Alex Miller, Lovesong

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Alex Miller, Lovesong

Lovesong bookcover (Courtesy: Allen & Unwin)

Lovesong is my first Alex Miller novel, which is a bit embarrassing, really, given that he has won the Miles Franklin Award twice.

John was the quiet type … Except when he was telling me his story. Even then there was something quiet and private in the way he spoke about himself and Sabiha; as if he was telling himself the story; going over it to find its meaning for himself. Looking for something he’d missed when it was happening to him.

As you can probably tell from this quote, Lovesong is one of those story-within-a-story novels. Its basic plot is fairly simple. John, an Australian, tells the story of his life in Paris with his Tunisian wife, Sabiha, to Ken, a retired novelist. Retired? Well, so he says, but can he resist a good story when he hears one?

John and Sabiha’s love story is not exactly straightforward, which is foreshadowed early in the novel when Ken first meets Sabiha and notes “a sadness in the depths of her dark brown eyes”. He begins to wonder about “her story”. Adding a little complexity to this is a loose parallel in Ken’s life. He lives with his 38-year-old daughter, Clare, who during the novel starts a love affair of her own. Sabiha is, coincidentally, about 38 when the “crisis” in her life occurs. There are other parallels in the novel, such as Sabiha’s aunt Houria and her marriage to Dom, and Ken’s marriage to his wife Marie. Again, these are loose. They provide depth and perspective rather than the direct commentary that parallels often seem to do.

This is a surely structured novel. Miller manages to be simultaneously subtle and obvious so that you are conscious of being led along, but you are not always sure where to or what it might mean. Early in the novel, Clare tells her father that “Love is never simple”. A little later, Sabiha’s father reflects on his daughter and wonders, rather more prophetically than he realises, what “makes some people so different from others that they cannot share a common fortune with them”.  Alongside these early thematic hints is a whole slew of comments about story-telling and writing, about story-telling as “confession”, as “craving for absolution”, as, in fact, catharsis. In other words, the novel is also self-consciously metafictional, which is not surprising given that the first person narrator, Ken, is a novelist.

Meanwhile, there is John and Sabiha’s actual story – and again, the plotting is sure. We learn early that Sabiha wants just one child, “her child. There was only one”. And we learn of her closeness to her maternal grandmother. These two things, dropped lightly in the book, play a significant role in the development of the plot.

The novel is full of irony, starting with the title and its romantic connotations being undercut by other sorts of songs. And there is this from Sabiha’s aunt Houria:

Don’t try sorting out the rest of your life tonight, darling. You’ll see, it’ll all work out in the most unexpected ways.

This is doubly ironic because, eventually, Sabiha does attempt to sort out her life, rather than let it work out, and the result, while giving her what she wants, is also not what she expected. What’s that adage? Be careful what you wish for? And yet, that’s not what the novel is about. It’s not a cautionary tale. Rather, without being coy, it’s a meditation on the mystery and power of love – and, I would say, on innocence and experience in its many guises.

But it’s about other things too, such as the importance of home and place. Both Sabiha and John spend much of their lives living away from their respective homes. Ken, at the novel’s start, has just returned from spending time in Venice and is trying to decide whether to return. It’s also about Life – and the inevitability of change: “Change being forced on them, even as they stood still”. John feels it, Ken feels it.

But again and again, we come back to stories and storytelling. Partway through the novel Ken thinks:

There were things I could have added to his story, but I didn’t want to make it up this time. The truth is … I have never really liked making it up. My imagination, such as it is, needs the facts to feed off. I could see the directions I might go in with John and Sabiha’s story, but I resisted. I wanted to hear the truth from John.

And yet, it is not so simple as it sounds. At the end, he wonders:

I had her story now, but it is one thing to have a story and another to write it. How was I to articulate the delicate complexities that must give weight and depth and beauty to her story, those things that most easily elude us?

I found Lovesong an engrossing read. Its writing engaged me, it’s accessible, and it tells a great story, while also exploring the art and meaning of storytelling. I am left though with one question: Whose story is it to tell?

Lisa at ANZLitLovers also liked this book. You can read her review here.

