"And then the nights came on and the frosts took hold again, and blades of cold slid under doors and cut the knees off those who still knelt to say
"And then the nights came on and the frosts took hold again, and blades of cold slid under doors and cut the knees off those who still knelt to say the rosary."
This is an intricately structured and beautifully written Christmas parable. As the previous sentence shows, Keegan can convey so much with so little.
Keegan's artistry is rare. She manages to chip away all extraneous detail, such that every single word feels necessary and important. Everything is at work, though the story still feels effortless.
In part of her description of the crows in town, we get:
"Dapper, some of the others looked, striding along, inspecting the ground and their surroundings with their wings tucked in, putting Furlong in mind of the young curate who liked to walk about town with his hands behind his back."
The imagery is superb and it's letting us know of the curate and the sort of town it might be, while also associating the curate and his church with these crows that in the previous sentence were picking through the trash. This is a character we only hear of in this one instance but it sums him up perfectly.
There's just such a deft touch to it all.
Christmas time tends to bring a dozen new Hallmark movies, none of which pass on any moral lessons or even meaning at all. In fact works of meaning at Christmas time are almost impossible to come by, many people would point to Love Actually as the last well-done Christmas related piece of art. So it's nice to get a story that has some heft to it, even if it's a considerable heft.
Keegan handles one of the darkest chapters of Irish history with such grace and poignancy. Setting the story at Christmas gives it that religious and familial context which charges the narrative with such tension. For a lot of society Christmas has moved away from its Christian underpinning and instead has become a commercial holiday. Keegan's work brings it back but also scrutinises the truth of that religious connection and acknowledges the modern shift away from it.
While the story is set in the 80's there's a certain timeless quality to it that makes it feel like it could be 100 years older. There would be some who protest to the word parable being used outside a biblical context but it just feels so apt here. Bill Furlong takes a stand not for the Christian faith but for the things Christianity is supposed to stand for, and in doing so sets himself against the church but for humanity.
As they carried along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?
This story is one of hope, even if that hope is desperate.
As our man, Bill Furlong, climbs the hill to his house with this young woman he's rescued from the Magdalene Laundry we're pretty sure he's brought doom upon himself and his family, but we feel that he's done the right thing.
"The worst was yet to come, he knew. Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been - which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life. Whatever suffering he was now to meet was a long way from what the girl at his side had already endured, and might yet surpass. Climbing the street towards his own front door with the barefooted girl and the box of shoes, his fear more than outweighed every other feeling but in his foolish heart he not only hoped but legitimately believed that they would manage."
In my review of Outline, the first book in this trilogy, I mentioned Maria Tumarkin. Particularly when Tumarkin went to an Ira Glass talk where he saiIn my review of Outline, the first book in this trilogy, I mentioned Maria Tumarkin. Particularly when Tumarkin went to an Ira Glass talk where he said
"A story is like a train going to a station."
and she felt rather that a story:
"sometimes, and increasingly, it can feel like a tank crushing all sorts of things under its tracks. Something in the way the form pushes itself onto the experience; something about how the obligatory reflection framing the story often feels subtly untrue."
I felt that Cusk was saying something very similar and sure enough in this book I get almost an exact quote to that effect.
"History goes over the top like a steamroller, she said, crushing everything in its path...
There is this feeling throughout this trilogy that the stories being told are crushing all other perspectives, even the perspective of our protagonist Faye. So it comes with little surprise that after two books of cruelty and meanness Faye or rather Cusk is quite interested in Justice. What should all these horrible people that seem to surrond her at every turn be dealt? What are their fates? Justice is certainly something that seems to keep Faye going; in the absence of a god, the idea that there is some greater force and that we're also responsible for the action of that force is important.
I said that I found his remarks somewhat cynical, as well as strikingly indifferent to the concept of justice, whose mysteries, while remaining opaque to us, it had always seemed sensible to me to fear. In fact the very opacity of those mysteries, I said, was in itself grounds for terror, for if the world seemed full of people living evilly without reprisal and living virtuously without reward, the temptation to abandon personal morality might arise in exactly the moment when personal morality is most significant. Justice, in other words, was something you had to honour for its own sake, and whether or not he believed that Dante could look after himself, it seemed to me he ought to defend him at every opportunity.
Later one of the woman who is meant to be interviewing Faye has a similar opinion. In fact in many ways she seems to repeat back to Faye her own opinion from earlier.
'You asked me earlier,' she said to me, 'whether I believed that justice was merely a personal illusion. I don't have the answer to that,' she said, 'but I know that it is to be feared, feared in every part of you, even as it fells your enemies and crowns you the winner.'
And then at another event another person comments on fairness which also appears to be a little bit of a critique of Cusk's own writing.
We invent these systems with the aim of ensuring fairness, she said, and yet the human situation is so complex that it always evades our attempts to encompass it. While we are fighting the war on one front, she said, on another chaos has arisen, and there are many regimes that have come to the conclusion it is human individuality that causes all the problems. If people were all the same, she said, and shared a single point of view, it would of course make us much easier to organise. And that, she said, is where the real problems start.
Like the previous books, this final instalment in Cusk's ground breaking literary experiment in form; abandons plot, pushes the protagonist to the side, and just lets the prose sing. Cusk has definitely saved the best till last. The final book even goes meta and self-referential with a few interactions with the previous books and their methodology, and a character that reappears from the first book. As has often been the case throughout, characters say things that are unnervingly relevant to Cusk's own life.
'Unusually for a man of this nation,' she said, 'and perhaps for any man, he has been honest about his own life. He has written about his family and his parents and his childhood home in a way that makes them completely recogniseable, and because this is a small country he worries he has used them or compromised them, though of course for readers in other parts of the world it is just the honesty itself that comes through. Though of course if he were a woman,' she said leaning more confidentially towards my ear, 'he would be scorned for his honesty, or at the very least no one would care.'
Remind you of anyone?
The meta analysis even stretches to what is almost a commentary on Goodreads. This quote is what prompted Faye's justice comments above.
It was entertaining, in a way, to see Dante awarded a single star out of a possible five and his Divine Comedy described as 'complete shit', but a sensitive person might equally find it distressing, until you remembered that Dante - along with most great writers - carved his vision out of the deepest understanding of human nature and could look after himself. It was a position of weakness, he believed, to see literature as something fragile that needed defending, as so many of his colleagues and contemporaries did.
Just like the other two books, the mid section of Kudos is the strongest part. Though, this last instalment also seems to have a little more of everything. It's certainly got more contributions from Faye herself. Where in the previous two the sessions of what were essentially client centred therapy, had little to no contributions from Faye, now we get her pushing back more, and even though most of her comments are ignored, we feel as the reader, that she's no longer content on the sidelines. Cusk has mentioned that part of inventing this style of fiction was to reduce herself as a target for criticism. For the most part Faye has presented the smallest target possible, though in this final book she starts to rankle at her wallflower status and peep her head over the parapet a little more.
The lack of self-awareness from the other characters in the book also naturally rings alarm bells. Faye comes across as more of a ghost than a living human, given how nothing she says to other people, regardless of how insightful it might be, ever disrupts their speech, let alone their image of themselves. This was something Cusk set in Outline and has stuck to throughout. It should be an indicator that we have an unreliable narrator but because this same narrator has essentially ceded the floor to all the other characters we don't really notice the way her own perception warps the story.
