The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted by Robert Hillman

Text Publishing:

Tom Hope doesn’t think he’s much of a farmer, but he’s doing his best. He can’t have been much of a husband to Trudy, either, judging by her sudden departure. It’s only when she returns, pregnant to someone else, that he discovers his surprising talent as a father. So when Trudy finds Jesus and takes little Peter away with her to join the holy rollers, Tom’s heart breaks all over again. 

Enter Hannah Babel, quixotic smalltown bookseller: the second Jew—and the most vivid person—Tom has ever met. He dares to believe they could make each other happy. 

But it is 1968: twenty-four years since Hannah and her own little boy arrived at Auschwitz. Tom Hope is taking on a batttle with heartbreak he can barely even begin to imagine.

This is not really a book about a bookshop.

But the lost and brokenhearted are everywhere.

If you're looking for another 84 Charing Cross Road or The Little Paris Bookshop or The Storied Life of A J Fikry, then this is not it. However if you enjoy gentle historical fiction full of love, tenderness and beautiful scenes of Victorian country life, you've found a winner.

Hillman has previously written the biographies of three Holocaust survivors - all women - so he is pretty well placed to write a sympathetic and accurate story about another such woman. It's not the first time that a bookshop setting has been used to represent culture and civilisation as a counterpoint against a time, person or place that is the complete opposite. But it is a useful, hopeful way of showing us how the better side of human nature triumphs over the worst.

In the Reading Guide for the Canadian edition of his book, Hillman said,

...victory. In the life of all Jews who outlived those who wished to murder them and found the courage to embrace life again, a victory is recorded. For me, every lovingly maintained bookshop is also a victory over all that is dowdy and dumb in the world.

The titular bookshop is more of an idea than the actual setting of the story, though.

The main backdrop of the story is Tom's farm in country Victoria. The bookshop may be a place of courage and ideas, but Tom's place is all about the heart and soul. It's a place to heal, to belong and to feel safe. All the main characters in the story are lost and damaged, one way or another. There are varying degrees of tragedy and trauma explored. Whether it's at the hands of a Christian fundamentalist cult, a deranged gunman, a thoughtless wife and mother, a revolutionary mob or Adolf Hitler. However, Hillman also said that,

it would be grotesque to suggest that the suffering of Hannah at the hands of the SS could be compared to Tom’s sorrow when Peter is taken away. People can recover from a broken heart, but the particular circumstances of Hannah’s heartbreak—no. The issue is not “recovery” but whether a commitment to life might allow a person to bear a terrible burden and still see the poetry in the world.

It is that commitment to life, that this gives this gentle story a little something special. It's easy to say that good will triumph over evil, that education will win out over ignorance and that kindness will oust brutality, but how? It doesn't just happen. You have to decide to make it happen. A life well-lived is the best victory of all.

Facts:

• Longlisted for the Australian Book Industry Award, Small Publishers' Book of the Year, 2019

Griffith Review 63: Writing the Country edited by Julianne Schultz & Ashley Hay

Image: James Tylor, Turralyendi Yerta (Womma) 2017 Photograph with ochre & charcoal.

Place. Land. Country. Home. These words frame the settings of our stories. Griffith Review 63: Writing the Country focuses on Australia’s vast raft of environments to investigate how these places are changing and what they might become; what is flourishing and what is at risk. 

How we speak of and to the world we live in requires us to make sense of where we are and where we’re going; it requires us to describe, interrogate and analyse our places from the smallest to the grandest of scales. In the second issue of Griffith Review, published fifteen years ago, Melissa Lucashenko wrote of ‘earthspeaking, talking about this place, my home’. All these years later, the need to hear all sorts of earthspeak has perhaps never been more urgent.

In the past, I would have gobbled up the stories, essays, poems and articles in a Griffith Review edition in one fell swoop. Leaving me with a general impression of the theme of the edition and a vague memory of some of the pieces. But this time, I decided to go slow.

Slow Reading is my new mantra. I want to read as thoughtfully, consciously and carefully as I can as often as I can. Obviously, not all books lend themselves to this approach. Some stories are lightly told, some favourite series are formulaic although lovable and comforting and some books are nothing more than a quick, easy holiday read. They all have their purpose, time and place.

But some books deserve more. And sometimes I deserve more!
Sometimes I want to devote more time to one book so that I can savour each moment, delve deeply and create a rich reading memory of my time with the book.

In recent times. Les Miserables was one such book, and I'm currently reading Moby-Dick with this slow reading approach. Back in February, when I acquired my copy of the Griffith Review 63, I decided to do the same. To slow read each essay and story. To let each one stand alone in my memory.

I confess, I didn't think I would still be reading it in November!

It also left me in a quandary about how best to record my slow reading experience. Giving each piece it's own post would be too laborious for me and rather dull for you, oh brave internet wanderer who landed on my page!

The passing of time has allowed the answer to present itself to me. Just like my Moby-Dick chapter posts, I will present each essay with a brief snapshot of the things that caught my eye or captured my imagination. Poems and stories I will leave for another time.

Introduction: On Suicide on Watch? The Enduring Power of Nature | Julianne Schultz (26th Nov 2018).

• societies and cultures evolve in response to the environment in which people find themselves.
• unforeseeable natural events have destroyed some civilisations...but others have been undone by over-exploitation. 
• Arnold J Toynbee quip - more civilisations die from suicide than murder.
• A classical historian and writer of comparative history.
• Hugely popular and influential in the 1940's and 50's.
• Now criticised for being more of a Christian moralist than an historian - ouch! (Encyclopedia Britannica).
• Schultz believes that we may be on 'suicide watch' but we can still feel optimistic with a 'sense of agency'.
• McLean Foundation and The Nature Conservancy commissioned writers for this edition.
• The McLean Foundation is a family foundation that has four areas of interest: protecting Australia’s biodiversity; supporting inter-city, rural and remote literacy programs for disadvantaged Australian children; rural tertiary education scholarships; and community development programs. 
• Their environmental funding to date has included establishing and supporting The Nature Conservancy Australia and their Nature Writing Prize. Robert McLean is the Chair of The Nature Conservancy Australia, a Senior Advisor to McKinsey & Co, and a Board Member of Philanthropy Australia.
• I love that people like Robert McLean exist. Read his 2011 bio in the SMH here.

