Here we are again at the first Saturday of the month – and you know what that means don’t you! Yep, the Six Degrees of Separation meme. As most of you know, it’s currently hosted by Kate (booksaremyfavouriteandbest). This means she has the power – though she will take requests – to nominate the book from which we create a chain of six more books, linking one from the other on whatever basis we can justify. After the excitement of having a book last month that I’d read, this month is back to situation normal – one I haven’t! It’s Steve Martin’s Shopgirl. As always, I have read all the books I select for my chain.

The obvious link would be Madeleine St John’s Women in black as it’s all about shopgirls, but I used it recently so have come up with a more fun link! The first thing I thought when I saw this month’s choice was that we currently seem to have many authors named Steve or Stephen in Australia. There’s Steven Carroll, the New-Zealand-born-but-now-Australian-resident Stephen Daisley, Stephen Orr, and Steve Toltz. I’m choosing Steve Toltz since he’s known as Steve (like Steve Martin) and because I’ve reviewed his book, A fraction of the whole. I think that’s a good enough reason.

Another interesting thing about Toltz’s A fraction of the whole, besides the fact that I enjoyed it, is that it won the inaugural NSW Premier’s Literary Awards People’s Choice Award in 2009. Two years later, in 2011, Alex Miller won it with his beautiful novel Lovesong (my review). So, my first link was on first names, and my second one is on an award won by both books, but my next is on style, specifically narrative technique.

Lovesong is a metafictional work about a novelist writing the story of other characters in the book. I enjoy novels which play with the idea of fiction, which remind us that we are reading fiction not reality, which draw attention to the art of storytelling. As Miller’s novelist Ken says, “I had her story now, but it is one thing to have a story and another to write it.” Another metafictional novel teasing us about the art of storytelling is Debra Adelaide’s The women’s pages (my review). Here is Adelaide’s novelist-character, Dove:

What, Dove wondered, had she done? Or had she done it? Maybe it had happened exactly like this and she was merely recording the facts.

My next link – Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli’s tricksy Faces in the crowd (my review) – continues the metafictional theme. In this novel we see our writer-character trying to make something interesting out of her life, and her husband, looking over her shoulders, is not very happy:

Why have you banished me from the novel? What? You wrote that I’d gone to Philadelphia. Why? So something happens.

But this is just one of the layers in this complex little (but big) novella.

I’ve probably done the metafiction thing enough for this round, so let’s move on to something else – translated fiction. I don’t read as much translated fiction as I’d like, but I have read some and am going to link to another translated work by another Latin American writer, Mario Vargas Llosa’s The feast of the goat (my review) If Luiselli is about exploring the meaning of, value of, boundaries of, fiction, Vargas Llosa is all about using fiction to tell a very serious story set during the end of Trujillo’s dictatorship in the Dominican Republic.

My final book is another translated work but that’s not the reason I’ve chosen to link it. My reason is that it’s another story which explores a political event, in this case Portugal’s Carnation Revolution. The book is António Lobo Antunes’ The natural order of things (my review). This one, however, is less overtly political than Vargas Llosa’s book, being about how people cope when the world around them is anything but “natural”.

Last month I said that next time we’d need to travel more widely than just England and Australia – and we sure have. This is also my first #6degrees meme which has more male writers than female, and an equal number of non-Australian books to Australian. What’s come over me!

Have you read Shopgirl? And whether or not you have, what would you link to? 

Another month, another Six Degrees of Separation meme. My how quickly the months are passing! The meme is, as most of you know by now, currently hosted by Kate (booksaremyfavouriteandbest). Each month she nominates a book from which we try to create a chain of seven books, linking one from the other on whatever excuse, flimsy or otherwise that we can come up with. And, guess what, this month I have actually read the nominated book, Christos Tsiolkas’ The slap (my review). As always, I have read all the books I select for my chain.

Tsiolkas’ The slap is about an extended family, of migrant background, and friends, living in suburban Melbourne. Its author, Tsiolkas, is Australian-born of Greek immigrant parents. This reminded me of Hanif Kureishi’s The buddha of suburbia (my review) to which I admit I’ve linked in this meme before. Kureishi is English-born of a Pakistani father and English mother, and his book is about the life of a multicultural family in a London suburbs. More satirical than Tsiolkas’ The slap, and more closely focused on the challenges of race and ethnicity, but both reflect the experience of immigrant generations in the ‘burbs.

