Category Archives: Book Group

The Book Group and The City and the City

Posted on 14 October 2010 | Leave a comment

China Miéville, The City and the City (Macmillan 2009)

Before the Book Group meets:
We decided to read some science fiction. Rather than opting for someone’s idea of a classic (Asimov, Heinlein, early Gibson or Stephenson) we decided to pick something current. I’d loved China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station and heard interesting things about The City and the City – among other things it had been nominated for a Hugo [and now has tied with Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl for Best Novel]. I suggested we take it on, and the suggestion carried the day.

So I was suffering a mild case suggester’s anxiety when I started reading. What response would the book get from Groupers who’ve read even less science fiction than I have? Would the meticulous world-building strike them as so much tedious scenery-painting? Would they see the elegant police procedural plot as something from a by-the-numbers TV show, the characters as two-dimensional, the tantalising central conceit the equivalent of a one-joke comedy? I’m pleased to report that after a while I stopped caring and was absorbed in the book’s world and its story.

The City and the City is hard to write about because it really is an extended exploration of a single conceit. I would infinitely prefer to have had it revealed  to me by the narrative itself, and don’t want to have a hand in spoiling it for anyone else. In a Book Show interview, Miéville went as far as saying that the story is set in two cities that share an unusual relationship to each other, which is true but doesn’t give anything away. Not until the end of the first chapter is there any hint that the world, or at least the cities, of the book are in some sense science fictional/fantastic. I would love to know how a reader who wasn’t forewarned would understand that first jarring moment, and how long it would take to grasp the full situation. Of course, in one sense, the full situation isn’t clear until the very last pages: as in Kafka and Raymond Chandler, to whom Miéville acknowledges indebtedness, the narrative at one level concerns itself with solving a single crime, but it also unfolds the deeper political realities of the world of the novel.

Pushing the spoiler envelope just a little, I had an insight into the book when out walking recently with the Art-Student. As we approached a small group boys riding their scooters in the street, one of the boys momentarily lost control and wheeled directly into our path. He pulled up short and called over his shoulder to his friends, ‘I’ll try that again.’ He had carefully avoided hitting us, but otherwise acted as if we dog-walking old people weren’t even there. He had ‘unseen’ us. Then I remembered noticing on my last visit to Cairns that though there were plenty of Aboriginal people in the streets, the non-Aboriginal people generally behaved as if they weren’t there, and vice versa – another case of mutual unseeing. The City and the City takes this common phenomenon to impossible extremes, and much of the joy of the book lies in how consistently and thoroughly he has imagined it. Miéville succeeds to the extent that every now and then a reference to the world as we know it – to Coke, or Madonna, or a Google search – brings one up short: oh, this is all happening in the world as I know it! The climactic point of the story consists of four people walking briskly down a street in close physical proximity – and it’s totally thrilling, not just because one of them is carrying a gun. That’s all I’m saying.

After the meeting:
It was a small meeting, but all of us had enjoyed the book. The group meeting had been postponed for six weeks or so, so quite a bit of time had passed since most of us had read the book. And even though in the intervening weeks one had reread it and another had read Perdido Street Station, our memories weren’t generally fresh enough to generate much detailed discussion. I needn’t have worried about the appeal of the world building: everyone enjoyed it. And my curiosity about how the setup was revealed to the unspoiled reader was gratified: the consensus seemed to be that the odd word (‘crosshatched’) created a sense of unease, enough to alert rather than alarm, and there was pleasure as more of the workings of the cities was revealed, until one felt (several times over), ‘Ah, now I get it!’

Leave a comment

Posted in Book Group, Books

Tagged , , ,

The Tree of Man revisited with the Book Group

Posted on 4 August 2010 | 2 comments

Patrick White, The Tree of Man (1955, Vintage 1994)

Before the group meeting:
My mother’s letters in the 1970s would occasionally report on her reading. She once transcribed a paragraph from Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children because it seemed to describe the noses of our family. The other day when I read the first page of the Drought chapter of The Tree of Man, I wondered if she’d thought, as I do, that this description of Stan Parker evokes aspects of my father (allowing for the fact that Dad grew sugarcane rather than running a dairy, and was never ‘broad’):

He was respected. He was inseparable from the district, he had become a place name. His herd was small, but of good quality for the herd of a man in a small way, neither rich nor ambitious, but reliable, the cans would always reach the butter factory to the minute, without fail. He went to church too, singing the straight psalms and rounder hymns, in praise of that God which obviously did exist. Stan Parker had been told for so long that he believed, of course he did believe. He sang that praise doggedly, in a voice you would have expected of him, approaching the music honestly, without embellishing it. Standing in the pew, singing. the back of his neck was by this time quite wrinkled, and the sinews were too obvious in the flesh. But he was a broad and upright man.

