Category: Non-fiction

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.

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.

Allen & Unwin, Australia, Author, Book review, Deborah Conway, memoir, Music, Non-fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘Book of Life’ by Deborah Conway

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Non-fiction – paperback; Allen & Unwin; 400 pages; 2023.

Back in 1998, not long after I first arrived in the UK, I went to Edinburgh to attend the renowned comedy festival. One day I got talking to a monk on the Royal Mile (as you do) — I think he must have been handing out flyers to a show of some sort, but my memory is vague and I can’t recall the detail.

He was Dutch and when I told him I was from Melbourne, he confessed he once knew a girl from Melbourne. He’d met her in Amsterdam and she was a singer in a band. Her name? Deborah Conway.

He had lost touch with her, so I was able to tell him she had forged a successful solo career and had achieved two chart-topping albums, String of Pearls (released in 1991) and Bitch Epic (1993). He was rather delighted by this!

Multi-talented performer

I was never a diehard Deborah Conway fan, more a casual listener, so I didn’t know much else about her, like the fact — newly discovered by me — that she’d had a fledgling acting career and had been in Peter Greenaway’s 1991 film Prospero’s Books, an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Conway played Juno and sang songs composed by Michael Nyman; I’ve seen the film but can’t recall Conway in it).

Earlier, in 1988, she had also starred in The Iron Man: The Musical by Pete Townshend — from The Who — playing a character called The Vixen.

Nor did I know she’d recorded a dance album in LA in 1990, which was never released, and a third album, My Third Husband, in London in 1997, which didn’t chart particularly well.

Memory lane

Reading her memoir, Book of Life, which was Conway’s covid lockdown writing project, was a real trip down memory lane for me.

(The title, by the way, is a nod to her Jewish background — The Book of Life is a metaphorical book that God opens on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and seals ten days later on Yom Kippur after he’s inscribed the names of people he considers righteous in it.)

I had first come across her as the singer in the post-punk group Do-Ri-Mi (before she went solo) and adored the song Man Overboard, which was all over the radio in 1985, and I have vague recollections of an experimental band she formed in 1995 called Ultrasound. (I had the album, I don’t recall loving it.)

I loved all the references to other Melbourne musicians I spent my teens and twenties listening to, such as the late Paul Hester, of Split Enz/Crowded House fame, who was her boyfriend for many years; singer-songwriter ex Boom Crash Opera guitarist Richard Pleasance, who produced her debut solo album and whose own solo albums, Galleon and Colourblind, are old favourites of mine; and troubadour Paul Kelly, with whom she’d had a fling before entering a long-term relationship with his cousin, Alex McGregor.

But it also fills in a lot of gaps. I lost track of her career when I lived in the UK for 20 years, but during that time she did a load of interesting things, including playing Patsy Cline on stage, being the Artistic Director for the Queensland Music Festival,  producing a national concert series called Broad featuring all female singer/songwriters, and performing in people’s homes in a bid to break down the barrier between performer and audience.

An eye-opening chronology

The book was also curiously eye-opening because I knew so little of her background (a fairly privileged upbringing. for instance, in Toorak, one of Melbourne’s wealthiest suburbs) nor the wide scope of her talents, which extend to modelling, singing, songwriting, acting and performing.

It’s told in broadly chronological fashion, but roughly every alternate chapter is themed around a specific aspect of her life, such as her romance and marriage to singer-songwriter musician Willy Zygier with whom she has three daughters, and the complex and complicated relationship she had with her late father, a lawyer who hid his homosexuality from his entire family and treated everyone around him abysmally.

Song lyrics are also included, often at the end of chapters to show how events in her life had inspired them. (There are photographs, too, but infuriatingly, there is no index.)

She writes in the same frank and forthright way as she has lived her life. There are tales about drugs and sex and, obviously, rock and roll, for which she makes no apologies. She’s loud and proud — and often contrary.

I remember always being impressed by her authenticity, her flagrant disregard for the norms, never afraid of just saying what she thinks and being her true self. This comes across tenfold in the book.

Doing her own thing

There’s a great example in Book of Life that shows her independent streak and unwillingness to bow to conventions or to be sexually commodified by the music industry. It’s 1991 and she turns up at a golf course in Melbourne to film the music video for It’s Only the Beginning — the first single from her first solo album — wearing pink plus-fours.

Michael Gudenski, the head of Mushroom Records, was not impressed. He had expected her to wear something more flattering and feminine and told her as much. She refused to change her outfit.

