Monthly Archives: Jun 2025

Emily Maguire’s Rapture

Posted on 27 Jun 2025 | 11 comments

Emily Maguire, Rapture (Allen & Unwin 2024)

Rapture is a historical fiction set in the 9th century of the current era. An English former priest living in Germany teaches his motherless daughter to read and encourages her to think for herself. After his death, with the connivance of Randulf, a worldly a young monk who fancies her, she dresses in men’s clothing and joins the Benedictine order.

If you’ve heard almost anything about this book, you already know where the story leads. It must have received the least spoiler-careful reception of any novel. Ever.

Though I may be being over careful, you won’t get the Big Spoiler from me. I’ll just say that as one who was raised in pre–Vatican Two Catholicism, I found the subject irresistible, and the telling wonderful.

You can read excellent reviews by Heather Nielson in the Australian Book Review (link here, spoiler already in the url), Ann Skea in the Newtown Review of Books (link here), and in the blogosphere, intelligent as always, at Reading Matters, ANZ LitLovers, Theresa Smith Writes and This Reading Life. I’m keeping to my resolve and sticking with page 78*.

As it happens, possibly because of shortsightedness, it took me three attempts to land on page 78.

First I looked at page 76, where Randulf and Agnes get their story straight: Randulf has discovered a beggar-boy who was proficient in Latin and theology and will propose that he be accepted to train as a monk in his abbey. If accepted, Randulf says, there will be no trouble with the story. Among monks, he says, ‘It is not done to exchange histories or probe for intimacies.’

Realising I had the wrong page I turned, inadvertently, to page 80, where Agnes hears Randulf pissing and ‘hot panic grips her’ – but he reassures her that the monks wash rarely, sleep fully clothed, and have latrines where privacy ensures they never glimpse even an ankle of another: ‘Your modesty would not be better preserved were you empress of the realm.’

Page 78, when I finally got there, wasn’t less pointed.

Agnes, disguised as a boy but not yet a monk, is travelling with Randulf to the Princely Abbey of Fulda (a real place, you can see a photo of the building, now a cathedral, at this link). They see some people with a mule coming their way on the open road. ‘Fellow travellers,’ Randulf says cheerfully, but his hand moves towards his concealed dagger. Agnes is terrified:

It’s an unexceptional encounter, a non-event. But it speaks to character and to the texture of the world Emily Maguire has created, and it foreshadows later events.

‘Randulf.’
‘All is well, Agnes. All is well.’

The relationship between these two characters is one of the joys of the book. Agnes is still a teenager. Randulf is older, but still a young man. He has won her trust and confidence by his genuine appreciation of her as a thinking person when he came to visit her father. They have had one sexual encounter – not exactly rape, but not a good experience for her, and in her piety and her abhorrence of childbirth she has made it clear that it is never to happen again. (Spoiler: it does, only better!) These two lines of dialogue evoke their current relationship: she looks to him for protection; as a man of he world he can reassure her.

Close enough now to see the eyes of the travellers, weary and wary. Three men of middle years and a boy her own age level with the animal. A man as old as her father and a woman older still moving behind. Their clothing long since covered by road dust. Their faces and hands too. Like they’ve crawled out of their graves and not had time to wash. Even the mule appears dragged from the tallow pit and loaded with sagging, filth-covered sacks.

There’s a Candide element to Agnes’ story. She has had a protected life, and is about to enter a differently protected life in the monastery. This is her first glimpse of the hardship endured by people who do not enjoy the protection of the Church or a prince. On the next page Randulf explains that it is not lack of godliness that makes life hard for people from further north, but economics – the further from big churches people live the greater their poverty, as they share less in the wealth accumulated by the Church.

‘Good day,’ Randulf says.
Agnes stays a step behind, eyes focused on the ground, praying her hood conceals her face and that she will not be called on to speak.
‘Good day,’ says one of the men. ‘We do not wish any trouble, sirs.’
‘You will find none with us. We are Brothers of Fulda and go always in peace.’
‘We wish you fair travels, brothers.’

This is wonderful use of dialogue to evoke the dangers of that world. We also see that at this stage Agnes is not confident in her disguise. With the passage of time, though she identifies completely as female (this is not a novel about gender fluidity) she becomes more confident that her disguise will work (until, not a spoiler, it doesn’t!).

‘Harmless, as most are,’ Randulf says when the mule’s clop has faded.

This is an adept piece of foreshadowing. The pair are to go on another journey years later when Agnes is fully Brother John. Again Randulf will be protective, but plague and war have made the environment infinitely more dangerous and hostile. The horror-movie quality to some of the description on page 78 – ‘crawled out of their graves’ and ‘dragged from the tallow pit’ – prepares the reader at a subliminal level for a pivotal moment on that later journey where Randulf and Agnes are horrified by a spectacle that is described only in a couple of disjointed phrases many pages later, but which the reader pretty much has to imagine.

That’s just one page: sadly it doesn’t contain any of the steamy sex, or the equally enthralling theological argumentation. It conveys only a little of the constant dread that hangs over Agnes/John, which for me is the most powerful element of the book. She is doomed, but not before some magnificent achievements and for me the way she meets her doom is both devastating and narratively satisfying.

I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, where a kookaburra flew right in front of me as I was walking this morning. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of this beautiful country, never ceded.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.

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Raja Shehadeh, We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I

Posted on 22 Jun 2025 | Leave a comment

Raja Shehadeh, We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir (Profile Books 2022)

When a young man at the Sydney Writers’ Festival recommended this book to me, I said, ‘What a great title!’ He didn’t miss a beat: ‘Yeah, a great dust jacket too.’ You’ve got to love the sarcastic young.

Superficial old man I may be, but the promise of the its title is what led me to this book rather than one of Raja Shehadeh’s other recent books, such as What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? (2024) or his Orwell Prize winning Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2008) – both with excellent titles. Since reading Annie Ernaux’s book about her father, A Man’s Place / La place (my blog post here), I’ve been hungry for more books in which the writer sets out to understand their father. This promised to be that. I was not disappointed, and I also received a masterly lesson in the history of Palestine since the nakbah in 1948.

