Take two: The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, F Scott Fitzgerald (1958)

The publication date shown above is for the Bodleigh Head collection, and isn’t the original publication date for these stories, which all came out originally in the 20s and 30s. I’m not sure when this Penguin book came into my possession but it has “$8” written in pencil on the first page. On the same page is a signature with the year “1972” written in the same hand, so that’s when the original owner got it.

I took this photo in the living room and in the background are a number of items. The painting was given to me and the linocut above it was framed when I lived in Maroochydore. It shows a boat and is one I did when I was about 20 years old. The ceramic camera on the entertainment cabinet is by Alan Constable. 

A camera is a curious device as the name derives from the Latin word for “room”. A camera uses a closed-off space in order to function. Fitzgerald’s ultimate demise puts him, to a degree, in a closed space. A casket is closed, and since I don’t believe in the soul once you’re dead it means you have no way to communicate with the living. Unless you’re a writer. This book offers the reader some puzzles, which I talk about in my Patreon review. Subscribe if you want to learn more. 

Take two: Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower (2009)

 I bought this at Vinnies for $3, but when this small miracle happened is a mystery to me for my sins. The sticker is still on the spine, “Sold As Is” – though what that means I have no idea. I guess there’s no guarantee, with books from Vinnies, that every page will be in place so you can successfully and uninhibited get to the end.

I took this photo with some small watercolours by Zuza Zochowski in the background. The paintings hang in my living room behind the couch and I can see them when I come into the room from the kitchen, where I make pots of tea to drink in between reading or watching the news on TV. If you want to read a full review, see my Patreon. I really don’t know if the author of this book is still alive. He seems to have had one successful publication but apparently his Facebook account has been inactive since 2013. The mysteries multiply … 

Take two: Best New Singaporean Short Stories, Volume 3, ed Cyril Wong (2017)

I bought this curious book at the 2MBS FM book bazaar but before that it’d earlier been bought at Kinokuniya’s in the Sydney CBD several years ago. The sticker on the back o0f the book tells me it was bought there sometime in or after January 2018. I haven’t been to Kinokuniya for a good long time, probably at least a year now, but normally they carry unusual things like this. 

As any good independent bookseller does. Not all of the stories in this collection are equally good but for a full book review, see my Patreon. 

I’ve taken a photo of the book’s cover in front of Dick Watkins’ ‘Untitled Drawing 07’, a favourite red-and-blue painting of mine that I chose on this occasion to feature on account of the colours. The book’s cover is a nice shade of blue. The mounting board used for framing the painting was something I chose. 

Take two: The Mansions of Bedlam, Gerard Windsor (2000)

For a full review, see my Patreon. I keep plugging away at this appeal having convinced myself of the value of what I write. If nobody values my reviews apart from myself I’d grow down instead of up, and I dream of the sun sometimes. If you can spare a few coins each month to support my writing, all the better. If you cannot, then that’s sad too. 

I took this photo in front of a sketch mum made of some of the participants in a sort of hybrid vacation and study tour of Oxford that she and dad did in the 90s, a time when I was struggling with work commitments and with the demands of a young family. On the day I started reading this book I met a man – who I know to be Catholic because he told me his uncle was a papal knight – on account of some coins I wanted to sell that had come to me as part of my patrimony. I was paid in cash, the last time I ever got anything from dad being when, in payment for some painting work I did on the interior of an apartment he owned in Elizabeth Bay, I was gifted mum’s green Toyota Corolla station wagon. I was very young and thought it generous but with the years I came to understand how miserly my father was, so keeping coins in a bank’s safety deposit box summed up the man.

Two Peruvian short stories

Links to these two excellent short stories arrived in my socials earlier this month and, immediately intrigued, I wanted to know more about the authors as it’s quite rare to find translations of Latin American literature here. Most of the books I review on Patreon are British, American or Australian. 

Investing time in these two tales was easy as they’re very short, Gunther Silva’s Luminous Fall’ and Pedro Novoa’s ‘The Dive’ each coming in at about 1000 words. 

Here’s a picture of Gunter Silva (left) and Pedro Novoa at the 2016 Trujillo Book Fair. 

Novoa died this year and belonged to the same generation as Silva, with the two men starting to publish in Lima in 2012. Pedro was from a poor family and while, for three years, he was a sailor in the Peruvian Navy learned to read detective and erotic novels, then decided to go out into the civilian world and become a writer. He left the military and got a place at university to study education. Gunter is from the jungle of Peru, comes from a middle-class background, studied law in Peru, then arts and humanities and a MFA in England.

It takes less than five minutes to read one of their wonderful stories. These very short devices of sentiment and yearning are unforgettable, containing the bare seeds of violence. It’s remarkable that they both turn on a hinge featuring rapid descent. Danger waits beside the door behind which these authors sit writing.

-------------------

I recently had a Muslim guy come over to buy books. I’ve been selling things in my collection in order to empty my bookcases (I have 13 in the house on four floors) and he was especially interested in nonfiction. He quickly took a book by Edward Said that I didn’t need. ‘Luminous Fall’ outlines a political settlement that exists in the shadow of the colonial project but it’s unconventional in a way that Said is now mainstream. In ‘The Dive’ the relations between the different people in the family of the diver are not crystal clear, on the other hand, so where in Silva’s story you can see the struggle for equality in a bare outline like a silhouette – one of those card cutouts you buy for children – in Novoa’s story the reason for the grandmother’s return to Japan is not itemised. 