It certainly didn’t stop that song from doing well — it peaked at number 19 on the Australian music charts in August 1991 and was nominated for four Australian Recording Industry Association awards. It still gets radio airplay today, more than 30 years on.

Later this month, Deborah Conway will be starring at the opening night of Perth Festival’s Writer Weekend. I’m so looking forward to being in the audience.

Finally, here are some of my favourite Deborah Conway tunes for your entertainment.

“Man Overboard” by Do-Ri-Mi (1982)
The bass line is incredible…but be warned, this song is a complete earworm!

“It’s Only the Beginning’ by Deborah Conway (1991)
There are those plus-fours I mentioned earlier! I love the upbeat nature of this song. The video is supposed to be a homage to the Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn comedy Bringing Up Baby.

“Alive and Brilliant” by Deborah Conway (1993)

An hour-long interview with Conway where she talks about her life in music (2023)
Interestingly, despite being inducted into the National Live Music Awards Hall of Fame in 2019, made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2020 and inducted into the Music Victoria Hall of Fame in 2022, she mentions none of this in her book. She might be opinionated and powerful, but she’s also humble.

Author, Book review, essays, Fourth Estate, Holly Ringland, memoir, Non-fiction, Publisher, Self-help

‘The House That Joy Built’ by Holly Ringland

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Non-fiction – hardcover; 4th Estate; 288 pages; 2023.

Self-help books, even if they are about creativity (one of my pet subjects), aren’t normally my cup of tea, but when I picked up Holly Ringland’s The House That Joy Built in my local independent bookshop, attracted by its beautiful cover, I started to read the first page — and was hooked.

Many of you may be familiar with the author, who is Australian and grew up in Queensland. She has two international bestselling novels to her name — The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart (which has been adapted for TV) and The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding — but I haven’t read either of them.

The book is a clarion call to just do that creative thing  — write a book, design a garden, draw a picture, knit a jumper — that you have always wanted to do but keep putting off, because you’re scared of failing or think you don’t have the time or are just waiting for the right circumstances.

In fact, Holly’s advice could be boiled down to a simple sentence: feel the fear and do it anyway.

The urge to create

In her opening chapter, she says The House That Joy Built is aimed at anyone with a creative urge “at any stage of development and engagement”.

It’s for writers, but it’s also for gardeners, carpenters, sculptors, jewellery-makers, yoga teachers, fashion designers, florists, songwriters, dancers, cooks, painters … anyone with a desire to create but who, like me, sometimes stumbles to engage with that desire because of fear. Fear of feeling afraid, of vulnerability, of criticism and judgement of others, of shame, of facing the past, of facing ourselves, of not being good enough, of not having enough, of having ‘bad’ ideas, of having ‘good’ ideas, of being ‘too much’. That is who this book is for — those who are stuck creatively, who long to create but don’t know how to find a way into, or back to, their imagination.

The book expertly marries memoir with hard-won advice and is easy to read and engaging. I was worried it might be riddled with new age/wellness/spiritual drivel, sending my bullshit detector into overdrive, but it’s very much based on first-hand experience and feels authentic.

And Holly is always quick to point out that what works for her, may not necessarily work for you, stating that “none of this is prescriptive”. It’s that kind of self-awareness I appreciate.

This isn’t a how-to book. Neither is it a workbook full of exercises. It’s not a step-by-step guide to creative writing, or writing a novel, or being a ‘good’ writer, or becoming any kind of artist. It is not written by a neurological, behavioural or social science expert. This book doesn’t assume that we have the same circumstances, come from the same childhoods or backgrounds, or have equal privilege and opportunities.

Interconnected essays

There are eight chapters, each of which explores a particular type of fear and reads like a standalone essay (there’s a helpful endnotes section where all her sources are carefully cited).

Although it’s clearly been written with an overarching narrative in mind (that is, the essays are connected), you don’t necessarily have to read it in order — you could simply cherry-pick the bits you were most interested in:

  • Fear + Play
  • Self-doubt + self-compassion
  • Failure + nothing is wasted
  • Procrastination + presence
  • Inner critic + inner fan
  • Outer critic + resilience
  • Creative block + daydream machine
  • Imposter syndrome + you belong here

At the end of each chapter is a page of questions — which are called Provocations — for reflection. Admittedly, I baulked at this, but I appreciate some readers might find them useful.

