On the literary (and linguistic) road in Japan: 2, Kanazawa and Kyoto

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Isabella Bird (Unbeaten tracks in Japan, 1880) doesn’t appear to have visited Kyoto or Kanazawa, which is a shame as I would have enjoyed reading her comments. However, I thought I’d quote from her anyhow, from Letter I. It covers her arrival in Yokohama harbour on May 21 which is close in time of year to now:

The day was soft and grey with a little faint blue sky, and, though the coast of Japan is much more prepossessing than most coasts, there were no startling surprises of colour or form.

She’s right. Japan is a subtle country. When I, an Australian, see a weather forecast for a fine day, I expect bright blue skies, but in fact that’s pretty rare in Japan. Even when there are blue skies they aren’t particularly bright. I am gradually getting used to it … and this softness goes, as Bird says, for colour in general here. It’s mostly muted, subtle … variations of green in the countryside, and beige and grey in the cities and towns. It’s quite a shock to see bright colours (in anything but flowers, which are of course blooming now that it’s late spring).

Anyhow, onto the subjects of this post, Kanazawa and Kyoto. By the end of this trip, our third in Japan, there will be three cities that we have visited every time: Tokyo, Kanazawa and Kyoto. Tokyo, primarily because we pass through it; Kanazawa because we fell in love with it on our first visit; and Kyoto because who doesn’t love Kyoto?

Kanazawa

Plaque in Kenrokuen containing Basho's Haiku

Sign containing Basho’s Haiku in Kenrokuen

Haiku by Basho. In my first post I quoted a haiku by Issa, one of Japan’s four haiku masters, so this time I’ll quote one from Basho, another of the four. A major reason people visit Kanazawa is to see its famous garden, Kenrokuen. In the garden is a stone monument engraved with a Matsuo Basho haiku in 1689. I had a tricky time trying to find the actual haiku because it is, of course, written in Kanji (on the stone and the wooden sign). But after some googling I found haikugirl who has kindly agreed to my copying from her post the translation given to her. Here ’tis:

Aka aka to
Hiwa tsure naku mo
Aki no kazu

This roughly translates to “How brightly the sun shines, turning its back to the autumn wind”, which sounds pretty appropriate to me, regardless of the accuracy of the translation. So thankyou haikugirl.

Carson McCullers in Japan. It took three trips to Kanazawa for us to finally visit its impressive 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art. They were running two excellent exhibitions, but I’ll just mention one, “Silent echoes”. The curator’s notes start with the following quote from Carson McCullers’s The heart is a lonely hunter:

How did it come? For a minute the opening balanced from one side to the other. Like a walk or march. Like God strutting in the night. The outside of her was suddenly froze and only that first part of the music was hot inside her heart. She could not even hear what sounded after, but she sat there waiting and froze, with her fists tight. After a while the music came again, harder and loud. It didn’t have anything to do with God. This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings. The music was her – the real plain her.

Murata Daisuke, the curator, goes on to explain that the centrepiece of the exhibition is “L’echo” by Tse Su-Mei, a Luxembourg artist whose work “resonates deeply with the world of music and human life conveyed by the above quote”. The aim of the exhibition, Daisuke writes, is to highlight “an artistic world created through a complete fusion of self, technique and the world”.

We found the exhibition appealing and accessible, and demanding engagement. It occupies 8 galleries/spaces, with each space containing only one or two works of art. This gives the viewer a wonderful opportunity to engage with the work, to contemplate its meaning for herself without being overwhelmed by surrounding works. The pieces range from three-dimensional sculptures and installations to two-dimensional pictures. One, for example, by Brazilian-born Vik Muniz, is a cibachrome print of an image of a (sky)diver he’d created using chocolate sauce. It’s two-dimensional but is tactile and free-spirited. It’s titled “Picture of Chocolate: Diver (After Siskind)”. Most of the works are monochromatic or use minimal colour, which also forces us to engage more deeply with the work I think.

But the exception to this muted colour use, and also the highlight for me, was “L’echo”. It’s a video projection showing a rear view of the artist playing a cello in a mountain landscape. She wears a red vest, while sitting on a stool on bright green grass and facing a very high dark green/blue forested mountain. She plays short simple sequences on the cello and pauses while the echo comes back. Sometimes she starts playing again before the echo finishes, so it sounds almost like a round. Sometimes the echo doesn’t quite replicate what she has just played. It’s mesmerising and beautifully evocative of the way humans and nature/landscape can engage on a level beyond reason and logic. I found it moving, and hard to leave.

Other works in the exhibition work at a similar level, and generally complement each other well, but I’ve not the time to dwell more on this now.

Kyoto

Our main reason for revisiting Kyoto this trip was to see Ginkaku-ji again and re-walk the Philosopher’s Walk because last time we’d done these it was late in the day and we had not “done” them justice. It was worth the effort. Ginkaku-ji is a lovely comparatively subdued temple with smallish but beautiful grounds which incorporate a dry landscape garden as well as “strolling garden” of paths, trees and shrubs.

