Women writers

Sigrid Nunez, The vulnerables (#BookReview)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why are you making things up?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday musings on Australian literature: Vale Yasmine Gooneratne (1935-2024)

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It was through the Jane Austen Society of Australia’s (JASA) newsletter, Practicalities, that I learned of the death of Yasmine Gooneratne, a woman with whom I have crossed paths – one way or another – three times. She was an academic at Macquarie University, where I did my undergraduate degree; she wrote a novel, A change of skies (1991), which my reading group discussed back in 1996; and, she was the patron of JASA (and you know how I love Jane).

You can find quite a lot about Yasmine Gooneratne on the Internet, if you are interested, so I’m just going to focus on a few points that struck me, and I hope will interest you.

“No nonsense”

A site called The Modern Novel provides a useful potted biography, so I will start with that. It says that she was born in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1935 as Yasmine Bandaranaike, which means she was “a member of the well-to-do Ceylonese family which included Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the first woman prime minister in the world”. She studied at the University of Ceylon and Cambridge University, and in 1962, she married the doctor and environmentalist Dr Brendan Gooneratne (who died in 2021). They emigrated to Australia in 1972, where she lived for 35 years, according to Wikipedia, before returning to Sri Lanka. It was here, in her home country, that she died on 18 February this year.

AustLit provides more detail, which includes that she was founding Director of Macquarie University’s Post-Colonial Literatures and Language Research Centre from 1989-1993, and that she was awarded an AO (Order of Australia) in 1990 “for her distinguished contribution to Sri Lankan and Australian literature”. She won (or was listed for) a number of awards in Australia and elsewhere.

Gooneratne wrote over twenty books, including novels, some poetry and short story collections, as well as many works of non-fiction, but she seems little known outside academic circles (and JASA). Indeed, my initial – and general – search for this post brought up many references to her but no news items on her death. I had to search a little more specifically for that. This was interesting given that, on the several internet sites I found, she is described as widely known. DBpedia* calls her a “Sri Lankan poet, short story writer, university professor and essayist” and says that “she is recognised in Sri Lanka, Australia and throughout Europe and the U.S.A., due to her substantial creative and critical publications in the field of English and post-colonial literature”.

When I did find something about her death, I was delighted to find an obituary written by her daughter Devika Brendon. Initially posted in the Sunday Times on 18 February 2024, it has been shared on many other sites including the blog I am quoting from. It provides a loving and personal tribute to her mother, but one which I suspect also rings true to the person Gooneratne was. Devika Brendon tells us that:

Yasmine Gooneratne as a private individual left clear instructions about what she wished regarding her funeral. Her directives show a great deal about her character and her values. ‘No public notices. No public viewing. No public funeral. No memorial lectures. No fuss. No feathers. No posturing. No performativeness. No photographers. No selfies. No celebrities. No nonsense.’

I have mentioned Gooneratne a few times on this blog, including in a brief Monday Musings post I wrote in 2013 on Migrant literature. It had been a long time since I’d read A change of skies (and it’s even longer now), but I wrote that the novel was about “educated middle class migrants – like herself I presume – who work to find a balance between fitting into the new culture while at the same time preserving their Sri Lankan identity”. If you want a better flavour of this work, check out this post written in 2012 by someone called Elen on a blog called the southasiabookblog. Elen says that Gooneratne’s “portrayal of the immigrant experience is as funny and poignantly ironic as Jhumpa Lahiri’s work on a similar topic is earnest”. I wish I could remember it that well, but I read it when I was immersed in parenting and my memory is general. This description of Gooneratne’s tone, however, sounds like the writing of an Austen-lover!

I will end with another paragraph written by her daughter because, not only does it tell us a lot about Gooneratne but, if you are an Austen fan, you will love the final line:

She had great contempt for hypocrisy and cruelty. She had a great sense of humour and a lively sense of fun. As she was a person of moral integrity, the repulsive conduct of people who prey upon the vulnerable saddened her, especially as she grew older. While always choosing to believe the best in people, she found herself unable to accept the lies that are spun by opportunists and predators on a daily basis. Her good opinion, once lost, was lost forever.

