Author Archives: Nathan Hobby

Tracy Ryan and John Kinsella

03 Tuesday Jun 2008

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I recently finished Tracy Ryan’s Jazz Tango, a fascinating novel about what happens after the fairtytale wedding of a working class girl to her ‘prince’, a member of the elite Oxbridge set. What I liked best about Tracy’s novel was its capturing of the patterns of thought, the strayness and whimsy of our minds. We read everything Jas, the protagonist is thinking, from the banal to the profound, and it’s the juxtaposition of these which is so compelling. All our best thoughts are embedded in mundane situations, whether it’s social awkwardness in a cafe or being stuck in traffic. The novel deliberately invokes the spirit of the great women modernists, and carries on their tradition of stream of consciousness, something which makes me glad. (All these great movements of the past which are not fashionable any more… horrible thing, we could do with a few more attempts at Mrs Dalloway or Ulysses.)

Tracy and her husband John Kinsella have a fascinating blog called Mutually Said : Poets Vegan Anarchist Pacifist. John, like me, is a big fan of Philip K. Dick and has some fascinating comments on PKD in a recent post.

Crawling

06 Tuesday May 2008

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I have to learn how to write again, and it’s like crawling. All the joy had gone out of writing for a long while, because I was just fixated on finishing. But now I’m learning to walk again. Just half an hour a day, a few plodding words in the morning. Rediscovering the simple pleasure of imagining, of describing, of living within a world of my creation.

Here and there and everywhere.

20 Sunday Apr 2008

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First this blog degenerated into Nathan’s reading journal, and then no posts at all. I’m sorry. It’s all been happening at my other blog, because a lot of my thinking and attention has been tied up with faith and theology.

I started rereading Updike’s Rabbit at Rest, because it was once a favourite book, but I didn’t finish it and I can’t explain why. Then I didn’t finish Richard Ford’s Men and Women either, and I can’t explain that either.

I read two chapters of G.K. Chesterton’s St Francis of Assissi, but I didn’t like that at all. It’s something his tone – I get this in a number of books written in the first half of the twentieth century – that is so condescending, as if the reader wants to be lectured. He spends those chapters explaining what sort of biography he mustn’t write. It was written for the ‘layperson’ and I got the impression he wanted to give the layperson a good piece of his mind. I just wanted to know about St Francis, thanks. (And I don’t even like your detective stories.)

And now I picked up the Arabian Nights in this old companion volume that is just beautiful. If you flip it around, it’s got Aesop’s Fables on the other side. And the binding page is this sixties wallpaper style. The Arabian Nights are enchanting me. What sheer and beautiful craziness! A doctor lets his head get cut off and then talks back to the king after his head’s cut off to get his revenge. There’s fish which start talking when they get cooked and there’s all these interwoven repeating variations on themes, like the delay of death due to the telling of a story.

And Sinbad borrows from the Odyssey to tell the story of his escape from a Cyclops. I’m sure there’s an interesting story behind that.

 

Book review : The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster

20 Thursday Mar 2008

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David Zimmer’s life collapses when his two sons and his wife die in a plane crash. He finds, if not meaning, then at least something to do, by writing a book about the silent films of forgotten star, Hector Mann. Hector Mann disappeared mysteriously in the 1930s, and is presumed long dead, but now in the 1980s Zimmer gets a letter from his wife, saying that Mann is alive but ailing  in New Mexico and would like to meet Zimmer before he dies.

I first read this book four years ago, and didn’t enjoy it as much as this time. I thought it was too derivative of his other work then, but now I think it’s brilliant with subtle intertextuality.

David Zimmer was Marco Stanley Fogg’s friend in my favourite Auster book, Moon Palace. I would like more than anything to read the continuing adventures of Fogg. This will have to do for now. One tantalising reference to the events of that book is the fact that Zimmer named one of his sons ‘Marco’. No more is said than this, but it put a smile on my face.

The rest of the intertextuality is only now being revealed. Auster published this novel in 2002, but it contains references to works he has completed since. [Spoiler alert] In New Mexico, Mann has spent years making films no-one else is allowed to see, films which his wife will destroy on his death. One of them has the title Travels in the Scriptorium; another, The Inner Life of Martin Frost. The first, of course, is the title of Auster’s 2007 novel; the second of the film he released this year.

Zimmer gives us a scene by scene breakdown of The Inner Life of Martin Frost, the only secret film of Mann’s he gets to see before they are destroyed. I’ll find it interesting to compare with the ‘real’ film of that name.

The threat of the destruction of these amazing secret films makes the whole novel feels like a tragedy at times. Auster reveals something in me, because I managed to feel like the novel had a happy ending when the films might be saved at the end, even after the sad death of Alma, Freida, Hector and possibly David.

9/10

Book review: The Innocent by Ian McEwan

08 Saturday Mar 2008

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Graham Greene-ish. A 25 year old British man who has lived with his parents up until now is sent to work on a secret tunnel in 1950s Berlin, a joint project between the British and Americans. He falls in love with a divorced German woman who introduces him to sex and love. Their relationship is threatened first when he rapes her (having tasted power and wanting more of it) and again when her ex-husband turns up and he feels pressured to be the strong man he has never been.

