Barbara Jefferis Award 2024 Shortlist Announced

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I didn’t report on this biennial award in 2022, but with the 2024 shortlist just having been announced, and my having read half of them, I am reminding us all again of this interesting award. Worth $50,000, this award, for those of you who don’t remember it, has very specific criteria:

“the best novel written by an Australian author that depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society”.

What this means is that it is not the sex of the writer that’s relevant here (nor, in fact, the genre). This award is for books about women and girls – and so can be written by anyone of any sex – but they must present women and girls in a positive or empowering way. I wrote a Monday Musings post about this “positive or empowering” requirement a few years ago.

This year’s shortlist of six books are all by women, but you’ll see that a male writer, Tony Birch, is among the highly commendeds.

  • Gail Jones, Salonika Burning (Text Publishing) (my review)
  • Melissa Lucashenko, Edenglassie (University of Queensland Press) (my review)
  • Miranda Riwoe, Sunbirds (University of Queensland Press)
  • Sara M Saleh, Songs for the dead and living  (Affirm Press)
  • Lucy Treloar, Days of innocence and wonder (Pan Macmillan Australia)
  • Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard devotional  (Allen & Unwin) (my review)

This year, the judges also named three Highly Commended titles:

  • Tony, Birch, Women & children (University of Queensland Press)
  • Shankari Chandran, Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens (Ultimo Press) (my review)
  • Katerina Gibson, Women I know  (Scribner)

The judging panel for the 2024 Barbara Jefferis Award comprises Hannah Kent (Chair), Jennifer Mills, and Melanie Saward. You can read the full judges’ comments on their decision and the individual books on the Australian Society of Authors website, but overall they said that:

“The many entries to this year’s prize reflected a healthy diversity of genre, form, settings and narratives. Common to many were themes of migration and exile, resilience and recovery from trauma, social isolation and renewed connection, thwarted ambition, and violence against bodies and minds. The representations of women and girls were varied and often original. We would welcome more expansive representations of gender diversity. […]

We found all six books deeply affecting, and many highly memorable for their unswerving demands for social justice and reclamations of power. We would like to extend our congratulations to their authors.”

They did make an interesting observation that “few writers focused on the future” and “wondered whether this revealed a wider desire for, and interest in, historical reckoning for this country”. Could be so. Having just spent two weeks in outback Australia, I sense some movement in understanding of what our dispossession of land has meant for our First Nations people. But so much has been lost and needs to be recovered, and progress in reconciliation seems very slow. Easy for a city-slicker to say, I do appreciate, but my heart tells me it has to be said.

The winner will be announced on 13 November 2024.

Apologies for the quick post, but I do like this award, and wanted to share it. However, I am on holidays still, and time is short.

Any thoughts?

Beth H. Piatote, Beading lesson (#Review)

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Beth Piatote’s “Beading lesson” is the thirteenth of fourteen stories in the anthology, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers, and with it, we move from the 1990s to the 2000s.

Beth H Piatote

Anthology editor Bob Blaisdell provides very little information about Piatote. It simply says that she is Nez Perce and a Professor of Native American Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Wikipedia provides a little more, but not much in terms of life history. It tells us that she is a scholar and author, that she is “a member of Chief Joseph’s Tribe and the Colville Confederated Tribes”. And it expands on her academic qualifications and achievements a bit more. It seems most of her writing is academic, but she has had one short story collection published, The beadworkers, published by CounterPoint Press in 2019.

“Beading lesson”

“Beading lesson” is the shortest story in the anthology. Blaisdell gives its original date as 2002, but the source for the story is a 2008 Oxford University Press anthology, Reckonings: Contemporary short fiction by Native American women. However, I believe, from the GoodReads description of The beadworkers, that the story was also included there.

GoodReads describes The beadworkers, starting with, “A woman teaches her niece to make a pair of beaded earrings, while ruminating on a fractured relationship”. This perfectly captures the setting of “Beading lesson”, but of course there’s much more to it. Before I get onto that, however, I’ll add that the collection sounds interestingly varied, as it includes stories set in the 1960s and 1890. GoodReads concludes its description/promo with “Formally inventive, witty, and generous, the works in this singular debut collection draw on Indigenous aesthetics and forms to offer a powerful, sustaining vision of Native life in the Americas”. I haven’t read the other stories, but my guess from reading “Beading lesson” is that the collection explores the cultural, social, political and economic role and implications of beadwork, and that it also uses the idea of beadwork literally, as a practice, and symbolically, to represent the wider culture.

