Non-fiction, Author, Publisher, Book review, Black Inc, Tony Birch, long form essay

‘On Kim Scott’ by Tony Birch (Writers on Writers series) + launch of Kim Scott’s ‘Benang: From the Heart’ 25th-anniversary edition

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Non-fiction – hardcover; Black Inc; 96 pages; 2024.

In recent years I’ve become a fan of Black Inc’s Writers on Writers series in which “leading authors reflect on an Australian writer who has inspired and influenced them”. I have previously reviewed volumes on Tim Winton, Helen Garner and Kate Jennings, and have many more in my TBR. They are excellent “deep dives” into writers who have shaped, and continue to shape, Australia’s cultural discourse.

The latest in this series is about Kim Scott, a Noongar writer who has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award twice — for Benang, from the Heart (2000) and That Deadman Dance (2011) — and is Professor of Writing at Curtin University in Western Australia.

Pathway to truth

In this perceptive and highly engaging essay, Tony Birch (who also has Aboriginal ancestry and is a qualified historian) discusses Scott’s novels to “explore fiction as a pathway to truth”.

In the 2020s, with ‘truth-telling’ becoming both a demand from Aboriginal people and, perhaps unfortunately, a populist buzzword, Kim Scott uses storytelling to address truths of the past that some would prefer we left silent and undocumented. (page 15)

He shows how Scott’s work has taken on the difficult questions about Australia’s past and interrogated them from a Noongar perspective.

Fiction, of course, also produces stories of national unity, whitewashing and occasional flag-waving. I value Kim Scott’s fiction so highly because I feel that his approach to fiction is to put the flags aside. (page 24)

Birch argues that Scott’s award-winning novel That Deadman Dance is not a novel of reconciliation, for instance, but a story that shows us “who we could be, collectively, in the future”.

Similarly, he suggests that Benang is a story that shifts our “collective understanding of who we are as a nation, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal”. That’s largely because his work helps us see that history is a bumpy road and not always linear and that the course of colonial justice in Australia is perverse.

Exploding national myths

He is not afraid to bust open white Australian myths of its colonial past and show how the nation is built on land theft and violence, much of it swept under the rug.

His most recent novel, Taboo, set in modern-day Western Australia, wrestles with truth and reconciliation when the nation seems reluctant to address the violence of the past.

But while his writing might be driven by anger, it is always balanced and generous. It is not about victim blaming or sensationalising events, it is simply laying it out, warts and all.

Kim Scott is a gentle combatant fighting injustice. And he is on our side — each of ours. Scott uses words, sentences, images and stories to confront racism, a blight that for him ‘burns like a pox and a plague and is incubated at the centre of how we live and organise ourselves.’ (page 32)

Power of fiction

On Kim Scott is an excellent, short book on the power of fiction to undermine falsehoods and to flesh out the truth in ways that evoke empathy and understanding. Or, as Birch so eloquently puts it, “to consider this country’s past in a mature and ethical manner”.

More importantly, while this book is about a singular Australian writer, it’s also a fascinating portrait of us as a people. It’s also an excellent clarion call about the need to come to terms with the past so that we can build a brighter future together.

If we are to shift the nation’s psyche for the better, we must embrace stories of our colonial past, rather than bury them. And if we are to overcome discriminations embedded in contemporary Australia, we will need to tell new stories. This is the work that Kim Scott has been doing for many years, and we are in his debt. (page 79)

Here, here.

Book launch: Kim Scott’s ‘Benang: From the Heart’ 25th-anniversary edition

On Friday night, Fremantle Press launched the 25th-anniversary edition of Kim Scott’s groundbreaking novel Benang: From the Heart at the Walyalup Civic Centre.

Local author Molly Schmidt, who is one of Scott’s past students, interviewed him about the book, including how he came to write it and why.

He said he wrote it as a form of “channelled aggression” after becoming increasingly angry at the injustices suffered by his people. He wanted to express that anger in a way that did not “dwell on or sensationalise” the trauma but “speak about it straight”.

He had come across A.O. Neville’s^^ Australia’s Coloured Minority: Its Place in the Community — a book, published in 1947, that documents racist colonial beliefs — in which he saw a photograph of three generations of Aboriginals, each one lighter skinned than the next, to depict how Aboriginal blood could be diluted to “breed them out.”

Scott identified with the lighter-skinned individual and wanted to explore Neville’s deeply offensive pursuit — to create the “first-born-successfully-white-man” in the family line — and to explore how his colonial settler dogma had harmed Noongar culture, language and family.

He said he played with “language from the archives” which he considered to be “profoundly hostile” and used dark humour to lighten the load.

It was a privilege to listen to the discussion — he clearly has a great rapport with Schmidt, who was warm and generous but also unafraid of asking delicate questions — and to hear him read from sections of the book. He has a remarkably entertaining reading voice and animated style. If you ever get the chance to hear him read, clear your diary to attend!

An interesting fact from the discussion is that we’ve all been pronouncing “Benang” wrongly. Scott pronounced it as “Ben-ung” (to rhyme with “hung”).

