Review

Ruth Park, Swords and crowns and rings

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Note to self: never again “read” an audiobook over a long period, such as, say, 5 months! This is how I read Ruth Park‘s engrossing 1977 Miles Franklin award-winning novel, Swords and crowns and rings. It was not hard to keep up with the plot as it’s pretty straightforward – and powerful. It is hard, though, over such a time to keep up with and remember all the nuances in her writing and expression and the way they affect character development and thematic strands. For a thoughtful review of the book by someone who read it more sensibly, please see my friend Lisa’s, of ANZLitLovers, here.

I am not an experienced “reader” of audiobooks and I have to say that I found what seemed to me to be the over-dramatisation of the story rather trying in the first few CDs. I gradually got used to it, however, and by the end I was happy with Rubinstein’s reading, but it did take me a while to settle into it.

New-Zealand born Ruth Park is a wonderful chronicler of Australian life. Her novel, The harp in the south, set in working class Sydney in the 1940s is, to my mind at least, an Australian classic – but it is just one of her extensive and well-regarded body of work. Her autobiographies are also well-worth reading, not only for the light they throw on her life and on that of her husband, author D’Arcy Niland, but also on that of the Australian literary establishment of the mid-twentieth century.

Anyhow, back to the novel. Swords and crowns and rings tells the story of two young people born in an Australian country town before World War 1 – pretty Cushie Moy (born to a comfortable family with the stereotypical socially ambitious mother who has married down) and the dwarf, Jackie Hanna (whose background is well and truly working class). Not surprisingly, Cushie’s parents frown on the friendship which develops between the two. This is not an innovative story but, rather, good historical fiction with evocative writing and sensitive character development. Consequently, as you would expect, the two are separated just as they realise their love for each other and the book then chronicles their respective lives – Cushie with various relations in Sydney and Jackie in a number of country locations before he too reaches Sydney. Much of the book takes place during the early 1930s Depression. Park gorgeously evokes the hardships – physical, economic and emotional – experienced by people like Jackie and his step-dad “the Nun” as they struggle to support themselves. All this is underpinned by Park’s thorough knowledge of the social and political history of the time: we learn about labour organisations and the rise of socialism, of that irascible politician “Big Fella” Jack Lang, and of the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

The resolution is predictable – it is, after all, a book of its genre – but it is not over-sentimentalised and is not achieved before the characters, Jackie in particular, have matured to the point that we can trust that he not only deserves what will come but that he will continue to work and mature for the betterment of himself and those he loves. It is truly a powerful book about human nature, as well as about the place and time in which it is set.

Ruth Park
Swords and crowns and rings (Audio CD)
Read by Deidre Rubenstein
Bolinda Audio, 2007
18 hours on 15 compact discs
ISBN: 9781741636628

Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew’s last stand

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If you like warm-hearted novels with a positive ending you may like this. If you like such novels with a touch of social commentary you will probably like this. If you like books like The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and Miss Garnet’s angel, then this is definitely for you. But if you like a little more meat in your sandwich, a little more fodder for the brain, then you may like to look elsewhere for your next read.

Major Pettigrew’s last stand concerns one widowed Major Pettigrew and the little, very English village in which he lives. He meets Mrs Ali, the English-born-of-Pakistani background owner of the local shop, and the result is a story of racism, classism and materialism as these two find they have much in common but are confronted by bigotry and cultural expectations (from both sides) that set to derail them. I won’t go into details. There are some interesting characters including the Lord of the manor, some businessmen and a self-centred ambitious son, but most are a little too stereotyped for serious analysis. Some valid contemporary issues regarding English village life are raised, particularly regarding the increasing cultural diversity in the population, and the aristocracy and its role in villages, but the plot becomes a little melodramatic and predictable for my preference.

There are however some nice observations in the book:

…as I get older, I find myself insisting on my right to be philosophically sloppy. It’s so hard to maintain that rigour of youth, isn’t it?

I have no patience with all this analysing of writers’ politics … let them analyse the prose.

Good point. I often – as I’m sure many of us do – wonder how much we should take into consideration the politics of the creator. Is it OK to like TS Eliot? Should we listen to Wagner?

Life does often get in the way of one’s reading…

Ain’t that the truth?

