Blogging highlights for 2016

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It seems that I’ve established a bit of an end of year trifecta with my Australian Women Writers’ Challenge wrap-up post, followed by posts on Reading highlights and Blogging highlights. This post, obviously, is the Blogging one. I do it as much for my own record, because I enjoy tracking trends on my blog, so please don’t feel obliged if you’ve had enough!

Top posts for 2016

Hannah Kent, Burial Rites bookcover

Courtesy: Picador

For the last three years, my most “hit” post has been Virginia Woolf’s short story “The mark on the wall“. This year, finally, an Aussie book topped the list, Hannah Kent’s Burial rites, which ranked 3rd last year. However, while last year, four Australian works appeared in my Top Ten posts, only three did in 2016:

Tenth in the list was, interestingly, my page on Australian Literary Awards. I must make sure I keep it up to date! My Red Dog post has proved consistently popular since I posted it. With a follow-up movie, Red Dog: True Blue, about to be released into cinemas, I presume it will continue to receive hits this year.

In 2014, Barbara Baynton’s short story “The chosen vessel” (posted November 2012) ranked 5th, and last year it ranked 9th. It’s still ranking well, but dropped again this year to 12th. Some of my other posts on her short stories also feature in the top twenty or so. It’s wonderful seeing such a strong, original voice from the past being still read.

What I find particularly interesting, in fact, is that short works, including Baynton’s above, continue to rank well, several appearing in the Top Ten:

Sarah Kanake, Sing Fox to meMy most popular 2016-written post – ranking 66th – was, unlike last year, for an Australian work, Sarah Kanake’s debut novel Sing fox to me. And it’s closely followed by another Australian work, Stephen Orr’s The hands.

So, once again, my top-performing posts are older ones, which suggests that litblogs are contributing, hopefully usefully, to wider literary culture.

Finally, there is a surprising post in my Top Ten, but you’ll have to read on to see what it is.

Random blogging stats

I love sharing some of the searches that find my blog, so here are some of this year’s more interesting ones:

  • freemasons secret magnify glass: what the?
  • ginger gits: ditto.
  • what pages are the best quotes on in red dog: haha, was this someone trying to short-cut writing an essay?
  • whispering gums means: I’d love them to tell me if they found out!
  • write a short note on the picturesque: presumably a homework question but I love that s/he seems to have typed in the whole question.

And then there were multiple searches relating to my 8th most popular post this year, What do you say when you order food at a restaurant (posted November 2014). The search terms included what else can i say in place of orderin restaurent, to place order in a restaurant what we say?, fine some expression ordery meal ins the restaurant, and when ordering food restaurant may i have. What a hoot, particularly when, quite coincidentally, the topic of what to say in restaurants became a bit of a family joke over Christmas!

Other stats tell the story of my year. This year was rather frenetic for me with some major family commitments but I managed to write more posts, 164 in fact, than last year’s paltry 133. My blog visitors came from 172 countries, and while Australia, the USA, Britain and Canada filled the top four slots, I love that India, the Philippines and Germany followed them. My most active commenters this year were: Lisa (ANZLitLovers), Stefanie (So Many Books, So Little Time), Ian Darling, Bill (The Australian Legend), and Meg. A big thanks to them, and to everyone who reads and/or comments on my blog. Whether or not you comment, it is a joy to share books and reading with you.

Challenges/Memes

awwchallenge2016As I wrote in my AWW Challenge wrap up, I will participate in the Challenge again this year. I won’t set a formal goal but expect to read around 30. (See here for the Sign Up page). I will also probably do the AWW Bingo Card challenge again, though, as with this year, I expect to do it more by serendipity than by design. It was fun seeing whether my reading was varied enough to slot into the set categories.

Late last year, I started doing the #sixdegreesofseparation meme, currently run by Kate (booksaremyfavouriteandbest). I enjoyed the way it made me look back at past reading, thereby refreshing my memory, so I plan to join in again when I can this year.

And to wrap up my wrap-ups …

I’ve already said it in my Reading Highlights post, but I’ll reiterate it: thanks to everyone who read, commented on and/or “liked” my blog last year – and thanks to all the other wonderful bloggers out there, even though I don’t always manage to visit everyone as much as I’d like. You prove that cyberspace can be a positive place. I wish you all happy reading in 2017.

And finally, a big thanks to the authors who wrote the books that we love to read and talk about, and to the publishers and booksellers who get the books out there. May 2017 be a great one for you all.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Louise Mack

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I promised in my Reading Highlights post that my first review of the year would be for a book from my TBR pile, and so it will be – hopefully in a couple of days. However, I suspect that the book, and maybe even the author, will be unknown to most of my readers here so I’ve decided to use my first Monday Musings of the year to introduce the author, Louise Mack.

Louise Mack, 1890s

Louise Mack, by Kerry & Co, 1890s (Photo:
National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an23474744, via ADB)

I’ve had Mack’s first novel, The world is round, on my TBR since the mid 1990s when I found it on a remainder table. It had been published under Imprint Classics by Angus & Robertson in 1993, and although it’s only 93 pages, I somehow didn’t read it then, and kept not reading it – until now. But, more on it later this week.

Louise Mack was born in Tasmania in 1870, the seventh child and first daughter of a family which ended up numbering 13! Her father was a Wesleyan minister, and they moved around, ending up in Sydney by the time Mack was in high school. She went to Sydney Girls’ High where she met and became friendly with Ethel Turner (who was also born in 1870). I wrote in my post on Ethel Turner’s juvenilia that Ethel and her sister, Lilian, established a magazine Iris when the school’s newspaper, Gazette, which was edited by Louise Mack, rejected Ethel’s contributions! However, I understand that they were very good friends and, in fact, Turner apparently met her husband at the Mack family home.