In 1984, Raja was 33 years old and working in the legal practice of his father, Aziz Shehadeh, on the West Bank. When he saw a map that he realised was a blueprint for an Israeli occupation, he wanted to challenge Israel’s plan through the courts. His father gave advice and put his name to brief that Raja prepared, but when the PLO failed to support it he didn’t share his son’s surprise and distress. Raja asked, ‘Had he given up on using the law to resist Israel’s occupation?’

The next year, aged 73, Aziz was murdered. (The case has never been resolved. Apparently the Israeli police knew who the murderer was but didn’t want to charge him.) For maybe 20 years, filing cabinets crammed with his papers remained unopened until Raja decided to have a proper look, and found a wealth of well-ordered material which may have been the preliminary work for a memoir. This book is the narrative Raja constructed from those papers.

Aziz Shehadeh was a prominent lawyer in Jaffa, Tel Aviv, who lost everything in 1948. At first he thought he and his family would be able to return home after a couple of months when things calmed down. It was not to be.

What followed was a long, intense engagement in political debate with other Palestinians and endless attempts, some successful, to mount legal challenges to Israel’s actions. And with it all the terrible sense of betrayal by other Arab nations. As Raja said at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, he had known the broad outline of his father’s activism, but only on reading the papers did he understood his suffering.

Page 78* is part of the story of one of Aziz’s great successes, what he called the ‘frozen money case’, an episode that illustrates the way Britain, Israel and the Arab states in effect combined forces against Palestinians.

When the British Mandate ended in 1948, the British Treasury declared that the Palestinian pound was no longer legal tender. This meant that for the thousands of Palestinians who had fled to other countries, any bank accounts in Palestinian currency were useless. Arab banks and the Bank of England denied all responsibility, and the fate of those accounts was left to the new state of Israel.

Israel ordered every commercial bank operating in its territory to ‘freeze the accounts of all their Arab customers and to stop all transactions on all Arab accounts’. Shehadeh points out that they refrained from calling them Palestinian accounts: ‘To them Palestine was no more and the Palestinians had ceased to exist.’

By the end of December 1948 every bank operating in Israel had obeyed the order. The newly established state was exploiting all its power to inflict the maximum amount of damage on its enemies, the Palestinians.

On this page, in measured, objective prose, Shehadeh outlines the ruthlessness of the new Israeli government. First, in December 1948, there were directives called Emergency Regulations on the Property of Absentees, with which both active banks, one British and the other Arab, felt obliged to comply. In February 1949 the Israeli government required the banks to transfer the affected funds to a new entity called the Custodian of Absentee Property. The banks could wipe their hands of the issue.

Within a year it became clear that the freeze was not a temporary measure, intended to last only until peace was established, as had initially been promised. For Israel now proceeded to liquidate the assets in these accounts as if they belonged to the state. Again the banks colluded in this harsh decision against the refugees, who had just lost all their properties in Palestine.
My father was appalled. He could hardly believe that the banks could get away with it and began to explore the possibility of a legal challenge.

The pages that follow tell of a protracted legal battle, which Aziz eventually won, alleviating the suffering of thousands of Palestinian refugees. One significant win along the way.

Aziz was at odds with the PLO. He argued that the refugees should accept that they would never be able to return to their homes. He campaigned for the notion of two states – a Palestinian state and an Israeli state – side by side. His personal story is intimately bound up with the story of the Palestinians, and it is one of many stories of sustained, systematic, heroic resistance.

Edward Said famously wrote that Palestinians have been denied permission to narrate. This book, like others by Raja Shehadeh and a score of other writers, defies that prohibition. I’ve read very little of that writing, but there are a couple of books I can recommend if you’re interested (links to my blog pasts): Drinking the Sea at Gaza (1999) by Israeli journalist Amira Hass; 19 Varieties of Gazelle (2002), a collection of poems by Palestinian-American Naomi Shihab Nye published in response to the rise of anti-Arab sentiment in the USA after September 2001; Palestine (2003) and Footnotes in Gaza (2009), groundbreaking comics journalism by USer Joe Sacco.

I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, whose occupation since 1788 has never been legally resolved. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of this country.

* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently 78.

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Helen Garner’s Season at the Book Group

Posted on 18 Jun 2025 | 8 comments

Helen Garner, The Season (Text Publishing 2024)

Before the Book Group Meeting:

While she was writing The Season, Helen Garner described it to friends as ‘a nana’s book about footy’. Her youngest grandson Amby was fifteen, on the cusp of manhood. Being witness to his football games and training sessions was, among other things, a way of enriching and maybe holding onto that precious relationship.

I came to the book with a lot of baggage. For a start I didn’t have a benign experience of fifteen-year-old boys when I was one. My boarding school’s focus on football made skinny, physically inept, nerdy Jonathan something of an outcast, and fifteen year old boys, however sweet they may look to a nana’s eyes, can be brutal to the designated outcasts. (Full disclosure: because the school also prized academic achievement, which I was quite good at, I wasn’t the worst abused.)

What’s more, Aussie Rules is pretty much a closed book to me. I don’t know a mark from a behind, let alone a torp, and nana Helen, who says she knows very little about the sport, is sufficiently steeped in AFL culture to feel no need to explain such terms. My whole family watched my big brother play League on Saturdays, my father yelling at the ref in cheerfully confected outrage. And the footballs I myself played at school, badly, were League, Union and soccer. We referred to AFL, then Victorian Rules, as aerial pingpong.

So, even though I’m a member of the vast Helen Garner fan club, I would happily have skipped The Season.

But what the Book Group wants …

I can’t say it completely won me over, but it’s beautifully written. While Garner’s intense desire to know her grandson – ‘what’s in his head, what drives him’ – is the heart of the book, it broadens out to look at aspects of masculinity, and aspects of being an old woman, and aspects of the role of football in Melbourne social life, in an engagingly impressionistic way. I doubt if any other book uses words like ‘sweet’, ‘delicate’, ‘graceful’ or ‘beautiful’ about men young and old with as much frequency. In the opening pages, she writes about becoming an engaged grandmother to two boys:

Never having raised a son, I now began to learn about boys and men from a fresh angle, to see their delicacy, their fragility, what they’re obliged to do to themselves in order to live in this world, the codes of behaviour they’ve had to develop in order to discipline and sublimate their drive to violence

In a recent Big Ideas podcast, Tim Etchells from the British theatre group Forced Entertainment talked about learning by finding rather than by searching. He could have had this book in mind. Garner depicts herself as going to training sessions and games and seeing what happens – no agenda, no conclusions, just acute, self-aware, finely articulated observation. Maybe this is why she kept her first husband’s family name: she garners.

