Category: Book review

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

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

Book review

Remembering John McGahern (12 November 1934 – 30 March 2006)

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The best of life is lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything…

Sitting on the memorial bench in Ballinamore in March 2011

Today marks the 18th anniversary of Irish writer John McGahern’s death. Long-time followers of this blog, particularly when it was hosted on Typepad, will know that McGahern is my favourite writer.

McGahern was born in County Leitrim in 1934, the eldest child of seven. He was raised on a farm run by his mother, a part-time primary school teacher, while his father, a garda sergeant, lived in the garda barracks at Cootehall in County Roscommon. Following the untimely death of his mother in 1944, McGahern and his siblings moved into the garda barracks to live with their father.

These details are important because they shape so much of his writing; a quest to understand his father’s distant, often cruel behaviour and to make sense of his mother’s passing.

His output was small — just six novels The Barracks, The Dark, The Leavetaking, The Pornographer, Amongst Women, and That They May Face the Rising Sun (published as By the Lake in the US) — but each one beautifully polished and eloquent, with an emphasis on nature, rural Irish life, family dynamics and the tension between tradition and modernity.

He was also an acclaimed short story writer.

A new-to-me discovery

I discovered McGahern in the British summer of 2006 when I read his debut novel The Barracks. I’m not entirely sure why I came to read him, other than his death, aged 71, was relatively recent and he had been described in various newspaper articles as one of the most important writers of the 20th century.

In his obituary, published in The Guardian, he was hailed as “arguably the most important Irish novelist since Samuel Beckett”.

As a lover of Irish literary fiction, I was amazed I’d never heard of him before and I suspect that’s why I bought his first book, published in 1963, to see what all the fuss was about.

I loved The Barracks so much that I bought his entire backlist (of novels) in one hit. Unusually, they were all sitting on the shelves at Waterstone’s Picadilly, almost as if they were waiting for me to take them home. I also bought his memoir, imaginatively titled Memoir, one of the most affecting books I have ever read.

Over the next 12 months, I devoured all the novels bar one because I didn’t want to be in a position where I had no more McGahern books left to read. I’m a “completist” but even so, all these years later, The Pornographer still sits on my bookshelves unread. Perhaps this year I will be brave enough to read it.

I might even dig out some of his short story collections because since discovering McGahern I have long got over my prejudice against the short story form!

A visit to McGahern country

In March 2011, I had the privilege of going on a self-guided trip to “McGahern country” with my partner Mr Reading Matters. I wrote about the short trip on my old blog, long since deleted, but I thought now was a good time to resurrect it, particularly as I have seen reviews of his work on other book blogs in recent weeks.

I think he’s also come to many people’s attention via the success of Irish writer Claire Keegan, who champions his work and is clearly influenced by his style and themes.

Whatever the case, it always delights me to see readers discovering his writing and appreciating its quiet beauty (and dark overtones) for the first time.

Lough Rynn Castle Hotel in Co. Leitrim, Ireland

On our trip all those years ago, we stayed at the rather wonderful Lough Rynn Castle Hotel, in Mohill, Co. Leitrim, deliberately chosen because it housed a small library dedicated to John McGahern. It was the perfect base to explore the area, where the author spent much of his life.

The John McGahern Library

The John McGahern Library was opened by the then-Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern in November 2006 in the presence of McGahern’s widow, Madeline.

It’s housed in a small but sumptuous room on the hotel’s ground floor. The colour scheme is a mix of deep ruby reds and golds, complemented by mahogany timber furniture and glass-fronted bookshelves.

The shelves are lined with various hardcover books, mainly Irish novels and biographies. There is supposedly a selection of rare first edition volumes among them, but I was too scared to touch anything lest I caused damage — and, anyway, many of the titles were behind glass.

First editions of McGahern’s work under lock and key

Of course, a library dedicated to John McGahern has to include copies of his books and a collection of first editions can be seen in a glass display case over which a framed portrait of the great man hangs on the wall.

With its touch of luxury — the stiff-backed chairs, the small chandelier, the fireplace — I’m sure it’s a long way from the priest’s library that McGahern used to riffle through as a child but it is a truly beautiful and fitting memorial to one of Ireland’s greatest writers.

The shores of Lough Rynn

Glorious weather

During our trip, the weather was glorious — blue skies and sunshine, so unusual for Ireland where it can teem with rain for days on end. And as we pootled along the roads of McGahern’s native Leitrim we got a real sense of the beautiful landscape — rolling green hills, woodlands and lakes — that the writer loved so much.

Of course, there’s no “McGahern Country” map you can follow ( certainly in 2011, Discover Ireland hadn’t wised up to that one yet, but perhaps things have changed?), so much of our adventure was based on internet research and reference to a tour that my friend Trevor Cook had made the year before.

