Review

Merlinda Bobis, Fish-hair woman (Review)

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Merlinda Bobis Fish-hair woman

Courtesy: Spinifex Press

How do you classify a book like Fish-hair woman by Filipino-Australian writer, Merlinda Bobis? Darned if I know, but I’ll have a go. It’s part war story, murder mystery, political thriller, romance, and historical epic. It draws on the magical realist tradition of writers like Isabel Allende, but overarching all this, it is a book about stories – about the stories we cleave to ourselves and the stories we tell others, the stories that convey the truth and the ones that hide it, the stories that change with time and those that never change.

But enough preamble, let’s get to the action. The book is set in the Philippines, with the core story taking place in a village called Iraya in 1987. It is a time of civil unrest: government soldiers fight communist insurgents (the historical New People’s Army), with privately-controlled armies added to the mix. The villagers are caught in the middle, struggling to survive under

violence dressed as salvation. What hopeful word, the sibilants a gentle hush: salvacion. The soldiers and the rebels spoke of this same cause, even as they remained in opposite camps and our village festered in between.

The central characters are Estrella, the fish-hair woman who uses her 12-metres-long hair like a net to retrieve the dead from the river (“trawl another victim of our senseless war”); her older “sister”, Pilar, who joins the communist insurgents; and Tony, the Australian journalist whom both had loved. These relationships are complicated by the fact that Estrella, whose mother died at the birth, is the illegitimate daughter of the most powerful man in the village, Mayor Kiko Estraderos (aka Doctor Alvarado), the man who runs the private army.

While the main action occurs in 1987, the time-frame moves between 1977, 1987 and 1997, with the story being mostly told from the perspective of 1997. By this time Pilar and Tony are among the dead or disappeared and Tony’s 19-year-old son Luke has been lured to the Philippines, on the pretext that his father is alive, by Kiko who wishes to “sanitise history and facilitate his return to politics”.

It’s a multi-layered story of political unrest, complicated village loyalties, and familial and romantic love. It is told in first person and third person, with changing points of view.  Sometimes we see through Estrella’s eyes, sometimes Luke’s, sometimes an omnipotent narrator’s or another character’s, and occasionally through newspaper clippings. Woven through it are recurring images and smells – the sweet lemongrass tainted by the corpse-laden river, the fireflies that light the dead so they can be found, and Estrella’s long hair that magically grows each time she senses violence and pain.

Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012 Badge

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

This is one of those books that requires you to go with the flow. Its structure mimics the way we layer stories, the way we weave history and myth, stories and memories, so that at any one time we may or may not know where we are or who we are. Estrella, the fish-hair woman, and Stella, Doctor Kiko’s daughter, for example, are different facets of the same person, each with different stories.

There are simpler characters, too. One is Pay Inyo, the village gravedigger. He reminded me a little of the grandfather in Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village. He’s the peaceful man, the wise one who urges a humane path, who says it’s about perspective, “about how and from where you look … how far … and what you will to see”. But even he is unsure about the story:

But who is the hero in this story? Pay Inyo is not sure anymore, nor is he sure about what the story is in the first place. There are too many stories weaving into each other, only to unweave themselves at each telling, so that each story can claim prominence. Stories are such jealous things. The past and the present, ay, what wayward strands.

There were times, as I read, when I thought that Bobis may have created a few too many “wayward strands”. Some stories may not have been critical to tell, but her voice is so compelling and the language so expressive that I didn’t really begrudge her these, because by then I was well and truly along for the ride.

This is a novel set during war and yet it is not really about war. It is about people, “those whom we love and hate”, about how we use and manipulate stories to “save” or ” kill”, and, as Pay Inyo would like us to see, about collective grieving, collective responsibility:

This is the wake of the world: each of us standing around a pool that we have collected for centuries. We are looking in with our little pails … We try to find only what is ours. We wring our hands. Ay, how to go home with only my undiluted pail of grief? To wash my rice with or my babies, to drink? But the water is my dead kin, an enemy, a beloved, a stranger, a friend, someone who loved me or broke my heart. How to tell them apart? How to cleave water from water?

For all the sadness and brutality in this book, it has a big heart. And its message is clear. We are all in this together. How much better if we see it sooner rather than later.

Merlinda Bobis
Fish-hair woman
North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2011
303pp
ISBN: 1876756977

(Review copy supplied by Spinifex Press)

Izzeldin Abuelaish, I shall not hate (Review)

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Revenge is a concept that I just don’t get. No, let me put that another way. I understand the emotions that give rise to the desire for revenge – though I’ve never, admittedly, been tested myself, not like, say, Izzeldin Abuelaish. What I don’t understand is the belief that revenge is the answer, that it will make something (whatever that thing is) better. I’ve never seen it do so. In fact, what it seems to do is make things worse. And so, I admire Abuelaish’s stance in his book, I shall not hate, because if anyone has been tested, he has.