The book moves through footy season from February to August. On page 78*, it’s May, and Garner has had Covid. Watching a lot of football on TV, she has surmised that Virgil and Homer would recognise the ‘hulking airborne men’ she sees in those games. After two weeks ‘reading, dozing, reading again, forgetting everything I’ve read’, she opens a newspaper to the sports pages, where she sees a photo of Buddy Franklin, a Sydney Swans player she describes as ‘a hero of the game, a dancing god of the game in his last season’, whom a Collingwood crowd has booed:

Franklin is thirty-six, battle-hardened. His face, in this photo, is calm, composed; but it is also as soft as a boy’s. It’s a wounded face, with that wiped look of someone who’s copped a ringing slap across the cheek: all his expression lines are gone. In my fortnight of isolation I must have lost a couple of skins: I shock myself by bursting into tears.

I found the photo at this link, or maybe it’s this one. To look at them and read Garner’s description of them is to recognise what a fine writer she is. Even when putting herself front and centre, bursting into tears, she communicates elegantly about the observed world.

The next sentence is a rare moment in this book when Garner allows an explicit moral judgement into the text. Elsewhere, when she narrates the attitudes of Amby and other men to physical injury – they almost seem to relish it – she maintains a kind of awed incomprehension. Even here, she doesn’t voice her own opinion, but goes into journalist mode for a moment and quotes someone else.

The Guardian doesn’t hold back: ‘It’s about the internalised hatred that men – who are the dominant force in shaping and sustaining AFL culture – have for themselves and each other. The Great Southern and Ponsford Stands merely provide a haven for the boozed up, brittle and broken to project their own self-hatred and insecurities on to others.’

I don’t read this as Garner using ‘the Guardian‘ as a mouthpiece for her own opinion. It’s as if some judgement is needed once the booing has been mentioned, but to make a moral judgement would be to disrupt her role as witness seeking understanding. All the same, she does let the harsh judgement stand, more endorsed than rejected, and returns to her primary focus.

Thursday, on the way to training.
‘I still haven’t heard about the game I missed.’
‘Okay. Because of the pain all down my leg I told Archie I wouldn’t be able to go hard, so he kept me on full-back and full-forward. It was horrible. I was so cold. I only touched the ball twice. I was on this huuuuuge guy.’
‘But you kicked a goal, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, but I didn’t get any of my anger out. And the goal wasn’t very … nice.
‘You mean it wasn’t sort of heroic?’
‘No.’
‘But nevertheless it was a goal?’
He shrugs and runs off.

The book is full of these wonderful nanna–grandson chats. Throughout, there’s a tension between Helen the invisible old woman who comes to training sessions or chats with other parents during matches, and Hel the grandmother who is almost a confidante. He puts his big arm around her, rebuffs her attempts to fuss over his injuries, lets her tease him about his mullet, is oblivious to her shock when she realises her grandson has turned into a six-foot man, ‘his surfer’s legs covered in golden hair’.

OK, so maybe those front-row forwards who threw their weight around back when I was 15 were also just boys, far from their mums and dads and nanas, and only smaller, vulnerable boys to get their anger out on. The book has enough AFL in it to have made me want to give up on it a number of times, but I stayed to have my perspective shifted by Helen Garner, a meticulous, wide-eyed, sometimes self-mocking, always loving witness.

After the meeting: This is an all male book group. We kicked off our discussion of the book with a round of ‘position statements’ vis à vis sport in general and AFL in particular. From my point of view this round and the conversation that grew from it was at least as interesting as the book.

I was pretty much the only one who both loathed sport at school and was ignorant about AFL. There was only one total AFL tragic – all but two of us grew up with different codes. For most of us, team sport had played an overwhelmingly positive role. One had played second row forward in the same scrum as a future prime minister. Another is directly related to ‘Rugby League royalty’. One, who came to Sydney from a country town as a young man to go to university, found refuge in the football team, and felt it pretty much saved his life. For another, from an non–English speaking background, the different codes signified different relationships to mainstream Australia – and as a young person he had avoided soccer, which his father loved, so as not to be seen as an outsider. There was much more.

When we came to the book, it’s probably fair to say we all enjoyed it, but there were lots of reservations. ‘She doesn’t get football,’ one man said a number of times. Someone explained to me (and by implication to Helen) that the full-on bodily contact of football isn’t violence. Mostly it doesn’t hurt unless, paradoxically, you don’t fully commit, and any injury is incidental. There was general scepticism about the book’s underlying assumption that men have an ‘underlying drive to violence’ which team sports exist to address – there was quite a bit of chat about women’s sport, some but not all of it on this point. We all, especially the grandfathers among us, admired and envied the relationship between ‘Hel’ and Amby – the relative openness of communication, his physical ease, her tact.

Someone said the book read like a diary – proposing no particular thesis and coming to no conclusion. Only one of us had read Helen Garner’s diaries (Yellow Notebook, One Day I’ll Remember This and How to End a Story), and said they were wonderful. Alas, he confessed at the end of the meeting that he’d only read 10 pages of The Season, so he couldn’t compare it with the more substantial work.

This post may be too much about me and too little about the book, but I came away from the discussion feeling that just as writing the book gave Helen Garner gained some access to arcane rituals and tenets of sporty masculinity, so did I in our conversation, from a different outsider perspective. Long live the Book Group.

The Book Group met on Gadigal land and I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, where we’re fast approaching the shortest day of the year. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of this country, never ceded and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog. The sport of AFL, like much that is distinctive in Australian settler culture, owes much to First Nations influence: some historians believe that it owed a lot to marn grook, a game played by First Nations people.

* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently page 78.

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Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits at the Book Club

Posted on 16 Jun 2025 | Leave a comment

Ferdia Lennon, Glorious Exploits (Fig Tree 2024)

Before the Book Club meeting: I’ve recently been reading a lot by Irish writers who travel beyond their native shores. What Happened to Nina? by Dervla McTiernan is set in Vermont. The Narrow Land of Christine Dwyer Hickey’s novel is Cape Cod, Massachusetts in the 1950s. Sean Whiteside’s eminently readable translation made Wolfram Eilenbecker’s The Visionaries available to English readers from 1930s Germany. Now Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits goes even further afield in space and time. It’s set in Sicily in the fifth century BCE, during the Peloponnesian War.

Athens has invaded Sicily and been soundly defeated. A large number of Athenians are imprisoned in a quarry outside the city of Syracuse (this really happened). Some of the prisoners are given slightly better conditions if they can quote lines from Euripides (this also really happened). Two unemployed potters, Lampo and Gelon, stage a double bill of two Euripides tragedies, Medea and The Trojan Women, performed in the quarry by Athenian prisoners (this is made up). The Syracusans, including Lampo the natrrator, have Irish accents (why not?).

The novel, Ferdia Lennon’s first, has been a big success. You can read the Observer review here, and Kirkus Reviews here. Apart from saying that I enjoyed it, laughed out loud a number of times, was shocked at the shocking moments and came to like and care about the characters, I’ll stick to page 78*, whose action is neither at the quarry with the Athenian actor-prisoners, nor at the pub with the Syracusans, but at the docks.

On this page Lampo meets the collector, a man of great wealth that is almost certainly ill-gotten. Gelon has gone alone to the collector’s ship to negotiate a deal on a pile of armour stripped from Athenian corpses. At the start of page 78 Lampo has told the collector’s piratical crew that he’s there to see his friend, and that he’s unarmed.

They pat me down all the same, and the bastards are rough and thorough. Still, it’s true what I said. I’ve got nothing on me, and, satisfied, the fella nods, goes to a hatch on the floor with an iron ring, and pulls it open.
‘Down there,’ he says. ‘Your mate’s down there. I’ll show you.’
Straight away, there’s a whiffy heft to the air. Sickly sweet, but with something sour beneath it. Your man walks on ahead.

There’s no attempt at faux-antique or heroic-Greek prose here. It’s straight into the ‘bastards’, ‘fellas’, ‘mates’ and ‘your mans’ of contemporary Irish vernacular. And, as everywhere in this novel, there’s a lot to smell. I don’t know if a specific source of the smell is being suggested, but there’s a clear metaphor: the collector, as we are about to see, is urbane and courteous, but with something ominous beneath the urbanity. At the end of the page, his teeth provide another metaphor:

The collector looks over at me and smiles. His teeth are ridiculously white and arrow-straight, yet there’s an animal feel to them. Like they belong in the maw of something larger in the woods, and not a merchant nibbling grapes.

If I’d set out to write a plot summary, I might easily not have mentioned the collector. He has a function in the plot – I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that he provides financial backing for the production, and later a potential means of escape for some characters. But there are at least two other things to notice.

First, he has a sadistic, ghoulish quality. There’s the bloodstained armour he’s buying from our heroes. Then on this page Lampo recognises him as ‘the fella who tried to buy the homeless bastard’s rope’ – referring back to a homeless man’s story of a threadbare length of rope he treasures as his only memento of childhood, which he refuses to sell it a vast sum to a stranger we now know to be the collector. (The rope later turns up on the collector’s wall, leaving the reader to deduce that it was taken from its owner by force.) So his involvement highlights the macabre dimension of Gelon and Lampo’s project. Gelon’s desire to stage plays by the great Euripides is surely a good thing, fuelled by his passionate love of high Greek culture, and the potters and their performers develop relationships of mutual respect and even affection. Their art gives them respite from the horrors of their situation. But for the other Athenian prisoners that situation is unchanged, and even for the performers there is only the briefest respite.

There’s another thing. The collector’s name is later revealed to be Tuireann, a name he shares with a figure from Celtic mythology. At a literal level this might suggest that he has come to Sicily from far-off Ireland. But I think it’s a little authorial joke. If the language of the book is Irish, why not give one of the characters an Irish name?

I had to do a web search on “Tuireann” to get that joke (if it is one). It’s the kind of book where there are plenty of things to look up if the spirit moves you. The Peloponnesian War and the two plays by Euripides are the big ones. Did it add to my enjoyment that I saw an amateur production of The Trojan Women in Darlinghurst four decades ago? Probably. Would I have felt the lack if I hadn’t? I doubt it.

After the meeting: We discussed this book alongside Han Kang’s We Do Not Part and apart from the person who had read only 10 percent of it, we all enjoyed it a lot more. The ten-percenter said she had stopped reading because of time constraints, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some readers put the book aside after the terrible brutality that comes in the first couple of pages.

One of us had been to Syracuse and visited the quarry, though the guide didn’t talk about the imprisoned Athenians. None of us had felt the need to read up on Ancient History – the book doesn’t depend on specialist background knowledge. Two of us had heard Ferdia Lennon speak at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, so could add a little bit of news about him and what went into the making of the book.

I can’t talk about the way the book ends, but it’s probably OK to say that it’s with a kind of coda. When someone said she loved the ending, two of us thought she meant the bitter-sweet, though mostly bitter, conclusion of the main narrative. Once we were reminded of the actual final moments of the book, we agreed. The other person who had got that far disagreed. She thought it was unnecessary and a bit of a stretch. ‘The whole book is a stretch’, three of us replied in unison.

The Book Club met in Gadigal land, close to the great harbour Warrane. I wrote this blog post beneath a cloudless sky on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge their Elders past present and emerging, and gratefully acknowledge their care for this land for millennia. I welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently page 78.

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We Do Not Part with Han Kang at the Book Club

Posted on 15 Jun 2025 | Leave a comment

Han Kang, We Do Not Part (2021, translated e. yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris, Hamish Hamilton 2025)

Before the Book Club meeting: Han Kang was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, so her most recent book to be translated into English seemed a good choice for the Book Club.

