Take two: The Seven Good Years, Etgar Keret (2015)

I bought this book at Elizabeth’s in Newtown when I was there to see ‘Dune’, the movie directed by Denis Villeneuve. I had 20 minutes to kill before my friend arrived and wanted something to read while I waited in the cinema vestibule.

I chose a Rob McHaffie drawing to go in the background of this photo with the cover of ‘The Seven Good Years’. McHaffie is Australian and chooses quirky subjects for his works, which I think complements Keret’s book nicely. Full review on Patreon. 

Take two: The Patagonian Hare, Claude Lanzmann (2012)

For a full review, see my Patreon. It only takes about $10 a year to get access to my reviews so – why not subscribe? Fresh content every week or so (or even more frequently) as I read a lot of books in a variety of genres. Currently saving money by reading things unread that’ve been ignored in my collection for years, books that’ve travelled with me from place to place. 

I’m grimacing in the above photo because I had to squat in order to get this shot of the book’s cover in front of Fritz Kraul’s ‘Koge’ (1912), selected for inclusion because Lanzmann’s memoir looks back – as all memoirs do – at the distant past. 

The painting came to me via my cousin and his father (who’d inherited it from his uncle-by-marriage). I bought Lanzmann’s book probably at Books of Buderim. The sticker on the back isn’t branded and that bookstore is a small independent concern. I used to go there with mum some weekends as she liked to browse in shops. When I was with her she’d also make time to take the opportunity to chat with people – not excluding salesclerks and proprietors – met with in her travels. 

Buderim is at the very top of a hill. The fact of the town being located on a summit is apposite as Lanzmann and Simone de Beauvoir, his lover, used to go on mountain hikes. Uncle Elmer also used to climb mountains when he was young, and I have some photograph albums with pictures of a young Elmer in the snow.

Take two: The Rings of Saturn, WG Sebald

For a full review, see my Patreon. 

I had this book from dad, who probably bought it in the 90s. The publication date (in English) is 1998. Wikipedia says this is a novel but it’s not: it’s a memoir. I took the photo shown above in front of two photographs in my collection. The top one is by my cousin Rob, and shows a Chinese window. The bottom one is by a man named Terry Broadford and is titled ‘Station Control’. It shows a Jpaanese railway employee, which is appropriate as Sebald uses trains in his book as a kind of magical device that lies in the region between his routine existence and a life free of bad memories he dreams of living.

Take two: Iran Awakening, Shirin Ebadi

For a full review, see my Patreon. 

This book was bought by me, when I worked at Sydney University, at the Co-Op Bookshop. The store sat just around the corner from my work office and some at lunchtimes I would visit to browse. I have no idea why I bought this in those days, other than, perhaps, in such a way to participate in the ongoing disaster that was American foreign policy. The US had invaded Iraq on spurious grounds and Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, the year of the invasion. I am grateful for my acquisitiveness now that going out is more difficult, it means I have more resources to call on when there are hours to fill away from friends.

Take two: In the Days of Rain, Rebecca Stott

For a full review, see my Patreon. 

I bought this at Dymocks in Broadway Shopping Centre this month while on the hunt for new books. Most bookshops in Sydney had closed due to the virus and so I went to where I could find one still open. More often than not I go to Abbey’s or Gleebooks, but they weren’t allowing browsing. Desperate times deserve desperate measures.

Book review: Adventures in Correspondentland, Nick Bryant (2011)

In shortish chapters that don’t tax your patience this memoir by BBC reporter Nick Bryant divulges little known aspects of a foreign correspondent’s life. It is as engrossing as Peter Greste’s account of his time in the Middle East, though in many ways different from that book. For a start, Bryant was never jailed for doing his job, as Greste was; what struck me most forcefully reading ‘Adventures in Correspondentland’ is the author’s sense of humour. It’s there in the ridiculous title and the amusing illustrations on the front cover. There’s also the prose, although at times I felt it could have been tightened up a notch so that it might read more smoothly.

Not all memoirs by journos are readable, as Les Hinton’s deplorable effort demonstrated. Perhaps News Corp knew of their man’s literary deficit and so promoted him to somewhere in the organisation where he wouldn’t be at risk of writing anything. Bryant, on the other hand, can write well, his carefully crafted sentences delivering each anecdote with confidence but also with frequent, silent laughter. It’s like being regaled at a dinner party by a competent raconteur, someone with a capacity to see an interesting story and to tell it with flair.

Bryant takes the reader behind the scenes to show him or her what life was like in, say, Afghanistan at a time of radical change. The book starts mid-story, in Afghanistan at the middle (to that point in time) of his career, and each chapter focuses on a different period. There’re sections of the book about Lady Di, Bill Clinton’s impeachment, 9/11, Guantanamo Bay, and Steve Irwin’s death. It wasn’t certain to me, while reading the book, who he intended his audience to be though for some bizarre reason known only to himself and his editors he calls university “college”, so perhaps he was hoping it might do well in the States.

It serves as something of an apologia, in two respects. Bryant firstly regrets the failings of some foreign correspondents due to what he admits can be a ghoulish appetite for evidence of bloodshed and other kinds of calamity. He also appears to regret not being more critical of the US administration in the years immediately following 9/11. In respect of the first charge, Bryant is at pains to absolve himself, as well as most of his colleagues, of voyeurism. As for the second charge, his apology is somewhat mealy-mouthed and docile.

In general there’s a certain aloofness from the concerns of the common man. To underscore my point he also decries globalisation on account of its homogenising effects, but by doing so only makes his own position as a rich westerner more obvious. For poor Indian 15-year-old girls it might be far preferable to get a job at Starbucks than in a brothel, and while he goes out of his way to condemn child prostitution he is also able at any time get on a plane and go somewhere in the first world, for example the US, where he now lives.

Bryant knows the absurd when he sees it but nevertheless genuinely admires the US and seems loathe to condemn it on any level. Despite having studied American history at Oxford Uni it looks as though he long ago drank the Kool-Aid.