Australian author Nancy Phelan, who was Mack’s niece, wrote the entry about her in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB), and also the introduction to the novel I’ve read. I don’t want to reiterate what you can read in the ADB, but here’s a potted history. After school she worked as a governess before being becoming “a regular contributor to the Bulletin in the late 1880s”, with the encouragement of owner-editor J. F. Archibald and editor A. G. Stephens. Phelan suggests that Mack perhaps received too much attention and praise, implying that it impacted the development of her talent. She married, but it failed and she went to England, around 1900, where she wrote novels and serials, travelled, and worked as a journalist, including as a war correspondent. She returned to Australia in 1915 and became a touring speaker or lecturer, something she did right through to the 1930s. During this time back in Australis, she wrote more novels and married a second time (more happily), before dying in 1935, “possessionless”.

“little lady”

They’re the dry facts. She was quite a colourful character, with Phelan describing her as “fair, pretty, extroverted, audacious, unpredictable, a genuine Bohemian who chose a life of adventure and insecurity”. Phelan writes in my novel’s introduction that Mack “grew up in a series of large, shabby, untidy parsonages, with no luxuries but plenty of books … books, as necessary as bread, were constantly discussed”. I found an article in Trove which announces her as a rising literary star. It suggests that:

Miss Mack owes much of her development to her mother’s literary tastes, and the varied training that an intellectual father can bestow on his children. (The Methodist, 23 Nov 1895)

My Trove search retrieved pages and pages of hits on her name, many of them from newspapers all around Australia – from Dubbo to Perth – announcing her lecture tour on her war experience, which included experiencing German occupation and bombardment in Belgium and going behind German lines. In her mid to late 40s at the time of the tour, she is, patronisingly to our modern ears, described in these announcements/reports, as “this charming little lady” or “the pretty and charming little lady”. This is the woman who, one of these articles says, was asked by Scotland Yard to report on a meeting of spies with Germans in Antwerp to which she’d been an eye-witness. This article’s writer also calls her a “little lady” but a bit later describes her more appropriately as “this daring and travelled lady”. S/he reports on an interview with Mack:

“I just love lecturing,” Miss Mack said; “it is the most fascinating work I have ever taken up. Indeed, I may say that I just live for the moment when 8 o’clock strikes, and I and my pictures begin to tell the story of a Woman’s Experience in the Greatest War this world has ever known.” (Western Mail, 17 September 1915)

Mack, you see, went the whole hog and illustrated her talks with moving pictures. Reports suggest that she was an excellent and engaging speaker. Some of these talks were given under the auspices of, and raised money for, the Red Cross. Her book, A woman’s experiences in the Great War, was published in 1915. 

I’m not going to discuss her writing in any detail here, because I’ll do that in my review post. Instead I’ll share a couple of columns that she wrote in the 1930s in the Australian Womens Weekly, for whom I’m guessing she must have been a columnist. These columns –  Louise Mack’s Diary and Louise Mack Advises – provide some insight into her values and sense of humour.

In a Diary column I found this on Mrs Bradfield, wife of Australian engineer and designer of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, John Bradfield:

I’VE always been wondering what would happen if Dr. Bradfield got his title, and dear Mrs. Bradfield became Lady Bradfield, and somehow, between myself and my diary, I must confess I’m glad that Mrs. Bradfield is still there. Dozens of times coming back from hospital, getting out of the train at Gordon, I would find my suitcase seized, or my parcels grabbed, and there’d be Mrs. Bradfield trotting along besides me, coming out of her way so that she could help carry someone’s burdens.

Could Lady Bradfield have done that? Ah, yes! Title or no title, this little simple, pale, absolutely natural woman, all kindness, with a quite remarkable craze for carrying other people’s parcels, would always have been Mrs. Bradfield. That’s her real title, her many friends think.

I like her focus on kindness, on the unimportance of “titles”, and her light humorous touch.

And, one of the advice columns. It’s called “The gentle art of giving” and asks “Do you give? Or Do you grab? The commonest way of giving is to give what you can spare. But that’s not giving at all, ethically speaking”. Fascinating. It made me think of Australian ethicist Peter Singer and his views on giving. However, let’s not get sidetracked by that now. Mack goes on to suggest that giving is good for your looks! She suggests getting on a tram and looking around:

Can’t you tell at a glance who hoards and who gives? It is written on their faces. It is graven around their lips. It is mirrored in their eyes, giving, or grabbing. The face that gives has a better complexion because the blood flows happily through capillaries kept open by the light-heartedness of generous doings. The face that gives has brighter eyes and sweeter lips. Oh, particularly about the lips does the will to give reveal itself in its full beauty.

She then gives examples of women who give and don’t give, ending with Myrtle who has almost no food left, when in comes her brother. Mack writes:

And there before my eyes took place a metamorphosis. Ovid wasn’t in it. One moment Myrtle was a grey woman with a quarter of a loaf of bread and a cold chop, and now she turned into a gracious creature, all wealth and possessions, that she was handing away to Tom. She whisked a bit of tea into one parcel, a quarter loaf into another, two potatoes and an onion into another, a cold chop out of her safe, two apples for the children, then pressed threepence into poor old Tom’s hand, with, “It’s pouring; take a tram.”

That was giving, indeed.

Giving is when you press your thumb down, down on the indicator of your heart—and, pressing still, and yet again pressing, send your will to give up, up, up, to the very highest storey of your soul.

Louise Mack sounds like a woman worth knowing … and yet is, I believe, unknown to most Australians. Such is life!

Reading highlights for 2016

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And so we finally say goodbye to a year many of us would like to forget, but before we do, I would like to share my 2016 reading highlights. As usual, I won’t be naming top picks, because I’m a wuss. It’s too hard. So, instead, I’ll be sharing highlights which combine best reads with those that were interesting for some reason or another.

First, though, this year’s …

Literary highlights

By literary highlights I primarily mean literary events. I went to a smaller number this year but they were good ones:

  • Carmel Bird, Fair gameTenth anniversary celebration for regional publisher, Finlay Lloyd. Held at the National Library of Australia, this was a most enjoyable occasion, with several authors, including Carmel Bird, Alan Gould and Paul McDermott, speaking about their FL books.
  • Canberra Writers Festival on which I wrote four posts (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 and Recap): What a thrill to have a writers festival here again after a very long hiatus. Although my messy year meant I didn’t plan well enough in advance for the event, it was great being part of the buzz. What I attended was excellent, and I understand funding is guaranteed for another couple of years. Woo hoo.
  • The annual Seymour Biography Lecture, given this year by David Marr. Titled Here I stand, it was a fascinating talk which provided much for me, and commenters on my blog, to ponder on, particularly regarding Marr’s exhortation for the biographer to keep out of the biography.