Linking now on content more than author similarity, The buddha of suburbia’s exploration of multiculturalism took me back to Australia and Madeleine St John’s The women in black (my review). It is set in the ladies fashion section of a classy department store in the 1950s, a time when the post-war influx of European refugees saw Australian society challenged by new foods not to mention new values and attitudes to life and family.

My next link draws on multiple aspects – content, location and period. I’m talking Mena Calthorpe’s The dyehouse (my review) which is also set in 1950s Sydney, and which, like The women in black, deals with the lives of workers in one business. However, Mena Calthorpe’s intention is more strongly focused on labour conditions. Her business is the textile industry, a dyehouse, and she exposes how workers are poorly cared for, poorly paid, and have little power to do anything about it. Towards the end of the novel, though, there are intimations of the workers starting to organise.

Wendy Scarfe’s Hunger town (my review) is set a little earlier, from the mid 1920s to late 1934, in Adelaide’s port district. It tells of the struggles of wharf labourers to survive as unemployment and hunger took hold. It explores the ensuing political unrest and the growing attraction of leftist political ideologies like communism and anarchism, alongside unionism, in such a volatile environment. It is also, like the books by St John and Calthorpe, historical fiction.

And so, my next link is on form (genre) rather than content. I’m going to change country and era, and pop over to early 19th century England in Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable creatures (my review). You’ll realise soon why I’ve chosen this particular piece of historical fiction, but first a little about its content. It tells the story of two women who were fossil hunters in Lyme Regis in the first half of the nineteenth century: Mary Anning (1799-1847), a poor working class woman whose fossil finds helped change the course of paleontology, and Elizabeth Philpot (1780-1857), a gentlewoman who befriended Anning and who was particularly interested in fossil fish.

And now, for the first time since I started doing this meme, I get to link to one of my very favourite authors, Jane Austen (1775-1817). I could link to any of her books because they are all set in early 19th century England, and I’d love to link to one I’ve reviewed here. However, I’m choosing one that I haven’t posted on yet, Persuasion, though I expect to write on it later this year. If you know your Austen, you’ll know why I’ve chosen this one: she set a critical scene in Lyme Regis for that novel. In fact, the Lyme Regis connection is the main reason I read Remarkable creatures.

And so, I started with an unruly, messy family in The slap and ended with another one, albeit of a different sort, in Persuasion. In between we went to England, back to Australia, before returning to England again. We must travel elsewhere next month!

Have you read The slap? And whether or not you have, what would you link to? 

I’m going to take you on a bit of a wild ride this month, bouncing from title to genre, from setting to risk-taking, and more, so hang onto your hats, because here we go …

Except, oops, I do need to tell you what this is all about. It’s the Six Degrees of Separation monthly “meme” again, of course, and it’s currently hosted by Kate (booksaremyfavouriteandbest). Each month she nominates a book from which we create a chain of seven books, linking one from the other as the spirit moves. Yet, again, I haven’t read the starting book, Emma Donoghue’s Room. However, as usual that didn’t daunt me. At least I can promise to have read all the books I select for my chain.

So, my first link is on the title, and I’m choosing a title with a “room” in it, in this case a “hall” as in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (my review). It was, as I recollect, a somewhat controversial Booker Prize win because it was, shock! horror!, a so-called genre book. To confirm my memory of this I did a bit of a Google search and found this wonderful commentary from The Guardian at the time of its win:

She’s also, by the by, managed to sneak a ‘genre’ novel into the Booker winners’ notoriously literary paddock – and recalibrated the arena of historical fiction in the process. The accusation that this year’s shortlist was weighted too heavily towards the historical has dogged the debate surrounding it, but even those who found Wolf Hall mannered or boggy …  agreed that Mantel’s novel was a far more exciting proposition than the usual ladies-and-lances epics that the genre turns out.

Haha, I’ve always called them “bodice-rippers”, but I love commentator Sarah Crown’s “ladies-and-lances”.

Anyhow, moving right along, it is genre – historical fiction about a real historical figure – that I’m using for my next link, Kate Grenville’s The lieutenant (my review). It’s the second book in Grenville’s Secret River early-contact trilogy and was inspired by astronomer Lieutenant William Dawes, who came to Australia on the First Fleet. He befriended a young indigenous girl and took interest in the local language, which he documented in his notebooks. A good read.

