Tag Archives: David Malouf

Alejandro Zambra’s Chilean Poet and the book group

Posted on 7 February 2023 | 1 comment

Aalejandro Zandro, Chilean Poet: A novel, translated by Megan McDowell (Granta 2022)

Before the meeting: I enjoyed this novel enormously. I expect people who know Chile, and especially the Chilean poetry scene, would enjoy it even more.

In the freezing Chilean winter of 1991, teenagers Carla and Gonzalo curl up night after night under a magnificent red poncho watching television in her mother’s house and manage to do ‘everything except for the famous, the sacred, the much feared and longed-for penetration’. Just as the nights are beginning to warm up and remove the excuse for the poncho, they get an opportunity, but the famous etc event turns out to be less than absolutely pleasurable, at least for Carla.

The story goes on from there. In my innocence, I was surprised by the turns of events, so I won’t go into detail, except to say that Gonzalo as a teenager is an aspiring poet, and we get to read one of the atrocious sonnets he writes for Carla; and some years later Gonzalo becomes stepfather to Carla’s son Vicente.

The second half of the book begins with an echo of the opening of the first half. Vicente, now a teenage aspiring poet (probably more promising than Gonzalo), is in explicit sexual action with Pru, an older woman visiting Chile from the USA, using alarmingly explicit English he has picked up from porn.

It may be a spoiler, but I’ll risk it: the relationship between the two poets Gonzalo and Vicente is the heart of the book and its narrative spring. Carla and Pru, and Vicente’s natural father León, are vivid secondary characters. Chile, in particular Santiago, and most specifically the Chilean poetry community, provide the charming, engrossing, at times hilarious, always lively milieu.

Pru is visiting Santiago on her first major journalistic assignment. Her editor wants a ‘human interest’ story about stray dogs, but she persuades him to let her explore the poetry scene, and Alejandro Zambra has a lot of fun describing her interviews with poets.

I have no idea if poets and poetry have the prominent role in Chilean life that these poets claim. One of them says that for Chileans the Nobel Prize in Literature is as significant as the World Cup, and it’s a matter of huge pride that Chilean poets have won it twice: Gabriela Mistral (1945) and Pablo Neruda (1971). Not that any of the living poets care too much for Neruda or Mistral – the living are much more interesting and important, and their mutual competition, championing and denigration make Australia’s so-called poetry wars look … well, I was going to say tame, but really it makes them look normal.

I’ve read two other novels with poet protagonists recently: Edwina Preston’s Bad Art Mother and Niall Williams’s A History of the Rain. Unlike the former, we believe that the characters in Chilean Poet actually write poetry of varying quality; unlike the latter, these poets are part of a thriving scene rather than slightly deranged, isolated mystics. One of the joys of the book is the way their alertness to language features strongly in all their relationships. The account of Vicente’s wooing of Pru, for example, is full of the joys and perils of communicating across a language barrier.

There’s a terrific scene in the first part, when Gonzalo is a hands-on father to Vicente. He breaks one of Clara’s rules by allowing Vicente to sit in the front seat of the car – and accidentally reveals his crime to her. She explodes, using the word betrayal, which sets him off:

‘I’m so sorry for taking care of Vicente every single day,’ said Gonzalo.
‘It’s times like these it’s clear you’re not his father,’ retorted Carla.
Gonzalo looked at her with astonishment and contempt. He grabbed his hair with his left hand, and with his right he tore up an abundant clump of grass.
‘I’m a much better father than that lame-ass, ugly, mediocre motherfucking pusillanimous sack of balls who stuck his dick in you.’

(Page 75)

Rather than continue with the fight, the narrative stops there, and the poet-mind kicks in. Gonzalo spends two pages mentally critiquing his own sentence. It ‘felt a bit ungrammatical and was a pretty stupid outburst, but …’ He ponders the accuracy of ‘ugly’, acknowledges that pusillanimous doesn’t apply, and wonders if he used that word ‘for the mere pleasure of saying a word that León would have to look up in a dictionary’. He quite likes sack of balls because it’s not only hurtful but original. And before pouring himself a double whisky and stomping off to his writing-room he indulges in this final piece of poetic analysis:

The truly damning part was definitely that grand finale, who stuck his dick in you, which brought jealousy to the forefront and insinuated that Carla was some kind of whore. Still, the accusation held a trace of childishness, as if Gonzalo had only just found out how babies are made.

(Page 76)

Megan McDowell’s translation is terrific. At many moments, the narrative turns on the use of language, as in the passage I’ve just discussed. At a key moment, when Vicente is quite young, he and Gonzalo discuss the Spanish word for ‘stepfather’ – padrastro. Gonzalo is reluctant to take it on because astro at the end of a word has negative connotations. McDowell does a brilliant job of putting this into English as a completely plausible conversation for a poet to have with a young boy, and manages not to feel as if she is winking at English readers over the characters’ heads.

The meeting: After an hour of convivial catch-up and organising of food, we settled down to the book. Unusually, the Chooser explained how he had made his choice: he started out thinking of something by Annie Ernaux, in deference to the Nobel Prize committee, but as none of her books were easily available he sought advice at from his local bookseller, who suggested this – which turned out, he said, to be a perfect summer read. One chap who usually doesn’t say much, and usually speaks softly, immediately grabbed the floor and disagreed vehemently: not an ideal summer read at all; for that he’d recommend Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series; this author was too intent on displaying his knowledge of poetry and poets to keep his narrative alive and engaging.

And it was on!

No one, it turned out, had done the work of checking which poets in the book are real and which imagined. A number of us, including a late-comer who had missed the opening salvo, just loved the bit where Pru interviews a range of poets and leaves the main narrative on hold. There’s a disorderly poet’s party that got a lot of love.

The bits that might have been irritating, where the author breaks the fourth wall to comment on his decisions, were pretty universally enjoyed. We were sorry to see the end of Pru, the gringa journalist over whose shoulder we get to know the poetry scene. One chap felt that Carla, Vicente’s mother, was a bit two-dimensional. No one contradicted him, but no one seemed to mind terribly. One man said he’d read the book very soon after last meeting and could barely remember it, which he took to mean it is pretty forgettable – though he did remember that it lacked any strong sense of place. Not everyone agreed – perhaps not the physical place, but we felt that there was a strong feel for the cultural milieu, and the food.

One man brought a bottle of pisco and made pisco sours (of which many are drunk in the book), plus a sour-without-pisco for the non-drinker. He also brought a selection of holiday photos from Santiago and Valparaiso, including one of Pablo Neruda’s home, now a museum.

Favourite passages about poetry were read and enjoyed all over again, including one in which a poet says he doesn’t know whether what he writes is any good, but he writes because of what it achieves for his own mind. (That definitely rang a bell for me and my own adventures in rhyme).