There's been humour throughout the trilogy but this book definitely goes to 11. Faye is at a literature festival in what seems to be a German town, and she goes through a string of interviews where the interviewers talk exclusively about themselves and their own theories on life and writing. One highlight comes when one interviewer talks about her own struggles, doesn't ask a single question, and after recounting her entire life story says she needs to go but don't worry because as she says to Faye.
‘I think I have everything I need,’ she said. ‘In fact I looked up all the details before I came. It’s what we journalists do nowadays,’ she said. ‘One day they’ll probably replace us with a computer programme. I read that you got married again.’
Later we have another interviewer who decides Faye's life is too sad and that she'd be happier if she moved to what seems to be Lisbon. Faye responds:
I said I wasn’t sure it mattered where people lived or how, since their individual nature would create its own circumstances: it was a risky kind of presumption, I said, to rewrite your own fate by changing its setting; when it happened to people against their will, the loss of the known world – whatever its features – was catastrophic.
But the interviewer plows on with trying to convince Faye to move. This interaction sums up the trilogy quite well. Only Faye seems aware of what makes her tick, no one else will listen to her or is even interested, they're all far too self-obsessed or hooked on their own impressions of her. This humour reaches its darkest point right at the end when after 3 novels of listening to others spill their guts, Faye's son says to her.
'Faye,' he said fractiously, 'will you just listen?'
One can do nout but laugh. We've just had three books of her doing nothing but listen and now this young potential source of hope commands her in the same horrible partiarchal way so many characters have been excoriated for throughout the trilogy.
I'm sure like me you've come across the thought experiment of what you would be like in Nazi Germany or whether you would work the Underground Railroad in Antebellum US. Like me you've probably reached the conclusion that while you think you'd do the right thing you just could never be sure. Cusk has a passage that is so chilling for its subversion of that exact thought experiment and it's followed by an example of gas lighting that makes the husband's position even more sinister.
My sister told me, she said, that she and her husband were once having a discussion about the former GDR and the awful ways in which people betrayed one another under the regime of the Stasi, and she had made the point that none of us truly knows the extent of our own courage or cowardice, because in these times those qualities are rarely tested. He had disagreed, very strangely: he said that under those same circumstances he knew he would be among the first to sell out his neighbour. That, my sister said, was the first clear glimpse she had had of the stranger inside the man she lived with, though there were many other incidents, obviously, during the course of their marriage that might have told her who he really was, had he not succeeded in persuading her that she had either dreamt them or made them up.
The patches of trancelike prose from the previous book have seemingly bloomed to nearly the whole novel. There's still a few sections where the prose throws you out of the trance and back to reality, oh there goes gravity.... But if you've read the previous two books you'll be quite familiar with this oscillation.
Who hasn't noticed this trend? It's nice to hear it so succintly put.
The personal value of books had - for her at least - increased; yet she had the sense that the attempt to make a public concern out of a private pastime - reading and writing - was spawning a literature of its own, in that many of the writers invited here excelled at public appearances while producing work she found frankly mediocre. In the case of such people, she said, there are only the grounds: the building isn't there of if it is, it's a temporary structure that will be swept away by the next storm.
There's a bit on Louise Bourgeois, and it hit hard because Sydney had an exhibition of her entire oeuvre this year. That goes to show that we're 6 years off the cultural pace of Europe. The section on Jacarandas also got a smile from this Sydneysider.
He had many friends - smart, aspirational people of good taste - who had planted a jacaranda tree in their new garden as thought this law of nature somehow didn't apply to them and they could make it grow by the force of their will. After a year or two they would become frustrated and complain that it had barely increased even an inch. But it would take twenty, thirty, forty years for one of these trees to grow and yield its beautiful display, he said smiling: when you tell them this fact they are horrified, perhaps because they can't imagine remaining in the same house or indeed the same marriage for so long, and they almost come to hate their jacaranda tree, he said, sometimes even digging it up and replacing it with something else, because it reminds them of the possibility that it is patience and endurance and loyalty - rahter than ambition and desire - that bring the ultimate rewards. It is almost a tragedy, he said that the same people who are capable of wanting the jacaranda tree and understanding its beauty are incapable of nurturing one themselves.
If you've read Cusk's other work, purple prose (pun intended) will be familiar. What you won't be familiar with however is the truly bizarre final scene. I've been racking my brain to figure out what the hell Cusk was trying to say. We've had 3 books of cruelty and selfishness, this most recent book also has numerous feminist diatribes (though none from the protagonist) albeit all delivered in very masculine domineering ways. Then to close the whole trilogy out we have the following.
"One of them got to his feet, a huge burly man with a great curling black beard and a rounded stomach and thighs like hams. Slowly he walked down towards the water's edge, his white teeth faintly glimmering through his beard in a smile, his eyes fixed on mine. I looked back at him from my suspended distance, rising and falling. He came to a halt just where the waves broke and he stood there in his nakedness like a deity, resplendent and grinning. Then he grapsed his thick penis and began to urinate into the water. The flow came out so abundantly that it made a fat, glittering jet, like a rope of gold he was casting into the sea. He looked at me with black eyes full of malevolent delight while the golden jet poured unceasingly forth from him until it seemed impossible that he could contain any more. The water bore me up, heaving, as if I lay on the breast of some sighing creature while the man emptied himself into its depths. I looked into his cruel, merry eyes and I waited for him to stop."
If you thought justice would be served, you were horribly wrong. But then that's probably the main message Cusk was trying to transmit. Kudos for achieving it....more
Cusk has got me transfixed. Best trilogy since Lord of the Rings. Ok, that might be slightly facetious.
She set out to create the anti-novel with OutlCusk has got me transfixed. Best trilogy since Lord of the Rings. Ok, that might be slightly facetious.
She set out to create the anti-novel with Outline and achieved that handsomely. As in the last volume, the prose in Transit is flawless. While Outline kind of launches us in medias reas, Transit has a more mundane narrative entry, we almost get to know our protagonist a little bit. Faye, is back in London and possibly back in time. Although as an anti-novel neither of those things really matter. In fact I heard Cusk say in an interview.
Content, you can just go and get some more. The form is what makes the book stand.
Faye, says a little bit more in Transit. She's still very much the blank canvas the other characters spew their stories on but we also get a little more pushback. If Faye was a clear window in Outline, she's tending a bit more to stained glass in Transit.
I can't count the number of books I've pilloried for weak plot and characters, and along comes Cusk, chucks those both out the window and I lionise her for it.
Cusk has Faye (who is probably just Cusk) resolving her trauma through the way she interacts with others. She's rebuilding her flat just as she's rebuilding her life, and she's living above some trolls who are egregious caricatures but also walking, talking metaphors.
There's a hell of a lot of cruelty and meanness in these novels. Not a single character comes out completely scot-free. They all have little cruel streaks, and some are evil personified. But it's Cusk's preternatural prose that makes even the dark stuff so compelling and at times beautiful. Here's just a few extracts that can make this point far better than I can.
"She had just broken up with her partner of two years, someone who knew her with sufficient throughness, that his demolition of her character in their final arguments could not fail to undermine her opinion of herself."
The book is best in the mid section. Passage after stunning passage.
