My participation in Nonfiction November tends to be sporadic. Last year, I wrote some weekly and some combined posts, but I did address the weekly questions conscientiously. However, the prompt questions are, I think, much the same this year and my answers would be very similar, so I’m not going to be as thorough this post. I will just respond to Week 1 (My year in nonfiction) and Week 3 (Book pairings) because the responses to these will be different every year.
Celebrate your year of nonfiction. What books have you read? What were your favorites? Have you had a favorite topic? Is there a topic you want to read about more? What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November?
This Nonfiction November year runs, by my definition, from 1 November 2023 to 31 October 2024. My nonfiction reading has been varied, though much of it did involve some sort of life writing – biography, memoir, and hybrids of the two. Two biography-memoir hybrids that I enjoyed this year were specifically related to the literary biography field that is my favourite type of nonfiction. The books were Anna Funder’s Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life (2023, my review) and Nell Stevens’ Mrs Gaskell and me: Two women, two love stories, two centuries apart (2022, my review). Both had personal – hmm, agendas is too strong a word so – drivers behind their author’s decision to write about the life of their subject.
Late last year, I posted on my brother Ian Terry’s book, Uninnocent landscapes (my post). It’s a truth-telling project for which Ian followed the journey taken by George Augustus Robinson on his 1831/32 Big River Mission (brief description), which was a poorly conceived attempt to conciliate between settler and Aboriginal Tasmanians. In his book Ian accompanies his photographs with excerpts from Robinson’s text.
I did read other nonfiction, but I’ll end with two, one that I finished and one I’m currently reading. The finished one is Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 (my review). It was a great read; it stimulated an excellent reading group discussion; and it has just won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, which is worth £50,000. (As some of you may have heard – see The Guardian – Flanagan said in his acceptance speech that he would not accept the prize money “until the fund manager shares a plan to reduce its investment in fossil fuel extraction and increase investments in renewables”. This is putting your money where your mouth is. I applaud him.)
The one I’m currently reading – slowly, between other books – is Hazzard and Harrower: The letters by Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham (see my author conversation post). It is an engrossing mix of personal life “stuff”, and observations on such things as politics at the time (such as Watergate in the USA and the election of Whitlam in Australia) and writers and writing. I’ve just enjoyed some discussion about criticism, which reminded me of that panel I attended at the Canberra Writers Festival. The panel discussed, for example, the idea that criticism can be a work in its own right. Shirley Hazzard, on the other hand, writes to Elizabeth Harrower that “I rarely read criticism, and have little interest in it as a genre [my emph.], only for the occasional statement or essay that rings true and wants books to be good, rather than showing relief & satisfaction when they’re not”.
Week 3: Book Pairings
Liz (Adventures is Reading, Running and Working from Home) hosts this week, and explains it thus:
Pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title (or whatever you want to pair up). Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. Or two books on two different areas have chimed and have a link. You can be as creative as you like!
This is my favourite part of Nonfiction November, because, like the #SixDegrees meme, it’s fun to think about. I’m giving you three pairs.
Reconciliation and truth-telling
I’ve already mentioned Ian Terry’s Uninnocent landscapes. Essentially, it looks at colonialism’s impact on country, through photographs of the landscape today, excerpts from the historical record, and essays by First Nations Tasmanians and a farmer living on the land. I will pair this with Melissa Lucashenko’s first work of historical fiction, Edenglassie (my review) in which she asks, among other things, what if colonialism had been done differently.
Letter-writing
I can’t resist pairing Brigitta Olubas’ and Susan Wyndham’s Hazzard and Harrower: The letters with Jane Austen’s epistolary novel Lady Susan (my review). I know, I’m shameless – any opportunity to mention my Jane!
Genre-bending
The Guardian article mentioned above describes Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 as “part-memoir, part-novel, part-history”. If that’s not a genre-bending work of nonfiction I don’t know what is. So, I thought to pair it with a genre-bending work of fiction (or, at least, not nonfiction), but which one? I think Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear (my review) is the perfect match. Winner of the 2022 Stella Prize, it is a collection that combines poetry and prose/memoir, and that, like Flanagan’s work, draws from Araluen’s own life to ask questions that are well worth asking.
What would you pair (and/or do you have anything to share regarding your year in nonfiction)?
This November has been – well, about as busy as usual. I am secretary of an association for which, in November, we present our annual lecture and also hold our AGM. It all takes time and energy. I am therefore planning to combine my Novella in November (run by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck) comments into a couple of posts.
These reading months tend to suggest you start with “my year in [whatever the topic is]”. For last year’s (2023) post, I was horrified to discover that I’d only read one novella in the preceding twelve months, Jessica Au’s Cold enough for snow (my review). But, in fact, I realise now that I told a lie, as I had read another, Gwendolen Brooks’ Maud Martha (my review). Regardless, that was an easy benchmark to beat and beat it I did. Of course, I’ve still only read a fraction of what many bloggers have read, but here is my alphabetically-ordered list of books read for this “novella” year – that is, between 1 November 2023 and 31 October 2024:
In addition to these, I have read a novella this month (but have not yet posted my review) and have also nearly finished another, but both of these will all appear in next year’s novella count.