As usual, the conversation dissipated, though this time it stayed roughly on topic: there were anecdotes about meeting famous poets and other famous people (including two stories about David Malouf that cemented his status in my mind as a spectacularly kind person), ruminations on the comparative respect in which poets are held in Chile and Australia, an invitation for personal reflections about step-parent experiences that went unaccepted because none of us had been there, stories of young men getting excited when they realised they were talking to an older man who reads books, some excellent ribaldry. Unrelated: George Pell’s faulty theology, Lydia Thorpe’s stand in relation to the Voice, the complexity of some post-Holocaust Jewish family histories.

Towards the end of the evening, the man who had set the ball rolling with vehement negativity announced with equal vehemence that he realised he had actually enjoyed the book. We took this as vindication of the group as a way of taking the solitary act of reading into a shared experience.

After the meeting: Someone mentioned having seen a YouTube conversation with Alejandro Zambra and Megan McDowell. I dutifully watched it during my grandson’s afternoon sleep the next day. It’s full of good things about the translator–novelist relationship – if you watch it and are strapped for time, you could start at the 10 minute mark and skip all the charming introductory stuff. I particularly love their discussion (from 13’00” to 19’05”) of the Spanish word for ‘stepfather’, padrastro, including Zambra’s comment that as a poet Gonzalo is fighting with that word. Poets are always fighting with words, intensely, he says, ‘which is beautiful’.

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Starting the Iliad

Posted on 1 November 2021 | 11 comments

Homer, The Iliad (Translated by Robert Fagles, with notes and an introduction by Bernard Knox, ©1990, Penguin 1998)

It’s more than a week since I finished reading The Prelude, and I’m already missing reading a couple of pages from a classic text first thing every morning. I’ve decided to take on Homer’s Iliad, which definitely fits the definition of a classic as a book that you can’t read for the first time. My copy of Robert Fagles’s translation was a Christmas gift a while back and has been begging for attention from my sagging To Be Read shelf ever since.

This is my first crack at the actual Iliad, but I have read many fragments, versions and variations of it. Here’s a list of the ones I remember:

  • Kingsley’s Heroes, the Argonauts Club and the Queensland School Readers – from my parents, the ABC and primary school respectively – all told stories of Achilles, and almost certainly some parts of the Iliad
  • The Classics Illustrated comic some time in the 1950s
  • Book 2 of The Aeneid, Virgil’s account of the fall of Troy, which I studied in high school
  • Alice Oswald’s Memorial, subtitled ‘an excavation of The Iliad‘, which presents only the deaths from Homer’s poem (here’s a link to my blog post)
  • The 28 minute version in Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics (link to the podcast)
  • Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls, which tells the story from the point of view of a captured woman (link to my blog post)
  • David Malouf’s Ransom, which I’m pretty sure I haven’t read, but I feel as if I know it intimately from reading and hearing about it.

I made a start on it this morning. So far I’ve read the translator’s note and I’m part way through the learned Introduction by Bernard Knox. Getting excited already. I’ll report back in a month.

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Journal Blitz 6

Posted on 11 December 2020 | 1 comment

I subscribe to a number of literary journals as a way of supporting Australian cultural workers – specifically writers. I generally read the journals I subscribe to, plus occasional others: the prospect of this reading tends to loom as an obligation as the pile of unread journals grows, but the reading itself dependably turns out to be a joyful and invigorating experience. Then I blog, in the hope of communicating some of that pleasure, and possibly encouraging some of my readers to back these crucial enterprises. So here goes, with three journals that were published, um, some time ago …

Jacinda Woodhead (editor), Overland 236 (Spring 2019)

I mistakenly wrote that Overland 235 was the last issue of the journal edited by Jacinda Woodhead. This one is actually her second last, and the new editors have brought out their third issue as I’m writing.

Overland 236 kicks off with two excellent articles. (Links are to the full items on the Overland web site.) In ‘After hours‘ Leigh Hopkinson, herself a former stripper, writes about the death of a stripper in a Melbourne club (Overland tend to be Melbourne-centred), and uses the case as a springboard to describe the terrible, and worsening, conditions of women who work in the adult entertainment industry. In ‘The great acceleration‘ Jeff Sparrow traces the history by which cars came to be established as the dominant, ‘natural’ mode of transport in the USA. Did you know, for instance, that before the automobile industry made a concerted effort to introduce the concept of a jaywalker, the term jaydriver was in common use, meaning someone who drove a car in the city with cloddish disregard of the danger for pedestrians, especially children?

There are more articles later, of which two stand out for me. But then, face to face by Joanna Horton is a wonderful account of the joys – and difficulties – of door-knocking for the Greens. Tina Ngata’s Toppling Cook puts a strong case, from an Aotearoa/New Zealand perspective, against celebrating the 250th anniversary of James Cook’s voyages of exploration.

Guest artist Sam Wallman has three spreads of sequential art (what some might call comics) that are brilliantly accessible lessons in recent English history, specifically the Sun boycott in the Liverpool region, the Annual Durham Miners’ Gala and the Grenfell Tower fire.

There are 13 pages of interesting and challenging poetry. My North Queensland heart leads me to single out ‘Toad‘ by Damen O’Brien, which begins:

Toad in the garden, which is the same as
a snake in Eden or a crack in a mirror.

and includes the gorgeously evocative line:

Inexhaustible armies of malevolence

Of the especially rich batch of short stories, the ones that most struck me are Jack Vening’s ‘Don’t tell me‘, a runner-up in the Victoria University Short Story Prize, and Allanah Hunt’s ‘Running to home‘, winner of the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers. No spoilers from me on either of them.

Elizabeth McMahon (editor), Southerly Vol 78 No 3 2018: Violence (2019)

Southerly, after 80 years of publication Australia’s second-oldest literary journal*, is in trouble. In March this year the editors published a plea for help on Facebook, and in October the website went down with a promise of reappearing soon – we’re still waiting. The editors, who aren’t paid for their work, have set up a crowdfunding platform at https://gum.co/wYZRP in the hope of prolonging the journal’s life. As a reader I’m still back in 2019, and though the editors were already desperately chasing funds then, the journal itself came out, behind schedule but in rude good health. There has been at least one issue since.

Like the Overland, this Southerly starts very strongly, with three poems: jenni nixon’s ‘knock on the door at 6am’ is an impressionistic narrative that earns the right to its epigraph from Gandhi, ‘poverty is the worst form of violence’; Brenda Saunders’ ‘Boab tree, Derby’ comes at the famous ‘Prison Tree’ in a number of choral voices (click here if you want to know about the tree); Andy Jackson’s ‘To name what we feel’ enacts the ambivalence of working on a phone-in service for violent men.

And it goes on from there, compellingly. There’s memoir (including Brenda Downing’s writerly ‘Letter to the Editor’ in which she arrives at a huge ethical dilemma when she tracks down the man who sexual abused her when she was very young), essay (including David Brooks’ ‘A Roo Battue’, on the continuing mass slaughter of kangaroos, which raises the spectre of extinction for some species), short stories (including Winnie Dunn’s brilliant ‘Wanting to be White’, a drama set in a Western Sydney Starbucks). I usually skip the scholarly articles, but Fiona Morrison’s ‘The Antiphonal Time of Violence in Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife‘ was a way to revisit the pleasures of a great night in the theatre. Likewise I tend to skip or skim the reviews, but Rachael Versace’s review of David Malouf’s An Open Book, by quoting generously and incisively, opened the door to revisiting the pleasures of that book.