Perhaps Novoa’s story loses some definition due to this lacuna, but on the other hand its dreaminess is paradoxically an anchor for the reader. A hazy future similarly renders Silva’s story deeply compelling, although here you’re aware of the politics that motivate the various characters who populate the story. This is a story sitting like a herald behind headlines. Both stories are very entertaining and rich.

-------------------

We’re hard-wired to respond to stories. Where language is innate storytelling is a species behaviour. It’s the stories we tell ourselves that determine the quality of our leaders and the shape of the path that leads to the future. Short stories are often overlooked because they’re considered entry vehicles to the more serious business of novels, or because they’re thought to be lightweight and somehow insubstantial. Yet they lie like beacons between the sea of poetry and the continent of the novel. 

Like a beach where we can find refreshment after work or where, like refugees, we can finally come ashore.

-------------------

If you liked this review and got something useful out of it, the please subscribe (for a modest fee) to my Patreon. New reviews go up on this site every month at a rate that depends on my schedule. I can’t guarantee multiple reviews per month, but the rule is significantly more than one per month.

Take two: ‘Canadian Short Stories in English,’ ed. Margaret Atwood and Robert Weaver

For full review, see my Patreon.

An engrossing read somewhat spoiled by a conflicted sense of superiority, one no doubt resulting from the fact that Canadians are always mistaken for Americans. Alice Munro’s unpleasantly patronising tone with regard to Australia sits uneasily alongside the post-war sneer of Timothy Findley’s ‘The Duel in Cluny Park’ – which is arguably the better product. Despite a few hiccups, the quality is pretty solid throughout, so worth a read if you have time to spare for a bit of culture-surfing. What makes a Canadian? Some clues lie within.

Take two: ‘Hybrids: Stories of Greek Australia,’ Nikos Athanasou

For full review, please see my Patreon. 

This collection of short stories helps the reader of the 21st century to understand the not-so-distant past. Reaching back to the time just after WWII, and encompassing other years as well, this book has a strikingly modern title. Who’d have thought a medical specialist with a penchant for writing would, in 1995, come up with a title so modern? Thoroughly enjoyable read and well worth the effort to dig it up on AbeBooks. Must be out of print.

Book review: Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing, Robert Dessaix, ed (1993)

I bought this near the end of this year in a Nowra second-hand bookstore.

This book could never be published in this form today. Like David Malouf’s ‘Antipodes’ which came out in 1985, explicit paedophilia makes Dessaix’s book completely incompatible with 21st century mores and laws. I do not think that he could have predicted the way that attitudes toward sexuality developed as the millennium turned and information began to flow out of the murky recesses of various churches and from the remoter regions of the internet.

Despite such misgivings, Dessaix’s book is more than just worth reading today, and should remind us of the recent – and not-so-recent – past and of the burden that that past still places upon people living. Because of certain biases implanted in religious codes by certain early Fathers many are forced to deal with a legacy of unwarranted shame but reading some of the stories in this book it’s clear how far we’ve come. The generally censorious attitude, with respect to sexuality and gender, of the generation that came before the Boomers – the latter of whom doing more than any generation since the 19th century to renovate morality – are now, for the main, buried in the fringes (as the marriage equality plebiscite showed) or else in the pages of books like this one. 

If anything should remind us of what is right, it’s the pieces – poems, extracts from novels, short stories – in this book. Where one injustice was so burdensome it’s hardly surprising that other levels of propriety should be questioned, even though, in the end, such avenues turned into dead ends. What we see as logical now was less so at a time because, as Dennis Altman explains in The Comfort of Men (1993), the counterculture was, itself, emergent:

[Ted] was a keen swimmer, played squash, still something of a novelty in the early 1960s, belonged to an amateur dramatic society, went bushwalking and even to local chamber music concerts. People like Ted now go to cafes rather than pubs, watch home videos rather than join societies, and buy take-away food or go to restaurants, of which there were then very few. Apart from the hotel dining rooms, there existed several coffee lounges, of which Helen’s was the most genteel, and two Chinese restaurants, one of them in the suburbs. Even for those who, like Ted, lived alone, eating out was something regarded as a special occasion, rather than, as is now the case, taken for granted.

The problem with the novel from which the above extract was taken is that Gerald – who is in love with Ted (but who is not the narrator) – met Ted when he (Gerald) was a schoolboy cruising for cash after classes ended for the day. Elizabeth Jolley toys with similar ideas in her novel Miss Peabody’s Inheritance (1983), from which there’s also an extract here. The boundaries exposed by the narratives start to break down but those who take the time to pick up Dessaix’s book and spend time with it will see sections of society at the roots of the counterculture that are today described in news reports. 

The work of such writers as Sumner Locke Eliott, Elizabeth Jolley, Mary Fallon, Rae Desmond Jones, and Jenny Pausacker allow us to reach, in our imaginations, back into history. Just as the 1960s were “historically” relevant in the 1990s (when Dessaix’s book was published), nowadays the 1990s are similarly grounded as an artefact of memory, something to be dissected and appraised according to contemporary standards, not to be emulated blindly as being somehow being more “authentic” than us. In the straightjacket of space-time fictional characters are Houdini figures, material for the stories the destiny of which is to become passports for a new generation.

Book review: East, West, Salman Rushdie (1994)

This knock-you-off-your-feet collection of short stories was picked up at an op-shop for $2, proving the rule that you cannot judge a book by the sticker price. It’s the only book of short stories I’d read since April this year, so was a breath of fresh air on two counts. The jacket is surprising too, and seems to me to be distinctly modern, with the naïve style reminding me of similar works by Australian Aboriginal artists.