Fittingly, we also discovered that Benang means tomorrow.

 

^^ Neville was Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia from 1915 to 1936 and Commissioner for Native Affairs from 1936 until his retirement in 1940. He is a recurrent figure in much First Nations literature.

2024 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, Literary prizes

The 2024 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award shortlist

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Earlier this week the shortlist for the 2024 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award was unveiled.

Previous winners of this award have included Christine Dwyer Hickey’s The Cold Eye of Heaven (2012), Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2014), Kit de Waal’s My Name is Leon (2017) and Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (2022).

Long-time followers of this blog will know that this is my favourite literary prize to follow and I usually read all the shortlisted titles ahead of the winner being announced.

But this year is different. It seems I have already read four of the five novels on the shortlist, which means I just have one book to read before the winner of the €20,000 prize is announced on Wednesday 29 May.  

Here’s the shortlist, arranged in alphabetical order by author surname, with a short extract of my review underneath. Click on the titles to read my full review.

‘Old God’s Time’ by Sebastian Barry

From my review: Old God’s Time is set in Dublin in the 1990s and tells the story of a retired policeman who is brought back to help investigate a “cold case”. But this is not a conventional crime novel. It’s a novel that refuses to be boxed in. It’s full of contradictions: complex and multi-layered, yet it’s also a page-turner and effortless to read. It’s an examination of memory, love and survival, blackly humourous in places, harrowing in others — but it should probably come with a trigger warning because at its centre is the utterly vile crime of child sexual abuse as carried out by priests in the Catholic Church.

Cover image of 'The Happy Couple' by Naoise Dolan.

‘The Happy Couple’ by Naoise Dolan

From my review: The tale is a simple one. It’s about a young betrothed couple, Celine and Luke, who live in Dublin and are planning their happily ever after, but there’s an unspoken secret at the heart of their relationship: neither of them is sure that getting married is the right thing to do. Will they or won’t they proceed with the nuptials? The book injects some originality into the storyline by using a playful structure in which each wedding party member, including the bridesmaid and best man, gives us their own take on Celine and Luke’s romance. But aside from the snappy dialogue and the sassy one-liners, what struck me most about The Happy Couple was the transactional nature of all the relationships. There doesn’t seem to be any genuine love or warmth in the story.

‘The Wren, The Wren’ by Ann Enright

From my review: The Wren, The Wren is an intergenerational tale revolving around a (fictional) famous poet whose poor behaviour has long-lasting impacts on the women in his life. The poet is celebrated for his literary talent, but is a bit of a cad on the home front and treats his wife abominably. He later moves abroad and marries a much younger woman. When the story opens he is long dead but his influence reverberates throughout the generations. The tale is largely framed around the poet’s daughter and granddaughter who take turns telling their stories in alternate chapters, but I didn’t much care for these characters; I felt too distanced from them and found their lives and problems dull and uninspired.

‘Remembrance Sunday’ by Darragh McKeon

From the publisher’s blurb: Chinatown, New York. After a chance encounter with an old friend, Simon Hanlon, an Irish architect, experiences a seizure, his first in almost thirty years. Soon, they come to him daily. As he awaits a brain operation, Simon turns his mind back to his childhood on a farm near the Irish border. At fifteen, he was present when an IRA bomb exploded at the Remembrance Sunday parade in Enniskillen. It was in the following weeks that his seizures first began. Now, he is compelled to seek out the bomber from the remnants of his past, and to ask himself the question: why do we harm one another?

‘The Bee Sting’ by Paul Murray

From my review: The Bee Sting is a spellbinding tragicomic tale that explores the emotional and financial outfall of the 2008 economic crash on one well-to-do Irish family. The story is told in the third person through the eyes of four family members. As the focus moves from character to character, following their missteps and bad decision-making along the way, we gain a more rounded perspective of the family and come to understand why each person is the way they are. Murray also seamlessly weaves in a catalogue of contemporary issues including climate change, online risks for minors, sexual assault, blackmail, identity politics, childhood poverty, materialism and consumerism, binge drinking and alcoholism, and gangster-related crime. The result is a hugely ambitious and immersive novel.

You can read more about the prize via the official announcement.

Have you read any of these novels? Or is there anything on the list that particularly intrigues you?

^^ No longlist is announced for this annual prize. Instead, a shortlist is revealed about a month before Listowel Writers’ Week — Ireland’s oldest literary festival — and the winner is named on the opening night of the festival. This year the festival runs from 29 May to 2 June.

A year with John Banville, Author, Benjamin Black, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, historical fiction, Ireland, John Banville, Penguin, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting

‘Birchwood’ by John Banville

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A Year With John Banville | #JohnBanville2024

Fiction – Kindle edition; Picador; 178 pages; 2011.

Birchwood is John Banville’s second novel, a dizzyingly audacious confection, first published in 1973.

It’s the story of the Godkins, an Anglo-Irish family living in a Big House on the Birchwood estate, whose money and influence are long gone. The dynamics within the family, including power struggles, dark secrets and eccentric, often violent, behaviour, drive much of the plot forward.