I’ll never know if she made that kind of connection, but she mentioned the book in passing in a comment on Cancer Ward:

It seems queer but I think Patrick White writes much like [Solzhenitsyn], so simply. I’ve read only one of his, The Tree of Man, & really enjoyed it.

Not bad, eh? She made no claim to literary sophistication, but she picked White’s affinity with the Russians. And she found his prose simple!

The prose is simple, but it’s not easy. It’s also impossible to read fast, lacking what A D Hope believed a novelist needs: ‘a plain style, a clear easy stride, a good open texture of language to carry him [sic] to the end of his path’. But it’s certainly not ‘pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge’, as Hope famously described it. It does constantly pull you up and make you look at a particular word or image – or, if you don’t stop, leave you with an uneasy feeling that you’ve missed something. The point of view frequently moves around within a single short sentence, or rather within a grouping of words between consecutive full stops, since White is a great user of what are sometimes known in the editing trade as frags. Even the very first sentence, innocuous enough at first glance (‘A cart drove between the two big stringybarks and stopped’), has the reader slightly wrong-footed with its abrupt rhythm, its lack of a human, or even animal, subject, its slightly skewed use of articles (‘the cart drove between two big stringybarks’ would be more natural, but of course it would mean something quite different).

The book’s peculiarities, and its arrogance, intimidated me in first year university in 1967. But not this time. True, I came close to genuflecting at the first four chapters, which tell of the primal encounter of ‘the man’, ‘the woman’ and the bush. I wondered if I would be able to keep up with the intensity of the prose for the whole 480 pages. But once the narrative emerged into something resembling a social world, I was less enthralled. In fact I became increasingly irritated. I just don’t believe in the nastiness of most of the characters. I can’t stand the snobbishness of the narrative voice. The drunken Irish shenanigans (read domestic violence, despair, wretched poverty and, towards the end, dubious religion) of the O’Dowds fail to amuse me. The pretentions of the nouveaux riches Armstrongs are awkwardly unconvincing, as is almost everything about the younger Parkers. The book seems to assume that some people, inarticulate or otherwise, have an honest capacity for rich inner lives, while others (most?) don’t, and must settle at best for synthetic souls with occasional exalted glimpses. For all the towering strengths of the book – and they certainly aren’t limited to the first chapters – I became increasingly obsessed with calculating what fraction of the pages I had yet to read.

Perhaps the most striking disappointment is the vast, gaping silence about Aboriginal Australians. When Stan’s cart stops between the stringybarks in that first sentence, it’s definitely in terra nullius. ‘Blacks’ are mentioned twice, once when young Ray refers to their arcane knowledge of how to survive in the desert, and again in the closing pages when the missionary mentions sex with black women as a sign of his youthful depravity. The phrase ‘dream time’ occurs twice. The first time, Stan and Amy have come to an ‘uneasy dream-time’. Since that probably signifies that neither of them was fully awake in relation to the other, the Aboriginal reference may be coincidental, but in the second, near the beginning of the fourth and final part, Stan looks back on his first days at the farm as ‘the dream time’. Here the phrase does refer to a time of creation, of beginnings, and it must disturbingly invoke for any Australian reader now, and surely for some in the 1950s, this continent’s history of genocide, dispossession and cultural appropriation. Invoke without acknowledging. The Irish are despised. The working class barely exist. Aboriginal people have been erased and over-written.

Then, here’s Stan, further down the first page of the Drought chapter:

There were certain corners of his property that he could not bring himself to visit, almost as if he would have discovered something he did not wish to see. […] Once he had been looking at a crop of remarkably fine sorghum that was almost ready to bring in, when he remembered that same stretch of land after he had cleared it as a young man, and on it the white chips lying that his axe had carved out of the trees, and some trees and young saplings still standing and glistening there, waiting for the axe. So that he forgot his present crop and went away disturbed, and thinking.

In a book that makes much of ‘things that are too terrible and wonderful to speak of’ is it too much to imagine that in this moment the thing Stan does not wish to see is the silenced Aboriginal history? That the dispossession on which Stan’s settlement of the land is built is almost forcing its way into the narrative? Surely it’s not just my idiosyncrasy that those white chips of wood remind me of the bones in the red earth of a massacre site in a William Yang photograph?

There may well be hundreds of learned articles about this disturbed silence, but that’s my two bob’s worth.