* DBpedia describes itself as “a crowd-sourced community effort to extract structured content from the information created in various Wikimedia projects”

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Vol. 1)

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Mansfield Park book covers
Mansfield Park book covers

This year my Jane Austen group is doing a slow read of Mansfield Park, which involves our reading and discussing the novel, one volume at a time, over three months. This month, we did Volume 1, which, for those of you with modern editions, encompasses chapters 1 to 18. It ends with the return of the patriarch, Sir Thomas Bertram, from his plantation in Antigua.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again. Every time I re-read an Austen novel, I “see” something new, something new to me that is, because I can’t imagine there’s anything really new to discover in these much loved, much pored-over books. Sometimes my “new” thing pops up because in a slow read I see things I didn’t see before while I was focusing on plot, or character, or language, or … Other times, it might arise out of where I am in my life and what experiences have been added to my life since the previous read.

I’m not sure what is behind this read’s insights, but the thing that struck me most in the first volume this time is the selfishness, or self-centredness, of most of the characters. It’s so striking that I’m wondering whether Austen is writing a commentary on the selfishness/self-centredness of the well-to-do, and how this results in poor behaviour, carelessness of the needs of others, and for some, in immorality (however we define that.)

Mansfield Park has been analysed from so many angles. These include that it is about ordination (which Austen herself said was the subject she was going to write about); that it is a “condition of England” novel; and that it is about education. In the first chapter, in fact, Mrs Norris, the aunt we all love to hate, says

Give a girl an education, and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without farther expense to anybody.

The irony of course is that the sort of education that Mrs Norris supplies to the Bertram girls does not do them any favours. That’s not exactly where I’m going now, though we could argue that poor education – or poor upbringing – is behind much of the selfishness we see in the novel. So, maybe, I will end up talking about education by the end of the novel.

For now, however, I will share why I am thinking this way. For those of you who don’t know the plot, it centres around Fanny Price who, at the age of 10, is taken in by her wealthy relations, the Bertrams of Mansfield Park, to relieve her impoverished parents of one mouth to feed. Fanny Price is the Austen heroine people love to hate, but I’m not one of those haters. I believe that if you truly look at her character and her life, within the context of her situation and times, you will see a young girl whose good values and commonsense enable her to make the best of a very difficult situation.

That it is a difficult situation is made clear in several ways, including the fact that we are told in the opening chapter that she is to be treated as a second class citizen in the family. A “distinction” must be preserved; she is not her cousins’ equal. In the second chapter, we are told

Nobody meant to be unkind, but nobody put themselves out of their way to secure her comfort.

As the novel progresses, and the characters are introduced, they are, one by one, shown to be self-centred and/or selfish in one way or another. I won’t elucidate them all, but, for example:

  • Lady Bertram (her aunt) is, from the start, lazy and careless about the needs of others. Her own comfort, and that of her pug, supersedes all.
  • Mrs Norris (another aunt) is judgemental and parsimonious, ungenerous in mind and matter in every possible way.
  • Cousins Maria and Julia show no generosity to Fanny, unless it’s something that doesn’t materially affect them; they are “entirely deficient in … self–knowledge, generosity and humility”.
  • Cousin Tom “feels born only for expense and enjoyment”, and exudes “cheerful selfishness”.
  • Visiting neighbour, Henry Crawford, is “thoughtless and selfish from prosperity and bad example” and amuses himself by trifling with the feelings of Maria and Julia who provide “an amusement to his sated mind”.
  • Henry Crawford’s sister Mary is unapologetic about her selfishness, asking Fanny to forgive her, as “selfishness must always be forgiven…because there’s no hope of a cure”. This surely takes the cake!

And so it continues … the clergyman Dr Grant is an “indolent, selfish bon vivant”; and the self-important Mr Rushworth and the self-centred Mr Yates show no interest or awareness of the needs of others.

There are, of course, some redeeming characters. Cousin Edmund, in the first flush of love, can be thoughtless at times but it is his overall kindness that keeps Fanny going, and Mrs Grant also comes across as sensible and kind.

