Annie Ernaux, une femme, a woman’s story and the book club

Posted on 1 Sep 2024 | 12 comments

Annie Ernaux, Une femme (Editions Gallimard 1987)
—–, A Woman’s Story (translated by Tanya Leslie 1991, Fitzcarraldo Editions 2024)

Before the meeting: The press release announcing that Annie Ernaux had won the Nobel Prize in Literature spoke of:

the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.

Every word of that is well chosen. Ernaux revisits her own life story in every book, pitting her ‘personal memory’ against what she finds in old photographs and diary entries, constantly questioning and challenging herself. She makes most other autobiographies / memoirs seem at least a little glib and self-serving.

I read Une femme / A Woman’s Story in both French and English. I could do this because it’s a short book – 60 pages in English, 95 in French. Apart from an opportunity to flex my rusty French, I was motivated by the way the English title departs from the original. Une femme is literally ‘A woman’. Calling it A Woman’s Story is a tiny change, but it significantly shifts the meaning. I wondered if similar shifts happened in the body of the book. (I think they do, and I apologise in advance for the way this blog post gets bogged down in the details of translation – fascinating to me, but maybe not to you!)

A Woman’s Story / Une femme does tell the story of a woman: Ernaux’s mother. But actually there are three stories. There’s Ernaux’s reconstruction of her mother’s life: her youth, her time as a shopkeeper in an impoverished part of France, her marriage, her ageing, and at last her dementia and death. There’s the story of Ernaux’s relationship with her, including the times that she lived with her and her family, and at the very end a brilliantly concise statement of what, after the initial intense grief, her mother’s death meant for her. And there’s the story of writing the book, begun in April 1986, very soon after her mother’s death, and finished in February the following year. This is a book in which une femme writes about une femme, and either could lay claim to the book’s French title.

I love this book. It reaches tendrils into parts of my own life that could do with a bit of ‘courage and clinical acuity’. I find Ernaux’s sheer dogged determination to find truthful words completely engrossing. In one of several moments when she steps in to tell us about the process of writing, she says:

When I speak of her, my first impulse is to ‘freeze’ her in a series of images unrelated to time – ‘she had a violent temper’, ‘she was intense in everything she did’ – and to recall random scenes in which she was present. This brings back only the fantasy woman, the one who has recently appeared in my dreams, alive once more, drifting ageless through a tense world reminiscent of psychological thrillers. I would also like to capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris. The more objective aspect of my writing will probably involve a cross between family history and sociology, reality and fiction [la jointure du familial et du social, du mythe et de l’histoire] … I would like to remain a cut below literature.

(Page 17)

That is to say, don’t look for fine writing here. Look for a serious attempt to see the reality of this woman’s life and how it was interwoven with Ernaux’s own.

My practice of looking at page 77 is a good way of giving you a flavour of the book, and of some of the issues that must have faced Tanya Leslie, the translator.

On page 77 of the French edition, page 51 of the English, it’s the early 1970s. Ernaux’s mother, now a widow, has sold her business and abandoned her life as a shopkeeper. She has moved to Annecy at the other end of France to live with Ernaux and her young family. She isn’t thrilled with her new life: she is no longer a significant part of a community. Her life has shrunk. ‘Now she felt she was a nobody’ / ‘Elle ne se sentait plus rien.’ She was proud of the life Annie had made for herself, but felt uneasy with the middle-class life that now surrounded her.

I ought to say that after my partner’s father died, her widowed mother became a much bigger presence in our lives, after a time spending a couple of nights a week living with us and then moving in full time. We didn’t have the class difference that Ernaux describes, but this page resonates powerfully, and I am in awe of the way the writing reaches for a deeply respectful understanding of the mother’s point of view:

Living with us was like living in a world that welcomed her and rejected her at the same time. One day she said angrily, ‘I don’t think I belong here.’

The transition from the generalised to the particular in those two sentences is typical Ernaux. In the French, it’s slightly different:

C’était vivre à l’intérieur d’un monde qui l’accueillait d’un côté et l’excluait d’un autre. Un jour, avec colère: « Je ne fais pas bien dans le tableau. »

There are three departures from a literal, word for word translation. First, there is no ‘us’: it’s all about the mother. Second, the English has tidied up the second sentence and given it a verb – ‘she said’ – which is not there in the French. There’s a lot of that in the book. The French text sometimes reads like quick notes: no need to spell out who was speaking etc. The English tidies it up, with the effect that what in French feels rough and raw becomes in English a more polished, considered text. And third, what the mother says has been softened: the tentativeness of ‘I don’t think’ is an insertion, where the French just has an angry statement of fact: ‘I don’t belong here.’

The rest of the page, in English:

And so she wouldn’t answer the phone when it rang next to her. If her son-in-law was watching football on television, she would make a point of knocking on the door before entering the living room. She was always asking for work – ‘Well, if there’s nothing to do, I might as well leave then’ – adding with a touch of irony, ‘After all, I’ve got to earn my keep!’ The two of us would argue about her attitude and I blamed her for deliberately humiliating herself. It took me a long time to realise that the feeling of unease my mother experienced in my own house was no different from what I had felt as a teenager when I was introduced to people ‘a cut above us’. (As if only the ‘lower classes’ suffered from inequalities which others choose to ignore.) I also realised that the cultural supremacy my husband and I enjoyed – reading Le Monde, listening to Bach – was distorted by my mother into a form of economic supremacy, based on the exploitation of labour: putting herself in the position of an employee was her way of rebelling.