"When I went back to the sitting room I was struck by the sight of Jane's jewel-coloured clothing amid the white landscape of dust sheets. She had remained very still, her knees together and her head erect, her pale fingers evenly splayed around the teacup. I found myself wondering who exactly she was: there was a sense of drama about her that seemed to invite only two responses - either to become absorbed or to walk away. Yet the prospect of absorption seemed somehow arduous: I recalled her remarks about the draining nature of students and thought how often people betrayed themselves by what they noticed in others. I asked her how old she was."
Again, like Outline, it's only towards the end that Faye ventures something close to explaining what the book is doing and how Faye/Cusk actually feels about things.
"I said, I shouldn't take my share of blame for what had happened; I had never regarded the things that had occurred, however terrible, as anything other than what I myself - whether consciously or not - had provoked. It wasn't a question of seeing my femaleness as interchangeable with fate: what mattered far more was to learn how to read that fate, to see the forms and patterns in the things that happened, to study their truth. It was hard to do that while still believing in identity, let alone in personal concepts like justice and honour and revenge, just as it was hard to listen while you were talking. I had found out more, I said, by listening than I had ever thought possible."
Do you need to read the first one before this? Definitely not but you should because it's more opportunity to be exposed to Cusk's phenomenal prose. You could easily read them out of order as well. Just to be close to Cusk's prose is the important thing....more
This is definitely not what I talk about when I talk about love.
I was actually using a Lifeline bookmark while reading this book and I think that's pThis is definitely not what I talk about when I talk about love.
I was actually using a Lifeline bookmark while reading this book and I think that's probably a policy I'd recommend.
The first couple of stories have a real surreal quality to them and I thought that was going to be par for the course but it was swiftly replaced with a grim realism.
It's just so bleak. Every single story is so incredibly dark. I've read that a lot of it comes from Carver's own life, must be a pretty grim life.
I liked the whole collection but several of them were so heavy I had to stop and take a break. Tell the women we're going is absolutely brutal. So much water so close to home is haunting. Popular Mechanics, the shortest story, is also a punch in the gut.
Maybe the only one that has a hopeful feel is Everything stuck to him.
I've also seen constant comments about how much material Carver's editor, Gordon Lish, sent to the cutting floor. I see there's the original manuscript version Beginners, published posthumously by Carver's wife. I'm going to give that a go to see if they keep their power while maybe gaining a bit more explication.
As it stands the work is taut and powerful. And the writing reads like nothing else. Yes I do detect some of the seeds of Murakami but Carver is far less interested in his character's unconscious mind, he's more content making stories that will camp out in yours for years to come....more
Perhaps it's because I cracked this book just as I sat down on a longhaul flight to Europe but it felt very real.
Outline has a strange construction. TPerhaps it's because I cracked this book just as I sat down on a longhaul flight to Europe but it felt very real.
Outline has a strange construction. The protagonist creates a void in the centre of the story and while barely telling us anything about herself we find her grief and pain shaped by the stories of the auxiliary characters around her. The protagonist describes it herself right at the end of the book ....
"This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she was now."
This was certainly Cusk's goal. When Outline was first published, Cusk told The Guardian that she felt fiction was:
fake and embarrassing. Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous.
She went on to suggest that Outline's annihilated perspective might be the
"beginning of something interesting.... I'm certain autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts. Description, character -- these are dead or dying in reality as well as in art.
Many readers will be tempted to spend their time reading Outline guessing which parts are Cusk's own story. I'd say given the statements above a huge chunk of it is but it's also been given the hall of mirrors treatment to further accentuate the bizarre world we live in or rather the world of bizarre people we live in. Admittedly, I often feel like most of the people I meet these days are a self-parody of themselves, acting their lives out as if scripted. If this is a work of autobiography it's one of the strangest you'll meet.
The protagonist reveals so little about herself and not a single character around her shows any empathy or interest in her story. Every time she says something it merely triggers other characters to recouch the conversation back into their own experiences. Even when she has some searing observations of their lives.
"I said I wondered how he could fail to see the relationship between disillusionment and knowledge in what he had told me. If he could only love what he did not know, and be loved in return on that same basis, then knowledge became an inexorable disenchantment, for which the only cure was to fall in love with someone new."
With the main character being a writing teacher there is a constant pull to see everything as a story needing to be told. Cusk addresses this directly in the classes that our protagonist teaches. I feel Cusk is also wrestling with the same issues I've seen Maria Tumarkin fight. I remember clearly reading about Tumarkin going to an Ira Glass talk where he said
"A story is like a train going to a station."
She felt rather that a story:
"sometimes, and increasingly, it can feel like a tank crushing all sorts of things under its tracks. Something in the way the form pushes itself onto the experience; something about how the obligatory reflection framing the story often feels subtly untrue."
It certainly seems that Cusk is well aware of these various characters stories rolling over the top of the protagonist's. It's not by chance that every one of her characters has been through some form of relationship upheaval. There's not a single happily married monogamous couple in the whole book. And we know that the protagonist is also recovering from a marriage breakdown.
The protagonist remains so much a void that the first time we encounter her name, Faye, is page 211 about 40 pages from the end of the book.
While I was reading Outline on the plane, I often wondered if I'd look up from the book and see Cusk across the aisle just grinning at me with a mile wide smile. So much of it seems tongue in cheek and ironic. It's a writer's book no doubt. I can imagine successful authors and writing teachers grimly chuckling while recognising the deep truth of Cusk's characters. Meanwhile amateurs will take her quotes on writing as if carved into tablets and brought back from the mountain top by Moses.
"That's writing for you, when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up."
There's just some stunning writing in here and ultimately you don't come for the characters or the plot, you just come for the prose.
"It was impossible I said in response to his question, to give the reasons why the marriage had ended among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious."
You're just reading along and then bang.
"And then one day the river dried up: their shared world of imagination ceased, and the reason was that one of them - I can't even recall which one it was - stopped believing in it. In other words, it was nobody's fault; but all the same it was brought home to me how much of what was beautiful in their lives was the result of a shared vision of things that strictly speaking could have been said to exist."
And you think surely she hasn't got more of this stuff and then bang
"It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destruction: even the kindest ones, the ones that are most loving, can rarely have your interests truly at heart, because usually they are advising you from within lives of greater security and greater confinement, where escape is not a reality but simply something they dream of sometimes. Perhaps he said, we are all like animals in the zoo, and once we see that one of us has got out of the enclosure we shout at him to run like mad, even though it will only result in him becoming lost."
You take a breather because it's been hitting you hard but then you want to be back in there because you know there's so many more gems and sure enough.
"The unexpected sometimes looks like a prompting of fate."
I could go on and on because as I said before this novel is first and foremost a great piece of writing. I doubt many of the characters will stay with me, or the plot (not that there is one), but the prose will continue its siren song long after I've put this book down. In fact the first thing I did on arrival in the UK was go hunting for book two of this 3 part series. Got to get my fix....more
You just can't beat the old myths. The older and more ancient, the better. Old English myths are our archetypal stories and some are buried deep in thYou just can't beat the old myths. The older and more ancient, the better. Old English myths are our archetypal stories and some are buried deep in the unconscious mind, most of them no longer told, many of them twisted and morphed into other stories or things we know but don't know why we know them.
