Nella Larsen, Passing (#BookReview)

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For last year’s Novellas in November, Arti (of Ripple Effects) posted on a book and author I’d never heard of, Nella Larsen’s Passing. She also discussed its 2021 film adaptation. Quite coincidentally, that same month, my Californian friend Carolyn wrote positively about the film in a letter to me. It sounded right up my alley, so how grateful was I when, this month, Carolyn sent me the book. I decided to squeeze it in …

According to Wikipedia, Nella Larsen (nee Walker) was born in a poor part of Chicago to a Danish immigrant mother, and a father “believed to be a mixed-race Afro-Caribbean immigrant from the Danish West Indies”. He disappeared early in Nella’s life, and her mother married another Danish immigrant. Because of Nella they were seen as a “mixed” family and were not welcome in the mostly white neighbourhood where they’d moved. Nella grew up in that difficult limbo of being neither white nor black.

Eventually, she married a Black-American* physicist and they moved to Harlem where they became involved with “important figures in the Negro Awakening”, later known as the Harlem Renaissance. I share all this because it is relevant to Passing, which was her second novel.

Passing, set mostly in 1927, tells the story of two Black women, Irene and Clare. Both can pass as white, but Irene lives in Harlem with her darker doctor husband, while Clare lives in white society, as a White, with her Black-hating banker husband. At the start of the novel, Irene receives a letter from Clare, referring to an accidental meeting they’d had in a swish hotel in Chicago where both had been “passing” as white. This meeting had been 12 years after they’d last seen each other as teens in Chicago, at which time Clare had been whisked away by her White aunts after the death of her drunken janitor father.

Two years had passed since that uncomfortable Chicago meeting, two years during which Irene had done her best to forget an occasion “in which even now, after two years, humiliation, resentment, and rage were mingled”. But now, Clare was wanting to see Irene again …

“they always come back” (Brian)

Much has been written about this book, which speaks directly to the challenges and conflicts faced by African Americans at the time. There was a new Black bourgeoisie – a professional middle class – to which Irene belongs, and in which she feels comfortable. She’s committed to the whole “uplifting the brother” project and does good works to that end. Clare, on the other hand, has turned her back on her race. The scene is set, we think, for conflict.

And there is, but if you think it’s going to encompass a simple dichotomy, you would be wrong. From the start, Larson keeps us on our toes, forcing us to see two very different ways of living as a black woman in that place and time. The story is told third person, but through the perspective of Irene. She is the conservative rule-follower who is sure of her path, while Clare, who is probably closer to Larsen herself, is more adventurous, a risk-taker. She’s lively, sensual, a breath of fresh air, but how are we to read her – and, for that matter, Irene?

As the novel progresses, we (and our allegiances) are tossed between the two, just as tensions between the two ebb and flow. Are we to approve Irene’s conscientious approach to life, or should we empathise with the “lonely” Clare who wants to reconnect with the black community? Both are flawed characters. Irene’s choice involves buying into the whole aspirational, consumerist, success-focused values of the bourgeoisie, so much so that she rides rough-shod over the wishes and needs of her husband and sons. Clare, on the other hand, might be lively but she can also be “selfish” and “wilful”, with her risk-taking being potentially dangerous or damaging to others, including her neglected young daughter. It’s clear that if her husband discovered she’d been touched by “the tar brush”, she’d be in deep trouble. It’s to Larsen’s credit that we do not see these characters as black and white (hmm!).

Irene and Clare are not the only characters in this tight novella, but the most interesting of the others is Irene’s husband, Brian, who finds himself caught between the two women after Clare inveigles herself into their lives. At the end of Part 1, just after the meeting in Chicago, Irene is preparing to return home to New York and Brian whose “old, queer, unhappy restlessness had begun again within him, that craving for some place strange and different, which at the beginning of her marriage she had had to make such strenuous efforts to repress.”

“caught between two allegiances” (Irene)

Passing is told in three parts – Encounter, Re-encounter, and Finale. In Re-encounter we learn more about these characters through their interactions, and we discover the source of Brian’s restlessness. He is, potentially, another adventurer, though different to Clare.

Early in this final part, Irene and Brian discuss Clare, “passing” and race. Brian has a more nuanced understanding of “race”, it seems. Answering Irene’s question about why those who pass “always come back”, he says, “if I knew that, I’d know what race is”. Much later, we learn that race is at the core of Brian’s restlessness. When Irene upbraids him for honestly answering their son’s question about lynching, he lashes out:

…I’d feel I hadn’t done my duty by them if I didn’t give them some inkling of what’s before them. It’s the least I can do. I wanted to get them out of this hellish place years ago. You wouldn’t let me. I gave up the idea because you objected. Don’t expect me to give up everything.

Passing is about many things, only some of which I’ve discussed. It’s about convention and security versus risk and adventure, about gender and marriage, about class and money, and about self-definition. There is much here that is universal about human nature, but, of course, race is a driving factor. As the novel draws to its conclusion, Irene finds herself

caught between two allegiances, different, yet the same. Herself. Her race. Race? The thing that bound and suffocated her.

But, there is another layer to this novel, a foreshadowing of something darker. Half-way through the novel, Irene says to Clare that “as we’ve said before, everything must be paid for”, while a little further on, Clare says to Irene

“Can’t you realize that I’m not like you a bit? Why, to get the things I want badly enough, I’d do anything, hurt anybody, throw anything away. Really, ‘Rene, I’m not safe.”

It’s chilling, but I’ll leave it there. I was engrossed by this novel from its opening sentence to its clever, unsettling ending.

* I’m uncertain about nomenclature, given the language used in this 1920s novel is not what we use now. I hope I’ve made a fair call.

Nella Larsen
Passing
New York: Penguin Books, 2018 (orig. pub. 1929)
128pp.
ISBN: 9780142437278

Monday musings on Australian literature: World Poetry Day, on anthologies

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Last week, Brona (This Reading Life) wrote a post on Eve Langley’s poem, “Native-born”, in which she shared the statement from Wikipedia that it appears regularly in Australian anthologies. As I responded to Brona, I checked my three “modern” Australian poetry anthologies and only found it in the most obvious one, The Penguin book of Australian women poets. This got me thinking about Australian poetry anthologies. I’m not an expert – by any stretch – on these, but it’s World Poetry Day today, so I thought to explore them a little.

