21st century literature

Anna Funder, Wifedom (#BookReview)

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Anna Funder’s Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life is a book with a mission, a mission that is implied in its full title. That mission is to examine the notion of “wifedom”, and the way patriarchy works to construct it, through the example of the invisible – or, as Funder also calls it, erased – life of George Orwell’s wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy.

To do this, she wrangles Eileen out of the shadows of history to produce an intelligent, funny, warm-hearted, loyal and hard-working woman who, observed novelist Lettice Cooper, loved George “deeply, but with a tender amusement”. It’s an engrossing story, well-told. However, it’s a challenging read too.

Funder explains early in the book that her interest in Eileen came from reading something Orwell wrote about women and wives – after Eileen had died. It’s astonishingly misogynistic, and made her wonder who Eileen was and what she might have thought. Funder set about reading six Orwell biographies written between 1972 and 2003, but she found them unhelpful when it came to Eileen. Indeed, she says, they gave so little that they “started to seem like fictions of omission”. Funder then, logically, went to these biographers’ sources. She found some more bits and pieces about Eileen, but it wasn’t enough. All she had was “a life in facts, a woman in pieces”, so she “considered writing a novel – a counterfiction to the one in the biographies”. But, she was fascinated “by the sly ways” in which Eileen had been hidden, and she felt a novel couldn’t effectively explore this. Then she “found the letters”.

These were six letters that Eileen had written to her good friend Norah from just after her marriage in 1936 until 1944, but they had not been discovered until 2005. These letters gave her Eileen’s voice – and this voice was “electrifying”. Funder believed she could no longer write a novel. She writes,

I wanted to make her live, and at the same time to reveal the wicked magic trick that had erased her, and that still holds sway today. I thought of it as writing a fiction of inclusion.

“it’s hard … for history to find you”

This is where the book gets tricky, because, while I found Wifedom a fascinating read, it raised questions too, and they are intrinsic to what Funder is trying to achieve, and how she goes about achieving it. The book is divided into five parts, with the first part titled “Wifedom, A Counterfiction”. What does this mean? She doesn’t immediately explain what I have described above. Instead, she opens her book on a scene in which she imagines Eileen writing a letter to Norah – and she includes excerpts from that letter. This throws us readers in at the deep end. As we get into the book, we come to recognise these imagined sections, because they are identified by indentation, and opening and closing graphical symbols, but at the beginning it’s a bit mystifying, albeit an engaging way to capture our interest.

Early in the read, then, it becomes apparent that Wifedom comprises a complex mixture of processes and forms. The imagined sections are interspersed throughout the book between more traditional biographical writing about Eileen and George’s life. And interspersed between these are reflections from Funder’s own life, because one of her points is that the patriarchy, the “patri-magic”, which erased Eileen’s life from George’s biography, still exists and is evident in her own life as a wife and mother, despite her supportive husband and “egalitarian” marriage. I’m not going to focus on this aspect of the book, though, because it seems to fade away somewhat as Eileen and George’s story picks up, and is not, anyhow, where I want to go in this post.

Instead, I want to tease out the process. Early on Funder writes that

Looking for Eileen involved the pleasure of reading Orwell on how power works. Finding her held the possibility of revealing how it works on women: how a woman can be buried first by domesticity and then by history.

This is not particularly new. Anyone interested in feminism is aware of how women have been lost in (and thus to) history. However, Funder’s book is enlightening in this regard. She does an excellent job of interrogating how it can happen. It happens when biographers ignore or play down the role of women in their subjects’ lives. Through cross-matching her sources she finds example after example of Eileen’s contributions being downplayed or omitted. She shows how the use of passive voice and terms like “wife” rather than Eileen’s name work to make her disappear. (Orwell does it himself in Homage to Catalonia.) She finds examples where biographers, disconcerted by some of George’s behaviour, excuse it (how often are men excused!), or, uncertain about evidence, will rephrase it. For example, Funder writes that Eileen

noted his extraordinary political simplicity – which seems to have worried one of the biographers, who rewrote her words to give him an ‘extraordinary political sympathy’.

Eileen’s words come from a 1938 letter to Marjorie Dakin. The biographer is Crick. (Another of the textual clues to readers in this book is that Eileen’s words are conveyed in italics, while the words of others are enclosed in quotation marks.)

But here’s the challenge – interpretation. Funder writes early in her book that,

As serendipity would have it, in 2020 Sylvia Topp published Eileen: The Making of George Orwell, which contained much material I hadn’t found, and was thrilled to read, though we interpret it differently, and so build differing portraits of Eileen.

She does not explain what she means here, but in the very thorough Notes at the end of the book, Funder elaborates on Topp’s approach to Eileen. Put simply, Topp, Funder says, sees Eileen as one of those celebrated people’s partners who devoted their lives “joyfully to assisting the talented partners in all their various needs knowing all along that they would be under-appreciated, and often ignored, and yet never faltering in their dedication, or in their willingness to submerge their own personal talents into their partners’ success.” Topp, then, sees Eileen as a “helpmeet of genius” while Funder is interested, as she writes in these Notes, “in examining what it took, perhaps, to be in that marriage, and that dream”.

So, what we have here is interpretation. Topp had the same sources that Funder did. Indeed, she added some to Funder’s arsenal. But, she interprets them differently. As a feminist, I easily aligned with Funder’s interpretation, but as I read I also had this little niggle that Funder was interpreting her sources – from the perspective of her times, values and gender – just as other biographers had before her.

Wifedom was my reading group’s April book. Our conversation focused mainly on the biographical content – on Eileen’s life, on George Orwell and his books, and on the impact of patriarchy on Eileen. We were horrified by the life led by Eileen, as Funder tells it – and the facts seem inarguable. Their relationship appeared to us to have been so one-sided. Eileen did all the domestic work, and it was hard work given the primitive rural cottage that they called home. She was, often, the main breadwinner, and she did his typing, as well as offering editorial comment. She was necessary to him. Meanwhile, he focused on his writing and, we gathered, chasing other women. And yet, Eileen stayed with George. Why, we wondered?