The book falls into at least three parts. (Spoilers ahead.)

Part One: The narrator, who is experiencing suicidal depression, receives an urgent request from a friend, Inseon, to come to her in hospital. When she arrives, she finds Inseon has done a terrible injury to her hand and is receiving frequent, excruciatingly painful treatment, graphic descriptions of which are interspersed with a history of their friendship and their artistic collaborations. Inseon asks the narrator to go to her house on the remote island of P– and feed her pet bird, who will otherwise die.

Pat Two: The narrator makes the arduous journey to Inseon’s house, the final stage of it on foot through a blizzard. When she arrives, the bird is dead. Though she herself has barely survived her ordeal, she immediately buries the bird out in the snow.

Part Three: While the ghost of the bird casts flittering shadows around the walls, Inseon turns up, with an uninjured hand. Evidently she is some kind of supernatural projection of the living person still back there in the hospital, though the narrator suspects at one stage that both she and Inseon are actually dead. Anyhow, Inseon guides the narrator through a number of documents that record a terrible massacre committed during the Korean War, apparently with US connivance, and the decades-long attempt by surviving relatives to have the massacre acknowledged.

At the level of narrative, I didn’t understand the book. When the exhausted narrator goes back out into the snow to bury the bird without even putting on warm clothes, I nearly stopped reading, and from then on my disbelief remained unsuspended. But as the story of the massacres emerged from the piles of documents, I was glad to be learning about a part of history I’d been completely ignorant of. On the other hand, given that the information is embedded in an unabashedly unrealistic narrative, I’m left not knowing how much of the massacre story is itself fiction. In effect, then, the book is a signpost pointing its readers to the need for further research.

WIkipedia has a minimalist entry about the Sancheong–Hamyang massacre of 7 February 1951, in which 705 civilians were killed, 85% of them women, children and elderly people. The files concerning the massacre, Wikipedia confirms, were not found until February 2006. That is the emotional heart of this novel: I have no idea how the story of the injury, the blizzard and the dead bird fit together with it.

The meeting:

I wasn’t the only one perplexed by this book. We were pretty well unanimous that we wouldn’t recommend it to friends, even though there is some beautiful writing in it. We were divided on the question of whether we would want to read anything else by Han Kang,

The narrator’s ordeal in the blizzard, we all agreed, is compelling.

One valiant soul found rich metaphor in the account of Inseon’s injury and treatment: her severed fingers represent the divided state of Korea and the painful injection every three minutes suggests that the process of reunion will involve sustained, painful work. My literal-mindedness at first rebelled at such a reading, but maybe it’s there for readers with a Korean cultural background, who I expect are also better equipped for the ghost-not-ghost parts of the narrative.

I wasn’t the only one who had done some research into the history that is the subject of the book’s final movement. Whereas I had looked up a single Wikipedia entry, S– had read a number of articles on the Korean War – but, she said, she ended up more confused than when she started

We discussed this book along with Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits. Both books build fictions around historical events, but no one felt compelled by Glorious Exploits to study up on the Peloponnesian War.

The Book Club met on Gadigal land. I wrote the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land where just now the sun is shining from a cloudless sky and the wind has died down. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia.

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Journal Catch-up 30: Meanjin Summer 2024

Posted on 9 Jun 2025 | Leave a comment

Esther Anatolitis (editor), Meanjin Vol 83 Nº 4 (Summer 2024)
(links are to the Meanjin website: some but not all of them are available to non-subscribers)

I’m usually at least three months behind in my journal reading, so I don’t expect the journals to comment on the day’s headlines. So it was nice serendipity, on the day I read a piece in the Guardian about bulldozers moving in on a tent city in Moreton Bay Council Area, to read ‘The tent village at Musgrave Park‘ by Lillian O’Neill, which addresses a similar fleeting community in south-east Queensland with curiosity, empathy and (this is Meanjin after all) erudition.

Other essays have a more general but no less pointed timeliness:

Meanjin has a number of regular features:

  • Even before the contents page, there’s ‘The Meanjin Paper’, an essay by a First Nations writer: it this issue it’s ‘Sing for the Black: From Act to Treaty‘, in which singer-songwriter Joe Geia talks bout his art, particularly his show From Rations to Wages to Treaty
  • ‘Australia in three books‘: Shakira Hussein discusses three books about Meanjin/Brisbane – by David Malouf, Melissa Lukashenko and Ellen van Neerven
  • Interview: ‘All colour and light’, an interview with Gerald Murnane, eccentric and elusive as ever
  • ‘The Year In…’ This issue has ‘… Poetry‘, not a survey, but discussion of a very few favourites by Graham Akhurst & Shastra Deo.

There are short fictions, memoir, book reviews and poetry. To name just one of each:

  • ‘Your heart sir‘ by Grace Yee is in the poetry section, but to my taste it’s the best short story in the journal, about the sudden death of an old man and the dementia of his widow
  • ‘Seven Snakes‘ by Carrie Tiffany isn’t in the memoir section, but it is a kind of memoir, in which the author, a park ranger, tells of seven encounters with snakes and one, more toxic, with a male manager.
  • ‘How Novel is the Novel Prize?‘ by Maks Sipowicz, a review of It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken and Tell by Jonathan Buckley, joint winners of the 2022 Novel Prize, includes reflections on the function of prizes and awards in the literary ecosystem – and wonders if perhaps the prize should have gone to books of less obvious appeal
  • ‘@ClanC #overflow‘, a lovely parody of Banjo Paterson written by Ian Simmons, whose bio says he ‘has been writing bad teenage poetry for almost five decades’, introduces some much-appreciated levity.

There’s much more in the journal’s 191 pages. I’ll give the last word to Maks Sipowicz. He was referring to literary prizes. I think the words apply just as well to literary journals:

As readers, we can only collectively benefit from the spotlight falling onto more challenging texts

I wrote this blog post on the cloud-covered, windy land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge their Elders past present and emerging, and gratefully acknowledge their care for this land for millennia. I welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

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Pádraig Ó Tuama’s 44 Poems

Posted on 8 Jun 2025 | Leave a comment

Pádraig Ó Tuama, 44 Poems on Being with Each Other: A Poetry Unbound Collection (Cannongate Books 2025)

Books are risky gifts. I’m very glad the friend who gave me this one took the plunge.