As, it would be unjust to include a non-indigenous writer on first contact without also giving voice to an indigenous author, my next link is to Kim Scott’s Miles Franklin Award winning That deadman dance (my review). While Grenville’s book is set in the first years of the Sydney colony, Scott’s novel is about the establishment of the British colony in southwest Western Australia in the 1820s-1840s. It’s a significant and unforgettable book.

My next link is to another Miles Franklin award-winning book, though that’s not the reason I’m linking it. The link is the setting, Western Australia, and the book is Tim Winton’s Breath (my brief review). I loved this book. I loved its evocation of surfing, which is something I have no desire to do but Winton helped me understand its thrall. I also loved its exploration of male risk-taking behaviour. Tim Winton knows his subject so well.

And now, I’m going to draw a long bow, and move from a book about risk-taking to a book in which the author took big risks, JM Coetzee’s Diary of a bad year (my review). It’s a strange book to read, because it has three (two to begin with) concurrent strands running across the top, middle and bottom of the page, with each strand representing different voices. How do you read such a book? Coetzee is a writer who seeks new ways of confronting us with ideas that he thinks matter. Oh, and note that even though South-African born Coetzee now lives in Australia, he is this month’s non-Australian contribution, because I always like to have at least one.

My last link is perhaps even more spurious. Late in Diary of a bad year, Coetzee refers to his love of Bach. I suggested in my review that the book itself could be seen as pæan to Bach, because its three-part structure, in which each part counterpoints the others, could be seen as a textual representation of Bach’s polyphony. This brings me to Helen Garner’s novella The children’s Bach (my review). There are references to Bach’s music in the book. However, I’m linking again on the structural element because, even though Garner’s narrative is not so formally divided as Coetzee’s, she tells her story about Dexter and Athena and their family tightly, through multiple vignettes which also reflect Bach’s contrapuntal, polyphonic approach to music.

And so, here we are at the end – and somehow, although I’ve linked via various concepts and strayed a few centuries in time, we’ve returned in the end to a story about parents and children.

Have you read Room? And whether or not you have, what would you link to? 

You probably know all about the Six Degrees of Separation monthly “meme” by now, but here’s the gen for newbies. It’s currently hosted by Kate (booksaremyfavouriteandbest), who, each month, nominates a book from which we players create a chain of seven books, linking one from the other as the spirit moves. Unfortunately, once again, I haven’t read the starting book, Nick Hornby’s football fan-book Fever pitch, but our host Kate said (somewhere) that she thought it would be interesting to start with a book about sport – and I’m up for the challenge! As always (to date), I promise I’ve read all the books I select for my chain.

When I said above that I’m up for the challenge I meant it, because I immediately knew what my first link would be, Gerald Murnane’s delightful Something for the pain: A memoir of the turf (my review). It’s another memoir from a writer with passion for a sport. I enjoyed it for two reasons. I learnt a lot about Murnane, and I learnt about a sport I know nothing about – which is one of the joys of reading, isn’t it, learning about subjects you know nothing about?

A sport I know a little about – more as spectator than exponent – is swimming, and it is to a novel about swimming that I’m linking to next, Christos Tsiolkas’ Barracuda (my review). It tells the story of a young potential swimming champion from the “wrong” side of town being offered a scholarship to attend an elite school where he can be coached by a top swimming coach. The book is not so much about swimming as about the meaning of success and failure, and about what makes a good man.

My next link sees me leaving the sport theme to draw on Barracuda’s idea of a boy from the wrong side of the tracks finding himself among the well-to-do. Sonya Hartnett’s Golden boys (my review) is about the reverse. A well-to-do family moves to a poorer neighbourhood and the two sons find themselves having to mix with the sons of a very different world. But, their real challenge is their father, who is the reason the family needed to move. It’s a disturbing book.

My next book is also about fathers and his sons. It was one of my favourite discoveries last year, Stephen Orr’s The hands (my review). Its evocation of a father’s relationship with his sons, and of the relationship between the two brothers, particularly through wonderfully authentic dialogue, impressed me greatly. It is set on a remote South Australian farm and deals with the stresses of modern farming in a dry land, stresses that are exacerbated by the spectre of climate change.

Another novel about farms and climate change that I enjoyed was Alice Robinson’s Anchor point (my review). This one, though, was more about a daughter and her father. Interestingly, in both The hands and Anchor point the mother is absent – albeit for different reasons. And now, because I really should, as I’ve said before, link to at least one non-Australian work, I’m going to conclude with another novel about a missing mother …

Kyung-sook Shin’s 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize winner, Please look after mom (or mother) (my review). Set in South Korea, it tells the story of a mother who goes missing. I loved it for a number of reasons: it’s set in a country whose literature I don’t know; it is told from multiple points of view and in different voices (first, second and third person); and it explores some themes that interest me including city versus country values, the importance of literacy and education, and those universal emotions of guilt and regret.

