Barnes writes most movingly about his life since the death of his beloved wife in 2008.  He writes about the shock of grief, and how it’s impossible to be prepared for it, because every grief is different and everyone deals with it in different ways.  He is, of course, writing about it some time after the death of his wife - still grieving, but not as he did at first.  But he tells us about Year One, and Year Two, and how it never really ends.  ‘Getting over it’ is impossible, because grief changes the bereaved irrevocably.

This book was especially relevant to me now because a dear colleague has just lost her husband to brain cancer.  I learned from this book that an expression like ‘lost her husband’ might jar: compare ‘We lost our dog to gypsies’, or ‘he lost his wife to a commercial traveller’  (p. 83) and so might euphemistic expressions like ‘pass’: ‘I’m sorry to hear your wife has passed’ (as in ‘passed water? ‘passed blood’?) (p.71), but that really what hurts the bereaved is not the ill-chosen word, it’s that is that people don’t understand, because they can’t.

Grief, like death, is banal and unique.  So, a banal comparison.  When you change your make of car, you suddenly notice how many other cars of the same sort there are on the road. They register in a way they never did before.  When you are widowed, you suddenly notice all the widows and widowers coming towards you.  Before, they had been more or less invisible, and they continue to remain so to other drivers, to the unwidowed.  (p.70)

It seems to me that all of us might benefit from reading Part 3 of this little book, it’s only 40-odd pages of a book just 116 pages long.  But as a guide to an inevitable part of life, it’s invaluable.

Even though there is nothing that can prepare us for it.

Author: Julian Barnes
Title: Levels of Life
Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2013
ISBN: 9780224098151
Source: Casey-Cardinia Library

Availability

Fishpond: Levels of Life
Book Depository: Levels of Life

Back in 2012 when Stu from Winston’s Dad decided to hold a Henry Green week I had never heard of this author and I was cross with myself for being too busy to join in.  But I didn’t forget Green’s name, and when The Folio Society offered me a copy of Loving for review, I didn’t hesitate.

(And before I write a word of the review, I must comment on the pleasure of reading this book in the Folio edition.  (The last time I enjoyed a similar reading experience was when my son gave me Robert Dessaix’s Night Letters, which I will always associate with the texture of the embossed letters on the dust-jacket under my fingers as I held it, and with the lovely papers and elegant type in the Pan Macmillan 1996 edition).   We get so used to reading mass-produced paperbacks on cheap paper that we forget the sensual delight of turning expensive pages of wood-free and acid-free paper, in a book that is cloth bound properly with sewn bindings.  And because the typography in the Folio edition is generous the book is so easy to read - not like those tightly squeezed, slightly blurry fonts which are sadly becoming a feature of reprints in particular.    I know, I know, publishers do what they must to remain competitive and Folio editions are not cheap, but reading beautiful books should not just be for collectors,  it’s a luxury we should all have every now and again if we can afford it.   If you are interested, you can read more about how these beautiful books are constructed here, and while you are at it, have a look at the gorgeous quirky illustrations by Christopher Corr in Loving here.)

My only quibble with the Folio Society is that now I want to read all of Henry Green’s books in Folio editions,  one each year for my Christmas present for the next ten years - but they only produce this one title by this author!

Anyway, back to Loving.  Wikipedia tells me that  Time magazine included Loving in its 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005, and it is easy to see why: this gentle satire of life upstairs and downstairs is rich with meaning and very entertaining to read.

The story takes place in one of those Big Irish Houses so often depicted in William Trevor’s fiction.  Loving was first published in 1945 during the war and one of the most interesting motifs is the way Green quietly contrasts the petty wartime discomforts of this all British household in neutral Ireland with mild allusions to the Blitz.  Mrs Tennant complains to her butler about not being able to get writing paper to colour-coordinate in the Gold Bedroom, but Young Albert, evacuee nephew of the cook, is painfully thin when he arrives from London.  Mrs Welch, vaguely wondering whether she should leave the safety of Kinalty Castle and go home and ’do her bit’,  tells Miss Burch

They’re starving over there my sister says in her letter she sent.  If it wasn’t for that I’d go tomorrer, I would straight.  He’s that thin. (p. 43)

Most of the house is closed up, but authorities are calling for blood donations, and Albert the apprentice footman steals peacock eggs to send to his mother in London.  (Rationing limited eggs to one per household, and that was still in place when my sister was born in the late 1940s.)  And when there are dark hints that the Germans might invade Ireland, Paddy the lampman sniggers at the pitiful weapons that the Home Guard has:

…Paddy started to mouth something.  It was so seldom he spoke at meals that all listened.
‘What’s he say?’ Raunce asked when the lampman was done.
‘He reckons the IRA would see to the Jerries,’ Kate translated.
‘Holy smoke but he’ll be getting me annoyed in a minute.  First he says there aren’t none then ‘e pretends they can sort out a panzer division.  What with?  Bows and arrows?
Paddy muttered a bit.
‘He says,’ and Kate gave a laugh, ‘they got more’n pikes like those Home Guard over at home.’ (p. 90)