I recognised that poorly drawn white horse on the cover immediately. I say I recognised it. I knew it, I just couldn't recall it's name. The Uffington White Horse of course. Regardless of not being able to recall it's name, when combined with the title, it let me know what the story would be like, and arguably better than any blurb could have. Because frankly blurbs weren't made for books like this. You can't put a blurb on an ancient tale. What would a compelling blurb for The Tortoise and the Hare be? Ok that's actually quite a fun game.
Testudine beats Lepus through a case of insomnia and perseverance over pace.
Back to what I was saying. This book is pulling on the old stuff.
Donkey Stone, I've definitely come across that somewhere. A scouring stone used to lighten the leading edge of steps. Traded mostly by rag-and-bone men. And the Corr Bolg, the Crane Bag. If it weren't already clear that Faeries were among us, Treacle Walker tells us he's from under a mound (they often live in hollow hills), and he talks about Middle Yard AKA middle geard AKA Middle Earth. There's stories within this story. There's Garner's childhood, there's English folklore, and there's the cuckoo clock of father time. Some of the words on their own are stories waiting to be told.
If Middle Earth piqued your interest and made you think of great battles between men, elves, and the hordes of Sauron, you'll be sorely disappointed. However, if you want another look at where some of Tolkien's stories come from you can see those origins blooming in a completely different way with Treacle Walker. Treacle Walker and his pony drawn cart are just a step away from Tom Bombadil riding on Fatty Lumpkin. Garner and Tolkien pull from the same material. Garner is pure Celtic derived English folklore and Tolkien has mixed it with some Norse components but the connections are there.
There are however some closer similarities. Lanny by Max Porter is easily the closest although I found Treacle Walker a superior book. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness also has some similarities though I'd say Ness wrote for children and though Garner has done so through countless other works this one is largely for himself, which is part of the reason it's slightly impenetrable. Anywhere else you see old English folklore you'll see a connection, whether it's Spenser's Faerie Queen or the recent Green Knight film by David Lowery.
One of my friends on here has mentioned that maybe not being a native English speaker has her struggling with this and I'd say that rings true to me. The word play sings to a native English speaker just as the myths pull on strings connected to things only the British still remember. I can see why this got a Booker nod, the Booker after all is a prize for the best English writing. This short and sweet novel deals with the very foundations of the language, it's not only written in English but it's about English itself. There's the ancient words from Old English and Middle English, there's some Celtic, there's the language of Garner's childhood and rural England, there's old geezer chat, there's the archetypes the language was built on, the meanings behind our metaphors, then there's the English of today.
The comic book scenes may seem silly to many and they're very much an indulgence Garner has earned himself after 80+ years of writing stories. I actually think they work quite well even if I don't recognise the comic.
There's a huge amount of humour here:
‘What’s amiss?’ said Joe. ‘I’ll tell you what’s amiss. I shall. I shall that. You come here, you and your box and your pots and your donkey stone, and fetch in enough to make me frit to death. You’re on about bones and all sorts; and then you’re off, some road or other, and I can’t tell where I am. I’ve got a pain in my eye. I can’t see proper. And I go down the bog and get stuck; and this chap with no clothes on and a daft silly hat, he sits up in the water and he makes no more sense than you do. He says I’ve got glammeritis, and then Stonehenge Kit, he’s gone, and so’s my best dobber; and Whizzy’s with a Brit Basher and they’re after Kit and the mirror’s all wrong then he’s back in the picture. And there’s this here.’ Joe pulled the crumpled paper from his pocket and lobbed it across the fire basket. ‘What’s happening? What the heck’s up?’
I'm not sure how to encourage people to enjoy it other than to say just let go, and ride with the apparent silliness. This is an old tale but a true tale....more
The Bookshop is a very simple novel but with an incredible richness. Fitzgerald has a stunning ability to nail characterisation with a single phrase.
TThe Bookshop is a very simple novel but with an incredible richness. Fitzgerald has a stunning ability to nail characterisation with a single phrase.
The awful fop Milo North His emotions, from lack of exercise, had disappeared almost altogether.
Poor Christine “... and believe me, Mrs. Green, she'll be pegging out her own washing until the day she dies.”
The odisome Theodore Gill "smiles as a toad does, because it has no other expression."
Fitzgerald is also exceptionally funny, if the ending wasn't so sad this novel would be in the pantheon of good comedy writing. There's a bleakness to Fitzgerald's dark humour that reminds me of Remarque, though in a far more pedestrian setting.
As it stands The Bookshop is very much a tragedy. Outside Fitzgerald's own work the book I sense the most similarities to is Kafka's The Trial. Undoubtedly there's more velvet glove than iron fist in The Bookshop. But Florence much like Josef K is chewed up and spat out by the machinations of beareaucracy. Unlike Josef K, the cause for Mrs Green's demise is obvious, yet the process and effects are much the same. Unlike Joseph K, Florence also has allies, which oddly, bar Mr Brundish all come from a non-reading working class background. But with both novels it seems the only reasonable response is to laugh because the other alterantive is existential despair or a fair share of tears.
Which reminds me that I once read about a time when Kafka did a public reading of The Castle and he had the audience in stitches. Dark humour pulls out a more primal laugh than some casual slapstick, and it allows us to examine the fragility of our own mortal coil without wanting to crawl into a ball.
Fitzgerald seems to understand that you can do nothing but laugh when faced with the dark abyss; aptly she summed this book up as "A short book with a sad ending".
And Fitzgerald definitely has a sense of the absurd. There's seemingly a real poltergeist in the story, a character that ultimately is far more lovable than the human detritus that arrays itself against Florence.
Still the reader is left with so many questions.
What leads Mr Brundish AKA Suffolk personified to readily shake off his slumber and ride into battle for our earnest protagonist, ultimately at the cost of his life?
Equally why is Florence Green quite so naive?
Fitzgerald certainly exaggerates, she caricatures, and she subverts cliché. This isn't provincial England, it's provincial England dialled up to 11.
At times the book reminded me of that hilarious English Parish Council meeting from a few years ago with the guy screaming over Zoom "You have no authority here Jackie Weaver" before she booted him from the meeting.
There's layers to this simple tale as well. Just as Mrs Green is being squished by those with power, so is Catherine being squashed into her working class lot in life. Yet despite that depth we know so little of our protagonist. Fitzgerald feels no obligation to answer any of the reader's questions or discuss anything she doesn't want to, as is any writer's perogative. I actually think it makes the novel stronger.
After being whelmed by Offshore, I wasn't holding out huge hopes for this slim morsel. I remember being flummoxed to find out that Offshore had won the Booker prize. Now I'm flummoxed in reverse, to see that The Bookshop was shortlisted in the same year. In my mind it's a superior work to Offshore by quite a margin.
I've also always felt that hidden inside every person on Goodreads is a little flame of hope about one day setting up their own bookshop. Well this is the cautionary tale to extinguish that little flame. The novel finishes with saddest line I've read in I don't know how long.
"As the train drew out of the station she sat with her head bowed in shame, because the town in which she had lived for nearly ten years had not wanted a bookshop."...more
Who loves longer? Chekhov's genius lay in never presuming to give the answer. Of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina Chekhov merely said it framed the questions c
Who loves longer? Chekhov's genius lay in never presuming to give the answer. Of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina Chekhov merely said it framed the questions correctly. Each of us has a public life and private life. But beyond both is a secret life that baffles us.