Cover, Four and twenty lamingtons

This will be the fifth post I’ve done on World Poetry Day. In my first, I mentioned that I bought many children’s poetry anthologies when my children were young. I loved reading poems to them, and loved that these anthologies would include poems not written specifically for children.

Anyhow, I’ll start by sharing my four (adult) anthologies, listing them in the order I acquired them:

  • Ian V. Hansen, The call of the gums: An anthology of Australian verse (1962): my first year of high school poetry text. I treasure/d this book (loved the title, of course). It’s organised by subjects/themes.
  • Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn, The Penguin book of Australian women poets (1986): produced partly in reaction to years of male-poet-heavy anthologies; organised chronologically.
  • Jamie Grant, 100 Australian poems you need to know (2008): organised by themes.
  • Bertram Stevens, Golden treasury of Australian verse (1912): my oldest, but most recently acquired, it was given to my grandmother in 1914.

And here, I lost three hours work, when WordPress suddenly told me I don’t have the right to save my work, and I hadn’t noticed that it wasn’t saving! I feel defeated as I just can’t sit down now at 8pm and rewrite the whole thing. I usually copy and paste my content elsewhere when something like this happens, but I didn’t tonight and lost it all. So, a summary instead, to which you may all say, phew!

Essentially, I was writing about the value of anthologies, starting from the point of view that national anthologies can play a role in defining a canon (putting aside whether defining a canon is a good thing or not). I had found an excellent article in JSTOR, written by poet Geoff Page in 1994. He discusses Australian anthologising through much of the 20th century, focusing particularly on the impediments to their canon potential. Impediments include the times in which they were compiled (such as the nationalistic/imperialistic tenor of one in 1922), and, in Australia’s case, differences of opinions between poets. This has been well documented over the years but he simply alludes to it here, making the point that different prejudices have played out in the anthologies produced. He says:

No editor, of course, can really escape his or her own subjectivity but it is remarkable how many ones seem to feel it was not worth the effort anyway.

Page’s survey and analysis of inclusions and exclusions in several anthologies is fascinating.

He suggests that anthologies compiled by academics have tended to be the “fairest”. He also talks about the gaps in representation – such as of women, First Nations, and non-English speaking background poets – and notes some slow improvements in these areas.

He also makes the obvious-when-you-think-about-it point that it’s not just who is included or excluded but what poems are chosen. Page recognises the impact (on canon formation) of

the universal anthologist’s desire to discover what has not been anthologised before–which often, when space for only two or three poems is available, means passing up a classic for something less central.

I can understand this desire from both the compiler’s and reader’s point of view. However, there can be a darker side to the choice of a, perhaps, “lesser” poem, or, say, fewer poems for one poet over another. With anthologists becoming, Page writes, “more cautious about omission […] it’s not so much about exclusion now but branding by short measure”!

Anyhow, the end result is that “there is no generally agreed canon; various traditions contend or, increasingly, coexist”. This is not necessarily a bad thing, particularly if, as Page suggests, “the quality of the best work bears comparison” with that of other countries, and if, as Page also suggests, poets who “represent, or identify with, minority groupings … are slowly [my emph] being more widely represented in major anthologies”. Page concludes

the situation is lively and in flux, and is likely to continue that way for some time. Some allegiances are changing, some borders are being crossed, but the presence of long-established loyalties and demarcations are not about to disappear.

And, it seems, he was right, because, nearly twenty years later, in 2012, academic and poet Ali Alizadeh wrote a negative review in Overland of a 2011 anthology, Australian poetry since 1788 by Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray (whose earlier 1992 anthology Page had discussed). Alizadeh writes that the anthology

is not only a collection of some of the more timid and uninteresting poetry produced in this country since British invasion, it also propagates ideological notions that are comprehensively trite and reactionary …

He comments not only on who is included, but also what, noting, for example, that

the only poem by the radical avant-gardist Ania Walwicz included in the anthology is ‘travelling,’ a poem that is, according to the editors’ notes, largely bereft of the ‘socio-political intent’ present in ‘much of Walwicz’s [other] poetry’.

This is just one example of unrepresentative selection he provides to support his assertion that the editors’ “key objective … may have been much more ideological and tendentious: to present – or even shape – an image of Australian poetry as a cultural milieu devoid of ‘socio-political intent’.” Strong words. And they garnered strong, but mostly very interesting, if lively, responses. Do read them if you are interested.

Meanwhile, I will just share a response by critic Alison Croggon (whose Monsters I’ve reviewed). Picking up the point about “what” has been included, she argues that “the creation of context [is] another crucial aspect of anthologising”, and agrees with Alizadeh that what has been created here is the idea that “poetry is apolitical, a contextless aesthetic object”. This reminds me of Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn who, back in 1986, introduced their anthology by calling it “part of a history of women’s writing and of cultural politics which are creatively disturbing the conventional view of our literary heritage.”

Ah, poetry in Australia! It’s still a lively, contested place, and, really, that’s a good thing.

Now, do you enjoy – poetry anthologies? Care to talk about them?

Delicious descriptions: John Hughes on Newcastle

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Recently, Bill (the Australian Legend) commented on a post of mine that reviewers rarely talk about place or “think geographically”. I’m not sure exactly what he means, but I think, partly, he wants us to discuss whether we think what we are reading accurately depicts place.

Now, I love descriptions of place, for all sorts of reasons, but particularly for the tone they convey, and for the way authors use place to describe character or to underpin their themes etc. Place in literature was the prime topic of a book I reviewed last year, Chrystopher J. Spicer’s Cyclone country: The language of place and disaster in Australian literature. It offers a fascinating approach to studying place in literature. In a recent Delicious Descriptions, I briefly looked at Sara Dowse’s use of place in her novel, West Block, and in another I commented on place in Gay Lynch’s novel, Unsettled. Pure accuracy, you’ll have seen, is not something I focus on.