A friendly guide

Overall, it’s a well-researched book, full of insight and personal knowledge. It’s upbeat and inspiring.

It’s occasionally repetitive (that is, we are told the same thing multiple times but in slightly different ways) and sometimes strays into pop psychology. There’s also a tendency to wear its sincerity too obviously on its sleeve. But I liked the intimate tone, almost as if Holly is a friend letting you in on some big secrets.

If I learned anything from The House That Joy Built it is this: creating things is good for us, but we have to make the time and effort to do it (a bit like maintaining this blog for almost 20 years). We should never feel guilty about creating things. Or, as Holly puts it:

Giving ourselves permission to create and to revel in the joy of creating is a powerful act of resisting cynicism and scarcity. To choose to make art when there’s so much grief, despair, suffering, cruelty and tragedy in the world is to choose to connect with the best parts of ourselves and each other as humans.

Author, Book review, Hachette Ireland, History, Ireland, John Banville, memoir, Non-fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir’ by John Banville

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Non-fiction – Kindle edition; Hachette Books Ireland; 224 pages; 2016.

When does the past become the past? Or as Irish writer John Banville so eloquently puts it:

What transmutation must the present go through in order to become the past? Time’s alchemy works in a bright abyss.

This fascination with the juncture between now and then is a constant refrain in Banville’s Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir, an intriguing book that is part memoir, part nostalgic travel guide, illustrated with photographs by Paul Joyce.

Full of Banville’s trademark wit and literary flourishes, combined with historical insights into “this city of stories”, it’s an intimate glimpse of the author’s life and personal recollections.

Escape from Wexford

Banville was born and raised in Co. Wexford — which is where Colm Tóibín, Eoin Colfer and Billy Roche also come from — and moved to Dublin, about 100 miles north, aged 18, keen to escape his provincial roots.

I left home with a cruel insouciance, shaking the dust of Wexford from my heels and heading for what I took to be the dazzling bright lights of Dublin. It must have been a wrench for my parents to see me go, so carelessly and with hardly a backward glance. I was the last of their children, and now the household that once had numbered five was reduced to its original two.

But he had visited Dublin during his childhood, and the book opens with his fond memories of annual birthday trips to Dublin, taken with his mother and sister, on the train. This sets the scene for Time Pieces, which is not about the Dublin of now, but the Dublin of the past.

Much of the book covers his wanderings across the city, led by his friend “Cicero”, who has “amassed a great store of arcane knowledge of a hidden city” (and who I think is probably property developer Harry Crosbie, whom the book is dedicated to).

He takes us on a fascinating tour of Dublin, including its famous and not-so-famous landmarks, such as the Abbey Theatre, Phoenix Park and Sandymount Strand, dropping in intriguing historical (both physical and social) facts and literary references, all the while describing scenes with his painterly eye:

It is a May morning of luminous loveliness. The sunlight glows through a delicate muslin mist, the soft air is fragrant with the smell of lilac, and out over the tawny reaches of Sandymount strand, where Stephen Dedalus once trod upon seaspawn and seawrack while seeking myopically to make out the signatures of all the things he was sent there to read, the pale sky shines and shimmers like the inner skin of a vast soap bubble.

Unsurprisingly, he mentions many writers and artists, from James Joyce to Patrick Kavanagh, who used the city as inspiration for their work. But it took him some time to see Dublin as a suitable backdrop for his own writing, mainly because he thought Joyce “had used it up”.

It was not until much later, when I invented my dark brother Benjamin Black, that I saw the potential of 1950s Dublin as a setting for his noir novels.

Interestingly, the shabby flat that Banville once shared with his Aunt Nan, on Upper Mount Street, is the same flat where his protagonist Quirke (from his historical crime novels) lives, although “I smartened it up considerably”.

A parental tribute

As well as being a heartfelt homage to his adopted city, Time Pieces is also a lovely tribute to Banville’s parents, both of whom died by the time he was 35. But comparing his life to theirs “is a dizzying exercise”, he writes.

His father was a quiet man who led a life of routine, something that Banville claims he couldn’t do himself but which was just the way things were back then:

He worked all his life at a white-collar job—though he did wear a brown shop-coat over his suit and shirt and tie—in a large garage that supplied motor parts to much of County Wexford. Ironically, he never learned to drive a car.

His mother, he thinks, was probably dissatisfied with her life to some degree, partly because she read widely and would have had “more of an inkling of what the world of elsewhere had to offer, and of all that she was missing”.