In the grounds of the Honen-In, Kyoto

In the grounds of the Honen-in, Kyoto

The literary connection I want to refer to was not here though, but along the Philosopher’s Walk from which you can detour to visit a number of other temples. One of these is Honen-in and I was rather thrilled to discover that Junichiro Tanizaki is buried in the grounds here. We visited the cemetery but of course couldn’t read the tombstones. However, I rather liked knowing he was there, since this sort of literature-spotting is not such an easy thing to do in Japan (though I’m sure I could do more if I put my mind to it!). I read Tanizaki’s The Makioka sisters about 20 years ago, and found it a real eye-opener. It introduced me to a more multi-cultural Japan than I was aware of, while also conveying the challenges of maintaining traditions in a changing world. Max of Pechorin’s Journal recently wrote a post on a book by Tanizaki on reconciling tradition and modernisation in Japan. Do read his post – and the following discussion.

A little more Japlish

And just for fun, I’ll conclude with one bit of Japlish. It comes from some instructions for hotel guests:

Washing machine: 300 yen
Desiccator: 30 yen for 10 minutes.

I decided not to find out how long it would take to desiccate our clothes, and so left the washing for another day and hotel. Funnily enough, the “desiccator” itself was well labelled by the manufacturer as “dryer”. Clearly though the translator chose a dictionary over the object itself … and I’m rather glad s/he did.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Helen Garner on writing about self

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I have mentioned Helen Garner several times in this blog, and the word I tend to use about her is “honest”. Her fiction is very much about “self”. And in her non-fiction that I’ve read – Joe Cinque’s consolation and The first stone – her “self” is an integral part. She is not what you’d call an objective writer. In fact, in a talk she gave in 2001 at the National Library of Australia’s conference titled “The Secret Self: Exploring Biography and Autobiography” someone who writes “helplessly about the intimate”.

This started with her first novel, Monkey Grip, which, though published to general overall acclaim, did attract some demurrers who argued that all she’d done was publish her diaries. That was in 1977. In her address at the National Library conference she spoke of how she’d been initially defensive about these criticisms but that in the succeeding years she’d thought about it and would now “come clean” because that’s exactly what she’d done. She’d cut out the boring bits, written bridging passages and changed names. And, she said, there’s craft in all that. “Why the sneer?” she asked,

…as if it were lazy. As if no work were involved in keeping a diary in the first place: no thinking, no discipline, no creative energy, no focusing or directing of creative energy; no intelligent or artful ordering of material; no choosing of material, for God’s sake; no shaping of narrative; no ear for the music of human speech; no portrayal of the physical world; no free movement back and forth in time; no leaping between inner and outer; no examination of motive; no imaginative use of language.

Sounds like a novelist’s manifesto to me! Anyhow, she goes on to say that she wrote it because she’s not such a narcissist as to believe that her story was so “hermetically enclosed in a bubble of self” that it could offer no value to anyone else. She’s talking, of course, about some level of universality.

Further, she says, when writing (whether from a diary or not), she has to find a persona … and it is different for every work. These personas may draw from her life but they are not identical with her. She cannot write until she finds this persona. (An aside. I love hearing from authors about what they need to get started. Australian young adult writer John Marsden says he must find “the voice”. Australian children’s writer, Paul Jennings, said he started with a “what if?”. Alan Gould about whom I posted recently starts with a sentence – which may or may not be the first in the book – and Helen Garner needs her persona.)

Garner’s persona, she admits, usually draws from herself, from “the intimate”. This inevitably results in some level of self-exposure, which, given our interdependent lives, can’t help but involve others. And so she has struck a deal with herself:

… if I’m rough on myself, it frees me to be rough on others as well. I stress the unappealing, mean, aggressive, unglamorous aspects of myself as a way of lessening my anxiety about portraying other people as they strike me.

She certainly keeps to her deal … and it often gets her into trouble, in both her fiction and non-fiction. Her latest novel The spare room is a raw exploration of a friendship between two women, one of whom is dying of cancer but refuses to accept it. The main character, the one not dying and who is challenged by her friend’s attitudes and demands, is called Helen! Life and art are very close in this book it seems, but she knows what she is doing. Her ethical challenge is about the “other” people in her life who get pulled into her exploration of “the intimate”. She says:

Writing, it seems, like the bringing up of children, can’t be done without damage.