A couple of significant events occur in this volume – the visit to Mr Rushworth’s place at Sotherton, and preparations for staging a play, Lovers’ vows. These provide ample opportunity for the characters to parade their self-centredness. You can’t miss it. Fanny certainly doesn’t, as she watches those around her jockey for position in terms of their roles in the play:

Fanny looked on and listened, not unamused to observe the selfishness which, more or less disguised, seemed to govern them all, and wondering how it would end.

Fanny, however, also questions her own motives in refusing to take part in the play: “Was it not ill-nature, selfishness, and a fear of exposing herself?” But, in fact, she is the only one who is truly alert to the dangers within.

This “selfishness” theme is not, of course, the only issue worth discussing when thinking about Mansfield Park, as other members in my group made clear with their own discoveries. It is simply the one that stood out for me, during this re-read.

Thoughts anyone?

Carmel Bird and Jace Rogers, Arabella (#BookReview)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the creators:

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

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

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

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

Karen Viggers, Sidelines (#BookReview)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vale Marion Halligan (1940-2024)

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Such sad news. I have just heard that Marion Halligan, one of Australia’s literary treasures, died yesterday. She has been frail for some time, but the last time I saw, and spoke briefly to, her was at the 2023 ACT Book Awards in December. She was her usual engaged self, though also frustrated with the limitations her health was placing on her life. Getting old, as many of us know, isn’t a heap of fun.

Before I share a few thoughts of my own, here is how I heard the news. It was from Karen Viggers, via Facebook. I hope she’s OK with my sharing this:

It is with infinite sadness that I share the sad news with you today that the wonderful literary champion, Marion Halligan, died peacefully last night.

Marion was just the most amazing, beautiful, graceful, wise and generous person. She always had time to talk to and support other writers and was always generous in her friendships. She had a sparkling wit and personality, was always astute and sharp in conversation and she enjoyed books and literature to the end.

She has had an incredible life and will be very sadly missed.

Marion Halligan Valley of grace

It is so hard to know where to start. I do not want to write an obituary, as there will be plenty of those in the coming days and weeks. Rather, I’d like to share my experience of her, which started in the 1980s when I decided to focus my reading on women writers, and particularly on Australian women writers. I read three of her novels with my reading group, Lover’s knots, The golden dress and Valley of Grace. For this last discussion, Marion attended our meeting. What an absolute treat that was.

Outside of the reading group, I have read more of her books, including The fog garden and The point, and I have around five others waiting on my TBR. It was through Marion, too, that I met Carmel Bird when she approached me about posting the speech she was making to launch Marion’s novel Goodbye sweetheart.

Carmel Bird and Marion Halligan
Halligan launching Bird’s Family skeleton

Marion lived her writing life in Canberra, and was a member of the “Canberra Seven” or “Seven Writers” group about which I have written. I have seen her at award events, festivals and conversations, sometimes the interviewer and sometimes the interviewee. One memorable occasion was when she interviewed Margaret Atwood back in the early 2000s. Atwood was not easy to interview, but Marion held her ground with grace and humour. I will never forget it. (I was glad it was she and not me in that seat!)

Marion is loved here as our grand dame of literature, and her presence will be greatly missed. Not only did she support local writers generously, as Karen Viggers says above, but she was for many years patron of the ACT Writers Centre (now named Marion partly in her honour), was at one time the chairperson of the Literature Board of the Australia Council and also an organiser of Canberra’s previous writers festival, the Australian National Word Festival.

She was a versatile writer. She wrote eleven novels, several of which won and/or were shortlisted for some of Australia’s best literary awards, and which included a little foray into crime fiction. She was a big supporter of the short story form, ruing their unpopularity with publishers, and she also wrote non-fiction books, as well as journalism, including articles on food. Wikipedia lists her books and awards. Searching her in your browser will retrieve several interviews with her, and she was interviewed by Irma Gold and Karen Viggers for their Secrets from the Green Room podcasts I posted on recently. You can see most of my posts involving Marion on this tag. (There are few reviews here, though, because most of my reading of her books was before blogging.)

I could go on, but this is enough for now. I will close with a quote I’ve shared before on this blog. It comes from one of my favourite books of hers, a work of autofiction, The fog garden. I just loved this book, her cheeky, wry way of telling us that it was fiction not biography. It’s a lesson, in fact, in how to read fiction, and it also has one of my favourite statements about the value of reading. It goes like this:

Read a wise book and lay its balm on your soul.

