Month: June 2020

Monday musings on Australian literature: Older men protagonists

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Early last year, I wrote a Monday Musings on Older women protagonists. With my father having turned 100 last month, I figured it was time I explored older men protagonists in Australian literature. It proved a bit harder than I expected, but gradually books started to make themselves known to me.

As in my older women post, I’m using 60+ as my definition. (Please note that I am saying “older” here, not “old”, as I don’t see 60s as old, though perhaps it’s all a matter of perspective!) Of course, not all authors specifically state the age of their characters, so, as in my “older women” post, I’ve had to guess sometimes. Do correct me if you know I am way out!

My select little list is alphabetical by author (with links being to my posts). I have read most of the books below, but some before blogging.

Older men protagonists

  • Peter Carey, Amnesia (2014): An old left journalist, and his university friends, consider their activist pasts against the current world and the ongoing need for activism.
  • John Clanchy, In whom we trust (2019): Set in early 20th century Victoria, Father Pearse is a priest nearing 70, who wishes to retire and return to his Irish home, but there is trouble from his past that he is forced to confront and consider righting.
  • JM Coetzee, Slow man (2006): A 60-year-old man suffers a cycling accident resulting in the amputation of a leg, and has to refigure how he is going to live.
  • Elizabeth Jolley, Mr Scobie’s riddle (1983): Set in a nursing home, three 85-year-old men consider their lives, the past and the idea of home.
  • David Malouf, Ransom (2009): A reworking of a section of the Iliad in which the aging Priam risks all to ask Achilles for the body of his son, Hector, asking, that is, for some humanity from Achilles.
  • Alex Miller, Lovesong (2009): A retired novelist, living with his 38-year-old daughter, is told a love story which he shares with us through his own lens.
  • Christos Tsiolkas, Damascus (2019): Covers the apostle Paul’s adult life, but focuses in particular on the lessons and understandings of three old men, Saul, Thomas and Timothy, in relation to the foundations of Christianity.
  • Arnold Zable, Cafe Scheherazade (2001): Journalist Martin visits Cafe Scheherazade to hear stories about displacement from its Jewish owners and patrons, particularly three friends who are also old men, Yossel, Laizer and Zalman.
  • Arnold Zable, Sea of many returns (2008): A dual point-of-view novel, with one of the POVs being a Greek-born grandfather who, in yearning for home, ponders the meaning of home and place in our lives.

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Ross King, writing in The Guardian in 2016 about older men protagonists, says this:

I was struck by the painter’s [Claude Monet] vigour, fortitude, ambition and (if I can declare some personal interest) sheer narrative traction. Monet in those years, his 70s and 80s, was very much an old man in a hurry, emerging from self-imposed retirement on the eve of the first world war to create some of the most daringly experimental pigmentary effects he had ever attempted. He offers proof that an eightysomething can propel a narrative without an author having to resort to wistful recollections of a vanished prime.

Interesting point. Certainly few of the characters in my little selection focus on their vanished primes. Several think about the past, but not in terms of their so-called prime. For some, like those older women books, there’s a need to resolve/atone for/amend the past, while for others there’s a more philosophical pondering about the meaning of the past, of home, of life. Unlike my older women books list, few if any of these older men books explore illness (like dementia and cancer).

Like that previous list too, but in reverse, most of the authors writing about old men are men – which is not surprising. I’m wondering whether any of our current male literary fiction authors who are now 60 plus, are writing about the topic? Like David Malouf (who has already done Ransom), Rodney Hall, Peter Goldsworthy, to name just a few.

And now, of course my question! Can you add some books to the list – Aussie if you’re Aussie, or your own nationality if you’re not?

Anne Tyler, Redhead by the side of the road (#BookReview)

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Book coverIn the last couple of months of my Mum’s life I bought her a few novels that I thought would give her pleasure. Although we didn’t know, then, how dire her health was, I did know that she was tired and needed good but not overly demanding or depressing reads. So, for Easter, I gave her Pip Williams’ The dictionary of lost words; for Mothers Day, I gave her Sulari Gentill’s A few right thinking men and Anna Goldsworthy’s Melting moments; and, then, when she went into hospital, I bought her Anne Tyler’s Redhead by the side of the road. Being the lexicographer she was, she loved The dictionary of lost words. She took A few right thinking men into hospital and read two-thirds of it before tiredness defeated her. She was finding the historical background really interesting, but she was keen to get onto Tyler whose books she’d read before. Unfortunately, she never did, but I picked it up as I sat by her bed on the last day of her life. It’s a long time since I’ve read Tyler, but it turned out to be the perfect book for my current state of mind. Even so, it took me two weeks to read it …

Anne Tyler has created some memorable characters and/or situations. I loved The accidental tourist with its travel writer aiming to show American businessmen how to travel without feeing they’d left home – the antithesis of how Mr Gums and I like to travel. I remember the opening of Breathing lessons with the couple squabbling about navigating as they drive to a funeral under pressure. And, her empty-nest-fearing character in The ladder of years who just ups and leaves in the middle of a family holiday is such a wonderful conceit. If she were Australian, we’d probably describe her work as quirky.

What makes Tyler’s novels so enjoyable, then, are her characters and her writing. Her characters are believable but just a little off-centre, and her writing is accessible, but tight and evocative. Her novels are character rather than plot-driven, but they don’t wallow in her characters’ lives. She keeps the story moving.

