Category: memoir

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.

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”.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), Author, Book review, History, Iris Origo, Italy, memoir, Non-fiction, Publisher, Pushkin Press, Setting

‘A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939-1940’ and ‘War in Val d’Orcia: An Italian War Diary 1943-1944’ by Iris Origo

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Non-fiction – paperback; Pushkin Press; 186 pages; 2018.

My fascination with Fascist Italy’s participation in the Second World War and the impact the conflict had on ordinary citizens continues with this compelling and highly readable two-volume set of war diaries by Iris Origo (1902-1988).

I had never heard of Iris Origo until I began to see these books pop up in my social media feeds earlier in the year. The diaries were published by both NYRB Classics and Pushkin Press in 2018, so I’m not sure why they have experienced a resurgence now, but I am so glad to have made their acquaintance, if somewhat belatedly.

But first, who was Iris Origo?

Portrait of a writer

The introductions to both these books, along with her Wikipedia entry, explain that she was an English-born biographer and writer who came from wealth and privilege — her father was a rich American diplomat and her mother the daughter of an Irish peer — but she had a peripatetic upbringing in England, Ireland, Italy and America.

After her father’s untimely death when Iris was eight years old, her mother settled in Italy and this is where Iris spent the rest of her childhood.

When she was 22, she married an Italian, Antonio Origo, and together they purchased a 2,800 hectare rundown estate, La Foce, in the Province of Sienna, and set about transforming it. During the Second World War, the couple housed refugee children at the estate as well as sheltering and feeding many escaped Allied prisoners of war and Italian partisans.

A talented writer, Iris became best known for War in Val d’Orcia: An Italian War Diary 1943-1944, which was published in 1947 to great acclaim. That book, reviewed below, recounts her time at La Foce (which is now a UNESCO World Heritage site) during the war, the last years of Fascism and the liberation of Italy.

But an earlier diary, A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939-1940, was not published during her lifetime. It’s a chilling account of how Italy stumbled into conflict in 1940.

In the afterword to the Pushkin Press edition, Katia Lysy, granddaughter of Iris Origo, writes that the manuscript was found hidden in her papers marked “unpublished”. She believes it was meant to be “a very private record in which Iris could give voice to thoughts and feelings she was usually forced to suppress” because to say such things aloud at the time might have landed her in hot water.

Chilling entries from the past

Published for the first time in 2017, A Chill in the Air is, indeed, chilling. It’s written reportage style without the benefit of hindsight which would allow the writer to contextualise events or to see the bigger picture. Instead, Origo provides a highly personal account of events happening around her, often via her impressive network of well-appointed contacts — her godfather was the American ambassador, for instance — giving us glimpses of multiple voices from political, cultural, religious and social circles.

Her granddaughter summarises it like this:

[…] A Chill in the Air reflects the increasingly oppressive atmosphere of a country on the brink of a war for which it is entirely unprepared. Iris Origo’s account of those years makes compelling reading. She pores over Italian newspapers and reflects poignantly on the changed attitude of her adopted country towards her beloved England, all the while holding our interest with an effortless flow of anecdotes, chilling wartime jokes and insider accounts of diplomatic negotiations doomed to failure.

The thing that strikes me most about reading this diary is that **I** know the outcome of events, but the writer, as she wrote the words, did not. Lines such as “terrible to think of what may lie ahead” (from 28 March 1939) and “the German advance on the Somme continues” (9 June 1939) and “All letters from England are a month old. What is happening? What can be happening?” (17 July 1940) seem alarming because history tells us what occurred.

The penultimate entry, written on 20 July 1940, before the writing of the diary was interrupted by the birth of Iris’s daughter on 1 August, is particularly chilling:

Last night Hitler’s speech. It is received here with almost universal approval: even those people who are not admirers of Naziism consider it a genuine effort towards peace and a last chance for England to save herself from destruction. That this destruction will be inevitable and will be swift, if Hitler does attempt it, no one doubts.

(This speech, in which Hitler offers the British an ultimatum — peace or destruction —  can be read in full online.)

 

Non-fiction – paperback; Pushkin Press; 320 pages; 2017.