Each story has its own style and so the fictional process is as much at issue as any notion of the Other that Rushdie successfully imports into his creations. In fact, the striking differences that take you from one world to the next are so severe that it is as though you were reading productions of a range of different pens. 

With aplomb, Rushdie manages to pull off each sally, never shrinking from a challenge and always delivering meaning as well as pleasure. What a find! Surely the best thing by this author I’ve ever read. In fact, it seems a shame that Rushdie decided to spend more time writing novels, if this level of quality is available in the shorter form.

Short stories are, unfortunately, discounted by readers and this can lead good short story writers to transfer their energies to the longer form. In Australia, two authors who have achieved acclaim in the short form and who then went on to try novels are Cate Kennedy (not brilliant novels but exceedingly good short stories) and Melanie Cheng (wonderful short stories; I haven’t read her recent novel). 

Rushdie’s mercurial temperament – something that made him infamous with some parts of the global community – might in fact be the thing that allowed him to write such brilliant short stories for ‘East, West’. He likes variety and doesn’t like to be tied down to convention. In fact he finds himself at home in both hemispheres, and this is a source of charm for the reader. A writer of the future …

Book review: Description of a Struggle: The Picador Book of Contemporary East European Prose, ed Michael March (1994)

This book comprises mainly short stories, but includes an assemblage of occasional prose and verse, as well as a piece of literary journalism (and one short story ironically subtitled ‘A Novel’). The contents are so varied as to belie the precision of the title. Prose it is, but the picture that emerges is saturated with complexity and nuance, though not all stories are equal in quality. In his introduction, Czech novelist Ivan Klima backgrounds the choices:

This anthology shows how writers ‘inside’ were generally resistant to a bipolar vision. Their world is not orverrun by corrupt Party secretaries, members of the secret police, or unwavering dissidents: it is full of ordinary people, loving and hating each other, committing rape, suffering, dying, waging pointless wars; here (as everywhere) trees blossom in spring, sons love their mothers, husbands long for a mistress; here (as everywhere else in the world) there are rogues, saints, eccentrics and lunatics, but most people have their ordinary joys and worries, prepare weddings or pig-slaughterings, some get drunk, others have higher aspirations, seeing that even in situations outwardly lacking in liberty those who try may find a good deal of freedom, while others go through life as a witness observing the strange theatrical spectacle offered by an existence full of paradoxes.

While the struggle was real and many people got out and lived elsewhere, or else tried to get out, the word “description” barely assists a curious person, looking for something to read, to grasp the nature of the range of things in this collection. Stories, some of them, so strange and beautiful that you are not sure if you are dreaming or if you are awake. Self-referential, humorous, tragic and funny. A kaleidoscope of ways of seeing and understanding reality, as diverse and challenging as anything that might have been published in a country in the world. But published, of course, only after the Iron Curtain had come crashing down.

If you consider the date of this collection you must think how difficult it would be, now, to publish a book with the same title. In 1989 the Berlin Wall was breached and the Soviet Union, having lost the Cold War, made its unsteady way toward adopting a new name and a market economy. But in 1994 no-one could have anticipated how Eastern Europe would look after a generation had elapsed. If you had asked the editor of this collection about such things he might have said that democracy would lead to a flourishing polis in any of the countries where lived the writers – most of them still, in 2020, still alive – with works published in this book. March could never have anticipated that the democratic deficit that is visible in so many Eastern European countries is echoed in other parts of the world notably, since 2016, in the United States of America.

But because the stories in the book are, many of them, so good, we can forgive the book’s prescriptive title, though “description of a struggle” might better have just been left off the dustjacket with its photograph taken on a street in Prague in 1968. The nearest approximation to the truth seems to have presented itself to the book’s producers as the best candidate. Whose struggle does the title refer to? To Eastern Europeans’ struggle? To the Cold War between the West and the USSR? To the struggle of the individual to find and maintain a place in the world, a struggle common to people wherever they live? To our struggle to grasp the nature of reality itself? To all of these things?

Another struggle is the one needed to get these authors’ work recognised on the international stage. Only one name had I come across before, that being Ismail Kadare, from Albania, whose short story ‘The Concert’ is here. It deals with Chairman Mao and is satirical, but I wouldn’t say that it’s the best of the bunch. The book’s diversity is overwhelming but Estonian writer Viivi Luik’s short story ‘The Beauty of History’ seems a suitable stand-in for the signification embodied in the title. Its use of code words and cyphers progresses, as this three-page story completes, into a cryptic meditation on a police state during a cold war.

Surprisingly, trees feature in a significant number of stories, such as Laszlo Marton’s lovely ‘The Sunken Apple Tree’, a family tale with magical elements, that was translated from the Hungarian. It tells of a child who died. In Hanna Krall’s ‘Retina’, translated from the Polish, there is a village near “dark green wooded hills”; this piece of literary journalism (or, possibly, fact-based fiction) deals with the Red Army Faction, a German terror group. In Drago Jancar’s ‘Repetition’, which was translated from the Slovenian, a group of armed men, possibly partisans, comes across a village where, “The glimmer of early morning light penetrated through the branches and trunks of trees, blinding the men of the night.” What they find in the village is disturbing and seems to presage disaster.

