Literature by period

Michael Sala and truthful fictions

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Michael Sala The last thread bookcover

The last thread (Courtesy: Affirm Press)

Michael Sala doesn’t actually use the term “truthful fictions”. That was a character in Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the river. But he could have.

Yesterday I heard Sala interviewed on ABC Radio National‘s Life Matters about his debut novel The last thread, which I reviewed last week. Presenter Natasha Mitchell commenced by mentioning the transitions, secrets and traumas that characterise Michaelis/Michael’s life in the novel. She asked why he had chosen the fictional, rather than memoir, route. He responded that he had started writing his story in first person but got swamped by emotions, and then he read J.M. Coetzee’s autobiographical novel*. He realised, he said, that he could write about the child he used to be “as if he were someone else”. (I love hearing how writers – as I also reported in my Jessica Anderson post – learn from other writers.)

This is fair enough I think. There are those who like a “memoir”, as it were, to be a “memoir”, but in our post-postmodern world in which we know that truth is a slippery beast at best, what difference does it really make? How important is it to be able to say Michael Sala did this, felt that, experienced such-and-such versus, for example, how does a child navigate abuse and how does such a child translate those experiences into functional adulthood? How important are questions of fact against exploration of these emotional “truths”?

In other words do we need to know the “facts” to understand the truths? I’m thinking now of Kate Jennings. I’ve reviewed two of her books here, her autobiographical novel, Snake, and her autobiography of sorts, Trouble: Evolution of a radical. Snake is a novella that chronicles Girlie’s life in a complicated family. We know it mirrors much of Jennings’s “real” childhood but we can’t be sure what are the facts and what are scenes created to convey her emotional truths. Trouble, described as an “unconventional autobiography”, is a collection of Jennings’ writings – journalistic articles, poems and excerpts from novels – that have been put together in such a way as to convey something about her life. We may not be able to glean from these slippery books a lot of citable “facts” but both tell us a lot about who Jennings is, about where she came from and what she believes.

All this of course begs the more fundamental question of how factual memoir is anyhow? But that is something I’ll leave – for the time being anyhow. Meanwhile, there’s a scene in Sala’s autobiographical fiction in which his mother discusses his problematical father with her sister:

“He’s a wonderful man,” Elfje says. “We’ve become great friends. Oh, he makes me laugh!”
“That’s one side of him,” Mum says.
“Yes, yes, we all have versions of events, stories to tell.”
“Stories?” Mum says. “Is that what you think they are?”
(from The lost thread, by Michael Sala)

Therein lies the rub. Whatever we read, memoir or fiction, we surely must always be aware that it is “one side” we are getting. Could it be, says she provocatively, that something labelled fiction is a more honest recognition of this fact?

* Coetzee has written more than one work of autobiographical fiction but Sala wasn’t clear which he’d read. I’m assuming he at least read the first one titled Boyhood: Scenes from a provincial life.

Dorothy Porter, On passion (Review)

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Do you read “little” books? You know those small books that are carefully placed on bookstore sales counters where you are buying the book you really came for? I don’t often, but every now and then one catches my eye. Today’s review is of such a book from Melbourne University Press‘s Little books on big themes series. It’s by Dorothy Porter and is titled On passion. She finished it just before she died in December 2008. I think I could be justified in calling that poignant, don’t you?

Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012 Badge

Australian Women Writers Challenge (Design: Book’dout – Shelleyrae)

Dorothy Porter was (is, really) a well-regarded, successful Australian poet. I reviewed her last collection, The bee hut, a couple of years ago. It’s a wonderful collection full of the pains and joys of living. It is, you could say, a passionate book. One of the poems I quoted in that review is about the passion for writing, for finding the perfect way to express an idea:

and your pen slashes ahead
like a pain-hungry prince
hacking through
the bramble’s dragon teeth
to the heart’s most longed for
comatose, but ardently ready
princess.
(“Blackberries”)

So, writing, of course, was one of her passions but in this little essay Porter explores all sorts of meanings of the word (for her). She starts with her adolescent passions – her youthful religious faith which was replaced by her “dark gods, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix” whose “daemonic songs” were her “new hymns”.

From here she explores the various ways passion has been part of her life … woven always with poetry, hers and others, and music:

Music has been my draught of intoxication since the very moment I first heard the Beatles in early 1964 […] I have been a Beatles pop/rock music maniac ever since, and have written virtually all my poems to rock riffs and rhythm – the catchier, the darker, the louder, the gutsier the better.