And in French:

Donc elle ne répondait pas au téléphone quand il sonnait près d’elle, frappait d’une manière ostensible avant de pénétrer dans le salon où son gendre regardait un match à la télé, réclamait sans cesse du travail, « si on ne me donne rien à faire, je n’ai plus qu’a m’en aller» et, en riant à moitié, « il faut bien que je paye ma place!». Nous avions des scènes toutes les deux à propos de cette attitude, je lui reprochais de s’humilier exprès. J’ai mis longtemps à comprendre que ma mère ressentait dans ma propre maison le malaise qui avait été le mien, adolescente, dans les « milieux mieux que nous » (comme s’il n’était donné qu’aux « inférieurs » de souffrir de différences que les autres estiment sans importance). Et qu’en feignant de se considérer comme une employée, elle transformait instinctivement la domination cultureIle, réelle, de ses enfants lisant Le Monde ou écoutant Bach, en une domination économique, imaginaire, de patron à ouvrier: une façon de révolter.

You can see what the translator had to wrestle with. She breaks two long sentences into shorter ones. I can’t tell if this is her way of making the text more elegant, or if it’s a difference in the way the languages work. And domination must have given her nightmares: ‘supremacy’ isn’t a dictionary equivalent, but it’s surely eccentric to describe reading Le Monde as an act of domination. Yet maybe that eccentricity is exactly what Ernaux intended – certainly ‘economic supremacy’ makes less sense than ‘economic domination’.

This is one place where I was happy I had read the French as well as the English. I didn’t understand the bit in brackets about the ‘lower classes’ until I read the French, where, rather than the ‘others’ choosing to ignore inequalities, they consider some différences to be unimportant (and yes, différences translates as ‘differences’, no inequality necessarily implied). Le Monde is just a newspaper to Ernaux and her husband, and Bach is pleasant to listen to. For the mother, they are markers of cultural superiority. A smaller oddity of the translation is that whereas the French insists that the ‘cultural supremacy’ / domination culturelle is real (réelle) and that the ‘economic supremacy’ / domination économique is imaginary (imaginaire), the English lets the word ‘distorted’ carry that distinction. On top of that, leaving out the word instinctivement, it seems to me, makes the mother seem much more calculating, and perhaps makes Ernaux less patronising. I don’t think Ernaux wants to blame her mother, or spare herself, in this way.

After I’d written that last sentence I noticed a moment in the previous paragraph that struck a chord with me. One of the things Ernaux’s mother has to do to conform to the household’s lifestyle is, in English:

‘observing personal hygiene’ (blowing the boys’ noses on a clean handkerchief).

That’s unremarkable, just one more detail in the list of things she has to adapt to. The original French is:

avoir de l’« hygiène » (ne pas moucher les enfants avec son propre mouchoir).

A literal translation of the phrase in brackets is, ‘not to blow the children’s noses with her own handkerchief’. They say a translation can never be complete, but still I allow myself to mourn the loss of this tiny, graphic image of grandparent–grandchild intimacy forgone in the name of upward mobility, and lost to the English text for who knows what reason: perhaps handkerchiefs themselves are so repugnant to modern Anglo sensibilities that sharing them is unspeakable.

After the meeting: In the Book Club, we traditionally discuss two books. This book was paired with Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise (link to come added later). I think the reason for the pairing was that they’re both by Nobel laureates. At the start of our discussion, an astute person pointed out that they both feature shops (the mother’s shop in Ernaux’s book, and two different shops where Gurnah’s protagonist worked). That’s about where the similarities began and ended. Our evening – or at least that part of it not taken up with excellent food and even more excellent conversation about life, physical afflictions, travel plans and so on – was split neatly into two parts.

As you’d expect, my having read the book in both languages was met with eye rolls, but there was general recognition that the difference was substantial between blowing a child’s nose on a clean handkerchief and not blowing it on one’s own handkerchief.

We had a very interesting discussion of a passage where Ernaux describes her aim as to set aside her own emotional memories about her mother (how she felt when she was angry etc) and tell the story from her mother’s point of view, but says that she finds those emotions breaking through anyway. I think we agreed that this, far from being a failure, is one of the things that makes the book so rich.

One person out of the five of us didn’t care for the book. Reading it, she couldn’t see any reason why Annie Ernaux would have been given the Nobel. Those of us who had read a number of her books tried to articulate our reasons for holding her in high esteem, but maybe it’s a matter of taste. What I/we saw as minimalism, for example, she saw as sketchiness.

One person spoke of the way the book had inspired her to try to write about her own childhood, focusing on specifics rather than a broad narrative. The exercise had led to interesting insights into her early life. We had a brief but interesting conversation about how for ‘our generation’ in Australia (we range from a couple of weeks short of 70 to a couple of years beyond 80), as for Annie Ernaux, there was a shift in class – ‘upward mobility’ – that hadn’t been so widespread in previous generations. This shift was due in part to increased access to education – so we did the Australian equivalent of listening to Bach and reading Le Monde.

It might seem that that conversation was of the same order as travel plans and medical reports, but I think it’s a quality of Ernaux’s books – not just this one – that they prompt readers to reflect on their own lives.

Next: Paradise.

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Ali Cobby Eckermann, She Is the Earth

Posted on 20 Aug 2024 | 7 comments

Ali Cobby Eckermann, She Is the Earth: a verse novel (Magabala Books 2023)

Ali Cobby Eckermann is a Yankunytjatjara woman. Her mother and grandmother were taken from their families when very young as part of the government policy. She herself was also taken. Raised by a loving German-heritage family, she found her way back to her First Nations family as an adult, after years of searching.

I first met her poetry in Black Inc’s Best Australian Poems 2009, edited by the late Bob Adamson. In his introduction, Adamson said of her wonderful dramatic monologue ‘Intervention Pay Back’ that it made ‘a new shift in what a poem might say or be’. You can read it in the Cordite Review at this link. Two poems by her, also dramatic monologues, were included in the special Australian issue of the Chicago-based Poetry journal in May 2016. They can be read on the Poetry Foundation website: ‘Black Deaths in Custody’ here and ‘Thunder Raining Poison’ (on the effects of the Maralinga atomic tests on traditional APY lands ) here.

