Don't take this the wrong way...

Have just discovered there won't be a fresh Sydney Morning Herald tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that. Guess they deserve bonus points for not bothering to pretend they're bothering to report the news this Christmas and I've saved my $2.20.

But I can't help wondering whether I'll manage to find out if something important happens.

Anyway, I'll be away from the internet until next year.

Post Trauma oblivion

Despite several opportunities for catastrophic failure, everything went SWIMMINGLY yesterday. Hurrah!!!

One of the many things I had to do was be the gender balance on a job interview panel. (Wouldn't you just love to do a job interview at 5:00pm on the second last working day before Christmas?) I found myself trying to calm the interviewees with my reassuring smile. For THREE HOURS. I wandered home with aching cheeks, wanting nothing more than to sit on the couch and watch telly. Is this why I never entered beauty pageants? Maybe there are exercises I can do to strengthen my facial muscles... Seriously, this HURT.

Sadly, telly didn't make me happy for long last night. I ended up watching The Midsomer Murders and once again wondering WHY OH WHY do they MAKE THIS SHOW?? It just makes no sense in this day and age. They could use the millions of pounds in so very many better ways.

For those of you who haven't seen it, The Midsomer Murders could have been written by Agatha Christie in 1925 except they were made for several years from 1997 onwards. There's an incredibly grating disjunction between the traditional form of the village detective mystery and the early 21st Century. People have mobile phones and new model cars (even if all the women wear floral frocks and cardigans) as they enact the archaic rituals of an idealised English country life. There's much cricket played, many rustic pubs and a new local festival each week. The crimes are always terribly complicated murders for motives of inheriting mansions or protecting secret societies or winning choir competitions. No mundanities like drugs or domestic violence! And strangely, not a single black or Asian person is in these villages with disturbingly high murder rates. Maybe changing the racial mix would lower the crime rate? Even the police are affected by this nostalgia for traditional English murder mysteries. Despite using the latest in high tech forensic techniques, there isn't a single WPC in the Midsomer constabulary.

I mean, I understand the attraction of detective dramas as a way of working out a slightly gruesome puzzle but without the nasty blood or other signs of real world crimes (like Cluedo - the butler did it in the drawing room with the poker). Over the years I've watched Inspector Morse, Taggart and Jack Frost with varying levels of enjoyment. I also understand nostalgia for a quieter, gentler time - I mean Heartbeat was quite fun in a cheesy way - but when you combine the two without acknowledging that the world is a very different place to bucolic Miss Marple wonderland, it just doesn't work.

Also, I would love to talk about Beachmasters but it was so masterly, there's nothing I can add. Where a lesser writer would have included a map and a glossary, Thea Astley describes the many places on this island well enough for you to know where you are and uses Pidgin English that makes me think I could get by on a Pacific island. She's especially good on the many ways Europeans end up in such places. If only I'd had the good fortune to be in her Australian Lit classes instead of suffering through the third rate lecturers who made it quite clear teaching first years was beneath their dignity.

Breathing Easy

Tipsy people who SHOULD KNOW BETTER and and KNOW THE RESULT have quietly told me at Christmas functions not to worry about keeping my job. Hurrah!

Of course, I STILL can't sleep. Things that are keeping me awake at night:
I have a plane to catch on Sunday but am convinced I won't survive because I spent an hour at the MCA watching a film about the history of hijacking. Will Hamas, Hezbollah or the Black Panthers stop me from getting to my parents for Christmas?
What if Qantas goes on strike on Christmas Eve?
What if my Beloved misses one of his several flights to Brisbane from Darwin and I have to spend Christmas at my parents ON MY OWN??
Will my mother will be disappointed that her present is much smaller than my father's?
My father's present is too big to fit in my suitcase if I want to bring any clothes. Sholud I try to post it up knowing that this will take a long time, cost a lot and may not get there in time?
What should I give my niece for managing to finish high school despite an unsupportive home and truly ghastly school environment?
Why has Channel 10 stopped showing "Charmed" after one episode?
Why do we need to win all five tests? Won't people not to play with us any more?
Does anybody buy any of that cricket merchandise?
Why do I never write down addresses of family and friends and then wonder why I can't send Christmas cards? Why have I only got three Christmas cards so far this year? Is it because I only sent three last year? Do email greetings count?
Will I make it to all of meetings I have on Thursday?

But at least I'm a bit more relaxed as I read into the night.

I'm currently reading Beachmasters by Thea Astley. It has a very nice cover.

It's about a coup in a South Pacific colony not unlike Noumea or the Solomons. I'm only half way through it despite it not being very long. It's very, um, dense. Most of it needs very SLOW reading. And it's startlingly good.

Suite Francaise

* This week I've felt a bit melancholy, partly because a lot of people are leaving my workplace because we're being "restructured" and partly because I finished Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky. (I know there are plenty of French curly whatsits and accents in both of those those things but it would have taken me too long to do to them right so I gave up.

When it was published here, the story of how the book came to be written received a lot of press attention. Russian-Jewish novelist living in France for 20 years dies in Auschwitz. Sixty years later her daughter realises the notebook she's carted round as a keepsake of her mother contains an unfinished novel that was written in incredibly tiny handwriting to save paper while she lived in exile in a tiny village during the Nazi occupation of France. Sadly, her other daughter dies a few years before the notebook is transcribed. Oh the humanity! Why didn't anyone read it sooner? Just the sheer waste of talent and life seemed horrifying.

