Category Archives: book review

The book shop : like the immense bar code of some key to all mythologies

26 Thursday Feb 2009

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Halfway through, I  am entranced by Gail Jones’s Dreams of Speaking. Take this passage about a bookshop:

Arriving at the bookshop, Alice browsed without pleasure. The books conveyed both intimidation and overabundant presence. They lined up like the immense bar code of some key to all mythologies. There were new novels, in hardback, with expressionistic covers and virtuosic claims, and colourful paperbacks, each announcing a superior, unmatched talent. Tables sagged under so many new-minted words. So many leaves of meaning, so many sentences, strung together, in immoderately shiny covers. After slow deliberation, Alice bought a volume of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. Although she had read it before, she felt it was a choice-against-disappointment…
(p. 81)

Strangely enough, I abandoned Henry James’s The Ambassadors for her book. One day perhaps I’ll have the patience, the sharpness of mind to untangle James, to keep him afloat in my mind. I do not in any way deny his genius.

Back to Jones’s passage. I find the weight of new books published overwhelming (the pressure to keep up? I don’t even pretend). And this passage captures some of that experience for me. And then there’s that experience of going back to a book I know when I’m in a bad reading patch.

Between you and me : a review

26 Thursday Feb 2009

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Between you and me / By Amber Fresh (2009)

Let me tell you a secret: the last six years I’ve found it hard to enjoy poetry. Something changed in my brain sometime around 2003. But then there’s collections like this one that remind me how good poetry can be.

Amber is a Perth poet and this small collection evokes a certain scene in Perth so well, of poetry readings, of enduring a session at the Ocean Beach Hotel, of twenty and thirtysomething parties, of Coles carparks and of the inner suburbs.

Her poems have a casual, insightful humour which manages, paradoxically, to also be passionate and intense. Thus in ‘Casual as’:

While you were at the bar
trying to organise some
casual sex
I was in my room
writing a melancholy song for you
and drawing a comic about how we met

…

But that’s because
I didn’t know then
that you were at a bar
making other arrangements

That phrase ‘making other arrangements’ gets me every time I read it – such a brilliant piece of sarcasm and so terribly sad, using that rather old fashioned phrase to devastating effect.

These poems show an ability to express states of mind and stray, strange thoughts that I believed no-one else knew about it. Thus in ‘Did you do it’:

i hit myself in the face
to see what it would feel like

it felt like

did you do it?

Two poems deal in a fascinating way with faith; in “1 Corinthians 6:18”, the Holy Spirit is compared to ‘an X-men girl/ who turns boys to dust/ with a touch of her hand’. It’s an earnest, distinctive take on evangelical experience. In “Jesus is my homeboy”, the poet hears God tells her to take her doona to some people who will need it ‘on the corner of aberdeen and station street’. It’s a poem of quiet faith that doesn’t lose its sense of humour just because it’s talking about God.

The collection hangs together so well. I was left at the end feeling like I’d read a short novel, that I’d experienced a season in the poet’s life. It was a season that felt a bit like the film You and me and everyone we know, with that same quirky take on big questions, a bit like Leunig’s cartoons, and a bit like (I’m not sure why this came into my head) Leonard Cohen’s novel Favourite Game.

You can buy the book at Oxford Books in Leederville (I’m told it’s on the counter) or from Amber herself – amberinparis@hotmail.com. It costs around $15 plus postage.

Christianity as grace and mystery : Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

06 Friday Feb 2009

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Gilead / Marilynne Robinson (2004)

In 1954, told he is not long for this world, 74 year old Congregationalist pastor John Ames sets out to write a testament of his life for his seven year old son. Ames has lived in the Iowan town of Gilead all his life. It is a digressive testament, journal-like, added to day by day. It starts out in the past, focusing on the conflict between his pacifist father and his abolitionist grandfather, both ministers of the same church he now pastors. The second half focuses on the present return of his prodigal grandson, Jack Boughton, and Ames struggle to love Jack. In the end, love wins out and Jack confides his secret to Ames.

Robinson’s prose is careful, precise, close to perfect even as she writes in the cadence and idiom of an old man fifty years ago. It was twenty-four years since her previous novel and it feels like the sort of novel a writer might spend decades on.