After the group meeting:
Tonight we met in a pub in Paddington, rather than in someone’s home. All but one of us turned up, and almost half had read all or most of he book. We had an animated discussion. Only one of us really loved the book. One, who may not have read it, considered it to be dated imperialism. The two of us who read the Vintage edition agreed that the cover was absurdly inappropriate (a horse? northern hemisphere trees?) No one shared my unease about the absence of Aboriginal characters: the consensus seemed to be that the original inhabitants of the Parkers’ land had been dispossessed long before Stan and Amy arrived, and that my reading of the white chips passage was drawing a long bow. As someone said, what’s the point of a bow that’s not long? And I still think that the general silence enacts a kind of genocide.

Whatever, unlike Anna Karenina, The Tree of Man couldn’t hold its own against the need to discuss Other Things – the sins of the ALP and the worse sins of the Coalition, our various adventures in work and education, travel and the weather. As always it was a fun evening.

2 Comments

Posted in Book Group, Books

Tagged , , , , , , ,

The Book Group’s Race of a Lifetime

Posted on 24 June 2010 | 2 comments

Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, Race of a Lifetime: How Obama won the White House (Penguin 2010)

Before the Book Group meeting:

This book’s US title is Game Change, with the subtitle Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime. This is snappy and gives a fair idea of the book’s contents. So why the change to a lame and inaccurate title for this British edition? Maybe it was revenge on the US for renaming J K Rowling’s first book Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

The authors say in their introduction that they set out to give ‘an intimate portrait of the candidates and spouses who (in our judgement) stood a reasonable chance of occupying the White House’ after the 2008 election. They conducted more than 300 interviews with more than 200 people between July 2008 and September 2009, while memories of the election campaign were still fresh, and produced a book bristling with direct quotes from behind the scenes. I wouldn’t describe much of it as intimate in any real sense, but it’s got a kind of gossipy fascination. The Obamas, the McCains, the Edwardses and especially the Clintons are all big characters, and all have marriages that have had to withstand unbelievable strain. Todd Palin gets mentioned quite a bit, but doesn’t become a character in his own right, and not a lot of ink is spent on Sarah Palin herself – though what there is of her is even more bizarre than the press suggested at the time.

I don’t know that the book does much to deepen the reader’s understanding of the US political system in general or the 2007–8 election campaign in particular. The main take-home message seems to be that you don’t have to be some kind of sociopath to run for President or Vice-President of the United States, but it helps. Miraculously, Barack Obama doesn’t seem to be one. One does weep for US-style democracy, at least as seen through the lens of political journalism. I found myself empathising with the widespread fear of democracy in mid nineteenth century Australia, expressed in 1853 by John Plunkett, Attorney General of the colony of New South Wales:

All serious convulsions are carried out by demagogues; as a boiling cauldron throws its scum to the top, so in all social convulsions unworthy persons will be sure to get to the top, and betray the people for their own selfish purposes. The people left to themselves, and uncontrolled, will be hurled on to ruin by the ruffians who make them their dupes.

(Quoted in Peter Cochrane, Colonial Ambition, MUP 2006, p 379)

Not that ruffians and demagogues prevailed in 2008, but one gets the impression that without ruffianly behaviour and demagoguery, and certainly not without being able to deal with lashings of both, no one could ever become Potus.

Kate Jennings’s Quarterly Essay, American revolution: The fall of Wall Street and the rise of Barack Obama, though not an insider’s account, probably casts more light on the issues at stake in the campaign and is almost as thrilling a ride. I do feel an itch to read an account as candid and thorough, and occasionally lurid, as this about an Australian election. Sadly, I doubt if even Tony Abbott, for all his lycra and chest pounding and people skills, could equal any one of a score of moments in this rip-roarer.

After the meeting:

Tonight we were five, then six and eventually seven, the last arrival being delayed by an argumentative accountant and a locked car park. The conversation folded back on itself a number of times, with recaps and revisitings. Most of us, I think, had found the book interesting, though a number hadn’t been able to finish it – the apparent weighting of the scales towards Obama was a factor (either the Clintons are actually really weird or the journalist/authors decided it was good ‘narrative’ to portray them that way), an absence of politics-tragicality on the part of the non-finishers was another: do we really care about advice from yet another aide that was disregarded by yet another candidate? As an innovation tonight was also discussed an article – on climate change – and though none of us was ardent about the article, the juxtaposition emphasised the way the book favours personality above policy and implies that the US democratic process does likewise. I think its true to say we were all shocked and awed by the sheer amount of money spent on presidential campaigns.

The fact that the ABC had been reporting a leadership challenge in Canberra meant the book’s holding power was tested. Once the conversation veered – even lunged – towards a debate about Rudd and the intense stupidity of the NSW Right of the ALP, who are largely responsible for Rudd’s losses in the polls and now (I’ve learned since coming home) have decided to dump him, none of us was wildly enthusiastic to get back to the book.

