Sherman Alexie, War dances (#Review)

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Sherman Alexie’s “War dances” is the fourteenth and last story in the anthology, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers. It is also the longest story in the book, and the most intriguing in form.

Sherman Alexie

Anthology editor Bob Blaisdell introduces Alexie as “born in 1966, of Coeur d’Alene and Spokane heritage”, meaning he is from US’s Pacific northwest. Describing Alexie as the “most colloquial” of the writers in the anthology, Blaisdell also says that he writes “with a confessional voice that is often humorous”. Not surprisingly, given Alexie is a contemporary and award-winning author, Wikipedia provides quite a lot more, too much in fact to share here in even summary form, so click on the link if you are interested. There are personal and political controversies there, as well as several literary awards.

Essentially, though, Wikipedia describes him as “a Native American novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter, and filmmaker”. And, citing a couple of sources, Wikipedia says this about his themes:

Alexie’s poetry, short stories, and novels explore themes of despair, poverty, violence, and alcoholism in the lives of Native American people, both on and off the reservation. They are lightened by wit and humor. According to Sarah A. Quirk from the Dictionary of Library Biography, Alexie asks three questions across all of his works: “What does it mean to live as an Indian in this time? What does it mean to be an Indian man? Finally, what does it mean to live on an Indian reservation?” The protagonists in most of his literary works exhibit a constant struggle with themselves and their own sense of powerlessness in white American society.

“War dances”

“War dances”, as I wrote above, has an intriguing form. Blaisdell writes in his introductory Notes for the anthology that “we feel as if the writer [Alexie] is discovering the story himself and extending conventional short story boundaries as he composes it: we encounter an interview a checklist, a poem, a critique of that poem and continual jokes and revelations”.

Now, as far as I can tell, the “story” titled “War dances” comes from a book of short stories of the same name. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2010. GoodReads’ entry for the book describes it as “a virtuoso collection of tender, witty, and soulful stories that expertly capture modern relationships from the most diverse angles.” My problem is that I don’t know whether the “story” in Blaisdell’s anthology is a coherent excerpt from this book, or whether Blaisdell has selected disparate pieces to represent the work as a while. Whichever it is, I found an online version in The New Yorker. It comprises essentially the same content, with just a few differences that suggest some editing has happened between the versions. Also, in Blaisdell’s book the short pieces are numbered 1 to 16, while in The New Yorker they are not. None of this is probably germane to my comments so I’ll say no more. Consider yourselves informed!

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this piece (these pieces). The quotes I’ve shared about his work all ring true from what I read here – the mix of forms (lists, poems, interviews, and so on), the wit and humour, the “diverse angles”. It is a work that draws from Native American experience, but that encompasses wider personal and political issues.

By personal issues, I mean his dealing with significant familial relationships, and by political, I mean his recognition that Native Americans don’t exclusively suffer from the socioeconomic (including health) ramifications of racial discrimination. While the pieces seem disparate, there is an overall narrative arc concerning the narrator’s own health – he is diagnosed with a meningioma – and his father’s. There are also recurring motifs which connect many of the pieces – insects, like Kafka’s bug (or cockroach), being one. Here is a scene from the first person narrator visiting his father in hospital. You can see the pointed use of bees here:

How had this change happened? For the first sixty-seven years of his life, my father had been a large and dark man. And now he was just another pale and sick drone in a hallway of pale and sick drones. A hive, I thought, this place looks like a beehive with colony collapse disorder. (4, Blankets)

The imagery here is clear, but not laboured. Alexie doesn’t, in general, labour his points but lets humour do the talking. The second last piece comprises questions for his dying father, the first one being

True or False?: when a reservation-raised Native American dies of alcoholism it should be considered death by natural causes. (15, Exit Interview for My Father)

There are many references to race, and to its construction by other in the determination to distinguish and separate, while for our narrator, no such distinction truly exists:

And then I saw him another Native man … Well, maybe he was Asian; lots of those in Seattle. He was a small man, pale brown, with muscular arms and a soft belly. Maybe he was Mexican, which is really a kind of Indian too, but not the kind that I needed. It was hard to tell sometimes what people were. Even brown people guess the identity of other brown people. (4, Blankets)

This is followed by a self-deprecating racist joke … the reason a Mexican was not the kind of Indian our narrator needed was because he was looking for a blanket for his shivering, hospitalised father, and, well, Indians do blankets don’t they! The dialogue with the man, who is indeed Indian, is priceless.

So, these pieces build up. Entertaining to read, with their varied forms and chatty but cleverly humorous style, they convey specific truths about racism, and larger ones about identity, change and loss. In terms of this work at least, I’d say Sarah Quirk’s above-quoted three questions nail it. “War dances” – including for its very title – makes a worthy conclusion to this anthology.

(Thanks to Carolyn for this book.)

Sherman Alexie
“War dances” (orig. pub. 2009)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 104-127
ISBN: 9780486490953

Available online, with some differences, at The New Yorker (August 10 and 17, 2009)

Sonya Voumard, Tremor (#BookReview)

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As I’ve previously reported, Sonya Voumard’s short memoir, Tremor, is one of the two winners of this year’s Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Publishing Prize. Earlier this month, I reviewed the fiction winner, P.S. Cottier and N.G. Hartland’s novella The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin. Now it’s Voumard’s turn, with her book on living with a neurological movement disorder called dystonia.

While essentially a memoir, Tremor also fits within that “genre” we call creative nonfiction. The judges would agree, I think, given their comment that Tremor is “notable for its compellingly astute interweaving of the author’s personal experience with our broader societal context where people with disabilities, often far more challenging than her own, try to adapt to the implicit expectations and judgements that surround them” (back cover). The interweaving of something personal with something wider is a common feature of creative nonfiction, but what seals the deal for me is its structure. Tremor has a strong – subjective – narrative arc that propels the reader on, with more objective information providing the necessary support.

