Category Archives: Book Club

Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie, page 76

Posted on 19 Dec 2023 | 10 comments

Melissa Lucashenko, Edenglassie (University of Queensland Press 2023)

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that Edenglassie, a portmanteau of Edinburgh and Glasgow, was briefly the name for part of what is now Brisbane, and this book is a historical fiction set there in the 1850s, when First Nations people outnumbered settlers along the Brisbane River, a time of armed resistance to colonisation, and a time of genocidal atrocities including those committed by the notorious Native Police.

My blogging practice of focusing on page 76 (my age) comes up with a passage that at first seems a long way from that subject. For a start it’s set in Brisbane in 2024, the bicentenary of John Oxley’s sail up the Brisbane River, and begins with a genial picture of a weekend market that could be in any western city:

Winona weaved a path through the many bodies at the market. The young and the elderly; the able-bodied and the infirm; the slender hipsters; the defiantly fat, the tattooed, the pierced, the dull suburban middle-class and the fabulously wealthy. All these met in the mecca of the inner south, held there in the tight Kurilpa loop of the river which, having embraced you, was mighty slow to let you go.

The market is complex and inclusive, or at least tolerant. ‘Kurilpa’ tells you, if you have a web browser handy, that the city is Brisbane: the Kurilpa precinct borders on South Bank, and what was once the Tank Street Bridge is now the Kurilpa Bridge. The way the narrator uses the word suggests that it is more than a simple place-name, hinting at an Indigenous perspective: the river has agency, embracing and slow to let go.

As the paragraph continues, a character moves through the scene:

Winona wasn’t much interested in the crowd; she’d been caught instead by a steady pulse, thrumming from afar. She followed the sound of the didgeridoo dragging her to the far edge of the park, eager to see if she knew the fella playing, and discover what other Blak mob were around. Hopefully, Winona thought, she’d find a little oasis of Goories there to replenish her spirit, weakened from the hours she’d spent lately in the soul-sucking hospital.

‘Blak’ and ‘Goorie’ make it clear where we are, though readers from outside Australia may need their pocket browser here too. ‘Blak’ is a self-description currently used by many urban First Nations people as a way of ‘taking on the colonisers’ language and flipping it on its head’ (the quote is from an article on artist Destiny Deacon, at this link). Winona is a young, politically aware Indigenous woman. The narrative cleaves mostly to her point of view, but it’s interesting to notice that here they part ways briefly: the narrator sees and enjoys the crowd, and virtually tells us in so many words that the ancient Kurilpa embraces that various crowd as well; Winona is committed to an ‘us and them’ perspective. The non-Indigenous crowd is like a desert to her.

I won’t quote the rest of the page. Suffice to say that when she finds the didgeridoo player, he’s a white hippy who claims to be Indigenous – a coloniser, a thieving dagai, as Winona sees it – and her violent outrage lasts for several richly comic pages.

Once I got past my initial sense that this page wasn’t from the interesting, historical narrative, I realised that many of the novel’s key themes are suggested in it.

Winona is the central character in the near future part of the novel, where the main narrative thread is her budding romance with Doctor Johnny, a man of questionable indigeneity (though less questionable than the didge player’s). Her grandmother, whom she has been visiting in hospital, is leveraging her claim to be Queensland’s oldest Aboriginal to secure a major role in Brisbane’s bicentenary celebrations – and an apartment. So there’s romcom tension, trickster play, and a generally comic tone. At the same time, the narrative is firmly embedded in an Indigenous perspective – or perspectives, really, as Grannie Eddie and her ancient friends see things differently from the militant Winona, and Johnny, a child of the stolen generations, brings yet another point of view. Winona’s rage at the hippy didge player is a contrast to her almost flirtatious hostility to Johnny. Her indifference to the complex everyday crowd plays off against Granny Eddie’s generously inclusive concept of Aboriginal sovereignty.

It’s especially interesting to note the way these paragraphs are linked to the historical story. Words that in 2024 feel like cultural reclamation or perhaps remnants of lost language – dagai, Kurilpa – are part of ordinary speech in 1854. Just as the hippy claims an Indigenous identity, a white man back then – Tom Petrie, grandson of a pre-eminent settler in Brisbane, and in the process of taking on a sheep property in his own right – claims the status of an initiated man: it’s not an exact parallel, as Tom’s claim, like that of the real-life Tom Petrie, has the approval of elders. But as he invites his ‘brothers’ to work for him a tremendous unease develops: certainly I spent a good deal of the book dreading that he would betray his close friends, his initiated ‘brothers’. It would be spoiling to tell you if he does.

Like the 21st century story, the historical narrative centres on a romance between two First Nations people with very different relationships to traditional culture. Mulanyin is a traditionally raised young man who is in Kurilpa as a guest of an established family. In the early parts of the book, he goes naked around town – he only starts wearing trousers to protect his fertility when he starts riding horses. Nita has been taken as a servant to the prestigious Petrie family, who are relatively decent in their relationships to the local people. Nita is a Christian, always modestly dressed, and attuned to her employers’ desires and expectations.

