#NovNov

Flawless Jade (1989) by Barbara Hanrahan

/ Lisa Hill / 8 Comments

I am so curious about how Barbara Hanrahan came to write this book! As far as I can tell she never visited China or Hong Kong.  What sparked her interest, and who were her sources?

This is the book description:

Wing-yee is an ordinary Chinese girl living through extraordinary times. Born during the war with Japan, she experiences the momentous days when Mao Tse-tung’s revolutionary changes are sweeping the land. Eventually her family separates, some remaining in Canton while others seek refuge in Hong Kong.

The novel revisits the themes of poverty and discrimination against females that we see in Hanrahan’s coming-of-age novels (see The Queens All Strayed and The Chelsea Girl) but while there might be autobiographical elements in the episodic plot, it’s set in China and Hong Kong and the central character is an ordinary Chinese girl.

Since I’ve read Hanrahan before, I know that the prose in Flawless Jade is a deliberate departure in style but it still jars a little.  The novel is narrated by Wing-yee in simple, naïve and occasionally ungrammatical prose, conveying a lack of education and unfamiliarity with English.  In short ‘diary-style’ entries looking back on her life, she relates her dramatic birth in Canton when she almost didn’t survive because the cord was twisted around her neck —  while overhead, bombs were falling.  This dates her birth at about 1938 when the Japanese bombed Canton during the Sino-Japanese war (1937-1945).

Although her parents were both schoolteachers, they weren’t well-paid.  They had been a wealthy family in the past but male relations took their money because women couldn’t inherit.  We learn about about the inferior status of girls in Chinese culture too:

Babies come cheap in China, but families only wanted boys.  It was better, on the whole, if girl babies died early. I was the third girl so I wasn’t welcomed.  Babies weren’t regarded as children but as grandchildren, and Grandfather wasn’t pleased at all and there were talks that I should be given away.  But Mother cried and asked to keep me, so in the end they had me.

Big Sister’s name was Sum-yee, that meant Heart Happiness. Second Sister’s name was Yun-yee, that meant Happy Happiness. Grandfather gave me the name Jin-tai, that meant To Take a Brother’s Place.  I carried the name for a while, but Mother didn’t like it, so quietly she changed me to be Jin-yee, that meant To Take Happiness. But I was also called Long-neck Goose, because I had a long neck.  Mother couldn’t change that because the cord had wound round my neck and made it long. (pp.1-2)

(At some stage the name Jin-yee morphs into Wing-yee, but I’m not sure if this is an editor’s error or not.)

Wing-yee tells us about her extended family, often in unflattering terms about their appearance and behaviours, and we learn that her mother’s origins in a higher class than her father’s makes her a bit of a snob, quite fond of dispensing advice about how her daughters must avoid cheapening their appearance in order not to look like peasants. There’s also a lot of ludicrous advice and superstition about preventing or curing medical ailments.  All of this is presented as straightforward and normal; Wing-yee has no reason not to believe what she is told.

The war years are really difficult, but eventually when ‘two big bombs’ fall on the Japanese there is peace. Father goes on teaching and Mother gets a job assessing claims from people who’d been evacuated from their houses but couldn’t dislodge squatters who’d taken them over. Food is more plentiful so Grandmother can cook her specialties again and there are joyous festivals at New Year. But the rumours about Communists marching down from the north turn to reality, most significantly as far as this child is concerned, when the Communists turn up at her school:

At school we’d always stood in the yard for Assembly and sung the song about the Generalissimo as the flag went up the pole.  It was a red and blue flag with a white sun, and we liked to watch it go up to the sky.  But one day the Communist people came to the school and they had uniforms with funny little hats, and there were some female ones too.  We had to stand in the school-yard and we were all very curious.  They gave us a new flag that was red with five yellow stars, and everybody — even the head teacher and our class teachers — had to learn a new song about the East is red and the sun rises and Chairman Mao is born… and Chairman Mao is the people’s life and he will give people happiness… and we are all equal with the workers and the peasants, and Communism is forever.  And they taught us to do rice-planting dances — about how we sow and then we harvest and then we sow again.

They took away our  red and blue flag with the white sun, and said we must not trust in Buddha or Jesus Christ or fairies or kings. People were frightened that the Communists had come, even though they were friendly and gave a very good impression as they helped to fix up Canton.  People thought the Communists would put all the babies in some big buildings while their mothers had to go to work. (p.74)

Before long the family makes a nightmare flight to Hong Kong, but they are even more poor than before and, disillusioned, the older sisters go back to Canton.  But things are no better than before and Father ends up sending money back to Canton to support them and the grandparents.  For a short time Wing-yee attended school for those who’d had disrupted schooling during the war, (and somehow money is found for the brother’s education even though he’s not as bright as she is), but grinding poverty in ever-smaller and more overcrowded, unhygienic rooms forces her into piece-work at home, doing embroidery and tapestry.

There is a brief moment of respite from this depressing life when she becomes a usherette in a picture theatre and she is courted by a wealthy young man, but her one hope of escape when she is accepted to audition for a film is sabotaged by her mother.

These days authors include effusive thanks to their sources in the Afterword, but I’ve found nothing anywhere that hints at what inspired Hanrahan to write a story set in places she’d never been and featuring a character with an entirely different history and culture to her own.  These days, identity politics would probably frown upon such a feat of imagination.  From what I’ve read of Chinese fiction (which I admit, is not a great deal) so much of Flawless Jade seems authentic that I can’t help thinking that Hanrahan may have somehow heard these vignettes first-hand during the wave of economic migrants from Hong Kong to Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. If so, Hanrahan was helping them to tell a story that is only recently starting to emerge for a western readership.

Author: Barbara Hanrahan
Title: Flawless Jade
Publisher: UQP (University of Queensland Press), 1989
Cover design by Christopher McVinish
ISBN: 9780702222467, hbk., 142 pages
Source: personal library

A House with Verandahs (1980) by Nene Gare

/ Lisa Hill / 4 Comments

First published in 1980, A House with Verandahs was Nene Gare’s third novel.  As you can see from her page at Wikipedia, she was a prolific author, with multiple works published in the press but her first novel was The Fringe Dwellers (1961, see my review), followed by Green Gold (1963) and a collection of short stories titled Bend to the Wind (1978).

A House with Verandahs is a homely story of an Adelaide family during the Great Depression.  The title refers to the mother’s dream of having a better house than the ramshackle one they are crammed into.  As the cover blurb says, it was…

…a house with a kitchen so narrow even the dog trod on Mother’s corns’, a garden that pleased itself and ‘dripped water down people’s necks in winter’, ever-widening cracks in the ceiling and a treacherous path to the outside W.C.

Despite these disadvantages, the situation is somewhat idealised. The cover blurb puts it like this:

But the Hounslow home was pervaded by love and warmth: a mother who the children could never get enough of and a father who was full of dreams but never quite managed to conquer reality.  Peace, the middle child, narrates the erratic, eventful life of the Hounslow family; the everyday bedlam, the comings and goings of various eccentric friends and relatives, is hilariously portrayed.

Well, I wouldn’t say hilarious.  Mildly droll, maybe.  And I wouldn’t say eventful either.  The middle part of the novel looks more promising when the landlord wants to sell the house they rent and Mother’s dream of a house with verandahs and the children’s hopes of living by the beach are briefly raised, but Father manages to sabotage the possibility by miraculously finding the deposit to buy the house they’re in, and a bit of extra land besides.  But apart from that, and the birth of the last child, it’s mostly episodes of little consequence.

The idealisation of Mother goes into overdrive in chapter 7.

Mother believed in love and showing it and so did my father.  Dad never passed Mother in the house without stopping to give her a hug or to ask her, ‘All right, old girl?’ Mother always said, ‘Yes.’ She almost believed it too and Dad certainly did.

Mother envied nobody.  She might wish for a bigger house, a little more money but the things she needed most she had, her husband, her children. Mother believed her children were the best looking, the brainiest, the liveliest and that we owed all these things to her husband.(p.83)

However, whether the author intended it or not, we see that she has some prejudices.

She found much to dislike in cruel schoolteachers, eavesdropping neighbours who never forgot her ages, the Labor party (full of Roman Catholics) and those beneath contempt who said they had forgotten to place her winning bets.

And though she’s generous with her jars of jam, she’s a snob too.  The local schools are not good enough for her children.

And maybe she was not as perfect as her naïve daughter thought.

I told a woman friend of the family that whilst my father had been away at war, my mother had had three babies.

The woman smiled, ‘She’s so innocent.’ (p. 101)

But the narrative then segues to something else, so the reader never knows what this is about.

It was disappointing to see a writer described at the Australian Dictionary of Biography as known for her empathy and friendliness, employing casual antisemitism in the form of a landlord’s greed being attributed to being Jewish.  (p.63) One comes across this in books published before the Holocaust, but it’s rare to see it after its horrors were known, and even more surprising to see it in a book published in Melbourne, home to more Holocaust survivors than any other city in Australia.

I’m not surprised that this is out of print.

Author: Nene Gare (1919-1994)
Title: A House with Verandahs
Publisher: Sun Books, 1982 (first published 1980)
Cover art by Guy Mirabella
ISBN: 9780725103866, pbk., 143 pages
Source: personal library, OpShopFind

Brief Loves that Live Forever (2011), by Andreï Makine, English translation by Geoffrey Strahan 2014

/ Lisa Hill / 11 Comments

I’ve read two other books by Russian-French author Andreï Makine, but I like this one the best.  Brief Loves that Live Forever consists of eight related short stories that combine to form a novella.  Each one can be read independently, but together they form a vivid portrait of growing up, as Siberian-born Makine did, in the USSR under Brezhnev.  Despite the deprivations and compromises required by circumstance, the tone is elegiac, because the narrator is looking back on events when he first fell in love.

The story titles convey something of the author’s preoccupations:

  • The Tiny Minority
  • She set me free from symbols
  • The woman who had seem Lenin
  • An eternally living doctrine
  • Lovers on a stormy night
  • A gift from God
  • Captives in Eden
  • The poet who helped God to love

‘She set me free from symbols’ tells the story of a episode that takes place with a backdrop of a May Day march, snippets of which people of my generation saw on TV in the Cold War days of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). Cameras zoomed in on grey-faced men in grey uniforms presiding over a massive parade of weaponry and endless lines of soldiers marching in military precision.  Here in Australia commentators always presented the march as a provocation to the US, but it was also something else.  Not unlike our Anzac Day marches, it was also a tribute to the 27 million Soviet citizens and military who died in WW2, and the intimidating display of the latest in military hardware was a promise to the people of the USSR that a catastrophic invasion of their territory would never happen again.