We didn’t delve into the interpretation issue, albeit I would have loved to, but I needed more time to collect my thoughts. We did, however, discuss why we thought Eileen stayed with George which, I guess, was us interpreting what we’d read! Various ideas were put forward, including that Eileen might have been a “rescuer”, or that she knew she was unlikely to have been published herself (in a patriarchal world) and so channelled her energies through George, or, simply, that she loved him and, much like Topp argued, willingly helped him in any way she could.

So, there you have it! History, biography, it’s all a matter of the facts you have, and the way you see them. I don’t mean to devalue the biographer’s art by that statement, but simply to recognise that even the most formal, most rigorously documented biography will, necessarily, be affected by the biographer and their times. For this reason, I found Wifedom an absorbing and provocative read, though perhaps only partly in the way Funder intended.

Anna Funder
Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life
Hamish Hamilton, 2023
511pp.
ISBN: 9781760143787

Monday musings on Australian literature: Stella Prize 2024 Winner

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The 2024 Stella Prize winner was announced last Thursday, the 2nd of May, but that was the also the day my blog turned 15, and I didn’t want to flood cyberspace with too many posts. Then this weekend was the SixDegrees meme which meant another post coming at you. So, I decided to do my Stella 2024 post, this year, as a Monday Musings. It makes sense to do so, in fact, because it’s an historic win. First though, the winner, for those of you who haven’t heard yet:

Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy

Why historic? Again, some of you will already know this, but Alexis Wright, one of our leading First Nations writers, is the first writer to win the Stella twice in its 12 year history. An impressive achievement by any measure. I am embarrassed to say, however, that of the now four Stella winners I haven’t read, Wright’s two are among them. This is not because I don’t want to read them, but because they are big tomes, and my life doesn’t seem to lend itself these days to chunksters. I read and loved her multi-award winning novel Carpentaria (my post), which was big enough – at over 500 pages – but that was before blogging when time pressures felt different! Clearly, though, I should make time for this because, from what I can tell, its subject matter is something I care about and it has the wit and playfulness, passion and imagination, that I loved in Carpentaria.

Praiseworthy has already been recognised by the literary establishment. Last year it won the Fiction Book Award in the Queensland Literary Awards. Further, as publisher Giramondo shares, it has been shortlisted for many other awards: The Dublin Literary Award 2024; the People’s Choice Award, the Christine Stead Prize for Fiction and the Indigenous Writers Prize in the 2024 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award; The James Tait Black Prize for Fiction 2024; and the Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance in the 2023 Queensland Literary Awards.

The chair of the judging panel said this about the book:

Praiseworthy is mighty in every conceivable way: mighty of scope, mighty of fury, mighty of craft, mighty of humour, mighty of language, mighty of heart. Praiseworthy is not only a great Australian novel – perhaps the great Australian novel – it is also a great Waanyi novel. And it is written in the wild hope that, one day, all Australian readers might understand just what that means. I do not understand. Not yet. But I can feel history calling to me in these pages. Calling to all of us. Imagine if we listened.

Giramondo’s (above-linked) page for the book, includes excerpts from other critics and reviewers. Samuel Rutter of the New York Times Book Review describes it as “the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century”, while Jane Gleeson-White wrote in The Conversation that “Praiseworthy is Alexis Wright’s most formidable act of imaginative synthesis yet…a hero’s journey for an age of global warming, a devastating story of young love caught between two laws, and an extended elegy and ode to Aboriginal law and sovereignty”. More than one references Ulysses, such as Ruth Padel, who describes it in The Spectator as “an impassioned environmental Ulysses of the Northern Territory… Playful, formally innovative, multi-storied, allegorical, protean and dizzyingly exhilarating, it is long, lyrical and enraged”. Several, in fact, praise the language; and many comment on its satirical aspect, its lyricism, its comedy. Lynda Ng, in Meanjin, calls it:

The finest distillation yet of Wright’s themes – a bold assertion of Aboriginal sovereignty that successfully encompasses all areas of life: culture, economy, and jurisprudence.

Of course, Giramondo has selected excerpts that praise, but the sources of that praise are impressive.

There are those who think that she should/may/will be Australia’s next Nobel Laureate for Literature.

Returning to the Stella, you can read more on the Stella website, including a link to Alexis Wright’s acceptance speech, and an expressive video performance of a brief scene from the novel by Boonwurrung actor Tasma Walton.

Just to remind you, this year’s Stella judges were writer, literary critic, Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival and this year’s chair, BeeJay Silcox; Filipino-Australian poet, performer, arts producer, and advocate, Eleanor Jackson; First Nations award-winning poet and arts board member, Cheryl Leavy; novelist, occasional critic and full-time dad, Bram Presser; and writer and historian, Dr Yves Rees.

Wikipedia offers a well-presented complete list of the winners and all the short and longlisted books.

Thoughts anyone?

Rachel Matthews, Never look desperate (#BookReview)

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One of the most appealing things about Rachel Matthews’ third novel, Never look desperate, is that it features some decent men. In this #metoo era, which differs little from what came before, there’s plenty of fiction which shows men in less than stellar light. And that’s fair enough. One of the reasons I read fiction is to expand my understanding of the issues I care about. I can feel along with the so-called sad girl stories, and applaud the angry feminist ones. However, most men I know, like most women I know, are decent human beings trying to live good, fulfilled lives. And this, essentially, is the subject matter of Matthews’ novel.

Never look desperate follows three main characters, in alternating, third-person chapters. These characters are 49-year-old Bernard, 54-year-old Minh, and Bernard’s recently widowed 70-year-old mother Goldie. It is set in Melbourne, immediately post-pandemic. People are starting to get out and about again, but the pandemic’s shadow lingers in the background. Bernard and Minh are single, lonely, and seeking connection.