The river is a powerful presence in both stories. The apparent throwaway line about how ‘having embraced you, [it] was mighty slow to let you go’ rings a lot of bells. It’s crossed by bridges and features the bicentennial celebrations in 2025; it’s a source of food and site of dramatic events in 1854. It remains the same river.

As I write this, I’ve read about half of David Marr’s Killing for Country, an unsparing account of frontier violence in eastern Australia, focusing in part on the Native Police and quoting extensively from breathtakingly brutal contemporary settler writing. The Native Police are a threatening presence in Edenglassie, and there’s devastating genocidal violence, but it happens offstage. Even a scene where Mulanyin intervenes in the humiliation of another man is reported by a character rather than told to us directly by the narrator. Where David Marr conveys the horror of our history, Melissa Lucashenko does the herculean task of imagining what it was to live with a strong connection to country, tradition and community while the horrors were multiplying all around, and up close.

We discussed this book along with Debra Dank’s We Come With This Place at my Other Book Club – the one that used to be just for swapping books with minimal discussion. Not everyone was as moved by it as I was. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I can’t tell you how the unimpressed readers saw it because I’m so dazzled by its achievements.

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Lauren Groff’s Vaster Wilds

Posted on 8 Dec 2023 | 7 comments

Laurn Groff, The Vaster Wilds (Hutchinson Heinemann 2023)

If you picked this book up in a shop or the library and turned to page 76, these are the first two paragraphs you’d see:

By now, the twilight had begun to thicken, however; and she had to find some shelter before thick night came on full of its roving predators. She sensed that it would be a very cold night as well.
When she stood, she found she had a hard time moving swiftly; she was so stiff and sore from her long walk.

You might gather that this was a story about a woman alone in a wilderness. You might notice a couple of quirks in the language: ‘twilight had begun to thicken’ with its awkward echo of Lady Macbeth’s ‘Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood’; the slightly archaic feel of ‘roving predators’ and ‘swiftly’. You might surmise that the action of the novel takes place in the not very recent past.

By the end of the page, the character has found shelter, ‘a little black space carved out of the rock wall of a ridge’. The cave exhales ‘a strange and musty warmth’:

Something in her said to her that she must be cautious, and she made herself go slowly and silently. But soon the coldness of the night oncoming frightened her more than the cave with all its menacing unknowns. She ducked low into the black space and felt instantly that it would be warm enough and out of the melting wet at least. It smelled dank and thick in there. The darkness welled and seemed to pulse at the back of the cave.

More of the archaic feeling in the language, not so much in the vocabulary as in the cadence and word order: ‘Something in her said to her’, ‘the night oncoming’, ‘the melting wet’. And the surmised threat of roving predators of the first paragraph has become more immediate, though still intangible, in the dank, thick, pulsing darkness. On the strength of this page you might expect something like a novel equivalent of the TV series Alone. And you’d be mostly right.

The novel begins with a character, known only as ‘the girl’ for the first hundred pages or so, running through forest in what we come to understand is the North American continent in the late sixteenth century. She has been brought from england (the book spells all places and nationalities without initial capital letters) as a servant, and we learn that she has committed some great crime and is running to escape retribution.

A number of questions are raised early: what was the girl’s crime? will she escape her pursuers and avoid whatever attackers, human and otherwise, she might encounter (see cave above)? what are we to make of her assumption that the ‘people of this place’ are savages to be feared? will her Christian world view be affected by her experiences in the wilderness? will she find the safety, even the ‘saviour’, she hopes for? These questions create a forward impetus, and the girl’s gradually revealed back story fleshes out her character, but it’s the narration’s attention to the detail of her life in the wild that most engaged my attention.

It took me maybe a hundred pages to get over my irritation with the olde worlde language: I was going to say there are too many untos, then realised there was probably only one, but that is too many. Your mileage may vary. I was uneasy with the treatment of the Native Americans on the periphery of the narrative, but that unease was elegantly dealt with, first with humour when in a rare departure from the girl’s point of view a couple of Native children see her and fall abut laughing at her incompetence in their environment; and more sombrely in the final movement as she reflects on her possible misunderstanding of near-encounters.

I’m not a fan of the individual-against-the-wilderness genre, so I’m not really part of this book’s intended readership. I did finish it, partly because I was reading it for my Book Club and felt obliged. I can see that it’s a very good book, and I especially appreciate the way it uses the genre to probe at the roots of the genocidal encounters of colonisation, without having the heroine be adopted by a Native tribe. We’ve come a long way since Booran by M J Unwin, which I studied at school in 1962, or Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves.

The Book Club I read it for is the one that formerly banned any book-discussion that lasted more than 30 seconds, but has now become more conventional. It was paired with Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie. We had animated discussion of both books.