So, in Redhead by the side of the road, we have 41-year-old Micah Mortimer, “such a narrow and limited man; so closed off.” Routine is his mantra, and you could pretty much set your clock by it. He’s not particularly socially astute, and doesn’t understand the jokes his four older sisters make about him, particularly when he tells them that it looks like his latest girlfriend, Cass, has broken off their relationship. He doesn’t explain that the cause was his inept response to her announcement that she feared she was about to lose her flat – because he hasn’t realised it himself. This is one of the catalysts that forces him to reconsider his life. The other is the sudden appearance on his doorstep of college freshman, Brink, who thinks Micah might be his father.

Now, Brink is the son of his first serious girlfriend Lorna. Micah knows for a fact that Brink is not his son but he accepts this young man into his home and tries, in his own way, to help. While all this is going on, he also keeps an eye out on his apartment building where he “moonlights as a super” and he attends calls for his sole-trader business, Tech Hermit. I must say that, living with my own tech expert, I loved Micah’s interactions with his clients, so many of which I’ve heard Mr Gums have with various friends and family members. “Have you turned it off and then on again?”, for example. The password-finding escapade for a young girl who had inherited her gran’s home and computer is particularly entertaining.

However, that’s not the subject of the novel. What is, is Micah’s slowly growing awareness of life not being as he has seen it, of realising that striving for predicable order does not necessarily make you happy. When Lorna explains why their relationship had ended, our routine-focused Micah, who has never been good at seeing things from other perspectives, has “to adjust to this altered view of the past”. The novel’s title provides a little insight into this:

He slowed to a walk on the last stretch approaching York Road. He momentarily mistook the hydrant for a redhead and gave his usual shake of the shoulders at how repetitious this thought was, how repetitious all his thoughts were, how they ran in a deep rut and now his life ran in a rut, really.

Micah, though, is not the only character muddling along. The thing I like about Tyler is that all her characters muddle along. She forces us to see below the surface, to see that while some may appear more successful than others, may have the trappings of success – like Lorna – all have their insecurities or uncertainties. The novel is full of gentle but no less pointed insights into relationships – Micah’s with his messy, chaotic family, for example, or, Lorna’s with her husband. And it has some sensible down-home philosophies, such as “what’s the point of living if you don’t try to do things better” and “try again, try again, and try again after that … because what else can a person do”.

All this might sound a bit cutesy, but the thing is that beneath Tyler’s apparent cutesiness, is a warm but clear-eyed view of human nature. She sees our foibles, our mis-steps, our little self-delusions, but she wants us to make our lives work. Redhead by the side of the road is no exception, and was just the right read for me for now. I must get back to reading Tyler.

Anne Tyler
Redhead by the side of the road
London: Chatto and Windus, 2020
178pp.
ISBN: 9781784743482

Bill curates: Tim Winton’s Breath

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Bill curates is an occasional series where I delve into Sue’s vast archive, stretching back to May 2009, and choose a post for us to revisit.

Tim Winton is not my favourite novelist but as a Western Australian I feel obliged to read those of his books that I come across, and mostly they’re OK though a bit same-ish (boys growing up on WA’s south west coast). It seems Sue initially titled this post Tim Winton versus Thea Astley. Read on and you’ll see why.
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My original post titled: “Four time winner: Tim Winton wins 2009 Miles Franklin”

Well, it’s finally happened as I knew it must. Someone has equalled Thea Astley’s record number of four Miles Franklin Award wins, as tonight Tim Winton was announced the 2009 winner with Breath. I was seriously considering making Thea Astley my third favourite writers post – I think this means that I will now have to.

Winton has won the award for Shallows (1984), Cloudstreet (1991), Dirt music (2001) and now Breath (2009); and Astley for The well dressed explorer (1962), The slow natives (1965), The acolyte (1972) and Drylands (1999). Both writers are great stylists who use metaphor well, both tend to explore strong connections between character and landscape, and both are indubitably Australian! I think, however, that Astley’s pen ranged wider than Winton’s and she took more risks. That’s not to say that Winton doesn’t deserve his wins but I do think that Astley (she died in 2004) was and continues to be undervalued.

Breath

Tim Winton, BreathAnyhow, here is a brief recap of my thoughts on Breath which I read long before I started writing this blog. I’ll start with a quick plot summary just in case there’s someone out there who doesn’t know it! It is a first person, coming of age story told by Bruce “Pikelet” Pike. It starts with his boyhood friendship with Ivan “Loonie” Loon. As young boys, they dare each other to perform dangerous stunts in the local river, and then as teenagers, they take up surfing where they are encouraged into new levels of recklessness by a former professional surfer named Sando. As time passes, Pikelet’s friendship with Sando and Loonie disintegrates and is replaced by a rather equally scary relationship with Sando’s American wife Eva, an injured and therefore ex-skier.

I like the book. I like the way he sustains the “breath” metaphor throughout to represent various facets of life and life-giving (or life-taking) forces. Despite not being a surfer, I love his wonderfully visceral descriptions of surfing. I also like his exploration of the imperative to take risks that is so common in young men and that is often accompanied by a drive to “be someone”.

