01/06/2013
Book 169: Last Train to Zona Verde
24 Septembre 2013, venue TBA
Our non-fiction read for the year is His Grumpiness, Paul Theroux, heading through Africa and bringing his unsparing, curmudgeonly gaze on all that he sees. And what he sees he does not like.
Book 168: The Rosie Project
27 August 2013, venue TBA
Well, every other book group in Australia’s picked it, so why shouldn’t we? Yes, it’s Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie Project, the latest in that new genre “autism lit”. What will those publishers think of next?
Book 167: Umbrella
30 July 2013, venue TBA
In the spirit of our earlier enthusiasm and desire for “challenging” reads we’ve chosen Will Self’s Umbrella, which even devotee’s of London Perambulator consider to be, well, challenging.
Book 166: Madame Bovary
25 June 2013, venue TBA
Mr Sponge is currently unavailable, so our stop-gap book is Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. If this film poster’s anything to go by, it should be a saucy read!
08/05/2013
Book 165: The Retriever
28 May 2013, Helen and Simon’s
Well, that was a surprise.
Not the book, which we generally decided lay somewhere on a continuum from “a bit ordinary” to “unreadable trash”, but the fact that The Retriever, by Keith Schafferius (with Grantlee Kieza), generated quite a lot of talk.
The book itself got short shrift. Something obviously went wrong, very badly wrong, from the moment when a guy called Keith Schafferius started telling yarns about his life as a private dick to people like Richard Fidler on the ABC Radio to the time when a publisher teamed him up with a ghost writer to make all these yarns into a compelling page-turner. Because Radio Keith was transformed into Book Keith, and while Radio Keith was interesting and dealt with terrible moral problems, Book Keith was a bombastic, egotistical nutter. Which Keith was the real Keith? Or was it all the fault of the ghost writer, trying to create some weird Sam Spade parody?
There were glimpses in there, little bits and pieces of real stories, but whenever these emerged they’d be banged on the head by some boy’s own adventure story of false passports, speeding cars and daring helicopter escapes. Which was all, rather bizarrely, a bit boring.
I suppose it proves the point that, while some authors should never be trundled out to writers’ festivals and made to perform or read from their work, some yarn-spinners should be left to spin their yarns and not have them made into books. But I don’t think that’ll stop ABC Books and HarperCollins, as Keith’s website says that he’s got a new book “detailing his investigative work in other areas including fraud, missing persons, undercover assignments, cult busting and an interesting array of other cases” due out this year.
Anyway, our marks
Marion 5; Simon 2; Helen 3; Charlie 2; Mark 2; Jane 2; Jo 2; Judith 1; Wendy 1; Karen 2. Average = 2.2
01/05/2013
Book 164: The Yellow Birds
30 April 2013, Karen and Charles’s
Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds has been getting lots of big reviews and onto lots of shortlists, but it’s not the kind of book we normally go for.
The book is centred on the war in Iraq and follows two lowly US soldiers, Bartle and Murph, both from America’s South, who become bonded during their training and look to one another to make it, intact, to the end of their tour of duty. But, while Bartle learns to disengage emotionally and get through the days, Murph struggles, eventually collapsing and [not a spoiler alert] dies in horrible circumstances.
Much of the book’s structure and story is set away from the field of conflict and occurs in the Virginia to which Bartle returns, and into which he fails completely to settle. The story propels towards the moment of Murph’s death and the events that follow: a cover up, and a letter that Bartle sends to Murph’s mother. But this is where, structurally, the book tended to lose its way.
It was still a great read, though All Quiet on the Western Front it is not. Its strengths are its themes of craziness and alienation and the author’s ability to articulate the young soldiers’ lost-ness, both in Iraq and after. Its weakness is in the writing, which occasionally become too clever for its own good. Those of the group with a professional background in mental health also questioned some of the actions and motives of people in the midst of PTSD. Truth schmooth!
I haven’t mentioned the Army Automaton that is Sergeant Sterling. A great character who reminded me of Robert Duvall’s “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” nutter from Apocalypse Now and a similarly psychotic NCO forcing cowering conscripts from their foxholes in Band of Brothers. Wars apparently need these guys, or maybe books about wars do.
There’s a Guardian interview with Powers [here] that provides a few answers, regarding the author’s background, that we wondered about.
And, of course, welcome to Jane, our newest member!
Our scores: Helen 9; Suzanne 9; Judith 8; Simon 8, Charles 6; Jane 7; Jo 7; Karen 6; Mark 7; Wendy 6; Marion 8. Average = 7.4.
Book 163: Lost Voices
26 March 2013, Marion’s
Christopher Koch’s Lost Voices is set in two Tasmania’s: one of the quiet, suburban 1950s and another of the immediate post-convict 1850s. The book is structured in three parts and moves between the two eras (1950s | 1850s | 1950s) and follows two Dixons.
The first Dixon, Hugh, is thrown into a dilemma when his father blows company money on a “dead cert” horse that, of course, is more dead than cert. Young Hugh throws himself on the mercy of his Uncle Walter, estranged from Hugh’s father, and Hugh and Walter develop a relationship based around Hugh’s artistic ambitions.