It is wise and grace-filled. It is Christian in many senses, but perhaps most importantly because its heart is grace: grace is embedded in the narrator and the novel. (I don’t think Christianity is or should be simply grace at its heart, but I think the novel and the novelist might contend so.) It is a novel which shows a lot of love for people and the world, even in their ugliness and brokenness.

Ames’ grace contrasts with his grandfather’s ‘activism’ and his father’s ‘holiness’. Robinson is contrasting three streams of Christianity – what Richard Foster would call in Streams of Living Water the social justice, holiness and incarnational streams. For Ames’ grandfather, Christianity means justice at any cost, and he steals and shoots to achieve it. For Ames’ father, having no part in evil is what counts, and he leaves the church for a time during the war to sit with the pacifist Quakers.

Robinson privileges Ames’ type of Christianity – a moderate, grace-filled faith of small things. There’s less certainty and more mystery.

There are few novels that are both so Christian and so accomplished. There are evangelicals writing consciously Christian novels which are Christianised popular fiction. There are great writers (Updike and Greene, both now deceased; Winton) with Christian tendenancies or some measure of faith writing novels which have some Christian themes. But there are few writers writing great literature that are so drenched in a Christian worldview.

And yet having said that, I didn’t connect to the novel as much as I wanted to. I think it just comes down to my personal aesthetics of writing, that this isn’t the kind of book I like to read best. Perhaps it’s the lack of particular kind of narrative drive I miss. Perhaps I like less saintly narrators with more ambition and sin to their name.

Last year, Robinson published a follow-up novel from the perspective of Jack. I’m looking forward to reading it.


Paul Auster’s Moon Palace : an overview

03 Tuesday Feb 2009

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(Moon Palace is my second favourite novel of all time. I just finished reading it for the third time and I wanted to write an outline of the novel for future reference and to help my own understanding. I hope to write another post exploring why it is so important to me.)

This story of how Marco Stanley Fogg’s life ‘began’ is told in first person; at one point he specifies that he’s writing in 1986, fifteen years after the narrative ends. We don’t learn anything of these intervening years save a single scene; it’s the first twenty-three years of M.S. Fogg’s life we learn about.

M.S. tells his childhood quickly, giving us summaries and a few brief incidents. When his mother is killed in a traffic accident, he is adopted by his Uncle Victor. Uncle Victor is a member of a band called the Moonmen and has a big influence on the young M.S.. He gets him thinking, gets him reading and teaches him that names have a power; they aren’t just co-incidental – the baseball player Glen Hobbie will never make it big, because his name implies amateurism; M.S.’s name itself carries much better significances – the explorers Marco Polo, Stanley Livingstone, Phileas Fogg. M.S. himself goes on to reflect on the initials M.S. which become his name and the idea of his life as a manuscript, a narrative in progress. When he heads to Columbia University, his uncle gives him his collection of 1492 books. The boxes form the furniture of M.S.’s apartment.

M.S. hasn’t finished university when news reaches him of his uncle’s death. Money was always going to be tight, but by the time he’s paid off Victor’s debts, he knows he is living on limited time, that he has to do something or he will not have the money to finish. And yet in an irrational act of quixotism, a kind of bravery or solitude or stubbornness, he decides to do nothing, to see what will happen to him.

His concession to his situation is to sell off his uncle’s books, but he reads each one before he sells it. Since the books were stacked chronologically, the sequence of titles resembles the sequence in which his uncle read them – except that the boxes themselves are not in order – and in doing so, he feels he relives his uncle’s life. (This might seem a small point, but it is the touches like this that are part of the brilliance of the novel for me.)

When he runs out of money, he goes to visit his friend David Zimmer (who, of course, reappears in Auster’s The Book of Illusions). Zimmer has moved on, but he bursts into a breakfast party held by the new tenants. They feed him; he eats ravenously and meets his ‘twin’ – Kitty Wu, who is wearing the same t-shirt as him.