I haven’t read her memoir, Too Afraid to Cry (Ilura Press 2013), or her first verse novel, His Father’s Eyes (OUP 2011). But I can tell you that her second verse novel, Ruby Moonlight (Magabala Books 2012), which deals with the aftermath of massacre, is brilliant (my blog post here). Of her verse I have read the chapbook Kami (Vagabond Books 2010) and Inside My Mother (Giramondo 2015, my blog post here), which are both filled with the intensities of re-uniting with her Yankunytjatjara kin and culture, and the loss of her birth mother soon after finding her.

All of this work has enormous power, and has garnered many awards in Australia and elsewhere.

She Is the Earth, which arrived eight years after her previous book, is a different kind of writing.

It’s described on the title page as a verse novel. There are no characters apart from an unnamed narrator, and no clear events apart from her meandering through an Australian landscape. Any movement is internal. But the book is meant to be read as a single text rather than a collection of short, untitled poems.

At first, I thought it was an imagined story of pre-birth existence, in which the narrator moves towards being born, taking on substance in the world. But that didn’t seem to work and in the end, I gave up on trying to find a narrative, and just went with the flow.

The flow is far from terrible, and the language is never less than gripping, but I don’t know what to say about the book as a whole. I can refer you to better minds than mine.

Here is part of what the judges had to say when the book won the Indigenous Writers’ Prize at the 2024 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards (go to this link for their full comments):

Ali Cobby Eckermann writes in a poetics of self-emergence in which the spectral is made solid through an eloquent economy of language and lifeforms. Each word of this verse novel is deeply considered and rich with meaning, forming as a whole a narrative which is sometimes gentle and sometimes sharp, both beautiful and terrible, and always profound in its exploration of healing, hope and the earth. Each word reads as a gift to the reader.

I recommend Aidan Coleman’s review in The Conversation (at this link). He discusses the book as an example of minimalism, and says interesting things about its recurring images, and even about the developing narrative:

The speaker in these poems is both child and mother, pupil and teacher. References to children and motherhood abound. Initial images of disconnection, anxiety and trauma give way, in later sections, to wholeness and calm.

But the journey is not linear: hope is present from the earliest sections and trauma haunts the closing pages. Healing is presented as an ongoing process that is projected beyond the poem.

[Added later in response to Kim’s comment: Kim on reading Matters had a very different, and more attuned response than mine. You can read her blog post at this link.

Page 77* occurs toward the end – there are 90 pages in the book. Piggybacking on Aidan Coleman’s reading, I can see it as a moment of consolidation, of identity firming up in the landscape:

The pleasure of these lines doesn’t depend on their function in the broader narrative. The owl arrives; the narrator admires it; their eyes meet, and there is a moment of identification with the bird; the ‘masterpiece of art’ of the bird’s plumage somehow transfers so that the narrator is painted. The final couplet pulls all that together.

In the wider scheme, that last couplet resolves more than the preceding eight lines. Up to now, the narrator has been full of yearning and unease. Here she seems to find peace: 

this is my totem 
this is my song

‘Totem’ takes the hint of identification in the comparison of eyes a step further. There’s something about finding a place of belonging, of deep affinity, of being at home in the world. Once that’s found, there’s the possibility of singing, of having one’s own song.

The first word on the next page is ‘resurrected’, and a couple of pages further on my favourite lines in the book:

I am a solo candle
inside a chandelier

this is the wisdom
I need to succeed.

I still can’t say I understand what’s going on at any given moment in this book. But maybe that’s OK.

I wrote this blog post in Gadigal Wangal country, where it is my great joy to live. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land.

* My blogging practice, especially with books of poetry, is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 77.

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Sou Vai Keng’s art of ignorance

Posted on 18 Aug 2024 | Leave a comment

Sou Vai Keng, art of ignorance(Flying Island Books 2023)

art of ignorance is the last of the small but substantial books I took with me on my recent fortnight in North Queensland. Like the others, it’s part of the Flying Island Pocket Poets series.

It’s a bilingual book – that is, each poem appears first in English then in Chinese. As there is no mention of a translator, I assume Sou Vai Keng wrote both versions. She also created the generous number of elegant drawings that intensify the book’s relaxed, contemplative feel.

A note tells us that all the poems were written in mountain areas in Germany and Switzerland between 2014 and 2018. Reading the book felt like sharing the experience of immersion in those mountains with someone with sharp eyes and a seriously playful mind – there’s not a lot of explicit description, things are seen in close-up, sometimes with a touch of surrealism, there are tiny fables and fantasies.

The opening line of the title poem could stand as an eight-word statement of the book’s prevailing mood:

the butterfly does not know the French call it papillon

Page 77* is a good example of how the book works: English on the left, Chinese on the right, with a delicate drawing in the middle (I’m sorry my tech skills aren’t up to showing the drawing without it being sliced in half by the gutter):

The poem starts with sweet whimsy: 

she believes she is a tree

The rest of the first stanza elaborates: to be a tree is to ‘live on blessings from heaven’ in the form of rain and dew, and not to need anything else. A different poem might have mentioned roots and connection with other trees by way of the complex underground tangle of fungi. It might have mentioned birds’ nests, or arboreal animals, or fruits and flowers. But not this one. Here the character, like certain ascetics in the early Christian tradition, and in Chinese tradition as well I think, is opting out of active social life, choosing solitude and passivity in relation to a world she assumes to be benign.

But society intervenes. If she was ‘mean and nasty’, she could vanish, but her version of opting out is ‘a lovely idea’. It’s an idea that, by implication, the passers-by find attractive but not permitted. It’s ‘lunacy’. The poem is a parable of sorts, in which a character indulges for a moment a yearning to be stable and self-sufficient like a tree, only to be drawn back gently to the reality of human connectedness and instability:

out of sympathy and solidarity 
people drag her away from where 
trees stand firm and strong
and from now on she has to 
roam and rove around 
together with other 
rootless nuts

The final word, far from offering a neat resolution of the poem’s conflict, raises more questions. What does it mean to equate humans with nuts? Nuts as opposed to sane, stable beings; nuts as fruits, insubstantial compared to the tree; nuts as bearing the possibility if one day taking root and developing into something more like trees? She is dragged away from her wistful belief, but at the very last moment the poem opens up to the possibility of her fantasy somehow becoming real.