And yet Banville claims he was indifferent to their lives and the place where he grew up, adding that he’s never “paid much attention to my surroundings”:

For good or ill, as a writer I am and always have been most concerned not with what people do—that, as Joyce might say, with typical Joycean disdain, can be left to the journalists—but with what they are. Art is a constant effort to strike past the mere daily doings of humankind in order to arrive at, or at least to approach as closely as possible to, the essence of what it is, simply to be.

Perhaps it is that exact attitude that makes Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir such a compelling read: Banville lets the city, and his own history, speak for themselves. He’s not searching for philosophical meaning, nor is he trying to imbue the past with misplaced nostalgia. He’s merely offering it up — this is how it was — and wondering at what point history begins when, essentially, you are living through it.

If you like the sound of this book, perhaps add it to your reading list for 2024 — it would be a great contender for  A Year with John Banville, a celebration of all things Banville, which I am co-hosting with Cathy from 746 Books.

Allen & Unwin, Author, Book review, Jeff Apter, Music, Non-fiction, Publisher

‘Don’t Dream It’s Over: The Remarkable Life of Neil Finn’ by Jeff Apter

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Non-fiction – paperback; Allen & Unwin; 304 pages; 2023. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

If I had to nominate a single musician (or band) that has provided the soundtrack to my life, it would be the subject of this biography.

Forgive the indulgence, but anyone who knows me well will be familiar with my love of Neil Finn.

Don’t Dream It’s Over: The Remarkable Life of Neil Finn is the first biography to focus exclusively on the singer-songwriter from Split Enz — which was formed in New Zealand in 1972 and became the nation’s first rock band to gain significant international recognition — and Crowded House, which achieved enormous critical and commercial success across the world, but particularly in the UK and Australia.

Neil has also forged a successful solo career, made two albums with his older brother Tim (under the banner of the Finn Brothers) and, more latterly (and unusually), been a member of Fleetwood Mac, replacing Lindsay Buckingham on guitar and vocals.

He’s also the master of collaboration, having created the 7 Worlds Collide charity project — with the likes of Johnny Marr (from The Smiths), Eddie Vedder (from Pearl Jam) and Phil Selway (from Radiohead) — and the Pajama Club band with his wife, Sharon, a bass player.

He has also worked with his own children: Liam, a musician-songwriter, and Elroy, a drummer.

Traditional rock biography

Don’t Dream It’s Over is a fairly traditional type of biography, tracing Neil’s life in chronological order, from his happy upbringing in the rural town of  Te Awamutu, in the North Island of New Zealand, where he was born in 1958, the youngest son of an accountant, right through to the dizzy heights of a career spanning more than 40 years.

For dedicated Neil fans, there’s nothing much surprising or new in this biography based on third-party sources (mainly TV, radio and print publications) and Neil’s extensive music catalogue, rather than first-hand interviews with the subject. But Jeff Apter, who has more than 20 other music books to his name, is clearly a fan and treats Neil’s story with care and respect.

It’s a compelling narrative, not least because Neil became famous as a teenager when he was roped in to join his big brother’s band, Split Enz, in 1977, following the departure of co-founder Phil Judd. He went on to pen many of the band’s hits, including their breakthrough commercial hit I Got You, which topped the charts in Australia for a record-breaking eight weeks when it was released in January 1980. In fact, this song is the one that first brought Neil to my attention — and began my lifelong affair with his music.

From here, the book charts how Neil led Split Enz after his brother Tim, the elder by six years, left to pursue a solo career. When Neil wound up the Enz in 1984, he went on to form Crowded House (initially called The Mullanes) with Split Enz drummer Paul Hester and Melbourne-based bass player Nick Seymour (the younger brother of Mark Seymour, the lead singer and driving force of Hunters and Collectors, whose own biography I have reviewed here).

Commercial success and critical acclaim

It’s a fascinating portrait of a man who achieved astonishing commercial success and songwriting kudos (he’s often compared to Lennon and McCartney, probably because there’s a definite Beatlesque sound to his music) through sheer hard graft.

In fact, it becomes clear he’s quite driven and a bit of a perfectionist — for instance, the Finn Brothers’ second album, Everyone is Here, was recorded twice, once in upstate New York, then in Los Angeles with different musicians and producers, because Neil wasn’t happy with it.

“It’s mysterious what makes things right or not right in music,” Neil said of his reaction. “I can’t be more specific than that. It wasn’t Tony’s fault [Tony Visconti, the producer]. It just didn’t seem to have the vitality we wanted it to have.”

