Tag Archives: Novel

Asako Yuzuki’s Butter

Posted on 6 Feb 2025 | 8 comments

Asako Yuzuki, Butter (2018, translation by Polly Barton, 4th Estate 2024)

This was my end-of-year gift from the Book Club. It is probably an excellent book about misogyny in Japanese culture, with sharp satiric assaults on attitudes to food, with extra piquancy derived from its claim to be based on a true-crime story. It was evidently a huge success in Japanese and this English translation by Polly Barton has been reviewed enthusiastically.

The protagonist, Kira, is an ambitious young woman journalist working on a sensationalist magazine. In searching for a career-defining scoop she becomes enthralled by Manako Kajii, a woman who defies the social norms of slender femininity and is currently in prison for having killed a number of elderly men, after winning their hearts by cooking luxurious food for them. Manako introduces Kira, who until now has survived on a spartan, negligent diet, to the joy of butter – cooking with it and eating the results.

My guess is that the key to enjoying the book is to read it fast, and I’m a slow reader. The themes are real and interesting: feminism versus feminine wiles; social norms versus desire; career ambition versus enjoyment of life. But I struggled with it, and gave up soon after my obligatory 77 pages.

It may well be that Polly Barton has reproduced the feel of the original Japanese, but the best way I can describe my response to the book’s language is to say that it reads like the kind of English you find in school students’ translations. The information is all there, but in the process of capturing it, the student forgets to pay attention to the natural rhythms and sequencing of English prose. That’s fine if you’re a teacher correcting someone’s homework, but if you’re reading a novel, it keeps yanking you out of the story.

I don’t want to spoil anyone’s enjoyment, but I’ll try to articulate why I find the book such a slog. Page 77* isn’t particularly egregious, but it offers a number of examples. Rika is on an outing with her mother, partly to cheer her up, and partly with the undeclared intention of having a look at Kajii’s apartment. Rika’s mother becomes high-spirited as they inspect the building that has been ‘making a splash in the news’.

I’ll just talk about the beginning and ending of the page, but you can enlarge the image to read it in full:

The first sentence:

Even when a resident came out and gave them a withering stare, Rika’s prevailing feeling was still one of relief that her mother’s mood had shifted.

There’s nothing glaringly wrong with that, but a close look reveals a number of tiny problems contributing to the cumulative awkwardness.

To my ear, the phrase ‘even when’ suggests an extreme event of some kind, and it takes a microsecond to realise that this is something quite undramatic: a resident comes out of the building and gives the pair a withering look. For another microsecond, I wonder why the resident would pay them any attention at all. They’re just two women in a public street. And it’s not just a look, but a stare! How does Rika know that this more or less abstract person is a resident? Moving on, the awkward phrase ‘prevailing feeling’ suggests, if anything, that Rika is experiencing complex emotions, but that suggestion goes nowhere. ‘One of relief’ is clutter – why not just ‘relief’?

One last thing: the word ‘still’, which if you read this sentence without context is completely innocuous. But it’s another example of a micro-interruption to the narrative flow. This is the first time we’ve been told that Rika is feeling relieved. The reader (or at least this one) has to do a quick calculation: oh yes, Rika’s mother’s mood has lifted so of course it was implied that Rika felt relief, so now we’re being told that that relief has survived. This is a recurrent quirk: we’re told that something has happened, rather than seeing it happen.

I can enjoy a text that demands work of me, but these extra little bits of readerly labour bring no joy.

I won’t take you laboriously through the whole page, though I can’t resist mentioning the phrase, ‘In the temple heaving with people’. The meaning is clear, but it doesn’t quite feel like English.

At the end of the page, Rika and her mother are having a coffee (in a Doutor, which Rika’s mother prefers to Starbucks because Starbucks doesn’t allow smoking – in the kind of culture-specific moment that I confess to enjoying).

No sooner had she lifted her mug of coffee to her lips than she began her confession.
‘You know, I feel like I can really understand why Manako Kajii was so popular with men. The truth is … You promise you won’t mention this to anyone?’
She giggled like a schoolgirl and leaned across the table to whisper in Rika’s ear. What Rika heard nearly made her choke on her mouthful of milk tea.
‘What! You worked as a decoy at a matchmaking party? I need to hear more about this.’

Again, these are tiny things, but they accumulate. ‘No sooner than’ is just slightly wrong: can you begin to talk at the moment you lift a mug of coffee to your lips? Specifying a mouthful of tea is unnecessary and creates another of those micro-pauses: I suppose it’s technically possible to choke on a mouthful of liquid, but the term ‘mouthful’ suggests that it’s still in the mouth and more likely to cause spluttering. Having the reader learn what the mother says only when Rika repeats it is an unnecessary and (to me) annoying complication.

Your mileage may vary, and I hope it does. If you want a completely different take on the book, I recommend Theresa Smith Writes.

I wrote this blog post on land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation. I happily acknowledge their Elders past and present for caring for this land for many thousands of years.