The narrative opens on December 3, 2020, the day Voumard is to undergo brain surgery for her condition. It leaves us in no doubt that what we are about to read is a very personal journey. “I am”, she writes on this first page, “a hairless head on top of a flimsy cotton gown and long compression socks”. But then, two sentences later, she opens a new paragraph with, “as I wait to be taken to the operating theatre, I channel my inner journalist. I’m on a news assignment for which I have already gathered some key facts.” And just like that, we are in journalist mode, with Voumard describing her condition and the relatively new treatment she is about to receive, followed by some facts and figures. Around 800,000 Australians, she informs us, experience tremors of the body, and about 70,000 of these have dystonia. A couple of paragraphs later we flash back to early 1960s Melbourne. Voumard is four or five years old, and her personal trajectory begins with an anecdote about dropping a bottle of milk, about being “clumsy, prone to dropping things”, but also being “a risk-taker”.

From here, the book takes us on the two journeys I’ve just intimated. There’s the mostly chronological one tracking her life with dystonia until we arrive – at the end of the book – back at the beginning with her surgery and its aftermath. And there’s her exploration of dystonia, its causes, diagnosis, and treatment. Voumard binds these two journeys together with her astute, and empathetic, reflections and analyses. She knows what it’s like to live with a disability, even if early on she didn’t recognise it as such.

So, for example, she chronicles the tactics she’d use to hide her shaking, in order to get jobs and then to demonstrate she could do them (when clearly she could). She would sit on her hands, refuse offers of drinks, self-medicate with alcohol. Whatever it took to hide her condition. She talks about navigating a medical world that is so “siloed” that diagnoses ranged from the “psychogenic” (due to “some sort of failure of womanhood, an unfulfilled yearning, a cloak for something else”) to the “purely physical” (like a sports injury or from computer use) – depending on the speciality she was dealing with – when it was something else altogether. She touches on the cost of treatment, the overall politics of medicine, the gender issues which see women’s conditions so often dismissed.

And, lest I’ve given the wrong impression, she does this not only through her own experiences, but through those of others – met personally, or found through her research – ensuring that Tremor is not a “misery memoir” but something bigger, that contributes to our understanding of how people navigate a world in which they don’t fit the norm. This navigation has a few prongs: the obvious ones relate to coping with the physical limitations, discomfort, and/or pain the condition brings; and the less visible ones concern managing your expectations and aspirations, while also dealing with how people interact with you. Voumard shares the story of a woman who had suffered for over twenty years from cervical dystonia before she got a diagnosis. While diagnosis didn’t bring a cure, “identifying her condition had helped her to live her life more calmly, to not try to do too much and to understand something of others’ suffering”.

Voumard, you’ve probably realised by now, packs a lot into the 20/40 form (that is, into 20,000 to 40,000 words). At the winners’ conversation, she said there is the assumption that to be marketable you need to write 55,000 plus words. She had the bones, and had then started filling them out, but it was just “flab”. The competition, and then Julian Davies’ editing guidance, taught her that she had a good “muscular story”. So she set about “decluttering”. The end result is interesting, because this book doesn’t have that spare feeling common to short works. Tremor feels tight – there’s little extraneous detail – but not pared back to a single core.

Voumard, in fact, covers a lot of ground. She uses the Eurydice Dixon murder case, for example, to epitomise her ongoing interest in media and reporting, particularly regarding structural disadvantage and social justice. She also contextualises the latter stages of her journey against the 2019 bushfires, the 2020-2021 pandemic and lockdowns, and the 2022 floods in NSW’s northern rivers. Why all this? The subtitle explains it. This book, this “tremor”, is not just about a movement disorder but about something bigger:

My more recent thinking about disability has strengthened my belief in the urgent need to privilege the voices of others more marginalised than mine. But I also cling to the concept of freedom of speech – not as a neoliberal, tabloid-news defender of hate speech – but as someone striving to find ways to respond to the challenges of a democratic society that is becoming more disordered.

Tremor is another beautiful, thoughtful product of the Finlay Lloyd stable. Recommended.

Read for Novellas in November, because, while not a novella, it is a short work.

Sonya Voumard
Tremor: A movement disorder in a disordered world
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd, 2024
129pp.
ISBN: 9780645927023

Review copy courtesy Finlay Lloyd.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Favourite fiction 2024

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Around this time of December, I have, for a few years now, shared favourite Aussie reads of the year from various sources. The specific sources have varied a little from time to time. Last year, a significant source – The Sydney Morning Herald/The Age – became unavailable to me as it is now paywalled, and I haven’t prioritised going to the library to access the paper. I have no problem with paywalling. We should pay for journalism, and I do, but for different news sources (such as The Canberra Times, because it’s my local; The Guardian via its app; The Saturday Paper and The Monthly digital editions; and The Conversation by donation). Not being able to access The Age/SMH is a bit disappointing, because theirs is a comprehensive listing. I’d love it if more sites offered the option to buy individual articles.

Anyhow, these lists are all subjective, of course. Plus, the pickers vary. There are critics and reviewers, commentators and subject specialists, and publishers and booksellers. Also, different pickers use different criteria, besides the fact that what they are asked to do, in the first place, varies. For example, some pickers are “allowed” to name several books while others are limited to “one” best (or favourite). Further, as The Conversation wrote, these lists rely not only on what each person has read, but what they remember, all of which means this exercise of mine is more serendipitous than authoritative. But, I think it is still interesting!

As always, I’m only including the Aussie choices, but I am providing links, where they exist, to the original article/post so you can read all about it yourselves, should you so wish.