Foreshadowing the end of country house life in this era, Green shows us that Mrs Tennant’s biggest problem is maintaining her staff.  Subtly contrasting the British servants’ fear of a German invasion of Ireland with European loyalty in the face of much closer danger,  Green sends Mrs T’s French maid home at the start of the war.  But it’s just one sentence, one the reader might easily miss if not paying careful attention.  It takes a while to tot up the number of staff Mrs T still has too:  I tallied a nanny, a cook, three housemaids, two scullery maids, a gardener, a footman-butler, and his apprentice learning how to clean the silver.  Only the lampman (who also looks after the 200-odd peacocks!) is Irish, because neither Mrs T nor her staff will have anyone Irish in the house, ostensibly because they might be IRA but really because of prejudice, as we can tell from insulting allusions to the Irish accent.

The story begins with the death of Old Mr Eldon the butler, which is an ’inconvenience’ upstairs: Mr Jack Tennant has joined his regiment (though he seems to be in danger) and so Mrs T, his mother, and Mrs Jack, his wife Violet, must manage the transition themselves. The exigencies of ’the servant problem’ mean that his successor must come from within the existing staff, and Charley Raunce is ambitious.  He’s a man with his eye on the main chance and he wangles his way in as a most unsuitable replacement - because he’s  sly, dishonest, and an opportunistic womaniser who can’t be trusted with the young housemaids.

But there is no replacement footman to take Charley’s place, so he must do both jobs, and there’s no increase in salary either.  Why is it worth it to him?

For a number of reasons, not least the improvement in his status both above and below stairs.  He gets his name back for a start.  With breathtaking indifference to the people who serve her, Mrs T has always called her footmen Arthur to save herself the trouble of having to remember their names.  Charley by his elevation to butler is re-humanised as Mr Raunce, and while there is a bit of a tussle over it with Miss Burch downstairs, the rest of the servants have to call him Mr Raunce now too.

Green shows us the significance of these petty status indicators in a superb set piece in the servants hall at dinner.  Charley has wasted no time in securing his promotion and so old Mr Eldon’s chair at the head of the table is barely cold when Charley appropriates it.  Miss Burch, however, has laid his place as usual down the table next to her.  So he rises from his seat, collects cutlery from the drawer and sits down again.  There is a pregnant silence as they all wait for the food to be brought in, because that’s the footman’s job and Charley is determined to relinquish this role even though upstairs he still holds both positions.  Miss Burch makes acerbic remarks, but Charley triumphs … and goes on to make a complete mess of carving the roast.

Equally important to Charley is his appropriation of Mr Eldon’s notebooks, which scrupulously record personal details about guests who tip generously so that he can ingratiate himself with them, (handicapped by his risible ignorance about crucial matters such as the seasons for hunting.)  Mr Eldon’s notes also explain other means by which an enterprising butler can enhance his salary…

Minor domestic intrigues such as a missing ring and a ‘waterglass’ that’s been tampered with offer further opportunities for Green to comment on the trivial preoccupations of this household, but it’s the ‘loving’ that’s the most fun.  A long-standing female friendship is tested when both girls fancy Charley’s favours, and there’s an indiscretion upstairs that scandalises the younger staff.

This is a very clever book, only 200 pages long but it repays re-reading to catch the subtleties.

BTW: If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know how cross I get about introductions with spoilers.  Trust me, it is safe to read Lorin Stein’s introduction: she offers an idea of recurring themes and style, and some author background, but she doesn’t ruin the story.

Author: Henry Green
Title: Loving
Publisher: The Folio Society, 2013
ISBN: it doesn’t have one, and it doesn’t have a barcode to spoil the back cover either.
Source: Review copy courtesy of The Folio Society

Availability:

This edition is only available direct from the Folio Society.

Penguin publish Loving (with a truly awful cover, what on earth were they thinking??) as a trilogy along with Living and Party Going from the Book Depository or from Fishpond Loving; Living; Party Going - but speaking for myself I’d rather have an old 1950s hardback from a second-hand bookshop.

Cover, Australian edition (Scribe)

Well, 24 hours ago the Shadow IFFP announced its choice of winner for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize: we chose Dublinesque by Enrique Vilas-Matas; trans. Rosalind Harvey & Anne McLean  (Spanish); Harvill Secker.  As you can see from our reviews on the Shadow IFFP Combined Reviews page, we all enjoyed reading it and were happy to select it as our winner.

But in London today the actual winner was announced – and I’m just as pleased to see that  The Detour by Gerbrand Bakker; trans. David Colmer (Dutch); Harvill Secker was the official winner.  You can read my review here.  This was the first of the longlisted books that I read, and I thought it was every bit as good as Bakker’s other prize winning novel, The Twin.  (See my review of The Twin too.).

You can also read an Interview with Gerbrand Bakker at Stu’s blog, Winston’s Dad.

• As I said last year, the real winners are those who take a step out of their comfort zone and read a book in translation. As the chair of the Shadow Jury, Stu from Winston’s Dad often says, it’s an opportunity to ‘read the world one book at a time’!

Check out some of the other Translated Books I’ve reviewed by clicking here, or on the tag in the RH menu.