Essay: Crossing the Line | Ashley Hay

• or the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef.
• There are mechanisms and consequences we can already see and understand (the known knowns).
• There are effects and impacts we can see happening without yet understanding why, or how they might impact each other (the known unknowns).
• And then there are the 'unknown unknowns', the layers of knowledge about our planet's natural systems, their requirements, their reactions and interactions that we don't know about yet. The Things that we cannot see coming.
• 30 yrs ago the CSIRO investigated what would happen if we doubled the concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere. 
• 'Most of the consequences that science then predicted would occur by 2030 we've already seen.' Griffith University's Emeritus Professor Ian Lowe.
• Including Perth's rainfall declining by about a quarter in 30 years. But what wasn't predicted was the decline by two-thirds of the run-off rate. 
• 'it's hotter and drier when it rains, which means there's a more dramatic reduction in run-off' - which means there is less water available to be collected when it does rain.
• A road trip is a kind of mediation. Time and space stretch a little and you pay different attention to the landscapes you move through.
• biophilia - love of nature
• The Permian-Triassic extinction, 252 million years ago, wiped out more than nine-tenths of all species. It took the ecosystems effected about 5-8 million years to recover.
• The unknown unknowns in all of this are each and every one of us: what we purchase, what we vote for and what we insist on, as much as how we live.
• Hay's solution - pay attention, witness this moment, imagine the unknowns, imagine what's coming next.

Essay: Lost and Found in Translation | Kim Mahood

• Books in books - Kangaroo (D H Lawrence), Voss (Patrick White), To the Islands, Tourmaline, Midnite, Visitants and The Merry-go-round in the Sea (Randolph Stow), Animal Farm (George Orwell), Tracks (Robyn Davidson), The Songlines (Bruce Chatwin), Belomor (Nicholas Rothwell)
• what is consistent in all these books is the presence of Aboriginal people in various configurations.
• Ochre and Rust (Philip Jones) songlines are a 'kind of scripture, a framework for relating people to land, and to show that their relationship is inalienable.'
• The major songlines, such as the Seven Sisters, are like arteries that carry the life force of the culture through the body of the country.
• songlines are fixed in the landscape
• but they can be performed anywhere, with permission.
• the land is as conscious as the people who live in it.

Essay: Boodjar ngan djoorla: Country, my bones | Claire G Coleman

• My bones are in the soul of Country, and Country is in my bones.
• No matter where we go Country calls out to us.
• I wept when I realised Country had not forgotten me even when I did not know Country. My old-people, my ancestors, would care for me.
• Truth escapes in the end, lies cannot live forever.

Essay: A Fragile Civilisation: Collective living on Australian soil | Stephen Muecke

• Ancient Indigenous civilisations and/or modern Western civilisations.
• I would like to define civilisation as planned, sustainable collective living.
• Yolngu as Indigenous example.
• If the Yolgnu have flourished for up to 50 000 years, while the kind of civilisation based on large cities could self-destruct after only a few hundred, perhaps it is time to recalibrate what we mean by civilisations.

Essay: The Planet is Alive: Radical histories for uncanny times | Tom Griffiths

• Amitav Ghosh - The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016)
• we are knowingly killing the planetary systems that support survival of our species.
• we half aware of this predicament yet also paralysed by it, caught between horror and hubris.
• Anthropocene - a new geological epoch that recognises the power of humans in changing the nature of the planet, its atmosphere, oceans, climate, biodiversity, even its rocks and stratigraphy.
• The Great Acceleration - from the 1950's when the human enterprise suddenly exploded in population and energy use.
• Or the Sixth Extinction - humans have wiped out about two-thirds of the world's wildlife in just the last half century.
• Big History - David Christian - history of the universe - global storytellers.

Reportage: A Change in the Political Weather? Forecasting the future of climate policy | Paul Daley

• Carl Feilberg - late 1800's Queensland - human rights activist & environmentalist.
• Bio coming soon by Robert Ørsted-Jensen.
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
• Daley wrote this piece Nov 2018 and talked about politicians being out of step with public opinion about climate change and that this would be evident in the federal election in 2019. Instead it showed that journalists were out of step with the broader public opinion about climate change. They were (I am) living in an inner city bubble and we all made the mistake in thinking that the rest of Australia (rural, suburban and city fringes) felt the same as us or had the same priorities and concerns.

Essay: We All Took a Stand: Margaret River versus the coal industry | David Ritter

• Loved this piece.
• I had no idea that this even happened - there is power in our stories if we choose to tell them.
• The community of the Margaret River took on the coal industry and won.
• Australia's approval systems for fossil fuel mining are antiquated and loaded towards the interests of developers.
•  In this case, the political and business elite decided, emphatically, that some things are more important than the extraction of fossil fuels.

Essay: Life and Death on Dyarubbin: Reports from the Hawkesbury River | Grace Karskens

• The Real Secret River: Dyarubbin | 2017

Essay: Rebuilding Reefs, Restoring Memory: At work in the waters of history | Anna Clark

• Clifton Springs shellfish reef restoration project, near Geelong.
• R H Tawney - doing history well meant contemplating the processes of how (and where) the past relates to people in the present.
• over 95% of native flat oyster & blue mussel reefs have disappeared across southern Australia.
• each generation remembers what fisheries were like at the beginning of their own lifetimes, so that the baseline of that ecosystem subtly changes over time...an ever-lower bar is set as the 'new normal'.

Reportage: The Butterfly Effect: Stalking a giant in PNG | Jo Chandler

• 1906 | Albert Stewart Meek
• Ornithoptera alexandrae | Queen Alexandra's birdwing - largest butterfly in the world.
• rural people do not always understand the outsider notion of 'conservation', and outsiders do not always understand what villagers think of when they imagine 'development'.

Memoir: The Suburbsm the 60's: What use a scrap of bush? | Kate Veitch

• Growing up in Vermont and Nunawading.
• An outdoor life, playing in the nearby bush.
• Naturally, we never talked about our adventures to our parents. Nor did they ask. This was an era when parents had better things to do than hover over their children, monitoring their every move.
• Healesville Freeway Reserve | 2012
• The importance of place & childhood spaces.

Reportage: Eating Turtle: Changing narratives of the normal | Suzy Freeman-Greene

• Heron Island
• the heroes of the story are scientists.

Memoir: It's Scary but Nobody Cares: Challenging Australia's reputation for deadliness | Ashley Kalagian Blunt

• A Canadian view of Australia, drop bears and other deadly creatures.

Essay: Valuing Country: Let me count three ways | Jane Gleeson-White

• In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to recognise the rights of nature.
• Rights-of-nature laws also now in Bolivia, New Zealand, India and Colombia.
• three ways of thinking about the natural world - country, natural capital, rights of nature.
• 2016 Fitzroy River Declaration recognises the river as a living ancestral being with its own life force.
• 2017 Yarra River Protection (Wilip-gin Birrarung murron).
• 2018 petition to protect the legal rights of the Great Barrier Reef.
• Capitalism is fundamentally opposed to preserving nature.
• ecological economics.
• protecting the environment is a good thing for humanity | Carl Obst

Reportage: Ghost Species and Shadow Places: Seabirds and plastic pollution on Lord Howe Island | Cameron Muir

• Runner-Up Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing 2019
• Shortlisted for the Eureka Prize for Science Communication
• flesh-footed shearwaters | mutton birds
• they vomit plastic. The parent shearwaters here are slowly feeding their chicks to death with plastic.
• the plastic blocks their digestive tracts and can pierce internal organs.
• A torrent of plastic is coming. More plastic was produced in the last fifteen years than in the previous fifty. 