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Thrity Umrigar’s Space Between Us

Posted on 31 Oct 2023 | 7 comments

Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us (©2005, Harper Perennial 2007)

Bhima is a domestic servant in Mumbai – or Bombay, as she calls it. She has been with the same Parsi family for decades. She can’t sit on the family’s furniture, and physical contact is avoided, but she and the woman of the house – Sera, whom Bhima cannot think of without the respectful suffix ‘-bai’ – have formed close bonds. Bhima is the only person in whom Sera has been able to confide about her husband’s violence, and Sera has paid for the education of Bhima’s granddaughter, Maya.

When the novel opens, Bhima is living with teenage Maya in a hut in the slums. We gradually learn that Maya’s parents died of AIDS when she was seven years old, that Bhima’s husband left her decades ago in tragic circumstances, that Sera’s husband has recently died. In the present, Sera’s daughter is pregnant and her relationship with her charming husband is a bright spot in everyone’s lives. To Bhima’s shame and fury, Maya is also pregnant, and the action in the novel’s present revolves around the father’s identity.

It’s Thrity Umrigar’s tribute to ‘the real Bhima’, who was a servant in her wealthy Parsi childhood home in Mumbai. But having established the bonds of affection and mutuality between the two families, the book turns, and becomes a brilliant study of the way relationships can be close and strong but in the end tragically vulnerable to social norms and structures.

I read this book after The Secrets Between Us, a sequel published 13 years later. This isn’t something I’d recommend. On the one hand it was interesting to see passing mention of Parvati, a major character in the second book, to have the stories of Bhima’s husband and daughter dramatically realised, and to come to a fuller understanding of the ending of the second novel. But the major thunderclap reveal of the identity of the man who got Maya pregnant comes as no surprise, and it was odd to know better than all the characters when there was very little foreshadowing.

A strong point in both books is the way they enact the fine detail of changing culture. Sera, like Thrity Umrigar, is Parsi, and the book’s version of traditional Parsi culture probably didn’t win it any friends among older Parsis. In one of the book’s many flashbacks, soon after Sera marries, she and her new husband move in with his parents, and what follows is a classic mother-in-law nightmare. Banu Dubash, the mother-in-law, insists on traditional Parsi practices, specifically those built around the idea that a woman is impure when he has her periods. Reluctantly, Sera accepts that she must eat meals in her room until her periods are over. Although she is Parsi herself, she has no idea of the extent of her assumed impurity, and walks through the room where Banu is praying, provoking a deafening shriek and a torrent of abuse. Freddy, Sera’s kindly father-in-law, comes running in from the dining room. This is on page 76:

‘Oh, Freddy, thank God you are here,’ Banu said dramatically. ‘help me, darling, help me.’
Freddy looked distraught. ‘Banu, what is it, will you speak? Is it your heart?’
‘No, no, nothing like that. Just that this whole house will have to be purified now. Sera walked across the room while I was praying and she is having her monthly cycle, you see. Still, without any consideration, she interfered with my prayers.’
Sera blushed. Before she could speak, Freddy raised his voice. ‘You and your superstitious vhems and dhakharas. Crazy woman, you are. Harassing this poor child, scaring her for no good reason.’ He grew even more angry. ‘And worst of all, you’ve ruined my enjoyment of my music. A new Mozart record I’d just bought, and now your hysterical faras has made me miss the best part.’ He flung a sympathetic look at Sera and then stomped out of the room.
Banu narrowed her eyes and flashed Sera a look that made her heart stop. ‘See what you’ve done, getting my Freddy all upset?’ she said, careful to lower her voice so that it didn’t carry into the next room. ‘Is that why you entered my house, to create friction between my husband and me?’
Sera felt dizzy, as if she had drunk four beers one after the other. She took a step toward Banu and reached out to touch her hand. ‘Banu mamma, I don’t know what happened–’
‘She touched me,’ Banu screamed. ‘Deliberately, on purpose, she touched me with her impure hands. ‘Oh, God, what kind of daakan has entered my house, to make me miserable in my old age?’
This time, Gulab, the Dubashes’ servant, came into the living room. She took one look at the situation and pushed Sera toward her bedroom. ‘Baby, you go in your room for a while,’ she said authoritatively. ‘Go on, I will calm Mummy down.’

I love the way the non-English words are given without italics or explanation. I couldn’t find ‘vhem’, ‘dhakara’ or ‘faras’ with a quick web search, and I’m happy to have them be untranslatable – or rather to be left to make my own rough translations: ‘panics’, ‘idiocies’ and ‘ruckus’, perhaps? And I love the way that each of the four people in this scene are in a different relationship to traditional religious practice. The pragmatic Gulab is probably, like Bhima, Hindu. Freddy is European in his musical tastes. Sera is part of the modern world and completely unprepared for Banu’s fanatical attachment to – in her understanding – antiquated practices. But mostly what I love is the vividly realised drama of the moment, the brilliant use of dialogue.