As I understand it, Cathy and Rebecca are not posing weekly prompt questions this year, which suits me as these can sometimes become repetitive. So, given that freedom, I am going to conclude this post with some comments made by Rebecca Campbell in an interview posted in the online journal The Artisanal Writer. The whole interview is worth reading, particularly if you liked Arboreality. She was asked
Another writer might have broken the personal narratives into linked short stories or added content to meet the length expected for a novel. You chose instead to give us a form we don’t get to read often enough. What drew you to the novella form for this particular piece of fiction?
It’s an interesting question, as the book can be (and has been) described as linked short stories. However, Arboreality does have an overall narrative trajectory and it has some continuing characters albeit, by the end, the early ones are in memory rather than still living. Anyhow, Campbell answered:
This is where genre expectations are important. Novellas have always been an important part of science fiction, probably a holdover from its origins in pulp magazines. They’re still published regularly in periodicals, and markets for them are growing at both major and small presses.
Readers like novellas, and they are of an appealing length for writers. The novella maintains some of the focus of the short story, but allows a writer more space to explore the world they’ve created, something that’s particularly important in a genre obsessed with world-building.
Arboreality is one of two novellas I’m publishing in 2022 (the other is The Talosite from Undertow Publications). After years of writing short fiction, I found my stories growing longer and more elaborate, so this form was the next natural step for me. I was also inspired by novellas that combined the focus of the short story with a sense of breadth, as though we are only seeing a fraction of a much larger world that is more compelling because it’s incomplete. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan and Great Work of Time by John Crowley in particular let me see how flexible and evocative the form can be, despite its brevity.
I have heard other writers talk about the novella form appealing to them.
I particularly liked Campbell’s point about how novellas can combine the focus of the short story with a sense of breadth resulting in our “only seeing a fraction of a much larger world that is more compelling because it’s incomplete”. While some sense of resolution is usually needed, I’m not one who must have closure, so this openness appeals to me. Certainly, I loved On Chesil Beach. What do you think about this idea of “incompleteness”?
Written for Novellas in November 2024 (linked in opening para).
Marcie’s (Buried in Print) MARM (Margaret Atwood Reading Month) event is now seven years old, but this is only my second contribution. I read a reasonable amount of Atwood before blogging, and since then have let her slide somewhat, though I have reviewed a couple of books here. You can’t read it all – but, I do like her voice …
So, I decided to join in again this year, as I knew I had a collection of short stories in my TBR pile. The only problem is that my non-Australian TBRs are still in boxes somewhere. What to do? Maybe, I thought, there’s a short story online somewhere, and sure enough I found one in The Guardian. Titled “Widows” it features Nell and (the late) Tig. From Marcie’s blog I learnt that this couple first appeared in Atwood’s collection of linked stories titled Moral disorder, and appeared again in her recent collection Old babes in the wood, from which this story comes. However, I’ve not read either of these collections, and I didn’t recollect those characters or their names.
Then a strange thing happened. According to Wikipedia, Moral disorder contains eleven connected short stories, the second last one being “The Labrador fiasco”. This is the story I read for last year’s MARM, but it was in a 1996-published Bloomsbury Quid edition. I had no idea it was later included in the 2006-published Moral disorder. Oh these writers can be tricksy. Did she change it in any way – such as to name the then unnamed character – for version in the collection? Anyhow, moving on, Wikipedia tells me that the 2023-published Old babes in the wood comprises fifteen stories in three parts: “Tig & Nell” (three), “My Evil Mother” (eight), and “Nell & Tig” (four). “Widows” is the thirteenth story in the collection, so presumably the second one in that last group of four.
I won’t rehash “The Labrador fiasco”, except to say that it is a “story-within-a-story” story, and that the framing story concerns the unnamed narrator (who is apparently Nell) visiting her aging father and mother. The father, in particular, is declining, having experienced a stroke six years before the story’s opening. It is told first person by the daughter, who regularly visits her parents and is becoming aware of aging and our inevitable decline. Some years have clearly passed, and in “Widows” Nell has recently lost her husband “Tig”. It’s an epistolary story, I guess you could say, though it contains only two letters, both by Nell to a friend named Stevie.
The first, and main, letter is a delight – and pure Atwood. It’s partly in what she covers, as this short short story manages to encompass Atwood’s recurring themes – women (their position in society, and their relationships), language, aging, social conventions, and the state of the world. But it’s also in the sly way she makes her sharp little points. For example, talking about widows, she has a dig at the modern penchant for creating increasingly complicated gender-neutral descriptions:
I’m hanging out with a clutch of other widows. Some of them are widowers: we have not yet got around to a gender-neutral term for those who have lost their life partners. Maybe TWHLTLP will appear shortly, but it hasn’t yet. Some are women who have lost women or men who have lost men, but mostly they are women who have lost men.
Similarly, there is a sly reference to world politics and climate change, when she says to Stevie, who is much younger, that:
if you live another thirty years and are still enjoying it, or most of it – if anyone will be enjoying, or indeed living, considering the huge unknown wave that is already rolling toward us – I expect you will look at a picture of yourself as you are today, supposing your personal effects have survived flood, fire, famine, plague, insurrection, invasion, or whatever …
Of course, Nell talks about grief, about the forms, assumptions and cliches that surround it. She’s quietly scathing about “checking the boxes of the prescribed grief process” and eschews the well-intended offers of casseroles and suggestions that she go on a cruise.