Once, in a row with Aunt Martha, when she had flung an ashtray at his head, he snapped his teeth abruptly shut in the middle of a howl of fury and turned on his heel and stalked out into the garden. We sat in silence and inexplicable horror and listened to his laughter booming in the flower-scented darkness outside, and I, cowering in my corner, felt my face grinning wildly, uncontrollably, at this intimation of splendour, of violence and of pain. [page 20]

It’s told through the eyes of Gabriel Godkin, the first-person narrator, who reflects on his upbringing, relationships and experiences. He’s trying to work out how he fits into the family hierarchy and is surprised to discover he will inherit the estate — although certain forces are out to ensure this does not happen.

So Birchwood was to be mine, that much I understood, albeit dimly. What I failed to see was the plot to deprive me of my inheritance. Aunt Martha was the instigator and prime conspirator. She arrived one bright windy morning in June. [page 32]

A story of two halves

Midway through the book, there’s a distinct change in gear and style, as Gabriel runs away to join the circus (yes, really) in pursuit of his long-lost twin sister, who may or may not exist.

But a sister! Half of me, somewhere, stolen by the circus, or spirited away by an evil aunt, or kidnapped by a jealous cousin – and why? A part of me stolen, yes, that was a thrilling notion. I was incomplete, and would remain so until I found her. All this was real to me, and perfectly reasonable. [page 78]

The story is full of eccentric characters, many of whom are badly behaved (Granny Godkins, for instance, is a bit of an old witch, and Aunt Martha is duplicitous), and told through a series of equally eccentric set-pieces that become increasingly more outlandish (and abhorrent) as the book wends its way towards a not altogether satisfactory conclusion.

It feels part black comedy, part Gothic fairy tale, and the section set in the circus — or “travelling theatre” as Gabriel describes it — borders on the surreal.

It’s fair to say that the sum of Birchwood isn’t as good as its individual parts. I can’t help thinking that Banville, then a young author (he was 27), threw all his thematic interests — time, memory, family dynamics, art, sex, guilt, Irish political history et al — into one big pot, let it all ferment and then served up a complex and rich narrative stew, some of which is outlandishly funny, absurd or both.

Despite the lush prose and vividly descriptive writing, the book is uneven in plot and tone of voice. Yes, it’s deeply flawed (and perhaps not a good one to start with if you have never read John Banville before), but I had a thoroughly entertaining time reading it!

So here then is an ending, of a kind, to my story. It may not have been like that, any of it. I invent, necessarily. [page 170]

Cathy has also read this one and her review is much more eloquent than mine.

I read this book as part of A Year With John Banville, which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books. You are invited to join in using the hashtag #JohnBanville2024. To learn more, including our monthly reading schedule, please visit my John Banville page.

You may have noticed that I’m a little behind in my John Banville reading — I was supposed to read and review this one in March — but other things got in the way. I am playing catch-up now and expect to review both my April (‘Mefisto’) and May (‘The Book of Evidence’) reads by the end of this month. Thanks for your patience.

♥ In March Cathy reviewed ‘Christine Falls‘, the first crime novel written under Banville’s pen name Benjamin Black. I have previously reviewed that one here.

♥ My scheduled April read is ‘Mefisto’, published in 1986, and Cathy’s read is ‘Ghosts’. Expect reviews soonish.

Triple Choice Tuesday

Triple Choice Tuesday: Laura Tisdall

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Welcome to Triple Choice Tuesday, an ad-hoc series I kicked off in 2010 which has been on hiatus for several years — but has now returned for 2024. This is where I ask some of my favourite bloggers, writers and readers to share the names of three books that mean a lot to them. The idea is that it might raise the profile of certain books and introduce you to new titles, new authors and new bloggers. If you’d like to take part simply visit this post and fill in the form!

Today’s guest is Laura Tisdall, a writer and historian who blogs at Laura Tisdall.

Laura is a history postdoc at Newcastle University in the UK. She grew up between Wiltshire and Washington DC and now lives in rural Northumberland.

She is currently writing a book for Yale University Press London that will tell the history of Cold War Britain (c.1956-89) through the eyes of children and young people. She also writes fiction and is working on an Antarctic-set horror novel.

Laura will read anything except romance, romantasy, cosy crime and uplit, because — as she says — she “clearly hates love and happiness”.

Without further ado, here are Laura’s choices:

A favourite book: ‘Adam Bede’ by George Eliot (1859)

We all know that Middlemarch is George Eliot’s greatest work, and that the Gwendolyn sections of Daniel Deronda probably showcase her most brilliant writing, but I always connected intensely with the enormously unfashionable Adam Bede.

Adam Bede, set in the English countryside in the very late eighteenth century, is likely to be read by modern readers as didactic and conservative. It focuses on a young carpenter, Adam; dairy-maid Hetty, who is seduced by a local squire; and Hetty’s cousin, the female Methodist preacher Dinah. The plot is conventional. But Eliot so perfectly inhabits the moral worlds of her characters. Her understanding of why we act against our own best interests, and what we know to be right, is revelatory. Her ability to write characters who are deeply, honestly good – far harder than writing evil – is unmatched.