It’s a fine example of the way Sou Vai Veng’s poem’s twist and turn beneath apparent simplicity. I enjoyed the book a lot.

I wrote this blog post in Gadigal Wangal country, as the days are warming up, the worms are fat and busy in the earth, the adolescent magpies are developing their adult colours. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land.

* My blogging practice, especially with books of poetry, is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 77.

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The Essays of Montaigne, progress report 5

Posted on 13 Aug 2024 | 3 comments

Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (Penguin Classics 1991, translated by M. A. Screech)
– part of Book 2 Essay 12, “An apology for Raymond Sebond’

Since my last Montaigne report, I’ve been faithful to my four pages of Montaigne each morning except for two breaks – one for a fortnight and the other just a weekend. The book is too heavy to take on a plane, and travel tends to disrupt routines like this one.

Five weeks ago, I had just started reading the longest essay in the collection, ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’. Today I still have 60 odd pages of that essay to go. As I have only the vaguest idea of who Raymond Sebond was, or in what way Montaigne is attempting an apology, I’ll spare you any attempt at a summary, and just give a couple of snapshots.

Having declared himself to be a sceptic (as opposed to a dogmatist), Montaigne sets out to establish the limits of human reason. He piles on example after example of ancient philosophical versions of God, products of the ‘fierce desire to scan the divine through human eyes’. Arguing that if reason were able to determine the nature of God, then these versions would tend to some kind of agreement. Having established that this isn’t what happened, he (at least in M. A. Screech’s translation) drops his dignified mode of discourse altogether and exclaims:

So much din from so many philosophical brainboxes! Trust in your philosophy now! Boast that you are the one who has found the lucky bean in your festive pudding!

That’s on page 577. I’ve now reached page 625. In those 48 pages he has explored (and deplored) the limitations of reason in understanding even the world of nature or the human mind itself, and has been cheerfully insulting of many ancient writers whom he clearly admires enormously (including describing Plato as sometimes ‘silly’). Now he is going on about how philosophers can’t reach any agreement about the immortality or otherwise of the soul. He has reached the transmigration of souls:

the received opinion … that our souls, when they depart from us, go the rounds from one body to another, from a lion, say, to a horse; from a horse, to a king, ceaselessly driven from one abode to another.

And he’s having quite a lot of fun with it, citing the Epicureans’ objection:

What order could be maintained if the crowds of the dying proved greater than the number being born? The souls turned out of house and home would all be jostling each other, trying to be first to get into their new containers! They also ask how souls would spend their time while waiting for their new lodgings to be got ready.

Having added some lines of Latin poetry, he then goes on:

Others make our souls remain in the body after death, so as to animate the snakes, worms and other creatures which are said to be produced by spontaneous generation in our rotting flesh or even from our ashes.

In short, I’m enjoying this essay as a kind of romp in the history of philosophy. As a settled atheist who thinks my mind is a function of my body, I have a kind of museum-piece interest in a lot of the arguments. I was taught at school that until a certain point in European history people relied on the authority of, I think it was Aristotle, for their knowledge of the world. We knew from Aristotle how many teeth a human had, and only at a certain stage did it occur to people to look in each other’s mouths and count for themselves. As I read this essay, it feels as if I’m seeing that change happen before my very eyes, and it’s riveting. (Mind you, I think the essay itself is going to end with a declaration that Christian revelation is the ultimate source of Truth, but both things can be happening at once.)

To be continued.

This blog post was written on Gadigal-Wangal land, where understandings of the universe beyond Montaigne’s imaginings were developed millennia before the Ancients he discusses. It’s raining again, and my compost bin is alive with worms. I acknowledge the Elders past, present and emerging of the Gadigal and Wangal Nations,.

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The 2024 Francis Webb reading

Posted on 9 Aug 2024 | 1 comment

For some years now, Toby Davidson has been organising an annual reading from the works of Australian poet Francis Webb.

This year it’s on again:

Saturday 31 August
2.00–4.00pm
Chatswood Library
409 Victoria Ave
Chatswood
It’s a free event, but you can go to eventbrite to reserve a place.

Here’s what the Willoughby Council website has to say::

Come along to hear how this ‘poet’s poet’ astonished his own generation and many more since.
You’re invited to join MC Dr Toby Davidson, editor of Webb’s Collected Poems, for an afternoon celebrating the works of North Sydney poet Francis Webb (1925-1973) who spent some of his early years in Willoughby.

This annual gathering sees poets, scholars, community members and representatives from Webb’s former schools St Pius X College and CBHS Lewisham read and discuss their favourite poems by this local prodigy who combined his visionary talent with an eye for social justice. Gwen Harwood once wrote ‘I think Webb is unmatched … wonderful Webb!’

Come along to hear how this ‘poet’s poet’ astonished his own generation and many more since

I am one of the poets, scholars and community members. I’d love to see some of my regular – or even one-off – readers there!

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Rebecca F. Kuang’s Yellowface and the book group

Posted on 8 Aug 2024 | 5 comments

Rebecca F. Kuang, Yellowface (The Borough Press 2023)

Before the meeting: It’s a thing: books – and movies – that deal with questions of authorship. The protagonist of Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World (2014) presents a young male artist as the creator of her sculptures. In Cord Jefferson’s movie American Fiction (2023, based on Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001), which I haven’t read), an African-American novelist writes a trashy novel full of the stereotypes he despises, and presents its author as a fugitive from justice. I won’t do a spoiler on Björn Runge’s movie The Wife (2017, based on a 2003 novel by Meg Wolitzer). In Caledonian Road, Campbell Flynn knocks off a self-help book for men and has a photogenic young actor pose as the author. And that’s just some relatively recent ones that come to mind.