Some time ago I reviewed a short story titled “The young painters” by Nicole Krauss. In it she explores the impact of writing from other people’s stories, and presents her case:

In the publicity interviews I gave, I emphasized that the book was fiction and professed my frustration with journalists and readers alike who insist on reading novels as the autobiographies of their authors, as if there were not such thing as the writer’s imagination …

Helen Garner has no real answer to the problems she poses (any more than Krauss’s fictional character does in the short story), except to say that

… if I can write well enough, rigorously and imaginatively enough, readers will be carried through the superficial levels of perviness and urged into the depths of themselves. I hope we can meet and know each other there further down, where each of us connects with every other person who has ever been loved, hurt and been wounded …

In other words, she’s looking for readers who can tell the difference between fiction and reality. This may not, I suspect, reassure all those close to her who may not want their lives to be caught up in such a risky writer-reader venture but, theoretically, I like what she says and the honesty with which she says it. I’d love to have been in the audience that day to hear the Q and As.

Delicious descriptions from Down Under: Alan Gould on the Monaro (and thereabouts)

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Tharwa - Angle Crossing, New South Wales
Monaro country after the 2003 fires

While I love reading to escape to other places and times, other cultures and ways of being, I also enjoy reading about the familiar, about places I know and experiences I’ve had. Alan Gould, whose The lakewoman I reviewed recently, is a local writer. The lakewoman, in fact,  is primarily set in England, France and Germany, but  the hero Alec Dearborn does return to Australia towards the end, and before that often thinks or talks about it. His Australia is the country surrounding where I live, an area we call the Monaro, to be exact.

Here are some descriptions from The lakewoman that describe this region;

He went on to describe the Murrumbidgee River that flowed beside The Dad’s place, how it used to run flush after rain, with the brown waters mounting each other like so many panicky sheep in a pen. How it might be a trickle at the end of a summer without rain, like glassy infrequent spillages between rocks.

and

Sometimes he would try to describe his part of Australia, the streaky, silvery, airy, dry spaces of his pastured and lightly timbered country, sheep standing immobile in fog as the crows called mournfully through the whiteness.

and

How, for instance, a Monaro mist would transform a big brittlegum into a delta of pale grey veins against the white. Or how the last hour of sunlight in this airy woodland could angle so searchingly under the foliage to suffuse the planet’s surface with aureolin gold.

This is not verdant country, nor is it particularly welcoming. But, it is spacious, golden and airy – and it lifts my heart whenever I drive through it. Gould captures its particular variety perfectly.

On the literary (and linguistic) road in Japan: 1, Central Honshu

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Given this is primarily a litblog, I like my travel posts to have some literary or, at least, linguistic interest. And so in this first post about our current trip to Japan, literary and linguistic observations and thoughts will be my focus.

Linguistic challenges

Japanese language has a pitch-accent system which can provide particular challenges for English-speaking foreigners who try to use some Japanese words when communicating. For example:

  • Kaki: Oyster or Persimmon, depending on, to me, a very slight difference in intonation
  • Sake: Salmon or, well, Sake, with the same proviso as above
  • Hana: Flower, Nose or a Girl’s name with, I think, no variation in pronunciation. So, when you see a shop, as we did the other day, called Hana No Hana (‘no’ denoting ‘possession’), you wonder whether it means ‘Hana’s Flower’ or’ Hana’s Nose’ or ‘Flower’s Nose’ or, Flower’s Flower’, or … well, you can see where I’m going can’t you? You can have fun playing word games with Japanese people.

Japlish

Sign in toilet, Japan

Sign in toilet, Japan

English-speaking foreigners, as you probably know, love to “catch” Japanese out in their English usage … and so for fun I’ll share just a couple that we’ve come across to date with you. But, please note that these are shared in a sense of fun not ridicule. After all, most Japanese know more English than I do Japanese, and at least they try.

  • On a special English menu in an izakaya that I shall leave unidentified to protect the innocent:

It is necessary to enjoy oneself over meal after it acknowledges though it is thought that the mistake of the word is somewhat found in the menu.

  • Inside a toilet door. For some reason, hotels and tourist venues often feel the need to tell you what to do with your used toilet paper. This one is particularly (unconsciously, we presume) entertaining:

Attention!
(It is asked a favour to users by a manager)
Please divert toilet paper to a toilet stool. Let’s use a restroom neatly.

Literature

I like to read Japanese writers, and have reviewed a couple on this blog to date, but here I’ll share something different.

A little haiku written by the poet Koyabashi Issa (1763-1827), one of Japan’s four haiku masters. It was inspired by a frog mating battle at Gansho-in Temple in the lovely little town of Obuse, and was written to encourage his sickly son. (Unfortunately, his son died a month later. In fact, Issa was pre-deceased by all his children and his wife).

Yase-gaeru,
Makeru na! Issa,
Kore ni ari.

It roughly translates to:

Skinny Frog,
Don’t give up! Issa
Is here.

English traveller-explorer Isabella Lucy Bird‘s* letters, titled Unbeaten tracks in Japan, published in 1880 about her trip to Japan. I downloaded an eBook version and have been dipping into it during our trip. In Letter XVIII she talks about her travels in the alpine region of Central/Western Honshu through which we travelled a day or so ago. Here is an excerpt:

It is an enchanting region of beauty, industry, and comfort, mountain girdled, and watered by the bright Matsuka. Everywhere there are prosperous and beautiful farming villages, with large houses with carved beams and ponderous tiled roofs, each standing in its own grounds, buried among persimmons [kaki, remember!] and pomegranates, with flower-gardens under trellised vines, and privacy secured by high, closely-clipped screens of pomegranate and cryptomeria.