It’s a collection of 44 poems, with commentary. I stumbled across an online review that said something like, ‘The poems are excellent, but I could have done without the commentary. It would probably be helpful for people who are learning how to read poetry.’

With all due respect, that person needs to have another look. It’s true, all 44 poems in this anthology are excellent, but the commentary isn’t there to help the ignorant (though it might do that): Pádraig Ó Tuama is a warm, charming, reader companion. Rather than assuming his readers are incompetent, needing to be instructed in the art of reading, he tells us how he reads poems himself – bringing to them his own history, knowledge and concerns, and by implication inviting his readers to do likewise. In a time when so much writing about poetry comes from the more esoteric corners of academia, his is fresh, conversational, smart, humble and completely engaging.

The anthology is an offshoot of the podcast, Poetry Unbound, and follows its format. First there’s a single page, printed white on black, in which Ó Tuama sets up a context with a personal anecdote or a reflection on life or literature. Then there’s the poem, followed by several pages of discussion. Ó Tuama finishes each podcast with a second reading of the poem, which readers of the book are of course free to do. I love the podcast, and I love the book.

Ó Tuama isn’t out to create a canon of ‘best’ poems. He may have what Trumpians would call an undeclared DEI agenda. Most of his poets are from non-mainstream groups of one kind or another: LGBTQI+, Native Americans, African heritage and other People of Colour, people with disabilities. A couple of poems are translated from other languages. But it’s far from being an exercise in box-ticking inclusiveness. There’s a clue in the book’s title – these poems are gathered from a wonderfully diverse range of poets, and together they create a sense of what it is to be together on this planet.

If I were to stick to my practice of writing about page 78*, I’d now look at the discussion of the shortest poem in the book, written by its most mainstream poet – ‘The Uses of Sorrow’ by Mary Oliver. But instead, I want to go to pages 310 to 315. The poem is ‘The Change Room’ by Andy Jackson. It’s the book’s only Australian poem, but my reason for focusing on it is that I already know it well, and have discussed it in this blog. Here’s a link where you can read the poem and, if you want, my discussion of it. (For those who don’t click: the poem consists of seven three-line stanzas and a two-liner. The poem’s speaker has three encounters at a swimming pool: a young child asks about his physical shape, a woman admires his tattoos, and a man chats with him in the shower after his swim.)

Ó Tuama’s introductory page, just 11 lines, tells us how the poem is personal to him. ‘Where do you carry shame in your body?’ he begins. And he ends:

The story of my body’s relationship to my own body – and the bodies of others – is a poem that’s asking for my attention.

You wouldn’t know from this that ‘The Change Room’ deals with disability or marked physical difference. Ó Tuama approaches it, as he does all the poems, from the standpoint of a shared humanity – a ‘being together’.

After rereading his discussion just now, I had another look at my blog post (here’s the link again), and I like the conversation we’re having.

We both discuss the rich ambiguity of the title of the book the poem comes from, Human Looking. Ó Tuama adds a reference to the tagline of Andy Jackson’s website, which includes the phrase ‘a body shaped like a question mark’, and relates that to the children’s questions in the poem. He pays close attention to the language:

In ‘The Change Room’ we read of nostrils, skin, tattoos, gaits, swimming, floating, showering, nakedness, proximity, speaking: all parts, functions and experiences of the body, all vehicles for body language, all ways in which the body is in conversation with itself and others.

Both of us puzzled over the poem’s last line, ‘Speaking, our bodies become solid.’ On rereading my blog post I quite like what I wrote about it, even if my reference to the Latin Mass may be a bit idiosyncratic. Here’s what Ó Tuama writes, to give you a taste of his prose:

‘Bodies’ here are held in a plural pronoun ‘our’. Why have they become solid? Were they not before? Were they fluid, or see-through, or gaseous? Perhaps solid is meant as the antonym for unreliable. The final stanza is composed only of two lines, in comparison with the seven tercets that preceded it. The missing third line of the last invites, perhaps, buoyancy, nature, exchange, consideration among all the bodies in, and reading a poem about, ‘The change room’. The poem asserts a shameless body-knowledge it establishes for itself.

I love the way he draws our attention to the precision of the language, and then the way, like Andy Jackson’s missing last line, he opens out to possibilities, rather than closing down on a particular reading.

I recommend this book, for yourself or as a gift to someone who likes a bit of poetry – for the poems, and for the companionship of the editor.

I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, under an almost cloudless sky and feeling the chill from a mildly bitter wind. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of this country, never ceded.

* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently page 78.

 

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Sydney Writers’ Festival 2025: My day four, part two

Posted on 5 Jun 2025 | 2 comments

The young woman who was my neighbour at the launch of Ritual was just at the festival for the one day. She said she planned to go to ‘all the Palestinian sessions’. My next two sessions would have been on her radar.

1 pm: Peter Beinart: Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza

Peter Beinart is a New York journalist, commentator, substacker, and professor of journalism and political science.  He was in conversation with ABC journalist Debbie Whitmont.

He began by saying that he hoped there would be people in the packed room who disagreed with him. If there were any such, he made no attempt to placate them, but left us in no doubt about his views. He spoke fast (and at times furious), so please don’t take this as a summary of his whole presentation, but here are some things I jotted down.

The Jewish community in the USA and elsewhere is painfully divided over current events in Israel-Palestine. He begins his book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza with a letter to a former friend: speaking from a position of love and Jewish solidarity, he says that something has gone horribly wrong, that the current action of Israel is a profound desecration, the greatest spiritual crisis of Judaism since the Holocaust.

There has been a great sustaining story for Jews. They are the world’s perpetual victims. In line with that narrative, Hamas’s horrific attacks on 7 October 2023 are seen in the context of the Holocaust and, before that, the centuries of pogroms and persecution. But placing the attacks in that narrative is to dehumanise Palestinians. To understand 7 October we need to look to different analogies – the example he gave was of a group of Native Americans who broke out of virtual imprisonment to perform a horrific massacre. In the case of 7 October, the Israeli Jews weren’t a marginalised group – it was horrible that they were killed but they were members of the oppressing group.