Soon he is kicked out of his apartment. He goes to live in Central Park. He gets sick, holes up in a cave and is on the verge of death when Kitty and Zimmer finally find him. Kitty has been looking for him for some time; she never felt so sorry for anyone in her life, she tells him, than when she met him that one time at breakfast.

He recovers in Zimmer’s apartment for several months and is rejected for the Vietnam draft. Zimmer urges him to go and pursue Kitty; she’s in love with him and she’s waiting for him to make the next move. Kitty and M.S. become lovers, discovering in each other true soulmates.

M.S. needs money; he answers an advertisement and becomes a companion to one Thomas Effing, an elderly bad tempered man who is either blind or pretending to be blind. M.S. moves in to Effing’s house, leaving Zimmer behind. At this point Zimmer disappears from the narrative and M.S.’s life, which seems extraordinary – why didn’t Kitty and M.S. keep up with him, at least? In the only flash-forward, M.S. tells us that the only time he’s seen Zimmer since was four years ago, in 1982, when he saw him, his wife and kids walking down the street and stops and talks to him for twenty minutes.

(We don’t read about this incident in The Book of Illusions; the only link to M.S. we learn about in that novel is that one of Zimmer’s sons – who die soon after in a plane crash – is named Marco. Surely Zimmer would have told M.S.? I don’t think Auster had realised he was going to do this when he wrote Moon Palace; if only he could go back and adjust it.)

After some space devoted to the great love between M.S. and Kitty, Kitty moves out of focus for a chapter as M.S.’s adventures with Thomas Effing come to the fore. I make the mistake of picturing Effing as the Big Lebowski, the one in the wheel-chair, from the Coen brothers’ film, but this is wrong. Both are grumpy and insane, but Effing is a tragic figure as much as a comic one.

M.S. takes Effing for walks, and must describe the world to him, quickly and precisely, noticing all the details he has taken for granted. Then one day Effing declares he is going to die in two months and it’s time to get started on his obituary. Effing tells his life story, a story which parallels and resonates with M.S.’s. Effing was born Julian Barber in a wealthy family. He was a painter and disliked his ‘frigid’ wife. He sets off into the Utah wilderness with the heir of another rich family to paint the unique light. Their guide is unscrupulous and when the young heir falls down a ravine and is fatally injured, the guide refuses to stay with him or to take him back. Effing stays with him as he dies and then wonders what to do.

Fearing his name will be mud because of the death of the heir but perhaps also sensing the opportunity, Effing decides to not return, to stay out there in the wilderness. Just on the point of death, he finds a murdered hermit in a cave. He decides to take over the hermit’s life, and paints his best paintings ever, knowing that no-one will ever see them, painting them only for himself. He learns that the hermit was murdered by a gang of robbers and that the robbers will be back. When they return, he’s waiting for them, killing all three and taking their loot. Rich again, he heads back to civilisation, exiled from everyone he once knew and living under his new identity of ‘Thomas Effing’.

In time, he learns that he actually fathered a son the night before he left for Utah and he observes the man’s life from afar. His son’s name is Solomon Barber and he is a history academic.

His time nearly up, Effing wants to give away the original amount of money he took from the robbers. Despite his bad health, he forces M.S. to take him into the streets where they give away the money. On the last night, it’s pouring with rain but Effing insists on continuing and M.S. realises he is determined to die. Sure enough, he catches pneumonia and holds onto life only until two minutes past midnight on the day he had nominated as his day of death.

Effing leaves M.S. a sum of money and for a time Kitty and M.S. enjoy a blissful, carefree existence living together. M.S., meanwhile, writes to Solomon Barber, who is keen to meet M.S..

Sol realises as soon as he meets M.S. that M.S. is the son he didn’t know he had. While a professor he slept with M.S.’s mother – his nineteen year old student – in the morning they were discovered in bed together and the scandal caused Sol to be dismissed. She went back to her hometown and refused to speak to Sol again. Sol doesn’t tell M.S. any of this, figuring there is lots of time, that the right moment will come. He does, however, move to New York and become friends with M.S. and Kitty.