Reading highlights

As in previous years, I’m going to discuss this year’s reading under categories which reflect this year’s experience.

The reading …

  • Julie Proudfoot, The neighbourDebut novels: I enjoy including debut works in my reading diet. This year I read around six, of which my two favourites would probably be Josephine Rowe’s A loving faithful animal for tackling the Vietnam War and the devastating impact of PTSD on a family, and Julie Proudfoot’s tight, powerful novella, The neighbour, which still has me thinking months after reading it.
  • Memoir/Autobiography: This was the surprise trend of the year (as Historical Fiction was last year). It certainly wasn’t planned but I ended up reading 8 memoirs/autobiographies, plus Anna Rosner Blay’s Sister, sister which, while mostly biography, had a touch of memoir about it too. I can’t possibly describe them all here but I do want to mention the three World War 2 mother-daughter stories, Blay’s book, Halina Rubin’s Journeys with my mother, and Susan Varga’s Heddy and me. I liked the way these daughters blended the forms of biography and memoir to produce something substantial yet engagingly personal. Then there were the two essay-collection-memoirs, Fiona Wright’s Small acts of disappearance and Georgia Blain’s Births deaths marriages, which played with the form in a different way. And oh dear, I loved them all, but I’ll name just one more, Gerald Murnane’s Something for the pain. My how I loved the sly way he told us about his wider life through describing his love of the turf.
  • Indigenous Australian writers: Shamefully, I only read four works by indigenous Australians, but at least I continued my education into indigenous Australian life and culture. I’ll name just two: Ali Cobby Eckermann’s beautiful and generous historical fiction verse novel Ruby Moonlight, and Bruce Pascoe’s more overtly political Dark emu.
  • Elizabeth Harrower, A few days in the country and other storiesShort stories galore: As always, I read a goodly number of short stories this year, though fewer complete collections than in 2015. The standout collection was Elizabeth Harrower’s A few days in the country and other stories. Such a great read, I’d recommend it to anyone. Debut author Cassie Flanagan Willanski’s Here where we live was also an excellent read particularly for telling about life in remoter parts of Australia. My favourite individual short stories included Ted Chiang’s “The story of your life” (adapted to the film Arrival) and the group of stories I read from Christina Stead’s Ocean of story for Lisa’s Christina Stead Reading Week.
  • From elsewhere: I read only two overseas works this year that weren’t English or American, but both were truly excellent. One was the African classic, Chinua Achebe’s Things fall apart, which I’ve been wanting to read for years. The other was Pierre Lemaitre’s contemporary Prix Goncourt winning novel, The great swindle. Excellent as they were, I must try to do better next year. My other favourite book from elsewhere was American author Anthony Doerr’s All the light we cannot see. Amazing how many stories can still be told, differently, about the Second World War.
  • Biggest surprise: I hadn’t read Stephen Orr before, but his pastoral novel The hands, which was one of my first reads of the year, is still vividly with me as the year closes. The way he captures the relationship, particularly through dialogue, between father and sons just bowled me over.
  • Biggest disappointment: This was  a surprise for one who loves classics, but I really wouldn’t have been sorry not to have read William Makepeace Thackeray’s The luck of Barry Lyndon.
  • The ones that got away: As always there were books I wanted to read during the year but just didn’t get to. Prime among them are Jenny Ackland’s The secret son, Larissa Behrendt’s Finding Eliza, Carmel Bird’s Family skeleton, and Kim Mahood’s Position doubtful (another memoir!) Roll on 2017.

Some stats …

For my interest really:

  • 65% of the authors I read were women (2% less than 2015)
  • 32% of the works I read were not by Australian writers (5% more than 2015!)
  • 63% of my reading was fiction (short, long or in-between!) (10% less than 2015)
  • 35% of the works I read were published before 2000 (a whopping 15% more than 2015)

A couple of interesting trends here. There’s the significant reduction in fiction, which is partly due to the big jump in memoirs (about which see above!) And, while I like to read contemporary authors, I also love delving into the past, so I’m pleased to see the increased number of works before 2000. Surprisingly, I managed to read more works overall than last year – a big plus. However, once again, I made woeful inroads into my TBR so, to get me off to a good start, I hereby proclaim that my first 2017 review WILL be for a TBR book. I hope you like it. I’m sure enjoying reading it.

Overall, it was a good reading year, made especially so by you who joined me here. So, a big thankyou for reading my posts, engaging in discussion, recommending more books and, generally, being all-round great people to talk with. I hope 2017 is good to you, and look forward to seeing you here again whenever something takes your fancy.

What were your reading or literary highlights for the year?

Eudora Welty, A curtain of green (Review)

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This week I received the Library of America’s annual email in which they list their “Top 10 Story of the Week selections of 2016″. I’ve only read eleven of their selections this year, but two – Kate Chopin’s “A pair of silk stockings” (my review) and Willa Cather’s “Enchanted bluff” (my review) – are in their Top Ten. More interesting to me though is that it contains another writer I like, Eudora Welty. I read her book One writer’s beginnings and what is probably her most famous short story, “Why I live at the P.O.”, before I started blogging, so I decided to read this Top Ten story, “A curtain of green”.

weltycurtainofgreenWelty was a short story writer and novelist who wrote mostly about the South. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 with her novel The optimist’s daughter and, according to Wikipedia, was the first living writer to be published by the Library of America (LOA)! “A curtain of green” was one of her early stories. It provided the title for (and was included in of course) her first published collection of short stories (1941), which also includes “Why I live at the P.O.”

However, before I get to the story, I want to share a little from One writer’s beginnings. This book originated in a series of lectures, the inaugural ones apparently, she gave in 1983 at Harvard University, the William E Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilisation. The cover of my 1984 edition claims that it was on the New York Times Bestseller List for 46 weeks! Pretty impressive for a series of essays I think. She was born in 1909 in Jackson Mississippi, the eldest of three. From the opening pages of the book she tells us how her growing up contributed to her writing.