Here are the sources I used:

  • ABC RN (radio broadcaster), in which presenters and guests named their recommendations from their reading of the year
  • Allen & Unwin (publisher) email, which shared one favourite A&U book per staff member
  • Australian Financial Review (newspaper, traditional and online), which shared “the top picks from our journalists to make your summer reading list sizzle” 
  • The Conversation (online news source), which invited 30 of their writers, “from fields as disparate as wildlife ecology and mathematics to literature and politics, to share their best books of 2024”, as well as letting the Books and Ideas team name theirs!
  • The Guardian (online news source), which promotes its list as “Guardian Australia’s critics and staff pick[ing] out the best of the best”
  • Readings (independent bookseller), which has its staff “vote” for their favourite books of the year, and then lists the Top Ten in various categories – Australian fiction, picture books, international fiction, junior & middle grade fiction, nonfiction, and adult nonfiction.

I apologise in advance for those of you who love poetry, nonfiction, and children’s books – which I also enjoy – but to keep this post a manageable length, I have decided this year to limit the list to my main interest, fiction.

Novels

  • Robbie Arnott, Dusk (Michaela Kalowski and Kate Evans, ABC RN; James Bradley, The Guardian; Readings Staff; see my CWF conversation) (Lisa’s review)
  • Ella Baxter, Woo woo (Bec Kavanagh, The Guardian; Readings Staff)
  • Brian Castro, Chinese postman (Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, The Conversation)
  • Melanie Cheng, The burrow (Jason Steger, ABC RN; Steph Harmon, The Guardian; Readings Staff; on my TBR)
  • Pitaya Chin, The director and the demon (Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen, The Guardian)
  • Miranda Darling, Thunderhead (Readings Staff)
  • Emma Darragh, Thanks for having me (Readings Staff)
  • Michelle de Kretser, Theory & practice (Julianne Van Loon, The Conversation; Susan Wyndham, The Guardian; on my TBR)
  • Alison Edwards, Two daughters (Jess, Allen & Unwin)
  • Lexi Freiman, The Book of Ayn (Michaela Kalowski, ABC RN)
  • Katerina Gibson, The temperature (Readings Staff)
  • Sara Haddad, The sunbird (Jumana Bayeh, The Conversation)
  • Dylin Hardcastle, A language of limbs (Kate Evans)
  • Anita Heiss, Dirrayawadha (Charmaine Papertalk-Green, The Conversation; see my CWF Conversation)
  • Heather Taylor Johnson, Little bit (Jason Steger, ABC RN)
  • Malcolm Knox, The first friend (James Bradley, The Guardian)
  • Siang Lu, Ghost cities (Beejay Silcox, The Guardian; Readings Staff)
  • Catherine McKinnon, To sing of war (Michaela Kalowski and Kate Evans, ABC RN; see my CWF Conversation)
  • Emily Maguire, Rapture (Rafqa Touma, The Guardian; see my CWF conversations one and two) (Lisa’s review)
  • Murray Middleton, No church in the wild (Readings Staff)
  • Louise Milligan, Pheasants Nest (Eleanor, Allen & Unwin)
  • Kylie Mirmohamadi, Diving, falling (Sian Cain, The Guardian)
  • Liane Moriarty, Here one moment (Cosima Marriner, Australian Financial Review)
  • Bruce Pascoe, Imperial harvest (Joseph Cummins, The Guardian)
  • Ailsa Piper, For life (Michaela Kalowski, ABC RN)
  • Jordan Prosser, Big time (Steph Harmon, The Guardian)
  • Jock Serong, Cherrywood (Dennis Altman, The Conversation) (Lisa’s review)
  • Inga Simpson, The thinning (Kate Evans, ABC RN; James Bradley, The Guardian) (Brona’s review)
  • Jessica Tu, The honeyeater (Anabel, Allen & Unwin)
  • Tim Winton, Juice (Michaela Kalowski, ABC RN; Sian Cain, The Guardian; Readings Staff; on my TBR)
  • Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard devotional (Cosima Marriner, Australian Financial Review) (my review)
  • Evie Wyld, The echoes (Readings Staff)

Short stories

  • Ceridwen Dovey, Only the Astronauts (Cassie McCullagh, ABC RN) (Melanie’s review)
  • Fiona McFarlane, Highway Thirteen: Stories (Jo Case, Honorable Mention, The Conversation; Kate Evans, ABC RN; Ash, Allen & Unwin) (Brona’s review)

Finally …

It’s interesting to see what books feature most. Popularity doesn’t equal quality, but it does provides a guide to the books that attracted the most attention in the year. Of last year’s six most mentioned books, three did receive significant notice at awards time, particularly the most popular 2023 pick, Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy (as I noted in a recent post). The other two of the six which also featured well at awards time were Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie and Charlotte Wood’s Stone yard devotional.

This year, I have a bit of help with identifying the most popular picks, because, thanks to Colin Steele again, I can report that Books + Publishing (an online book trade site) listed the most mentioned Australian books from five sources, three of which I’ve accessed (Guardian Australia, ABC RN and the Australian Financial Review) and two of which I’ve not been able to (The Age/Sydney Morning Herald and Australian Book Review)

These are the fiction books which received at least three mentions across the publications were (in alphabetical order):

  • Ella Baxter, Woo woo
  • Melanie Cheng, The burrow 
  • Michelle de Kretser, Theory & practice
  • Malcolm Knox, The first friend 
  • Emily Maguire, Rapture 
  • Tim Winton, Juice 
  • Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard devotional 

To these, I would add, from my sites:

  • Robbie Arnott, Dusk
  • Fiona McFarlane, Highway Thirteen

In 2024, I read five books from 2023’s lists, three novels (Shankari Chandran’s Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens, Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie and Charlotte Wood’s Stone yard devotional) and two works of nonfiction (Anna Funder’s Wifedom, and Richard Flanagan’s Question 7). I would love to have read more, but I can attest that those I read were all worthy favourites.