To my fellow jurors Stu from Winston’s Dad, Tony from Tony’s Reading List, Mark Staniforth from Eleutherophobia, and Gary from Parrish Lantern – thanks, gentlemen!

Availability

Fishpond: The Detour (the title link is for the Australian edition)
Book Depository: The Detour

The following is the (slightly amended) press release from fellow-juror Tony of Tony’s Reading List

*drum-roll*

We started off in March with sixteen titles, (see the longlist and our combined reviews here) the cream of the fiction in translation published in the UK last year. After a hard month of reading, thinking, discussion and cursing, the list was cut down to six by the official panel

• THE  DETOUR by Gerbrand Bakker; trans. David Colmer (Dutch); Harvill Secker
• BUNDU by Chris Barnard; trans. Michiel Heyns (Afrikaans); Alma Books
• TRIESTE by Dasa Drndic; trans. Ellen Elias-Bursac (Croatian); MacLehose
• THE FALL OF THE STONE CITY by Ismail Kadare; trans. John Hodgson (Albanian); Canongate
• TRAVELLER OF THE CENTURY by Andres Neuman; trans. Nick Caistor & Lorenza Garcia (Spanish); Harvill Secker
• DUBLINESQUE by Enrique Vilas-Matas; trans. Rosalind Harvey & Anne McLean (Spanish); Harvill Secker 

Which is where we parted ways (a little bit)….

Having chosen four of the same titles as the official panel, the Shadow Panel (Stu from Winston’s Dad, Tony from Tony’s Reading List, Mark Staniforth from Eleutherophobia, Gary from Parrish Lantern and myself) opted for two others  – Satantango by László Krasznahorkai and The Last of the Vostyachs by Diego Marani - to complete the full half-dozen, and then set about deciding which was to take out the prize…

Our road took us on a long journey through many times and lands.

With Traveller of the Century by Andrés Neuman (see my review) we spent a bizarre time in an ever-shifting, nineteenth-century German town, working on translations and kissing the local girls.   With Satantango by László Krasznahorkai we moved onto a dark exploration of Communist-era Hungary (and an even darker examination of human souls…). We went for walks around the rainy city of Barcelona, and then via Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas (see my review) we  flew off to Dublin for a Bloomsday jaunt.  In The Fall of the Stone City by Ismail Kadare, (see my review) we witnessed an extraordinary dinner party in Albania – and its consequences ten years on.  With The Last of the Vostyachs by Diego Marani (see my review) we followed a boy from the Siberian wilds on his trip to Helsinki and watched as he encountered civilisation in all its forms.  In Gerbrand Bakker’s The Detour (see my review) we fled to Wales (seeking some solitude) and shared a woman’s house – but not her secrets…

Then we came back to earth with a bump. There were discussions, disagreements, grudging acceptance, and then a decision…

Our choice for the winner of the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize is:

Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas  (translated by Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean)

Congratulations to the writer and translators – Dublinesque is a great book, and it would be a worthy winner of the real prize. So, can it do the double? We’ll find out very soon…

(And speaking for myself, I would still choose Dublinesque as the winner from the official shortlist too…)

My thanks to Stu, from Winston’s Dad the Chair of this year’s Shadow IFFP, for inviting me to participate in the Shadow Jury this year.  It’s very rewarding to read so many interesting books in this way, and it gives me a greater awareness of international trends, by which to judge Australian writing.

Christina Stead Prize for Fiction

Mateship with Birds by Carrie Tiffany (Picador) See my review and Carrie Tiffany at the Parkdale Library

People’s Choice Award

Animal People by Charlotte Wood (Allen & Unwin) See my review and Meet an Aussie Author: Charlotte Wood

Special Award for Australian Fiction

David Ireland, see my review of The Glass Canoe 

Douglas Stewart Prize for Nonfiction

The Office: A Hardworking History by Gideon Haigh (Melbourne University Press)

Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry

Ruby Moonlight by Ali Cobby-Eckermann (Magabala Books)

Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature

A Corner of White by Jaclyn Moriarty (Pan Macmillan)

Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature

The Ghost of Miss Annabel Spoon by Aaron Blabey (Viking)

Community Relations Commission for a multicultural NSW Award

Don’t Go Back to Where You Came from: Why Multiculturalism Works, Tim Soutphommasane (New South Publishing)

UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing

The Last Thread, Michael Sala (Affirm Press) See a review at Liticism or at Whispering Gums.

NSW Premier’s Translation Prize

Peter Boyle

Congratulations to all the authors and publishers!

To check out the other very worthy titles which were shortlisted, click here.

A Spy in the House of Love is only a very short novella of 124 pages but Sabina is a fascinating character and she must have startled the respectable readers of 1954 when A Spy in the House of Love was first published.  John Cleland’s Fanny Hill was not legally available in the US till 1963, and anyway Sabina is a different character altogether from Fanny and her carefree attitude to sexual pleasure.  Sabina is no Madame Bovary either, she is deliberately behaving like a man, organising her life and managing her marriage so that she can take pleasure when and how she wants it.  She is driven simply by sensual desire and rejects the sentimentality of love.