So now, “Beading lesson”. The fractured relationship mentioned by GoodReads is with the aunt’s sister, that is, the niece’s mother. The story is told first person by the aunt, who gently and patiently shows her niece the intricacies of beading, as they make some earrings for the mother. However, as she passes on to her niece an important cultural skill, she also shares values and information that she believes are important for her niece to know. In other words, the skill teaching is part of wider mentoring, which is what all good skill teaching is about.

What makes this story interesting is the subject of this mentoring. It’s multifold – to pass on cultural traditions, to teach the niece some life-skills, and, eventually, maybe, to lead to a repair in the broken relationship with her sister. It appears that this sister, the youngest in her family, had been spoilt. As a result, she had not learnt the skills our narrator had learnt, and has lost culture. The aunt tells her niece:

I think sometimes she wishes she learnt to bead, but she didn’t want to when she was little. She was the youngest, so I think she was a little spoiled but don’t tell her I said that. She didn’t have to do things she didn’t want to, she didn’t even have to go to boarding school. 

The boarding school reference is intriguing. Our narrator is positive about her experience, when, quite often, such schools were sites of cultural loss.

As the lesson progresses, we learn that the narrator is passing on beadskills to men in prison, which gives them skill and pride. The subtle message here of course concerns Indigenous incarceration. We also learn that her beadwork has supported her in tough times, through times of “livin’ skinny”. And, we gain some insight into the politics of, let us say, “Indigenous arts and crafts”. The aunt tells her niece that when some people

buy your beadwork, they think it should last forever. Somebody’s car breaks down, he knows he got to take it to the shop, pay someone to get it goin’ again. But not with beadwork — not with something an Indian made. No, they bring it back 10 years later and they want you to fix it for free! They think because an Indian makes it, it’s got to last forever. Just think if the Indians did that with all the things the government made for us. Hey, you got to fix it for free! 

The use of vernacular for the aunt’s story could lull readers into thinking she is a sweet but simple old lady. However, as the story builds, it becomes increasingly clear that she knows exactly what she is about. We see her to be kind, wise, and generous, where it is warranted, but not stupid. She knows the value and importance of what she does, but she also knows exploitation and is resilient in its face. She knows that maintaining cultural practice is important to her people’s continuation. This a story in which the personal is quietly, but absolutely, infused with the political. It’s clever and delightful to read.

Beth H. Piatote
“Beading lesson” (orig. pub. 2002)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 100-103
ISBN: 9780486490953

Available online at High Country News.

Monday musings on Australian literature: A little Longreach interlude

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I am still tripping through Queensland, and had planned a more in-depth post for today – in fact, I’d started working on it before I left Canberra on 31 August – but my energy levels have been sapped by having had COVID for the last week, not to mention by our busy touring schedule. Rather than publish that post half-baked, I am saving it. Maybe next week!

Instead, I’m sharing a little sign on a library board at the Longreach School of Distance Education. This school was formerly called School of the Air, of which there were several around Australia (five in Queensland). These schools, which started operating in 1951, originally delivered education to children on remote properties via radio. Over the years, the delivery technologies changed, but it has only been since 2016 that the school turned to presenting online classes. A big change from their more paper-with-teacher-support based programs. I’m not sure when the name changed, but in Longreach, and presumably elsewhere, it is now called a School of Distance Education.

We did a little tour of the School, and in the library we came across a decorated quote on the library wall. It’s about reading, so this is my little post for today.

This quote is not Australian, and has been around for a century, so it is probably known to many of you. However, if you don’t know its origins, this is apparently it (from Quote Investigator, a site I hadn’t come across before):

“The earliest evidence appeared in 1926 in an intriguing report published in a journal called “The Library” from the Newark Public Library in New Jersey. The head of the library had received a collection of 43 slogans constructed by students, and that set included the statement under investigation. The creator of the slogan was a student named W. Fusselman.”

It’s worth reading the full Quote Investigator article, because it provides verification for its information, and a few other quotes. It also discusses an incorrect attribution to someone called Margaret Fuller. (Of course the School had done the job for me. They have credited Fusselman as the author.)

I do like that this quote came from a student.

Anyhow, this is your lot for this week’s Monday Musings. I hope to resume more usual posts next week.