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

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Yael van der Wouden’s Safekeep at the book club

Posted on 7 Jan 2025 | 3 comments

Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep (Viking 2024)

Before the meeting: As I mentioned in my post about Lai Wen’s Tiananmen Square, this book has a general strategy in common with a number of other books I’ve read recently – a personal relationship as way of drawing the reader into a big public event.

In this case the personal relationship is sexual. At times I felt like averting my eyes, as if I was intruding on intensely intimate moments.

The book is told from the point of view of a woman who lives alone in the house she has kind-of inherited from her parents in postwar Netherlands. Her brother actually owns of the house but lets her live in it. The story kicks off when he pressures her to allow his girlfriend to stay with her while he goes away for work. The two women are very prickly with each other at first: the owner is prim and obsessive about neatness, and her begrudged guest is an apparently easygoing woman of the world. Bit by bit we realise that the narrator is constantly aware of the other woman’s bodily presence, and eventually the dam breaks and there are many pages of enthusiastic sex.

There are hints along the way that something else is going on. In the book’s very first paragraph, for instance, the uptight host finds a ceramic shard buried in the cottage garden. She recognises a piece from her mother’s precious dinner set, but has no memory of any of those plates ever having been broken. This is the first of a number of hints that there is something about the house that has never been acknowledged. More telling perhaps are childhood memories of strangers knocking at the door and her mother ignoring them.

I guess I knew from the beginning roughty where things were going, and even during the scenes of passion I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. It does drop, most satisfactorily.

I loved this book.

After the meeting: I wasn’t alone in loving it.

This book group, the majority of whose members are Lesbian, has long had a rule that no Lesbian books were allowed unless the Lesbianism was incidental to the plot. Well, this book smashed that rule to bits, but it did it with such grace and integrity and good writing that not even the Chief Rulemaker minded.

Though we all loved the book, we spent some time discussing the ending. Was it too neat, too quickly achieved, too much out of character? It’s hard to blog about endings but I don’t think I’m giving too much away if I say that two possibilities were raised in defence: first, it’s like the endings to Shakespeare’s comedies – you’re not meant to think this could really have happened but it’s satisfying to imagine it as a kind of justice; second, the apparent change of personality involved could be accounted for by the transformative power of the passionate sexual experience – certainly it was transformative, and maybe even more so than obvious. If you’ve read the book, you’ll have opinions of your own.

The Book Club met on Gadigal land, and I wrote the blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, land that has never been ceded. I acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this land for millennia.

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Lai Wen’s Tiananmen Square at the book club

Posted on 6 Jan 2025 | 3 comments

Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square (Swift Press 2024)

Before the meeting: On page 411 of this novel, the narrator-protagonist, a student at Beijing University, posts an application for an exchange program at a Canadian university. She goes to one of the bars on campus, and then:

The enormity of what I had done began to sink in.

A few pages later, sensations flash across her mind ‘like lightening’, and a few pages further on there is a lake, where a turquoise glow

expanded outward as far as the eye could see, and beyond, the tawny ridges of ochre mountains were flushed at their foothills with dark streaks of wild grass and moss.

The fact that I am brought up short by such moments (enormity is something big and horrible, not something like a major life decision; lightning is what flashes; if the water goes as far as the eye can see, how can you describe what can be seen beyond it?) may say more about me than about the book, but I’m pretty sure if I’d been gripped by the narrative I wouldn’t have noticed them.

If the pseudonymous author is who she says she is, this is an autobiographically inflected story of a young woman caught up in the student uprising in China in 1989. As such, it commands respect.

By coincidence, it shares something of a strategy with three other books I have read recently, telling a story with a tight focus on relationships and then widening out into a huge public event or issue. Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck is a tales of a toxic relationship between an older man and a young woman that culminates in the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller is an adolescent boy-boy love story that becomes a retelling of The Iliad. The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (blog post coming soon) is a steamy Lesbian romance that turns out to be about what happens to property confiscated from Jews in the Netherlands under Nazi occupation.

In this book, the personal story lacks a clear or interesting focus. The death of a beloved grandmother, an embittered mother, a pallid teenage sex life (though the first unsatisfactory moment of sexual intimacy is vividly realised), and quirky university encounters all compete for attention. And the otherwise powerful Tiananmen Square narrative is undermined by giving the final moment to a twist that’s silly, and not in a good way.

I am glad I’ve read the book. It’s an important story. It’s just that at the sentence level, which is where I mostly live in books, it trudges.

After the meeting: We discussed this book along with The Safekeep. It was the Book Club’s celebratory end-of-year meeting with exchange of gifts in a restaurant, so discussion of the books was perhaps less extensive than usual.

All but one of us had read the whole book, and given that our meeting had been postponed twice because of illnesses, it was clear that it was lack of interest rather than lack of time that had led to the one non-completion. Generally, the completers all agreed that it was too long – it would have been a better book without a lot of the earlier family stories. Not everyone was convinced by the implied eye-witness status of the author – that claim is undermined by what looks like an arbitrary and ahistorical invention at the very end (and who knows, but we might yet be proved wrong in judging the final moment that way).

