Quo Vadis

2018-08-01T16:42:00.000+10:00

THE ARMIDALE QUATRAIN
The man stood on the podium
Whence all but he had fled
A poet in the room cried out,
‘You’re white! You’re old! Drop dead!’

White Album / Wash / Lie / House

2008-08-16T18:30:00.000+10:00

Aravind Adiga is a graduate of Oxford and Columbia universities and writes business journalism for Time magazine. In this Man Booker long list 2008 finalist novel the notion of The White Tiger - a rare and beautiful event - is used to characterise the transition of a young man in India from 'the Darkness' to the light - from empty belly to full belly. The metaphor is flawed - the white tiger is not a rare endangered species, but a genetic misfit bred for profit. According to Adiga the transition to wealth is best accomplished by sacrificing family (quite literally) loyalty and morality. Many Indians of my acquaintance would take a different view. But for those of us who travel to India, and are assigned a driver who sits in the car and waits, this novel certainly provides a sobering pause for thought.

Lovely Linda

2008-08-13T19:35:00.000+10:00

Here's a delectable novel for lovers of London, particularly those mysterious mansion blocks just west of the Marylebone High Street. Linda Grant's The Clothes on Their Backs teems with the spirit of place - and time too, the glorious seventies and the rich variety of costumes which went with them. The story concerns the gradual self discovery, through the vicissitudes of life, of the only child of elderly Hungarian refugees. Through her eyes we enter the exotic private world of a notorious slum landlord - her long lost uncle. And learn that European affluence also often conceals a bleak and tortured history. Surprise surprise, things are seldom what they seem. Love and splendor are not the sole province of the beautiful people. In short, then, another strong contender for the Man Booker prize - what a marvellous long list we are enjoying this time round.

The Lost Narrative

2008-08-07T12:11:00.001+10:00

The first half of this 2008 Booker long list contender is engrossing, moving and strong, with a beguiling richness of story-telling and achingly lovely prose. Then Michelle de Kretser's The Lost Dog seems to get rather lost in the Aussie scrub itself. The tropes, the scenes even the authorial voice become repetitive: they tell us nothing new. The reader starts to skip impatiently forward. Interesting characters are introduced then fade puzzlingly into the background. Stasis threatens. From the simple yet crucial perspective of plot, too much remains unresolved, the mother and her failing body, the art gallery owner and his sexual ambiguity, the son and his disputed parenthood, and most of all, the missing millionaire husband, who surely is the real 'lost dog' of the title. Will he too come crawling back bruised and starved, but still wagging his tail? (...or, perhaps, wearing that little black dress?)

Zia zia piano piano

2008-08-06T11:09:00.001+10:00

So it goes: first book very good, second book very bad. Well, just plain awful actually. Mohammed Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes essays a fictional account of an actual event - the assassination of the deeply unpleasant President Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan on August 17th 1988. It shares something of the manic, riotous, image-laden quality so often evident in writing from the sub-continent, from Rushdie through Arundhati Roy to last year's Animal's People, but here applied with what my mother would call 'a nasty streak'. Every character is venal, self-obsessed and corrupt, and they all suffer various repulsive humiliations before meeting sticky, unpleasant ends. You finish the novel feeling as if you've supped on carrion. Haven't been to Pakistan, but it's hard to believe that any place on earth is as bleakly unpleasant and unredeemable as Hanif's fictionalised homeland.

We of the Nether Nether

2008-08-02T17:28:00.001+10:00

Well well well, what a surprise, a veritable bobby-dazzler for the first station of the cross in this year's Bookerathon - Joseph O'Neill's Netherland. Just my favorite sort of novel is all, a sweet murder mystery love story covering off New York, London, big business, cricket, cooking, cute lawyers, 9/11, Eros, Google Earth, the Chelsea hotel, the odd angel, and all of it neatly packaged in a dreamy, stylish first person narrative with plenty of purple patches. So good it's tempting to give O'Neill my personal Booker here and now and skip the rest, but for one slight problem - we never get to learn whodunnit. That may be just one genre transgression too many. Or have I missed a crucial subtext?

