Festivalling...

I have been festivalling, drinking up the observations of writers at The Melbourne Writers Festival. I have been to a young adult day and a few more adult things. I came away with some great suggestions for books to read... and I have read a few of them!

I read a series by a YA writer Justine Labastier, the Magic or Madness trilogy. These books seemed aimed at the tweenie end of the YA market and are based on the idea that using magic comes at a cost. Justine's biography is inspiring - she decided to be a novellist and got a contract based on her idea! Magic in these becomes becomes a metaphor for temptation and causes a conflict or two within Sarafina's magic family. The settings are the best things about these books. Courtesty of magical portal Newtown, New York and the outback are bought to life rather vividly. I also read the first of the Midnighters series by Scott Westerfield. I liked the authentic sense of teenage life he created.

I also discovered Lisa Unger an American crime writer. I read her novel Sliver of Truth and was rather swept away by it. I love the world she created and that characters were never as they seemed.

I also went to a great session on writing the Holocaust. I went for work, really, because I'll be teaching a book Once by Morris Gleitzman. But one other the other panellists, Thomas Buergenthal spoke about his life and his memoir A Lucky Child. I came home and read this book in one sitting. I was struck by the understatement of his story, when so many Holocaust narrative highlight the drama.

Being Charlotte B

Charlotte's Bronte's books were formative ones for me as a reader. I remember reading Jane Eyre and Villette as an 18 year old ( a bookish provincial one no less), about to leave my country town for university. I think what touched me about these books was the transformative power of the writer's life so I was interesting to read Jude Morgan's book about Charlotte and her family. It was an odd experience reading the book, seeing Charlotte, Emily and Anne suffering the vagaries of earning a living and intensely felt crushes , to know the plot and wait for it to reveal itself. When are the going to write the books? This question kept me reading. Its a very modern book. Although Charlotte emerges as the novel's main character - simply by longevity, her siblings fall one-by-one to consumption - the novel is very equally weighted; Jude Morgan moves easily between the characters and their consciousness. the novel ends with Charlotte's voyage to the sea "the real sea The Atlantic" and some comfort in her marriage.

The Romance of Birds

This elegant book has renewed my faith in reading after a string of so-so reads. I think it's a big question - how to write about love without making it the same old story - and it seems the secret is to write about the whole story, first love to death. Towards the end of the novel Tom (the leading man) says "you know, the only times we aren't mysterious to one another are probably when we're first falling in love and when one of us is dying. New love blinds us for a while to all the things we don't know".Tom and Addie fall in love around a common obsession with birds, Addie as a painter and Tom as a scientist. Through their lives as Addie develops a intense ecological awareness, this shifts and she almost becomes angry at the simple beauty of birds as involved as she is in various activist struggles. Artistically this is expressed through assembages of taxidermied birds, arranged to comment on environmental issues. These dark expressions of her rage find a popular audience. Through all this the bond with Tom morphs and shifts, as does her relationship with her daughter Scarlett. The writing is lovely and the novel, structured around Addie's first notebook with flashbacks and flashforwards, has a unity that is just so.

A Boy and his Maps

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet is physically a beautiful book. Wide silky pages are home to a central narrative, drawings, maps and sub narratives. T.S of the title is a twelve year old boy genius who loves maps. He maps concepts - such as the construction of longing by McDonald's- as well as his physical surroundings. He lives on a ranch in Montana with his scientist mother Dr Clair and his archetypal rancher father and is dealing with the grief of the loss of his younger brother.

The book has a number of literary touchstones. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime comes to mind as well as the boy wizard who shall remain unnamed! Reif Larsen plays with these connections cleverly, yet his protagonist is still a compelling fully realised character. I loved this book. It swept me along!

Once Again, Families

I have been chipping away at this book Things I've Been Silent About by Azar Nafisi - I think I've been reading it for two months! It's a memoir charting her relationships with her mother and father and as much as I was drawn in by its subject - Dad's death last year has left me thinking about parents in our lives - the baldness of it's revelation has left me feeling a little uncomfortable. I'm not sure about the ethics of it all, the laying bare of families for the world! I think this is the place of fiction. We can use our emotion truth with a different cast of characters.

There is no denying Azar has lived through interesting times. Her father was Mayor of Tehran in the Shah's time and there's lots of black and white photos of him in nightclubs pre-Cultural revolution with elegantly coiffed women. From these worldly groovy times, Azar lives through the rise of fundamentalism and the stripping of women's rights. Like many of her class she studies overseas, in her case England and America and eventually leaves Iran.

It's a beautifully written book and the stories contained within it are compelling.

