I loved this group of what are described as literary essays, but I think of as reflections.
From Maturity:
Our culture has an implacable aversion to age
I loved this group of what are described as literary essays, but I think of as reflections.
From Maturity:
Our culture has an implacable aversion to age, something that goes far beyond its ugliness and infirmities, beyond the mere selfishness of those who have no time for declining parents, beyond the understandable vanity that would reverse hair loss or lift a drooping bosom, beyond the fear of death, even. People seem to accept that they have to die, but resent the idea of ageing. Yet the process is well under way. Already one has to be careful about what one eats. Already one loves young women without being in love with anyone in particular. Suddenly appetite is no longer quite part of me, or yes it is, but a potential enemy too. A scission is taking place. Do I have to decide what side to stay on? What is the way forward now? Throw oneself into appetite or renounce it. Stay in 'that country' or pack my bag against eventual departure? Where to? Sail the seas with Yeats and come 'to the holy city of Byzantium? City of art and intellect. Of hammered gold and gold enamelling. What kind of a trip would that be? Stay young, the bias of y culture tells me. Look around.
From Destiny:
In any even, you are beginning to get the picture. A life suppurating with unpleasant incident. A family where bygones are never bygones. Grudges, hatchets, corpses, are only buried the better to be dug up again. Decay seething with vitality.
At its nadir, according to google Ngram viewer, the use of the word 'rancour' has consistently declined more or less in a straight line between 1800 and 1980. What a pity, it expresses something important which has no substitute. I'm guessing that Parks may have single-handedly brought it back from five zeros after a decimal point to four. It's an important word in his thinking and writing. And no doubt, as one might garner from the previous short quote, about family, one could not possible comprehend Italian relationships without it. And so in this collection it even has its own essay. Bravo Tim Parks.
From Rancour:
That writing is a phenomemon often galvanised by anger is evident enough. How rancorous Shakespeare's plays are! How Hamlet raves and Lear rages! And Swift and Pope and Byron, and Dickens too in his way. Only those who do not understand what a central part such emotions play in life, would consider Eliot's description of The Waste Land as 'one long rhythmical grumble' reductive. What is not so clear is the nature of the writer's rancour, where it came from, what it is about. Could it be this matter is taboo?
One of the things about rancour that one doesn't find in a dictionary definition of it, is that it requires infinite energy. Parks has that, you can feel it in everything about his writing, how he does it, his choice of words, what he writes about. I hope he never loses that source. Maybe as long as he is in Italy, it is self-sustaining. ...more
Maybe I'm less crotchety at the moment, or maybe inflation has me in its grip. Maybe it's just because it's on my books I have lived through shelf. FoMaybe I'm less crotchety at the moment, or maybe inflation has me in its grip. Maybe it's just because it's on my books I have lived through shelf. For whatever reason, I'm giving this 4 stars and without wanting to damn Doug with faint praise, one of the things I admire about this novel is that it stays within its capabilities. A retired academic who has turned to fictional writing in his older age, he does not have a wealth of experience behind him. Indeed, I suspect he had to unlearn decades of academic-speak, and academic ways of teasing tiny data points.
I don't know if the fact that I did live through the period in which he sets his story makes me more, or less, able to objectively review this. The backdrop is the Vietnam war and its tragic impact on Australian youth, which he portrays through a group of university students in Adelaide. Although in this period, I was only a primary and early secondary school student, I was acutely aware of this period of dissension, protest and its impact on my parents' friends, some of whom went underground rather than accept being conscripted. The demonstrations were electrifying and served to prove the importance of grass roots action in relation to democracy.
Here also are the differences which would be called 'class' in the UK, but are less clear in Australia, with its egalitarian basis to society. That is particularly true of Adelaide, where Stardust and Golden is set. A tolerant and non-judgmental society was always the aim here and, not to say that the boys in the posh private schools weren't privileged and knew they were, but it was and is quite different from the UK. The relations between characters in the novel make this clear. Yet there was a class aspect to the nature of protest, which is explored here too.