Sebastian Barry, The secret scripture

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What follows here is an edited version of the first ever review post I wrote – back in December 2008 on a Blogger blog I set up for my reading group. I’ve been meaning for some time to bring it over here because I’d like to have Sebastian Barry represented on my blog! However, my review was written in a different style to the one I use now, so I’ve tried to update it a bit. This is difficult given it’s a long time since I read it! I apologise for its awkwardness.

I read The secret scripture because I’d heard great things about his previous novel, A long long way, which, like The secret scripture, was shortlisted for the Booker prize. The book is set in Ireland in contemporary times, with flashbacks to the 1930s, and is told through the voices of two characters: Roseanne, a centenarian who has lived in a mental hospital for over 50 years, and Dr Grene, a psychiatrist at the institution for 35 years. As Roseanne writes her life-story, which she hides under boards in her room, Dr Grene investigates the reasons for her being there with a view to deciding her future, because the hospital is slated for demolition. His understanding of her story and her own telling of it differ. What falls out is a tortured story of religion, family and politics at a time in Ireland when sides had to be taken, rules took precedence, and humanity was in short supply.

As he investigates Roseanne, Dr Grene, who is grieving over the death of his wife, Bet, spends a lot of time with Roseanne, and shares his own story with her.

“the assault of withering truth”

There was so much to like about the novel – the language, the characters (albeit most are loosely drawn), and the themes. I particularly liked Barry’s musings on “truth” and “history”, which is not new of course. I also liked the connection made between truth and health, that Roseanne’s “truth” was a healthy one.

Roseanne is intriguing as a narrator. I would call her reliable not because she tells us the correct facts necessarily (as it appears that she may not have) but because, as Grene says at the end, she tells us “her” truth and this truth “radiated health”. It may not hold up in a court of law but it gets to the heart of who Roseanne is. It is “vexing and worrying”, though, as Roseanne says, when different people’s truths (such as Fr Gaunt’s and Roseanne’s) cross each other. How true is (the perfectly named) Father Gaunt’s anyhow? His conveys the facts but contains no humanity, let alone empathy. He has no idea of who Roseanne is, but he does know the “law” (of the church at least).

“History, as far as I can see, is not the arrangement of what happens, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth.” 

As those of you who know me might imagine, the exploration of truth was one of my favourite aspects of the book. In this novel it is so humanely nuanced, suggesting that we should look out for two truths – the facts and inner meaning – and decide which one should take precedence in any given situation. Facts, as we know only too well, are important but we should also heed the “hidden inner” truth as well. In relationships, for example, perhaps the “hidden inner” truth is equally if not more important. Why a person is saying or doing something, for example, may be more critical than what they are saying or doing.

Then there’s the language. It is beautiful, poetic. Poetic usually means two things to me, mostly in combination – language that is rich in imagery and that has a strong rhythm. Barry’s writing has wonderful rhythm, which he creates through the use of repetition, and particularly thought the careful use of punctuation, and long sentences interspersed with short sentences to give a lovely flow. This example near the opening almost reads like blank verse:

“That place where I was born was a cold town. Even the mountains stood sway. They were not sure, no more than me, of that dark spot, those same mountains.

There was a black river that flowed through the town, and if it had no grace for mortal beings, it did for swans, and many swans resorted there, and even rode the river like some kind of plunging animals, in floods.

The river also took the rubbish down to the sea, and bits of things that were once owned by people and pulled form the banks, and bodies too, if rarely, oh and poor babies, that were embarrassments, the odd time. The speed and depth of the river would have been a great friend to secrecy.

That is Sligo town I mean.”

He sets a powerful tone in these opening few paras – the rhythm is slow but with just an edge of awkwardness that catches you off guard. And the language conveys something untoward – “cold”, “dark”, “black”, “rubbish”, “secrecy”. These are not repeated but, used in combination in such a few concentrated paragraphs, they give a sense of the story to come. It’s an evocative opening and it engaged me quickly.

As for characters, Roseanne engaged me from the start; she always felt authentic. I wasn’t always so sure of Dr Grene. Did we need all the Bet stuff, albeit was moving? Perhaps, given the role of men in women’s lives, and in Roseanne’s in particular, we are meant to be on guard. However, he particularly started to lose me towards the end, when he started to more actively investigate Roseanne’s history. From a plot point of view it was logical and understandable, but the voice became more prosaic, ordinary, in some sense that seemed to lose Grene’s particularity.