The book’s strongest advocate felt (if I remember correctly) that the complex mundaneness of the family story and the story of teenage emotional entanglements was the book’s strength: it took the events of Tiananmen Square in 1989 away from the abstract an showed them irrupting onto the lives of otherwise ordinary people. While others agreed that that’s how the book works, they (we!) felt that the narrator was peripheral to those big events, so her account of them doesn’t add substantially to what we already know from other sources.

We enjoyed The Safekeep a lot more.

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Rodney Hall’s Vortex

Posted on 31 Dec 2024 | 11 comments

Rodney Hall, Vortex (Picador 2024)

I haven’t read anything by Rodney Hall since the early 70s, and then it was just one book of poetry and one novella. Since then he has had thirteen more novels published, as well as ten more poetry collections, a collection of short fictions, two biographies – and non-fiction, an opera libretto and radio plays (not an exhaustive list), not to mention that he has won any number of prestigious prizes and accolades.

So it may be because I’m coming late to his writing that Vortex had me feeling off kilter pretty much from start to finish. On any page there’s something to enjoy, appreciate, puzzle over or be wowed by. But I don’t think I ever had a sense of the book as a whole.

There’s Brisbane in 1954: the Queen’s visit, a spectacular water-weed infestation, an exhibition of Tollund Man in the museum, a cyclone, the aftermath of the US army’s stay there in World War Two, the beginnings of ASIO domestic spying. Vladimir Petrov makes a cameo appearance. Entertaining endnotes underline the historicity of some of these features and events, even while asserting that the book is fiction.

And there’s 1954 beyond Brisbane: the Mau Mau in Kenya, the Royal Charter for North Borneo, the battle of Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam, and a boatload of refugees.

There’s Compton Gillespie, a young, bookish working-class teenager who befriends Beckmann, a German man, formerly a member of the Hitler Youth, possibly homosexual, who dances with women for money. Any sexual tension in the novel is between these characters.

There’s Paloma, a Spanish countess who presides over a table of European migrants and refugees at the Colony Club, where the conversation is witty, urbane, and mildly satirical of the host culture.

Paloma’s husband, a crude member of the public service with aspirations to gentility, is involved in cloak and dagger intrigue with the Americans while playing some kind of role in making sure the Queen’s visit goes well.

Vassily Bogdanovich Hmelnitsky, ‘thirty years a homeless vagrant’, wanders the streets of Brisbane.

There are flash-forwards. John Howard’s ‘We will decide’ speech, or near enough, turns up in the dialogue. Scott Morrison is a mysterious presence in someone’s dream.

These narrative strands intersect: the boy takes a photo of the countess; the vagrant takes shelter in the Colony Club during a downpour; the queen speaks to the boy’s mother on her hospital visit. And there’s a fairly improbable tying up of at least some threads at the end. But it’s hard for the mind to find purchase.

And maybe that’s the point. Apart from the first, each chapter and subsection of a chapter begins in mid-sentence without a capital letter: ‘or how to kill so much time?’ (Chapter 2); ‘and because none of Professor Antal Bródy’s three doctorates is recognized by the University of Queensland’ (Chapter 3); ‘because the night is warm and splendid with stars’ (Chapter 6); and so on. Similarly, they all (including the final one) end mid-sentence and without a full stop. There’s a constant sense that we aren’t getting the full story: we are seeing and hearing only moments from a great, complex, uncontainable whole.

The received version of 1950s Australia is that it was boring, monocultural, conformist. This book challenges that view. Its sympathetic characters are all in one way or another non-conformist and questioning, and its Brisbane is part of the great movement of people around the globe that began after World War Two and continues until now. I think that’s the vortex of the title. Here’s a paragraph from page 230:

from an observation balloon the vast seething mass of displaced persons is caught and processed by still photographs. From a thousand feet up an aerial platform provides intelligence pinpointing any breakouts in the movement of the desperate massed figures below. Unseen analysts make their scrupulous adjustments

This paragraph is typically complex.

First, it wrenches our attention from its immediate context, in which Beckmann is being challenged about his relationship with Compton, to the general question of refugees. There’s a suggestion that the same thing happens at different scales: Beckmann’s roommate questions him, the unseen analysts do their work. This movement from Brisbane to international scenes happens regularly in the novel.

Second, it draws attention to the time-specific nature of the book: in 2024, readers are used to surveillance – in 1954, this paragraph insists, it was already a thing, but it was much more primitive, depending on still photographs rather than video streams, and observation balloons rather than satellites or even spy planes.

Third – and this is how I first read it – it suggests something about the book itself. Its true subject is ‘the vast seething mass of displaced persons’, but it captures and processes it, not by still photographs, but by word sketches, anecdotes, scraps of dialogue, fractures narrative arcs. It does it, not from a distance of a thousand feet, but in close-up, paying attention to the details of people’s lives.

I can see that, and respect it, but in the reading I was mostly unengaged.