While it seems Neil’s never really had any bad press, nor a whiff of scandal, around him (he’s been married to Sharon for more than 40 years), it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. For instance, the book covers his conflict with Tim, especially when he briefly joined Crowded House in 1990 and disrupted the equilibrium of the band, and the untimely death by suicide of Paul Hester in 2005 (which, humble brag, I wrote about in the form of a letter, which was published in The Age newspaper, although my name seems to have fallen off it after The Age revamped its website).

As much as I enjoyed this trip down memory lane (I have all the albums and have seen Neil perform in various guises — Split Enz, Crowded House, Finn Brothers and solo — multiple times in multiple cities), the book lacks intimacy. Apter never really gets inside Neil’s head — we never find out how he feels about certain events or what makes him tick. Instead, we are kept at a distance because his story is filtered through indirect sources.

The book also lacks an index, a particular bugbear of mine because this is relatively easy to sort in Word  (I can only posit that it’s just a cost-cutting exercise for publishers to keep page counts down), and the table of contents is no help because the headings are all quirky Neil quotes instead of helpful place markers such as album names or career phases.

But it does include a selected discography and bibliography, as well as an intriguing list of “ten musical moments” that demonstrates the strength and breadth of Neil’s career.

All in all, Don’t Dream It’s Over: The Remarkable Life of Neil Finn is one for the fans.

Jeff Apter has also written a biography about Neil and his brother Tim — Together Alone: The Story of the Finn Brothers — which has been sitting in my TBR for more than a decade!

5 of my favourite Neil songs from across his career

Split Enz | I Got You | 1980

Split Enz | Message to My Girl | 1983

Crowded House | Something So Strong | 1986

Crowded House | Into Temptation | 1988

The Finn Brothers | Won’t Give In | 2004

Neil Finn (solo) | Better Than TV (live) | 2014

Australia, Author, Book review, Non-fiction, Publisher, Setting, Simon Tedeschi, Upswell Publishing

‘Fugitive’ by Simon Tedeschi

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Non-fiction – paperback; Upswell Publishing; 120 pages; 2022.

Fugitive, by Simon Tedeschi, is a strange and wonderful and beguiling slice of narrative non-fiction.

It blends poetry with memoir and long-form essay, uses recurring motifs and themes, and meditates on the meaning of music and language and the passing of time.

Written in mosaic-like fragments — short paragraphs separated by infinity signs — it has a rhythm and structure not unlike a musical fugue. Indeed, it interleaves its parts (or thoughts) in exactly the same way a piece of music is formed. Perhaps this isn’t surprising given the author is a renowned classical pianist (Wiki entry here), who has performed in major concert halls around the world.

Difficult to categorise

It’s hard to pin down exactly what the book is about, or even what genre it belongs to. But its mix of philosophy and autobiography is insightful and thought-provoking. It ruminates on illness, poetry, dreams, history, memory, ghosts and borders, among other subjects, and looks at how the traumatic experiences of his relatives — on both sides of the family — have shaped his own life.

The stories of his grandparents, including their tales of escape and trauma and their deaths in a land far from where they were born, permeate this book.

His paternal Jewish grandfather was a teenager in the (compulsory) Italian youth cavalry, who, under Mussolini, was made to parade in front of Hitler — “I fixed my eyes on Hitler’s face and felt a deep hatred” — before fleeing to Australia, where his father was interned in a camp for enemy aliens. His maternal grandmother, a Polish Jew, survived the Holocaust and also emigrated to Australia.

In my childhood, my maternal grandmother took pleasure in reliving her suffering, drawing it out and over us like too much rubato in Chopin, the only composer she ever recognised.

Musings on language

The bits that resonated with me most were Tedeschi’s musings on language, including word origins, the impossibility of being able to translate certain words because there’s no English equivalent, and — my old favourite — punctuation:

In Russian orthography^, the hyphen and the em dash are used to indicate heightened levels of separation between subjects. The hyphen is used within words (light-blue, half-dead), the em dash between words (the latter of which would, in English, often require parentheses). So, it can be said that what in English is contained is, in Russian, unleashed.

I also liked how he describes a poem:

A poem is a form of address, an arm extending out across the evanescence of eternity. At its highest vibration, the poem is the sibling of the dream.

