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2024 winners of the Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Prize

Just in time for #NovNov (Novellas in November) here are the winners of the Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Prize. (What follows is shamelessly lifted from their website)

— NONFICTION WINNER —

Comments from the Judging Panel

Why this book is different Tremor is notable for its compellingly astute interweaving of the author’s personal experience with our broader societal context where people with disabilities, often far more challenging than her own, try to adapt to the implicit expectations and judgements that surround them.

Why they liked it With empathy and flair, Voumard helps us understand that behind the convenient illusion of normality, individual lives chart atypical, often difficult, but ultimately inspiring paths.

— FICTION WINNER —

Why this book is different The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin welcomes us to a world where absurdity and reality are increasingly indistinguishable and where questions of identity dominate public discourse. The book spirits us off on a playful journey into the lives of a group of individuals whose physical attributes appear to matter more than who they may be.

Why they liked it This comedic exploration of the role of the ordinary person in the exercise of power offers a striking reminder that, whoever we are, we are captured by the systems that govern us.

You can see an interview with the winning authors at the Finlay Lloyd website.

What books have you read?

More than I thought I had, though some of them were very short. In fact, I coined the term ‘handbag’ books for the ones that were easy to carry about and read at stray moments in waiting rooms and cafés. These were:

On Life’s Lottery (2021), by Glyn Davis
On Merit (2019), by Paula Matthewson
Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books, by Georges Perec, translated by John Sturrock
The Construction of the Tower of Babel, (1990) by Juan Benet, translated by Adrian Nathan West
From the Tsar’s Railway to the Red Army (2014), by Mark O’Neill

There were also a couple of essays from the Library of America:

The Power of Touch (1908), by Helen Keller
Suggestions to Detective Story Writers (1930), by Dashiell Hammett

And some posts that were about NF chapters in books rather than the whole book:

‘Responses to Modernism’ by Julian Croft, in the New Literary History of Australia (1988), edited by Laurie Hergenhan
The Reith Lectures, (2017) in A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing (2023), by Hilary Mantel, edited by Nicholas Pearson
Ali Smith, on Katherine Mansfield, in the Introduction to The Collected Stories (Penguin, 2007)

Plus there were some posts from the journals I read:

Blindness, October 7 and the Left (2024) by Hadley Freeman
Dark Star, Elon Musk’s Dangerous Turn (2024) by Richard Cooke
Whitewash, Poland and the Jews (2024), by Jan Grabowski

Some memoirs, biographies and autobiographies, also see Literary Biographies below:

Under a Starless Sky, A Family’s Escape from Iran (2008), by Banafsheh Serov
A Resilient Life (2012), by Mariam Issa
Hope (2024) by Rosie Batty, with Sue Smethurst
I’d Rather Not (2023), by Robert Skinner (humorous essays)
Time Stood Still (1931), by Paul Cohen-Portheim
Artemisia (1998) by Alexandra Lapierre, translated by Liz Heron
Man’s Search for Meaning (1959), by Viktor E. Frankl, Part One translated by Ilse Lasch
I am Sri (2019), by Sri Setyaningsih, translated by Stuart Robson
Doctor Copernicus (1976, The Revolutions Trilogy #1), by John Banville

A bit of history, a bit of sociology and an essay or two:

George Orwell’s Elephant and Other Essays (2024), by Subhash Jaireth
Edith’s Blake’s War (2021), by Krista Vane-Tempest
Farewell, Dear People, Biographies of Australia’s Lost Generation (2012), by Ross McMullen
Townsend of the Ranges (2024) by Peter Crowley
The Fox Boy (2001) by Peter Walker
Love Across Class (2024) by Rose Butler and Eve Vincent
The Good Women of China (2002), by Xinran, translated by Esther Tyldesley
The Real History Behind Foyle’s War (2006), by Rod Green
The Postcard (2021), by Anne Berest, translated by Tina Kover
The People Immortal (1942, Stalingrad Trilogy #1), by Vasily Grossman, translated by Elizabeth Chandler and Robert Chandler

What were your favourites?