Bernard, a photographer who works at Officeworks, dearly misses his father Marvin, who had died 12 months ago. He also wears a locket encasing some of his dead-ex-wife’s ashes around his neck. He had loved his wife, and the fact that they were divorced when she died, does not lessen his grief. With both gone, he feels that from now, “the world would keep taking pieces of him”, but he’s surviving – just. The last time he’d had sex, on a Tinder date, “it was all over in one minute and 10 seconds – the same time it took him to microwave porridge”.

Vietnamese-born Minh, who came to Australia by boat when she was seven, works at the Kino cinema complex. She has never married, though has had her share of boyfriends. She loves her mother, but rarely sees her because her evangelical step-father had kicked her out long ago. We first meet her as she wakes, gasping, from “night terrors”, and we soon learn that she carries trauma from the loss of her father on that boat from Vietnam and from the racism she experienced as the only Vietnamese kid at school.

Goldie is more complicated. She’s “alternative”, and uncompromising. She is implicated in her husband’s death, though this is not a legal issue in the novel, because she had slowly replaced his blood pressure tablets with alternative medicines. She has a new lover, but she’s prickly – and grief and ageing are not making her any easier to be with. However, Franz is hanging in there. As she does with the other characters, Matthews nails her with sentences like this:

Goldie didn’t really have friends. Her old workmates from a community centre in Collingwood, found her difficult to work with, but we were grateful when she wrestled with management for better conditions.

She is the most difficult character for readers to identify with, but she has her own baggage, including a tough upbringing, during which her mother would lock her in a dark laundry, aka “the Thinking Room”.

“the world was different now” (Goldie)

So, we have three people who are all grieving or have suffered losses in their lives. Bernard and Minh meet early on via the dating app Tinder, and through the rest of the novel there’s a rom-com type tension regarding whether they will overcome their anxieties and get together. The novel’s other main tension concerns whether there will be a rapprochement between Goldie and Bernard, whose upbringing had been difficult with such an inflexible, “alternative” mother, and who believes that she does not grieve his beloved father. We though know better. (Marvin, whom we only know by hearsay, is one of the book’s joys.)

Now this might all sound ho-hum, but it’s definitely not, for a few reasons. One is the humour. Matthews captures the place and time, and her characters, with light satire that preserves their humanity while letting us laugh at the things they and we do in these strange times of ours. She hones in on some of the absurdities and pretensions of our times, without condemning. After all, who knows who will have the last laugh! That said, the IKEA and cruise-ship scenes are priceless.

Another reason is the characterisation. These characters are real. We know them, and, even if we are not exactly like them, we have surely suffered similar sadnesses and insecurities. This week, for example, we lunched with a recently widowed friend, and as I greeted her with a hug, she said “oh, a lovely hug”. One of the points Matthews makes so eloquently in this novel is the longing “to be touched” in those left alone – especially during the pandemic. So, there’s genuine pathos here, too, as we watch our characters struggle, hard, to beat back their justifiable fears and reconnect.

Related to the characterisation is the setting. Melburnians will love all the grounding references to places, products and businesses that carry signals for those who know, but are self-explanatory enough for those who don’t. The novel is also peppered with pop-culture references, particularly to music but also to film and TV shows, which will be more universal for the generations involved.

Then there is the quiet wisdom. Bernard’s dad had told him once that “a sad day is only a day”. This is not to minimise intense grief, of course, but it puts into perspective the little ups and downs that we can let get on top of us if we don’t take care. Matthews shows the various kindnesses people meet through life, often in unexpected places, and also that online-friendships, like Minh has with Suzy in New York, are real and sustainable.

Goldie recognises early in the novel that “the world was different now. She just had to find her way”. By novel’s end, our characters are finding their way. The future isn’t guaranteed, but they are on their way with a little more connection in their lives. What did E.M. Forster say in Howard’s End? “Only connect”. Yet again, we see his wisdom – and Matthews has given it to us in a funny, warm-hearted novel that is a real pleasure to read.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) also enjoyed this novel.

Rachel Matthews
Never look desperate
Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2023
297pp.
ISBN: 9780645565393

(Review copy courtesy Transit Lounge, via Scott Eathorne, Quikmark Media)

Shankari Chandran, Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens (#BookReview)

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Shankari Chandran’s Miles Franklin Award winning novel, Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens, was my reading group’s March book. Unfortunately I was out of town at the time of the meeting, but of course I wanted to read it – and I did, finally!

Like many people, I think, when I first saw the book, I assumed it was one of those cosy crime novels set in a nursing home or retirement village. The title and the pretty cover certainly suggest that. Only a fraction of this first impression was right, though. It is set in a nursing home, and crimes do occur, but it is not a crime novel and nor is it cosy. Instead, it is a serious, thoughtful and immersive novel that covers many issues confronting modern multicultural Australia, but that also has one main driving idea – which I’ll get to soon.

First, though, I want to clear up another assumption I had, which was that Chandran is a Sri Lankan-Australian writer. Wikipedia told me otherwise. It describes her as a British-Australian writer, who was born in London to Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka. She grew up in Canberra, and studied law at the University of New South Wales, before working as a human rights lawyer in London for a decade. She now lives in Sydney. Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens is her third novel. GoodReads describes her first novel, Song of the Sun God (2017), as being “about three generations of Australian Tamil women and the choices they make to survive Sri Lanka’s civil war“. I don’t know what that novel’s overarching idea is, but Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens also draws from its main characters’ experiences during that civil war, and I do have a view on what drives it, so let’s get to the novel.

It is set in the Cinnamon Gardens Nursing Home in a fictional Sydney suburb called Westgrove, which situates it in Sydney’s multicultural western suburbs. The home is taken over in the early 1980s by Sri Lankan migrants, Cedric, Zakhir, and his wife Maya who wants to transform it to a place “where people will be valued”. The novel is told through multiple alternating voices, but starts with a Prologue which describes the home and which, if you read carefully, also prepares us for what’s to come:

Arabian jasmine climbs the wooden trellises staked in the garden beds. They are bold travellers, dark vines carrying white stars up the two-storey walls and around the windows of the residence. The plant grows obediently in the quiet suburb of Westgrove, Sydney, but its tropical ancestors are a wild breed, a vine that grows rampant in the villages of Sri Lanka, a home more familiar to many of the residents.