There is one moment of eerie prescience in this Southerly. Josephine Clarke’s ‘transnational’ laments the way technology, while enabling connection over great distances, still leaves us bodily unconnected. Covid–19 wasn’t even a blip on the horizon when it was published, yet there’s this:

what if I take ill? who will come back /
come home / come through 

and hold my hand      my real hand
where the creases run labyrinthine across my palm

– my palm where your newborn head once rested
and was safe

*The oldest is a children’s literary journal, The School Magazine, published since 1915 by the NSW Department of Education.

Andy Jackson and Jennifer Harrison (editors), Australian Poetry Journal Volume 9, Number 2: DIS– (2019)

Andy Jackson and Jennifer Harrison, guest editors of this issue of Australian Poetry Journal, are both poets and advocates for writers with self-identified disability/ies. They have collected more than 60 poems related to disability, aiming, as Andy’s foreword puts it:

… for a diversity of voices, in many senses of that word – bodily experience, cultural background, age, gender, philosophy, aesthetic. We also strongly prioritised poems of lived experience, including the voices of carers, friends, lovers – poems of solidarity and care that recognise that distancing ourselves from disability is impossible.

By arranging the poems, mostly, in reverse alphabetical order of poem title, the editors have added an extra stroke of disorder: each poem stands on its own, spatially disconnected from others on the same subject or by the same author, defying easy categorisation. The effect is indeed a marvellous ‘diversity of voices’, all dealing one way or another with disability. As Jennifer Harrison says in her Foreword:

What poetry gives us is birdsong alongside activism, the outside word alongside the internal world of emotions, hope shadowing despair … Poetry has a unique ability to see behind doors previously closed …

In this journal, many poets opens doors to whole worlds of difference.

A number of them are poets whose work I already know. Fiona Wright, who has written a lot about her own struggles, speaks to someone who may be a version of her younger self in ‘poem for jessie’ (‘I want you to remember / how to want’). David Brooks makes translation look easy with a version of Baudelaire’s ‘The Albatross’, which in this context becomes a powerful metaphor for physical disability. Samuel Wagan Watson’s ‘DISlocation’ captures a raw moment of betrayal (‘I may have challenges but my sensory perception is still sharp’).

Mal McKimmie’s ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at Blackbirds’ is wonderful. It begins:

There are no 'blackbirds with disabilities' –
_____________all blackbirds can fly.
There are only 'blackbirds with disabilities' – 
_____________all blackbirds will one day fall from the sky.

E A Gleeson, whose bio tells us that she ‘cares for her sister who lives with significant physical and intellectual challenges’ gives us a graphic childhood vignette in ‘The First Seizure’. Oliver Mills, in ‘De-Coding’, speaks clearly and succinctly, and wittily, about the difficulty of being understood when you have cerebral palsy, as he does: :

When I'm out of breath
Or having a lazy laugh
I make the sound of a creaking door

I could go on quoting. There’s plenty here for anyone interested in poetry. There are drawings, as well as poems, by people with mental illness diagnoses and people with learning difficulties. Just reading the poets’ bios is a revelation of the myriad ways the body and mind can differ from the typical. Even if you’re (temporarily) non-disabled and not interested in poetry, these pages may expand your world immensely. They have mine.

As a bonus, up the back, half a dozen pages are given over to Rachael Mead, winner of the 2019 Australian Poetry/Nature, Art & Habitat Residency. She lived in a village in the Taleggio Valley in northern Italy in June 2019, and three of the poems she write during her stay there are reproduced here. What with one thing and another, it’s glorious to read her poem, ‘Pacing myself’, about waking in that beautiful place, so far beyond the reach of most of us just now.

Speaking of journals, there’s some good news on the horizon concerning Heat, which ceased publication in 2011, after 39 issues in two series over 15 years. According to the Giramondo web site, ‘The third series of Heat, in a new design and format, will be published from 2022.’

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Two weeks on Yunbenun

Posted on 28 July 2019 | 10 comments

The Emerging Artist and I have fled the winter in Sydney (which some people are beginning to call Eora, but I’ll wait to see on whose say-so before doing that myself) to spend two weeks on Yunbenun (aka Magnetic Island) in the tropics.

In the taxi to the ferry, the EA asked our friendly driver if he’d lived in Townsville long. ‘I’ve lived here all my life,’ he said. ‘It’s my land.’ He is a Wulgurukaba man. Let me start this blog post by acknowledging the Wulgurukaba and Bindal peoples, both with substantial claims to be traditional owners of the land where I have been holidaying, and made welcome.

We’ve been here a little over a week now, with a little less than a week to go. We’ve both been laid low with viral infections, the kind that come with grandparenting territory. We’re less sick now than when we arrived, but still coughing and spluttering quite a bit. Still, we’ve managed to go on some reasonably demanding walks – classified as moderate, but entailing fairly prolonged uphill climbs and including some spectacular views of the Coral Sea. We’ve been entertained by legion kookaburras, curlews, koels and currawongs, and admired the cuteness of rock wallabies. Koalas are yet to make themselves visible to us, but we’re confident that will happen. Our Air BnB host is friendly and very interesting – a marine scientist who is a rich source of information about the sea around us. He was able to reassure me that I needn’t have scrambled for the shore when a stingray came swimming straight for me when I ventured into the water.

Our usual experience is to arrive at a holiday destination and discover that a really interesting festival or event has just finished. This time is an exception. Quite without planning, our visit coincided with the North Australian Festival of Arts, and we spent the weekend on the mainland to participate. We were too crook on Saturday night to use our tickets to Tom Gleeson’s show in the May Wirth (a tent in the Queen’s Garden, named for one of Australia’s outstanding circus performers), but we walked the length of the Strand a number of times, taking in Strand Ephemera 2019, billed as North Queensland’s sculpture festival.

As in Sydney’s Sculpture by the Sea, the sculptures are displayed in a stunning natural environment, and have tremendous appeal for whole families. Here are some photos taken by the Emerging Artist: a weaving and ceramics tableau by the students at St Patrick’s College for girls (a video of the making of it here); an archipelago of caged gnomes painted variously in Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander colours, LGBTQI symbols, etc; a car tyre pierced by the handles of hundreds of souvenir teaspoons; 200 coconuts, some of them sprouting, painted with Pacific designs; a string bag representative of the traditional people of Western Cape York, but huge and made from industrial materials; coral sculpted in sugar, beautiful and also emblematic of environmental disaster; bamboo pipes played gently by the wind; what one boy called a pillow fort and I thought of as a defended place to dream. And much more that we didn’t photograph.