Dr. Abuelaish & Rabbi David

Dr. Abuelaish & Rabbi David, Oct 2009 (Photo credit: achituv, using CC-BY-SA 2.0)

For those of you who don’t know his story, Abuelaish was born in the Jabalia Refugee Camp in the Gaza Strip in 1955. Through hard work and persistence, the encouragement of several teachers, and the support of his mother, he became a doctor, eventually specialising in gynaecology and obstetrics, and becoming an infertility expert. This, though, is not what the book is about. It’s about his ability to rise above horrific personal tragedy – the killing of three of his daughters by Israeli Defence Force (IDF) shells in January 2009 during a 23 day attack on Gaza* – and his decision:

I had two options to choose from: I could take the path of darkness or the path of light.

He chose the path of light, because, as he writes:

I believe in co-existence, not endless cycles of revenge and retribution. And possibly the hidden truth about Gaza can only sink in when it is conveyed by someone who does not hate.

Though making this choice – towards light – was clearly a conscious act, we readers aren’t surprised because we’ve seen him making this same choice throughout the book despite, as he says, being “tested by brutal circumstances the whole of my life, as have many people in Gaza”.

The book chronicles his life from birth to the tragedy – and then his response. He tells about his family’s leaving their farm (which was subsequently taken over by Ariel Sharon!) to join the refugees in Jabalia, and their lives in the camp. He describes the struggle to survive – under grinding poverty that’s rather reminiscent of Frank McCourt’s in Angela’s ashes. He understands how poverty and long-standing oppression lead to acts of violence. As a young boy, he saw education could provide a way out but writes of how without the encouragement of teachers he could well have given up in order to work to help support his parents and siblings. And, he describes his early experiences with Israelis, including working on an Israeli farm during a school vacation, and their joint recognition that they had more similarities than differences.

More alike than different. That’s one of the threads of his story. Another is his belief – and this, again, is a belief he has chosen – that good can come of bad. That’s how he has survived and will, presumably, always survive the setbacks that confront him. One of the lessons of the book is, I think, this one of choice – it is within us all to choose light over dark, hope over desperation. A cynical reader could see Abuelaish as naive except, and this is a big except, he has walked the talk. Not only did he experience the violent (I can’t begin to describe what he saw in his daughter’s bedroom minutes after the attack) deaths of his daughters but throughout his life he has faced immense obstacles to get where he’s got and to maintain his generous positive philosophy. Just reading his descriptions of getting in and out of Gaza – such as he did on a regular basis to work in an Israeli hospital – has made me decide that I will never again complain about being held up a few minutes at an airport for a random security check!

This is not literary fiction, but the story is so compelling it rises above the plain prose. If I had any criticism it would be that it gets a little repetitive at times – but then, I get the sense that life is pretty repetitive in Gaza! He tells his story chronologically, with the odd out-of-sequence digression to make a point. And, there is the rare use of medical imagery to convey an idea. He describes hate as a chronic disease and says:

I am a physician, and as a consequence I see things most clearly in medical terms. I am arguing that we need an immunisation program, one that injects people with respect, dignity, and equality, one that inoculates them against hatred.

It might sound like most of the book is just about talk, but Abuelaish is about more than that. He recognises that action is needed. This action can be as simple as bringing people together so they can share their experiences, find commonalities and learn to trust again. Trust in the Middle East is, he says, “gasping for air”. But, the point I really like is his argument that empowering women, changing their status and role, is a critical part of the solution. Girls need to be properly educated and women’s values need to be better “represented through leadership at all levels of society”. The impediments to achieving this are both financial and cultural, and he has established a foundation titled Daughters for Life to work towards this aim. “Investing in women and girls”, he writes, “is a way out of poverty and conflict”.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going … and Abuelaish is one tough, in the best senses of the word, guy. This is a book I won’t be forgetting in a hurry.

Izzeldin Abuelaish
I will not hate: A Gaza doctor’s journey on the road to peace and human dignity
London: Bloomsbury, 2010
237pp.
ISBN: 9781408814147

* This is not a spoiler. If you don’t come to the book already knowing the basic story, you will know it from the back page and from the foreword and opening chapters.

Virginia Woolf, The mark on the wall (Review)

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Back in November I wrote a post titled Nettie Palmer on short stories which resulted in Stefanie (of So Many Books) recommending one of her favourite short stories, Virginia Woolf‘s “The mark on the wall”. I told her I’d read it and, finally, I have.