“Bold travellers”, “dark vines”, and “white stars” together with words like “obediently” and “wild” suggest a tension that we are going to explore.

We then start the narrative proper. It’s 2020, and Maya is now old and living as a resident in the home – albeit one who still holds many strings. Ruben is attending her, and we become aware that he bears fresh and old scars on his body. As the narrative progresses, we learn that the fresh scars come from recent racist attacks on him in the vicinity of the home, while the old scars relate to his experiences in Sri Lanka during the war. These scars more literally embody the tensions that pervade the novel.

From here, the rest of our narrators, all third person, are gradually introduced – Ruben; Maya’s daughter Anjali (Anji), who now manages the home; Anji’s old schoolfriend Nikki, who is the home’s geriatrician; and Nikki’s husband Gareth, who is white-Australian and a local councillor. There are other characters, including, most significantly, Anji’s also white-Australian husband, Nathan, and Maya’s aforementioned husband, Zakhir who disappeared, now presumed dead, ten years before the novel’s opening.

A strength of the novel is the way these characters inveigle their way into our hearts and minds so that we care about them, even the unappealing Gareth who, blinded by self-pity, rashly but unintentionally unleashes the dreadful drama that unfolds. It all hinges on racism. Chandran exposes the awful truth of how endemic racism is in Australian society and how, as a result, things can so quickly get out of hand. Interspersed with this present-day storyline are Maya’s, Ruben’s and Zakhir’s backstories, which explain why they had come to Australia – personally, in terms of what they had experienced during the civil war, and politically, in terms of their Tamil heritage and what that civil war was about.

I said at the beginning that the novel covers many issues which confront modern Australia, but that it also has one main driving idea. The issues include racism, colonialism, and multiculturalism; trauma, loss and grief; friendship, family and community; and the role played by the media, including social media, in fuelling emotions rather than encouraging reason. Underpinning these issues is the idea that drives the narrative – storytelling, and “the most powerful” of all stories, history. By framing her story within the Sri Lankan civil war and its battle over contested histories, Chandran makes her novel relevant to all cultures and societies where history has been used to oppress minorities resulting in violence, disempowerment and oppression, where distortion produces misinformation and confusion that can be manipulated to serve personal and political ends.

As grim and confronting as much of it is, Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens is not without hope. Alongside Chandran’s exploration of the misuse of history is a commitment to the positive value of story. To this end Maya, from the beginning, interviews all residents of the home, capturing their lives and their dreams in order to properly know and care for them. This provides the book with another underlying tension, that between histories that erase and stories that “must not be erased”.

Does it all work? Chandran holds a lot of balls in the air. Early on I felt caught in an awkward amalgam of a contemporary novel about middle class angst (husband versus wife, daughter versus mother, and so on) and one exploring critical political ideas. Also, there’s constant moving backwards and forwards in place and time, the plot felt a little contrived in places, and the main themes are hammered home. However, Chandran balances the tone well, mixing light humour and satire with sadness and tragedy, and the characters are vividly and sympathetically drawn. The end result is a book that reveals our essence, and asks us to consider how we might live together in respectful community. Consequently, despite some unevenness, I greatly enjoyed the read.

Shankari Chandran
Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens
Ultimo: Ultimo Press, 2022
360pp.
ISBN: 9781761151408

Stella Prize 2024 Shortlist announced

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For what it’s worth, given I’ve not read any of them, here is the Stella Prize shortlist. The announcement I received via email this morning describes it as comprising:

a diverse mix, featuring novels, memoir and an essay collection. Three of these works are by debut authors, showcasing fresh voices in Australian literature. 

To summarise from my longlist announcement, this year’s judges are writer, literary critic, Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival and this year’s chair, BeeJay Silcox; Filipino-Australian poet, performer, arts producer, and advocate, Eleanor Jackson; First Nations award-winning poet and arts board member, Cheryl Leavy; noveslist, occasional critic and full-time dad, Bram Presser; and writer and historian, Dr Yves Rees.

The shortlist

Here is the list, in alphabetical order by author, with brief comments from the judges (found on the Stella website’s page for each book, linked on the title):

So four novels, and two works of nonfiction. No poetry on this year’s shortlist. I have added a couple of reviews from my blogger friends, including Bill’s for Praiseworthy (which was also included in my Longlist post). Kate, as you will have seen, has managed to read two of them since the announcement. I am certainly interested in some of these.

The winner will be announced on 2 May. You can seen more details on the Stella 2024 page.

Any comments?

PS: Darn it, I copied my longlist post and then edited the title incorrectly so it was published as “Stella Prize 2023 Longlist” not “Stella Prize 2024 Shortlist!! Shows how distracted I am.

Sigrid Nunez, The vulnerables (#BookReview)

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Sigrid Nunez has been on my radar for a long time. So, why now? I blame Jonathan (Me Fail? I Fly!), since it was his post on Nunez’s latest novel, The vulnerables, that captured my attention and encouraged me to make now her time. What an intriguing book! I have no idea whether it is like her other books, but it certainly captivated me.

What exactly is it, was my first question? A novel, says its subtitle. Its probably best described as autofiction, but it did feel at times like a book of essays. In fact, late in the novel, our narrator who, like Nunez herself, is a writer, refers to Virginia Woolf and her aspiration

to invent a new form. The essay-novel. Chapters of fiction alternating with nonfiction chapters, “a terrific affair” that would include, well, everything: “satire, comedy, poetry, narrative . . . And there are to be millions of ideas but no preaching—history, politics, feminism, art, literature—in short a summing up of all I know, feel, laugh at, despise, like, admire hate & so on.”

