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

Letters reveal Mother Teresa’s despair – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

27 Monday Aug 2007

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Letters reveal Mother Teresa’s despair – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

A book of letters written by Mother Teresa of Calcutta reveals for the first time that she was deeply tormented about her faith and suffered periods of doubt about God.

“Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear,” she wrote to the Reverend Michael van der Peet in September 1979.

…”I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God – tender, personal love,” she wrote to one adviser. “If you were (there), you would have said, ‘What hypocrisy’.”

Reading this makes me feel both encouraged and discourged. Encouraged that she was just like me. And discouraged that she was just like me. (I should qualify ‘just like me’. I am not devoting my life to poor people in Calcutta. But ‘like me’ in suffering periods of doubt.)

Do we want our saints, our heroes, to be so sure of their faith that it makes us think they – and, by extension, we – must be right? Or do we want them to be vulnerable like us? Struggling along?

I doubted a lot when I was seventeen, eighteen. I thought it would never end. It did. For seven years after that, I experienced God in a way that made me feel strong in my faith. I had found something amazing, and I had no problem believing it. And then, in the last year, the doubts have come back. And sometimes I think they will never end. But then – in small ways – over the last week I’ve been experiencing God in fresh ways.

Watching Amazing Grace part 2: the letdown

26 Sunday Aug 2007

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It all seems so clear in the cinema. All it takes is passion and dedication,  and you can free the slaves. You can change the world. You can make your life into a burning torch which sets the world alight.

But I get out of the cinema and time is no longer compressed. It passes with all the boring bits left in. The conversations we have to have about what groceries need buying. And the reality: I am not William Wilberforce. I am a librarian with a job to go to in the morning and dishes to be washed.

Watching Amazing Grace: what’s our issue?

26 Sunday Aug 2007

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The story of William Wilberforce’s parlimentary fight against slavery in Britain and his marriage to Emily.  

I was inspired by the film. I didn’t care how much director Michael Apted was manipulating me, I was barracking for William Wilberforce, I was angry at the capitalist forces which made slavery happen in the first place. I was proud that this man was a Christian.

 I wanted to make a difference like he made a difference. Looking back from where we are, slavery seemed clear as such an abhorrence, the greatest evil that needed fighting. But that moral clarity wouldn’t have existed in the 1790s, not for most people. And we can’t have that ‘moral clarity’ about our own times. It takes someone with prophetic imagination, a man or woman who can see the evils that have been naturalised.

And so what is the equivalent today that we should be fighting for? I’m not sure; I don’t have enough of a prophetic imagination. There’s too much grey in any issue I can think of. It’s clearer for my wife, and I can see where she’s coming from – the virtual slavery of the two-thirds world, making stuff for the first world for a pittance.

Add to this all the related evils of the System: global warming, war, greed.

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.

King’s Park turns sinister

16 Thursday Aug 2007

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Police and forensic investigators this morning continue to trawl through bushland in Kings Park in the search for missing mother-of-two Corryn Rayney.

Today marks nine days since Mrs Rayney disappeared after a bootscooting class in Bentley on August 7.

During guarded comments to waiting media yesterday, police admitted they had found “disturbed soil” in an area of Kings Park where an oil link from Mrs Rayney’s car lead them yesterday.

http://www.thewest.com.au/default.aspx?MenuID=145&ContentID=37511

The story has been building up for days. At first she was just missing, mysteriously, after a Bootscooting class. And then yesterday her car is found in Subiaco. And then a trail of oil into King’s Park and recently disturbed soil.

It feels, reading the paper and listening to the news, that the media has this expectation: today there will be a body.

And Perth, voyeuristically, waits. I peer into King’s Park from the bus on the way to work, but I don’t even see any police cars. Somewhere in there, a body.

King’s Park seems a place for bodies. Recently, there were weeks of stories in the local paper about a missing Nedlands man. His poster was up at the local supermarket. He looked familiar; maybe I met him once. And then the postscript: a tiny article in the local paper saying that police had confirmed a body found in King’s Park was that of missing man and no suspicious circumstances were involved. Between the lines: a suicide, and, hence, thankfully, not a media fanfare. I felt so sad reading about it.

A few years ago, a homeless woman was found dead in King’s Park. She had no family.

King’s Park has taken on a sinister aspect in my mind. A place of secrets. A place of death.