His stint after India was in Australia and his privilege is evident in the fact that though his opinion of that country is largely correct, you can tell that he has always had enough money to support himself as he doesn’t seem to adequately value such things as a decent minimum wage and free access to most medical services that is available to the majority living Down Under. Sadly there are no comparisons made to arrangements that obtain in the old US of A. Like his opinions about multinational corporations operating in the developing world, this lack of objective good sense was reinforced for me by his expressed distaste for the British monarchy; he’s genuinely puzzled by Australians’ loyalty to the House of Windsor. Bryant might not be aware of any personal bias – he comes across as blithe, erudite, yet not overly self-aware – though a genuine interest in history makes you feel confident, in a general sense, of his perspicacity. Unlike Greste – who as the BBC’s foreign correspondent covered Afghanistan in 1995, and who was arrested in Egypt in 2014 while working for Al Jazeera English – Bryant’s a puzzle.

For news junkies his book, though now a tad out of date, offers plenty of interest; it brought back memories of a time that, unsurprisingly now, seems more and more remote. And Bryant is even-handed: he sees the good side of George W. Bush but laments almost-universal fawning on the US establishment following 9/11. Personally, I don’t remember much about what was in the news in the period immediately after that day because I’d just returned to Australia from overseas and when it dawned I hadn’t yet taken the community’s pulse (I arrived in Sydney on almost the same day the Twin Towers were hit). But I remember the time around 2003 when public rhetoric began to be inflected differently because of the crisis that had started to overtake the Middle East and that, regrettably, is still at issue.

Book review: The Tennis Partner, Abraham Verghese (1998)

I bought this memoir on AbeBooks after a person I follow on Twitter named Michelle Matthews posted, on 19 November last year, a link to a Slate article listing nonfiction works from the 1990s.

Subtitled ‘A Doctor’s Story of Friendship and Loss’, the book deals with the author’s experience with a friend met at his teaching hospital in El Paso, Texas, in the early 90s. Abraham Verghese was working there as a specialist in infectious diseases and internal medicine, and David Smith was an Australian who won a scholarship to study medicine in the US on the strength of his tennis prowess. Outside of the hospital, Abraham and David bond over the games they play together on local tennis courts. Smith was a better player but they shared a love of the game.

Verghese and his wife Rajani are ethnically associated with southern India, where a vibrant Christian community has lived for the best part of 2000 years. The marriage was breaking down at the point where the book starts, and so Abraham valued highly the interludes with David. Initially moving out of the family home where his wife and two young sons lived, Abraham found a rental apartment nearby in the town, which is on the US-Mexico border.

At work, Abraham was senior to David, and the author made concessions as the younger man struggled with his own demons. While Abraham uses his powerful diagnostic acumen to see things about David that perhaps only a doctor could see there is, in the memoir, a lack of attention given to Abraham’s relationship with Rajani. Though the author is attentive to the reasons behind the changes in David Smith’s circumstances, the reasons for the breakdown of Abraham’s marriage are obscure. It just didn’t work out, and we’re left to be satisfied with that. This is not like a book of Knausgaard’s, where every stray thought is captured and displayed in the author’s attempt to render meaning.

When he is being sincere it’s perhaps unfair to blame an author for not being innovative, but Abraham’s reluctance to include certain things in his account reduces the power of his story. Abraham alternately sees a flaw in David’s character and evidence of an illness but he seems not to accurately read his own reactions to the problem and the reader of the book is left wondering if he is perhaps not a reliable witness. On the other hand it is clear Abraham is a subtle observer of the world, as the following extract demonstrates.

My friendship with David, during its inception, and during the heady period when our lives revolved so much around each other, had held out the promise of leading somewhere, to something extraordinary, some vital epiphany – what, precisely, I couldn’t be sure of. Still, that was how it felt – magical, special. And that was enough; that was reason to keep going. 

Playing tennis seemed to express this, as if it were a beautiful experiment we two had created out of thin air. The uniforms were simple, the equipment rudimentary, but in our rat-a-tat volleying at the net, in our mastery of spin, in the rallies, in the way the rackets functioned as extensions of our bodies, in the way we came to know each other’s tics and idiosyncrasies, in the way we controlled the movement of a yellow ball in space, we were imposing order on a world that was fickle and capricious. Each ball that we put into play, for as long as it went back and forth between us, felt like a charm to be added to a necklace full of spells, talismans, and fetishes, which would one day add up to an Aaron’s rod, an Aladdin’s lamp, a magic carpet. Each time we played, this feeling of restoring order, of mastery, was awakened. It would linger for a few days but then wane. The urge to meet and play would build again.

Abraham shows in this colourful passage how he had control of his material, and the book serves, like one of his games of tennis with David, as an attempt to put order on his world. For anyone, tiny shifts in the balance of things can lead to going off kilter or to spinning onto a dangerous trajectory. The passage shows how sport can function as an antidote to a need for other ways of mitigating the pain of existence.

I enjoyed reading ‘The Tennis Partner’ and completed the whole of it in a few days. I love literary journalism because reality has a different texture from fiction. Neither is better than the other, but they do different things. To be able to give a satisfying structure to a tale drawn in all its details from real life is a special talent, and it provides its own pleasures for the reader.

Book review: Poppy, Drusilla Modjeska (1990)

My copy of this fictionalised biography of the author’s mother has a sticker on the back saying “$16.95” stamped with the name of the bookstore (Gleebooks), and a sticker on the front saying “$3.00” that shows it was bought subsequently at a sale, probably at one of the charity book events that are held regularly in Australia’s major cities.

The cover design is of its time (as all book covers are, despite the fact that good books, like this one, are timeless) and is made in pale blue and a dark pink, with black and grey in some parts. The mixture of different fonts is typical of the era, as is the inclusion, in the text, of a number of dreams; such elements serve to form part of the book’s fictional hemisphere.

I almost gave up after reading about two-thirds of it at which point, in terms of the narrative, the fabric of the book started to loosen. I persisted after a delay of a couple of days and was glad to have followed the thread to its end.

This work is also a kind of literary journalism, and the author is included as a protagonist in the narrative (something that must have happened anyway considering her relationship to the main character). But names have been changed, so the author appears as someone named Lalage though she does retain certain characteristics that tie her closely to the figure of the author, being for example an avid reader from childhood. 

‘Poppy’ explicates the author’s life in a good deal of detail, using, among other things, the mother’s diaries and some diaries from a man named Marcus, a Catholic priest Poppy has a relationship with. Not all the diaries are made available to the author as Poppy destroyed some, notably those that deal with the beginnings of her affair with Marcus. 