This is the sort of story I like. It doesn’t have a strong plot but is the meditation of a lively, creative mind. This meditation is inspired by a mark on the wall which leads the first person narrator to wonder what the mark is, and what it might signify. She doesn’t want to get up to investigate, preferring to let her mind wander, as it will, on the possibilities:

How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw to feverishly, and then leave it …

The story does progress, albeit in an organic, stream-of-consciousness way, rather than according to any clear logic. She wonders if the mark is a hole, then thinks it could be a stain, or even, perhaps, something more three-dimensional like a nail head that has broken through the paint. At the end, we do discover what the mark is, but that’s not the point of the story. The point is what she thinks about as she considers the mark …

And the things she thinks about are wide-ranging as we have come to expect in stream-of-consciousness, a technique of which Woolf was one of the early pioneers. The thing about stream-of-consciousness is not only that it tends to roam over a wide range of ideas and topics, but that these ideas and topics are very loosely connected. Sometimes the thread between them is barely visible, usually because the connection is idiosyncratic to the thought processes of the narrator.

This is the case with “The mark on the wall”. The first paragraph uses strong imagery – based around the colours of red and black – which encouraged me to expect something more dramatic than what did, in fact, follow. In the third paragraph she exclaims:

Oh! dear me, the mystery of life. The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity!  To show how very little control of our possessions we have — what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilisation …

Nothing, though, is accidental in Woolf’s story, no matter how much the stream-of-consciousness form may lull us into thinking it is. This is the story of a woman concerned about the meaning or import of reality. She ponders the shallowness of “things” (including, even, knowledge). In the second paragraph she suggests the mark may have been made by a nail holding up a miniature that would have been

a fraud of course, for the people who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in this way — an old picture for an old room.

She writes of how we like to construct positive images of ourselves but how fragile this is, of how superficial reality is. Interestingly, while the story flits from idea to idea, there’s one motif (besides the mark) that recurs, Whitaker’s Table of Precedency. Whitaker’s exemplifies “the masculine point of view which governs our lives”. She uses it to represent the faith we have in rules, and the way we let rules and reality prevent our seeing the “sudden gleams of light”.

There’s a funny sequence in which she imagines a Colonel pontificating with other men on the history of objects like ancient arrowheads. The  Colonel, she imagines, might suffer a stroke and his last thought would be, not his wife and family, but the arrowhead which, she suggests in her stream-of-consciousness way,

is now in the case at the local museum, together with the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, a great many Tudor pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and the wine-glass that Nelson drank out of — proving I really don’t know what.

That made me, a librarian-archivist, laugh!

And so, what is it about? Well, the mark seems to represent the unwelcome intrusion of reality into her life – it gets in the way of her thinking (of her desire “to catch hold of the first idea that passes”) while also, paradoxically, offering inspiration to her thoughts. An intriguing story. And, like Stefanie did to me, I recommend it to you.

Virginia Woolf
“The mark on the wall”
Originally published: 1919
Available online at The Internet Archive 

Anna Krien, Us and them: On the importance of animals (Review)

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Krien Us and them

Quarterly essay cover (Courtesy: Black Inc)

I’ll admit it right up front, I am not a vegetarian or a vegan. I like to eat meat. I wear leather shoes. I like to think, though, that the source of these products has had a comfortable life and a quick, stress-free death. But I’m kidding myself, I know. And Anna Krien’s essay, Us and them, about the relationship between humans and animals, doesn’t reassure me.

In roughly 25,000 words, Krien, whose Into the woods I reviewed a couple of years ago, explores the complex relationship we humans have with our living, breathing co-inhabitants on this earth of ours. She exposes the underbelly of this relationship but resists simplistically declaiming the abuses and proclaiming that there is an easy solution. We all know there isn’t. As she says in the first section:

I’m not weighing up whether our treatment of animals is just, because it isn’t. That age-old debate is a farce – deep down we all know it.

The real question is, just how much of this injustice are we prepared to live with.

To try to answer this question she confronts the tension that exists in our relationship with “them” which is, as she puts it, the tension between seeing them as “beings” versus “objects”. She asks:

How to ensure that the butcher, the scientist, the farmer recognise that the creature in their care is a being, even as all the while they [and, I would say, by extension we] continue to use it as an object?

This is a well-structured essay. After an introductory section in which she sets the scene and poses her question, Krien explores the issues thematically, through the sorts of “encounters we have with animals”: Killing; Testing; Hunting,

These are, obviously, the encounters which are the most problematic. She spends little time on our positive and generally more mutually beneficial* encounters, such as in their roles as pets, guide dogs, and companion animals. That’s fair enough, given the serious questions she wanted to confront, but it’s a bit of a shame, nonetheless.

I like Krien’s writing. It’s well-researched, informative, and presents unpleasant facts with a light touch. She’s neither didactic nor conclusive but rather writes as one going on a journey with us. And she asks hard questions, such as these ones in the killing section:

  • Should Australia remain in the live animal trade and by so doing help other countries improve their animal welfare practices?
  • What does it say about our priorities when we have a World Society for the Protection of Animals but not one to protect women?
  • How do we explain the fact that more Australians empathised with the cows (being sent to Indonesia) than with people (such as those Indonesians for whom the cattle trade  means work and food, let alone the asylum-seekers plying the same seas as the cows)?