For example, in the first paragraph she mentions growing up “to the striking of clocks”. She’s not sure whether it’s because of her father’s Ohio family “having been Swiss back in the 1700s” but her family were all “time-minded” all of their lives:

This was good at least for a fiction writer, being able to learn so penetratingly and first of all, about chronology. It was one of a good many things I learned, almost without knowing it; it would be there when I needed it.

Surely there’s a little bit of the tongue-in-cheek in her reference to the Swiss origins? Anyhow, two pages in, and she’s talking about her parents’ respective reactions to the weather, her father’s caution regarding storms for example and her mother’s rejection of that “as a character failing”:

So I developed a strong meteorological sensibility. In years ahead, when I wrote stories, atmosphere took its influential role from the start. Commotion in the weather and inner feelings aroused by such a hovering disturbance emerged in dramatic form.

And so the book continues in this delightful manner, sharing her childhood with affection, perception and a wonderful sly wit … but now to “A curtain of green” in which meteorological conditions do, in fact, feature!

“A curtain of green” is about grief, but it starts

Every day one summer in Larkin’s Hill, it rained a little. The rain was a regular thing, and would come about two o’clock in the afternoon.

One day, almost as late as five o’clock, the sun was still shining …

It tells the story of Mrs Larkin whose husband had died the previous summer in a terrible accident – a tree, “a fragrant chinaberry”, had come crashing down on his car as he was arriving home. She had seen it happening, had believed her love would keep him safe. And so now, while the other women of the town sit inside “fanning and sighing, waiting for the rain”, Mrs Larkin is out in her garden, where she is now all the time, because “since the accident in which her husband had been killed, she had never once been seen anywhere else”. It’s a fertile garden, needs “cutting, separating, thinning and tying back” to keep the plants from “overreaching their boundaries and multiplying out of all reason”. But, Mrs Larkin is deranged with grief. She does none of this, just works incessantly, obsessively, planting

thickly and hastily, without stopping to think, without any regard for the ideas that her neighbours might elect in their club as to what constituted an appropriate vista, or an effect of restfulness, or even harmony of colour. Just to what end Mrs Larkin worked so strenuously in her garden, her neighbours could not see …

She doesn’t offer flowers when they’re sick or die, for example. I love how the language in this story just piles on, driving us forward this way and that, just like Mrs Larkin’s grief does to her. The garden, to the neighbours who had initially tried to support her, “had the appearance of a sort of jungle, in which the slight, heedless form of the owner daily lost itself”. It’s oppressive to us, but Mrs Larkin has isolated herself behind her “curtain of green”. The only person she tolerates in this garden, and then only occasionally, is Jamey, “the coloured boy who worked in the neighbourhood”.

At this point in the story, which is told third person, the perspective shifts from omniscient to subjective, to Mrs Larkin’s point-of-view, that is. We are now in the garden with her as her memory returns her to the day of the accident. Suddenly all is still, “everything had stopped again, stillness had mesmerised the plants …” Jamey infuriates her, with his “look of docility”, of being “lost in some impossible dream of his own”. She watches him – her hunger for his innocence suddenly overtaken by a fury at his youthfulness, at his being able to be lost in this, to her, “impossible dream”. She’s overwhelmed by the unaccountability of accident, of life and death, by the meaningless of it all, and wants to smash his innocent absorption – but then comes the rain. There are two more pages in the story after this, but I’ll finish here.

This story was written in 1938 – quickly written and easily published, according to LOA. LOA also tells us that in 1931, Welty and her mother had been present when her father died of leukaemia, and they quote Welty’s biographer Suzanne Marrs as saying that her mother “discovered solace in gardening”. She spent hours in her garden, most days, often with Eudora by her side. Welty, says Marrs, wrote in an unpublished essay that “its [the garden’s] peace and fragrance are soothing to frayed nerves when we are weary from contact or perhaps conflict with the everyday world.” This memory clearly informed her story of the grieving Mrs Larkin.

“A curtain of green” is a great read, for its exploration of how grief can derail you, making you, temporarily at least, a little mad; for its evocative writing which captures that sense of derailment, taking you right into that garden with Mrs Larkin; and for its resolution which offers hope without being simplistic about it. After such a year as this has been, it seems just the right story to end on. Happy New Year everyone!

Eudora Welty
“A curtain of green”
First published in: Southern Review (Autumn 1938).
Available: Online at the Library of America

Georgia Blain: Births deaths marriages: True tales (Review)

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Georgia Blain, Births deaths marriagesPoignant is a word I actively avoid in my review posts, as it’s such a review cliché, but sometimes a book really does call for it, and the late Georgia Blain’s essay-collection-cum-memoir, Births deaths marriages, is such a book. In the last essay, she talks of her mother, broadcaster, activist and non-fiction writer, Anne Deveson, trying her hand at fiction just as she, Blain, was trying non-fiction. She writes:

We had switched places, my mother and I. And we looked at each other. Both mothers. Both writers. Both trying on each other’s shoes, taking a few steps back, eyes on our feet, before we glanced across once again, curious as to how this had happened (“A room of one’s own (2)”)

The poignant thing, of course, is that these two who were so closely entwined in life, not just as mother-and-daughter but as writers, died within a few days of each other – with the sadly ironic twist that the daughter died first. It makes my heart break a little, something I wouldn’t have felt had I read it before these deaths. Such is the impact of context on our reading, eh?

Anyhow, onto the book. Births deaths marriages (the title has no separating commas) is the second memoir-in-essay-form that I’ve read this year, the first being Fiona Wright’s Small acts of disappearance. Both books follow a general chronological arc but the essay form makes it easy for this not to be strict, allowing the writers to follow tangential yet relevant threads. From here, though, the two “memoirs” depart, because the respective writers’ lives are very different. Wright, the younger writer, was writing primarily about her twenties and focused particularly on her experience of an eating disorder, while Blain was in her mid forties when writing hers. She was a published novelist and, significantly, had experienced a much more public life, not only because both her parents were public figures but also because of her mother’s own memoir, Tell me I’m here, about life with her schizophrenic son.

