three women who were crucially important in his life, punctuated by the contrasting voice of his real-life biographer Elizabeth Bisland. The effect is not to make the reader doubt the veracity of these women but to acknowledge that people present different versions of themselves to others for all sorts of reasons, dubious or otherwise.
BEWARE: MILD SPOILERS
The first narrator is the illiterate (real-life) Rosa Antonia Cassimati, (1823-1882) dictating her story to Elesa, who is nanny to her second but (so far) only surviving child, Patricio Lafcadio Hearn. En route to Dublin where she hopes to reunite with the father of this child, Charles Bush Hearn, Rosa has escaped the bullying and cruelty of her childhood home where she was held to blame for her mother's premature death and destined to live out her days in a convent. Naïve and inexperienced in the ways of men, Rosa has to learn the hard way that men like Charles care more about their military careers in far-flung places than they do about their families.
[image] Commemorative plaque to Lafcadio Hearn, 48 Gardiner Street Lower, Dublin, Ireland. (Wikipedia)
The reader does not learn about the betrayal of Rosa's hopes in this part of the story. That comes later in the second narration, which is by (real-life) Alethea Foley (1853-1913) in Cincinnati.
Tucked up in the LH corner of the book cover, Helen Garner sums up the impact of this book so well:
'A wonderfully friendly and likeable book. It put
Tucked up in the LH corner of the book cover, Helen Garner sums up the impact of this book so well:
'A wonderfully friendly and likeable book. It put me in a good mood for days, and taught me a thousand important things.'
A friendly book. A likeable book. These are not words we hear too often about the books we read, but in this case they're true. I've been reading Belinda Probert's Imaginative Possession at lunch time, a chapter each day, and as I've bonded with the author through the words on the page, it's furnished me with interesting things to think about and new ways of looking at my world.
You might remember from a previous post when this book was a giveaway from Upswell Press, that I liked the subtitle Imaginative Possession, Learning to Live in the Antipodes because it makes it clear that migration takes effort and humility. As a newcomer in many places, a migrant in others, and an outsider in all of them, I know this, and am sometimes impatient with the current narrative about migration being so much a matter of pain, loss and resentment against the host country. Migrants, as distinct from refugees, choose to come here, and they have an entitlement to go home again if Australia doesn't suit them. When refugees can't go home because it's not safe, and so many displaced people around the world have nowhere to go at all, it's a privilege to have a secure homeland.
Humility is not just about recognising that extraordinary privilege, it's also about recognising a responsibility to learn about the new country. Born in England, Belinda Probert has the humility to recognise this, and this book explains her efforts to learn about Australia, and her enthusiasm for the journey. Over many years, and through periods of time in Victoria and WA, she explores landscapes; plant, animal and bird life; the concept of distance, space and scale; and Indigenous culture and storytelling. She recounts amusing anecdotes about her first bullant bite and about learning not to be sentimental about some of the creatures on her bush block. She tries and fails to develop some expertise in identifying species of eucalypts, but has more expertise with birds because there's an App for that. She wrestles (as we all do) with the issue of native plants versus exotics, the topic becoming more urgent than academic as climate change limits what can survive into the future. She reads voraciously, everything from Don Watson's The Bush, to Henry Handel Richardson's Fortunes of Richard Mahoney.
In the last part of Imaginative Possession, Probert tackles the issue of 'belonging,' and what it takes to 'belong'...
I can't help feeling a bit discontented about the latest novel from Colm Tóibín. I've read and enjoyed all of his novels, starting with The South in 1I can't help feeling a bit discontented about the latest novel from Colm Tóibín. I've read and enjoyed all of his novels, starting with The South in 1990, and continuing with each new release, the more recent of them reviewed here on this blog. I loved The Master, (2004) a 'bionov' about Henry James — so why I am disappointed by The Magician, a 'bionov' about Thomas Mann? (I just discovered this new word 'bionov' from Twitter: it means a fictionalised life, a biographical novel. Will the label catch on?)
The Magician is a fictionalised life of Thomas Mann, whose books I like, and Mann had a tumultuous life as did many who had to flee Nazi Germany, so at the surface level the novel makes interesting reading, though not as engaging as I expected it to be. The focus on Mann's repressed homosexuality is a bit overdone, and the prose is a bit ponderous here and there —channelling Mann himself? I don't know, I can only read Mann in translation... was he ponderous in German? OTOH I really liked the segments portraying the mind of the novelist at work, harvesting and hoarding events and people in his life for his next novel. I especially savoured this when I'd read those novels myself, that is Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus (see my reviews here) and found myself wanting to read Mann's other fiction, and the work of Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann's brother as well. On that level, for a reader like me, the novel succeeds. How it travels with readers unfamiliar with Thomas Mann's writing, I can't guess.
However...
Having read Evelyn Juers' House of Exile (and under-appreciated it at the time) I knew something of the Mann family, but not much about Thomas Mann's children who seem to have been 'difficult', to say the least of it, more so in adulthood. (I am assuming biographical accuracy in The Magician, which is not a given in a fictionalised life.*) They experienced the horror of Nazi Germany displacing civilised life so trauma is to be expected, but they were tiresome, aggressively rude and socially embarrassing even before that. Their parents were remarkably tolerant both then and in later years in America, and not in ways that you might perhaps expect in a bohemian household because the Manns were not at all bohemian, they were bourgeois in their lifestyle and habits. This strand of the novel made me realise how little Tóibín attends to Katia, Thomas Mann's wife. She speaks, sometimes with forbearance that can be deduced, but there's very little about her feelings or her interior life. Or even about how she spends her days except when she's trying to organise their escape from Europe.