In the meantime, the bliss of M.S. and Kitty’s love is destroyed. Kitty gets pregnant; she wants an abortion and M.S. desperately wants the baby. M.S. frames it as his mistake, that he was foolish to be upset about her wanting the abortion. When he gives in and she has the abortion, something breaks in his heart. He can’t bear to be with her; he moves in with Sol for a ‘break’. Sol tries to get them back together; Kitty waits for M.S. to return – but he cannot.

(One can only speculate on Paul Auster behind the text here. And as much as I shouldn’t, I will. Perhaps like M.S., as an American liberal, he believes in his head that abortion is a necessary choice, not something to mourn. Yet perhaps he had an experience like M.S. where his heart felt it was a terrible thing and wouldn’t match his head.)

Sol hatches a plan to get M.S. out of his funk. They are going to find the cave in Utah where Effing lived for a time and hid his paintings. On the way, they stop to visit M.S.’s mother’s grave. Sol starts sobbing at the grave and reveals the truth to M.S.. M.S.’s first reaction is anger and Sol blinded by tears stumbles away, straight into an open grave. His back is broken and he spends weeks dying in the hospital, attended by M.S. day and night.

When Sol dies, M.S. rings Kitty; she’s the only one who might understand. She listens, and is sorry for him, but she won’t have him back. She has someone else; she says he nearly killed her and she’s had to harden her heart to survive. (As much as one might understand this, it’s actually only been three months since M.S. moved out; I can’t help thinking that the truest love would have waited longer than that.)

Having lost everyone, M.S. tries to find Effing’s cave. He finally discovers the area was flooded; all he can do is hire a boat and ride over the lake, knowing he is as close as he will get. When he returns, his car with his inheritance has been stolen. With just his wallet in his pocket, he starts walking. He walks all the way to the west coast, and when he gets there he stands in the Pacific Ocean watching the moon rise. And that’s the end of the story.

Reading Madeleine L’Engle’s From This Day Forward

29 Monday Dec 2008

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A memoir of her marriage. In several ways I’m enjoying it, but the first section is awkward. It is too anecdotal; the contrast with the immediacy and feeling of the second section is stark. She’s too removed from the events of the first section and she’s telling it like a grandmother to her grandchildren.

What’s more, she has this habit of defanging whatever she says, reducing it to nothing, explaining it away, leaving me saying ‘why’d you mention it in the first place?’. Eg:

Sometimes on my way home after a show I would be accosted by a drunken solider or sailor, but I would just smile and move out of the way and I never had any real problem. If someone started to be ugly, there was aways somebody else to say, “Is he bothering you?” (p. 36)

Dreadful writing. I believe in you, Madeleine, I believe you’re going to wipe away the bad memory of this sentence and ones like it.

After the planes : a review of The Falling Man

29 Monday Dec 2008

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The Falling Man / Don DeLillo (2007)

DeLillo’s novels always become better in my mind a few weeks, a few months after I’ve read them, when they start to haunt me. Presumably this one will be the same. But it starts with ‘the planes’, the towers coming down on 9/11, and it feels like his characters don’t know what to do afterwards and they drift away, which might be what life is like, but isn’t how a novel should be.

Keith, who was in the tower, returns to his estranged wife, Lianne, and son. He’s there but he’s not there. A private, inscrutable man. He returns the briefcase he grabbed in the tower to its owner, an overweight black woman. He listens to her talk about the haunting memory of going down the stairwell, down and down with thousands of others; it’s a powerful image. After starting an affair with her, he ends it out of guilt. In a well-handled scene he imagines her different responses when he confesses to what he did. But then he doesn’t confess to what he did.

Instead, he becomes obsessed with gambling. He starts going off to Las Vegas for weeks at a time. Lianne can only ever have a little piece of him. The novel ends with a description of his escape from the tower; it is, of course, the beginning of the novel and reflects DeLillo’s problem (or theme?) that he has started with the climax. There’s nowhere to go after the towers have come down. Just dissipation in both senses of the word.

Keith’s son, Justin, takes to watching the skies with binoculars, waiting for ‘Bill Lawton’ (Bin Laden) to send the coded message that he will be returning. (In Justin’s worlds, the towers haven’t come down, they’ve only been damaged, and it’s not too late to save them.) These sections – and many others – are beautiful.