She explores the complexities of testing and here again disabused me of my head-in-the-sand hopes. I was surprised to read that the number of animals being used in research and teaching is increasing not decreasing. And again, the difficult questions. Is some testing acceptable, necessary even, and others not? And if so, on what basis do we decide? Why is there a disjunction between what scientists do in animal testing and believe is ethical, and what laypeople think?

Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012 Badge

Australian Women Writers Challenge (Design: Book'dout - Shelleyrae)

In her section on hunting, the focus is not so much on recreational hunting but on the hunting of animal pests – some native, such as dingoes, and some feral. She talks about apex predators, and the environmental impact of removing them. When the top predator goes, the ecological balance is severely disturbed. The loss of dingoes, for example, can be directly related to the extinction of small mammals. One solution to protecting farm animals that doesn’t involve killing dingoes is to use guardian animals like maremmas and alpacas. Hmm, methinks, introduced species aren’t always a good option – think camels, think cane toads – but so far so good it seems.

Late in the essay, Anna Krien writes that many scientists describe our current geological era as the Anthropocene, recognising the significant (negative) impact human activities are having on the earth. She follows this with biologist Edward O. Wilson‘s suggestion that what comes next will be “the Age of Loneliness” typified by “a planet with us and not much else”. I don’t want to think about what that would be like. There’s no easy answer to all this but, as Krien says, we must “acknowledge the questions” and continue the discussion. To do anything else is to deny that not only are animals are “important” in themselves but, to put it selfishly, they are important in multitudinous ways to us.

Anna Krien
“Us and them: On the importance of animals”
in Quarterly Essay, No. 45
Collingwood: Black Inc, March 2012
125pp.
ISBN: 9781863955607

(Review copy supplied by Black Inc.)

* Though I’m aware I’m making a human-centric assumption here!

Amitav Ghosh, River of smoke (Review for the Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize, 2011)

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I’m rather sorry that I haven’t read Amitav Ghosh‘s Sea of poppies because, while River of smoke does work on its own, I think my experience would have been richer had I read the beginning of the trilogy. This shouldn’t affect its Man Asian Literary Prize chances, but you never know.

Giant water lilies, Pamplemousses

Giant water lilies, Pamplemousses Botanical Garden

I loved that the book starts in the gorgeous island of Mauritius which I visited for a couple of weeks in 2004. Pamplemousses Botanical Garden was one of the first sights we visited. It is full of wonderful exotic plants, particularly spices, that we hadn’t seen before. This sounds a bit nostalgic but it is relevant to a book that is, as the artist Robin Chinnery writes, about “flowers and opium, opium and flowers”.

Let me explain. The story centres on three boats – the Ibis, the Anahita and the Redruth. The first two are involved in the opium trade – one English owned, one Indian owned – while the Redruth is involved in plant collecting and trading. The novel is primarily set in Canton in the lead up to the first Opium War of 1839-1842. At the time of the novel, the Chinese are in the process of trying to ban the opium trade and consequently have forbidden foreign ships to enter the port. The result is that the traders are all in Fanqui-town (Canton’s foreign enclave) waiting for the situation to resolve in their favour, while their boats are moored in the Hong Kong-Macau area. The novel reminded me a little of Dickens, not just because of its length but also because of its large cast of characters, its plot encompassing nefarious deeds, conspiracies and adventures, the comic relief, and its socio-political themes. There is also colourful language, satire and irony. Of course, Ghosh is writing historically while Dickens was exploring his own place and time, but that’s a minor difference.

The story is told from two main points of view. One is a traditional third person story of the opium traders, seen mainly (but not only) through the life (and eyes) of the Indian opium trader, Bahram Modi. The other combines the opium story with the plant story, through letters written from a young gay artist in Fanqui-town to his botanist friend, Paulette and her employer Mr Fitcher, on Redruth. He, Robin Chinnery, describes the hunt for the elusive golden camellia, while also providing a (semi)outsider’s perspective on the unfolding events in the opium trade crisis. I enjoyed Robin’s generally cheery voice and his colourful descriptions of life in Fanqui-town but I wonder whether the novel needed this extra layer to provide this added perspective? Paulette, the recipient of his letters, is largely silent and seems to add little to the narrative.

When a novelist writes a work of historical fiction, I wonder s/he has chosen to set a story in a past time – and look to see whether there is some application to the story in the novelist’s own time. In this case there is, for Ghosh’s target is the complexities of international trade, and the hypocrisies and fallacies that are still evident in the notion of “free trade”. He shows that “free trade” is rarely free or equal to all parties. The opium trade (and the British East India Company’s involvement in it) is perfect for this with its additional moral problem involving trading (or is it smuggling – the line is a fine one) a product that is injurious and that was, in fact, banned in England. Towards the end of the novel, the traders discuss their response to the Chinese Commissioner Lin’s demand that they give up their opium cargoes. The American Charles King appeals to their “better” natures:

‘ … Are you not aware that with every shipment you are condemning hundreds, maybe thousands of people to death? Do you see nothing monstrous in your actions?’