And his powers of description are often arresting, as this stanza, illustrating how he feels during a concert, demonstrates:

performing for ten thousand^^ people is one thing but one-hundred thousand is another. Such a crowd is one—a rapacious beast, a heaving shoulder, the outer reaches of a glistening hell.

Fugitive has been shortlisted for the 2023 Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry, which is part of the Queensland Literary Awards, and the 2023 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry. It’s worthy of winning a prize but I’m not sure this is the right category for it; I’d be inclined to label it non-fiction.

That said, I loved its fragmentary style, its pushing of boundaries and its originality: it really does defy being pigeon-holed into a one-size-fits-all literary genre.

Fun fact: Tedeschi’s father, Mark, is a renowned, high-profile barrister in Australia who also writes in his spare time. I have previously reviewed his non-fiction book Eugenia: A True Story of Adversity, Tragedy, Crime and Courage about a woman who lived as a man for 22 years and was charged with murdering her wife in 1920.

————

^ Am not sure this is the correct word to use because orthography is the conventional spelling system of a language, and hyphens and em dashes are punctuation. Ironically, the em dash on page 58 is used incorrectly and the full stop is also in the wrong place because it should be within the brackets, not outside it: “(Something you taught me—when a person leaves the room, it can hurt—physically).” In fact, throughout the book, I think the em dash is often being used in places where a colon would be more appropriate. Can you tell I’m a copyeditor? LOL.
^^ There’s a missing hyphen here
1001 books, 20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), Author, Book review, Carlo Levi, Italy, memoir, Non-fiction, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, translation

‘Christ stopped at Eboli’ by Carlo Levi (translated by Frances Frenaye)

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Memoir – paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 256 pages; 2000. Translated from the Italian by Frances Frenaye.

Christ Stopped at Eboli, by Carlo Levi (1902-1975), is a beautifully evoked portrait of life in a remote village in Southern Italy in 1935, a place beset by poverty, superstition and ancient beliefs, a place so primitive that sending an educated man to live there was seen as a form of punishment. It was such a bad place, it was said that even Christ would never visit it — hence the title.

A first-hand account of Levi’s experience as a political exile banished from the north of Italy for anti-fascist activities under Mussolini, the book is as much an anthropological study as it is a memoir.

It is full of sublime observations and insights into a traditional way of life — and is probably the best book, and certainly the most interesting, I have read all year.

Banished to the south

Levi was a writer and painter from Turin who had a degree in medicine, but he had never practised as a doctor. He came from a wealthy Jewish family and had been arrested for political activism. (Wikipedia tells me he founded an anti-fascist movement in 1929 and became leader alongside Natalia Ginzburg‘s husband, Leone.)

When he is sent to Aliano (which he calls Gagliano because that is how the locals pronounce it), in what is now known as the region of Basilicata, he is forbidden from contacting the dozen or so other political prisoners living in the same village and must report daily to the fascist mayor.

Knowledge of his medical background precedes him, and soon the local peasants descend on him for treatment because they do not trust the local doctors who are incompetent. The region is plagued by malaria and trachoma (an eye disease that can cause blindness), and the level of illness, starvation and poverty he sees, especially in the children, is distressing.

A dozen women with children in their arms or standing beside them were patiently waiting for me to get up. They wanted to show me their offspring and have me attend to them. The children were pale and thin with big, sad black eyes, waxen faces, and swollen stomachs drawn tight like drums above their thin, crooked legs. Malaria, which spared no one in these parts, had already made its way into their underfed rickety bodies.

Among women

He comes to understand the locals as decent people, but their beliefs are largely superstitious and their customs ancient — most of them shun church. He is immediately warned to stay away from the women — he is a good-looking man — and must never take food or drink prepared by them for “they would be sure to put a philtre or love potion in it”.

The village is dominated by women in what he describes as a “matriarchal society” because most of the men have gone to America in search of work and a better life.

Those [men] who are left in the villages are the discarded, who have no talents, the physically deformed, the inept and the lazy; greed and boredom combine to dispose them to evil. Small parcels of farm land do not assure them a living and, in order to survive, the misfits must dominate the peasants and secure for themselves the well-paid posts of druggist, priest, marshal of the carabinieri, and so on.

A year in the life

Over the course of a year, Levi charts not only his interactions with these people with whom he becomes very fond but also the changing seasons and the beauty he finds in the landscape around him. His painterly eye is apparent in his vivid and ever-eloquent descriptions.