When I read writing like this, I can’t help being reminded of Jane Austen, because both have the ability to see through our conventions and pretensions to the truths beneath, and to make us chuckle as they do so.
However, for all the cheeky barbs and social commentary, there is also something heartfelt in her discussion of grief. She speaks of how it skews one’s experience of time, how it affects one’s relationship with the person who has died, and what grieving people really talk about and deal with. Atwood knows whereof she speaks having lost her husband of 46 years in 2019.
If I thought this first letter was both clever and moving, the second letter just nailed it. In fact, if I were writing criticism and not a review, I would discuss what Atwood does here, but that would spoil the whole experience, and I don’t want to do that because you can read it yourself at the link below. Suffice it to say that, while “Widows” is a short story, it does a lot in its few words, and its ending signs off with aplomb.
For the last two Six Degrees I was away from home – first in outback Queensland and then in Melbourne – but this month we are back in our little apartment enjoying Canberra’s spring. And, I’m rarin’ to go with this month’s Six Degrees. If you don’t know how the #SixDegrees meme works, please check host Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.
The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book. This month, again, it’s one I haven’t read. Indeed – sorry Bill – but I haven’t yet read any of this author’s books. I’m talking Sally Rooney, and her latest novel,Intermezzo.
The word Intermezzo refers to a particular type of music, so for my first link I’m choosing a book titled for another type of music, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes (my review). It’s a collection of somewhat connected short stories, and music features strongly in the stories.
I have decided, in fact, to stick with a music theme for this chain. My next link also has a type of music in the title, but, in addition each of the book’s chapters is titled with a piece of music, starting with Nocturne for Chapter 1! The book is Julie Thorndyke’s Mrs Rickaby’s lullaby cosy mystery, (my review) which is set in a retirement village.
My next link has of course a music theme, as I said all my links would, but it also links to Thorndyke’s novel because it is set in a specific sort of community,. The book is Christine Balint’s Water music (my review), an historical novel set in the 18th century in one of Venice’s musical orphanages for girls. (And, in a little shout out to Novellas in November, Water music is a novella, having co-won the 2021 Seizure Viva La Novella prize.)
My next book has a musical term in the title and the word “music” in its subtitle. It is Emma Ayres‘ (now Ed Le Brocq) travel memoir, Cadence: Travels with music (my review). And, with a little six-degrees licence, I’m going to lay claim to another link, which is that Ayres’ next memoir, Danger music, is partly about his working in the Afghanistan National Institute of Music which was created primarily to teach music to disadvantaged children. (The book also chronicles Ayres decision to come out as a transgender man.)
Staying with memoirs (and the word “music” in the subtitle, my next link is an another musician’s memoir, this one by singer-songwriter and Aboriginal activist, Archie Roach. His book is Tell me why: The story of my life and my music (my review).
Virgil Thomson, 1947 (Public Domain, Library of Congress via Wikipedia)
My last link is not a book but an article written by the American composer and critic, Virgil Thomson. Titled “Taste in music” (my review), it was published in 1945 in The musical scene, a book containing a collection of his articles and reviews. I loved this article because Virgil Thomson had composed the music for two wonderful, classic documentaries, The plow that broke the plains (1936) and The river (1938), and because he had some interesting things to say about reviewing/criticism. What he says, I realise now, is similar to what James Jiang said in the CWF session I attended on critics (my post). He said that “in order to be a reviewer, you have to forget whether you liked it or not and tell your reader what it was like”. As I wrote on my Thomson post, and again on the CWF session, this approach is for me. I prefer reviews/criticism that focus on analysing what the work is like, what makes it tick, more than whether the reviewer/critic liked it.
So, we started with Sally Rooney in contemporary Dublin, and moved to contemporary England and Australia, before time-travelling to 18th century Venice. Back in more contemporary times we went on the road from England to Hong Kong with Ed Le Brocq (as Emma Ayres), and experienced Archie Roach’s moving journey from Stolen Generation child to successful musician. We ended in mid-20th century America with a composer who also had some interesting things to say about developing our taste in music (or, by extension, any art form I think).
Now, the usual: have you read Intermezzo and, regardless, what would you link to?
Michael Wilding’s short story, “The man of slow feeling”, is hopefully the first of two reviews I post for the 1970 Club, but we’ll see if I get the second one done. I have been making a practice of reading Australian short stories for the Year Clubs, so when the year is chosen I go to my little collection of anthologies looking for something appropriate. My favourite anthology for this purpose is The Penguin century of Australian stories, edited by Carmel Bird, because it is a large comprehensive collection and because the stories are ordered chronologically with the year of publication clearly identified. Love it!
Who is Michael Wilding?
With these later year clubs, like 1970, there’s a higher chance that the authors we read might still be alive. This, I believe, is the case with Michael Wilding. Born in England in 1942, he took up a position as lecturer at the University of Sydney from 1963 to 1967, before returning to England. However, two years later, in 1969, he returned to Australia and stayed. He was appointed Professor of English and Australian Literature at the University of Sydney in 1993, and remained in that position until he retired in 2000.