I have heard writers talk about place many times. It’s a popular topic at writers festivals. At the inaugural Yarra Valley Writers Festival, Karen Viggers (The orchardist’s daughter) and Alice Robinson (Anchor Point) spoke about it. Viggers said she uses place to orient herself as a writer, and then to explore our connections and help us reengage with the natural world and each other. The challenge, she said, is to bring readers in and engage them with ideas they may find uncomfortable. Robinson said that Anchor Point was based on landscape she grew up in. She was interested in how we have engaged with the landscape, and have failed to care for it.

For some authors, getting place right can be critical, more to avoid reader criticism, than because absolute accuracy is that important to them. They don’t want their novels to be de-railed by pickiness about, for example, whether the church was on this corner or that (which I have heard readers do!)

Anyhow, all this is to say that I think place can be very important in novels for a raft of reasons, and that I enjoy reading about place for the said same raft of reasons. John Hughes’ The dogs, while being about “big” human issues, is also very much set in place. Mostly this is Newcastle, and its environs, though there are vivid scenes in Europe, particularly Venice, and Surfers Paradise. Here, though, I’m focusing on Newcastle (which, I might add, has been written about by many authors, including Dymphna Cusack, Elizabeth Harrower, Marion Halligan, and Michael Sala).

Newcastle is probably best known to Australians as an industrial town, but, it is also a coastal city near beautiful beaches. Hughes draws on these beaches. At the end of Part 2 of the novel, protagonist Michael spends a day at a beach just north of Newcastle with his potential new love interest Catherine, and in Part 3, he and his son Leo spend a glorious day together, which takes in a Newcastle beach.

Here is an excerpt from the day with Catherine:

A cold sea breeze hit us when we got out of the car. There was no one on the beach. Catherine tied a scarf around her neck and pulled her shawl in tight around her shoulders. It was just like her to come so prepared. I, on the other hand, was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. It certainly cleared my head. We took our shoes and socks off and left them in the car, then walked down the small grassed slope. On the soft sand Catherine displayed for me the best way to walk without sinking. … But I’m a sinker by nature …

It’s all rather blissful, particularly when Catherine hikes up her skirt to paddle:

It was quite a sight, all that bare leg, and it made me lightheaded myself, my mind no longer on the surroundings, which were spectacular. When I looked up, the sky seemed higher somehow, like someone had lifted the roof.

There’s hope here for a new beginning for both these lonely people, but, soon after

At the top of the beach, in the soft dry sand she finds a small dune which offers some protection from the wind, which has picked up again while we’ve been walking. A few clouds have appeared in the sky and the sun moves in and out behind them, as if in the game of hide and seek.

Not long after this, their happy moment takes a downturn … This could be many beaches, I suppose, but the description of place seems accurate to me, and Hughes uses it to such great effect.

Then, in Part 3 comes our lovely father-son day in which this somewhat estranged pair plan to do something deadly serious – but first, there is the day together. It starts with Michael picking up Leo from Newcastle airport, and Leo taking the wheel:

I’m enjoying the world from the passenger seat and anticipating the view from the top of the bridge, which always takes my breath away even though I’ve seen it a million times. Above us, pens dipped in blue-black ink, Pacific swifts (on winter sabbatical from Siberia!) write their signatures on the sky and blink their wings. They leave no mark except in recollection, hurled into space with sudden changes of direction, hairpin turns, rapid wing-glides, accelerations, gear shifts. I’d like to point them out to Leo but I don’t want to distract him as he glides into the overtaking lane …

I don’t know this part of Newcastle, but what an evocative description. It made me stop my reading and think – the way nature and machine are seamlessly linked, and the bird metaphor for life with “sudden changes of direction, hairpin turns …”.

This book is full of delicious descriptions like these, descriptions which read so well on the surface, but which suggest so much more in terms of mood and meaning, whether we specifically notice it or not.

John Hughes, The dogs, Perth, Upswell, 2021

John Hughes, The dogs (#BookReview)

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Dogs are mentioned frequently in John Hughes’ novel, The dogs, but the most dramatic reference occurs when the narrator’s mother, Anna, is hiding in a swamp with other partisans during World War 2. The barking of the Germans’ dogs tells them “it was only a matter of time” before they’d be found, causing Anna to do something that will irrevocably change who she is and result in her being the glacial, detached mother she was.

This story, that we don’t get until half way through the novel, is foreshadowed in the Preface, where the narrator briefly backgrounds the story he is about to tell, sharing with us a telling moment. The last time he had visited his normally remote but now also ageing mother in her home, she’d said to him “Don’t you see them? … The dogs, they’re getting closer”.

So, The dogs. It was, for me, a bit of slow burn. I was pulled in from the start by Hughes’ writing. His gorgeous descriptions and his perceptive insights into human behaviour were enough to keep me going on their own. Also, the two main characters, Michael and his mother Anna, despite being, initially, more unlikable than not, intrigued me. But, I was unsure where all of Michael’s introspection was going. Patience, however, is a virtue, and my patience was rewarded, because this story about dysfunctional family relationships and inherited trauma had so much to offer both my heart and mind.

Fifty-five year old Michael is our first person narrator, and the novel starts with him returning to Newcastle in 2015 to see his 99-year-old mother, whom he had placed in a nursing home two years previously, against her will. He’d not seen her since, partly out of guilt, but partly also because she had rejected him for this action. Although Michael is a successful screenwriter, he is a lonely, isolated individual. He is divorced, and has a difficult relationship with his wealthy, property developer son.

The novel follows Michael as, desperate to understand both himself and his mother, he tries to untangle her mysterious past while she still has some memory left. With her mind going and her lifelong reticence, it’s not easy to get the truth, though he senses, as he always had, “the traces of a story she wasn’t telling”.

Anna’s past is a complicated one, taking in, among other things, an Italian opera-singer mother and a Russian Prince father, not to mention world wars and the Russian Revolution. Anna had grown up fatherless, as Michael had from the age of 7 after his father’s suicide. But Anna had other traumas too, about which Michael only learns in this closing stage of her life. It’s a convoluted tale, mostly revealed in the second part of this three-part novel through recently discovered letters and an interview Michael records with his ailing mother.

Now Anna, as I’ve already intimated, is not a sweet old lady, and Michael, as you’ll have gathered, is not the doting self-sacrificial son, but as the story progresses, we come to understand some of the whys. In doing so, I came to like the characters more. Isn’t that why many of us read? To see into the human heart to better know it? “Whose heart … isn’t a Pandora’s box?” Michael proposes late in the novel.

