Category Archives: books

Book review – Ian McEwan: Saturday

01 Saturday Sep 2007

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An excellent novel which manages to show the state of the world through one man’s mind on one day. Perowne is a neurosurgeon; the Saturday in question is the day of the anti-war protests just before the invasion of Iraq. In his relationship to his family, a game of squash and a road-rage incident which turns into a home invasion by a thug, he feels and thinks about the state of the world and the state of his life.

McEwan’s prose has these moments of intense insight that are beautiful to read. He manages to write about what it’s like to listen to a certain piece of music, or the subtle feelings you might have waking in the middle of night and watching your wife sleep.

The final scene lifts the whole novel another notch, an inspired piece of writing with Henry Perowne looking out on the square at the end of the long Saturday and thinking about what will come in the future, the leaving of his children, the death of his mother and father-in-law; the terrorist attack that has to happen. He imagines another doctor standing looking out at the square in 1903, and how this doctor would not believe what was to happen in the next one hundred years.

Book review – Andrew McGahan: Last Drinks

01 Saturday Sep 2007

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Ten years after the Fitzgerald Inquiry, corrupt journalist George is in exile in a small country town; but then his ex-best friend Charlie turns up dead in the town. George goes to Brisbane to cremate Charlie and tries to find out what happened. The story emerges in big chunks of flashback whenever George meets someone from his past. This feels clumsy to me; it’s not integrated, it’s a stop the story and go back to the past. The novel is soaked in alcohol; every character is an alcoholic. George has gone sober for the last ten years, but when he finally uncorks a bottle toward the end, it’s like a sex scene we’ve been working up to all novel.

Book review – Carol Shields: The Stone Diaries

01 Saturday Sep 2007

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The main character is Daisy Goodwill, and it’s not exactly a diary. But Stone refers to the surname given to all the orphans at the orphanage where Daisy’s mother Mercy was brought up and to Daisy’s father’s preoccupation with stone as a quarry worker and then a stone sculptor. Daisy is herself almost an orphan, her mother dying in childbirth; her father not seeing her again until she was eleven.

The novel tells her story from birth to death, 1905 to the 1990s. Its scope is huge; we learn the stories and fates of many of the people whose lives contribute to Daisy’s.

Most interesting to me was the life of her father-in-law, Magnus Flett, who lives to 116, the last fifty years of his life spent unknown and estranged from his family, who all think him long dead. Daisy, visiting Scotland, comes across him.

The novel embraces many genres, a tapestry of biography, monologue, newspaper articles and letters.

Book review – Dara Horn : The world to come

01 Saturday Sep 2007

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Benjamin Ziskind steals a Chagall painting from the NY Jewish Art Gallery because his family used to own it.

The novel has many strands – Benjamin’s grandfather who was given the painting as a boy in a USSR orphanage; Benjamin’s parents – his father a Vietnam veteran and his mother a children’s book illustrator who takes Yiddish stories and folklore and brings them to life again; Benjamin’s twin sister, Sara, who forges a copy of the Chagall; Benjamin’s potential lover, Erica, curator at the gallery, who is trying to find the thief. And then finally, bringing the strands together, Benjamin’s unborn nephew, Daniel, who in the final chapter is shown through the ‘world to come’, the world he is entering, by angels who are his dead ancestors.

The two novels it reminds me of most are The Book Thief and Nicole Krauss’s History of Love. I wonder if Krauss and Horn are friends or rivals, being two Jewish women writers in New York with two years between them and both writing magic realism that concerns family and text

Book review: Strong Motion – Jonathan Franzen

23 Thursday Aug 2007

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A long scrapbook of a novel, with brilliant passages and fascinating characters let down by long passages of exposition and a plot that tries to do too much.

A seismologist, Renee, works out that the earthquakes around Boston are being caused by a huge hole drilled by Sweeting-Aldren, who are secretly pumping all their waste down it. Louis Holland pursues her, even though she’s older than him, and joins her quest to bring Sweeting-Aldren down. His detested mother has just inherited $22 million shares in the company, and he wants to teach her a lesson.

But just as important, and much more interesting, is the love sub-plot. A troubled girl from Louis’ past, Lauren, turns up and due to a moment of fatal hesitation, he loses Renee. Louis is a brilliant character. He’s like Holden Caulfield at twenty-two. He makes his mother and sister uncomfortable because he is so judgemental. If they’re phony, in his eyes, he won’t even talk to them. When a fundamentalist Christian takes over the radio-station where he works, he tells the new owner that he (Louis) is the antichrist and walks out.

Franzen has such good insights into the way family works, something he developed even further in The Corrections. If you loved The Corrections (like I did) you’ll like this novel.

Help me find the book I can’t get out of my head

18 Saturday Aug 2007

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When I was ten, I got given a discarded library book. Unusually for me, I can’t remember its title or author.  Sometime in the 1990s, my mum threw it out. I would dearly love to find it again; I think about it at least once a week.

The plot went something like this: a young tourist (possibly Australian or English) goes to a small town (possibly in Italy or Greece). He starts having strange feelings and strange memories. He is drawn to a particular grave in the cemetery. The date of death of the man buried there is his own date of birth. He is then drawn to a house. An old woman lives there. He tells the woman that she is his mother. The woman doesn’t believe him; her son has been dead for years. He says that when he was a boy growing up in this house, he hid something he stole behind a loose brick. He goes to the brick, removes it and finds the object (whatever it is) and the woman bursts into tears.