War in Val d’Orcia covers the period 30 January 1943 to 5 July 1944 and feels more polished and more personal than the earlier diary. It is definitely more detailed and intricate.

It’s a well-written, first-hand personal account of a difficult time in Italy’s history but Iris Origo always brings a clear-eyed pragmatic view to everything she writes.  In the preface to this Pushkin Press edition, she claims that she tried to “avoid political bias and national prejudice” but acknowledges that she may well have “swallowed propaganda without realising it”.

Complex position

During 1943-1944, Italy’s involvement in the war is complex — and ever-changing. While the earlier diary covered the stage when Fascist leader Mussolini joined forces with Hitler, this diary charts changing circumstances. This includes the Allies landing in Sicily and bombing Rome, the Germans being driven out and Mussolini being arrested, heralding the fall of the Fascist regime.

As well as documenting the conflict — the looting, the bombing, the ever-present danger to Italian Jews and how the Fascist militia works hand in hand with the Nazis — Iris also gives us an insight into her own war efforts. Together with her Italian husband, Antonio Origo, the pair oversee more than 50 farms run by local peasants on their vast estate, producing the food required to sustain the nation. They open up La Foce to 32 refugee children, providing them with food and shelter, educating them and keeping them occupied while the war rages on.

Later, they secretly house escaped Allied prisoners of war (POW) and partisans who have taken up arms against the government. By doing this, both Iris and her husband are risking their lives for to help the enemy is a serious crime, punishable by death.

When the Italian armistice is called in September 1943, it looks like the war is over, but it’s really the beginning of the violence as the Nazis go on a rampage and POWs look to escape to places of safety. The diary does not shy away from describing some of this brutality.

Bombs were dropped in the valley this morning, shaking the house — aimed a the bridge on the Orcia. Then the bomber formation (thirty-six) flew over our heads and bombed Chiusi and the railway line. The explosions were loud even up here, and the children were frightened […] A lorry full of evacuees, all women and children, was hit at the Acquaviva crossing — twenty people wounded and eleven killed. (22 April 1944)

It doesn’t bode well when an airdrop by German planes announces that anyone hiding or helping the enemy will be shot on sight and that any house in which rebels are found will be blown up. Leaflets dropped by Allied planes announce the opposite.

The peasants read these leaflets with bewildered anxiety as to their own fate, and complete indifference (in most cases) to the main issue. Che sarà di noi? (What will become of us?) All that they want is peace — to get back to their land — and to save their sons. (21 May 1944)

Doing the right thing

I found this book not just a compelling and eye-opening read, tinged with sadness, enormous loss and grief, fear and violence, but a ringing endorsement of doing what is right and helping others in whatever way you can. The folly of war plays out against these pages yet Iris Origo, with all her wealth and privilege, does not seek the easy path, which would be to turn a blind eye. Instead, she courageously acts for the greater good.

What drives her to take the less selfless path is hard to know, but it may well have been the death of her son, who died of meningitis at the age of seven in 1933.

Reading A Chill in the Air and War in Val d’Orcia back to back was an intense and unforgettable experience.

For another take on these two diaries, please see Radz’s combined review at Rahika’s Reading Retreat. Jacqui of JacquiWine’s Journal has also reviewed A Chill in the Air and War in Val d’Orcia separately.

These are my 13th and 14th books for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I bought them earlier in the year after I kept seeing mention of them on Instagram.

Author, Book review, Fourth Estate, History, memoir, Non-fiction, Publisher, Reading First Nations Writers, Reading Projects, Stan Grant

‘The Queen is Dead’ by Stan Grant

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Non-fiction – paperback; 4th Estate; 304pp; 2023.

Stan Grant’s latest book, The Queen is Dead, blends lived experience with factual journalism and memoir to tell a compelling story about Australia’s colonisation under Empire.

It asks important questions about the monarchy and why Australia so willingly accepted (and promoted) the seamless transition of King Charles III reign without properly considering the perspective of First Nations people, both at home and abroad, of this news.

I began reading it just days before Grant, a Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi man, announced he was stepping back from his role presenting the panel discussion show Q&A on ABC TV because of the racism he’d experienced following the King’s coronation.