I could write a review about this book but I think Flanagan's own writing will be a much better testament. Flanagan wrestles with the implications of Chekhov's question and all the other big questions that might come to a man who is watching the winter of his parents lives while facing his own autumnal season. Sebaldian, will definitely be used to describe this book but it also reminded me a lot of Dasa Drndic's Trieste, which is often given the Sebaldian tag too, so a hall of mirrors then.
"A writer if they are doing their job properly, is always a heretic."
Of the many necessary illusions that enable a writer to write, two are paramount - one, the vanity they can write a good book, and the other the conceit that a good book will be read by good readers, people with the insight to recognise what is good within it.
Writers rail against misunderstanding, but poor writers prosper by being misunderstood.
All words are at best transitory and soon enough become archaic, ceasing to belong to language at all and instead becoming the property of data sets that after a further time return only dead URL links, so many 404 errors.
Rutherford was undoubtedly an expert. But what was an expert? Someone focused on what little was known and not the much greater sum of what wasn't?
I could check which year was the wettest, or whether either is even correct, but this is an account of memory, not fact, and facts are not how we know ourselves, while memory - its tricks, its evasions, its silences, its inventions, its inevitable questions - is who we become as we shuffle around in a circle in that small lounge room while the incessant rain continues crashing on our uninsulated tin roof and brushes our windows, the tv again irrelevant, my father lost in another dance and other, older memories as we slowly circle his past together.
When I first attempted writing novels as an adult I wrote tales of cities and crowds, the great tropes of European modernism. Every word was rubbish. I'd never seen a city or known a crowd. My first experience of a crowd was in London at the age of twenty-four. I was frightened. It was inconceivable that there could be so many people and not one person knew you nor you them. And there amidst innumerable millions of fellow human beings I felt the most terrible solitude that was also an inconsolable fear. There was no anchor, there were no roots, there was no river down which I might return.
And I realise writing this that memory is as much an act of creation as it is of testimony, and that one without the other is a tree without its trunk, wings without a bird, a book without its story.
Just like Wallace Stevens' poem, Lloyd Jones has linked together a series of vignettes into a vivid tapestrThirteen Ways of Looking at the All Blacks.
Just like Wallace Stevens' poem, Lloyd Jones has linked together a series of vignettes into a vivid tapestry but rather than a blackbird we get the men in black; the 1905 Originals on their European tour.
If you want to know where the legend of the All Blacks started this is your answer.
Beyond the rugby this is a fascinating study of second generation, antipodean, colonial subjects returning to the "motherland" to realise for themselves why their parents left it in the first place.
While this book does not have the same universal appeal as Mr Pip, I enjoyed it a lot more.
Here, in the Tuileries, you saw how trees grew wanting to do their best You saw spires and understood that where thoughts went to was exactly the same place where ideas were fetched down....more
A few years ago K. and I spent several glorious days in Trieste. This included hikes up into the hills, cut from Karst limestone, that surround the ciA few years ago K. and I spent several glorious days in Trieste. This included hikes up into the hills, cut from Karst limestone, that surround the city, and following trails of crossed branches towards countless osmizze (farmhouse stores/restaurants). While there we stayed in a tiny apartment near the water that looked over a seemingly abandoned industrial building. Something about that building wasn't right, it didn't just feel like it was abandoned, it felt like it was deliberately preserved in its state of disrepair. It wasn't until several years later that I was to learn it was the San Sabba Rice Mill we were looking at. A building that Austerlitz briefly mentions with regards to another holder of his odd surname. Austerlitz's mention also triggered my memory of the devastating book Trieste by Daša Drndić, which is where I learned of the Rice Mill and it's dark history. Drndić approaches the holocaust in a similar way to Sebald, such that her work has been called "Sebaldian". The ties between these memories are tenuous and much like Austerlitz I struggle to grapple with them and follow their trail to the real meaning behind them.
Another memory....... when I was younger I lived with a family in Paris for a few months. At one stage my billet and I took a trip to Alsace to see some of his extended family. On a crisp winter's day a week out from Christmas, they dropped us off at Neuf-Brisach. We proceeded to explore the star fort both inside and out for the better part of the day. The fort had that eerie feeling of being outside of time, like an animal frozen in ice. A feeling that was compounded by the stillness and silence, and the snow falling softly as we circled the battlements. We were the only visitors to the town that day but it felt like we were the only visitors in the past decade. Later that evening we went to a service at a small church in Colmar, where the choir sung a song in French, English, German and Alsatian about the birth of Jesus. As an atheist, It was the closest I've ever come to God. That trip lit a passion in me for the Alsation french accent, the smell of Glühwein in the Christmas markets, choucroute garnie, the Astronomical clock in Strasbourg cathedral, and Vauban and his star forts. Sebald's book is the first time I've come across one of those memories in fiction.
Another tenuous connection..... Cockatoos have one of the most distinctive bird calls in the avian world. There's something about it that is also incredibly Australian, you can almost hear them saying "maaaaate". Recently I had to host a few trivia nights and I went in search of some cockatoo related trivia. I was stunned to learn there are 22 distinct cockatoo species in the world and that many of them are indigenous to Indonesia. Not the most Australian of birds as I originally thought. The week after finding that fact, sure enough Austerlitz recounts a family of cockatoos being established at a house he frequented in Wales. There they thrived, prying everything up, cartwheeling about, and causing a general ruckus. These cockatoos of course were not from Australia but the Moluccas. There's also a family of Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos that rip apart the Banksia cones outside our apartment every winter. Unlike the raucous gravelly voice of a sulfur-crested cockatoo, these guys have the most mournful, haunting cry you've heard. It will transfix you to the spot and send a shiver down your spine. The local indigenous tribe always considered these birds a portent of rain, for me they fill me with emotion and memories. They've been calling while I've been reading this book and the timing of their calls have been nothing short of ominous.
There's something quite strange about various pictures popping up in a heavy literary text. It adds a completely different experience to reading. The only other books that I've read which attempted the feat were the aforementioned Drndić's Trieste, and Apeirogon by Column McCann. The strange thing is that all three books take a very similar fragmentary approach to narrative. Each of their narratives is pieced together like an album of photographs, even though the photographs aren't pulled from the same album. All three books are incredibly powerful works of literature and I recommend them all but also remind people that their power also makes them taxing reads. They request an enormous amount of emotional energy from the reader. I also feel that all three writers realised that the fragmentary approach is the best way to handle a history where not all the facts are known and death has caused so many gaps in the story. All three seem to understand that silence is the most important part of speech.
Last week we went to the ANZAC Day Dawn service. It's an event that is slowly dwindling as a part of the Australian national fabric but it's also the most moving and powerful event in the Australian calendar. It's not a celebration of a glorious military victory but a commemoration of a horrific military defeat, and the loss of so much unfulfilled life. You cannot but be moved as you stand there in complete silence, in the pre-dawn darkness, surrounded by fellow Australians and Kiwis, because it's really only silence that is worthy of that sacrifice. That silence between the last post and the reveille.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.
I see Austerlitz fading back into the silence at the end of this novel. His efforts to reconcile the great hole in his heart and life, largely unsuccessful, because that chasm just cannot be filled.