There are woods and trees also in Rein Tootmaa’s ‘We Gaze Up into the Tops of the Spruce Trees’, which was translated from the Estonian. It is a kind of love story, or a chapter from a tale of love, but it is also another thing entirely, full of longing and a sense of the impossibility of happiness. In Romanian author Mircea Cartarescu’s ‘The Dream’ you are also not quite sure what is real and what is imagined by the narrator. Trees appear in this story as well:

That night I dreamt of a key which someone had left in the forest. I had just descended a gentle slope into a dell where the beeches had grown sparse and slender, and the black soil between their trunks was dappled with bright white and yellow patterns of light. The sun shone dazzling through the branches swaying in a green breeze. The trees’ bark was peeling off and it gave forth a bitter tanic fragrance. A mist, caused not by vapour but by ennui and nostalgia, was coolly spilling into the eternal morning.

Jurga Ivanauskaite’s ‘Two Stories about Suicide’, translated from the Lithuanian, mingles sadness and humour to create a gentle sense of pathos. The second of these stories, ‘Danguole L. (1960-87)’ involves a young woman on a ship who invites a stranger into her cabin. It turns out they have met before, though he remains faceless. The uncanny is also there in Teodor Laco’s fairy tale ‘The Pain of a Distant Winter’, translated from the Romanian, which is about a child and his mother in a forest. Family also features in Czech writer Eda Kriseova’s haunting ‘The Unborn’, which has strong supernatural elements and which has at its core a planned child.

Another Czech story has a husband and wife at the centre of the narrative. This is Alexandra Berkova’s ‘He wakes Up’, which seems to be taken from life and recounts the events in a man’s day. Her story is wryly funny. Humour is found in a number of stories, including Jerzy Pilch’s ‘The Register of Adulteresses’, which is set inside a house and which was translated from the Polish. ‘Bohumil Hrabal’s ‘The Pink Scarf’ is a whimsical story set at the time of the uprising in Prague, and centres on a young man who, at a wedding, appears to wear a snake as a scarf. In ‘Down the Danube’ by Peter Esterhazy, a Hungarian man is travelling and giving an ironic account of his journey. Slovakian writer Rudolf Sloboda’s ‘The White Dog’ is also full of laughter and sadness. Sometimes the humour is acerbic or dark; a pig takes centre stage in Romanian author George Cusnarencu’s ‘The War’.

Metafictional elements are strong in Peter Nadas’ ‘Vivisection’, a Hungarian tale focalised through the eyes of an art student who is attending a drawing class. The story asks us to think about how reality is constructed, and questions the validity of the authorial position. The author, born in 1942, worked for a time as a journalist. In ‘The Secret of my Youth’, translated from the Albanian, Mimoza Ahmeti uses metafictional elements to interrogate both the narrative process, the state of the world behind the Iron Curtain, and the promise of happiness offered by countries in the West. Ahmeti’s story reminded me of Ivanauskaite’s contribution. A Hungarian, Lajos Grendel, who was born in 1948 and published his first novel in 1979, uses, in ‘The Contents of Suitcases’, the idea of the novel to question the very likelihood of existence. This stunning story which, like Nadas’, could have been written in any country in the world, was dedicated to Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges.

Other global themes appear, such as anti-Semitism in Jan Johanides’ ‘Memorial to Don Giovanni’, which was translated from the Slovakian. Some stories have different institutions at their core, such as Romanian author Ana Blandiana’s ‘The Open Window’, which is set in a prison and which avails itself of magic, or Piotr Szewc’s ‘Annihilation’, which recounts the adventures of two policemen out one night on the streets of a Polish town. In ‘Mina’, a story by writer and journalist Pawel Huelle, the subject is madness and a Polish mental asylum sits at the centre of the narrative. This is a lovely story full of longing and regret. In Czech writer Ondrej Neff a librarian is entranced by dust and his behaviour confuses villagers.

A sense of sadness also pervades Svetlana Vasilieva’s ‘The Time of Peonies’, though there is laughter in this story as well. It was translated from the Russian and is like an allegory; it uses tropes common to depictions of the USSR, such as hoarding and kleptomania. At the centre of the drama, appropriately, is a policeman. Appropriate because this list started with a story about codes and espionage, or perhaps codes and terrorism.

What is certain is that the long shadow of Russia still extends over the nations in which these 22 writers appeared in order to give us their unique and incomparable gifts. It’s probably worth mentioning that the stories picked out for notice here – and there were many stories I didn’t finish reading – mostly have indeterminate endings. Nothing wrong with that, of course, as good short stories often seem like a light switch has been flicked suddenly, illuminating for an instant an otherwise dark room. For that instant you can make out figures moving across the floor or a man sitting at a table talking on the telephone (as in Jerzy Pilch’s story). Then, just as suddenly, the switch is snapped off and the room again goes black. Night, light, night. Like life itself.

Book review: Picador ‘Highlights No. One’ (1995)

Most of these excerpts and short pieces of fiction and nonfiction were published in various places in 1994 and -95. The collection dates from 1995 as a book.

The quality is mixed, with standouts being short stories by Lily Brett (‘Just like That’) and Kate Grenville (‘Dark Places’), and really good excerpts from novels by Rod Jones (‘Billy Sunday’) and by Susan Power (‘The Grass Dancer’). I didn’t like the nonfiction for the most part and didn’t read the excerpt from Helen Garner’s ‘The First Stone’ because I had read the whole book on an earlier occasion.

Book review: Antipodes, David Malouf (1985)

This collection of short stories feels dated. Some of the issues it deals with – such as Australia’s recent establishment and its belonging to the “New World” – are not much talked about now, in the 21st century. We are much more confident about who we are than Malouf and those of his generation were, once. We don’t need bolstering in our self-esteem. We know what we can do and how much our polity is worth. The cultural cringe is gone.