I don’t really have a favourite book, but I believe Eliot at her best represents the absolute peak of the novel form.

A book that changed my world: ‘The Hero and the Crown’ by Robin McKinley 

Aerin grows up at court as female heir to the king, but is ostracised because of her dead mother. She learns how to kill dragons, but this does not win her acclaim: present-day dragons are seen as no more than annoying vermin, as the great dragons are all dead. Or so it is believed…

The Hero and the Crown is a classic: it won the Newbury Medal in 1985. But it changed my world not because of its compelling content but because of its nested sequence of stories. It tells and retells one story that Aerin has always known: that her mother died of despair when she gave birth to a daughter rather than a son.

Bigger legends also haunt the text: those of the great dragons, and the mystical Lake of Dreams. When I first read this book, I was too young to comprehend its structure. But it drew me back again and again as I figured out that you don’t have to tell stories in order, and that the stories we are told shape us.

There’s more I could talk about (the way McKinley handles Aerin’s trauma after killing the Black Dragon! the sheer beauty of the Le Guin-esque prose!) but I’ll just say that this book hit me with the force of a folktale.

A book that deserves a wider audience: ‘Always’ by Nicola Griffith

Good luck getting anybody to read this one: it’s the third of a trilogy, out of print, and saddled with a truly awful cover. But it’s also a brilliant and necessary novel that can absolutely be read as a stand-alone.

The unforgettable protagonist of Always, Aud Torvingen, is a former police lieutenant, lesbian, martial arts practitioner, Norwegian-British-American, carpenter and social manipulator. In the most important thread of this novel, Aud is teaching a self-defence class to a group of women in Atlanta. Aud does not deny the reality or the rationality of female fear, but she has a very clear philosophy, important in the face of the modern flood of psychological thrillers: she believes that women can learn to defend themselves and that seeing off a threat is much more likely than the media makes it seem.

Griffith also uses this narrative to delve even deeper into Aud’s psyche. She’s a closed narrator, who does not often tell us what she’s thinking or feeling; but her attention to the minutiae of others’ physical responses helps us understand how her body inhabits the world. Truly beautiful.

What do you think of Laura’s choices? Have you read any of these books?

This is a nice reminder that I really ought to read something by George Eliot (I had a failed attempt at a group read-along of Middlemarch more than 15 years ago), and while I’m not one for reading books about dragons, I’m intrigued by The Hero and The Crown! I also looked up Always but the £421.58 price tag for the sole secondhand copy on Amazon.co.uk is a little out of my range!

Author, Book review, Jonathan Cape, memoir, Non-fiction, Publisher, Salman Rushdie, Setting, true crime, USA

‘Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder’ by Salman Rushdie

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Non-fiction – paperback; Jonathan Cape; 224 pages; 2024.

When Sir Salman Rushdie, an Indian-born British-American novelist, was recovering from the violent knife attack that almost ended his life (aged 75) in 2022, he told his agent and friend Andrew Wylie he wasn’t sure he’d ever write again.

“You shouldn’t think about doing anything for a year,” Andrew told him, “except getting better.”

“That’s good advice,” I said.
“But eventually you’ll write about this, of course.”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I’m not sure that I want to.”
“You’ll write about it,” he said. [page 86]

And so it proved. Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder is a first-person account of Rushdie’s experience surviving an attempt on his life 30 years after a fatwa was ordered against him.

It is deeply personal and told in such a compelling, forthright style that I read the entire book in one sitting.

(At this point, I confess that I have never read any of Rushdie’s fiction but am very much aware of his history because I was a part-time bookseller when The Satanic Verses was released. At the discount book store where I was employed — the now-defunct Libro Books at 191 Bourke Street, Melbourne — we kept the book under the counter and exercised much caution whenever anyone enquired if we had it in stock. I suspect I was far too young and naive to understand the implications of this.)

Attempted murder

In Knife, Rushdie recounts events leading up to the attack — on stage just as he was about to deliver a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York — and what happened in the aftermath during his long recovery.

“A gunshot is action at a distance,” he writes, “but a knife attack is a kind of intimacy, a knife’s a close-up weapon, and the crimes it commits are intimate encounters” (page 15).

The actual attack took just 27 seconds but left life-changing injuries.

I never saw the knife, or at least I have no memory of it. I don’t know if it was long or short, a broad bowie blade or narrow like a stiletto, bread-knife-serrated or crescent-curved or a street kid’s flick knife, or even a common carving knife stolen from his mother’s kitchen. I don’t care. It was serviceable enough, that invisible weapon, and it did its work. [page 7]

The most striking thing about Rushdie’s story is not that he survived (which, by all accounts, is miraculous) but that he is not bitter or angry about what happened and bears no malice toward his attacker. Despite losing the sight in one eye and the full use of his left hand and suffering numerous wounds to his neck, face and upper body, he is extraordinarily sanguine about it all. His pragmatism, I suspect, comes from living most of his adult life under threat of assassination.