We got lost a few times and had one hair-raising episode in our hire car when we thought the wilds of rural Ireland would swallow us whole. We were looking for the farmhouse that McGahern had supposedly spent some time in as a child, but the gravel road we followed — and which we had spent a good half-hour looking for — led us a merry dance through bumpy terrain and wild woodland. Eventually, it became a boreen (rural track) masquerading as a swamp.

A soon-to-be treacherous boreen

As the hedgerows closed in around us and the surface of the track got muddier and muddier, it seemed inevitable that we were going to get bogged (not long after the photograph above was taken the road conditions deteriorated drastically). But Mr Reading Matters, who was driving, held his nerve and pushed on through (I kept my eyes closed). And then, just when we least expected it, we turned a corner where there was a quiet stretch of tarmac waiting to meet us. The sense of relief was enormous.

We never did find that farmhouse.

McGahern landmarks

But we did find plenty of other landmarks associated with McGahern. Here are some of them:

The plaque that commemorates his last novel

This plaque on the footpath in Ballinamore commemorates McGahern’s last novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, which was first published in 2001. It sits at the foot of a memorial bench (see the photograph at the top of this post).

The abbey that stars in McGahern’s last novel

Fenagh Abbey, in Fenagh, was built on the site of a 6th-century monastery founded by St Caillin. It sits atop a hillside overlooking the local village and surrounding landscape. In That They May Face the Rising Sun, this is the graveyard where the character Johnny Murphy is buried.

The garda barracks that stars in his debut novel

The barracks in Cootehall, just over the border in Co. Roscommon, where McGahern’s father, a garda sergeant, was based and where the family, including John, lived after the death of his mother. This is also the basis for the barracks in McGahern’s debut novel of the same name.

McGahern is buried alongside his mother

This is McGahern’s plain but dignified grave. He is buried alongside his mother, who died of breast cancer when he was 10 years old, in the grounds of St Patrick’s church, Aughawillan. The inscription on the cross reads:

Susan McManus McGahern, NT
2 May 1902 – 28 June 1944

John McGahern
12 November 1934 – 30 March 2006

Find out more

Please excuse the poor quality of the photographs in this post. They were originally taken on a digital camera (not a smartphone) in 2011 and have been “rescued” from the Internet Archive website Wayback Machine because I no longer hold the originals.

I wrote this post for Cathy’s #ReadingIrelandMonth24. You can find out more about this annual blog event at Cathy’s blog 746 Books.

Author, Book review, crime/thriller, Delphine de Vigan, Europa Editions, Fiction, France, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction, women in translation

‘Kids Run the Show’ by Delphine de Vigan (translated by Alison Anderson)

kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Europa Editions; 300 pages; 2023. Translated from the French by Alison Anderson.

Children’s right to privacy in the Internet age is at the heart of Kids Run the Show, a provocative novel — part crime thriller, part social commentary — by French writer Delphine de Vigan.

The story focuses on Mélanie Claux, a young mother of two, who exploits her children online for financial gain.

It is set against a backdrop of calls to regulate the commercial exploitation of children by their parents and to classify the activity as work. In fact, in 2021, France introduced a law to protect “child influencers” on social media because it regards it as a form of child labour, which is already outlawed. The legislation is designed to protect the rights of children who are making money online via online platforms and the Internet.

Mélanie, a failed reality TV star (she got voted off Loft Story, France’s first reality TV show, an adaptation of the Big Brother franchise, early in the first season), is desperate for love and attention. Unable to achieve it for herself, she sets about achieving it vicariously through her children via a YouTube account called “Happy Recess”.

Here she posts cute videos of 8-year-old Sammy and 6-year-old Kimmy, which go viral, attract millions of “likes” and rack up the follower numbers. Happy Recess becomes so successful it generates enough money to support both Mélanie and her husband, Bruno, who live in a beautiful apartment full of beautiful objects, many of which are “freebies” sent to them for review or endorsement purposes.

Kidnapped for ransom

But when Kimmy disappears while playing hide-and-seek with other children in their apartment building early one evening, Mélanie’s carefully curated life begins to fall apart.

At 21:30 Mélanie Claux received a short private message on her Instagram account. The sender, whose name was unknown to her, had no followers of their own. Everything indicated that the account had been created with the sole purpose of sending her the following message: “Kid missing, deal coming,” which confirmed the theory of kidnapping for ransom. (page 33)

The case is referred to the Paris Crime Squad and investigative officer Clara Roussel has the thankless task of trawling through hours and hours of Happy Recess YouTube videos, looking for clues to Kimmy’s disappearance.

The list of suspects is long (possibly anyone who has ever watched a Kimmy video) and Clara’s task is a challenging one. But this isn’t a strict police procedural, rather it’s a thought-provoking examination of how social media has eroded our sense of privacy and created new opportunities to generate lucrative income streams — but at what cost?