She talks in one section of Dionysus and moderation, strange bedfellows, eh? She argues that Euripides best understood the Dionysian, by exploring “how best to respect and live with it”. She admits, though, that “moderation was not something I embraced with Delphic calm, but something I gutlessly and gracelessly caved into” because, for example, she and drugs did not mix!

Nature too features, snakes in particular. “Real and living snakes are sacred to me” she says and then explores Minoan snake worship versus “the debased and diabolical serpent-demon of the Judaeo-Christian Garden of Eden”. She talks of the Rainbow Serpent in Australian Aboriginal Dreaming but admits that, when she actually confronts a King Brown snake in the desert, her worship did not stop her getting “the shock of my life”. She also refers to DH Lawrence‘s poem “Snake”, which I fell in love with in my teens. Lawrence describes the visit of the snake  as “a sacred event”. Porter says she always forgets the ending, how Lawrence’s fear gets the better of him so that he scares the snake away. She remembers only the vision of the wild thing being watched (and appreciated) by the poet.

There are other passions, but I’d like to conclude on the one dear to the heart of readers. She writes

I wonder if some of the most deeply passionate experiences of my life have happened between the covers of a book.

Not only do I love the idea that books have such an effect on us, but I also like her qualification: “some”, she says! Life is, after all, important too!

She describes Wuthering Heights as “the most scorching novel in the English language”; says that “there is, paradoxically, much more convincing grown up sex in Jane Austen than in Emily Brontë“. Oh, yes! She talks of Sappho’s love songs; admires one of my favourite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, for “pushing language as hard as it will go into ecstasy – and despair”; and describes Ginsberg as convincing her “of the power of language to shock”. She talks of love and desire, of wanting “to find and deliver scenarios, characters and poems that are magnetic with sexual energy” but asks, provocatively,

… how many readers have we lost because we have ignored the ancient silent cry: ravish me.

Near the end she wonders if reading had been the greatest passion of her life. She says – reminiscent of Francesca Rendle-Short and Michael Sala’s comments that writing/reading is dangerous – that

… at a more profound level I recognise that there is something very unsettling about a book.

Absolutely … but what say you about books, reading, passion?

Porter, Dorothy
On passion
Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2010
(Series: Little books on big themes)
96pp.
ISBN: 9780522858358

Michael Sala, The last thread (Review)

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Michael Sala The last thread bookcover

The last thread (Courtesy: Affirm Press)

It’s clear why Affirm Press chose a comment by Raimond Gaita for the front cover of their latest publication, Michael Sala’s autobiographical novel, The last thread. Gaita, for readers here who don’t know, wrote an award-winning memoir, Romulus, My Father, about growing up as a migrant with mentally unstable parents. Sala’s story is different but both boys suffered emotional deprivations that they chronicle in their books … except, and this is a big one, Sala’s book is classified as “fiction”, and we must therefore read it as such. A bit, in fact, like Francesca Rendle-Short’s Bite your tongue!

So, what is his story? The novel is told from Michaelis’ (later Michael’s) point of view. It is divided in two parts: Bergen Op Zoom and Newcastle. It starts, then, in the Netherlands when Michael is around three or four years old, and his brother, Con (Constantinos) three years older. But it’s not quite this simple, as in the first part which is told third person we follow them from the Netherlands to Australia to the Netherlands and then back to Australia. The family’s unsettled state physically – they also move multiple times in Australia – works metaphorically too because there is little emotional stability in the boys’ lives. At the start of the novel, the mother has left the boys’ father, the Cypriot Phytos, and is living with the physically and emotionally abusive Dutchman, Dirk. (“There’s no problem”, Michael writes of this handyman stepfather, “that he can’t solve with his hands”.) By the end, when the boys have grown up, the mother has been married a couple more times. She is skilled, you would say, at choosing wrong men: “The men in my life take advantage of me”, she says.

What makes this somewhat age-old story compelling is the writing. It is told more or less chronologically but in little vignettes. The two parts are divided into chapters, but the chapters themselves are broken into smaller sections that provide an eye into scenes from Michael’s world. It’s a child’s eye, until near the end, so we readers must try to fill the gaps between what Michael describes and what we know could be the meaning behind what he’s seeing. Why, we must ask ourselves, would a young boy think this:

Michaelis can’t imagine anything more frightening than living forever.

