Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels

I’ve spent the last three days in bed with a horrid flu, my knees, elbows and jaw dragging and gnawing, huge pulses of chilli-hot temperature, and regular explosions of sneezing and coughing. The churning in the back of my head suggested that my mind would be too sluggish, that I couldn’t read at all, but I casually picked up Fugitive Pieces from the “to-be-read” tower on my bedside table, and slid into a book that surprised me with its gentle pleasure and ability to offer a humane, sad relief.

Yes, it’s a Holocaust novel, which follows the life of a young Polish boy, Jakob Beer, who survives after his parents are murdered by Nazi soldiers and his sister is abducted. The book works on a huge canvas; geographically from Poland to Greece to Canada, historically from Iron Age settlements to the Berlin Wall, intellectually from the concerns of translation to the propensity of language to contain experience to techniques for forecasting the weather. It explores geology, archaeology, science, poetry, music and the joy of learning.

Written in two parts, from the stance of two men whose lives have been enduringly changed by war, it’s a challenging read. Anne Michaels is almost painfully careful about the gravity, the meaning of every word she uses, demanding that the reader takes equal care, almost mulls over each word, enjoys each drop of significance.

It’s a novel which asks the big questions. How do we survive the unspeakable? What is it possible to regain? What should we close up forever? How do we find happiness after such colossal grief? What is the significance of recording history?

It’s also a novel which sends you burrowing down so many personal rabbit holes. Would I preserve a record of my experience in the face of death? Could I make a good life if I had lost so much?

This brilliant, beautiful and heartbreaking book, Fugitive Pieces, won several important prizes, including the Orange Prize and the Guardian Fiction prize in 1997. Reading it was a big upside to being bowled over by the flu. I wonder what I’d make of it with the cerebellum firing on all cylinders. It will certainly stand a second reading.

A Village Affair by Joanna Trollope

I found this book when I was trawling through lists of “lesbian novels” and wondered why I hadn’t heard of it before. Then I looked at the date – it was published in 1989 – and realised that it came out at a time when I was thoroughly absorbed in raising three children. I have a very wide cultural gap in my education stretching over about twelve years – I know virtually nothing about the music, art, literature, film or theatre of the eighties. I was otherwise very happily occupied.

So, it’s a big treat for me now to discover gems from that time. And this really is one.

A Village Affair is Joanna Trollope’s second novel, which makes it interesting because it was published well before she had the big reputation as the creator of the “Aga Saga” genre of British women’s writing. To date she has published fourteen novels under her own name, and a further nine, mostly historical novels, under the pseudonym Caroline Harvey.

Alice Jordan, the main character, has almost stumbled into a marriage with the rich but boring Martin. Alice is a painter, but her ability to paint is overwhelmed by her efforts to escape her own narrow-minded parents, caring for her children and trying to live up to the expectations of her glamorous and wildly successful new mother-in-law. When the family move to a small idyllic village, Alice desperately tries to fit in, but instead is bowled over by Clodagh, the wayward daughter of the local gentry.

The writing is exquisitely paced, in a tone ranging from gentle mockery to outright condemnation of all the terribly silly social conventions of English middle class village life. The writing itself, the tone and the vocabulary, is also peculiarly, inexplicably, English. Some of it is so funny that it lead me to laugh aloud.

Take this, for example, from chapter four; “Alice had asked Mr Finch, in his shop the previous week, for an avocado pear, and Mr Finch had made it elaborately plain to her that left to himself his shop would be a profusion of avocado pears, but that the brutish character of his non-poetry reading clientele demanded nothing more outrē than cabbages.”

The brilliance of Joanna Trollope is that she writes from both an insider’s and an outsider’s perspective. While understanding the complexities of English manners, and appearing sympathetic to their intent, she stands back and allows the reader space to experience the claustrophobic impacts.

She describes the relationship between the two women well. Alice, trying to find herself, trying to surface, takes a chance on the unknown. Clodagh, knowing that her emotional life is bound to other women forever, explores the possibility of a domesticity in all its bucolic guises - love and family, children, pets, gardening, cooking and cleaning. Joanna Trollope handles the outcome for both women with great sensitivity.

A beautiful novel to read. In the Bloomsbury Classics small format edition, a beautiful book to handle. I hope there are more treats from the eighties I’ve yet to discover.

The Maytrees by Annie Dillard

My friend Elizabeth gave me this book for Christmas, which was brave of her because most people don’t, knowing how many books I buy for myself. I’m so pleased Lizzie took the chance, even though she was concerned that it was “too hetero” for me. But I loved this book in so many ways.