We say of adolescent love that boys play at love to get sex and girls play at sex to get love, but Sabina isn’t interested in love.  She has designed an elaborate persona as an actor so that she can absent herself from her loving husband Alan. (Such a prosaic name! We can just imagine his beige cardigans, eh?)  When the story opens with a late night phone call that she makes to a random number in hope of a pick-up, the man who answers is named by the narrator as The Lie Detector, and he traces her to a bar where she is not behaving like a respectable married woman at all.  The identity of this man, the Lie Detector is not revealed until the end of the story.

BEWARE: SPOILERS

She has had her latest fling,  so she returns to Alan with stories of her performance in the play.  The irony is that Sabina the fake actor is actually a superb actor, apparently convincing Alan of all she has to say, even though the very first thing she must always do is to have a shower…

Because she wants to be able to have sex without any romantic attachments, she is actually pleased when she learns that the future wife of Philip – the opera singer who picked her up on the beach when she was sunbathing naked – is not beautiful.  This means that she is the ‘steadfastly loved one’ and so Sabina can continue to be ‘the whim, the caprice, the drug, the fever’. (p. 37)

Each man is associated with music: Philip strides over the sand dunes singing the theme from Tristan and Isolde, its use of harmonic suspension often associated with frustrated desire.

The song ascended, swelled, gathered together all the turmoil of the sea, the rutilant [1]  gold carnival of the sun, rivalled the wind and flung its highest notes into space like the bridge span of a flamboyant rainbow.  And then the incantation broke. 
He had seen Sabina. (p. 27)

Debussy’s Ile Joyeuse is associated with her intense restlessness:

The image of the ship’s cracking, restless bones arrived on the waves of Debussy’s Ile Joyeuse which wove around her all the mists and dissolutions of remote islands.  The model notes arrived charged like a caravan of spices, gold mitres, ciboriums and chalices bearing messages of delight setting the honey flowing between the thighs, erecting sensual minarets on men’s bodies as they lay on the sand.  Debris of stained glass wafted up by the seas, splintered by the radium shafts of the sun and the waves and tides of sensuality covered their bodies, desires folding in every lapping wave like an accordion of aurora boralis [sic] in the blood.  She saw an unreachable dance, at which men and women were dressed in rutilant colours, she saw their gaiety, their relations to each other as unparalleled in splendour. (p. 40-41)

Minarets, eh?  I wonder how the censors missed that?

Clair de Lune makes Sabina want to be in Paris, but it’s the  African drums that convey a transgression that would have shocked America before the Civil Rights movement.  Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1987) was a controversial film yet to be made and interracial marriage (and presumably anything else) was still illegal even as late as then. Sabine’s relationship with Mambo is across the colour bar - yet also not.  This is because – as Nin is careful to explain – although he is African, his skin is white due to a grandmother from France or Spain.

Each note was the brush of his mouth upon her.  His singing grew exalted and the drumming deeper and sharper and it showered upon her heart and her body.  Drum – drum – drum – drum - drum – upon her heart, she was the drum, her skin was taut under his hands, and the drumming vibrated through the rest of her body.  Wherever he rested his eyes, she felt the drumming of his fingers upon her stomach, her breasts, her hips.  His eyes rested on her naked feet in sandals and they beat an answering rhythm. (p. 51)

He tells her it cannot be, but before long she is coming out of his house at dawn, anxious about the Lie Detector keeping watch on her movements.

The title refers to Sabine’s habits being like the habits of a spy, ready always for a quick getaway, leaving no traces of her presence anywhere.  Her ingenuity enables her to

‘defeat life’s limitations’ but ‘the morass of dangers’ and ‘the smothering swamps of guilt’ await ‘her hour of punishment after living like a spy in the house of many loves, for avoiding exposure, for defeating the sentinels watching definite boundaries, for passing without passports and permits from one love to another. And she knows that ‘every spy’s life ended in ignominious death’. (p.64)

It is John, the grounded aviator still grieving for mates lost in the war who – in telling her that she is not a bad woman – disarms her entirely and ‘injected into her own body his own venomous guilt for living and desiring’ (p.77).  With Donald she meets his need for a Stravinsky firebird and a mother.  But it is Jay, an artist whose paintings are fragmented to symbolise the splitting of the atom, who made me realise that Sabina is a woman of many fragmented selves.

With her one female friend Djuna she finds an outlet for her guilt, because guilt is the one burden human beings cannot bear alone’ (p.114) and so we see that in some ways this is a very conventional novel.  Djuna tells her that she should not feel guilty for seeking wholeness, and that none of the men she slept with were ‘whole’.   She has been seeking crusaders and judges, and she has been acting like a child, trying to love, but loving only illusions.  (Philip for example, had to be Siegfried, always singing in tune).   Sabrina protests that only Alan’s love is  ‘infinite, tireless, all-forgiving’ but, says Djuna, that’s not a man’s love, that’s an idealised fantasy father figure invented by a needy child.