I came across these books thanks to the Emerging Artist’s practice of plucking books with non-Anglo author names from the shelves of our local library. It’s a life-enriching practice

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Thrity Umrigar’s Secrets Between Us and the Book Club

Posted on 24 Oct 2023 | 8 comments

For years, I’ve been part of a Book Club where no one can spend more than 30 seconds talking about any book. We would eat, return books borrowed at previous meetings, each offer three books which we describe and score out of 10, then – in an order determined by a card draw – borrow up to three books each.

Over time, as most of the Club’s six members made the move to electronic books, the original idea of lending books we had enjoyed got muddied. We struggled on, meeting less frequently, two thirds of us buying books specifically so as to offer them at the Book Club.

At last we bit the bullet and agreed to try all reading the same book and discussing it. Our first title is:

Thrity Umrigar, The Secrets Between Us (HarperCollins 2018)

Thrity Umrigar emigrated from India to the USA when she was 21 years old. Since then, among other things, she has written a number of novels in English. The Secrets Between Us revisits characters from her second novel, The Space Between Us, which was published 12 years earlier, in 2006. I’m writing this without having read more than a couple of pages of the earlier novel (I managed to get hold of a copy, but it arrived too late for the meeting). Though the second novel makes frequent reference to events from the first, I didn’t feel I was missing anything.

Before the meeting: Other demands on my time mean that this has to be brief.

It’s a terrific novel set mainly in the slums of Mumbai, featuring a brilliant gallery of women characters. It begins with Bhima, who is living with her granddaughter in a hovel in the slums. For many years she was employed in a Parsi household, virtually a member of the family, but expelled when she, correctly and necessarily, accused one of the family members of wrongdoing. She has been abandoned by her husband, and her daughter and son-in-law have died of AIDS. She makes a precarious living and enables her granddaughter to attend college by finding domestic work with a number of wealthy women.

In the course of the novel, Bhima’s life is transformed by two unlikely friendships. One is with Parvati, a woman who is even poorer than she is, who was sold into prostitution as a girl but now, as an old woman, is hideously disfigured by a growth under her chin and survives by buying and selling half a dozen shrivelled heads of cauliflower each day and sleeping on a mat outside a nephew’s apartment door, for which she pays rent. The other is with Chitra, a young Australian woman, the lover of one of Bhima’s employers, who was born in India but cheerfully disregards the rigid requirements class, caste and heteronormativity.

At the risk of reducing the book to a single paragraph, the significance of the title is spelled out in an exchange between Bhima and Pavarti. Bhima was initially shocked when she realised that Chitra and her lover aren’t just good friends, but as she comes to know them and appreciate Chitra’s generosity of spirit, she is then shocked when neighbours call them ‘a very bad name’. Here’s a quote from the conversation that happens after Bhima learns about Parvati’s background as a sexual slave, and meets her former employer who tells her how she suffers from lying about Bhima’s revelations. The lump that’s mentioned is the unsightly growth under Parvati’s chin:

‘Why do we aIl walk around like this, hiding from one another?’
Parvati’s thumb circles the lump in a fast motion as she ponders the question. ‘It isn’t the words we speak that make us who we are. Or even the deeds we do. It is the secrets buried in our hearts.’ She looks sharply at Bhima. ‘People think that the ocean is made up of waves and things that float on top. But they forget – the ocean is also what lies at the bottom, all the broken things stuck in the sand. That, too, is the ocean.’

(page 243)

The book’s story could be seen as a process of bringing those broken things to the light, and at least sometimes making them whole again.

After the meeting: We were a bit tentative about the Book Club’s new MO. We ate a pleasant dinner first, with barely a mention of the book until we moved to comfortable chairs. Conversation started out a little stiffly. Someone actually read out the questions for book groups at the back of her e-book, but we realised we absolutely didn’t want to go down that route.

The main question that got tossed around was how seriously to take the pair of books. The second book (which is the one I’ve read) has some extremely improbable benign elements, including – spoiler alert – a happy ending which may be the set-up for a third book, or not. The relative ease with which characters transcend the rigid barriers of class and custom, one person felt strongly, moves the book into the genre of fantasy, or perhaps mark it as prettified for the US mass market.

Not everyone agreed. Sure, things happen that are extremely unlikely, but they are within the realms of possibility, and the good fortune of the main characters allows the situation from which they (or at least some of them) escape to be seen more clearly by contrast. There’s no pretence, for example, that Lesbians are universally embraced by Hindu society, or that there is any kind of safety net for the poor.

Whether it’s an airport novel or a serious work of art, we all enjoyed it. All except me had read and enjoyed both books. I’m now well under way with the first one, and it’s a curious experience reading some of the harsh judgements expressed in its opening scenes, knowing that they’re based on wrong assumptions.