AustLit provides an excellent summary of his career. As an academic, he has, they say, had a distinguished career as a literary scholar, critic, and editor”, specialising in seventeenth and early eighteenth century English literature. Since the early 1970s, he has also “built a reputation as an important critic and scholar of Australian literature” focusing in particular on Marcus Clarke, William Lane and Christina Stead. And, he has been active as a publisher, having co-founded two presses, and at least one literary magazine.
However, he also, says AustLit, “came to prominence as creative writer in the late 1960s, when he was at the forefront of the ‘new writing’ movement which emerged in Australia in at that time”. He was part of a group of writers, editors and publishers “who were influential in promoting new and experimental writing, and in facilitating the revitalised Australian literary landscape of the late 1960s and 1970s”. AustLit doesn’t identify who was in that influential group, but I think Kerry Goldsworthy does in her introduction to Penguin’s anthology. She writes that “short fiction was the dominant literary form in Australia in the 1970s” and the most recognised practitioners were Frank Moorhouse, Peter Carey, Murray Bail and Michael Wilding. (All men, interestingly.) This writing, says Goldsworthy, was heavily influenced by European and American postmodern writing, but she doesn’t specifically reference Wilding’s story in her discussion.
Wilding has published over twenty novels and short story collections. AustLit adds that his short stories have also been published widely in anthologies, and that many have also been translated. Wikipedia provides an extensive list of his writing.
“The man with slow feeling”
“The man with slow feeling” is a third-person story about an unnamed man who, as the story opens, is in hospital after a serious accident from which he had not been expected to survive. However, he does survive. Gradually his sight and speech return, but not his sensation. That is, he can’t taste food or feel touch.
Soon though, he realises that sensation is returning, just some time after the actual experience. For example, he and his partner, Maria, make love, but he feels nothing – until some hours later. Not good! Not only is there the problem of feeling nothing, but when they are making love, he might experience some unpleasant sensation from three hours ago. Then, when he is out shopping three hours later, he experiences the orgasm. Or, regarding food, he will eat lunch but not taste it until 4pm. It is all, to say the least, disorienting. So, he sets up a system where he records his “sensate actions” so he can prepare (or “warn”) himself “after a three hours’ delay … of what he was about to feel”.
I’m sure you can see the practical problem with this. Soon, he becomes trapped in “a maze of playback and commentary and memory”, where he is trying to record the present for the future while at the same time experiencing the past. It becomes intolerable.
The tone is one of disassociation, alienation – which had me heading off down that more “modernist” path. But, the “recorder” aspect suggested that the theme involves partly, at least, exploring the conflicted role of recording versus experiencing – which is a more post-modern idea. Can you do both? Can a writer do both? Can, I remember discussing at length during my film librarian career, a documentary filmmaker record and not experience (or not affect the experience) during the act of recording? What are the bargains you make between the two?
I don’t know enough about this time in Australian literature – I haven’t read enough – to understand where Wilding’s ideas and thoughts fit into the zeitgeist. In her introduction to the anthology, Kerryn Goldsworthy says that the writing of this time incorporated “elements of fantasy, surrealism, fabulist, literary self-consciousness, and the process of storytelling itself”. She says the stories by Murray Bail and Peter Carey are concerned with “the riddles and paradoxes of representation itself”. Wilding’s story could also be read as part of this exploration.
This is a dark story in which, if I stick with my idea about the theme, Wilding suggests that the life of sensation is what it’s all about. Fair enough, but where does that leave the writer (or recorder)?
“The man with slow feeling” had me intrigued from its opening lines to its close. I’m not sure I have fully grasped all that Wilding intended by it, but this was a time of experimentation with the short fiction form and new writerly freedoms. I wish I could point you to an online version of the story.
Michael Wilding “The man with slow feeling” (orig. pub. Man: Australian Magazine for Men, July 1970) in Carmel Bird (ed.), The Penguin century of Australian stories Camberwell: Penguin Books, 2006 (first ed. 2000) pp. 232-238
Once again it’s Karen’s (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) “Year Club” week. This week, it is 1970, and it runs from today, 14th to 20th October. As for the last 6 clubs, I am devoting my Monday Musings to the week.
Despite the excitement and idealism of the 1960s, 1970 Australia was strongly conservative, politically speaking, with some notorious conservative leaders (like Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Sir Henry Bolte, and Robert Askin) being premiers of their respective states. But, there were exceptions. The socially progressive Don Dunstan became premier of South Australia during the year, and, while our Prime Minister, John Gorton, was a conservative, he was recognised as a supporter of the arts.
The war in Vietnam was still underway but was becoming increasingly unpopular. This was the year Australia decided to go metric for weights and measures, and, more relevant to this post, it was also the year that Germaine Greer’s The female eunuch (which I read the following year) was published.