And so, here we are at the end. This is the first time that all my links have drawn on the content of the books. I don’t think I can link at all back to the first book, but we have played some sports along the way, visited a couple of farms, and got to know a few parents and their children. That’s pretty interesting – at least, I think so.

Have you read Fever pitch? And whether or not you have, what would you link to? 

You probably all know the Six Degrees of Separation monthly “meme” by now, but here’s the info for those of you who haven’t caught up with it yet. It’s currently hosted by Kate (booksaremyfavouriteandbest). Each month, she nominates a book, from which “players” create a chain of six more books, linking one from the other as the spirit moves. Unfortunately, for the third time in a row, I haven’t read the starting book, Lauren Groff’s Fates and furies, but …

Daughter Gums has, so I asked her choose my first link. Her first suggestions were books I haven’t read – and that’s no good because my commitment is to having read all the books I choose for the chain. So then, after some to-ing and fro-ing, she came up with a book I lent her, Ariella Van Luyn’s Treading air (my review). There’s a problem, however, because the best linking point apparently relates to a “reveal” part way through Fates and furies, so I can’t use that. The other link is that both books, writes Daughter Gums, “track a couple’s relationship history from early on (particularly when the woman was quite young) through to the demise (in different forms, though …), both track the relationship through up and down …”. I liked this suggestion not only because it enabled me to highlight a debut Aussie author, but because it lets me link to …

One of my favourite Aussie authors, Thea Astley. Treading air is set in Brisbane and Townsville, and Thea Astley was born in Brisbane, moving to Townsville for a teaching job in her early twenties. Her first novel, Girl with a monkey, is set there, but I’m linking to The multiple effects of rainshadow (my review) which explores the longterm effects of a tragic event which occurred in 1930 on Palm Island, just north of Townsville. This island was where the Australian government “sent” problematic (from the “white” point of view) indigenous Australians, but the tragedy was enacted by the “crazed” white superintendent. It did, however, involve indigenous people in the ensuing “resolution” of the superintendent’s actions, and resulted in a surprisingly just court decision.

My next link is probably obvious, Chloe Hooper’s The tall man (my mini-review), which is about another tragedy on Palm Island. Hooper’s book, though, is a true crime non-fiction work. It chronicles the 2004 death in custody of an indigenous man, Cameron Doomadgee, and the subsequent riot and ongoing unrest concerning the official response through criminal courts, appeals and coronial investigations. Here, though, is not the place to unravel, if we could, the truth of this situation, but Hooper’s book is an excellent read both for her coverage of the subject and as an example of a genre which we, in Australia, see as being championed by Helen Garner.

And now, you probably think that I’ll link to Helen Garner, but that would be poor form I think because, having linked to two books by white (non-indigenous) writers exploring black-white relations in some way, I should (and would like) to link to an indigenous author. So, I’m going to go back, back, way before 1930, to the early nineteenth century settlement by the British of Western Australian – that is, to Kim Scott’s wonderful That deadman dance (my review). In it Scott tells the story of first contact from the local people’s, the Noongar’s, point of view.  His thesis, supported, apparently, by historical evidence, is that the Noongar were willing to work with the newcomers, but of course they were the losers in the end.

I’m going stay with this idea of contact, and link to another indigenous author’s book, Marie Munkara’s Every secret thing (my review). This book, which is more a collection of interconnected stories than a novel, is set in northern Australia and explores the relationship between indigenous people (the “bush mob”) and white people (the “mission mob”). The “bush mob” think they can keep the upper hand, or, at least, maintain their pride and independence. This is a very funny book, but its humour has serious bite. In the end, of course, it’s not the “bush mob” who have the power.

And now, partly because I really should include at least one non-Australian book, I’m going to link to another comic-satire, Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of suburbia (my review). It’s a more than appropriate link, in fact, because not only does it have over-the-top humour, like Munkara’s book, it is, also, partly about “other”, in this case about immigrants trying to make their way in England. As narrator Karim says, “to the English we were always wogs and nigs and Pakis and the rest of it”. However, unlike Munkara’s “bush mob”, Karim and his friends do manage to make some self-determining way in the world they find themselves in.