“It’s never really the past we remember”

The dogs is one of those books that can be explored from all sorts of angles, but one particularly captured my attention from the beginning – the past, and its relationship to the future. The past is mentioned several times in the first chapter, including this on page 12:

… it’s never really the past we remember. The future clings to the past like a winding sheet. Every time we think back, we attach the future to it, if only unconsciously … thus the past always knows the future, not as something still to happen, but as something that already has.

Get your head around that! Seriously though, I love this idea because it seems true that what we remember as the past is just that, what we remember – and what we remember is coloured by what has happened since. And, to complicate it a bit more, I guess, the past we remember informs who we are, which then affects the past a bit more? Michael says a little further on about his mother’s story that “in Europe she would have told one story; after seventy years she adds her whole life to the memory”.

Anyhow, the problem for Michael is, always was, that his mother would not tell him about the past – her past or his father’s – so he grows up never understanding who his mother really is, and why she is the way she is. Gradually we come to realise that this is a story about intergenerational trauma, about “the way family travelled through the flesh”. As the truth becomes clear, Michael writes of the impact of not knowing:

I thought it was me. That I’d failed to please her in some way. Some way she would never say. So solemn, so cold.

Furthermore, not only had he felt guilty, but he had also thought, equally, that “the monster was her”.

Having grown up in this atmosphere of coldness and unknowing, it’s not surprising that Michael had not been a good husband or father. He is, and this helps endear him to us, excruciatingly honest about his failings, but we see that these failings are replicated before and after him in this challenged family.

By now, you may be thinking this is a bleak book, but in fact, while there’s a lot of sadness here, the overriding sense is one of humanity and, reality. This means that there’s lightness too. There are wonderful scenes of connection, and there’s even a reference to the good things you can inherit from family. As Michael’s son Leo thinks happily of something he’s inherited from grandma Anna, Michael thinks, “so much pleasure in inheritance”.

The novel has four epigraphs, but I’ll just share the first, which comes from the Bulgarian author, Elias Canetti: “The story of a life is as secret as life itself. A life that can be explained is no life at all”. This is interesting given the book is about uncovering secrets, and about how important that is for Michael. Perhaps, though, it’s there to remind us that no matter how many secrets we might expose, we can, and should, never know it all.

I started my post by referencing “the dogs”, so I’m going to end with them too, because, in addition to negative connotations, “dogs” can also be positive, representing love, loyalty, warmth, protection. John Hughes’ The dogs is a tough, honest book about human frailty, about the decisions we make, the things we do that we shouldn’t, and the things we don’t do that we should have. But, it’s also about family, and ultimately, Michael and his son do the most loving thing they can do in the circumstances. Consequently, this title, The dogs, which encompasses such horror for Anna and, through her, for Michael, can also embrace the idea of redemption.

Lisa also enjoyed this book.

John Hughes
The dogs
Perth: Upswell, 2021
312pp.
ISBN: 9780645076349

Monday musings on Australian Literature: Colonial Texts series

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I came across the Colonial Texts series back in 1988 with the publication of its first book, Ada Cambridge’s A woman’s friendship. I bought it and read it, and was inspired to read another novel by Cambridge, Sisters. Somehow, though, I lost touch with this series, partly due to my young family busy-ness at the time but also, I’d say, due to poor general (ie outside academia) marketing.

The series is just one example of the flurry of activity that was happening around the late 1980s in terms of retrieving Australian literary history, particularly, but not exclusively, women’s writing. This was strongly related to the Australian Bicentenary which saw all sorts of renewed enthusiasm for things “Australian”, though there was at the time, and quite rightly, controversy about celebrating 200 years of settler society, given the long habitation of this land by First Nations Australians who had never been celebrated.

This is an important issue, but not related to this post, so, back to the series … The University of New South Wales’ Australian Scholarly Editions Centre (ASEC) devotes a page to it. The eight titles were published between 1988 and 2004, when it – just – stopped. ASEC describes the series’ aim as being “to provide reliable reading texts of little-known nineteenth-century Australian literary works”, in editions that include introductions and explanatory notes, which “outline relevant biographical, book-historical and critical contexts”.

ASEC also notes that the titles by Catherine Martin, Ernest Favenc and Tasma, as well as Ada Cambridge’s  A Black Sheep, are “full-scale critical editions, recording variant readings in other lifetime printings”. These are, then, scholarly editions but this doesn’t detract from their essential content, which is accessible to any interested reader.

Some of these works first appeared as serialisations in the newspapers of the day, and for some, this series was the first edition since their original publication. Others, however, had – and/or have since – appeared in other editions.

The list

Here is the list of the books published, in series no. order, and with some notes from ASEC’s site.