The Red and the Black

No not Stendahl, but two other red and black books - one about spies and one about vampires! I have been craving an old style thriller, so it was great to stumble across Red to Black by Alex Dryden. I grew up reading John Le Carre's Cold War thrillers, so it was a little nostalgic, but of course the political landcape has changed. Putin is in charge now and the Communist "red" is being replaced by the capitalist "black". Finn is a British spy and Anna is a KGB Colonel. Anna lures Finn in a "honey trap" but the relationship actually works for them despite the complications of their lives. Finn uncovers a corrupt banking arms money scam that he tries to foil but of course it's in everyone's interests that he doesn't. The layers off corruption and the irrelevance of the truth are pure spy thriller stuff. Alex Dryden really takes you into the settings both in terms of the espionage world and the European backdrop.

Vampire Academy is first in a series by Richelle Mead. In this world there are two types of vampires - Moroi, living vampires, and Stigoi ,the undead type we are more familiar with. There are also Dhampirs, guardians to the Moroi. The main character of this book is Rose, the "shadow-kissed" guardian of Lissa, a Moroi princess. The high school politics are catty and there are a lot of young women being mean to each other about their sexuality, which I didn't like! But there's a noble hunk and the supernatural side of things is creative and involving.

Love and Bicycles

“They don’t make love affairs like yours any more, Dad”

“Oh no, that’s an interesting observation. Why not?”

“Most women of my generation would have left you years ago.”

At the centre of The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey are a glamour couple, Sabine and George Harwood. They are a cocktails-on-the-terrace type and have been married fifty years. The novel examines the glue that holds such a couple together, depite infidelity and expreme differences in world view.

"Your mother filled up the frame. I couldn't see anyone else but her, no one around or past her."

"Did that ever wear off?"

"No it got worse"

"How?"

"Well then love comes. You fancy lots of other people. But the heart is small and fussy: it knows exactly who it wants."

Sabine and George are expats living a comfortable life in Trinidad before during and after Independence. Sabine is painfully aware that this comfort has been bought through the injustice of a racially segregated society, whereas George is infatuated with both the exoticism of his tropical life and the privileges it bestows upon him. The background is fascinating and the reader feels this pull between tropical exoticism and justice in reading the novel.

The structure of the novel is interesting. The first half of the novel is written in the third person. Sabine and George are elderly and a little cranky with each other. George finds a bundle of letters that Sabine has written to Eric Williams, a former Prime Minister. These letters remind George of their past together and he tries to take up the cause of Talbot, as a form of atonement to the island and to Sabine. It ends sadly.

The second half of the novel is written in the first person from Sabine's point of view, beginning with their arrival as a besotted young couple in 1956. Sabine discovers the country on her green Raleigh bicycle, becoming a figure of fun because it is ludicrous in this society that a privileged white woman should ride a bicycle.

"I tell dem i go fine a job with the white lady on de green bicycle...You is famus, Miss."

The bicycle becomes an emblem of Sabine's youth, independence and naivete and eventually, of course, she stops riding it. Thus the bicycle is imbued with a sense of loss. As an old man, George renovates the bicycle for Sabine, but perhaps this is too late...

To Brooklyn, Carlton and Beyond

Eilis travels from Ennisworthy to Brooklyn; Esma from Footscray to Carlton. For both young women these journeys are signficant in terms of the lives they will lead and the people they will become. It is such an interesting time of one's life, when one is so unformed and decisions can have such an impact.

Eilis is the protagonist of Brooklyn by Colm Toibin. At the suggestion of a visiting priest she finds herself leaving Ireland for a new life - job, home and eventually man - in the United States. Toibin captures perfectly this unformed quality. Eilis has the newness of youth; her only baggage a small snub at a dance before she leaves. She is ever so quietly courageous; dealing with new experiences such as seasickness and squabbling rooming-house mates with integrity. Reading this book I found myself thinking of my mother's story. While she didn't travel so far, in her teens she had left her home town for work. These were the times.

This book is an utterly convincing portrayal of Eilis' character and her world. The writing is pared back and lovely. I loved a scene where Eilis goes to confession to tell of her sex with Tony, the priest compassionately offering help "if she is pregnant". It is such an achievement I think that Toibin has taken such a simple story and made it such a beautiful novel.

Eilis has a choice that is a literary choice only. She has married the man she is ambivalent about and is unable to explore the man who might be more suitable, the man of the snub. )This would be her Mr D'arcy ending!) That Eilis loves numbers and her dream is to a bookkeeper must be forgotten as this was not a choice she has in her time. the reader sees these choices but Eilis can and has made only one. The promise and the pleasure of the opening up of new experiences of early adulthood close off as choices are made.

Something in the World Called Love by Sue Saliba explores these questions on more local ground. Esma moves to a share house in Carlton. She is studying poetry and wants to be a writer. She is drawn into a dark intimacy with Kara , a "queen bee" character, a manipulative girl-woman. (They should come with warning stickers, these women). Esma begins to think that there is "something in the world called love" and that is this "love" for Kara. Its an interesting subject the girl crush. Esma is looking for intimacy and a model on which to base her new life. Sue Saliba in trying to capture this unformed nature of Esma's character writes in loose open prose poetry with minimal intrusive punctuation.