  • St Patrick’s College, Plenty More (detail)
  • St Patrick’s College, Plenty More (detail)
  • Jan Hynes, Incarcerate! (detail)
  • Karl de Waal, I’ve been everywhere Man
  • Toni Rogers, The Language, the Wind and the Tides (detail)
  • Ngethn O’thawvl Wedlvn, Thawvl
  • Ken and Julia Yonetani, Sweet Barrier Reef (detail)
  • Ken and Julia Yonetani, Sweet Barrier Reef (detail)
  • Graeme Buckley, Lynn Scott-Cumming and Rhonda Stevens, Aeolian Messenger
  • Dominique and Samuel Chen, Dream Palisade

And this afternoon, at the Mary Who? Bookshop, David Malouf read to an audience of abut 50 people. It’s hard to imagine that the Tom Gleeson show that we’d missed could have given as much joy as this. David is a brilliant reader of his own poetry, and framed his selection beautifully today. He spoke of three stages: the experience that a poem draws on; the writing of the poem, which often happens many years after the experience; and, if the poet lives long enough, reading the poems many years after it was written. He began with The Year of the Foxes, a poem about a childhood memory written in 1965, and ended with Seven Last Words of the Emperor Hadrian, which has to be one of the most cheerful death-anticipating poems ever written (which made wet stuff run down my cheeks anyhow). When the Emerging Artist and I arrived, we commented that the age of the people gathered in the shop was generally well over 60: it was sweet, therefore, that David Malouf several times felt he had to explain a reference because most of his audience wouldn’t be old enough to recognise it. (He’s 85!)

Now for another week of health-restoring warmth, about which I may or may not blog.

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End of year lists

Posted on 31 December 2018 | 5 comments

The Emerging Artist and I are in Victoria for the New Year, but we’re squeezing in (or should that be squeezing out?) our end-of-year lists.

Best Movies:

We allowed ourselves to pick five each. The Emerging Artist went first, and then I chose five that weren’t on her list. The last one I picked was Juliet, Naked – and it got in on the grounds that there was no comedy on the combined list. There probably should have been more.

  • Juliet, Naked (Jesse Peretz 2018)
  • 13th (Ava DuVernay 2016)
  • 22 July (Paul Greengrass 2018)
  • Jirga (Benjamin Gilmour 2018)
  • BlacKKKlansman (Spike Lee 2018)
  • Vice (Adam McKay 2018)
  • One Day (Zsófia Szilágyi 2018))
  • Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Martin McDonagh 2017)
  • The Other Side of Everything (Mila Turajlic 2017)
  • Gurrumul (Paul Damien Williams 2017)

Theatre:

It’s hard to single out best theatre for this year. Belvoir Street had a good year, beginning with My Name is Jimi and ending with The Dance of Death, with treasures in between. And we spent six weeks in London, where we managed to go to some excellent theatre. We get to name one each from London and Sydney for the year. We both chose Matthew Lopez’ The Inheritance Part 2 at the Old Vic in London (we were exhausted on the evening we’d booked for Part 1, but Part 2 was stunning as a stand-alone event). It’s about Gay men in the age of AIDS. We booked because Vanessa Redgrave was in it, but though she was terrific she was by no means the main attraction.

Back home, the EA chose debbie tucker green’s one-hander, random, directed by Leticia Cáceres, with a bravura performance by Zahra Newman. I chose Calamity Jane, directed by Richard Carroll, which was great fun – Virginia Gay’s raucous, swaggering gaucheness made Doris Day’s Jane look like a maiden aunt.

Books:

Rather than a list of our Best Books, I’ve decided to follow a meme that originated at the vlog memento mori and came to me by way of Lisa at ANZ LitLovers LitBlog.

1) What’s the longest book I read this year and the book that took me the longest to finish?

Emerging Artist: Victoria: The Queen by Julia Baird (Random House 2016) was both. It was a Christmas present, whose size meant it was awkward to read in bed, so I was reluctant to take it on, and then the detail, though fascinating, needed breaks to digest. It turned out to be an excellent complement to the British TV series, which we watched soon after I finished reading the book, and a welcome gift after all.

Me: The longest book was probably Gerald Murnane’s Collected Short Fiction (Giramondo 2018).

The one that took longest was either Jennifer Maiden’s Selected Poems 1967–2018 (Quemar Press 2018) or Judith Beveridge’s Sun Music: New and Selected Poems (Giramondo 2018): they both include decades of work by fine poets, and I enjoyed them both immensely.

2) What book did I read in 2018 that was outside of my comfort zone?

EA: Deep Time Dreaming by Billy Griffiths (Black Inc 2018) is a fascinating book about palaeontology and archaeology in Australia in relation to actual Aboriginal people, but there’s a lot of technical scientific writing that is not my favourite recreational fare.

Me: Gerald Murnane’s Collected Short Fiction again. I had gleaned something of his characteristic style some time ago and completely failed to grasp how wonderful it is. I wouldn’t have opened the book if it hadn’t been picked for the Book Group. Reading it was a joy-filled revelation.

3) How many books did I re-read in 2018?

EA: None.

Me: Just one, Jane Austen’s Emma. I loved it all over again.

5) What book did I read for the first time in 2018 that I look forward to re-reading in the future?

EA: Change the question to, ‘What writer did I read in 2018 that I look forward to re-reading?’ My answer is Geoff Dyer. I first read him years ago, and rediscovered him this year when I found The Colour of Memory on our bookshelves. I’ve just bought Out of Sheer Rage, his book about himself and D H Lawrence.

Me: There are so many, but I’ll pick David Malouf’s An Open Book (UQP 2018). I will dip into so many of the books of poetry I read this year, but I think this is the one I’m most likely to reread in its entirety. That and Jennifer Maiden’s Appalachian Fall (Quemar 2017) 

6) What’s my favourite short story or novella that I read in 2018?

EA avoids short stories and didn’t read any novellas.

Me: Given that Gerald Murnane is in a class of his own, I’ll name Suneeta Peres da Costa, Saudade (Giramondo 2018), which is a coming of age story set in the context of the Angolan war of liberation. (I was astonished to hear Ms Peres da Costa say at a reading that she has never been to Angola, as the place comes alive in this short book.)

7) Mass appeal: which book would I recommend to a wide variety of readers?

EA: Free Food for Millionaires (Head of Zeus 2018) by Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko: it’s hard to think who wouldn’t love it.

Me: I know many people these days think of poetry as an esoteric art to be avoided by everyone except poets and cryptographers. All the same, I recommend Eileen Chong’s Rainforest (Pitt Street Poetry 2018) to anyone interested in being alive and human.

8) Specialised appeal: which book did I like but would be hesitant to recommend to just anyone?

EA: I loved Elisabeth Åsbrink, 1947: When Now Begins, translated into English by Fiona Graham (2016, translation 2017). If you are interested in history, then the way this interweaves so many themes as they manifested in 1947 will fascinate you and illuminate our times.