So, what has caught my eye from this year’s list. Those on my TBR, of course, and those I heard about at this year’s Canberra Writers Festival. Several more have now caught my eye, but as I’m unlikely to read many of them, I’ll just keep them to myself, and pass the baton over to you for your …

Thoughts – on this or lists from your neck of the wood?

Shirley Hazzard, The bay of noon (#BookReview)

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Shirley Hazzard’s novella, The bay of noon, has been in my sights for a long time, but finally, this Novellas-in-November year, I managed to get it out of my sights and into my hands. It’s the first of two novellas I read for the month, but the second to review. Such was my November (and we are now well into December!)

Published in 1970, The bay of noon was Hazzard’s second novel. It was one of six books nominated for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010. This was a special award created to, in effect, right a wrong which occurred when a change in the Booker Prize rules resulted in books published in 1970 missing out on a chance for Booker glory. The award was decided by public vote, with JG Farrell’s Troubles emerging the victor.

I’ve read three books by Hazzard before blogging, but since then I’ve just read one short story – “The picnic” – for the 1962 Club. In my post on that story, I referred to a review in The Guardian of Shirley Hazzard’s Collected stories. The reviewer Stephanie Merritt writes that “Hazzard’s recurring themes here – enlarged upon in her novels – are love, self-knowledge and disappointment”.

This is true of The bay of noon, which tells of a young Jenny, who, though born in England, had been sent to Cape Town with other young children to escape the Blitz. Post-war she was reunited with her older brother but, realising that her love for him was unhealthy, she leaves England to take up a job with NATO in Naples, bringing me to another of Hazzard’s recurring themes, that of young women leaving home to find their place. I understand from her biography that Hazzard herself worked for NATO in Naples in the timeframe this book is set, so she knows whereof she writes – which is not to say that she is writing her life. This is fiction, so while Hazzard draws on her own experiences, Jenny’s story is not hers.

Anyhow, we are in Naples, and it is some years after World War II, the mid 1950s in fact. Hazzard loved Italy, and her description of Naples at this time is imbued with a love born of knowing a place authentically, not as a sightseer. Naples is poor, and damaged both by war and a Mt Vesuvius eruption in 1944. Hazzard’s evocation of the city is a joy to read. A “through the looking-glass” city of both “apartness” and “continuity”, it also provides a moody, sometimes metaphoric, backdrop for our newcomer Jenny.

The storyline is straightforward. Knowing no-one outside of her work, Jenny follows up a letter of introduction to the charming and welcoming writer Gioconda, whose married lover, and Roman film director, Gianni, she also meets. Soon, however, through her work, Jenny also comes to know a Scotsman, Justin Tulloch, and a relationship of sorts develops between them. These relationships, and how they play out – with their mysteries and betrayals – form the nub of the story, but they are not what the novel is about. That is not so straightforward, but there are clues.

The title offers one clue, particularly, for me, the idea of “noon” as a time when the sun is at its highest, when the light is brightest, and so, perhaps representing a moment of clarity and, perhaps, also, of transition or change? Another clue is in the epigraph from Auden’s “Goodbye to the mezzogiorno” and in the opening paragraphs, both of which encompass ideas about memory and experience. The story is told first person through Jenny’s eyes, and there is a sense as the novel progresses of her working through an experience. Or, perhaps, not so much “working through” as allowing the passage of time to do its work. In the opening paragraphs, Jenny speaks of experiences building up “until you literally sink under them” but is also aware that, with the passage of time, memory, which was once “clouded with effects and what seemed to be their causes”, can become protective. As Auden concludes his poem:

… though one cannot always
Remember exactly why one has been happy,
There is no forgetting that one was.

But of course, not all memories are happy – and time can’t make them so. Gioconda, who had suffered loss, says

‘When people say of their tragedies, “I don’t often think of it now”, what they mean is it has entered permanently into their thoughts, and colours everything…’ (p. 67)

Just prior to this, she admits:

‘When I talk of it this way, now, to you, it all comes out as if there were some sequence, some logic, instead of moods, contradictions, alternatives. The design imposes itself afterwards. And is false, must be false.’ (p. 66)

It’s a curious but beguiling novel. The writing has a formal, intellectual – almost dispassionate, and sometimes elegiac – tone. It feels as though it belongs to a much earlier time, earlier in a way than the time in which it is set. This works somehow, partly because of Hazzard’s clear and measured prose, partly because the characters themselves seem to belong to an earlier time, and partly because Jenny is telling us the story from some time in the future.

As I read The bay of noon, I kept trying to place it within a wider literary tradition. It belongs, in part, to those stories about young people being taken under the wing by more experienced elders. Jenny observes the world she is drawn into, gradually becoming a more active and confident player in it. However, an Englishwoman, she remains an outsider, so retains her observer status which, over time enables her to see some realities she had missed in the first flush.

This is not a simple coming-of-age story, as it might look on the surface. Jenny is not an ingenue, but neither is she, at the start, experienced enough to understand the complex emotions and tragedies her older friends have experienced. Moreover, Hazzard has set the novel in a time that was itself complex, as Europe, and Naples specifically, was emerging from the war and – hmmm, was what? I wanted to say remaking itself, but that’s not the sense we get of Naples. It’s more one of being itself.

Towards the end, Jenny, reflecting on that past time in Naples, likens it to a

vineyard that had been left to flourish intact … among the deadly apartment buildings, not so much showing how it was as what has happened to it.

And that is the book’s ultimate meaning for me. It is not about who we are, what we hoped for, or where we have arrived, but about, in the closing words of the novel, “how we came”. Life, in other words, is a process, a journey that doesn’t always take us where we plan or expect.