My main issue with the book was, in fact, the ending. It was contrived. Maybe Dr Grene’s voice felt more forced towards the end because even Barry knew his plot resolution was a bit too neat and didn’t quite know how to do it! Fortunately, plots aren’t the main indicator for me of a good read.

Dr Grene’s choosing, in the last para, the bright and open rose rather than a uniform neat one, suggests an acceptance of being open to many truths, to the imperfections of the world, than to that tidy, dry version of the world that we get from Fr. Gaunt. This softens the neat plot conclusion somewhat – as does the fact that Barry doesn’t go in for the full cliched emotions that such a story might commonly close on. Consequently, despite some misgivings, I’d happily read more Barry because I loved the heart and openness in his exploration of truth, and his writing is so engaging.

Kimbofo also reviewed this way back when!

Sebastian Barry
The secret scripture
London: Faber and Faber, 2008
300pp.

Monday musings on Australian literature: A little note on the Kalkadoon (or Kalkatungu)

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Tonight I am in Kalkadoon (Kalkatunga) country. The Kalkadoons were the first Indigenous Australian people I became aware of as a young pre-pubescent girl living in Mount Isa in the 1960s. What I remember being told is that they were “fierce warriors”, but nothing much else, because we didn’t learn this history of Australia back then did we? This description, however, never sat easily with me. What did it mean?

During my current tour through outback Queensland, we’ve heard a little more, mainly about how many Kalkadoons were killed at Battle Hill (or Battle Mountain), in retribution for some action of theirs. The word massacre has not been used in the stories we’ve heard, though there has been recognition that spears had little chance against guns.

Of course, the truth is far more complicated, and was part of a long ongoing conflict between the Kalkadoons and settlers. The Kalkadoons certainly see it as a “massacre”. And they have a good website. I am too tired to write a full post tonight, but I wanted to share this site as an example of sites created by First Nations people, in which they tell their story their way, in which they communicate their stories to a wider world while also providing community for their people.

The Kalkadoon site also proudly shares that

On 12th December 2011, Honourable Justice John Alfred Dowsett of the Federal Court said the price the Kalkadoon People had paid for the prosperity of the region would not be forgotten. Native Title was granted to the Kalkadoon People.

We were told about this Native Title on our drive into Mount Isa, but just think about the meaning behind those words, “the price the Kalkadoon People had paid for the prosperity of the region would not be forgotten”. What a significant acknowledgement!

I am leaving it here, because if I write more, it would need to be a lot more, so I’ve decided to go for succinctness.

If you are Australian, do your local First Nation people have a website?

Six degrees of separation, FROM After story TO …

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It’s the start of spring down under and, as some of you know, I am on a holiday in outback Queensland. It’s a bit of a sentimental journey for me, but it’s a region that is worth visiting regardless of personal connections. Anyhow, my holiday is not what you are here for, so I’ll get onto the meme. As always, if you don’t know how this #SixDegrees meme works, please check host Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book, and this month she selected another book I have read! That makes two in a row! Unheard of – or, at least, very rare for me. The book is Larissa Behrendt’s After story (my review). As its subject matter is a mother-daughter holiday – this one to England – and as I am currently also on holiday, I plan to use some sort of holiday theme for all the links this month.

Given my plan to stick with the holiday idea, my first link is obvious to me, Jessica Au’s Cold enough for snow (my review). Not only is it about a holiday – this one to Japan – it’s also about a mother and daughter with some issues to resolve, from the daughter’s point of view anyhow.

For my next link, we are staying with the parental theme, but in this case the protagonist, an adult son, is running away from his oppressive elderly mother, to an old holiday haunt from his childhood, a place called Jimenbuen in the Monaro region of New South Wales. The book is Nigel Featherstone’s My heart is a little wild thing (my review), and our character falls passionately in love. It’s a wonderful experience, even though it doesn’t quite end the way he’d like.

The Monaro is a beautiful place, and it just so happens that I have another novel set there that fits the bill. Charlotte Wood’s Booker Prize long-listed novel Stone Yard devotional (my review) is about a woman who goes to a place on the Monaro for specific type of holiday, a retreat to heal her troubled spirit. Gradually, we come to understand her troubles, and many stem from unresolved grief over the loss of her parents, decades earlier.

Now, because I can’t have all Australian authors, I’m taking us back to England, but staying with a parental link. It’s a daughter again, but in this case the novel opens with her father having just died at the place they had taken for late summer. Utterly bereft, she stands at the front gate when a man goes by. Vulnerable in her grief, she falls in love, but as it turns out he’s not what she thought at all. Elizabeth von Arnim’s Vera (my review) is an early, chilling study of coercive control.