Alex Miller
Lovesong
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2009
368pp.
ISBN: 9781742371290

We unfold – or do we?

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It’s been a while since I reviewed something other than books and writing here, but tonight Mr Gums and I went to the Sydney Dance Company’s performance of We unfold, and so it’s time I thought for another performing arts review.

We Unfold, photo by Tim Richardson

We unfold (Image: Tim Richardson, via twitpic, http://twitpic.com/9up5t )

The choreographer – and artistic director of the company – Rafaela Bonachela describes his creation as follows:

I wanted to create a piece about our needs and desires to slowly unfold, revealing ourselves to those around us … we unfold is collective discovery, a self-examination of our emotional cores. [Program]

The work uses 14 (or so) dancers, and incorporates music by Ezio Bosso, video art by Daniel Askill and costume design by Jordan Askill.

The dancing was beautiful. It was fluid but also had a feet-planted-firmly-on-the-ground muscularity, resulting in a performance that had both strength and beauty. The music was powerful, but perhaps a little too insistent at times. There wasn’t a lot of dynamic range – it seemed either strong and loud, or stronger and louder. The video art, on the other hand, was quite mesmerising, making it sometimes hard to know where to look – at the dancers or the video behind them. The costuming was effectively minimal for a dance about “emotional cores”, with neutral colours and, for the women, light barely-there diaphanous shifts/tops/dresses (take your pick).

So, what was it all about? The video art suggested a range of things. At times I thought I was seeing a progression of the elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. At other times I thought I was seeing evolution, or at least its commencement in the Big Bang Theory. Then again, there was also a suggestion of Adam and Eve in two sequences, one featuring a man rising from a crouching position, and the other featuring a woman who was, at the end of the sequence, suspended in mid-air. Perhaps it was all of these? Perhaps it was about all these basic things that make us who we are.

In the program notes, Bonachela said that the work was developed collectively with the dancers by encouraging them to improvise during the creation process. He wanted them to explore their willingness to open up, or not, to each other and said that this resulted in different connections and relationships being developed. There was certainly that. I enjoyed, for example, seeing gender roles played with. Not only did men lift women, but men lifted men, women lifted women, and women lifted men. Dancers moved fluidly from solo to duet, trio and larger groupings – and they did it surely.  Overall, it was a very “ground-based” piece, earthy rather than light and airy. In fact some moves were reminiscent of something primeval (which made me think evolution) but neither these nor anything else seemed to turn into any sort of “narrative”, even in an abstract sense. In other words, the unfolding connections weren’t particularly obvious to us. By the end, we felt like we’d watched a sequence of beautiful, well-executed and very watchable moves, but something that was a bit repetitious or, as Mr Gums so succinctly put it, somewhat one-dimensional.

This is the first time we have seen the company since Graeme Murphy and Janet Vernon (artistic director and associate director) left in 2007 after 30 years with the company. We unfold didn’t grab us quite the same way as previous performances (such as Boxes, Tivoli, Grand, The Director’s Cut) have – but the dancing was excellent, as we’ve come to expect, so we’ll be back.

Thea Astley, The multiple effects of rain shadow (Review)

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There are two main reasons why I like – actually love – to read Thea Astley. One is her language, her wonderful way with words that may, at times, be over-the-top but that is never clichéd. The other is her passion for the underdog, and thus for social justice in a world where it is often conspicuously absent.

Island, Palm and Sun

Island with palm, because Penguin will not answer emails regarding bookcover use (Courtesy: OCAL, via clker.com)

The multiple effects of rainshadow is Astley’s second last novel. Its overall subject matter is, as one character says late in the book, “the unmoored behaviour of humans”, an effective image given the book’s central motif is an island. It has a very loose plot which is based on an actual event that occurred on Palm Island in 1930. Palm Island was, at that time, essentially a dumping ground for Indigenous Australians deemed to be “problems”, but the event in question concerned the white superintendent, mad with grief at the recent death of his wife, running amok and setting fire to buildings (including his own home in which his children were sleeping). He was eventually shot (and killed) by an Indigenous man under the (cowardly) order of the white deputy superintendent. The novel explores, through multiple points of view and over a period of around 30 years, the impact of this event on six white people who were present on the island at the time – but interspersed between these voices is the voice of Manny, the man who shot the super. This is, I think, a pretty risky thing to do but Astley is not one to shy away from risks in her writing.