There are no neat lessons that emerge from the story, although it is notable how the author doesn’t point out explicitly – though she cannot have been unaware that a reader would come to realise this – that it was precisely the same social shifts that prompted Richard, Lalage’s father, to abandon Poppy that allowed Poppy to subsequently make a career in the British probation service. Lalage was born in the 1940s, so times were a-changing, and it was Poppy’s generation – the generation that came of age at the time of WWII – that was exposed to many of the social and political adjustments in the developed world that came to be known as the counter-culture.

Modjeska makes a good point when she uses Poppy to point out that while “family” was important as an idea used in the public sphere to moderate the effect of the changes, when push came to shove her husband was unfaithful and her parents blamed her for the illness that took her into an institution for the mentally ill. So family let Poppy down even while it asked her to maintain itself as an institution, but Poppy would make some of her parents’ ideas her own when it came time to settle her own daughters. The matter of love and marriage returns again and again as something to be dealt with.

You can feel Poppy’s generation welcoming change – change from the 19th century values of their parents – but you can also feel Lalage’s generation having second thoughts despite the drastic alterations that took place to make life easier for women. 

There is so much that is fluid, especially with regard to romance. I found similar misgivings and hesitations expressed in the biopic of Mary Shelley that came out a couple of years ago and which was reviewed on this blog. While changes at the beginning of the 19th century made the community more responsive to the individual’s needs, it disadvantaged women as the security of marriage – necessary, in those days (and, for that matter, still nowadays), to provide a solid foundation for the raising of children – began to disappear as sexual liberation gathered pace. 

Jane Austen explores precisely this theme in ‘Mansfield Park’ (1814) and such ideas are explored in Modjeska’s book, but in the end words – in which she puts so much stock – fail her and only the characters are able to express what she took it upon herself to communicate. There are no easy answers, the glib lines of sung heroines are not up to the job at hand, and the ending seems weak until you get to the final word, at which point the metaphor of the labyrinth looks attractive and the book assumes a shape resembling a noontime soap opera, where close personal relationships are the primary locus of sense-making. The whole story has to be told to understand what feminism has meant to Modjeska’s generation. 

Like Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 memoir ‘Eat, Pray, Love’, ‘Poppy’ attempts to understand the nature of the maternal, and is possibly a better book. While the biological imperative looms large – women desire stable relationships with men due to the need to raise children – both Poppy and Lalage began to contemplate the necessity of a spiritual dimension to life in order to understand their worlds, something that I found revelatory. 

Complexity is what I especially admired in this work; you cannot ignore certain things but they are not stuck in your face like a gun pointed at a hero in an action thriller. You have to do some of the work yourself though, and the story is sometimes hard to follow since people are frequently named without any context so, for example, I never worked out who Jacob was even though his name appears in the text often. This tactic performs a role in maximising the “etrangement” the book uses, the “making strange” – something authors deploy in order to put a new spin on ideas – and you feel at times as though you are hearing things about a family you don’t know well. Which is appropriate because that is precisely what you are reading.

Through the stories of these people – China, the author’s grandmother, Poppy, the author’s mother, and Lalage, the author herself – you learn a good deal about being a woman in the 20th century or, at least, in the period after WWI. The changes that took place in society are given prominence and you feel as though you have come to some sort of accommodation with ideas that changed the world. 

Book review: Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer (1997)

This copy of Dyer’s bibliomemoir – in which he talks about his interest in DH Lawrence – was printed in 2008 and I bought it online recently after finding mention of it in a review of books that were published in the 90s. I use AbeBooks for purchases like this, for books that are probably out of print (I didn’t check before placing my order).

Like Nabokov’s biography of the Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol, this is a minor classic. In it, the author melds his own preoccupations with those of the object of his enquiries, so that you get something like a confessional tone upon which he is able to weld observations about life, the universe and everything.

Lawrence belongs to the last generation of writers who were able to celebrate the individual. His vaunted hatred of religion – something Dyer chronicles in the book – betrays a desire to find meaning that clashed with the equally strong desire to maintain individual integrity. There is something universal about the themes in this book.

Writers these days are so bound up with the ethos of the collective that literature itself is a niche interest, and it is in the various types of genre fiction – in the sub-genres and sub-sub-genres that proliferate in our postmodern world of frictionless markets and immediate gratification, of bingeing TV series and of scolding streaming video providers for cancelling a promised third season for our favourite show – that the most politically engaged writing is found. With the deaths of writers such as Lawrence, Nabokov, and Miller came the birth of the selfie generation, the predominance of applied arts as objects of desire for a fetishizing collective, reality TV, and Donald Trump.

While the title of this book suggests anger it is actually very funny, and Dyer makes Lawrence accessible even to the most jaded Boomer. He might even appeal to Millennials, should any of them become aware of Dyer’s output beyond the confines of the universities he teaches at. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and found it made a refreshing change from the action thrillers I so love and that I have been watching in vast quantities since I got Netflix in January.

Book review: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, David Sedaris (2004)

These autobiographical essays, or snippets of memoir, are funny and human but there’s a missing piece at the core of the edifice, as though the only way to understand the world were by reading the scripts of sitcoms. I had started watching commercial TV before beginning this book, and one of the programs I tuned into on a channel I hadn’t visited before was a show named ‘Frasier’. It’s about a well-to-do Seattle resident who lives in an apartment in a high-rise building.

In the show, every now and then the doorbell rings and a friend or family member enters the living room. A conversation ensues that is by turns amusing and, even, witty. Full of repartee and hidden gems, like a collage made by a precocious 18-year-old. I didn’t make the connection to Sedaris’ book until I read it, but there you have it: a flawed jewel that gives off flashes of brilliance and that has many facets but that, in the end, only leaves you asking for more of the same.

There’s no end-point to the process of consuming these short sketches, regardless how appealing and how avantgard they seem. Sedaris predates Knausgaard, but the latter is a much better writer because he’s a good deal stranger. The failure of the last book in his series (which is titled ‘My Struggle’; I mean come on) is almost a guarantee for the quality of the other five. Sedaris can’t hold a candle to rival the bright sceptre of the Norwegian writer’s prose.