She then names a number of villages, including the gorgeous Takayama which we have now visited on two occasions. She describes the farms as “exquisitely trim and neat”, and nothing has changed today.

I was also struck by a comment on food from the same letter. When she asked her hosts whether they drank milk from their cow, she learnt that they didn’t, that they thought it was “most disgusting” the way foreigners put into their tea something “with such a strong smell and taste”. Tea is of course a significant part of Japanese culture, but from a country which eats the oddest things to our western minds – salmon nose anyone? – this did make me laugh. Each to her own, as they say!

And here ends, my first little travel piece. More to come (probably).

*In the interests of full disclosure, I must add that according to Wikipedia, her first adventure was to Australia but she apparently didn’t like it.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Guest authors at the Sydney Writers’ Festival

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Regular readers of Monday musings will remember that a recent post in the series was inspired by the Qantas flight magazine, The Australian way. Well, I’ve been in the air again … this time for a longer trip, as Mr Gums and I have again left daughter and dog in charge at home, and are holidaying in Japan. Of course I read The Australian way again, and in the May 2011 issue found an article about guest authors who will be attending this month’s Sydney Writers’ Festival. Now this, I thought, could make for an interesting Monday musings post. It’s not really about Australian literature but it is about some writers who’ll be attending an Australian literary event. The premise of the article is that its author, Paul Robinson, asked the authors to share their “literary discoveries”, and so I thought I could share them with you. I’ll say straight off though that I’m not familiar with all the authors mentioned. Would love to hear if you are, and what you think of them.

  •  Ingrid Betancourt, author of Even silence has an end: Mario Vargas Llosa’s The feast of the goat. Having read this one recently, I can concur with this discovery!
  • Fatima Bhutto, author of Songs of blood and sword: Colombian author Hector Abad’s Oblivion.
  • Philippa Fioretti, author of The fragment of dreams: Gay Talese’s The sons (1992).
  • Emma Forrest, author of Your voice in my head: Tom Rachman‘s The imperfectionists. I’ve seen this one reviewed around the blogs and have my eye on it for my TBR.
  • A A Gill, author of Here & there: Collected travel writing: Simon Sebag Montefiore‘s Jerusalem: A biography, and the complete works of H L Mencken.
  • A C Grayling, author of The good book: Dale Peterson’s The moral life of animals, and Michael Shirmer’s The believing brain.
  • Howard Jacobson, author of last year’s Booker Prize winner, The Finkler question: Milan Kundera‘s essay “The curtain”, and Ian Mackillop’s F R Leavis: A life in criticism.
  • David Mitchell, author of The thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoet: Simon Lelic’s The facility.
  • Favel Parrett, author of Past the shallows: Chris Wolmersley’s Bereft. (Ah, someone has nominated an Australian book.)

There you have it. Not much about Australian literature, but these are the people who’ll be speaking about books and writing to Australians this month – and that has to be interesting, hasn’t it?

POSTSCRIPT: This was supposed to have been published on Monday, but I made a mistake in the scheduling, so it is now Monday musings on Wednesday. Traveller’s brain!

Jay Griffiths, A love letter from a stray moon

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Jay Griffiths, A love letter from a stray moon cover

Book cover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

I have always wanted wings. To fly where I belong, to become who I am, to speak my truths winged and moon-swayed.

I’m not sure I can do justice to this poetic, passionate novella by Jay Griffiths. Titled A love letter from a stray moon, it’s a first person outpouring in the voice of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. I don’t use the term “outpouring” pejoratively, but rather to describe the full-on passion with which it is told. This is a book with confronts the senses with its power – the imagery is strong but beautiful, the story raw and honest (or so it seems to me.) It’s a book you want to describe as a “tour-de-force” but that would be too clichéd.

The opening lines of the novel quoted above introduce us to its two main metaphors – wings/flight and the moon. For Frida, flight equates with hope and with magic. The moon, though, is a far more complex image, and I’ll try to tease it out a bit as I go on. First though the story. This is biographical fiction (historical fiction?) in the form of a prose poem, told in the first person voice of Frida. The facts of Kahlo’s life are conveyed – such as the terrible accident when she was 18 which left her unable to bear children; her falling in love with, marriage to and divorce from Diego Rivera; her relationship with Trotsky; and even her death and cremation which requires some suspension of disbelief but that’s not hard to do given the novel’s style and tone. If you didn’t know much about Frida you could, I think, read this piece of fiction and feel you’ve got the basic facts, as well as a good understanding of the woman who “lived” those facts.