Toxic racism

That racism, mainly via social media, came as a direct result of his contribution to the TV coverage of the coronation in which he discussed the Crown’s legacy — massacres and segregation of his people, invasion and theft of their land. Taken out of context, his commentary (or “truth-telling” as I call it) was viewed as being unsuitable for the occasion in the same way as saying horrible things about someone at their funeral would not be wholly appropriate.

The ABC failed to come to his defence even though it had invited him on the show to talk about this specific issue (italics are mine), and so he was left to deal with the toxic social media comments, or “racial filth” as he describes it, alone. But Grant claims he was speaking “truth with love”. (You can read his statement, published on the ABC website, here.)

Knowing this background lends The Queen is Dead a particular potency. It exposes the awful truth of the monarchy’s impact on First Nations people, not just here in Australia but around the world, and highlights the disconnect between the Crown, represented by Queen Elizabeth II, and the legacy of impoverishment and imprisonment experienced by Indigenous Australians created in its name and which she never acknowledged in her lifetime (italics are mine).

Death of a monarch

Grant begins his book with Queen Elizabeth II’s death after her 70-year reign, but this is not really a story about the Queen per se. Yes, it’s about what the Crown represents, especially under Empire, and yes, it argues that there’s no place for it in a modern forward-thinking world.

But the crux of The Queen is Dead is less about monarchy and more about Whiteness (it is capitalised in the book) and the West, both of which are social constructs and can, therefore, be changed (as Grant’s logic suggests).

Some of his arguments are confronting, especially if you are White, a royalist, British or a combination thereof, and the anger is palpable, but in laying bare the truth, he shows us a path to reconciliation. He argues that the Queen’s death — she is described as “the last White Queen” throughout — offers a chance to reset, end the monarchy in Australia and redress the bitter legacy of colonialism for Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

What is Whiteness?

Here’s how he describes Whiteness, which he claims is an invention of the British:

In her land [the Queen’s], under the rule of her ancestors, Whiteness was born. No, invented. Because Whiteness is an invention. It was created to crush other people. Whiteness made the world, a world dominated by force, and then it made its domination legal. It wrote laws that underwrote the theft of other people’s land, It wrote laws that put chains around the necks of Black people and put them to work to make untold riches for White people. The great destructive power of Whiteness was to decide who was White. It divided up the world and placed Whiteness at the top.

Later, he adds that Whiteness is not White people:

It is an organising principle. It is a way of ordering the world. It is an invention. An idea. A curse.

Grant asks whether it is possible to be ever truly post-racial, suggesting that even those White people who are allies aren’t fully aware of their own unconscious bias. When reporters, for instance, claim it is the colour of someone’s skin that got them killed by a terrorist, Grant says that logic is wrong:

There is nothing in the colour of their skin that should mean they are gunned down in broad daylight. Their skin has nothing to do with it. They were killed because of what the crazed White man with a gun believed about Black skin.

Later, he argues that White people are “tempted by amnesia” and he is often asked why he simply can’t move on when he mentions the negative legacy of the Queen’s rule.

I know why forgetting is so prized. Because the past is too ugly to look upon. While ever there is the past, there can be no peace.

Angry and profound

The book is heavy going, not in its prose style, which is clear and concise and often elegant, but in the heft of its ideas and the weight of its anger. And yet, I found it utterly compelling and read it in two sittings. But afterwards, in the wake of what I’d just read, I had to let it sit with me, I had to process and digest it before I was comfortable enough to write about it. (How long did that take? The answer: six weeks.)

I feel angry on Grant’s behalf. I see images of the royals now and I feel a deep loathing for them in a way I never loathed them before (don’t get me wrong, I’ve never been a fan but I kind of tolerated them as figures of fascination).

I can’t understand the Australian media’s obsession with them and the almost near sycophancy of the coronation and everything Charles has done since his mother’s death. The pomp and ceremony of the recent Trooping the Colour, for instance, just looked like an anachronistic throwback, completely inappropriate and utterly frivolous at a time of world crisis. I can’t even begin to imagine what my First Nations colleagues at work think — and dare not ask.