Me: I’m rarely confident that books I’ve enjoyed will appeal to ‘just anyone’, so I’ve got lots to choose from, but bypassing all the titles I’ve mentioned so far, I nominate China Miéville, The Scar (Del Rey Books 2002), which, to quote my blog post about it, ‘includes, not necessarily in order of importance, vampir (sic) bureaucrats, cactus people, probability mining (I won’t try to explain), fabulously bloody sea battles, a sweetly tragic love story (not of the romantic variety), a vast crack in the universe, and a charming account of the process of learning to read.’

And that’s it for 2018. Have a great New Year, reader!

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David Malouf’s An Open Book

Posted on 28 November 2018 | 4 comments

David Malouf, An Open Book (UQP 2018)

Speaking a couple of years ago at a seminar on Poetry and the Sacred at the Catholic University, David Malouf offered a definition of prayer as paying close attention. If one accepts that definition, then An Open Book is full of prayer: attention to the environment, to relationships, to small children playing, to tiny moments, to his own fleeting thoughts and feelings. There’s also close attention to language, in particular the kind of attention that translation demands.

This means that for the reader the book offers many things that make you go hmmm, or ah, and sometimes oof! 

The title, An Open Book, could look like a publisher’s little joke: that is, it’s a kind of label – ‘This is a book.’ But there’s more to it: it makes you think  the sentence, ‘My life is an open book,’ and the book does follow the trajectory of a life’. It pretty much begins with a series entitled ‘Kinderszenen’, German for ‘Scenes from childhood’, and ends with a number of poems about old age and the anticipation of death. It follows in the poet’s footsteps from the Brisbane of his childhood, to London, the village of Campagnatico in Tuscany, Myrtle Street in Chippendale, and back to Brisbane.

One of the childhood poems, ‘The Open Book’, suggests pretty strongly that while the book may be in some way autobiographical, it’s not offering us a writer stripped bare:

My mother could read me, or so she claimed,
like a book.  Fair warning! But I
too was a reader and knew that books

like houses have their secrets. Under the words
even of plain speakers,
echo and pre-echo.

There’s plenty of echo and pre-echo under the mostly plain words of these poems.

I mostly want to talk about translation, but first, just because I love them, I have to quote these lines from one of the ‘death’ poems, ‘Before or After’:

At something more
than fourscore, till the big

surprise kicks in and leaves me
breathless, most
surprises, though not unwelcome,

are small. It is the small,
the muted inconsequential,
at this point that comes closest
to real.

About translation. Malouf’s first collection, Bicycle and other poems (UQP 1970) included a number of translations. I can’t quote from memory, but I remember the pleasure I found in the freshness of  his versions of Horace: one of them mentions the early light glinting off milk churns put out beside a country road, and to me it felt that rural Queensland was being linked to classical Rome; and his translation of ‘carpe diem’ is a small miracle: 

Today's a rose.
Let it blaze in your lapel.

There’s a Horace translation in this book, and a Dante, and the one I want to talk about, ‘La Belle Hélène’, after ‘Sonnet pour Hélène’ by the 16th century French poet Pierre de Ronsard. This is not exactly an obscure poem: I found a website that gives the original French and at least ten translations (here, if you’re interested).

A basic question about any translation is: why? Why this poem? Why include it in a collection of your own poems? Is it a technical exercise? is the translated poem one you love and simply want your readers to know about? Or does it provide a medium for you to express something of your own?

The first thing to say is that ‘La Belle Hélène’ is actually a translation – in contrast to W B Yeats’s also-lovely ‘When You Are Old‘, which takes the original poem as a starting point for a slightly different argument addressed to his own love.

Look at the first lines.

The original:

Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle,
Assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant,
Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous émerveillant :
Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j'étais belle.

Very close literal translation):

When you will be well old, in the evening, by the candle,
Sitting near the fire, dividing and spinning
You will say, singing my verses, being filled with wonder:
Ronsard celebrated me in the time when I was beautiful

David Malouf:

Long years from now, in the fireside hush of midnight,
as you muse by candlelight, you'll pause at your needle
-work and say, 'Years back, when I was a girl,
an impossible sweet sixteen, Ronsard, the poet

you know, once sang my praises, called me 'belle'.

Malouf doesn’t stay close to the words of the original, or use full rhymes, but nor does he hijack the poem for his own purposes. There is evidence everywhere that he has paid close, loving, deeply respectful attention to the original. All the elements are there: the projection well into the future, the fire, the candle, the work, the rhyme scheme (though modernised away from full rhymes). Instead of singing the poet’s verses, the future person drops his name, a rough equivalent in these days when no one sits around a fire singing poetry. Malouf moves the hour of the imagined future scene from the evening to midnight, and introduces the idea of a hush, but the effect is to intensify what’s in the original rather than change it. Interestingly, he does specify the girl’s age, ‘sweet sixteen’, which has a decidedly 20th century feel, and can be seen as part of the project of rescuing the poem from a museum existence.

But she’s not just ‘sweet sixteen’, she’s ‘an impossible sweet sixteen’. And that sounds a note not in the original: one feels that Ronsard is about the same age as the woman he addresses, but this ‘impossible’ comes from a much older person. It seems to be asking how anyone could ever be that young?

And it turns out that the poet as an older person has been subtly woven into the texture of the poem. Where Ronsard’s speaker refers to his future self abstractly as a boneless ghost (fantôme sans os), Malouf’s is more specifically imagined – ‘innocuous’ and ‘esteemed’. It’s slight, but enough to be the difference between a young person and an old one imagining themselves as no longer alive. So the ground has been prepared for when he calls her ‘child’ in the second last line. And that word does a lot of work.

Ronsard’s original is unambiguously a poem of seduction. Malouf’s is something else. Ronsard says the older woman will be ‘regrettant mon amour et votre fier dédain‘ (‘regretting my love and your proud disdain’). There is no reference to Malouf’s speaker’s love:

You'll regret at last what youth 
and youthful pride disdained.

Ronsard’s final injunction – ‘n’attendez à demain; /Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie‘ (‘don’t wait until tomorrow; / Gather today the roses of life’) – is a lover pressing his case. In Malouf’s version, having diverged incrementally from the original, it becomes something else, a warning from age to youth:

child, relent, choose life! Today is a rose
that withers. Pluck it now, and boldly. Beware tomorrow.

Only the single word, ‘relent’, carries a hint that seduction might be on the agenda. Which would be just a bit creepy. But having now read the poem a number of times, I find that element recedes into the shadows, and the poem becomes an impassioned, generous, considered cry to the young not to waste their youth.

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SWF: My Day 3

Posted on 21 May 2016 | 3 comments

Circumstances made me miss Friday morning at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. The Emerging Artist, however, got two sessions under her belt.

10:00–11:00 am: Sri Lanka: This Divided Island. She said this was marvellous. Samanth Subramanian, an Indian Tamil journalist, spoke with Michael Williams from Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre. Quite apart from its main thrust, an account of the recent three-decade war and its aftermath, the conversation helped her think about the ethics of her own current art project, which involves many people making small terracottta hearts.

11:30 am – 12:30 pm: Jonathan Franzen: My Reading Life. The main things she reported was that he enjoyed the famous German sense of humour, and was influenced by a number of women writers.