Read for Novellas in November. Also read by Brona for the month. Read very late for the 1970 Year Club run by Karen (Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings) and Simon (Stuck in a Book)

Shirley Hazzard
The bay of noon
ISBN: 9781860494543
Virago Press, 2005 (originally published 1970)
182pp.

My reading group’s favourites for 2024

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Once again, I am sharing my reading group’s top picks for the year, because I know I’m not the only one who enjoys hearing about other reading groups.

I’ll start by sharing what we read in the order we read them (with links on titles to my reviews):

This year’s schedule was rather less diverse than we’ve done for a while, with eight of our eleven authors being Australian. (Next year will see some “correction” to this.) Last year we read only four Australian women, while this year we read seven (plus an Australian man). We did, however, schedule a classic (Vonnegut) which we omitted to do last year, but we read no books in translation, which is a bit ethnocentric of us. We read more nonfiction than we have for a while, with books by Flanagan, Funder and Winn, and we read fewer male authors, just two. However, despite the list looking less diverse from the author origin point of view, it is more diverse in subject matter, with nothing like the concentration we had last year on the status and condition of women’s lives. If I were pushed to name a flavour for this year, I’d say that there was a strong serving of (socio)political and/or philosophical issues in this year’s books.

The winners …

This year all eleven of our regularly attending members voted, meaning the maximum a book could get was 11 votes, and that there were 33 votes all up. The rules were the same. We had to name our three favourite works, and all were given equal weighting. This year, unlike last year, the top three positions were closely fought and we ended up with three clear winners. Last year, there was a runaway winner, and then two second and two third place getters. 2024’s top three places were:

  1. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (8 votes)
  2. Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko (7 votes)
  3. Stone Yard devotional by Charlotte Wood (6 votes )

Last year, the highly-commendeds right behind the two third place getters, but this year, the next two books were a few votes behind, at three votes each: Question 7 by Richard Flanagan and Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran.

As for my three picks, it was very tough (as it usually is). I got something out of every book I read, and many will stay with me for a long time, but, like last year, the group’s number 1 pick was not in my top three. This is not to say I didn’t like Demon Copperhead, because I did very much, but that I loved something else more. My three books, in alphabetical order, were Marion Halligan’s Wishbone, Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie, and Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard devotional. I chose these because Halligan just knows human beings and uses wit and humour to show us ourselves; because Lucashenko tells us our history from a First Nations perspective and does it with fierce honesty but also with humour and generosity; and because Wood explores the place of stillness, silence, solitude, contemplation in our noisy, troubling world.

Selected comments

Not everyone included comments with their picks, and not all books received comments, but here’s a flavour of what was said:

  • Demon Copperhead: Commenters used superlatives like “huge”, “outstanding”, “brilliant”, “powerful” but also commented on its exploration of poverty and disadvantage, and its relevance to now.
  • Edenglassie: Commenters focused on the value, the importance, of seeing our history through a First Nations perspective, and how it brought our intellectual knowledge to life.
  • Stone Yard devotional: Commenters talked about its gorgeous evocation of place (as we all know the Monaro), and loved its sparseness, introspection, meditativeness, its exploration of solitude and silence.
  • Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens: Commenters liked its exposing the traumas involved in human movement, of its mix of politics, culture and human suffering, with one calling Chandran a “true story-teller”.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, particularly if you were in a reading group this year. What did your group read and love?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Australia’s bestsellers, Black Friday week 2024

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With thanks to Colin Steele – Canberra’s wonderful Meet The Author convenor, who is also one of my major sources of literary news – I have another list for you, this one of the top selling books in this year’s Black Friday sales. Black Friday is a post-Thanksgiving Day sales event with a long and complicated history in the USA, which Wikipedia explains in detail if you are interested. Australia has no Thanksgiving Day so, how do these things happen? (That’s a rhetorical question, folks). And how does Black FRIDAY become Black WEEK or so? (Another rhetorical question.)

Wikipedia also explains that it came to Australia in the 2010s, with Apple Inc being an early promoter of Black Friday deals. However it happened, and whenever it happened, today, if you enter “book sales black friday Australia” into your search engine you will get myriad results from the big well-known online places like fishpond, booktopia and amazon, through the shopfront/online booksellers like QBD, Dymocks and Big W, to publishers like Penguin Books Australia and specialist organisations like the Children’s Book Council of Australia. Everyone, it seems, had Black Friday book sales.

There are many ways we can think about this – in terms of capitalism and the encroachment of American culture, for example – but when it comes to books, there is a silver lining if it results in more people buying books they otherwise may not have. I’ll leave that for you to think about (and maybe discuss in the comments). Meanwhile, whatever we might think, it has presented another interesting way (for those of us who love statistics) to see what people are buying – presumably not only for themselves but for Christmas gifts.

Colin obtained this list from (the pay-walled) Books+Publishing, on Friday, 6 December 2024. They reported that according to Nielsen BookData, 2024 Black Friday–week sales ‘saw volume sales in the Australian book market 40% higher than the average weekly sales in the four weeks prior’, with sales volume in the week of Black Friday up 4% compared to the week of the retail promotion in 2023.