All I can say is, thanks Marion for your intelligent wit, your warmth and your wisdom – and for the balm you laid on our souls. We will miss you muchly.

Lucy Mushita, Chinongwa (#BookReview)

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Where to start with this complex, unusual and gorgeously written novel that manages to convey the horrors of child marriage, of colonialism, and of patriarchal cultures, without eulogising or demonising the characters involved? It’s quite a feat, and it made this book a deeply involving read.

The place to start, I suppose, is the beginning, which is that Chinongwa is the debut novel of Zimbabwean author Lucy Mushita. Published most recently by Australia’s Spinifex Press in 2023, it was originally published in 2008 in South Africa, under the author name of Lucy Michot (which I discovered when searching for the book cover in GoodReads.) Its eponymous protagonist, Chinongwa, is 9 years old when the novel opens:

Chinongwa Murehwa was nine, but her age was not vital. Just her virginity. Though she was not yet washing, her fruits were already protruding. That was a relief for her family. Anyway, she was the only one they could use.

And there you have it. For a reason that soon becomes obvious, Chinongwa is to be “used”, that is, married off to save the rest of her family from starvation. The root cause of this starvation is colonialism – the arrival of the “kneeless” or vasinamabvi and the fact that Chinongwa’s family ended up with the poorest quality land in the village because her paternal grandfather had stood up to the vasinamabvi and arrived late at the place their community settled.

So, in Book 1 of the novel, 9-year-old Chinongwa is “hawked” around neighbouring villages by her father and aunt, with little success. Can you imagine it? She is starved and thin, not one of those “juicy” nubile young women men desire and are happy to pay for with cows and grain. At last, however, a childless woman, Amai Chitsva, for reasons of her own, offers to take Chinongwa as a second wife to her own husband. Not only is this husband, Baba Chitsva, thirty nine years her elder, but he does not want a second wife. Regardless, Book 1 ends with Chinongwa about to start her new life with her new family.

Now, before I get to Book 2, I should explain that this book is a novel, but one based on the life of a real person. I say this because a Chronology is provided at the beginning of the book. It tells us that Baba Chitsva was born in 1871, and Chinongwa in 1910, that Baba Chitsva died in 1935, and, finally, that “Chinongwa is telling all” in 1940. There are other dates, but these are the most relevant in terms of grounding the book.

So, Book 2. Unlike Book 1, which is told from the third person voice (albeit mostly through Chinongwa’s eyes), Book 2 is told in the first person voices of Amaiguru (Amai Chitsva) and Chinongwa, with one chapter in Baba Chitsva’s voice. This shift works because in Book 1 Chinongwa is a child, so not fully aware of the ways of the adult world, whereas in Book 2 she grows up – very rapidly. It’s a heart-breaking story of a young woman who is essentially groomed to seduce a man who doesn’t want her, a young woman who subsequently has her first baby at the age of 11.

For the first few years she and Amaiguru make it work well enough, as we hear through their individual voices. Chinongwa has no other real option, while Amaiguru tries to make work what she had started. But things turn sour when, upon her mother’s death, Chinongwa finally realises she is on her own, and that it’s time to be more independent:

I now had to take my destiny into my own hands: I would have to return to my jail and fight for my freedom from within.

And so she does with disastrous results.

What makes the novel such good reading is that Mushita is able to convey the culture, how and why it tolerates the practice of child marriage and polygamy, including the economics of it all – how cows are passed back and forth between families, for example – while simultaneously recognising the humanity of those involved. These men and women – the mothers and fathers, the child-brides, the first wives and second wives, the husbands, the aunts, the villagers – are human beings with the full range of social and emotional behaviours. Some are kind and some cruel, some are envious, some are sensible, some are weak, some are manipulative, some are scared, some are wise, and so on. Chinongwa eventually recognises this truth:

At first I refused to accept what life had dealt me. I said that my load was too heavy. But, with time, and as I look around me, I decided that one will never know the weight of one’s neighbour’s load. Maybe if I were to carry it, I might ask for mine back. Only that one who carries it knows its weight.