‘No, sir,’ answered Mr Burnham coolly. ‘Because it is not my hand that passes sentence upon those who choose the indulgence of opium. It is the work of another, invisible, omnipotent: it is the hand of freedom, of the market, of the spirit of liberty itself, which is none other than the breath of God’.

Guess who wins the argument?

Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 Badge

Image by Matt Todd of A Novel Approach

The most interesting character in the book is Bahram, the Indian opium trader who is only just accepted by the British traders. He is a complex character whose nature, motivations and flaws we come to know well. His flaws as a husband, father and businessman are many, but so are his strengths as an employer and friend. We  feel for him as he has to make a difficult decision and wish he were a little braver, a little wiser. He is testament to Ghosh’s ability to draw a flawed but sympathetic character.

A major pleasure in the book is the writing. Ghosh is a versatile writer who can slip from the breezy, colloquial vernacular of Robin to the formal tones of the English merchants. His grasp of the period is breathtaking. I gave up “Googling” the unfamiliar words and just let them flow over me, because the context made them clear:

On reaching the enclave the lascars and lime-juicers had gone, as was their custom, straight to the shamshoo-shacks of Hog Lane, so as to get scammered as quickly as possible.

In other words, as soon as they got off the boats, the sailors went to the pubs and got drunk (by drinking too much “stagger juice”).

There were, though, occasional lapses into didacticism. They were rare but they jarred when they occurred. An example is a little aside describing the Spanish silver dollar.  Mostly, though, Ghosh does show rather than tell and the novel is full of colourful detail about food and dining, art, plants, boats and business.

River of smoke is not a perfect novel but is a great read – for its description of a fascinating period in history, for its lively portrayal of characters you would recognise today, and for its exploration of issues (still) relevant now. My overall assessment? Read it.

For reviews by other team members, please see my Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 page.

Amitav Ghosh
River of smoke
London: John Murray, 2011
522pp.
ISBN: 9780719568992

Tafelmusik anyone?

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Galileo

Galileo (Courtesy: tonynetone, using CC-BY 2.0, via flickr)

Tafelmusik = table (or banquet) music, and has been used since the mid-16th century for music played at feasts and banquets.

AND …

Tafelmusik = a Canadian Baroque orchestra specialising in early music, performed on period instruments.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE …

197856 Tafelmusik = an asteroid discovered in 2004 and named for the orchestra.

You learn something new every day, don’t you? But why am I sharing this particular learning of mine? Well, because this week we attended our first Musica Viva subscription concert of the year and it happened to be The Galileo Project: Music of the Spheres, created and performed by Tafelmusik. It’s been some time since I wrote about a music concert. As I’ve said before, I love music but am no expert. This concert, though, was one-of-a-kind and I can’t resist sharing it with you, Whispering Gums style.

Baroque music was my first “classical*” music love – and so I was predisposed to enjoy this concert but I wasn’t expecting to enjoy it quite as much as I did. The concert was a musical performance something like we’ve seen before with groups like The Song Company (and their Venetian Carnival). The Galileo Project was performed by 17 musicians and an actor. It incorporated music (of course), visual images, narration and movement. And, unusually for ensembles, the whole program was performed from memory. If there were any hiccoughs I didn’t hear them.

So, why Galileo? Through the program and post-concert Q&A, we learnt that The Galileo Project was Tafelmusik’s contribution to the International Year of Astronomy in 2009, which was the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s use of the astronomical telescope. We were told that Canadian astronomers had a goal for 2009: that every Canadian would get to look at the stars through a telescope! I don’t think they quite achieved that, but it never hurts to aim high.

Anyhow, the program. It was divided into sections:

  • The Harmony of the Spheres I (Vivaldi)
  • Music from Phaeton (Lully)
  • Music from the Time of Galileo (Monteverdi, Merula, Galilei, Marini)
  • Henry Purcell
  • The Dresden Festival of the Planets (Rameau, Handel, Telemann, Zelenka, Lully, Weiss)
  • The Harmony of the Spheres II (Bach)

The music was linked by a narration drawn from contemporary writings (by Shakespeare, astronomers/scientists – who also included Newton and Kepler – and musicians) exploring the relationship between science, mathematics and music. Galileo’s father, Vicenzo Galilei, was a lutenist. One of his interests was testing lute strings to find “the mathematical formulas that express the relationships among length, tension and musical pitch” (program notes). Galileo, himself, was also a lute player, as well as a mathematics teacher and astronomer.

The concert program contains extensive notes on how astronomy and music intersected during the period, including:

  • the 1719 Festival of the Planets, which was a month-long event comprising operas, balls, outdoor events and special concerts designed to commemorate each of the known planets of the time – Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn**. Handel, Telemann and other musicians were involved in the Festival.
  • Johannes Kepler‘s Harmonices Mundi (Harmony of the World) in which he outlined his theory regarding harmonies (musical intervals and short melodies) that can be derived from planetary motion using mathematical formulae. The orchestra played some of these tunes from the planets.