Lianne is coping simultaneously with ‘the planes’ which have brought her husband back and her mother’s decline. She’s sick in 2001; in the final part of the book, we jump forward three years to anti-war protests and her funeral.

Her coping mechanisms are much less destructive: she runs a writing therapy group for Alzheimer’s patients; later she turns to religion. Through it all, is the shadow of her mother’s lover, a man living under an assumed name, who was involved in a European terrorist group in the 1970s. The parallel to the present day terrorists is mentioned without being explored. She also encounters ‘the falling man’, a performance artist who hangs himself in a pose like that of the famous photograph of the man jumping from the tower.

The third section carries the falling man’s real name. The second section carries her mother’s lover assumed name. The first section carries the name Justin gives to his myth of Bin Laden – Bill Lawton.

There are two anomalous interludes from the pov of one of the terrorists; beautifully written but not fitting in. These interluding chapters have no numbers but location titles. Significantly, the second, as the terrorist waits on the plane about to smash into the tower, segues from the terrorist to Keith inside the tower at the point of impact. Or I assume it’s significant, and it is a powerful image, from the terrorist watching a water bottle roll in the corridor seconds before oblivion to the man feeling the shock of that impact. But I feel like I don’t get it, or many other important things about this novel. Yet we’re probably not meant to get DeLillo.

And even if I don’t get it, in the midst of it, there’s DeLillo’s beautiful non-sequitors, his repetitions, his delightful dialogues. He is one of the best dialogists I have read and a writer I feel that I’m going to have keep engaging with.

Don DeLillo’s Underworld

26 Friday Dec 2008

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I never got to write properly about Don DeLillo’s Underworld, a book which took up a significant part of my reading year. There’s a couple of posts about the reading in progress. I want to add to them this  paragraph I wrote in the reading list I keep in Excel. It might not make sense, but it might mean something to people who’ve read it.

The narrative is a kind of archaeology, winding backwards, not in a linear way, but ending finally with the beginning, the shot that was heard through Nick Shay’s world when he accidentally shot his friend George. When we met Nick in the nineties, we don’t even learn directly that he did this, we just get a few hints that something happened. But as we get further back, closer and closer to the event itself, it becomes louder. The connections are fascinating and there are so many I must have missed. But at the beginning, Nick is going to meet Klara Sax, an artist reworking old bombers. The bomber she works on is the same one we see in action during the Vietnam War toward the end of the book. At that point, one of the crew remembers the baseball his father bought for him, the gameball from the famous game with which the narrative starts. This same ball is now in the hands of Nick Shay. Other connections are less literal; J. Edgar Hoover is one of the characters; Sister Edgar another. Their parallel lives in Cold War America are contrasted by their same name.

Prose too plain even for me.

10 Wednesday Dec 2008

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I Know What I’m Doing / Hans Koning[sberger] (1964)

I am a fan of Koning’s unfairly neglected work and I was excited to find a first edition hardback of this book at Gould’s Book Arcade in Sydney on the weekend. But this is the weakest novel of his I’ve read yet.

I usually like Koning’s sparse prose. At its best – such as in The Revolutionary – it is poignant and evocative. Yet in this work, the sparse plainness is all. It is a simple novel of an ordinary girl’s hesitation between two men. It didn’t feel like there were hidden depths: there was only surface.

He  explored similar themes much better in the earlier American Romance.

Most of the novel is in first person with occasional chapters in third person. I don’t know what it would take to make this work, but it doesn’t work here. I think the voices would need to be differentiated enough for it to matter, for there to seem to be a reason to be doing it. As it was, it only interrupted the flow.

The truth about Burke and Wills

10 Wednesday Dec 2008

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The Dig Tree / Sarah Murgatroyd (2002)

Sarah Murgatroyd wrote this brilliant book about Burke and Wills while dying of cancer in her thirties. She insisted the publisher not publicise her illness at all in the promotion of the book and she died the same year it was published. This brave refusal of self-pity comes through in the book; despite the adventures she must have had researching it, she stays on task, never consciously intruding as an author into her story.