Woven through all this is the Mexican Revolution which started in 1910 (three years after she was born), discussions of the rise of Fascism, and her ideas on love, art and life (and particularly on how they interrelate). There are also, though this seems a bit anachronistic, some strong references to climate change. In fact, at the end of the novel, Griffiths dedicates her book to two groups of people, climate change activists and Zapatistas. Frida died in 1954. Was climate change an issue then? In the book Griffiths has Kahlo expressing concern about the Amazon and Tuvalu:

But the  Amazon will die of thirst, she will seize up with drought … One island nation, five atolls and four islands, pacific and named by doves, Tuvalu, is silently submerged as the quiet waters lap its shores, past the fishing boats, up its beaches, up, to the houses at the coastline, on, on, the gentle sea, the sea murmuring in quiet amazement at itself, on, until the centre where it can see itself coming, reflecting its rise, it meets itself in a full circle of embrace and Tuvalu will only be a story of mythic islands beneath the waves.

Let’s though get back to the moon. The motif is sustained throughout the novel. It’s appropriate of course for a woman, with its implications for women’s reproductive cycle, but Kahlo draws so much more from it than this single meaning. She layers meaning upon meaning for the moon, some of them superficially paradoxical but together they form a whole. Throughout the novel, for example, she opposes the ideas of gold, earth, sun and matter to silver, moon, and myth. The moon represents for her the mythical, the immaterial and creativity but it also connotes coldness and barrenness. I did say it was a complex symbol – but it’s fittingly s0 for a complex woman. In the first chapter, “Exiled from Casa Azul” she talks of wanting to fly to the moon, describing it as “pure idea” versus the sun which, more pragmatically, “lights the earth”. In the next (very short) chapter, “The moon’s instructions for loss”, she expands on her idea of the moon a little further:

And the moon? In the revolution of the earth’s turning – and I was a revolutionary – a shard of earth was flung off, coalescing, reforming further and later, far off as the moon. But shard is the wrong word, too hard and substantial; so immaterial was this moment, so unearthly the earth, so unanchored the moon, what word could be better? The moon was more like Idea, more like Metaphor, or Time, Flight, or Potential or Longing. A highly strung intensity of latency.

In the rest of the book, these ideas about the moon are explored, teased, stretched as far as they will go to convey the wild, free essence of her life. In her mind the moon is closely related to the idea of flight. She refers to Icarus (whose downfall of course was the sun), arguing that the important thing was not the fall but that he dared to fly.

In one of many references to flight she says:

… flight’s true reality was never in its being made material. What is real need not be material at all.

Given the challenges of her physical life (polio as a child and a leg amputation late in life in addition to her accident), it’s not surprising that Frida found significance in the life of the mind, the spirit and the soul.  “The mind needs myths, good ones”, she says.

And then there’s art. She was known for her self-portraits, in which she painted her passion and her pain. Her art was an extension of her “self”:

…so I make this as a votive painting, a prayer, a vow, a plea, painting to win him back to me…

Frida was a rebellious soul … whose passions were personal and political. Somehow Griffiths has managed to capture all this in a novel which could so easily have been over-the-top. It isn’t, because her Frida’s voice sounds authentic. Frida says, towards the end, ‘I would re-enchant myself with mankind, nothing less … I will promise to find the god of new beginnings.”

I have not done justice to this wonderful, complicated little book – but I hope I have conveyed something of its magic. After that, it’s up to you.

Jay Griffiths
A love letter from a stray moon
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2011
117pp.

(Review copy supplied by Text Publishing)

Talking with Alan Gould

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Joseph Conrad
Conrad, 1904, a favourite writer for Gould (Photo: George Charles Beresford, Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

I didn’t say in my recent review of Alan Gould‘s The lakewoman that Gould attended my reading group’s discussion of his book. I had so much to say – so many thoughts – about the book, that I thought I’d save a report on his comments for another post, so here goes … but first …

Becky of PageTurners wrote a post recently on the impact of having an author attend a reading group discussion of his/her book. She suggested that it can be hard for group members to be honest when the author is present. That’s true of course. Few of us are willing to “attack” an author face to face, particularly when we see what heart (not to mention sheer sweat) has gone into writing the book under discussion. Fortunately, being honest didn’t seem to be a big issue in my reading group’s discussion with Alan Gould. Some found it slow at the start, and some asked him about the resolution, but all seemed to have enjoyed the book and his writing as a whole. For me, having an author present can add benefits that outweigh this honesty concern. See what you think from this report of our meeting with an author, because Gould, like Halligan when she joined us for her book, was articulate and generous in sharing his ideas with us.

