Tag Archives: non-fiction

Raimond Gaita after Romulus

Posted on 9 Sep 2011 | 3 comments

Raimond Gaita, After Romulus (Text 2011)

As the title suggests, this is a follow-up to Raimond Gaita’s Romulus My Father and as the cover suggests this time there’s a focus on his mother.

There’s an essay on the process of turning the book into a film, surely be among the most emotionally charged essays of its kind, made all the more poignant by the author’s repeated, convincing assertions that he works hard at avoiding sentimentality. I can’t imagine a better antidote to the world weariness of Radio National’s Movie Show or the consumerism of Margaret and David. The emotion isn’t anything as trivial as authorial pique. This is about passion: according to Gaita, Richard Roxburgh didn’t want to become a film director, he just wanted to direct this film, and the description of the moment when Gaita finally meets Kodi Smit-McPhee, the actor who plays young Rai in the film, comes like a thunderclap.

But that’s just one of five essays. There are two pieces more or less in the manner of the earlier book. One (‘A Summer-Coloured Humanism’)deals with Hora, his father’s close friend and almost a second father to young Rai, and the other (‘An Unassuageable Longing’, the longest essay and the book’s reason for existing) with Christine, Gaita’s mother, who was seen pretty much from his father’s point of view the first time around. Raimond Gaita probably couldn’t write a shopping list without at least alluding to philosophical profundities, and his writing about these two towering figures from his childhood is richly philosophical. But he saves his main philosophical powder for the other two essays, ‘Character and Its Limits’ and ‘On Truth and Truthfulness in Narrative’, in which he expands on and corrects some of the philosophy raised in Romulus My Father or in responses to it. He reflects on his father’s moral behaviour and sees in it the source of key elements of his own philosophical thought.

‘Philosophy always needs to be read slowly and more than once,’ Gaita writes.’ I would happily read these pieces several times, which is also true of his A Common Humanity and The Philosopher’s Dog. I can’t say that I follow his thinking all the time, but I do trust him. What appeals to me most strongly is the way he roots his philosophising in experience: there’s a deep sense throughout the book of each human being as unique and irreplaceable, and of thinking as embedded in a human life.

Some of the philosophy is hard to grasp, but I found it tantalising rather than annoying. He distinguishes between obligation and moral necessity, between affection and desire, between moral inflexibility and moralism, between sentimentality as the cause of error and as the form of the false. He writes of the importance of serious conversation, of the way people who share a life can fail to understand each other, of the difficult feat of responding  to someone who suffers ‘the utmost degradation’  with ‘compassion that is entirely without condescension’.

I read this on a long plane trip. There was something wonderful about reading his careful, deeply felt ruminations on the importance of honouring a child’s need to love and honour (in this case) his parents, even when they have betrayed his trust, and the harm done by disdaining the parents of such a child while the young man next to me had Will Smith waving a gun around on his laptop and the woman on the other side was alternating between a book of sudokus and Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

3 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged , ,

Coming into the Country

Posted on 29 Jun 2010 | 3 comments

John McPhee, Coming into the Country (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1977, 1991)

I had no obvious reason to read this book. It’s about Alaska, after all, written more than 30 years ago, originally as three articles spread over eight issues of The New Yorker and dealing with such historical dead ducks as the vote to move the state capital from Juneau to somewhere more accessible1: more than 400 pages of dated journalism about a distant, cold place.  But a discerning friend gave it to me a while back with the implication that it was something I’d enjoy. It turns out he was right.

On a recent Book Show, Philip Gourevitch – himself among other things a writer for The New Yorker – described McPhee as having a ‘wonderfully informative, wonderfully vivid way of conveying knowledge as pleasure rather than as sort of eat-your-vegetables data.’ That’s spot-on: history, politics, geology, geography, climatology, anthropology, zoology – these pages offer a a huge diversity of knowledge for pleasurable absorption. The explorer Roald Amundsen rides into the book as naturally as he rode into the town of Eagle in 1905. The ‘winter bear’ phenomenon, in which a bear gains an armour of ice that makes it invulnerable to spears or even guns (shades of Iorek Byrnison) is mentioned almost in passing. There are helpful hints about how to leave a log cabin in the woods so as to minimise any damage by curious bears – not that you or I will ever need such hints, but reason not the need. The third essay in particular, which gives the book its title and accounts for more than half the pages, explores the intricacies of life in and around the tiny ‘city’ of Eagle, on the Yukon River, near the Canadian border, entirely through McPhee’s relationships with people there, interspersed with forays into history and an occasional string of quotes from the judgemental gossip that thrives there as in any small community. Eagle is divisible into the Christians, the bootleggers, the ‘river people’ (who live, illegally, out in the bush) and the Indians (who mostly live in Eagle Village, a couple of miles down the river). There’s plenty of animosity between these groups, but McPhee seems to have developed strong, trusting relationships in all groups – and the reader is invited to sympathise with them all as well.

