Running through my mind on every damn page: what makes this guy think he has a right to write something this long. And why didn't an editor fix it? I Running through my mind on every damn page: what makes this guy think he has a right to write something this long. And why didn't an editor fix it? I made p230 at which point I lost heart. For potential readers: lose heart more quickly, there is no salvation. ...more
I loved this group of what are described as literary essays, but I think of as reflections.
From Maturity:
Our culture has an implacable aversion to age
I loved this group of what are described as literary essays, but I think of as reflections.
From Maturity:
Our culture has an implacable aversion to age, something that goes far beyond its ugliness and infirmities, beyond the mere selfishness of those who have no time for declining parents, beyond the understandable vanity that would reverse hair loss or lift a drooping bosom, beyond the fear of death, even. People seem to accept that they have to die, but resent the idea of ageing. Yet the process is well under way. Already one has to be careful about what one eats. Already one loves young women without being in love with anyone in particular. Suddenly appetite is no longer quite part of me, or yes it is, but a potential enemy too. A scission is taking place. Do I have to decide what side to stay on? What is the way forward now? Throw oneself into appetite or renounce it. Stay in 'that country' or pack my bag against eventual departure? Where to? Sail the seas with Yeats and come 'to the holy city of Byzantium? City of art and intellect. Of hammered gold and gold enamelling. What kind of a trip would that be? Stay young, the bias of y culture tells me. Look around.
From Destiny:
In any even, you are beginning to get the picture. A life suppurating with unpleasant incident. A family where bygones are never bygones. Grudges, hatchets, corpses, are only buried the better to be dug up again. Decay seething with vitality.
At its nadir, according to google Ngram viewer, the use of the word 'rancour' has consistently declined more or less in a straight line between 1800 and 1980. What a pity, it expresses something important which has no substitute. I'm guessing that Parks may have single-handedly brought it back from five zeros after a decimal point to four. It's an important word in his thinking and writing. And no doubt, as one might garner from the previous short quote, about family, one could not possible comprehend Italian relationships without it. And so in this collection it even has its own essay. Bravo Tim Parks.
From Rancour:
That writing is a phenomemon often galvanised by anger is evident enough. How rancorous Shakespeare's plays are! How Hamlet raves and Lear rages! And Swift and Pope and Byron, and Dickens too in his way. Only those who do not understand what a central part such emotions play in life, would consider Eliot's description of The Waste Land as 'one long rhythmical grumble' reductive. What is not so clear is the nature of the writer's rancour, where it came from, what it is about. Could it be this matter is taboo?
One of the things about rancour that one doesn't find in a dictionary definition of it, is that it requires infinite energy. Parks has that, you can feel it in everything about his writing, how he does it, his choice of words, what he writes about. I hope he never loses that source. Maybe as long as he is in Italy, it is self-sustaining. ...more
Maybe I'm less crotchety at the moment, or maybe inflation has me in its grip. Maybe it's just because it's on my books I have lived through shelf. FoMaybe I'm less crotchety at the moment, or maybe inflation has me in its grip. Maybe it's just because it's on my books I have lived through shelf. For whatever reason, I'm giving this 4 stars and without wanting to damn Doug with faint praise, one of the things I admire about this novel is that it stays within its capabilities. A retired academic who has turned to fictional writing in his older age, he does not have a wealth of experience behind him. Indeed, I suspect he had to unlearn decades of academic-speak, and academic ways of teasing tiny data points.
I don't know if the fact that I did live through the period in which he sets his story makes me more, or less, able to objectively review this. The backdrop is the Vietnam war and its tragic impact on Australian youth, which he portrays through a group of university students in Adelaide. Although in this period, I was only a primary and early secondary school student, I was acutely aware of this period of dissension, protest and its impact on my parents' friends, some of whom went underground rather than accept being conscripted. The demonstrations were electrifying and served to prove the importance of grass roots action in relation to democracy.
Here also are the differences which would be called 'class' in the UK, but are less clear in Australia, with its egalitarian basis to society. That is particularly true of Adelaide, where Stardust and Golden is set. A tolerant and non-judgmental society was always the aim here and, not to say that the boys in the posh private schools weren't privileged and knew they were, but it was and is quite different from the UK. The relations between characters in the novel make this clear. Yet there was a class aspect to the nature of protest, which is explored here too.
And then, for those reading it who happen to be from Adelaide, they will find places and streets as they were in our childhood. Nizam's gets a mention, my first taste of what we believed, at least, in my family, make proper Indian food. The start of my still-going affair with it.
Not to mention the Indian setting for part of the story....yes, everybody went on the pilgrimage, if you like, to India. One could call it a rite of passage. Lots of young travellers fell ill on these trips and some did not come back. Eyes start tears at the end of this book.