Annie Dillard is often referred to as a writer’s writer. When I did my Masters in Writing at UTS, her book, The Writer’s Life, was almost a set text. But, interestingly, the thing I most remember about that book was that she asks over and over “Why are we reading?”

Ostensibly this is the tale of a long and not always conventional marriage. There are important friends, children and lives lived not in the pursuit of the material, but with an awareness of the mind, emotion, even spirituality. It is inspiring in its understated themes of loyalty, the importance of friendship and the rejection of bitterness and revenge in the fulfilled life.

When I read the first couple of pages, I felt the task was going to be too much. To understand, to really follow her, I would have to concentrate on every single word, to check back and forth to grasp the thread, to ponder. But four or five pages in, I realised that it was okay to wander along, to put my confusions or puzzlement aside, and get to the meaning, or at least what I was going to make of it, by letting it wash over me line by line. Like poetry?

I might even suggest that there are lines and sentences and sometimes whole paragraphs that do not bear absolute rational scrutiny. At times I didn’t know what she was talking about. But somehow that made it richer.

She tries very hard to stimulate the reader, to lead us down curious paths.

And the words themselves. About the same time I read this book I took up playing Scrabble, both online and at home with friends on a beautiful old board I bought on eBay. But even with the weirdest constellation of letters, I couldn’t make some of the words she uses. I needed to keep the dictionary close by, for words like “tatterdemalion” which means a person in tattered clothing, or “epistomeliac” (which incidentally isn’t in any of my dictionaries.)

Is it too clever? No, it’s thrilling. Should you read it? Yes. Would I play Scrabble with her? Never.

The opposite of Dewey

On a recent trip to England, I noticed some very innovative approaches to categorisation in bookshops. That's not new, of course. My friend Michael, when he ran Norton Street Bookshop, used to have a section called Economics and Astrology, because in his opinion they were equally rigorous in analysis and predicting future outcomes! This section from Forbidden Planet, in Shaftsbury Avenue, is called Paranormal Romance.

Walking the Camino: a modern pilgrimage to Santiago by Tony Kevin

Tony Kevin is the author of A Certain Maritime Incident: the sinking of the SIEV X, which exposed the tragedy of the drowning of 353 people when their boat sank in the Indian Ocean on its way from Indonesia to Australia. Those people were Iraqui Shia Muslim refugees, mostly women and children, and there is no doubt that the Howard government’s border protection policies were implicated in their deaths. Tony Kevin worked long and hard to ensure that these people’s lives were not written-off as collateral damage the hysteria of the War on Terror.

Subsequently, Tony Kevin suffered a deep personal crisis of realisation when he understood that the incident was part of; “…a disturbing collapse in previously assumed public standards of truth in government and respect for human rights of all in the community.” So, in his own words, he set off, as a 63-year-old, overweight, retired man lugging a sixteen-kilo pack 1400 kilometres across Spain.

This book wouldn’t be an obvious choice for me, but I very much enjoyed reading it, for two reasons. Firstly, the ruminations on a very complex, multicultural, multi-faith Spanish history which prompts the gentle reestablishment of belief in the inherent possibilities of people of all kinds living side-by-side in harmony. And secondly, the travelogue of his epic journey, with its rugged terrain, physical challenges and chance encounters appeals to the wanderlust in me.

Tony Kevin is a deeply religious man, which made this pilgrimage significant to him in a way that it would not for me. And only occasionally did Tony Kevin’s essential conservatism disturb me. And it’s not hidden. He confesses that he is an old-fashioned family man, maybe even a bit patriarchal. Doh! The responsibility seems to be left with the reader to occasionally remember his obviously long-suffering wife, left back in Canberra with small children to care for, while he wanders off to salve his soul. His obvious admiration for the toughness of rural Spaniards shows little understanding of the suffering of women in poor, rural communities. And when he waxes lyrical, in an aside, about the wonders of those areas of Annapurna where there are no cars and everything is carried in by porters, I have to object (I’ve been there myself twice in the last two years and can only be deeply distressed at the sight of men and women carrying 50 kilo’s of dried noodles, lentils and tinned tuna up the side of mountains day after back-breaking day, for the equivalent of $10 a day) Get real, Tony – while the rural way of life has many, many merits, when accompanied by a desire for modern product consumption it spells misery for the poor in general and women in particular.

But that was all a little like having a nagging blister on my heel while staring up at the Himalayas. In the end, the beauty of the Spanish terrain, the wonderful descriptions of local people and fellow walkers, and the gradual restoration of Tony Kevin’s belief in human goodness makes this a terrific read for the armchair traveller.