Strangely enough, after I put this book away on the shelf I took down the one next to it, which was Toni Morrison’s ‘Tar Baby’ (1981), and on page four of this book I found a passage that uses the words “corduroy” and “denim” near each other. So ‘Tar Baby’ was the inspiration for Sedaris’ title. The passage goes like this:

“I envy you,” said the second voice, but it was farther away now, floating upward and accompanied by footsteps on stairs and the swish of cloth – corduroy against corduroy, or denim against denim – the sound only a woman’s thighs could make.

In the end I finished about 30 pages of Morrison’s novel before putting it down in the pile of books next to the door that are destined for the op-shop. I was defeated by a long passage of dialogue, reading which I couldn’t follow the cues and so had, half-way through, no idea who was speaking to whom. It was a conversation between a husband and his wife and, coming right at the start of the book, seemed to serve an important function in the novel as it helps the reader get to know different characters, as well as situate the book in an historical period (sometime after WWII).

I did finish Sedaris’ effort, and enjoyed it. It represents the best of its time, a period when the rules (once again) were changing. But aren’t they always morphing? Aren’t we perennially faced with cues to novel ways of expressing ourselves? Sedaris’ book fits into the flow of stylistic innovation like a curious piece in a jigsaw puzzle that, when finished, makes a beautiful face appear.

Book review: Poster Boy: A Memoir of Art and Politics, Peter Drew (2019)

Released in Australia on 6 August, this book hasn’t made much of a splash and it’s easy to see why. Drew seems to be a little confused about life and he’s got a hot head – which is probably why street art appeals to him; it makes him feel good to break rules – but his understanding of the importance of stories as social glue is correct. Language is innate so the use of stories to create community is a species behaviour.

I wasn’t sure though why Drew seems so wedded to the idea of belonging either to a left wing or a right wing, politically speaking. (I liked his poster with the skulls and the word “equality”.) Being politically agnostic might help him, and people like him, to simply forget about that kind of nonsense and deal with individual issues on their merits.

But then, if you did that, people might ignore you, which might lead to disappointment. It feels good to belong to a group and mobs are born when people are given an opportunity to gratify an instinct to gather to achieve a common goal. Mobs can be unruly and Drew appears to regret the polarisation that characterises the public sphere in the age of social media but his book was born in exactly that place, so the reservations he expresses are not entirely convincing.

The pacing of the book is good but it flags once the campaign has finished that uses the image of an Indian migrant wearing a turban. The image sits on well-known posters that Drew has put up all over Australia’s capital cities. The problems that enliven the narrative in the book from that point seem to be domestic ones that don’t have much to do with the posters except through Drew’s use of rhetoric to construct an argument.

I wondered if he wasn’t perhaps brought up ae Catholic considering his emphasis on what he doesn’t term transcendence (though that’s what he means; seeking out an adrenaline rush from postering is linked to the same urge) and the power of a kind of spiritual awakening that can be used to overcome problems and find relief. To find redemption. He doesn’t give the reader much detail on matters of faith as it relates to him personally but he says that he has been, since the age of seven, an atheist, which is what someone who has been brought up in a religious family would say.

Drew’s constant use of the word “empathy” bothered me as well as his admiration for Aboriginal culture, a culture in which elders are (allegedly) respected on account of their ability to impart wisdom. But then he turns around and lambastes every white, middle class guy aged over 50 who says he doesn’t like his posters. A double standard seems to be in play but this is just one example of the author’s inability to recognise his own biases for what they are. The lack of rigour evident in this regard is typical of the book generally.

On a related note, the title is a bit of a puzzle, since by the time the story ends Drew is already 35 and hardly a “boy”. Seems a bit like false advertising, but the publisher probably liked the idea. Makes the project fit the profile if you are trying to gain traction on the internet.

There is more I could say, for example on the subjects of racism, but I won’t indulge myself. The book is, in fact, worth reading even given the points I’ve listed but Drew will not win any prizes for his effort.

Book review: On Drugs, Chris Fleming (2019)

This brilliant memoir chronicles a life, but particularly that part of Fleming’s life that involved the use of drugs and alcohol.

Addiction is common and the use to excess of alcohol, illicit substances, and gambling is widespread. The huge influence of the Australian Hotels Association, the stupendous size of the criminal drug trade, and the massive scale of the gambling industry (which, to borrow a common media trope, state governments, themselves, are addicted to via taxation) all attest to the need of people to seek comfort from chemicals in order to escape the boredom and pain – perhaps best expressed by Hunter Thompson: “fear and loathing” – that mundane life can bring with its endless procession of small events and its petty struggles.

What Fleming so humorously does – as though someone had crossed Winnie the Pooh with Nick Cave to arrive at a sort of surreal hybrid form of entertainer (because this book is very entertaining) – is to display the pathos of this kind of life (the only one we have) – and hint at the tragedy that lies waiting if we lose the things that can keep us on an even keel. What must be those techniques, totems, prayers, incantations, or spells?

It seems there isn’t a one-size-fits-all method of staying sober and sane. Just as every society, in its own way, has to learn the hard lessons that lead to peace and to progress.

From the outset, you’re hooked (reading is a benign kind of addiction, since it actually does you good, as studies have shown). What does the trick is the whimsy and intelligence of the prose, the thoroughness of this academic’s approach to unearthing the truth, and what seems like a supernatural memory.

But like all really good nonfiction, this book turns up things that are unrelated to the subject immediately at hand and, in doing so, expresses something profound about the human condition. It’s a wonderful, wonderful book and I highly recommend it. 

Book review: Sorted, Jackson Bird (2019)

At the beginning of last year I read and reviewed a book about a trans woman titled ‘The Trauma Cleaner’. The author of that work of creative nonfiction, Sarah Krasnostein, is Australian. I felt her book to be masterful in its ability to capture the trauma and difficulties that beset the woman at the centre of the drama – whose name is Sandra Pankhurst – before she arrived at where she was at. By framing the narrative in overlapping sections – parts of the past and parts of the present – Krasnostein was able to build suspense as well as render in full the complexity of Pankhurst’s life.

In ‘Sorted’, Jackson Bird, who went the other way – from being a girl to being a man – the journey to sorting out his life was different because so many of the achievements of Pankhurst’s generation have made life much safer for trans people than they were in the past. Not that all the problems have been solved, it has to be admitted. Intolerance can still define the relations between some people who are comfortable with the gender they were born with, and others, who are not.

