Another bad book for an anxious new parent

The night before I went into hospital, I started reading The Slapping Man by Andrew Lindsay.

I didn't get far that night. On page one a woman gives birth to a child with a monstrously deformed jaw. On page 2 she's worried he'll bite her boob off while breastfeeding.

Luckily that turned out all right in the end. The baby grew up up to be Ernie, a man with a powerful jaw that could withstand any amount of violence.

This book took me two weeks to read because I kept losing my place.* But this is exactly the sort of self-consciously odd book I find a bit irritating at the best of times. It's set in an isolated coastal community of indeterminate siuze full of "quirky characters". There's Ernie who makes his money from being slapped and his quirky parents and the quirky town butcher who wants to slaughter every different animal and the town publican who's scared of his brother the butcher and quirky Jean who sleeps with everyone but hasn't kissed anyone since her first boyfriend died and finally there's Vronsky the fake town shrink, the quirkiest of them all because he hears all the town's secrets.

It's structured around really short chapters focussed on one character that may not relate to anything else that happens. Some of these are quite poetic but it's impossible to work out how much time passes during the action - it could be weeks or a couple of decades. Yes, I realise this is probably the point.

Anyway I was surprised that even though there was heaps I didn't like, it wasn't that bad. Some of it was even pretty funny. Oh and I liked the cover.

*Admittedly, for most of that time, I WAS heavily medicated, sleep deprived and a bit excited about having a tiny baby of my own to cuddle and wrap up and try to tickle.

Fire and Brimstone and all that

The week before Winnie arrived, I was desperate to finshThe Volcano by Venero Armanno. This was mostly because the book weighed almost two kilos in hardcover and I didn't think I could hold both it and the baby. It wasn't really because of the plot because you knew pretty well what was going to happen from the beginning.

The book tells the story of Emilio Aquila, a Sicilian post-War immigrant to Brisbane who got caught up with a crime lord and with union-busting railway management. Along the way he could never really shake the nickname "Devil of Sicily" he got as a youngster for living as a brigand on Mt Etna and kidnapping a girl who then had to marry him.

This was published about five or six years ago and I used to see a lot of people reading it in public. It has a lovely cover and sounds like a terribly PC postcolonial immigrant tale. But I was put off from reading it then. This was partly because the reviews talked about the use of ancient mythology (Pluto kidnapped Proserpine on the slopes of Mt Etna and took her to the Underwold to be his queen except she wasn't happy which is kinda sorta what happened to the protagonist and his wife) and I'm dubious about modern novels using myths because it's hard to do it well. But in this book, it wasn't that heavy handed and it did work.

And there were a lot of good things going on that I enjoyed a great deal such as descriptions of migrant life in Brisbane in the 1950s where the locals were as casually and unapologetically racist as you'd expect. Life in Sicily during the war sounded very grim too. Where the book did lose me though was in the present where Emilio befriends an annoying young woman who's trying to study creative writing and is depressed after the death of a boyfriend. Some of this - such as her discussions with her incompetent supervisor - is meant to be funny but it doesn't really work for me and I got annoyed that she had not one but two artist boyfriends.

So, a lot of pages, a lot of story, a lot of great background research but ultimately unsatisfying.

Good but not for the squeamishly expectant

A couple of weeks ago I read The Hamilton Case by Michelle de Kretser. Until just now I didn't realise it's technically Australian because the author has lived here since she was 14. This is a reasonably excusable oversight because the novel is set almost completely in Sri Lanka with a couple of excursions to England.

The action takes place from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s amongst the privileged Sinhalese class who were wealthy and socially powerful but never accepted by the Europeans as equals even though they sent their children to be educated at Oxford and Cambridge and bought their suits on Saville Row.

The central figure, Sam, is a very unhappy barrister who spends his whole life being rejected by both his mother and the society which unaccountably defies his expectations, rewarding people he sees as useless and denying him his just desserts. He can't bear Sri Lankan independence: at one point he laments that he has to put up with pineapple jelly when he'd been raised to appreciate marmalade. This unhappiness makes him very cruel.

I thought it was remarkably good. It starts off with Sam's account of his life and the case he thought would make his career. Mercifully, this is quite short because he has an overly fussy, ironical voice. Most of the rest of the book is narratged in the third person, some from other viewpoints so you can qury the reliability of Sam's version of events.

The blurb on the front of the book says that it is reminiscent of Remains of the Day. This is a fair enough comment about Sam's capacity for self-deception but there is a lot more going on in the story. The jungle is described magnificently. One character changes from a hunter to a proto-ecologist over time. There are ghosts of dead children and magical visions. It's a very fine read.

But I really could have done without reading about a stillborn baby when I was eight and a half months pregnant. I poked Winnie until she did somersaults after reading that bit.

Staying out late to watch telly

Some days I feel very idealistic. I dream about reducing my footprint on the earth even further below the Australian average than it already is because I can go weeks without using a car, I live in a flat, I buy Safe toilet paper and I'm too indecisive to buy new clothes very often. (Please bear with me. I realise this assessment is delusional and can't be fixed unless I install a worm farm on my balcony to compost household waste, persuade the cat to live off local insect life, work out how to isolate the air conditioning from my office and convert to green power even though it will double the power bills).

Other days, high faluting principles seem a bit too hard.