The symbolic importance of all this is lost on the young boy who witnesses this spectacle.  In later years, it means something else entirely:

She was not the first woman to have dazzled me with her beauty, with the patient strength of her love.  She was, however, the first to reveal to me that a woman with love in her heart no longer belongs to our world, but from it creates another one, where she swells, sovereign, untouched by the restless greed of everyday life.  Yes, an extraterrestrial.

And to think that our encounter took place upon a stage set devised to represent a life devoid of love. (p.27)

His disillusionment begins when the official party moves off the grandstand because of a shower of icy rain, and the orphan narrator sees the wrong side of the scenery.

The shock was as great as if in the middle of the screening of a film I had caught sight of technicians rearranging the furniture or even tickling one of the actresses.  (p.33)

At first he thinks this is all a secret, but no…

One afternoon in February, they sent us to clear the pathways in a huge park at the edge of the city, and it was there, in an area that few people visited, that we came upon the parade grandstand.  Nobody had thought of covering it up,  except that it was blanketed in thick snow, intensely blue in the sunlight, marked by no human footprint.

The real mystery, however, lay not upon the snow-covered terraces but in the grandstand’s entrails, a dark space, pierced through with steel poles, into which I slithered, following three or four of my comrades. The others, their shovels on their shoulders, were already lining up in ranks, to return to the orphanage, just as we embarked on a long exploration of the metallic maze.  (pp.33-4)

However, much to the derision of his comrades who abandon him, he gets stuck and can’t find his way out.  And in his panic, he  sees the remnants of a child’s balloon, which triggers thoughts of all that he does not have:

I felt the gulf that separated me from the child who had lost it.  I pictured a boy of my own age, living in a family, watching the parade, not in the middle of a crowd of strangers, but on the grandstand, with his parents.  I did not think ‘A rich kid’, it was more that I sensed the texture of a life so different from my own, a maternal presence at his side, the solidity of a mode of existence this boy would share with some other children in the enclosure.  The impossibility of imagining his way of life coincided with my inability to escape from these steel cages. (p.38)

It is another scrap of balloon above him that shows him the way out, and he scrambles through, just in time to catch the sight of the troop of orphans walking slowly away. Nobody had even noticed his absence. And in this confusing moment where time had seemed an eternity while he was trapped but was actually only a few minutes, he sees a young woman.  She is not like those he’s used to:

It was the first time an awareness of femininity had struck me so openly.  Before that women used to have the physique of the workers we came across in factories and on construction sites, strong women, often marked by physical labour and alcohol, whom life had moulded to be able to hold their own against men.  At the orphanage femininity was even less in evidence, we all of us, boys and girls, had a neutralised identity: our heads cropped once a month, clothes of the same thick flannel, a way of talking whose male roughness passed unnoticed. (p.40)

So this lovely young woman, tears glistening on her cheeks as she reads a book, steals his heart.  As he flees towards his disappearing comrades, he overhears two older women — gardening staff — musing about the young woman, whose husband was lost at sea in a submarine and has no grave to mark his passing.  As he runs he is hoping to forget the beauty and grief he had just witnessed, but this forgetfulness never came. She becomes a memory that teaches him a way of seeing and understanding.

After my fleeting encounter with her I had quite a different perception of the weighty symbols celebrating my country’s messianic project.  All those parades, ceremonies, congresses, monuments… Curiously enough I now had less desire to make fun of them, to criticise the hypocrisy of the dignitaries up there on the grandstand, to denounce them as profiteers for whom the dream of a new society was nothing more than a convenient old lie.

I sensed that the truth was to be found nether among them nor in the opposing camp, with the dissidents.  I perceived it as simple and luminous, like that February day, beneath the tree burdened with snow. <snip>

What spoke the truth was this woman’s silence, her solitude, her love, so all-embracing that even this child, a stranger, scrambling down from tier to tier, remained forever dazzled by it. (p.42)

A society can provide everything but yet not love.

The other stories are equally profound.  My favourite is ‘Lovers on a Stormy Night’ looking for somewhere private… it’s also the favourite of Debbie Robson whose Goodreads review covers more of the stories than I have.

Author: Andreï Makine
Title: Brief Loves that Live Forever (Le livre des brèves amours éternelles)
Translated from the French by Geoffrey Strahan
Publisher: MacLehose Press, 2014
Cover design by Monica Royes, cover illustration by Claudia Gutierrez
ISBN: 9781780870496, pbk., 175 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from The Avenue Bookstore Elsternwick, $19.99

The Blue Cathedral (2023), by Cameron Hindrum

/ Lisa Hill / 9 Comments

First published in 2011 and reissued in 2023, The Blue Cathedral is the first book I’ve come across that fictionalises the battle for the Franklin River in 1983.  For international readers and those too young to remember this historic environmental issue that was fought all the way to the High Court of Australia, there’s an excellent blog post about it at the Two Sisters blog.

This is the book description for The Blue Cathedral:

Queenstown is below, stitched into the bottom of the valley, the dark geometric shapes of the Mount Lyell headframe away to his left and the vast sail of Mount Owen on the other side of the town, opposite him. The summer sky is clean and clear, vast and high, an endless cathedral ceiling. This is where he comes when he wants to hide.

1983: The Franklin River Dam Blockade has invited protesters to Tasmania’s remote west coast. For one local delinquent, coping with an ill father and an uncertain future, their arrival brings a time of challenge and confrontation, when Billy begins to feel everything sliding out of control.

Hindrum’s novella tells the story from contrasting points of view in Queenstown, the centre of construction and the protest movement.  Chris and his girlfriend Mandy represent The Wilderness Society campaigning to save Tasmania’s last wild river, Billy’s dying father and mother represent those hoping for better employment prospects if the dam is built; Dan is a local policeman torn between his personal loyalties and his job; while Billy and his low-life mates represent the lost generation with an inchoate hatred of Greenies whose actions are impeding the only kind of unskilled work prospects that they could have.

However, although it is clear where the author’s sympathies lie in terms of protecting the river, it is Billy’s story which makes for a compelling narrative.  He’s one of those kids that has given up on school, his community and life in general.  He’s not a neglected kid and he doesn’t come from a feckless home, but is mother is preoccupied with keeping the family afloat with her work as a nurse while also caring for her husband who has terminal cancer.   Billy is having difficulty coming to terms with what is happening to his father, and there’s a poignant chapter where he learns more about his father’s life at the funeral than he ever did at home. That’s when he realises that any opportunity to get to know his father better is gone forever.

He’s wagged school so often that he has no hope of catching up or getting any kind of certificate, and he is so alienated that he doesn’t have any friends either at school or in the neighbourhood.  Once Billy starts hanging around with the local hoodlums, his pathway seems set.  They are a bit older than he is, and they’re progressing from shoplifting and vandalism to violent assault, criminal damage and theft on a the largest scale that a small town has to offer.  It amuses the gang leader to ‘mentor’ the younger boy, but it’s also clear that there will be violent consequences if he doesn’t keep his mouth shut.

The action takes places over the months of 1982-83, but the novella is structured in jagged timeframes, which was sometimes confusing but certainly ensured that the last dramatic chapter had a shocking impact.

A quick online search revealed that Hindrum won the 2022 University of Tasmania Prize for an unpublished manuscript called The Sand so it looks as if there will be more fiction from this emerging writer.  (Other winners of this award who have a presence on this blog include Soon (2017) by Lois Murphy; The Signal Line (2022) by Brendan Colley; Kubla, which became A Better Son (on my TBR) by Katherine Johnson; and Brodsky Dies by Adam Ouston (who subsequently published  Waypoints 2022 which was nominated for the Miles Franklin Award.)

Author: Cameron Hindrum
Title: The Blue Cathedral 
Publisher: Forty South Publishing, 2023, first published in 2011
Cover image: Royal Hotel, Linda ©2021 Sonja Hindrum
ISBN: 9780645736731, pbk., 187 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased direct from Forty South Publishing

Novellas in November is hosted by Cathy at 746 Books and Bookish Beck.

 

The High Road (1988), by Edna O’Brien

/ Lisa Hill / 9 Comments

This year Kim from Reading Matters and Cathy from 746 Books have been co-hosting A Year of Edna O’Brien so The High Road at 180 pages was an ideal choice for #NovNov (Novellas in November). This is the book description from the inside jacket cover of my first edition:

Edna O’Brien’s first novel in eleven years is a triumph.  It is a rich, passionate account of lost love and the return to loving, where currents of regret and loneliness clash with a fiery instinct for survival.  A Spanish seaside enclave finds many women trying to pacify their memories: the imperious Iris, no longer young; Charlotte, the glittering debutante whose thirst for life has driven her to bitter withdrawal; and Anna , the wounded narrator, who senses in the young Spanish girl Catalina a rare chance to defy the ravages of time and find a renewal of hope. But the landscape of the heart is laid with mines, and new dangers attend on new loves.

The High Road marks Edna O’Brien’s long-awaited return to the literary scene.  Intense, lyrical, masterfully written, here is a novel where the ease and light of the Mediterranean thrown into relief the machinations and darkness of man and woman.

Got that?  Middle-aged woman with a broken heart goes to a small Spanish town full of other women disappointed by life, (all of whom conveniently speak English), and has a crush on a servant girl at the hotel. #SpoilerAlert: It ends badly, especially for the servant girl.

It wasn’t until my curiosity got the better of me and I Googled to find out from the Guardian why a successful author would have a hiatus of eleven years, and then write this oddly disjointed novel, that the penny dropped. Characters that seem utterly absurd are drawn from her own life.

The book begins with an absorbing account of her desperate misery after the break-up of a long relationship.  We’re not told exactly what precipitated the break-up.  Perhaps he was a married man. Perhaps she just got older and was replaced by a trophy.  Whatever, the demolition of her expectations in middle-age has a devastating effect and she doesn’t know what to do with herself.  It wasn’t clear to me why she thought going to Spain would help with her distress.  She doesn’t speak the language and has nothing to do while she’s there.  She doesn’t hire a car (maybe she doesn’t drive?) so that she can go exploring or discover Spain’s rich history, art and architecture. She doesn’t do some kind of creative activity to pour out her emotions.

She is there, as my mother would say, to wallow.

But, since we have all had a broken heart at some stage, we empathise with her hopeless aimlessness and feel optimistic that Something Will Happen to Sort Her Out. Plus, no doubt about this, O’Brien writes exquisite prose.