Book coverRelated, I suppose, to the coming-of-age issue is the theme of learning to accept being ordinary.  After Sando and Loonie leave the first time, Pikelet goes out and surfs Old Smoky: the first time he does it he’s so successful he feels he’s not ordinary, but then in his overconfidence he does it again and nearly does himself in…this is the beginning of his changing point of view. As he says a little later when he reviews his relationship with Eva, “No, Eva was not ordinary. And neither was the form of consolation she preferred. Given my time over I would not do it all again”. In other words, while he had originally equated not being ordinary with doing big risky things, with courting fear, by the end of the novel he realises that life is “a tough gig” and is about more than courting fear and taking big risks. This doesn’t mean that he can’t do and enjoy a job that provides an andrenalin rush (paramedic/ambulance driver) but it does mean that he no longer seeks to be anything other than himself and that he now goes for an adrenaline rush in “safer” more acceptable ways.

Before he gets to this point, though, he has to come to terms with his Eva experience and with the fact that he spent a big part of his life blaming her for his problems. He eventually comes to the conclusion that “people are fools, not monsters”. This closely resembles my own world-view: that is, that mostly(there are obvious exceptions) when people do the wrong thing they do it, at best, from the best of intentions, or, at worst, for reasons of laziness, selfishness or just plain obliviousness.

There’s no neat ending or pat conclusion: Pikelet recognises that he has been damaged by his life experiences and that he needs to manage himself – but he still loves to surf, that is, to do something “pointless and beautiful”. In this sense it is very much a book of its post-modern age: the lesson almost is that there is no lesson, that each of us has to find our own way. Pikelet says to Sando “maybe ordinary’s not so bad”. As one who is rather ordinary herself, I concur!

Tim Winton
Breath
Penguin Australia, 2008
224pp.
ISBN: 9780241015308

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Bill is nothing if not observant! He noticed that the URL for my Breath post was “Tim Winton versus Thea Astley”. Being an early blogger when I wrote this post, I wasn’t completely clued into changing the URL if you change the blog title before you finally post it. The thing is, I was, at the time, really irritated that Astley was never being mentioned – certainly not in the general or popular press – for her Miles Franklin record. Even now, I think, many people do not realise just how significant she is!

Are any of you Winton and/or Astley fans? We’d love to know your favourites if you are. Or, alternatively, we’d love to know why you aren’t!

Monday musings on Australian literature: Guest post from Michelle on our Brave New (online) World

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Book coverToday, I present another Monday Musings guest post coordinated for me by Bill (The Australian Legend), this one from Michelle Scott Tucker, author of the wonderful Elizabeth Macarthur: A life at the edge of the world (my review).
Thanks so much again to Bill and to Michelle for helping me out with my Monday Musings. Read on … and of course we’d love your comments  … Do you think your online activity will change significantly post-COVID-19?

Michelle’s post

Hands up if you’re quite the expert at videoconferencing now. Got your lighting all sorted? Your headphone hair? De rigueur Indigenous artwork behind you?

With the onset of the COVID-19 shutdowns, the Australian literary community has moved its events online with commendable alacrity. A few organisations, like the Wheeler Centre, were ahead of the curve. They’ve regularly livestreamed some of their events for a while now. But for the rest of us, the haste with which the move to online ‘events’ had to happen resulted in a few bumps along the way, but overall, the experiment has been a success, I think.

I’ve no insider data for you, no formal evaluation, but in the last three months I’ve been involved in quite a few literary events via Zoom, or similar – so let’s take a closer look at how the experiment is going.

The Stella Prize usually hosts a glamorous, invitation-only gala event at which the annual winner is announced. Egalitarianism be damned! The NSW Premier’s Literary Awards have an equally glamorous event which, in the past, was at least ticketed. This year, though, the events were cancelled, and the announcements were livestreamed. Well, I say livestreamed but what they really meant was pre-recorded clips of the relevant hosts and authors were livestreamed to the web at an agreed announcement time. That was a little disappointing, to be honest, although understandable logistically. It wasn’t that the winners weren’t fabulous, or the speeches less interesting but what was missing was the buzz. The excitement. The little jokes and patter that are part of a live event. Frankly, though, even big-budget events like the Logies (Australia’s version of the Emmy Awards) or the Academy Awards are pretty tedious. It’s only the fashion that gets them over line and let’s face it, fashion isn’t going to rescue a literary award – everyone wears black, or Gorman. Apparently that’s the law.

The organisers of the Yarra Valley Writers Festival managed to pivot from face-to-face to a live-streamed extravaganza with swan-like grace. I can only imagine how hard the organisers had to paddle beneath the surface. The livestreamed festival was a very professionally run event, and it showed. And it was actually ‘live’, which was nice. The organisers clearly had access to excellent video and tech support. Whispering Gums blog-host Sue wrote about the sessions she watched here, here, here and here. I “attended” the festival too, largely because I found their pricing to be irresistible. For $15 I could watch a whole day of sessions live, and for an additional $20 I could continue to have access to the recordings for the next two months. Bargain. To compare, attendance in-person would have cost me $75 for the day, plus food and petrol.

In the pre-COVID world there’s little chance I’d have attended the Yarra Valley Writers Festival. It was at least two hours’ drive from my place, and family commitments usually fill my weekends. So in terms of accessibility, the revised format was a winner. But I found it difficult to stay watching and engaged for more than a couple of sessions, and eventually spent the afternoon doing something else. I kept meaning to go back and watch those later sessions but somehow never got around to it. I would rather, I belatedly realised, have listened to them in podcast format while I was doing that ‘something else’. And my insider sources tell me I was not alone – the online version of the Yarra Valley Writers Festival could best be described as a qualified success.