Susan Hawthorne, Limen, book cover

My next link is a little tenuous in more ways than one. It is about a camping holiday taken by two women, and we are back in Australia, so no connections there. However, I can find one link, besides the holiday one, and that’s the idea that holidays don’t always go to plan. For Lucy, it’s the death of her father that puts paid to the happy times, while for our two camping women it’s a flood, one serious enough for them to have to consider how best to survive it. The book is Susan Hawthorne’s verse novel, Limen (my review).

And finally, I am concluding with a sort of everylink! That is, a link that should work with any book featuring a holiday because, what do you do when you go on holidays? Hmm, perhaps that should be, what did we used to do when we went on holidays? Send postcards of course. So, my final link is American poet and blogger Jeanne Griggs’ Postcard poems (my review), which enables us to end on a positive note! Thankyou Jeanne!

So, we started with Kate’s book taking us to England, then I took us to Japan, Australia and England, before ending with Jeanne who takes us all over the USA and a few other places besides. I’m sorry-not-sorry to say, however, that all but one of my authors this month are women. (Sorry, because I do enjoy many male authors, but not sorry because I also love supporting the women!)

Now, the usual: have you read After story and, regardless, what would you link to?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Nettie Palmer on Australian novels

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Nettie Palmer has appeared a few times before on this blog, and is likely to appear again, because she was such an active member of Australia’s early to mid-twentieth century literary community, and she was a keen supporter and promoter of Australian writing and writers. Three years ago, I wrote about an article she’d written in 1930 in which she discussed pleasing “advances” in the Australian novel. This post draws on an article she wrote for the Illustrated Tasmanian Mail, a couple of years earlier, on 15 August 1928.

The article seems to have been inspired by the novel competition the Bulletin ran that year. There were, according to Palmer, some 536 entries, which she suggests is “a matter for national astonishment”, given the effort it takes to write a novel.

While only few can win, she says, “the lift in the status of the Australian novel will be considerable”. She goes on to talk about the challenge the judges face, and suggests that, with all that reading to do, their minds are likely to be ‘attracted by what was “striking” rather than what was merely solid’. She says that Australia’s chief literary prize-winner to date had been “that rather esoteric writer, Katharine Susannah Prichard”, and identifies some of the prizes she had won – for The pioneers (1915, my review), a short story, and a play. Will she win again, Palmer wonders. She wouldn’t be surprised if she did, Palmer continues, because Prichard “has always added something fresh and original to our literary store”. As it turns out, Prichard did win this prize, for Coonardoo, but jointly with The house is built by the collaborative novelists known as M. Barnard Eldershaw.

However, I have digressed a little, as my point here is to share Palmer’s thoughts on the Australian novel. Her life’s work seems to have been, at least partly, to define the Australian novel. Anyhow, she comments that she had been “examining a great many Australian stories in magazines, journals, books and manuscripts” and one of the things that has struck her was “the immense variety of geographical angles from which Australia can be regarded”. She takes, as an example, the idea of “the north-west”. For a Victorian, this means “the Mallee country, with its acres cleared for wheat, running up to the irrigated country with Mildura and its fruits and close settlement of semi-urban, rather ‘American’ homes”, while in South Australia it means “the interior, near the transcontinental line, given up to sheep”. In Western Australia, on the other hand, it’s “the country used by H. E. Riemann in his book of short stories, Nor’-West o’ West, set in Broome and its hinterland”. And so on … This, she says, “is just to name one half-point of the compass”. She discusses this a little more, but then says the thing that I really wanted to share:

The point is … that the life and problems of various parts of Australia show immense contrasts, from pearling at Broome to legislating at Canberra. Our writers have the task of gradually revealing it all to us.

This is it, it seems to me, in a nutshell. At some fundamental level, an Australian novel – or any nationality’s novel for that matter – is one which reveals who we are, in all our richness and diversity. It is what, I think, Miles Franklin intended by endowing an award for a novel that conveys “Australian life in any of its phases”. For Palmer, and I suspect Franklin, there was an awareness of the role the arts can play in nation-building, which is understandable given their times. The thing is, we are still nation-building – maybe always will be – and so today, we have First Nations writers and migrant-background writers trying hard to reveal to us their view of Australia. For as long as society keeps changing, there is a role for writers to “reveal it all to us” – even while they also explore the universal – don’t you think?

