Tag Archives: Nicholson Baker

End of Year List 4: Books

Posted on 31 Dec 2023 | 2 comments

From the Emerging Artist, in her own words (links to the LibraryThing pages or, at her request, to my blog post when there is one):

Non fiction

Claire O’Rourke, Together We Can (Allen & Unwin 2022)
I read this after hearing Claire talk on a Sydney Writers’ Festival panel on how to have hope in relation to climate change. It’s a good read, mixing specific examples of everyday Australians tackling what’s happening with broader theory on how to bring about change. It does fulfil its title, giving a real sense that “together we can”.

Debra Dank, We Come With This Place (Echo Publishing 2022)
We watched this book win four awards and heard Deborah Dank’s speech at NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2023. We immediately went out to buy it. The writing is beautiful, a slow evocation of country and its connection to the author, while filled with story. I think it’s the must read of the year.

Fintan O’Toole, We Don’t Know Ourselves, a personal history of Ireland since 1958 (Head of Zeus 2021)
Hearing Fintan on the ABC’s Conversations, I immediately placed an order and waited patiently for four months for it to arrive. I’m glad I did. It’s written in short chapters in chronological order, but often picking up themes from chapter to chapter. It’s funny while documenting the appalling state of Ireland from 1958 through personal history, statistics and other sources. The incredible poverty (no running water in homes or sewage, no education for 80% of the population past primary school) made worse by the stranglehold of the Church and corruption in keeping poverty in place and the changes brought about by the impact of globalised capitalism all come alive in riveting storytelling.

Dean Ashenden, Telling Tennant’s Story: The Strange Career of the Great Australian Silence (Scribe 2022)
A very readable history of post WWII Australian policies in relation to First Nations people where the impact of the policies on Aboriginal people in a specific area – Tennant Creek – are made clear. It tells how the policies of assimilation and later self determination came about and how far-reaching their effects have been. It would have been good for all those voting no to have been made to read this as a requirement for having a say.

Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life (Penguin 2023)
So much has been written about this book already I don’t need to give a summary. I found it gripping. 

Fiction
I read 62 books this year, from quick comfort ‘junk’ reads to harder literary tomes. I take a photo of each book to prompt memory, and going through them all, it’s clear I have had an excellent selection to choose five favourites from. I’ve ended up deciding by level of enjoyment, not on some literary merit criteria.

Hilde Hinton, A Solitary Walk on the Moon (Hachette AUstralia 2022)
A totally enjoyable read while disquieting in its simplicity. This is a second novel by an Australian author who seems to slipped under the radar. I found it in my local library. 

Annie Ernaux, The Years (Fitzcarraldo Editions 2018)
This was also an entrancing read, covering a similar time period to my own life. It conjures up the similarities and immense differences between growing up in middle class France and Australia.

Thrity Umrigar, The Secrets Between Us (HarperCollins 2018)
Another library chance find. I loved the three strong old women protagonists, the exploration of caste and how this is/isn’t changing in modern India.

Melissa Lucashenko, Edenglassie (University of Queensland Press 2018)
This was gripping rather than straight out enjoyable, with a sense of what was to come on every page. I loved the imagined world of life at the point where the strangers are staying and growing in number, while keeping your own way of life intact.

Richard Russo, Somebody’s Fool (Allen & Unwin 2023)
Jonathan hasn’t yet been lured into the wonderful world that Richard Russo writes about, but I expect that to change soon. This is the latest in a series that includes Everybody’s Fool and Nobody’s Fool, all set in small town east coast USA. The books follow a number of interconnected characters over a few generations recording the process of change as late capitalism, racism and gender are played out in the town of Bath. He writes with affectionate humour about all of his characters. We see their frailties and appalling behaviour (between white and black, men and women, different generations) but in a number of cases we see how their connections with each other bring a shift in perspective. I love them. 

From me

I read 83 books (counting journals but not children’s books). I finished my slow read of Middlemarch and read St Augustine’s Confessions, a little each morning, but didn’t start another slow read in September because I was doing the Kelly Writers’ House course in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (ModPo), which was great fun and probably taught me a lot.

I read:

  • 21 books of poetry
  • 26 novels
  • 4 comics
  • books in translation from Chinese (2), Spanish (3), French (2), Danish (1 or 3, depending on how you count), Russian (1) and Latin (1), and bilingual books containing Greek (1) and Maori (1)
  • counting editors and comics artists, 44 books by women, 39 by men
  • 12 books by First Nations writers, and
  • 15 books by other writers who don’t belong to the White global minority.

Biggest serendipity: Four books spoke powerfully to each other and to me in the wake of the referendum on the Voice: Debra Dank’s We Come with This Place, Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie, Dean Ashenden’s Telling Tennant’s Story and David Marr’s Killing for Country (no blog post yet). Unlike Voice and Treaty, the third proposal from the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart – Truth – doesn’t have to wait for government action. These books, and so many others with them, are moving that project forward brilliantly and unsettlingly.

The most fun was probably two novels about poetry, which also spoke to each other: Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra and The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker.

Most interesting new discovery of someone who has been writing for decades: 2022 Nobel Prize laureate Annie Ernaux. I read Les années and Mémoire de fille, both of which mine her life story in ways that make most memoirs seem dull. Though I read them in translation, it seems right to name them in French.