Gourevitch said on The Book Show:

Coming into the  Country remains one of the two or three essential books about the nature of Alaska, and by that I mean its character, the people who are there, why they’re there, what it means to be Alaskan, what the state is in America.

I was surprised to read that only a thousand people voted in the 1974 Alaskan gubernatorial elections. Suddenly Sarah Palin’s governorship looks a lot less impressive. Likewise, having shot a moose is less of a feat when you consider that if you live in one of the larger population centres you have to be very well off to be able to afford to go hunting, and we can be fairly sure that the Palins weren’t among the people who choose the extremes of life ‘in the country’, where moose is a staple food.

McPhee evidently lived in Alaska for months if not years on the way to this book, long enough to get to know some of its people well, to learn the peculiarities of language as spoken there, to develop a deep feel for the country, to amass a vast store of fact and anecdote, to ferret out first-person accounts of incidents that had become legendary. This is journalism that’s not so much embedded as immersed.

There’s some wonderful nature writing, combining lyrical description with other perspectives as in this, from a much longer account of Mt McKinley:

The Alaskan Range elevates with a rapidity rare in the world. Its top is about two-thirds as high as the top of the Himalayas, but the Himalayan uplift is broad and extensive. if you were looking toward Mount Everest from forty miles away, you would lift your gaze only slightly to note the highest in a sea of peaks. Forty miles from McKinley you can stand at a bench mark of three hundred and climb with your eyes the other twenty thousand feet. The difference – between your altitude near sea level and the height of that flying white mountain – is much too great to be merely overwhelming. The mountain is a sky of rock, seemingly all above you, looming. Until it takes itself away, you watch it as you might watch a hearth fire or a show in colour of aurorean light. […] The Athapascans are not much impressed that a young Princeton graduate on a prospecting adventure in the Susitna Valley in 1896 happened to learn, on his way out of the wilderness, that William McKinley had become the Republican nominee for President of the United States. In this haphazard way, the mountain got the name it would carry for at least the better part of a century, notwithstanding that it already had a name, for uncounted centuries had had a name, which in translation had been written, variously as The Great one, The Mighty One, The High One. The Indians in their reverence had called it Denali. Toponymically, that was the mountain’s proper name.

Possibly my single favourite passage is about fifty-five-gallon drums:

A fifty-five-gallon steel drum is thirty-four and three-quarters inches high and twenty-three inches in diameter, and is sometimes called the Alaska State Flower. Hundreds of them lie around wherever people have settled. I once considered them ugly. They seemed disappointing, somehow, and I wished they would go away. There is a change that affects what one sees here. Just as on a wilderness trip a change occurs after a time and you cross a line into another world, a change occurs with these drums. Gradually, they become tolerable, and then more and more attractive. Eventually, they almost bloom. Fifty-five-gallon drums are used as rain barrels, roof jacks, bathtubs. fish smokers, dog pots, doghouses. They are testing basins for outboard motors. They are the honeypots of biffies, the floats of rafts. A threat has been made to use one as a bomb. Dick Cook, who despises aircraft of all types, told a helicopter pilot he would shoot at him if he ever came near his home. The pilot has warned Cook that if he so much as points a rifle at the chopper the pilot will fill a fifty-five-gallon drum with water and drop it on the roof of Cook’s cabin. Fifty-five-gallon drums make heat stoves, cookstoves, flower planters, bearproof caches, wood boxes, well casings, watering troughs, culverts, runway markers, water tanks, solar showers. They are used as rollers for moving cabins, rollers to smooth snow or dirt. Sliced on the diagonal, they are the bodies of wheelbarrows. Scavenged everywhere, they are looked upon as gold.