A brief 1970 literary recap
Books were of course published across all forms, but my focus is Australian fiction, so here is a selection of novels published in 1970:
Jessica Anderson, The last man’s head
Richard Beilby, No medals for Aphrodite
Richard Butler, Sharkbait
Diane Cilento, Hybrid
Jon Cleary, Helga’s web
J.M. (John Mill) Couper, The thundering good today
Geoffrey Dutton, Tamara
Catherine Gaskin, Fiona
Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon
Edward Lindall, A gathering of eagles
William Marshall, The age of death
Cynthia Nolan, A bride for St Thomas
Barry Oakley, A salute to the Great Macarthy AND Let’s hear it for Prendergast
Dal Stivens, A horse of air
Colin Thiele, Labourers in the vineyard
Ron Tullipan, Daylight robbery
Barbara Vernon, Bellbird (based on the ABC television series)
F.B. Vickers, No man is himself
Patrick White, The vivisector
A few of these writers are still respected and read today; a few are known but read less frequently; while some have fallen out of public consciousness (to my knowledge, anyhow!)
Of those I didn’t know, a couple caught my attention for their subject matter. F.B. Vickers is one. Trove describesNo man is himself as “A novel set in the north west of Western Australia concerning an officer in charge of Native Welfare who is sympathetic to Aborigines but involved in personal difficulties with the white community and his wife.” The other is Edward Lindall whose A gathering of eagles is also set in Western Australia, and has a First Nations character. Google Books describes it as a “thriller set in the remote barren wasteland of north western Australia; an outcast Aboriginal woman, Ilkara, assists the survivors of a murderous plot to outwit their would-be killers.” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says Lindall was the pseudonym used by Edward Ernest Smith (1915-1978). He is also listed at a Classic Crime Fiction site.
Writers born this year include novelists Julia Leigh and Caroline Overington, and those who died include Herz Bergner (whose Between sea and sky I’ve reviewed), children’s fiction writer Nan Chauncy, Frank Dalby Davison (who was part of “the triumvirate” with Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw), and George Johnston.
There were not many literary awards, yet, though the state awards we know were getting close. And, several of the main awards made in 1970 weren’t to fiction. The ALS Gold Medal, for example, went to historian Manning Clark, and the Colin Roderick Award to Margaret Lawrie’s Myths and legends of Torres Strait.
There were some fiction awards, however, including of course, the Miles Franklin Award, which went to Dal Stevens’ A horse of air. The trade union-supported Mary Gilmore Award (my post on this award) was made to Keith Antill for Moon in the ground. It’s an Australian science fiction story set around the secretive Pine Gap near Alice Springs. The “$1,000 Rothman’s award for the best Australian novel of 1969” was awarded in 1970 to George Johnston‘s “semi-autobiography Clean straw for nothing” (from Trove).
The state of the art
As for previous club years, I checked Trove to see what newspapers were saying about Australian fiction. This was a little trickier for 1970 because, due to copyright, many newspapers from this time have not yet been digitised. However, some papers, most notably The Canberra Times and Tribune, along with some regional ones, have made their content available to Trove. To them I am most grateful.
George Johnston
If one name loomed large in my my 1970 Trove research, it was George Johnston, and not just because he died in July. There were, of course, the obituaries, but, unrelated to his death, is his being used as a benchmark by commentators. For example, John Lleonart, reviewing Barry Oakley’s A salute to the Great McCarthy in The Canberra Times (8 August), has some “niggles” about the book but concludes that “Oakley has given us in McCarthy a classic figure of Australian mores to rank with George Johnston’s My brother Jack“.
Meanwhile, in discussions about the need for more Australian content on television, the television miniseries of My brother Jack was suggested as a benchmark for good Australian television content. Frances Kelly, writing in The Canberra Times (August 26), discusses the economic and artistic challenges to producing more “good” Australian content, and suggests one solution could be for Australia to
follow the BBC’s lead and begin work on adaptations. There are many fine Australian novels, which if we must still fly the flag, would bear dramatisation. My brother Jack was a shining example.
The obituaries sum up Johnston’s career well – at least as it was seen at the time of his death. Maurice Dunlevy writes in The Canberra Times (23 July) that:
He had come back to his gumtree and kookaburra womb to find a new land, a people without a soul, and some uncomfortable ghosts from his past. “I would like to help Australians to find a new identity, a new soul, a new spirit”, he said on television. But to do so he had to sort out his own attitude to a country where he had left “the irrecapturable rapture of being young”. He was trying to do this in the third volume of the trilogy [A cartload of clay] during the past year.
the important thing is the task that George Johnston recognised and set for himself — that of modernising Australian literature, of dragging it screaming into the 1970’s, of giving it a shape consistent with the world around it. That task must now be taken over by someone else — perhaps a writer who will emerge from the ranks of this new emerging generation.
These two obituaries make good reading if you are a Johnston fan.
Bookworm diggers
Meanwhile, over in South Vietnam, reported the Victor Harbour Times (May 29), Australian soldiers were well supplied with most amenities, but were running short of reading material. They had, says the report, “ample supplies of newspapers and regularly published magazines” but “novels, other books and paperbacks [were] in short supply”. Donations were being called for, and the Army would deliver them.