And then, for those reading it who happen to be from Adelaide, they will find places and streets as they were in our childhood. Nizam's gets a mention, my first taste of what we believed, at least, in my family, make proper Indian food. The start of my still-going affair with it.
Not to mention the Indian setting for part of the story....yes, everybody went on the pilgrimage, if you like, to India. One could call it a rite of passage. Lots of young travellers fell ill on these trips and some did not come back. Eyes start tears at the end of this book.
In brief, a very engaging look at young people in sixties Adelaide, and although I could have said Australia, to make it sound broader, it IS an Adelaide book....and if you aren't an Adelaidean yourself, maybe you just won't get that. ...more
Although my local bookseller told me that Haruf is a bit of a dud, less his , I decided to ignore that and plug on with another. VerAlthough my local bookseller told me that Haruf is a bit of a dud, less his , I decided to ignore that and plug on with another. Very pleased I did so. Our Souls at Night has an ending which I hope we are supposed to find problematic. Plainsong does not. I didn't think it made a false step in its depiction of small town US. Highly recommend to those who like that setting....more
This is the third in the trilogy, I talked about the others . I don't want to spoil reading this one. Suffice to say, it doesn't let the first twoThis is the third in the trilogy, I talked about the others . I don't want to spoil reading this one. Suffice to say, it doesn't let the first two down. At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, Sharp is such an under-valued writer. Seek her out!...more
For some reason, perhaps because Australia is still dominated by the UK culturally, famous US writers can be all but unknown here, and Jess Walter is For some reason, perhaps because Australia is still dominated by the UK culturally, famous US writers can be all but unknown here, and Jess Walter is a case in point. I came upon him in The Paperback Bookshop in Melbourne, the title The Financial Lives of the Poets caught my eye and I figured the title itself was worth the purchase price, should the book as a whole fail to deliver on its cover's promise. Astonished by how good it was, I started asking around and none of those I know who read a lot had heard of him. He is, however, a wonderful writer and any Australians reading this, take the plunge. Cash in your stocks and buy Jess Walter. I have finished the three on my shelves and need (NEED, I say) to buy more.
I don't really want to say anything about this book, spoilers would definitely spoil. But if I may, reading this made Tim Parks pop into my head a lot. While that's partly because of the strong Italian theme running through Beautiful Ruins, it's also because it's a book about people who have to decide whether to do the right thing. Tim Parks' characters do the right thing, but in a rather peevish way, see, I'm doing this, but only because it's the right thing to do. Walter's characters rise above that. Walter and Parks, two very different voices, different ways of seeing the world, different ways of making us laugh. But upon closing the last page of books by each of these writers, the possibility exists that one may view the world in a slightly different way from now on. High praise....more
By sheer coincidence these were back to back reading. They are both Australian classics, both set in rural AustraliaPaired with Snake by Kate Jennings
By sheer coincidence these were back to back reading. They are both Australian classics, both set in rural Australia, written around the same time, and both are short. In the case of The Plains, mercifully so, and even then, I couldn't make myself get to more than half way through. In my defence, this is my third Murnane and I fully intend to read right through the increasingly-unlikely-to-be Nobel-prize-winning oeuvre of this exceedingly retiring writer. The Plains is an academic exercise, cool-clever, aloof, reminding me so much of Calvino that it makes me think if I ever were to reread that much-loved-writer-of-my-youth, I'd be repelled, not just by him, but by my young self. Snake is everything that The Plains isn't. To the point, gripping and warm, visceral where The Plains is cerebral. The main characters of Snake could be anybody, sad people with sad lives, struggling to make the best of things until they don't.