And what a story. Her picture of the incompetent Royal Club’s decision to mount an expedition is a bizarre, fascinating one. The Burke expedition is full of the strangest details. On the first day, they only got as far as Richmond and Burke rode back to Melbourne that night to see the teenage singer who he was obsessed with perform.

I couldn’t put it down as mistake after mistake piles up. The picture of the small party reaching the north of Australia, but not quite seeing the ocean, stopping by estuary a few kilometres short, before heading back is a poignant one.

Burke and Wills’ bodies were retrieved months after their deaths and put on exhibition in Melbourne. Spectators took souvenirs from their bodies – teeth and hair.

This is the kind of book that makes me want to write non-fiction.

‘To work and yet not pay life’s price for working’: a review of Herman Hesse’s Narziss and Goldmund

27 Thursday Nov 2008

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Narziss and Goldmund is set in a timeless medieval Europe. It is a dreamy, episodic novel with a kind of beauty that reminds me of The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It deals with similar questions to Wilder’s novel: the deepest questions of what life is for, of what type of life we should lead.

The monk Narziss sends his student Goldmund out into the world to experience it and live it to the full because he senses in Goldmund something Narziss – a cold scholar – can never have: passionate intensity. So, for the bulk of the novel, we follow Goldmund on his life as an adventurer or a vagrant as he goes from bed to bed and house to house, this shining youth who all women fall for. He puts down no roots until he sees a beautiful carving, decides he must become a sculptor and works for a couple of years as an apprentice, carving a magnificent statue of Goldmund.

Yet his old itchy feet return; he cannot settle (the theme is similar to Alain-Fournier’s Le Grande Mealunes) and he goes travelling again. Things take a dark turn as plague descends on the country and the death around him ages him and leaves him wiser.

The pattern continues, though, until finally he is aged enough that eternal youth is no longer an option and he returns to the monastery, finally settled, but deathly ill.

There are pages of densely beautiful, insightful writing. Perhaps this extract sums up the theme better than any other:

Oh, it was high time to accomplish something, carve out some figures to leave behind him; something with longer life in it than he. Small fruit was born of all these wanderings, these years since he escaped into the world. He had saved so little from time; a few figures, carved and left in a workshop, the best of them all his Johannes – and now this unreal picture-book in his head, his fair and agonized image-world of memories. Could he ever manage to rescue some of them, setting them forth for all to see? Or would his life go on like this to the end, always with new cities, new country, new women, fresh experiences, other pictures, one piled up over the other, from which at last he would have nothing, save the restless, painful beauty in his heart? Life tricked so shamelessly. It was enough to make men laugh or weep. A man could live, letting his senses have free rein, sucking his fill at the breasts of Eve, his mother – and then, though he might revel and enjoy, there was no protection against her transience, and so, like a toadstool in the woods, he shimmered today in the fairest colours, tomorrow rotted, and fell to dust.

Or he could set up his defences against life, lock himself into a workshop, and seek to build a monument beyond time. And then life herself must be renounced; the man was nothing but her instrument : though he might serve eternity he withered, he lost his freedom, fullness, and joy of days. Such had been the fate of Master Nicholas.

And yet our days had only a meaning if both these goods could be achieved, and life herself had not been cleft by the barren division of alternatives. To work and yet not pay life’s price for working: to live yet not renounce the work of creation. Could it ever be done?

Some men could do it, perhaps. There might be husbands, and honest fathers of families in the world, whose senses had not been blunted by their fidelity. There might be industrious burghers whose hearts had not been tamed and rendered barren, by their lack of danger and its freedom. Perhaps. He had met none yet.

– pp. 237-238

I thought for a while it was a perfect novel. But the ending feels rushed. The greatest shift in Goldmund – his wearying and rootedness, the end of his youth – seems to accelerate dramatically in the last chapters. But perhaps that’s not a flaw, perhaps it’s even true to how life is sometimes.

Indeed, there is a sense of Hesse knowing he can’t show some of this transition. There is a gap as Goldmund sets out one last time at the end of the penultimate chapter and then returns at the beginning of the next. We only ever learn fragments of what finally broke him or matured him as he feverishly relates it to Narziss while dying.

A beautiful, important novel – as you will either think or not from the extract.