And Michael’s eye, though a child’s one, is very observant. He particularly notices faces, watching them it seems for signs of warmth and connection, but

Each time light blazes from the screen, it washes across Con’s face and reveals it like something carved from stone.

and

She [mother] holds her belly and sighs, and there’s a look in her eyes as if she might burst into tears.

I could be mistaken but it felt to me that as we moved through the second part, Newcastle, which is told first person by the adult Michael, the chronology became more disjointed, mirroring I think Michael’s growing awareness of what lies behind the dislocations in his family, and of its impact on him.

As you’ve probably gathered by now, there are secrets in this family that contribute to the dysfunctional behaviour. These secrets are not mentioned on the backcover, so I won’t mention them either. Sala handles them well. He doesn’t labour them but rather lets them hover in a way that we know they are there but that doesn’t let them occupy centre-stage. We learn to live with them, the way the family has to. In the way of modern novels, there’s no dramatic denouement …

In talking of the writing, I’ve mainly discussed the narrative style but I should also mention the language. It is, in a word, gorgeous. Here are just two descriptions that convey Sala’s ability to capture the essence of things. First, being dumped by a wave:

There is such strength in the sea. He has forgotten it until now. It pulls at his limbs so that his feet touch nothing and only his desperate grip keeps him there. A sensation comes to him of being separate, of seeing it all from a great distance as if he cannot reach out and touch the world. Then the noise dies in his ears, the sky appears again above him.

And next, of his mother’s house:

The rooms and corridors of my mother’s house became like the arteries of a heart attack victim, all clogged up. Even the breeze had to bend in half to get through.

I’ve read quite a bit of autobiographical/biographical fiction, fiction-cum-memoirs, and memoirs in recent months, and some I’ve found a little wanting here and there. This, though, is hard to fault – if, that is, you like reading more for the interior than the exterior, for what’s going on inside rather than for what’s happening in the material world.

In the very last pages of the book, Michael’s mother says that “words and stories can be dangerous” (echoing Francesca Rendle-Short’s “to think, to write, is dangerous”). They can indeed, but sometimes that danger can have positive outcomes. I hope that, for Sala, the dangers of putting his story, his truths, on the page will be restorative. There’s no guarantee though that such bravery will have its just rewards … in life or in fiction.

Michael Sala
The last thread
Mulgrave: Affirm Press, 2012
238pp
ISBN: 9780987132680

(Review copy supplied by Affirm Press)

Fergus W. Hume, The mystery of a hansom cab (Review)

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Hume Mystery of a Hansom Cab

The mystery of a hansom cab (Courtesy: Sydney University Press)

Sometimes you just have to break your reading “rules” don’t you? Two of mine are that I’m not much into detective fiction (despite having reviewed Peter Temple’s Truth here) and I don’t read self-published books – but then along came Fergus Hume‘s The mystery of a hansom cab. It’s a classic Australian crime novel – and it was “originally” self-published (says she cheekily)!

I’m not, you now know, an aficionado of crime fiction, so my assessment of this book may be the skewed one of a newbie not versed in the intricacies of crime writing. However, I must say that I found this a thoroughly enjoyable and engaging book, and would recommend it to crime and non-crime readers alike, for reasons that will soon become obvious. But first, the plot.

The story commences with a newspaper report of a murder that takes place in a hansom cab, and over the next few chapters we learn the name of the victim (a young man, Oliver Whyte, who was drunk at the time of his death) and that he was killed by a passenger who got into the cab, ostensibly to see him safely home. The detective on the case fairly quickly deduces that the murderer is a rival for the affections of a young society woman … and from here, as it always does, the plot thickens. The accused murderer declares his innocence, that he indeed has an alibi, but he will not divulge the information it would “curse” the life of his fiancée. The trial occurs and is resolved halfway through the novel. The rest explores … but wait, if I tell you this, I’ll give too much away, so I’ll stop here. The resolution, when it comes, is not a complete surprise but neither is it completely predictable. At least, not to non-aficionado me.