Australian classics
Publishers publishing classics is not new, but it’s always interesting to see “what” publishers see as those worth publishing at a particular time. In 1970, the Australian publisher Rigby published two Australian classics, Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery under arms and Marcus Clarke’s For the term of his natural life, in $1.25 paperback editions. The Canberra Times (May 30), described them as “quite massive little tomes as paperbacks go” but said they gave readers “the opportunity of owning at a reasonable price two books that will be read and reread as long as Australian literature survives”. I love the qualification, “as long as Australian literature survives”. I wonder what the reporter thought might happen? Anyhow, these are still recognised “classics” but more have been added to the Australian classics pantheon since then.
While not quite making classics status, two other authors from the past were mentioned in the year’s papers. One was Communist Party member, Jean Devanny, whose papers were donated by her daughter to the University of Townsville. (I included her in my post on women writers and politics in the 1930s.) The Tribune‘s report (January 28) says that Jean Devanny had had more than 20 books published by Australian and overseas publishers. One of her best known, Sugar heaven (1936), is a novel of class and politics on the Queensland cane fields, and was published in the Soviet Union in 1968.
The other author, Vance Palmer (1885-1959), came from the same era, and while not a Communist, was left-leaning politically. By 1970, he was seen as old-fashioned, but Professor Harry Heseltine thought he was due for a reassessment, and published his Vance Palmer in 1970. I will share more about this in another post.
The last book banned in Australia was Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s complaint. It was banned in 1969, but after protestations by booksellers and publishers, and two trials in New South Wales which ended in hung juries, the ban was lifted in 1971. In 1970, however, it was all still happening. There’s way too much reporting for me to cover here, so I’m just to entertaining references to whet your appetite.
The University of New South Wales’ student newspaper, Tharunka (April 21), devoted a special literary supplement to the issue, asking writers to comment on censorship. One was Thomas Keneally, who commenced his piece by saying he felt “uneasy contributing to a forum on censorship because I have never achieved banmanship”. He is tongue-in-cheek about the reasons for the ban, which had to do with its being a “dirty” book. Keneally doesn’t see orgasm as “the key to the vision of man”, and argues that “there is very little of less value to the novelist than a person enjoying himself”. Fair point! Nonetheless, despite his “spinsterish views on eroticism in literature”, he thinks the ban is “an embarrassment”.
Maurice Dunlevy takes satire further in his article “The Portnoy tug-of-war” (The Canberra Times, September 5). Do read it … And, for a more recent history of the saga, check this article by Sian Cian in The Guardian (February 2, 2022). She quotes Des Cowley, of the State Library of Victoria:
“There’s been a lot written about the whole saga with Penguin and the legal case, but a little part of that story is that a small group of people got together and defended the right of literature to exist. It is such a beautiful case because, in a way, it ushers in the change Australia saw between the 1960s and 70s, with the progressive Whitlam government, and going from a literary backwater to a world stage.”
I’m not finished with 1970 … but this post is long enough. I’d love to hear any thoughts you have about the year, or about the stories I’ve shared here.
When last month’s Six Degrees went to air, I was on holiday in outback Queensland. I have since returned from that wonderful trip, but am now in Melbourne for two weeks, catching up with family, including of course our two gorgeous grandchildren. I could do the grandmotherly thing and wax lyrical about what fun they are, but if you have grandchildren, yours will be just as much fun, and if you don’t, then, my stories will bore you very quickly, so let’s get straight to this month’s Six Degrees. As always, if you don’t know how the #SixDegrees meme works, please check host Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.
The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book. This month we are back to books I haven’t read, this one being Colm Tóibín’s Long Island. I’ve seen (and loved) the movie of the first novel, Brooklyn, but haven’t read it or this sequel. I’d like to though!
I considered many ways to take this chain but in the end, I decided to go with the idea of a sequel. My link is an old Australian novel, Louise Mack’s Girls together (my review), which was published in 1898 and was the sequel to her novel Teens.
Girls together is about two friends, 16-year-old Lennie, who is at a point of transition in her life, and 18-year-old Mabel, who returns in the opening chapters from Paris and is training to be an artist. My next link draws on the idea of friendship between two young women. Nell Pierce’s A place near Eden (my review) is very different to Girls together, but the main friends here, Tilly and Celeste, are, like Lennie and Mabel, two years apart in age, meaning that from the start, Tilly is less experienced than Celeste – and she feels it. For the main part of the story, they are 19 and 21, and something happens, near Eden, for which Tilly is blamed.
My next link is simple, obvious, so MR at least is sure to love it! I am linking, in other words, on title. The book is Chris Flynn’s A tiger in Eden (my review). It’s about Billy, “a thug-on-the run” in Thailand from his violent past in Belfast. He is, of course, the “tiger” in Eden, but there are more tigers to the story than just this.
A tiger also appears in my next novel, Fiona McFarlane’s The night guest (my review) which is about an older woman living on her own, the carer her children organise for her, and a tiger which starts to visit at night. As in Chris Flynn’s novel, there are layers here to the idea of the tiger.
The older woman in my next link has far more agency than McFarlane’s Frida who is, admittedly, in the early stages of dementia. The woman is the narrator of Sigrid Nunez’s essay-novel cum autofiction work, The vulnerables (my review). It’s the story of a woman who, in the early days of COVID and lockdown, takes on the task of pet-sitting a miniature macaw in a classy New York apartment, but finds herself sharing this role with a disaffected, opinionated Gen Z son of friends of the apartment owner. An uneasy relationship develops between these two strong-minded people.