The Queen is Dead is subtitled “The Time has come for a Reckoning”. My hope is that Australians will rally behind this idea when the Voice Referendum is held later this year. The eyes of the world will be watching.

I read this book for my ongoing #ReadingFirstNationsWriters project, which you can read more about here. You can see all the books reviewed as part of this project on my dedicated First Nations Writers page. 

2023 Stella Prize, Australia, Author, Book review, Debra Dank, Echo, Literary prizes, memoir, Non-fiction, Publisher, Reading First Nations Writers, Reading Projects, Setting

‘We Come with This Place’ by Debra Dank

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Non-fiction – paperback; Echo Publishing; 252 pages; 2022.

Debra Dank’s We Come with This Place is a love letter to Country and family.

A brilliantly evocative memoir about place and culture, it explores Australia’s dark history and the special connection First Nations people have with Country — that is, the lands, waterways and seas to which they are connected.

It takes us on a wondrous adventure out bush, but it also shows us the terrible injustices inflicted on First Nations people and the violence that underpins Australian history. And yet, this is not a misery memoir. It’s hopeful, even joyous in places, and it brims with an intense love for Aboriginal culture and traditions.

Our story is etched into the rocks and it whispers through the trees and with our kin who are more than human. The wind tells it, sometimes strolling gently, sometimes bellowing from cavernous, dark, felt places, where eyes do not see, and only our goodalu can feel.

Warm and generous

Based on Dank’s PhD in Narrative Theory and Semiotics, We Come with This Place is written in a spirit of generosity and is warm-hearted, tender and humorous.

It mixes autobiography with intergenerational family history and First Nations storytelling. (The dreaming tale of three water-women “who came out of the salt water to the north-east of Gudanji Country” is a recurring refrain.)

It gives us a glimpse of another way of life, one in which relationships — with plants, animals, landscapes and ancestors — are crucial and grounded in reciprocity. And where family ties and kinship are key.

As a child I sat with my two sisters and our mum and dad at the fire, watching the gidgea logs burn to coals that could cook a nice, charred edge on a goanna. This night, though, it would be chunks of the recently killed bullock charring on gidgea. The gidgea burned and its dry heat worked its way under our skin and smoothed the dryness already there from the sun, becoming an extra layer of warmth. There was often a chill in the air at night in this place. We sat in company with our old stories, living our new stories and speaking our place into them where they came together. Our dad didn’t often waste air with words, he practised a silence that let other stories be told, so as we sat with the gidgea, we learned to hear and feel those stories waiting in the gaps between the noise.

The narrative is not told in chronological order; instead, it comprises a mix of vignettes, stories and anecdotes which move back and forth in time and cover Dank’s upbringing on remote Queensland cattle stations, her parent’s troubled but loving marriage, her own marriage (to a white man) and the ways in which her grandparents guided her and passed on traditional knowledge and how she, herself, is doing the same with her own grandchildren.

Her father’s story

Much of the memoir focuses on her father, Soda, with whom she has a close but complex relationship. She details his brilliant skills as a horseman and station hand (he could fix anything despite never being trained) and his deep knowledge of Country.

But she also reveals how the trauma of racist violence runs deep. The hardships and horrendous experiences he endured throughout his life (he witnessed, for instance, the brutal rape of his mother by station men when she stood up for herself and refused to return to her place of work), using this as a prism through which to view so many injustices experienced by First Nations people.

As a memoir about resilience, identity and family, We Come with This Place — which has been shortlisted for the 2023 Stella Prize — is heartfelt and honest. It should be required reading for all Australians. I adored it.

Debra Dank is a Gudanji/Wakaja woman who has almost 40 years of experience as an educator. She has worked in schools and universities across Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and the Northern Territory.

This is my third book for the 2023 Stella Prize. I am trying to read as many as I can from the shortlist before the winner is named on 27 April 2023. I also read this book for my #ReadingFirstNationsWriters project, which you can read more about here. All the books reviewed for this project are on my dedicated First Nations Writers page. 