Yellowface is an entertaining addition to that list.

June Hayward, a young white woman whose first novel has done poorly, has an uneasy friendship with Chinese-American Athena Liu, a fabulously successful one-book novelist. When Athena dies suddenly with June as the only witness, June gets hold of her unfinished manuscript, which deals with aspects of Chinese immigrant life in North America. She sets about editing the manuscript and completing the story, telling herself that she is doing it to honour Athena. She gradually comes to think of the novel as primarily her own work and sends it to her agent over her name.

The novel is a publishing sensation and, without actually claiming Chinese heritage, June allows herself to be seen as Chinese. Her Hippie parents had given her ‘Song’ as a middle name, so – she rationalises – it’s not actually lying when she adopts the Chinese-sounding pen name of June Song and lets people make their own assumptions. Anyhow, Athena’s research consisted of extracting stories from other people, so they were already stolen property. And other rationalisations.

Needless to say, things go very wrong. Right up until the last movement I was having a great time. There’s a marvellous scene where June is invited to do a reading to a local Chinese community, where her hosts – including one elderly man whose experiences are similar to those narrated in the novel – are genuinely shocked when they realise she is not Chinese, but remain icily courteous. Social media users are infinitely less restrained.

We see it all from June’s point of view. We sorta-kinda believe the stories she tells herself, and even when she crosses the line into outright deception, we sympathise – until we don’t. June may acknowledge that she hasn’t been completely honest, but she continues to see herself as the victim of unfair attacks until the end of the book. But somewhere along the line, and I imagine the precise point differs from reader to reader, she loses our allegiance. So at the end, where she comes up with a way to redeem herself in the eyes of the publishing and reading world, we are led to believe that it will probably work, but are disgusted by a world where that is the case.

It’s cleverly done. The introduction of some unconvincing horror tropes spoiled the big climax, but I can forgive that.

Page 77* is a nice example of one of the strengths of the book. If you’re going to write a satire of identity politics in the publishing industry, you’d better make your version of the industry seem real. Kuang does that. June’s conversations with her agent and editor, her meeting with the marketing executives, the closing of ranks among authors, followed by the shunning once the scandal becomes too much: all feel real. The description of publication day on page 77 is surely taken from life:

Months become weeks become days, and then the book is out.
Last time, I learned the hard way that for most writers, the day your book goes on sale is a day of abject disappointment. The week beforehand feels like it should be the countdown to something grand, that there will be fanfare and immediate critical acclaim, that your book will skyrocket to the top of all the sales rankings and stay there. But in truth, it’s all a massive letdown. It’s fun to walk into bookstores and see your name on the shelves, that’s true (unless you’re not a major front-list release, and your book is buried in between other titles without so much as a face out, or even worse, not even carried by most stores). But other than that, there’s no immediate feedback. The people who bought the book haven’t had time to finish reading it yet. Most sales happen in preorders, so there’s no real movement on Amazon or Goodreads or any of the other sites you’ve been checking like a maniac the whole month prior.

According to Wikipedia, Rebecca F. Kuang’s first novel, The Poppy War, was a big success, but I am pretty confident that its 22-year-old author had exactly such a ‘day of abject disappointment’.

After the meeting: As usual, our meeting was convivial, and people had a range of responses. I was a bit of an outlier in feeling generally positive about the book, but I wasn’t the only one to derive at least mild enjoyment from the meta stuff: the Asian woman writing in the first person as a white woman pretending to be Asian. Someone wondered out loud how James would have been received if the author was revealed to be white, Helen Demidenko/Darville/Dale and The Hand the Signed the Paper was mentioned. But I don’t think anyone else just enjoyed Yellowface as a light satirical tale.

At least one other chap couldn’t for the life of him see what there was to enjoy. From memory, he was something like, ‘Yes, I get what you’re saying about identity politics and the publishing industry, and maybe even that there’s satire happening, but it’s not funny, there are no real characters, and nothing interesting happens. June, the protagonist, doesn’t develop and we don’t learn anything about her beyond the superficial.’

There were a number of positions in between. The extreme implausibility of the big climactic scene was something we could all agree on. Someone said that the effect staged there would have taken the resources of a Taylor Swift concert to pull off. I couldn’t disagree.

But we had an excellent time together, enjoyed the food and the fleeting visit from a teenager who lives in the flat, shared stories (including some tales of school reunions, of which the outstanding one was the 40th reunion of a former Australian Prime Minister who had been bullied at school and continued to be bullied 40 years later), laughed a lot, had peanut-flavoured ice cream, and didn’t feel at all competitive with (something I found out about recently) the all-male Book Group that has been meeting for 25 years in Melbourne.

I pressed ‘Publish’ for this blog post on Gundungurra land, where the creeks are flowing and the air grows cold as soon as the sun goes down. I read the book on Gadigal Wangal land, and brooded on it in Yidinji country and the many lands I have flown over or driven through in the meantime. I acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for these lands for millennia, and continue to do so.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page of a book or journal that coincides with my age, which currently is 77.

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Anastasia Radievska’s City of the Sun

Posted on 6 Aug 2024 | Leave a comment

Anastasia Radievska, City of the Sun / Місто Сонця (Flying Island Books 2024)

This is Ukrainian-Australian poet and artist Anastasia Radievska’s first book of poems. It’s a rich, complex creation.

There are poems in English and Ukrainian, which means that almost half the book’s contents remain enigmatic and even unpronounceable to readers like me who can’t read Ukrainian script – but beautiful to look at.

The book takes its title from The City of the Sun, an early 17th century philosophical work by Tommaso Campanella, which according to Wikipedia is an important early Utopian work. Campanella’s city is protected by a series of walls, and this book’s sections are named for six of those walls. Each section is introduced with what I assume to be a quote from Campanella describing the images painted on its wall – followed by a double-spread illustration, a semi-abstract painting that mostly relates to that description.