Australia’s bestsellers during Black Friday week, ranked by copies sold from 24 to 30 November 2024, were:

Top five overall bestsellers

  1. Nagi Maehashi, RecipeTin Eats: Tonight (Macmillan): Australian
  2. Guinness world records 2025 (Guinness World Records)
  3. Lee Child & Andrew Child, In too deep (Bantam)
  4. John Farnham & Poppy Stockell, The Voice inside (Hachette): Australian
  5. Liane Moriarty, Here one moment (Macmillan): Australian

Top five adult fiction

  1. Lee Child & Andrew Child, In too deep (Bantam)
  2. Liane Moriarty, Here one moment (Macmillan): Australian
  3. Carissa Broadbent, The songbird and the heart of stone (Tor Bramble)
  4. Richard Osman, We solve murders (Viking)
  5. Sally Rooney, Intermezzo (Faber)

Top five adult nonfiction

  1. Nagi Maehashi, RecipeTin Eats: Tonight (Macmillan): Australian
  2. Guinness world records 2025 (Guinness World Records)
  3. John Farnham & Poppy Stockell, The Voice inside (Hachette): Australian
  4. Nagi Maehashi, RecipeTin Eats: Dinner (Macmillan): Australian
  5. Helen Garner, The season (Text): Australian

While I’m sure Australia’s booksellers were pleased with the sales, and will hope that these sales continue through the holiday season, and while it’s good to see a strong showing of Australian writers in the non-fiction list, it is disappointing to see Australian writers all but absent from the fiction list. The crime novels in the list aren’t Australian, nor the fantasy. Even the one literary fiction work is not Australian. Why is that? Why do more people want to read Sally Rooney than the recent works of Charlotte Wood, or Melissa Lucashenko, or Robbie Arnott, or any of our many other wonderful writers of literary fiction?

Any thoughts?

Six degrees of separation, FROM Sandwich TO …

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And here we are again at the last Six Degrees of the year. I’m not going to say the obvious about time, as you are all thinking it anyhow, I’m sure. Instead, I will just wish you the best of the season. I hope it’s a contented and peaceful one for you all. Now, on with the show … as always, if you don’t know how the #SixDegrees meme works, please check host Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book. This month, it’s another book I haven’t read. Indeed it’s one I hadn’t even heard of, but it was chosen because it’s a beach read (and here, down under, it’s beach-time!) The book is Sandwich by Catherine Newman, and it’s about a family’s annual vacation to Cape Cod in northeast USA.

Annie Dillard, The Maytrees

As frequently happens, I considered many options – beach read, a book about someone in the sandwich generation, a book with food in the title, a book by Anne Patchett who appears on the front cover, and so on. However, in the end I went with location, Cape Cod, and a family story, though my choice is a about a family which has lived on Cape Cod for generations rather than one which just visits there, The Maytrees, by Annie Dillard (my review).

Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

As best as I could determine, The Maytrees tells the story of a family over a period of around 60 years from the 1920s/30s to the 1990s. Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko (my review) is another family saga which spans most of the 20th century, from 1910 to 1989. It starts in a fishing village in Korea, before moving to Japan. (Provincetown in Cape Cod was also well known for fishing, though I suspect tourism might be its main industry now.)

Hoa Pham, Lady of the realm

Fishing village is my next link. Hoa Pham’s The lady of the realm (my review) opens in 1962, by introducing the protagonist Liên, who, as a young girl, has a prescient dream that the Viet Minh will come and destroy her fishing village. And thus starts a novel which explores the suffering wrought by war. The lady of the realm, like Pachinko and The Maytrees, spans multiple decades (albeit, in this case, in just 90 pages!)

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The sympathizer

Another book I’ve read about the Vietnam War is Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Sympathizer (my review). Quite coincidentally, I read it back in 2017 straight after reading The lady of the realm. They make, I said, an interesting pairing because both deal with the Vietnam (or American) War and its aftermath, both are written in first person from a Vietnamese character’s point of view, and both question what happens when revolutions win. But, the similarity ended there.

One of the reasons The Sympathizer differs from The lady of the realm, is that The Sympathizer is a satirical novel. Another anti-war satirical novel is Kurt Vonnegut’s now classic Slaughterhouse-Five (my review), so that’s an obvious next link – and I’ll leave it at that.

Book cover

Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim spends time in a Dresden prisoner-of-war camp, the titular Slaughterhouse-Five, a place to which he keeps returning in the novel (unless he’s escaped to the alien Tralfalmadore). Dorrigo in Richard Flanagan’s The narrow road to the deep north (my review) also spends time in a POW camp – in the same war, but on the Thai-Burma Railway. It seems the right link to conclude on, though I did, briefly, consider a more tricksy link related to my reading group.

So, we started with Kate’s book in Cape Cod America, and stayed there for the next book before travelling more broadly in Asia, Europe, Australia and some more in the USA (though not necessarily in this order). Four of today’s writers are American born or based, with just two, Hoa Pham and Richard Flanagan, being Australian born. The gender split is 50:50, which is unusual for me. But we have, unfortunately, spent too much time thinking about war, so let’s not any more. Instead, I’ll reiterate my opening wish for you all to have a wonderful holiday season, and leave you with my usual question …

Have you read Sandwich and, regardless, what would you link to?

Novellas in November 2024, Part 2 (New to my TBR)

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November is over and, as I expected, I didn’t get to post much for Novellas in November. However, I did read a couple of novellas and started another short form work (ie nonfiction), and, more to the point, I did read some participants’ posts which resulted in my noting some “New to my TBR” options.

Last year I listed 8 “New to my TBR” options and, unusually for me, I actually read two of them. They were:

New to my TBR:

  • Jon Fosse, Aliss at the fire (translated by Damion Searles) (orig. pub 2003): Brona of This Reading Life was mesmerised by this book in which an elderly woman reflects on the disappearance of her husband some twenty-five years before, after taking his rowboat out into the fjord.
  • Pascal Garnier, Boxes (translated by Melanie Florence) (orig. pub. 2012?): Kimbofo of Reading Matters didn’t like this as much as other books she’s read by Garnier, but I’m intrigued. Strangely, given my interest in Fosse’s book, it’s about, says kimbofo, “a middle-aged man reeling from his young wife Emma’s sudden disappearance”. It appears that journalist Emma fails to return home from a work trip and is presumed dead.
  • Paul Griffiths, Tomb guardians (2021): Lisa of ANZLitLovers makes this story – about the guardians of the tomb from which Christ’s Resurrection took place – sound both interesting and entertaining.
  • Jean-Patrick Manchette, No room at the morgue (translated by Alyson Waters) (orig. pub. 1973): host Cathy of 746 Books attracted me to this one by describing it as French noir which “blends a taut mystery with a trenchant sense of ennui and regret”.
  • Hiroko Oyamada, The factory (translated by David Boyd) (2010): Karen of Booker Talk posted on this and caught my attention, partly because it’s Japanese, but more because factory settings intrigue me and she describes it as unsettling and bordering on the absurd. 
  • Evelyn Waugh, Love among the ruins (1953): Judith Stove commenting on my Part 1 post, recommended this dystopian novella. She write that “Waugh covers a lot of themes – the ‘ruins’ of the title, criminal rehabilitation, and the transformative power of love – as well as the assisted-death industry. Plenty of themes with relevance to our time!” It’s a while since I’ve read Waugh, and this appeals and sounds manageable in my time-poor life!

There are probably others but given my track record for actually reading books I spy, I think this is enough. Maybe some of them caught your eye too? I see that two caught host Cathy’s eye. Check out her post to see which ones! I must say that she reminded me that I’d also been attracted to Kate’s post on Carys Davies’ Clear, but I am not going to (formally, anyhow) add it to my list. It’s long enough.

Regardless, has Novella November affected your TBR pile this year?

Written for Novellas in November 2024. Thanks as always to Cathy and Rebecca for hosting this special month.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Books set at the beach

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Summer has formally started here in the Southern Hemisphere, and in Australia that means (for most people), the beach. We have gorgeous beaches here – not that they are my go-to place – so I thought to share some books set at the beach, by the sea. Some of these may also be “beach reads” (see my post on that concept), but that idea, whatever it means to you, is not what is driving this selection. Rather, I’ve chosen these books for the different ways they explore the beach – or, the idea of the beach – in Australian culture.

This is a very selective list, and I’m presenting it in order of publication.

Beach set books

Nevil Shute, On the beach

Nevil Shute, On the beach (1957, read before blogging): Shute’s classic apocalyptic novel needs, surely, no introduction. It is perhaps a cheeky inclusion here as it is not so much set “on the beach” but in Melbourne where some of the last people alive on earth are awaiting death from radiation following a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere. The idea of beach, in fact, is more metaphoric, or allusive, than literal, though most covers show beach and/or sea scenes. This book keeps on keeping on. Only last year, Alexander Howard wrote in The Conversation that the Sydney Theatre Company was presenting the first stage adaptation, and commented that

Shute’s vision of humanity’s self-inflicted destruction is eerily resonant in our time of climate emergency. The nuclear threat remains, too, in our perilous historical moment of democratic backsliding and failing nuclear states.

Kathy Lette and Gabriel Carey, Puberty blues (1979, seen – but not read – before blogging): one of our most famous beach-set books, this is a coming-of-age novel about two friends growing up on Sydney’s beaches, and coming up against the gendered nature of the surfing community, where girls are accepted only so long as they support the males. Lette has described 70s surfing culture as “tribal and brutal”.

Robert Drewe, The bodysurfers

Robert Drewe, The bodysurfers (1983, on my TBR): Drewe regularly features the beach and/or the sea in his writing. Many of his books are titled for beach and sea themes. His novels and and short story collections include The rip, The drowner, and The true colour of the sea; his memoir is titled The shark net; and he edited an anthology titled The Penguin book of the beach. The bodysurfers is more a collection of interconnected short stories than a novel. According to the back cover blurb of my edition, it is “set among the surf and sandhills of the Australian beach – and the tidal changes of three generations of the Lang family”. Like many of the books I’m including here, it has been adapted to other media, in this case to film, television, radio and the theatre! I read the first two stories some time ago and loved the writing. I intend to finish it one day, which is why it is still on my bedside table.

George Turner, The sea and summer (1987): like Shute’s novel, this is not exactly set on the beach, but this dystopian novel by Miles Franklin award-winner Turner is about climate change and the sea flooding the city – Melbourne again, in fact. Fourtriplezed, who comments on my blog occasionally, has reviewed this novel on goodreads. The book, he says, conveys a “dystopian nightmare” characterised by “greenhouse induced floods that make large tracts unlivable, worldwide economic collapse, over population, mass starvation”. He quotes from the novel:

“This is Elwood and there was a beach here once. I used to paddle here. Then the water came up and there were the storm years and the pollution, and the water became too filthy.”

Tim Winton, Breath (2008, my post): like Puberty blues, Breath is set amongst surfers, though on the Western Australian coast. Also like Puberty blues, it’s not so much about surfing as the cultural issues around it. In this case, the protagonist is male, and the focus is masculinity and risk-taking, and how the choices you make follow you. Winton, like Drewe, writes frequently about the beach and the sea but never simply. The sea and surfing offer necessary rejuvenation for Winton the person, but writer Winton uses it effectively to explore the themes that concern him about family and love, values and responsibility, lost males, and the environment.

Malcolm Knox, Bluebird (2020, my review): a satirical novel set in a beachside suburb. I wrote in my post that it looks like a satire on all those beach communities that pepper Australia’s coasts – the middle-aged men who prefer surfing to working, the country-club set, the councils which sell out to developers, small-town racism and gay-bashing, and so on. However, I suggested that while a beach-town might be the setting, its satire is broader, reaching into wider aspects of contemporary Australian life – dysfunctional men and broken families, development, aged care, banking, local government, and so on. In other words, given Australians’ love for the beach, such a place makes the perfect, relatable, setting for his satire …

That seems a good point on which to end this little selection. The beach in Australia can mean and reference so many aspects of our lives and national psyche, from escape and relaxation through the many ways we relate, behave and think to apocalypse and dystopia.