A premonition

Funnily enough, Rushdie, who is an avowed atheist and does not believe in premonitions or fate, claims that two nights before the actual attempt on his life he had a dream “about being attacked by a man with a spear, a gladiator in a Roman amphitheatre”.

There was an audience, roaring for blood. I was rolling about on the ground trying to elude the gladiator’s downward thrusts, and screaming. It was not the first time I had had such a dream. On two earlier occasions, as my dream-self rolled frantically around, my actual, sleeping self, also screaming, threw its body — my body — out of bed, and I awoke as I crashed painfully to the bedroom floor. [page 7]

He told his wife — the American poet, novelist and photographer Rachel “Eliza” Griffiths — he did not want to go to Chautauqua. Still, he did because he knew tickets had been sold and that his “generous” speaker’s fee would “be very handy”. (Ironically, he was speaking about “the importance of keeping writers safe from harm”.)

The book charts his hospitalisation and long recovery and details the ongoing security concerns he faced when he was finally discharged. This is antithetical to his way of living in America — highly visible and “normal”, achieving  “freedom by living like a free man” — after decades of high-security detail and vigilance in the UK. It’s a difficult pill to swallow because he feels guilty subjecting Eliza to this kind of life.

Love letter to his wife

It is Eliza who is the central focus of Rushdie’s narrative. The book is not merely a memoir; it is a beautiful love letter to her — they had been married for less than a year when the attack occurred. (This is his fifth marriage; the previous four all ended in divorce.) The story is imbued with love, gratitude and kindness for Eliza, but also for his two adult sons, his sister and her children, all of whom live in the UK.

There’s also much affection for the literary community which rallied around him, including his good friends, Paul Auster and the late Martin Amis, who were experiencing their own health issues at the time of Rushdie’s attack.

Perhaps the only aspect of the book I was unsure about is the chapter titled “The A”  in which Rushdie imagines what he would say to his would-be assassin if he was given the chance. In his attempt to “consider the cast of mind of the man who was willing to murder me”, he interviews him in his prison cell. The conversation, which is probing but empathetic, says more about Rusdhie than his assailant…

Knife is an extraordinary book. It’s frank and warm and incisive — no pun intended.

Further reading/viewing

If you wish to know more about the fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death issued in 1988 by Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, and how it came about, I recommend this excellent 2009 BBC documentary, Salman Rushdie & the Satanic Verses Scandal, which you can view in full on YouTube.

And this weekend, Rushdie’s wife has written a piece about the attack, published in The Guardian, which presents her version of events. It is deeply moving.

Author, Barbara Comyns, Book review, Daunt Books, England, Fiction, historical fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead’ by Barbara Comyns

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Fiction – paperback; Daunt Books; 201 pages; 2021.

I have long wanted to read something by Barbara Comyns (1907-1992), an English novelist widely respected and often championed by book bloggers but her work is hard to come by in Australia — unless you want to place a special order.

So when I saw Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, her third novel, sitting on the shelves at Readings Emporium store on a recent trip to Melbourne, I snapped it up.

First published in 1954, the novel is set about 20 years earlier in the small English village of Warwickshire at around the time of King George VI’s coronation.

It tells the story of the Willoweed family  — widower Ebin; his three children, Emma, Dennis and Hattie; his 71-year-old mother; their live-in maids, Norah and Eunice; and the gardener known as Old Ives — and charts their experiences during a series of bizarre and tragic events, which begins with a flood that foreshadows more disaster to come.

Strange objects of pitiful aspect floated past: the bloated body of a drowned sheep, the wool withering about in the water, a white beehive with the perplexed bees still around; a newborn pig, all pink and dead; and the mournful bodies of the peacocks. […] Now a tabby cat with a distended belly passed, its little paws showing above the water, its small head hanging low. [page 8]

That gruesome scene establishes the book’s mood, which is quite dark and oppressive, tinged with just the barest dusting of humour and laced with much cruelty.

Badly behaved grandmother

That cruelty comes in the form of a domineering matriarch — Ebin’s mother, who is called Grandmother Willoweed throughout — who conducts herself with a ruthless disregard for the feelings and well-being of those around her. She terrorises her family by subjecting them to her vile jibes, violent rages and rude behaviour, forcing everyone to tread on metaphorical eggshells.

On one occasion she hurls a brass candlestick down the stairs, repeatedly puts down her son (in front of others) and calls him a fool, and later develops a “pathetic whine” which embarrasses those around her. The word “witch” comes to mind:

She looked like a dreadful old black bird, enormous and horrifying, all weighed down by jet and black plumes and smelling, not of camphor, but chlorodyne. [page 57]

The novel isn’t just about Grandmother Willoweed and her long-suffering family; it also explores a mysterious contagion that infects many of the villagers, causing strange behaviour and fatalities. And with any unexplained pandemic, there are instances of panic, victim-blaming, finger pointing and paranoia. There are many deaths, including those of children.

Eccentric tale

It’s an odd story, morbid and often ghoulish, a mixture of the domestic with the surreal. I didn’t like it very much, nor the distant, almost off-hand style in which it was written, and I struggled to pick it up again whenever I put it down.