The Lie Detector tells her that it was she who invited him to follow her and to judge her, ‘a flirtation with justice’. Her distrust of love meant that she has not considered the other aspects Alan might offer.

‘You haven’t loved yet, ‘ he said. ‘You’ve only been trying to love, beginning to love.  Trust alone is not love, desire alone is not love.  All these paths [were] leading out of yourself, it is true, and so you thought they led to another, but you never reached the other.  You were only on the way.  Could you go out now and find the other faces of Alan, which you never struggled to see, or accept? ‘ (p. 121)

One of Beethoven’s Quartets drowns out the sound of Mambo’s drumming as Sabina sinks to the floor, ‘her wide skirt floating for one instant like an expiring parachute; and then deflated completely and died in the dust. (p.123)

PS (19/5/13) I am curious about when this book became available in Australia and whether it can be said to have had any influence on Australian women’s writing then or later.  If anyone knows anything about that, please share what you know in comments, thanks.

[1] rutilant – glowing or glittering with ruddy or golden light

Author: Anaïs Nin
Title: A Spy in the House of Love
Publisher: Pink Popular Penguins, 2013, supporting Breast Cancer Awareness*, see below.
ISBN: 9780734306913
Source: Review copy courtesy of Penguin Australia

Availability

Fishpond: A Spy in the House of Love (Pink Popular Penguin)
Book Depository: A Spy in the House of Love

Or direct from Penguin Australia

* From the Penguin Australia website:

Co-founded by Jane and Glenn McGrath, the McGrath Foundation raises money to place McGrath Breast Care Nurses in communities right across Australia and to increase breast awareness in young women.

The McGrath Foundation believes 150 of these specially trained nurses are needed to ensure that every family experiencing breast cancer has access to a breast care nurse, no matter where they live or their financial situation.  McGrath Breast Care Nurses offer a unique service to families who can self-refer to this free support.

Penguin is proud to donate $1 from the original sale of each Pink Popular Penguin to help the McGrath Foundation realise their goal.  To find out how you can make a difference visit www.mcgrathfoundation.com.au

There’s a Kafkaesque quality to the novel: the city itself has no fixed topography and its streets and buildings move.  Every venture outdoors involves getting lost, and yet no one – the reader least of all – seems disoriented by it.  Journeys merely take a little longer, and that seems to be all right because there’s a timeless quality to Hans’s sojourn even though the seasons move on.

What time is it? What! said Alvaro astonished. Do you mean to tell me you don’t wear a watch? The fact is, I don’t see any point in watches, said Hans, they never give me the time I want. (p. 113)

At the outset, Hans is not much impressed by his dingy lodgings and plans to leave the next day.  But he doesn’t, and like others who arrived intending to stay only a day or two, he finds that a succession of days come and go until even his vague plans to depart drift away into a formless existence spent hanging out in the cave of a nameless organ grinder and indulging an interest in Sophie, daughter of Herr Gottlieb, a retired tea importer and textile merchant.

Before long part of the charm of Wandernburg becomes the lovely Sophie, who is – alas – engaged to a local aristocrat called Rudi von Wilderhouse.  Rudi isn’t all that bright but he’s elegant and handsome, his home is a sort of Versailles on steroids, and he enjoys that casual exercise of social power that comes naturally to people of privilege.  Sophie’s father, Herr Gottlieb, is of course keen for this marriage to take place, and it doesn’t enter his head that Sophie might throw it all away for a penniless translator of no fixed abode.

Hans, however, appeals to Sophie’s intellectual ambitions.  Like Hans, she is an unbeliever, telling Father Pigherzog that she has no need of prayer, and she’s a proto-feminist who wants a seat in parliament.  Like many a heroine in La Comedie Humaine, she holds a salon every Friday, at which the local intelligentsia debate politics, philosophy, literature and aesthetics.  Sophie listens to Professor Mietter, Herr Levin and Herr Urquiho pontificate away but when asked what she thinks, she promptly cuts them down to size with pseudo female humility and then rubbishes their pet philosopher Schopenhauer because – like all the other great philosophers of the day – he thinks the same way about women, relegating them to house and garden.

Hans is adept in these discussions, and becomes a regular guest.  Plagued by doubts about whether Sophie cares for him at all, Hans undertakes a sly but elegant courtship, beginning with a prolific correspondence, attending a local dance hall where Sophie tries to teach his two left feet to waltz, and grasping every opportunity to ensnare the hapless Rudi in an intellectual cul-de-sac.  And Hans has a sort of cheer squad, led by the organ grinder who likewise holds a salon of sorts - in the freezing cave where he makes his home.  Here the Spanish businessman Alvaro and a couple of cantankerous labourers debate industrial relations, government and revolution.