By the time I reached the end I could almost understand what some people find attractive about living in a place that gets to 40 below zero (Farenheit) and stays there for a good part of the year.
—–
1 When the book was first published, the quest for a new capital was still under way, and supplied the backbone for the second essay, ‘What They Were Hunting For’: I had to look up Wikipedia to discover by what chicanery the vote was overturned.

Later: WordPress’s automatic link to possibly related blog posts went to Wickersham’s Conscience,, in which an Alaskan blogger echoes Philip Gourevich’s evaluation:

If you want to try to understand Alaska, its people, its politics and why I live here, this book is the best place to start. This book is a great writer’s greatest book.

3 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged , , , ,

Really merde

Posted on 15 Sep 2009 | Leave a comment

Dave Eggers, Zeitoun (McSweeneys, Hamish Hamilton 2009)

zeitounReading this in the wake of Ronald Wright’s What Is America?, I can’t help but see it as a case study in the dimension of the US that is missing from the land-of-freedom myth. It’s a post-Katrina story: Abdulrahman Zeitoun is a painter, contractor and landlord who had been living and working in New Orleans for 15 years when Katrina struck. His wife and children left before the storm, but he stayed behind to look after their properties, and then stayed on, paddling around in his canoe, helping people to safety, feeding dogs that otherwise would have starved, generally serving God’s purpose (he was and is a devout Muslim). Things go terribly wrong when he encounters the military, and the story takes on the quality of a nightmare.

Dave Eggers displays extraordinary authorial restraint: his narrative is based primarily on the stories as told by Zeitoun and his wife Kathy, and everything is told here from their points of view. There are writerly flourishes in some of the descriptive passages, and it may well be that some of the embedded commentary about George W Bush and FEMA originates with Eggers, but the whole reads as an impressively humble work, the author at the service of his material, at the service of his subjects. All his royalties go to the Zeitoun Foundation, which exists to fund organisations that help people caught up in similar difficulties to the Zeitouns.

The day I finished it, I saw Inglourious Basterds in New York City. The audience laughed cheerfully as the Brad Pitt character did something completely brutal — I couldn’t help but feel that, though he may complicate it with possible alternative readings, Tarantino romanticises, glamorises and eventually in effect endorses exactly the kind of US savagery that laid waste Native American civilisations, the Philippines, Iraq, and led to Guantanamo Bay and Camp Greyhound  in New Orleans.

Leave a comment

Posted in Books

Tagged , , , , ,

Mars & Venus, Shmars & Shmenus

Posted on 9 Jul 2009 | 1 comment

0199214476 Everybody loves a good smackdown, especially when it’s delivered judiciously, with careful marshalling of evidence and argument. The Myth of Mars and Venus is such a smackdown to the noxious theses of John (Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus) Gray and his ilk.

Deborah Cameron, currently visiting Australia and speaking at the Uni of NSW tomorrow afternoon, is a linguistics scholar (according to the jacket flap she is actually Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at Oxford University, a title that might itself spawn a learned paper or two). And she casts an unfriendly eye on the agenda-driven cherrypicking, or worse inventing, of research results that lead to all those fabulous scenarios about women and men being hard-wired to use language differently, coming from different cultures, etc.

I recommend the book to anyone who has been made to feel not quite man enough, not quite woman enough, ot trapped in a role because of intransigent and immutable biological inheritance, to anyone who has run some of their writing through the gender genie and wondered what was wrong with them (rather than what was wrong with the GG, as Deborah Cameron points out would be a more sensible response). I also recommend it to anyone who wants to read fabulous snippets of research into the language of adolescents in US cities, in a traditional New Guinea village, in 19th century Japan.

That is to say, this is a debunking book of the best kind: it puts sound research in the place of shonky, restores one’s faith inhuman beings, and has fun on the way.

The book in brief:

The genius of the myth of Mars and Venus is to acknowledge eth problems and conflicts many people are now experiencing as a result of social change, while explaining those problems and conflicts in a way that implies they have nothing to do with social change. They are as old as humanity (quite literally in some versions of the myth) and their root cause is the irreducible natural difference between the sexes.  … The belief that [these problems] are timeless, natural and inevitable stops us thinking about what social arrangements might work better than our present ones in a society that can no longer be run on the old assumptions about what men and women can do.