Another problem you have with these stories is the determination of the author to create high culture. There is a languor about the prose, and which is betrayed by the long, multi-clause sentences that carry the plots forward and that render the characters. You get impatient with each list of things that the author has decided is necessary to create the illusion of life on the printed page. I wasn’t overly impressed by this kind of dynamic and wished that things would move a bit faster. I am used, now, to the quicker pace of prose that is published in both the mainstream and for literary fiction.

The way the theme of teenage sexuality is explored, furthermore, in the first story in this collection, which is titled ‘Southern Skies’, would be impossible to publish now, in the years following the hundreds of cases of child sexual abuse that we have been witness to over the past 15 years or so. In fact, such a story could not even be written now by an author with any self-respect.

The cover design is curious and I wonder if the two stars to the left of the Southern Cross represent the US and Europe. Such a reading would make sense in the light of the book’s contents. This copy has been in my library for a long time and I hadn’t read it before now, although I skipped the last few stories. 

If you give this book a chance it is worth it to persist just so that you can see how much fiction in Australia has changed in a generation. In his heyday Malouf was considered very classy but I don’t think many people read him now.

Book review: Where the Jackals Howl, Amos Oz (1980)

Originally published in Hebrew in 1965, this is the author’s first published work of fiction and it is ravishingly good on that account. Oz died in 2018 and I have written about his work before but it always strikes me, when I read his prose, how competent he was at what he did. I can’t understand why he never got the Nobel.

This collection of stories derives for its inspiration from the desert, where Oz lived for part of his life on a kibbutz. The jackal follows the reader from one story to the next, popping up like a refrain to enliven your experience. And you can feel the author’s youth in these stories – he was about 26 at the time they were first published in his native tongue – and there furthermore is a kind of ellipsis in some of them, a gap where things seem to happen outside the reader’s sight. Violence is never far from the surface and the thing that is left out is usually some form of extreme action that serves to turn the narrative in a new direction.

Having spent some time in Israel and in other Middle Eastern countries, I intuitively recognised the characters that Oz creates. For me, reading this book at this time, it was like returning to a place I had already been to.

The last story in this collection – ‘Upon this Evil Earth’ – is different from the others as it is not set in a modern Israel, rather, instead, it is a kind of parable set in a mythical past. It is stupendous, however, a great shining jewel of a story ..

My copy of the book is part of an edition brought out by Vintage in 2005, and I bought it from the Co-op Bookshop.

Book review: The House of Youssef, Yumna Kassab (2019)

This collection of short stories is separated into four parts. The first section is a series of stories mainly about young people and what they think. The second section is a series of stories about a family named Youssef (hence the title of the collection).

The third part is the first of two long narratives, this one focalised through the monologue of a father who is a migrant from Lebanon. He is speaking directly to the reader, as though the two were sitting face to face in a room. The fourth section is the monologue of a mother of about the same age as the man whose story occupies the third section; she is talking to one of her daughters. The man and the woman who focalise the narratives in these two sections seem to be husband and wife.

This is a wonderful book that is full of rare insights into a way of life that will be familiar to so many Australians. The tug of home and the ways of the old world compete with the opportunities offered by the new world, and with the ways it uses to organise the lives of the people who live in its communities. The normal problems that characterise relations between parents and their children are influenced by the demands of two, separate, cultures: two homelands.

As with all good fiction, you get a nuanced view of the world the author creates. While the demands made by a pluralistic Australian community are strong for the children, and sometimes rub the parents up the wrong way, the wisdom that is available from obeying the precepts of the foreign way of life – for example through frugality and through the deliberate exercise of restraint as a consumer – are equally worthy. Neither one way or the other offers answers to every single question; both deserve to be followed, each at different times.

I found so much here to think about and I put the Kindle down feeling replete. The way the book ends is perfectly fitting and lovely. I could have read twice as much and still have been entertained.

Book review: This Taste for Silence, Amanda O’Callaghan (2019)

I found three different kinds of short story in this wonderful collection. The first kind is almost like a prose-poem, barely two or three pages long and containing an embryo, or just the outlines, of a drama. There is a protagonist, as in ‘The Mohair Coat’, which is about a woman who travels back to England with a coat her dead mother had owned. Or, as in ‘The News’, a woman, who remains unnamed, who is at a party when something happens that is not described in any detail but that affects her deeply. The poetry is all in the language.

With the internet and social media, we have seen the emergence of short pieces of poetry or prose, sometimes in the form of a thread. On Twitter, a “thread” is a continuous narrative where a person responds to each tweet they post with a new one, making a kind of string where you can read each tweet in the sequence they were posted in. Threads can go for a long time or they can be short, but they are very common and can be used to deliver longer narratives to an audience.

And then there are even shorter “stories” in the form of memes, such as one that appeared in my feed on 29 September at 8am Sydney time when Lacey London, a British author with over 113,000 followers, tweeted, “In six words or fewer, write a story about this photo...” the tweet came with this image (see below). I responded, “Where’s the cradle …?” but the tweet had had over 1000 replies, so I was just one of many who thought the proposition fun.

While O’Callaghan’s very-short short stories are emblematic of a trend where people value brevity and concision, they are so good, and the language is so wonderful, that the example given above might appear a tad out-of-place. I’m not suggesting for a moment that O’Callaghan’s short stories are like cat memes. I include this example just to make a point about how, nowadays, we are trying out new types of writing as the new media percolate through society and help us to organise our lives.

The second kind of story in her collection is a longer piece that is a fully-fledged narrative containing a protagonist and secondary characters. There are a number of this type of story in the book. Once again, the language is deeply poetic and nuanced and lovely. 