Australian Literature Month Platypus logo

Read for Reading Matters' Australian Literature Month

Now, why do I like it? To start with, it’s a well-told story, with nicely delineated characters. Then there’s the setting: it is primarily set in Melbourne, with a little excursion into the country, in the 1880s. This was a boom-time for what was known then as “Marvellous Melbourne” and Hume describes life in this well-to-do post-Gold Rush city with gorgeous clarity. Most of it concerns the middle classes – the professionals and self-made men – but we are also taken into the slums where prostitutes struggle to survive. Hume does not have the social justice goals of, say, William Lane (in The workingman’s paradise) but he doesn’t shy from describing some of the seamier aspects of the city:

Kilsip and the barrister kept for safety in the middle of the alley, so that no one could spring upon them unaware, and they could see sometimes on the one side, a man cowering back into the black shadows, or on the other, a woman with disordered hair and bare bosom, leaning out of a window trying to get a breath of fresh air … Kilsip, turning to the left, led the barrister down another and still narrower lane, the darkness and gloom of which made the lawyer shudder, as he wondered how human beings could live in such murky places.

Hume then describes the woman they had gone to meet, Mother Guttersnipe (how Dickensian is that?):

… a repulsive-looking old crone; and in truth, her ugliness was, in its very grotesqueness well worthy the pencil of a Doré.

This brings me to another aspect I enjoyed. It is chockablock with allusions to Shakespeare and the classics, and references to what the writer of the introduction describes as the “middle-brow, middle-class, international entertainment culture of North America and Europe”, such as the artist Doré, the composer Offenbach, and the writers Poe, Dickens and De Quincy. There’s also a cheeky reference to novelist Mrs Braddon – “Murdered in a cab … a romance in real life, which beats Mrs Braddon hollow” – containing a clue that readers of the time might have picked up.

There’s the 19th century style – third person omniscient, descriptive chapter titles, a touch (but not too much) of melodrama, light satire and humour, the use of little homilies (often to introduce chapters), and a (very) neatly tied up conclusion. This is not ponderous, heavy-handed 19th century writing, but good well-paced story-telling supported by lovely description and observations. Most of the light relief comes through minor characters, like the landlady Mrs Sampson and the young-man-about-town Felix Rolleston. Here is Mrs Sampson:

She was a small, dried-up little woman, with a wrinkled yellow-ish face. She seemed parched up and brittle. Whenever she moved she crackled, and one went in constant dread of seeing a wizen-looking limb break off short like the branch of some dead tree. When she spoke it was in a voice hard and shrill, not unlike the chirp of a cricket.

She is, for all this, a warm-hearted woman, but whenever she appears so do such words as “crackle’, “rustle”, and “chirp”. Beautifully vivid, but nicely controlled.

It is of course also 19th century in its worldview … and so has a patriarchal flavour. Our “plucky” heroine, Madge, buys “a dozen or more articles she did not want” writes the author. And in the resolution the men decide what they will and will not share with the women involved – “it would be useless to reveal” the truth to one female character as “such a relevation could bring her no pecuniary benefit”, and to another because “such a relation could do no good, and would only create a scandal”. The infantilisation of women, eh?

Fate also makes its appearance in the novel, from early on when the accused murderer’s life “hangs on a mere chance” to late in the novel when the author makes his position clear. He writes that men:

… created a new deity called Fate, and laid any misfortune which happened to them to her charge. Her worship is still very popular, especially among lazy and unlucky people, who never bestir themselves … After all, the true religion of fate has been preached by George Eliot when she says that our lives are the outcome of our actions. Set up any idol you please upon which to lay the blame of unhappy lives and baffled ambitions, but the true cause is to found in men themselves.

I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll be saying it again: I could write on and on about this book. It has so much to explore and it would be fun to do so, but at this point I’ll simply recommend it to you and hope that you’ll find time to discover and enjoy it too. It was, in its time, a best-seller …

Fergus W. Hume
The mystery of a hansom cab
(The Australian Classics Library)
Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2010
(Orig. pub. 1886)
293pp.
ISBN: 9781920899561

(Review copy supplied by Sydney University Press)

Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011: Reviews from the week January 15-21

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Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 Badge

Logo by Matt Todd of A Novel Approach

Week 10 of our Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 project and, as I reported last week, we are still reading and reviewing. We are, however, slowing down now as most of our team have finished, or nearly finished, their reviewing. This week:

  • Jamil Ahmad’s The wandering falcon (Pakistan) by Matt of A Novel Approach. He thought it was an interesting description of time and place, but as a whole it left him cold. I was so tempted to buy the Granta Pakistan issue the other day but the TBR pile is so-o-o high.

And, if you missed it, I posted my review of Kyung-Sook Shin’s Please look after mom earlier this week.