One of the principles I've been persuaded to adopt is not to get Pay TV (evil mind numbing commercialism, think how many books you can buy for $50 a month, we watch quite enough dross on free to air etc etc.) This means that the only ways we can see Sydney FC play when they're not at their home ground is to travel long distances to away grounds or find a pub with Foxtel. And I haven't actually kept a running tally of how much we spend on beer in the interests of saving money on pay TV.

Usually finding a pub is ok unless they don't want to swap their tellies over from the cricket or rugby or fashion TV. Usually SOMEONE will agree to show it and, if it's an important game, we can go to proper offical club screenings at the casino. At least they turn the sound up.

But last night it was all a bit hard when the team was playing in China. From 10:00pm. On a school night. When I was tired. I couldn't help but wonder why I was hanging on a bar stool when there was a perfectly good telly all on its own at home that could show me the game if we weren't so very PRINCIPLED. And it wouldn't notice if I wore pyjamas.

To change the subject entirely, last week I read a gently wonderful book called The Dickinson Papers by Mark Ragg. It was about the way people love poetry for different reaons and whether poets' intentions matter and how myths about poets can arise. It's also about finding love in odd places and being brave enough to change the direction of your life. I quite liked the cover (which is this picture above) because all the things on it are important to the plot (and goldfish are cute) but the colleague who lent it to me thought that it had made the book not sell very well. You also learn an awful lot about Emily Dickinson and her work.

Two days in bed with Patrick White

I've been quiet for a while firstly because of unexpected busy-ness, then being a bit ill and then YESTERDAY

Oh my, YESTERDAY!!

I was so stressed by the effort of getting on a train after the line that had been closed (because someone had been killed*) along with everyone else who had obviously been waiting for an extremely long time so were incredibly pushy, smelly and shirty that I had to turn around and go home again.

Absurb. I'm wondering if Cityrail will pay the resulting medical bill or if it's my fault for not realising in advance that it would have been quicker to walk. Or more sensible not to go at all.

Anyway, last night I managed to see the second part of the ABC's First Tuesday Book Club. They were talking about Patrick White's The Solid Mandala which I read a long time ago and remember liking very much - unlike every other book of his I've read. Half the panel loathed the book with the sort of passion I can only respect. In fact, word for word, it's how I feel about DH Lawrence (who was probably one of White's models) "all these words and 50 pages about a walk but we can't work out what happened!" - I read Women in Love at uni and found it so obscure I didn't notice two characters got it on until the tutor raised the subject.

But Jackie Weaver (!!) was such a fan, it was truly delightful. She'd read the book three times (and was still a bit unclear about the plot but loved the ambiguity). She confessed to having had a standup fight with Frank Hardy about the virtues of White - I would have loved to have been there.

Then she talked regretfully about how people don't read White any more because gone is the era when you could take a book to bed for a couple of days. Everyone else claimed this was outside of their experience. No it's not Jackie! I'd do it all the time if I didn't have to go to work five days a week.

* By a train. A mere station away. What a horrible way to die.

Stalking David Malouf

I realised yesterday that I've been more or less stalking David Malouf my whole life - although usually at a gap of 30 or 40 years. I went to the girls' highschool across the road from where he says he went to school in Johnno . When I went to uni (the same one he went to and the same department but NOT the same building), I often drove past the site of what he described as his childhood home in 12 Edmonstone St (a weatherboard Queenslander in his day but a nondescript medium rise office building in mine). At highschool, I spent days and days in the old State Library perched on the edge of the city next to the river where he talked about struggling with his Latin translations in at least one of his memoirs. (A new library was built shortly afterwards). I've even followed him on some of his travels he's written about through Belgium, Greece and Italy.

But I've only knowingly shared the same place as him simultaneously yesterday and a few times a decade ago, when I went out with someone who lived in the same inner-city Sydney street as he did. Occasionally, I'd see a dapper gentleman in his middle years crossing the road in the distance. I'd be quietly glad that he was still around and hoped that when he went inside his terrace he'd write something I could read in a year or so.*

Because I think he's quite delightful. Three or four of his books have stayed in the back of my mind ever since reading them. These memories are of gentle, beautifully written books with powerful images even though they don't have the pyrotechnic displays of say Patrick White. (This in itself is odd because Malouf's plots aren't that gentle. Johnno is about coming of age in the 1950s, the cultural cringe and existential angst leading to suicide - even though what I remember about it is the nostalgic visions of Brisbane before I was born. An Imaginary Life is about Ovid dying in the wilderness. Fly Away Peter (I think vaguely) is about a guy coming back from the Great War dealing with demons by birdwatching(??) and The Great World is about a successful businessman who wasn't much good at life.)

Malouf's really good at describing the edges of things and people on the boundaries between one state and another. For instance An Imaginary Life describes the ultracivilised Roman poet coping with exile in the back of beyond and then befriending a feral child who was apparently raised by wolves. Even though that all sounds a bit postcolonial and academic, he was doing it before it was trendy and in a completely accessible way. And readers love him if the crowd of people at the library yesterday is any indication.

Curiously, Random House seems to think he wrote Jane Eyre in 2000. Can't wait to read this. I mean, he is good at historical fiction but he probably would have made it a bit shorter than Charlotte Bronte's version.

*I thought actually going up and saying "love your work" might be too distracting.