The voices are, in chapter order:

  • Manny Cooktown, first person, the indigenous “shooter” and main narrator who commences the story and appears between each voice, but does not conclude the novel
  • Mrs Curthoys, first person, landlady on Palm Island at the time of the incident
  • Gerald Morrow, third person, writer/editor who had gone to the Island to work as a foreman, for which he had no skill or experience, and who was in fact escaping the Island in a boat at the time of the incident
  • Captain Brodie, third person, the Superintendant who ran amok and was shot by Manny
  • Mr Vine, third person, a school teacher on the Island at the time of the incident
  • Father Donellan, third person, priest who visits regularly from the mainland and is responsible for the Island’s religious “needs”
  • Leonie née Curthoys, first person, daughter of Mrs Curthoys and so on the Island at the time of the incident
  • Omniscient author who carries the last chapter

Looks complex eh? But in fact it’s pretty straightforward in terms of knowing who is who, as each voice “manages” its own chapter. The chronology is a little trickier as many of the characters (let’s call them that from now on) flip between their present (some are writing from many years after the event) and the past. Did you notice that the first person voices belong to the two groups most recognised by Astley as disadvantaged: women and indigenous Australians? A subtle but clever use of her narrative structure to give them a voice!

The setting is, after all, very much a white patriarchal world, and marriage is seen in that light. Vine, for example, is told to get a wife  for

‘The boring bits. You know. Meals. Washing. Shopping. Kids. All that sort of thing. A man hasn’t time for that sort of thing.’

‘Why not a housekeeper, then?’

‘You are green. Cost too much …’

Not surprisingly Mrs Curthoys and Leonie do not find marriage much to their liking. The main underdogs in this novel though are the indigenous people, many of whom are brought to the Island – and therefore separated from their country – as problems, and are treated with disdain at best and real cruelty at worst by most of the white residents (from 1918 when the settlement begins to 1957 when the book closes). Astley offers, I’m afraid, little hope. She is not a cheery writer: her goal is to shock us into attention – and that she does. However, I can imagine some critics accusing her of putting contemporary views about feminism and indigenous relations in characters’ mouths. I would argue though that contemporary ideas do not spring from a vacuum, and that therefore the occasional more sensitive/egalitarian views expressed in the novel are historically valid.

I said at the beginning of this review that one of the main reasons I like Thea Astley is her language, so here are some examples of her imagery:

…whistlestop hamlets scattered along briefly tarred roads that led to further sprawls moated by loneliness …  [from school-teacher Vine, heading to a country school]

And I am weary of  a Celtic charm that is shaken like spice over any dish within gulping reach. We bore each other rancid. [Leonie on marriage and her philandering husband]

At least I’ll have tried. At least I’ll be learning to decline the gumleaf, conjugate the seasons. [Vine’s “do-gooder” son Matthew]

She also effectively mixes up the rhythm to make points or convey feeling, using short snappy sentences, repetition of phrases (such as Morrow’s “swing dip drag” as he sails across the sea), and punctuation-free streams of consciousness:

There was an unalterable plane geometry to his movements: the clock the tea/toast the clock the bell the classroom the toted piles of exercise books the bell the repeated texts the stale jokes the texts the bell the common-room bitchings the clock the bell … the … the … [schoolteacher Vine]

Astley is often quite self-conscious about the act and role of writing, and this is certainly the case in this novel. I’ll give just one example, the bitter rant of failed writer Gerald Morrow, who is jealous of the success of another, to him, lesser writer:

There must be a million readers out there who crave boredom! Who love the dangling participle! Who wallow in truisms and fatuous theorisings! … Slap in your popular aphorisms, buddy, but don’t make ’em think!

You could never accuse Astley of not making you think, but there has to be some irony here, some little sense of self-deprecation even, in the fact that she put these words in the mouth of a failed writer, as if she knew that for all her passion there’s only so much you can achieve with words. That may be so, but Astley has given it a darned good try!