Simonson is British born but wrote this in the USA where she now resides. There are quite a few “digs” at America. The Major, with whom we are supposed to sympathise, if not identify, is critical of American “self-absorption” though he discovers that his potential American daughter-in-law has more substance than he thought. The book, does, in fact  explore the way we stereotype each other in ways that can prevent “true” relationship developing. As the Major recognises at one point, he

knew he was a fool. Yet at that moment, he could not find a way to be a different man.

The novel has some genuinely funny scenes and is lightly satirical in that way that the English tend to do well… And so, while it is not my preferred type of reading, it is nicely written and will provide good reading for those who want a bit of grit without the grimness that often accompanies stories of racial conflict and politics. I know a few people to whom I will happily recommend it.

Helen Simonson
Major Pettigrew’s last stand
New York: Random House, 2010
361pp
ISBN: 9781400068937

(Unpublished proof copy, lent)

Alexander McCall Smith, Tea time for the traditionally built

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Alexander McCall Smith said at the literary event I attended recently that if he achieves nothing else in his life he is glad he introduced the concept “traditionally built” because it has brought such comfort to many women (particularly, he says with a twinkle in his eye, in America!).

Tea time for the traditionally built is the tenth book in the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series – which is not a bad achievement for an idea that started out as a short story! The eleventh in the series, The Double Comfort Safari Club, is now out (in Australia at least) and McCall Smith has no plans yet to finish the series. When you’re on a good thing …

I am not, as I said in my recent post on McCall Smith, normally a reader of series, but I have made an exception for this series and forgive it the things that would normally make me steer clear of books like this, such as simple language and repetition of theme, because, well, because it is gentle and generous. Generosity is, in fact, an important quality for McCall Smith. At the talk I attended he said that he rarely based his characters on real people because that would be “an abuse of authorial role”! Tell Truman Capote that! When he does draw on real people, he said, it is to paint that person in a positive light. One such example is Mma Potokwani, matron of the Orphanage that features in the Detective Agency series, who is clearly a woman he admires.

Anyhow, onto Tea time. It’s a gentle read – with the plot this time focusing on a football team that is suddenly losing every game after having been consistently successful. The owner, Mr Molofololo (great name eh?), suspects a traitor in the ranks and Mma Ramotswe is, of course, called on to investigate. Suffice it to say that she does and the outcome isn’t quite what Mr M suspected.

I’ll say just one more thing about these books and that is that McCall Smith does create “rounded” characters…even the admirable ones have their flaws and this, I think, gives his books a little depth that can engage, even though the language and style do not offer the challenge than I prefer in my reading. Reading one a year is a nice thing to do – and keeps me in touch with a writer who knows the world has problems but who likes to think that people can be good, and that there is hope yet!

Alexander McCall Smith
Tea time for the traditionally built
London: Abacus, 2009
266pp
ISBN: 9780349119977

Edith Maude Eaton, Mrs Spring Fragrance

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This week’s Library of America short story offering is “Mrs Spring Fragrance” by Chinese American author Edith Maude Eaton (1865-1914) who wrote under the pen name of Sui Sin Far. She had an American father and a Chinese mother and, according to the notes which accompany the story, was apparently the first person of Chinese descent to write in the US about Chinese-American life.

“Mrs Spring Fragrance” was published in a collection in 1912. Its concerns are not new to us, reading it nearly a century later and familiar with literature about the challenges of living cross-culturally, but at the time it was apparently rather exotic. The subject of the story is marriage, and the conflict between traditional Chinese arranged marriage and westernised marriage in which young people choose their marriage partner. The main characters are a happily married Chinese couple who live in America, the Spring Fragrances. Their marriage was arranged but as we are told early in the story, both are quite “Americanised”. Mrs Spring Fragrance, we learn, is sympathetic to the plight of their young neighbour who has been promised in marriage but who wants to marry her chosen love.

The plot turns on that old conceit of eavesdropping – of things heard out of context which threaten to derail the “real” situation. (Interestingly, there is a book published by Cambridge University Press titled Eavesdropping in the novel from Austen to Proust, which explores the concept of eavesdropping in nineteenth century English and French novels.) Anyhow, back to the Spring Fragrances. In this story, the eavesdropping is complicated by cultural confusion and the result is … Well, I’m not going to give it away as you can read it yourself using the link above.

I will say, though, that what is eavesdropped is Tennyson’s statement:

‘Tis better to have loved and lost,
Than never to have loved at all.

Surely, says Mr Spring Fragrance, expressing a Chinese perspective despite his “Americanisation”:

Is it not better to have what you do not love than to love what you do not have?