The Angel's Game

On Friday the sofa, the heater and The Shadows of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Safon made a compelling combination. David Martin, the hero of this doorstop book, falls into a career as the writer of a series of "penny dreadfuls" called The City of the Damned. I loved the term "penny dreadful". It builds a sense of nostalgia for a time when trashy books were cheaper than their more worthy cousins! And of course, The Shadows of the Wind is in its own way a penny dreadful (but of the $32.95 variety). David is a self -deprecating narrator and he comments early in the novel on his adolescent creation of his dream girl, and Shadows has two of them, the unattainable Christina and the more worthy but overlooked Isabella. Ruiz Safon is borrowing from Dickens here. Great Expectations becomes a touchstone in this book and its plot is plundered repeatedly. The mysterious benefactor is also a device Ruiz Safon borrows Vidal with his guilty secret and the sinister Corelli. Ruiz Safon's literary pantry is also well stocked with Faust and Borges. There's a labyrinth of lost books and a pact with the devil!


The novel opens splendidly - it's evocation of a writer's life and the world of books was highly seductive - but ultimately the layers and layers of pastiche left me with a soulless feeling. It invokes all the elements of the Gothic without really believing in it and the Gothic needs its raw passion. Yet it's not really clever enough to be pure pastiche in the Borges style. Nevertheless it had a page turning quality!

Lives and Choices

I have been reading The Good Parents by Joan London, My Candlelight Novel by Joanne Horniman and Michael Tolliver Lives by Armistead Maupin. An odd little collection of books reall. Their cocktail of disparate characters from Perth, Lismore and San Francisco have left me thinking about those who chose their lives and those who let their lives choose them.

The Good Parents is a wonderful book – complex and detailed. At its centre are Toni and Jacob, parents of eighteen year old Maya who has disappeared. They are an attractive couple: “The couple didn’t think of themselves as old. They wore jeans and leather jackets and much-polished RM Williams boots, more like aging rockers than hippies…You could say a sort of small town version of Nick Nolte and Anjelica Huston”. They are ostensibly happy together and are "good parents". However the stress of their daughter's disappearance causes flashback reflections on their lives so far and the choices they have not made. Jacob remembers a moment in his youth when studying for his exams he abandons his study to elicitly read War and Peace, achieving a lack lustre grade for his beloved English, and by default falling into a career as an English teacher in a country town. Toni's good looks catch the eye of a gangster at the bus stop and she defaults into marriage. Toni and Jacob connect by accident, run away and have a family.

The minor characters are great. Jacob's sister Kitty, also a teacher, falls into a lifetime of unsatisfying relationships having at one stage "three abortions in a year". Her story - a passionate fling with the possibility of a last chance child - was poignant. Maya, the teenager who is seduced by her truly horrible boss, is also passive, passive character. What was she thinking?

Armistad Maupin's friendly tome was a contrast in confidence! Still living despite his HIV (hence the title), Michael at 55 has found love again with Ben, a lovely man in his thirties. Despite small moments of insecurity, Michael is so confident sexually. In fact all of the characters are. It must be a San Francisco thing! It's interesting despite the big differences in worlds, there are those universal touchstones - Michael's mother is dying and he has to deal with this.

Joanne Horniman's book tells the story of Sophie a single mum in her twenties. Sophie loves reading and her daughter and is inspiringly resilient really, but doesn't dare to dream to want the best for herself. What is up with this? it's everywhere....

Wild Oats and Wings

The Angel's Cut by Elizabeth Knox is a grown up fairy tale and like the fairy tales for the little ones unpicks the dark seams of the human heart. The angel Xas is back from The Vintner's Luck and this time is in Hollywood, flying stunt planes for the movies. His immortality is a burden and Sobran the love of his life is long lost to time. He becomes infatuated with Cole, a narcissist movie mogul. Xas is deeply damaged by Lucifer's removal of his wings; the stubby remains of these become a secret he hides from his maniacal lover. Cole has all the manias: nymphomania, megalomania and probably a few more that haven't been discovered! He treats Xas and his other lovers appallingly.

Xas befriends two fabulous women: Millie a "coloured" stunt pilot whose dream is to establish a flying school for "coloured" pilots" (banned from learning to fly in "white" flying schools) and Flora, a former actor now editor, damaged terribly by a fire that has rendered her unable to have sex easily by the unfortunate location of her scars. Nevertheless she has a child with another narcissist movie maker Connie, the birth of which kills her.

It's a book about modernity. Its amazing how the world has changed since The Vitner's Luck where Xas was Sobran's lover for life. An elicit love for sure, but a stable one. This stability is gone in The Angel's Cut. The view of heaven and hell, of God Xas and Lucifer is also fascinating, especially the idea that the souls that go to heaven are happy but lose their selfhood. I am still thinking about this book. It is a wonderful evocation of our dreams and disappointments.