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The Book Group and Samantha Harvey’s Orbital

Posted on 12 Dec 2024 | 5 comments

Samantha Harvey, Orbital (2023)

Before the meeting: We picked this book as our next title the day before it won the Booker Prize. Smart us!

Four men and two women on a space station orbit the Earth sixteen times in twenty-four hours. They eat, they monitor experiments with plants and mice, they do strenuous exercise to counteract the bodily effects of living in low-gravity, they maintain their environment and monitor their own vital signs, they report back to ground control, they exchange messages and images with their loved ones at home, they occasionally have weirdly unreal conversations with complete strangers on Earth, and they look out with wonder at the planet below them and at the vastness of space.

That’s the plot.

A writer less sure of herself might have developed a plot where the relationships among the travellers create conflict or titillation. There would be plenty of possibilities in the crew consisting of two Russian men, an Irish woman, a Japanese woman, a Christian man from the USA, and a Latino man with connections in the Philippines. But the subject of this novel is the humans’ relationship to the planet, and beyond that to the universe, from a perspective that makes the conflicts that dominate human life in general seem absurd.

At the front of the book there’s a diagram showing the pathway of the spacecraft’s orbit over the day. The craft flies / falls in a straight line, but the rotation of the planet beneath it means that it crisscrosses the land and ocean below. I kept flipping back to the diagram as chapter by chapter, one for each of the sixteen Earth orbits in the day, describes in lyrical language what can be seen below.

This book is ideal for my blogging practice of singling out a particular page, currently page 77, because though there is a narrative of sorts it’s not the kind that means one has to be wary about spoilers. Part of what makes this book a worthy winner of the Booker is its brilliance at the sentence level.

Page 77 is in the chapter ‘Orbit 8, ascending’. Though the craft is over the south-west of the USA, the narrative departs, as it does occasionally, from what lies below to describe what is happening on the other side of the planet:

Over there, in tomorrow, the typhoon summons winds of a hundred and eighty miles per hour. It’s rampaging through the Mariana Islands. The sea levels off the islands’ coasts have already risen with the expansion of the warmer water, and now, where the winds push the sea toward the westward edges of its basin, the sea rises more and a five-metre storm surge engulfs the inlands of Tinian and Saipan. It’s as though the islands are hit with cluster bombs – windows blown out, walls buckling, furniture flying, trees splicing.

There follows a little more description of the typhoon from a meteorological perspective. Its growth is the book’s one central narrative thread. In later chapters, the crew see it as spectacle – contrasted with the terrifying reality on land, especially as it affects a poor family who once offered hospitality to one of them.

But for now, the daily routine asserts itself:

The crew go on with the last of their tasks. Anton eats an energy bar to fight off late afternoon drowsiness. Shaun removes the four fasteners on the bracket of the smoke detector that needs replacing. Chie inspects the bacteria filters. Their path now ups and overs and exits America where the Atlantic is ancient, the placid silver-grey of a dug-up brooch. Calm suffuses this hemisphere. And with no ceremony they complete another lap of the lonely planet. They top out some three hundred miles off the Irish coast.

And then there’s this:

ln passing through the lab, Nell looks out and sees the promise of Europe on the watery horizon. She feels somehow speechless. Speechless at the fact of her loved ones being down there on that stately and resplendent sphere, as if she’s just discovered they’ve been living all along in the palace of a king or queen. People live there, she thinks. I live there. This seems improbable to her today.

This intermingling of more or less objective observations of the Earth as seen from orbit, the daily routines of life in the space station, moments of lyrical reflection is maintained, with miraculous poise, through the whole book.

The meeting: We’ve been calling our bring-a-plate meetings gentlemen’s picnics. This one was an actual picnic, in Bicentennial Park on the shores of Blackwattle Bay, Gadigal land. Pavlova, quiche, dumplings, barbecued sausages eaten to a backdrop of birdsong and practising dragon boats beneath a three-quarter moon. We were interrupted briefly by what seemed to be a gay bashing – eight men of certain ages tried to look imposing as we lumbered towards the scene, but it seemed to vanish before we reached it. We conferred with a couple of men who were dossing down in the Esther Abrahams pavilion, and with a cluster of hefty teenage boys, and decided there was nothing further any of us could do.

It was our final meeting for the year, so we swapped gift-wrapped books (I scored a Zadie Smith) and most of us read a poem: David Malouf, Robert Frost, me and John Levy (it was unclear whether I’d broken a rule by reading one of my own, but it was excused because my poem was there to illuminate John’s), Brecht, James Baldwin.

In the middle of this mostly joyous occasion, we managed to talk about the book. The first thing said could have been a paraphrase of my fourth paragraph above: what a relief that Samantha Harvey didn’t go down the track of having big conflicts among the crew. My sense is that everyone enjoyed the book a lot.

We reminded each other of ‘good bits’: the lab mice learning to live in low gravity, the tear drop that has to be caught and disposed of because free-floating liquid can’t be tolerated, the nose pressed against a stomach as two characters squeeze past each other … Someone mentioned what should have been obvious: though the crew sees sixteen sunrises, they all happen on the same day – I took that in my stride while reading the book, but when it’s put like that it leaves me gasping.