For example, ‘The Fifth Wall’ is introduced by this paragraph:

On the fifth interior they have all the larger animals of the earth, as many in number as would astonish you. We indeed know not the thousandth part of them, for on the exterior wall also a great many of immense size are also portrayed.

For a casual reader like me, this framing has a pleasingly decorative effect, but as with the beautiful characters of the Ukrainian alphabet I expect that a more serious approach would make the reading experience much richer. More serious readers, please speak to us in the comments.

Page 77* includes neither Ukrainian text, quotation from Campanella, nor illustration. It’s ‘instructions for lunchtime’, one of six English poems in the ‘The Fifth Wall’ (which also includes six Ukrainian poems). As you would expect from the section’s introduction above, the poem features some of ‘the larger animals of the earth’.

instructions for lunchtime

always remember
dogs are beautiful for having been engineered 
and well-loved
to engineer us back

the gaze turned inward 
towards something worthy –
finally – of looking back at

and an entire piece of ginger in the mouth
doesn't say otherwise

but thinks of course 
of racing horses
with ginger in the sacrum 
a culinary cruelty 
somebody's paying to have 
done to them

and on a Monday
I would too if hadn't thrown away 
a fortune on tom kha soup 
in little brown bowls 
and a seat by the window

watching the dog wag its tail at the Lime bike 
like it might be relevant to it 
as a conspirator or fellow thing 
to answer our doubts with – 
throw in the river
– price – chase 
at fleece rabbits –
does it not breed, breed, breed?

As with Radievska’s poems generally, part of the pleasure here lies in the poem’s difficulty. It’s not that there’s a puzzle to be deciphered; what the poem asks for is a little patience – understanding will come.

The poem starts with an abstract consideration about dogs, goes to the sensation of ginger in the mouth, then to a memory of cruelty to horses. Only at about the fifteenth line, you get to see some coherence. As advised in the title, it’s a lunch poem: the speaker is having her customary tom kha soup in a Thai eatery. Just as she sees a dog in the street outside the window wagging its tail at a hire bike, she finds she has put a whole piece of ginger into her mouth and her mind wanders to something she has heard about a use of ginger in horse-racing. Her attention returns from the ginger and horses to what she is seeing in the street, and she indulges some fanciful imaginings about the dog and the bike.

That’s the narrative.

There’s a lot else happening. The opening injunction, ‘Always remember…’, is a nice reminder of something we all know: we find dogs beautiful because we have bred (‘engineered’) them to be that way, but they have their own subjectivity and have changed us in turn. It’s not the standard joke about how dogs have made us their servants – bringing them food, throwing balls for them, cleaning up their messes, etc. It something about the dogs’ gaze: meeting a dog’s eyes can make you feel (‘finally’) that you are worth looking at (unlike the often indifferent or critical gaze of other human beings).

The piece of ginger in the mouth introduces a different human–animal relationship – a piece of ‘culinary cruelty’ in the racing industry. I don’t know what ‘ginger in the sacrum’ is and couldn’t find anything in a quick online search, but I’ll trust the poem that it’s a thing.

someone is paying 
to have done to them

The cruelty to horses is a comparatively malevolent, profit-driven parallel to the engineering of dogs.

But this isn’t a poem of indignation or protest:

and on a Monday
I would too

At first glance this seems to be condoning cruelty to racehorses, but it’s worth spending time on the convoluted syntax to realise that it’s actually a little joke, playing perhaps on the ambiguity of ‘them’ in the previous line – callous about the horses, perhaps, but only because not keeping them in mind. A paraphrase might be: ‘When I have to drag myself to work on a Monday, I’d happily pay someone to do something similar to me …’

I would too if hadn’t thrown away
a fortune on tom kha soup

And with this mock-lament at having spent money on soup rather than self-torture, we’re back by the restaurant window, or in the reader’s case, realising for the first time that that’s where we are, watching with idle amusement as a dog confronts a hire bike (Lime bikes are everywhere in my part of town).

The thoughts projected onto the dog pick up on the poem’s opening lines: dogs are bred to please us but they look back and have an effect on us. Can a bike do the same? The answer isn’t as obvious as we’d like. Sure, a bike can be thrown in the river, the cash transaction is front and centre, and (we know, even if the dog doesn’t) that a bike won’t play with a soft toy. But the final line introduces some doubt:

does it not breed, breed, breed?

On the surface, this is a version of the joke about the discarded hire bikes that litter some parts of our cities – they’re breeding like rabbits. The dog asks if that’s literally so. But there are further possibilities: there may be something about capitalism as a creature that has got out of hand, but what strikes me is a suggestion that as artificial intelligence develops, perhaps objects like this bike will, like dogs, develop agency of their own, and if they haven’t already changed the way we see ourselves (with ‘the gaze turned inward’), that may be just a few generations of breeding/engineering away. Dogs and horses are among the ‘larger animals’; the poem asks if bicycles also belong in that category, or will some day.

Not bad for a poem that presents as capturing the idle play of mind during a lunch break.

I finished writing this blog post on Gadigal Wangal country, where the days are growing longer, and some wattle trees are in exuberant flower. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land.

* My blogging practice, especially with books of poetry, is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 77.

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Mark Mahemoff’s Beautiful Flames

Posted on 2 Aug 2024 | 2 comments

Mark Mahemoff, Beautiful Flames (Flying Island Books 2024)

This is another pocket-sized book I took with me on my recent trip to North Queensland. It’s Mark Mahemoff’s sixth book, a modest, user-friendly poetry collection in four sections.

The first section, ‘Chronicles’, mostly includes brief stories taken from life – family events, losses, a school reunion, the process of leaving home. From ‘Leaving’ (page 20):

Because childhood is a country
no one escapes unscathed
we haul it like a suitcase
stuffed full of unwashed clothes.

