Douglas Stuart’s, Shuggie Bain
For many, childhoods aren’t dreamy. It’s a coin toss after all; who we get for parents, where we get to live, the time/era of our birth, our genetics. There are many chances for a sub-optimum experience when, as children, we are at our most vulnerable. For those of us who are lucky, we mustn’t forget fate’s substantial leg-up. (read on)
Tim Winton’s, Dirt Music
Freakily, reading Tim Winton’s Dirt Music is like reading about myself. Looking back, it’s not difficult to find a time when I was a little lost, a little trapped, a little aimless and a lot unsure. This is what Winton does so well. He’s the master of the awkward, the displaced and the stuck, so while Dirt Music is an Australian story, it’s a universal one too. If you like your characters neat and clean and sure of themselves, he’s not your guy. The characters in this novel are imperfect beings held in place by their pasts and weighed down by guilt and regret. (read on)
Michelle de Krester’s, Scary Monsters
Even with the benefit of the past, we are wading knee-deep through our present. We embrace the new normal, but as we do, its already ageing, nearly passe. Where does our gaze rest and why? What are we admiring? Is the future a distraction from our past or the present a distraction from the future? These are the questions which bubbled to the surface during and after reading Michelle de Krester’s, mind-stretching and form-warping novel, Scary Monsters. With Halloween approaching I though now was the time to bring it up. What we scare ourselves with might serve to distract us from what is truly frightening. (read on)
Elizabeth Strout’s, Olive Kitteridge
Olive is a retired school teacher. She is hard-edged and difficult. She misses things. She rubs people the wrong way. Her only adult child has made a beeline across the country to avoid her and even when his marriage fails, he refuses to return. It kills her, this lack of loyalty. Her husband, Henry, has fantasised about an affair with his pharmacy assistant, but decided against it. ‘To leave Olive was as unthinkable as sawing off his leg.’ Bob says to Jane on the night of a local performance. ‘I don’t know how he can stand her.’ Later Jane says, ‘He loves her. That’s how he can stand her.’ (read on).
Margaret Atwood’s, The Blind Assassin
It may be the earliest of crimes. A parent says you are this kind of person and other people agree. The story is off already before we are old enough to rein it in and when we are, it is too late. The tale of us is set in stone. Our siblings cop it too. All offspring are differentiated. One is shy; one is outgoing. One pragmatic; one a romantic. And so it goes down through the generations. Each child born, each one named and typed and sent out into the world…(read on)
James Baldwin’s, Another Country
It’s a kind of rage which builds and builds, until you say something or do something because you must. It arises from humiliation and injustice that can’t find a place to go where further humiliation and injustice cannot follow. It is the rage of James Baldwin’s, Another Country, and it was presented to me in a way I am unlikely to forget…(read on)
Saul Bellow’s, The Adventures of Augie March
A life is a contrary thing, resistant to a theme, don’t you think? At times it shrinks to its single bearer and all seems lost and then at times it billows wide to take in a crowd of rowdy, joyous others, who all meet for drinks at the club. It’s like that, isn’t it? We are one and then we are another. A life is a large thing to take in, so large it has its own eras – the school years, the time spent with Jacob (mostly in bed), that job in advertising, the Sydney years, that marriage, the vagabond years, the other marriage and that time I lost my driver’s license and had to walk everywhere. And what of our driving force. Is it fate or chance or a little of both?…(read on)
JM Coetzee’s, Disgrace
It’s awful to think it, but it’s true, truer than most things. The world as we know it will change profoundly, even in our own lifetimes. Those with great power will only hold it briefly. Decision-makers and their decisions may not stand the test of time. The wheel will turn and future humans will look back and wonder what we were thinking. If we live long enough, we will wonder too…(read on)
James Joyce’s, Ulysses
We are universes within ourselves, I think he meant to say. We are a constant interplay between the world inside our head and one beyond it. Life as we experience it is an alchemy of the two. Our mind flits from one thing to another drawing unique connections between our senses and our memories. The lilt of a song can morph into a memory, even if it be a misheard song or a misremembered memory, and can carry us far from where we are now. It’s extraordinary what we do inside our heads. I wonder if we are not all half-mad and I have James Joyce to thank for pointing this out…(read on)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s, Love in the Time of Cholera
Some people are built for a swoon-ier age. They astound me with their persistence. For them, life has no hard edges and even if it does they are willing to throw themselves on these, take a corner of the table to the hip, a shopping trolley to the ankle, a sword to the guts, all in the name of love. I am torn. I want to address the heaving obvious: that love is hard enough as it is without elevating it further. I also want to believe them. I would like to throw myself into a world where my motivations are honed to a single purpose. I just can’t…(read on)
Cormac McCarthy’s, Blood Meridian
We can’t deny our histories come in narrative form. We don’t always mean harm. The story is how we remember and pass on the events of our lives to those we don’t live long enough to meet. But it is also true the last word on history has gone to the those in power and this version has the story rise high above what really happened to a romantic peak before it falls and lands in the minds of the majority and becomes what people remember as the truth…(read on)