It was September and the heat was giving way to promises of autumn. The wind came from a different direction; it no longer brought with it the burning breath of the desert, but had a vague smell of the sea. The fiery streaks of the sunset lingered for hours over the mountains of Calabria and the air was filled with bats and crows. From my terrace the sky seemed immense, covered with constantly changing clouds; I felt as if I was on the roof of the world or on the deck of a ship anchored in a petrified ocean.

His time in exile is cut short, but when he is told he is free to leave he is reluctant to do so: something about the experience of living among these salt-of-the-earth types has irrevocably changed him and he has learned as much about himself — and the divisions within his own country — as he has of them. So, despite his loss of freedom, the distressing poverty he has seen, the never-ending disease, the “backward” customs he has had to negotiate and the greed and petty corruption of the village “elite”, the village has wormed its way into his soul.

The place and the people wormed their way into mine as well.

Christ Stopped at Eboli is a singularly beautiful memoir; it’s heartfelt without being sentimental, and insightful without being judgemental. It was first published in 1945 and translated into English in 1947.

There’s a film adaptation too. It was critically acclaimed, winning a BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1983, and is available to view on the fee-paying Criterion Channel — I haven’t watched it, but it looks sublime.

If you liked this, you might also like:

‘The Aran Islands’ by J.M. Synge: an anthropological study of the people who lived on these ancient rocky islands in Galway Bay, untouched by modernity at the turn of the 19th century.

This is my 20th book for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I purchased it from Dymocks online earlier this year when I was looking for books similar to Cesare Pevase’s ‘The House on the Hill’, which I had enjoyed immensely.

‘Christ Stopped at Eboli’ by Carlo Levi, first published in 1945, is listed in Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, where it claims the novel was an “international sensation” and “in a move toward social realism in postwar Italian literature, brought to the attention of the Italian public a long-neglected part of their own country”.

Author, Black Inc, Book review, Erik Jensen, long form essay, Non-fiction, Publisher

‘On Kate Jennings’ by Erik Jensen

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Non-fiction – hardcover; Black Inc.; 112 pages; 2017.

Kate Jennings (1948-2021) was an Australian writer, who moved to the US in her early 30s. She died in May 2021 in New York, aged 72.

A feminist, poet and short story writer, she is best known for her two novels, Snake (published in 1996) and Moral Hazard (2002), which are two of my favourite reads. Completely different in terms of subject matter and setting — the first is set in rural NSW in the mid-20th century, the second on Wall Street in the 1990s — both books are written with a polished concision that expresses universal truths with brevity and clarity.

On Kate Jennings, part of Black Inc’s ongoing Writers on Writers series, was penned by journalist and editor Erik Jensen as a tribute to her work. (In fact, he describes his essay as a “love letter” and “a thankyou note”.) He had been a fan for years and interviewed her in New York on several occasions. Those interviews form the basis of the book.

But the main purpose of what is essentially a long-form essay is to carefully examine Snake, which Jensen describes as a “poet’s novel, built of accruing stanzas. The whole book is shot through with angry truth”.

Snake is the great Australian novel. That is what I start telling people. I give as gifts three dozen copies. I see the book at a house I’ve never visited and open it to find my own inscription: ‘As promised, the Great Australian Novel.’

A writer’s story

Jensen picks apart Jenning’s life — from country school girl to city academic and pioneering feminist — to try to determine the genesis of not just this single work of literature but her sense of being a writer. He wants to discover how much of the book — which is about a disastrous marriage between polar opposites living on an outback farm — is rooted in truth. Is it about her parents, a quiet, introverted man and a flamboyant woman? Is it based on her own rural upbringing, her own complex relationship with her mother?

By interleaving aspects of Snake with biographical details and direct quotes from interviews, Jensen is able to show that it’s largely autobiographical — and that the author had a miserable childhood because of her mother, who was “having affairs left, right and centre”.

‘It’s much easier to write about something — and people — when you’re not anywhere near them,’ she says. ‘You don’t care what they think about you. You just do it.’

Anatomy of a novel

Jensen also looks at what makes Snake such a great book, narrowing it down to its clarity, silences, ellipses of plot and “arid prose, irrigated here and there with startling imagery”. But anyone who has read it will already know this.

What they might not know are the details of Jennings own life. She makes many startling admissions to Jensen, not least that she once tried to take her own life, that she became an alcoholic and that she did not know if her parents had ever read her book (and did not care to know). What emerges is a vivid portrait of a vivid woman, someone who was complex and complicated but generous and compassionate, too.