The best we can do is stand in silence and remember....more
Much of the talk about Grimmish is about the conditions under which it was published and its nature as an exploded non-fiction. While both of those arMuch of the talk about Grimmish is about the conditions under which it was published and its nature as an exploded non-fiction. While both of those are interesting, they don't make it unique. What makes this book truly unique is that it's both a philosophical look at sport and it blows apart the saying "history is written by the victor". Winkler decides to give voice to the ultimate punching bag, Joe Grim, a man who hasn't beaten the best but instead has been routinely beaten by the best. Grim is the sort of curiosity who would normally be forgotten a generation or two after he'd fought his last fight, while the champs he fought, like Jack Johnson, get thrown around in the endless GOAT conversations that seem to plague sports at the moment.
Those with no interest in the pugilistic arts will probably blanch at the beatings Grim takes and not agree that his ability to take punishment is something worth investigating. They'll dismiss Joe Grim's mastery of boxing as stupidity. Certainly, there were times in the book where I thought why can't he just fight back but that's how he makes his living and it's his body not mine taking the beating. There's plenty of average fighters who win half their fights and don't make any money. Joe Grim is the only fighter who deliberately goes in and takes the biggest beating possible and still remains standing.
It must be a chilling feeling to be the world champ and knock another man down 30 times just for him to spring back up like Antaeus each time. Punches that normally strike fear into your opponents and send them to the shadow realm just seem to be sucked into the abyss of pain. Then after 20 rounds when you've won the bout but are absolutely gassed, your opponent, who you knocked down 30 times, does a back flip and showboats around.
Winkler in his self-written review talks about exploded non-fiction. His introduction of a goat into the narrative won't be loved by many but I quite liked our caprine friend and now want wise cracking goats to turn up in other non-fiction books I read. It made me think of the Goatwriter in David Mitchell's Number9Dream or the monkey in Yann Martel's Beatrice and Virgil. As for the uniqueness of exploded non-fiction, very early on I felt quite a similarity to Maria Tumarkin's Axiomatic. The strong prose seeded with philosophical musings from a constantly visible narrator was a style that, despite Winkler's insistence, is not his invention. It came as no surprise to see Tumarkin in the footnotes on page 104, Winkler has clearly read his fellow Victorian's book.
Grimmish definitely fades towards the end and in some ways this is sympathetic to Joe Grim's own failing pugilistic powers and the narrator's uncle's increasing inebriation, one is getting punch drunk while the other is just getting drunk. There's a certain poetic quality to the ending but it still felt like the weakest part of the book.
There's something deeply primal about a sport that involves beating the opposition into unconsciousness but there's also something deeply idiotic about two guys giving each other brain damage. Winkler somehow manages to find the romance in what is a truly dire line of work. As far as boxing books go this is right up there with The Sweet Science and The Fight. It does fall more on the literary fiction side of the fence than those two and it won't necessarily appeal to lovers of other boxing books but for those from the Cus d'Amato school of mind over matter it might just blow you away.
While I don't really care for awards I do see it as a great travesty that this book was knocked out by Jennifer Down's Bodies of Light in the Miles Franklin. Part of me feels the award selectors didn't know what to do with it and the conspiracy part of me wonders if they were worried what it would say about the book industry when a self-published work trounces all the other books that year. I also think this is the most masculine book I've read in a very long time and I'm well aware that it will repulse a lot of readers. But literature wasn't invented to garner awards, it was created to explore the human spirit and with that as our guiding light this is literature at it's finest....more
Magisterial is a word that I don't often find cause to use with the books I read. Here it is completely apt but then so is the word exhausting.
This bMagisterial is a word that I don't often find cause to use with the books I read. Here it is completely apt but then so is the word exhausting.
This book was both my most fascinating and tortuous read in recent memory, it's like trying to take a drink from a firehose.
Rhodes' research is beyond comprehensive but his writing is for the most part quite dry. He's interested in accuracy and facts, not so much artistry and feeling. Towards the end his prose gets a lot more florid as all the fallout from the bombs charges both the time in history and the prose with poignancy. It's where we cut from the decades of scientific work to the eventual victims of those great leaps that the prose naturally becomes heavy with that unforgettable and immense, personal cost.
The book's weakest element is its occasional staccato rhythm. At times we jump from place to place, person to person, making discovery after discovery, and decision after decision with the only link being a temporal one. As if the research of Fermi in his lab in Rome and the decisions of Churchill at 10 Downing St can be juxtaposed simply because they happened on the same day.
Rhodes also has an enormous run-up. There are at least 200 pages of scientific history leading into the First World War. Rhodes starts way back at the birth of nuclear physics, with Rutherford and his coterie (Interesting side note Rutherford directly mentored 11 Nobel prize winners) and their counterparts on the continent; Bohr, the Joliot-Curies, the Germans and Hungarians shaping science. Rhodes does a great job of outlining the old system of mentor driven science, where one would chose a great man or woman to essentially apprentice themselves to. It made me nostalgic for a type of education that is largely absent in today's business of universities. While it's a big run-up, you could do much worse for a primer on turn of the century physics.
The period of discovery from Rutherford discovering the atomic nucleus to the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki could certainly be put forward as the greatest scientific period in human history. The community and fraternity of scientists across the globe preceding the Great Wars is also heartening and certainly a golden era I imagine all scientists wish we could return to.
As for the main event there is no stone, pebble, or grain of sand that remains unturned in the examination of this history altering moment. For me it's the interesting little side notes that provide such rich texture to a history that everyone around the world at least knows the basics of. Things like when they were making the dozens of enormous cyclotrons for production of Uranium there was a copper shortage and they had to contact the US Mint to ask if they could borrow some silver and form it into wire as a copper replacement. The Mint asked how much Silver they needed and the scientists responded with a tonnage amount to which the Mint replied "We measure things here in Troy Ounces please send us the correct amount using the right measurements." The little peccadilloes of bureaucracy taking centre stage when a race to save the world is on can't help but make me laugh.
There's some fantastic profiles of truly great scientists in this book and it's not one of those pop science or psuedo science books where every person is some quirky character described by a few flippant physical characteristics. I probably learned the most about Fermi from this book; he is an absolute giant. I came across Robert Wilson's take on Fermi in another book.
"Wilson left Princeton when J. Robert Oppenheimer invited him to join the then-fledgling Manhattan Project. Despite initial reluctance, he wound up being the youngest group leader in the experimental division when Enrico Fermi persuaded him to head the Cyclotron Group—by promising to meet with Wilson every week to talk about physics. "Sure, I sold out," Wilson later said. "Everyone has his price, and mine was a few moments each week with Fermi."
I did notice Rhodes really had a fetish with Szilard and that seemingly translated into his next book Dark Sun about the Hydrogen bomb. There's no doubt Szilard was also a giant in this period but he was slightly more auxiliary when it came to these atomic bombs. I wonder if maybe the attention lathered on Szilard would have been better focused on some of the other dozen scientists who had such big contributions but perhaps Szilard's ego demands the attention.
This is such a minor complaint with what is the best science book I've ever read, I've been cautiously recommending it to people, mainly ones who I know are either deeply passionate about this area or have an abundance of time on their hands. Rhodes' work definitely has a place in the pantheon of great history and science books...more
An absolute must-read. Especially if like this reader you had the AstraZeneca vaccine. How often do you get to read a book about the vaccine that has An absolute must-read. Especially if like this reader you had the AstraZeneca vaccine. How often do you get to read a book about the vaccine that has recently been injected into your arm? This book should have easily won best science book of the year and it should also be given to every person when they get their vaccine, every anti-vaxxer, and just everyone really.