Gould on his influences

  • Joseph Conrad (and, before him, Emily Bronte), who taught him about timing, something Gould plays particular attention to in his writing. I particularly liked the timing and pacing in The lakewoman, but I wrote a little about that in my review so won’t go on about it here.
  • Thomas Hardy, who uses coincidence, arguing that it’s coincidence that makes a story a story, if you know what I mean. Gould did say though that Hardy tended to use coincidence in a realist setting, whereas for him coincidence helped create the sense of magic or enchantment. He said his aim was to use coincidence in a way that would be psychologically or practically plausible but that also added a sense of mystery. One of the things I enjoyed about the novel was its somewhat mystical tone – the sense that things were occurring on a slightly “higher” plane than pure logic.
  • Shakespeare, who taught him that the key to writing a novel is to quickly establish “the calibre of the character’s intelligence”, that is what makes that character tick, what his/her mind is like. He gave Iago as an example and explained how Shakespeare establishes early on “who” Iago is. This is certainly what Gould does with Alec Dearborn in the novel. We get into his head quite early and gain a clear understanding of what sort of person he is and why he might be open to Viva’s influence.
  • Roger McDonald, an Australian novelist, who encouraged him to try writing a novel (instead of poetry) by saying that “a novel begins with a sentence”. Gould then talked about a few of his books and how this idea works for him. This first sentence, he said, does not always end up being the first sentence of the book but it is the kernel that gets him going.

Gould on writing novels versus poetry

Gould started as a poet and now writes both. He told us that he writes them alternately, that he can’t write poetry and a novel concurrently, because it’s like “changing from an art form tilted to music to one tilted to history”. He further explained this as being related to “time”. Poetry is a case of “and now and now and now” while novels are more “and then and then and then”. I’d love to hear what you think of this. I found it an interesting concept, though my first reaction was to think “but…” And yet I think I see his point, at least in general terms because of course there are always exceptions. Poetry is, I suppose, often about capturing a moment, while a novel does usually cover a period of time with at least some elements of cause-and-effect (even those novels, like Virginia Woolf‘s Mrs Dalloway or McEwan’s Saturday that take place in a day).

Gould on The lakewoman

And of course, he talked about the book, in particular. It was inspired he said by the poet David Campbell, though Alec Dearborn is not Campbell. Rather, it is Campbell’s combination of physicality (he, like Dearborn, was a rugby player) and “a lyric sensibility” that Gould tried (successfully I think) to capture.

He also wanted to write a “romance” in the old sense of the word. He defines this as being about a hero on a quest, who thinks he knows what he’s about until he meets someone who shakes up this idea. Viva is this catalyst for Alec. She is an utterly practical woman – something we see played out through the novel from the way she saves Alec from drowning at the beginning to how she plans to conceive a child towards the end – and yet she has an aura of enchantment, starting from that first moment when she appears by the lake as he lands from the sky!

He said a lot more – particularly about some of the images and motifs he used in the novel – but I’ve probably written enough, so I’ll just share his answer to my last question, which was about his favourite contemporary writers. After prevaricating a bit on the definition of contemporary, he named the following Australian writers and books: Inga Clendinnen (not a novelist), Helen Hodgman’s Blue skies, Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus, Kate Jennings’ Snake, Christina Stead’s For love alone, Randolph Stow, and Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet. No wonder I enjoyed his novel, he has great taste.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Popular Penguins at a Perfect Price

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Penguin with No. 1 ribbon

Since Penguin never responds to my copyright queries (Courtesy: OCAL via clker.com)

You all know Penguin Books – and perhaps something about the company’s origin. The story goes that Allen Lane, standing on a train platform in 1935 and not being able to find “something good” to read, decided that there existed “a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price”. He staked all he had, apparently, and a publishing giant was born.

Over time though, prices have climbed and so a few years ago, Penguin decided to introduce plain covered (much like the original orange and white covers) editions of popular titles. The first set was published (here, anyhow) in September 2008. The price, in Australia dollars, $9.95. I like them – their bindings are easy to open, they are light and easy to carry, they look classic, and they are inexpensive. What’s not to like?

Content-wise – and fair enough, since reading should not be not an exclusively nationalistic activity – the majority of the offerings are non-Australian. However, each release of new titles includes a small selection by Australian authors, and it is these that I look out for and buy if I don’t already have them (because some nationalism is good!). Here is a list of what I believe are the currently available Australian titles published as Popular Penguins:

  • Astley, Thea It’s Raining in Mango
  • Carmody, Isobelle Obernewtyn
  • Clarke, Marcus For the Term of His Natural Life
  • Conigrave, Timothy Holding the Man
  • Courtenay, Bryce Power of One
  • Cracknell, Ruth Journey from Venice
  • Drewe, Robert Bodysurfers
  • Drewe, Robert Our Sunshine
  • Garner, Helen Monkey Grip
  • Garner, Helen Postcards from Surfers
  • Hartnett, Sonya Of a Boy
  • Hartnett, Sonya Surrender
  • Horne, Donald Lucky Country
  • Hyland, M.J. How the Light Gets In
  • Jolley, Elizabeth The Well
  • Leunig, Michael Curly Verse: Selected Poems
  • Lindsay, Joan Picnic at Hanging Rock
  • Marshall, Alan I Can Jump Puddles
  • Niland, D’Arcy Shiralee
  • Park, Ruth Playing Beatie Bow
  • Park, Ruth Harp in the South
  • Richardson, Henry Handel Getting of Wisdom
  • Stow, Randolph Merry-Go-Round in the Sea
  • Turner, Ethel Seven Little Australians
  • Winton, Tim In the Winter Dark

That’s twenty-five titles, mostly novels, but some non-fiction as well as poetry and short stories. A couple of the novels are children’s or young adult.