1 Comment

Posted in Books

Tagged , , ,

Not the Blue Mountains

Posted on 6 Jul 2009 | Leave a comment

Mark Tredinnick, The Blue Plateau: a landscape memoir (UQP 2009)

4541 As well as being a poet and writer of personal essays, Mark Tredinnick teaches writing in both creative and business contexts (not that I think business is never creative, but you know what I mean). I went to one of his Sydney Community College courses a couple of years ago, and not only got a boost for my writing but also was introduced to contemporary nature writing – Mark had us read passages from some of the great American practitioners, did a non-pushy but in my case successful sales job on The Land’s Wild Music, his book about them, and talked about his own longterm project, a memoir about the Blue Mountains. At the Sydney Writers Festival this year, beside stacks of his Little Red Writing Book and  Little Green Writing Book, there was the memoir, The Blue Plateau, in print at last.

You don’t have to scratch far in non-Aboriginal Australian literature before you come across the idea, usually accompanied by an element of yearning, that people live in close mutuality with the land they inhabit. It could hardly have been otherwise – the first settlers were discovering a new nature. Barron Field had fun describing a kangaroo

Nature, in her wisdom’s play,
on Creation’s holiday

and it probably makes sense to read a lot of Henry Lawson’s stories as exploring the deep interconnection of humans and environment – as in the oddly bathetic final sentence of ‘The Bush Undertaker‘:

And the sun sank again on the grand Australian bush – the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of the weird, and of much that is different from things in other lands.

Not to mention Judith Wright and all those poets who wrote about the landscape of the mind (‘South of my days’ circle, part of my blood’s country,/rises that tableland’ etc).

Mark Tredinnick is consciously part of a different tradition. Just as Patrick White decades ago revolted against ‘the dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism’ which he saw as dominating Australian literature, looking instead to European models, Mark T looks to North American models. I know this, not because I’ve read any of them, and not just from the enthusiasm of The Land’s Wild Music, but from references embedded in the text – explicitly to Barry Lopez, in a nod and a wink to James Galvin, and perhaps by a mention of bell peppers where someone writing in an Australian tradition might have said capsicums or red peppers. The book offers a wealth of stories, mainly of three families – two who lived in the region for generations, transformed it in big and small ways by their labour, and were transformed by it; one who came as an immigrant and found home there. Actually make that four families, the fourth being the author, his partner and children: their stay in a place up on the ridge by Katoomba, and Mark’s attempt to belong there, is a central narrative thread. Many of the stories are classic bush yarns – miraculous escapes from bushfires, lives lost from flood and rockfalls. That is to say, they have the subject matter of classic bush yarns: they are told in elevated, mellifluous language, rich with simile and, especially, personification, a very far cry from the tightlipped, sardonic discourse we have come to think of as typically Australian. I wouldn’t want to give the impression that the book is a tapestry of yarns in the manner of Joseph Furphy’s Such Is Life, though in more high-falutin language. True, like Furphy’s fabulous book, it lacks a straightforward linear structure. But it is a very different beast: self-described as something that has been eroded, leaving only fragments of its whole, it is indeed fragmentary, to be read, I think, almost like a book of poetry. Some of the “poems” are ten pages or more long. The narrative of Les and May Maxwell stretches through the whole book like a backbone. There are many outcrops of observation, reflection or anecdote that are barely a paragraph long.

(A newspaper review on the weekend lamented the absence of Indigenous people, except ‘obliquely’. And it’s true that no Indigenous person appears as a character. But one of the distinctive features of The Blue Plateau is the way the Gundingurra people are a constant, though abstract, presence. Perhaps this is a book that’s easy to skip. And that’s every reader’s right, but one that, when exercised, makes it hard to be an accurate reviewer.)

Improbably, the opening paragraph reminded me of Terry Pratchett’s descriptive writing. I thought at first that to mention this would be to make fun of Mark Tredinnick’s elevated style. But that ain’t necessarily so. On reflection, I think it’s fair to say that my favourite fantasy writer manages to slip brilliantly lyrical writing past our defences by taking the mickey, Mark’s lyricism is full frontal, dares us to laugh, and restores the mickey to readers who are timid about lyricism in their prose. Here are a couple of excerpts from The Blue Plateau and bits of Terry Pratchett. See if you can tell which is which.

It’s early September, the driest month of the year, and the valley is rolling over into summer. The sun has been out all day, and now what’s left of it has fallen into the valley and is lying there on the yellow grasses like whisky in a glass.