BEWARE: SPOILERS

It starts out badly because Anna hasn’t booked accommodation in advance,  but a chance encounter with Wanda lands her a (somewhat uncongenial) bed for the night and then a share-house with a reclusive character called Charlotte.  Lo! It turns out that bitter and twisted Charlotte is really Portia from Anna’s party years.  She’s a socialite who has retired from the scene and she is not best pleased to be discovered because she wants to wallow in private.  But lo! a room is now conveniently available at the hotel where there are opportunities for drinking with the local Irish drunk (who is as tedious as every other Irish drunk you’ve encountered IRL or in books); and for lounging about by the pool; people-watching in the restaurant; and being ordered about by Iris.  Iris is an overbearing older woman with a peremptory manner who bullies Anna into attending on her every whim.  We are not meant to like her but lo! it turns out that she has a broken heart too.

There is a poignant episode where a family from Germany has a devastating loss at the hotel, which, whether it was meant to or not, puts the women’s experience of loss into some kind of perspective.

So then there’s the crush on the servant girl, Catalina (whose English BTW is rudimentary).  For Anna, it develops into an obsession, bombarding the girl with gifts, taking her out for dinner and frantically searching for her when she’s not at work. (Anna has an unspecified source of money, so perhaps she doesn’t understand the concept of having a day off.)  Readers can guess how this goes over in conservative Catholic Spain but it turns out even worse than I had predicted.

I really didn’t know what to make of this novel.  My experience of reading Edna O’Brien (Girl, 2019, and The Little Red Chairs, 2015) is of her powerful late work, traversing the impact of atrocities on individuals and giving voice to the voiceless.  The High Road seems like a lament for women who lived life to the full during the heady years of Women’s Lib, and then floundered when opportunities for either love or the simple consolations of contentment seem to have passed them by.

Cathy from 746 Books recently read this for #20BooksofSummer.

Author: Edna O’Brien
Title: The High Road
Publisher: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988
ISBN: 9780297794936, hbk (first edition), 180 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from Diversity Books

 

Klausen (2002), by Andreas Maier, 2010 translation by Kenneth J Northcott

/ Lisa Hill / 13 Comments

An act of violence seems to have occurred in Klausen — a small German town near the border with Italy — but nobody is exactly sure what happened.  It might have been a bomb on the autobahn or in a toolshed beside it, or it might have been a shooting at (not in) the town.

There’s a lot of speculation about who’s responsible.  It could have been triggered by a huge brouhaha about noise pollution from the autobahn, or it could have been eco-terrorists.  Possible scapegoats are the Pakistani guest workers or the Kurdish, Moroccan and Albanian immigrants… but the No 1 suspect is Joseph Gasser, who’s recently returned to the town.

(He gets accused of writing a scurrilous pamphlet about Klausen as well.)

The novel has a deliberately absurd beginning.

  • The landlord at nearby Feldthurns is unsure if Gasser stayed there or not. He just remembers Gasser’s odd behaviour and how he took an unusual interest in his bragging about the tourist attractions in Feldthurns.  He also noticed that Gasser lied about aspects of South Tyrol when he interrupted two tourists who were in discussion with the landlord;
  • Exhibiting the remarkable human characteristic — namely that after the fact people believe that they already had a presentiment of exactly what was to happen later on — the landlord’s mother, OTOH, says she recognised Gasser immediately, but this coincides with Gasser’s picture being in the newspaper.  She says she set up a petition in the church to call for better protection for the town, but others say that the petition only turned up well after events and not as an immediate response to seeing the young man;
  • The landlord’s daughter Julia, is definite about Gasser not being in the inn at all;
  • There’s a lot of irrelevant gossip about whether Gasser did or didn’t eat the calf’s head that he’d ordered at the inn;
  • Plus there’s also gossip about Auer, who’d died suddenly after being at the inn with Gasser; but
  • Public opinion in Klausen concludes that the stories from Feldthurns are merely an invention.

Next, there are stories about Gasser’s background:

  • He is the son of a Klausen shoemaker who just sells shoes.  A quiet man, he has an invariable routine and enjoys drinking with his neighbour;
  • As a child, Gasser was nervy, and as an adolescent had an odd obsession with capitalism and the Italian economy (but was really a communist);
  • He was rebellious, but liked reading until one day he threw all his books away;
  • He left Klausen to study at Innsbruck and then Berlin, hung out with radical left-wing groups, and was said to have been a teacher but has no qualifications;
  • Strangely, he doesn’t live with his parents and is doing odd jobs to pay the rent.

Readers usually have a sense of setting, character and/or plot from the first pages of a novel — but by page 11, readers of Klausen still have no clue. The novel goes on to relate stories about Gasser having a letter that belongs to Auer, and a parcel that might or might not contain a rifle.  He sits under trees that cause quarrels about what kind of trees they were, and he argues with his mother about his jealousy of his sister Kati’s fame as an actress and her choice of future husband.  There’s a long Bernhardian tirade about the way she sits in his chair that she sits in just to annoy him, and there’s a rant about a former classmate called Paolucci, a Milanese journalist who’s investigating possible corruption by Herr Laner who was instrumental in getting the autobahn built for his own benefit. There’s a very long section about the kerfuffle over noise pollution from this autobahn, and the wife of the visiting professor shares a long rant about how unreasonable he is about noise.

There’s also historical revisionism about the Nazi period.

Gasser himself casts aspersions on Delazer, his sister’s fiancé.

And so it goes on, increasingly entangled and deliberately incomprehensible, mirroring the way that rumour and tabloid journalism make the truth impenetrable.

Whenever people start gossiping about someone, stories about some sort of lechery spring up around him, like weeds, from fully adult people who are not remarkable for anything else. (p.35)

The vision is the highest form of rumour, and he who has such visions, is of course always irrefutable. (p.134)

Even the painting of Klausen that decorates the inn is a lie.  It sells well because it’s a picturesque scene of a Klausen that does not exist.  Maier takes quite a few pages of philosophical discussion about Nietzsche between a visiting professor and a local drunk in order to convey that the artist Pareith has taken what you and I would call artistic licence to create a piece of kitsch.

Klausen must have been a nightmare to translate.  As it says on the back cover, Maier emulates techniques from Thomas Bernhard and José Saramago.  There’s the nested indirect speech, the repetition and the run-on paragraph that lasts for 168 pages.  A reader needs patience for this kind of narrative, but fortunately mine lasted until (none the wiser about who dunnit, I got to the end.

Read at this time for #NovNov (Novellas in November) hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Bookish Beck and German Lit Month, hosted by Tony’s Reading List and Beauty is a Sleeping Cat.

Author: Andreas Maier
Title: Klausen
Translated by Kenneth J Northcott
Publisher: Open Letter Press, 2010, first published 2002
Cover design by N J Furl
ISBN: 9781934824160, pbk., 168 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from Open Letter Press

Man of Letters (Dog Rock 3, 2012), by David Foster

/ Lisa Hill / 10 Comments

This was a terrific choice for #NovNov!

Man of Letters is Book 3 in David Foster’s comic novel series set in a declining small town called Dog Rock in NSW, but it doesn’t seem to matter that I haven’t read the first two in the series: Dog Rock (1985) and The Pale Blue Crochet Coathanger Cover (1988).  Man of Letters is a spoof of crime fiction, starring a Ten-Pound-Pom postman (with an aristocratic title) as the detective determined to solve the mystery.

This is the book description:

Man of Letters is the third and final volume in the Dog Rock trilogy, completing David Foster’s comic vision of a small rural town in New South Wales as over fifty years it gradually succumbs to economic imperatives, as witnessed from the perspective of the postman D’Arcy D’Oliveres.

In his final appearance, the intrepid D’Arcy has a mystery to solve that involves a local musician, a stamp of the realm, a dodgy personalised numberplate and a retired sergeant of police now turned student of semiotics. Man of Letters is a very funny book from the writer the Manchester Guardian described as the worthy successor to Flann O’Brien.

Man of Letters is indeed very funny, with laugh-out-loud moments scattered throughout its novella-length narrative.  Drawing on his own experience as a postman in a rural town, Foster has created a daft mystery out of a collectible stamp series that feature Australian Legends of Popular Song. Much to the astonishment and indignation of all concerned, Ross Commoner, a local musician of little talent and no renown whatsoever, has displaced the obvious choice of Neil Finn, and Des, the local postman charged with making the nominations for Dog Rock, is the obvious suspect.

But, actually, there’s more than one mystery.  Someone has stolen a Bunnings voucher, someone has (a-hem) ‘silenced’ a howling tomcat, and someone has caused a diplomatic incident by running an Indian tourist off the road, putting her in a coma.  Unfortunately, Des broke his collarbone when he fell off his bike in shock when he saw Commoner’s face on a stamp, so he can’t ride his motorcycle.  So D’Arcy — whose role at corporate Australia Post seems to be getting workers back to work whether they are fit or not — has despatched him to Crookwell to do his rounds on a bicycle.  D’Arcy (on Des’s motorcycle) takes over the round in Dog Rock so that he can pursue his investigations.

The passage of time since this book’s publication in 2012 has made some aspects rather poignant.  Thirty-odd years ago Dog Rock was once D’Arcy’s postal round, but he finds that things have changed.  He used to know everyone in town, but the small farms are gone, replaced by anonymous housing developments, and personal mail is largely displaced by advertising catalogues and parcel deliveries. It’s much more arduous, and the small satisfactions of the job are gone.  Things must surely be worse now with the growth in online shopping, and hardly anybody sends letters any more.  I used to write to my parents in Queensland weekly, and my father was a great letter-writer in reply, but I can’t remember the last time I received a personal letter.

I think I know why our postie delivers our mail to our door even when it could fit in the letter-box: it’s because we’re retired, and we’re home most of the time, and so he gets a cheery word of thanks when he rings the doorbell. Even the people he passes on the street are mostly plugged into ear-buds so they don’t even pass the time of day. It must be a lonely job these days.

Author: David Foster
Title: Man of Letters (Dog Rock 3)
Publisher: Puncher & Wattman, 2012
Cover design by Matthew Holt
ISBN: 9781921450549, pbk., 142 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from the publisher, $19.95

 

Novellas in November 2025

/ Lisa Hill / 19 Comments

Novellas in November 2025 is hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Bookish Beck and this week we are invited to share the novellas that we’ve read during the year… so here they are! 

(Six of them were by Australian authors and I’ve asterisked them). 

Most recent prize winner, but timeless

Oldest 

Most poignant

Most illuminating about another culture

Most thought-provoking

Most arty

Translations that I didn’t really get on with: 

Favourite cover designs

I have a pile of 25 novellas set aside for this month, *blush* some of them since last #NovNov.  The only one I’m going to commit to is Klausen by Andreas Maier, translated by Kenneth J Northcott, because it ties in with German LitMonth too.