2 Comments

Posted in Book Group, Books

Tagged , , , ,

Jasper Jones at the Book Group

Posted on 13 May 2010 | 4 comments

Craig Silvey, Jasper Jones (Allen & Unwin 2009)

The fourth paragraph of Jasper Jones begins:

This is the hottest summer I can remember and the thick heat seems to seep in and keep in my sleepout.

‘Keep in’? That’s awkward, I thought, and it chimes oddly with ‘seep in’ and ‘sleepout’. The paragraph continues:

It’s like the earth’s core in here. The only relief comes from the cooler air that creeps in between the slim slats of my single window. It’s near impossible to sleep …

Seep in, keep in, sleepout, creeps in and sleep, all in five lines: this is definitely odd, but – along with the heat, the relief and those slats, which are slim for no reason other than alliteration – it’s clearly deliberate.

Over the next pages, while the story had my attention from the word go – thirteen year old Charlie Bucktin, the narrator, is woken in the night by the town’s bad boy Jasper Jones and led to a secret place in the bush where he’s faced with a terrible spectacle and an equally terrible dilemma – I had a weather eye out to see if anything would come of this stylistic oddity. Nothing did, in the sense that if you didn’t notice it you weren’t missing a vital clue to the book’s meaning. But Charlie is in love with language, and bursts of assonance and alliteration for their own sake amount to something of a stylistic signature. I did a quick scan before returning the book to the library, and noted, from many examples, ‘a bundle of lonely bones tied to a stone’ (page 123), ‘Pored over it, taking little portions’ (page 128), and this, in one of Charlie’s reflective moments:

Sorry means you feel the pulse of other people’s pain, as well as your own, and saying it means you take a share of it. And so it binds us together, makes us as trodden and sodden as one another. Sorry is a lot of things. It’s a hole refilled. A debt repaid. Sorry is the wake of misdeed. It’s the crippling ripple of consequence. Sorry is sadness, just as knowing is sadness. Sorry is sometimes self-pity. But sorry, really, is not about you. It’s theirs to take or leave.

Like the frequent references to Charlie’s reading – To Kill a Mockingbird, Batman, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (which he hasn’t read, but Eiza, the love interest, has, and seen the film), Huckleberry Finn, The Wizard of Oz – this fascination with words is important in establishing Charlie’s character and the tone of the book. It’s been described as an Australian To Kill a Mocking Bird, but I doubt if Harper Lee’s book was anything like as intertextual as this. The description is OK as a sales pitch but I’m surprised that reviewers have echoed it.

Anyhow, it’s a terrific, fast moving, undemanding read: a coming-of-age romance cum mystery cum homage to Mark Twain cum historical drama (the Vietnam War is on, and the Beaumont children are mentioned towards the end) cum tale of pre-adolescent friendship (with a substantial nod towards the movie Stand By Me). There’s a beautiful description of a cricket match in which Charlie’s best friend, a very short Vietnamese boy (‘Jeffrey Lu on debut’) makes a splash, in a way that reminded me of Ruth Starke’s brilliant book for younger readers, Nips XI.

One thing I don’t understand is what makes the book ‘mainstream’ rather than ‘young adult’. There’s some pretty intense swearing, I guess, but sex is treated with great tact; even when sexual abuse is described explicitly in a letter that’s crucial to the plot, we don’t get to read the letter. The story is told from a thirteen-year-old’s point of view, and there’s no hint that he’s in any way an unreliable narrator: we don’t know any more than he does and we’re not invited to make judgments that differ from his – we learn about the world with him. In fact, Charlie’s angry mother is treated with less adult-sympathy than similar mothers in many a YA title. I’ve heard that the classification was a policy decision on the part of the publishers – that they were invited to submit the book for the Children’s Book Council Awards, but declined. The mainstream classification seems to have paid off in adult readership and award nominations – always assuming that a Miles Franklin shortlisting is more prestigious than one from the Children’s Book Council, and that being on the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards shortlist alongside David Malouf’s Ransom and Coetzee’s Summertime is more dignified than being named in the same breath as Justine Larbalestier’s Liar (not a view I share: I’m looking forward to Justine’s book as keenly as I am to David’s, and who in their right mind would want to compete for a prize against Malouf and Coetzee?). I hope this taxonomical decision hasn’t discouraged the young people who are the book’s natural readership. [Since writing that I’ve seen an online  trailer that is clearly aimed at teenagers, so it looks as if the pubisher is having two bob each way, and a good thing too.]

I wrote that much a number of weeks ago. The Book Group met last night.