In other words, people will be people. They are rarely to blame for the system in which they find themselves. Some will survive and some won’t, but that’s not the point. The point is the system, and its complex historical and cultural interconnections. The point, too, is that child marriage still happens, and that patriarchies still govern much of women’s lives. In Chinongwa, Mushita conveys the economic, social and cultural imperatives that underpin these practices while also showing the personal costs. It makes compelling reading.

A little contribution to Bill’s Africa Project. Lisa also enjoyed this novel.

Lucy Mushita
Chinongwa
Little River, Vic/Mission Beach, Qld: Spinifex Press, 2023 (orig. pub. 2008)
235pp.
ISBN: 9781925950816

(Review copy courtesy Spinifex Press)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 3, Marion Simons

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Back in 2021, I started a Monday Musings sub-series on forgotten Australian writers, but to date have only written on two – Helen Simpson and Eliza Hamilton Dunlop. I have been intending to get back to it and with this year’s slight revamp of Elizabeth Lhuede’s and my contributions to the Australian Women Writers blog, now is the time. In the revamp, Elizabeth and I are going to focus on sharing public domain works published in 1924 – or written by writers who died in 1924. My first contribution was by Marion Simons.

This post expands on that blog post – but doesn’t include the piece written by Simons, a short column titled “To the old gumtree”, that I included there. To see that, please go to AWW. It is a short piece and worth reading!

The more we research Australia’s earlier women writers, the more we become aware of just how many used pseudonyms – sometimes more than one. Marion Simons was one such. Using pseudonyms was, as we know, not uncommon for women. Often it was to hide their gender, so they would be published and/or read, or to protect themselves from criticism for stepping outside the expectations of their gender and daring to write in the public domain. Sometimes, though, writers used pseudonyms – still do, in fact – to keep their different styles of writing separate. Unfortunately, we don’t know a lot about Marion Simons, so we can’t be sure of her motivation. However, she did use several pseudonyms, and some at least seem to have been used to differentiate different writing personas.

Marion Simons

So, who was Marion Simons? Most of what I’ve found has come from the (partly paywalled) AustLit database, and from Trove, mostly from pieces by her and but I did also find the occasional brief reference to her. The fourth of seven children, Simons was born in 1883 in Crystal Brook, South Australia, and spent her childhood years there and in Port Germein and Port Pirie. She never married, and when she died in 1952, she was living with one of her brothers in Mile End, a suburb of Adelaide.

It’s difficult to know exactly when or how her writing career started. AustLit, which describes her as a freelance radio script writer and journalist, says that she wrote radio plays for school broadcasts for the ABC between 1939 and 1949, including adaptations of classics. For these, AustLit says, she used her birth name, “Marion Simons”, but they add that she also wrote short stories and articles under the pseudonym “Stella Hope” and radio talks as “Lady Tulliver” (a reference, it seems, to George Eliot’s Milll on the Floss character, Maggie Tulliver). She used other pseudonyms too, including Quilp, Robin Adair and Nardoo. These were difficult to research, “Quilp” and “Nardoo”, for example, being used by more than one writer.

Book cover

Simons was clearly versatile – she probably had to be to make a living as a writer – as she also wrote plays for the theatre, including  “Casablanca”, which won the 1932 Repertory Prize, and a small 1941-published book, The Innkeeper’s wife, that was based on the Thomas Hardy poem “The oxen”. Adelaide’s News (22 November 1941), reported that this story, then unpublished, won first prize in a short story competition conducted by the South Australian branch of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. (Read it online at the State Library of Victoria). It’s not clear exactly when she moved to Adelaide, but from Trove, I’d day she was there by the early 1930s, if not in the 1920s. Simons was active in Adelaide’s literary society, with various Trove articles dated from the 1930s to the 1950s reporting her being on the Poetry Society’s Council, the last librarian of the University Shakespeare Society (before it folded), Vice-President of the Adelaide Dickens Fellowship, and President of the Y.M.C.A. Dinner Club which would feature speakers at their dinners.