What makes this novel so interesting, however, is not this scaffold of a romance novel.  It’s the way that Neuman effortlessly segues between the early 19th century and what might be our own time, where the characters travel in coaches and read by oil lamps  yet discuss issues so contemporary they might well be at the Melbourne Festival of Ideas.  When Sophie’s salon debates the idea of a Customs Union, it’s eerily reminiscent of the arguments we’ve all heard about the European Union; when the organ grinder’s salon discusses the invidious position of powerless factory workers, one can’t but think of the sweatshops of Asia.  The meditations on the nature of travel reminded me of Michelle de Kretser’s recent Questions of Travel (see my review): the organ grinder never wants to travel, fearing that it will lead him astray and prevent him from seeing beauty in the everyday, but Alvaro says it is ‘impossible to be fully in one place or to leave it completely’  and Hans quotes an Arab proverb that he who follows a path becomes the path’. (p. 132) He also quotes Chretien de Troyes:

He who believes his birthplace to be his homeland suffers.  He who believes all places could be his homeland suffers less.  And he who knows that no place can be homeland is invincible. (p. 133)

(This also reminds me of Hiroko Tanaka, a character in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows, who adapts to different nationalities with ease after the destruction of Nagasaki, believing that attachment to a homeland is a fatal flaw.  More of that later, when I have finished the audio book.)

When the not-accidentally-named Reichardt argues in the cave that he knows he’s a Saxon and a German, Hans reminds him that his ‘homeland’ has been at various times, Saxon, Prussian, half-French, and practically Austrian.  Why doesn’t Reichardt feel Teutonic? he asks:

Borders shift around like flocks of sheep, countries shrink, break apart, grow bigger, empires are born and die.  The only thing we can be sure of is our lives, and can live them anywhere. (p. 134)

Neuman also pokes fun at his own country, Argentina, through the character of Alvaro, claiming that Argentinians talk all the time about Argentina, but never actually stay there.

The author plays interesting games with these characters, investing them with opinions that might – or might not – be his own.  Mietter is a conservative, who thinks there are too many books, and they are no longer special.  Readers used to be able to expect books to reveal knowledge, but now ‘people prefer buying a book to understanding it’. (p. 189)  Hans, himself a character in a book set in an historical period though not an historical novel, is critical of the genre: he says that they either idealise the past as a rural idyll or portray it as a kind of hell.  Either way, such novels are fraudulent because implying that the past was hell distracts from present injustices, and superficial plots (such as those in Sir Walter Scott’s novels) are full of action but are meaningless if they don’t interpret the past or the origins of the present.  They also debate whether or not it is ever possible to translate poetry, a topic still subject to endless argument today.

At another of the salons myth is deconstructed, with the Professor asserting the value of Graeco-Roman culture to explain reality, and Hans just as enthusiastically claiming that the ancient gods are remote to today’s readers.   The general thrust of these salon discussions is conservatism and adherence to form versus experimentation, open-mindedness and breaking free of old constraints in a new ‘federalism of aesthetics’.

However, I suspect that this is one of those novels that will appeal to a limited readership.  There are some extravagant claims made for this novel by various blurbers but Michael Orthofer (whose opinions I respect) at The Complete Review had this to say:

 Maybe came at this with far too high expectations, but put it aside after a hundred disappointing pages; poorly paced, lazily quirky, and it just dragged and dragged with barely anything (even the salons) or characters (like the cave-dwelling organ grinder …) the least enticement to carry on; it read like an amateurish modern attempt at writing what was supposed to (but didn’t) read like a German novel of ca. 1800 (the sort of thing I’m a fan of).

It is true that the reader needs sustained tolerance for long disquisitions about esoteric topics, and for the idiosyncratic punctuation which obscures shifts from speaker to speaker and from talk to thought to action.  I became used to it, and didn’t mind it, but I know that such experiments really annoy some readers (and that being the case, I can’t really see why publishers persist with it.)

Oh yes, I suppose I must comment about the s_x, since the blurb makes so much of it, but I can’t verify whether the novel lives up to the claim that it has the ‘hottest s_x in contemporary fiction’ because I skipped these scenes.   As an ignorant adolescent, I found D.H. Lawrence endlessly fascinating, but as my father said (tactfully, much later) ‘One grows out of D.H. Lawrence.’  These days I find s_x scenes in novels boring, boring, boring because after all, by now we all know what happens, and the longer these scenes are, the more likely I am to skip them.

(And I hope that my feeble attempts to mask the offending word in this paragraph will keep offensive spam away from this blog!  Unless you are a WordPress blogger yourself and you check your spambox from time to time, you can have no idea how disgusting some of it is.  Thank heavens for Akismet, WordPress’s spamkiller which takes care of it all).

I read this book as a member of the Shadow Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Jury.  To view other reviews of this and other nominations please click here or on the IFFP graphic.

There are other reviews at The Complete Review,  Words without Borders, The Independent and The Guardian.

The winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize is due to be announced on Monday, so I’ve finished the shortlist just in time!

Author: Andrés Neuman
Title: Traveller of the Century
Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia
Publisher: Pushkin Press, 2012
ISBN: 9781908968388
Source: personal library, purchased from the Book Depository $12.59

Availability:
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I haven’t read it myself, but Sue at Whispering Gums has, and you can read her review here.

Sala’s delighted publishers, Affirm Press have sent the following press release:

Michael will now represent Australia and the Pacific region in vying for the main Commonwealth Book Prize, which will be awarded for the best first book of 2012, and announced on 31 May at the Hay Festival in Wales.