Thea Astley
The multiple effects of rainshadow
Camberwell: Penguin, 1996
296pp.
ISBN:  9780143180265

The limits of Google

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I’m sure you’ve all had them, those searches that bring people to your blog by accident. Well, let me rephrase that: as far as Google is concerned it makes good sense, but you know the poor searcher at the other end of the keyboard would not agree.

Smiling cartoon face

Cheesy? (Courtesy: Mohamed Ibrahim, via clker.com)

I just have to share with you one that came to me yesterday. The search was:

Why do my gums smell cheesy?

“What the?” I thought. It’s obvious why the “gums” got to me but the rest? So I did the same search in Google and sure enough my blog was listed as hit no. 4 – and it’s there because in my post on The lady in the van I included a quote that has the words “a cheesy smell”. Nowhere are “gums” mentioned in that post, except of course in my blog name.

I often wonder to what degree Google uses proximity in its search algorithms – not a lot it seems*. It is this sort of thing that should tell the world that we still need librarians. Google is great – don’t get me wrong – but I cringe a little when I hear people say that they want to find things just like they do in Google. When time is money (or is short, in any way), Google on its own can be a frustrating beast.

Oh, and do you want to know what no. 6 in the hit list was? It’s “My boa smells” from Constrictors Forum. It refers to a boa that might have “cheesy nasty smelling junk on his gums“. To find this junk, though, you have to “hold him gently behind the neck and use your thumb to pull his lip down GENTLY”. You learn something new every day … thanks Google!

* DISCLAIMER: There are ways to refine the search in Google using asterisks but it’s not very sophisticated. If you Google  (ha!) “Google proximity searching” (with or without the quotation marks), you will find some interesting discussions.

James Thurber, The lady on the bookcase

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James Thurber, 1945

Thurber, 1945 (Courtesy: life.com, for personal non-commercial use)

If you like to think of yourself as a critic, read this. It is last week’s offering from the Library of America, and is an essay by James Thurber titled “The lady on the bookcase”; it was first published in The New York Times Magazine in 1945 under the title “Thurber as seen by Thurber”. I read it as a general spoof on the art of criticism; the Library of America says he “teases [his] colleagues and editors at The New Yorker.”

The scene is set in the first paragraph when he reports on a cartoonist complaining about being rejected:

“Why is it”, demanded the cartoonist, “that you reject my work and publish drawings by a fifth-rate artist like Thurber?” Ross came quickly to my defence like the true friend and devoted employer he is. “You mean third-rate”, he said quietly, but there was a warning glint in his steely gray eyes that caused the discomfited cartoonist to beat a hasty retreat.

Just this beginning, before I read any more, reminded me of why I had enjoyed Thurber in my baby-boomer youth when many of us read a bit of Thurber. Thurber was a writer and cartoonist, and in this essay he combines the two to poke fun at criticism … and at how editors tend to show a journalistic rather than a critical interest in his work by wanting to know the stories behind his work rather than analysing it.

He writes that:

I have never wanted to write about my drawings and I still don’t want to, but it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to do it now, when everybody is busy with something else, and get it over quietly.

… and, to continue his satire, he talks about “shoving” some of his originals around the floor until they “fell, or [he says archly] perhaps I pushed them, into five separate categories”. He goes on to describe the categories, illustrating each with some of his cartoons:

  • the Unconscious or Stream of Nervousness category
  • the space between the Concept of the Purely Accidental and the Theory of the Haphazard Determination
  • the theory of the Deliberate Accident or Conditioned Mistake
  • the Contributed Idea category
  • the Intentional or Thought-Up category

If you haven’t worked it out by now, you can’t take much of what he says seriously – and that is his point. Don’t, he tells us, try to categorise or apply psychological theories to someone’s work, go for a run instead. Then again, I wouldn’t take this too seriously either, because Thurber is also being disingenuous: in the tradition of the satirist, he sets us up at every point, only to pull us down again. After all, like any creative artist, he wants us to look at and respond to his work.

Have a look at it … I’m sure you’ll enjoy the ten cartoons reproduced even if you don’t want to read the essay.