All this was fascinating, but if you want to know more, here is a link to a Teacher Resource Guide which will give you more info than I ever could.

Meanwhile, I’ll just dot point my highlights of the concert:

  • the engaging rapport between the members of the ensemble. They clearly know each other well and enjoy playing together. That, or they are good actors!
  • the gorgeous sound. Llewellyn Hall should have good acoustics but I have never noticed quite how beautiful the sound is until this concert. It was warm and lush but also oh-so clear.
  • perfection that wasn’t cold and technical. They played from memory, they “orbited” or otherwise moved around the stage – and the hall – as they played their violins and oboes (which was impressive in itself but also enhanced our experience of the sound), and they made it feel spontaneous.
  • the sensitive incorporation into the narration of an indigenous Australian story about tracking Venus, from the Yolngu people.
  • beautiful, varied pieces of music played on authentic instruments.

We were told last year that if we only came to one Musica Viva concert in 2012, this should be it. We have, as usual, subscribed for the year, and we plan to attend them all, but this was a concert to remember. We hope Tafelmusik comes back.

* Using “classical” in its generic, not specific, meaning.
** Did you know that Uranus was discovered in 1781 by Sir William Herschel who was an oboist, organist, composer and amateur astronomer?

Yan Lianke, Dream of Ding village (Review for Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize, 2011)

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Yan Lianke's Dream of Ding Village

Bookcover courtesy Grove / Atlantic Inc.

As I started reading Yan Lianke‘s Dream of Ding Village, I was reminded of a favourite novel of mine, Albert Camus‘ The plague. However, as I read on, the similarity started to fade – or, perhaps it’s just that the particularity of Lianke’s conception took over. Both books explore a community living with a highly contagious, deadly disease, and both can be “read” through the lens of a wider political interpretation, but the two stories are told differently. For a start, Camus does not make his political “reading” literal while Lianke closely intertwines the political with the personal in his novel. No wonder this novel was published in Hong Kong and banned in China!

The story was inspired by the fallout that occurred from Henan Province‘s plasma economy, 1991-1995, in which Chinese were encouraged to sell their blood plasma. According to the Wikipedia article, it is estimated that over 40% of the blood donors (sellers) contracted AIDS, due to the low health and safety standards applied to the campaign. It’s a tragic story and Lianke uses it to tell a cautionary tale about a rush to progress that seems to cast humanity to the winds.

So, how does he tell it? The story is narrated by the dead son of “blood kingpin” Ding Hui. Qiang was poisoned in an act of revenge for his father’s role in bringing “the fever” (HIV/AIDS) to Ding Village. In the clear, non-judgemental voice of a child, Qiang proceeds to chronicle events in the village as the disease takes hold, using occasional flashbacks to fill in the gaps. His is not a schmaltzy or sentimental voice. It’s simply the voice of an omnipotent narrator who happens to have also been part of the story, before the novel starts, and whose “existence” initiates its dramatic denouement. It’s an interesting device that nicely balances involvement with distance. We get close, but not too close, to the people and events.

Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 Badge

Image by Matt Todd of A Novel Approach

The novel is told in 8 Volumes, and progresses chronologically from the appearance of the fever to when its impact on Ding Village is complete. Qiang tells his story primarily through the actions and behaviour of his grandfather, a man who hangs onto his ethics throughout the crisis while trying, mostly against his better judgement, to remain loyal to his two self-centred sons. A difficult task for the hard-working man entrusted with caring for the school and being its teacher when qualified teachers couldn’t be found. While Grandpa does his best to support the villagers in their darkest time, his oldest son Ding Hui engages in scam after scam (such as selling the government’s “free” coffins and organising “marriages” between dead people) to feather his own nest and further climb the greasy pole of bureaucracy.

Along the way, the stories of other villages are told, such as that of the adulterous couple Ding Liang and Lingling who, having uninfected spouses, decide to find affection in each other’s arms. It’s hard to feel they deserved the disapprobation they received (from most, though not all, in the village), but, speaking novelistically, they usefully represent the breakdown in normal codes of behaviour. Early in the novel, there is a respite from the horror when Grandpa invites all infected villagers to live at the school – and for a while a real community develops among the sick and dying. It doesn’t last of course and, as in The plague, bad things start to happen as the villagers respond to their disastrous situation. Graves are robbed, buildings ransacked, and, in a terrible scenario, the village is denuded of all its trees by villagers needing to make coffins. Black humour is never too far from the tone, and this tree-felling scene provides a perfect example.

It’s all powerful stuff and is conveyed through strong writing that uses physical description to underscore the devastation occurring in the village. I particularly liked the paradoxical use of the sun, gold and yellow throughout the novel to convey on one hand, warmth, prosperity and harmony, and on the other drought, desiccation and oppression, with the latter becoming precedent as “the fever” and associated corruption take hold:

Translucent, pale yellow and green leaves shimmered in the sunlight like golden offerings.