PS: On Wednesday, Mr Gums and I start a 14-day outback Queensland tour. I may not manage to write Monday Musings on the next two Mondays, but we’ll see. Apologies in advance for this potential hiatus! Monday Musings will not be lost forever.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (#BookReview)

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While my reading group’s main reading fare has, from the start, been contemporary fiction, we also mix it up a bit. We do non-fiction, for example, and most years we try to do a classic. Over the years we’ve done Jane Austen, Elizabeth von Arnim, Anton Chekhov, EM Forster, and Randolph Stow, to name a few. This year we turned to Kurt Vonnegut, and, because we couldn’t decide which book to do, we narrowed it to two – Cat’s cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five – and let members decide. You can tell from the post title which one I chose. This was because I have read Cat’s cradle, albeit decades ago. Most of the group, however, read Cat’s cradle, because they’d read Slaughterhouse-Five before.

So, Slaughterhouse-Five it is then – and I’m confronted by the old challenge of what to say about a classic, and a cult classic at that. This book has been analysed ad infinitum, and been found, as the decades have trundled by, to retain its relevance to new generations. However, before I say more, let me give a very brief synopsis, just in case there’s someone out there who doesn’t know the story.

“jumbled and jangled”

Ha, did I say brief synopsis? Easier said than done, but I’ll give it a try. Slaughterhouse-Five tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, from his early years, through his time as an American soldier during World War II including being in Dresden when it was bombed, to the post-war years. During his life, Billy is also abducted by flying saucer and taken to the planet of Tralfamadore, where he is displayed in a zoo. The critical issue underpinning all this is that Billy was damaged by his wartime experiences, something we now recognise as PTSD. Vonnegut conveys – and represents – Billy’s discombobulation, his trauma, through a complex non-linear, non-chronological narrative, in which Billy, who “has come unstuck in time”, travels not only back and forth through time, but also back and forth between Earth and Tralfamadore. 

Slaughterhouse-Five is, as a result, a challenging, sometimes mystifying read, but it is also an exhilarating one, because Vonnegut tells his story through satire and absurdity, both of which I love. In the first chapter, the narrator, who is Vonnegut, tells us about writing the book we are now reading. As he hands his finished book to the publisher, he says

It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.

Alongside the occasional appearance of this first-person narrator, we have the unsuccessful science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, who can also be read as a version – caricature – of Vonnegut. His “unpopularity was deserved”, the narrator tells us. “His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good”. But, Billy loves him. We first meet Trout when Billy is introduced to him by Rosewater, another patient in the hospital to which Billy had committed himself when he feels he is “going crazy”:

Rosewater was twice as smart as Billy, but he and Billy were dealing with similar crises in similar ways. They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war. Rosewater, for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking him for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden. So it goes.

If you’ve read the novel, you will know that “so it goes” is its over-riding refrain. Used over 100 times, at moments of murder, death, and other disasters, it functions as a motif, one that both underlines and undermines the horror, by drawing attention to it, then passing it off. The constant opposition, in the novel, of the serious with the offhand keeps the reader unsettled, which is part of the point.

The occasional self-conscious appearance of the author/Vonnegut and the references to Kilgore Trout, along with its story-within-a-story framework, its wild playing with time and place, its fragmentary approach to storytelling, and its unapologetic undermining of “reality”, make this book a postmodern work, if that interests you. By this I mean what sort of work it is doesn’t matter, really. It’s what the work says or makes you feel that really counts. However, it’s these features and techniques which enable Vonnegut to convey what he wants to say in such a powerful way. The how of it is inseparable from the meaning of it.

Slaughterhouse-Five is said to be about many things, including war and pacifism, fate and free will, our experience of time. I could discuss each of these in turn, but the academics already have. I’ll simply say that my primary takeaway is that it’s about the absurdity and incomprehensibility of life and, by example, about how our everyman Billy Pilgrim copes (or doesn’t) with such life.

Slaughterhouse-Five was published at the height of the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement. It was, it seems, the right novel at the right time. Although Vonnegut had had some success before, this was the novel that apparently established him. I can see why. With wars just keeping on coming – and being just as horrific and absurd as the ones that came before them, I can also see why this novel continues to speak to new generations of readers. I mean, how can you not laugh at Billy on display in Tralfamadore:

Then he did exercises he had learned in the Army—straddle jumps, deep knee bends, sit-ups and push-ups. Most Tralfamadorians had no way of knowing Billy’s body and face were not beautiful. They supposed that he was a splendid specimen. This had a pleasant effect on Billy, who began to enjoy his body for the first time.