Not too shabby, Abbey's!

2008-07-31T15:56:00.000+10:00

Best Booker local harvest ever: Abbey's bookshop has all bar four of the long list, so it's only the Arnold, Berger, de Kretser, and Hensher will have to come from Amazon UK. Kicking off the marathon with Netherland.

Bookies 2008

2008-07-30T08:36:00.000+10:00

This chronicle now reverts as always at this time of year to the novel, in particular the 13 just announced for the Man Booker long list. So nicely timed for the European summer hols. Interesting to see how many are already available in Oz. The Rushdie is the only one already read*

The Man Booker Prize 2008 Long List

Aravind Adiga The White Tiger
Gaynor Arnold Girl in a Blue Dress
Sebastian Barry The Secret Scripture
John Berger From A to X
Michelle de Kretser The Lost Dog
Amitav Ghosh Sea of Poppies
Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs
Mohammed Hanif A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Philip Hensher The Northern Clemency
Joseph O'Neill Netherland
Salman Rushdie The Enchantress of Florence
Tom Rob Smith Child 44
Steve Toltz A Fraction of the Whole

*or to be honest, just the first 100 pages before getting distracted - just the same as with every Rushdie ever sampled.

Hotoke*

2008-05-13T07:08:00.003+10:00

So much to write about, where do I start?
Iridium? MOMA? Or Stewart’s Macbeth?
(A Star Trek alumnus’ sanguinary death
˗ astonishing, how well he suited the part)
Maybe Iridium: old Jimmy Cobb,
seventy-nine, remarkable, black ‘Miles’ baseball cap
perched jauntily, battering that high hat
for five hours straight – hell of a job!

When I’m in America, I think of growing old,
Of all those tunes unplayed, stories left untold.
Tina Turner’s touring soon, so fine at sixty eight,
Like Nancy Pelosi, while MCain’s 71 out of the gate.
What will become of us? Don’t answer that!
Already too old, too grey, too forgetful, and too fat.

* Japanese for ‘dead person’ & by extension ‘Buddha’. Also a restaurant in New Brunswick NJ

Boston the sonnet

2008-05-10T20:24:00.002+10:00

Mission@bar+grill - ah, two Sam Adams!
Sharing the tenderlings off on the side
(Hoping for grilled but, natch, they're deep-fried)
Friday night, molto crescendo: Aida & Rhadames
Beckon, but me & Frank are heading out
To MOFA for just a bite or two to eat.
Chatting: academia & industry; quiet, discreet.
The discord more a whisper than a shout?

Harvard, the NEJM, all sacred sites
Wisdom & ritual, knowledge & pride
Spiritual leaders' earthly delights
- Nothing to live for, too much to hide...
The old schizophrenia festers apace:
Dump the arcana for a more human race.

Sic transit

2008-04-07T21:07:00.000+10:00

Air France nearly bought
Alitalia yesterday.
Last minute, walked away
(Hunky dory till they fought).
Doesn’t matter, still flying,
Green livery, down to Rome,
Then to London, nearly home…
…barely laughing, nearly crying.

4 weeks in Europe, my DNA’s home –
denatured Oz makes it fit for a poem.
Too many paintings & sculptures & crap
fall out of the sky & go splat in my lap.

Culture-free Sydney is beckoning now
Welcome to Haymarket’s Concertgebouw.

Shortz

2008-04-04T01:39:00.000+11:00

Usually Thursdays the crossword defeats me.
In sunny Piazza Maggiore, failure streams
down ancient brick courses like sunbeams.
So is this where a misplaced rapture meets me?
Three clues answered of one thirty two:
inn / lay / needed – that’s it!
Can’t cheat on the Blackberry – it’s on a hissy fit
Substitute another cap, a croissant – well, what would you do?