It is a straightforward story, but told nicely and with a light touch. She shows how difficult it is to truly “change” cultures: through such comments as those above and Mrs Spring Fragrance’s unconscious error when she refers to the “loved and lost” poem as the “beautiful American poem written by a noble American named Tennyson”! You have to laugh – but not cruelly, as these are appealing characters, earnest in their desire to do the right thing.

This is not a must-read story, unless you are interested in the history of Chinese-American literature, but it is an enjoyable one nonetheless.

Martin Boyd, A difficult young man

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Martin Boyd's A difficult young man
Difficult but handsome (Courtesy: Sydney University Press)

I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I certainly wasn’t expecting the delightful sly wit I found in Martin Boyd’s A difficult young man, which, I understand, is the second book in the “Langton Quartet”. This novel though can clearly stand on its own – otherwise, why would Sydney University Press publish it alone as part of its Australian Classics Library? Is it the best written of the four? The most readable? The one most commonly studied (which goes back to the original question anyhow)? Or was it simple a case of eeny-meeny-miny-moe? (Even “eeny meeny miny moe” has a Wikipedia article – how great is that?) Whatever  the reason, my appetite has been whetted, and the first book, A cardboard crown, will now be promoted in my TBR pile.

Anyhow, back to the serious stuff. I know it was written in a completely different place and oh, nearly a sesquicentenary later, but there’s more than a whisper of Jane Austen about Boyd’s book. Superficially, this book and Austen’s works are very different: this is not a romance – but then neither is that Jane Austen’s focus either; its main characters are male rather than female; it has an autobiographical thread which none of Austen’s novels do; and it uses first person rather than Austen’s omniscient third person narrator. The similarities are, rather, in language (their wit and irony) and form (both write what can be described as social satire). I may be the first person to have put these two authors in the same sentence, but, well, that’s the fun of being a blogger: you can say it as you see it! And what I see is that both writers make me chuckle with their observations on human nature.

So what is the plot? The story is narrated by Guy Langton (a veiled Martin), who is the fourth son of Steven and Laura Langton. He focuses on the late adolescence-early adulthood of the eldest living son, Dominic (inspired by – but not – Merric), the “difficult young man” of the title, who, as the story progresses, manages to fail in, or otherwise mess up, pretty well everything he does. Through the course of the book the family moves from Australia (Melbourne and environs) to the family seat in England and back to Australia again. The book chronicles a number of domestic crises, at the root of which is usually Dominic who somehow undermines “the various attempts to fit him into some place in the world”.  In many ways though, the book is just as much about Guy who, through the process of narration, works to find a balance between “the unaltered impression” of “my childish mind” and “the glaze of adult knowledge”. This is a clever book which reads like, but is not, an autobiography.

It’s an engaging story – not so much for its rather episodic plot as for its array of wonderful and mostly eccentric characters, from the social-climbing arriviste Aunt Baba (who thinks anyone who does “a kindness from which they received no benefit” is silly) to the gentle, wise but somewhat ingenuous father, Steven. My favourite aspect of the book though is its style. I usually enjoy self-conscious narrators, and Guy is definitely that. He regularly addresses the reader directly, reminding us that he can use “the mask of a character in the story” and advising us of which “glaze” he is applying at the time. In this way he lets us know which parts might be more suspect than others in terms of the “facts”, which he recognises as being different from the “truth”:

..but the reader must take certain wild statements as intended for fun, though they contain an element of truth too subtle to be confined within the limits of accurate definition. One can make exact statements of fact, but not of truth, which is why the scientist is forever inferior to the artist.

And this brings us to another concern of the novel – the importance of the imagination. In many ways the book is a hymn to the creative life, a statement of the Boyds’ belief that a life lived without imagination is probably a life not worth living. It also makes a plea for humane values, for peace not war, for gentle not brutal discipline of children, for education that is not conformist. The book is set in the years leading up to World War 1 and the point is made that life before the war – the “secure civilisation” – was to change irrevocably after.

In addition to irony, Boyd uses a wide range of literary techniques rather effectively, such as foreshadowing (which teases us while at the same time directing our understanding), analogies, contradiction, and allusions (particularly to art and literature). All of these imbue the book with a reflectiveness that undermines a focus on plot.

There are so many strands to this novel – its style, diverse subject matter, and characterisation – that would be fun to explore, but that would leave nothing for the rest of you to talk about, so I will finish with a statement made by the narrator towards the end of the novel:

This is really what I am seeking for throughout this novel, the Memlinc in the cellar, the beautiful portrait of the human face, lost in the dissolution of our family and our religion.