The borders between private and public had disappeared long ago. This staging of the self, of one’s everyday life, the pursuit of likes: this was not something Mélanie had made up. It had become a way of life, a way of being in the world. One-third of the children who were born already had a digital life. (page 190)

The last section of the novel fast-forwards to 2031 to look at the long-term impact of the case on each of the main protagonists. It makes for uncomfortable reading.

Kids Run the Show is a clarion call, warning parents about the dangers of turning children into media stars before they are old enough to understand the consequences of their fame.

Guy at His Futile Preoccupations has also reviewed this.

Author, Book review, Colm Tóibín, Fiction, Germany, historical fiction, literary fiction, Picador, Publisher, Setting, Switzerland, USA

‘The Magician’ by Colm Tóibín

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Fiction – paperback; Picador; 436 pages; 2021.

Colm Tóibín is one of my favourite writers, but The Magician didn’t quite work for me.

It’s an account of the life and times of Nobel Prize-winning German author Thomas Mann (1875-1955), whose work — Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain et al — I’ve never read, so part of me wonders whether I might have enjoyed the experience more if I was familiar with his writing.

Yet, on the face of it, Mann is the perfect subject for a fictionalised biography because his life was so intriguing on so many levels — economically, socially, politically, sexually. He was born into a rich mercantile family, but his father left them high and dry when he died, and it was up to Mann to find his calling as a writer.

A closeted homosexual with a (supposed) interest in young boys, he went on to marry the devoted and independently minded Katia, who was from a wealthy industrialist family, with whom he had six children. Three of their children went on to become famous writers.

But Mann’s life was marred by the times in which he lived, particularly the rise of Hitler and the outbreak of World War II, during which he fled to Switzerland and later the US. Despite his wealth, he and Katia never seemed to settle in one place, moving constantly between Europe and America, and spending time in Sweden.

His fame meant he was often called upon to criticise Hitler and the Nazi Party, but he was reluctant to use his platform, frightened that it would put other family members at risk, but perhaps, also, because he was more interested in his own self-preservation, of living a quiet life in which he could continue his writing uninterrupted.

Tóibín chooses to tell Mann’s story in a distant third voice so that we don’t really get much of an insight into Mann’s motivations. The closest we get to a seemingly non-existent interior voice is when he frets that his diaries, which detail his sexual fantasies, may fall into the wrong hands.

And despite the great cast of characters that surround him — in particular, his transgressive, sexually outrageous-for-the-times offspring Erika and Klaus — we never really discover what others think of him. The only hint is toward the end, when his youngest son Michael sends him quite a scathing letter, claiming that he has neglected his children in favour of his creative life.

‘I am sure the world is grateful to you for the undivided attention you have given to your books, but we, your children, do not feel any gratitude to you, or indeed to our mother, who sat by your side. It is hard to credit that you both stayed in your luxury hotel while my brother was being buried. I told no one in Cannes that you were in Europe. They would not have believed me.

‘You are a great man. Your humanity is widely appreciated and applauded. I am sure you are enjoying loud praise in Scandinavia. It hardly bothers you, most likely, that these feelings of adulation are not shared by any of your children. As I walked away from my brother’s grave, I wished you to know how deeply sad I felt for him.’ (page 394)

Perhaps the reason I struggled to fully engage with this novel was the complete lack of emotion in it. Both Mann and his wife come across as rather cold fish. Was it a protective coping device? A way of saving face?

It’s hard to know, because despite the many deaths in the family which are detailed here — including the deaths by suicide of Mann’s sisters in separate incidents, and the loss of a son-in-law when the Transatlantic passenger ship he was travelling on was torpedoed during the war  — Mann does not appear to shed a tear. He chooses to bury himself in his work.

Even the rivalry that Mann has with his older brother, Heinrich, who was also a writer, does not seem to trouble him and yet they had been close, living together in Italy when they were both young men. United by their desire to escape their bourgeois roots and the long shadow of their late father — a senator and grain merchant of some repute — they appear to have chosen completely different paths; Heinrich takes the radical, outspoken path, Thomas chooses the one of least resistance.

This is reflected much later in the circumstances in which they live in America: Heinrich and his ditzy second wife Nelly live in a squalid apartment; Thomas and Katia reside in a large, flashy house with an enormous garden.

Of course, the problem with a fictionalised biography of this nature is the lack of distinction between fact and fiction. I do not know enough about Mann’s life to recognise what is an act of Tóibín’s imagination and what is real.

I had hoped to take The Magician as I found it, to enjoy a story about a fascinating writer who was beset by deeply personal challenges throughout his life, but what I got was a rather plodding account of a seemingly unknowable man. Perhaps, in the end, that was Tóibín’s point?