 

 

 

 

The Word for World Is Forest (Hainish Cycle#5, 1972) , by Ursula Le Guin

/ Lisa Hill / 18 Comments

Oh dear, I’m not going to win any friends from the SF reading community from my reading of Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest.  Truth be told, I only finished it so that I could add it to my tally for #NovNov (Novellas in November) and get it off my TBR.

I should say first that my introduction to Le Guin came in the 1970s with my reading of the Earthsea fantasy series.  I loved it. We only had to read Book I, A Wizard of Earthsea  (1968) at Teachers’ College, but I wasted no time in buying the others in the series The Tombs of Atuan, (1970) and The Farthest Shore (1972), and I pushed it into the hands of many of my senior students throughout my career.  Based on this favourable experience, I ventured last year into the fantasy realm again with Le Guin’s short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’ (1973) in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, because I’d heard about it on an episode of Free Thinking at the BBC.

But I did not get on well with The Word for World is Forest.

I know, I know, my copy comes from a series called SF Masterworks, no less.  And it turns out that I have actually read and enjoyed some SF from this series, all them long ago, except the one reviewed on this blog:

But…The Word for World is Forest is, IMHO, a polemic. Admittedly, it’s a well-intentioned polemic, written in the glare of the United States’ war on Indochina, according to the Introduction by Ken Macleod.  It is anti-colonial, anti-imperialistic and anti-militaristic.

The Word for World is Forest is a reflection on invasion, exploitation and oppression, and on the necessity and cost of resistance.

Though short, the novel is far from slight.  It brings into sharp focus several of its author’s enduring concerns, and draws on the same intellectual resources that illuminate her wider work: notably anthropology, anarchism, feminism and Taoism.  Characteristically of all Le Guin’s writing, it embodies the stubborn virtue of seeing with both eyes, in depth and in colour, without looking away from or ignoring uncomfortable truths. (p.1)

The trouble is that the characterisation is sooooo black-and-white.  The colonists are logging the planet because they’ve ruined Earth. These characters range along a continuum from Captain Davidson who is unambiguously evil and goes rogue, disobeying all the feeble commands from the colonial authority; to the amoral bureaucratic administrators obfuscating over the causes of the rebellion and covering their own tracks; to the weak and ineffectual Lyubov, the anthropologist who studies — and betrays — the native Athsheans who are used as slave labour and sexual slaves.

The Athsheans — little green men dismissively called ‘creechies’ by their overlords — are idealised, and the reader needs to read carefully to recognise that this wise and gentle tribe were invaders and colonisers themselves long, long ago.  Now their society is non-violent and matriarchal and they live in harmony with their environment. They resolve conflicts through dreaming, and gentle touch is an integral element of their communications with others.  But their ultimate fate will be extinction because they have cooperated with the invaders rather than compromise their core values.

That is, until their leader, Selver, is pushed too far by the rape and murder of his wife, and he leads a massacre at Davidson’s camp.

Summarised by Macleod, the point of the novel is that violence is corrupting, in any circumstances:

The invaders from Earth are indisputably the bad guys and the rebellious natives are entirely in the right.  But the novels’ revolutionary defeatism doesn’t fall into the trap of romanticising the revolt of the oppressed.  The Athsheans are changed by the very act of fighting, new and strange to them; the world they win back is not the same as the world that was taken from them; and their fight is not fair, or discriminating, or by the rules.  It is dirty and brutal and shocking.

That oppression corrupts the oppressors is well enough known.  That resistance to oppression can profoundly change those resisting, and for the worse, is less widely recognised — particularly among those who give that resistance their sympathy and solidarity.  The ennobling aspect of resistance — of standing up, of fighting back, of driving the invader from the homeland — is seen and celebrated.  The corrupting aspect — the hardening of the heart, the acceptance of casualty and atrocity, the replacement of the moral calculus with a cold-eyed calculation of advantage, of revenge and reprisal — is put out of mind, and sometimes for what seems like the best of reasons.  That too is part of the damage done. (p.3)

Those of us who have seen the gruesome booby traps used by the Vietnamese to trap and mutilate the enemy for interrogation can attest to the fact that war brutalises all sides so that the participants become indifferent to atrocities they would otherwise abhor.

Truth be told, I found the Introduction more interesting to read than the novella.

 

Author: Ursula Le Guin
Title: The Word for World is Forest (Hainish Cycle #5).
Introduction by Ken Macleod
Series: SF Masterworks
Publisher: Gollancz, Orion, 2015, first published 1972
ISBN: 9781473205789, pbk., 128 pages
Source: personal library

 

Mr Palomar (1983), by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver

/ Lisa Hill / 8 Comments

Although Mr Palomar is definitely fiction, I don’t know whether Mr Palomar is a novella or not, but I’m going to tag it for #NovNov anyway because at 118 pages, it is a short book of fiction, and we certainly get to know Mr Palomar as a character. In ‘The Blackbird’s Whistle’, we get to know Mrs Palomar too, and we also learn about their longstanding relationship:

The premiss of these verbal exchanges is the idea that a perfect accord between a married pair allows them to understand each other without having to make everything specific and detailed; but this principle is put into practice in very different ways by the two of them: Mrs Palomar expresses herself with complete sentences, though often allusive and sibylline, to test the promptness of her husband’s mental associations and the syntony of his thought with hers (a thing that does not always work); Mr Palomar, on the other hand, from the mists of his inner monologues allows scattered, articulate sounds to emerge, confident that, if the obviousness of a complete meaning does not emerge, at least the chiaroscuro of a mood will.

Mrs Palomar, instead, refuses to receive these grumbles as talk…(p.24)

Any reader will become fond of Mr Palomar when he goes shopping.  I was especially amused by his thoughts in the queue in a Parisian cheese shop.

The book description at Goodreads describes Mr Palomar as ‘eccentric’, but I don’t think he is.  I think he’s a man with an intense curiosity about the world in which he lives, and like Calvino himself, as we can see in his musings in ‘How New the New World Was’, he looks afresh and meditates on phenomena that are all around him.

Calvino being Calvino, he frames Mr Palomar’s contemplations with a mathematical precision and patterning.  In a handy Index at the back of the book, this framing is explained.  There are three ‘settings’: titled

  1. Palomar’s Vacation;
  2. Palomar in the City; and
  3. The Silences of Palomar.

Within each of these there are three sub-settings, so, for example, in Palomar’s Vacation, there are three further settings:

  1. Palomar on the beach;
  2. Palomar in the garden; and
  3. Palomar looks at the sky.

Within these there are three further thematic explorations, so at the beach, for instance, his musings are:

  1. Reading a wave;
  2. The naked bosom; (which is hilarious) and
  3. The sword of the sun.

These three thematic kinds of experience and enquiry follow a pattern too.

  1. The first one is descriptive.  Palomar is pondering a visual experience, almost always some natural form.
  2. The second tends to be a story.  Palomar is considering cultural or anthropological elements, with language, meaning and symbols supplementing visual data.
  3. The third is more speculative, involving meditations on the cosmos, time, infinity, the relationship between the self and the world, the dimensions of the mind. 

Many have tried to convey the delicious experience of reading this book (808 reviews at Goodreads alone) so I shall confine myself to my own musings about the nature of astronomy, thoughts triggered by the last part of ‘Palomar’s Vacation’, i.e. ‘Palomar looks at the sky’, which consists of:

  1. Moon in the afternoon;
  2. The eye and the planets; and
  3. The contemplation of the stars.

Readers in the northern hemisphere will be familiar with the night sky that Palomar observes in ‘The eye and the planets’, but that is not the night sky that we see here in Australia.  In distinguishing between the experience of observing with and without a telescope, and using the European names for the constellations, Palomar reminds me again of ‘How New the New World Was’.  Palomar, and maybe Calvino himself, is viewing the night sky through the prism of his own European experience, as if it were the sole defining exemplar.  And whether he meant to or not, when supplementing visual data with language, meaning and symbols drawn from all that we know from viewing the night sky with lenses both simple and highly sophisticated, on earth and from space travel such as Voyager II, he is also drawing attention to the gulf between scientific astronomy and the observations of the night sky that were made by the Ancients and First Nations peoples around the world.

Mr Palomar is excited to be able to see Mars, Saturn and Jupiter with the naked eye.  (And here we learn that Mr P bears the same name as a famous observatory, i.e. Palomar Observatory in the US. Clever, eh? But that’s not surprising for Calvino.)

When he learns that this year, for the entire month of April, the three ‘external’ planets, visible to the naked eye (even his, nearsighted and astigmatic) are all three ‘in opposition’ and therefore visible for the whole night, Mr Palomar rushes out onto the terrace. (p.34)

He sees the three planets neatly lined up, but to enjoy most fully the triple planetary opposition it is necessary to procure a telescope.  

Now, when I was designing curriculum units on ‘Space’ for Years 5 & 6, I used to begin by introducing them to the concept that First Nations had names for stars and planets visible to the naked eye. (See here).  Back then in 2008, this was innovative practice and everything had to be researched, doing the best I could with reputable resources recommended by Margo Neale from the Australian Museum in Canberra.  Now there are websites, books and other resources that suggest a more sophisticated understanding than just naming observations, because these observations were used, according to Australian Indigenous Astronomy for navigation, calendars, and predicting weather. I expect that the First Nations of the Americas and other places are exploring similar recognition of ancient knowledge of the night sky.  I’d be interested to know if there are research projects into indigenous astronomy in Africa and Asia too.  Australian Indigenous Astronomy is unique because it was isolated by geography for tens of thousands of years, but did the tribes and peoples in other places share their knowledge and have a shared vocabulary and naming system in some places?

I have strayed from Mr Palomar’s meditations, because that kind of musing is what Calvino provokes in all his works.

Author: Italo Calvino
Title: Mr Palomar
Translated from the Italian by William Weaver
Publisher: Vintage (Random House), 1999, first published as Palomar in 1983
Cover design: Michael Salu
ISBN: 9780099430872, pbk., 118 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from Readings

Broken Words (1988), by Helen Hodgman

/ Lisa Hill / 6 Comments

It’s not often that a mass market paperback gets a cover image right, but Anchor Books have done it with my 1997 edition of Broken Words by the late Helen Hodgman (1945-2002).