One of the stories in this category is ‘New Skins’ about an elderly couple living in the suburbs of a city in Australia who are visited often by Vincent, the son, aged about 11 years, of the neighbours who live next door. Vincent likes to play with the couple’s dog, April. Des, the old man, is indulgent and his wife, Rosemary, has trouble sleeping. She is often up late at night and sometimes at such times notices the lights on in the house next door. She talks about it with Des but they do nothing, not wanting to intrude. Vincent’s father, Teddy, had been declared drowned after saving a girl who had gotten in trouble on a boat in a river. Then, one night when she is awake in her house, Rosemary realises something that would have eluded her during the day. 

As you read this type of story that O’Callaghan has devised, you are filled with pleasure, and it’s not only because of the language the narrative is cloaked in. As with the first type of story, it is also about the suspense. Always, you are trying to work out who is talking, the relationships between the characters, and the nature of the events that are taking place. Often crime is involved. There is hatred and fear, there is cowardice and evil. Within each story there are worlds and they ring true with a clarity that is rare.

The theme of cultural and political legacy and of ancient wrongs committed against indigenous people is touched on in two of the stories, in ‘A Widow’s Snow’ (the story that opens the collection), and in ‘The Memory Bones’. There is another theme, that of history itself, which emerges in the first of these stories (Roger, Maureen’s new beau, runs an antiques store) and in the third type of story in the collection. 

This third category of story in the collection has only one story in it. I have classified this story, titled ‘The Painting’, in this way because it is significantly longer than the stories I have talked about above. But it is also strongly self-referential or, to put it another way, it is metatextual. Coming at the end of the collection, it furthermore functions as a kind of punctuation mark for the whole, summing up the entirety of themes that the book retails in. 

It is about a man named Eddie. His mother dies – and this part of the story is particularly fine in its execution, the moment when life departs – and, as a result, he inherits a house. But Eddie’s mother also gives him a painting before she passes away. He takes the painting to Frank, his local pawnbroker in Brooklyn, and gets a feeling during the ensuing conversation – more of O’Callaghan’s clever writing here – that the thing is worth more money than he thought it had been before the conversation took place. So then he takes it to an art gallery, a place where he had tried, on an earlier occasion, to offload some old WWI medals that had been given posthumously to his great-uncle Ivan. The gallery owner, Walter, had not been interested in the medals and now, seeing the old painting, also declines to deal. Then things become strange when Eddie, one day sitting at home, with the painting hanging on the wall, sees something he had not seen before. 

This story is complicated by the existence of a sub-narrative, printed in italics, about the man who painted the work of art. I won’t spoil the story by telling anything more about it but it deals in an inventive way with our current (seeming) obsession with the past and with the way that we use the past to define who we are. We are, I think the author is suggesting, shackled to the past and may therefore never be entirely free. Perhaps, therefore, our taste for silence. We love our chains too much to take them off.

However strong the themes employed in this book are – and they are very strong – and however entertaining the plot of each story, it is the writing that stood out for me for its ability to adequately render the most ephemeral as well as the most concrete thing. The writing is both flexible and robust, comfortable and stimulating, and it is given the task of conveying profound truths.

While silence is often used to hide the past, ‘The Painting’ suggests that we are, nowadays, almost overwhelmed by the vestiges of history in one form or another. How to achieve authenticity, to deal fairly with each other, and to live in peace and harmony: such questions lie hidden within the matrices of ideas that emerge in O’Callaghan’s marvellous book. We must always remember – for otherwise we can repeat the mistakes of the past – but it is also important to forgive and to live with an open heart. Salvation is reached by negotiating a paradox.

Book review: Lucky Ticket, Joey Bui (2019)

I wonder how some might feel about a young, Harvard-educated Vietnamese-Australian woman writing about a Tanzanian temporary migrant working in the United Arab Emirates (‘Abu Dhabi Gently’), a Nepalese student whose photograph hangs in a Kathmandu exhibition put on by an American (‘Before the Lights Go Out’), or an Argentinian musician (‘Dinosaurs’).

Some might think cultural appropriation of this kind strikes a note that sounds off-key. For my part, I have no problem with anyone writing any type of characters they feel like, but for parts of the left this sort of thing elicits feelings verging on suspicion. The question being: is it authentic? Well these short stories, while reading, certainly felt authentic to me.

They are full of life and they are interesting but tonally they are somewhat uniform, even at their endings. This kind of plain writing makes you trust the author – she is not unwontedly spicing up her narratives for effect, you feel. But what the stories lack in the way of that characteristic punch you find terminating some writers’ short stories they make up for in other ways.

Bui is a competent chronicler of the migrant experience, and the majority of these stories are about Vietnamese living in Vietnam or else Vietnamese who have migrated to Australia. Cultural markers such as filial piety and a solid work ethic are offset by other aspects of these people’s lives, such as a love of beauty or the remains of trauma due to war and displacement.

As important as the protagonists are the secondary characters, such as the father in ‘Before the Lights Go Out’, the father in ‘Mekong Love’, or the mother in ‘I Just Want to Hear You Say It’, each of whom perform important roles in the stories they appear in. There is a range of different voices and these men and women – and children, too, sometimes – give the reader access to other ways of living and other systems of value. And Biu is clear-eyed about the lives of her creations, she doesn’t spare anyone from her critical intuition.