At 3 o’clock the Emerging Artist went to Migration: A World Without Borders? and pretty much fell in love with Aleksandar Hemon. She bought two of his books, even overcoming her vehement dislike of zombie stories to buy his novel, The Making of Zombie Wars.

At 4:30 she went to hear Starlee Kine: From This American Life to Mystery Show and discovered a new podcast to subscribe to, dealing in ‘mysteries that can’t be solved by Google’.

Meanwhile, apart from sitting and chatting over lunch, my Festival day began at 3 with The New Australian Poetry. Unlike previously, this year’s poetry events are in largish rooms and mostly aren’t free. This one was a book launch – of an issue of the US journal Poetry devoted to Australian poets.

As we queued in the scorching afternoon sun (yes, scorching in mid- May), we were regaled by the booming opinions of a youngish man who had evidently been all over the world (perhaps his time in the US accounted for his LOUDNESS) and wanted the world to know that poetry is held in lower esteem in Australia than anywhere else.

The room was filled to capacity. After brief remarks from Don Share, soft-spoken editor of Poetry, and Robert Adamson, guest editor of this issue, we were read to by Ali Cobby Eckermann, Lionel Fogarty, Lisa Gorton, Michael Farrell and Robbie Coburn. In response to an audience request, some of them read poems by other people that appear in the anthology. Then two poets – Susan Fealy and Petra White – were drafted from the audience. Taking a cue from David Malouf the previous day, I asked if any of them would read the same poem a second time – I named Lionel Fogarty and he obliged.

There were two questions, both from the same person, one for each of the Indigenous poets. Don Share made that’s-a-wrap noises, and we were gathering up our stuff when Lionel Fogarty stepped up to his mic again and called on us to break out of our individualism and think in terms of community.

Ali Cobby Eckermann took a turn at the mic and told us, shockingly, that when she was at an international gathering of poets recently some Syrians had asked her how come she writes war poetry. They recognised in her poetry about Aboriginal Australia striking similarities to their own war-torn lives, and she realised that, however deep and strong the denial, the Australian war of dispossession is still going on.

Don Share rose beautifully to the occasion: ‘The difficulty we have in understanding a poem,’ he said, ‘is the same as the difficulty in hearing another person.’

I went home to deal with various animals, then rejoined the EA in the evening for Magda Szubanski and George Megalogenis: Rated PG (Polish and Greek), an entertaining conversation between two children of immigrants.

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SWF: My Day 2

Posted on 20 May 2016 | 5 comments

Thursday morning in Marrickville the air was grey with smoke – someone was burning off. At the Sydney Writers’ Festival at Walsh Bay, the air was clearer but there was still plenty of grey, this time on people’s heads and faces, though the festival goers aren’t as homogeneously 60+ as on weekdays in previous years.

If I had to name a theme common to the five sessions I attended today, I’d say it was intergenerational respect and co-operation.

At 10 o’clock Zelda la Grange discussed her memoir Good Morning, Mr Mandela, steered deftly by veteran interlocutor David Leser.

As an ‘apolitical’ young Afrikaner who absolutely supported apartheid, la Grange accidentally found herself working for President Nelson Mandela, the man she had seen as her people’s greatest enemy. She told us of her first meeting with him in her early 20s: where she had expected hostility she not only  found a warm handclasp and interested questions about her life, but he spoke to her in Aftikaans, the language of the people who had gaoled him for decades. She burst into tears. He put his free hand in her shoulder and said, ‘Relax, you’re overreacting.’

Over the following weeks and then years, she heard more of his story, shed more tears and felt the bubble of white privilege that had kept her world narrow dissolving. She became his private secretary and, as he grew old and frail, his protector. She said he worked on her heart every day. She called him by the Swahili (I think) word for granddad. He rechristened her Zeldiña.

Since his death in 2013, she treasures their great non-romantic love, and sees it as her mission to keep alive his legacy of respect in public life.

Then on to a spectacular queue for Climate: Knowledge and Hope featuring scientists Tim Flannery and Peter Doherty, wrangled by Bianca Nogrady.

Flannery’s most recent book, Atmosphere of Hope, was written last August, when it seemed Paris would lead to good things. It did produce an agreement, but things are less obviously hopeful now, with news of record temperature increases. Doherty’s is The Knowledge Wars, which I gleaned is about current attacks on scientific knowledge on a number of fronts, beginning perhaps with climate change but extending to areas like vaccination.

Faced with the dire reality of climate change, these two men of a certain age remain ebullient. When Nogrady ventured that hope has a passivity to it – we just shrug our shoulders and hope for the best – Flannery apologised to his mainly older audience and said that many young people, scientists and activists, are less prone to despair than their elders, but see the situation as a challenge which they set about vigorously meeting. Doherty echoed that view.

My other heartening take-home from this session was that where The Australian and the rest of the denialist and reactionary Murdoch press have been very influential on the rest of the media, that dominance is now being challenged by The Conversation, a much more reality based publication which presents the work of academics online in readable form. He urged us to subscribe at theconversation.com/au.

1:30-2:30 pm: NSW Premier’s Awards: Meet the Writers: I was initially disappointed that only two of the NSWPLA winners were on the podium with ‘senior judge’ Ross Grayson Bell, but when the two are Magda Szubanski and Alice Pung less is more.

Both women are daughters of immigrant fathers who experienced major traumas in their home countries – Poland under the Nazis and Cambodia under Pol Pot respectively. Both have written about their fathers, Magda in Reckoning, her award-winner, and Alice in her earlier memoir My Father’s Daughter. Though Alice spoke a little about her award-winner, Laurinda, most of the conversation revolved around their points of similarity. In both their families, the traumatic experiences of the parents weren’t passed over in silence to protect the children, but were told, often enough, as funny stories or adventures. Alice in particular now finds herself wondering about the wisdom of advice from teachers not to tell students too much detail about the terrible ordeals described in her books.

Neither writer referred to our current government’s cruelty to asylum seekers and refugees or to Peter Dutton’s recent disparagement of some as ‘illiterate and innumerate’. They didn’t have to. This was pointedly so when someone asked Alice Pung how her mother responded to her memoir: ‘My mother’s illiterate. She said she’ll wait for the movie.’

3:00-4:00 pm: Paul Muldoon talked with David Malouf for a wonderfully loose, lucid hour, about the way a poem is a process of discovery for the poet, and for the reader. Apparently distracted by the sounds outside the cavernous room, Muldoon drew our attention to the rhythmic creaking of the wharf’s posts and a distant pneumatic drill then, as if drawing his ideas from these ambient sounds, talked about the dual activity of the poet – construction worker/ maker/ makar, and explorer/ troubadour/ trovatore. The two poets, like the two scientists and the two daughters earlier, had a wonderful rapport. Each time the conversation threatened to slacken, David Malouf (who had introduced himself here as a reader) asked the poet if he would read to us. The poems he chose for us were ‘Hedgehog‘, written when he was a teenager, and ‘Pelt’ from his most recent book. Interestingly, far from patronising his sixteen-year-old self, Paul Muldoon was in awe of him.