With one exception, we were lukewarm. No one actively hated the book, but different people saw different things as gaping flaws. One man said he found Charlie’s decision at the very start to help conceal a crime highly implausible, and intolerably hackneyed – from then on he read with very little pleasure. Another was irritated by the banter between Charlie and Geoffrey (though one man said he thought that was the best thing in the book). Others found the narrative voice, and the characters’, wildly inconsistent – perhaps especially in beautifully written passages such as the aria on ‘sorry’ I quoted from above. I think we were unanimous in finding the characters’ emotional responses to crises (a grisly death, the acrimonious departure of a parent, the discovery of a grandparent) lamentably one-dimensional. I’m sorry to say that as we talked the book’s charms diminished. I proposed a reading that transcended these concerns for consistency, verisimilitude and psychological realism. Perhaps we ought to see the book as akin to the startlingly discontinuous novelitas of César Aira that I’ve just been reading about in the current Heat. But that didn’t wash. Its one defender said it reminded him vividly of things he had felt when he was an adolescent, and he wasn’t howled down.

Sorry, Craig.

4 Comments

Posted in Book Group, Books

Tagged , , , , , ,

The Book Group and Peter Temple’s Truth

Posted on 18 March 2010 | 2 comments

Peter Temple, Truth (Text Publishing 2009)

The Book Group decided we wanted a page turner for this meeting, and a couple of people were keen on Peter Temple’s Truth, the second of his detective novels. So Truth it was. Attempts to get it from the library made it pretty clear that other people were keen on it as well, and at least one of us, it turned out, had to go to the airport to buy a copy.

Here’s the first sentence:

On the Westgate Bridge, behind them a flat in Altona, a dead woman, a girl really, dirty hair, dyed red, pale roots, she was stabbed too many times to count, stomach, chest, back, face.

It takes a bit of work to figure out the internal relationships in this congeries of phrases. You may go down dead ends in which the flat in Altona is on the Westgate Bridge, or the girl was stabbed too many times to stomach, but once you’ve done the work the meaning is unambiguous:

[They were] on the Westgate Bridge. Behind them [in] a flat in Altona [was] a dead woman, a girl really, [her] dirty hair dyed red [with] pale roots[.] She was stabbed too many times to count, [in the] stomach, [the] chest, [the] back, [the] face.

In effect, then, the sentence gives fair warning that this won’t be a lazy read – there will be many sentences requiring at least a little backtracking if their meaning is to be extracted. But the difficulty is not arbitrary, representing as it does a particular laconic spoken English, the kind spoken by almost all the male characters and one or two of the females. The sentence also gives fair warning, amplified by the reference a couple of paragraphs later to the 1970 collapse of the Westgate bridge, that non-Melburnians and people who don’t know their Melbourne may have extra work to do in the comprehension stakes.

Having said that, Peter Temple’s Villani belongs to that distinguished international fraternity of ageing homicide detectives committed to bringing criminals to justice, at odds with their superiors, and in trouble with what’s left of their families: Rebus, Montalbano, Zen, Wallander, and now Villani, with his own distinctive line in introspective self-blame and self-criticism beneath a hardboiled surface, his own reluctant corruption. I enjoyed the book, much as I enjoy very good TV detective shows – I’d place it at the level of Silent Witness or NYPD Blue rather than up there with The Wire. On the whole, though, I think I prefer my television on the screen rather than in novel form, even when it’s as well written as this unarguably is.

My main difficulty was related to elliptical language. Not that it was difficult, because the difficulty, such as it was, was fun. But the speech patterns of most of the male characters tended to be indistinguishable from each other, so the characters themselves tended to blur. This didn’t matter very much until the perpetrators of the various crimes were revealed and the effect (for me at least) wasn’t much more specific than: ‘One of the characters did this crime, another did that one, and their reasons had to do with revenge or corruption or something of the sort.’ I’m happy to report that there was plenty to hold my interest on the way to that unsatisfactory destination: Villani’s relationships with his wife, his daughters, his father and brothers are as complex as anyone could wish – and if it wasn’t for the demands of the policier genre they might have been fleshed out to become fully three-dimensional; the language is full of delights as well as provocations; there are plenty of richly detailed observations of street life and the life of the mind (‘These thoughts had begun to come to Villani in the small moments of his life – at the traffic lights, in the haunted space before sleep, in the wet womb of the shower’ is a nice instance).

Just as I finished reading the book the long list for the Miles Franklin Award was announced. I’ll be surprised if Truth wins the award, but I haven’t read any of the other contenders.