The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn’t sure it was worth all the effort.

[The] soft yellow light of dawn flowed over the sleeping landscape like the caress of a gentle lover or, as some would have it, like golden syrup. It paused to fill up valleys. It piled up against mountain ranges. When it reached [placename here], it built up in heaps until it finally crashed in great lazy tsunami as silent as velvet, across the dark landscape beyond.

The valley is a woman who likes  a bath, and she likes to smoke while she lies there. She breathes down the sky, and she lets it travel through her body, and she holds it a long time, and then she breathes it out again, heavy with desire and complaint.

Leave a comment

Posted in Books

Tagged , , , , ,

Bookblog #68: The joys of non-fiction

Posted on 19 May 2009 | 3 comments

[This is reposted from my earlier blog because I want to link to it from a 2020 post. It first appeared on 19 May 2009 – JS]

Bernhard Schlink, Guilt about the Past (UQP 2009)
Theodore Seifert, Snow White: Life Almost Lost (©1983, translation into English, Chiron Publications Illinois 1986)

Pasted Graphic 2

It’s a truism that as men get older we prefer non-fiction to fiction. I hesitate to say that that’s true me in particular, but this collection of lectures by Bernhard Schlink thrills me much more than The Reader did some years ago. The Reader was a bloody good, thought-provoking read. Guilt about the Past strikes sparks from my brain with just about every paragraph.

These essays/lectures deal with the question of collective guilt: is it a legitimate concept, and if so what is to be done about it? Who has the right to forgive? How can a valid reconciliation be achieved between those who inherit a shared history of monstrous deeds in which their forebears were perpetrators and objects respectively? Bernhard Schlink has recent German history in mind and refrains from talking about his subject in universal terms, but what he manages to articulate is powerfully relevant to all manner of situations. He talks in terms of law, and morality where it’s not covered by law. I won’t try to write a proper review here, but recommend that you read the book. It’s short, clear, and lively. Every time I picked it up, as I flicked through the pages looking for my place, sentences would leap out at me. At random:

The notion that the past could be brought into form and order is foreign to the law.

… simply stated, everyone whose relationships have been damaged can reconcile. While forgiveness lifts the burden of guilt from the guilty parties, reconciliation merely makes it a bit lighter.

… understanding does not have only positive connotations.

… my mother was right. If a person does not believe in a forgiving God, then they have to live with their guilt when they can no longer obtain forgiveness from the person they injured.

The book is very readable, but I’ll need to re-read it and meditate on it.

sw021

Snow White: Life Almost Lost, on the other hand, does the meditating for you. It’s a discussion of the fairy story from the point of view of a Jungian therapist. Much wisdom is dispensed about the challenges of the inner life, and the Grimm Brothers’ 1859 version of the tale provides a mostly plausible springboard for it, but Herr Seifert surely sets a record of some kind by taking 32 pages of discussion to get us through the first 45 words of the story – and that’s without any attention to ‘Once upon a time’! The words themselves, in case you need reminding:

Once upon a time in the middle of winter, snowflakes were falling like feathers from heaven; a queen was sitting at a window that had a frame of black ebony, and she was sewing. As she sewed and looked up at the snow, she pricked her finger with the needle.

You’ll have to read the book to discover what profundities about life and death, hope and despair, belief, imagination, love, law and deprivation those words contain – assuming that like me you can’t see these profundities unaided.

My favourite couple of sentences, from much later in the book (remember there is no married couple in the story, until the wedding in its last paragraph):

Even after many years of marriage, going to bed at different times is still a problem for many couples. Every evening they suffer the same irritation: The one has to go now, the other can’t go yet. Each always experiences this as a form of a seeming demand; and without exception the mate is accused. We talk only of what the other did to us; we do not talk of our own lack of readiness to risk corresponding conflict and stand up for our own wishes. Ultimately all these poisoned thoughts suffocate our soul, just as the bodice laces suffocated Snow White.

Leaving aside the incomprehensible phrases, which can probably be laid at the translator’s door, this measures up fabulously against some of the most ingenious of mediaeval biblical hermeneutics. And for all that, and for all the preoccupation with marriage as the one road to a fully human life, I have come away from the book with a much deeper appreciation of the Snow White story.

Posted: Tue – May 19, 2009 at 11:57 AM

3 Comments

Posted in Books, Retrieved from 'Family Life'

Tagged , ,