Other Asian Literature News

The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2012 has just been announced and the winner is Chinaman by Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilake. The novel is about a retired, alcoholic cricket writer. According to the article in the Times of India, Karunatilake was awarded the prize for “exploring cricket as a metaphor to uncover a lost life”. Ah, cricket … perhaps that means The sly company of people, which is also about a cricket writer, will win our prize! Just joking!

Note: The DSC prize is for novels exploring South Asian themes. The writer can be of any ethnicity or nationality.

Quick links to Man Asian Literary Prize posts

  • Click Badge in sidebar for all longlist views to date
  • Click Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 tag in the Tag Cloud for all my posts on tawkward.

Bettye Rice Hughes, A Negro tourist in Dixie (Review)

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"Colored" waiting room sign, Roma, Georgia, 1943

Colored Waiting Room sign, Roma, Ga, 1943 (Public Domain: Library of Congress, via Wikipedia)

I have plenty to read at the moment, but when I see a Library of America story come through that is set in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement in the American South, well, I can’t resist. I’ve never heard of  the author Bettye Rice Hughes, which turns out to be not surprising as the Library of America people don’t know much about her either. In fact, at the end of their brief, but always interesting, introductory notes they write “If any of our readers happens to have additional information about Bettye Rice Hughes, we’d love to hear from you at lists@loa.org.” So, if you do, please contact them!

Anyhow, the article. LOA starts with some background, describing the Freedom Rides which occurred in the American South in 1960-1961. Their aim was to test compliance with the September 1960 Interstate Commerce Commission‘s (ICC) rules prohibiting interstate carriers from using segregated bus terminals, and mandating that seating on buses be “without regard to race, color, creed, or national origin.” Despite this and an earlier Supreme Court decision prohibiting segregation in interstate bus terminals, several Freedom Ride buses had met with violence, two being firebombed. In the wake of all this, in 1962, Miss Hughes set out alone, on a bus

to see at first hand how many Southern states were complying with the ICC ruling; and I also wanted to see if a female Negro tourist traveling alone – unheralded and unprepared for – would receive a different reception from that which had greeted the Freedom Riders.

What a brave woman! She travelled through Arkansas, Tennessee, South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Georgia and back home via Texas but, she writes

interstate passengers going from east to the west by Greyhound bus over the southern route never set foot on Mississippi soil.

In fact, the bus took a circuitous route to drive around Mississippi! I guess we ca guess why …

Without spoiling anything – after all this is an article not a piece of fiction – I can report that she returned home unscathed. But that’s not to say it was all smooth sailing. In most of the places she visited she found that the letter of the law was being followed. However, the segregated areas – waiting rooms, cafeterias and toilets – still existed and her black American co-travelers continued to use them. Hughes though always used the “main” facilities and while on occasions the staff tried to move her on to “the other restaurant where you belong”, she stood her ground and was (eventually) served. As her journey wore on, she felt she was being watched by her black travel companions:

The other Negro passengers, who went to the waiting rooms formerly designated as “Colored”, had started watching to see what I was going to do at rest and lunch stops. Several of them asked me, ‘Are you riding for us?’ I said that in a sense I was. But no one offered to go into the main waiting area with me.

She provides several anecdotes to describe her experience, and the article – less than 6 pages – is worth reading for these and for her reflections on them. While she made it through safely, she says, “the threat of violence was always there”. She concludes that “the advances that have been won through group action” now need to be “reinforced by individual action”. Southern white people need to “get used to seeing Negroes in waiting rooms, rest rooms, and cafeterias” and Southern Negroes also need “to get used to seeing other Negroes bypassing the segregated areas so that they may take courage and insist on the best facilities and services available for their money”.

All I can say, again, is, what a brave woman … and what a shame we don’t know more about her.

Bettye Rice Hughes
“A Negro tourist in Dixie”
First published in The Reporter, April 26, 1962
Available: Online at the Library of America 

Kyung-Sook Shin, Please look after mom (Review for the Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011)

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Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 Badge
Image by Matt Todd of A Novel Approach

Am I right in thinking that mothers are more often the subject of novels and memoirs than fathers? Or, is it just that I’m a woman and am subconsciously (or even consciously, if I’m honest) drawn to the topic? Of course, with the Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize reviewing project I didn’t really have a choice. Kyung-Sook Shin’s Please look after mom (or, mother in the British edition) has now been shortlisted for the prize. So, here I am again, reading about a mother!