Set in London (mostly), Quebec (a bit) and Australia (hardly at all), Broken Words is a spiky, brittle and darkly brutal novella that defies categorisation.  It won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the 1988 NSW Premier’s Awards, suggesting to me that judges then were a good deal braver than they are now.  The Penguin first edition cover — plastered with the blurb ‘Ferociously funny’, immensely stimulating like a small dose of strychnine’ — hints at some kind of satire of marriage, while the US first edition, demurely retitled as Ducks, hints at a lesbian relationship but the androgynous profiles mean you could easily miss that. (If you want to know where the allusion to ducks comes from (and there’s also a later Virago edition with a yellow rubber duck on the cover), look at the postscript below. But not if you are squeamish.) The 1989 Virago edition is  ambiguous too; is this a rainbow family or just a woman, a child and a photographer friend? It’s the Anchor edition that hints at the macabre…

There’s an author at Goodreads who has succinctly dismissed this novella as more like a broken book  and though I suspect it’s not meant as a compliment, it’s an accurate description of the fractured narrative delivered in cinematic brief scenes.  It’s like linked flash fiction and readers need to keep their wits about them as the narrative jumps about through the lives and back stories of urban women in London.  The blurb on the back cover gives some idea…

Moss wants to go shopping.
Elvis wants an aquarium.
Harold wants to start his own religion.
Princess Anne might want to be left out of it.
Angst wants to know where his next meal is coming from.
Walter and Daphne want Rupert to wake up.
Manny, Maureen and Sue want to open a garage.
Beulah wants the Southern Belle.
Buster wants to take the baby to Berlin.
Hitler and the Bogeyman want only to be loved.
Le Professeur de Judo wants love to leave him alone.
Renate wants to know what’s love got to do with it.
Hazel wants life to have a plot.
But you don’t always get what you want.

(Except for the two who only want to be loved) it all sounds kind-of innocuous… so here’s hint of what lies beneath.  Walter and Daphne are the estranged parents of Rupert, who, high on drugs, has leapt through the roof of a railway station and (abandoned by his ‘mate’ who is lying low about it) is on life support in a hospital.

Harold has never recovered from being shown his father’s box of Belsen bits and pieces as a nine-year-old.

Here is Daphne:

This being a Monday, Iris Tatters had let herself in at 8.30 to clean.  She hadn’t yet looked in to say hello to Daphne because she’s run out of suitable things to say to a woman whose eldest son is in a coma, and anyway Daphne’s incomprehensible jokes made her nervous.

Daphne heard the dull thud thud which was Iris sweeping the back stairs. The stairs the children use most; all the window ledges piled with toys, books, broken and forgotten things. The dark back stairs where, on narrow January days, it was Daphne’s habit to stand at one or other of the windows to watch the engorged red suns of winter hang low in the sky…(p.111)

Here is Harold, who went to the pictures by himself one day when he was five, and saw a newsreel of ugly puppets thrown in a heap on somebody’s allotment (was it?)

Bulldozers were pushing the ugly puppets into holes, where they flopped and bounced all over each other while soldiers just like his dad stood watching with hankies over their mouths. (p.14.

He asks his Dad about it and his Dad had begun to cry. His mother intervenes:

‘You shouldn’t carry on like this, he heard her say.  ‘I know the war sent you barmy, but you should make an effort for his sake.  Never mind me.’ And then she’d started crying too. (p.15)

It is not until page 23 that this fragment resumes.  His father prises up the floorboards in the shed…

He told Harold that he’d intended waiting until he was older before showing him these things but something had happened and he’d had to change his plans.

What was in this mossy box were mildewed photographs of sadism and records of obscene medical experiments and other things I prefer not to detail here.

Why had his father given him these things?

‘So you’ll know, son.  So you’ll know what people are all about under the surface.’ And the next day he’d gone away. (p.23)

Hodgman’s voice pops up about halfway through the book:

It’s not Moss.
It’s not Manny, Maureen or Sue.
It’s not Walter.
It’s not any of them.
It’s me.
They’re all busy with their plots.  So it must be me who makes this whole thing so fragmented, pointless and irritating. (p.79)

But it isn’t pointless and irritating.  The narrative becomes more and more seductive as the pieces come together. Some of it is repellent; some of it is gruesome.  But if you come across a copy of this masterpiece of 20th century women’s fiction, don’t miss the opportunity to read it.

Author: Helen Hodgman
Title: Broken Words
Publisher: Anchor Books (Transworld Australia), 1997, first published 1988
ISBN: 0868246808, pbk, 198 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased second-hand from Brotherhood Books.

PS The allusion to ducks comes from the brutal image that begins the book.

The pond on the Common froze in the night.  Thirteen ducks were caught by their feet.  The big dog came along and bit each bird off at the knee.  Later, the sight of a stubble of duck stumps poking through the ice like a five o’clock shadow was to fracture Hazel’s morning.  (pg. 1)

The Tomb Guardians (2021), by Paul Griffiths

/ Lisa Hill / 11 Comments

Ideal for #NovNov (Novellas in November) The Tomb Guardians, despite its sombre name, is another playful novella from Paul Griffiths, author of Mr Beethoven which I enjoyed in 2020. And like Mr Beethoven, it explores interesting ideas in an economical  narrative form.  In just 121 pages,  I learned things I did not know about the Gospels, including one that was suppressed;  about religious dogma and how it was enforced; and about how the Reformation impacted on the practice of art.

The narrative consists of interwoven dialogues, which, as you can see, converge sometimes as if they were answering each other across the centuries:

  • the panicked voices of the soldiers who were supposed to guard the tomb of Jesus after the Crucifixion but woke from the innocence of sleep to find it open, and
  • the anguished voice of an art historian whose thesis has gone awry, and his colleague’s attempts to understand what’s gone wrong.

What are we going to do now?

I don’t know what to do now.

What do you mean, What are we going to do now?

What do you mean?
I just don’t know what to do.

Steady on.

Steady on.
You don’t realise.

What’s the problem then? 

What?
It’s this lecture.
Yes.

I just don’t like it.

It’s fallen apart on me.

There’s a lot I don’t like, beginning with that dirty great rock having shifted on its own-i-o. (p1-2)

As you can see, you can tell that the dialogue in Italics is between the soldiers.  They know they’re in trouble, the authorities will want to know what’s happened, and they won’t be pleased about this dereliction of duty.  Nobody knows yet that the Resurrection has taken place; and the guards are too scared to go into the tomb to see if the body is still there.  But there is no chance this will be overlooked: the more astute soldier of the group debunks the forlorn hope that the authorities will have forgotten about them, and he’s got a sarcastic turn of phrase.

Have either of you had a sudden accident or something? Forget about us? You don’t seem to understand. This is political.  This is hot.  A local rebel got executed.  The population’s full of his partisans.  They’ll want to get their revenge.  Almost certainly it’s some of them have taken the body.  And we — us lot, all four of us — were supposed to stop that from happening.  Oh yes, they’ll forget about us, all right.  Sure, they’ll forget about us. (p.19)

So they need a good (i.e. untrue) explanation for why the rock has been moved, and for where the fourth soldier went to while they were asleep.  Some of their invented explanations are very droll indeed.

The art historian is to give a lecture about his research, which focuses on these four soldiers as depicted by Bernhard Strigel (c. 1461–1528), a significant German artist from Memmingen. Strigel was a notable portrait painter, but — the art historian tells us — it was his religious paintings that make him important in the history of art.  His paintings of these four soldiers were the first time that ordinary people were depicted in religious art, and the first time anyone had been depicted asleep. Here they are, detached from the altar panel, and if you click on it, you can see that the fourth soldier is different.  He seems to be faking sleep whereas the others are oblivious.

BTW my edition has full page colour reproductions of all four paintings.

But that is not the art historian’s problem.  His interest is in the origin of the belief that there were four guards at the tomb.  There’s only one mention of any guards in the gospels and that’s in Matthew 27, verse 62.  Would four professional Roman soldiers all have fallen asleep and thus missed out on the critical moment of the Resurrection, so pivotal to Christianity? (Well, the soldiers can’t come up with a convincing explanation for that!)  And let’s not forget that there’s no mention of how many guards there were, until Peter’s uncanonical Gospel turns up in Egypt until the 19th century… so how did Strigel come up with these four snoozing soldiers, eh?

Well, you have to read the novella to find out.  Enjoy!

Author: Paul Griffiths
Title: The Tomb Guardians
Publisher: Henningham Family Press, 2021
Cover designer not acknowledged
ISBN: 9781916218611, pbk with French flaps, 121 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from The Book Depository

Image credits:

The painting are all in the public domain.  The first three are held with the Bavarian State Painting Collections at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, and the fourth at the York Art Gallery in the UK.

 

The English teacher (1945), by R K Narayan

/ Lisa Hill / 15 Comments

It is always a pleasure to pick up a book by R K Narayan, one of the great 20th century writers of India.  Born in 1906 and dying in 2001 after the turn of the millennium, he wrote exquisite stories of everyday Indian life, while his contexts  traversed cataclysmic change.  His earliest semi-autobiographical novels take place during the British Raj. The English Teacher was published in the last year of WW2 and on the cusp of independence.

The English Teacher is a deeply personal story derived from events in Narayan’s life.  It is last in the semi-autobiographical trilogy that began with Swami and Friends (1935) but I do not yet have The Bachelor of Arts (1937) and it’s not in my local library and neither is anything else by this author.  If there are any librarians or teachers reading this, please consider acquiring works by Narayan for the growing Indian community.  These are the books that reveal the lives of Indian parents and grandparents to generations born here in Australia. Not having any is a bit like not having any Austen…

The English Teacher begins with Krishna, a cautious man whose small ambitions are often failed by his own weaknesses. He is a somewhat cynical teacher of English, pressured to conform to English standards of written expression and ideas about a canon of English literature taught …

…so that they might mug up Shakespeare and Milton and secure high marks and save me adverse remarks from my chiefs at the end of the year. (p.1)

His heart isn’t in it, because he’s a poet.

A grand plan to bathe daily in the river and write poetry before work means (on the first day of this regime) he attends his classes unprepared, and — to wing his way through an hour, he wastes his students’ time by stretching out the attendance roll to take up half an hour. But he endears himself to the reader when he starts reading from King Lear to stretch out the lesson and becomes so absorbed in Shakespeare’s play that he loses track of time.

I read on.  The boys listened attentively.  I passed on to the next scene without knowing it. I could not stop.

‘Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That hide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides
…defend you
From seasons such as these?

At the thought of helpless humanity I nearly broke down. The bell rang, I shut my book with the greatest relief, and walked out of the class. (p.9)

It’s not hard to see that while Narayan himself was a writer of literature that was relevant to the Indian reading public, he chose this excerpt to show that Shakespeare was relevant too.  Those lines can also allude to the houseless heads and unfed sides who were all around Narayan and his students, living a life of poverty on the streets under the Raj.