Later to via della Belle Arte, to try viola bows,
perhaps after lunch at Zanarini, pasta and local red wine.
Just wander up old via Oberdan, turn right and follow your nose
So the mundane is rendered transcendent, the quotidian divine
Travel making strange always, overthrows
The signifier – but we’re luckily left with the sign.

Back in Bologna

2008-04-03T01:42:00.000+11:00

Lazy late breakfast in this lovely town
- this time in via Clavitura, where
Il Calice has thank goodness reopened. Over there
the bearded bullying patron fusses around
his red check tablecloths and broad bowl
of ice, which will fill later with bottles
of Prosecco and Pinot Grigio (after Giotto?)
A town full of food, art and an academic soul.
But I’ve abandoned all that, thanks,
in favour of a sonnet a day,
a long walk, a good lunch,
the casual observation of assorted cranks,
the internet, perhaps a brief sharetrading foray,
anything to avoid the final crunch.

Mr Watts Pigs Out

2007-08-22T21:41:00.000+10:00

This Jones boy has had more than a few books published in New Zealand on a disconcerting variety of themes but according to the flyleaf this seems to be the first to crack the UK publishing circuit. And - ka mate! ka mate! ka ora! ka ora! - straight to the Booker Long List!

Quite an enjoyable read – exotic location: Bougainville at the time of the troubles – and a familiar theme: how a good read can help you through tricky times. The character of Mr Watts (who is also Mr Dickens AND the eponymous Pip) is rather evanescent, perhaps on purpose, perhaps due to some untidy drift in the narrative flow. But clever young Matilda who tells the story, and her Godbothering momma, come through loud and clear.

Published, interestingly enough, with three vastly different cover designs in different markets - the one shown to the left is much the best. So the main quarrel is with the choice of Charles Dickens Great Expectations as the redemptive novel: such a dreary load of old rope – no, no, anything but that - bring out the machetes! Chop chop!

Booker 2007 Long List
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

Watery Eyes / Grave / Prose

2007-08-20T21:44:00.000+10:00

Here’s a tortuous, tortured cry of the heart, an Irish epithalamium for a lost brother. Easy to put down, hard to read. Brutal, bawdy, bathetic and all too heart-felt.

But by giving her narrator a family of 20 odd members, Enright creates such a tangle of narrative complexity that the reader gets lost in the maze – which one was Kit again, which one Ada? Probably they are all quite distinct in her mind, but they aren’t in mine.

Booker 2007 Long List
The Gathering by Anne Enright

The Reluctant New Yorker

2007-08-20T21:12:00.000+10:00

As you tackle the opening paragraph you sigh a little, because this novella is written entirely in the first and second person, rehearsing in real time just one half a conversation taking place over dinner in a market stall in Lahore. So often Booker judges seem to go for the oddball voice, which palls after a couple of chapters and then simply irritates.

But your sigh is misplaced, because in this case the undeniably severe boundaries of time/place/person to which Hamid has submitted create a narrow, pure form which he carves, a master sculptor, into a compelling cul-de-sac of a narrative.

Lahore, Princeton, Manhattan, Lahore. Warring cultures. Our own contemporary nightmare. And less convincingly, a rather sad little cross-cultural love story that goes all wrong. Take you an hour and a half to read these 190 brief pages, longer to try to decide whose side you're on.

Booker 2007 Long List
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid.

Booker, Tea & the MGs

2007-08-14T18:59:00.000+10:00

For some odd reason the Man Booker mob have shortlisted 13 novels instead of last year's 19. Makes the task of the obsessive Booker completist slightly easier, at least, although Abbey's only had 5 of them on Sunday, not counting On Chesil Beach.

And natch, a nagging incentive to fire up the world's least read blog one more time. So I brought The Reluctant Fundamentalist and The Gathering with me to Johannesburg, but can't really start them until I've finished John Gray's extraordinary Straw Dogs.