Other writers festivals were not so confident about executing the pivot from face-to-face to live-stream and so sensibly aimed for a much less ambitious offering. The volunteer organisers of the excellent Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival, for example, ended up cancelling the festival although they managed to salvage the Poetry Slam, which they ran live via Facebook, as well as some other book launches and workshops. I genuinely feel for the organisers, and for the would-be audiences, the local businesses and the speakers (of which I was going to be one. I was lined up for a couple of sessions at Bellingen, but the one I was looking forward to the most was facilitating a discussion between three Stella Prize winners: Heather Rose, Vicki Laveau-Harvie and Carrie Tiffany. How good would that have been?). On this last point, I should flag that I accept speaking gigs because I enjoy them. The fact that I occasionally also get paid for them is a happy bonus. But many writers rely on their speaking gigs as an important source of income. Some earn more from speaking than they ever will from sales of the book itself, especially those who speak at schools. This is yet another example of the impact of the COVID-19 shutdown on artists’ incomes.

During the shutdown period, I also “attended” an online book launch and, separately, a bookshop event where a panel of three writers were interviewed about their work. Both these events were held via Zoom on weekday evenings. The book launch was a free event, and the bookshop panel discussion was sensibly priced at $5. I thoroughly enjoyed both of them, and would have been unlikely to physically attend either in a pre-COVID world (not least because the bookshop in question was quite literally a thousand miles from my place). But, again, I had some reservations.

These days I usually attend bookish events because I know the author and want to support them. For authors I don’t know personally, but whose work I admire, I simply seek out their interviews in podcast format. ABC Radio is a great source of interviews with Australian writers, via The Book Shelf, The Book Show and Conversations, as are the excellent podcasts The Garret and The First Time. So all this Zooming has made me think about WHY I attend literary events.

I think that it’s less because of the formal proceedings, and more because of the interesting conversations that follow – with the author when I buy their book, and with the other book-loving attendees. At the last book launch I attended in person I ended up having a good chat with Helen Garner! At writer’s festivals, the same applies. I enjoy listening to the sessions, but I REALLY enjoy meeting new people or bumping into acquaintances in the crush of the coffee queue. To continue my blatant name-dropping, at Bellingen Writers Festival last year I had an impromptu pub dinner with Dr Marcia Langton AO and Dr Jane McCredie, CEO of Writers NSW. Halfway through we were joined by actor and director Rachel Ward AM. Yes, I managed to play it cool – sort of!  And, to be clear, while I know that Jane remembers this dinner very fondly, I very much doubt that Marcia or Rachel do!

So the online book launch I attended, and the online literary event were interesting, but they lacked buzz. I missed the face-to-face interactions of real life, and in this I’m not alone. A friend started up a Zoom book club as we moved into the COVID-19 shutdown. She reports that they were very popular early on, but enthusiasm was waning by the three-month-mark. Many reported that after spending much of the day using Zoom for the day job, the thought of logging-in again in the evening was less than appealing. I can vouch for that, too.

But what of the core purpose of literary launches and events – to sell more books? It appears that Zoom and its ilk have only been a qualified success. Writer and bookseller Krissy Kneen had some super interesting things to say on the topic recently, during a podcast interview. She was pleasantly surprised by the number of sales that livestream events generated but didn’t pretend that those sales were as high as they would have been for a face-to-face event.

So, in essence, livestreamed literary events have been a useful stop-gap but may play a decreasing role as physical distancing restrictions are eased. There is, however and of course, an exception to that rule.

Writers Victoria, in a usual year, hosts large numbers of face-to-face workshops, seminars and events. They adroitly managed to move most of these online and my sources tell me that the number of participants has been pretty much the same as usual. This is impressive, given that fees for a full-day online workshop remain at $155 for members (concessions are available, and non-members pay more) but the sweetener is that most online courses include, afterwards, personalised feedback by the presenter on a piece of writing up to 500 words. It’s also worth reminding ourselves that delivering online sessions often costs much the same as delivering face-to-face sessions. Fee-paying participants can also subsequently access a recording of the session, so they can go back and review what they learned.

The delightful part, though, is that the online workshops have provided access to people who otherwise could not have participated. Attendees have included people from overseas, from interstate, or who for various reasons would have been housebound even without the COVID-19 threat. Apparently there’s a mum with a newborn who has happily attended several! I delivered one of these full-day online workshops and was pleasantly surprised by how interactive it was, and how much we were able to engage with one another. The word is that Writers Victoria will return to face-to-face workshops when they can, but – beyond the shutdown – will continue to provide online workshops too.

And there, for me, lies the answer. As we move beyond a strict shutdown, I hope that we’ll be able to enjoy a blended approach to accessing literary events. By all means hold a live, face-to-face event but livestream or podcast it too. Include separate webinars as an integral part of your festival offerings, alongside face-to-face activities. By doing so, the literary community might become a little more open to the wider community and might become a little more accessible to readers – whoever, or wherever they are.

What do you think?

Michelle Scott Tucker is the author of Elizabeth Macarthur: A Life at the Edge of the World (Text Publishing, 2018) – a compelling biography of the woman who established the Australian wool industry, even though her husband received all the credit.