One person found a lot of the book tedious and repetitive, but later, driving in the car, he realised that the repetition was partly the point, these people were caught in a continuous loop.

The closest we came to disagreement was when someone said the absence of ordinary, everyday irritations and conflicts among the crew strained his credulity. In real life, people living together in such close quarters would inevitably grate on each other at best. Two arguments were offered to counter this view. First, on the level of verisimilitude, the crew are disciplined – they can live with an itch in a space suit for hours without scratching, surely they can put personal irritations aside. Second, yes it’s unrealistic, but to pay attention to such matters would have cluttered the book or even taken it to a different, less interesting place. (One of us has spent some months in a hut in the Antarctic, so could vouch for the likelihood of conflict – though he was the one who argued most strongly that these are disciplined space travellers.)

It was a terrific end to another Book Group year.

Photo by Steve Kennedy, used with permission

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Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles and November verse 2

Posted on 2 Nov 2024 | 7 comments

Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles (HarperCollins 2011)

The first half of The Song of Achilles is in effect a Young Adult boy-meets-boy love story, as the demigod Achilles befriends our narrator Patroclus, one of his father’s many foster-sons. The friendship becomes increasingly steamy until, while the language remains as chaste as anyone could wish, the two teenage boys find rapture in each other’s arms and are soon tacitly acknowledged as a couple. ‘Patroclus is my sworn companion,’ Achilles announces at a state occasion. ‘His place is beside me.’ This is against the will of Achilles’ goddess mother, Thetis.

Most of my readers won’t need to be told that Patroclus and Achilles are key characters from The Iliad, and that the emotional heart of that epic is Achilles deep love of Patroclus and his inconsolable grief when Patroclus is killed. This novel is mainly back story. The explicit sex isn’t so much a departure from the original as a confirmation.

At about the halfway point, after spending years being trained by the centaur Chiron and an episode in which Achilles hides out dressed as a girl, the two young men arrive with the vast Greek war force at the beach near Troy. Achilles is now acclaimed as the greatest of the Greek warriors, and the second half of the book is a completely engrossing retelling of The Iliad.

Because it’s November*, I won’t linger on page 77, when teenaged Patroclus wakes up in bed next to Achilles in Chiron’s cave. Instead, I have gone to page one, and read until I came to a potential first line for an Onegin stanza. The book begins with Patroclus’ mentally incompetent mother and his own physical ineptitude (the only element in Madeline Miller’s telling that conflicts with my own reading of The Iliad – it had never occurred to me that Patroclus was less than formidable). Patroclus’ first glimpse of Achilles is when Patroclus is five years old. Achilles is among the youngest boys who compete in games hosted by Patroclus’ royal father and, being a demigod, he wins. This is in spite of being easily the youngest competitor: ‘He is shorter than the others, and still plump with childhood in a way they are not.’

In the book, this last sentence signifies that Achilles is gifted well beyond his years. When I nicked part of it for my first line, my mind went somewhere completely different, to a memory from 60+ years ago. 

Verse 1: Nudgee College, 1961–1962
He is shorter than the others,
thinner too, not seen as cool.
We've all been sent here from our mothers, 
to this Christian boarding school,
sons of far-flung Queensland farmers,
just four hundred teenage charmers:
ten grown men. It's no surprise
that kindness doesn't rule our days.
His nakedness provokes derision,
soapsuds sprinkled in his sheets
cause eczema, and laughter greets 
his asthma. Here's my shamed admission:
terrified, I turn my back
glad it's not me they attack.

OK, maybe tomorrow will get cheerful.

Added later: Inspired by the online course in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (ModPo) I’m currently doing, here’s a chance-based/ procedural poem created from The Song of Achilles. It begins with the book’s first word beginning with A, which is followed by the first word after that to begin with B, and so on. It took 52 pages to get to ‘Zeus’.

A built ceremony
did eye forward
glints.
He is jest kneeling
looked man
not one present quieted
raised
said things
upbringing vividness
when exile you Zeus

I wrote this blog post in Gadigal Wangal country, and am posting it as lorikeets shout to each other about the rain that is about to come down. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land, over which their sovereignty has never been ceded.

* For the last 14 years, I have challenging myself to write fourteen 14-line poems during November. The poem may be inspired by a book I’m blogging about, or may be connected to it by the vaguest of tangents, as here.

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The Book Club at James McBride’s Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

Posted on 14 Oct 2024 | 3 comments

James McBride, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2023)

Before the meeting: Though this is the first book by James McBride that I have read, he has featured in this blog before, as the author of The Good Lord Bird, one of the Emerging Artist’s best five books of 2014 (link here). That book won the USA’s National Book Award. According to his Wikipedia entry, The Color of Water, a 1995 book about McBride’s African American and Jewish family history and his relationship with his white mother, is widely regarded as an American classic.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is his sixth novel, set in 1925, mainly in Chicken Hill, a ‘ramshackle neighbourhood’ of the Pennsylvania city of Pottstown (Pottstown exists in real life; Chicken Hill not so much as far as I can tell). The store of the title is run by Chona, a Jewish woman, whose husband Moshe runs a neighbourhood theatre. As most of the Jews leave Chicken Hill for more salubrious neighbourhoods, Chona and Moshe remain and, swimming against the tide of their times, continue to serve and welcome the presence of their African American neighbours (always ‘Negroes’ in this book). At the heart of the book is a celebration of friendship and alliance between Jews and Blacks, plus a significant Italian or two.