Essay: The Cost of Consumption: Dispatches from a planet in decline | James Bradley

•  2018 Living Planet Report
• The sheer scale of the problem makes it difficult to think about.
• As creatures disappear, we forget them, as baselines shift we adjust, and the world as it was is lost.
• The Great Acceleration
• For while population growth has played a part, the rise in GDP and energy far outstrips the rise in population. In fact it is humanity's booming middle classes...who are the problem. The ecological footprint of an average Australian or American is three times that of a Costa Rican, and almost eight or nine times that of the average Indian or African. It is also, significantly, double that of many Europeans.
• The real problem is the insatiable consumption of the world's wealthy.
• We already possess the technologies to deal with the problem - renewable energy, sustainable farming practices...better education and literacy, especially for women...basic income...progressive taxation and economic reform...better governance....
• Environmental justice is also social justice and intergenerational justice. But it is also interspecies justice.

Essay: Climate Change, Science and Country: A never-ending story | Brendan Mackey

• the climate norm will be there is no norm.
• scientists are not catastrophists - they project rather than predict.
• Climate change may be a scientific discovery, but it is the humanities and creative arts that speak to what this means.

Reportage: Remaking Nature: Novel strategies in modified landscapes | Andrew Stafford

• Bitterns in Rice project
• Yandina Creek Wetlands

Image Source

Essay: Transforming Landscapes: Regenerating country in the Anthropocene | Charles Massey

• regenerative farming
• Many of the world's desertifying environments are the result of human activity. In Australia - as in the Middle East...
• in mismanaged landscapes the small water cycles are destroyed.
• capitalist market economy believes in continual growth. Nature is viewed as a raw material for wealth and property creation.
• to become landscape literate.
• Paul Hawken | human brain is not wired to deal with future existential threats.
• Project Drawdown
• This is not a liberal agenda, nor is it a conservative agenda...this is a human agenda.

Essay: Encounters with Amnesia: Confronting the ghosts of Australian landscape | Inga Simpson

• Judith Wright | The love of the land we have invaded, and the guilt of invasion - have become a part of me. It is a haunted country.
• Louisa Atkinson | 1853 | The Illustrated Sydney News | Nature Notes

• Eric Rolls | A Million Wild Acres | 1981
• Mark Tredinnick | The Blue Plateau | 2009
• One of the most obvious characteristics of Australian nature writingnis the tension, for non-Indigenous Australians, around how to write about our connection to the places we love, knowing that those places were stolen from others, and possibly sites of violence.
• Although thinking of ourselves as a bush nation, we are, in fact, urban and suburban - and increasingly illiterate in nature.
• Nature writing...is...about wanting to belong, a yearning for connection with the natural world and the places in which we live. To be at home....Instead of trying to write ourselves all over the landscape, it is time to hear what it is saying and write it deeper into our selves.

This is the very first Griffith Review I have read from cover to cover. 

Previously I have enjoyed the occasional essay or story when an online prompt led me to the one free monthly read I am allowed as a non-subscriber. I was, however, particularly drawn to the topic of this edition. I figured it would have lots to say about the environment, climate change, Indigenous perspectives and landscape. It did. 

My Goodreads wishlist has exploded as I pour over the individual the bibliographies and I have found new authors to explore. I have discovered new-to-me websites and environmental projects that not only provide the scientific facts about climate but also give us all hope that we can really look after this planet we live on, if we really want to.

I won't be able to devote as much time as I have for this edition to all future editions, or even to catching up on the back list editions. It will be a case of cherry-picking the topics and authors that interest me or challenge me the most.

The various essays, stories and poems in this edition, helped me to complete several squares on my AusReadingMonth Bingo card - NSW, VIC, QLD, TAS and WA. As a bonus, I also ticked off a few nearby islands - Heron Island, Lord Howe Island and PNG.

#AusReadingMonth
#NonFictionNovember

FranKissStein by Jeanette Winterson

I have spent a ridiculous amount of time wondering how best to write the title of this book - FRAN KISS STEIN like the cover, FRANKISSSTEIN like the title page of the book or Frankissstein like Goodreads.
FranKissStein appealed to me, but it's not a version I've spotted anywhere else.
Whatever you call it, though, Frankissstein: A Love Story was fascinating stuff.

• I was never bored except in the company of others.

After reading McEwan's Machines Like Us earlier in the year, I was in the mindset to be thinking about AI, robots and what our future world might look like as technology takes hold or even takes over. It was very interesting to be able to compare and contrast two such prominent authors and their approaches to the topic and their different ways of weaving a story around it.

• The timeless serenity of the past that we British do so well is an implanted memory - you could call it a fake memory...where the turbulence of the past is recast as landmark, as tradition, as what we defend, what we uphold....History is what you make it.

Last year I also read Shelley's Frankenstein and a bio about her and her mother (Romantic Outlaws). All of this gave my reading of Frankissstein a much richer experience as my knowledge of the original story and details about Shelley, and her mother's life, were still fresh in my mind.

Winterson weaves together several strands of story. We start with a reimagining of Shelley's time in Italy with her husband, Percy, her sister, Claire, Lord Byron and Dr Polidori where she first develops the idea for her story Frankenstein.

• Percy - the mystery of life is on earth, not elsewhere.

We then jump to now, or perhaps a now just minutes away, where sex bots, AI, cryopreservation and cephalic isolation are becoming the norm. Our modern characters are called Dr Ry Shelley (a transgender doctor/journalist), Ron Lord (the sexbot king), Claire (the admin assistant who keeps popping up everywhere in different roles), Poly D (the Vanity Fair reporter) and Prof. Victor Stein (a TED talking scientist).

• Victor - I want to live long enough to reach the future.

Later on, Winterson also brings in an alternate ending for the original story, with some time in the lunatic asylum, Bedlam. Frankenstein has been admitted by Captain Walton, after he found him floating by his ship on an ice floe. To make it even more interesting, the director of Bedlam, Mr Wakefield, then invites Mary Shelley to his facility to talk with the patient who claims he should have 'perished on the ice'. Love it!

• Ry - I am what I am, but what I am is not one thing, not one gender. I live with doubleness....I am in the body that I prefer. But the past, my past, isn't subject to surgery. I didn't do it to distance myself from myself. I did it to get nearer to myself.

To round out the tale, we finish with a glimpse into the life of Ada Lovelace, Byron's mathematician daughter.