Elizabeth Macarthur was shortlisted for both the 2019 State Library of NSW’s Ashurst Prize for Business Literature, and the 2019 CHASS Australia Prize (from the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences).

Michelle is a freelance writer and consultant, with a successful career in government, business and the arts – including a recent stint as Executive Director of the Stella Prize, Australia’s top prize for women writers. She has served as Vice Chair of the Writers Victoria board and is currently one of the organisers behind the inaugural ‘Mountain Writers Festival’. The festival’s focus on the environment, story and place not just as a theme, but as the festival’s entire purpose now and into the future, is unique in Australia. Passionate about Australian literature, history and storytelling, Michelle lives in regional Victoria with her family.

Bill curates: Notes from a Wikipedian

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Bill curates is an occasional series where I delve into Sue’s vast archive, stretching back to May 2009, and choose a post for us to revisit.

I first ran into Sue in Wikipedian mode when I wrote something wrong about Eve Langley, and Sue who had spent a great deal of time and effort on the Eve Langley entry in Wikipedia, pulled me up. Rightly, of course, because she was, and kindly, because she is. I have moved on only one day from May 2009, so when Sue writes “two years ago” she is referring to 2007.

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My original post

Two years ago I made my first edit in Wikipedia … and got hooked. You see, as a young teenager I decided I wanted to write an encyclopedia. I did start one, but didn’t get very far. Life got in the way as I recollect. As with several of my early dreams, however, life has had a way of seeing them realised, almost without my being aware of it, and so to Wikipedia I came.

Like any communities – and Wikipedia is a community – it has its ups and downs. Within a couple of days I had incurred the wrath of the “copyright” patrol. Some young (I could tell from their user page) French Wikipedian slapped a “speedy deletion” notice  for copyright infringement on a page one hour after I had created it and while I was still working on it. You see, I had “copied”, with some minor changes, a couple of sentences from a website into a new article I had created. The article was about a conference and these sentences essentially said the conference was held biennially and rotated around the states.  There are only so many ways you can say that! As someone who had worked closely with copyright all my career, I didn’t think I’d breached anyone’s creativity in almost-but-not-quite copying those sentences and, anyhow, I was still working on the article. My initial reaction was, I have to admit, a high level of distress. Sitting quietly on my comfy sofa with my laptop on my lap I felt attacked – personally and professionally (in terms of my sense of self). But, I calmed down, decided to react sensibly and got through it: I politely left a message on the tagger’s user page explaining what I was doing and set about enhancing the article. Three hours later the tag was suddenly, and as mysteriously, removed. Phew! I relaxed. But I did learn some things from that experience:

  1. the Wikipedia quality police are out and about 24/7;
  2. the best way to react is calmly so that you don’t enflame the situation; and
  3. there is an “under construction” tag you can put on a new article to tell the police (and other eager editors) to lay off for a while.

All this came back to me as I read David Runciman’s review in the London Review of Books of a book by Andrew Lih called The Wikipedia Revolution. Runciman describes in some detail the way the Wikipedia community works suggesting that it reverses Gresham’s Law which states that “bad money drives out good”. He writes:

One of the remarkable achievements of Wikipedia is to show that on the internet Gresham’s Law can work in reverse: Wikipedia has turned into a relatively reliable source of information on the the widest possible range of subjects because, on the whole, the good drives out the bad.

And how do they do it? Via the police of course! Because the truth of the matter is that my French Wikipedian was simply doing his best to ensure that the high principles of Wikipedia were being upheld. He wasn’t to know I was an honest newbie still feeling my way.

Anyhow, read the article … Runciman says some interesting things and, along the way, does manage to talk a little about the book he is reviewing.

Subsequent posts on WIkipedia:

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Ali Cobby Eckermann, Inside my motherWell, I wasn’t expecting Bill to choose this one for Bill curates, but I’m so glad he did because Wikipedia was an inspired idea and has become such a significant force on the Internet. I love that Bill went the extra mile and sussed out my subsequent posts to add to the end of my original post.  As for kindness! Bill has shown his own colours in that direction by producing this series for me.

As I became more involved in blogging, my Wikipedia work fell away, though I still regularly update pages when I can, particularly Australian literary awards pages or pages for contemporary Australian authors. However, I did take part in the Boosting women’s entries project in 2017, and created the page for Ali Cobby Eckermann.

Do any of you dabble in Wikipedia editing or article creation? We’d love to hear your experiences.

Vale my magnificent Mum (1929-2020)

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Portrait of JessieSome of you already know, but most of you may be wondering about my recent silence. I am really too heartsore to write much now, but I feel all you lovely followers deserve to know whyfor this silence. On Friday, my dear 90-year-old Mum died peacefully, after a short illness that, coincidentally, aligned with the COVID-19 lock-down here. I have spent much of the last month by her side, and am just too sad right now to compose a proper post about her. She loved and nurtured me with all her heart from the moment I was born right through to the end; she fostered my love of reading, introduced me to Jane Austen and taught me cryptic crosswords; she supported and respected me; she was self-effacing, always putting herself last; she was quietly passionate about social justice and the environment; and she made me laugh. She was the whole package.

Here are some words from her friends:

“I have fondly admired Jessie and feel so privileged to have learned from her wisdom, her gentle elegance, and her intellect.”

“Jessie is one of the most beautiful women I have known, so kind and thoughtful and so clever too. She is a truly lovely lady.”

“I feel very privileged to have known Jessie … so wonderfully supporting, caring and kind.”