This book – with its intensely personal subject matter and its unusual form – offers rich opportunity for discussion. To do it justice, I’m going to have to narrow it, so I’m going to focus on form and style, but some content will push through along the way. The way I see it, there are two broad types of memoir, those which tell about lives most of us know little or nothing about (such as Frank McCourt’s Angela’s ashes, or, more obviously, celebrity memoirs) and those which are about lives much like ours. Georgia Blain’s falls into this latter category. For these ones to engage readers, they need to offer something illuminating about the lives we lead.

“the truth was a little more complex” (from “Getting in the boat”)

The first essay in Blain’s memoir is titled “A room of one’s own”. In it she reflects on her childhood, on how her mother would write about their family for newspaper columns and how reading these columns later, with their bland pictures that “did not accurately reflect who we were”, brought back the child she was, the child who wanted her family to be like the one in the columns, who thought all other families were like that and not like the messy reality she was experiencing. These bland columns are the antithesis of what Blain shares in her essays (and indeed of what Deveson herself shared in her memoir). It’s all about purpose I suppose. Newspaper columns tend to be more about entertainment – with perhaps some subtle messages about life – whilst memoirs, good ones anyhow, are about “truth”. If we don’t feel the memoirist is sharing the “truth” of her (or his) experience we are going to lose interest pretty quickly.

Blain convinces me that she is sharing her truths when, for example, she describes, in “The story my mother tells me” and “The outside country”, her fears about childbirth and her struggle to cope with the demands of motherhood. She exposes herself with soul-baring honesty when she shares her sense of disconnect, of being alone, of being “shattered” when her baby is born. She writes that she wanted to give her daughter “the place in my life that she needed and deserved, one that was without my terror and anxiety about loss of self” but it took several months for this to happen. She writes with similar honesty about her relationship with her husband Andrew. It takes some guts to write what she does.

In “Close to the bone”, Blain addresses more directly her writing life, and the difference between writing fiction, which she’d done until this book, and writing about herself, which she was now doing. Reflecting on her brother’s death, she says:

The complexity and rawness of an immediate response to pain is not easy to understand and recognise, let alone pin down in writing, in a photograph or in a film. The very act of capturing distorts. Once neatly contained, all that we felt is no longer unruly, unreasoned, immediate and wild. Perhaps this is why we hold these moments as truth. They cannot be replicated. Each time we try, we dilute their intensity, we confuse, holding up false images of this so-called truth that leave us reeling as we try to reconcile what we see encapsulated with what we have experienced.

Even her “truth”, the one she is writing, she sees, is not easy to grasp. She goes on:

I believed, and still do, that if I wrote about my own life and the lives of those I love, I had to tell the truth. But foolishly, I believed the truth lay only in the immediate…

These two excerpts reminded me of that David Hockney comment about happiness being a retrospective thing I wrote about recently, because I read them as her recognition that there are different truths – those immediate reactions and feelings, and those that come later. It’s this sort of reflection on “how” we live and interpret our lives which makes Births deaths marriages such a meaningful read.

I said that this memoir exemplifies the second type of my two simple categories, but I meant it when I defined them as being about “lives much like ours” because no life is the same. And so, Blain, like all of us, had her own set of challenges, including her control-freak, sometimes-violent father, and the tragic loss of her schizophrenic brother. One of the joys of her book lies in watching her explore and expose her own development, her learning not only to come to terms with these experiences in her life, but to use them to come to a more open, flexible way of understanding. She writes of “chasing absolutes”, of believing that “there was one truthful answer to every question” which she had to pin down, when in fact, as she learns, the truth lies in the “layers”.

In the end, there are no resolutions, she realises, but there are momentary happy endings along the way. She also realises that “writing about oneself” can “amount to more than a purely personal exercise”. It sure can, as she has proven here. This memoir is special – and not just because of the context in which I am reading it – but because it’s honest, because it doesn’t pretend to have it all sorted, because, in fact, it’s true – to her life and experience, and also to ours.

AWW Logo 2016Georgia Blain
Births deaths marriages: True tales
North Sydney: Vintage Books, 2008
ISBN: 9781742743981 (eBook)

Books given and received for Christmas, in 2016

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I did a “books given and received post” last Boxing Day, and decided to do it again, but after Boxing Day because this year Boxing Day coincided with Monday Musings, and I have another tradition for the last Monday Musings of the year. Anyhow, here goes with the books I gave and received this Christmas. There are not so many of them this year, for some reason.

  • Robyn Cadwallader, The anchoressFor Ma Gums, who has worked as a lexicographer, yet another word-oriented book: John Simpson, The word detective: Searching for the meaning of it all at the Oxford English Dictionary, which I bought on spec when I saw it in the National Library’s bookshop (I think). Simpson was once chief editor of the OED. Next year I really will have to get her something different.
  • For Brother Gums, an historian who loves walking: Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust, as the result of Stefanie’s (So Many Books) review. It even mentions Lizzie Bennet apparently.
  • For Sister-in-law Gums, who likes to think about things: The best Australian science writing of 2016 . I loved (my review) the 2015 edition so I’m hoping she will like this. (I was tempted to keep it for myself!) And SNAP, in one of those wonderful readerly coincidences, Brother and Sister-in-law Gums gave this book to Mr Gums – so I will now have an opportunity to read it after all!
  • For Gums’ Californian friend, who showed interest when I told her about this book in a letter: Robyn Cadwallader’s The anchoress (my review).
  • For Gums’ Californian friend’s daughter, who’s just finished her law degree and might be interested in some Aussie crime: Peter Temple’s The broken shore.
  • For Gums’ Californian friend’s other daughter, who is interested in things factual and, I think, scientific: The best Australian science writing of 2016. (This book did well this Christmas in our neck of the woods.)

I did do a little shopping to help out Ma Gums, and bought on her behalf for her grand-daughter, aka Daughter Gums, Maxine Beneba Clarke’s The hate race. (I’m hoping that I might get to read it too!)