My last link is about another older woman and a younger man living in the same apartment complex. They become friends when he is locked out of his apartment, but their friendship happens rather more easily than Nunez’s pair because they quickly find points of connection. The novel is Michael Fitzgerald’s Late (my review). It is a “what if” story about Marilyn Munro spun through a story about Sydney’s 1980s gay murders. Late encourages us to think about who Marilyn might have been had she been allowed to be herself, and who her young gay neighbour might be if allowed to be himself!
So, we started with Kate’s book in greater New York, but moved very quickly to Australia, before popping over to Thailand, back to Australia, and then to New York again, before finally ending up in Australia. We’ve met tigers and thugs (not to mention a macaw), older women and younger men, and we’ve come across some interesting girl friends. We’ve met people to be trusted and some not so much. I hope you’ve been intrigued!
Now, the usual: have you read Long Island and, regardless, what would you link to?
It’s the start of spring down under and, as some of you know, I am on a holiday in outback Queensland. It’s a bit of a sentimental journey for me, but it’s a region that is worth visiting regardless of personal connections. Anyhow, my holiday is not what you are here for, so I’ll get onto the meme. As always, if you don’t know how this #SixDegrees meme works, please check host Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.
The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book, and this month she selected another book I have read! That makes two in a row! Unheard of – or, at least, very rare for me. The book is Larissa Behrendt’s After story (my review). As its subject matter is a mother-daughter holiday – this one to England – and as I am currently also on holiday, I plan to use some sort of holiday theme for all the links this month.
Given my plan to stick with the holiday idea, my first link is obvious to me, Jessica Au’s Cold enough for snow (my review). Not only is it about a holiday – this one to Japan – it’s also about a mother and daughter with some issues to resolve, from the daughter’s point of view anyhow.
For my next link, we are staying with the parental theme, but in this case the protagonist, an adult son, is running away from his oppressive elderly mother, to an old holiday haunt from his childhood, a place called Jimenbuen in the Monaro region of New South Wales. The book is Nigel Featherstone’s My heart is a little wild thing(my review), and our character falls passionately in love. It’s a wonderful experience, even though it doesn’t quite end the way he’d like.
The Monaro is a beautiful place, and it just so happens that I have another novel set there that fits the bill. Charlotte Wood’s Booker Prize long-listed novel Stone Yard devotional (my review) is about a woman who goes to a place on the Monaro for specific type of holiday, a retreat to heal her troubled spirit. Gradually, we come to understand her troubles, and many stem from unresolved grief over the loss of her parents, decades earlier.
Now, because I can’t have all Australian authors, I’m taking us back to England, but staying with a parental link. It’s a daughter again, but in this case the novel opens with her father having just died at the place they had taken for late summer. Utterly bereft, she stands at the front gate when a man goes by. Vulnerable in her grief, she falls in love, but as it turns out he’s not what she thought at all. Elizabeth von Arnim’s Vera (my review) is an early, chilling study of coercive control.
My next link is a little tenuous in more ways than one. It is about a camping holiday taken by two women, and we are back in Australia, so no connections there. However, I can find one link, besides the holiday one, and that’s the idea that holidays don’t always go to plan. For Lucy, it’s the death of her father that puts paid to the happy times, while for our two camping women it’s a flood, one serious enough for them to have to consider how best to survive it. The book is Susan Hawthorne’s verse novel, Limen (my review).
And finally, I am concluding with a sort of everylink! That is, a link that should work with any book featuring a holiday because, what do you do when you go on holidays? Hmm, perhaps that should be, what did we used to do when we went on holidays? Send postcards of course. So, my final link is American poet and bloggerJeanne Griggs’ Postcard poems (my review), which enables us to end on a positive note! Thankyou Jeanne!
So, we started with Kate’s book taking us to England, then I took us to Japan, Australia and England, before ending with Jeanne who takes us all over the USA and a few other places besides. I’m sorry-not-sorry to say, however, that all but one of my authors this month are women. (Sorry, because I do enjoy many male authors, but not sorry because I also love supporting the women!)
Now, the usual: have you read After story and, regardless, what would you link to?
It’s another new month, meaning time for another Six Degrees. Last month, in my introduction, I said that one of the things I like about doing this meme is seeing what book Kate has chosen next. Little did I know when I was writing that post, that the book she had chosen for this month was inspired by a recent post of mine on writers and artists. What a surprise, but how lovely. However, before I share what that book is, I need to do the formalities, that is, to tell you that if you don’t know how the #SixDegrees meme works, please check host Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.
So, the first rule is that Kate sets our starting book, and as you know for this month she selected a book from a post of mine. The book is Heather Rose’s novel, The museum of modern love (my review) and – haha – I have actually read it! In case you haven’t, it was inspired by artist Marina Abramović’s 75-day performance piece, The Artist is Present, which she performed at MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art) in 2010. From this, Rose weaves two stories, one about the real Marina Abramović and the other about a fictional musician who regularly attends the performance.