• Ada - It was hoped that numbers would tame the Byronic blood in my veins....My life in numbers has been as wild as any life lived among words.

There are so many ideas to explore within these pages - gender, duality, consciousness, religion, soul, history, change and knowledge - just to name a few. What's real and what's false? Does history repeat itself? What's the difference between privacy and secrecy? Is history memory or fact? Are inventions dreams or machines? What does it mean to be alive? Can technology be bad or good, or is just the use it gets put to?

• Byron - we are haunted by ourselves, he says, and that is enough for any man....The human race seeks its own death. We hasten towards what we fear most.

We also have books in books, with references to Albert Camus, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood and Ovid.

Winterson's delicious imagery emerges from page one and draws you into the various strands of story, with a poetic, Romantic writing style for the 19th century sections morphing into a more jarring, rapid speak for the now.

• every solid thing had dissolved into its watery equivalent.
• We were all around the fire that night, the room more shadows than light, for we had few candles.
• We update ourselves individually and generationally. We can adapt within a generation to a changing world.

Ultimately, I found Frankissstein to be the more satisfying, complex read. Machines Like Us failed to excite me or fully engage me in the discussion that McEwan was aiming to stimulate. Whereas Winterson stimulated me from start to finish. But, I've just realised, none of that really tells you why I enjoyed this story so.

The technical stuff obviously played its role, but the stuff I'm still thinking about two weeks later is all the discussion around gender, personality and who we really are.

What is it that really makes us human? From the stories well tell about ourselves to the way we chose to present ourselves to the world. It's an age-old process that flows over into the kind of future we end up creating for ourselves. We merge fact and fiction, dreams, beliefs and misconceptions, until we have something that makes us unique. Or does it?

Favourite Quote: Humans: so many good ideas. So many failed ideals.

Favourite Character: Ry Shelley, who seemed to inhabit quite a bit of Winterson's own persona, and certainly captured my own doubts and questioning way of viewing pretty much everything.

Favourite or Forget? Loved it. It would make for a great book group discussion.

Facts:

• Longlisted for 2019 Man Booker Prize

The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

The hardest part about writing a review more than a week after finishing the book is trying to make sense of my notes and markings and trying not to get my current reads mixed up with the old book. So to help me get everything straight in my head, I'll start with the housekeeping.

The Sea, The Sea was my fifth book in Liz @Adventures in Reading great Iris Murdoch Readalong, where she is reading (or more accurately rereading) ALL 26 of Murdoch's books in chronological order over a 2 year period. There are now only seven more books to go - of which I have only one on my TBR pile - The Book and the Brotherhood. Although I'm tempted to source Jackson's Dilemma before December so that I can be in at the end.

My edition of The Sea, The Sea was the 1999 Vintage one with an Introduction by John Burnside. He focused on the seventies provenance of this book and the 'spiritual awakening' happening at that time in the Western world - the interest in Eastern philosophies and ideas about 'mercy, compassion and right action'. He also alerted me to the fact that Charles Arrowby, our flawed protagonist, had bought into the whole 'Romantic, theatrical myths' idea of retreating, hermit-like to the coast to ponder his life, to get back to nature and surrender his 'worldly powers'.

Burnside warned me about the negative view of marriage that permeated the entire book before going off on an excursion into Milarepa country at the end. Who, I hear you ask?

Milarepa was a Tibetan poet mystic who managed to achievement Enlightenment in one lifetime. The two things I took out of Burnside's discussion of Milarepa - to be kept in mind as I read - was that the spiritual life led 'not to transcendence, but to a fuller expression of one's true nature' and 'we cannot change ourselves utterly; we can only change how we are in the world: how we see, how we act, how we tell our stories.'

I give you all this research because I have discovered over this past year that Murdoch's books not only improve when read in company, but furthermore they improve with knowledge. Murdoch wrote intelligently, coolly passionate and intense, with literary and philosophical references throughout her work. Watching her subtle clever ways at work as you read, is one of the pleasures of her work. There are times when she falls short, comes up clunky or heavy-handed, but then there are times when she soars. Despite liking very few of her characters (and actively disliking an even larger number) her books have insinuated themselves into my psyche, I suspect forever.

Murdoch gets inside the heads and hearts of her main characters. Since I tend to read for character development more so than an action-packed plot, it's understandable why she affects me so deeply. Whether you like them or not, Murdoch's characters go on a journey, both internal and external. I'm still not sure Charles Arrowby's journey resulted in him learning anything or changing anything though. I suspect he will always be a pompous, self-righteous, arrogant, control freak. Which is why the end annoyed me.

Liz loved the ending, claiming it was one of the best Murdoch endings ever. But it left me scratching my head as it seemed to take off in a new direction entirely. Any future drama that Arrowby inflicted on himself and others could now be blamed on the demons set loose - just another cop out for a man unable to face his own demons and accept responsibility for his own actions!

Arrowby is the classic Peter Pan figure - a man who never grew up, constantly searching for an all-forgiving, unconditional loving mother and stunted by a failed teen romance. He idealised women, pursued them relentlessly, before withdrawing his love and affection when he discovered they were not perfect. He lived his life in a heightened state of absurd melodrama and self-made confusion. As the narrator of his story, he is highly unreliable. The reader doubts his motivations, questions his hold on reality and suspects his memories have been twisted to fit his preferred version of events.

I couldn't understand why this master manipulator had so many friends who wanted to stay in touch with him, even when he moved off to the ends of the world, and why on earth all those ridiculous women kept coming back for more. There must have been an hypnotic charm to his personality that he was unable to reveal in his writing.

As with most of Murdoch's books, inanimate objects become personalities in their own right. In this case, the sea and the house, Scruff End, that Arrowby moved into take on a life of their own, full of unknown, possibly monstrous or magical beings. There was a constant threat implied - mother nature was not to be the solace or calm retreat that Arrowby was seeking.

I had also been reading the book for a few days before I noticed the discreet green detail in the wave design on the cover of the book, that was not a wave. Jo Walker had carefully, gracefully inserted a tendril - Arrowby's unknown, dream-like sea creature's tentacle - lurking amongst the waves. Nice!

Other Murdoch tropes popped up including caves, caverns, towers, magnifying glass, pools, bogs, moss, fog, windows, stones, rocks, pebbles, shells, vase, monsters, faces, letters, rope and field glasses, just to name a few.

Many of the themes were pure Murdoch too - goodness, obsession, limitations of the human soul, success, rational thought, truth and imperfection.

A number of quotes about marriage bear repeating for how disturbing they truly were. Is this Murdoch's view I wonder, or just Arrowby's?

Marriage is a sort of brainwashing which breaks the mind into the acceptance of so many horrors.

Every persisting marriage is based on fear.