I wrote the preceding paragraphs before the group met last night. There were only four of us. I don’t think it was lack of enthusiasm for the book that brought the numbers down – one man had a lecture, another’s plane from Brisbane was late, and so on. We had a pleasant discussion, mainly swapping Bits We’d Liked – one guy had jotted down clever bits of dialogue, and often as not someone else would be able to say what the next line was. We agreed there were longueurs. We agreed that it was a fine bit of genre writing (more confined by the requirements of genre than Shane Maloney’s novels, one guy thought). We reflected that none of us saw Melbourne as quite as grim as the book, though one guy told us of a Sydney experience involving four big policemen running onto the street in front of his car and pointing guns at the driver of the car next to him. We resonated with the awkwardness of the male characters in attempting to give and receive whatever it is one gives and receives in moments of great pain (though as I write that, I realise that I appreciated those moments cerebrally rather than responding to them emotionally).

And we talked about Djan Djan, Reinventing Knowledge, Mawson’s huts, the excellent food, how a career as an assistant director in the movies affects one’s reading habits, regulations for backyard ponds, etc etc etc.

2 Comments

Posted in Book Group, Books

Tagged , , , ,

My Book Group Is Illuminated

Posted on 4 February 2010 | 3 comments

Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated (2002, Penguin Australia 2008)

I read five pages of this when it was freshly published, and decided it was not for me. It’s rare for me to dismiss a book like that, so I dipped ahead reading a page here, a page there, and found absolutely nothing to change my mind. Then at the December meeting of my Book Group, a number of people were keen to put it on our agenda, and they won the day. So, eventually, I bought a cheap copy (all the libraries’ copies were out) and set to work. By the time the group met last night, I’d finished it, though I did skim the last 20 pages so I’d have time to cook the dinner. There are some very strong bits, as it turns out to be a story of a small Ukrainian village whose entire Jewish population was murdered by German soldiers, counterpointed by a ludic tale of the Jonathan Safran Foer’s forebears’ lives in that village.  I can see why the book received such acclaim, but pretty much the first half is taken up with ha-ha-I’m-being-funny humour and an awful lot of the shtetl story that felt contrived, inconsistent and disrespectful, like Isaaac Bashevis Singer off the rails; the thesaurus-driven voice of the Ukrainian Alex, who narrates the modern-day quest for the village, eventually toned down as it got to the point, but by that time I had endured too much that was weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. My moment-by-moment irritation robbed the narrative of almost all momentum. In the hope that mine was a minority response, I came to the group resolved to listen and learn.

The book found no stout defenders among us. Roughly half hadn’t managed more than 20 pages or so. The man who’d liked it most – we think he was the one who proposed it – had seen and enjoyed the film, and admitted that when he read the book he skimmed the bits that weren’t in the film, which meant all the shtetl stories, all the clever literary bits (some would say these were darlings that should have been murdered), and the worst excesses of the mangled-English narration.

The reason we’d chosen this book is that we wanted to see how it went if we watched a movie of the book under discussion. So after dinner we watched Liev Schreiber’s Everything Is Illuminated. All O knew of the movie beforehand was from glimpses seen in Operation Filmmaker, the achingly funny documentary about an Iraqi intern on the shoot, in which Liev Shreiber and others came across as humane, generous and admirable people who clearly believed in their project. I don’t know that I liked the film all that much: the Elijah Wood character (‘Jonathan Safran Foer’) was too weird, and there were some awful saggy bits. It was fascinating to watch it so soon after reading the book. The ancestral story – roughly half the book – was sheared off. The second of the two revelations at the end was replaced with something much less interesting, less morally complex. A climactic action that almost made sense in the book made no sense at all in the film. And the upbeat ending was despair-inducing. Paradoxically, the film made me appreciate the book much more.

A pleasant evening was had by all, even the two dogs, who managed to bully someone into throwing a ball for them more than once. Next month, not Franny and Zooey or Arctic Dreams or The History of Knowledge or Wildlife, but Peter Temple’s Truth. We wanted a page-turner.

3 Comments

Posted in Book Group, Books, Movies

Tagged ,

The Book Group’s Revenge of the Lawn

Posted on 8 December 2009 | Leave a comment

Richard Brautigan, Revenge of the Lawn (1972, Picador 1974 – with British spelling!)

BrautiganA Book Group member was given a copy of this book by his son, and thought it would be a good quick read for our December meeting, when there are so many competing demands on our time. None of the nearby libraries had copies, and I may have got the last one listed in Australia at AbeBooks. Other members of the Group made do with PDFs. So I was feeling pleased with myself when I opened my slightly stained book, formerly the possession of one Kerry Thomson. That pleasure had pretty much evaporated 50 pages later. It was only corps d’esprit that kept me going: if David and Keith had persevered with the Coetzee book in spite of finding nothing there to interest or please them, surely I could hack another hundred or so pages of underdeveloped twaddle – reminiscence, dream fragments, quirky observations – snapped up by a publisher confident it would sell on the coattails of Trout Fishing in America, published about a decade earlier. That was my state of mind after reading 12 of the book’s 62 pieces.