In publishing a collection like this Bui is aware of the kinds of debates that circulate in the public sphere about migration. When I was younger I was employed by the police and many of the people we investigated were Romanians involved in the drug trade but there was also a significant number of Vietnamese running such businesses as well. In Sydney, where I was doing that work, common in the records that we generated by doing car registration checks and from other sources were addresses in the suburb of Cabramatta – where many Vietnamese migrants lived.

That part of the Vietnamese-Australian experience is happily, now, ancient history and although many Vietnamese-Australian families still live in Cabramatta how they earn a living is, now, for the most part legal. So it is salutary to read a book like this one, a book filled with important stories that add to the stock of credit that Australia reaps as a result of its generous immigration policies. As for Bui, I suspect that she will become better-known in future as her work is more widely read.

Book review: The Angel Esmerelda, Don DeLillo (2011)

This collection of nine short stories was a revelation for me, although it’s possible that I had read something else by this author earlier in my life. For the life of me I couldn’t remember if I had done.

The stories here are not all of the same quality but that’s hardly surprising when you consider that the earliest of them, ‘Creation’, dates from 1979. The book is split into three sections and the stories are published in the order in which they were completed: 1979, 1983, 1988, 1988, 1994, 2002, 2009, 2010, 2011. Part three starts on page 103 and there are 211 pages in the book, so it comprises almost exactly half of the whole. It has four stories in it, the most of any of the sections.

The stories are good even from the earliest days but they get better and better with time. DeLillo is a careful craftsman and a deep thinker who uses minute observations about the world to give substance to his creations, which are stories however that, like many art-house movies, want a certain degree of forward movement. The denouement arrives quietly, in many cases, such as in ‘Hammer and Sickle’ (2010), ‘Midnight in Dostoyevsky’ (2009), or ‘Baader-Meinhof’ (2002).

In order to conserve a degree of brevity I’ll restrict my comments to these three stories as they appeared to me to be, of the ones I read, the best in the collection. I didn’t read the final story before writing this review.

‘Hammer and Sickle’ is about an inmate in a kind of low-security prison, who lives among men most of whom have been placed there due to financial crime. It’s not at any point clear what the protagonist, Jerold Bradway, did to deserve his incarceration but there are strong and compelling hints thrown out in the course of the story. Some of them are delivered by Jerold’s two daughters, Kate and Laurie, who have been compelled by their mother to put on a program on children’s TV in the episodes of which they talk about the financial crisis. Their mother had specifically told Jerold to watch the series of programs. The punchline is devastating and it comes well before the final paragraph, which contains a moment when Jerold contemplates himself in the world as he stands on the overpass of a motorway looking down at cars moving in the darkness. Jerold had told his roommate about his daughters and it’s not clear if this news spreads to the other residents of the camp but by the end of its run the program, which no-one had been interested in at first, draws a crowd to the TV room.

‘Midnight in Dostoyevsky’ is about two university students – Todd and Robby – who are studying at a small-town institution. One of their teachers, a man named Ilgauskas, who takes classes in logic (so the two young men are studying the humanities), becomes enmeshed in a fantasy that the two dream up on their walks around the town that concern a man in a parka (or anorak; they argue about what the correct word should be for the garment) who they see from time to time walking on the streets.

This story, like the other one already discussed, does a number of different things. One of these is to highlight something that I have often thought myself: that people are always telling themselves stories in order to make sense of the world around them. Todd and Robby try to understand their teacher and he becomes linked to the man in the parka through the agency of a girl named Jenna who met with Ilgauskas one day at the town’s diner. Ilgauskas told Jenna that he was always reading Dostoyevsky. Hence the old man becomes Ilgauskas’ father and they end up being Russian (although the name Ilgauskas is probably Lithuanian) in the minds of Robby and Todd.

‘Baader-Meinhof’ is another strange story that, again, has a certain heft and weight. It deals with a woman and a man who meet at a museum where there is an exhibition of artworks to do with the German terrorists whose names appear in the story’s title. There is a reticence about the way that the man and the woman talk and the matter of sex is not far from either of their thoughts, although how things turn out would not occur to anyone reading the story in its early pages. The matter of violence that is implicit in the history of the terrorists arises also in the relations between the two people, who eventually end up back at the woman’s studio apartment.

The degree of ambiguity that DeLillo includes in his stories and their sometimes vanishingly slight plots will mean that he will probably always remain an author prized by a minority. Unless he wins the Nobel Prize in Literature, of course, which is something a friend of mine thinks possible. In fact it was the recommendation in this form from this friend that led me to take this book down off the shelf of the op shop in Waverley where I saw it last week. Going by the strength of the stories in this collection, such an accolade seems deserved but, having said that much, not all Nobel winners turn out to be the best representatives of their era.

People who value reading and who aspire to think deeply about the world will gravitate to DeLillo. He’s not ever going to be mainstream, is my estimation of this work. It’s too complex, too difficult. One thing that did put me off about these stories is DeLillo’s tendency not to properly mark out the identities of people involved in the conversations that he includes in his writing. You often struggle, with his stories, to work out who is speaking because he just puts the quote, and mostly leaves out the marker to say which character is speaking. I wonder why he does this, it seems so unnecessary. It might be due to his belief, as with many American authors, that you have to concentrate on style more than on plot and character.

This continental bias goes back as far as Henry James and Ernest Hemingway. In many cases it leads to the production of brilliant literature (and the first and second stories discussed above most certainly contain nods to Nabokov) but in others it can lead to dead ends. DeLillo’s work is definitely not in this category.