Krishna’s impulse to argue trivial issues with assistant professor Gajapathy fizzles out, but his disdain for his good chief Brown remains unexpressed… though he has a fine argument with him in his head. At the urging of Narayan’s mentor Graham Greene, this book was first published by Eyre and Spottiswood in Britain in 1945, and by then both the British and Indian audience for this novel would have understood that it was impossible to argue with the English head of the school, and would have known too that Gajapathy is in an invidious position because he can’t do anything about Brown’s nit-picking absurdities.  Names convey a lot in this slim novella.

BEWARE: SPOILERS

Eventually the narrative reveals that Krishna has a wife and child.   They have never lived together because of Krishna’s inertia and fear of change.  She has been living with his in-laws and now although Krishna has visited, the baby is seven months old.  But when his father writes to him about it, Krishna decides to leave the hostel where he has been living all through his student years and the transition to his career as a teacher.  Narayan portrays his inner thoughts and fears about this disruption to his life, but all turns out well.  Susila is a wonderful wife, Krishna adores the child, and they live very happily together.

Fatefully, however, Krishna’s father offers to help with the purchase of a house so that they need not rent.  And on a day when they are happily house-hunting, Susila contracts what turns out to be typhoid, and the story takes a darker tone as her illness progresses through to its tragic conclusion.

The rest of the novel is about Krishna’s efforts to be a good father to his daughter, and his journey to enlightenment.  To Western eyes, his interactions with the spirit of his wife through a medium may look like charlatanism, and the behaviour of Leela’s teacher towards his wife and family may look like heartless desertion, but when this journey through grief is viewed through the prism of Hindu religious belief and reincarnation, it is a portrayal of acceptance, made all the more powerful because Narayan had suffered the same grief himself.

I read this book at this time for #NovNov (Novellas in November).

Author: R K Narayan (1906-2001)
Title: The English Teacher
Publisher: Vintage, (Penguin Random House) 2006, first published 1945
Cover designer not acknowledged
ISBN: 9780099282280, pbk., 180 pages
Source: personal library

Snow, Dog, Foot (2015), by Claudio Morandini, translated by J Ockenden

/ Lisa Hill / 10 Comments

*blush* Half way though the month, Snow, Dog, Foot is my belated first novella for #NovNov (Novellas in November)… and what an outstanding story it is. It won Italy’s Procida Isola di Arturo – Elisa Morante prize in the fiction section, and its translator J Ockenden won the 2019 Peirene Stevns Translation Prize.

As Stu tells us in his enticing review at Winston’s Dad, Snow, Dog, Foot was Morandini’s sixth book. Born in 1960, he was an Italian teacher of Latin and literature and is an author of novels and short stories. The list at Wikipedia shows us that he’s prolific, and as of 2023 had published eleven books. Only one of which has been translated, more’s the pity…

Snow, Dog, Foot with its strange title was the first book published for Peirene’s 2020 ‘closed universe’ theme.  (You can see their themes for other years here.)  To see how apt Morandini’s setting is for this theme, we can see the region at Wikipedia.  His birthplace was Aosta in a bilingual region of the Italian Alps, northwest of Turin.   I can’t enlarge the photo enough here to show that there are small settlements on the lower slopes, but you can see them if you visit the original image at Wikipedia.

And then you must imagine Adelmo Farandola living in solitude even higher up the mountains.

What would drive a man to do that, to prefer to live a life of such squalor and privation?

Adelmo Farandola learned the advantages of solitude as a young man, during the time he spent as a fugitive in the woods, among rocky crags and in abandoned mineshafts. He retains vague, distant memories of this period.  It was during the war, when the valleys were haunted by men in heavy greatcoats who muttered incomprehensible words as they lined up everybody they came across and shot them without much ceremony.  Adelmo Farandola had fled into the mountains like many others who had sensed the danger in time and formed themselves into bands, but he soon went off on his own, wandering among abandoned farms and old mineshafts hidden by tree stumps, eating nothing for days on end except a few berries and leaves that he recognised.  He never imagined that he would have to stay hidden for months.  He thought it would be only a few days — he thought it would be exciting, like a dangerous children’s game.

Day and night he heard the echo of gunfire and he knew that each shot meant the death of another person like him, caught behind a wall, in a mountain pasture or at the bottom of a well.  He had heard that the men in greatcoats were methodical and scrupulous, that they knew how to scour the mountainside with binoculars in hand, maps unfurled and the volume on the two-way radio turned all the way up.  Sometimes he heard the crackle of those radios, which told him that the grey-coated men were close, really close, so he stopped breathing and tried to still his heartbeat so it couldn’t be heard. (p.52)

He found a secondary tunnel of an abandoned manganese mine, and made himself a den in a space so well-concealed and so narrow that no one would ever think to look for him there.  And he stayed there for the war years, staving off extreme hunger and cold and taking comfort in talking to himself and in imagining the voices of animals and objects ready and willing to reply. 

When the story opens many years later he is an old man living in a rudimentary cabin high up on the mountain,  He ventures down to the town only for supplies to see him through the winter months. On one occasion an old dog follows him home, and though at first he rejects the dog’s overtures, it eventually becomes a companion of sorts and the text reproduces their ‘conversations’ as Adelmo experiences them in his own personal reality.

His presence in the village is only fleeting, but lapses of memory and other odd behaviours noticed by the woman in the shop, send a ranger up the mountain in search of him.  The ranger is young and perhaps inexperienced.  He seems genial, but what was supposed to be a welfare check prompts Adelmo to flee further away because of the ranger’s enquiries about illegal hunting and an unlicensed gun.  This only increases Adelmo’s paranoia, and he spends the winter snowed into a freezing shelter high up in the alps, where his supplies fail too soon because he is also (reluctantly) feeding the dog.

And then when the thaw begins, the dog finds a human foot protruding from the debris of an avalanche.  As Stu says in his review, the story morphs from a portrait of mental dissolution into a chilling mystery.  Who is this corpse, and how did he die?

It is not surprising that the translation was rewarded with a prize.  It really is superb:

People imagine that a snow-covered mountain must be a silent realm. But snow and ice are noisy, mocking, unabashed creatures.  Everything creaks under the weight of the snow, and the creaking takes your breath away, because it seems like the prelude to a devastating collapse.  The sound of snow and ice settling echoes for a long time, travelling through the ground underfoot and through the air.  The great avalanches speak in fearsome roars and in fierce hisses of displaced air that fill the listener with dread — but even the smaller landslides thunder and echo through the valleys, the sound vibrating between rock walls miles away from the actual point of collapse. (p.56)

Highly recommended.

Author: Claudio Morandini
Title: Snow, Dog, Foot 
Translated from the Italian by J Ockenden
Publisher: Peirene Press, 2019, first published as Neve, Cane, Piede in 2015
ISBN: 9781908670564, pbk with French flaps, 124 pages
Source: Personal library

Image credit: By Tiia Monto – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40799287

 

My Year in Novellas #NovNov

/ Lisa Hill / 13 Comments

*chuckle* A good few of these were novellas that I set aside to read for last year’s #NovNov.

*wry smile* Due to my incorrigible book buying habits, the pile is even bigger than it was last year, oh well….

All links go to my reviews.

Only a few Australian novellas, but these ones were very good to read, and they’ve all got interesting covers:

Bliss and Other Stories, read by Peter Dann at Librivox

Some of Katherine Mansfield’s ‘short stories’ qualify as novellas by my definition, (i.e. fiction 100-200 pages long), and I read them for #AYearOfNZLit. 

Quite a few were translations, partly because I chose some for #WITMonth.

International fiction from well known authors:

And a couple of classics:

Given that I am deep in the throes of the Cazalet Chronicles and the remaining two are chunksters just like the others, I don’t know how many novellas I will manage this November, we shall see…

Passing Remarks (1998), by Helen Hodgman

/ Lisa Hill / 5 Comments

At 196 pages, Passing Remarks by Helen Hodgman (1945-2022) only just scrapes into my definition of a novella but I read it anyway for Novellas in November, hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck. Passing Remarks (1998) was Helen Hodgman’s penultimate novel (1945-2022), and it is quite different to her other books that I’ve read.

Blues Skies (1976) is, despite its title, a sardonic portrait of marriage and motherhood in Tasmanian suburbia; Jack and Jill (1978) is a macabre twist on Tasmanian Gothic; and Hodgman’s last novel The Bad Policeman (2001) is a tragi-comedy about an anti-hero with an heroic streak. (See my reviews here and here and here.)  Though impossible to read now without the awareness that its preoccupation with ageing foreshadowed the author’s own long, slow descent into dependence on others due to Parkinson’s Disease — Passing Remarks is, as I showed in this Sensational Snippet, often outrageously funny.

Passing Remarks is also a novel of lesbian love.  There is not much about Hodgman’s private life in the public domain, but she married young and had a daughter within a marriage that appears to have lasted quite some time. (His Wikipedia page makes no mention of his personal life, except that he re-married in 1984).  But in an interview at the SMH on the reissue of Jack and Jill in the Text Classics series, Hodgman revealed that she had fallen in love with a woman in what was described as a catastrophic affair that consumed her emotionally.  Whether there were autobiographical elements in Passing Remarks or not,  Hodgman writes convincingly about the lesbian milieu, and the problems that confront a May-September relationship.

This is the blurb:

Two things happened to Rosemary that summer; she won $30,000 playing Keno at the Hakoah Club and she fell in love with a woman much younger than herself…
Award-winning Helen Hodgman is back with a witty and perceptive new novel about love, sex, aging, the art of literary biography, tattooing, underwear, lesbian fiction, Enid Blyton, drugs, female circumcision, family values, near-death experiences, gardening, body piercing, holiday resorts, genocide, little boys, plaster saints, Kmart, baseball, big boys, cats, cricket, koalas and the Virgin Mary.

The story is narrated mostly from the intimate perspective of Rosemary, whose breakup with Billie has precipitated a mid-life crisis; but told also from the point of view of Billie, the much younger lover who has left her.

For Rosemary, the break-up is a catastrophic moment of truth.  It’s not triggered by any dramatic moment, only Billie’s desire to visit her mother who’s living a hippie lifestyle in Bundagen on the NSW north coast, and then to travel north, to work perhaps in Byron Bay, or even go as far as Cairns.  Billie sets off on her Harley insouciant about this departure, but it sends a chill down Rosemary’s spine.  She worries that it is her minor signs of bodily ageing that remind Billie of her mother.

What’s the matter?’ But Rosemary cannot tell Billie she is scared of being alone, not necessarily in the immediate future but in the longer term.  Old and alone.  Ill and lonely.  This morning it seems possible people she’s always dismissed as pathetic have a point.  Stay married and live longer.  Stay together and live.

But Hodgman doesn’t dwell on it, Rosemary’s inner dialogue undercuts itself.