 “I have always enjoyed her company and admired her attitude to all things.”

And, finally, from one of her church friends …

“We have lost a soft voice, a strong faith, an enquiring mind and a great friend”.

As for the family, we have lost a dearly treasured and much enjoyed wife, mother and mother-in-law, grandmother, great-grandmother, aunt and cousin. The loss is all ours.

(Finally, I must say a huge thanks to Lisa and Bill for their behind-the-scenes support and offers of help, and to Bill, in particular, for ensuring my blog kept going. There are still a couple of Bill Curates posts to come. I do not have enough words to thank them.)

Bill curates: Christos Tsiolkas’ The slap

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Bill curates is an occasional series where I delve into Sue’s vast archive, stretching back to May 2009, and choose a post for us to revisit.

Tsiolkas is an author I admire and enjoy and yet I have not read The Slap. I remember that it caused quite a stir when it came out and if I was the sort of person who went to dinner parties I’m sure I would have joined in the discussions it gave rise to (I smacked my own children, but not other people’s). This is my third and final selection from May 2009. Notice how short it is. I wonder when her reviews began to get longer.
Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap, Allen & Unwin, 2008

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My original post

You could easily give yourself away when reviewing Christos Tsiolkas’ latest novel, The slap. For example, do you align yourself with the uncompromising, emotional earth mother Rosie or the rational, cool and collected but somewhat more willing to compromise Aisha? Do you rail against the liberal use of expletives, the relaxed attitude to recreational drug use, and the focus on carnal appetites more often in their ugly or elemental than their loving guise? Do you engage in the private versus public school argument? These are the sorts of things that confront Tsiolkas’ readers.

Courtesy: Allen & Unwin

In simple terms, The slap explores the fallout that occurs after a young child is slapped by an unrelated adult at a family-and-friends barbecue. This slap occurs in the first “chapter”, reminding me of Ian McEwan’s books which also tend to start with an event that triggers a set of actions and reactions. However, unlike McEwan, Tsiolkas does not build up a strong sense of suspense about “what will happen next”. In fact, the actual slap storyline is resolved about two-thirds of the way through the novel.

Rather, the book is about its characters and their relationships as spouse, parent, child, sibling, friend. At face level, most are not particularly appealing. They are often intolerant, narrow-minded and/or confrontational. Just as you begin to like, or at least understand, them they do something that changes your mind.  And yet, in all their imperfections, they do engage.

The book has an interesting though not unique structure. Like Elliot Perlman’s Seven types of ambiguity, the story is progressed through a sequence of different, third person, points of view covering three generations. This shifting of perspectives and stories has the effect of moving our focus from the plot to the content.  And the content ranges broadly across the things that confront families and marriages – love and hate, family versus friends, anger, loyalty, compassion and forgiveness. It has moments of real venom, but also of real tenderness.

Not surprisingly, violence features heavily in the book. Tsiolkas shows how pervasive violence is in western middle class society. Through the various characters’ stories we see a wide range of violent behaviour from domestic violence through consensual but aggressive sex to those seemingly casual expressions of violence such as “I wanted to kill her” about a person who annoys. We also see how deeply ingrained prejudice against “other” is, whether that other be racial, religious, cultural, sexual orientation or socioeconomic. In Tsiolkas’ world it feels as though only a thin veneer of civility covers our more primitive selves and the reader is never quite sure when or whether these selves will break through and wreak havoc. It is to the credit of the characters, and by extension us, that they rarely do, but we are left in no illusion that they could.

A critical aspect of the structure is whose perspective starts and ends the novel. Interestingly, again perhaps emphasising the minimal importance of plot, these are neither the slapper nor the “slappee”. In fact, the final voice is given to someone who starts out on the edge of the main action but is gradually drawn in. As an involved outsider, with issues of his own, he is able to resolve (as much as they can be resolved) the secondary plot lines and, as a person on the brink of adulthood, he can offer a sense of hope to what has been a pretty gritty story.

Wallace Stegner, the great American writer, wrote in his book, Angle of repose, that “Civilizations grow by agreements and accommodations and accretions, not by repudiations”.  This, taken at a more personal level, seems to be the point of the novel for as Aisha says in the second last chapter, “This finally was love … Love, at its core, was negotiation, the surrender of two individuals to the messy, banal, domestic realities of sharing a life together. In this way, in love, she could secure a familiar happiness”.

POSTSCRIPT: In 2011 The slap was adapted for television, for the ABC, and closely followed the novel’s narrative style with each episode being viewed through the eyes of a different character. The scriptwriters are, I think, a quality bunch:  Emily Ballou, Alice Bell, Brendan Cowell, Kris Mrksa, Cate Shortland. Interestingly, Tsiolkas is not among them.

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So, Bill likes Tsiolkas too, but, from his comment on my review of Damascus, it seems that that book’s subject matter doesn’t appeal to him much. Given Bill hasn’t read The slap nor Damascus, I’m guessing he’s read the earlier novels, which I haven’t – and should rectify.

Oh, and re length of reviews. I love that Bill noticed that. I started by wanting to keep my reviews to 800 words, but now my goal (not rigorously adhered to) is 1000-1200.

Anyhow, are any of you Tsiolkas fans and, if so, what is your favourite?