The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser

Regular readers of this blog will be well aware of my (often fruitless – no pun intended) search for books that explore vegetarianism. The Lost Dog doesn’t give details about the foods the characters choose to eat, but it does advance a very definite humane and positive attitude to animals.

Importantly, there’s the lost dog himself. The book is structured into ten chapters charting the ten days Tom spends looking for his canine companion. He searches and worries and loses heart and searches again in a way which reinforces the significance of the dog in his otherwise messy life. In desperation, Tom calls his estranged ex-wife to confess that he has lost the dog. He ponders on the efficacy of telling his mother. But it takes until page 287 of this 342 page novel for de Kretser to write; “ …to love even one animal boundlessly might make it unthinkable to eat any.” She goes on; “When eating out with friends, Tom had noticed the fashion for naming the animal that had supplied a dish. I’ll have the cow. Have you tried the minced pig? An ironic flaunting was at work: I know very well that this food on my plate was once a sentient creature, and that doesn’t bother me. Euphemisms are symptomatic of shame; to avoid them was to deny shame, deflecting it with cool.” (That last part, thinking that meat-eaters are ashamed, is almost Pollyanna-ish of her in my opinion, but then I am in a state of continuous incredulity at the persistence of meat-eating in otherwise thoughtful egalitarian people.)

de Kretser creates Melbourne with great affection, almost nostalgia. She describes the neon signs, graffiti, railway lines, old warehouses ripe for developers with a sense of gloom for what is being forfeited to an increasingly profit-driven world. Her characters see the value, the quirkiness and novelty of recycling. The way they utilise other people’s junk is a critique of our wasteful society. Another issue close to my heart.

What else is the novel about? Art and creativity feature large. Nelly, Tom’s (oblique) love interest, paints pictures and then takes photographs of them, destroys the original painting, and shows the photographs. There’s something here about authenticity, about the reproduced contemporary life.

The writing is beautiful. In an interview on Radio National’s Book Show Robert Dessaix twitters on as only he can about the exceptional way she uses language – and for once I agree with him. Rather than say something is like another thing, for example, de Kretser describes a particularly uptight man as; “an umbrella tightly furled.” You know she is referring to that event known as “9/11” when she writes, almost casually; “On the September night when he stood in a bar with Nelly watching towers sink to their knees…” de Kretser has a way of capturing the quintessential in the everyday.

Quibbles? Well, there is a mystery in the book involving the disappearance of Nelly’s husband, which de Kretser appears to explore almost nonchalantly. I wonder if she thought she needed to include something more plot driven, but in the end it didn’t sustain her interest? The husband himself was a highly unlikely partner for Nelly, unless the point was that she changed greatly after his departure, but that’s never made clear. And, only occasionally, that wonderfully lyrical descriptive talent can come across as too clever by half.

But that’s all very minor. The Lost Dog is a great book by a writer who is growing stronger with each novel.

The Thirteenth Tale by Dianne Setterfield

Margaret Lea lives for books. When she is offered the challenge of writing the biography of the most famous writer in England, she finds uncanny parallels with her own life.

The Thirteenth Tale is a book for greedy bibliophiles. It’s a book for all those of us who know books as places to loose oneself, books as vehicles for travel in time and space, who feel sentimental about books as objects. Albeit if that sentimentality sometimes tips over into indulgent soppiness. Who cares? This is a sometimes silly, entertaining, enchanting and engrossing story, with all the ingredients of a gothic novel. Set on the Yorkshire Moors, with massive old houses falling into decay, abandoned babies, topiary gardens, and undiscovered ancestry, it lays out a mystery which twists and turns through ghostly imaginings and haunted characters.

The thrill of this book is its challenge to the site of truth. What tells us more about the past, subjective unreliable narrative or factual evidence?

This is Dianne Setterfield’s first novel, though she is very well versed in 19th and 20th century French literature. All the way through this book, you get the feeling that she is having a great deal of fun playing with genre and image and language to produce a lovely bibliomystery.

The Thirteenth Tale could be criticised for its shameless evocation of the Brontes and Dickens, but that would be churlish. It’s not highbrow. It has a certain whiff of upstairs-downstairs. But as a whole, it’s a book to read in one gulp, curled up in an armchair, beside a pile of unread tomes!

There is an absolutely beautiful website to accompany this book. Enjoy the book and then explore the connections so skilfully offered here (though it’s a shame that the online conversation about the book has been taken over by junk mail trumpeting free online betting and sex with Brazilian transsexuals!)