The narrative behind the creation of Israel is that Jews need a safe place. But supremacy does not make you safe. In South Africa it was widely believed that the relinquishment of white supremacy and Apartheid would lead to a bloodbath because whites would no longer be protected from the armed resistance. It didn’t happen(whatever the current president of the USA might say). Similar fears in Northern Ireland proved to be illusory. When structures of supremacy were taken down, the violence pretty much ended.

Yet the fear persists. Jewish Israelis fear to visit Gaza or the West Bank – while going to hospitals where there are many Palestinians among the doctors and nurses. Rather than argue, one needs to ask, ‘What are the experiences that led you to that belief?’

The answer is partly that the Holocaust is not ancient history. There are still fewer Jews in the world than there were in 1939. He is not suggesting that we should forget the past, but it matter what stories we tell. In his early 30s he went (as a journalist, I think) to spend time with Palestinians on the West Bank. Nothing in his life had prepared him for the brutality and terror he witnessed there. He realised then that the story of the persecution of the Jews was not the only story, and not the main one to tell in Israel-Palestine.

Among some circles there is a new definition of what it means to be a Jew. To be a real Jew, you must unconditionally support Israel. This, he says as an observant Jew, is a form of idolatry – the worship of something human-made. States are meant to support their citizens. Under this new definition, the state of Israel is to be worshipped: it’s not a relationship of support but of adoration. Likewise there’s a new definition of antisemitism that includes anti-Zionism: this would mean that any support of Palestinians is antisemitic. Again he quoted Edward Said, ‘Palestinians have been denied permission to narrate.’ This would make that denial absolute.

In fact, Jews are disproportionately represented in pro-Palestinian activities in the USA. These are not ‘self-hating’ Jews, but Jews acting in keeping with longstanding cultural values.

The last sentence of my notes: ‘Jews need to be liberated from supremacy.’

4.30: Plestia Alaqad: The Eyes of Gaza

Plestia Alaqad is a young Palestinian woman who has defied the lack of permission named by Edward Said. On 6 October 2023, a recent graduate, her application for a job with a news outlet in Gaza was rejected: local journalists weren’t needed. On 9 October, after the Hamas attack on Israel and the beginning of Israel’s response, she received a call saying things had changed. So she began an astonishing period of reporting. (At least, this is what I gathered from this conversation; the Wikipedia page tells a slightly different story.) For six weeks, she published first-person eye-witness accounts as Israel’s attacks on Gaza became more intense. She also published her diary on Instagram, giving millions of followers what Wikipedia calls ‘an unfiltered glimpse into the harrowing realities of life under siege’. And she wrote poetry. Her book, Eyes of Gaza, is a memoir built from her Instagram diaries.

At the beginning of the session, Sarah Saleh stepped onto the stage and sat beneath the huge screen to tell us who Plestia Alaqad was. Being completely ignorant, I assumed Plestia Alaqad was about to be beamed in from the Middle East, like Ittay Flescher and Raja Shehadeh. In fact, she is currently living in Australia, having left Gaza in November 2023 in fear for her family’s safety. Sara was alone on the stage so her guest could make an entrance: our applause was accepted, not by a stereotypically dour, hijab-wearing Palestinian refugee, but by a glamorous, vivacious, long-haired young woman.

The entrance wasn’t just a nice piece of theatre. Like Flescher and Shehadeh, she sees her work as being in large part to counter the dehumanisation of Palestinians – and she made us see her as human. This is why she writes about shopping as well as the outright horrors. ‘People don’t expect to see me shopping. They want to donate clothes to me.’

‘I knew how to be a journalist,’ she said, ‘but not how to be a journalist in the middle of a genocide.’

‘You have to deal with the genocide,’ she said, ‘and then you have to deal with the media’s treatment of it.’ Once she had come to public notice, mainstream journalist wanted to hear from her. She told us of one interview, with an Israeli news outlet I thnk, where the interviewer kept asking her leading questions, wanting her to say something like, ‘Kill all Jews.’ But this is not her position, and she referred constantly to the perpetrators of atrocities specifically as the IDF, not even ‘the Israelis’ in general. The interview was not published.

Children in Gaza grow up afraid of the sky.

About her book, she said, ‘I want people of the future to not believe that this book is non-fiction.’

5.30: Anna Funder, Closing Address: Bears Out There (click for podcast)

It was a hard transition from Plestia Alaqad to the formalities of the festival’s closing address. The CEO Brooke Webb (wearing a Protect the Dolls t-shirt), Artistic Director Ann Mossop and the NSW Minister for the Arts John Graham each spoke in justifiably self-congratulatory mode. What remains tantalisingly in my memory from all three speeches is an unexplained image of Jeanette Winterson being pursued by three stage managers. Apparently it was funny and made sense, but I guess you had to be there.

Anna Funder’s speech was terrific. The bears of its title came from an incident in her childhood. At a campsite in a Claifornian redwood forest, she needed to go to the toilet. Her mother, who was breastfeeding little Anna’s baby sister, told her to go to the toilet block by herself. When she came back and said she couldn’t go alone because, ‘There’s a bear down there,’ her mother, like the mother in Margaret Mahy’s classic children’s book, A Lion in the Meadow (it’s me, not Anna Funder, making that comparison), told her to stop making things up. The third time little Anna came back she was accompanied by a burly man who wanted to know who kept sending this small child to the toilet block when there was a bear there.

She went on to offer a range of perspectives on that story. Her mother told it often as a humorous story against herself as a neglectful mother. It could be read as showing the importance of the kindness of strangers. And so on.

I’m writing this at least ten days after the event, from very scanty and mostly unreadable notes, but where the story landed in the end was to make an analogy with the work of a writer, to go to places where there are bears – in Anna Funder’s case, the world of secret police, patriarchy, and like that. In these days, with the advent of AI under a global surveillance oligarchy, we need to recognise the importance of human beings writing and reading, daring to go where the robots cannot.