They’d be printing it on bumperstickers next.  Rosemary tells herself to stop it.  You get a cat and you cope, Rosemary tells herself firmly.  Or a dog, if you must.  A dog is always pleased to see you when you get home from work.  What she needs is a drink.  She knows alcohol is a depressant, but, quite honestly, in the short term at least, it does the trick.  Luckily there’s still a bottle of champagne in the fridge.  She opens it, hands a glass to Billie.

‘To your travels,’ she says and drinks.

‘Cheers, lover,’ says Billie.  And Rosemary reminds herself that she’d rather be dead than totter handcuffed and in tandem towards the grave. (p.16)

As she reflects on major problem in the relationship — the age difference — Rosemary revisits incidents from their time together that hint at other issues.  Rosemary loves Billie for her casual, impulsive ways; her lack of interest in clothes and home decoration; and her free and easy attitudes to things. But Rosemary is an Associate Professor of Early Childhood Studies while Billie does casual work that brings in money but doesn’t demand responsibility or after hours work at home.

Billie’s middle-aged mother doesn’t have any money, but Billie is more street smart than that.

Billie mulls over this question of money and her own mother’s attitude to it.  It didn’t do to be casual about money.  Billie couldn’t understand how any woman would willingly embrace powerlessness, but her mum seemed almost proud of the fact.  ‘I’m a bit of a sixties person,’ she’d say, as if this were something to boast about.

Money equals power and freedom, thinks Billie, but there must be other ways of getting it other than clawing your way toward the light shining through the glass ceiling inside some male institution.  Billie doesn’t want equal opportunity, Billie wants a different planet. (p.20)

These differences in class don’t matter between the sheets or when they’re out having fun but Billie doesn’t quite fit in with Rosemary’s friends.

Sometimes Billie felt unsure.  Times like the party when she was about to be faced with the ranks of Rosemary’s friends — the heads-of-committees-of-enquiries — there were lots of those going on — the doctors, the lawyers, the artists, academics and such, and all she could do was stand staring at the heap of clothes in front of her and panic about what to wear.  What would they be wearing? The enquirers, for instance.  Did they wear shoulder pads to parties or only to lunch? For all she knew they wore them to bed as well. She could see them all lined up toothless and mumbling on the verandah of some future rest home for faded femocrats, scrawny arms flung wide to illustrate their quavering claims that, once, they’d word should pads this big. (p.18)

When colleagues Susan and Sara visit to coo around the kitchen admiring the blue terrazzo work surfaces, Billie is introduced and it does not go well.

Their united gaze, it seemed to Billie, said Rosie’s new kitchen was a dream but her new lover was a serious breach of taste.

‘Billie.  Billie. Is it short for Wilhelmina?’ (p.18)

Billie had dealt with playground harassment about being named after an English actress her mother admired but with Rosemary’s friends, she knew she could not start hurling her scrawny mates all around the kitchen in time-honoured playground fashion. So she makes a lesbian joke which falls flat…

Billie had watched the fine creases of confusion that constituted Susan and Sara’s faces slowly arrange themselves into tight and tidy smiles before they turned back to higher things — whether or not it was really necessary to install a bidet, the conclusion being yes it was, absolutely. (p.19)

Women are so good at being cruel, sometimes.

Anyway, Billie goes north, and Rosemary frets about ageing and whether Billie will ever come back to her. Lots of interesting things happen, but I shall say no more!

Passing Remarks is long out of print, but on the day I looked there were copies at AbeBooks for a song.

Author: Helen Hodgman
Title: Passing Remarks
Publisher: Anchor Books (Transworld), 1996
ISBN: 9780868246772, pbk., 196 pages
Source: personal library

Siblings (1963), by Brigitte Reimann, translated by Lucy Jones

/ Lisa Hill / 28 Comments

I think I may have mentioned before that Readings bookstore features translations in a sub-section of their online fiction category, but for reasons best known to their web designer, the link to it is tucked away on their blog.  Fortunately I remembered that it was there on Love Your Bookshop Day in October, and so was able to find The Picture Bride by Lee Geum-Yi (reviewed here); Barefoot by Nobel contender Can Xue (on the TBR); and this one, Siblings by Brigitte Reimann.

In the interim everyone seems to have read Siblings, because at 134 pages and with a German author it’s a perfect choice to combine Novellas in November hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck. with German Lit Month hosted at Lizzy’s Literary Life.

Siblings is the story of three children in the GDR which was part of the Soviet bloc from 1949 to 1990.  Konrad has defected to the west and his presence in the novel is mostly a ghostly absence; Elisabeth has embraced the ideals of a glorious socialist future; and her brother Uli is chafing under the oppression of the regime.  When he confides in Elisabeth that he is going to defect too, the scene is set for a tussle between love and duty; loyalty and desire.  In a microcosm of a world then bifurcated by the competing philosophies of capitalism and socialism, this novel depicts what it meant to families to have to choose.

For Elisabeth, an artist working in an industrial complex to train the workers as artists too, the GDR offers opportunity.  But Uli’s career has been blighted by a fleeting association with a university professor who transgressed against the regime.  He has excellent qualifications as an engineer but can only get work as a draughtsman.

In a narrative that weaves the recent past with the present, the fault lines begin to emerge as Elisabeth encounters criticism from the Party at work.  She had made the mistake of expressing her reservations about one of her worker painters that had been foisted on [her] by an overly ambitious union man.

A few of them had only their longing and love of painting to offer.  Two or three of them had real talent, and for these I had high hopes.  But mostly there were too many clever amateurs who copied soppy landscapes of purple heather and idealised fisherman’s cottages.  You could have bought half a dozen decent reproductions for the prices they wanted for their kitsch.  I would argue with them, then run, sobbing, to tell Lukas that he could carry out his damned cultural revolution on his own, for all I cared. (p.36)

60 years after this novel was published, contemporary readers are familiar through books and film with the modes of suppression and surveillance in the Soviet bloc, but this novella — drawing on the experience of the author’s brother’s defection and her own work leading a circle of writing workers at a coal mine — was courageous in its time. Brigitte Reimann (1933-1973) rejected Party interference in the arts.  According to Wikipedia…

Reimann never joined the Socialist Unity Party of Germany and was critical of the East German state’s involvement in the country’s literary movement.  She wrote in her diary that there were ‘Opportunists and numbskulls everywhere. The only subject worth discussing in a novel, it seems, is the need to increase work productivity … Human problems are not in vogue.’

Ultimately, Siblings is about the very real human problem of political differences within families. Those of us who lived through the years of the campaign to end the Vietnam War know how it divided families and in some cases how those chasms were never resolved.  Among my friends at the moment it seems wise to maintain a charged silence about current conflicts so that opinions destructive to friendship are not expressed.  We have learned that relationships matter more than expressing opinions about things we cannot change anyway.

But that is not an option for Elisabeth and her brother.  An episode in the story illustrates what’s at stake.

Siblings is set in 1960 before the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, so Elisabeth and her mother are able to cross the border to visit Konrad.  It’s not a success. Elisabeth has listened to, but not promised to accede to her mother’s appeals to avoid arguing with Konrad, and it isn’t long before Mother, pale and unhappy is witness to a fast, sharp, cold look that pierced the well-intentioned appearance of family harmony.  Elisabeth reminds Konrad that he would be nothing in the west if the east had not paid for his education, and he responds in kind:

Konrad stared at me with an expression of anger and disgust and said, ‘That’s always your final argument, the money you’ve invested in us.  When all your sophisms cut no ice, you pay the wage earner’s card.  But you need us, you really do.  The economy in the east would have come crashing down long ago if the feeding trough wasn’t always full to the brim for the intelligentsia.  Everyone has a price — even you, Elisabeth, even you have your price: a contract or the guarantee that people will buy your optimistic little paintings to hang in the canteen or the Party secretary’s office.’

Even though answering him was pointless, I said, ‘You hate us because you feel you owe us something.’ (p.40)

This naked hatred is what lies ahead if Uli defects too.

BTW You can see from that excerpt that this is a fine translation by Lucy Jones.

Grant at 1st reading and Jacqui at Jacquiwine reviewed it too.

Author: Brigitte Reimann
Title: Siblings (Die Geschwister)
Translated from the German by Lucy Jones
Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics, Penguin Random House, 2023, first published in 1963
ISBN: 9780241555835, pbk with French flaps, 134 pages including explanatory notes at the back
Source: Personal library, purchased from Readings $35.

 

Swami and Friends (1935), by R K Narayan

/ Lisa Hill / 13 Comments

Time for another novella for Novellas in November, hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck.  This is Week 3 (starting Monday 13 November) and the theme is Broadening My Horizons:

  • Pick your top novellas in translation and think about new genres or authors you’ve been introduced to through novellas.

Well, I have broadened my horizons, but the remarkable novella I’ve just read isn’t in translation. Swami and Friends (1935) was written in English by the great Indian author R K Narayan. There are 44 reviews of books by Indian and Anglo-Indian authors on this blog, but prior to this I had never read anything by an Indian author written before Indian independence in 1947.

On his Wikipedia page, we learn that

Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami (1906 – 2001), better known as R. K. Narayan, was an Indian writer and novelist known for his work set in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi. He was a leading author of early Indian literature in English along with Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao.

Narayan’s mentor and friend Graham Greene was instrumental in getting publishers for Narayan’s first four books including the semi-autobiographical trilogy of Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts and The English Teacher. The fictional town of Malgudi was first introduced in Swami and Friends.  (Narayan’s Wikipedia page, lightly edited).

Ostensibly written as a children’s novel, Swami and Friends (1935) is more than that. In 2019 the BBC listed Swami and Friends on its list of the 100 most influential novels, (and in 2015, Robert McCrum at the Guardian berated himself for overlooking the book in his list of the Best 100.)  This novella is a vivid portrait of childhood in British India but it also shows how a childhood was impacted by significant events in the pre-partition era. So though the story focusses on the universalities of childhood — school, friendships, relationships within the family and the puzzling business of growing up — it also shows this impulsive boy getting caught up in political protests even though he only dimly understands what they are about.  And while Narayan’s style is appropriately light in tone, Swami and Friends also satirises middle-class society and its complicities in the colonial administration.

Ten-year old Swami does not recognise that his parents are sometimes struggling financially.  Although his father is a lawyer and the family is middle-class, they are still not well-off.  In chapter 3, Mother asks Father for some money to pay the tailor who is pressing for payment, and Father expresses anxiety about not having enough money for the rest of the month.  This tells us two things: (unsurprisingly) that it’s a patriarchal society in which women have no economic power, and that (under the British) even a lawyer is sometimes short of money.  In the recurring theme of the relationship between father and son,  Swami doesn’t understand why he can’t have the things he wants, and he thinks his father is just being mean.