What I found most scary was how misinformed I was, despite my vigilance. I only use what I believe to be reputable news sources, ABC (Australian), The Guardian, BBC, NY Times etc, yet I was still infected by a lot of false reporting and fallacious news. This book set me straight.
Here are the key things I learnt, all of which I found fascinating.
The Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine is a "platform technology". That is to say that these brilliant scientists at Oxford had already created an adenovirus vector to carry anything they may want to transmit. They had successfully used this technology to make a MERS vaccine that was already in use. The Oxford AZ vaccine or ChAdOx1-S recombinant vaccine is a Recombinant, replication deficient chimpanzee adenovirus vector. I'll unpack it for you just as the authors do.
Recombinant: means that the DNA sequence for the Covid-19 spike protein was made in a lab. That is they looked at the 28,000 letters of the Covid-19 virus genetic code and identified the 3,819 letters that encode the spike protein (this was made easier by having already done it on MERS, so they knew what they were looking for). Once the sequence had been identified they recreated it on a piece of computer software and then did a process called codon optimisation. That process involves changing certain letter sequences to correlatives that are more efficient or better recognised by the human body. For example the amino acid arginine is more likely to be AGG than CGT and so you would put the former into the sequence. Once they had their spike protein design complete they sent it off to a lab to be created.
Replication Deficient: The virus cannot replicate once injected. So however many viral particles (in this case 50 billion are in the vaccine) that's how many you will be getting.
Chimpanzee Adenovirus: Bet you didn't know that! They used an adenovirus common in chimpanzees but not present in humans. Why? Well if they use an adenovirus common in humans, the virus would be wiped out before the body had a chance to make an immune response to the spike protein it is carrying. So we use a weakened chimpanzee one to allow the body a chance to recognise the spike protein and start making antibodies.
Vector: The adenovirus was used as a vector to carry the covid-19 spike protein.
I also learnt that the two dose method was in some ways a fortuitous discovery. They had some of the trial vaccine made in a lab in Italy and they had a difference in concentration reading from that batch. They decided to half the dose from the Italian batch just to be safe and then got approval to do a second full strength shot for participants who had received the half dose. Hence the confusing efficacy study results which seemingly baffled the media and caused all sorts of drama. The trials resulted in 70% total efficacy, 62% two standard doses, 90% half dose then standard dose. Which leads me to one of my few criticisms in the book, despite saying they'd address it, neither author explains why the half dose and then full dose is the most effective.
Further learning included finding out that the control group in the UK trials received a meningitis vaccine because it created symptoms that were most similar to the covid-19 vaccine.
From an Australian perspective the biggest controversy around the AstraZeneca vaccine was the blood clotting. It dominated the news here for several months and caused a lot of hesitancy in the population. The authors don't spend a huge amount of time addressing this and don't explain how the blood clotting happens. They do however calmly compare the risk to other behaviour, for example you have more chance of blood clotting from the contraceptive pill than the AstraZeneca vaccine. This reader got his Astro-Zucchinis jab as soon as he was able to, which resulted in some of my friends calling me a gunslinger (a title I proudly bore). The blood clotting issue highlighted how the Australian media often choose to stir up controversy without thinking of the social impact.
I also learnt that the whole mercury in the vaccine fake news stems from decades ago when flu vaccines sometimes had thiomersal a mercury-based preservative in them. Thiomersal was used in multi-dose vials to kill any bacteria that found their way into the vial. The amount of mercury in those vaccines was so tiny and quickly excreted by the body yet it has caused much hesitancy around vaccines. None of the Covid-19 vaccines have thiomersal or any mercury in them.
HEK293. The Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine is grown in Human Embryonic Kidney cells taken from a single foetus aborted in the Netherlands in the 1970's. Cue Catholic outrage. But don't worry the Pope's given his tick of approval. However, it warms the cockles of my heart to think that anti-abortion activists around the world may have life-saving vaccine in them that was created in a rich nutrient bath of aborted foetal cells. The vaccine also has a tiny bit of alcohol in it .002mg per dose, but again don't worry because the British Islamic Medical Foundation have declared it has a negligible effect, as the authors point out you can get more drunk off bread.
Also, the Appendices are probably the most readable appendices I've ever encountered in a book. There's even the full list of ingredients of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine with explanations in Appendix C.
Now my only other gripe with this book was Dr Green's and Professor Gilbert's daily grumbles. It's their book and they kind of saved the world, so they can do whatever they want but I just wanted more science and more info that I couldn't get anywhere else. I'm sure many will find their distinctly British humour and quotidian chores a strong human touch to the story but I would have preferred a little more science. Their complaints about the difficulties of attaining funding are valid and exceptionally important but completely boring next to the life saving science going on (and yes I know that science needs to be funded). Please don't let my criticisms dissuade you because this book as I've already said is an absolute must-read.
Finally, the average vaccine takes ten years to be created, the world record before Covid-19 was 4 for the mumps vaccine. These two superstars and their team of superheroes did it in a year.
A moving bildungsroman set during the Second World War.
Wharton's methods are unconventional but that gives them power.
We start towards the end with hA moving bildungsroman set during the Second World War.
Wharton's methods are unconventional but that gives them power.
We start towards the end with his two protagonists meeting each other in a psych ward, where one tries to rehabilitate the other. As the story progresses it starts to become clear that maybe the more disturbed character is the one outside the cage.
This is a great war novel, I put it right up there with All Quiet on The Western Front. Although Wharton's approach to war is to examine the effects of it rather than immerse the narrative in it. He dedicates less than 5% to an actual account of the war but the effects of it smother everything else.
Imagine watching people going into and coming out of a Haunted House. By observing them closely you can guess not only what the Haunted House is like but also what the people themselves are like.
I've read Wharton's biographical account of his time in the war, Shrapnel, which is much closer to All Quiet. It's another fantastic book and one of the only accounts that takes the US military to task for their poor conduct in Europe. In Birdy you can see Wharton's refusal to glorify war, and instead he examines the dark shadow it casts over society and individuals.
Birdy also examines love and obsession but above all else it is a book about the most important question of all; the meaning of life and how to keep seeking it despite formidable adversity....more
Matsumoto is the visual version of Haruki Murakami. They both have a style that is unique and absolutely mesmerising, you can't look away. You have toMatsumoto is the visual version of Haruki Murakami. They both have a style that is unique and absolutely mesmerising, you can't look away. You have to read everything they produce because you're an addict and only they can give you the next dose your mind craves....more
Ireland has created a masterpiece here. The Australian pub male sits in this novel like an insect trapped in amber. Or rather the Australian Pub Male Ireland has created a masterpiece here. The Australian pub male sits in this novel like an insect trapped in amber. Or rather the Australian Pub Male floats, suspended in a glass of amber coloured ale, pickled for posterity. But unlike an unfortunate insect from the jurassic period, Ireland manages to keep the pub male in an animated suspension bursting with life and blood, both spilling liberally across the pages.
