Category Archives: Everything

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Did I Choose Something I Should Regret?

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The Little Red Chairs
Edna O'Brien
Literary fiction
Allen & Unwin
December 2015

9780571316281Firstly allow me to apologise for being spotty this past month.  NaNo, family engagements and now illness have quashed my ability to write all that much of anything that was not my current novel project, or indeed anything at all since the start of December.  Distressing.  But let us set that aside, because the novel I’m reviewing this week, The Little Red Chairs is a fair bit more distressing, since it deals with the aftermath of the Bosnian War and genocide.

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Through the Eye of a Blackbird

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Thirteen Ways of Looking
Colum McCann
Bloomsbury
November 2015

518WCie+KaL._SX309_BO1,204,203,200_Thirteen Ways of Looking is a book of three short stories plus a novella.

The book was in the process of being written when the author, Colum McCann, was assaulted and hospitalised after he went to the aid of a woman who was being attacked by her husband. At the end of the book McCann invites readers to go to his website colummccann.com to read his Victim Impact Statement.

McCann’s stories of varying degrees of human suffering are never mawkish or laboured in their execution, but finely written and strangely uplifting. He has not, like some other authors, gone to the extremes of the human condition as an easy source of drama but, I think because he has the insight and skill to shine a light on it. The book is an attempt to connect us more with our fellow human beings rather than an exploitative romp through misery. Continue reading

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Social Fabric of New York

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Humans of New York: Stories
Brandon Stanton
Macmillan Australia
October 2015

HONYStories_smIf there’s one thing that Humans of New York: Stories makes clear, it’s that everyone is the hero of his or her own story. And while, yes, this is something that each of us knows, on an intellectual level, applies to every one of us, it can nevertheless cause a quiet unraveling in the confidence of self to read snippets of people’s stories, their everyman journey, and witness the illusion of gravitational pull they perceive of their own life. Because, once you see it, laid out on the page, you then become increasingly aware of the illusion that exists within your own perception, and gravity begins to loosen, and you begin to drift.

To go one step further, Humans of New York: Stories is, perhaps unintentionally, a fascinating glimpse into the construction of self that we all experience throughout our life. Continue reading

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And you thought you were going to be productive today…

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Screen Shot 2015-12-08 at 7.37.12 PM

If you have not yet had a play around with Google Ngram Viewer, then prepare to put aside an hour, two, or, heck, maybe most of an afternoon. Google Ngram Viewer lets you look at trends for word use across all of the Google digitised library of books from 1800 to 2008. The default that came up when I landed on the page was Frankenstien, Albert Einstein and Sherlock Holmes, cutting off at 2000 (image above).

So, let’s have a play around.

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My Life Got Flipped, Turned Upside Down

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Hester & Harriet
Hilary Spiers
Allen & Unwin, RRP $29.99
October 2015

9781925266412I am quite sure I have previously expounded on my early-onset curmudgeoness, which began some time around the onset of puberty. Some may have called it simply “being a teenager”, and certainly many similar behaviours were involved. However, it also involved a whole lot of tutting at rude people, finding fellow teenagers to be irritating, and enjoying Brussels sprouts. In other words I have always been old.

Not that Hester and Harriet are old. Do not, under any circumstances, let them overhear you saying that. They are at most late middle-aged, okay. Got that? Continue reading

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For the Birdo in Your Life

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Nextinction
Ralph Steadman (illustrator), Ceri Levy (commentary)
Bloomsbury
Aug 2015, RRP $69.99

nextinctionNextinction is one of those tricky books to pin down in a review. This mixed up, vibrant and colourful tome is part art book, part coffee table extravaganza, part humour, part social commentary and part call to environmental action. It is an ambitious follow-up act to the successful, similarly veined collaboration Extinct Boids.

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A Novel of Contrasts

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Tape
Steven Camden
HarperCollinsChildren’sBooks
Jan 2015, RRP $16.99 (paperback)

tapeQuintessentially, Tape is a novel of contrasts. It contrasts the past world of Ryan with the present world of Ameliah, the world of the male with the world of the female, the world of 1993 tape technology with the 2013 world of texts and twitter, and the world of the adult (from the teenager’s perspective) with the world of the teenager.

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Politician’s Funeral Pyre

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The Sympathizer
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Grove Press
November 2015

the_sympathizerThe Vietnam War, it will be no news to anyone, has had considerable impact on world history, both as a national tragedy for Vietnam and in its global cultural impacts.  It sparked a mass movement of people around and out of Vietnam and the rest of Indochina.  The song I’ve posted above is apparently about this migration.  I couldn’t find any English translation of the lyrics and sadly do not know any useful Vietnamese.  The Sympathiser follows the story of a migrant, the Captain, who journeys to the US as a refugee and sleeper agent for the Viet Cong.

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An Elfish Yuletide Tale

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A Boy Called Christmas
Matt Haig, illustrations by Chris Mould
Allen & Unwin RRP $19.99
November 2015

51utTx5pslL._SX321_BO1,204,203,200_Matt Haig’s Christmas tale for children explains how a Finnish boy named Nikolas became Father Christmas. You know the one, the fat bloke in the red suit who delivers presents to all the children of the world on Christmas night using only a sled and flying reindeer.

The story begins with Nikolas and his father, a nine and a half-fingered woodchopper, eking out a meagre living in the forest. One day Joel the hunter calls at their isolated cottage with a job offer for his father—to join an expedition to go north in search of Elfhelm, the mythical home of the elves.

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Literature, Empathy and the Landscape of Quandary

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El_Tres_de_Mayo,_by_Francisco_de_Goya,_from_Prado_in_Google_Earth

I have only recently become aware of the writer and philosopher Martha Nussbaum. If you aren’t aware of her thoughts on the moral importance of stories, art and literature, you can start by listening to her speak on some older episodes of ABC Radio National’s The Philosopher’s Zone. As it happens, Nussbaum ranges over a wide swathe of philosophy, though frequently comes back to an orbit around ethics and the idea of cosmopolitan or global morality: that is, how to be moral with regard to everyone, not just within your own tribe, country, religion, friends, family or even species.

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The Silence is Illusion

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Without You, There is No Us
Suki Kim
Memoir, politics
Crown
October 2014

without_you_there_is_no_usI first came across Suki Kim as a panellist at the exceedingly awkward “Inside North Korea” talk at this year’s Melbourne Writers Festival.  I have written about this panel in more detail before, but Kim’s frustration at her co-panellists, and at the situation in and around North Korea generally, was as palpable there as it is in this book.  Without You, There is No Us is a memoir of her time as a missionary English teacher at an elite university outside of Pyongyang.  It is an incisive and self-reflective memoir.

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Alternative history: Ilia Tare

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ILIA TARE
mrblo

Born in Golem, Albania in 1961, Tare studied astrophysics under the tutelage of Adam Kola at the University of Tirana.

In 1981, using the pseudonym ‘Orion Mala’, he began writing articles for the underground periodical Lëndë e Djegshme in which he argued that Leninism had debased the original aims of socialism. Continue reading

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      THE KINGDOM OF GODS N K Jemisin (2011) ISBN: 9781841498195 The last of N K Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy, The Kingdom of Gods follows trickster god Sieh as he forms a complicated relationship with the descendants of his former slavemasters, the last Arameri heirs. Set some hundred years after the events of The Broken Kingdoms, … Continue reading