And the Jane Austen bloggernaut just keeps rolling …

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Late last year I created a blog for my local Jane Austen group and in the blog roll listed some of the well-known (among Austen circles anyhow) Austen blogs. Since then I have come across many bloggers like myself – such as, say, So Many Books and The Captive Reader –  who like Jane Austen but don’t focus their blogs on her. Nothing unusual about all this you might say, but then things start to get a little weird, almost as weird as the appearance of books like Pride and prejudice and zombies, because I recently came across another Austen-lover’s blog, this one a foodie. It’s called Pride and Vegudice and belongs to a vegan-lovin’ Austen fan. Now what would mutton-stew-and-roast-pork-eating Jane Austen think of that?

In the immortal words of another nineteenth century writer, it just gets curiouser and curiouser!

Fallen over palm

Almost as curious as this fallen over palm

I do like a bit of nonsense

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You will never stub your toe standing still. The faster you go, the more chance there is of stubbing your toe, but the more chance you have of getting somewhere. (Charles Kettering, from thinkexist.com)

For over four months now, our daughter has been struggling with a toe-that-will-not-heal, her left big toe to be precise. It all started with a wedge resection done just a week before she headed off for the post-graduation grand adventure. She did have the grand adventure – those interested can check the link above – but through it all the toe refused to heal. She has now returned home and will have more surgery in a few days … so far so good, more or less.

Last week, while organising a table at an outside venue where I was to meet a couple of friends for lunch, I managed to drag said table onto my toe – my left big toe to be exact – and, well, I’ll spare you the gory details, but the end result is that mother and daughter are now sporting white-bandaged left big toes.

All this got me to thinking about toes, and what should pop into my mind but Edward Lear’s wonderful poem from my childhood, The pobble who has no toes. Now, at the beginning of the poem, the pobble happens to have toes, but by the end they are gone:

And when he came to observe his feet,
Formerly garnished with toes so neat,
His face at once became forlorn,
On perceiving that all his toes were gone

No-one knows where his toes goes went, but I do hope the same fate does not befall daughter and me. For the Pobble though, as I’m sure you all know:

… “It’s a fact the whole world knows,
That Pobbles are happier without their toes!”

But, moving on from toes, the point is that the Pobble made me think of nonsense-verse in general. The most well-known example is probably Lewis Carrol’s “Jabberwocky” (“‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves …”) but according to Wikipedia there is a long tradition of nonsense verse in English, and over the years I’ve read my share, because …

I have always enjoyed a bit of nonsense. I loved reading Dr Seuss to my kids and I got a kick out of reading Flann O’Brien’s rollicking, exuberant, almost incomprehensible at times, At Swim-two-birds. But, extending this a bit further, I think a love of nonsense is related to a love of word-play – in all sorts of writing. It’s one of the reasons why I like Gerard Manley Hopkins so much. His word-play is at the other end of the scale from nonsense, but it demonstrates the same fascination with and desire to push language to its limits – and to challenge the reader. I must say that I don’t always rise to the challenge, but I do enjoy trying.

Jane Austen: Conservative or progressive?

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I must admit that, fan as I am of Jane Austen (of her wit and clear-eyed observation of humanity), I have sometimes been conflicted about whether she is, as this post title asks, conservative or progressive.

She was innovative in terms of the history of the novel – her sure use of the third person omniscient narrator and her psychological and social realism were progressive for her time. But, what about her plots and their resolution? The fact that her heroines tend to marry well? Or, well enough, anyhow. I have often felt ashamed about my sorrow that sensible Elinor in Sense and sensibility did not “catch” as wealthy a husband as her emotional sister Marianne did. It’s not the money so much, but the fairness of it! Elinor deserved … but, she got what she deserved didn’t she? The man she loved!

But, I digress. The point is – and this is what seems to put some readers off – that Austen’s heroines always do marry, and they always marry within their class or slightly higher. They don’t throw it all to the wind to follow some passion; they are usually materially “sensible” even though they also determine to follow their heart. And so, there’s the conundrum. Austen’s heroines are independent of mind enough to hold out for a marriage of affection, but they don’t cast their net outside their kind. They seem to affirm the status quo.