Perhaps I just wasn’t in the mood for reading about eccentric behaviour and dysfunctional families, but either way, I’m wondering if Barbara Comyns is really for me or whether I just started with the wrong book.

For more favourable reviews, please see those by Jacqui at JacquiWine’s Journal, Simon at Stuck in a Book, and Radz at Radhika’s Reading Retreat.

Triple Choice Tuesday

Triple Choice Tuesday: From Pyrenees to Pennines

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Welcome to Triple Choice Tuesday, an ad-hoc series I kicked off in 2010 which has been on hiatus for several years — but has now returned for 2024. This is where I ask some of my favourite bloggers, writers and readers to share the names of three books that mean a lot to them. The idea is that it might raise the profile of certain books and introduce you to new titles, new authors and new bloggers. If you’d like to take part simply visit this post and fill in the form!

Today’s guest is Margaret, who blogs at From Pyrenees to Pennines.

While Margaret’s blog is more wide-ranging than just books — it spans travel, photography, history, reading and everything in between — I invited her to participate because she’s such a loyal and passionate supporter of Reading Matters and our reading tastes seem fairly aligned.

Margaret describes herself as a “Yorkshire lass” who has spent much of her life living anywhere but Yorkshire.

“For the last ten years though, I’ve been back, exploring the many walks it has to offer, volunteering – at my local library of course – and at the National Treasure which is Fountains Abbey,” she says. “Together with my husband, we still travel in Europe as much as we can, especially in Spain, since our daughter lives there.  What else?  Singing, blogging, writing … and reading, always reading.”

Without further ado, here are Margaret’s choices:

A favourite book: The Commissario Brunetti series by Donna Leon

I’m choosing a series, rather than a single book as my go-to comfort read.  When seeking the virtual and entirely congenial company of someone fictional, it often has to be Commissario Brunetti, of the Italian State Police.  He’s always lived and worked in Venice, a city he loves whilst being alive to its problems.  He and his wife Paola are civilised, humane and with a well-developed social conscience. They’re well-read, and they enjoy good food.

Walking the streets of the city with Guido (we’re on first-name terms now) is to enjoy the sights, sounds and smells of Italy, as his active and thoughtful brain works on his latest case. Thank you, Donna Leon, for bringing us so many intriguing stories about this special police officer!

A book that changed my world: ‘Mend the Living’ by Meylis de Karangal

I first read this book about eight years ago, and still remember its impact. A boy dies in a road accident as he and his friends return from surfing. His perfect body is there for his mother and his father to see, lying on his hospital bed. Thanks to technology, he breathes, as if in dreamless sleep. But he’s dead. And his parents need to decide whether his organs can be ‘harvested’ so others might live. And they must decide now, watching their son calmly ‘sleeping’.

This is their story. It’s also the story of the hospital staff, medical and otherwise, charged with his care, coming into work from their messy day-to-day lives. They leave behind them evenings of unsatisfactory sex, of football matches missed, and it’s business as usual for them. It’s the story of Simon’s girlfriend, annoyed that he’s preferred to go surfing than snatch a few more hours with her. It’s the story of the woman destined to receive his heart.

This is no medical manual. It’s poetic, beautiful, lyrical, rhythmical – and audacious: a quality which seemed to identify the book for me as ‘very French’. And I want to single out the quality of the translation. This is an extraordinary narrative alongside an intimate exploration of what it is to be human, which invites thought and reflection.

A book that deserves a wider audience: ‘The Communist’s Daughter’ by Aroa Moreno Durán

Katia, the daughter of Spanish refugees from the Civil War was raised in East Berlin with all its difficulties and privations.  She saw the wall go up, experienced the limitations of the life they were obliged to leave.  And she left, with all the difficulties and dangers her leaving represented.  But what had she gained? And what might her family have lost? 

This is a sparely written, thought-provoking and unsettling book about what it means to be personally and politically uprooted.  Though widely read in Spain, this book seems to be a bit under the radar here. 

What do you think of Margaret’s choices? Have you read any of these books?

I have read a few books by Donna Leon (all in the early days of this blog) but they didn’t really “grab” me in the way I’d hoped given I’ve been to Venice multiple times and am mildly obsessed with the watery city. The other two books are new-to-me titles and I love the sound of them. Triple Choice Tuesday does terrible things to my wishlist and TBR!

Author, Book review, Cesare Pavese, Fiction, Italy, literary fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction

‘The Beautiful Summer’ by Cesare Pavese (translated by W.J. Strachan)

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Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 112 pages; 2018. Translated from the Italian by W.J. Strachan.

The Beautiful Summer by Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) won Italy’s most prestigious literary award, the Strega Prize for fiction, in 1950. (The author sadly died by suicide a couple of months later.)

It’s the story of a teenage girl whose friendship with an older woman draws her into a bohemian artistic community in 1930s Turin, showing her an alternative way of life.

It has been reissued as part of Penguin’s European Writers series.