Book review: The Tailors’ Cake, Noel Devaulx (1946)

Every now and again as a reviewer you come across something so strange and sui-generis that you find yourself looking for things to compare it to among the sister arts. In the case of this book, the closest thing I can think of to illustrate the nature of the short stories in this collection, which were written in the late 1930s and early 1940s, are the photographs of Eugene Atget, a Frenchman whose strange portraits of the places he lived in are so strikingly modern to our eyes even though many of them date from the beginning of the last century. There is also in this book an echo of Italo Calvino’s fabulism.

Each of the stories has a strong dramatic core but the structure that supports it in each case is often not very strong. Devaulx tends to peter out at the end in his narrations, and there is a distinct lack of force at the conclusion of each story that limits the reader’s enjoyment.

If there is anything beyond the magical qualities already mentioned that unites all the stories in this book it is the existence, near the surface of an otherwise bourgeois normalcy, of otherworldly forces, forces that embody something outlandish or evil or, in the case of the story that concludes the collection, something angelic. In one story, two people driving in the hills in a car have their way blocked by rocks and are forced to proceed on foot. They enter a township where the people don’t speak the same language as them but where they are shown the kind of hospitality that is due to travellers. In the morning they wake up and walk through the forest a bit further and come across the town they had been heading for in the first place. The strange town they had initially come across recedes from consciousness as though it had been part of a dream.

In another story a travelling salesman driving in the countryside comes across a large manor and he goes off in search of its occupants. There, inside the walls of the building, he sees many people seated silently around a table. Below, through a grating, he can see horrors and the existence of some infernal creature (the story is titled ‘The Vampire’) is hinted at, a being that demands regular sacrifices.

It is a shame that this author is not better-known in the Anglosphere. These are fine stories that have aged well and they give access to ways of thinking that belong to a time now well in the past. The poetic vision that animates the stories in this book is very strong and so the whole can serve to form a kind of link to a simpler time. The melding of magic and realism in the stories is, furthermore, something marvellous, hinting at things that would come alter in the century, and beyond that this book can be seen to form a legitimate part of the canon of speculative fiction. It will please readers of science fiction if they decide to give it a go.

Book review: Sultana’s Dream, Roquia Sakhawar Hussain (1905)

This little short story evidences the kind of abrupt machinery of one of those Medieval accounts that involve a dream about angels that a man (the writer) has after he has fallen asleep during the day. First he goes to sleep then he opens his eyes and he sees an angel and a conversation ensures. It is almost without adornment and artifice it is so simple and bald, like a freshly-boiled egg that you just have to peel in order to get the goodness out. The story is a standalone in the volume that contains it, and is not part of a collection of short stories.

In this story, a woman named Sultana falls asleep in her room and when she awakes she looks up at the stars. Then a woman who resembles a friend, named Sister Sara, appears to her and the two go out into the garden, where it is suddenly morning. Sister Sara takes her into a town, which she calls “Ladyland”, where there are no men in the streets. Sultana asks where they have gone.

Sister Sara tells Sultana that the men have all been sent to the zenana (the inner apartments of the houses, which in the subcontinent are where the women of the household traditionally spend their time). The two continue talking and Sultana learns that in Ladyland water is harvested from the atmosphere and power is provided by the sun. The men had been enticed into the zenana after a neighbouring nation tried to invade. The queen of Ladyland had deployed her scientists with their war devices, which deployed the power of the sun, and her enemies had been defeated. The men were then told that they should retire from the world, and they complied.

In the end, Sultana is awakened and returns to her routine life when the story suddenly ends. As in the beginning, where there is little narrative material to build up to the appearance of Sister Sara, material that might have given some context that might tell the reader about Sultana and her life, at the end of the story Sultana simply stops dreaming and the story closes. There are no subsequent episodes that might help the reader to understand the nature of Ladyland or the reason for the writer dreaming it up.

Nevertheless, this is a sweet tale that for the casual observer of Bangladesh (where Hussain lived, in the years before independence or partition) evokes a range of feelings linked to the status of women in that country and, indeed, in India as well. Feminists and nerds will get especial enjoyment from this strange item. The flying vehicle that Sister Sara assembles and then uses to transport Sultana and herself to an audience with the queen is characteristic of the kinds of ideas this short story retails in. The device reminded me of nothing quite so much as the winged personal transports that people use in Hayao Miyazaki’s 2004 film ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’.

Book review: Picnic in the Storm, Yukiko Motoya (2018)

This collection of short stories, which has been released in the US as ‘The Lonesome Bodybuilder’, is by an author who has won numerous prizes in Japan but I couldn’t see how that had honestly occurred. I was bored when I got most of the way through a story in the collection titled ‘An Exotic Marriage’. That was at about the 61-percent mark in the book. The story was long and meandering and didn’t appear to have any specific core idea to keep everything together. Eventually, it just lost all the impact it might have had and I gave up with it.

The shorter stories were better and I managed to read a few of these but I still didn’t see the appeal to the prize judges who have in the past read Motoya’s books with such evident pleasure. (There might seem to be something perverse about a Japanese person who aspires to gain critical acclaim, but all authors will, and do.)

There is here none of the intensity that you get with the poetic vision of Murakami although there are some supernatural elements in action in these stories. I felt reading this book something similar to what I had felt reading the work of Yoko Tawada, another Japanese female author, who is a novelist. In both cases there is a lack of strength in the conception of the ideas behind the work and a looseness in the structural framing of the narrative.

The subject matter of these stories is modern suburban Japan and there are attempts to fashion a sense of magic out of the mundane events that characterise most people’s lives in that country, but the execution fell far short of the promise offered by the acclaim the writer has earned in her native Japan.