Which also made me dubious about whether the book would be any good. It wasn't until my mum lent me her copy that I bothered to read it. And it is good. Unfinished - possibly 40 per cent finished - it tells the story of how several different groups of people respond to the German invasion. Part one is about an incredbily chaotic evacuation of Paris in 1940. Part two covers dealing with the enemy occupying a village and a farm. It ends with the Germans leaving to go to the Russian front. What would happen next is only roughly sketched out because she was writing in approximately real time.

The niceties of civilised behaviour are strained by the circumstances of exodus while pursued by bombers. Nemirovsky has a very deft way of skewering the vanities and pomposities of her characters and meting out appropriate treatment. The rich woman who prides herself on her Christian charity merrily shares her stores of biscuits with other refugees until she realises the shops are empty. TThen only HER children matter. The man who values his porcelain more than people meets an appopriate end. The banker who reneges on an offer of a lift to his staff because his mistress insists on taking their place is punished for his selfishness. Others rise to the crisis and help children find their parents.

The second part is less urgent and more bucolic. The Germans are living amongst us. Who will talk to them? Who will sleep with them? There are some wonderful descriptions of the natural world as well as of the intense claustrophobia of village life. Behind the closed shutters eyes are watching! There is tremendous humanity in this section as Nemirovsky makes the German soldiers individuals who are kind to animals and really truly can fall in love. There are also no real surprises about which characters become collaborators.

The appendices include her plans for the rest of the book (a complex construction based on musical structure without much musical knowledge which sounds pretty dodgy to me - but then it's only a plan) and correspondence about her life. The contrast between her circumstances and her book could hardly be more stark. As a foreign Jew (despite her baptism as an adult), she was banned from publication and from receiving roylaites for earlier works. She couldn't travel. Eventually she was arrested and for months and months her husband tried to find her until he too was taken to a concentration camp. Her children were only spared with the help of friends who kept them hidden until the end of the war.

Nowhere at all does the book mention the persecution of the Jews. I don't know whether this was because she thought such things shouldn't be talked about. Or if she thought her book would be more popular this way (there is a comment in her plan to include many descriptions of the lives of the rich because people loved this) or if she really didn't see this as part of the French experience of the War. In this era of identity politics this omission seems very peculiar and doubly sad.

Without knowing the circumstances of Nemirovsky's life, you'd think this was a clever, insightful and wise book. Knowing them, it seems tragic that she was able to recognise the humanity of the Germans even though they didn't pay her the same courtesy.

*This was originally posted LAST week but I couldn't remove dodgy comments offering me untold riches without pulling it down/

Weight of the World

It rarely happens that the books I pick up to read chime so well with how I'm feeling. Yesterday, I was interviewed along with a great many other people to see if I deserved to keep the job I've done for almost three years. Today, five people from our smallish office finished up and we said good-bye, wondering what would happen next. Next week, I've triple booked myself for meetings to sort things out before everyone else disappears to far-flung places. I'm fretting about the usual family burdens of meeting everyone's impossible expectations for Christmas and I can't sleep.

Last night, I picked up Weight by Jeanette Winterson a wonderful poetic retelling of the story of Atlas, the Titan bearing the weight of the cosmos on his shoulders. This is part of a series of various authors retalling classical mythology for Text publishing. A.S.Byatt, Margaret Atwood and Donna Tartt are amongst the many people who've contributed to the series but I haven't seen their books yet.

I've said in other places that Winterson's work can be quite baroque and inpenetrable. This, on the other hand, is deceptively simple prose that works on at least two levels - sometimes metaphysical, sometimes literally. (You're really entirely sure where Atlas is standing when he's holding up the universe.) The book opens with the start of the world, geological time and talks about the layers of sedimentary rock as pages of a story, where things get trapped.

Atlas is the child of the earth and the sea who produced him from an extended coupling when the sea covered an island for 36 hours. For a while, he tills the earth and raises a family. But then he's punished for taking part in the war between gods and titans by being forced to carry the cosmos. A long time later, Heracles needs his help. He borrows the load for a while and then tricks Atlas into taking it back. Atlas knows he's made choices to accept his punishment but wonders why he obeys the gods. In between these bits, the gods and heroes behave badly and the real world moves on.

Winterson interweaves this bits with sections in her (pseudo)autobiographical voice to show how she's been carrying far too much around with her for too long and she wants to put it down. Writing this story is meant to help. I hope it did. This is a wonderful meditation on life and love and the choices we make that set our paths. It's a lovely way of using the myth.

I've always loved retellings of classical mythology eg Alan Garner's series of at least three books (The God beneath the Sea? Heracles?) were some of my favourite books as a kid. I was really disappointed at uni to find out how badly written or inaccessible the original versions of the myths are. (And it's such a relief to read something GOOD after a week of dodgy SF even I'm too embarrassed to blog about.)

Now for something existential

What a sadly neglected blog this has been lately. Each time I try to log on (unsuccessfully a few times lately for IT reasons), I've been distracted by invitations to upgrade, update, go beta. It's all too hard at the moment. I'm completely absorbed in trying to work out what to buy family and friends for Christmas.

But, if I do upgrade and I get tags, I wouldn't feel so, I don't know, random compared to the Superfast Reader who claims "Reading is my superpower" (And the frequency with which she updates make me agree me her.)

Not sure I need a separate classification for "Norwegian Literature" as she does. In fact, I'm not sure that I pass snap judgements on books so much as dither about why I didn't like them. I don't think I could divide them into "Love!!" or "Boring". This is yet another reason why I haven't been appointed to the High Court - that and not having a law degree or anything.

I would very much like to have a super power. But it wouldn't be reading. It would something more uncanny X-Men-ish, like flying or teleportation or stopping time for a bit while I got on with something important like finishing a chapter. Hmm, maybe reading is a good super power to have after all.