I also read Hungry Woman in Paris by Josefina Lopez. I loved her movie Real Women Have Curves, and was attracted by the forbidden fruit style cover in my local book shop. Canela is running from that vague ennui after a broken engagement and ends up in Paris at a cooking school almost by default really. She's a very passive character and this applies to her relationships with men - she falls into whatevers on offer, sowing some wild oats rather vividly! As a Mexican-American, she is drawn to the outsiders in Paris, the Arabs and also a Chinese woman refused service at the Louis vouitton shop. She meets very few French people other than her teachers, the chefs for whom oral sex seems de rigeur with one's creme anglaise. It's a novel, obviously, but what i found most interesting is that she's writing about out her world - the outsider's perspective is very interesting. Interesting, too, is that the ennui follows her to Paris and follows her home. It wasn't a simple go to Paris, fix your life tome like one or two others.

Phillip Marlowe hits Yarraville and Blue, Blue Love

Nick Gadd's Ghostlines is a classic kind of detective novel. His detective Phillip Trudeau is a jaded, scarred by the world type with a drinking problem, a little Rebus, a little Humprey Bogart as Marlowe. The writing, fittingly, is very clean and manly. Straight up as it were...

While the plot with it's underdog exposing the unethical rich narrative is appealing, what is extraordinary about this novel is its wonderful evocation of Melbourne. It begins with a kid on a bike being hit by a train and continues from this point to an old man's cluttered house in Williamstown to the sushi bar infected cbd. I loved a sub plot about the Maribyrnong group and and artist named Valerie. He managed to weave in much that was really Melbourne.

I have also been dipping into collection of stories about lovers' quarrels called Let's Call the Whole Thing Off. I loved the artfulness of the writing. Its "ready for my close-up" stuff; no word is really wasted. Dorothy Parker opens the anthology with painfully observed post wedding conversation between a bride and groom about a tiara. The wife picks, the husband deflects then overacts, the wife retreats, the husband makes amends. Darkly comic or depressing depending on one's own state of mind. Jhumpa Lahiri also had a newlywed story that travelled this fine line between love and resentment. The stories are diverse, crossing cultures and sexualities. My favourite was a story about bedrooms and the differing decorating styles of men and women. It was witty and whimsical. Pink has her heart brolen by Blue but eventually finds love again with Green! Gotta watch out for those Blues....

Earlier in the month I read Fred Vargas The Three Evangelists - good quirky french detective fun - and Robin Bowles' The Case of the Missing Masterpiece - more local, slightly less fun.

Music and car crashes

There is much to love about good young adult fiction - the possibility is there for character and story and also a form of untrendy mimesis that can be so refreshing. It is lovely to see your world reflected back to you and to enter the head of a character you like to share a little of their life with them. This was very much the case with me and the book "If I Stay" by Gayle Forman; the narrator Mia had a nice take on the world. She's also in a coma after a car crash and in a Lovely Bones sort of way is commenting on her ailing body as it hangs on to life in the ICU. So the novel moves from this to her memories, happy memories of her family, her friend Kim and her boyfriend Adam. The parents are great characters the mum is a rock chick and the dad a reformed punk English teacher. Their life is very ordinary - chats about life while doing the dishes, school and circle of friends and family. The big idea - how do you get over losses that seem insurmountably cruel? - is always interesting, and this book explores it in a gentle compelling way. Almost everyone in the story has a relationship to music, and choosing your music - be it The Ramones or Yo Yo Ma - works as a metaphor for choosing your way. Its a weepy! ... but the sadness feels very honest, and the books explorations of life, love and memory ring true. The writing is lovely - it seems effortless but is understated and artful.

Families and readers

I have been reading The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif, a lovely saga of a thing, perfect for wintry nights because its set somewhere warm (Egypt) and has at its heart a reader prone to worrying with whom I instantly identified. This is the beginning of the book. "Amal reads deep into the night. She reads and lets Anna's words flow into her, probing gently at dreams and hope and sorrows she had sorted out, labelled and put away". I loved Amal as a character. She has so much integrity, but because the world is so imperfect this leads to a passivity and inertia because it is so difficult to act with integrity when all of one's choices seemed not quite right. Amal absorbs herself in the documents of Anna Winterbourne and her grandmother Layla, documents in English, French and a "neat Arabic raq'a script". I loved this too - the intersections of culture as manifest in language.

It's so clever because at the same time as it is an exotic love story between Anna and Sharif and then Isabel and Omar, it also problematises this notion of exoticism (and really of love). There's a moment in the novel where Amal discovers an article by Sharif about the appeal of the East which he sees as a economic solution to the West's problems and also the Orient, a wonderful otherwordly place full of exoticism. Amal jokes that they could republish it now. I found myself wanting to read about this book (discovering this very glamourous photograph of Ahdaf giving a speech) and some people found the romance too much and others found it a wonderful post-colonialistic launching pad for pontificating! (Actually this article was very interesting about the letters of women travellers as a subversive discourse).