On the next page, Nunez writes of Annie Ernaux who told her diary that “Tonight, I know I have to write ‘the story of a woman’ over time and History.” And so she did, some twenty years later. Ernaux’s book, says Nunez, is “a personal narrative spanning the period between 1941 … and what was then the present day, 2006: the autobiography of a woman that was also a kind of collective autobiography of her generation”.

Both of these encapsulate, to some degree, what Nunez is doing in The vulnerables. I like essays, so I enjoyed the “essay-novel” feel of this book, including its cheeky toying with where the boundaries are in what she is doing. And, I like personal narratives, not to mention the idea of a book being “a kind of collective biography” of a generation.

Nunez and I are of the same broad generation, although with some significant differences given she was born in New York in 1951 to a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father. But, we are both women of a certain age and so were designated “vulnerable” at the start of the pandemic, which is where the novel opens – in the northern spring of 2020. It is here, early on in the pandemic, when she is “breaking the rules” by going out and about too much, that a young friend admonishes her, telling her, “You’re a vulnerable … And you need to act like one.”

There is so much to write about in this book – her exploration of our generation, and how we are seeing things in these last decades of our lives. The discussions our narrator has with her friends about gender, for example, mirror mine, as does her awareness of the changes that come with ageing. Her concern about what happened in American politics in 2016, and its ongoing implications, mirror that of many of us. As do her references to racial and social injustice, the climate crisis … and so on. All heightened, here, by the pandemic, whose uncertainties shape the book’s tone. But, I want to focus on one particular aspect, her exploration of writing.

Our narrator is, as I’ve said, of a certain age. She’s seen a lot of life, and a lot of writing, and here she ponders, though her lively stream-of-consciousness style, the role, meaning, and form of writing. She begins with the opening sentence – “It was an uncertain spring” – from Virginia Woolf’s The years. But, just a few paragraphs on we are told that one of the first rules of writing is to “never open a book with the weather”, albeit our narrator has “never understood why not”. Between the opening sentence and this statement, she admits that she remembers almost nothing about Woolf’s book, and then writes that:

Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described.

I felt right then and there that this was going to be a book for me. I rarely remember plots, but frequently remember how books made me feel, how I reacted to them.

Why are you making things up?

The vulnerables is deceptively simple. Our narrator takes us into her confidence about what is happening to her, and what she is thinking, as she moves through those early days of spring and into lockdown stage, when she accepts the task of pet-sitting a miniature macaw named Eureka in a classy New York apartment, only to find herself sharing this role with a disaffected, but opinionated Gen Z son of friends of the apartment owner. She calls him Vetch, a prickly metaphoric contrast to the old-lady flowers, like hydrangeas, that she had previously regaled us with.

Woven through this loose plot, are our narrator’s thoughts on a range of subjects. It has a relaxed stream-of-consciousness feel, but is, nonetheless, formally stylish, using subtle repetition, metaphor, sly humour and literary allusions, to develop her ideas. It’s also erudite with frequent digressions that explore anything from the relevance (or not) of Dickens and what, say, J.M. Coetzee thinks about writing, to a discussion of My octopus teacher and of how the events of 2016 stopped speculative fiction author William Gibson in his tracks. This might feel random at the start, but the links are there, and the ideas – the questions – slowly build. It’s the sort of book that invites you to go with the flow, and if you do, you will eventually not only see the pattern, but will also have been both entertained and inspired to think.

What most inspired me was Nunez’s exploration of what sort of writing is most relevant now. She shares the thoughts and experiences of many of the great writers of the last century or so – Virginia Woolf, Annie Ernaux, Joan Didion, J.M. Coetzee, to name a few. Early in the novel she quotes Coetzee who said that what comes in late life to many writers is “an ideal of a simple, subdued, unornamented language and a concentration on questions of real import, even questions of life and death.”

Then, late in the novel, in a wry comment about the pandemic and its distinction between “essential” and other workers, she notes that of writers, the only ones deemed essential were the journalists. She seems to agree, writing that “silence all the journalists and we’d have the end of human rights”. And, more pointedly, she responds to the question of whether there is still a place for fiction, with:

Growing consensus: The traditional novel has lost its place as the major genre of our time. It may not be dead yet, but it will not long abide. No matter how well done, it seems to lack urgency. No matter how imaginative, it seems to lack originality. While still a powerful means of portraying human character and human experience, somehow, more and more, fictional storytelling is coming across as beside the point. More and more writers are having difficulty quieting a voice that says, Why are you making things up? 

There is fear about “the growing use of story as a means to distort and obscure reality”. But, in her subversive way, Nunez explores both sides. She writes of her time with Vetch, saying

… even now I sometimes find myself talking to him. But when I do he is never ‘Vetch.’ Always his real name. His sweet name.
But how could any of this have really happened? I must be making it up.

Does it matter whether she’s making it up or not?

It is a little before this, that our narrator discusses Woolf’s thoughts about creating her new form, “the essay-novel”, and then teases out what we might want now (including a funny dig at reader’s guides for book clubs). It’s not simple or straightforward – indeed, it’s paradoxical, it’s “elegy and comedy” combined – but, in the end, what she has written is a novel. A strange, or different, almost essay-novel it may be, but there, I’d say, is your answer.

Sigrid Nunez
The vulnerables: A novel
London: Virago, 2023
250pp.
ISBN: 9780349018096

Carmel Bird and Jace Rogers, Arabella (#BookReview)

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If you have read Carmel Bird, and particularly if you have read her bibliomemoir Telltale (my review), you will know that she has a whimsical turn of mind. You will also know that she can turn her hand to most forms of writing, including children’s picture books. Her latest outing, Arabella, proves the point.

Arabella tells the story of two cats, and it starts like this:

Once in a cupboard
full of coats and old hats
lived the prettiest, sweetest
and littlest of cats.

The accompanying illustration shows the inside of a cupboard, with hats on a high shelf, coats hanging below them, and, spying from behind the boots at the bottom, a little cat. The illustrations are minimalist pen and black ink drawings with restrained, delightful touches of watercolour – just like you see on the cover.