People simply settle into positions of dominion and submission. Of course they sometimes "grow together" or "achieve a harmony", since you have to deal rationally with a source of terror in your life. I suspect there are awfully few happy marriages really, only people conceal their misery and their disappointment.

I had to struggle here with my own superstitious horror of the married state, that unimaginable condition of intimacy and mutual bondage.

I finished the book not only doubting Arrowby's chances of enlightenment but also his ability to self-reflect or change. He claimed that the least he could do was, 'live quietly and try to do my tiny good things and harm no one.' I seriously doubted his ability to harm no one and any good he attempted was designed to help himself first and foremost. As for living quietly, the entire story is about Arrowby's complete inability to live a calm, quiet life.

Photo by Sketch the Sun on Unsplash

Favourite Character: The sea, the sea! So many glorious Murdochian descriptions of the sea during all weathers, seasons and times of the day.

Favourite Quote: I had three.

• one of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats
• if there is art enough a lie can enlighten us as well as the truth
• they yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving

Facts:

• Winner of the 1978 Man Booker Prize.
• The title could be a reference to Xenophon's Anabasis - where 10 000 Greeks, after marching and fighting in a foreign skirmish, called "thalatta, thallata" (the sea, the sea) when they realise they'd been saved from certain death and had made it home to safety (this phrase was also referenced by Jules Verne in Journey to the Centre of the Earth and James Joyce in Ulysses).
• or more likely it was a nod to Paul Valery's poem, La Cimetiere Marin and the lines "la mer, la mer, toujour recommence" (the sea, the sea, forever restarting) which Murdoch also referenced in The Unicorn chapter 4.
• The Sea, The Sea was a modern homage to Shakespeare's The Tempest (theatrical illusions, magic, betrayal, revenge, family, morally ambiguous, power, obedience, monstrosity, cruelty).

Books in Books:

• Odyssey
• Lord Jim
• Wings of the Dove
• Hamlet

Previous IM Posts:

• Under the Net
• Flight From the Enchanter
• The Unicorn
• The Nice and the Good

#IMreadalong

Memories of the Future by Siri Hustvedt

Memories of the Future by Siri Husvedt has lived with me for a few months now. The slowness of my reading is in no way indicative of any lack of enjoyment on my behalf. It is, however a thoughtful, intelligent read, that requires some active participation. Something I could only do when not completely exhausted after work or double-booked, triple-booked on the weekends.

My early feelings and thoughts about the book were contained in this post from last month - Starting a New Book... I won't repeat myself, so if you'd like a brief synopsis of the story, and a poem by Elsa, I'll wait here for you to catch up.

In this particular book, the book you are reading now, the young person and the old person live side by side in the precarious truths of memory

What the 23 yr old SH wrote and what the 61 yr old SH remembers are often two very different things. Hindsight gives a shape to what is shapeless as you live it.
The things that have stayed with her as important are not always the things she recorded in her journal. I am interested in understanding how she and I are relatives.
The story changes, adjusts to new experiences. Memory is not only unreliable; it is porous.
And sometimes there are shocks waiting in the wings to floor you. Sometimes memory is a knife.

This is the stuff I love. I even did a similar thing myself in my thirties when I read through my old travel journal from 1991. Even after a decade, the things I remembered were different to what I recorded at the time. I wrote another journal comparing my record with my memories. As I wrote, I was also being written.
I should hunt it out to see what it looks like twenty years later again.

We are all wishful creatures, and we wish backwards too, not only forward, and thereby rebuild the curious, crumbling architecture of memory into structures that are more habitable.

Sadly, though, somewhere after the halfway mark of Memories of the Future I lost my way. All the sideline stories (the crazy neighbour Lucy Brite, the story within the story that she wrote in her twenties...) stopped being interesting to me, even as they began to take up more and more of the story telling space. Every story carries inside itself multitudes of other stories.

It all got too much in the end - too rambling, too meta and curiously, not enough Elsa.

There was one brief passage towards the end about the Marcel Duchamp porcelain urinal debate, where ID, the Introspective Detective says,

The preponderance of scholarly evidence has long been on the side of the Baroness, you know. One, we have the letter Duchamp wrote to his sister, Susanne, two days after the urinal was rejected. It was discovered until 1982. In it he wrote. 'One of my female friends who had adopted the pseudonym Richard Mutt sent me a porcelain urinal as a sculpture.' Two we know that a newspaper reported at the time that the artist Richard Mutt was from Philadelphia. The Baroness was living in Philadelphia at the time. Three, we know that it wasn't until after the Baroness and Stieglitz were both dead that Duchamp assumed full credit for the urinal.... 

Duchamp stole it, all right. It doesn't even resemble the rest of his work.... 

Fountain doesn't fit in. But the museums haven't changed the attribution.

Marcel Duchamp, 'Fountain', 1950 (replica of 1917 original), porcelain urinal, 30.5 x 38.1 x 45.7 cm
Philadelphia Museum of Art 125th Anniversary Acquisition, gift (by exchange) of Mrs Herbert Cameron Morris,
1998-74-1 © Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP. Copyright Agency, 2019

Marcel Duchamp
Fountain, 1950 (replica of 1917 original)
porcelain urinal
© Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP. Copyright Agency, 2019

And as luck would have it, from the 27th April until 11th August my local Art Gallery of NSW is hosting The Essential Duchamp exhibition, with the urinal in question on full display. I wonder if the 'replica of 1917 original' is enough to cover his bases?

Favourite or Forget: Not a favourite in the end, but still keen to read more by Hustvedt.

Favourite Characters: IF IS and ID

Favourite Quote:

My first moments in my apartment have a radiant quality in memory that have nothing to do with sunlight. They are illuminated by an idea....I was twenty-three years old...

This took me straight back to my own 23 yr old self, living alone for the first time in a new town, starting my career, on the brink of my adult life, excited, full of anticipation and hope and plans and the love, the 'radiant quality' I felt for my first, slightly dingy, older style townhouse on the wrong side of the tracks.

Books in Books:

• Don Quixote 
• Balzac
• The Great Gatsby
• Proust
• Sherlock Holmes
• Gogol - Dead Souls
• Baudelaire - The Flowers of Evil
• Laurence Sterne - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
• Plato - Apology
• Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
• Socrates
• Smolett - The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle
• The Metamorphosis
• Chaucer
• Milton - Paradise Lost
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• Finnegan's Wake
• Simone Weil "imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life."
• Great Expectations
• John Ashbery
• Michael Lally
• Thomas Wyatt
• Shakespeare
• John Donne
• John Clare
• Emily Dickinson
• Thomas Moore
• Sylvia Plath
• Alan Turing
• Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
• etc - there were many more but you get the jist!

Starting a New Book...