Most imaginatively huge was Alexis Wright’s novel Praiseworthy, which incidentally is set in some of the same localities as Killing for Country.

Most memorable poetry: Sarah Holland-Batt’s Jaguar, with Ken Bolton’s Starting at Basheer’s (no blog post yet) a close second, the first for its precise, compassionate treatment of the poet’s father’s final illness, the latter because it filled me with joy about the everyday.

Happy New Year to all. May 2024 see the rejection of authoritarianism in elections and an end to mass killings everywhere. And may fossil fuels at last be left in the ground. Failing that, may we all keep our hearts open and our minds engaged.

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Winter reads 5: Nicholson Baker’s Anthologist, page 76

Posted on 4 Aug 2023 | 4 comments

This is my fifth post on books I’ve brought with me on my escape from Sydney’s winter, focusing as usual on page 76. Most of the books have been physically tiny books of poetry. This is the second novel.

Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist (Simon & Schuster 2009)

One of the men from my Book Group handed a copy of The Anthologist to me with a knowing look. ‘You’ll love this,’ he said.

He was right.

Paul Chowder is a minor US poet. He has had poems in The New Yorker and is on nodding terms with eminent literary figures. When the book opens he’s running spectacularly late with his introduction to an anthology he has edited, of rhyming poetry. His girlfriend, Roz, has found his procrastination unbearable and moved out. Over the next couple of weeks and almost 250 pages, he ruminates on what he wants to say in the introduction, does a half-hearted clean-up of his house and workspace, makes feeble attempts to win Roz back, and reflects on his own failings as a poet and a human being.

That’s it. It’s not exactly nail-biting stuff. I loved it.

The guts of the book is Chowder’s mind playing over the things he wants to say in the introduction. He has theories about metre that fly in the face of standard accounts, but are far from ridiculous. He spells them out in detail, with many examples. He considers the last century or so of ‘free verse’ to have been a mistake, though he admits some excellent poems have been written without rhyme. He detests enjambment. He dishes the goss about great poets of the past, and has plenty to say about key poets – especially Swinburne (too much of a good thing), Marinetti (bad), Elizabeth Bishop (good), Ezra Pound (very bad). He takes several pages to rip into Pound – the man himself and those who protect his legacy. His opening salvo gives you the general gist:

Pound … was by nature a blustering bigot – a humourless jokester – a talentless pasticheur – a confidence man.

(Page 92)

This may make it sound like a series of lit-crit essays strung together on a flimsy narrative. But that’s not so at all. It really feels that we are spending time inside the hand of a man almost totally preoccupied with matters poetical. If we learn something, that’s a side benefit. If we disagree with him, all the better. You may have to be interested in poetry to be interested in Paul Chowder: there’s no exuberant sex as in Alejandro’s Zambra’s The Chilean Poet, another excellent novel about poetry. The stakes are pretty low – will he get back with Roz, will he ever write his introduction, will he ever write a poem he thinks is any good? But I for one enjoyed it from cover to cover.

Spending a little time on page 76, I realise that we learn a lot more about Paul than I have indicated so far. The page begins with memories of his father, who used to recite two poems ‘with his fists clenched’ – ‘John Masefield’s “Cargoes” and E. E. Cummings’s poem about the watersmooth silver stallion. I had to look the latter poem up (it’s here if you’re interested): Paul Chowder’s father was more sophisticated than my parents, who sang ‘The Rose of Tralee’ and recited part of ‘The Hound of Heaven’ respectively; my older brother used to recite E. E. Cummings’s poem with ‘mudluscious’ in it.

He says in passing that he misses his parents every day – a note that is struck a number of times without further elaboration. Then his mind moves on, first to Tennyson:

Tennyson’s father was a beast. He was a violent alcoholic and an epileptic, and he was horrible to his sons. From the age of twelve on, Alfred Tennyson was home-schooled by his fierce, crazy father. When Tennyson Senior was drunk, he threatened to stab people in the jugular vein with a knife. And to shoot them. And he retreated to his room with a gun. A bad man. And eventually he died. Tennyson was liberated, and he began writing stupendous poems.

Characteristically, having made a huge value judgement, he pulls back from it:

Were they stupendous? Or were they only good? Or were they in fact not good at all? I’m not sure.

None of this may make it into the Introduction, but a constant process of drafting and redrafting is under way.

But his mind won’t stay there for long:

Last night I watched two episodes of Dirty Jobs and then went upstairs to bed after thinking that my poetry was not for shit, frankly. If I may be pardoned the expression. I got in bed, and I realised that what I wanted was to have some Mary Oliver next to me. If I had some Mary Oliver I would be saved

Now, the second most visited post on my blog is about a book by Mary Oliver, so whether by calculation or otherwise, Paul’s wanting her book next to him will strike a chord with many readers (it does with me). She was alive when the book was written, and I hope she would have been chuffed that he turned to her for salvation, even though she doesn’t use rhyme or strict metre.

If you picked up The Anthologist in a bookshop and flipped to page 76, you’d get a fair idea of what the book is: a kind of stream of consciousness of a man who is steeped in poetry and feels himself to be part of a great community of poets living and dead – a poet himself, a passionate reader, a teacher of sorts, a mind that’s alive.

I hear that Nicholson Baker has written a second book about Paul Chowder. I can’t imagine it.

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