The novella also shows the stratification of society and how easily Swami has absorbed a sense of superiority over servants, and how sometimes this backfires. When Swami yearns for an unattainable hoop, he becomes easy prey for a resentful coachman who promises to get one for him for five rupees… and then reneges.

Narayan’s father was a schoolmaster, and Narayan himself briefly was too, so it is not surprising that Swami and Friends stresses the value of a good education.  Swami is an unenthusiastic student, more interested in the social side of school and often in trouble for daydreaming.  At home his strict father nags him about homework and study for the exams (with a predictable response from Swami) but Swami eventually knuckles under — because he’s afraid he’ll lose touch with his friends if he fails the exam for high school.

But when he gets there, trouble finds him.

At the All-India Congress Committee in 1920, Gandhi had united Muslims and Hindus in his policy of non-violent non-cooperation, invoking boycotts of official functions; elections; government schools and colleges, and British goods, particularly textiles.  Indians were encouraged to use home-spun, home-woven cloth. (See the Mahatma Gandhi page at Cotton Town, viewed 14/11/23) [Narayan BTW repeats the accusation that some colonial cotton manufacturers cut off the thumbs of their weavers but this is contested, not least by Gandhi who said that some weavers self-mutilated to avoid imprisonment. Which is also an indictment of colonialism, but in a different way.]

Swami’s a-political parents have sent him to the Albert Mission High School — a British Christian school, where the theme of the need for religious tolerance is exposed by a master who repeatedly mocks the Hindu religion. Swami takes any excuse to have a day off school so he goes to the protest and in the ensuing riot he enthusiastically contributes his school cap to the bonfire of Lancashire and Manchester cloth and breaks a whole lot of windows at his school.

When he gets home, with a story about how his cap was taken from him, his father is livid because he has gone out of his way to make sure that Swami’s uniform is entirely made of local cloth.  But worse is to come when his feeble excuses aren’t accepted at school, and he is expelled because of his disrespectful impudence to the headmaster.

Things are even worse at the very strict Board High School where there are school parade drills which interfere with Swami’s passion for cricket.  He and his pals dream up their own team and with a mixture of naivete and chutzpah organise an important match which necessitates Swami’s punctual attendance at practice.  Things go horribly wrong when Swami doesn’t realise that a doctor is only humouring him with a promise to get him out of school commitments, and he sees no alternative but to run away when he is found out and loses his temper.  Even then, his priority remains the cricket match and his all-important friendship with Rajam and Mani is sorely tested when once again somebody humours him and the misunderstanding causes him to miss it.

I wish I’d had a copy of this book for my school library when I was still teaching.  I think all the students — especially those from India — would have enjoyed the mischief and mayhem, and they would have been interested in the activities of children before the digital era.  At the Ohio State University blog Literary Globetrotters, they recommend it because it also shows

  • the power of the mob mentality and peer pressure;
  • the importance of making new friends and adjusting to changes that may occur among the friends you already have; and
  • its anti-violence message to use words rather than actions.

I’ll finish with an excerpt that shows how authentically Narayan depicts the mind of a child:

He sat at his table and took out his atlas.  He opened the political map of Europe and sat gazing at it.  It puzzled him how people managed to live in such a crooked country as Europe.  He wondered what the shape of the people might be who lived places where the outline narrowed as in a cape, and how they managed to escape being strangled by the contour of their land.  And then another favourite problem began to tease him: how did those map-makers find out what the shape of a country was? How did they find out that Europe was like a camel’s head? Probably they stood on high towers and copied what they saw below. He wondered if he would be able to see India as it looked in the map, if he stood on the top of the town hall.  He had never been there nor ever did he wish to go there.  Though he was incredulous, tailor Ranga persistently informed him that there was a torture chamber in the top story of the town hall to which Pathans decoyed young people.  (pp.63-64).

Emma reviewed it at Book Around the Corner

Author: R.K. Narayan
Title: Swami and Friends
Publisher: Indian Thought Publications, 1994, 74th reprint 2015
Cover design not acknowledged.
ISBN: 9788185986005, pbk., 216 pages, large font.  (In other editions it’s <200 pages and qualifies as a novella.)
Source: personal library.

Recommended to me by Vishy, who places it as No 1 on his Vishy’s Indian Literature Rading List.  Which is why I bought it along with The English Teacher (1945);   The Painter of Signs (1976); and The Dark Room (1938).

Late, a novel (2023), by Michael Fitzgerald

/ Lisa Hill / 20 Comments

Imagine one of the world’s most iconic women: capture your image of Hollywood screen legend Marilyn Monroe in your mind’s eye…

Born in 1926, she would be 97 now had she not killed herself in 1962 aged 36. Can we imagine her in old age? The prevailing narrative tells us that ageing was what she feared because her identity depended on her beauty, her sensuality, her persona as a sex symbol. People thought that’s all she was; they thought she was a dumb blonde, and she thought she had no future as an older woman.  Michael Fitzgerald’s new novel Late imagines her otherwise, reinventing herself to take control of her destiny.  She fakes her suicide, and when the novel opens she is living a life free from the constraints of celebrity in a clifftop apartment in late 1980s Sydney.

This is the blurb:

So, was it hard to pretend I was “dead”? Well, my motivation was abundant; it was splendiferous, endless, you might say.’

An American actress, renowned for being late, is living with her two cats in a modernist clifftop apartment in Sydney in the late 1980s.

The recounting of her story is prompted by the arrival of an old typewriter and a book addressed to Zelda Zonk. And by the arrival of a young man called Daniel, who is locked out while house-sitting her neighbour’s apartment.

Together Zelda and Daniel form an unlikely but close bond as they go walking, prepare dinner for Shabbat, traverse Sydney Harbour on a ferry and talk about their lives. Part of their bond is the discovery that they are both orphans. Daniel is also a habitué of the nearby sandstone cliffs where men have mysteriously gone missing.

In Late, Michael Fitzgerald superbly captures the literary spirit and sensibility of an ageing woman and icon who has escaped celebrity. It is a haunting and lyrical novel about art, friendship, and confronting our fears.

Like Fitzgerald’s earlier novels, The Pacific Room (2017), and Pietà (2021), Late is a richly layered work that rewards close reading and an openness to allusion. Marilyn, a.k.a. Zelda Zonk narrates the novel, and her interactions with others trigger memories that spark a narrative that sets the record straight about that ‘dumb blonde’ image. (The Acknowledgements at the back of the book list a remarkable catalogue of sources.)

She has a lot to talk about.  She has a childhood marked by poverty and instability and three ex-husbands behind her, plus a career that often exasperated her, a relentless Hollywood publicity machine that exploited her and the effects of a beauty industry that wrecked her hair.  (There are no mirrors in her apartment). She’s also widely read (most famously of James Joyce’s Ulysses, one of 430 books in her personal library); she’s interested in architecture, (sending me to Google to find Harry Seidler’s Igloo house (more properly known as the Williamson House, see here where you can see why its curves are of interest); she’s read countless play scripts and met Khruschev; and she’s familiar with the fade-out of Beethoven’s last string quartets and Strauss’s final songs. 

She’s also a kindly person..  When one of her neighbours locks himself out of an apartment he’s house-sitting, she befriends him, introducing him to caviar, Mumm champagne and Jewish cuisine (IRL she was a convert) and also to her cats named after two writers she’d had lunch with in the (late?) 1950s.  

Not that their tastes run to oysters, white grapes and champagne, as those of the two lady writers did, nor are they female.  When they tussle on the keyboard, flipping like Graeco-Roman wrestlers, Carson and Isak are undoubtedly boys.  (p.6)

Knowing what it’s like to be without family, she helps Daniel to find his birth mother, and it is with him that she encounters repeated incidents of gay-bashing.  And that’s where Fitzgerald’s imagination shows us that she was brave too.

This Marilyn is also a terrific writer. Pounding on her Royal typewriter, she asks her readers…

Are you more surprised that I can do butterfly or that I can write? Think about it.  The Babel tower of scripts I had to pray for at first, words dropped like Communion wafers onto my grateful tongue, poured like wine into my being — as if I were a pure empty vessel, when in fact I was a sponge, bulimic for knowledge. (p.6, underlining mine to highlight the (increasingly rare) grammatically correct use of the verb in the subjunctive mood!)

Macquarie Lighthouse (Wikipedia Commons)

She’s funny:

Ahead is the lighthouse, so perfectly named. Though surely I’m not the first to notice its resemblance to that manly attribute we have all perhaps seen too much of in a lifetime but never (or am I missing something?) alabaster white. (p.138)

And lyrical:

Reversing shudderingly from the Quay, the ferry does its frothy little curtsey before the Opera house, its ceramic sails licked by the sun, the sun SINKINGSinkingsinking so low as to be eye level and reflected back through the dirty windows of the ferry, a kinda granular gold.  It’s safe to say this is my favourite time of day (or perhaps not-night?) When edges lose their sharpness; shapes slump and squish out, dissolving briefly into fuzzy particles of light.

Late.  Late as in a late Titian painting, when artist eyes become caked in cataracts and can see only in memory. Late as in a Mahler symphony, when sound turns to space, spacious and cranky, tearing with strings.  (p.128)

This is a splendid work for the first of my Novellas in November.

Highly recommended!

Author: Michael Fitzgerald
Title: Late
Publisher: Transit Lounge, 2023
Cover design: Peter Lo
ISBN: 9781923023024, hbk., 196 pages
Review copy courtesy of Transit Lounge.

Image credit:

 

2023 Novellas in November, Week one: My year in Novellas

/ Lisa Hill / 17 Comments

 

So this is Week One of Novellas in November, hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck. and I have (sort of) jumped the gun with my previous post with a reading list of recent Australian releases. 

But now it’s time to widen the field to include international titles — and to narrow it with the novellas I’ve read only since this time last year.

I’ve pinched, and tweaked, Kate’s categories from her post about plans for #NovNov… I’ve ditched Short Non Fiction because IMO if it’s not fiction, it’s not a novella.  (Yeah, I know, I’m out of step on this because this meme’s hosts think otherwise).

Australian novellas are in bold.

All links go to my reviews.

Short classics

From the UK, France and Austria.

Novellas in Translation

From Palestine, Israel, Argentina and France.

Contemporary novellas

From Australia, the UK and Ireland.

 

Not so contemporary but not quite classics, all found lurking on the TBR

From Uganda, South Africa, Australia, and China via the UK.

My definition of a novella is a book between 100 and 200 pages, though of course not all books, fonts or layouts are the same.
But all these are short enough to be readable in a short time, and they’re all long enough to have character development.