The temptation of course is to quibble with choices like this, to argue for one’s favourites, or on other grounds for why some other title/s may be more worthy … but why bother? The point is that it’s good to see an interesting variety of Australian titles being re-published in an affordable format – and, since the series seems to be popular, we can only expect that more Aussie titles will be published in the future. Meanwhile, non-Australian readers looking for Australian titles to read would not go too far wrong by choosing (according to their own interests) from this list.

A little postscript

I’m (well Whispering Gums, anyhow, is) 2 years old today. I can’t quite believe how quickly these two years have gone. It’s been great fun writing this blog, responding to comments on it, and reading the blogs of those I’ve met through blogging. Thanks a bunch for sharing your thoughts and ideas. And thanks especially to those who helped me get going in my early days. You know who you are and, while I won’t out you here, I want you to know that I greatly appreciate you! Roll on year 3 …

Elizabeth Jolley, Diary of a weekend farmer

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Elizabeth Jolley's Diary of a weekend farmer

Bookcover (Image courtesy Fremantle Arts Centre Press)

I took 2 valium and went to bed early (Monday 12th October, 1970)

Elizabeth Jolley’s Diary of a weekend farmer is one quirky memoir (if you can call it that). And yet it is, really, exactly what you might expect from a writer who rarely wrote the expected!

It is a slim volume – illustrated with warm, shimmery paintings by West Australian artist, Evelyn Kotai. The diary entries were written by Jolley at irregular intervals from 1970 to 1974 (probably), and are accompanied by poems by Jolley, plus the occasional contribution from her husband Leonard and daughter Ruth. Some of the entries are reflective

… being on this piece of land makes me feel very much aware of the shortness of life, I mean our human life in comparison with the land and the big old trees. (from Monday 6th [September, 1971] continued)

while others are factual

Ruth and I tried to plant tomatoes ground too dry and hard. (from 10th November 1970)

As you can see, little care (or perhaps a lot of care – how are we to know?) is taken with punctuation.

Jolley’s trademark wry, or even wicked, comments are in evidence

Next door’s place has been well cleared and conquered I think the word should be … (from 11th November 1970)

There is, in fact, a tiny plot running through the book and it has to do with the “neighbour woman”. She appears regularly as a rather ambiguous presence who doesn’t respect Elizabeth and her city-slicking family, and their farming endeavours, but offers some useful advice at times. Much of this “plot” is carried though a poem (“Neighbour Woman on the Fencing Wire”) which continues in sections throughout the book:

I suppose you didn’t notice last Sunday evening
you left your rake and mattock out …
(from “Continuation from the Fencing Wire”)

This woman is a little thorn in Jolley’s side – always pointing our her failings – and yet at the end, Jolley’s underlying compassion becomes evident as she writes of the “neighbour woman’s death” and her husband’s grief:

… and I understood I was face to face with someone who really loved the neighbour woman and that he would never get over something that is brushed aside in the word bereavement. (from No date required)

But, what this little volume particularly shows is her love of the land – along with her recognition of its challenges. Here’s one example:

Is it an alien place resisting or is it retreating from all our human endeavour. And then the doves fly up glowing in the rising sun and the sound from their wings is like a tiny clapping. (from Monday 25th February, 1973).

There is a very Jolley-esque tension here between an almost mystical beauty and a power that is not always benign.

And here is a reference to gums and their widow-making capability:

The wind moves the trees great branches fall
In the wind or in the stillness
A few feet nearer and I should have been crushed
Into the greater stillness.
(from “Great Branches Fall”)

These diary entries were made before her first book, Five acre virgin, and other stories, was published in 1976, though she’d had individual short  stories published from the 1960s on. When I read memoirs by writers, I look (of course) for references to writing. There is not much here, though. Besides the mention of something her husband said as being “a very good 1st sentence”, the main reference to her writing is this:

I finished the story “Pear Tree Dance” for the BBC, an idyllic ending! The newspaper of Claremont Street contains the grim and sinister side of things. (from 19th August 1971)

She’s right about that. Newspaper is one of my favourites of hers but it is rather grim. It was not published until 1981 … and is about a woman who wanted her own piece of land. I think I’ll leave it here – and let you ponder that idea!