The book runs to 381 pages, so page 77* occurs at about the one-fifth point. If a conventionally structured Heaven and Earth Grocery Store film were to be made, I imagine that the events on this page would come much earlier, at the 10 percent mark, when the Inciting Incident is due. The set-up has been established: a death has been foreshadowed; we’ve met Moshe and Shona and the main African American couple, Addie and Nate, who work in the shop and the theatre respectively; we’ve seen the theatre and the grocery store in action; we know the story of Chona’s chronic illness and disability; we’ve met the book’s villain, Doc Roberts, who comes from ‘good white Presbyterian stock’ and marches every year with the Ku Klux Klan. It’s time for the first turning point.

Nate has told Moshe about his ten-year-old nephew, Dodo, who recently started working in the theatre. He was made deaf by an accident, and his mother has died.

Nate’s brow furrowed and his old hands moved up and down the broom handle slowly. He said softly, ‘Me and my wife’s got him.’

Moshe looked down at the floor a moment, embarrassed. It rarely occurred to him that he and Nate shared one commonality. Neither of their wives could bear children. They had worked in the theater all day side by side for twelve years but rarely discussed their wives or matters of home.

Their relationship is already changed by this conversation. The distance imposed by their histories is being bridged. The rest of the conversation introduces the book’s main external action.

‘Well, I think that’s fine,’ Moshe said. ‘You can run things as you like.’

Nate’s brow furrowed. ‘A man from the state come to the house last week. Says he’s gonna carry Dodo off to a special school over in Spring City. Dodo don’t wanna go to no special school. He’s all right here with us.’

Moshe’s heart quickened. He felt a request coming, but Nate continued. ‘The man says he’s coming back to fetch him next week. I’m wondering if you might let me slip Dodo into the theater here tonight, just for a few days till the man goes away. The boy’s quiet. Can’t hear nothing. Won’t be scared or make no noise. He can work good, clean up and so forth.’

‘For how long?

‘Just a couple of days till the man’s gone.’

Knowing where this passage occurs in the book, you would almost certainly guess – correctly – that those few days will expand, and the small favour will balloon into something that changes all their lives. As it turns out, when Moshe tells Chona the situation, she insists that they take Dodo into their own home, and he becomes a much loved member of their family until, in spite of their careful strategies to keep him hidden from the authorities, he is taken from them to a ‘special school’, which is in fact a prison-like institution for people deemed insane. Doc Roberts is key to that removal.

The second half of the book is given over to plans to free Dodo. Relationships between Jews, Blacks and poor Whites flourish. Nate’s back story emerges from the shadows and the man who we first meet as the genial, ageing employee shows a dark side that leads to the book’s one shocking moment – shocking because the reader, or at least this one, cheers on a terrible act of violence.

Doc Roberts and his ilk are embodiments of callous, racist, antisemitic hypocrisy and not much else. There’s a subplot to do with water supply to the synagogue that had me wondering why it was there at all until at the very end it joins the main plot to lead to the death mentioned on the first page. (Not really a spoiler.)

The meeting: We discussed this book along with Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky. We seem to be developing a tradition in the Book Club of having a dedicated nay-sayer at each meeting. This month’s nay-sayer said she had had read this one first, and felt it was built from hackneyed tropes with nothing fresh to offer. Then she read There Are Rivers in the Sky, and revised her view upwards. Our non-finisher had the reverse view – based on a small taste of each book, this one was much less gripping.

Such faint praise aside, we had an animated discussion. One person’s bug turned out to be another’s feature. For example, Chona’s neighbour Bernice was once her best friend but they have been estranged for decades, yet when she asks for help in concealing Dodo from the authorities, Bernice is willing to put herself on the line. One person saw this as inconsistency in the character; another saw it as reflecting the nature of the community – solidarity trumping personal animosity.

There’s a sequence in which two young disabled men – one deaf and the other with severe cerebral palsy – work out a way to communicate. ‘Unbelievable!’ someone said. ‘But brilliant!’ someone else replied. It turned out they both meant pretty much the same thing.

Our Book Club meets on the land of Gadigal and Bidjigal, looking out over the ocean. I wrote this blog post further inland in Gadigal Wangal country, where I am priivileged to live. I acknowledge Elders past and present for their continuing custodianship of this land.

* My usual blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 77. Sometimes, as here, it’s a crucial page.

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There Are Rivers in the Sky, Elif Shafak and the Book Club

Posted on 13 Oct 2024 | 4 comments

Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky (Penguin 2024)

Before the meeting: I’m glad I read this novel. I am much better informed now on the history of the Yazidi people, and about the unearthing of the Epic of Gilgamesh in the mid 19th century.