The middle section of the book takes us back a century and follows Martin Dixon, Hugh’s (great-uncle? can’t remember) and his strangely similar relationship with an older mentor, in this case the bushranger “Captain” Wilson, the creator of a wilderness Utopia.
In part three we return to young Hugh. The two stories kind of converge around acts of evil and their resolution.
How did we like it? We all found the good/evil stuff to be pretty cack-handed, and those who’d read earlier works by Koch felt that Ancient Light did not stand up well in comparison. The middle section seemed like a novella of its own that added nothing to the Hugh Dixon story. But Koch did evoke postwar Hobart extremely well.
I’m sorry, but I simply cannot find the bit of paper upon which the marks were scribbled. Need a new purple book!
Update: Don’t panic! I found the bit of paper with our marks.
Marion 7; Jo 7; Wendy 7; Karen 6; Charles 7; Judith 6; Simon 6; Helen 6; Mark 7; Suzanne 6. Average = 6.5.
Book 162: Ancient Light
26 February 2013, Mark’s place
John Banville’s The Sea divided opinion among the group, and the second of his novels to fall under our scrutiny did the same.
Ancient Light stands alone but also features characters from a previous Banville novel, Eclipse, and there are many references to the events and people from that earlier work. In fact Ancient Light is two stories: the first is that of a nearly retired actor looking back on the events of a summer and his sexual relationship with the older Mrs Grey; the second is the same actor suddenly thrust back into work, though now on screen rather than stage.
For a book that is centred on the sexual relations between an adult and a fifteen year old we talked very little about the ethics of the situation. Rather, as with The Sea, it was Banville’s writing and language and rambling, almost plotless, style that dominated much of the evening. We fell into two camps: those who loved it and couldn’t wait to open it, and those who “hit the wall” and really struggled, particularly with the second half. (Interestingly, the “strugglers” almost all reached for a good ol’ detective novel after finishing Ancient Light. Gimme a plot!!!)
Was the language of the story soaring and transcendent or artful and self-conscious? Was the narrator’s descriptions of Mrs Grey’s body sensual or overdone and sordid? The answer is yes. It really comes down to whether you went with it or not.
It could have been a book 20 pages long or 2,000. But, most importantly, it was a book that generated lively, polarised discussion. It was a great night, I thought, a gorgeous February evening with a light breeze. The only down side was that we missed Helen and Simon, who I’m sure could have given us great background detail on the events in Eclipse, and Wendy, slumming it in her Fifth Avenue apartment.
Thanks to everyone who brought cake, cheese, figs, crackers, Ferrero Rocher chocolates (it really did feel like Christmas for a moment).
Suzanne 8; Karen 5; Judith 4; Charles 5; Jo 8; Marion 7; Mark 8; Wendy 9. Average = 6.75
10/01/2013
Book 161: New Finnish Grammar
29 January 2013, Helen and Simon’s
New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani was less confronting than our other January double-header book, Trieste, but still gave us a lot to discuss.
Those present with a medical background gave us non-medical types plenty to think about with the way that medicos can (apparently) transfer expectations, hopes and aspirations onto their patients. Several people commented positively on the author’s (and, again, the translator’s) ability to describe the period and the landscape.
Father Koskela’s lessons on Finnish mythology divided opinion. For some, they offered insights into the Finnish psyche, for others … But all agreed that the setting was fascinating and, as with Trieste, most of us at some point found ourselves on Google, wanting to learn more about this sparsely populated but bigger-than-you-think nation squeezed between Scandinavia and Russia.
Our marks: Marion 7; Wendy 7; Karen 7; Helen 7; Charles 7; Judith 6; Jo 6; Simon 4; Mark 3; Suzanne 7. Average = 6.1
Book 160: Trieste
Tuesday, 29 January 2012, Helen and Simon’s
Dasa Drndic’s Trieste describes itself as “documentary fiction”. The story follows several generations of the Baar and Tedeschi families through the years before, during and after the Second World War, with all its awful impacts on the people of that city.
Opinions varied on how well the author (and translator) accomplished the task of balancing the documentary with the fiction, and the impact of the clash between the horrors of the Holocaust with the banality of its execution. I came across this snippet from AN Wilson in the Financial Times‘s review that sums up this ambivalence:
This is a quite appallingly painful book … Trieste recalls that great essay by Simone Weil on the capacity of war to reduce human beings to things. It contains no consolation, no happy resolutions, no hope. It makes you groan with despair, and you feel yourself going mad as you read it. I seldom read any book that made me more achingly unhappy. It is a masterpiece.
It’s a book that’s intent is to confront in every way, and our marks tended to reflect that.
Marion 4; Wendy 3; Karen 5; Helen 6; Charles 5; Judith 2; Jo 4; Simon 6; Mark 1: Average = 4
Authors cower and gnash their teeth before it. Publishers pose and fawn in despicable attempts to curry its favour. But all is in vain. The Purple Book is incorruptible.