Allen & Unwin, Author, Book review, Greece, memoir, Non-fiction, Publisher, Setting, Susan Johnson

‘Aphrodite’s Breath’ by Susan Johnson

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Non-fiction – paperback; Allen & Unwin; 368 pages; 2023. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

There’s a long tradition of people heading abroad to try living in a different country and then writing about it. But I’d wager few have embarked on such an adventure with their 85-year-old widowed mother in tow.

This is what the Australian writer Susan Johnson did when she decided to move from Brisbane, Australia, to the Greek island of Kythera — the birthplace of Aphrodite, the ancient Greek goddess of sexual love and beauty.

Aphrodite’s Breath, subtitled “A mother and daughter’s Greek island adventure”, is a frank and funny memoir. It’s as much about the island’s culture, landscape, history and people as it is about the mother-daughter relationship and the tensions that threaten to unravel it.

The narrative, which spans a couple of years, moves from Brisbane to Greece and back again, via side trips to Paris and London, with the threat of the pandemic somewhere in the middle.

But it’s the first few months of the adventure that pose the greatest challenges. The pre-arranged car doesn’t eventuate, the rented house lacks modern amenities and the winter weather is perishingly cold and unforgivably windy. Then there’s the whole language barrier.

And mother and daughter don’t always see eye to eye about everything.

Mother-daughter tensions

Much of the book deals with the inherent and unspoken tensions within the relationship: Susan is a dutiful daughter who always thinks of her mother’s comfort; Barbara, who is used to the finer things in life, is flinty, headstrong and opinionated.

The more time they spend in each other’s company, the more Susan realises their differences. It comes to a head with a fiery argument only two months into their stay: Barbara wants to go home.

I know I had benefited from many advantages that Mum never had, most notably a university education, and I was forced to examine whether I was guilty of implying my tastes and opinions were superior to hers. As far as I could tell, apart from being a smartypants and falling into womansplaining, I hadn’t paraded any supposed supremacy over her but had done my best to secure her ease and comfort.

Barbara does get her own way in the end, returning home to Australia, but Susan remains in Greece, working on the edits of her previous book (From Where I Fell, reviewed here), writing this one, befriending the locals — a wonderfully varied cast of characters — and embarking on a short-lived romance.

Her reflections on this new life are forthright, unflinchingly honest and often self-deprecating.

Equally, her analysis of what makes a writer and how the art of writing can lay bare the truth at the expense of friends and loved ones is open and candid. Here’s how she puts it in the prologue:

If to photograph people is to violate them, as Susan Sontag suggests, turning them into objects hat can be symbolically possessed, what does writing them do? Perhaps even before we left home, I was the violator, my mother the violated.

Island life

But it’s Susan’s deeply felt personal connection to Kythera, a place she first visited in her youth, that really transforms this memoir into something that feels meaningful and passionate.

That first dawn, the sun lying pale in the sky as if dipped in water, as if it was not lying in the sky at all but in the sea. The village outlined, on the opposite hill, against the dawn sky, the singular cut of trees, buildings, stones; timeless, ancient. In the watery morning sun I wandered down the stony road, emerging into the rustle of pine trees, the wind rising, the sound like the breaking of waves upon an unseen ocean. The fizzing of electricity in the powerlines. The fizzing of my blood.

Her descriptions of the island, its culture and its people are vivid and lyrical (as the above quote attests).

Her interest in history, sense of curiosity and journalistic eye for a story have her tracing the tragic life of Rosina Kasmati, the daughter of one of Kythera’s wealthiest families, who was committed to a psychiatric institution in the mid-19th century after her marriage to an upper-class Irishman fell apart. The couple’s second son, Lafcardio Hearn, became a famous writer (Wikipedia entry here).

Susan’s own personal tragedies mark the end of Aphrodite’s Breath  (tissues are required), but this is a luminous, life-affirming memoir with all the qualities of a finely crafted novel.

Finally, in the spirit of transparency, I know the author personally, but this has not influenced my review. I was surprised to see my name (alongside dozens of others) mentioned in the Acknowledgements!

Australia, Author, Book review, Jackie Huggins, Magabala Books, memoir, Ngaire Jarro, Non-fiction, Publisher, Reading First Nations Writers, Reading Projects, Setting

‘Jack of Hearts QX11594’ by Jackie Huggins & Ngaire Jarro

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Non-fiction – paperback; Magabala Books; 224 pages; 2022.