We agreed to carry on as a Book Discussion Club.

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Ronnie Scott’s Shirley: page 76

Posted on 5 Jul 2023 | 8 comments

Ronnie Scott, Shirley (Hamish Hamilton 2023)

Ronnie Scott has played an important role in Australian culture over some decades, not least as founder of the literary magazine The Lifted Brow. So it’s only fair that his novels (Shirley is his second) should be reviewed with respect. It’s not that I don’t respect the book, but I’m definitely not part of its intended readership, so I don’t know that anything I have to say will be of much use.

You can read thoughtful and mostly laudatory reviews in the Sydney Morning Herald (Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen), the Guardian (Bec Kavanaugh), the Newtown Review of Books (Jessica Stewart) and Australian Book Review (Morgan Nunan), to give just a sample.

It’s a novel set firmly in Melbourne, Collingwood to be precise, mostly among people involved in the food industry, with unconventional familial and sexual relationships, as the bushfires of 2019–2020 are coming to an end and Covid-19 is taking hold. The unnamed female narrator (who is not the Shirley of the title – that’s a house) tells the story after Melbourne’s many Covid lockdowns. By about page 20 when the narrator does something of a sexual nature that seems to defy the laws of physics, I was reading without much pleasure. A passing, and to me incomprehensible, mention of people licking themselves, a few pages later left me pretty thoroughly alienated,. Nevertheless, I persisted. There’s a twist at the end that reveals a shape in what until then had seemed to be fairly pointless meanderings. For my taste that was far too little far too late, but my taste is evidently an outlier – see list of laudatory reviews above.

Currently when blogging about books I have a policy of taking a closer look at page 76, chosen for the arbitrary reason that it’s my age. On page 76 of Shirley, the narrator has answered a knock on her apartment door and opened it to her affluent downstairs neighbour Frankie, a ‘famous condiment maven’. After a little chat, she yields to unspoken pressure and invites her in. Then, on this page, the narrator resumes the scrambled tofu she was cooking when Frankie interrupted her, while Frankie asks about it: ‘Wait, what have you put in that? Why does it look so much like curds?’

It was just the Safeway brand of melty ‘mozzarella’, and I’d stolen Meera Sodha’s method of pouring a base of neutral oil, frying off some spices, mixing in the ingredients that had to be actually cooked, and then crushing some silken tofu in my hands – splatting it, really – along with the ‘final’ ingredients that just had to be wilted and warmed; when I’d read that recipe, in East, I’d scrambled tofu before, but somehow I hadn’t realised that the tofu didn’t need to be cooked, that it could be honoured as a soft, pillowy additive.

Today was a bit different, as Frankie had interrupted me just after I’d crushed in the tofu, but I supposed it was fine, as I’d decided on impulse to cook a hash brown in the same pan, and parts of it had broken up as I’d initially over-microwaved it from frozen. Coming back to the pan, I noticed these parts were blackening and sticking, and I chipped them off and incorporated them with a wooden spoon.

There’s quite a bit of vegan cooking in Shirley, mostly with meticulous acknowledgement of the source of the recipes. Meera Sodha’s East, acknowledged here, is subtitled ‘120 Vegetarian and Vegan Recipes from Bangalore to Beijing’.

There’s a school of thought that any passage of a novel needs to do one or preferably all of three things: move the plot forward, deepen our understanding of character, and develop theme or themes.

On first reading, nothing much happens on this page, but revisited when you’ve read the whole book, it astonishingly can be seen to do all three things.

In terms of plot, Frankie’s visit occurs almost exactly at the novel’s one-quarter mark. In conventional movie structure, this would be time for the second turning point, sometimes known as the Change of Plans. Indeed, Frankie’s moving into the narrator’s intimate space marks a major shift: Frankie is actively cultivating the narrator, for reasons that will be revealed much later. No doubt more sensitive readers pick up a weird vibe here that only gets weirder as the pages turn. (I was cleverly seduced into thinking it was all just part of a general weirdness.)

The narrator has already been established as a vegan foodie. This passage reinforces that aspect of her character, shows it in action. We learn more about Frankie too: this is the first time we see her outside of an environment where she is ‘the boss’. Here and on the next couple of pages, we see her as, well, a bit of a manipulator: praising, professing interest in what is after all pretty mundane, offering to help …

As far as thematic development goes, a key strand of the book is the narrator’s relationship with her mother, and her attention to the physical detail of food is in contrast to her celebrity-cook mother’s approach, which is mostly showbiz. Interestingly enough, the narrator silently judges Frankie a couple of pages later as ‘an entrepreneur by temperament but a cook only through opportunity and trade’. That is to say, bit the narrator’s mother and Frankie lack her authenticity around food.