I am doubtless romanticising the Bynghams [maternal ancestors], but there is an element of truth in what I write, which is all I ever claim. Also everyone romanticises what interests him.

As he does so often in the novel, he says one thing here and then undermines it immediately after. But it works, and it works because life is messy and contradictory and yet out of this mess and contradiction comes a vision of something that is real and enduring – and that is the transcendence of family, and the importance of imagination.

Martin Boyd
A difficult young man
Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009 (orig. pub. 1955)
223pp.
ISBN: 9781920898960

(Review copy supplied by Sydney University Press. This is the last of 12 books that my friend Lisa (aka ANZLitLovers) and I received to review. We believe more will be published in this series: if these 12 are anything to go by we are in for a real treat – and the cause of Australian literature can only profit from that.)

Bran Nue Dae

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Broome

The gorgeous colours of Broome

You could hardly get two more different films than Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah and Rachel Perkins’ Bran Nue Dae. Both are directed by indigenous Australians and both address indigenous Australian issues but, wow, how differently they do it. While Samson and Delilah is spare and almost without dialogue, Bran Nue Dae is exuberant and highly verbal. Of course it is, it’s a musical set in 1969.

There’s nothing I would rather be
Than to be an Aborigine
and watch you take my precious land away.

You have to see it to fully appreciate the contrast between the joyful (in fact cliched-musical-style) presentation of this song and the sting in its tail. Bran Nue Dae started life as a set of songs written by indigenous Australian musicians about growing up in Broome in the 1960s. Some time later, these musically eclectic songs were transformed into a musical that was a hit at the Festival of Perth in 1990. Rachel Perkins has apparently long wanted to adapt it for film. I have not seen the original play and so cannot comment on how the film compares with the original. Others can do that if they wish: I’m not always convinced that it is a worthwhile exercise to compare originals and their adaptations. Judge each work on its own terms is, I think, a better policy.

Briefly, the plot. Willy’s devout mother has scrimped and saved so he can go to boarding school in Perth and train to be a priest, but Willy (newcomer Rocky McKenzie) has met a girl (Jessica Mauboy), in his hometown of Broome, and is not so sure that priesthood is what he wants. Following conflict with the school’s priest (Geoffrey Rush), he heads back home from Perth, more or less under the wing of newly met Uncle Tadpole (Ernie Sigley). They obtain a ride with a hippie couple (Missy Higgins and Tom Budge), and the rest as they say is …. The encouraging thing about the film is that it celebrates our similarities (this is, after all, a coming-of-age story) while at the same time recognising significant differences (specifically the cultural dislocation experienced by indigenous people).

Comedy always seems to me to be a little tricky to review. There is such a fine line between being funny and being cringe-making. This film has the odd awkward or cringe-making moment – it verges on vaudeville and has its share of stereotypical if not downright cliched scenes. But these moments are few – and in fact they are, I’m sure, self-consciously there. Perkins wants us to make the connections between traditional musical comedy and her movie so that we can see its subversiveness – and it is subtly (or not so subtly) subversive. I found it genuinely funny – but with enough satire and moments of pathos (such as the references to deaths in custody) – that I got the message as well.

This film is at the other end of the black-white dialogue in Australia from Samson and Delilah. It is also starkly different from Rachel Perkins’ other musical (but definitely not comedy) film, One night the moon, which deals tragically with the refusal to engage in dialogue. It too is a spare film. These are both great must-see films, but it is also good to see humour being used in this important but mostly oh-so earnestly explored area.

And so, if you like to have a laugh – but with a little bite in it – go see Bran Nue Dae.

Geoff Page, The scarring

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Geoff Page (born 1940) is a Canberra-based poet who has been active in the Australian poetry scene for many decades now. He was also, for nearly three decades, an English teacher. Page has published several volumes of poetry and at least three verse novels, of which The scarring is his first.

The scarring, which I read a few years ago but have been wanting to review here, is, I have to say, one of the most gut-wrenching works I have read. Page has set it in the landscape – rural northern New South Wales – of his childhood and says it was inspired by rumours he heard as a child (but it is not a “true” story). The story spans around seven decades from the 1910s to the 1980s, and chronicles the lives of a couple from their youth and courtship through to old age. As the blurb on the back cover says, “their separation through war sows the seeds of their eventual destruction”.