And, you know what? I’m going to leave you right here, because if this doesn’t convey why this book is such a complex, funny, humane read, I don’t know what will.

Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The children’s crusade
Horizon Ridge Publishing, 2024 (Orig. pub. 1969)
199pp.
ASIN: ‎ B0D9SKLL68

Monday musings on Australian literature: Best Australian books, 21st century (to date)

/ Whispering Gums / 31 Comments

I do think it’s jumping the gun, rather, to be listing best books of a century when that century is barely a quarter through! However, it seems that critics and reviewers around the world are giving it a go, including the esteemed New York Times, so who am I to quibble? Certainly Readings Bookshop and The Conversation, motivated by the non-inclusion of even one Australian book in NYT’s list, decided they wouldn’t. And, after all, what reader doesn’t love a list?

That said, listmakers rarely agree with each other, neither in their actual lists, nor in their approach to making their list. Some take it deadly seriously, and do their best to produce something authoritative (however you define that) whilst others see, perhaps, that authoritative lists in artistic/creative endeavours are not possible so take a looser approach. So it seems to be here. Readings, for example, asked members of the Australian literary community to nominate their best Australian books of the 21st century, and created a ranked top 30. The Conversation, on the other hand, asked 50 Australian literary experts for their top pick, and they listed all 50, starting with the books that had the most “top pick” nominations. Their experts were allowed to identify two honourable mentions. These “mentions” are not included in the list, but they are in the pickers’ comments. (Check out the lists, including NYT’s, at the end of the post.)

In The Conversation’s list, five of the 50 books were nominated by more than one expert, and they are listed first, but this is not a ranking they say – and perhaps that’s a fair point given their survey was very small. So, their list is indicative rather than thorough in any way, but indicative is still interesting:

  • Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy (3, Bill’s second post)
  • Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (3, my review)
  • Helen Garner’s How to end a story (2) (on my TBR)
  • Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of travel (2, my review)
  • Kim Scott’s That deadman dance (2, my review)

Three books by First Nations authors, and four by women writers. Interesting. Some authors appear more than once in the list, including, obviously Alexis Wright, whose The swan book is also in the list, but also Kim Scott and Fiona McFarlane. Theirs is a diverse list reflecting the diverse experts, and that makes it a “good” list to me, because it will speak to different readers.

For me, the most significant book published anywhere this century is Carpentaria (2006). Wright’s larger-than-life, all-too-human characters enact their dreams across a vast tract of earth, water, sky and the “alltimes”. The writing crackles. In this story of Country, ancestral voices offer wisdom and hope. (Nicholas Jose)

Readings’ list on the other hand was drawn from 600 “votes” from members of the Australian literary community – writers, publishers, and Readings’ own booksellers. They were asked “to nominate their favourite Australian books, published since 2000”. I don’t know whether 600 people nominated one book each or whether some nominated one and others more. Whatever method Readings used, they came up with a ranking, presumably based on the number of times each book was nominated. Their top 5 is:

Christos Tsiolkas, The slap

A more popular list, dare I say, than The Conversations’, which is not surprising given its genesis in a bookseller. I have read all of these. Indeed, it’s not until no. 15 on their list – the Garner that also appears in The Conversation’s list – that I hit a book I’ve not read.

Conclusion

Jason Steger wrote about these three lists in his most recent weekly email. He explained that NYT’s aim was to “take a first swing at determining the most important, influential books of the era”. Which of those will still be there in 75 years time? Care to take a guess? You may as well go out on a limb as I’m assuming most people reading this post will not be here on 1 January 2100 to say “I told you so”, or not, as the case may be!

Links to the Lists

Donna M. Cameron, The rewilding (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 20 Comments

Quite coincidentally, earlier this month, I read and posted on Willa Cather’s short story “The bookkeeper’s wife” which commences with a young man, Percy Bixby, sitting in his office deciding to do something in order to keep his flashy fiancée Stella. That was published in 1916. I have now just finished Donna M. Cameron’s novel, The rewilding, which was published in 2024. It commences with another young man, Jagger Eckerman, is sitting in his office deciding to do something that will lose him his flashy fiancée Lola. Both young men are caught up in fraud, Percy of his own making, Jagger unwittingly, though that doesn’t make him entirely blameless. From here the stories part company, so we will leave Percy, whose story I’ve already told, and look at 27-year-old Jagger.