But I would hazard the suggestion that such clashes are less common now than they were in the past. Certainly, reading Bird’s account, the number of people who were supportive of his desire to transition overwhelmingly outnumber those against the idea. No such tolerance was extended to Pankhurst. In fact, there is no such conversation mentioned in Krasnostein’s book, as far as I am able to recall this far away from the time I read it.

Bird’s writing style reminded me of a blog – complete with photos and notes and poems – but it seems, in parts, to have been written without an enormous quantity of revision. An occasional lapse into cliché, the odd unfortunate turn of phrase, nothing very serious. Offsetting such shortcomings his story is told in a way that makes it seem that he is talking directly to you. The tone is intimate and engaging.

Yet the narrative arc – from hardship and doubt to fulfillment and success – is a bit neat considering the kinds of things you must feel when you sense that you exist outside the mainstream. Although Bird goes into some detail about how he felt at various milestones in his transition from female to male, there appeared to me to be a certain lack of self-awareness at the core of his rendering of what it means to be one gender or another. Or of what it means to be human. It seemed like it was the outward signs of gender that were uppermost in his mind: the evidence that other people were able to appraise and judge. Such things seemed to be the most important things to him, rather than what he, himself, felt about himself. It is as though, in Bird’s mind, the interior life of the individual is entirely determined by what other people think and say. He seemed to lack some degree of agency when he was young but, then again, aren’t we all, when we are young, still trying to work out who we are?

In Krasnostein’s book, Pankhurst is given a greater degree of personal agency than Bird allows himself to possess. Against all the odds, with no online resources to turn to, no examples to use as a guide, and no-one to draw comfort from, Pankhurst made the transition. In her case, the man who becomes a woman (at a time when police routinely bashed cross-dressers just for the hell of it, and when homosexual men were ruthlessly slaughtered by gangs of city toughs) is an individual who struggles against terrible odds for the independence he craves and, ultimately, achieves. In Bird’s book, the barriers fall, it seems, as soon as they are approached, without even a need to touch them with an outstretched hand.

Having said these things, I feel that Bird’s book should be read by politicians who want to support with concrete action whatever claims they might have in terms of valuing diversity. If the West is to stand for anything, then diversity and tolerance has to be at the centre of that project. Nothing less than complete personal autonomy is acceptable, as long as it does not impinge on the freedom that others, likewise, deserve.

Just a final note, this time to the publishers: the break-out boxes were very hard to read on a Kindle and I wished, for this reason, that I had bought this book printed on paper. I missed out on quite a bit because of this technical problem with the digital file.

Book review: Permanent Record, Edward Snowden (2019)

Writing a memoir allows Snowden to demonstrate things about himself that go to the question of his character. This tactic makes it evident that what he did – reveal the US intelligence community’s unlawful, and frankly ludicrous, acquisition and use of the electronic data of everyone on the planet, what they called “bulk” collection – was something like an inevitability.

Courage is rare to come across but there’s no question that Snowden is a man of exceptional courage. He also has an unusual personality. This is a man who kept copies of the US Constitution on his desk at work so that he could give them away to other people in the office. He took his job seriously and expected others around him to do the same. Unfortunately, many of them let him down.

One thing that emerges from reading this book is the way that Snowden’s hacker roots helped him make the decisions he did. It wasn’t an accident that he decided to buck the system; the need to do so from his earliest years – in order to learn about computers and digital networks – instilled in him a healthy dose of libertarianism. In a sense Snowden is a kind of literalist. The copies of the Constitution on his desk were as much a part of his education as a citizen as were his years tinkering about with the computers his father – who worked for the US Coast Guard – brought home.

Snowden is also a good writer, although he did benefit from the help of at least two people (a circumstance he notes in the book). From time to time there is a folksy expression that proves that Snowden, rather than someone else, was driving the bus. There is something old-fashioned as well as familiar about this kind of writing, in the sense that it draws the reader close to the author, as though the two of you are sitting in front of a fireplace in the evening after dinner having a congenial chat. The chapters are short and the pacing is solid. There is enough colour to give the reader a rounded view of each person without overburdening the reader with information.

Overall, I found the story of Snowden’s life to be well-told as well as interesting. I have tried reading official histories of spy agencies but the two I started to read were impenetrably dull. They seemed to have been designed for academics, or other types of specialist, people with an inexhaustible capacity to struggle through acres of opaque prose. This is a shame. It’s not surprising however. Often when you phone a government agency – or even if you email their media department to ask for information – you will have to wait an age before you get to speak to a human, or else you will get an email in reply that hides more than it discloses. Large organisations almost universally lack the human touch.

Snowden does away with all the crap and gives you what you need to understand his story. And because of the time period covered in the book – it starts in the 90s – this memoir also has elements of history that can be very revealing about the times it talks about. The way that young people (like my own brother) became enamoured of everything digital is worth several histories, at least.

The book is also full of the author’s native intelligence. Snowden appeared to me, as I was reading, to be very sensible (as we all are in our own ways) to the nuances and subtleties of existence. Here is someone, I thought to myself, who is conscious of the impact that his own actions have on others. I wish him all the best for the future. Whatever that holds for him.

We already know the story, of course, or we do if we watch at least some of the news. The story so far, in any case. But even when you know how things turn out, the journey to reach the ending of this book is still thrilling. Congratulations to Edward and to all of the people who helped him, including Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald.

There are others in this class of people who gave Snowden assistance in his hour of need, but you can buy the book if you want to find out more. I will say however that Snowden does leave out some details from the account he makes in order not to unnecessarily compromise the security of the organisation – the National Security Agency (NSA) – he was working for when the time came to carry out the acts that enabled him, carefully and deliberately, to remove documents from his workplace. Part of the curtain remains in place, preventing the reader – whoever he or she is – from seeing everything. But at the level of sophistication I am talking about, only specialists would be able to understand what any disclosure would mean. The substantive outlines of the crime Snowden committed are adequately rendered.

Book review: The Erratics, Vicki Laveau-Harvie (2018)

It’s difficult to say much about what is recounted in this memoir because I don’t want to give away anything the reader might not want to know before buying it. Having said that, this is a very good read and, while the person who wrote it is completely unremarkable, it must stand as a reliable account of how a mother can become a menace to her children and to her husband. As such, this tale reverses some of the commonplaces that populate the media in our day and age.