Then again, if that sounds a bit dreary, this is how the describes Snake:
Set against the hard landscape of postwar Australia and moving through the 1950s and 1960s, Snake starts with a premise as frightening and common-place as the deadly bush snake that lurks in the Australian interior: The loyal Rex, a good man, cherishes his wife Irene. Irene, bubbling over with feminine anger and unspecified desire, despises Rex. Into this marriage, this terrible emptiness, two people pour their very lives. Snake is about the loneliness of men married to unkind women, about the unloved becoming unlovable. Irene - an Australian Madame Bovary - moves through these pages like a force of nature. Chapter by brief chapter, Snake tells her story with archetypal force and subtlety - and a mesmerizing, zero-at-the-bone simplicity that literally propels the reader to the novel's stark climax.
While Murnane is still alive, Jennings died at an age we probably think of as young these days. Because she wrote for her living, her actual literary output is tiny, alas. I would wonder why Snake does not merit a wiki page except that her own page does not even mention her notable work on Obama and the fall of Wall St, a book-sized Quarterly Essay which is still on sale in Australia and lies somewhere in my to read pile....more
By sheer coincidence these were back to back reading. They are both Australian classics, both set in rural AusPaired with The Plains by Gerald Murnane
By sheer coincidence these were back to back reading. They are both Australian classics, both set in rural Australia, written around the same time, and both are short. In the case of The Plains, mercifully so, and even then, I couldn't make myself get to more than half way through. In my defence, this is my third Murnane and I fully intend to read right through the increasingly-unlikely-to-be Nobel-prize-winning oeuvre of this exceedingly retiring writer. The Plains is an academic exercise, cool-clever, aloof, reminding me so much of Calvino that it makes me think if I ever were to reread that much-loved-writer-of-my-youth, I'd be repelled, not just by him, but by my young self. Snake is everything that The Plains isn't. To the point, gripping and warm, visceral where The Plains is cerebral. The main characters of Snake could be anybody, sad people with sad lives, struggling to make the best of things until they don't.
Then again, if that sounds a bit dreary, this is how the describes Snake:
Set against the hard landscape of postwar Australia and moving through the 1950s and 1960s, Snake starts with a premise as frightening and common-place as the deadly bush snake that lurks in the Australian interior: The loyal Rex, a good man, cherishes his wife Irene. Irene, bubbling over with feminine anger and unspecified desire, despises Rex. Into this marriage, this terrible emptiness, two people pour their very lives. Snake is about the loneliness of men married to unkind women, about the unloved becoming unlovable. Irene - an Australian Madame Bovary - moves through these pages like a force of nature. Chapter by brief chapter, Snake tells her story with archetypal force and subtlety - and a mesmerizing, zero-at-the-bone simplicity that literally propels the reader to the novel's stark climax.
While Murnane is still alive, Jennings died at an age we probably think of as young these days. Because she wrote for her living, her actual literary output is tiny, alas. I would wonder why Snake does not merit a wiki page except that her own page does not even mention her notable work on Obama and the fall of Wall St, a book-sized Quarterly Essay which is still on sale in Australia and lies somewhere in my to read pile....more
I feel like books of short stories should be easier to produce than a novel. You write bunches of stories over a period of years, pick the best ones aI feel like books of short stories should be easier to produce than a novel. You write bunches of stories over a period of years, pick the best ones and hey presto! But in practice it doesn't seem to work like that, it's more often like an LP which has a stand out song or two, saving the ass of the rest. Here, however, we have a collection with no such failings. Every story is a delight and Jess Walter is fast becoming a favourite of mine. He has perfect comic timing, a way with words, interesting story lines....oh, and having read it on the back of , I was particularly thrilled that he does female characters that are real, the reader believes in them without question, and is on their side. Peter Goldsworthy could take note....more
Just as in the case of , Goldsworthy's portrayal of the main female character in this story leaves one perplexed. It was published soJust as in the case of , Goldsworthy's portrayal of the main female character in this story leaves one perplexed. It was published some five years earlier, in 2003. Again I wondered if it was the case that 'way back then' women would have been okay with the characterisation. That is, until I came upon two reviews cut from newspapers of the day, both by females, and both unhappy with Lucy. Overall, a rather unsatisfactory affair....more
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