The narrator’s veganism, made concrete here, has an important thematic value. I took it, disparagingly, to be part of the book’s inner-city cool vibe. But it’s more than that. It contrasts to a frequently mentioned photo, unexplained until the last pages, of the narrator’s mother holding a knife and spattered with blood. It’s a key piece of character rooted in plot.

So a lot is happening under the bland surface of page 76. For my taste, here and in the rest of the book, it’s all too far below the surface. Maybe on second reading I’d be alert to the subterranean shifts elements. But I don’t want to reread it. Its cultural terms of reference are largely alien to me. I know anything about vegan cookbooks. I don’t know any of the songs the characters listen to. I barely know West Brunswick from Fitzroy. I’ve never heard of Zachary Quinto. Celebrity cooks aren’t part of my internal pantheon, even ironically. Perhaps most importantly, it’s been a long time since I was dealing with the hopes, despairs and confusions of my 20s.

Your mileage may vary.

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Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind

Posted on 26 Aug 2022 | 3 comments

Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind (Bloomsbury 2020)

Just a quick post about this one.

A white middle-class family from Brooklyn – father, mother, teenage boy and younger teenage girl – move into an isolated, luxurious AirBnB place on Long Island. (How do we know they’re white? There are a number of tells apart from their immersion in US materialism – they refer casually to slavery and the dispossession of Native Americans in ways that would be astonishing in the mouths of people of colour or Indigenous people.)

They stock up with luxury holiday supplies and are just settling in on the first night, revelling in the fantasy that this fancy place is theirs, enjoying the delicious discomfort of not being able to check work emails because they have no coverage or WiFi, and generally wallowing in the first night of their vacation while a storm rages outside, when a knock at the door strikes terror into their hearts.

Their visitors are an older African-American couple. We know they’re Black because we see them through the holidayers’ eyes, and that’s the first thing they see. Our heroes’ initial worry that this is some kind of home invasion are dispelled when they are told, and eventually believe, that the visitors are the respectable upper middle-class AirBnB hosts.

The terror never quite dissipates, but its focus shifts. The narrative proceeds painfully slowly. There are weird signs and omens – hundreds of deer in the woods, a dozen flamingoes in the swimming pool, an unexplained noise loud enough to crack the glass in windows. The characters spend most of the novel in various states of unknowing.

It’s like one of those horror movies where there’s a slow build-up until finally the horror is revealed – except in this case we don’t arrive at the inevitably disappointing moment where we see the horror face to face. It’s probably eccentric of me, but I think of Hart Crane’s novel The Red Badge of Courage, where the protagonist has no idea what’s going on in the war in general but can only see what’s going on in his immediate vicinity. In that case, the readers have a wider perspective because we know some of the history. In this one, the narrator breaks the fourth wall with increasing frequency to give broad-brushstroke information about what is happening back home in Brooklyn or somewhere in Florida. We still don’t know the exact nature of the disaster unfolding in the wider world, but we do know the cause of the mysterious noise and – the narrator seems to imply – if we’ve been paying attention to events in real life we should be able to guess what’s happening.

If The Red Badge of Courage is too far-fetched a comparison, how about Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel. In that movie, the guests can’t go home from a bourgeois dinner party. In this novel they could theoretically leave, and they make a number of sallies forth, but – no spoilers here – there’s an overwhelming sense that these six people are stuck with each other.

The opening pages moved almost unbearably slowly with their attention to the detail of the white mother’s shopping excursion. And once the full complement of characters is present, the conversation tends to repeat. But something in this obsessive listing of brand names and constant return to a handful of observations was generates a cumulative sense of dread, and for me at least it pays off brilliantly as things come closer to boiling point.

Once again, I’m grateful to our Book(-swapping) Club for taking me out of my comfort zone.

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Nir Batram’s At Night’s End

Posted on 22 Aug 2022 | 2 comments

Nir Baram, At Night’s End (2018, English translation by Jessica Cohen, Text Publishing 2021)

I may have missed the point of this book.

It begins with an Israeli novelist waking up in a hotel room in Mexico after appearing as a guest at a writers’ festival. He is disorientated, and decides to stay on in order to track down a young woman whom he blearily remembers saying something to him about the death of his best friend. The friend isn’t dead, or is he?

The following chapters take place by turns in three different time periods: the late 1980s, when the novelist and his friend are in elementary school, creating an elaborate fantasy world and dealing with a trio of bullies; the mid 1990s, when they are in their final year of school; and the present time, in Mexico. There are frequent flashbacks and forward projections in each of the time periods, complicated further by dream sequences, drugged states and possible psychotic episodes. The friendship hits on some hard times. The friend (I think) becomes deeply depressed and after being suicidal for years finally kills himself. The narrator does meet up with the young woman, but as far as I could tell he just gets very drunk and/or stoned with her and another poet. I don’t know if the friend dies before or after their meeting.