4:30-5:30 pm: Tammy and Lesley Williams, Murri mother and daughter who collaborated on the book Not Just Black and White, were brilliant. Lesley led a successful campaign to reclaim wages withheld by the Queensland government from Aboriginal workers last century. She wanted to write a book about it but was daunted by the task as she’d left school at the end of primary school, and also had trouble believing anyone would be interested. Tammy, then a teenager in school, now a successful barrister and Queensland’s Commissioner for Children, helped with both problems. She taped her mother’s spoken account and transcribed it. Just as importantly, she constantly reassured her mother that the story was worth telling. This book tells their story in the form of a conversation.

In question time a young woman thanked the writers because, even though her grandmother had received only $4000 in acknowledgement of a lifetime’s work, the payment made a huge difference.

I had a personal connection too, but not one I wanted to inflict on that gathering. As a white child in north Queensland in the 1950s I was completely unaware that most Aboriginal people were living ‘under the Act’. I don’t know if the Aboriginal couple who worked for my parents, the man with my father on the farm and the woman with my mother a day a week in the house, were subject to the same covert exploitation as Lesley Williams discovered. My ignorance  is given extra point as their names were Charlie and Pearl Williams (always Mr and Mrs Williams to us kids). I’m ashamed, but hugely grateful to these Williamses for their generosity and valour in putting the story out here for all of us. I’ve bought the book.

End of my Festival day. [Wipes sweat from brow]

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David Malouf’s First Place

Posted on 21 January 2016 | Leave a comment

David Malouf, A First Place (Knopf 2014)

dmfpThere isn’t just one Australian story. Even as a child I had my doubts about grand unifying versions of what it is to be Australian. Even though my family were white and English-speaking, and enjoyed meat pies and Vegemite as much as anyone, we lived in coastal north Queensland, where Dorothea Mackellar’s ‘land of sweeping plains’ might as well have been on another planet. The much talked-about monoculture of Australia before the 1950s may have been a reality in Sydney, but my grandfather, a magistrate in Queensland in the 30s and 40s, learned Italian in order to deal with the people who appeared before him and my sugar-farmer father played poker with a Greek and a Korean, and placed bets with a Chinese SP bookie.

David Malouf hails from Brisbane, which we in Innisfail referred to as ‘Down South’ or even ‘The Big Smoke’, but the essays and occasional writings collected in  A First Place provide eloquent solace to my inner tropical child. This is from ‘A First Place’, a lecture from 1984:

We have tended, when thinking as ‘Australians’, to turn away from difference, even to assume that difference does not exist, and fix our attention on what is common to us; to assume that some general quality of Australianness exists, a national identity that derives from our history in the place and from the place itself. But Australians have had different histories. The states have produces very different social forms, different political forms as well, and so far as landscape and climate are concerned, Australia is not one place

Following his own advice Malouf writes beautifully in that lecture and throughout the book about his home city of Brisbane, about Queensland architecture, both domestic and public, about his culturally diverse family (‘My Multicultural Life’, also written in 1984, and ‘As Happy as This’ written for a collection of family memoirs a decade later, are joys to read), about the Bicentenary, Anzac Day, the Republican movement. He is always urbane, humane, nuanced, always drawing on a deep and broad knowledge of Western art and literature.

In 1988 he wrote a piece on the Bicentenary for the Age, ‘Putting Ourselves on the Map’. Like many of us, he was uneasy at the fanfare and pomp, but he was able to get past bald political catch-cries, writing that

this celebration of a great event goes against the grain with me because it goes against the grain of our real experience as Australians. Anniversaries are not what this particular enterprise is about. The anniversaries of the real events that made us, the millions of small ones – axe blows, blows with the pick and crowbar, childbirths, first cries, the squeak of chalk across a blackboard – do not need celebrating, or are celebrated already, by repetition each day. This particular event [the arrival of the ‘First Fleet’] is too ambiguous – and its repetition in fancy dress is ridiculous. It is too blackened with sorrow for some of us … and with shame for the rest: too loaded with despair, courage, the slow triumph of surviving and creating, for its re-enactment to be any more than a tawdry farce.

The longest piece in the book at 110 pages is ‘A Spirit of Play’, which comprises Malouf’s 1998 Boyer Lectures, a masterly meditation on ‘The Making of Australian Consciousness’. In these essays Malouf brings a poet’s sensibility to a subject we’re used to hearing about from journalistsor politicians. He draws on deep knowledge of history, poetry, architecture, to tell a story that is at once his own and persuasively ours.

It’s interesting to think about who that ‘ours’ refers to: it shifts around, sometimes seeming to exclude, for example, Aboriginal people, or Communists, or committed homophobes, but these exclusions aren’t rigid. Roughly speaking, ‘we’ are people who participate in mainstream Australian culture. What Malouf has to say about an audience is relevant:

An audience comes together of its own volition, unlike a rally, for example, where there is always some element of compulsion, if only a moral one of commitment or duty. An audience simply appears, as the 700 000 or so people do who turn out each year for the gay Mardi Gras procession in Sydney. They have no reason for being there other than interest, curiosity, pleasure, and they are an audience, not simply a crowd; an audience that has been created and shaped by the society it draws from, and in which the faculty of watching, listening and judging has been to an extraordinary degree sharpened.

He has more to say about that particular audience, but I think it’s fair to say that his general notion of an audience relates in some way to the ‘us’ he talks about in these essays: ‘we’ are the people who of our own volition do our watching, listening and judging in this society, and also our creating, living and relating to one another. Both the people who wrapped themselves in the flag at Cronulla ten years ago (nearly a decade after these lectures were given) and the people attacked by them are part of ‘us’, though each might not be part of some accounts of who ‘we’ are. Malouf certainly doesn’t deny the existence of brutality and narrowness in our history: his account of the 1950s as on the one hand ‘comfortable, secure, cosy’ and on the other mean-spirited, defensive, embattled ‘against life itself’ is brilliant, and then followed up by his compassionate account of the series of blows that closed down the open-hearted confidence of the start of the century – which I will leave you to read. (It turns out the original lectures are still online at the ABC’s website. The description of the 50s is in the fifth lecture, ‘The Orphan in the Pacific‘.)

There’s a lot more. These essays were written over three decades for vastly different readers and audiences. They build on each other, occasionally almost contradict each other, rarely outright repeat each other. They don’t demand that the reader agree with them, but ask us to engage thoughtfully, and often to have another look at received ways of seeing the world. Taken together, they are a beautiful example of what Malouf calls ‘the real work of culture’:

This business of making accessible the richness of the world we are in, of bringing density to ordinary, day-to-day living in a place, is the real work of culture. It is a matter for the most part of enriching our consciousness – in both senses of that word: increasing our awareness of what exists around us, making it register on our senses in the most vivid way, but also of taking all that into our consciousness and of giving it a second life there so that we possess the world we inhabit imaginatively as well as in fact.