Favel Parrett, There was still love (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 22 Comments

Book coverFavel Parrett’s third novel, There was still love, is one of those novels in which not a lot happens but has a lot going on. Just the sort of novel, really, that I tend to like. (It all started with Jane Austen!)

The novel revolves around the lives of two Czech sisters, one who ends up in Melbourne with the other remaining in Prague, but their story is mainly seen through the eyes of their grandchildren. Melbourne-based Malá Liška or “Little Fox” lives with her grandparents Máňa and Bill, while Prague-based Luděk lives with his Babi (grandmother). The novel is set mostly in 1980, and alternates between these two places, with occasional forays into other places and/or times to fill in some backstories. It’s a carefully constructed book, one that benefits from close reading, which is not to say it’s hard reading, because it’s not. It’s one of the fastest reads I’ve had in some time.

Now, if you know your European history, the above description will have suggested to you the book’s framework, and you’d be right. Separated during World War Two, with young Máňa going to England, the women’s lives are further up-ended by the 1968 Czechoslovakian Revolution. Through it all, although physically separated, they stay in touch, via letters and the occasional visits back to Prague by Máňa and Bill:

My grandparents saved their fifty-cent coins to buy aeroplane tickets. They managed to do this every four years, sometimes every three years if they were careful. If they saved very hard.

They bought the cheapest tickets.

They took the longest route.

Such is the call of home, about which more later.

The stories, as mentioned above, are told through the eyes of Malá Liška (in first person) and Luděk (in third person.) I suspect Malá Liška’s is first person because she is modelled on Parrett herself, thus providing a grounding authenticity. Luděk’s story is, the Author’s Note says, drawn from the experiences of her cousin Martin. The Prague scenes, she writes, “would be nothing” without his help. I haven’t visited Prague, but Parrett, through Luděk via Martin, brings it alive:

Luděk loved the mess, the decay. His city wasn’t clean, it wasn’t pretty. And there were wires everywhere in the sky and they crisscrossed like a million black lines. Everything was covered in stinking soot, in pigeon shit, covered in old rusted scaffolding … Prague was his city, the flat his whole world, and he loved it all.

Prague, and his grandmother’s flat, in other words, are his home.

There was still love is about many things, of which love, which survives upheaval and separation, and home, which you can make and remake throughout life while never forgetting your origins, are the two overriding ones. These are big themes, and yet the novel is just over 200 pages. I’m in awe of Parrett’s concision. There were some in my reading group who wanted the whole family saga – which I get – but I loved Parrett’s ability to convey a wealth of meaning and history in a phrase, a sentence or a short scene. Here, for example, is a scene between Luděk and his uncle Bill, in Prague:

‘I think that man is following us,’ he [Bill] said, and his eyes moved up the path towards another bench.
…
Luděk remembered how his Mama said they were always watching at the airport, watching, taking photos …
…
Babi told him never to say anything important on the telephone.

The reality of living under surveillance is conveyed quietly, thus, in a couple of pages, but we readers know exactly the fear and brutality that lie just behind these words.

Another example of this concision is a brief scene in a Melbourne shop during which Máňa is called a “stupid wog”. She walks out of the shop with dignity, but Malá Liška notices that “a tear, just a small one, spills down her soft, powdered cheek and she does not wipe it away.” Again, a brief scene, but we know that this is not the only time Máňa has been treated like this. Life, Parrett shows, can be difficult whether you stay or go.

Parrett also achieves concision through a “suitcase” motif. It is introduced in the gorgeous brief poetic prologue called “The suitcase”. Parrett describes suitcases being everywhere, evoking a powerful image of people on the move, of people escaping and of people not getting away. She writes:

You must close up tight, protect your most needed possessions … your heart, your mind, your soul. You must become a little suitcase and try not to think about home.

From here on, suitcases of all sorts are subtly dropped into the narrative to suggest various ideas – a suitcase in a roof space holding an old gymnastics blazer from a past life; “a suitcase with yellow eyes – a suitcase with a mouth like a big black hole” in a Czech Black Light Theatre performance in Melbourne; people arriving at airports, looking “dazed, pushing trolleys loaded up with suitcases”. The most powerful reference, though, comes from The Black Light Theatre Company’s Magician (based on the still living Jiří Srnec):

I put the broken in my suitcase and take them with me until they are ready to go home again.

There is still love.

There it is, home and love again. Luděk’s much missed mother travels with this company, and is tempted to defect to the free West.

Closely related to the idea of love and home is the story of refugees, of migration. In a little section devoted to him, Bill tells of changing his name from Vilém in 1942 England in order to fit in, while Máňa “works on her accent”. He shares the pain of leaving one’s home:

The only way to live now is to keep moving forward and not look back. It is the only way his heart can keep on beating and not break. He must look forward and not behind.

He must never look behind.

A common – and painful – experience for refugees.

Finally, There was still love is also a story about women, and particularly old women who carry on. It is Luděk, loving his grandmother and coming to care for another old women, who voices this:

The city was full of old women left behind, left to keep everything going – to carry the old goddam world by themselves.

My reading group briefly discussed the title, There was still love. What did “still” mean we pondered? “Still” as in ongoing, or as in continuing despite everything? Both, I think. Whatever the meaning, however, There was still love is a moving read that reminds us yet again that the most important things in life are home and love, wherever you find them.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) also loved this book.