Her experience looking after her husband, Bob Cato, who died as a result of complications of Alzheimer’s disease in 1999, is but one example of her care and kindness. The shape of Bob’s illness is a major story arc in Moral Hazard, which is about a woman who works at an investment bank by day and looks after her ill husband by night.

‘I had to tie myself to the chair to write the Bob parts,’ she said. ‘I cried the whole way through, while I was writing. But it would have been for nought if I hadn’t got that story down. That’s all.’

On Kate Jennings is described as “a biography of a book and the life that made it”. It’s an insightful look at how life experiences, poetry and politics shaped the author’s best-known work and it offers tantalising glimpses of a writer who was keen to pursue the truth and wasn’t afraid to mine her own life for her craft — with dazzling, and cutting, effect.

For another take, please see Sue’s review at Whispering Gums. And to find out more about Kate Jennings, please see this tribute by Lisa at ANZLitLovers published following news of the author’s death in 2021.

Writers on Writers series

There are currently 12 books in this series in which “leading authors reflect on an Australian writer who has inspired and influenced them”. I have previously read and reviewed:

And have several more (on Patrick White, Peter Carey and Thomas Keneally) in my collection.

Australia, Author, Book review, Jeanne Ryckmans, Non-fiction, Publisher, Setting, true crime, Upswell Publishing

‘Trust: A fractured fable’ by Jeanne Ryckmans

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Non-fiction – paperback; Upswell Publishing; 120 pages; 2023.

If you made up this story you would say it was too crazy to be true.

A globe-trotting academic heading up an international project about trust turns out to be the most untrustworthy person of them all. A big spender with a taste for first-class travel and the finer things in life ($200 steak, anyone?), he styles himself as a world-leading expert on ethics and governance, wracks up massive debts, defrauds friends and business acquaintances, loses his job (and reputation), commits acts of domestic violence, ends up in the court system, claims to have a nervous breakdown and continues his attention-seeking, money-grabbing ways as if nothing has happened.

Oh my, no wonder I raced through this book and ate it up in one sitting!

Trust: A fractured fable is narrative non-fiction that’s written in clear-eyed, unsentimental prose and reads like a psychological thriller. The narrative is well-paced, methodical, factual, free from sensation and not without humour.

The author, Jeanne Ryckmans, is an experienced publisher and literary agent here in Australia. She became romantically involved with the subject of this book and dubs him the Irish Professor throughout. But it’s clear from very early on, for this reader at least, that the Irish Professor is a bullshit artist and narcissist.

A fateful meeting

The pair met in a hotel bar in Sydney in July 2016 when he was visiting from Dubai, where he was living at the time.

The Irish Professor was disarmingly open, articulate and charming. Bespectacled and small in stature, he wore a feminine cashmere Hermés scarf and carried a book, a recent prize winner. […] I was captivated and flattered by his attention. He described himself as a ‘distinguished professor of ethics’ who specialised in ‘trust’.

A few months later he “lovebombs” Ryckmans into visiting Inishbofin, a small tree-less island off the west coast of Ireland, for a romantic holiday to see “his island”, a place he has been visiting since childhood. He’s trying to negotiate a deal to buy the site of a rundown cottage “on the north side of a horseshoe bay” where he wants to build his dream house.

From there, Ryckman unravels the story of a man who is not what he seems. Slowly, over time, she manages to figure out his behavioural patterns — he is not the first woman he has charmed into visiting Inishbofin with him, for instance — and begins to feel uncomfortable and anxious about some of his exploits. Her trust in him begins to waver.

A creeping unease

Described as a “hybrid memoir and personal detective story” on the blurb, Trust: A fractured fable is also a subtle account of cover-ups and corruption within academia. The Irish Professor, for instance, abuses university corporate credit card accounts but keeps getting away with it.

It’s also a fascinating portrait of control and coercion within a relationship, and what can happen if you take people on face value and fall for those who use charm for nefarious ends.

Finally, while the man at the heart of this story is never named, a quick Google search for a cover image to illustrate this review unearthed, quite unexpectedly, a piece in the Australian Financial Review (paywalled) that reveals his identity.

If you liked this, you might also like:

‘Fake’ by Stephanie Wood: A true story about a con man who woos the author in order to take advantage of her.

‘First Person’ by Richard Flanagan: A fictionalised account of Flanagan’s time as a ghostwriter for “Australia’s biggest conman”, John Friedrich, in the late 1980s.