The structure was great - I liked the layers, the disparities between the past and present, the gaps in knowledge between the generations. I found myself fascinated by the missing generation, the adult Nur (Anna's daughter and Isabella's grandmother) and Ahmad (Layla's son and Amal's grandfather), their life stories hinted at in just a few sentences.

Tangles of a Story

Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero was a small gift of a thing. Its subject - the fragility of families - is mirrored in the fragile narrative that spreads like a cobweb with tenuous and haphazard links between the characters. I keep finding stories of fathers in my reading travels and this was an interesting one - a silent, dutiful father with moments of explosive temper. A particular moment of temper - violent and truly awful - propels Anna, Claire and Coop into different worlds. Anna, whose identity is riven by this act of violence becomes an academic, being particularly drawn to the story of a writer called Lucien Segura - whose family is as fragmented as her own. Claire becomes a paralegal, making a career out of building a false intimacy with strangers and Coop a high stakes gambler also an artifice of sorts.

Divisadero blends the poetic and the narrative. Ondaatje's sentences are effortlessly beautiful. Like this one from Anna's point of view: "I am a person who discovers archival subtexts in history and art where the spiralling among a handful of strangers tangles into a story." Ondaatje's doesn't over explain his poetry or force closure on his narrative - this spiralling is exactly his method here. It's finding moments of truth, epiphany and hope in the randomness of life.

Forgetting our thirties...

This book dug under my ribs. I'd put an exclamation mark here - except I'm not sure it was a pleasant feeling! (There! That thought can have one!) Alice has had a head injury and wakes up thinking she is girlishly 29, happily married and expecting her first baby. In reality she is 39, getting divorced, has three children and has turned into a Stepford wife. Its territory I have been travelling in my minds murk. How does one keep one's girlishness alive against the demands of life? I guess at twenty nine Pascale was a baby and Kris and I were newly married. Thirty-nine was that challenging year after the broken engagement. Maybe this why this book has left me a little melancholy. Still I think some people do get nicer as they (we?) get older. The odd disappointment or two makes us more compassionate, having children more generous.

I loved Liane Moriarity's The Last Anniversary. It was so whimsical and quirky (but honest enough not to be completely fluffy) and I was hoping for more of the same with this one. But although it had some quirk (I loved the blogging granny broadcasting the family secrets online and that when Alice loses her memory she starts raiding her daughter's dress up box),the ending was a little fluffy and unbelievable. Of course, perhaps that is the point. Although I think no-one has their happy endings all at the same time, its a squiggly graph like the ABC logo and even feel good books feel better when they are true to this, other wise it feels like a lie and makes you feel worse!

Angels and Daughters

I followed my daughter through the labyrinth of these lovely books - City of Bones, City of Ashes and City of Glass - snuggled up on the couch reading different installments. It's perfect fare for us as there’s a mother and daughter – Jocelyn and Clary - at the centre of this story. I remember when my daughter was about four starting to read Ursula Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan to her and it was terrifying because the mother dies so early in the narrative and the little girl is so completely and utterly alone. Before she could speak she was also riveted by Are You My Mother, the story of the little bird who has fallen out of his nest and needs to find his mother. So it’s an elemental part of a story being separated from a mother and the anxiety this causes, especially in fantasy stories. Fantasy stories do this so well. In this trilogy The Mortal Instruments, Clary must save her mother, who is kidnapped by a Ravener demon and bewitched. It is the adololescent shift in this relationship, where the little girl must rescue her mother. My daughter was very sage about it all, refusing to give away the plot details I was desperate for, thus rescuing me from my own self-destructive thwarting of my plot satisfaction.

Reading these books was so utterly pleasurable. The narrative seemed to combine every fairy tale motif imaginable with out being too much: angels, enchanted swords, magical runes, vampires, lost evil Frankenstein-like fathers, separated siblings, impossible love. I imagine this must have been what reading Harry Potter must have been like for the people who could get over the clunky sentences. It reminded me a little of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – without the cheesiness - and of Phillip Pulmann’s His Dark Materials without the ponderous qualities. When Cassandra Clare was borrowing plots – such as from Star Wars and Paradise Lost she referenced it in a worldly postmodern way. At our place we are both desperate for her new book!

Teenager Discovers Kissing – Stop Press!