And I liked it – for a number of reasons. But, before I explain that, a quick overview of the plot. The book commences with the line “It’s been one week since Mom went missing”. We learn pretty quickly that the mother and father had been in Seoul to visit some of their children and had become separated when trying to board the subway together, with the mother being left behind. The rest of the book chronicles the family’s search for the mother and, as they search, their reflections on her life and their relationship with her.

So, what did I find fascinating? Firstly, of course, is the fact that it is set in South Korea. I haven’t been there, and I don’t think I’ve read any Korean literature before, so I was predisposed to be interested before I started it. I wasn’t disappointed. The novel is contemporary but spans a few decades, decades in which many of the current parental generation were still living fairly traditional rural lives while their children were being educated and moving to the city to chase “bigger” dreams. Through flashback reflections of the various characters we learn about this time of transition, and the challenges both generations faced in coping with the change. We learn of the mother’s determination that her children be educated, the lengths she went to to obtain the money to pay for this education, and her disappointment when one daughter trained to be a pharmacist but then married and had three children in pretty quick succession. It’s a story that’s been repeated around the world over the last century or two, and the usual universals are there – the economic challenges and all those big and little conflicts that attend social change – but each situation has its particularity. In this book it’s in how this specific family functions – the mother’s determination springing from her own lack of education, the self-centred father’s unreliability resulting in increased poverty for the family, the sibling relationships characterised by a mix of mutual responsibility, love and exasperation.

The next thing of interest is the form. Readers here know I like books which play around with form and voice, and this is one of those books. The story is told in five parts, using four points of view and three different voices. Got that? To make it easy, I’ll list how it goes:

  • “Nobody knows”, told by the elder daughter (but second eldest child), Chi-hon, in second person
  • “I’m sorry, Hyong-chol”, told by the eldest child, son Hyong-chol, in third person
  • “I’m home”, told by the father/husband, in second person
  • “Another woman”, told by the mother, Park So-nyo, in first person
  • “Epilogue: Rosewood rosary”, told by Chi-hon (again), in second person.

As is common in multiple point-of-view novels, the main narrative, the story of the search, progresses more or less chronologically through these parts, with each part also incorporating some back-and-forth flashbacks in which we learn about that person’s relationship with “mom”. This multiple point-of-view technique provides a lovely immediacy to the different perspectives. The choice of different voices – first, second and third – though, is an intriguing one. Here is how I see it. First person for “mom” makes sense since she is the subject. Second person feels like a half-way house between the intimate first person and the more distant third person. Using it for Chi-hon and her father, to speak about themselves, subtly conveys a tension between their responsibility for “mom” (which would be expected of their roles as elder daughter and husband) and their regret and guilt for their failings. Third person, on the other hand, seems appropriate for Hyong-chol who, as the oldest in the family, carries the major weight of familial responsibility into the future. It’s the most distant voice and gives, I think, a layer of gravitas to his role.

And last is the theme – or, should I say, themes? The lesser, if I can call them that, themes include the country-vs-city one, particularly in relation to values; literacy and education; and our mutual responsibility for others (something, the family discovers, “mom” took seriously for friends and strangers as well as her family throughout her life). The overriding theme, though, is that of guilt and regret, of having taken “mom” for granted. They all assumed she liked cooking and being in the kitchen, day in day out. The children forgot to call her regularly and didn’t always come home for special occasions. Her husband remembers all the times he failed to help her, while she would put herself out repeatedly for him. It’s a pretty common story but the way Kyung-sook Shin tells it – the form, the reflective tone, the characterisation, the setting – makes this universal story about respect, a very personal one. I admit to being a little choked up at the end!

I have one little query though, and that relates to the invocation of Catholicism in the end. “Mom” does, early in the novel, ask about a rosewood rosary, thus providing a link to the Epilogue, but where did this interest in the rosary come from, given the frequent references to the more traditional ancestral rites during the book? Mom doesn’t explain it – “I just want prayer rosary beads from that country”, “the smallest country in the world”, she says. I assume it has something to do with the recent growth of Catholicism in South Korea. It didn’t spoil the book for me, but it provided a somewhat odd note. All I can say is read the book for yourself, and see what you think.

Please click on my Man Asian Literary Prize page link for reviews by other members of the team.