As a bookish child in north Queensland, I felt the absence of that work, perhaps not acutely but as a dragging background ache. Seeing  cane-cutters on stage in The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll when I was nine was a revelation, though even then the North was a long way from the real, felt action of the play. David Malouf’s essays are a wonderful gift to that child, who is still here, hoping to have density brought to his life in that place.

I read A First Place in August last year. I think I’ve delayed blogging about it because I didn’t want to be finished with it. It’s been sitting on my desk, like a talisman. It’s been good to go back to it to write this. I will go back to it again.

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2015 favourites

Posted on 7 January 2016 | 15 comments

Each December we – that is, me and the Emerging Artist formerly known as the Art Student – compile a list of our favourite books and films of the year. We’ve been caught this year with minimal internet coverage (and maximal sun, sand, beach, bush and rain, especially rain) so we’re running a bit late.

Three movies made both our top five lists:

ToY

Testament of Youth (directed by James Kent), from Vera Brittain’s memoir, screenplay by Juliette Towhidi: A World War One film in the year when idealising  Gallipoli  was big in the headlines, it doesn’t focus on the battlefield but on the effects of the war on the combatants and their families and loved ones. It makes a powerful pacifist argument.

Meet the Patels (Geeta Pavel, Ravi Patel 2014): We saw this at the Sydney Film Festival. It’s unlikely to get a theatrical release, but it’s a very funny documentary about match-making among first generation Americans of Indian heritage. It’s really about intergenerational relationships. The EA says it’s a must-see for every parent.

hnmm

He Named Me Malala (Davis Guggenheim 2015): Another documentary, this one could be seen as hagiographic, but Malala Yousafzai is a remarkable young woman. I loved the way she spoke with the absolutism of teenagehood from a position of influence to tell the president of Nigeria to do his job and ensure the safety of the girls abducted by Boko Haram.

The Emerging Artist’s other two:

selma

Selma (Ava DuVernay 2015): A flawed movie, but it conveyed the experience of ordinary people taking part in Civil Rights marches. The leadership of the march across the bridge was particularly interesting: how to think strategically, resisting the push to be seen to take ‘decisive action’. The filmmakers weren’t given permission to use Martin Luther King Jr’s actual speeches, but the ones written for the film caught his style brilliantly.

 The Dressmaker (Jocelyn Moorhouse 2015): The humour, the flamboyance, the over-the-topness of it. Kate Winslett was marvellous. So was Hugo Weaving. In fact, there were no weak performances.

My other two:

 Ex Machina (Alex Garland 2015): The thing that stays in my mind is the image of the artificially intelligent creations – a fabulous effect where we see the cogs and wheels whirring away inside what is otherwise a human head. The story worked very well too.

ffm

Far from Men (David Oelhoffen 2014): Apart from enjoying the easy irony that there were only men in most of the film (should it have been called Far from Other Men?), I was transfixed by this slow, beautiful film of a pied noir (Algeria-born white Frenchman) escorting an Arab prisoner through the austerely photogenic Atlas Mountains.

The EA’s top five books:

The EA’s reading year was bookended by titles that brought home the harshness of the oppression of gay men and lesbians, even in times and places where one might think it was comparatively mild. Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer deals with novelist E M Forster’s agonising life in the closet, and the part of Magda Szubanski’s memoir, Reckoning, that tells the story of her coming out is genuinely harrowing.

But those books are in addition to her actual top five. Here are those, with her comments:

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Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: This is a bracing book that everyone needs to read. We all know about climate change in a general way, and we know that powerful vested interests fight attempts to respond effectively. Naomi Klein gives detail and challenges us not to look away.

ioc

Jean Michel Guenassia,  The Incorrigible Optimists Club: A novel about Soviet bloc refugees in Paris at the time of the Algerian War of Independence, this includes a coming of age story.

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Biff Ward, In My Mother’s Hands: Excellent memoir of a 50s childhood. Buff Ward’s father was prominent left wing historian Russel Ward, so the domestic story includes elements of red-baiting. But the real power of the story is in her mother’s intensifying irrationality and the family’s attempts to deal with it.

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Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City: The birth of liberalism without the US-style individualism. This is not a travel book. It’s very accessible, thoroughly researched history that compelled at least one person to read big chunks aloud to her partner. The history of Europe looks different after reading this .

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Vivien Johnson, Streets of Papunya: Vivien Johnson has been involved with the Western Desert artists for decades. An earlier book told the story of the great Papunya Tula artists. This book tells the story of Papunya itself, especially after many of those artists left. Art is still being made there, by a new generation, mostly women.

My top five books:

I read at least 12 books in 2015 that did what you always hope a book will do: delighted, excited or enlightened me, changed the way I felt and/or thought about the world. I whittled the list down to five by selecting only books that touched my life in explicit ways. Here they are i order of reading:

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John Cornwell, The Dark Box (2014): A history of the rite of Confession in the Catholic Church. The confessional was a big part of my childhood. I’ve dined out on a story of going to confession with Brisbane’s Archbishop Duhig when I was about thirteen. He asked in a booming voice that I was sure could be heard by everyone in the cathedral outside, ‘Would these sins of impurity have been alone or with others?’ Cornwall’s book felt like a very personal unpicking of that moment and the whole cloth it was spun from.

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Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014). What can I say? I’m white. In laying out the way a word or phrase between friends or strangers can disrupt day-to-day life, so that the ugly history of racism makes itself painfully present, and linking those moments to the public humiliations of Serena Williams and the violent deaths of so many young African-American men, the book is a tremendously generous gift. It and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me share this generosity of spirit.

dmfp

David Malouf, A First Place (2015): I haven’t blogged yet about this collection of David Malouf’s essays. It feels personal to me because David lectured me at university, but also because he is a Queenslander, and these essays explore what that means. Even though he is from what we in north Queensland used to call ‘Down South’, these essays fill a void I felt as a child – I was a big reader, but the world I read about in books only ever reflected the physical world I lived in as an exotic place.

talking-to-my-country

Stan Grant, Talking to My Country (2016): I was privileged to read this ahead of publication. Stan Grant is a distinguished Australian TV journalist. This book, part memoir, part essay, gives a vivid account of growing up Aboriginal. It includes the most powerful account of a ‘mental breakdown’ I have ever read, not as a medicalised episode of ‘depression’, but as the result of generations of pain inflicted by colonisation refusing to stay at bay.

The-Fox-Petition

Jennifer Maiden, The Fox Petition (2015): I love this book in all sorts of ways. I love the way the image of the fox recurs – a literal fox, a fox as in Japanese folk lore, Whig politician Charles Fox. I love the chatty voice, and Jennifer Maiden’s trademark linebreaks after the first word of a sentence. I love the argumentativeness. I love the playful, almost silly, resuscitation of the distinguished dead to confront those who claim to be inspired by them. I love the way Jennifer Maiden makes poetry from the television news the way some poets do from flowers.

And now, on to 2016! I’m already about eight books behind in my blogging.

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