In addition to revealing her involvement in the above organisations, Trove also told me that she was cousin to one J.J. Simons. She may not appear in Wikipedia, but he does. He was born in Clare, South Australia, in 1882, and, says Wikipedia, “was an Australian businessman and politician, best known for establishing the Young Australia League” (in 1905), which started as a football league but, says Wikipedia, “diversified to include literature, debating, band music, sport and theatrical performances, as well as outdoor pursuits such as hiking and camping”. It still exists. He was also active in publishing, but all this was in Western Australia where he moved in 1896, and I am digressing a bit too much now, so back to Marion. (You can read about him at ADB, if you are interested.)

Given Simons’ use of pseudonyms, it’s difficult to identify her earliest writings. However, Port Pirie’s Recorder (10 November 1934) says that she wrote as “Quilp” while living in Port Pirie, and I found a “Quilp” writing the “Comment and Criticism” columns in the Port Pirie Recorder and North Western Mail of 1906. I believe this is Simons because this “Quilp” mentions not having been long out of school. (I found some earlier columns by a “Quilp” in a Port Augusta paper but they were dated 1902 when Simons was 19 and they seem to have been by an older man.) In late 1907, “Quilp” seemed to be also writing a column “Odds and Ends from the Oracle” in the Quorn Mercury and the Petersburg Times. A letter to the editor, referencing one of “Quilp’s” columns, describes “Quilp” as “your comic writer”. Certainly “Quilp” used a humorous tone used for reporting local events and activities, much as you find in modern columnists. Take for example this from her “Comment and Criticism” column in the Port Pirie Recorder and North Western Mail (of 5 December 1906):

I went to a garden fete the other day and helped to damage a very nice garden…

“Quilp” was also referenced in another (1907) report as delivering a paper on David Copperfield to Port Pirie’s St Barnabas Literary Society.

The “Stella Hope” by-line appeared in South Australian newspapers in the early 1920s. These pieces included general interest columns, also delivered with a touch of humour, and short stories. The first piece I found was “February the Fourteenth, St Valentine’s Day” in The Journal (17 February 1923).

My first in this series were novelists, which Marion Simons was not, but she was prolific enough across a number of forms to make her worth including here. I’d love to know more about her life but, despite her active involvement in Adelaide’s literary community, I have not yet located an obituary. I’ll keep looking though.

Duane Niatum, Crow’s sun (#Review)

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Duane Niatum’s “Crow’s sun” is the tenth story of fourteen in the anthology, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers, and moves us into the 1990s, where we will remain for the next two stories before ending up in the early 2000s.

Duane Niatum

Anthology editor Bob Blaisdell provides more information about Niatum than he does for some of the writers, but I am supplementing that with information from Wikipedia and the Poetry Foundation. Variously described as a poet, fiction writer, playwright, essayist and editor, Niatum was born in 1938 in Seattle, Washington, to a Klallam (Salish) mother and Italian-American father. After his parents divorced when he was just 4, he spent a lot of time with his maternal Klallam grandfather, from whom he learnt tribal ways and oral traditions. He is an enrolled member of the Klallam Tribe (Jamestown Band).

At 17, Niatum enlisted in the United States Navy, and served in Japan. On leaving the Navy, he did his B.A. in English, at the University of Washington, studying with poets, Theodore Roethke and Elizabeth Bishop. He then earned his M.A. at Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D. in American culture from the University of Michigan.

Poetry was his main love, it seems. Wikipedia states that he “established himself as one of the most influential promoters of Native American poetry”. He edited a Native American author series at Harper & Row Publishers, producing two “influential anthologies”. He has published essays on Native American literature, and his poetry has been translated into many languages.

The Poetry Foundation says that his “writing is deeply connected with the Northwest coast landscape, its mountains, forests, water and creatures” and that “the legends and traditions of his ancestors help shape and animate his poetry”. However, it is a short story, of course, that Blaisdell has chosen for his anthology.

“Crow’s sun”

I’ve now read a couple of Niatum’s poems at Poetry Foundation, but none that specifically illuminate this story. “Crow’s sun” presumably draws from his experience in the Navy as it deals with a young sailor named Thomas sentenced to 30-days in the brig. I’m not saying that the story is autobiographical. It may be – I don’t know – but my point is that his Naval experience, and its treatment of people of colour, is sure to have informed the story.