A girl’s life

Sixteen-year-old Ginia works at a dressmakers and lives with her brother, Severino, a nightshift worker, for whom she cooks and cleans.

To alleviate the mundane nature of her work and home life, she’s keen to go “gadding about”, as she describes it, so when she develops a friendship with 20-year-old Amelia who works as an artists’ model, her social life opens up. They go to dance halls, visit cafes and see films at the local movie house. But there’s always tension between them, because Ginia is cautious, whereas Amelia throws that all to the wind.

In public, Amelia dares to go bare-legged (because she can’t afford to buy stockings), making Ginia anxious and worried about what people might say. Yet this also holds an allure for her, because she’s fascinated by Amelia’s way of being in the world, her freedom and her carefree attitude.

‘Being free in the world in the way I am, makes me mad,’ said Amelia. Ginia would have gladly paid money to hear her hold forth so eagerly on many things which she liked, because real confidence consists in knowing what the other person wants and when someone else is pleased by the same things, you no longer feel in awe of her. (page 14)

Loss of innocence

In her short introduction to the novella, Elizabeth Strout explains that Pavese described it as “the story of a virginity that defends itself”. For most of the book, Ginia acts chastely but she’s fascinated by the adults around her and wages an internal battle to overcome her disgust and shame associated with what she sees and what she wants to experience for herself. She knows she has power over men but is fearful of wielding it.

When Amelia gets a new job posing naked for an artist, Ginia asks to watch, not for any voyeuristic tendencies but to observe the artist at work.

They discussed the question for a short part of the walk and Amelia laughed because, dressed or undressed, a model can only be of interest to men and hardly to another girl. The model merely stands there: what is there to see? Ginia said she wanted to see the artist paint her; she had never seen anyone handling colours and it must be nice to watch. (page 12)

When she gets to watch the proceedings, she finds she’s disgusted by the whole sexual objectification of her friend and her friend’s inability to understand that this is what is happening.

Once more she saw Amelia’s swarthy belly in that semi-darkness, that very ordinary face and those drooping breasts. Surely a woman offered a better subject dressed? If painters wanted to do them in the nude, they must have ulterior motives. Why did they not draw from male models? Even Amelia when disgracing herself in that way became a different person; Gina was almost in tears. (page 23)

Later, Amelia introduces her to two artists, Guido and Rodrigues, who share a studio. Ginia is intrigued by the enigmatic Guido, a soldier who is an artist in his spare time, and a love affair develops — ushering her into a more complex adult world.

Compelling novella

The Beautiful Summer has a simple set-up and follows a predictable outcome. But it’s written in such a rich, lyrical language, with an undercurrent of suspense and danger, it makes for a compelling read.

Strout suggests there are hints of Elena Ferrante in the narrative style, to which I concur. Its depiction of female friendship, including its petty rivalries, quarrels and sharing of confidences, is pitch-perfect, and I loved the melancholia at its heart.

It not only explores themes of youth, desire and loss of innocence, but it also poses questions about the male gaze, sexual objectification and women’s position in Italian society at the time. It demands a reread to properly unpick it, but has certainly made me keen to explore more of Pavase’s work — I read, and loved, The House on the Hill last year.

Triple Choice Tuesday

Triple Choice Tuesday: Bookish Beck

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Welcome to Triple Choice Tuesday, an ad-hoc series I kicked off in 2010 which has been on hiatus for several years — but has now returned for 2024. This is where I ask some of my favourite bloggers, writers and readers to share the names of three books that mean a lot to them. The idea is that it might raise the profile of certain books and introduce you to new titles, new authors and new bloggers. If you’d like to take part simply visit this post and fill in the form!

Today’s guest is Rebecca Foster, who blogs at Bookish Beck.

Rebecca is from Maryland, USA but has lived in England since 2007. She works as a freelance proofreader of academic writing, and as a literary critic for BookBrowse, Foreword Reviews and Shelf Awareness. Her book reviews have also appeared in the Church Times, Literary Hub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Times Literary Supplement and Wasafiri.

A former library assistant, she volunteers at her local library and curates her neighbourhood’s Little Free Library. She especially enjoys following literary prizes and has three times been a manuscript judge for the McKitterick Prize for debut novelists over 40.

Without further ado, here are Rebecca’s choices:

A favourite book: ‘Sixpence House’ by Paul Collins

I rarely reread anything, but my three choices are all books that have stood up to a reread.

Apart from some childhood favourites, Sixpence House is probably the book I’ve read the most, usually corresponding with visits to Hay-on-Wye, Wales (eight times so far, between 2004 and 2023). Collins, with his wife and young son, moved to Hay from San Francisco in 2000, hoping to make a life there. As they house-hunted and he edited his manuscript on inventors whose great ideas flopped (Banvard’s Folly), he was drawn into working for Richard Booth, the eccentric bookseller who transformed Hay into the world’s first Book Town.

The memoir is warm, funny in a Bill Bryson-esque way and nostalgic. I first read it in 2003, whetting my appetite for study abroad in the UK.