Where to from here? There were many options, but I decided to go with something fairly obvious, another novel set in a museum, this one a fictional house museum devoted to an artist and her muse, Helen Meany’s novella Every day is Gertie Day (my review). This museum, like MoMA during Abramović’s performance, attracts a lot of attention, albeit for different reasons.
Meany’s novella was co-winner of Seizure’s 2021 Viva La Novella Prize with Christine Balint’s very different book, Water music (my review). Balint’s book, unlike Meany’s contemporary-near future novel, is an historical novel set in a musical orphanage for girls in 18th century Venice.
So next we are going to Venice and a book I read quite early in my blogging days, Geoff Dyer’s unusual Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (my review). I could almost call it a double link because this book reads more like two loosely connected novellas, than a single novel, albeit both parts are set in watery cities.
My next link didn’t come naturally. Instead, it is the result of some research I did into Dyer’s book which turned up that it won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction in 2009. Quite coincidentally, I have also read the 2010 winner, Ian McEwan’s climate-change inspired novel Solar (my review).
Next we go with something more obvious! That is, I’m linking on author’s name to another novel by Ian McEwan, Nutshell (my review), this one a literary mystery inspired more than a little by Hamlet.
My final link is not obvious if you don’t know the books, as it is on unusual narrators. Nutshell is narrated by a foetus, while my final book, Carmel Bird’sFamily skeleton (my review), is narrated by the proverbial (or is it literal) skeleton in the closet. Either way, these unusual narrators provide a perfect link between two enjoyable – and witty – novels. (And neatly, our first book, The museum of modern love, also has a different sort of narrator.)
This is a different chain to my usual because four of my six books are witty, humorous and/or satirical. I like humour but it’s not always easy to find. The author gender split is 50/50, and we have travelled in space and time from 18th century Venice to 21st Century Australia.
Now, the usual: have you read The museum of modern love and, regardless, what would you link to?
Another month, another Six Degrees. This is the only meme I do as a regular thing, and sometimes I wonder why I do it. It is fun to think about how to link books, so it’s always exciting to see what book Kate has chosen next. But, is it more than fun? Does it result in our choosing to read books we hadn’t considered before? Is its main value in keeping us connected? Are there other benefits or impacts? Any thoughts?
While you ponder that, I’ll just get on with it … if you don’t know how the #SixDegrees meme works, please check host Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.
The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book. For this month she set the 2024 winner of the International Booker Prize, Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos (translated by Michael Hofmann). It is described at GoodReads as “a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates”. I’d like to read this one but suffice it to say I haven’t, to date.
I considered choosing another book set in or about the GDR, but I ended up choosing another translated German writer, without specific relevance to the GDR. My link is W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (my review), translated by Anthea Bell. If you know Sebald, you will know that this is no ordinary novel, but very broadly its central, titular character is a man who, traumatised by being a kindertransport refugee from Czechoslovakia in 1939, tries to recover his memory and his life some 50 years later.
My next link is to a book in which the protagonist translates Austerlitz, among other books, because translating great books is her hobby, her passion. The book is Rabih Alameddine’s An unnecessary woman (my review). My reading group read this novel, and we did a straw poll on which of the books the protgonist writes about we’d most like to read. There were several, but Austerlitz was the winner. An unnecessary woman is a beautiful book about readers and reading.
A very different reader is Alan Bennett’s in his novel The uncommon reader (my review). The reader is Queen Elizabeth II, and in his story she discovers reading through a mobile library that visits the palace grounds. In my post, I wrote that Bennett cheekily suggests what the impact might be on her family, staff and the politicians around her when reading becomes not only something she wants to do all the time (instead of her work) but also results in her starting to think and question. A whimsical but not unserious book about readers and reading.
It’s no accident that Alan Bennett’s Queen discovers books through a library. Bennett is surely making a statement there too. A book which the librarians in my reading group loved for its love and promotion of libraries is Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land (my review). Among other things, this novel is about the role played by librarians in fostering knowledge and reading. Doerr’s Dedication is “For the librarians then, now, and in the years to come”.
I cannot resist staying with the libraries and librarian theme. A character in Doerr’s book speaks of how endangered books are, “They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world.” Librarians and readers safeguard books, and this is exactly what is happening in the first story in Rebecca Campbell’s dystopian book, Arboreality (my review). A librarian and university researcher are fighting desperately against time to save books which are being destroyed by climate-change induced floods and fires.
Besides its interest in books, Arboreality is – obviously – about trees. It features many trees, but one species provides a linking thread between the stories, the Golden Arbutus. A very different tree but an equally significant one in terms of the book is the greengage tree in Shokoofeh Azar’s The enlightenment of the greengage tree(my review), translated by Adrien Kijek (pseudonym). It is on top of this tree that the character Roza attains enlightenment. Coincidentally, in this Iran-set politically-driven novel, a library is burnt.
This chain has taken us around the world – but, unusually for me, not to Australia – and through time, from centuries past and into the future. Also unusually for me, four of my six writers are male. Finally, I’d like to draw your attention to a neat circle – my closing book, like the book that starts this month’s meme, is translated.
Now, the usual: have you read Kairos and, regardless, what would you link to?
Whispering Gums 