  1. Ada Cambridge, A woman’s friendship (1988, ed. Elizabeth Morrison): a “gentle satire of class and sexuality” which “opens a window on Melbourne society of the 1880s and illuminates some important issues of the day – reform of dress and diet, the ‘marriage question’, socialism, and women’s suffrage”. (1889)
  2. Mary Theresa Vidal, Bengala, or, Some time ago (1990, ed. Susan McKernan): “depicts the life of the colonial gentry in the years before the goldrush, but it offers a more domestic and less exaggerated version of their lifestyle”. (1860)
  3. N. Walter Swan, Luke Mivers’ harvest (1991, ed. Harry Heseltine): “a tale of adventure, love, and revenge”, which ranges from the sheep runs of Victoria to the Palmer goldfields in North Queensland. Intersperses scenes of high passion and excitement with “satirical commentary on many aspects of nineteenth century Australian life and manners”. (1879)
  4. Catherine Martin, The silent sea (1995, ed. Rosemary Foxton): “centres around the Colmar Mine which is modelled on the largest gold mine existing in South Australia at the end of the nineteenth century … intelligent and sophisticated novel [which] encompasses compelling psychological obsession, passionate romance and ironic questioning set in vivid historical detail against Adelaide society and the outback”. (1892)
  5. Ernest Favenc, Tales of the Austral tropics (1997, ed. Cheryl Taylor): collection of stories which “draw their vivid realism” from the author’s experience as an explorer and rover in north Queensland”. Includes romances and comedies, but most “return to the theme of death in the desert, mangroves and caves. Their obsessive horror and ugliness are suggestive of tensions in the national identity, as it emerged in an alien environment, to confront many kinds of racial and cultural differences”. (1890s) (Lisa’s review of SUP edition)
  6. Louisa Atkinson, Gertrude, the emigrant : a tale of colonial life (1998, ed. Elizabeth Lawson) (Bill’s review of Mulini Press edition on AWW site): “the first Australian novel written by a native-born woman and the first to be illustrated by its author … [the] story of a young immigrant heroine making a life in a colony which is itself in the making … draws on authorial and family memories to summon the harsh, more complex, convict worlds of Sutton Forest, the Shoalhaven and Sydney in the late 1830s and 1840s”. (1857)
  7. Tasma (Jessie Couvreur), The Pipers of Piper’s Hill (serial version of Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill ) (2002, ed. Margaret Bradstock) (my review of PGA edition): “the story of the Cavendish family who come to Australia from England to live with Mrs Cavendish’s parvenu brother, Tom Piper” focusing on “the clash of values between the impoverished old world of privilege and the new-world democracy of the self-made man … Tasma’s depiction of the conflicting currents of life in colonial society, and her delightful evocation of the characters involved, rapidly established her as an author of note”. (1888)
  8. Ada Cambridge, A black sheep: some episodes in his life (serial version of A marked man) (2004, ed. Elizabeth Morrison) (Narelle Ontivero’s review of Pandora’s edition of A marked man on Bill’s blog): follows the life and loves of Richard Delavel, from being “a rebellious Oxford undergraduate in 1850s England” to “a still restless middle-aged family man in 1880s Sydney … against a background of constraints and opportunities in Britain and Australia”. Described as “a powerful creation of an iconoclastic character in search of professional fulfillment” and “a complex reflection on marriage ties and social obligations and a lively evocation of late colonial Sydney”. (1888/1890)

It’s interesting, but not surprising, to see that the goldrush and goldmining feature in several of these, not to mention the clash between old and new worlds. It’s also interesting that a few are satirical.

Hmm…

In 1991, a report titled “Successful symbiosis of defence and books”, was published in The Canberra Times. Written by literary editor Robert Hefner, it describes the launch of NINE books published by the staff of the English Department at University College, the Australian Defence Force Academy, which, Hefner writes, “has for more than a decade, been building a reputation as one of the country’s leading centres for the study of Australian literature”. Australian polymath Barry Jones, who did the launch said:

It’s always very flattering to be asked to launch a book … but to have been asked to launch nine is something well beyond my experience … and to do it here in the environment of the Australian Defence Force Academy… makes the occasion all the more unusual and to be cherished.

The English Department here at the University College… an outpost — and I would hope a revolutionary and subversive outpost of the University of New South Wales — with its extraordinary symbiosis has been extraordinarily productive.

It was the idea that a Colonial Texts series would come out of a defence force academy that thrilled me so much when I bought my Cambridge. The nine impressive books are listed in the article. They include two Colonial Texts, Vidal’s Bengala and Swan’s Luke Mivers’ harvest. Bengala editor, Dr McKernan, said that something they’ve

all found in working on this series is that you can’t rely on public opinion for the good things to come to the surface… there’s a lot of pleasure in things that’ve been lost. 

Don’t we know it! She went on to say, writes Hefner, ‘that this reinforced the sense that critics working today had a big responsibility to read and argue about things, “because in a hundred years’ time they may all be forgotten”.’ This is why our reframed AWW program is so important.

Why, you might wonder, did I head this section, Hmm? It’s because Hefner concluded his report with a comment by one of the launched authors, Adrian Caesar:

All these books were, I think, largely conceived, written and produced before the Government and the University of NSW began expending so many efforts and energies on making us more efficient, productive and accountable.

Very possibly we’ll have to work even harder in the future to match this output, since so much of our time is now taken up with shuffling bits of paper around our desks in order to prove how efficient, productive and accountable we are. This of course inevitably makes us much less efficient since it detracts from our proper task of teaching and research. I feel hopeful, however, that this department at least will maintain its productivity, despite, not because of the valiant initiatives to improve us.

You can’t help thinking that in saying this, he was foretelling the future, because publication of the last five Colonial Texts took much longer than the first three (even allowing for a couple of years lead-time before the first was published). And then they stopped. I’m sure that’s not because there was nothing else worth publishing!

Delicious descriptions: Ida Vitale and Byobu on literature and humanity

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I couldn’t include in my recent post on Ida Vitale’s Byobu all the ideas that grabbed my attention. It’s impressive how such 85-page book could contain so much, more than I can even include here. However, I do want to share (document) a few more ideas here, for my own benefit at least, before I shelve the book away.

Literature and reading crop up frequently in the book. A favourite reference occurs in “Sensitive toad”, in which Byobu has a surprising experience with a toad that would be hard to believe, except that he has a witness. However, we are told that

Of course a witness isn’t needed for him to write it: there’s no need for the truth when creating literature, good or bad.

We are then told the story, but this point had me thinking about what Vitale meant. For me, there is a need for “truth” in literature, but not necessarily for “facts”. What is written here – presuming the translator has conveyed Vitale’s intention – is “the” truth which could mean “facts”? I’m not sure exactly what she is saying but I think she is challenging us to think about literature and what it means for us? Certainly, from the first chapter, “A story”, the idea of stories threads through the book – the stories we are told, the stories we tell.

In “Anguish”, the idea that literature can alleviate one’s pain is raised:

Supposing that other people’s unexpected words might subdue it [his anguish], he walks toward the public library, in search of those bound inside its books. He’s welcomed by the concerns of the world; each book holds a different form of anxiety, malaise, sickness, or grief that asks: isn’t my situation worse? Each one – a soul fighting for its salvation, a hostage rescued, provisionally, by the hand that chooses it – calls out with its delightful devices, tempting and distinct. And Byobu gives in, rarely joining another’s joy, and in the end finds himself liberated from his own asphyxia, less serious than some he has glimpsed. This was not an act of magic: he has learned to minimise himself.

Again there’s a sort of paradox here. There’s the idea of feeling better because others are worse off. Is this OK because these “others” are characters in books? There’s also the idea of minimising oneself. Is this a positive thing?