However, as I also wrote in a recent post, I and many others see Austen as a protofeminist: while her plots and their resolution can be seen, superficially, to be conservative, there is something else going on. And this was presented from a fascinating perspective the other night by academic Glenda Hudson who spoke at the public library. Her topic was “Sibling love in Jane Austen, revisited” and was an updating of an article she published in 1989. She explored the role of sibling love and incest in Jane Austen – not that “actual” incest ever occurred in her books, but some of the highly sanctioned relationships, such as Fanny and Edmund in Mansfield Park, and Emma and Mr Knightley in Emma, have incestuous overtones (that are consciously articulated in the books).

Hudson claims that Austen promotes the value of fraternal (sibling) love in her novels – and defines this love as being based on shared moral and intellectual values and ideas. She argues convincingly that in many of Austen’s novels this idea is extended to encompass conjugal love, and that marriage in Jane Austen is presented as a meeting of like minds, as an egalitarian partnership between two people who, through the course of the novel, have come to love and respect each other. In fact, she argues that, through these marriages, Austen redefines gender roles in marriage.

Here is a description of Fanny with her brother, in Mansfield Park:

Fanny had never known so much felicity in her life, as in this unchecked, equal, fearless intercourse with the brother and friend [brother William] who was opening all his heart to her, telling her all his hopes and fears, plans, and solicitudes  … An advantage this, a strengthener of love, in which even the conjugal tie is beneath the fraternal. Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connexions can supply … (Mansfield Park, Ch. 24)

Here is Edmund, realising at the end that Fanny just might be the one for him. It is interesting in to look at in light of the above, since Edmund and Fanny were, from the time Fanny was 10 years old, “children of the same family”:

… it began to strike him [Edmund] whether a very different kind of woman might not do just as well, or a great deal better: whether Fanny herself were not growing as dear, as important to him in all her smiles and all her ways, as Mary Crawford had ever been; and whether it might not be a possible, an hopeful undertaking to persuade her that her warm and sisterly regard for him would be foundation enough for wedded love. (Mansfield Park, Ch. 48)

Hudson’s conclusion is that Austen is both conservative and radical – that she confirms the validity of the traditional family in what was a changing world, but that her vision of that family incorporates something new. I found this argument pretty convincing – but then, of course, it doesn’t take much to convince me that Austen was ahead of her times in thought and writing.

Rudyard Kipling, An interview with Mark Twain

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Rudyard Kipling

Kipling, somewhat older than 23! (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

How could I resist reading this offering from the Library of America, featuring as it does two giants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Both are writers I know well in a superficial way: I’ve really read only a little of their works. This essay, I thought, presented an interesting opportunity to get to know them from a different perspective.

“An interview with Mark Twain” was published in 1890, the year after Kipling, then 23 years old and on his overseas tour to Europe and the USA, interviewed the great man. Twain was 54, and staying in Elmira, NY, at the time. We know from the opening lines that Kipling idolises Twain:

You are a contemptible lot, over yonder. Some of you are Commissioners, and some Lieutenant-Governors, and some have the V.C., and a few are privileged to walk about the Mall arm in arm with the Viceroy; but I have seen Mark Twain … Understand clearly that I do not despise you, indeed I don’t. I am only very sorry for you, from the Viceroy downward …

Clearly this is going to be a positively reported interview! The essay starts though, rather humorously, with the challenges Kipling faced in locating Clemens (as he was known) but, one-third of the way into the essay, we finally meet Twain who, despite his grey hair (that “was an accident of the most trivial”) looked “quite young”.

Kipling’s next comment rather continues his hero-worship – and reflects the way many of we readers think when we think of our favourite writers:

Reading his books, I had striven to get an idea of his personality, and all my preconceived notions were wrong and beneath the reality. Blessed is the man who finds no disillusion when he is brought face to face with a revered writer.