Haruki Murakami’s, Killing Commendatore
It can be weird, eerie even, after a relationship breaks down. Try as we might to stay singular in a partnership, there is a blurring of lines. We borrow from each other – ideas, beliefs, underpants. It’s easier that way, economic. So when the relationship dissolves, it’s a wrench. We are left with pieces missing. It’s not just who we are now that is the challenge. It’s how we have changed since the last time we were single. A metamorphosis has occurred and moving on seems so difficult with our newly partial selves…(read on)
Joyce Carol Oates, Double Delight
How reckless, how dangerous, we can be in the grip of an obsession. We can steal, lie, do murder even. And just before you say, not I, know that if this can happen with Terence Greene, oh yes, it can happen with you. Terence is the protagonist in Joyce Carol Oates’ novel, Double Delight. He is the director of a charity, (a deft move by Oates to give him gravitas) and lives in the wealthy suburb of Queenston, New Jersey. He wears expensive suits during the week and, when not socialising with the other well-to-do residents of Queenston, he fiddles with his small DYI projects on weekends. Terence is stolidly and eminently respectable…(read on)
Chigozie Obiama’s, The Fishermen
“They will be great!” we think as parents of newborns. “They will go on to live exceptional lives!” But sitting on our shoulder whispering in our ear is our less certain self. It may not turn out the way we would like, it says. It may not turn out at all. I’ve been thinking about broken hearts and lost dreams, since reading Chigozie Obioma’s, The Fishermen. It is impossible not to think such things having spent time between the pages of this beautiful book…(read on)
Michael Ondaatje’s, The Cat’s Table
How is it that the child’s eyes have the wonder still attached? Reading Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The Cat’s Table reminds me of this. I’m jealous of his story. I want to be that eleven year old aboard a great ocean liner with no adult supervision. I do. The freedom of it, the waking early to swim in the first class pool, napping in the afternoon down in the turbine room so as to stay up late and catch glimpses of a transported prisoner as he exercises on deck…(read on)
Richard Powers’, The Overstory
We think they don’t move, but they do. We think they don’t communicate, but we are wrong. They live on a different time frame, that’s all; one that takes in the great vistas from an age before people. Their gaze is farseeing, beyond us (over our heads, so to speak), and hopefully will persist long after we are gone. That is, if the world is lucky. They are trees and this novel from Richard Powers allows us to get close to something marvellous and infinitely more valuable than the surfaces of our floors, the frames of our houses, and our own front doors…(read on)
George Saunders’, Lincoln in the Bardo
We know we are destructive creatures, but to this I now add ridiculous and delusional. It’s how we go on, isn’t it, in the face of our inevitable end. It makes it possible for us as readers to enter a graveyard and cavort with the dead and pity them their unfinished business. This is the scene set by George Saunders in his novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. We are easily drawn into his tale of these malformed spirits, who despite all they witness, cling to the lives which have long-since left them. This is a netherworld where coffins become ’sick-boxes’ and the life they once lived is known as the ‘previous place.’…(read on)
John Steinbeck’s, The Grapes of Wrath
“Wherever human beings dream of a dignified and free society in which they can harvest the fruits of their own labor, The Grapes of Wrath’s radical voice of protest can still be heard.” Robert DeMott says this in his introduction to the Penguin edition of Steinbeck’s depression era novel and its difficult to get past it. Of course, I read the introduction after I’d finished the novel, so the bit about getting past it is a lie. What I mean is I could not find other better words to describe what I was left with once the reading was done…(read on)
Niall Williams’, History of Rain
We yearn. The best of us do anyway and we struggle. Most often the struggle is carried on inside our minds as we attempt to bound and then rebound off walls we’ve built ourselves from beliefs we’ve had or adopted from…..goodness knows where. And this could be seen as futile and perhaps wisely so, if it were not for there being something noble, something best called human in the most fragile sense of the word, in the yearning and the struggling…(read on)
Tim Winton’s, The Turning
What takes us back to another time? I’m not talking about a memory, something viewed from afar. I’m talking about us slotting back into the skin of our younger selves, looking through those younger eyes and taking it all in with our younger minds. It’s so rare, I think, this kind of transportation, but when it does happen its powerful. It lingers for days…(read on)
Virginia Woolf’s, Mrs Dalloway
Some relationships require a lot, don’t you think? There is no timely and gentle unveiling of our interior or a patient knock on the door from which we can turn away. No, no, these relationships are an invasion, a real pirate-boarding with swashbuckling and cannon. There is no rest even in the corners of our minds. I’ve been thinking about these differing kinds of relationships, the gentle ones where the two are side-by-side, where the internal voice is louder and has more room and then the relationship where the two are facing, asking questions and answering back, delving into all there is…(read on)