Jack of Hearts QX11594 is an affectionate portrait of Jack Huggins, a former POW and son of a First World War veteran, as told through the eyes of his daughters, Jackie Huggins and Ngaire Jarro.

The book has recently been longlisted for the 2023 Stella Prize, which is how it came to my attention, but I can see that Lisa at ANZLitLovers reviewed it last September, so I am not sure how I missed it.

Wartime experiences

It’s an interesting account of one man’s wartime experiences and the legacy he left behind, but it also reclaims the important role Aboriginal soldiers played in Australian history. That’s because Jack Huggins was a First Nations man who signed up to defend the country at a time when Aboriginal Australians were not even considered citizens. In this context, why did he and so many other Aboriginal men go to war, his daughters wonder.

There were many reasons why Aboriginal men and women went to serve in defence of their country. For many, it was for love of country, to defend their country and sovereign rights, for others it was for payment, security, pursuit of freedom and adventure. We believe our Father’s motivation was to follow in his Father’s footsteps …

Based on personal recollections and written in a naïve, conversational style, the book follows one man’s journey from an idyllic childhood in Ayr, in northern Queensland, to his time as a prisoner of war working on the notorious Burma-Thailand Death Railway during World War Two.

It covers his return home, where fell in love with an Aboriginal woman and got married. He died seven years later from a heart attack, aged 38, leaving behind his wife, Rita, and a trio of young children — three-year-old Ngaire, two-year-old Jackie, and Johnny, who was just four months old. (As an aside, Jackie Huggins has previously written her mother’s life story in a book titled Auntie Rita, which was published in 1994.)

Two voices

The book is told in two distinct voices and while they’re not labelled as such, it’s clear that the more personal elements are Ngaire’s and the more factual ones are Jackie’s. Together, the sisters piece together their father’s story from family anecdotes, defence force records, letters, photographs and interviews with people who knew him personally.

They also retrace his steps as a soldier, where he was captured by the Japanese in Singapore and put to work building the notorious railway, a forced labour project in which “nearly 39 per cent of all those who worked in the railway perished […] mainly from disease and malnourishment”.

As well as being a loving portrait of a man who survived against the odds, Jack of Hearts QX11594 shines a light on the role Aboriginals played in Australia’s ANZAC tradition. The sisters write that in the wars, both First and Second, “Indigenous men and women were spotlighted, welcomed, seen and recognised, serving on the frontline and protecting each other”. But when they were repatriated, it was another story:

For many returned Indigenous veterans, discrimination and prejudice flourished. They were left out of society and were not served in shops and public places, after fighting for their country. They were scorned and degraded and could not get the necessities of a good life such as employment and housing.

Jack, an only child, was one of the lucky ones. He had a good job in the post office and had been raised in a loving home. His parents were unusual in that they were Aboriginal homeowners. The sisters say that it has always puzzled them as to “why Father’s family […] remained ‘free’ people while other Aboriginal people were being herded off in droves to missions and reserves all over Queensland”. They wonder if they claimed another identity to escape, which was common practice at the time.

Another perspective 

I had a couple of minor issues with the editing of the book — the word “very” is used repeatedly, there’s a lot of repetition and sometimes statements are made that could have been fleshed out to add more colour and vibrancy — but I’m being pedantic.

This isn’t the kind of book you read for its literary merit. If you judge Jack of Hearts QX11594 on the sisters’ desire to learn more about their father’s short life by writing his story, it has hit its mark.

Will it make the Stella shortlist? Probably not. But this is a worthy contribution to our nation’s history, one that debunks the myth that only white Australians went to war, by quietly sharing a deeply personal account so different to what most of us have been previously told.

UPDATE (17 March): I neglected to mention that the sisters are from the Bidjara/Birri Gubba Juru nations.

I read this book for my #ReadingFirstNationsWriters project, which you can read more about here. All the books reviewed for this project are on my dedicated First Nations Writers page. I also read this book because it is on the 2023 Stella Prize longlist .