The narrative takes place over one day. It starts with Thomas, just one year into his service, waiting to be taken to the brig and ends with him behind bars. Not a lot of action, in other words, but a lot goes on. This is a story about systemic racism. Thomas, we learn, had let his mother and step-father talk him into enlisting under-age, a common story for youths of colour with limited opportunities. In his case, he’d already been kicked out of home after he’d “stopped his step-father from beating up his mother in a drunken brawl”.

Once in the Navy, things don’t go well. Thomas “cannot fathom why sailors 17 to 70 live in some dream of future glory, which is the oldest myth of the military”. We are not told what Thomas has done, but it appears, from Shore Patrolman Cook’s advice as he delivers Thomas to the brig, that Thomas has been treated harshly:

“This hole’ll be your home for thirty days, Thomas. And buddy, you’d better watch your mouth in this joint. Do your time with your trap shut, until you’re running free. Don’t act the wise-guy. I don’t like your face, Thomas, but I don’t think those hicks from the base were right. You’re a punk, but who isn’t at your age. They went too far. I believe burning a man at the stake’s too much like what like what I left in Alabama.”

This surprises Thomas, because Cook, who “is a spit and polish sailor married to the idea that blind obedience to orders is the only law”, has never really liked him. His advice, then, means something, and Thomas thanks him for it. The rest of the story tells of his admission interview with the Brig Warden – and we get the full measure of the racism he is likely to experience. The Warden aggressively violently enforces his will. He calls Thomas, insultingly and erroneously at that, a “wetback”. He ridicules Thomas’ name insisting it should be “Pancho Villa or Willy Garcia”. I don’t need to continue because you’ve surely seen or read enough scenes like this to get the gist.

What makes this story is how Thomas handles the situation, which is to call on the wisdom of his grandfather. At the first sign of the Warden’s aggression:

The muscles in Thomas’ face tighten; his eyes thicken; narrow into tiny moons peering from behind a shield of fern. He sways slightly; stiffens his whole body, not sure what to expect from the man closing in. Grandson to Cedar Crow, Thomas feels his fingers change to claws, to a wing of thrashing spirit flying wildly inside his ear. (Be calm and steady now. This man could be your enemy. Know his every move. Break him like a twig if he tries to harm you. Be the Thunderbird of our song. I am Crow, your father.)

From here on, Thomas draws on his grandfather’s wisdom to assess and manage the situation. There is violence but he sees death is not on the cards. We learn that many Klallam people had lost faith in their beliefs and practices, but not Thomas. His late grandfather, “the quiet man of family, sea and forest had counselled him well”. From here to the end, where we leave Thomas standing in his cell, we observe him watching and responding to the Warden and drawing on his spirit wisdom.

It’s a strong story about the power and value of knowing your culture.

Duane Niatum
“Crow’s sun” (orig. pub. 1991)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 75-83
ISBN: 9780486490953

Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead (#BookReview)

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Barbara Kingsolver’s latest – and multi-award winning – novel, Demon Copperhead, was inspired, as I’m sure most of you know, by Charles Dickens’ autobiographical novel, David Copperfield. Indeed, Demon Copperhead opens with an epigraph from that novel:

“It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.”

This could be an argument for writing historical fiction, and is certainly relevant to Kingsolver’s political intent, but for the novel’s protagonist it’s far more personal. Several times through the novel Demon refers to the point at which things changed – usually for the worse – but it’s two-thirds through where he makes it clear

Where does the road to ruin start? That’s the point of getting all this down, I’m told. To get the handle on some choice you made. Or was made for you. […]

In my time I’ve learned surprising things about the powers stacked against us before we’re born. But the way of my people is to go on using the words they’ve always given us: Ignorant bastard. Shit happens.

But, I’m jumping ahead here … so let’s back up a bit. I started by referencing the fact that the novel was inspired by David Copperfield, and it was inspired by it for one very good reason, which Kingsolver explains in her Acknowledgements:

I’m grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Copperfield, his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us. In adapting his novel to my own place and time, working for years with his outrage, inventiveness, and empathy at my elbow, I’ve come to think of him as my genius friend.