On the next page we learn that this cat, who sleeps behind an umbrella, is named Miss Arabella. She is small, quiet and shy. Unfortunately, not only is she shy, she’s also a bit of a scaredy-cat – well, a frightened cat anyhow. She seems to be managing her life well until into it comes another cat named George. He’s confident, and he knows there’s another cat there – somewhere. How will Arabella cope? Will she cope? Well, I’m not going to tell you, but let’s just say that this is a perfect book to read to children who love animals, particularly those who love cats, and to children who are frightened or lonely, and who need a little encouragement to come out of their shell to explore the big wide world – especially with a friend.

Arabella is one of my favourite sorts of picture books, by which I mean, it’s a rhyming one. It flows along beautifully, with words that soothe and please, and with little shifts in rhyme and rhythm that alter the pace just when they ought, so that the reader is jolted out of that sing-song tone that is so easy to fall into with rhyming books. The story is charming, and the gentle, whimsical illustrations encourage engagement. The book has an old-world air but with a timelessness that speaks to now as much as to any time. It has, I believe, been successfully tested on Carmel Bird’s own grandchildren, to whom the book is dedicated.

But don’t take my word for it, see what you think. I’m sure you’ll be delighted, particularly if you have grandchildren.

About the creators:

If you read my blog regularly you will know Carmel Bird (my posts). Born in lutruwita/Tasmania, she has been a fixture on the Australian literary scene since the 1980s when her first novel, Cherry Ripe, was published. She has written over ten novels, multiple short story collections, and much more besides. In 2016, she was awarded the Patrick White Award.

You may not, however, have heard of Jace Rogers. He is an artist who lives in Castlemaine, Victoria, where Bird now resides. His Facebook Page told me more, and gave me a sense of why he would have worked well with Carmel Bird. His intro is “My work salutes the anti hero. Fragments of brain clutter drawn out, cut up and cemented in binder medium” and his email address is given as jaceartyfarty@gmail.com. Love it.

Carmel Bird (text) and Jace Rogers (illustrations)
Arabella
Castlemaine: Treasure Street Press, 2023
33pp.
ISBN: 9780646883601

(Review copy courtesy the author. This book is published by Carmel Bird’s own – new – publishing company, which might make it self-published, but then again, might not. The book is available in bookstores, like Readings, but also direct from the author: carmel@carmelbird.com, $25 plus $6 postage)

Karen Viggers, Sidelines (#BookReview)

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I don’t usually start a book review by relating its content to my own experience, but local author Karen Viggers’ latest novel Sidelines invites exactly this. Sidelines is about children’s sport and what happens when the competitiveness gets out of hand. It was largely inspired by Viggers’ own experience as the mother of sporty children, and by an ugly parental brawl at a children’s football match that happened during those years.

My children’s sport experience was blissfully different. Our son played cricket, and his coach’s last name was McPhun – I kid you not. He was the perfect children’s sport coach. His focus was on “phun” and teamwork. He encouraged those kids, was fair about opportunity, did not favour his own son, and we parents had the best time. I loved seeing the enthusiasm with which the kids played, and their resilience when they were out for a duck, despite having gone in to bat with dreams of sixes and high scores. You won’t be surprised, perhaps, to hear that our kids were not in the elite division, but this should not make any difference. Unfortunately, however, it probably does.

So, Sidelines. As Viggers explained at the meet-the-author event I attended – and as is obvious if you read it – her novel has a structure rather like Christos Tsiolkas’ The slap*. This means that the novel’s story or plot is progressed through a sequence of different, third person, points of view encompassing the parents and children involved in the sport. Sidelines is a little different though because in Tsiolkas’ book, the slap occurs in the first chapter and we then watch the fall-out from that action. Viggers’ novel commences with a prologue describing an ambulance arriving at a sports ground where a badly injured child is lying far from the goal-posts. “What the hell happened here?” We then flash back to nine months earlier and, through those sequential voices, we work our way towards what had happened and why.

“It’s not meant to be fun” (a football father)

The novel focuses on two families – the well-to-do Jonica, Ben, and their 13-year-old twins, Alex and Audrey; and the Greek-Australian working class family of Carmen, Ilya, and their daughter Katerina. Into this mix comes Griffin and his single-parent Dad, Lang. Griffin is a natural, and his appearance upsets the team’s sporting and interpersonal dynamics. The characters telling the story are Jonica, Carmen, Audrey, Katerina, Ben, and finally, Griffin. For each voice, there is a thematic word or phrase that provides insight into, and commentary on, that character.

The first voice, Jonica’s, initially made me feel I was reading one of those stories about a dysfunctional family. You know, the well-to-do family with the successful, professional, and controlling husband, the privileged children, and the wife and mother caught somewhere in the middle. And there is some of this aspect in the novel, because, as becomes clear, part of the story Viggers is telling is one of class. So, in Jonica’s story we see the tropes of her class. Everything is laid on in a material sense, but the two females, in particular, aren’t happy. Jonica, like her husband, is a lawyer, but she is frustrated about not working. Ben, you see, “likes having her at home”, and insists she is needed to look after the children. He will “support her” (and the family) while she supports the children. There’s an irony in this word, “support”, which is Jonica’s theme, because, as Viggers said during the author talk, there’s a fine line between “support” and “pressure”. Audrey certainly feels more pressure than support.

The next voice is that of the other mother, Carmen, whose daughter, Katerina, like Audrey, is trying out for a place in the boy’s team where, as Ben had told Jonica, girls will learn “speed and aggression”. While Jonica tries, unsuccessfully, to resist her husband’s pressure to push the children, Carmen is more like Ben. She wants her daughter to achieve where she had failed, and she will manipulate and kowtow as much as is necessary to ensure this happens. Her theme or motif is “goal poacher”, the one who “attempts to shoot goals from loose balls … and uses other non-traditional ways of scoring”. Perfect for the resourceful Carmen.