Long List
Nicola Barker: Darkmans (4th Estate)
Edward Docx: Self Help (Picador)
Tan Twan Eng: The Gift of Rain (Myrmidon)
Anne Enright: The Gathering (Jonathan Cape)
Mohsin Hamid: The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Hamish Hamilton)
Peter Ho Davies: The Welsh Girl (Sceptre)
Lloyd Jones: Mister Pip (John Murray)
Nikita Lalwani: Gifted (Viking)
Ian McEwan: On Chesil Beach (Jonathan Cape)
Catherine O'Flynn: What Was Lost (Tindal Street)
Michael Redhill: Consolation (William Heinemann)
Indra Sinha: Animal's People (Simon and Schuster)
AN Wilson: Winnie & Wolf (Hutchinson)

Ambivalent Ambos

2006-09-20T23:19:00.000+10:00

The wonderful world of books! You learn new things and visit new places, not accessible in any other way. How grateful you feel.

In this case, for instance, who would have thought that those Blitz ambulances were manned by gay women, and that their private lives & loves would be so vividly documented by the liquid prose of Miss Waters, who has mined the lesbian seam (as it were) so effectively in recent years.

She does write exceptionally well, but this is a long book, over 500 pages, and the last 100 or so pages are quite an effort, the more so as chronologically speaking they are actually the first 100 pages. One was tempted to go back to the beginning and see how it all fits in... as it were.

But this reader proved rather better at resisting temptation than Helen, Julia, Kay, Vivian and the rest.

Carry On Ireland

2006-09-20T22:56:00.000+10:00

Maria Joan Hyland was born in London of Irish parents, but her Arts/Law degree from the University of Melbourne surely qualifies her as an Aussie author, particularly if she wins the Booker. Or so the Australia Council must have thought when awarding her the scholarship which supports her to live in Rome these days.

But she won't, not for this one. The 2006 Booker seems to be specialising in odd authorial voices, in this case that of a gangly 11 year Irish child who only gets about 30% of whats going on around him. That trick worked a treat for Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day but here one rapidly tires of the child's obtuseness and obsessions.

Short Black List

2006-09-20T22:27:00.000+10:00

Well, the Booker short list was out last week - an event noted rather belatedly on this site due to a quick disconnected flip to Brisbane for the writers festival of which perhaps more later.

Kiran Desai. The Inheritance of Loss - Hamish Hamilton
Kate Grenville. The Secret River - Canongate
MJ Hyland. Carry Me Down - Canongate
Hisham Matar. In the Country of Men - Viking
Edward St Aubyn. Mother’s Milk - Picador
Sarah Waters. The Night Watch - Virago

Hmm. Nice to see Carey omitted, but rather a surprise that Gordimer was overlooked. Aussie firm Text Publishing - one of the very few Australian companies to take literary fiction seriously - can celebrate contributing two authors (Grenville and Hyland) to the list. So two Aussies, two coffee colonials, a Lebanese, the usual liquorice allsorts. Only one member of the traditional British literary aristocracy, St Aubyn (Westminster, Oxford) and even he has had the odd encounter with the dark side.

Suppose there's no escaping finishing the Grenville now, abandoned after the first 60 pages due to its intensely irritating authorial perspective. To be struggled through somehow. But Booker completism will be something of a challenge with the Matar and the St Aubyn not due for publication in Australia until well after the winner is announced

Got it, thanks

2006-09-10T10:41:00.000+10:00

Now this is more like it. Give this one the Booker now and save eyestrain.

Gordimer is well known of course, but still something of a discovery. This is her 32nd book, 14th novel. Nobel Prize for literature 1991. The voice is distinctive, but also has echoes of Coetzee – is it a South African cadence, this laconic, incisive, ironic note?

Get a Life is brief – just 187 large font double spaced pages. At around 270 words per page that’s slightly more than 50,000 words. You, dear reader, writing at 1000 words a day, could create something similar in less than 2 months.

Well, perhaps not similar. The same length. For this is writing of the highest quality, elliptical, amusing, insightful and compelling. It’s the tale of an affluent South African professional family – the father a businessman, the mother a lawyer, a son who is an ecology campaigner, married to an advertising executive. They fall in and out of love, acquire children, advance their careers. Just human.