In brief, a very engaging look at young people in sixties Adelaide, and although I could have said Australia, to make it sound broader, it IS an Adelaide book....and if you aren't an Adelaidean yourself, maybe you just won't get that. ...more
Although my local bookseller told me that Haruf is a bit of a dud, less his Our Souls at Night, I decided to ignore that and plug on with another. VerAlthough my local bookseller told me that Haruf is a bit of a dud, less his Our Souls at Night, I decided to ignore that and plug on with another. Very pleased I did so. Our Souls at Night has an ending which I hope we are supposed to find problematic. Plainsong does not. I didn't think it made a false step in its depiction of small town US. Highly recommend to those who like that setting....more
This is the third in the trilogy, I talked about the others here. I don't want to spoil reading this one. Suffice to say, it doesn't let the first twoThis is the third in the trilogy, I talked about the others here. I don't want to spoil reading this one. Suffice to say, it doesn't let the first two down. At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, Sharp is such an under-valued writer. Seek her out!...more
For some reason, perhaps because Australia is still dominated by the UK culturally, famous US writers can be all but unknown here, and Jess Walter is For some reason, perhaps because Australia is still dominated by the UK culturally, famous US writers can be all but unknown here, and Jess Walter is a case in point. I came upon him in The Paperback Bookshop in Melbourne, the title The Financial Lives of the Poets caught my eye and I figured the title itself was worth the purchase price, should the book as a whole fail to deliver on its cover's promise. Astonished by how good it was, I started asking around and none of those I know who read a lot had heard of him. He is, however, a wonderful writer and any Australians reading this, take the plunge. Cash in your stocks and buy Jess Walter. I have finished the three on my shelves and need (NEED, I say) to buy more.
I don't really want to say anything about this book, spoilers would definitely spoil. But if I may, reading this made Tim Parks pop into my head a lot. While that's partly because of the strong Italian theme running through Beautiful Ruins, it's also because it's a book about people who have to decide whether to do the right thing. Tim Parks' characters do the right thing, but in a rather peevish way, see, I'm doing this, but only because it's the right thing to do. Walter's characters rise above that. Walter and Parks, two very different voices, different ways of seeing the world, different ways of making us laugh. But upon closing the last page of books by each of these writers, the possibility exists that one may view the world in a slightly different way from now on. High praise....more
By sheer coincidence these were back to back reading. They are both Australian classics, both set in rural AustraliaPaired with Snake by Kate Jennings
By sheer coincidence these were back to back reading. They are both Australian classics, both set in rural Australia, written around the same time, and both are short. In the case of The Plains, mercifully so, and even then, I couldn't make myself get to more than half way through. In my defence, this is my third Murnane and I fully intend to read right through the increasingly-unlikely-to-be Nobel-prize-winning oeuvre of this exceedingly retiring writer. The Plains is an academic exercise, cool-clever, aloof, reminding me so much of Calvino that it makes me think if I ever were to reread that much-loved-writer-of-my-youth, I'd be repelled, not just by him, but by my young self. Snake is everything that The Plains isn't. To the point, gripping and warm, visceral where The Plains is cerebral. The main characters of Snake could be anybody, sad people with sad lives, struggling to make the best of things until they don't.
Then again, if that sounds a bit dreary, this is how the NLA describes Snake:
Set against the hard landscape of postwar Australia and moving through the 1950s and 1960s, Snake starts with a premise as frightening and common-place as the deadly bush snake that lurks in the Australian interior: The loyal Rex, a good man, cherishes his wife Irene. Irene, bubbling over with feminine anger and unspecified desire, despises Rex. Into this marriage, this terrible emptiness, two people pour their very lives. Snake is about the loneliness of men married to unkind women, about the unloved becoming unlovable. Irene - an Australian Madame Bovary - moves through these pages like a force of nature. Chapter by brief chapter, Snake tells her story with archetypal force and subtlety - and a mesmerizing, zero-at-the-bone simplicity that literally propels the reader to the novel's stark climax.
While Murnane is still alive, Jennings died at an age we probably think of as young these days. Because she wrote for her living, her actual literary output is tiny, alas. I would wonder why Snake does not merit a wiki page except that her own page does not even mention her notable work on Obama and the fall of Wall St, a book-sized Quarterly Essay which is still on sale in Australia and lies somewhere in my to read pile....more
By sheer coincidence these were back to back reading. They are both Australian classics, both set in rural AusPaired with The Plains by Gerald Murnane
By sheer coincidence these were back to back reading. They are both Australian classics, both set in rural Australia, written around the same time, and both are short. In the case of The Plains, mercifully so, and even then, I couldn't make myself get to more than half way through. In my defence, this is my third Murnane and I fully intend to read right through the increasingly-unlikely-to-be Nobel-prize-winning oeuvre of this exceedingly retiring writer. The Plains is an academic exercise, cool-clever, aloof, reminding me so much of Calvino that it makes me think if I ever were to reread that much-loved-writer-of-my-youth, I'd be repelled, not just by him, but by my young self. Snake is everything that The Plains isn't. To the point, gripping and warm, visceral where The Plains is cerebral. The main characters of Snake could be anybody, sad people with sad lives, struggling to make the best of things until they don't.