In “Oral frustrations”, the idea of oral versus written stories is explored. Byobu wants to be able to tell stories to an unnamed person who pronounces people are boring because they don’t tell stories. The kicker is that the stories must be well-told and Byobu “lacks even the rudiments of the art of oral storytelling”. He is reminded of a wife whose husband would remove himself from conversation abandoning her “to her words turned monologue”. The wife would insert an irrelevant, “unexpected twist” into her story to recapture his attention. “One of these days,” we are told

Byobu will devote himself to inventing who knows what variety of frightening tales, littered with outrage and explosions, which will act as spring traps to catch that [aforementioned] restive protomalcontent by his auditory foot.

I have no idea what the translator was presented with, but this writing is gloriously funny, and yet so real too.

Meanwhile, a concurrent thread deals with humanity – with the idea of being human, and what it means. It is partly because of this that I read Byobu, the character, as being a sort of Everyman. It’s clear to me, as I think I mentioned in my review, that Vitale is concerned about where the world is heading. Seemingly throwaway lines like “imagining himself in other times, when humanity was human” suggest this – though, really, have there ever been such times?

In “Byobu and the acceleration of history”, Byobu considers the work of

the scientists and specialists who work day and night to better the health – how could anyone say otherwise – of the human race, of which, despite all his recurring doubts, he knows he belongs.

And so the book continues its elliptical way, throwing out thoughts from the mind of a habitually indecisive character who is muddling through the chaos, though a world in which “horrendous, coveted knowledge survives [like] ways to ascend in society …”. No answers are offered, except perhaps one – the idea of letting the imagination, magic and mystery back into our lives. By being itself, rather mysterious, Byobu does just this – I think!

Ida Vitale, Byobu, Charco Press, 2021.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Australia’s favourite genres

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A week or so ago I received an email from an organisation called Studying in Switzerland. Their main focus, as their name suggests, is helping students who want to study in Switzerland, but it seems that they also do some research of their own. A recent project was to identify the most popular book genres – in countries where data was available. 

Their methodology was to analyse Google search queries on genres from different countries, and the results are intriguing. I haven’t found much discussion of their analysis to know how others view the effectiveness of the methodology. Does it match up with borrowing or book-buying data? Or, is what we read different to what we research?

Study in Switzerland says that:

Books continue to be a significant part of our lives, with reading being a popular pastime for many people. Indeed, a typical person reads 12 to 13 novels each year, and how people choose what to read has long piqued the curiosity of researchers. As a result, book publishing has a huge market size worldwide, with revenue reaching $112.5 billion in 2022.

Anyhow, here is what came up for Australia – they identified that Australians search most for Adventure and Classics! Is this what you would have guessed? If I’d been asked, I would have thought Crime. Indeed, I probably would have said “Crime, hands down”. And, of course, as I questioned, what is searched may be different from what is actually read.

We are not the only country interested in Classics. This genre was also popular in Sweden, Hong Kong, USA, UK, Ireland and New Zealand.

Worldwide, they say, Romance, Classics and Poetry are the most searched for genres but, drilling down, there are some interesting preferences. Asians and Canadians, for example, had Poetry first, while overall Europeans (like the Russians, Poles and Finns) go for Fantasy, although some of them (like the French and Spanish) searched more or Romance! Not surprisingly, Belgians, the Dutch and the Norwegians seemed to prefer Crime and Thrillers.

Study in Switzerland makes some assumptions about the reasons for the various preferences they found. Those assumptions make some sense, but they are not based, I believe, on this research.

For their report, please check out this link.

Meanwhile …

There is other research to look at. Back in 2017, a survey conducted by the Australia Council and Macquarie University of Australians’ reading habits, found something closer to what I expected, which is that

The most popular fiction genre is crime/mystery/thriller, with 49% of Australians having read a book of that genre in the last 12 months … followed by historical fiction on 36%, contemporary/general fiction on 33%, science fiction/fantasy on 32%, and classics on 31%.

However, they also found that just over half (51%) of Australians were interested in “literary fiction”, which they described as fiction “eligible for prizes like the Man Booker and Miles Franklin”. They also found that it’s generally older readers who are most interested in this fiction. Interestingly, they found that these “older readers also tend to be more interested in work by Australian authors”.

I did report on this survey back in 2017, and posed some questions at the end. Some of these might have been answered by …

A report on bookselling published by ArtsHub in 2019 which confirmed Australians’ interest in “home-grown authors”. They found “a 30% jump in local authors featured in the top 25 fiction titles” over the previous two years. Further, bookseller and Book Club coordinator, Jennifer Stephens at Brisbane’s Avid Reader Bookshop, Brisbane, reported that “we are reading a lot of Australian women writers”. (Music to my ears, of course.)

Overall, this report, which drew on two years of Nielsen BookScan data, concluded:

Australian readers’ priorities and interests are evident: self-help and finance, a taste for home-grown writers, an eye for feminist writing, curiosity about sexuality and gender, a fascination with crime and mystery, and a deep need for First Nations perspectives.

I wonder if things have changed much since then, particularly given the pandemic? Either way, it’s interesting to ponder whether there is a significant difference between what we search for online and what we actually buy, or, whether, Study in Switzerland has identified a big swing in our interests over the pandemic?

Any thoughts?

Six degrees of separation, FROM The end of the affair TO …

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March. Summer is over and I’m a bit grumpy, as you couldn’t call what we’ve just had, summer. Very few days exceeded 30°C and none exceeded 35°C. But, I can’t really complain. I am not facing war or floods, and last month a new grandchild – a healthy baby girl – joined our family circle. I’m very fortunate. So, we’ll just enjoy autumn, always a lovely season, and get onto this month’s Six Degrees. As always, if you don’t know this meme and how it works, please check meme host Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book. For March, she’s chosen a classic, Graham Greene’s The end of the affair. I’ve read a few Greenes but am not sure I’ve read this one, which has to be a gap in my reading …

Jane Austen, Emma, Penguin

I have, in fact, even reviewed a Graham Greene novel here, but that seemed a  bit boring for a link. Moreover, it’s been some time since I included a Jane Austen novel in my chain, so this seemed to be the perfect opportunity. But no, the link is not on English classics, but on books that have been adapted to films of the same name. The end of the affair and Emma (one of my many Emma posts) have been adapted more than once.