As for what I received, a varied but much appreciated bunch:

  • From Parents Gum: Grahame Greene’s Travels with my aunt, because they knew that it’s on my reading group list for next year. They’re not silly: they know this is one book they’ve given me which they can be confident will get read within a reasonable time of their giving it to me.
  • From Brother and Sister-in-law Gums, who know my interest in indigenous Australian culture: Kanalaritja: An unbroken string: Honouring the tradition of Tasmanian Aboriginal shell stringing, supporting a touring exhibition (and, to go with it, an original, authentic – and gorgeous – shell string necklace.) A beautiful gift.
  • From my Californian friend, who reads my blog and with whom I correspond regularly by snail mail, and who, therefore, knows my reading taste well: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer prize-winning The sympathizer. A commenter on my review of Josephine Rowe’s A loving, faithful animal recommended this book, as did the present-giver in a letter, so I’m very pleased to have it.
  • From a Jane Austen group member (a lovely out-of-the-blue present): Helena Kelly’s Jane Austen: The secret radical. This sounds intriguing, and I can see that the first couple of chapters on Northanger Abbey will come in useful when my group discusses this, Austen’s first novel, in 2017.

Jane Austen ornament and pendantsAnd I also received a couple of other book related gifts from friends who know me too well: a pendant necklace with a quote from Jane Austen’s Pride and prejudice,”I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading”; and two gorgeous Jane Austen tree ornaments (a silhouette and a little figure). It pays, sometimes, to have obsessive interests!!

What about you? Any Christmas book news you care to report?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Australian Women Writers’ Challenge 2016

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AWW Logo 2016For the fifth year in a row, I’m devoting my last Monday Musings of the year to the Australian Women Writers Challenge*.

This year has been one of consolidation rather than of huge change for the Challenge, as we got used to our self-hosted site to which we moved in 2015. The big advantage of this move was that it enabled us to produce a single searchable database of all reviews logged since the challenge started. It now contains reviews for nearly 3,600 books across all forms and genres of Australian women’s writing, an increase of 20% on last year’s total. A good achievement n’est-ce pas?

Once again the Challenge ran some special events during the year, achieved some milestones, and introduced some new initiatives. These include:

A big thanks to author/researcher Jessica White for her special posts on diversity – the Migrant heritage, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage, and writers with a disability  posts – and to Kelly (Orange Pekoe Reviews) for creating the Bingo Challenge, which we hope to run again in 2017. And a shout out too to Brona, Debbie Robson and Elizabeth who often commented on my AWW round-up posts.

The Australian Women Writers’ Challenge is the only challenge I do (or have ever done). This year I posted 30 reviews for the challenge, three more than last year. I managed a similar variety in my reading, but only dipped once into my TBR pile (to read part of Christina Stead’s Ocean of story for Lisa’s ANZLitLovers’ Christina Stead Week). Last year, I challenged myself to tackle my TBR pile and I failed, miserably. I also let the ball drop this year in one of my favourite areas, classic Australian women’s fiction. I’m therefore making no promises, setting no goals (at least publicly!) for next year.

Anyhow, here’s my list of works read for this year (with links to the reviews):

Debra Adelaide, The women's pagesFICTION

Tegan Bennett Daylight, Six bedroomsSHORT STORIES

POETRY and VERSE NOVELS

Emma Ayres, CadenceNON-FICTION

As in each year, there are subtle differences in this year’s list, though none are big enough to suggest my reading tastes have changed! For example, last year 48% of the reviews were for novels, while this year only 40% were. Half of these were debut novels. This year saw a return to 2014’s heavy emphasis on Memoir in my non-fiction reading, though there was some interesting playing with form. Not only were a couple of memoirs told through essays, but I also read three mother-daughter stories which combined elements of memoir with biography.

aww2017-badgeAnyhow, if you are interested in the challenge, you can check it out here. The 2017 sign up form is ready so do consider joining up, as we welcome all – women and men – to join us. I’ll be there again. The challenge is also on Facebook, Twitter (@auswomenwriters), GoodReads and Google+.

Finally, a big thanks to Elizabeth and the rest of the team – including Lewis, our wonderful database developer – for making it all such a cooperative, and enjoyable experience. I look forward to seeing what 2017 brings.

* This challenge was instigated by Elizabeth Lhuede in 2012 in response to concerns in Australian literary circles about the lack of recognition for women writers. I am one of the challenge’s volunteers – with responsibility for the Literary and Classics area.

David Hockney at the National Gallery of Victoria

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David Hockney

David Hockney (from video at NGV)

It’s a while since I wrote about an art exhibition, not because I haven’t been to any but because this is a litblog (and I’m even less of an art critic than I am a literary one). However, I did feel the urge to write about the David Hockney Current exhibition, which is now showing at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), because I have a long-standing – if rather rudimentary – interest in him.

It all started when, early in my film librarian career, I selected for the library a documentary about Hockney. That would have been the late 1970s or early 1980s. I hadn’t heard of him before that, but I was attracted to his larger than life, big, bold, art. This film featured, among other works, his famous 1967 painting, “A Bigger Splash“. My next memorable encounter came about twenty years later when, in 1999, the National Gallery of Australia acquired Hockney’s immense work, “A Bigger Grand Canyon”, and we hot-footed it to the Gallery to see it (having seen the Canyon itself several times in the preceding two decades). Looking at it again now, I can see that the issues Hockney was exploring then, including point-of-view in place and time or, as the NGV describes it, “multi-point perspective”, are still fascinations for him now – even more so, in fact, given the way visual media has developed in our digital age. And so, this current exhibition, which focuses on his work of the last decade, includes not only canvas paintings, but digital prints, videos and iPad/iPhone drawings.

Bigger Trees on Water detail

“Bigger Trees Near Warter” (large detail)

I’m not going to write a comprehensive report of the exhibition, but just share a few thoughts and highlights, starting with his work “Bigger Trees Near Warter ou Peinture en Plein Air pour l’age Post-Photographique“. (Are you seeing an ongoing “bigger” theme here!!) Like the Grand Canyon painting, it’s a multi-canvas work. Its dominant image is, by definition (not that painting titles are always so easily defined), trees. In the delightful 9-minute video interview with Hockney, which was created especially for this exhibition, he says that he has “always liked trees”. (A man after my own heart, obviously). The painting occupies the whole wall of one gallery room, with the other three walls containing digital same-size-as-the-original prints of the work. Beautiful – and rather mind-bending to be in a room surrounded by the original and its copies.