And so the novel progresses through to Audrey’s and Katerina’s voices, where we see the pressures that their parents don’t. These girls do want to play well, but they also want other things in their lives. They are teens, for heaven’s sake! And Viggers’ rendition of them convinced me.

The penultimate voice is Ben’s, and here, in particular, is where Viggers’ choice of a multi-voice structure shines, because, while he’s still unlikable, we also see his point of view. Ben is the alpha male, no doubt about it, but he loves his family and he’s not so tuned out that he doesn’t sense something is wrong with Audrey in time to take critical action. This is the value of reading, being able to see a situation from another point of view. We don’t have to agree with Ben – I’m sure few of us do – but we can see where he’s coming from and that he’s human. This awareness can be achieved with third person voices, of course, but Viggers has effectively used first person voice here to directly confront readers with her protagonists’ thoughts.

By the end of the novel I was impressed by the careful and sophisticated way in which Viggers had developed and explored her main idea, which is to encourage us to think about our attitudes to and behaviour around competitive children’s sport. She offers no easy solutions. This is not a didactic book. There are many points left open for readers to think about. Can you play for fun, for example, and what does that look like?

In the above-linked interview with Viggers, she said she has realised that she is an issues-based writer. This is exactly what I thought as I started reading Sidelines. On the surface, it departs from her previous, environment-themed novels but, in fact, like those novels, it takes an issue Viggers cares about and explores it through characters who are real on the page. I enjoyed the read, but more than that, I hope it gets read and talked about in places where it matters.

* Interestingly, another Tsiolkas book, Barracuda (my post), starts with elite children’s sport, but while class is also an element, it takes a long view of what happens when things don’t go to plan.

Karen Viggers
Sidelines
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2024
343pp.
ISBN: 9781761470714

Stella Prize 2024 Longlist announced

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As has happened in the past, this week’s Monday Musings has been gazumped by the announcement this evening of the Stella Prize longlist. I attended the online streamed announcement from the Adelaide Festival Writers Week

As I say every year, I don’t do well at having read the Stella Prize longlist at the time of its announcement. In recent years the most I’ve read has been two (in 2019). This year, like the last two years I’ve read none, but a couple are on my TBR! Is the a start?

I was, however, doing better at reading the winners, having read Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with birds (2013), Clare Wright’s The forgotten rebels of Eureka (2014), Emily Bitto’s The strays (2015), Charlotte Wood’s The natural way of things (2016), Heather Rose’s The museum of modern love (2017), Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s The erratics (2019), Jess Hill’s See what you made me do (2020), Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear (2022). I have the 2021 and 2023 winners on my TBR, Evie Wyld’s The bass rock and Sarah Holland-Batt’s The jaguar, respectively.

This year’s judges include one from last year, and some newbies, keeping the panel fresh as in Stella’s commitment: writer, literary critic, Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival and this year’s chair, BeeJay Silcox; Filipino-Australian poet, performer, arts producer, and advocate, Eleanor Jackson; First Nations award-winning poet and arts board member, Cheryl Leavy; noveslist, occasional critic and full-time dad, Bram Presser; and writer and historian, Dr Yves Rees.

The longlist

Here is the list, in alphabetical order by author, not the order in which they were presented, and with a few scrabbled notes I made as I listened to the list being read out.

  • Katia Ariel, The swift dark tide (memoir)
  • Stephanie Bishop, The anniversary (novel): “genre fiction at is very best … as clever as it is delicious” (kimbofo’s review)
  • Katherine Brabon, Body friend (novel)
  • Ali Cobby Eckermann, She is the earth (verse novel)
  • Melissa Lucashenko, Edenglassie (novel): “triumph of characterisation … gives truth to state sanctioned violence” (Brona’s review)
  • Maggie MacKellar, Graft (memoir/nature writing) (Kate’s brief review)
  • Kate Mildenhall, The hummingbird effect (novel): “speculative fiction at its finest” tackling the issues of our age (Brona’s review)
  • Emily O’Grady, Feast (novel): “country house novel … be wary of deep subjectivity of moral value”
  • Sanya Rushdi, translated by Arunava Sinha, Hospital (novel): “unflinching and insightful work of autofiction”
  • Hayley Singer, Abandon every hope (essays): “no moral shrillness here”
  • Laura Elizabeth Woollett, West girls (novel): “a novel of sad girls that is the antithesis of sad girl novels”
  • Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy (novel) (Bill’s second post): genre-buster, “fierce and gloriously funny – part manifesto, part indictment”

The panel discussion that followed the announcement was wonderfully engaging, with the judges (sans Bram Presser who was home looking after his kids), exploring the individual works, and looking at the “conversations between the books”, that is the ways the books intersected with each other in subject matter and form. They talked about how many of the books critique systems of power wielded over others, how many embodied the idea of the body, how climate change is addressed in different ways, and more. It was too much to capture and listen to at the same time. They talked about form, and how some books were true to form and were great because of that, while in others form was wildly broken (like Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy). The books, they said, are powerful but without sentiment, asking instead for “the dignity of witness”. They are not hectoring, and many are deeply funny.

I am not going to say anything about the selection, because the Stella is such a wonderfully diverse prize that aims to encompass a wide range of forms and styles. There will always be choices we question. But, I will just say, because I can, that I’d love to have seen Carmel Bird’s Love letter to Lola (my review) recognised, because as they spoke about the books they read, I felt that Bird’s collection has the energy, the wit, the heart, and the awareness of “the issues of our age” that their selected books apparently also have. Did they even read it, I wonder?

Opening the session, Beejay Silcox said that the “heartbeat of Australian writing is here” and it’s damning that our writers cannot make a living from their craft. Amen to that.

You can write a different future and dream the culture forward. (end of the Panel discussion)

The shortlist will be announced on 4 April, and the winner on 2 May. You can seen more details on the Stella 2024 page.

Any comments?

Richard Flanagan, Question 7 (#BookReview)

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Question 7 is the fifth book by Richard Flanagan that my reading group has done, making him our most read author. That surprised me a little, but he has produced an impressive body of work that is hard to ignore – and, clearly, we haven’t.