For the podcast of this address, clink on the title above. [Added later: An edited version was published in the July 2025 issue of the Monthly.]

And that’s it for another year, bar the events scheduled outside the week in May and of course the podcast series (I’ll add links to them as they appear). The Festival had an official blogger, Dylin Hardcastle. You can read his blogs at this link.

The small fraction of the Festival that I saw was terrific. At least four people, from different perspectives, spoke of the importance of countering the dehumanisation of Palestinians. There were lots of Readers against Genocide t-shirts, but any fears that there would be displays of antisemitism proved to be unfounded. There were wonderful poetry events – curated as part of the First Nations program, featuring a spectacular international guest, launching a landmark anthology of Muslim poets. I missed the intimate poetry sessions that were a feature of the Festival when it was held at the Walsh Bay wharves. Maybe next year we could have Pádraig Ó Tuama, or Judith Beveridge, or Eileen Chong, or a swag of poets from Flying Islands, Australian Poetry, or Red Room.

I gained new insights into books I’d read, and was tantalised about books I hadn’t. I’ve come away with a swag from Gleebooks, and have added to my already vast To Be Read shelf. I’ve already read a book by Raja Shehadeh from the Newtown library and am part way through a book by Emily Maguire.

Normal blogging will resume shortly.

The Sydney Writers’ Festival took place on Gadigal land. I have written this post on Gadigal and Wangal land, where the days are growing shorter and colder beneath, at this moment, a cloudless sky. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging and warmly welcome any First nations readers of this blog.

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Sydney Writers’ Festival 2025: My day four, part one

Posted on 2 Jun 2025 | Leave a comment

The final day of the festival dawned clear and not too cold. We had another early start, not for fun and games this time, but for a line-up of three journalists and an academic to ruminate about Trump 2.0.

10 am: Trumpocalypse Now (Link is to the podcast)

Barrie Cassidy makes hosting a panel discussion look like the easiest thing in the world. This conversation just flowed. The formidably well informed and articulate panellists were Peter Beinart (of whom more later), Nick Bryant (author of When America Stopped Being Great and The Forever War), and Emma Shortis (Director of the Australia Institute’s International & Security Affairs Program). Mostly they were in furious agreement about the meaning of Trump’s re-election..

Peter Beinart kicked things off by saying that the USA has been a multiracial democracy only since 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was passed – forms of racial and gender supremacy are much more deeply rooted than democracy. Nick Bryant agreed with this in the manner of someone whose thunder had been stolen. Emma Shortis chimed in the we have to shelve our assumptions of normal order. And we were off.

I can’t tell you who said what, but what follows are some of the main points that made it into my scribbled notes (and that I can decipher).

If Trump had been in Europe he would have led a minor party. But the USA has only two parties, and there is a culture of extreme partisanship. The Republican Party’s elite had been delegitimised in the eyes of the Republican base, among other things because of its engagement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Trump rode in on that wave of distrust – it wasn’t a hostile takeover.

They discussed the tariffs, the need for a co-ordinated response to Trump by the USA’s allies (not going to happen), and what Albanese should do (get out of AUKUS – not going to happen), and more. ‘We’re ripe,’ Peter Beinart said, ‘for a massive insurgency in the Democratic Party.’ It could happen.

Barrie Cassidy asked why Gaza didn’t become a campaign issue. I thought for a minute he was referring to the Australian election, but he meant in the USA. The answers were interesting. Again, I’m not sure who said what.

To get power in the Democrats you have to build a career on ultra-caution about the Middle East. Biden won against Trump in 2016 because he presented himself as the loving grandfather who cared about people’s suffering. But when he refused to extend that love to babies in Gaza he lost a lot of support. He didn’t listen to that response, and nor did Kamala Harris. When, more recently, Trump used accusations of antisemitism as justification for his attacks on free speech, the Democrats had already ceded that ground by their support of a conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. To be against Israeli actions in Palestine (in both Gaza and the West Bank) is not to be antisemitic. Some Jewish students may feel uncomfortable but that is fundamentally different from being unsafe. In fact, the pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus and elsewhere in the USA are full of Jewish students. Peter Beinart quoted Edward Said: Palestinians have been denied permission to narrate.

Which provides a segue to my next session, an hour later.

12 noon: Ritual (Link to podcast be added if/ when it is available.)

Ritual is the first anthology of poems by Muslim-Australian writers. This was its launch

The session started with dramatic solemnity. Three women walked quietly to their chairs and somehow we knew not to applaud. A prayer was read in Arabic, Country was acknowledged, the suffering of Palestinians named. You could have heard the proverbial pin drop.

The session alternated between readings by poets included in the anthology and conversations between Winnie Dunn, general manager of Sweatshop Literacy Movement, as facilitator, and the two editors of the anthology – Sara M. Saleh (performance poet, and educator and human rights lawyer of Palestinian, Egyptian and Lebanese heritage) and Zainab Syed (Pakistani Australian with a scary range of skills and accomplishments to her name).

The book was conceived as a celebration of the diversity of Muslim Australians. The editors didn’t just put out a call for submissions and then choose from what came in the mail. They organised a retreat, and followed it up with community building events – a Muslim First Nations woman, Eugenia Flynn, had input, and a Muslim poet from the USA provided mentorship. But part way through the project, the Hamas attacks on Israel and the ensuing genocide in Gaza changed the literary landscape. Poetry became a refuge.

At the start of the session, Sarah Saleh told us that heartbreaking and enraging events in Gaza were threatening to steal the joy of the occasion from her. Zainab Syed was in Pakistan when the conflict over Kashmir erupted. They were both resolved not to give in to the dark. Zainab reminded us that the great poet Rumi wrote in a time of great horrors, and from one perspective his poetry is a protest against erasure. ‘As ritual, as prayer, as inheritance, poetry can be a sovereign record of our whole selves.’

The poems that were read, like the poets who read them, were marvellously diverse. I was too engrossed to take notes. It’s an anthology worth buying.

The Sydney Writers’ Festival took place on Gadigal land. I have written this post on Gadigal and Wangal land. I acknowledge their Elders past present and emerging.

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