So there you have it. Kingsolver has transferred Charles Dickens’ London of the early to mid-nineteenth century to Lee County Virginia from around 1990 to 2004 or so. While Demon struggles to make something of his life against all odds, not recognising or accepting until later that those odds were stacked against him from the start, Kingsolver, like Dickens, is a reformer doing her best to ensure that we will see from that start just how stacked those odds are at every level. I was expecting the book to be primarily about the OxyContin/opioid addiction crisis but it is much broader than that. It’s about poverty and the intergenerational trauma that this engenders – and how this helps lay the foundation for something like OxyContin to take hold.

“What matters in a story is the heart of its hero” (Demon)

I admit that I was not initially keen to read this novel. Not only is it very long, but I’ve read (and, yes, enjoyed) Barbara Kingsolver before, and I have higher priority books on my TBR. However, it was my reading group’s first read of the year, so of course I read it. It’s not a perfect novel, but Demon’s voice was so engaging and the translation of Dickens to Appalachian America is so pertinent to contemporary politics, that I’m glad I read it.

I can see, though, why it’s one of those divisive novels that engenders strong feelings one way or another. For a start, translating Dickens to contemporary times is risky. Dickens’ novel, being published in serial form, is long and episodic, with a large cast of characters, a touch of melodrama, and a lot of detail. A big, baggy, monster in other words. This style does not necessarily suit contemporary readers, but this is what you get with Demon Copperhead.

Like Dickens’ novel, Demon Copperhead wears its heart on its sleeves, meaning it’s not subtle. It can be didactic at times, as in Mr Armstrong’s lessons on capitalism and coal mining companies and Tommy’s discussion of historical truths. Its large cast of characters aren’t quite stereotypes but many are clearly typified by their behaviour – the bad characters who manipulate and use others (like stepfather Stoner, foster-father Crickson, and anti-hero Fast Forward), the weak characters who are well intentioned but can do more harm than good (like Coach), the kind hearts who pick Demon up when he’s down but can’t properly guide him (like the Peggotts), and the shining lights who try to set him on the right path but know he has to decide for himself (namely June and Angus).

In other words, Demon Copperhead is an in-your-face novel, which could be alienating. However, what kept me engaged was the character of Demon himself. Born to a junkie mother and orphaned at 11 when she ODs on oxy, he has a vivacity, an openness, and a heart that you want to see survive, despite setback after setback after setback. He’s “resilient”, a survivor, which is something those around him see early on. This is not to say, though, that he will survive, because even survivors need a hand, and this is what Demon sometimes gets, sometimes doesn’t, and, distressingly, sometimes eschews because he is determined not to be helped, to make his own decisions, to be his own man.

Regardless, once Demon had me, I was in. I have lived in Virginia (albeit very middle-class northern Virginia) and I have driven through various parts of Appalachia. I am interested in the culture, and, having recently read JD Vance’s Hillbilly elegy (my review), I am interested in how it is playing out in contemporary America. Kingsolver explores the role played by big pharma in targeting poor Appalachian regions with their painkillers, at a time when the region was suffering from the callous withdrawal of coal companies*. She shows how socioeconomic factors like these, combined with systemic failures in child welfare, not to mention poor educational opportunity, and the ongoing ostracism of “hillbillies”, contribute to the rise of MAGA politics in the USA.

She also shows the opposite, because while Demon is aware of the factors that work against him, he also sees what can sustain – good people offering the right support, the best parts of rural traditions, and nature, whose benefits are both spiritual and practical. The question is, are these enough? Or, what is needed to make them enough?

You have probably noticed by now, that I am not doing my usual sort of review here. This is partly because, being a multi-award winning Barbara Kingsolver novel, Demon Copperhead has already been written about ad infinitum, and partly because I wanted to tease out my own feelings about such a polarising novel. Yes, I can see – even agree with – some of the criticisms. It’s long and detailed, is didactic in places, and is not what you’d call subtle – rather like Dickens, in fact. However, the power of the story and its accompanying messages, combined with Demon’s utterly captivating voice, got me over the line. Kingsolver, I’d say, does her epigraph proud, whichever way you read it.

* One of my reading group members share an article about this very issue in a January 28 article in The Guardian.

* For a more traditional review of the novel, do check out Brona’s.

Barbara Kingsolver
Demon Copperhead
London: Faber & Faber, 2022
644pp.
ISBN: 9780571376490 (eBook)