We always start our meetings with sharing our first impressions. For this book they ranged from those who were somewhat bemused because of its disjointed nature to those who loved it, one calling it “extraordinary”. My first impression was that it’s a book full of paradoxes, and that these started with my experience of reading it. By this I meant that it was both easy and hard to read, easy because it was so engrossing and moving I was compelled on, but hard because the paradoxical nature of the ideas being explored kept pulling me up to ponder what he meant. What I didn’t add, because I feared overstaying my “first impressions” time, was that Question 7 felt like a humane book, a book about who we are and how we are, about what we do to each other and why. 

“The words of a book are never the book, the soul of it is everything”

I can see how Question 7 can feel a bit disjointed – an effect of its stream of consciousness style – but there is a clear structure underpinning it, one provided by three interwoven threads. The first comprises the Hiroshima story, the role of Wells’ novel The world set free, in which he imagined “a new weapon of hitherto unimaginable power”, and the scientist Szilard. Flanagan uses novelistic techniques to link Wells, his lovers, Rebecca West and Little e (aka Elizabeth von Arnim), and Szilard, whose reading of Wells’ novel set him thinking about an atom bomb, and conceiving the idea of a “nuclear chain reaction”. The idea of a chain reaction becomes one of the novel’s connecting motifs or metaphors. One things leads to another, and, as Szilard was to find out to his horror, once started chain reactions are very hard to stop.

The second concerns the colonisation of Tasmania and, bringing in Wells again, his statement that his novel, The war of the worlds, was inspired by the cataclysmic effect of European colonisation on Aboriginal Tasmanians. Wells’ invading Martians become the novel’s second metaphor, Flanagan equating them with the colonising British. In a neat additional link, we learn that Szilard and some of his Hungarian Jewish scientist peers called themselves the Martians.

The third thread encompasses the story of Flanagan’s Tasmanian-based family, particularly his father’s life and his own. The way these threads, and their linking metaphors, coalesce to explore and expose life’s unanswerable questions makes for involving reading, as Brona and Lisa also found.

And yet, there’s more… There is another less visible connecting thread which provides the novel’s backbone and guide to meaning. It comes from Flanagan’s understanding of an essay by a young Yolnju woman, Siena Stubs, in which she discusses “a fourth tense” in Yolnju thinking. As I understand it, this encompasses the idea – in my words – that all time can coexist. For the Yolnju, for example, this means the ancestors were here, are here, will be here. Flanagan uses this concept as a refrain throughout his book, but in different contexts so that we can see its relevance. Thinking about his near-death experience on the Franklin, for example, he writes that “though it happened then it’s still happening now and won’t ever stop happening”. Or, to universalise it, “life is always happening and has happened and will happen” (p. 99). 

A little later on, reflecting on the Hiroshima atrocity, he says:

what if vengeance and atonement both are simply the lie that time can be reversed, and thereby some equality, some equilibrium, some justice had? Is it simply truer to say Hiroshima happened, Hiroshima is still happening, and Hiroshima will always happen? (p. 140)

Further on again, he delves into the horrors of Tasmania’s colonial past and uses the refrain, “we were, we are, we will” to encompass not only the continuation of First Nations culture but the fallout from “the System” that the Martians had created. He concludes this section with another of his paradoxes:

And thereafter it was we who bore the inescapable, ineradicable shame that was not ours and which would always be ours. (p. 230)

Question 7, then, explores some of the toughest imponderables of our existence. It reminds us that once something happens, it doesn’t go away, but is part of the past, present and future, is part of the fabric of our being.

And so, we get to a related idea of memory, which also recurs throughout the novel. Writing about his childhood in Rosebery, Flanagan eschews checking some facts, saying,

This is an account of memory, not fact, and facts are not how we know ourselves, while memory – its tricks, its invasions, its silences, its inventions, its inevitable questions – is who we become as we shuffle around in a circle …. (p. 151)

There’s that circle – or non-linear time – again, because, in Flanagan’s mind “only fools have answers”. It is far better to keep questioning. This might be the appropriate place to share Flanagan’s two perfect epigraphs, as they provide a guide to how to read this book:

The author has not given his effort here the benefit of knowing whether it is history, autobiography, gazetteer, tragedy, romance, almanac, melodrama, or fantasy. It maybe myriad, it may not. The question is put, but where is the answer? 
– Hobart Town Mercury reviewing Moby Dick 1851

and

No, this is not piano. This is dreaming.
– Duke Ellington.

It might also be the time to share book’s framing question, which comes from a short story by Chekhov, “Question posed by a mad mathematician”, in which he parodies a school test problem:

Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3am in order to reach station B at 11pm; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?

Ha! This unanswerable non-sequitur of a question, “who loves longer, a man or a woman”, is another of the novel’s framing motifs, alongside the (almost) throwaway line he uses at the end of particularly tragic or egregious situations, “that’s life”.

So, where does this all leave us, the reader? With a challenge, I think, to reckon with our personal histories and the wider histories we are part of – and to do so with a sceptical attitude to logic and rationality, because “the world  from which we presume to derive meaning and purpose is not the true world. It is a surface world … beneath which an entirely different world surges.”

Near the end of the book, Flanagan shares some of the rather bizarre responses he received to his first novel, Death of a river guide, and writes,

After that I knew that the truth wasn’t the truth even when it was.

Here, then, another paradox, one that quietly snuck up on me but that embodies the book. Truths, of one sort or another, come thick and fast as you read, but always there are questions. We cannot, in other words, measure Hiroshima or the impact of colonialism. We cannot pretend

… there is some moral calculus to death. There is no equation of horrors … Who do we remember and who do we forget?

Ultimately, as Flanagan wrote part way through his book, the words are not the book, its soul is everything. In Question 7, we see into Flanagan’s soul and, inevitably, have a light shone on our own. Where to from here?

Richard Flanagan
Question 7
Knopf, 2023
280pp
ISBN: 9781761343452