Two plot devices overlay the domestic: in the first, the son develops thyroid cancer in his thirties, requires surgery and then the ingestion of radioactive iodine to ablate the remaining tumour cells. This works. The enforced retreat - while he is ‘hot’ - to his childhood home provides a caesura for reflection, and the inevitable intimations of mortality.

The second revolves around a campaign to save certain ecologically sensitive parts of South Africa from development. This, frankly, doesn’t work as well: it’s dull and repetitive, the issue is presented monochromatically, and one tends to skip forward. It may be possible to write grippingly about the environment, but it doesn’t happen here.

What makes this novel successful, as so often, is the writing. The epigraph is from Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror –

O what authority gives
Existence its surprise?

An unanswerable question, of course, but an engrossing one. Good things and bad things happen to these folk, as good and bad things happen to us all. The soft-shelled carapace of language Gordimer constructs as their ordinary story unfolds creates beauty of its own accord, makes the particular universal, and not only leaves the reader noting, as Donald Rumsfeld did, that stuff happens, but also, as Donald didn’t, wondering why.

Carey get out your cane

2006-08-31T21:41:00.000+10:00

The story of my brief infatuation with Carey's prose goes like this: The Fat Man In History was just fine, improving on multiple re-readings. Bliss stretched the friendship almost beyond endurance, and about half way through Oscar and Lucinda as the church was floating down the river the whole edifice sank without a trace, never to be salvaged.

So it was solely with Booker completism in mind that I tackled Theft - only to be pleasantly surpised by the opening few paragraphs, which had a narrative clarity and urgency which recalled the finest moments of The Fat Man

But it was not to last. For half of Theft is a tale told by an idiot. As you might expect, then, it is full of sound and fury, but just doesn't signify. In alternate chapters Carey affects rather unconvincingly the voice of some mindless rural dolt from his (real) home town, Bacchus Marsh VIC, but it is the voice of an idiot more savage than savant. This complex and over-elaborate device rapidly becomes tedious, and slows the narrative down to a skin-crawl.

Theft tries to be about art, and moral rights, and also as the subtitle implies about love. We don't learn more than we knew already about any of these subjects. Too many of the characters can be sketched on the back of an envelope - the too cute root, the rich drug addled scion, the nasty enigmatic art buyers... even Slow Bones the duffer brother reads like a gloss on Dostoyevsky's Myshkin, or Steinbeck's Lenny.

And the overbearing tweeness of the name-borrowing, the all-too-knowing phrases from popular song, the Condé Nasty travelogue and the slender sub-Grisham plot. Even at 279 double spaced large font pages, by half way through I was skimming Hugh's automatic/automaton writing and longing for the end...

You kiss by the Booker

2006-08-15T13:54:00.000+10:00

OK, Booker season, long list announced today, so time to reactivate Quo Vadis and see what sort of malarkety the judges are up to this year.

For those even to lazy to clip on the link, here they are:

Peter Carey Theft: A Love Story (Faber & Faber)
Kiran Desai The Inheritance of Loss (Hamish Hamilton)
Robert Edric Gathering the Water (Doubleday)
Nadine Gordimer Get a Life (Bloomsbury)
Kate Grenville The Secret River (Canongate)
MJ Hyland Carry Me Down (Canongate)
Howard Jacobson Kalooki Nights (Jonathan Cape)
James Lasdun Seven Lies (Jonathan Cape)
Mary Lawson The Other Side of the Bridge (Chatto & Windus)
Jon McGregor So Many Ways to Begin (Bloomsbury)
Hisham Matar In the Country of Men (Viking)
Claire Messud The Emperor’s Children (Picador)
David Mitchell Black Swan Green (Sceptre)
Naeem Murr The Perfect Man (William Heinemann)
Andrew O’Hagan Be Near Me (Faber & Faber)
James Robertson The Testament of Gideon Mack (Hamish Hamilton)
Edward St Aubyn Mother’s Milk (Picador)
Barry Unsworth The Ruby in her Navel (Hamish Hamilton)
Sarah Waters The Night Watch (Virago)

As Hermione Granger, chair of the judging panel, once commented wisely:

Books! And cleverness!
There are more important things -- friendship and bravery.