Things improved at about page 60. It was probably the piercing nostalgia for childhood games in ‘The Ghost Children of Tacoma’ that dispelled my irritated boredom. After that, I was drawn in mainly by pieces capturing (or perhaps re-imagining) moments from his childhood: ‘Blackberry Motorist’, in which he discovers an abandoned car under a high tangle of blackberries; ‘The Post Offices of Eastern Oregon’, a kind of Lake Wobegon horror story; ‘One Afternoon in 1939’, in which he tells a story his little daughter loves to hear, and ends beautifully, ‘I think she uses this story as a Christopher Columbus door to the discovery of her father when he was a child and her contemporary’; ‘A Complete History of German and Japan’, which would be great without the nudging of the terrible title.

After another 50 pages or so, the whimsical observations of life in San Francisco bars, buses, streets, bedrooms and bookshops became the dominant mode, and I lost interest again.

I came across a thoroughgoing web site devoted to all things Brautigan, and found a page giving the place of first publication of these stories. A good number first appeared in Rolling Stone and I’m sure they sat comfortably with the dope and psychedelia of its pages. Mostly they haven’t travelled well. And I haven’t even mentioned the casual sexism.
—–
I wrote that a couple of weeks ago when I’d just read the book. Tonight the Group met, at a very expensive Japanese restaurant, where we managed to have an interesting conversation about the book before ranging off in a hundred other directions. There was genral agreement that the quality was patchy, but my impression is that other people enjoyed the book as a whole much more than I did. One guy had read it in the 70s, so this reading was partly an exercise in nostalgia. The frequent quirky similes, which irritated me, gave delight to others. One comment was that the prose generally left a lot of room for the reader to fill out the picture, in contrast to a lot of recent writing that corrals your response leaving you nowhere to go but where the writer decides. I didn’t understand what he meant until he said that the reading made him think back to his own childhood – and I realised that for me that was a good part of the childhood stories’ the appeal: some of them, at least, triggered a mood of reminiscence, of reflection on my own childhood with a kind of openness to wonder. And of course it was worth ploughing through a fair amount of unaffecting stuff to have that.

Leave a comment

Posted in Book Group, Books

Tagged ,

Summertime, Boyhood and the book group

Posted on 3 November 2009 | 4 comments

J M Koetzee, Summertime (Knopf 2009)
—-, Boyhood (Secker & Warburg 1997)

I wasn’t there when Summertime was chosen for the Book Group1846553180, and might well have argued against it. I’d read some bemused discussion about its mixing of truth and fiction and multiple perspectives that made it sound like the kind of clever writing that disappears up its own whatsit – you know, technically challenging but otherwise as gripping as batshit.

It turned out I loved it, and put in orders at the library for the two previous volumes in Coetzee’s Scenes from Provincial Life series, Boyhood and Youth. It’s autobiographical writing, covering the years when Coetzee was teaching at school and university in Cape Town and writing his first novels. It’s not straightforward autobiography, though. The John Coetzee character is dead, so who knows in what other respects the narrative here differs from the factual record? The book consists mainly of transcripts of recorded conversations between an (almost certainly invented) academic biographer and a handful of people. I have no idea what relationship any of the interviewees have to actual people, but I am persuaded that there’s a genuine project here on Coetzee’s part of imagining how he was seen by a number of key people in his life at that time. ‘Coetzee’ doesn’t exactly emerge covered in glory. In fact, if this had been told in straightforward narrative, even in third person, some of it would have been cringingly embarrassing; and some of it, removed from the realm of hints and suspicions, might have laid the author open to criminal investigation. Coming mainly from women who had, or in one case (if she is to be believed) didn’t have, sexual liaisons with him, it’s funny, and for me at least very engaging. I’m in awe of Coetzee’s feat of creating self-portrait from the point of view of people he’d had unsatisfactory intimate relationships with, most of them much more interested in themselves than in him. It’s an act of great imagination and unsparing self scrutiny.