Elizabeth Jolley
Diary of a weekend farmer
South Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1993
ISBN: 1863680438
95pp

Alan Gould, The lakewoman: A romance

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Alan Gould, The lakewoman

Book cover (Courtesy: Australian Scholarly Publishing P/L)

I’m a little embarrassed to say that until The lakewoman was shortlisted in the 2010 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, I only knew of Alan Gould as a poet. Turns out, though, that he has written several novels, of which this one is his most recent. It is, ostensibly, a war novel, in that much of it is set in or around World War 2, but it is not in fact about the war.

It’s an intriguing book that slides literally and metaphorically between the solidity of the earth and the fluidity of water, between pragmatism and magic (or enchantment). It tells the story of Alec Dearborn, an Australian grazier’s son who was born in 1918. He goes to Cambridge in England and, when the war starts, decides to join up with the British Army rather than return home. The novel starts with his having landed in a lake, after parachuting from a plane for the D-Day Invasion. He is drowning, dragged down by his weapons bag and parachute, but is rescued by – yes – a lady in a lake. Ha! Now you see why it is called a “romance” because, while it contains “a” romance, it also hearkens back to the “romances” of yore, like the Arthurian legend. Here is the set up, pp. 2-3:

As he vomited he also wondered why this sudden young Mamzelle happened to be present at the exact, unlikely spot in France where his foolish body had come to earth. It was a question that would usefully occupy his mind later, when he was behind the wire with the austere leisure to brood on the magic that settled into his life following this, his fluky rescue. Magic? He was not a fellow given to outlandish notions, and would interrogate the dubious word, looking for its sense, not in mumbo jumbo, but as some friable quantity existing within the very crevices of everyday occasions.

In this passage, we see how carefully Gould has laid out his novel. He introduces us to the ideas of coincidence (fluke) and magic versus the everyday business of living, and he uses foreshadowing to distract us from plot issues (what will happen next) towards more interior ones (what is the meaning of what happens). As the novel progresses, this fellow who is not given “to outlandish notions” finds himself drawn, almost telepathically (it seems), to his rescuer. She , Viva, rather like the Arthurian lady-in-the-lake, frames the rest of his life, one way or another.

What happens on the surface of the novel is fairly matter-of-fact. Alec’s life runs its course in a mostly unremarkable way. One of the central questions of the book is that which Alec poses to his sister, Bell, a little while after he returns to Australia:

What I can’t work out is […] Well, how a person knows whether the existence he’s been given has been of value to anyone else.

This is Alec’s conundrum. He does not fulfil the traditional expectations of a grazier’s son (“Dearborn”, after all), despite his “prospects” : he’s intelligent, sensitive, and physically capable (“the dynamism in balance with the dreaminess”). Much of this failure stems from his being “disarmed” on June 6, 1944, by Viva. There are some lovely, appropriate wordplays in the novel, and one of these centres on the idea of disarming/arming, which works beautifully against the novel’s military background:

‘If you think about me, then, when you are gone, I will be arming you still,’ she assured him, mysteriously.

Soon after he leaves her, he ponders what has occurred:

‘I feel distress at having relinquished you,’ he supplied on consideration. For it was distress, he recognised, to be walking away from this sudden new claim on his life. ‘It is this that has disarmed me, I reckon,’ he explained for her.

I will be arming you, she reminded.

It is difficult with this WordPress theme to get the formatting right: this last statement by her is in italics in the novel and suggests either his memory of her words or an actual telepathic communication. Which one it is, is one of the lasting ambiguities of the novel. Italics are used throughout the novel for “communications” like this and for interior monologues/reflections, usually Alec’s, since this is a third person narrative, told mostly from Alec’s point of view.

By now you may be thinking that this novel is a fantasy, even a romantic fantasy, but not so. Neither is it magical realist. It’s simply that there is a sense that slightly mystical things may be happening, things that make sense psychologically but that also convey another plane of human thought and behaviour. It reminded me, at times, of Patrick White‘s Voss, but to suggest more than that would be to do it a disservice because it is not at all derivative. Rather, it is simply that the story focuses on a dimension of experience that can’t always be logically explained but that is nonetheless very real. Gould has, I think, pulled this dichotomy off, by careful manipulation of tone: through language that is poetic but not overdone; a pacing that is meditatively slow at the beginning and pragmatically faster at the end; evocative chapter titles (such as “To Fling the Lovely Foolish Body”, “Had You Down Dead”); the occasional light touch (“‘You are the invasion?’, she asked”); and timing that foreshadows just enough to make sure we stay focused on the ideas and not the facts.

And for me, the main idea (the one that provides an “undercurrent” to all the others) is that of completing the self, which is something Alec struggles  to do. In the end though:

…the joy, the completion was her presence, and the talk was strangely superfluous. Yet by convention they did talk from some region of the mind where the words did not especially matter but the proximity of the person created an entirety of being.

This is a rather melancholic, but by no means sentimental, book – and it moved me deeply.

Alan Gould
The lakewoman
North Melbourne: Arcadia, 2009
296pp.
ISBN: 9781921509346