BUT LATER

… leaving Grandpa standing in the middle of the road, beneath the blazing sunshine, like a small clay figure of a man that someone had left to dry in the sun. Like an old wooden hitching post bleached by the rotting wood that no one wanted any more.

Other colours also pervade the book such as blood-red suns and green leaves and grass, continuing the disconnect between life and death that characterises Ding Village in the throes of “the fever”.

There’s something about the form though that puzzled me and that’s the use of italics. Sometimes they are used for Grandpa’s dreams – dreams that are often prescient, occasionally surreal – and sometimes they are used for flashbacks. But sometimes I couldn’t quite work out the reason, other than that they were possibly for ideas or events slightly out of kilter with the narrative point at which they occur. I’m not sure that the differentiation, except perhaps to delineate Grandpa’s dreams, serves the novel well.

This is a minor quibble though in a book that explores how greed leads to skewed values (“I spent my whole life doing philanthropy” says the serial scammer Ding Hui) and provides an opening for political corruption. Fast economic progress, Lianke seems to be saying, cannot be simply or easily pasted over cultural traditions that have taken centuries to build … but his vision is not, I think, completely hopeless. “A cool breeze”, he writes near the end, “carried the mingled scents of rotting plants and newly sprouted grass across the plain”. Let’s hope that “newly sprouted grass” gets the upper hand.

For reviews by other members of the Shadow Man Asian Prize jury, please click on my Man Asian page.

Yan Lianke
Dream of Ding Village
(trans. by Cindy Carter)
New York: Grove Press, 2009 (2005, orig. Chinese ed.)
341pp.
ISBN: 9780802145727

Gillian Mears, Foal’s bread (Review)

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Gillian Mears' Foal's bread

Foal's bread cover (Courtesy: Allen & Unwin)

Foal’s bread is Gillian Mears’ first novel in around 16 years, though she has published short stories in the interim. This is a shame because she is a beautiful writer, particularly when she writes about the place she knows best, the farms of the New South Wales north coast.

Foal’s bread is about the Nancarrow family. Most of it takes place between 1926 and around 1950, as it follows the fortunes of Noah (Noey/Noh), her husband Roley (Rowley), and the extended family with which they live. Their main business is dairying, but their passion is the sport of horse high jumping. At the beginning of the novel, Roley is an Australian high jump champion and Noey a young 14 year-old girl with promise. They meet, marry (early in the novel, so no spoilers here) and start working hard to achieve their dream of having their own high jumping team. Hope on, Hope ever, is their motto. That’s the broad plot; the story is far more complex.

This is an archetypal story of strong country people coping (or not) with “luckiness and unluckiness” in life. In its depiction of hardship, stoicism and the will to survive in rural families, it reminded me – in tone if not in story – of Geoff Page’s The scarring. The hardship may come from different quarters, but in both there is a sense of forces out of one’s control combining with things of the characters’ own making. That mix – of characters’ judgement or behaviour clashing with luck (usually bad) – tends to make for a good story, in the right hands. It’s a bit Shakespearean in a way, the clash of character with “the elements”.

Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012 Badge

Australian Women Writers Challenge (Design: Book'dout - Shelleyrae)

In Foal’s bread, the “bad luck” has many sources, some human and some natural, such as incest, lightning strikes, giving birth to a disabled child, war and drought. How the characters cope with the trials confronting them is the core of the novel. Unfortunately, more often than not, they don’t cope very well. Why? Mainly due to their very human failings. Noey and Roley, whose marriage commences with great love and big dreams, don’t know how to communicate when calamity hits. Noey’s mother-in-law, Minna, lets her jealousy (“of the happiness she’d never seen before”) get the better of her and prefers to increase the tension between her son and his wife rather than to ameliorate it.

By now you’ll be thinking this sounds like a miserable story, and in some ways it is. But it’s not all darkness. While the novel has an almost elegiac tone, its movement is towards light. It has a three-part structure. There’s a very short Preamble which sets a tone of harshness and brutality with its references to incest, bushfires, floods, and animal cruelty.”Watch out you don’t cry” we are warned. Then there is the bulk of the novel in which the story of Noey and Roley is played out. This is followed by a Coda, set some 50 years later, in which we learn that “the old voices remain … funny, flinty, relentless”. These voices are carried into the future by Lainey, the strong, resourceful daughter of Roley and Noey, “her mother’s daughter through and through”.

A strong story, but what gives this novel its real power is the writing. Mears mixes the rough, ungrammatical country-speak of the era with glorious, rhythmical language describing the magpies, butcherbirds, trees, creeks and hills of One Tree Farm. The “one tree” is a jacaranda, and it features throughout the novel. It could almost be, dare I say it, a character. Early in the novel, when all is full of hope, it quivers “to create the feeling of a big bosomed woman wanting to waltz”. Later, as things start to collapse, it loses its leaves, but at the end “the old tree lives on … like a huge purple cloud hiding the rooflines”.