Do you have favourite beach-set books, Australian or otherwise?

PS Cottier and NG Hartland, The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin (#BookReview)

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Earlier this month, I posted on a conversation with the winners of the 2024 Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Publishing Prize, P S Cottier and N G Hartland, who wrote The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin, and Sonya Voumard, who wrote Tremor. On the surface, these books look very different, but conversation facilitator, Sally Pryor, found some similarities suggesting both explore ideas related to identity, one’s place in the world, and how we can be captured and defined by the systems within which we live. Having now read Cottier and Hartland’s novella, and having started Voumard’s memoir, I can see she has a point.

If you didn’t read my conversation post, you may be wondering what the heck this book with its curious title is about. Besides the fact that it’s a novella, which I love, I was attracted to it from the moment I saw it on the shortlist because the description said it “spirits us away on a comedic journey into a world where the reality and absurdity of political power are increasingly indistinguishable”. That sounded just too delicious and I was glad to see it win.

Ok, so I still haven’t told you what it’s about, but be patient, I’m getting there. The novella was inspired, said Cottier and Hartland, by the idea that there are such things as Putin “body doubles”. There is even a Wikipedia page about this “theory” so it is a thing, as they say! The titular “thirty-one legs” belong to 16 of these body doubles whose stories are told in the book. Sixteen, you ask? That doesn’t compute from 31? True, but one of the doubles only has one leg! How can that be, you might also ask, how can a “double” of two-legged Putin only have one leg? Good question, and I won’t give it away, but let’s just say that the idea epitomises the absurdity of the notion.

Now, this is a collaborative novel, and if I understood correctly from the conversation, Cottier and Hartland started by “pushing out” individual Putins. In fact, the novella reads rather like a set of interconnected short stories because each Putin stands alone, with minimal connection between them except they are all Putin doubles and most of them assume there must be others. However, there is a narrative arc to the whole. Each Putin tells us something about their recruitment and its impact on their lives, with some threads recurring through the different Putins, depending on their location and personality. Two Putins also bookend the story. Surfing Putin, Dave McDermott in Western Australia, opens the book in the Prologue and concludes it with his own story, while English Putin Samuel Chatswood starts off the stories proper, and returns with the penultimate story. Each chapter is titled with the name and location of a Putin, so we have, for example, “Maja Dahl, Oslo, Norway”, “Richie ‘The Putin’ Rogers, Cirencester, England”, “Joppe Stoepke, The Hague, Netherlands”, and “Andrei Galkin, Rostov-on-Don, Russia”.

The set-up, or plot, is simple. People from around the world who look like Putin have been recruited to act as Putin doubles should they be so needed. This recruitment has happened over twenty years, but the book is set post the Ukraine invasion, so our doubles suspect they will not be called upon to play Putin. Some are quite edgy about this, while others are more phlegmatic. For all of them, though, being paid – because paid they are, monthly, from an anonymous bank account – comes with questions, if not challenges.

Our first fully-fledged Putin, Samuel Chatswood from London, sets the scene. He tells us about his fears about being a double. Not only is he frequently teased about his resemblance to Putin and asked “why anyone would want to invade Ukraine?”, but he’s anxious because he has been increasingly getting dark looks from strangers since the Skripal poisoning. However, having recently spied another lookalike, he is “comforted” by the idea that “whatever suspicion and recriminations are possible, they are less likely to entangle me if I’m not the only Putin lookalike”. He also heralds the denouement, when he returns to find that such comfort might have been misplaced.

We meet all sorts of Putins, from the fearful, through the deluded, and the thoughtful, to the confident or more upbeat, but all ponder what being a Putin double means for them. For some their own identity gets lost in the role, and some are confused, or at least perplexed, about what’s expected of them. For others, like the resourceful Chilean, Sebastian Soto, it’s a business proposition, while several capitalise on their lookalike-ness. Steve Pinebrother in “International Waters”, for example, not only makes money, secretly, as a double but, publicly, as a performer on a cruise ship. Each one is beautifully individuated, and I find it hard to pick a favourite. There’s much humour in many of their stories, but there’s pathos too, particularly with those who get lost in – or fearful about – their roles. Life is not simple when you accept money without clarity, eh?

“the butterfly of truth does not need questions to emerge from its cocoon of facts”

So, what’s the takeaway. An obvious one is contemporary culture’s focus on appearance and its willingness to monetise looks without much substance behind it. But another is murkier. This novella, I’m tempted to say, could be read as an allegory of the changing world order. No matter where the Putins live, recent changes are unsettling them. The ground is shifting and they (we?) don’t know how to react. Do they bury their heads in the sand, believing it will be alright? Do they wait for the inevitable or, try to withdraw? Or do they take action, and if so, what action can they take? For French Putin, Hugo Fournier,

It matters not, I conclude, what is reality and what is an extravagant theory from a feverish mind. The answer of course is that I should trust no one. I am the only Putin who can, and will, look after me.

Is such isolationism the answer? Through their various Putins, Cottier and Hartland pose serious questions, including, what do we believe and what we can or should we do?

The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin is an audacious “what if” story. Its episodic approach works well in the novella form. Were the book much longer, the conceit would, I think, start to lose its freshness. As it is, there are enough Putins to provide a variety of stories, without becoming repetitive. The tone is light enough to be highly entertaining, but the content is informed and thoughtful enough to engage our minds. This book would make a perfect Christmas stocking stuffer, which is not to say I put it on a par with chocolates and scratchies, but that it is small in size, well-priced, physically lovely, and a thoroughly absorbing read.

Read for Novellas in November.

PS Cottier and NG Hartland
The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd, 2024
115pp.
ISBN: 9780645927016

Review copy courtesy Finlay Lloyd.