One of the things I love about the book is the way Page weaves so much of the social and political history of twentieth century Australia through the lives of this couple – war, the Great Depression, the boom of the 1950s, city versus country life and values, and of course gender inequity and the old double standard! The scene is set from the first line:

Breed em tough, the old man says.

Little do we know what lies beneath this seemingly innocuous opening – and I’m not about to give it away to you now. Let’s just say that Page deftly weaves the breeding motif through his tale of a young couple running a cattle property.

Here is an example of how history is told alongside life on the farm:

the new white stiffness of the sheets
where Sally will be his forever

…

‘Forever’ moves on two years more.
The set of skills they share between them
shoves them sideways from the news:
Sudetenland, then through to Munich,
Kristallnacht and into Prague.
It rattles in through bakelite
and once or twice on Cinesound
showing at the flicks in town,
that lifted arm and square moustache
relishing a massed salute.

And so the story moves on to its more or less inevitable – given the events that occur – conclusion. This is not flowery poetry. Page tends more to a spare style that is well suited to his setting and subject.  The poetry’s insistent rhythm draws you on, and Page’s use of repetition slowly but subtly builds up the tension. This is a novel that you’ll want to read in one sitting.

Page is, I think, a little too unsung … but then, isn’t that the case with most poets?

Geoff Page
The scarring
Alexandria: Hale & Iremonger, 1999
111pp.
ISBN: 0868066826

John Muir, A wind-storm in the forests

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Giant Sequoia, Yosemite

Giant Sequoia, in the Sierras

Being rather partial to trees, I could not resist reading “A wind-storm in the forests” by Scottish-born American naturalist/enviromentalist John Muir (1838-1914) when it lobbed in by email today as this week’s Library of America story of the week. Anyone who has been to the stunning Yosemite – or visited the peaceful Muir Woods north of San Francisco – will have heard of John Muir.  Not only was he responsible for preserving many wilderness areas including of course Yosemite, but he founded the Sierra Club, an environmental organisation that remains today.

“A wind-storm in the forests” is more essay than story, but perhaps it is best described as a mood-piece: it uses a lot of musical imagery, not to mention sea imagery, religious imagery, and any other imagery that suits his purpose. And that purpose? To convey the grandeur and timelessness of the forests he loves and wants to protect. The story commences with a discussion of trees in the Sierra and how they variously respond to the wind, and then moves onto a description of a particular wind-storm during which he climbed a 100 ft Douglas Spruce to experience the storm first hand:

I kept my lofty perch for hours, frequently closing my eyes to enjoy the music by itself, or to feast quietly on the delicious fragrance that was streaming past.

Muir’s is a typically nineteenth century Romantic sensibility, and his prose is of the purple variety – but gorgeous for all that in its patriotic passion for the trees (“we are compelled to believe that they are the most beautiful on the face of the earth”) of the Sierras:

The waving of a forest of the giant Sequoias is indescribably impressive and sublime, but the pines seem to me to be the best interpreters of winds. They are mighty waving goldenrods, ever in tune, singing and writing wind-music all their long century lives.

AND

…the Silver Pines … wave like supple goldenrods chanting and bowing low as if in worship, while the whole mass of their long tremulous foliage was kindled into one continuous blaze of white sun-fire.

All eight pages or so are written in idolatrous prose like this. According to Wikipedia, Muir found writing hard, feeling that words were not really up to the task. Whether the problem is words or Muir himself, the prose is a little heavy-handed – and yet how wonderful it is to have the writings of such a man. We would, I think, have been the poorer without a written record of his passion.

POSTSCRIPT: Apologies to my Australian readers. I have no idea why, on Australia Day, I have chosen to write about American trees! I will, however, write one on a lovely book of Australian trees soon.

Vale Kate McGarrigle

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Kate McGarrigle

Kate McGarrigle, 2008 (Courtesy: Dfrancois, via Wikipedia, under CC-BY-3.0 Unported)

Last week I read on Cat Politics’ blog that Kate McGarrigle – one part of the Kate and Anna McGarrigle duo – had died just shy of her 64th birthday. How very sad. Like Cat Politics I discovered the McGarrigles in the 1970s, and over the years have acquired a few of their albums:

All wonderful. For those rare ones of you out there who don’t know them, they sing, write songs, and play instruments. Kate was married to musician Loudon Wainwright III (who wrote that silly fun song of my youth, “Dead skunk in the middle of the road”!) and is mother to musicians Rufus and Martha Wainwright. Oh, and they are Canadian.