Jagger has been living the high life. Caught up in his own privileged lifestyle, he’s been carelessly signing documents he shouldn’t, until finally the penny drops and he wakes “up to the fact that every aspect of his life is a farce”. So, he clicks Send on his whistle-blowing email and scarpers. The problem is that the only place he can think to scarper to is a cave in a national park south of Sydney, and when he gets there he finds someone else already holed up in the same spot, the 24-year-old “feral” eco-warrior, Nia Moretti. As the accompanying publicity sheet says, it is hatred at first sight, but they soon realise they need each other, whether they like it or not.

The rewilding starts with a bang and barely lets up for the length of its 300 pages. It’s a genre-bending work of eco-literature that combines thriller, road story and romance. The central thriller-driven plot is not my favourite type of story – I’m not much interested in watching or reading about chases, violence and suspense – but Cameron handles her material confidently, creating a book that I enjoyed reading despite myself. I just hurried through the bits that were less interesting to me. Why I was happy to read it is what I want to focus on here.

First, there’s the genre-bending aspect. Cameron balances the thriller components with more reflective and tender sections, with moments of interpersonal tension, with touches of humour, gorgeous natural descriptions, and serious themes. Second, the story is well-paced, and the writing fresh but accessible. It is primarily told third person through Jagger’s perspective, but this is occasionally interspersed with short chapters in Nia’s voice, in which she speaks to a mysterious “you”. These provide additional insights into Nia that Jagger can’t know, while also increasing the mystery. Who is this “you”? What has happened to Nia? Third, the two main characters are nicely developed. Jagger is on the run, scared and uncertain about what his future holds. Still grieving his mother’s death and the mistakes he’s made, he is fundamentally decent and an optimist. Nia, on the other hand, is an uncompromising idealist, and pessimistic, but reveals a softer side. Gradually, as is typical of the romance genre, the antagonism between them is relaxed, although not, of course, without setbacks.

“a capitalist suit” versus “the feral”

And finally, there are the themes. For me, a good story isn’t enough. I need some meat, some ideas that make the time I put into reading worthwhile, and this book has meat – personal and political. In the personal realm, Jagger is a young man who had lost his way but, when some truths become clear to him – when he realises his relationship had been built on a lie and his workplace was engaging in a waste removal scam – his better self, the one his recently dead mother had so carefully tried to engender in him, comes to the fore. In his suit and fancy shoes, he surprises Nia with his deep knowledge of and love for nature. Likewise, Nia is struggling with a personal loss. She is resentful of the “capitalist suit” who comes into her cave, and finds ways of using him – and his money – to her own ends but, despite her toughness, she has a heart. So, on the personal level, The rewilding is a novel about values, about the lines you draw, about the life you choose to live and what that means personally and …

politically, because this is also a novel about climate activism. Nia and her radical Earth Rebellion mates, the Lorax, are determined to save the planet. Their focus is a mining operation in northern Queensland which is about to proceed without permission. First, though, she has something to do in disaster-struck, flooded Brisbane, something that puts her and Jagger’s lives at risk. On the run, and being followed by hit men, he has no option but to go along with the only person who can help him. It is at this point, before the final dramatic confrontation at the mine, that Nia starts to unbend a little towards Jagger and his perspective.

“Why be scared of change?”

The rewilding is a wild, dramatic novel. It does push the boundaries of credibility at times, but probably no more than you expect in a thriller. Ultimately, through her characters and their fierce, lively conversations, and through her fast-paced plot which offers a few scenarios, Cameron explores the critical issues confronting us and asks the big questions we are asking, without resorting to overt didacticism.

Climate change novels can be bleak, but many authors, even those writing the bleakest of stories, talk at writers festivals about wanting to leave their readers with some hope. That this was Cameron’s intention is foreshadowed in the epigraph from Tolkien’s The lord of the rings, “Where there’s life, there’s hope”. So, at the end, certain rapprochements are achieved, but the conclusion is real rather than simplistic. It recognises that life is messy and change is hard but that it’s worth keeping on trying. The rewilding is a worthy addition to Australia’s eco-literature field.

Donna M. Cameron
The rewilding
Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2024
309pp.
ISBN: 9781923023062

(Review copy courtesy Transit Lounge, via publicist Scott Eathorne of Quikmark Media)