And then, of course, there are the horses. Reading this book reminded me a little of reading Tim Winton’s Breath. Mears does for horse high-jumping what Winton did for surfing. She made me feel the joy and beauty of the jump, of pushing oneself to achieve just that little bit more in a risky sport, of having a dream that keeps you going, of doing “the impossible”. Mears, like Winton, knows her subject inside out, and you feel it in her writing.

I fear I haven’t done the book justice. I’ve not really described its complex plot. I’ve named only a few of its large cast of colourful characters. It’s an ambitious book with big themes and a big style. Not everyone loves it. Some find the dialogue tricky or some descriptions overdone; some think the ending is disappointing; some think it’s stereotypical in places. I think none of these things. I’d love to know what you – if you’ve read it – think!

Gillian Mears
Foal’s bread
Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2011
370pp.
ISBN: 9781742376295

(Uncorrected proof copy received from Lisa of ANZLitLovers in a blog giveaway)

Jahnavi Barua, Rebirth (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

What a shame Jahnavi Barua‘s novel, Rebirth, is, to the best of my knowledge, available “for sale in the Indian Subcontinent only” (backcover). Our Shadow Man Asian team had real problems tracking this one down, but I’m very glad we did manage to obtain some copies, eventually, because this is a beautiful book.

The title, Rebirth, might give you a sense of its subject matter – but, then again, it mightn’t! The novel – novella really – is a first person monologue by a mother to her unborn child. The child is waiting to be born – not reborn – but there is a sense that for the mother, Kaberi, a rebirth might be in the offing as she explores the state of her shaky arranged marriage, and of some tricky or unresolved relationships with family and friends.

While set in India – in Bangalore and Guwahati (in the troubled province of Assam) – this novel does not have the noise and energy that often accompanies stories from the subcontinent. It’s quiet and contemplative. Moreover, while it is imbued with gorgeous descriptions of the plants and landscapes of India, and while it refers to the ongoing political unrest in Assam, it is not specifically Indian in theme. Its story is universal, that of the desire for love between husband and wife, and of the love of a mother for her child. And here is the difficult part, because it is hard to describe this largely plotless novel without making it sound twee or mawkish, but somehow it is not that at all. Barua manages to find a voice for Kaberi that is tender but matter of fact, that is tentative but also confident. The progression is chronological, commencing with her husband leaving her for another woman at the beginning of the novel just as she discovers she is pregnant (after many years of trying). She doesn’t tell him – or her family and friends – for some long time as she considers her life. In the opening paragraphs we are given a picture of her as somewhat passive and inward-looking. Before her husband left, she says she

had been partial to the large soft sofa in front of the television, from where I had a good view of the screen, but from where I also looked inwards, into the heart of the house. I did not see much of the sky or buildings clustered around our own, but all that, anyway, did not cross my mind very often, so focused was I on your father and myself and the home we had fashioned together.

Ah, we think … a person ripe for “rebirth”. And yes she is, but it is slow and undramatic as she gradually, by meeting friends, remembering her old childhood friend who’d died in a bombed bus in Assam, and reflecting on her marriage past and present, comes to a better understanding of who she is. Early in the novel she, a keen reader, says:

I will not buy a book today. I will try and live in my life instead.

As the novel progresses, we find that she is, in fact, stronger and more directed than we (and, more to the point, even she) had realised. She has, for example, written a book and organised for her friend Preetha to illustrate it. This is no simple thing, but her husband, “whose public manners were always nice”, knows nothing of this. Ah, we wonder, what is she saying about his private manners, the way he treats her? We learn, through more stories in the next few pages, that what she hasn’t received from him is tenderness and love. But we also receive a clear sense of strength growing in her:

I demand love. Now, especially now, at least now.

This comes about a quarter of the way through the novel … the rest explores, in the same quiet tone, how things fall out for Kaberi, how she confronts her fears and insecurities. Things do happen – her father dies and she returns home to Guwahati, she eventually tells her husband, family and friends about her pregnancy. You can’t hide that forever after all! In other words, there is a plot of sorts, but the story is mostly an internal one and the ending is appropriately open albeit also with some sense of things resolved.

A little over halfway though the novel Kaberi says:

Birds wheel around slowly in the cloudless sky. Seemingly aimless, but I know better; little happens in nature accidentally.

And, I’d say, little happens accidentally in the writing of this book. It has been carefully and subtly structured to lay the foundations for Kaberi’s growth, and this makes it an absolute pleasure to read.

For other reviews by the Shadow Man Asian team, please click on my Man Asian Literary Prize page.

Jahnavi Barua
Rebirth
New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2010
203pp.
ISBN: 9780143414551

(Review copy supplied by Penguin Books via Lisa of ANZLitLovers)

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