After a short opening chapter featuring the tyrant Ashurbanipal in ancient Nineveh, the narrative follows three distinct threads, which remain separate until the final, very short chapter.

There’s Arthur, full name Arthur King of the Sewers and Slums, a fanciful version of the amazing George Smith who decoded the cuneiform script of ancient Mesopotamia, translated the Epic of Gilgamesh and travelled to Nineveh in the mid 19th century. There’s Narin, nine years old at the start, living in south-east Turkey in 2014, child of a shrinking and beleaguered Yazidi family. And there’s Zaleekhah, a 30-something hydrologist in the throes of a break-up in 2018, who we first see renting a houseboat on the Thames.

A number of motifs occur in each of the stories, so that they resonate with each other even there is no evident narrative connection: images of lamassus, the protective spirits of ancient Nineveh who have bearded human heads and lions’ bodies; pieces of lapis lazuli; cuneiform script, on clay tablets or in tattoos; references to The Epic of Gilgamesh; and above all water. The book begins:

Later, when the storm has passed, everyone will talk about the destruction it left behind, though no one, not even the king himself, will remember that it al began with a single raindrop.

That raindrop has no causal impact on events, but the identical drop, having lain dormant in the water table, floated in the ocean, wafted about in clouds, turns up again at crucial moments of each narrative, as a snowflake or ocean spray or another raindrop. That conceit, and the way the narrative frequently pauses for mini-lectures – on hidden rivers, the industrial revolution, Yazidi culture, Napoleonic archaeology, etc etc – meant I spent a lot of time being irritated. The fourth wall is forever being broken, either by a mention of water (at least four times there are sweating necks, or a character introduces herself by saying her name is short for an Irish word for water) or by what reads like a piece of undigested research.

Page 77*, it turns out, has some fine examples. Zahleekha has just stepped into her houseboat for the first time. First there’s the water, with heavy-handed metaphorical significance. She drinks a mug of water ‘in one draught’, and:

It tastes earthy and slightly metallic, with an aftertaste of iron. The flavour has less to do with its intrinsic qualities than with its biophysical environment, the set of conditions that brought it about. Water hardens in adverse circumstances, not unlike the human heart.

Then comes the lecture, preceded by a moment of backstory:

Out of nowhere a memory surfaces – the words Uncle Malek uttered the day she had graduated from university with honours. I’m so proud of you, habibti. I want you to be very successful. Remember, people like us cannot afford to fail.

‘People like us’ … immigrants, exiles, refugees, newcomers, outsiders … Too many words for a shared, recognisable sentiment that, no matter how often described, remains largely undefined.

Children of uprooted parents are born into the memory tribe. Both their present and their future are forever shaped by their ancestral past, regardless of whether they have any knowledge of it. If they flourish and prosper, their achievements will be attributed to a whole community; and, in the same way, their failures will be chalked up to something bigger and older than themselves, be it family, religion or ethnicity.

Then, after a little more along the same lines, Zahleekhah sits down and after a moment starts to cry. But rather than allow the reader space for empathy, the narrator sweeps in with her insistence on water as ubiquitous and rich with symbolic meanings:

A tear falls on the back of her hand. Lacrimal fluid, composed of intricate patterns of crystallised salt invisible to the eye. This drop, water from her own body, containing a trace of her DNA, was a snowflake once upon a time or a wisp of steam, perhaps here or many kilometres away, repeatedly mutating from liquid to solid to vapour and back again, yet retaining its molecular essence. It remained hidden under the fossil-filled earth for tens if not thousands of years, climbed up to the skies and returned to earth in mist, fog, monsoon or hailstorm, perpetually displaced and re-located. Water is the consummate immigrant, trapped in transit, never able to settle.

Again, I’m glad I read this book. But I was annoyed a lot of the time while reading it.

After the meeting: We read There Are Rivers in the Sky along with The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride. There were five of us, well-fed by the time we got to the books. We began with confessions: only one person hadn’t read either book, and she had read ‘about 35%’ of this one. She spoke eloquently about what she liked in what she had read – mainly the evocation of polluted, foul-smelling mid-19th century London – which makes me think it’s probably a good idea to have someone in any group who hasn’t finished the book.

Of those who had read to the end, we had a range of responses. One enjoyed it, only peripherally put off by the telling-not-showing and heavy-handed deployment of the leitmotifs. Onehad been enthusiastic abut the book because she hoped it would have interesting things to say about Gilgamesh and appreciated much about it, but was disappointed and disliked being lectured at. And the other just found the book tedious, would rather have read a non-fiction treatment of the history and persecution of the Yazidi, couldn’t feel any of the characters as more than made-up figures to allow the plot to move. And there was me (see above).