Maintaining a proud Australian tradition of success in this award, The Last Thread joins notable recent Regional award winners: Me and Mr Booker by Cory Taylor (Text Publishing) in 2012; That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott (Picador) in 2011; and The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas (Allen & Unwin) in 2009.

On news of the award, Michael Sala said from his home in Newcastle, “I’ve always felt that the best writing crosses international boundaries, and that has always been my ambition as a writer. To be acknowledged by the Commonwealth Book Prize so early in my career is just incredibly exciting. With such diversity and talent on the shortlist, I feel honoured and humbled to be selected as a regional winner. I can’t thank the Commonwealth Book Prize enough for this wonderful opportunity to get my work out into the wider world.”

Michael Sala and The Last Thread are described by Raimond Gaita thus:

“Michael Sala has a rare gift: in prose that takes your breath away, he tells a story of heart-rending sorrow without a trace of sentimentality. His debut as a novelist is one to celebrate.”

Martin Hughes, Publisher at Affirm Press, said: “We are delighted that Michael’s talent has been recognised regardless of the size and relative newness of his publisher. It’s a credit to Michael, his editor, and a collaborative approach to publishing that is a joy to be part of.”

Congratulations to both author and publisher!

Availability: The Last Thread

The Sydney Morning Herald on the dust-jacket calls it a ‘love letter to the beach’ – and that’s not my favourite place to be, so I nearly put it back on the shelves.  But I flicked through the pages anyway, and I found this somewhat provocative statement:

Western Australians are great trashers and thrashers – it’s a proud tradition and one we’re always threatening to defend by seceding from the rest of the country.  A state of small people with big bulldozers.  But now and then even we see something that causes us to back off and think before we shoot; little blessings and miracles get through. (p. 36)

Intrigued, I took Land’s Edge home and read it …

If you’ve read Cloudstreet,  Dirt Music, or The Turning, you know that Winton doesn’t romanticise his fellow-man:

West coasters live in the teeth of the wind.  Distance, waterlessness, relentless weather have made them taciturn.  If you do meet them on that virginal beach John Blight speaks of, they won’t detain you long. Fishing makes them secretive; they fear greenies, people from the government, visitors with a rod and reel. …

… Their faces are crusty with cancers and they give little away with their smiling faraway stares.  They are not romantic people and this is not a romantic coast.  They feel forgotten, neglected, put upon, and yet proud to be far away, on the edge.  But in truth, they are less different than they imagine. (p.102)

For like Winton himself, these people share a ‘longing for excitement and surprise’ and they too can be touched by natural wonders.

Winton gives three examples of coastal wonders that even ‘trashers and thrashers’ value:

• Monkey Mia, the only place in the world where you can …. touch a free dolphin, feel its powerful bulk, look it directly in the eye and feel it slide back out of reach unafraid; (p. 40-41)
• a swim with a whale shark [near Exmouth] …something that awes even those who do it every day; (p. 44) and 
• a remarkable natural phenomenon that took place in 1993 at Cape Cuvier:

…  a dark mass formed at the base of the high yellow cliffs there and spread like the stain of an oil slick two kilometres long.  An unseasonal easterly blew the sea flat, and the water was so clear that onlookers could see the black belt change shape, elongating here, fattening up there, as though it were alive.  To seaward, on the perimeter, were other shadows, small mobile blots that moved in on the big mass, causing it to retreat and press up against the cliffbase so close the spectator could now make out what he still couldn’t believe. That was no oil slick down there.  It was a vast school of fish being herded by tiger sharks, Spanish mackerel and Bryde’s whales beneath a natural amphitheatre.

What followed for weeks on end was not so much a feeding frenzy as a nonchalant and amiable slaughter before an ever-growing audience.  Marine biologists, tourists, fishermen, news crews gathered on the cliffs to watch whales, sharks and pelagics casually taking turns at gliding into the black cloud of anchovies that made space for them the way the weak always will for the powerful.  The predators moved open-mouthed through the captive school, cutting a swathe without gnashing or excitement, leaving only a green trail of clear water behind them that closed up again as the terrified fish bunched for security’s sake.  Those not feeding cruised the perimeter, herding, shaping, intimidating the millions of little fish.  Spanish mackerel, tuna and yellowtail kings worked alongside bronze whalers and tiger sharks.

It’s a stunning image, superbly rendered. You can read an even longer extract here.

This edition is a 2010 hardback reprint of the original which was first published in 1993, and it features a selection of beach photos by Narelle Autio.

Author: Tim Winton
Title: Land’s Edge, A Coastal Memoir
Publisher: Penguin Australia, 1993
ISBN: 9781926428284
Source: Kingston Library

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 Writers can sometimes be a little recalcitrant and uncharitable when it comes to the winners of writing grants (okay, jealous will do as a word choice, if you insist). So it is particularly gratifying when one reads a book that won the Melbourne Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing Award and one discovers it is an exceptional piece of work. To learn that the author was a recipient of an Australia Council Varuna Writers’ Centre mentorship reinforces a faith that we writers simply have to maintain; good, decent, talented writers do win awards.