Though I spent most of the book in a state of disorientation, the problem wasn’t at the sentence level. The prose, in Jessica Cohen’s translation, is clear and flows easily. It’s just that I never did really get what happened between the two friends, either in the late 1980s, the mid 1990s, or whenever the friend finally died.

The back cover blurb quotes a review by in Haaretz: ‘One of the most intriguing writers in Israeli literature today.’ Yossi Sucary, the quoted reviewer, is probably more dependable than I am. I brought it home from the Book(-swapping) Club. I can’t say it was one of my more successful borrowings.

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Zadie Smith’s Intimations

Posted on 1 Sep 2021 | Leave a comment

Zadie Smith, Intimations: Six Essays (Penguin 2020)

This tiny book was written in the first half of 2020, when Covid-19 was running wild in New York City, where Zadie Smith teaches creative writing. It comprises six personal essays, which their author describes in her foreword as ‘small by definition, short by necessity’. They are written in the spirit of what she learned from the stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: ‘Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.’

It’s a tiny book, but it’s not slight. As I read it, I could feel my personal understanding of the word ‘intimations’ changing to include an element of intimacy. These essays ruminate intimately on life, art and relationships in the middle of a pandemic. The first essay, ‘Peonies’, sets the tone:

Just before I left New York, I found myself in an unexpected position: clinging to the bars of the Jefferson Market Garden looking in. A moment before I’d been on the run as usual, intending to exploit two minutes of time I’d carved out of the forty-five-minute increments into which, back then, I divided my days.

She was transfixed by the sight of a bed of garish tulips, wishing they were peonies. That moment leads into reflections on the concept of a ‘natural woman’, the nature of creativity (‘Planting tulips is creative. … Writing is control’), the ‘global humbling’ that was to happen a few days later, on creativity and submission. She quotes a parable from Kierkegaard about the difference between how we actually are in the world and the stories we tell about ourselves in the world. You can make them peonies in a story, but they are still tulips in the real world. With the lightest of touches, the essay takes us into the deep challenge that April 2020 – ‘an unprecedented April’ – presents to our sense of ourselves.

The second essay ‘The American Exception’, also has a brilliantly enticing first line: ‘He speaks truth so rarely that when you hear it from his own mouth – 29 March 2020 – it has the force of revelation.’ We know exactly who she means. Paradoxically, the truth he spoke is that before that date ‘we didn’t have death’. The essay goes on to justify the paradox beautifully.

All the essays tackle big themes, and do it lightly. The longest, ‘Screengrabs (After Berger, before the virus)’ is the one where the author brings her gifts as a novelist most strongly to bear. I think the Berger in brackets is John Berger, and there may be a reference to his famous quote, in Understanding a Photograph: ‘I have decided that seeing this is worth recording.” The essay offers six portraits, mostly of people peripheral to Smith’s New York life, though one, subtitled ‘An Elder at the 98 Bus Stop’, is someone who has known her since childhood back in London. Each of the portraits has a twist at the end, as the pandemic leads the person to reveal something unexpected about themselves. After the portraits, there’s ‘Postscript: Contempt as a Virus’:

‘The virus doesn’t care about you.’ And likewise with contempt: in the eyes of contempt you don’t even truly rise to the level of the hated object – that would involve a full recognition for your existence.

The brief essay-within-an-essay ranges over racist micro-aggressions, Dominic Cummings’s cavalier violations of Covid restrictions, and, most compellingly, the look on Derek Chauvin’s face as he murdered George Floyd.

I haven’t read anything by Zadie Smith before this. I haven’t even seen White Teeth on TV. I’ve enjoyed her brother Ben Bailey Smith’s occasional stints on the Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review, but that’s as close as I’ve got. I brought this book home from the Book(-swapping) Club, and Im very glad to be introduced to this fine writer.

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Catherine Menon’s Fragile Monsters

Posted on 26 Aug 2021 | Leave a comment

Catherine Menon, Fragile Monsters (Viking Penguin 2021)

It’s 1985. Durga’s relationship comes to an end when her lover returns to his wife. She leaves her job as a maths lecturer in a Canadian university and takes her wounded heart back to her native Malaysia where she gets a job at a university in Kuala Lumpur. When the novel opens she has left KL for Diwali to visit her cantankerous grandmother in the village of Kuala Lipis where she grew up. A gift of fireworks goes badly awry, the roads are shut by floods, she stays in the village much longer than expected, and while she’s there confronts the ghosts – fragile monsters – of her past.

In alternating chapters we read the story of Mary, Durga’s grandmother: her childhood, her experience of the Japanese occupation in the 1940s, the Malayan Emergency, her relationship with her daughter Francesca, who was Durga’s mother.

The two narratives come together in the climactic final chapters. Durga makes some deeply disturbing discoveries about her family history, and the great miasma of stories that she grew up with are resolved into some kind of reality.

Throughout, there’s a contrast between Durga’s world view and her grandmother’s. Durga is thoroughly westernised, and loves the world of mathematical exactness and consistency. Her grandmother is a wild woman who tells stories that differ with each telling. Durga finds herself being drawn back into her childhood world of ghosts and half-truths.