Enlarge iPad artBut, the exhibition comprised other works as well. The first thing that confronts attendees is a wall containing a row of iPhones, each containing drawings by Hockney. These little works are whimsical and fun, but have a serious edge too, reflecting, for example, on how new media can be used to create – and share – art. There are also bigger (ha!) screens displaying iPhone and iPad art in a larger easier-to-see format. These digital drawings include still lifes, portraits and landscapes, including some stunning, very large ones of Yosemite National Park (which, like the Grand Canyon in our gallery, had increased appeal for Mr Gums and me because of our familiarity with the park).

Some of the digital drawings are animated to show Hockney’s drawing process. Made me think – almost – that I could do it too but, funnily, whenever I put finger or stylus to a screen the result never looks quite as it does in my mind’s eye. The curators’ label suggests that these works “demonstrate that for Hockney art-making is a daily activity.” Hockney suggested in the interview that drawing had been dying until these little devices started bringing it back. He was amazed, he said, that the telephone could bring drawing back! Anyhow, these digital works, whether tiny or large, made for fascinating viewing, but there were so many of them it was impossible to take them all in. If I lived in Melbourne I’d happily go back.

Barry Humphries portraitThe last work I want to mention is a little different from the landscapes and still lifes. It occupied a long narrow hall/gallery and contained 82 (I think) recently painted acrylic portraits of Hockney’s family, friends, colleagues and other artists. I didn’t recognise any by face, except for Barry Humphries. In the interview, Hockney mentioned these portraits, each of which was painted in just 2 to 3 days, and said that he sees them as one work. He then quipped – partly seriously – that at his age he now sees all his life as one work. I love portraits and could have spent hours pondering each one – the poses, the expressions. Why did this one sit that way, but that one sit this way, for example. What did their choice of clothes tell us about them? (So many men seemed to wear blue and cream/beige. Not Humphries though!)

Finally, I want to share another comment Hockney made in his interview. He said that “happiness is a retrospective thing”. Interesting, we thought. Of course, as life is happening we feel things – happy, sad, proud, and so on – but I think his point is that it’s only in retrospect that we can obtain a “real” perspective on the sense of those times. That is, at the time it is experienced, happiness, for example, is usually an ephemeral thing, or so it seems to me. In that sense it could be described as superficial? But later, we can look back, reflect and perhaps comprehend a more mature, lasting form of the feeling? I’m not sure what he meant, but this is the meaning I came away with!

It’s a great exhibition. It can be easily enjoyed on the surface, but if you spend time with it, you can see things going on underneath. Hockney comes across as whimsical, charming, engaging but also alert, ever-curious, always-thinking, and above all excited by new ideas (or perhaps, by new ways of exploring old ideas). We came away on a little high.

NB: In previous art posts I have not included images of the art for copyright reasons, but I’m now thinking that using a small number of low-resolution pics will not infringe copyright.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Spotlight on Georgia Blain

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Courtesy: Annette Marfording

Courtesy: Annette Marfording

This is the fifth in my occasional series of Spotlight posts inspired by Annette Marfording’s Celebrating Australian Writing: Conversations with Australian Authors, and this time I’m featuring Georgia Blain who died just over a week ago, three days before her mother Anne Deveson also died. In a comment on my Vale post, Annette Marfording reminded me that she’d interviewed Georgia Blain for her book and so, with her support, I decided to make Blain the subject of this week’s Monday Musings.

Marfording’s interview took place in 2010, at which time Blain had published 4 novels, one of which had been shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award; plus a memoir, which was shortlisted for the Nita B Kibble Life Writing Award, and a young adult novel. She had also been named in 1998 as one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelists. At the time of her death, her eighth novel, Between a wolf and a dog had won the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction and been shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. In addition, her first novel, Closed for winter, had been made into a film, and her second novel, Candelo, had been optioned for a film. Not a bad record for a writer who wasn’t, really, on everyone’s lips!

Marfording asked her, as she asked many writers, what awards meant to her. Blain simply said it “was incredibly pleasing” to be shortlisted and also to have one’s work made into a film, although on the latter she commented on the work required from others and that she “applauded” them more than herself for that. Sounds pretty humble to me. Later in the interview, when asked about her role as a judge, she comments on the degree of serendipity involved.

Anyhow, Marfording then moved on to talk about her most recent book, the young adult novel Darkwater which was published in 2010. She asked the question that I often want to ask writers who set novels in the recent past, which is why she’d set her novel in the 1970s rather than the present. This question is particularly pertinent when you are talking about a young adult novel because, as Marfording commented, “the young adults for whom the book is written weren’t alive then”. The simple – and probably obvious – answer which Blain gave is that it was the time of her own youth. She was writing what she knew, in other words. However, she also said she wanted the challenge of writing about a time when there was no technological communications – no mobile phones or texting or emailing, etc. And it was also a fascinating time she said that encompassed both “great conservatism and great liberation”.

Marfording then notes that her adult novels were also set in this period, and wondered, given Blain was only a child then, how she’d managed to evoke the mood so well. Blain replied that, being the period she grew up in, it “soaked” into her.

Moving onto subject matter, Marfording asked Blain about her focus on darkness, on pain and the loss of a major character. Blain responds not only that loss and pain are part of life but that they can lead to positive things.  I wonder whether she remembered this when six years later she wrote in The Saturday Paper about her initial hope that there’d been a mistake, followed by attempts to rationalise and intellectualise her prognosis, and finally her realisation that she needed to try

to live alongside this unwelcome guest, a guest whose presence cannot be ignored, and must be accommodated in the best way I am able.

Can we see this realisation – and her later understanding of what it means “to truly love” – as some of those positive things? It’s a hard – tragic – way to learn these lessons, isn’t it?