I don’t remember the rest. There is something about a motorbike. Perhaps he died in a motorbike accident?

The cover has a skull on it? (Maybe)

It’s a small paperback, at most eighty pages. It was written for teenagers? Children?

Do you know what it’s called? Please, please put me out of my wondering.

Stephen King mistaken for vandal in Alice – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

16 Thursday Aug 2007

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Stephen King mistaken for vandal in Alice – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

I’ve sometimes thought of secretly signing my book when I see it in a bookshop. I’ve never actually done it surreptiously, though.  I  asked the assistant at Floreat Forum Book Exchange if she wanted me to sign my book, and she said ‘no’. Stephen King has the right idea – just go ahead and do it.

Book review: The blind assassin

14 Tuesday Aug 2007

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Image of The Blind Assassin     

A long novel that borrows from the family saga genre, but recasts it in a literary form. It’s difficult to summarise, because of the intricacies of relationship that make up its substance.

Iris and Laura Chase are brought up in a privileged world, which collapses in the Great Depression. Iris, the elder sister, is married off to her father’s business rival, Richard Griffen. He takes over the Chase button factory and suddenly both girls are under his care. (And that of his evil sister, Winifred.)

The story is told by Iris as she nears death in 1999. Scenes from her present life intersperse the flashbacks to the fateful events in the 1930s and 1940s. We also read extracts of Laura Chase’s novel, The Blind Asssassin, published posthumously.  It describes an illicit affair between a wealthy woman and an itinerant fugitive. Together, they concoct a fantasy world involving the Blind Assassin.

Spoiler alert:

As we read the extracts from the Blind Assassin, we assume it’s Laura having an affair with the communist agitator she met at a picnic. But the ending reveals that Iris wrote the book as a memorial for Laura. Iris herself had an affair with him, and revealing this to Laura was enough (maybe) to drive Laura to suicide. (After Laura was repeatedly raped by Richard and had a forced abortion.)

 For me, the highlight of the novel is the enigmatic Laura. She is such a wonderful character – dreamy, otherworldly, full of an entire world no-one else enters. She is passionate about religion. She cuts the bits out of the family Bible she doesn’t like. And then there’s this story:

On bread days Reenie would give us scraps of dough for bread men, with raisins for eyes and buttons. Then she would bake them for us. I would eat mine, but Laura would save hers up. Once Reenie found a whole row of them in Laura’s top drawer, hard as rock, wrapped up in her handkerchiefs like tiny bun-faced mummies. Reenise said they would attract mice and would have to go straight into the garbage, but Laura held out for a mass burial in the kitchen garden, behind the rhubarb bush. She said there had to be prayers. If not, she would never eat her dinner any more. She was always a hard bargainer, once she got down to it.

(You can read more Blind Assassin quotes on my quotes blog: http://othervoices.wordpress.com/tag/atwood-margaret/ )

For me, the weakness of the novel is all the chopping and changing. I like a more linear narrative.
      

Book lists: Modern Library’s 100 best novels

10 Tuesday Jul 2007

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The first list I paid any attention to was this one from Modern Library, released in 1998. In 2002, I was intimidated by how many my friend Tim had read and how many I hadn’t. Now a couple of times a year I read books from the list. It has been widely criticised because of its lack of women writers and its American focus. Fair criticisms – it is really a list of the 100 greatest American male novels written before 1960, with a couple of extras.

I only recently discovered how the list was chosen, and it made me like it less – nine writers were asked which, of a list of 400 books (published in the Modern Library) they would recommend. The books were ranked by numbers of recommendations.

That is a very limiting way to make a list! And yet I’ve made some amazing discoveries from the lists – books which have become favourites of mine, including John Updike’s Rabbit series; John Cheever’s Wapshot Chronicles and Graham Greene’s The heart of the matter.

I think the Board’s choice of James Joyce’s Ulysses as number one is a good one. It is one of my favourite novels, and an incredible literary accomplishment. I think it shows what it is to be alive better than anything else written in the twentieth century.

I have now at least begun reading 42 of the books, up from 25 back in 2002.

Being aware of the list’s limits, I would recommend it. (But you should totally ignore the Readers’ List. It is a victim of vandalism by fans of Ayn Rand, L. Ron Hubbard etc – internet freaks who think distorting the list will make more people read their crazy books. They’re probably right.)

http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html

The ‘Greatest’ novels ever written: why lists?

10 Tuesday Jul 2007

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I spend a lot of time looking over lists of the greatest books ever written. I take notice of award winners. I listen to critics.

Unpopular things. My friends regard me as either stupid or obsessive.

 But critical opinion does matter. Critics are generally good readers who have read a lot and have informed opinions. I tend to enjoy highly recommended books. There are times I don’t; there are a number of critical darlings I just can’t abide – but I certainly have a good success rate.

They are subjective – but that doesn’t make them just a matter of taste. The amazing things about humans is our ability to share language and taste through the medium of culture. The books on many of the ‘greatest’ lists compiled have managed to appeal to many people for many years. So they might appeal to you too.

I’m going to start a series of posts on different lists available and how I’ve found them.