The prose only sometimes achieves the clarity and beauty which make McEwan one of my favourite writers. But I see in this novel interesting roots for later themes or scenes – Leonard rehearses a letter in much the way Robbie does in Atonement; the descriptions of Berlin resonate with those in Black Dogs; the couple have not so a disastrous wedding night as in Chesil Beach, but a disastrous engagement night for completely different reasons which still manage to tear the couple apart. Indeed, the ending of the novel is – SPOILER ALERT – quite similar to Chesil Beach.

7/10

Siri Hustvedt at Adelaide Writers Week

06 Thursday Mar 2008

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Hustvedt endeared herself to me greatly by being nervous. She was the only writer I noticed being nervous in all the sessions I went to. She said she was shaking and couldn’t stop. She’d written out her speech word for word, and I loved hearing it. This tall woman nervously saying beautiful things about her writing.

She defined writing as ‘Remembering something which never happened.’ She talked about her work as echo chambers for themes and how she removes anything which doesn’t echo with it.

It was a treat to see J.M. Coetzee, another of my favourite writers (at least for the brilliant Youth), chairing her session. He wasn’t as aloof as I imagined or heard, and he’s hardly a hermit being involved with Writers’ Week.

On the death panel Hustvedt said some interesting things, including relating her brush with death when she, Auster and their daughter were in a car accident. She talked about how celebrity is a third person existence, emptied of humanity.

Ian McEwan at Adelaide’s Writers Week and questions from the public

06 Thursday Mar 2008

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I got there early, but the seats were already filled up and there I was outside the tent in the sun again, and when he came my myopic eyes could only make out a blur. He was a good speaker, but his voice was rougher than I imagined. I thought he’d have the same smoothness as his prose, a sort of aristocratic eloquence, but it wasn’t that kind of voice.

He read from his work in progress, a climate-change novel which sounds brilliant so far, full of those McEwan tics, timeframe and style that I love so much. He covered about five minutes of narrative-time in twenty minutes of reading.

A woman taking an ego trip asked him if it was possible to write happiness, because (she claimed) Saturday was a failure.

‘I did it,’ he replied graciously, ‘and you didn’t like it.’

I disliked a lot of the questions throughout writer’s week. They seemed to be divided between the self-serving, the loony , the wannabe writers looking for The Secret – and, I must admit, the good. ‘Don’t let the public near a microphone. They’ll say all kinds of stuff.’

The woman saying how it was unfashionable to talk about the afterlife. All the boring old men who made speeches. We didn’t come to hear you!

I’m a grumpy old man. I believe in everyone having a voice, but I don’t necessarily like the outcome.

Writers’ Week panel on the Rules and how to break them

06 Thursday Mar 2008

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This panel had Paul Auster, John Kinsella (my PEAC teacher’s cousin!), Margo Lanagan and Matt Rubenstein.

None of the writers particularly liked the question, and it was amusing to see them deconstruct it. Lanagan and Kinsella were both amusingly opinionated. I liked  Kinsella’s rabble-rousing excitability and his earnest ideology – ‘I am a vegan pacifist anarchist’ – but it didn’t go down well with the older book-club set sitting near me.

Auster was brilliant. He said there was only one truly subversive thing – clarity. And I agree with him entirely. I love clarity too, a transparent book where the words aren’t calling attention to themselves but you’ve just found yourself immersed in the narrative world. It’s what’s similar about Auster and my second favourite writer, Ian McEwan.

Auster said at one point ‘I live in such a solitary world. I’m just trying to do my work. I don’t have an awareness of the literary world.’ He talked of his indifference to critics and fame and I thought of his years living ‘hand to mouth’ working on translations and starving. For him, writing is about one person talking to another, two strangers meeting in intimacy. Well, I’m a stranger to him, but he’s not a stranger to me.

Auster’s only rule : ‘swift and lean’. He said profound things on the spur of the moment in answering questions and he was private yet generous. He didn’t want to be there, but he was making the most of it and delighting me.

Nathan Hobby meets Paul Auster at the Adelaide Festival Writer’s Week

06 Thursday Mar 2008

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I did not have a coffee with Paul Auster. I did not shake hands with Paul Auster. I didn’t even really have a conversation with him. But I went to Adelaide and heard him speak (I was just out of the tent in the sun and he was very small but distinguishable) and he was wise, cynical yet generous, amusing and weathered, just as I imagined and hoped for.

And I did exchange a few words with him.

I was waiting in the autograph line wondering what I could say to a man who I had spent so many hours with and who had been so important to me. In the end the exchange went like this:

NH: ‘You’re my favourite writer, Mr Auster – it’s an honour to hear you speak.’

PA: ‘Well thank you. Thank you reading for my books.’

(Paul Auster indecipherably scribbles in my battered copy of Moon Palace.)

NH: ‘In my new novel one of the characters reads Moon Palace.’

PA (looking surprised): ‘Really? Well thank you.’

What happened then? Did he move onto the next person or did I walk away, spoiling a promising opening because there were a thousand people behind me waiting in the hot sun? I don’t know.

The reality is that you can’t hope to know a writer in ‘real life’ with any of the intimacy or depth that you know him or her through their books. It’s just not possible. It’s the wonder of reading and writing. Auster even said something to this effect at some stage, or I think he did.

There was a time when I would have thought of a witty or controversial or brilliant question to ask and I would have asked it, and I would have waited by the tent for hours, and I would have pushed my way into talking to Auster. But I’m 27 now, as of yesterday, and I’m old and shy. I’m mistrustful of people who push their way forward and I’m sick of egos.

I was glad I went, because I had to and because I enjoyed it, and yet it was in an important sense exactly as I feared.