BoyhoodAt the risk of appearing excessively diligent, I managed to read Boyhood before the Group met. At least on the surface, it’s a much more conventional piece of work, a possibly fictionalised memoir of the author’s childhood told in the third person. (We don’t learn that the boy’s name is John until about the halfway point.) Unlike the unreliable interviewees of Summertime, the narrator appears to be omniscient, though he reports the young John’s understanding of things without signalling to the reader when the boy has got it wrong. This sometimes results in a straightforward irony, as in matters of reproductive physiology. Elsewhere, as the boy struggles to make sense of his relationships to his parents, of the English, the Afrikaans, the Coloureds and the Africans, of South African history, of religion and his own preadolescent stirrings, the narrator leaves us alone with the boy’s painful sense of his own peculiarity. The effect, for me at least, rang very true to what childhood is like, stripped of the gloss of nostalgia and self-preserving sentiment. An unexpected bonus from having read the book out of order was the poignant discovery that the father for whom ‘John’ cares in Summertime was an object of his contempt and intense dislike in Boyhood.

Tonight we discussed Summertime in the book group. There were ten of us, fairly evenly divided between those who loved the book and those for whom it did nothing except perhaps induce sleep. A couple of guys turned up with their books bristling with sticky yellow papers, and argued for particular ways of reading the book. Over melon and prosciutto and then strawberries, the conversation tended to take the form of them what enjoyed the book telling them what didn’t about what had given them pleasure or illumination. One man talked about the theme of embodiment – that the struggle of the character was to find a way of being in the body, of having a voice, and the structure with its multiple filters and distancing devices fitted the theme brilliantly. Another read it as an extended build-up to the passage towards the end where a woman says of the John Coetzee character that people may be interested in him because he’s won the Nobel Prize and is seen as a brilliant writer, but to her he is just a man, and not a very interesting one (though others saw that passage as a bit of almost mechanical rounding out of things). Yet another was interested in it as a portrait of a man whose masculinity was under attack. And so on. It was a terrific evening; the book is perfect for that kind of free-ranging discussion.

4 Comments

Posted in Book Group, Books

Tagged , ,

Landscape of Farewell

Posted on 10 September 2009 | Leave a comment

Alex Miller, Landscape of Farewell (Allen & Unwin 2007)

It pains me to say it, but the best thing about this book as far as I am concerned is that it’s short. I read it in a day.

In the first couple of pages, it seemed to hit wrong note after wrong note. Just two examples, tiny in themselves, but part of a cumulative effect that left me simply not believing in the characters: an elderly German professor, meditating on the notion of honour, remembers that somewhere in the bible, probably in the New Testament, we are told to honour our father and our mother; a young Australian History professor asks that same man what his father did in the war, and when he reacts with shock says it was just a piece of Australian humour. Just what planet do you have to be an academic on not to know the Ten Commandments, or that Germans of a certain age might not like to be asked by complete strangers about their family’s relationship to Nazism.

In spite of encountering some fine prose and being invited to confront difficult realities, I never recovered from the blow my trust received in those first pages. The book’s centrepiece is a powerful account of a meticulously planned massacre of white settlers in North Queensland by Aboriginal men in reprisal for the unwitting violation of a sacred site. Everything else seems to be there to justify this piece of writing. It didn’t work for this little white duck. I was left with an uneasy feeling that some kind of equivalence was being proposed between the Aboriginal action and unnamed actions taken by German operatives during the Second World War. I’m sorry, but my response, in a word, is ‘Ewww!’

My Book Group is to discuss this book at our next meeting. Since the meeting is on the evening of the day I get home from a month in France, I may not make it. If I do, I’ll let you know what other people thought.

Leave a comment

Posted in Book Group, Books

Tagged ,

The train has left the station

Posted on 25 August 2009 | 3 comments

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenin (1873-1877, translated by Rosemary Edmonds 1957, 1978)

anna002 What with cleaning the house, travel, conference, broken computer and jet lag, this has taken me longer to read than it normally would have. It’s wonderful wonderful – funny, confronting, deeply instructive. At times I felt as if Tolstoy wrote the book to explain the society of his time to readers who wouldn’t be born for at least 70 years (the situation of women, the conditions of the peasants …). I knew in advance that this was a book about a woman who throws herself under a train, and expected it to have a bit of A Doll’s House about it. I didn’t expect it to have elements of P G Wodehouse twittiness at one extreme and almost Joycean internal monologue at another. And is there a bit of proto-Wittgenstein (‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent’ ) in Levin’s decision to renounce argument in the last chapter? And how about those similes! (Just in case you’re reading this and haven’t read the book: maybe half a dozen times, at intense moments in the narrative, a character’s mental state is explained through a simile, and each time it’s just brilliant.)

Why didn’t anyone tell me? I may have to set aside time for War and Peace sooner than I’d planned. (I’ve been told I should have read it first, because it’s not as grim. Oh well …)

3 Comments

Posted in Book Group, Books

Tagged , , ,