And like that other wonderful contemporary Canadian singer-songwriter, Leonard Cohen, Kate and Anna are poets. I know that’s a bit simplistic – most songs can be seen as poetry (or at least as verse!) – but Kate and Anna’s words (with sometimes unusual rhythms) and music, in songs like “Heart like a wheel” (Anna) and “Talk to me of Mendocino” (Kate), have a plaintive beauty that resonates long after the song is over. Add to this their mesmerising voice tones and lovely harmonies and you have the whole package.

There are many obituaries out there and so I am not going to ramble on but, for those interested – and who haven’t seen it already – here is a link to Kate and Anna singing “Heart like a wheel” in 1990.

And let the sun set on the ocean
I will watch it from the shore
Let the sun rise over the redwoods
I’ll rise with it till I rise no more

(Talk to me of Mendocino, Kate McGarrigle)

Don DeLillo, Midnight in Dostoevsky

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Do reading synchronicities affect our comprehension? Well of course they do, since everything we do affects our comprehension to some degree doesn’t it? Anyhow, I have just read Don DeLillo’s short story, “Midnight in Dostoevsky” (you can read it here), and, as I read it, I couldn’t help bringing to mind Salman Rushdie’s The enchantress of Florence. Whether that’s valid or not is, I suppose, up to others to decide.

The plot concerns two college boys who spar, who indeed become disconcerted if they concur:

This was not supposed to happen – it unsettled us, it made the world flat – and we walked for a time in chagrined silence. Even in matters of pure physical reality, we depended on a friction between our basic faculties of sensation, his and mine, and we understood that the rest of the afternoon would be spent in the marking of differences.

At the beginning of the story the two boys see a man, and they start sparring about him. It starts with what sort of coat he is wearing but, over time, moves into less apparent things such as where he’s from. Interspersed with this are other scenes, including a few from their Logic class. Are you starting to get the connection with Rushdie? It’s the imagination-reality nexus I’m thinking about…the point where imagination and reality meet and merge.

Russian Ushanka Hat

Russian Ushanka Hat (Courtesy: Eugene Zelenko, via Wikipedia, under CC-BY-SA-3.0)

It’s a gorgeously ironic tale, with the boys attending a very dry Logic class (in the evocatively named Cellblock) taught by the rather inscrutable Ilgauskas “who was instructing us in the principles of pure reason … he challenged our reason for being, what we thought, how we lived, the truth or falsity of what we believed to be true or false”. This class nicely counterpoints the flights of fancy the boys engage in when they are alone:

“Think of the hat he’d be wearing if he was wearing a hat,” I said.

“He’s not wearing a hat.”

“But if he was wearing a hat, what kind of hat?”

As I said, this is a story about imagination versus reality… The boys’ fascination with the man continues, as their imaginings become more and more intense (but never moves into actual fantasy the way Rushdie does in his novel).

“Feel the air. I say minus nine Celsius.”

“We’re not Celsius.” [narrator]

“But he is, where he’s from, that’s Celsius.”

That did make me laugh – fiction becoming, in a sense, reality for a while!

We then discover that Ilgauskas reads Dostoevsky (“day and night”) and so our narrator starts to read Dostoevsky too, finding it “magical” that the book which he leaves open at a page in the library is there the next day, open at the same page. In a great leap, he decides that the man is Russian, and that Ilgauskas is his son. His friend Todd says, “Does he have to be Russian to read Dostoevsky?”. Our narrator answers:

“That’s not the point. The point is that it all fits together. It’s a formulation, it’s artful, it’s structured.”

Wow, is this DeLillo’s fiction manifesto? I love it and I love the way this fiction manifesto also works for reason and logic, even though Ilgauskas says that “we  invented logic to beat back our creatural selves”. Creatural? A lovely bit of wordplay: one dictionary provides several meanings including “a living being” and “an imaginary or fantastical being”; another dictionary says “anything created” and “an animate or living being”. Now, that word packs a punch in this story!

The story continues, with the inevitable desire to check the reality of their fiction…but I won’t give any more away. Suffice it to say that this is one delightful and very intelligent story, well worth the read.

(Oh, and as for reading synchronicities? It’s quite possible that had I not just read the Rushdie, I might have come at the story from quite a different angle, such as looking at the relationship between the two boys – but I’ll never know now!)