Kyung-Sook Shin
Please look after mom
(trans. by Chi-Young Kim)
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011
237pp.
ISBN: 9780307593917

Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011: Reviews from the week January 8-14

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Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 Badge

Image created by Matt Todd of A Novel Approach

Week 9 of our Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 project and the shortlist has now been announced, as I reported earlier this week. However, we are still reading and reviewing in preparation for announcing “our” Shadow winner in early March, just before the announcement of the winner. This week’s reviews are:

  • Amitav Ghosh’s River of smoke (India) by Matt of A Novel Approach. Like me, Matt has not read the first book (Sea of poppies) in the planned trilogy, but he says he is now sold on the trilogy. Can’t think of higher praise than that I reckon.
  • Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village (China) by Lisa of ANZLitLovers. She describes it as a “powerful book” that shows “how quickly a society can degenerate under pressure”.
  • Anuradha Roy’s The folded earth (India) by Lisa of ANZLitLovers. Lisa calls this “a superb novel” and said she “enjoyed reading it the most”.

Shortlist news

Matt and Fay bravely posted their shortlist “picks” before the announcement, and Mark and Lisa discussed theirs in comments on Lisa’s blog. Stu and I did not have a go at shortlisting. Here is a summary of their selections:

  • Only one book was selected by all four – River of smoke – and it was selected by the judges.
  • Only one book was selected by only one, Matt, of the four – The lake – and it was selected by the judges, too!
  • Three books were selected by Fay, Mark and Lisa – Wandering falcon, The good Muslim and The sly company of people who care – and the first and third of these were also selected by the judges.
  • Please look after Mom was selected by Matt, Fay and Mark and by the judges.
  • Dream of Ding Village was selected by Matt, Fay and Lisa and by the judges.
  • The folded earth and The valley of masks were selected by Matt and Lisa but not by the judges.
  • Rebirth was selected by the judges but by none of our four, but then only one of them had read it due to limited availability for this title.
  • The colonel and IQ84 were not selected by our four or by the judges.

There’s a fair degree of unanimity regarding the shortlist, but this doesn’t mean that picking “our” Shadow winner will be straightforward. There are some strong feelings about some of the differences … Let’s just hope there won’t be blood on the floor! We’ll keep you posted!

Meanwhile, if you want a succinct rundown on the shortlisted books, you can read team member Mark’s article, “Your guide to the Man Asian Literary Prize shortlist”, in the online magazine, The Millions.

Francesca Rendle-Short, Bite your tongue (Review)

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Francesa Rendle-Short book cover Bite your tongue

Bite your tongue Bookcover (Courtesy: Spinifex Press)

How much do you think about the first sentence of your review? Like me, you probably try to find some anchor or point of interest to lead off from, but my problem with novelist-journalist Francesca Rendle-Short‘s fiction-cum-memoir, Bite your tongue, is that I have too many angles to choose from. Which one do I use? Do I go with the unusual form of this fiction-cum-memoir? Do I talk about my old friend synchronicity and how one of my first reviews in 2011 was a (semi)autobiographical novel about an Australian childhood, Barbara Hanrahan‘s The scent of eucalyptus? Or, do I talk about how I’m sure Spinifex Press had no idea how close to my heart this book would be when they offered it for review – how I (more or less) share a late 1950s/early 60s Brisbane childhood with Rendle-Short and how the very word “spinifex” is nostalgic for me due to my mid-1960s years in the mining town of Mount Isa? There, I’ve covered them all … so now I can get on with the review!

This is a mother-daughter story. How many of those have you read? I’ve certainly read a few in the last decade or so, including straight memoirs (such as Jill Ker Conway‘s The road from Coorain) and thinly veiled fictional pieces (such as Kate Jennings‘ Snake). These books can be challenging for daughters to write, particularly when there is significant pain involved. Rendle-Short’s solution is to (mostly) tell from a “fictional” standpoint. She creates names for the family, including MotherJoy for the mother, Glory for herself, Gracie for her nearest and youngest sister, and Onward for her father. The last-name she devises for this family is Solider, which is an anagram of “soldier”. With the father being Onward, and the family being devoutly Christian, the hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers” must surely have inspired her naming. Rendle-Short writes, in the introduction, about how she chose to tell the story:

Some stories are hard to tell, they bite back. To write this one, I’ve had to come at it obliquely, give myself over to the writing with my face half-turned; give my story to someone else to tell. My chosen hero is a girl named Glory …

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Reading Matters’ Australian Literature Month