As the saying goes, teenagers cannot see beyond the end of their noses and Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging by Louise Rennison adds to the body of evidence – narrator Georgia Nicholson is a very self-absorbed girl. Unless of course beyond the end of one’s nose are a pair of boyish lips on which to experiment. Georgia approaches kissing like netball training, at one stage going to a boy Peter’s house who teaches kissing skills to girls “but doesn’t take any money or anything” and she discovers that kissing is best when you fancy the kissee, in fact you go “jelloid”. Georgia’s poor mother with a not-quite toilet trained three year old, self-absorbed Georgia and a hairy husband in New Zealand could probably have told her that, but the older characters the parents and teachers are figures of fun in this book.

The novel is for the funny girls. It shows its readers you can be funny and desirable (even dressed up as an olive). Georgia is often a funny narrator. “His Mick Jagger impression did not stop at the lips. He was a lunatic on the dance floor, strutting around with his hands on his hips. I nearly died. Then Sven joined in, dragging Rosie with him. His style of dancing was more Cossack, a lot of going down into a squat position and kicking his legs out”. And of course kissing is lovely; it’s lovely to discover its loveliness and lovely to be reminded of its loveliness. Here is how it went for Georgia: “I went completely jelloid – it was like being part girl, part jellyfish. It was mega brilliant. Twenty out of ten type kissing. I got all the stuff you’re supposed to have fireworks whooshing in your head, bands playing, sea crashing in and out”. Maybe I’ve been a little hard on Georgia… but she’s is unrelenting on parents and teachers!

Under the Spell of the Astrarium….

After my sojourn in the nineteenth century, a return to the modern world – and the Middle East in the brash seventies no less – was very pleasurable indeed. Tobsha Learner’s Sphinx had a page-turning quality that was not unlike an airport novel – in a good way. I think this page turning quality is highly admirable, I would like to know how to do it!


She is returning, here, to Witch of Cologne territory in the sense of the grand love that transcends time and place; and also the dialogue between the rational and the esoteric. Like Ruth and Detlef, the lovers Isabella and Oliver occupy different ends of the rational and mystical spectrum. Oliver the narrator is skeptical whereas Isabella recklessly and boldly pursues magic in the form of an agristrum, an ancient Egyptian device with the capacity to predict death and thus change the future. There is something of the quest novel in Sphinx and I guess this is where that racing thrust of the narrative comes from. It reminded me a little of The Amber Spyglass in that way, it’s a race for good to defeat evil, although the morality of this novel is refreshingly murky. Despite the intensity of their relationship, it seems Isabella and Oliver have not been entirely honest with each other. Oliver’s initial imperative to fulfill his dead wife’s quest for the astrarium becomes compromised by his own desires. All the characters have their compromises and their secrets.

There is something a little over the top about this novel that touches on melodrama. The historical settings of Tobsha’s previous novels The Witch of Cologne and Soul seemed to work a little better with this intensity. But I admired her attempt to explore these ideas in a more contemporary setting. I remember news reports that I didn’t quite understand about Sadat and the peace process when I was growing up. The ancient Egyptian side of things was rather fun, although a little teacherly in tone, but I didn’t mind that. It’s rather good fun to learn a thing or two about history through a rollicking narrative.

Another Lovely Literary Gilbert

I have closed the black cover of Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall with its very serious, thin-lipped painted lady - two tomes from the nineteenth century dispensed with in a month!

This one is a version of the "who to choose" novel - the handsome exciting man or the sensible good man, but whereas Jane Austen's heroines always seem to have the good sense to see through the hollow charms of these caddish types, poor Helen -Anne's heroine - marries one. I have to say I liked her the more for it. Who hasn't been charmed by a handsome man at some time or other? I also admired Anne for moving beyond the conventions of the conventional romance to write honestly of her observations of relationships at this time. In her introduction she says "I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it. But as the priceless treasure too frequently hides at the bottom of a well, it needs some courage to dive for it". (She has a soft spot for a slightly purple metaphor) Indeed she even hints at venereal disease in Arthur's decline when she says "It is deplorable to see how completely his past life has degenerated his once noble constitution". Or perhaps I am reading too much in to it!

But of course Tenant is foremost Helen and Gilbert's love story and they are both so lovely, temperate and undemanding of each other that when at last the husband dies, they almost miss the opportunity to live a long, lovely temperate and undemanding life together.

The novel has a strange structure. It begins with Gilbert writing an intimate letter to a male friend and about a fifth of the way through the book Helen gives Gilbert her diary so that he may know her sad story. I was fascinated by this as a plot device. At one level I found it very unbelievable - but at another I admired its grandness as a gesture of intimacy.

Through the Looking Glass of Sexual Awakening

I have been too scatty to read lately, so this morning I gave myself the pleasure of finishing this book curled up on the couch with a coffee before life intervened. Actually I read with a sense of urgency as I was somewhat worried about Lily the main character, as it was looking risky for her. (Actually I had checked to see her name on the final page, I am a narrative cheat!)

The book drew me in my its seductive descriptions of Lily's attraction to Ed an artist painting in the street. I liked the descriptions of their erotic world very much - it was understated and honest. There was a surreal quality to the book, at one point in the narrative I wondered whether the strange events were occurring only in Lily's consciousness.