Then again, if that sounds a bit dreary, this is how the NLA describes Snake:
Set against the hard landscape of postwar Australia and moving through the 1950s and 1960s, Snake starts with a premise as frightening and common-place as the deadly bush snake that lurks in the Australian interior: The loyal Rex, a good man, cherishes his wife Irene. Irene, bubbling over with feminine anger and unspecified desire, despises Rex. Into this marriage, this terrible emptiness, two people pour their very lives. Snake is about the loneliness of men married to unkind women, about the unloved becoming unlovable. Irene - an Australian Madame Bovary - moves through these pages like a force of nature. Chapter by brief chapter, Snake tells her story with archetypal force and subtlety - and a mesmerizing, zero-at-the-bone simplicity that literally propels the reader to the novel's stark climax.
While Murnane is still alive, Jennings died at an age we probably think of as young these days. Because she wrote for her living, her actual literary output is tiny, alas. I would wonder why Snake does not merit a wiki page except that her own page does not even mention her notable work on Obama and the fall of Wall St, a book-sized Quarterly Essay which is still on sale in Australia and lies somewhere in my to read pile....more
I feel like books of short stories should be easier to produce than a novel. You write bunches of stories over a period of years, pick the best ones aI feel like books of short stories should be easier to produce than a novel. You write bunches of stories over a period of years, pick the best ones and hey presto! But in practice it doesn't seem to work like that, it's more often like an LP which has a stand out song or two, saving the ass of the rest. Here, however, we have a collection with no such failings. Every story is a delight and Jess Walter is fast becoming a favourite of mine. He has perfect comic timing, a way with words, interesting story lines....oh, and having read it on the back of Three Dog Night, I was particularly thrilled that he does female characters that are real, the reader believes in them without question, and is on their side. Peter Goldsworthy could take note....more
Just as in the case of Everything I Knew, Goldsworthy's portrayal of the main female character in this story leaves one perplexed. It was published soJust as in the case of Everything I Knew, Goldsworthy's portrayal of the main female character in this story leaves one perplexed. It was published some five years earlier, in 2003. Again I wondered if it was the case that 'way back then' women would have been okay with the characterisation. That is, until I came upon two reviews cut from newspapers of the day, both by females, and both unhappy with Lucy. Overall, a rather unsatisfactory affair....more
Tim Winton's take on the world we are leaving our children and their children's children. Because who gives a fuck, except for the things that are easTim Winton's take on the world we are leaving our children and their children's children. Because who gives a fuck, except for the things that are easy? We fly to our children's doom. Oil company CEOs make promises as if they were pollies, speak the speak no need to walk the walk. Bonusses aplenty for saying any old shit when you are a CEO. In Tim Winton's world, the ancestors of these people are killed without compunction, because it's the right thing to do. In our world they get bonusses. Privatised water supplies are poisoned by privatised sewerage. Those CEOs get bonusses too. In Tim Winton's world they are killed too, there is no mechanism for justice, but if there were, it wouldn't be wasted on such monstrous shits. They are killed in Juice because it's obvious that if anything is to be fixed, it will be in a world cleansed of these corporate criminals and sociopaths and their offspring. There are some interesting ethical situations in this book.
I don't know if Winton is ever a great prose stylist, and one might best approach this 500 pager as a piece of science fiction, something you are reading for the ideas, the dilemma, and how those to be born try to deal with it. It's a large picture of Gaia dying by one who is deeply attached to it...and for all the reader might criticise the style, he's won four Miles Franklins and been short listed for the Booker here and there. A recent interview with him indicated that this was his attempt to get people now, for it is only possible for us now, to stop his future from happening. The future Earth he describes in blunt terms - one might call them monotonous even, but then, the world will be a globe of ash and ruin, uninhabitable except by desperate people who have to make do. Monotony is the name of the game. Which is not to say that this is a dull book, I read it over a week.
Winton tells us he spent seven years researching Juice, reading the science and extrapolating from it. It was for him a dark place. That's the novelist's role, to have the vision. We don't listen to the scientists. Will we listen to the writer? Stop his fiction from becoming real? He hopes so. I can't see it myself, so for me, I was reading the chronicles of the future begat of our present. For much as we may demonise the oil barons and the tech billionaires, we could turn our backs on all of that if we wanted to....but we don't. They are what we have made them and we don't want to mess with our creations. But let us weep and gnash our teeth while we add up our Frequent Flyer points and trade up for a bigger car. There is time enough for that....more
It is the mark of a writer's greatness that their words do not stop on the page. We reuse them over and over because they fit, most obviously ShakespeIt is the mark of a writer's greatness that their words do not stop on the page. We reuse them over and over because they fit, most obviously Shakespeare - for a nice example in the press recently, there is Blumenthal's account of Trump as Lear, though frankly, if Lear's downfall is a tragedy, does this then elevate Trump when he should not be?