So I've just started reading Siri Hustvedt's latest novel, Memories of the Future.

I'm inclined to anticipate enjoyment of Hustvedt's work thanks solely (so far) on my experience with What I Loved. I feel sure that I will be in for an intelligent, literary treat.

The first chapter has not disappointed.

Metafiction is the name of this game as Hustvedt's story explores a 61 yr old woman looking book on the journal written by her 23 yr old self when she first moved to New York to write.

In a curious, personal, twist of fate, there is a Don Quixote connection right from the start.

Within the journal of 23 yr old S.H. is another story about Ian Feathers (I.F.) - a man whose real 'life was lived in books, not out of them.' A man who took his passion for mystery, unsolved crimes and murder too far. A man who 'lived in a world built entirely of clues.' A man who wanted to live his life through the 'splendid' example of Sherlock Holmes (another S.H.). All good heroes need a sidekick - I.F.'s 'all-important confidante, his Sancho, his Watson,' was/is Isadora Simon (I.S.).

I love it when my book worlds collide, or perhaps, more elegantly, when serendipity steps in to allow one bookish experience to inform the next.

Memories of the Future is also ripe with books within books, or more accurately, poets and their poems.

John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest and Frank O'Hara. And The Great Gatsby, Balzac, Proust, Gogol, Baudelaire, Laurence Sterne and Plato just to name those referenced in the first 32 pages. But the one that has made several appearances and will obviously play a bigger role as the story unfolds is the Dada-poet/performance artist, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.

Who? I hear you ask.

According to the Poetry Foundation, she was a 'German-born avant-garde poet. Known for her flamboyance and sexual frankness, the Baroness was a central figure in Greenwich Village’s early-twenties Dadaism'.

Wikipedia describes her as 'breaking every erotic boundary, revelling in anarchic performance'.

Her friend Emily Coleman saw her as, 'not as a saint or a madwoman, but as a woman of genius, alone in the world, frantic'.

I'm very curious to see how Hustvedt will thread the Baroness' life into the rest of her story.
                     

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven by Holland Cotter

Fruit Don’t Fall Far
By Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven
Translated by Jill Alexander Essbaum

From Daddy sprung my inborn ribaldry.
His crudeness destined me to be the same.
A seedlet, flowered from a shitty heap,
I came, the crowning glory of his aim.

From Mother I inherited ennui,
The leg irons of the queendom I once rattled.
But I won’t let such chains imprison me.
And there is just no telling what this brat’ll...!

This marriage thing? We snub our nose at it.
What’s pearl turns piss, what’s classy breeds what’s smutty.
But like it? Lump it? Neither’s exigent.
And I’m the end result of all that fucking.

Do what you will! This world’s your oyster, Pet.
But be forewarned. The sea might drown you yet.

Not my usual poetic fare, but from what I have seen so far, a fair example of the Baroness' writing. And as S.H. says on pg 53, 'I returned to the sputterings of the Baroness because I regarded her as my archival rescue job, almost annihilated back then, and I wanted to protect her from oblivion with my voice.'

Jennifer @Holds Upon Happiness posts a lovely Poem for a Thursday each week. I enjoy sourcing poems from my recent reads to join in with her as I can.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

I like to think that I have taken my 'what to read whilst travelling' choices to an inspired level of brilliance, but I really outdid myself with our recent trip to Japan. Reading Murakami in Japan now feels like the ONLY place to read Murakami!

Not only does the usual Murakami weirdness make sense when you're actually in Japan, but you also realise just how important the environment is to Murakami and his characters. His descriptions of the trees, forests, waterways and urban spaces are everywhere as you move around the country. As are the crows.

In this case, the boy named crow is a mentor to our young protagonist, Kafka Tamura, perhaps an alter ego, a Japanese Jiminy Cricket. Whatever crow is or isn't, right from word one, Murakami is flagging that symbolism, mythology and psychology will be our prime concerns in Kafka on the Shore.

In Japanese mythology, crows are seen as a sign of 'divine intervention in human affairs' (wikipedia). Western mythology tends to associate the crow with bad news or as a harbinger of death. They're selfish, spread gossip and neglect their young. And they're everywhere in Japan. They sit on telegraph wires, fence posts and roof tops. You often wake up to their cawing, even in the city.

Cats are the other creatures that dominant not only Murakami stories, but many Japanese stories, yet curiously I didn't see one single cat in three weeks, let alone a talking cat! The opposite of the crow, cats are creatures of good luck, although still often associated with death and hauntings.

Silence, I discover is something you can actually hear.

There is no denying that Murakami is on very intimate terms with kooky.

If the talking cats weren't enough, a cameo appearance by Johnny Walker and Colonel Sanders of KFC fame might tip you over the edge. A reference to the (fictional) Picnic at Hanging Rock as an example of another group loss of consciousness event caught my eye. Did Murakami know that it was an urban myth? Is that what he was implying about his own story? The sense of mystery and other-worldliness was certainly a shared atmosphere between the two stories.

I was also amazed by truck drivers who suddenly became classic music afficiandos, quiet librarians who turned out to be sex fiends and sex workers who quoted philosophers. What's not to love? The kookiness gets under my skin and into my head. Just like what happened to me with his previous books.

1Q84 is still roaming around in my head, Colourless Tsukuru less so, but it's still a memorable book experience.

Things outside you are projections of what's inside you, and what's inside you is a projection of what's outside you. So when you step into the labyrinth outside you, at the same time your stepping into the labyrinth inside. 

One of the really enjoyable aspects to reading Murakami in Japan is the place names. Suddenly they really mean something. Most of the action in Kafka takes place in Takamatsu on the island of Shikoku. 

We didn't get to Shikiko with this visit, but we did see one of the huge bridges, from a distance, that joins Shikoko to Honshu and we spent some time at the station that is the interchange for the JR line that goes to Takamatsu. Seeing the name of the city featured in my book up in lights suddenly grounded this surreal story into reality.

This is only my fourth Murakami (see my Author Challenge tab for details) so I'm not sure I can safely name all his common themes and ideas, but there are a few that I've clocked. Going into the woods/fear of getting lost, weird sex, talking creatures, dreams, random jazz references, loneliness and silence. And for me, the reader, there is an over-riding sense of bewilderment (WTF was that about?) as well as an overwhelming sense of wanting more (whatever it was a think I like it!) 

I'm caught between one void and another. I have no idea what's right, what's wrong. I don't even know what I want anymore. I'm standing alone in the middle of a horrific sandstorm. I can't move, and can't even see my fingertips.

Murakami doesn't wrap his stories up with a neat, tidy bow or resolve many of the story lines. This should be totally frustrating...and it is, but somehow you love being kept in the dark and confused at the same time. Perhaps it's the likeable characters? Or perhaps it's the not so subtle way he plays with your head? Or perhaps it is the hope that the next book he writes will bring you one step closer to understanding this maddening man and his ability to suck you into his world. 