Question 7 (2023), by Richard Flanagan

and the LitBios listed below.

Have you had a favourite topic?

Of course, there were more LitBios than anything else, and I also read some interesting literary criticism:

[Joan] London (2024, Contemporary Australian Writers Series) by Tanya Dalziell
Donald Horne, A Life in the Lucky Country (2023) by Ryan Cropp
George Johnston, a Biography, by Garry Kinnane
Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths (2023) by Matthew Lamb
On Kim Scott (2024, Writers on Writers), by Tony Birch
Exiles at Home, Australian Women Writers 1925-1945 (1981), by Drusilla Modjeska
Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend, Australian Women’s War Fictions (2023) by Donna Coates, Part 1
Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend, Australian Women’s War Fictions (2023) by Donna Coates, Part 2

Is there a topic you want to read about more?

*chuckle* I think I may have made declarations about this before: I want to read more of my literary biographies.

What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November?

I’d like to find that one surprising book that I haven’t heard about anywhere else.

And I’m really hoping to finish the LitBio of Eleanor Dark by Barbara Brooks so that I can add it to this post!!

Posted in Australian Non-fiction , NON-FICTION | Tags: 2024 Nonfiction November

Hope (2024) by Rosie Batty, with Sue Smethurst

Given the high profile of Rosie Batty AO for her role in raising awareness about family violence, it’s possible to think that you know her story, especially if you’ve already read A Mother’s Story published in 2015. But you don’t. This is the book description from the back of Hope, her new memoir:

On a warm summer’s evening in February 2014, eleven-year-old Luke Batty was killed by his father at cricket practice. It was a horrific act of family violence that shocked Australia. The next morning, his mother Rosie bravely stood before the media. Her powerful and gut-wrenching words about family violence galvanised the nation and catapulted her into the spotlight. From that day on, Rosie Batty campaigned tirelessly to protect women and children, winning hearts and minds with her courage and compassion, singlehandedly changing the conversation around domestic violence in this country. Rosie’s remarkable efforts were recognised when she became the 2015 Australian of the Year and a year later she was named one of the World’s Greatest Leaders by Fortune magazine. However, behind Rosie’s steely public resolve and seemingly unbreakable spirit, she was a mum grieving the loss of her adored son. What happens when you become an accidental hero? What happens the day after the worst day of your life? What happens when you are forced to confront the emptiness and silence of a house that once buzzed with the energy of a young son? Hope shares the ups and downs of Rosie’s journey into the public spotlight. In this heartfelt, and at times heartbreaking memoir, Rosie tells how she found the light on her darkest days and how she found the hope to carry on.

In some ways, we read what we might expect to see. There is the story of what happened to Luke, and of Rosie’s astonishing decision to speak out to the media the day afterwards. Her speeches from the 2015 Australian of the Year Award and other events are included, and she is frank about her grief, her self-doubts, and the value of the support she has had. But there are also chilling accounts of vituperative social media comments from people who blame her , including the NSW MP Mark Latham who has sunk to a new low in my estimation. There are other insights about her work with Indigenous women who suffer appalling levels of violence, and reports about her presence at international forums as well.

She also writes about how important ongoing support is. Giving examples of other women who have suffered unimaginable horror and violence, she reminds us that it’s not just those anniversaries which are hard, it’s difficult ‘firsts’, like the first time she visited family in England without Luke. It’s also times like seeing his friends having experiences that Luke would have had: finishing school, having driving lessons, turning into young adults. He would have been twenty-one this year. The pain never goes away, and it never will. But sometimes because of her public persona as a woman of great strength and courage, people think she’s okay when she’s not.