We all agreed that the most interesting thing in the book was the character of Arthur. Born in abject poverty, his photographic memory and a series of Dickensian coincidences (one of them featuring Charles Dickens) led him to interesting places, and fixation on a book about Nineveh as a way of dealing with the pain of brutal beating led to a grand obsession that gave The Epic of Gilgamesh to the modern world. I now want to find out more about the real-world George Smith, but I’m very happy to have Arthur in my mental world as distinct from him.

I wrote this blog post in Gadigal Wangal country, in a place where wetlands have been drained, but the river is recovering health, is home to a marvellous variety of birds, and is a great place for catch and release fishing (one day the fish may be edible again). I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land.

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

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Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise and the Book Club

Posted on 2 Sep 2024 | 2 comments

Abdulrazak Gurnah, Paradise (©1994, Bloomsbury 2004)

Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021, was a wonderfully urbane guest at this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival. In the session I attended he spoke mainly about his 2021 novel, Afterlives, but talked a lot about that book’s relationship with the much earlier Paradise. (Added much later: you can listen to the podcast of the conversation at this link.)

We read Afterlives a while ago in my all-male Book Group, and had a wonderful discussion of it. Now my predominantly female Book Club is tackling the earlier novel.

Before the meeting: Paradise is a long way from languishing in the shadow of Afterlives. Its action unfolds in the same part of East Africa, beginning a couple of decades earlier, in the years leading up to the First World War.

The book begins with a boy named Yusuf looking forward to receiving a customary gift of money from Uncle Aziz when Aziz’s brief visit comes to an end. There is no gift, and instead the boy is taken away with the uncle. Then he realises that he is not going back to his family and soon learns that he has been given to Aziz, who is not actually his uncle, as surety against his father’s debts. He has become little more than a slave in the merchant’s household.

The story unfold from there. There’s adventure, involving an arduous, perilous expedition into the unknown. There’s romance, where intimate moments, perhaps even a kiss, may be snatched in dark corners of a walled garden. There’s a gallery of rich, exuberant characters – Khalil, an older boy in a similar state of bondage to Yusuf; an older woman, infatuated by Yusuf’s beauty, who harasses him to the amusement of onlookers; an ancient gardener who long ago refused his freedom when actual slavery was abolished; a formidable, scarred man who organises Aziz’s trade expeditions and has a reputation as a sexual predator on young men; Aziz himself, a formidable commercial operator who remains calm in the most extreme situations.

Meanwhile, European powers are colonising East Africa. They are mostly peripheral, offscreen characters who threaten to destroy the whole world experienced by the main characters. German soldiers appear twice, once at roughly the midpoint and then again at the very end. Both times they function as a deus ex machina: the first time their unexpected arrival saves Aziz and his expedition, including Yusuf, from a vengeful tribal chief, but the incident leaves a nasty sense of something unresolved; the second time they provide the book’s final moment, which left me staring into space for a long time.

The book was only transated into Swahili – the official language along with English of Gurnah’s home nation Tanzania (known as Zanzibar back then) – after he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

After the meeting: At this meeting we discussed Annie Ernaux’s Une femme / A Woman’s Story along with Paradise, an odd pairing which meant we had two quite separate discussions.

All but one of us enjoyed this book a lot, and the dissenting voice meant we had an interesting conversation. The main character, she said, is completely passive: things just happen to him, one after another, and especially on the gruelling trade expedition that takes up a good slab of the book the bad things are repetitive. The book only becomes interesting once Yusuf is back in town and a powerful woman, in a complex way, is lusting after him. Though others were able to point out that Yusuf was constantly taking initiatives – a surreptitious excursion to town just for fun, offering unauthorised help to the ancient gardener, etc – I was struck by the similarity of this observation to what someone in my other Book Group said about the main character in Afterlives: because of the constraints on the characters, they don’t have the space to attend to their inner lives. When I tried to articulate this thought, someone said something beautifully concise and wise about the way trauma can alienate a young person from their own experience. Sadly I didn’t write it down, but to my mind it captured beautifully the way Yusuf does indeed move from one thing to the next, having no real say about the direction of his life, and no ability to form coherent thoughts about it.

I realised in the course of the discussion that the story is full of references to Joseph / Yusuf in the Hebrew Bible and the Quran, in particular the episode of Potiphar’s wife / Zuleikha. I just read a version of the Quran story on Wikipedia, and the parallels are even closer than I thought. It makes me wonder what other references may be hovering around this eminently readable tale. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness comes to mind. (Gurnah’s Gravel Heart includes a retelling of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, set in modern East Africa.)

We discussed the final paragraph, which I’d love to expand on here but, unlike some surprise revelations (see my blog post on Wole Soyinka’s Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, coming in a month or so), it really is a surprise.

Being of a certain age, we said goodnight a little after 10 o’clock.

I wrote this blog post in Gadigal Wangal country, where it is my great joy to live. In particular right now the days are getting warmer, the sun is rising earlier and setting later, and whenever I walk out my door I see tiny lizards scurrying for cover. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land.

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Rebecca F. Kuang’s Yellowface and the book group

Posted on 8 Aug 2024 | 5 comments

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

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

Yellowface is an entertaining addition to that list.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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