Interestingly, particularly given their deaths, Marfording comments on what she saw as “the autobiographical base” to Blain’s novels and whether there was “an element” of her trying to understand her mother and their relationship. Blain said that she didn’t see it this way, and that she didn’t believe in writing for catharsis. In fact, she said, that this can be self-indulgent and that she writes when she has some measure of resolution. But she followed this up with

of course I constantly draw on my life when I write and I think any writer who says to you that they don’t is lying to you.

I like her calm reason, I must say. Later in the interview, Marfording returns to her relationship with her mother, from a different angle, that of being the child of writers. Blain’s response is interesting, and perhaps a little guarded, when she says she “thought Why bother hiding it? It’s part of who I am and it doesn’t bother me that much”. My understanding, I should add here, is that Blain had a good relationship with her mother but that the family did suffer under a physically violent father, Ellis Blain.

Here is an excerpt from her autobiographical essays, Births, deaths, marriages:

Detailing his extreme physical outbursts was also an easy way of making people understand why I had so little love for him. But there was so much I could not describe in neat episodes. His presence alone created tension; it was the threat of what he might do that kept us tiptoeing, scared, around him. Each night we ate dinner in silence, knowing that the wrong word, a dropped piece of cutlery, even the scrape of a chair could set him off. He would slam his fist down…

I’m not going to summarise the whole interview, of course, but I do want to share a few more things. One of these is in relation to researching her various settings. Blain responded that

I’m quite a lazy researcher [laughs] but I write about places that have had a strong impact on me, and I work from memory … “Candelo” was set in a town where we had holidays when we were young, and again, I did not go back and research there. I actually got the geography of the town completely wrong – I did a reading in Candelo once and readers almost chased me out of town – but that actually doesn’t matter to me because what I’m doing is drawing on the impact that the place had on me.

I hear you, Georgia! I am one of those readers who doesn’t care about this sort of factual detail in a novel. I care about emotional truths, about whether they make sense to and move me, not about whether that hill is really here or over there. But, I often feel I’m in the minority. Anyhow, I wouldn’t have driven her out of town!

Marfording asked her about the impact of bad reviews, commenting on her reference to self-doubts, but once again Blain responds with a calm reason. She admits they can “knock you for a six” but then says that her main concerns are commercial. Will the bad review affect sales and/or the ability to find a publisher for the next book?

Finally, Marfording asked her about her favourite writers. Like Annette, like me, I’m guessing you’re interested in the answer? Well, they are Alice Munro and Richard Ford (his short stories specifically). In a 2008 article in The Australian, she also mentions Alice Munro, but this time alongside WG Sebald. Interesting choices don’t you think?

It’s an interesting interview. Blain says at one stage that maths was her best subject at school. I think you can see the clear, logical, mathematical brain at work here, a brain that, given what we know of the challenges she faced in her life, probably stood her in good stead – or, am I generalising too much?

Previous Spotlight posts:

Annette Marfording
Celebrating Australian Writing: Conversations with Australian Authors
Self published, 2015
273pp.
ISBN: 9781329142473

Note: All profits from the sale go to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. To find out where you can purchase this book, please check Marfording’s website.

 

Elizabeth Jolley, An innocent gentleman (Mini-Review)

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Elizabeth Jolley, An innocent gentlemanNote: this is a mini-review compiled from the notes I made when I read Elizabeth Jolley’s An innocent gentleman before blogging. I found them on some scrappy pieces of paper while decluttering and figured my blog is the best place to keep them … not floating in some drawer somewhere!

Most if not all of Elizabeth Jolley’s books that I’ve read deal with the difficulties in forming and maintaining meaningful human relationships. Of course, a lot of writers do this – after all people and their relationships are the stuff of life. But Elizabeth Jolley tends to deal with the disturbing or unsettling sides of our relationships. She explores the ‘feelings’ people have but often don’t admit to, such as feelings for a person of the same sex or for a person for whom they should not have feelings. This might be because of age or power differences or infidelity. She shows how difficult it is – though we desire it so – to maintain a long-term intimate or deep relationship that is equal on all levels (physical, intellectual, social, material, etc). And she usually does it with a deep sense of irony. In this, she is, to me, a contemporary Jane Austen.

And so, in An innocent gentleman, Jolley’s last novel, we have three main characters – Henry, Muriel and Mr Hawthorne – who have a complicated set of relationships with each other based on wishes and desires for something deeper, happier. The setting is World War 2, and the woman, Muriel, has married ‘down’ according to her mother. Henry is her husband, and Mr Hawthorne is the ‘classy’ man they meet. If you suspect the “eternal triangle” you’d be right, sort of, but in Jolley’s hands it doesn’t play out to script. The relationships that develop are complex … and play, for one thing, on the notion of innocence.

There is an autobiographical element to this too. In her essay collection, Central Mischief, Jolley writes about her mother’s long-running adulterous relationship, which her husband, Jolley writes, “grudgingly accepted”. He was an older, more well-off man. It’s not surprising, really, that Jolley explored complex, odd-to-many-of-us relationships.

Anyhow, besides these three, there are some secondary characters – Muriel’s mother, their neighbours the Tonkinsons, the two little daughters, and Victor and Miss Morton – who circle around these characters, being affected by or affecting the central relationships. This is very Jane Austenish too, in fact, this focus on a small range of characters operating in a small sphere, which comprises, in this case, a town in the midlands and a trip to London. In Jolley’s hands, though, there’s often a suffocating sense of lives too well controlled, too small, and of a desire, sometimes, to break out.

Jolley quotes Wordsworth: ‘…There is a dark/Invisible workmanship that reconciles/Discordant elements, and makes them move/In one society’. And so, as in most of her books, there is not a final resolution where the characters find their place, resolve their issues. There is just a point in time where they have learnt something about themselves and resolve to keep on going, doing the best they can ‘in one society’, but what that best entails is another thing.

Lisa at ANZLitLovers is also an Elizabeth Jolley fan, and has reviewed this book.

AWW Logo 2016Elizabeth Jolley
An innocent gentleman
Ringwood: Viking, 2001
258pp.
ISBN: 9780670912155