The name of the book derives from a succession of large rocks that were left in the wake of the retreat of a sheet of ice that once sat along the west coast of North America where, now, parts of the United States and Canada are situated. This piece of poetry is skilfully performed and the rocks reemerge at the very end of the narrative to form the second of two brackets within which the drama plays out.

The language is succinct and the author is a competent user of commas, which are deployed to help create the cadences of speech and to add emphasis at points of heightened tension or of relief. The reader must forge on from them not knowing how the story will play out. The technique used belongs in the arsenal of the novelist, and it is good fun to find a writer who can use the same tactics that animate fiction to create a work of nonfiction. This breed of book is not uncommon these days but I find that it is still unusual enough to warrant remarking on it when I find it.

This book won the Stella Prize, a prominent literary award exclusively for Australian women, and I feel that, for a change, the right book was chosen. So many prize-winners turn out, in the reading, to be poor substitutes for the kind of reading experience that transports, entertains, and educates.

Laveau-Harvie’s father fought in WWII. She worked (like her mother) as an academic. She has adult children and has made Australia her home, embracing aspects of the local culture that contrast with what she and her sister grew up with in Canada. Occasionally, such insights appear in the novel to help anchor the reader’s imagination in the real world as the author tries to explain her mother’s personality. She begins slowly, deliberately, and her mother doesn’t really make much of an appearance until you are already caught in the web of the narrative.

Despite her childhood trials, the author’s own personality lacks any trace of a need to feel sorry for herself. There are a lot of other good things I could say about this book, which was originally brought out by a small Sydney press (which has now closed its doors) before being picked up by an imprint belonging to one of the major houses. 

Book review: Imperfect, Lee Kofman (2019)

Kofman in her book takes a look at physical beauty and its obverse, disfigurement, and it’s an involving journey from her own childhood undergoing surgery for a defective heart when she was a small girl, followed by reconstructive surgery necessitated by being run over by a bus when she was a bit older. The scars from these events followed Kofman from the country of her birth to Israel, where her parents, who were devout, migrated after receiving permission to leave from the Russian government. Here Kofman grew into a young woman and began her lifelong love affair with the written word. She was also in the armed forces and worked in a variety of jobs before emigrating to Australia. She still lives in Melbourne.

The scars went with her through all of these alterations of time and place, and in her memoir Kofman examines what it has meant to go through life with visible reminders of the past etched into her flesh. She also goes looking for information on the nature of beauty and of normalcy and its opposite by talking with other people she meets: people who modify their bodies, people who like going out with large-sized women, and people who are recovering from burns. The range of opinions she takes in in her catalogue of imperfection – a thoroughness no doubt assisted by her doctoral research, on which at least part of the book is based – seems exhaustive. The number of themes she touches on is similarly large, and includes such things as desire, shame, pity, resilience, the redemptive power of humour, and the transformative power of beauty.

This last idea seems to have been one of the things that impressed itself most forcefully on the author in the course of her investigations. Rather than ignoring the problematic nature of disfigurement, she suggests, people should learn how to find agency despite the debilitating aspects of life lived with it. You cannot simply dismiss the reality of a visible scar resulting, for example, from a burn or from cancer treatment. By the same token, you cannot ignore (as Kofman herself would not during her life) the ability of beauty to signify something important about humanity. The remedy for a diversity of body types is not to reject beauty outright but to find it in difference, and Kofman applauds moves by makers of popular culture to normalise it by featuring it in their dramas through the use of actors with different body types.

I found Kofman’s struggles with the idea of beauty to be the most interesting part of this lengthy work, a work that tries to get under the skin of corporeal diversity and to find clues there to the nature of happiness and of personal fulfillment. Her withering take on the politically correct approach to beauty belonging to parts of the intelligentsia formed for me a dramatic crux in the book. In this deliberate and fresh take on one aspect of contemporary feminism I perceived the very heart of the approach to the material being studied.

Good works of creative nonfiction by Russian women are becoming something of a trope on this blog. Back on 18 June of last year I published a post about Maria Tumarkin’s ‘Axiomatic’ little thinking that in less than a year I’d be reading another migrant’s work that would be nonfiction written in a fictional style. What both of these books share is an outsider’s viewpoint. The ability to turn the object under consideration through 45 degrees so that a new aspect of it is revealed.

The obverse of Kofman’s being an outsider is the existence of some archaic terms like “sin” and a reliance for the creation of signification on the old Greek myths, which are elements that a writer such as Helen Garner or Chloe Hooper might not use in a work similar to this one. In some sections furthermore I felt that the writing was a bit underdone, as though the author had not adequately reviewed her own work. This characteristic of the text gives the book a flavour of reportage and a discursive informality that does not so much reflect poor style but it would not suit all nonfiction writers. Perhaps more time spent going through the work to make sure that all of its ideas were conveyed with equal clarity would not have been wasted.

I also have to say that it is a relief to find, as I do from time to time, another reader who never took to Steinbeck. I don’t remember which of the American author’s books I read but there was something about the beginning of it that told me that there would be loads of tragedy in what was to follow. I felt cornered, as though there was no space to escape from the author’s plan.

Just a note as well on formatting. I read this book on Kindle and the parts that are in italics are very small and hard to read. Normally this is not a problem because italicised text in the book is usually short, just a word or two. But some passages are entirely set in italics and these were almost impossible to read.

Book review: Stet, Diana Athill (2000)

Athill was born in 1917 and was educated at Oxford and joined the BBC during the war, after which she went into the publishing industry. Her boss in this enterprise was Andre Deutsch, who was a migrant from Hungary, and they worked together until he sold his second business in the 1980s. She continued working for the company for a while but then retired. Her partner was a black man, although she doesn’t say if they were married, and this fact only appears right at the end of the book, which is a memoir.

The book is mainly episodic and chronological in its first part, which is a digest of the publishing business from the 1950s to the 1980s. The second part of the book is a series of independent chapters about individual writers she worked with during her time at Andre Deutsch Limited. Both parts of the book are very chatty and gossipy but there is little thematic development, which a more skilled writer might have found ways to include.

The only concession to anything like a theme that Athill manages to make is to finish the second part of the book with a chapter about an Irishwoman named Molly Keane. This concluding chapter (there is just a postscript that follows it) is largely positive in tone because this author gave Athill far less grief than some of the others who are profiled in the book. So she finishes it on a high note.