St Francis bites his own Animals

2006-05-06T17:18:00.000+10:00

Is there any commentator more regularly misjudged and misquoted than Fukuyama? His 1992 magnum opus The End of History and the Last Man has been the launching pad for innumerable opinion pieces, most structured along the lines of "ho ho ho, silly old Fuku-san thought history was over, but hey, he was wrong!"

Actually, he's not such a soft target. EOH is not an easy read, but it repays the effort, and offers a genuinely thoughtful and at the time fairly novel proposition: that there is now a broad global consensus, right across the political spectrum, that liberal democracy, capital markets and competition work better than any other known system. So it is history in the Hegelian and Marxist sense of the word which he proposes has come to a conclusion rather than all human history, as his sillier detractors imply.

Even if you do not agree with him, it's a thought provoking idea, and who is to blame an author of a fairly abstruse work for dreaming up a catchy title.

Anyway, this is his latest effort, published a few weeks ago - bought in Oxford St, London, with the flashy cover you see above. Amusingly, in the US it has a sober black cover and an alternative title America at the Crossroads

So FF's nose for a catchy title or two, tailored to the local market, is still in fine working order.

This one is much more readable. Success and fame have brought in their wake better prose - pointed, concise and with a refined sense of humour lacking before. Fukuyama claims, perhaps with some justification, that his ideas became part of the intellectual apparatus of the neoconservative administration of George Bush. He now wishes to formally repudiate the association, and mounts a ferocious critique of his government's current foreign policy and ideology.

This brief monograph (just over 190 pages of large double spaced type plus critical apparatus) traces the early history of neoconservatism as a school of thought, then explains how its ideas, perhaps not that intrinsically smart to start with, have been systematically altered and debased by the current rulers of America.

He concludes with a couple of chapters of positive suggestions, one on alternative and more effective global institutions, and one on American foreign policy.

The reader may mutter, well, well, easy enough to be an armchair critic and theorist, of course, (but is it really that easy?) Nevertheless, the views which emanate from Fukuyama's cosy upholstery at Yale are always a cut or two above the average, and usually do merit thoughtful reading and debate, never more so than here, where we can all enjoy the rare enough spectacle of one of the most celebrated and respected conservative theorists decisively distancing himself from the increasing global catastrophe that is George Bush abroad.

Si vuol ballare

2006-05-01T08:35:00.000+10:00

Do you wanna dance, under the moonlight, kiss me kiss me, all through the night, oh baby, do you wanna dance? Le Nozze de Figaro, Act IV

David Cairns was music critic of the London Daily Telegraph and founded the Chelsea Opera in 1950 with the sole purpose of giving himself the opportunity to sing Leporello in an amateur production of Don Giovanni

Those two factlets tell you everything you need to know about this book - it combines a British urbanity and considerable erudition and insight with a tireless commitment to self-indulgence and a rarefied hedonism. This is not as maladroit a recipe for an engaging read as you might suppose.

Does the world need another book about Mozart, Cairns asks in his introduction - probably not, he cheerfully admits, but he plans to write one anyway. He loves these operas so much, he tells us, he feels compelled to share the love. Well, if you have an obliging publisher, why not?

So he takes us lovingly through a detailed analysis of the historical context and musical structure of Mozart's most legendary works - Idomeneo, the three Da Ponte operas, Zauberflote and La Clemenza di Tito. This harmonious sextet is topped and tailed by a preliminary recitative covering Mozart's early life and operas and a coda which briefly charts the well known story of his final days.

If you love the operas, as Cairns does, you'll enjoy the book, and the love. Unnecessary books are sometimes just a delicious treat. Not unlike dancing in the moonlight...