Each time I visit, Hay has changed: bookshops have closed or opened; the main streets have gentrified, with hipster eateries and coffee houses; and the castle has gone from a ruin to a proper tourist destination. I often wonder what Collins (and Booth, who died in 2019) would make of it today.

Sixpence House also inspired me to make pilgrimages to other Book Towns in the UK and internationally.

A book that changed my world: ‘Conundrum’ by Jan Morris

This was one of the books that helped me to move beyond the conservative Christianity of my upbringing and understand sexuality as a continuum rather than a fixed entity. It’s also one of the very first autobiographical works I remember reading. These days, life writing makes up a huge proportion of my reading.

Morris was a true trans pioneer. Her concise memoir opens: “I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl.”

It took many years – a journalist’s career, including the scoop of the first summiting of Mount Everest in 1953; marriage and five children; and nearly two decades of hormone therapy – before surgery confirmed her gender identity. Morris describes feeling like she’d been a spy in privileged all-male circles. She also speculates that her travelogues arose from “incessant wandering as an outer expression of my inner journey.”

The focus is more on her unchanging soul than on her body, so Conundrum is not a sexual tell-all but a record of a spiritual quest toward true identity. There is joy in new life rather than regret at time wasted in the ‘wrong’ one.

A book that deserves a wider audience: ‘The Sixteenth of June’ by Maya Lang

This playful literary debut has flown under the radar since its release nearly a decade ago. Set on the centenary of the original Bloomsday, it transplants many characters and set pieces from Ulysses to near-contemporary Philadelphia. But even if (like me) you’ve never read James Joyce’s masterpiece, you’ll have no trouble following the plot. In fact, Lang dedicates the book to “all the readers who never made it through Ulysses (or haven’t wanted to try)”.

On 16 June 2004, brothers Leopold and Stephen Portman hold their grandmother Hannah’s funeral at the local synagogue in the morning, and their parents’ annual Bloomsday party at their opulent Delancey Street home in the evening. Between the two thematic poles – genuine grief and regret on the one hand, and superficial entertainment on the other – the story expands to build a nuanced picture of three ambivalent twenty-something lives.

The third side of the novel’s atypical love triangle is Nora, who is Stephen’s best friend from Yale – and Leo’s fiancée. Nora, a trained opera singer, is reeling from her mother’s death from cancer a year ago. During my rereading, I was captivated by the portraits of loss, and the characterisation and dialogue felt fresh as ever.

What do you think of Rebecca’s choices? Have you read any of these books?

I have to admit that these are all new titles to me, and they all sound fantastic, particularly the Joycean-inspired The Sixteenth of June, which has gone straight onto my wishlist!

Ali Cobby Eckermann, Author, Book review, Fiction, Magabala Books, Publisher, Reading First Nations Writers, Reading Projects, verse novel

‘She is the Earth’ by Ali Cobby Eckermann

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 Fiction – paperback; Magabala Books; 96 pages; 2023.

I am partial to a verse novel (although I have only read a handful), so I was keen to read Ali Cobby Eckermann’s She is the Earth, which was longlisted for this year’s Stella Prize.

The book is a luminous love letter to Mother Nature, including her life-sustaining ecosystems, weather patterns and landscapes.

In many ways, it reminded me of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, but instead of looking at Earth from above, it looks at Earth from the ground up and presents it as a living, breathing organism.

I am staring
at the new day

it grows brighter
and brighter

the sky and the sea
defined by blue

as if breathing now
the water is tidal

inhaling first
exhaling next

the horizon
a definition
(page 59)

This long-form poem is comprised of meditative, two-line stanzas. It’s minimalistic yet brims with rich imagery and pulses with life.

Repeated motifs — of birth, of breath, of “sun and moon and sky”, for instance — abound, creating gentle echoes that deepen the reader’s understanding of the work as you progress through it.

And just like birth, it begins with a sense of violence…

exhausted I am
unable to breathe

I scratch for air
my mouth a cave
(page 5)

But moves towards a more gentle way of being:

from the cosmos
I learn my place
(page 80)

That “learning my place” is a central theme. References to other life forms, such as birds — brolgas, pelicans, owls, for instance — reveal how everything in the natural world has a role to play — and a path to follow.

do not diminish
the role of the mother

do not diminish
the role of the father

do not diminish
the role of the child

do not diminish
the role of the ant
(page 81)

The author, a Yankunytjatjara woman from South Australia, has long struggled to find her place in the world.

She was forcibly removed from her family as one of the Stolen Generations, which caused long-lasting trauma, powerfully evoked in her extraordinary memoir, Too Afraid to Cry (2012). In 2017 she was the first Indigenous person anywhere in the world to win the international Windham-Campbell Prize.

She is the Earth is her first book in eight years. An eloquent review of it in The Conversation sums it up better than I can:

She is the Earth is unlike any other book in Australian literature. Of the works Eckermann has written to date, it could well prove her most enduring.

I read this book for my ongoing #ReadingFirstNationsWriters project, which you can read more about here. To see all the books reviewed for this project, please visit my Reading First Nations Writers page.