The second section, ‘Observations’ is what it says on the lid, observations on life’s passing parade. The titles of its poems generally tell you what to expect: ‘Kookaburras’, ‘Night Train’, ‘A Mediation’, ‘Bar Sport’, ‘Professional Development’.

The main pleasure of these first two sections is like what can get from a photograph of something ordinary – not claiming that it’s anything other than ordinary, but inviting us to pay attention to it for a moment. I generally try not to quote the final lines of poems – it’s too much like revealing the punchline of a joke – but the last stanza of ‘Nasturtiums’ (page 53) is too good an example of what I mean. Having described the large patch of these flowers on a lawn ‘somewhere in Haberfield’, and wondered whether they count as ‘weeds, food or flours’, the poem concludes:

But just devour them with your eyes
and you'll find that's enough
when you're walking beside someone
or alone
in sunlight.

That might seem banal but there’s some subtle, even self-effacing complexity. Mahemoff isn’t just talking about his own walk, but gently and elliptically inviting us to go on a walk of our own, to see for ourselves, and the last two line breaks create an unsettling effect. (What if it’s an overcast day, will it be enough then? If not, is it because the flowers look drab without the sun on them? Or is the sunlight a kind of companion?) The poem isn’t tied off in a neat bow.

The third section, ‘Travelogue’, comprises six poems in the form of notes from visits to, respectively, Western Australia, New Zealand, Melbourne, two unnamed places (one of which has a river and the other cactus plants), and Texas. The last-mentioned (‘Dallas in January’, page 84) forms a nice companion piece to Andrew O’Hagan’s essay ‘The American Dream of Lee Harvey Oswald’ in The Atlantic Ocean, which I read a couple of weeks ago: O’Hagan and Mahemoff describe the same museum, and have similar responses.

Page 77* contains two of the nine short poems that make up ‘New Zealand Snaps’.

The first is ‘Lower Shotover’:

Lower Shotover
Cool in the shade.
Singeing in the sun.
'The ozone layer is thinner here,'
she said.
You watch washing flap 
while jets cruise past mountains.
How does one manage 
this surfeit of beauty?
A bee falters 
from flower to flower.

I had to look Lower Shotover up, but even without seeing images online (here are some if you’re interested), I knew from the poem the kind of place it is. And that’s without any of the kind of writing you might find in a tourist brochure or a poem that trusted its readers less.

It’s a thing in some contemporary poetry to plonk one thing down after another – an image, a quote, an aphorism – and call on readers to make their own connections. The poem becomes a collaboration between writer and reader. ‘Lower Shotover’ does a version of that, giving us a two-line observation about the temperature, a snippet of dialogue, images of washing on a line and jets in the sky, an abstract question, an image of a bee. We’re not left entirely to our own devices. We know from the title that the disparate items all refer to a place, but it’s up to us, for example, to imagine who speaks the third line (I think it’s the host at a tourism spot, but you might think it’s a visiting climate scientist), or whose washing flaps in the fifth line. But what is definitely there is the way the poem moves from bodily sensations in the first lines, to human connection in the third and fourth, to attention first to things seen and heard in close-up and then things seen and heard heard far-off . Only then, in the seventh and eight lines, is there an oblique reference to the reason the poem exists: the beauty of the place. But instead of trying to describe the beauty, the poem in effect confesses itself inadequate to the task. The image of the bee in the last two lines brings a nice meta touch – the poem itself has been faltering from one thing to another.

The second poem, unlike most of the poems in this book has a strict form. Each of its stanzas consists of 17 syllables – 5 in the first and third lines and 7 in the middle line. Yes, they are haiku, as we have come to understand that form in the English-speaking world. 

Fox Glacier
Mountains demand awe.
We whisper in their presence, 
take snapshots, and leave.

It rains ceaselessly.
A single set of headlights
burns through the distance.

Haiku, like sonnets, have a turn. In these examples, the turn has a visual quality: in the first, our gaze rotates (literally turns!) from the mountains to the tourists; in the second, there’s a change of focus from wide to narrow. I’m not sure that the rules of haiku, strictly speaking, allow words like ‘I’ and ‘we’, but the point of this ‘we’ here is that the human presence is tiny, and temporary, barely there at all.

Having written that, I have just read in Mark Mahemoff’s bio at the back of the book that his poetry

is chiefly concerned with framing, reimagining and memorialising commonplace moments, primarily in an urban setting.

Which makes me notice one more thing about these haiku: the Fox Glacier is about as far from an ‘urban setting’ as you can get, yet both haiku have industrial elements – snapshots and headlights – that make their (momentarily puny) demands on our attention.

I finished writing this blog post on Gadigal Wangal country, where I’ve noticed leaf-curling spiders waiting patiently in their rain-spangled webs. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently 77.

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Me and Ray Lawler

Posted on 29 Jul 2024 | 9 comments

I met Ray Lawler once. I was working for Currency Press when he came to visit, probably to talk to our managing editor, theatre critic Katharine Brisbane, about his play The Man Who Shot the Albatross. I have only the vaguest memory of him. I was probably introduced, then sat quietly in the corner or went back to my work in the adjoining room. He was soft-spoken and unassuming, a far cry from some of the more flamboyant visitors to our offices.

But my most memorable encounter with him happened much earlier, when I saw his most famous play, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.

If Wikipedia gives correct dates for the New South Wales and Queensland tour, I saw the play in early 1956. It was in Innisfail’s Johnstone Shire Hall (now the Cassowary Coast Shire Hall), and I was almost exactly nine years old. My parents used to take me to every piece of live theatre that came to town – amateur productions by the Repertory Societies of Cairns and Innisfail, and the Cairns and Atherton Choral Societies. They included an annual Gilbert and Sullivan, Franz Lehar operettas, Die Fledermaus, The White Horse Inn, Harvey (source of the James Stewart movie of the same name), Arsenic and Old Lace, and a comedy about ants called Under the Sycamore Tree. The auditorium was a vast dance hall with unraked seats, so eye lines weren’t all that good. Sometimes the performers’ voices had to compete with the rustling of fans as audience members dealt with the tropical heat. It was all magic to me.