I've also read a very fine novel about the existential crisis faced by Thomas Mann when he was weighing up whether or not to denounce Nazism. That book was The Decision by Britta Böhler, translated by Jeanette K Ringold. As I said in my review:
[Thomas Mann] had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. His was a powerful voice, and — having left Germany for Switzerland in 1933 when Hitler came to power, he had to decide how best to use his celebrity.
He has written a letter denouncing the regime to the Zurich-German press, that when published would amount to cultural suicide. It is not just that he cannot ever go back unless things change, it is also that he is tormented by the idea that he shares the same cultural tradition as new regime, and may be tainted by it. He’s not even sure if he can still enjoy the sublime music of Wagner, now that it’s been appropriated by the Nazis.
Tóibín's Thomas Mann is diffident to the point of seeming indifferent in many situations where a thoughtful man, as we see in Böhler's novel, would be tormented by cascading perils, including his own safety and that of family members remaining in Europe as it was rapidly being overrun. But no, in Tóibín's novel, nothing disrupts Mann's morning routine so he continues to disappear into his study to write for four hours until lunchtime.
So, firstly, the title is apparently a reference to a song by David Bowie? Well, I Googled the lyrics... and am none the wiser.
Secondly, the 'novel' So, firstly, the title is apparently a reference to a song by David Bowie? Well, I Googled the lyrics... and am none the wiser.
Secondly, the 'novel' is actually two novellas, tenuously linked. One, 'the past' is set in 1980s Montpellier, France, and the other, 'the future' in a dystopian Melbourne. It's packaged in an upside-down format so that the reader can choose whether to read 'cherry-side-up' first: the coming-of-age story of Lili in France; or alternatively cherry-blossom-side-up: the satirical story of Lyle in the future. I can't see that this experiment in format makes much difference whichever one is read first, though perhaps Lili's story might put you in a better mood...
De Kretser explains the reasoning behind this upside-down format at the Guardian, i.e. her belief that migration turns lives upside-down, and she expresses her anxiety that publishing the book this way might be seen as gimmicky. Well, I'll leave that to others to judge, but I will comment on her idea that migrants are viewed as gimmicky citizens whose worth is constantly questioned. FWIW The 'migrant as victim' is an offshoot of identity politics that I reject. It's hard — of course migration is hard, change is always hard. But unlike refugees, migrants choose it. As a migrant myself I consider it a privilege to have been accepted as a migrant when there are millions of people around the world fruitlessly seeking a new homeland.
Anyway...
I started with the story of Lili. She's a twenty-something teacher from Australia, settling into Montpellier in the south of France. Through Nick, who teaches at the same school, she develops an intense friendship with his girlfriend, a young English artist called Minna. Minna teaches Lili to be more assertive with the landlord who takes advantage of her inexperience to deny her heating in winter. She also encourages her to dress with the individuality of mismatched clothes because 'uglification' is a way of mocking the French preoccupation with appearance. They have a lot of fun together, but Lili privately thinks that she would be a better soulmate for Nick because she knows more about French literature and culture than Minna does. However, because Lili is a person of colour, she thinks that she can never be quite 'enough'.
Lili wants to be a Bold. Intelligent. Woman. like Simone de Beauvoir, and she enjoys posing for Minna's series of photos called 'Daring Audrey'. (This reminded me of Kim Mahood's Position Doubtfulin which Mahood's friend the photo-artist Pamela Lofts posed her in all kinds of ironic feminist critiques out in the Tanami Desert.) But despite having the courage to set off alone across the world for adventures in a different culture, Lili is more often hyper-alert for serial killers and she suspects that her creepy neighbour is plotting to attack her. Reading this novella first without the brief allusion to it in Lyle's story makes it end somewhat inconclusively in 1983 two years after the election of the socialist president François Mitterand.
Lyle's story is a rather heavy-handed satire. It is set in a surreal dystopian Melbourne where Islam is illegal and there are heavy penalties for mentioning climate change. Sydney has been abandoned because of coastal erosion and bushfires, and the government monitors communications to identify troublesome migrants for repatriation. Migrants Lyle and his wife Chanel keep their heads down in the outer suburbs while their adult children Sydney and Mel bully them. Mel is studying architecture in Chicago, but her YouTube channel is about the 'architecture of the face' and her speech is loaded with farcical Millennial jargon. When Lyle demurs about the cost of an American college, Mel tells him she'll get a better job in Australia with an American degree and it's really patriarchal of him to destroy her career before it's even begun. Mel demands three 'statement' dresses for forthcoming social events, and her grandmother Ivy is not to make them because that would be 'beyond tragic'.
'Can't you wear the same dress?' asked Chanel. 'There'll be different people in those three places.'
Mel burst into tears. 'Oh my god, I can't believe it!' she gasped between sobs. 'Gaslighted by my own mother. Oh my god.' (p.75)
What she wears is monitored by everyone in the world on Instagram...
Millennials are such an easy target for mockery...
Another title for #WITmonth, this time a recent release from Melbourne publisher Scribe Publications.
Higher Ground (Schäfchen im Trockenen) by German Another title for #WITmonth, this time a recent release from Melbourne publisher Scribe Publications.
Higher Ground (Schäfchen im Trockenen) by German author Anke Stelling and translated by Lucy Jones won the Leipzig Book Prize and the Friedrich-Hölderin Prize. According to Scribe’s website:
Anke Stelling was born in 1971, in Ulm, Germany. She studied at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig. Stelling is a multi-award-winning novelist whose previous works have been much acclaimed. Higher Ground is the first of her novels to be translated into English. Stelling lives and works in Berlin.
Higher Ground is an absorbing novel that kept me interested from start to finish. Laced with dark humour, it’s very contemporary, skewering complacency and hypocrisy among the moneyed classes in Berlin.
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