Why is this story so hard to tell? Well, Glory’s (Rendle-Short’s) mother was “a morals crusader, an ‘anti-smut’ campaigner. An activist. She was on a mission from God to save the children of Queensland” (from the Prologue). This mission involved banning “lewd” and “pornographic” books (of which 100 are listed at the back of the book in “Dr Joy’s Death List: Burn a Book a Day”). Clearly Rendle-Short (aka Glory), the fifth of six children (all girls in the book, five girls and a boy in reality), had a painful childhood. It’s not that she and her siblings weren’t loved – they clearly were – but it was a hard love, a love based too much on a narrow Christian ideology and too little, it seems, on the needs of children. One of the most painful scenes in the book is when Glory visits her mother in hospital after heart surgery and wants to kiss her but can’t bring herself to do so! Can’t kiss her old mother! That shows more than words ever could the pain in this relationship.

The book pretty well covers the story from Glory’s birth to MotherJoy’s death in her 80s, though it focuses primarily on Glory’s school years. There are 100 chapters in less than 250 pages. Most of these chapters are told third person, from Glory’s point of view. What makes this book particularly interesting form-wise, though, is that 14 chapters are written in first person, memoir-style. That is, Francesca speaks of herself and her mother, Angel, using their real names. In these scattered first person chapters, Francesca writes on her research, on how she pieced together her mother’s story through, for example, research at the National Library of Australia and the National Archives of Australia. She also occasionally comments on where the “fact” diverges from the “fiction” such as:

Unlike Glory, I wasn’t in Brisbane when my mother died, I was at home in Canberra where I was living at the time – because there was a scene. There was always a scene with Angel, especially where her children were concerned, the ‘jewels in her crown’, and on her deathbed it was no different. All six children had been at her bedside while she was dying …

And then, without describing exactly what happened, she tells us that, despite all of them having made the effort to get there, including from overseas, “seven days before she took her last breath, all six of us walked out on her. We had to do it …”.

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Australian Women Writers Challenge (Design: Book’dout – Shelleyrae)

Now, if you are a reader who likes closure, who wants to know exactly what happened, you are not going to get it in this book, not specifically anyhow, but you will, if you read the clues, know what life was like in that family, at least what it was like for Glory/Francesca. You will know that she loved her mother, and wanted her mother’s approval, but that she had other attitudes and other feelings that were clearly not in accord with her mother’s. We are given enough “scenes” involving her mother (directly or indirectly) to tell us all we need to know. A particularly excruciating example is when Glory is cruelly bullied by her school “peers” (one can’t say  “mates” in the context) because of her mother’s views. (Where her father, an academic in pediatrics and a creationist, stood in all this is unclear. He’s there in the book, but we see little active parenting from him.)

Oh dear, I have so much to say on this book that I could easily turn this post into an essay, so I will finish here. I thoroughly enjoyed this book … on multiple levels. The writing is good, comprising many of the things that appeal to me – wordplay, lovely rhythm, effective imagery (such as the “tongue” motif). The story is easy to follow, despite changes in voice and chronology (as we flip backwards and forwards from childhood to MotherJoy/Angel’s old age). There are universals about love and forgiveness (real and wished for) between parents and children. And, there is love for books (in all their glory!):

Books show us how to love, really love body to body between the pages. Love perhaps where we’ve never loved before. That’s what Glory hopes.

Reading changes things …

… as, I suspect for Rendle-Short, does writing!

Francesa Rendle-Short
Bite your tongue
North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2011
246pp.
ISBN: 9781876756963

(Review copy supplied by Spinifex Press.)

Review to count towards the Australian Women Writers 2012 Reading and Reviewing Challenge.

Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 Shortlist announced

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Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 Badge

Image created by Matt Todd of A Novel Approach

… And my preferred two books – those by Ahmad and Yoshimoto – of the three I’ve read are in the final seven books. Woo hoo … but I have a lot to read to catch up to the rest of the team.

The shortlisted books are:

  • Jamil Ahmad’s Wandering falcon
  • Jahnavi Barua‘s Rebirth
  • Rahul Bhattacharya’s The sly company of people who care
  • Amitav Ghosh‘s River of smoke
  • Kyung-Sook Shin’s Please look after mom
  • Yan Lianke‘s Dream of Ding Village
  • Banana Yoshimoto‘s The lake

You can find our  Shadow team’s reviews by clicking the team logo in the blog sidebar or by clicking on the Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 page.