One drawback that the book has is that some parts are not as easy to understand as the writer would have liked or imagined. At times you struggle to follow the thread that is being laid down in your path and you have to just get through these rough patches until things clear up. Being herself a copyeditor, she was presumably skilled at making sure things in the stories she worked on flowed smoothly, but for her own book she sometimes falls short of the reader’s requirements in terms of clarity. She is also a bit verbose at times, preferring the casual sentence that resembles spoken language to the more tightly constructed sentence of the committed stylist.

With some of the writers Athill deals with she is tight-lipped and discrete but with others, such as VS Naipaul, she lets you have all the details and I wondered why different writers were dealt with in different ways. It might have had something to do with how they dealt with her. The relationship between Deutsch and Naipaul was not always smooth. At one stage Athill describes how she critiqued a novel he had submitted to the company for consideration. She had thought that some of the characters were not formed well, and told him so. In response, Naipaul stormed out of her office and left the building, later calling Deutsch on the phone to tell him that he, Naipaul, was going to take his books elsewhere from then on. But for some reason Athill never really understood Naipaul was soon back with Deutsch and they brought out a number of his subsequent books. In the end he left them for good at a time when Deutsch was in decline (and everyone at the company knew it).

This kind of detail constitutes the bulk of the book. The tone is light and casual. Pub talk, mainly, but not uninteresting. Probably the most important parts of the book are concerned with books that Deutsch brought out in the wake of WWII, notably books about the Nazis. In these passages you get some idea of the fear that the war had inspired, and would continue to inspire in people who read about it. Sadly, a lot of that knowledge seems to be disappearing today and ugly trends are starting to emerge in some parts of the world that echo what had been though to have been obliterated forever.

One thing that strikes the reader of this book, at least it struck me, are the sometimes intimate relationships that publishers have with the authors they work with to bring out new books. Athill goes into some detail, for example, about the mental health problems that Jean Rhys and Alfred Chester, two authors that Deutsch handled, exhibited, and the types of interactions that Athill was obliged to have with them. In the case of Rhys, this took the form of visiting her in hospital and even visiting her home in Devon where she lived alone and in a penurious state. In the case of Chester, an American, it was delusional behaviour that Athill was unequipped (this was in the 1960s) to deal with. In these sorts of situations an editor takes on roles other than the merely professional one, the one that involves helping to get a text ready to print. He or she becomes a confidant, a nurse, a source of emergency funds, a friend, and a bulwark against adversity.

And you get to see different facets of Athill’s own character in the book, too. As a person Athill reminds me of someone like Stella Rimington, the former MI5 head who turned novelist, or the novelist Kate Atkinson (whose novel, ‘Transcription’ I reviewed on the blog on 14 September last year). Athill is one of those no-nonsense Englishwomen who lived through times that are now remembered in terms of the pop songs that they gave rise to rather than in terms that people alive at the time would think to be truly representative of their era.

In this book you can also find hints about novelists who used to be acclaimed but who have now fallen out of favour with the public and with critics. This sort of decline is perhaps inevitable but Athill’s reminders are certainly things that I will be following up on in future.

Book review: The Shepherd’s Life, James Rebanks (2015)

This memoir also contains a potted family history that stretches further back into a kind of ersatz history of sheep farming in the Lake District, which is located in the north of England. Very early on, Rebanks positions himself in contradistinction to William Wordsworth, the first-generation Romantic poet who made this part of the world famous in his writings, and especially in his poetry. I found it hard to see what problem Rebanks might have with what Wordsworth did especially considering the parallel trajectories the two men’s lives took. Both were born in the area and then went on to one of the UK’s old sandstone universities (Wordsworth to Cambridge, Rebanks to Oxford). Rebanks doesn’t see this kind of connection or, if he does see it, he doesn’t say anything about it.

Wordsworth’s descriptions of a farmer handling a sheep dog in the 1805 version of his autobiographical poem ‘The Prelude’ are possibly the first time that such a feat had even been attempted in any literary production in any country. I certainly cannot remember reading anything similar by anyone else that precedes that passage. Its existence is testament to Wordsworth’s deep and abiding connection to his native region, and his understanding of the people who, still today, inhabit it.

The niggling resentment that Rebanks feels about his famous predecessor (who he curiously calls a “dead white man”, borrowing a rhetorical trope from the language of the metropolitan progressives he elsewhere positions himself at odds with) seems to have been part of the author’s life from the days of his earliest memories. When he was 13 and still at school, Rebanks says he felt his teachers’ scorn for the farming life and admits that it is difficult for him to remember if he felt resentment at that time, but he certainly felt it when he decided to sit down and write his book. In fact resentment about perceptions that people who come from outside the local community have about farmers seems to be a kind of leitmotif in the work, stemming from its importance for the way that the author thinks about himself. Resentment as identity politics, if you like.

One thing that is remarkable at the outset is that Rebanks is often not as good at explaining things as he thinks he is, or as his editors and readers have told him he is. The economics of sheep farming is explained but a novice will still struggle to understand its intricacies having read the passages in question. You are on surer ground where he explains the art of making hay. So the quality of the work is patchy just as the author himself is a deeply flawed, and very human, character in his own production.

I’ve read another book by a farmer, ‘The Cow Book’ by John Connell, which came out in 2018 (it was reviewed on this blog on 8 September of that year). Connell, like Rebanks, puts much stock in the longevity of animal husbandry, in Connell’s case in a part of Ireland, and there is a narrow kind of cultural exceptionalism that creeps in in both works to muddy the waters with a certain kind of – you guessed it – resentment.

Farmers declaring the legitimacy of their industry based on how long their forefathers have been doing it seems like a perfectly natural reaction in the face of sometimes noisy and usually misguided attacks that metropolitan progressives periodically launch in the direction of people living in rural communities, but it’s not exactly endearing. Rebanks ended up being, in my mind, a prickly cove.

Book review: Saltwater, Cathy McLennan (2016)

It’s really terribly sad that this brilliant memoir has not been more widely acknowledged for what it so evidently achieves. For my part, I came across the name purely by chance and had not seen it, for example, spoken of on TV. I think the mention I saw was on social media somewhere.