The enchantment of Lily occurs on a number of levels: she enchants others - her ex Hank and the disturbed Martin - and Ed and the creative life - in Lily's case acting - enchants her. In particular her performance of Hermia in a Midsummer Nights Dream, creates a sense of new confidence and possibilities for her, as an artist and as a woman with sexual agency. I liked the interpretation offered of Hermia in this book as a "tough broad". I've always thought of her as a whiny princess, used to having it her own way!

I also loved Lily's relationship with an old older woman Mabel. There's a moment towards the ending of the novel where they escape to bed, surrounded by books.

The book is an interpretation of the Alice in Wonderland quest, where the quest is sexual identity, a confident and in-control womanliness. (Maybe that's what Freud would make of all those holes anyway). I liked it!

Musings from the Nineteenth Century

I have just emerged from 998 pages of Dicken's England - Bleak House! I have discovered Dickens also uses the exclamation mark, but a little more judiciously than Jane Austen. He is fond of it in describing beautiful mornings and gardens. Actually these descriptions are quite lovely. Although it took me a full five hundred pages to get into this novel, in the end I was rather swept away by the tragedy. The Lady Dedlock story was terribly sad and I could certainly see it's cinematic potential. It was a little like the Cohen brothers with the evil petty conspirators such as Bucket and Guppy. It was terribly frightening when Esther went off with Bucket in pursuit of her mother. I do admire that Dickens attempts to write about his whole world. Of course his depiction of women in a little narrow. He does have a fondness for the good orphan and little tolerance for the woman with a cause - poor Mrs Jellaby. Still, Charlie the rights of women and Africans will eventually prevail. It is at least as noble as housework!!

The Women in Black by Madeline St John was my holiday treat, a wisp of a thing really. I bought it at Book City in Shepparton. It was strange seeing how little there was to buy there really and it showed me how much more rich it is having access to the city and its literary riches. The novel reminded me of buying my green coat, that first ridiculous adult purchase. The layby that went forever. It was almost like a sketch of a novel or a screenplay. The characters were diverse and I liked the fragile connections between them. I'm not sure if the lightness of it all was a strength or a weakness. The snippy disingenuous tearoom conversations reminded me of my workplace.

Linda Olson's Let Me Sing You Gentle Songs was deeply melancholy book about loneliness and grief and locking oneself in. Beautiful descriptions of place both in Sweden, London, Japan and New Zealand. Sweden in winter is seen in “a muted twilight where people walked in ankle-deep snow, lifting their feet like wading birds.” In contrast, summer nights in London are “warm, like velvety tepid water.” I also admired Linda's understated descriptions of relationships such as Veronika and her lover's mother and Veronika and her father. These relationships are fragile but still valued. And of course it was a reminder of the transformative power of love! I found this book quite inspirational to my own writing.

April's disappointment was PD James The Private Patient. I felt so excited to stumble across this in my school library as I was 57th on the waiting list for it at my local library! Sometimes I love the certainty of PD James pronouncements on the world and her terribly English sentences. This time I found her irritating. She was quite as sexist as Dickens without the excuse of the nineteenth century to fall back on. Rhoda, a successful journalist with a disfiguring scar left from an attack by her violent father, is by far the most interesting character and she is killed off in chapter two and, of course, the villian of the piece is the repressed spinster.

April Fools's Day

I read The Marriage Club by Kate Legge, a kind of "Friends" (or friends with benefits as it transpires) for the charcoal bob set. It was disappointing. I had loved her Unexpected Moments of Love and was looking forward to this one. The main character Leith was a little unlikable, perhaps all the characters were drawn a little thinly. I guess this can be a trap of the ensemble novel.

Readings on Sunday had lots of tempting things. Perhaps its that time when the books for winter start to emerge. I had a surprising library lesson yesterday with my Year10 English class. They are readers! I found some treats for the holidays, including a Linda Olsson novel Let Me Sing You Gentle Songs which has lovely prose.

Back-announcing March (or late nights on blog spot)

I have just put down Vertigo by Amanda Lohrey. It was compelling and with my teacher hat on I thought what a wonderful text! Oh dear! How to turn that off… it was a great idea to revisit Henry Lawson and wonder … how would it be different now?

With my writer hat on I loved its economy. I loved its subject matter of a relationship that’s not in the heady states of beginning or collapse but in its shiftingly stable middle. The writing was lovely. I Lingered over ever sentence bur still chose to be late to work so I could finish it. The description of the bushfire was great and at its emotional core how children are the heart of it all.