Staying with film adaptations, the most recent film adaptation of Emma was the 2020 version directed by Autumn de Wilde to a screenplay by the New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton. It’s to her Booker prizewinning novel The luminaries (my review) that I’m linking next. Helen Garner is another novelist who has written screenplays (albeit original stories rather than adaptations) but she is not my next link!

David Mitchell, The thousand autumns of Jacob de Poet

The luminaries has a large number of characters. Fortunately, Catton (or her publisher) very generously provided one of those character charts at the front of the novel. Another novel that has a huge character list is David Mitchell’s The thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoet (my review). No list or chart is provided in this book, but one of my reading group members created one herself. That was in 2010, and over a decade later we still often remind her of her diligence!

Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

I know many of you are David Mitchell fans, but for those who aren’t this novel was set in Japan (in Nagasaki in fact). Mitchell, of course, is not Japanese, but English. Another novel set in Japan but not written by a Japanese writer, is Korean American writer Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko (my review). This one, as many of you will know, tells the story of a Korean family in Japan. However, that’s irrelevant to my next link, which is a simple one …

Michelle de Kretser, The life to come

Pachinko was published in 2017, along with a few other books, says she cheekily! One of those was Michelle de Kretser’s The life to come (my review), so that’s my simple fifth link. I guess you could say there’s another link here because de Kretser’s book does include some immigrant stories.

Book cover

And now we go from a simple link to an obscure one. The life to come is told in 5 parts, one of which is titled “Pippa passes”. It surely has to be a reference to Robert Browning’s eponymous poem. This made me think of Browning, and epigraphs in books. I love epigraphs! So must Orhan Pamuk as he included four in his novel, Snow (my review), one of which was from Browning. Not from “Pippa passes”, unfortunately, but from “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”, on the paradoxical nature of things: “the honest thief, the tender murderer,/the superstitious atheist”. I enjoy paradoxes too, but, luckily for you, I’m at the end of my Six Degrees!

I feel as though I may have gone a bit rogue with my links this month, but I’ve enjoyed doing so. What isn’t rogue is that I’ve returned to my usual proportion of four links by women writers and two by men. We’ve travelled quite a bit – England, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Turkey – with some brief trips to Korea and other spots around the world.

Now, the usual: Have you read The end of the affair? And, regardless, what would you link to?

Ida Vitale, Byobu (#BookReview)

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Uruguayan writer Ida Vitale’s Byobu was my reading group’s second book of the year. Originally published in Spanish in 2018, with the English translation released in 2021, Byobu is Vitale’s first book of prose to be translated into English. Few, if any of us, had heard of her – and yet, this now 98-year-old woman was, in 2019, named by the BBC as one of the 100 most influential women of the year. The things we don’t know!

Anyhow, Byobu is a curious book. It has no clear narrative, and only one character, the eponymous Byobu. It’s just 85 pages, and comprises 34 “chapters”. It is replete with allusions to a diverse range of writers, thinkers, musicians. In other words, it’s one of those books you can struggle with, if you don’t come up with a way of reading it. For me, this was to jettison preconceptions about what a novel is and go with the flow to see what fell out. And what fell out was a mind-opening, and sometimes witty, series of thoughts and observations about life and living. I can’t say I understood all of it, but I thoroughly enjoyed the reading experience.

The best way I can encapsulate Byobu is to describe it as a sort of modern Everyman story, the story of an individual in a world that can be confusing, if not sometimes downright hostile. The overall theme seems to me to be: How do you live in this world?

Before I explore this more, some basics. Byobu is set in Uruguay, and although there’s no plot per se, there is some structure. (I’d probably find more structure had I time to read it a few times). The opening chapter introduces the idea of “story” – and clues us into the idea that we are going to be unsettled:

a story’s existence, even if not well defined or well assigned, even if only in its formative stage, just barely latent, emits vague but urgent emanations. (“A story”)

The next few chapters introduce us to Byobu, conveying a general sense of who he is. These are followed by chapters that consider bigger issues in contemporary life.

However, although we are introduced to Byobu, he remains somewhat shadowy. We don’t know how old he is, but one member of my reading group suggested he was old, like his author, and that he encompasses an old person’s thoughts about life. I can accept that. Regardless, besides not knowing how old he is, we don’t know whether he is (or has been) married, has a family, is working, and so on. A family home is mentioned, and there are references to daily activities including attending a conference. All this vagueness supports the idea of him as an Everyman (albeit, possibly, an old one!)

We do, though, learn some things about the sort of person Byobu is. He can be indecisive. He has “an intractable inclination to complicate things”, and hates change. He’s not a good storyteller, but he likes nature and enjoys minutiae. Unfortunately, though,

often distracted by some minutia captivating him at a particular moment, he misses fragments of conversations that later turn out to be important. (“On anodyne things”)

I found him very human and engaging, to the degree I could, given his shadowiness.

I fear though that I’m not selling the book, so I’ll try now to share some of its joys and intellect. I’ll start by talking a little about the style. Many of the “chapters”, and I put them in quotation marks because some are only a paragraph long, start with what you could call truisms, but they don’t read as cliches, like:

Everything important lies below the surface. (“Terrestrial labours”)

Byobu concludes that he must begin by ending. (“Knots”)

Byobu has heard it said that ‘every mile has its rough patch’. (“Epiphanies”)

Byobu is not always able to predict how the situations he gets involved in will end. (“Dangerous misunderstandings”)

How can you be sure that the avenue, boulevard, or ordinary road you’re facing is not actually a blind alley? (“Crossroads”)

Just look at that sentence, “Byobu concludes that he must begin by ending”. So terse, so clever. “Knots”, in fact, is one of those one-paragraph chapters. It concerns Byobu’s realisation that if he doesn’t end his “trepidations” and “tepid transactions”, if he doesn’t “lay limbos aside” and “ignore everything initiated by the iniquitous” – he will have to “accustom himself” to “the cage”. But, can he recreate himself?