For other takes on this novel, please see Lisa’s review at ANZLitLovers and Brona’s at This Reading Life.

I read this book as part of Cathy’s #ReadingIrelandMonth24. You can find out more about this annual blog event at Cathy’s blog 746 Books.

Book review, Fiction, Holland/Netherlands, Jonathan Cape, Katie Kitamura, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘Intimacies’ by Katie Kitamura

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Fiction – hardcover; Jonathan Cape; 225 pages; 2021.

Can there be a more intimate act than listening to a war criminal’s testimony and then interpreting it — in real-time — in an international courtroom setting?

Such interpreters often deal with sensitive subjects — including violence, death and ethnic cleansing — but must maintain impartiality and communicate what they hear accurately and without emotion.

Or, as the first-person narrator in Katie Kitamura’s extraordinary novel Intimacies says, they must make the “spaces between languages as small as possible”.

[…] interpretation can be profoundly disorienting, you can be so caught up in the minutiae of the act, in trying to maintain utmost fidelity to the words being spoken first by the subject and then by yourself, that you do not necessarily apprehend the sense of the sentences themselves: you literally do not know what you are saying. Language loses its meaning. […] And yet—as I stared down at the pad of paper in front of me, covered in shorthand—something did seep out. I saw the words I had been saying, for nearly twenty minutes now, cross-border raid, mass grave, armed youth. (pages 116-117)

Set in The Hague

In this compelling story, told in languid first-person prose, the unnamed interpreter accepts a one-year contract at the International Court in The Hague [1] on the North Sea coast of the Netherlands. It’s the perfect opportunity to escape New York City, where she was raised, following the death of her father after a long illness and her mother’s return to Singapore.

Here, in a strange new European city, with a new job, she tries to adjust to a new way of life, aware that her colleagues all seem super confident, even flamboyant, while she’s more introspective and focused on just getting through the year without making any drastic errors.

Asked to interpret for a former president who has been accused of the worst crimes against humanity, she grapples with the emotional challenges of her job. And outside of work, she also grapples with two intertwined issues: her identity and a sense of home.

Australian paperback edition

A tale of contradictions

The story is full of paradoxes. In this calm and peaceful city, the narrator is surprised to discover there’s an undercurrent of violence; the international criminal court, which strives to provide justice for victims regardless of their nationality, is said to have an African bias; and the extreme nature of certain atrocities, such as genocide or war crimes, is in complete contrast to the mundane characteristics of the individuals who commit them.

Any wonder the narrator seeks to build intimate relationships with good people — she needs them for emotional support, companionship and fun. She finds this with Jana, a single Black woman in her forties who is a curator at the Mauritshuis museum, who becomes a close friend.

Her character was the opposite of mine, she was almost compulsively open whereas I had grown guarded in recent years, my father’s illness had served as a quiet warning against too much hope. She entered my life at a moment when I was more than usually susceptible to the promise of intimacy. I felt a cool relief in her garrulous company, and I thought in our differences we achieved a kind of equilibrium. (pages 2-3)

And then there’s her lover, Adriaan, whose “intrinsic ease” with her offers a sense of normalcy, routine and comfort. But while intimate, it’s an ambiguous relationship for Adriaan is married with children (“He had been left by his wife a year earlier”) and for much of the novel he’s in Lisbon, trying to sort things out with his estranged wife, leaving our narrator with a set of keys to his substantially sized apartment because it “would make me happy to imagine you here”.

On the surface, this seems a wholly intimate act, to reside in your lover’s home, surrounded by his things (and his wife’s things), but it soon becomes a chore when Adriaan stops communicating and his one-week trip morphs into an extended period away with no end date in sight.

Quiet and understated

Intimacies is a quietly understated novel about big issues (another paradox!), including morality, crimes against humanity, trauma, justice and the importance of language, especially the way it is interpreted and conveyed.

I loved reading about the intricacies of this line of work, of the pressure to do it against the clock and to do it accurately so that a reliable witness doesn’t appear unreliable and doesn’t affect the “outcome of a trial”.

It’s a stylish novel, full of beautifully crafted sentences, the kind that meander but are deeply personal and contemplative. It’s a beguiling tale, but there’s an undercurrent of suspense, too — will Adriaan ever return, for instance, and will the former president do or say something in the courtroom to unravel her professional demeanour?

I highly recommend adding this one to your list — I’m confident it will be going on my list of favourite reads for 2024!

Thanks to Brona’s at This Reading Life for bringing this extraordinary novel to my attention and to the Festival Mavens (on Instagram), whose concise review confirmed that I really needed to read it.

 

[1] In her acknowledgements, the author writes: “Although the court that appears in this novel does contain certain similarities to the Internationa Criminal Court, it is in no way intended to represent that institution or its activities”