Challenge logo

Favel Parrett
There was still love
Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2019
214pp.
ISBN: 9780733630682

Monday musings on Australian literature: Guest post from Kate on anxiety, COVID and Aussie lit

/ Whispering Gums / 32 Comments
Today, I present another Monday Musings guest post coordinated for me by Bill (The Australian Legend), this one from Kate (booksaremyfavouriteand best), she of Six Degrees of Separation fame. Bill suggested a topic to Kate – one applicable to her professional interests and to what we are currently experiencing – and it seems she ran with it!
Thanks so much again to Bill and also to Kate for helping me out and for offering some fresh content for Monday Musings. Read on … and of course we’d love your comments  … How are you coping with COVID-19?

Kate’s post

Had you told me last year that 2020 would bring months of ‘stay at home and bunker down’ time, I would have thought that it sounded like heaven. No more taxiing children around? No more daily commute and peak-hour traffic? Oodles of ‘free’ time to read? Great, sign me up. And true, at the beginning of lockdown, I thought that I would get so much reading done, and therefore so much blogging done…. But that hasn’t happened. Like many bloggers (and people in general), COVID-19 brought with it a level of anxiety that I have not previously experienced.

At the same time as this feeling of anxiety was creeping in, posts on social media popped up about how ‘industrious’ people were being – “I cleaned out my wardrobe!” and “I painted the fence!” and “I’ve finally knitted that jumper I bought wool for three years ago!” and “I’ve learnt Spanish!” and “I’m making my own sourdough #delicious #nomnom!” Huh.

Then came round two of the ‘maximising time’ posts – “My kids are really getting ahead in maths” and “Look at these macarons Master 6 whipped up for afternoon snack”.

Through the noise of painting, craft, calculus and baking, one thing became very clear to me – I can’t possibly write blog posts and worry about a pandemic at the same time. Great for those that can, although I think that’s a very small percentage of people. For most, the industriousness that they’re putting on social media is their anxiety talking. Specifically, when overwhelmed by uncertainty, some people focus on what they can control (such as their sourdough starter, or memorising conjunctions for Spanish verbs), and others (like me), do nothing. Both are defence responses – our reptilian brain relies on fight/ flight/ freeze for survival.

To understand what was happening with blogging, social media, and my lack of reading, I turned to Maslow’s hierarchy. Essentially, we can’t do the ‘self-fulfilment’ stuff when the ‘basics’ are in doubt (and blogging sits in the self-fulfilment category) – with our ‘foundation’ threatened, no wonder we feel anxious.

This is a Monday Musings post, and therefore needs an Australian literature reference. There are plenty of memoirs by Australian authors dealing with anxiety – this year alone I’ve read such books by Clare Bowditch, Georgie Dent and Nicola Redhouse. Equally, there are plenty of memoirs and novels that deal with anxiety in relation to a particular trauma. But what of stories that speak to those bottom rungs on Maslow’s hierarchy? Certainly stories about ‘pioneering’ fit (I’ll defer to other bloggers, such as Bill of The Australian Legend, who have a thorough knowledge of these books). But my mind turned to a book I read thirty years ago (so my memory is sketchy, but significantly, small details have stayed with me) – Amy’s Children by Olga Masters.

Book coverIt’s the story of a young woman living in Sydney during WWII. The War is merely a backdrop – instead, the focus is on Amy and her decision to leave her children in the care of her parents in regional New South Wales, while she goes to Sydney to make a life for herself. Amy puts considerable effort into setting up a home. There’s a slow accrual of ‘things’ – a bed, a wardrobe, a kitchen table – and the coveting of the unobtainable (Amy’s fantasies include “…a little glass fronted cabinet containing a bottle of sherry and fine stemmed glasses and a barrel of wafer biscuits. She would put a match to the gas fire ‘to take the chill off the room’, without having to consider the cost…”). She digs a vegetable garden and meets the neighbours. She gets a job, and begins a relationship.

From memory, much was made of Amy’s ‘selfishness’ and lack of maternal feeling, but does the story read differently through a Maslow lens? Are Amy’s attempts to ‘set up house’ representative of her need to feel secure, both personally and in the context of a world at war? I’ll do a re-read and report back.

In my professional life, I spend a lot of time working with people suffering anxiety. Anxiety tends to be a very specific beast – different things trigger different people – however, the starting point for managing it doesn’t change (I call it ‘mental first-aid’). Basically, get some exercise (preferably with fresh air involved); eat well (I don’t mean lavish, I mean nutritious,  so redirect Master 6 from macarons to paella); sort out your sleep; maintain social connections; and talk with someone if you’re not feeling great. Hopefully, with those things in order, the space for becoming engrossed in a book will return.

Six degrees of separation, FROM Normal people TO …

/ Whispering Gums / 17 Comments

My time is tight right now and my mind distracted, but I did want to continue Six Degrees, which as you know is a meme currently run by Kate, and you can read all the rules on her blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

Her June selection is Sally Rooney’s Normal people, which I have not, once again, read. I am going to keep it brief.

So, here goes:

Normal people

Call me

to take

Two steps forward.

But,

Everywhere I look,

I see

Signs preceding the end of the world.

Maybe tomorrow?

Regardless,

Yours truly,

The still deceived.

(Links on titles are to my posts.)

How nice it would be if our recent experience of cooperation (here in Australia, anyhow) did encourage us to take two steps forward into a new way of being and doing and relating.

And now my usual questions. Have you read Normal people? And, regardless, what would you link to?