“Crossroads” addresses another recurrent idea in the book, the importance of the imagination, of mystery, over the mundane. Opposing mystery and imagination are “straight lines” which also recur, starting in the second chapter, “Life is not a straight line”. In “Knots”, Byobu learns that straightness “lays snares” and in “Against the Argive Way”, he is aware that “The world loves conversations in straight lines and single-minded strides. Intersections divert. Labyrinths confound.”

A few chapters in, then, it dawned on me that Byobu was about more than a man muddling through life, that it’s a commentary on modern life. Byobu pleads for the imagination, for not going in straight lines. It critiques conformity, power and authority, commercialisation, urbanisation, inhumanity, and resistance to change. “Internal coherence” explores resisting social pressure. It is “immoral”, it suggests, to accept a world “governed by the boorish authorities who rule during these evil times we inhabit”. Yet, Vitale realises resistance is not easy, so her Byobu “resists on the inside, while staying quiet and feigning surrender”.

In the penultimate “chapter”, “Byobu and the traffic light”, traffic lights are a metaphor for “supervision and compliance”. Here “the defiant … recognise the bad example of a behaviour that is a silent hymn to obedience to all authority”. Vitale goes on to suggest that traffic lights should, in fact, “innervate the pedestrians” (who are “increasingly incongruent elements in the city”) to “assume their role as essential antagonists”. This chapter is a call to defy, to rebel.

Lest this all sound rather bleak, let me say there’s beauty here too. There are, for example, some lovely descriptions of nature:

In the garden, jasmines reign supreme. At night the star jasmine is a vertical Milky Way, delirious with aroma. (“Seasons”)

And, there is quite a bit of humour. Much is of the quiet, understated sort, but it made me laugh. “It’s true”, thinks Byobu, “there were three Wise Men; not quite a battalion” or “They’d better not count on him. He’s not an abacus”.

I hate leaving this book, but of course I must, so, I will leave you with two ideas. The first comes from one of the two epigraphs. Neither were translated, but the second is by Henri Michaux, and it roughly translates as “In case of danger, joke”! Joking is part of this book, but it is also deadly serious. Speaking of “story”, the opening chapter exhorts Byobu (our Everyman) not to “underestimate its flexible, disordered density”. And neither should we, because this novel has much to offer those willing to go with its flow.

Ida Vitale
Byobu
Translated from the Spanish by Sean Manning
Edinburgh: Charco Press, 2021 (Orig. Pub. 2018)
85pp.
ISBN: 9781913867023

Stella Prize 2022 Longlist announced

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Apologies to those of you who look forward to my Monday Musings post, but I’ve gazumped this week’s edition, because the Stella Prize longlist was announced this evening, and I do like to report on that. I attended the online streamed announcement.

As I say every year, I don’t do well at having read the Stella Prize longlist at the time of its announcement. In recent years the most I’ve read has been two (in 2019). Last year it was none. I don’t expect much better this year.

I was, however, doing better at reading the winners, having read Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with birds (2013), Clare Wright’s The forgotten rebels of Eureka (2014), Emily Bitto’s The strays (2015), Charlotte Wood’s The natural way of things (2016), Heather Rose’s The museum of modern love (2017), and Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s The erratics (2019). But, that’s slipping too. So far, I’ve missed 2018’s winner, Alexis Wright’s Tracker, am still reading 2020’s winner, Jess Hill’s See what you made me do, and still have last year’s winner, Evie Wyld’s The bass rock on my TBR.

The judges are a complete changeover from last year’s with the excellent, multi-award-winning Melissa Lucashenko taking the role of chair. Her co-judges are writer, poet, essayist Declan Fry; author-across-all-forms Cate Kennedy; memoirist and activist Sisonke Msimang; and essayist and screenwriter Oliver Reeson. As always, attention has been paid to diversity on the panel.

Oh, and I should note that a new form has been added to those eligible for the prize this year, single-author poetry collections. An excellent decision – as it turns out.

The longlist

  • Randa Abdel-Fattah, Coming of age in the War on Terror (nonfiction)
  • Eunice Andrada, Take care (poetry)
  • Evelyn Araluen, Dropbear (poetry) (TBR, Brona’s review)
  • Paige Clark, She is haunted (short stories)
  • Anwen Crawford, No document (memoir) (Lisa’s review)
  • Jennifer Down, Bodies of light (novel)
  • Anita Heiss, Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (novel) (TBR, Lisa’s review)
  • Lee Lai, Stone fruit (graphic novel)
  • SJ Norman, Permafrost (short stories)
  • Elfie Shiosaki, Homecoming (memoir) (Lisa’s review)
  • Lucy Van, The Open (poetry) 
  • Chelsea Watego’s Another day in the colony (nonfiction) (Bill’s post)

I didn’t have a strong feel for what might be on the list, but did guess four that ended up there – Araluen, Crawford, Down and Watego. I should have thought of Heiss. On the other hand, although I haven’t read it yet, I was hoping to see Melinda Bobis’ The kindness of birds. However, as I haven’t read any of the longlist, I’m not going to judge. But I will say that the panel discussion that followed the announcement made powerful arguments for their choices. It might be a cliched thing to say, but it looks like a brave list that is likely to challenge readers.

In the lively and very enjoyable online discussion, the panel made some overall comments, as well as discussing individual books. They said that the flavour of the year was poetry. There are, in fact, three on the list. Interestingly, there are only two novels, but there is a graphic novel, and there are two short story collections, so fiction is still well represented. That leaves four works of nonfiction to round out the twelve.

The panel was “excited to have all genres in the list”, and made the strong point that it’s the message that matters more than the medium. It was very clear, as the evening progressed, that message was a critical issue for this panel, that works that interrogate and fiercely tackle the serious matters confronting us, are what most attracted them – whether from a political, or personal point of view, or both. As one who loves “message” in literature, I appreciate this. However, lest all this sound too bleakly serious, they also made the point that although the books are all “quite challenging”, in most there’s also wit, if not, in some, laugh-out-loud humour.

Finally, I’ll close with judging panel chair, Melissa Lucashenko’s opening comments:

In the aftermath of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, Stella writers are not holding back… Australian women and non-binary writers are producing innovative, sophisticated literature in very difficult times. It has been a great privilege to read and assess their work for the 2022 Stella Prize.

To read more, do check out the Stella website.

The shortlist will be announced on 31 March, and the winner on 28 April.

Any comments?