I’m glad I read this book. The characters, especially the grandmother in the present time, feel real, and there are rich insights into Malaysian traditional culture and history. (The university in Kuala Lumpur is an offstage presence that tries to pull Durga back to westernised, mathematical reality, but without a lot of success.) But it didn’t sweep me away. It was as if I could always feel the work that was going into the writing – a symptom of this is the occasional reflection on mathematical concepts. These feel like scaffolding the helped the writer create the work, but needed either to be more fully integrated or designated as darlings to be killed.

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Growing up Aboriginal in Australia

Posted on 11 Jul 2021 | 6 comments

Anita Heiss (editor), Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia (Black Inc 2018)

I’m coming to this book late, but it’s a book that will remain fresh for a long time yet.

It contains 52 essays from First Nations people of Australia. The range of contributors is huge: people from all parts of Australia, urban and remote, from Cape York to the Western Australian wheat belt; some who are household names, some who should be, and some who live quiet lives far from the limelight; people who were strongly connected to culture and community as children and people who discovered they were Aboriginal only in adulthood; old (several contributors were born the same year as me, 1947) and young (one was 13 at the time of publication); sports stars, poets, novelists, classical musicians, prisoners.

Anita Heiss writes in her introduction:

There is no single or simple way to define what it means to grow up Aboriginal in Australia, but this anthology is an attempt to showcase as many of the diverse voices, experiences and stories together as possible.

The attempt succeeds admirably.

I was struck by the sheer number of almost identical incidents in which someone challenges a young person’s Aboriginal identity. Here’s one of them, as told by Keira Jenkins, a Gamilaroi woman from Moree in New South Wales:

I was six years old, sitting cross-legged on the floor in my checked dress, which was slightly too long for me, looking eagerly up at Miss Brown – at least I think that was her name – the first time I had a blow to my sense of identity. We were learning about Aboriginal people and I piped up very proudly.

‘I’m Aboriginal.’ I waved my hand in the air.

‘No, you’re not,’ my friend Alison said. ‘You’re too white to be Aboriginal.’

I don’t remember what happened after that; I just remember feeling ashamed.

(Pages 119–120)

The challenger isn’t always another child. Sometimes it’s an adult in authority, sometimes even another Aboriginal person, but the confident refusal to accept that a child with fair skin can be Aboriginal occurs again and again in almost exactly the same words, never without impact on the child. No wonder Andrew Bolt was taken to court over his 2009 slur against ‘light-skinned people who identified as Aboriginal’ (news story here if you don’t know about that): the people bringing the case must have been desperately sick of that pernicious stuff.

The sameness of attacks stands in striking contrast to the tremendous variety of the life stories. I loved reading how eleven-year-old Miranda Tapsell refused to go to an event as Scary Spice just because Scary Spice was brown like her, and risked the ire of her non-Indigenous friend by going as their shared favourite, Baby Spice; how Adam Goodes disobeyed a teacher on a zoo excursion and stared at a gorilla; how Karen Davis, a Mamu–Kuku Yalanji woman who grew up n Far North Queensland in the 1970s and 80s sang songs on long car trips with her family pretty much the way I did with mine in the 1950s.

Some of the stories defy belief. William Russell, who describes himself as ‘a black, fair ex-serviceman with PTSD, blind and with a severe hearing impediment, and a long list of other physical problems from military service’, is a case in point. He tells of a time when his mother, with a babe in arms and four-year-old WIlliam by her side, faced a crowd of drunk, angry white men in the tiny town in Victoria where they had just come to live as the only Aboriginal family. Her grandfather stepped out of the shadows to save the day, naked ‘as always’, painted up in ochre and kaolin, and discharging a shotgun. This was in the 1950s. Hm!

There are tragic stories of the damage done by of colonisation to individuals and communities,featuring alcoholism and addiction; diabetes and diagnoses of mental illness; family violence and dysfunction; premature death. And there are stories of heroic resilience. Tony Birch’s story of his father is a beautifully told study in reversing fortunes. After years of violence and anger, followed by years of medication, electric shock treatment and institutionalisation, he ‘is saved’:

The Aboriginal community of Fitzroy gather around and care for him: men and women who had known him when he was a kid, during the years before any of them were ravaged by the force of racism and exclusion. He moves to the countryside and begins working with young blackfellas in schools. The experience is life-changing, for both my father and his family. I discover, a little to my own surprise, that I love him.

(Page 35)

My copy of Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia is a loan from my Book(-lending) Club. I consider it belongs in the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2021: it’s edited by a woman, and more than half the contributors are also women. So I’m counting it as the eleventh book I’ve read for the challenge.

This blog post is also a contribution to Indigenous Literature Week hosted by Lisa at ANZ LitLovers blog.

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