Is there a word for nostalgia when you haven't actually experienced the original time period yourself? A longing for a past you never lived? The good old days your father and grandfather talk of? Surely the Germans have one. I'm not suggesting I want to be thrust back into a pub in the 70's but I've noticed a massive culture of young men who could think of nothing better. Australian masculinity and blokesmanship are still going strong, and despite considerable change they're still unique in the world. If you're wondering what I'm saying is true or not have a look at things like Brown Cardiganhttps://www.instagram.com/browncardigan/?hl=en, The Betoota Advocate, or Bands like The Chats. I challenge you to listen to Pub Feed (appropriate) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LGM82uPuvA or Smoko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j58V2vC9EPc. Or a lesser known song like Go The Mongrel by Boing Boinghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2-iaZOUrWY. There's a certain feeling to them which is an echo of Meatman's tribe in the Southern Cross, they lack the profundity of Alky Jack but then I guess the meaning has been hollowed out of that culture. If you're Australian you'll also recognise the nostalgia whenever Horses comes on at an event, or You're the Voice.
"Don't be a wanker" is still the best description I've heard of what it means to be Australian. There's such a deep irreverence in this country, which is why it's bizarre it hasn't become a republic yet. Although there is also this twin force of despising authority while longing for tradition. Australians are desperate to establish traditions to shape who they are. For many reasons they won't pick up the oldest extant traditions in the world, the aboriginal ones, instead they want to make their own. Going to the pub used to be the strongest tradition and nestled inside that like Russian dolls were a million other small traditions. Many of these are gone now and instead most people head home to their obscene mortgage and stay inside streaming garbage American shows and whinging about how Australia has lost its night life.
My thoughts can't compare with the beauty of Alky Jack in full flight though. Here's one of his drunken speeches to the pub.
‘Never be ashamed of being an Australian,’ he'd say.
‘There's plenty just as bad as us in the world.’
‘Anything can happen. We started off in chains, we do our best when we're not pushed, we pay back a good turn, say no to authority and upstarts, we're casual, we like makeshift things, we're ingenious, practical, self-reliant, good in emergencies, think we're as good as anyone in the world, and always sympathise with the underdog.’
It's funny how the order we read books in can shape our impression of them. Straight after reading The Glass Canoe I read Love & Virtue by Diana Reid. I couldn't think of a more diametrically opposed work. The Glass Canoe is hypermasculine, misogynist, and very funny. It also bears witness to the decline of the Australian Pub Male and his way of life etc. Love & Virtue is hyperfeminine, misandrist, and incredibly serious. It also bears witness to the decline of the Australian College Male and the rise of a new powerful feminist movement. What most interested me in the comparison is that reading The Glass Canoe felt true. I didn't live through Australian pub culture in the 70's but I've been to many a pub and I've met men like those in the book, I feel like Ireland captured that time perfectly. I did however attend a Sydney University college and probably only 5 years before Diana Reid did. Though many of the scenes she describes are familiar, many of them are not. Had the colleges changed that much in that space of time? Was my perception of college wrong? Or has Reid not given a true picture? It's fascinating to me that the book from my time seems grossly inaccurate while the book from 30 years before my time seems to be the gospel truth.
The Glass Canoe will never be taught in schools or universities ever again and that saddens me because frankly it's one of Australia's better works of fiction. It contains some things we now consider despicable but if anything that's the reason to keep reading books like this, to remind ourselves where we've come from, what we've gained, and what we've lost....more
I'm beyond late to this party and I've definitely fallen asleep during the movie adaptation in the past.
But is this the best spy thriller out there?
IfI'm beyond late to this party and I've definitely fallen asleep during the movie adaptation in the past.
But is this the best spy thriller out there?
If you find James Bond's wisecracks corny, and his world saving antics ridiculous but you still like the espionage then this might be more your style.
George Smiley is almost the anti-Bond. Completely unremarkable in appearance, almost deceptively weak. But at his core he has an indomitable will and a mind like a steel trap. Best summed up by a private detective he hires.
"That one won't crack, though, Mendel decided with approval; one of your flabby oak trees, Smiley was. Think you could blow him over with one puff but when it comes to the storm he's the only one left standing at the end of it."
A Flabby Oak. Now there's a British compliment.
This book is dense though, Le Carré makes you work as hard as his characters to unravel the truth. And it is truly rewarding when you get there. You really feel like you've done all the gruelling mentation that Smiley himself has endured. That's not to say that Le Carré's prose doesn't sing at times.
"Patiently Smiley waited for the speck of gold, for Connie was of an age where the only thing a man could give her was time."
I'm certain that Le Carré is a romantic at heart, something that is far more obvious in The Constant Gardner, which is a love story masquerading as a takedown of big pharma. Nestled more deeply inside TTSS is Smiley's love for his wife. Or as Karla identifies, his one weakness. The central question though becomes is that weakness, Smiley's devotion to his errant wife, actually worth more than what seems to be despite its prestige a circus true to its name. It seems that Smiley's troubles are probably an echo of Le Carré's own life, considering he divorced his first wife two years before the publication of this book.
Other than providing a thoroughly entertaining read and a brilliant character in George Smiley, this book made me realise that we never really truly know anyone....more
I'd be lying if I said the impetus to read this book wasn't the most recent escalation in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine. I receiveI'd be lying if I said the impetus to read this book wasn't the most recent escalation in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine. I received this book as a gift for Christmas a few years back. I've read quite a few of McCann's books and enjoyed them, so a thoughtful person decided to get me this one as a gift. But it's sat next to my bed for about three years. Every time I went to read it, the physical size and the philosophical weight of it turned me away. Now I lament not having read it sooner.
Column McCann has woven a million narrative threads into the finest gossamer silk. The two boldest are the central stories of Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan, both having lost their daughters to the ongoing conflict in Israel and Palestine. Rami's 13 year old daughter, Smadar, as a victim of a terror attack, and ten years later Bassam's 10 year old daughter, Abir, shot in the back of the head by a rubber bullet. Both of these stories are heart breaking on their own. Combined they're even more poignant
But in amongst these two core stories are thousands of others, migratory birds, Philippe Petit, the Atom Bomb, water, algebra, bone setting, Picasso, the list goes on and on. Somehow McCann manages to make all these little tributaries feed the main river and drive the narrative forward. For a lifelong trivia lover this book could not have been better designed.
McCann has achieved a quite extraordinary piece of work. It's about as close to non-fiction as fiction can possibly get. But it also manages to feel like the only way to deal with the subject matter. It handles the topic with the most delicate touch. It's a beautiful work and beauty seems almost impossible to achieve when dealing with such horrific circumstances even if at the same time beauty seems so necessary.
Sadly a lesson I got from this book is something I'm also learning while watching the constant stream of news from Gaza over the last few months.
Peace will not come from the barrel of a gun and certainly not from the mouths of politicians.
It's only when the victims can tell their stories and lead the negotiations that true peace will come. Bassam and Rami tell their stories again and again, both at home and around the world in the hopes of moving the needle. It seems a Sisyphean task and yet they persist. It's astounding how their own friends and families often can't understand their positions. Surely if nothing else we can use the experience of those who have suffered so much as a light to guide us away from suffering that pain ourselves. Surely the suffering of a single wounded child on either side should be enough to make the case against violence. Or do we all have to suffer that inconsolable grief before we can finally say "that's enough"? One hopes we choose the path of the wise man learning from other's grief rather than fool learning from his own.
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