But sometimes it is incredibly personal. At face value these books have nothing to do with my life. They are set in a different world, a different time, with a protagonist who makes life-changing decisions I hope I would never make. And yet! Oh my goodness, how I felt that we were one and the same.
This is part three of has been published as the Vera Wright trilogy, as bitterly sad as the others. And as unread as the others too. WTF, Northern Hemisphere, listen to Coetzee, he's been fighting for the right of Australian (and Southern Hemisphere generally) literature to be accepted for a reason dudes....more
Anybody who has been an expat will share the lost sadness of this one. It amazes me how often people leave, and then come back to their place of origiAnybody who has been an expat will share the lost sadness of this one. It amazes me how often people leave, and then come back to their place of origin and are surprised to discover that it is no longer home. As one who has lived for more than a decade in each of three cities, as well as my original home town, to which I have returned, it seems to me that the sense of any of them being home is lost in the snap of your fingers. Two of them never felt like home. One did, but although for the first years or so that I found myself going back for visits, it felt like I was coming home, that it was where I really belonged, suddenly that changed. There were various reasons why, but that somewhere else was home was not one. How sad is that? Just like the book....more
The intensity of living inside the protagonist's head during the 72 hours of this book is riveting, I could not put it down. If one may divide novelisThe intensity of living inside the protagonist's head during the 72 hours of this book is riveting, I could not put it down. If one may divide novelists into the ones who do everything again and again, vs the ones who need to be moving on, Parks is in the latter category, whilst being much more than 'merely' a novelist. But although he is forever doing something different, exploring another way, there is always the security of it being a Parks affair. I don't know if I've read another author who so blatantly gives himself to the reader. As you read, he is there with you. I feel like we hang out together and that if we ever met, we would simply carry on a relationship which has been long established. How many writers can you say that about?!...more
How lucky I was to pick this up at one of those little bookhouses people have on their front fences these days. It's way too modern for me to have notHow lucky I was to pick this up at one of those little bookhouses people have on their front fences these days. It's way too modern for me to have noticed it otherwise. Look forward to reading more by this Oz author.
PS the captcha asked me to tick all the pictures with stairs, so I picked none. It turned out that I was supposed to count steps as stairs. ...more
The second in the trilogy which starts with My Father's Moon, it is episodic reverie, maybe a little harder to follow, to begin with, than the first. The second in the trilogy which starts with My Father's Moon, it is episodic reverie, maybe a little harder to follow, to begin with, than the first. Stick with it!...more
Is it only the Brits who think that a book about a chap who brutally beats and rapes his 5 year old son, whilst terrorising his wife who is complicit Is it only the Brits who think that a book about a chap who brutally beats and rapes his 5 year old son, whilst terrorising his wife who is complicit in the treatment of their child, is humorous? I suppose not. Mr Google tags it as 'humorous fiction, domestic fiction, coming-of-age story' with, one supposes, the emphasis on coming.
Having read most of Sharp's books for adults now, this is the only one which is weighed down with the predicament of the main character to the extent Having read most of Sharp's books for adults now, this is the only one which is weighed down with the predicament of the main character to the extent that there is no relief. Not even the unusually satisfactory ending for Cathy changes that. It's a total downer. And the ending is so odd that one wonders if Sharp felt that it had to be tied up in what is not a deus ex machina, but might just as well be, in order to make up for the relentlessly dreary, unhappy life she presented here for her readers. Looking back on it a couple of months after reading it, it strikes me still as unsettling, if not disturbing. But please read it!...more
Apt that Adelaide just this weekend held Speaking from the South conference. Led by Coetzee, it is (yet) another get-together of writers bemoaning theApt that Adelaide just this weekend held Speaking from the South conference. Led by Coetzee, it is (yet) another get-together of writers bemoaning the cultural dominance - ignorance born of presumed superiority - of the North. If Elizabeth Jolley had stayed in the UK, she would have become a famous writer and a band of academics would be milking her texts for their livelihood. But she moved to Perth on the west edge of Australia, thus damning her to a career which is monumentally underestimated. This is the third of hers I've read, and they keep getting better. The protagonist in this one engages our sympathy despite her being rather ghastly - or perhaps because. I kept thinking how like hers my life has been, right from the ways she is not happy as a child, not in the detail but in the sentiment. It was only after finishing it and looking around for people's thoughts on it that I discovered it is the first of a trilogy. Number two is on my pile, but I have yet to spot number three at my usual bookshops. I'm expecting a lot of cringing as I carry on....more
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