Nonfiction is usually less loudly applauded than fiction, but the fictional aspects of this account of part of the life of a lawyer working for the Townsville and Districts Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Corporation for Legal Aid Services are so dramatic and compelling that the book truly deserves to be broadly consumed so that everyone can better understand the kinds of things that are happening in remote communities. It’s easy to criticise TV personalities for being “racist” but when you come face to face in a book of this nature with the realities on the ground in such places you understand that comments made by Kerri-Anne Kennerley were well-founded in fact.

McLennan is now a magistrate and it is clear from reading this account that her feelings of responsibility toward the people living in the communities she worked for grew deep. When her partner, Michael, decides to relocate south to Brisbane for work (he is a journalist) she refuses to go with him and instead stays to help people she has grown to love and respect.

The cases McLennan takes on are often desperately sad. One of them has at its centre an 11-year-old girl named Olivia whose mother had abused alcohol during her pregnancy. The effects of that indulgence meant that Olivia never really grew properly and had the appearance at 11 of a five-year-old. And she compulsively steals things from people’s houses, which attracts the ire of the community. Her mother eventually promises to get off the grog but Olivia is confronted by a magistrate who requires her to live on Palm Island, where she is gang raped by men she has been sent by other girls to get drugs and alcohol from. In the end, Olivia’s mother gets the girl back to Townsville after a story is leaked to the local newspaper and the police refuse to arrest her for breaking her bail conditions.

This is a kind of victory but it’s an empty one because the damage had been done long before. Olivia’s father had beaten her mother and the poor woman relies on the state for support, although this is probably the least of her worries. Other cases engage McLennan just as intensely. There is the case that opens the book of four boys who are charged by the police with murder after they arrest them while they are driving the car of a man who had been beaten to death. This case is a thread that finds its way through the whole book and the court case held to decide the guilt or innocence of the boys comes right at the end of it.

McLennan when she first encounters the case of the four boys is a new employee just out of university but she matures into the role she has been given and in the end is forced to hand over the defence of the boys to others due to a conflict of interest. Several of the boys tell her the truth of what happened on the night in question and she must give the job of being their advocate to others. I won’t spoil the suspense for those who want to read this book, so you will have to buy it if you want to find out what happens to Malachi and his confederates. Because of professional privilege some details in this account have been changed, such as the names of some of the people.

The narrative apparatus employed to keep the reader interested in this book is pretty fair given that the author trained as a lawyer. Lawyers spend all their time working with words, so it is not entirely surprising to come across a member of the profession with a love of the apt phrase and the occasional bit of colour, someone who can give immediacy to situations that might, in other hands, have been too dry to make much sense of.

The secondary characters who work in McLennan’s office are just as well-drawn as are the clients whose cases make it into the book. McLennan does her level best to draw you into the story using the types of fictional techniques that make reading novels so enjoyable, although at times the mechanics of the work are somewhat exposed. In general, the author has done a proper job of writing a book that will be easy to read and engaging and she should be commended for the effort required to get everything down on paper after so much time had already passed.

Book review: Red Azalea, Anchee Min (1994)

For this memoir and for her other books the author uses her given name first and her family name last, in opposition to common Chinese practice. It would be an understatement to say that the events in this book are dramatic, but you have to start somewhere and with a work as compelling as this one you have to give credit where it’s due or else you can appear as if you have misunderstood the point of the exercise. On the other hand, every Chinese family has stories to tell of the bad years and there is no reason why Min’s story needs to be unduly celebrated. So the critic is, if you like, faced with something of a dilemma.

Min is a clever writer however and the task of ascribing talent is easily completed. Her story is told often in very short sentences that serve to heighten the suspense the reader feels at different points in the narrative. There is a breathless, urgent quality to the tale that makes it especially compelling.

The story takes the reader initially out of Shanghai, where Min was born into an average family. Her parents had several children and Min is sent to a collective farm named Red Fire Farm when she is a teenager. The story of how she survives on the farm take form around the character of Yan, who runs the operation, and the second-in-command, Lu, who wants more power and influence. Min and Yan become lovers but one day as she is in the fields, Min is questioned by some visiting dignitaries and she is given a place at a film academy, so she goes back to Shanghai to live.

Min is given the task of preparing for an important role: the lead of an opera titled ‘Red Azalea’ that has been commissioned by Chairman Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. One of the teachers takes a liking to another young woman, named Cheering Spear, who is also being considered for the role, and Min is outperformed at an audition. She is then given the job of set clerk (continuity) and secretly spends time smoking cigarettes in an empty room where she licks her wounds. There, one day, she is spoken to by a man who turns out to be the Supervisor, the man in charge of the production. They become friends and eventually Cheering Spear is replaced in the lead role by an exultant Min, who visits the Supervisor’s lavish residence in Beijing and is given the task of perfecting the lines she must speak in order to play it.

This gives you the bare outline of the plot, something that is quite unequal to conveying the nature of the work at hand. Min spends a lot of time talking about desire and about love and it is in the context of such feelings that her own feelings about her homeland must be interpreted. The long scene that takes place at her parent’s house, when Yan visits so that she can be alone with her lover, who runs a collective farm near Red Fire Farm, is gloriously rendered in all of its details so that you can understand the feelings that Min has for Yan in the light of her new relationship. In fact, the relationship with Yan lies at the core of the drama in so many ways.

One day, while she is still working at the academy, Min goes back to Red Fire Farm to visit Yan because she misses her. She knows that if anyone from the academy found out about her visit, she would be forced to explain herself and her situation might worsen. But she is compelled by loyalty to go back and see Yan in all the pathos of her reduced circumstances, reduced because of the circumstances that accompanied Min’s leaving the farm for the big city. But without such details the book would make no sense. In fact, there would be very little to say if Min and Yan had not been so close.

Min’s relationship with the enigmatic Supervisor also draws nourishment from Min’s relationship with Yan, and she tells him about it one night in a park where they are surrounded by other furtive Shanghai lovers trying to find some privacy in the strict moral environment the Party enforced on the people it governed.

The Party is a silent force at the core of the drama, and although Min must come to terms with it in many ways up to the point where she finally leaves the country to settle in the US, part of her remains to the end, to some degree, unsullied by the idiotic logic of the perverse calculus imposed on people in China at the time by Party policies and agendas and by the unworldly vagaries of Mao’s seemingly endless dicta. Under such conditions, people’s legitimate desires and aspirations were perverted and channelled into bizarre behaviour that on the face of it as expressed in this book has the appearance of a kind of psychopathy.