It’s like back announcing on the radio…

and before that there was…

Linda Jaivin “A Most Immoral Woman”. Highly disappointing in the raciness factor. I imagine after “Eat me” everything would be disappointing in those stakes. Also a deeply involving read. A version of the vamp versus the bluestocking debate but fascinating that the work was based on fairly comprehensively archived love letters and autobiographies. I m tempted to go and see Linda speak tomorrow in Carlton. It had that wonderful satisfying oomph factor when I finished it.

An before that there was…

Worldwide Adventures in Love by Louise Wener.

Not at all romantic, a testament to the importance of honesty and fighting the double standard. A lost bub, a malicious brother-in-law, a thwarted sense of adventure and a deep nutty loneliness. That gritty British disconnectedness.

An before that there was…

Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay

It was so strange. When I put this book down I thought “what a great idea”. But then I thought I had had the one fm idea when I was in Shepparton. Dido is a woman unaware of her attractiveness to men but this attractiveness has a destructive quality. Wonderful writing about small town life. The landscape was fantastic especially in the decryption of a canoe trip through the frozen lakes.

And…

I think I read the new No 1 Ladies Detective Agency. Its very remiss of me to read so many books and not write about them. I loved the crocodile shoes. I also reread Catcher in the Rye and loved it. I tried to start Bleak House by Dickens but almost threw it out the window. All those tedious old men with weird attractions to winsome orphans…. Thank god for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

February slips by...

February slipped by in a flurry of teacherness - meetings, photcopying, pd. So the resolutions of writing here, writing my novel and not letting work dominate failed miserably. Perhaps March will be more balanced. Still, I am loving teaching context writing - especially to my year 11's. Its making me think about writing and this is helpful. I also loved presenting at VATE - it was challenging and fun working with grown-ups.

AS a reader I have flipped through four books. Three by French mystery writer Fred Vargas.
The first was Seeking Whom He May Devour. What an ominous title! I had been reading admiring reviews of Fred's quirky French thrilers all over the place. The story begins at a gentle pace, ambling around the countryside with the sheep and the wolves but builds to quite a exciting and surprising conclusion. The characters are very real in their flaws and grace despite mostly living out their plan B of life, especially as regards, disappointment in love. From time to time there are quite delicious sentences such as this one "She had a steady static relationship, standing four square like a farmhouse table, a simple wholesome love scrubbed squeaky clean every day". This one was my favourite of the three I have read as the characters were so realised. The connections and parallels in their yearnings lent the book an elegance. The two other books I read were Have Mercy on us All and Wash this Blood Clean from my Hands.

February's reading treasure was a book called Sorrows of an American by Siri Hustvedt. She is such an interesting writer. I had read her book What I Loved a year or two ago and it was soul wrenching. So deeply, terribly sad. Sorrows also charted this territory of sadness but in a gentler way. Erik the main character is living out a year of mourning after his fathers death. His life has many of the challenges of mid life - adjusting to life as a single person post his marriage breakdown and accepting his identity as it is reflected back at him through others. Erik's relationship with his sister Inga is his most nurturing, but in the course of the book he makes attempts to rebuild his romantic life one through fantasy and one through a tentative real world relationship. Sir's writing is so understated and lovely. Her understanding of people is also layered and perceptive. I think this book would be well worth reading again, for the writing.

Musings from the Verandah

The cool change is delicious. I have a wet plait snaking down my neck like a tendrilly vine and I am listening to the leaves rustle on the verandah. Being outside is so interesting. Moments of life stories float over the barking dogs and distant hum of Bell Street. I have decided to keep a blog of all of books I have been reading this year as it is so easy to read wonderful things and then forget them. If I succeed in writing this book - my dream - its paying attention to the words that seems important and after all writing is as pleasurable as reading. More so!

Exclamation marks!!! Why is Jane Austen the only person allowed to get away with this and still be considered a good writer. Certainly narrative ingenenuity can't be her claim to fame. I have had an idea for a while to write a witty piece decrying her popularity. I wonder if Jane Austen was alive today with a room and a laptop of her own would she stay home and watch costume dramas on Saturday night? I think not!

I have just finished Dissection by Jacinta O'Halloran. It drew me in. Her writing is very Chekhovian - beautifully observed ordinariness. The main character is a doctor charged with negligence and tapped in a depression. The blurb praised her "stoicism" and while there's stoicism there for sure there's also an estrangement from her husband and her children. Jacinta is admirable in the understated way she reveals this estrangement. But what struck me most was her character's passivity. Having lost all confidence she is passive in the face of her husband's infidelity and the defence of her negligence claim. At first I found the 43 year old with the lines in the mirror a little cliched and depressing but it was honestly observed. There's a moment where she accedes to her husband's lust for another woman that is very bittersweet. I wonder about this bittersweetness. Is it inevitable? I feel as I crawl along these early years of my forties a loss of sweetness and I want it back really. Could this be something to write about - this longing for sweetness? I would like to read a book like this. Perhaps it could be linked to the trip around australia idea. I'd like it not to be particularly romantic but to be infused with a love of humanity.