You might think, from all this, that the rest of the interview will be rather hagiographic, with Kipling hanging on Twain’s every words. But, while there is an element of that, Kipling is delightfully self-conscious and there is a lovely sense of like minds engaging. Kipling reports on a conversation that ranges over a number of issues, including copyright, about which Twain has strong feelings, believing that a writer (and his heirs) should maintain control over “the work of his brains” (Kipling’s words) in much the same way as you might own “real estate” (Twain’s analogy). If you search the Internet, you will find a number of references to Mark Twain and copyright. As an (ex) librarian/archivist, I have a complicated relationship with copyright. I believe in abiding by it, I believe that creators need recompense for their work and that copyright is one way they can ensure that, but I also like people to be able to access the works they wish. According to my Internet research, Twain did not seek perpetual copyright, but enough to protect/provide for his immediate heirs. That sounds fair enough to me. And, it sounded fair enough to Kipling, though he was a little tongue-in-cheek in reporting that he saw Twain’s point, because he follows it up with “When the old lion roars, the young whelps growl. I growled assentingly”.

[If you are interested in copyright in the USA, check this timeline prepared by the Association of Research Libraries.]

Anyhow, they move on to discuss Twain’s books, and the possibility of a sequel to Tom Sawyer. Twain, teasingly, suggests that he hasn’t decided, that he could “make him rise to great honour and go to Congress” or he could “hang him”! This was too much for Kipling who says “I lost my reverence completely” arguing that Sawyer “was real”. Ah, fiction and reality I thought! This essay is speaking to me again.

Twain replies that Sawyer “is real … he’s all the boys that I have known or recollect” but then goes on to say that:

Suppose we took the next four and twenty years of Tom Sawyer’s life, and gave a little joggle to the circumstances that controlled him. He would, logically, according to the joggle, turn out a rip of an angel.

He calls this Kismet, and asks whether Kipling agrees. Kipling does to a degree, but suggests that Sawyer isn’t Twain’s property any more, “he belongs to us”. Hmmm…I’m not sure that this is the aspect of “reality” in fiction that interests me, but the discussion (which is not reported further) is interesting, if only because it reflects topics that engaged these two writers.

They they go on to discuss “truth and the like in literature” but the discussion focuses more on autobiography and Twain’s view that no matter how much an autobiographer may lie about him/herself, the “truth” will out. Ain’t that the truth! All of us writing blogs give ourselves away, regardless, I think, of how we may try to “present” ourselves… But, I think I’ll move on from this possibly murky mire!

And then, in a fascinating little discussion of novel-reading comes this point which may interest we bloggers. It’s about assessing novels. Twain says:

You see … every man has his private opinion about a book. But that is my private opinion. If I had lived in the beginning of things, I should have looked around the township to see what popular opinion thought of the murder of Abel before I openly condemned Cain. I should have had my private opinion, of course, but I shouldn’t have expressed it until I had felt the way.

Is he saying what I think he’s saying? A little later in the essay, and on a slightly different topic, Kipling says “and I am still wondering if he meant what he said”! Knowing a little of Twain, I must admit I’m wondering what was “true” in his comments, and what wasn’t … so much of his “truth” is behind rather than in his words.

Twain goes on to talk about fiction and fact, implying that he prefers the latter, that he doesn’t “care for fiction”. He then gives this advice which I love:

“Get your facts first, and” – the voice dies away to an almost inaudible drone – “then you can distort ’em as much as you please”.

I can’t think of a better point upon which to close this post … but, by way of conclusion, I found at The Huffington Post this comment made by Twain, many years later, about the meeting:

I believed that he knew more than any person I had met before, and I knew that he knew that I knew less than any person he had met before–though he did not say it, and I was not expecting that he would. . . . He was a stranger to me and to all the world, and remained so for twelve months, then he became suddenly known, and universally known.

Miles Franklin shortlist for 2010

/ Whispering Gums / 4 Comments

It seems vaguely silly for all we bloggers to be announcing the same thing – except that perhaps each of us has a slightly different readership so maybe it’s not completely redundant for me to announce here what has already been announced elsewhere – at Musings of a Literary Dilettante.

The Dilettante has provided links to the Judges’ comments, so please check out his link (here) if you’d like to see them. The shortlist though is:

  • Alex Miller’s Lovesong
  • Brian Castro’s The bath fugues
  • Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones
  • Deborah Forster’s The book of Emmett
  • Peter Temple’s Truth
  • Sonya Hartnett’s Butterfly

To date, I’ve still only read Jasper Jones, though Lovesong is creeping up the pile!

Now the fun – and the wait – really begin.