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, a play in which a couple of men who cut cane in North Queensland come to Melbourne to spend the off-season with their regular summer girlfriends, took things to a different level. This was my first experience of professional theatre, and the actors commanded the stage in a way that was beyond magic.

Two moments stand out clearly in my memory. (‘Clearly’ doesn’t mean ‘accurately’. I haven’t checked the text.)

When Pearl, the new woman, says to Barney, ‘I didn’t know you had a family’, he says, ‘Oh, I haven’t got a family, just kids in three states.’ This got a big laugh from the audience, and from me, in a classic case of a joke working at different levels for adults and children: I thought Barney had uttered a delightful absurdity. Later, I overheard my father telling someone that he knew I knew ‘the facts of life’ because I had understood the jokes in The Doll. That may have been the beginning of my quest to discover what those facts were. A further follow-up: at the end of that year, or the following year, when invited to choose a book as a prize on the school’s Speech Night, I picked a paperback of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, and was astonished when the teacher told me it was inappropriate for my age.

The second moment comes at the play’s climax. The men have given the women a kewpie doll each year, and the dolls have come to represent the enduring nature of their relationships. At the climax (spoiler alert), Roo, enraged by the way this summer has played out, throws the vase of dolls to the ground, smashing it and their relationships to pieces. I remember vividly how the huge bulk of a man hurled the object into the centre of the stage with tremendous physical and emotional force. I was definitely on the same page as everyone else in that moment of shock and grief. It may well be that whenever I’ve gone to the theatre since then I’ve been hoping to re-experience such a moment.

One other thing. It’s often said that this play brought Australian language and experience to the stage. (Not true, of course: but Louis Esson’s The Time Is Not Yet Ripe (1912) and Betty Roland’s A Touch of Silk (1928) were pretty much forgotten by 1956.) But Melbourne was as foreign to me then as, say, New York. What the play did for me was acknowledge the existence of North Queensland and the sugar industry. It was the first time I saw the realities of my place reflected back to me in a piece of art.

As a small child I would sometimes bring smoko to the paddock for my father and a gang of cane-cutters. I remember thinking the play had it wrong – cane-cutters in my experience were generally Italian or Maltese, not Anglo like Roo and Barney. But there was something else that I couldn’t have articulated at the time. Roo and Barney as cane-cutters are seen by the character Olive as models of heroic masculinity, flying down to Melbourne like eagles out of the sun, and I’m pretty sure there’s a description somewhere of the actual work of cutting cane as noble. I have no idea if Ray Lawler actually knew any cane-cutters, or if he’d ever been to a canefield. But, to me as a nine-year-old, this version of the work of the cane-fields offered a different perspective, an outsider’s view. It allowed me to see my world in a different light.

I’m immensely grateful for that gift, and though it would have been beyond awkward to try to say any of that to the man I met in the 1980s, I hope he knew something of the impact his work had on so many lives like mine. He died on Saturday, aged 103.

This post was written in Gadigal Wangal land, where the days are getting gradually longer, and the wind is bitter. I acknowledge the Elders past present and emerging who have care for this country for millennia, including during at least one major ice age.

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J. G Ballard’s Crash

Posted on 25 Jul 2024 | 13 comments

J. G. Ballard, Crash (© 1973, Vintage Books 2005)

tl;dr: Yuk!

Having seen Crash on Tim Walters’ list of must-read science fiction / fantasy novels about 15 years ago, I got hold of a copy via Bookmooch, and it has been sitting on my To Be Read shelf ever since. I knew a David Cronenberg movie was based on it, and that it was about car accident survivors who share a sexual fetish for cars and car crashes.

Not an attractive proposition. But it’s a slim paperback, so I overrode my reluctance and packed it to read on the plane on my recent trip.

The Vintage Books edition has an Introduction written by J. G. Ballard in 1995, which includes this:

Throughout Crash I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society. As such the novel has a political role quite apart from its sexual content, but I would still like to think that Crash is the first pornographic novel based on technology.

If pornography is something that feels you leaving just a bit less than fully human, he succeeds. If it’s something that makes you feel sexy, not so much. I’m a long way from being a connoisseur of porn, but the book this reminded me of was the one in the podcast My Dad Wrote a Porno. It has the same obsession with genitalia and sex-related bodily fluids – which in this book means pretty much all bodily fluids – but it’s not funny, even unintentionally. The patriarchal world view is overwhelming, and the sex is somehow tangled up with, or smeared or squirted on, car dashboards, crumpled metal, and terribly scarred bodies. The book is not for the faint-hearted, and I include myself in that category. In case that makes it sound titillating, I should add that it’s not for the easily ignored either: it goes on and on with unerotic sex scenes that are described in clinical, mechanical language (I won’t inflict examples on you) but still manage to be anatomically/mechanically confusing..

It’s not that I was clutching my pearls. I read the whole thing in the hope that it would deliver on the ‘total metaphor for man’s life’ etc. There’s a whiff of a promise that it would shed light on our society’s widespread fascination with car crashes, or the frisson produced by famous road deaths (Jane Mansfield, Albert Camus and James Dean are mentioned). But no more than a whiff. The opening paragraph foreshadows a near escape by ‘the film actress Elizabeth Taylor’ (whose Cleopatra appeared in the year the book was published), but she pretty much remains an abstraction.

Suffice to say I’m not rushing out to see the movie.

I wrote this blog post on the unceded land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation, where the earth has been reshaped over the last century to accommodate the needs of motor vehicles. I acknowledge their Elders past and present, with gratitude for their care of the land over millennia, and hope that the rest of us can learn from them in time.

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