And so, this time I’ve linked mostly on content, with a nod along the way to setting and style. Not knowing Fates and furies, I can’t say whether we’ve ended up anywhere near where we started. Can anyone enlighten me?

And, if not, there’s always my usual question for this meme: where would Fate and furies take you – your first step at least?

Ok, I admit it, I’m hooked on this meme, not only because it’s a fun intellectual challenge to find links between books, but also because it gives me an opportunity to revisit books I’ve read, which helps keep them fresh in my mind. For those who haven’t caught up with this meme, it’s the Six Degrees of Separation monthly “meme”  and it’s currently hosted by Kate (booksaremyfavouriteandbest). Each month, she nominates a book, and then we who play create a chain of seven books, linking one from the other as the spirit moves. Unfortunately, like last month, I haven’t read the starting book, Stieg Larsson’s The girl with the dragon tattoo but I promise I’ve read all the books in my chain!

Now, you might expect me to link Larsson’s The girl with the dragon tattoo to another crime/mystery novel or, perhaps, to another novel by a Swedish author or one set in Sweden, but I’m not going down these paths. This novel, as you may know, was published posthumously – and this is the tack I’m going to take. It has led me straight to Australian poet Dorothy Porter’s collection, The bee hut (my review), which was published after she died from breast cancer. This is one of those books that I don’t need to be reminded of, because its ending is so powerfully generous. She wrote, just two and a half weeks before her death, the following lines: Something in me/despite everything/can’t believe my luck. Now that’s inspiring!

Generosity of spirit – a willingness to view the world positively – is something I prize. If we were all only a little more generous to each other, surely the world would be a better place, or am I naive? Anyhow, one of the most generous books I’ve read since starting this blog was Izzeldin Abuelaish’s memoir I shall not hate (my review). If anyone had a reason to hate, it’s he – he lost three daughters and a niece in an attack on Gaza by the Israeli Defence Forces  – and yet he chose the “path of light” over that of “darkness” because he believes in “co-existence, not endless cycles of revenge and retribution”. If he can do it, surely the rest of us can?

Now Izzeldin Abulaish also happens to be a medical doctor, which reminds me of a fictional doctor, Rieux in Albert Camus’ The plague (my review), who, albeit in a different circumstances, evinces generosity of spirit or selflessness. This is a book I’ve read a few times, and will very likely read again, because it’s about people being prepared to take a stand, people who put themselves at risk. Rieux himself talks of people who, by “refusing to bow down to pestilences [whether these be natural or man-made, like, say, Nazism], strive their utmost to be healers.”

And now, to get off this generosity/selflessness bandwagon, albeit it’s a worthy topic to discuss, I’m going to do the more obvious thing and link via the author’s nationality. I haven’t read a lot of French authors on this blog, but one I did read one fairly recently, Pierre Lemaitre’s The great swindle (my review). Its story of France in the aftermath of the First World War is a powerful one, but one of the issues that my reading group discussed when doing this book was its translation. Some felt it was a bit uneven. I didn’t feel that – I felt the author intended an unevenness or jerkiness – but I am always a little bothered about reading translations because there’s a mediator between me and the text.

However, this doesn’t stop me reading translations because they are the only way, given I’m not fluent in multiple languages, that I can read works from non-English writers. Hence, my next link is to another translated work, Sawako Ariyoshi’s The doctor’s wife (my review), which is historical fiction about the Japanese doctor, Hanaoka Seishū (1760-1835) who is purported to be the first to use general anaesthesia to perform surgery. However, as the book’s title suggests, the Ariyoshi’s main concern is not him, but the women in his life, his wife and controlling mother. She explores the competition that occurs between these two women who play a secondary role in the life of the important man.

A recent book which explores the secondary role of women to men is Charlotte Wood’s The natural way of things (my review). It’s a very different book, which takes as its starting point the way women’s sexuality is used against them in the support if not furtherance of male power. But it does have a subtext, that we also see in Ariyoshi, to do with ways in which women can be their own worst enemy.

And so, quite unintentionally as I just followed my nose, I see that I have come almost full circle from a novel set in Sweden which reflects misogynistic behaviour to an Australian novel which confronts such behaviour head on! In between we’ve travelled to Australia, the Middle East, France and Japan, and explored, in some at least, the best in human behaviour! Such is the reader’s lot.

Where would The girl with the dragon tattoo take you – your first step at least?