In his opening salvo, Morgan punches out:

The crumbling, Art Deco monochrome of Melbourne’s inner city, trimmed below with a technicolour lacework of graffiti. Or in the lingo of editors, that over-baked, undernourished dialect used to communicate with publicists, writers and such-like pests, it was simply urban bohemia (P. 3)

Touché!

This is a book filled with biting wit, priceless metaphor and perfectly-drawn characters. The first half in particular is a master-class in the economy of words. Phrases like ‘I was not one of his many creditors’ (p. 3-4) say so much with so few keystrokes that the cleverness is hidden. The description of an author who is a ‘recognised brand name’ gets the retort ‘like Thalidomide’ (p. 5). Bottles of booze encircle a chair ‘like a miniature picket fence’ (p. 92). Sometimes, it’s the single simple word choice that is so perfect you almost miss it: string that is ‘confining‘ a manuscript (p. 29), ‘charcoal‘ pouches under eyes, a ‘pendulous‘ earlobe (p. 47). 

The humour that peppers Morgan’s writing is evident in the chapter headings too which run from ‘The Hangover, the Harangue, and the Hanger-on’, to ‘Surprise!’ The final chapter title is – fittingly – ‘The Beauty of Independent Publishing’. 

Something as simple as a fly entering a room is elevated literarily under Morgan’s pen:

Roused by my entrance, a blowfly disconsolately circled yet another naked light globe before hurling itself in suicidal despair into a drift of cobwebs above the window. But it seemed the arachnid owner-builder had perished or moved out. The blowie complained bitterly for a few seconds then succumbed to ennui. (p. 53)

The main players in this comedy are:
1. Nettie, the editor who spent her teenage years ‘interred in Sydney’s western suburbs’ and who insists that her daughter use ‘correct grammar and punctuation’ in her text messages (p. 10)
2. Said teenager – Charlotte – who sarcastically texts ‘Where, oh where, art thou, Mommy Dearest ?’ (p. 10)
3. Josh Henry, the writer. Perhaps the least realised character for me. I found him a little predictable with his temper tantrums and his fondness for booze. I wondered if it was a little harder for Morgan to invent this character. Perhaps it was too close. Perhaps we really are all predictable. Having said that, Josh Henry does have one of the funniest lines. When Nettie rattles a pill bottle, asking if the writer had been contemplating suicide, Josh Henry blows a raspberry and says ‘I’d probably just f— it up anyhow, and end up a vegetable. Or a publisher’.  (pp. 94-95) Due to my possibly warped sense of humour, I almost choked on my morning cuppa!
4. The loveable independent publisher Augustus who puffs on his cigarettes like a ‘well-tailored industrial complex’.  (p. 102)

Bit players include the rough-diamond aspiring writer Keith with his ‘elephantine footfalls’ (p. 39) and Xanthe, Nettie’s impeccably dressed and somewhat predatory (and predictable?) ex-mentor.

If the plot seems a little slight and unrealistic – an infamous writer getting a second shot at the same manuscript – it doesn’t matter: it simply adds to the rollicking good fun the reader has on the journey. It is a small book (just 183 pages) and it is easy to read in one sitting, not because it is a page-turner in the conventional sense but rather that you can’t wait to see what the next perfect word choice or simile might be. It’s like watching a good comedian; you just want one more laugh. 

I have given more direct quotes throughout this review than I normally do for one simple reason: I find I cannot do justice to Morgan’s unique style. So it seems more prudent to let the writer speak for himself. Here’s just one more snippet:

Lying in bed I lapsed into that semi-conscious, airport transit lounge state, where reality and unreality start looking and acting like mischievous name-swapping twins. (p. 150)

I worry that my effusiveness may come across as one of those ‘writers-being-nice-to-other-writers’ reviews so I hasten to assure you that I wouldn’t know Andrew Morgan from a drunken hamster. There is a saying that comes to mind … so-and-so is ‘a man’s man’. In a similar vein, I’m thinking that Morgan is a writer’s writer and so I will be interested to hear what other (non-writer) readers think of ‘Good on Paper’.

In one of her musings over Josh Henry’s work, Nettie thinks ‘If the author is the stunt pilot, the editor is the mechanic’ (p. 115). I’d say Andrew Morgan has a few good ‘mechanics’ on his team (and he does thank a few of them in his acknowledgements). There is no doubt that he’s pretty good at Cuban 8s and Barrel Rolls (yes, I Googled aerobatic stunts) and I can’t wait to see what manoeuvres he comes up with next time around.

© Karenlee Thompson

Karenlee Thompson is an author and an occasional reviewer for The Australian and was featured on Meet an Aussie Author in 2011.  Her debut novel 8 States of Catastrophe is reviewed on the ANZ LitLovers blog here.  Karen blogs at Karenlee Thompson.

Thanks, Karenlee, you’re a pretty good stunt pilot yourself!

This review is cross-posted at Karenlee Thompson.

Author: Andrew Morgan
Title: Good on Paper
Publisher: Hunters Publishers, 2013.
ISBN 9780980740547
Source: Review copy courtesy of the author.

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