Every one of us is losing something precious to us....Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's how I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories.

Image source

Murakami likes to do the whole books in books thing. Kafka's backlist was an obvious start -The Castle, The Trial, Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony in this case. But he also referenced The Arabian Nights, the complete works of Natsume Soseki, a book about the trial of Adolf Eichmann (I can only assume it was Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem), Electra by Sophocles, The Tale of the Genji and 'The Chrysanthemum Pledge' in Tales of Moonlight and Rain by Ueda Akinari.

So many tangents, so many connections, which one should I tackle next?

The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose

Usually I prefer to start a book knowing as little about it as possible, especially contemporary fiction. I like to come at it without any prejudices or preconceived ideas so that I can make up my own mind.

However that was not the case with the Stella Prize winning book The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose.

Based on nothing but the cover and it's shortlisting for the Stella, I had decided that I would probably give this book a go one day when I felt like a bit of love mixed with art. The tag 'a novel inspired by Marina Abramović' rang no bells at the time except to tell me that this story would be based on someone's real life.

But then I read Kim @readingmatters review, which lead me to Lisa @ANZlitlovers and Kate @booksaremyfavouriteandbest and I realised very quickly that I did indeed know who Marina Abramović was. 

And knowing that moved The Museum of Modern Love straight to the top of my TBR pile.

A while back I had seen Ulay's video (below) as it made it's rounds on social media. Ulay was Abramović's former partner.

I have been haunted by the old lover's reuniting scenario in this video ever since - the look in Marina's eyes and the whole concept behind the staging of the Artist is Present (2010) exhibition fascinated me. 

Having watched this (and several others about Marina's show since) I do now wonder about Ulay's song that plays over this video. It feels a little like Marina's performance has been usurped by his agenda (there is another youtube video of this meeting available that Abramović's team produced as well). But that's an another story....

After reading Kim. Kate & Lisa's reviews I found an archival documentary by Nicola Flint (below) and read this article in The Guardian about Abramović's 2014 exhibition at The Serpentine Gallery in London.

As you can see I became fascinated (okay obsessed) very quickly...and I hadn't even opened the book at this point!

I had very high expectations for this book and it didn't disappoint, although it wasn't exactly what I thought it would be either. By the end though, I had no idea how I could possibly review it any better or more succinctly than Kim, Lisa & Kate had done before me.

It was the art that stood out for me though.

There were so many discussions by the characters about various exhibitions and modern artists that I had no idea about. With each one, I felt the need to google and find out more. This on-the-side research added a great deal of aesthetic and intellectual pleasure to my reading experience.

Reading and researching The Museum of Modern Love became my very own personal art therapy session.

Early on in the novel, Jane Miller (a visitor to New York) on her way to MoMA to see Abramovic's performance, looked up and caught 

sight of the silhouette of a man standing high on the edge of a nearby building. She had squinted, puzzled, ready to be alarmed. But then with a thrill she recognised it as one of the Antony Gormley sculptures dotting New York's skyline through spring.

Rather spooky isn't it?
Antony Gormley has now (re)created several Event Horizon shows around the world including the original in London in 2007, New York in 2010 and Hongkong in 2015/6.

Jane Miller again:  'I think art saves people all the time.'

Yes, Jane, I think so too.
I know that it saves me on a regular, almost, daily basis.

(She) thought instead of Gustav Metzger. Metzger liked to drape cloths over things. He had draped cloth over images of the Holocaust. He might drop a cloth right over Marina Abramović. 

Historic Photographs: To Crawl Into - Anschluss, Vienna, March 1938 (1996/2011)

Sadly, when I googled Metzer for this post, I discovered that he had died just last month at the age of 90. The idea of what can be seen, what is hidden, who is doing the looking and who is hiding were themes that Rose played with throughout the story.

Jane, again (she was an art teacher which explains her interest and knowledge. Rose used her very effectively to provide the reader with relevant information and as a gentle provocateur):

Brancusi, the sculptor, for thirty years or more, worked exclusively with two forms - the circle and the square. Every sculpture was a marriage of the egg and the cube....I think Abramović probably has the same thing in mind. She's asking us to look at things differently. Maybe to feel something invisible....she's always been exploring either intense movement or utter stillness.

Constatin Brancusi - The Kiss 1916

Keeble (a TV art critic, and a not so gentle provocateur):

'For several centuries now art has sat beside religion,' he said. "When we get overlap we get outrage. Take The Black Madonna. Piss Christ. Wim Delvoye tattooing the Madonna onto a pig's back. I'm uncomfortable with how religious it feels to walk into MoMA right now and see all those people literally kneeling or sitting about and staring at Abramović  as if she was a saint.'

Jesus (2005)

The novelist, Colm Toibin sat with Marina in real life and in the book. He wrote about it in The New York Review of Books. Rose's ability to weave together the real and the fictional was flawless.

Books also got mentioned by our characters - Muriel Barbery's, The Elegance of the Hedgehog and 1Q84 by Murakami. One I've read and one I haven't - but it is on my TBR pile. I love books that lead me to other books.

There were so many rich layers and ideas about art, life and love interwoven throughout this gorgeous story that, when I finished, it moved straight onto my To Be ReRead Pile.

Connection and convergence were major themes that resonated strongly with me...not only within the book, but with other real life stuff as well.

It felt like The Museum of Modern Love has now led me naturally, like stepping stones named art, New York and love straight into the arms of Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, Bill Hayes' Insomniac City and now Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved.

Synchronicity and convergence and connection at work on my bookshelves!

I have also been thinking (a lot) about how these things also play out it in our day to day lives.

Perhaps some of the highest praise I can give Rose's book is that it has not only opened up my mind, heart and world to modern art and the idea of art as therapy, but it has also inspired and informed my subsequent reading.

The other review for The Museum of Modern Love that I wanted to highlight was Heather's @Bits and Books.

Sadly, Heather Croxon died after being involved in an accident in early March.
I only knew Heather via her blog, Bits and Books and her instagram, litzy & twitter feeds, but the news gutted me when I first heard about it.

Her enthusiasm for books, the reading community and her budgie knew no bounds. I loved the time and effort she took to create beautifully styled book pics and I always enjoyed seeing her latest book recommendations and links for #6degrees and #TopTenTuesday.

I cannot imagine what Heather's family must be going through now, but if they somehow wander onto this post, I would like them to know how much fun and creativity Heather added to the book blogging world. She will be missed.
Heather was only 31.

Thank you also to Julianne and Andi @Dewey's 24hr Readathon for honouring Heather's memory in their recent post.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien

For four days I've been trying to write a review that would do this rich, engrossing, mosaic of a book due justice.

It wasn't so much writer's block as writer's muddle.

There was soooo much to say! I couldn't even decide which lens or which perspective to choose?

Because I was enjoying Do Not Say We Have Nothing so much, I began researching stuff before I had finished reading.

I looked up the classical pieces of music conducted by Glenn Gould* that Thien mentioned throughout the book (Bach's Goldberg Variations and Sonata for Piano & Violin no 4) and listened to them as I read the book.

I researched the politicians and artists who were real people. He Luting (1903 - 1999) was a real composer and he really did say 'shame on you for lying' when hauled before a televised interrogation during the Cultural Revolution.

I researched the L'Internationale** to find out the various interpretations of the phrase that Thien used in her title.

I simply couldn't get enough of this book - I wanted to know more, delve deeper. I wanted to totally immerse myself in the reading experience.

On the surface, this is a story about a Chinese composer called Sparrow and the things that happened to him and around him during his lifetime. A lifetime that encompassed the extraordinary events from the Chinese Revolution to Tiananmen Square.

However, Thien weaves in many threads and motifs, until we have a story within a story, across three generations and two continents. She plays with recurring themes, copies of copies and the cyclical nature of history.

Music is a big part of the story and I found her descriptions of the creative process and the interpretation of music mesmerising.

Equally mesmerising, but in a horrifying way, was the astounding use of double-speak by politicians and revolutionaries during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in China.

Thien showed some of the effects of 'self-criticism', 'struggle sessions' and 'denunciations' on the creative mind as they learnt to silence their talents and learnt to live without their language.

One of the major themes developed throughout the story was the life of homosexuals in China*** during the Mao years. Sparrow and Jiang Kai obviously had an intense loving relationship that could not be realised openly. One had to become a hard-line revolutionary, destroying art and lives, while trying to protect his friend from within, who eventually fled the country. While the other stayed, gave up his career as a composer, married and worked in a radio factory of the governments choosing.

Later on, Sparrow's daughter, Ai Ming, also developed very strong feelings for her female neighbour during the heightened times surrounding Tiananmen Square.

Thien intertwined mathematics, etymology, translation, calligraphy, memory, disappearance, loss, free-will, and the nature of time seamlessly. There were moments of humour and moments of pathos.

I have read some reviews that felt Do Not Say We Have Nothing was too wordy. Not for me. I loved every single moment and thoroughly enjoyed the multi-layered, enchanting nature of Thien's loquaciousness.
However this book will not be for everyone.
Hopefully this review will help you decide whether it's for you or not.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing is a keeper for me. I plan to reread this one day and I will be devastated if this book doesn't win one of the book awards that it is currently shortlisted for (Booker and Giller Prizes as well as the Canadian Governor General's Literary Award).

Below are some of the results of my research (thank you wikipedia):

• The Chinese Soviet Republic (1931-1937) adopted a 19th century French socialist worker's song called L'Internationale** as their anthem. There was a line in the original (Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout) that according to Wikipedia could be translated as 'we are nothing, let us be all'.

• Qu Qiubai translated a version of this song from Russian into Chinese in 1923 which changed this line to mean 'Do not say that we have nothing.'

• To my mind, the Chinese version has a sense of martyrdom inherent in its phrasing. They are being watched and judged by others who say they have nothing. Whereas the English translation seems to resound with solidarity and a proactive intent.

• The anthem later became a rallying cry for the students during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

• Glenn Gould* (25 September 1932 – 4 October 1982) was a Canadian pianist. He became famous for his interpretations of Bach's music. His methods of recording, splicing, mixing and editing his performances in the studio caused controversy at the time. Critics questioned the authenticity of his work and made claims of imitation. More delicious multiplicity on Thien's behalf.

• Historically China, was tolerant of sexual experimentation and same-sex couples. However in 1949***, homosexuality was declared to be a sign of Western bourgeois decadence and vice by the Communist Party. 

• Treatment of homosexuals during the Cultural Revolution was harsh, many were humiliated in public and some were executed. They were forced into heterosexual marriages and all LGBTQ art and culture was destroyed. However, all sexual activity and discussion was considered lustful and decadent during this time. Personal choice was not important. Affairs, sexual freedom and even sex education in schools were all considered enemies of class. Neutral gender clothing was promoted and monogamy expected.

• Some of the books read by the characters during the story - David Copperfield by Charles Dickens and Notes From the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Friedrich Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Kang Youwei's Book of the Great Community and Border Town by Shen Congwen.

• Thien was born in Vancouver. Her mother was born in Hongkong and her father was born in an ethnic Chinese area of Malaysia. They met whilst studying in Australia. The immigrated to Canada in 1974 just before Thien was born.

Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift

OMG!

How have I not read anything by Graham Swift before?

(Assuming that is, that the writing abilities he displayed so gloriously in Mothering Sunday are also evident in his previous works.)

This is the best book I've read this year so far. Hands down. No contest.

Every single word was perfectly placed and felt like exactly the right choice for that sentence, that moment, that character.

The first half was beautifully sensual, languid and full of youthful abandon. Yet the shadows of the great war hang heavy.

Swift plays with time, starting the story with "once upon a time" and constantly shifting between now - the perfect day - to reflections of earlier days and big jumps forward into a future made different because of this perfect day. It could be disconcerting, but I found it breathtaking.

The writing has a circular, pacy feel. You're racing through and onwards and going around at the same time. Ideas of sliding doors and possibilities and chance tease you at ever turn. What if? becomes the central theme.

The final section turns more inward looking as our characters discuss the nature of truth and story and memory. We see the power of the mind to carry us away with alternate versions of our stories.

You are left pondering all the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives - all the fictions and possibilities that we run through in our mind that seep into our realities, that inform our decisions and choices even though they are merely figments of our imaginations.

If I hadn't finished this book at 1:30 in the morning, I would have turned it over and started it again straight away.

I cannot remember the last time a book had such a powerful effect on me.

Some readers may not enjoy the rather English class conscious writing style and some may be put off by the slim book/same price as a chunkster thing, but for me this book has been one of the most fulfilling, satisfying, enriching stories I've read in a long time.

A great English writer at the height of his creative powers will always be a joy to behold.

This slim volume packed a punch with every single word in a way that many of the current stock of chunskers fail to maintain for their entire wordy length.

Mothering Sunday also provided plenty of books in book action.

Jane was a reader and many books informed her later opinions and stories - the main ones being Treasure Island, Kidnapped and Youth by Conrad.

A note about the cover.
The Australian hardback edition comes with a stunning slip cover featuring a detail of Modigliani's Reclining Nude (red nude) (1917-18). It seems fitting that this painting that is a homage to sex, should grace the covers of this story. It captures the post-coital mood of the first half of the book perfectly.

1/20