And though the campaign she led for so long has been of immeasurable value to individuals and to us as a society, the time comes when grief must be confronted, and strangely, it was the pandemic that forced Rosie to slow down and give herself the time and space that grief counsellors advise. She took some solace in walks with the dogs during the lockdowns, and since then has also done some major walks, such as the Larapinta Trail and the English coast to coast walk that featured in the novel I’ve just read, You Are Here .

Of particular interest is what she tells us about Sweden.

According to the World Economic Forum in 2015, Sweden was considered the gender-equality capital of the world. The country’s rate of women in employment was high, women outperformed men in education and women were well represented in government and in the parliament. On paper, it seemed like the Nordic nation had its act together, but behind closed doors it was a very different scene. Sweden also had (and still has) one of the highest rates of domestic violence in the OECD. A survey in 2014 by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights reported that 46 per cent of Swedish women had experienced physical and/or sexual violence, 33 per cent had been stalked and 81 per cent had experienced sexual harassment. Of those who reported a violent assault, 64 per cent were closely related to the perpetrator. Incredibly, Sweden has strong laws to protect women, particularly around violence and gender-based crime, and yet, violence is endemic. (p.140)

It’s horrifying to learn that Sweden — a country long-admired for its progressive welfare and social policies — is a place where violence is endemic. It’s disconcerting to think that the campaigns for equality and respect for women — for which we hold such high hopes — may not have the impact that we believe they will.

However, one difference — according to a very violent offender who was getting help for his behaviour — is that they don’t talk about family violence in Sweden. And maybe it is thanks to the courage of Rosie Batty who started the conversation and has led it for the decade since her beloved son Luke was killed, that there has been progress here in Australia. According to Our Watch, although violence is still a problem of epidemic proportions in Australia, it is not inevitable, it is preventable.

And we are making progress. Prevalence of violence against women is declining and attitudes towards the issue are improving. Violence against women has decreased over the past 10 years. There has been a significant decrease in the number of women murdered each year over the past three decades. Most Australians know gender inequality and violence against women are significant issues. Australians’ understanding of, and attitudes towards, violence against women and gender inequality are improving. Young men report lower social pressure to conform to rigid ideals of masculinity, however one-quarter continue to strongly endorse rigid ideals of masculinity.

This memoir is rightly called Hope.

Author: Rosie Batty, with Susan Smethurst Title: Hope Publisher: Harper Collins, 2024 Cover design by Hazel Lam ISBN: 9781460760291, pbk., 288 pages Source: Personal library, purchased on Love Your Bookshop day from Ulysses Bookstore Hampton, $35.99

12 Comments

Posted in Aust 2024 , BATTY Rosie , BOOK REVIEWS , Domestic a.k.a. Family violence , English authors , Harper Collins Australia , Life Stories , Memoir , Read in 2024 , SMETHURST Sue , Victorian authors | Tags: BOOK REVIEWS , Hazel Lam cover design , Hope , Rosie Batty , Sue Smethurst

Blog Milestones: ANZ LitLovers reaches two million hits!

Today ANZ LitLovers reached its two millionth hit since I started it in July 2008.

I’ve been watching the hit counter on and off all day because I missed the moment when I reached one million. (I know, it’s daft, really. But when so many depressing things are happening in the world it’s nice to let myself be briefly distracted by a milestone like this.)

That’s 4,723 posts, 3017 reviews and 56,665 comments!

Ok, that’s enough bragging!

A big thank you to fellow bloggers who inspire and encourage me, and grateful thanks to the readers who take the time to share their thoughts in comments. You all know who you are!

Happy reading everyone!

32 Comments

Posted in Blog milestones

Held (2023), by Anne Michaels

Alas, I can’t honestly say that I enjoyed reading it. Yes, yes, it’s all very poetic, and some of the individual fragments ( described as kaleidoscopic by the Booker judges ) are compelling in their intensity, but at the end of the day, it’s yet another book about the long term effects of trauma. It didn’t offer anything new to enlighten me about anything. And #DuckingForCover, I began to feel as this author had trawled through history looking for traumatic events to link her four generations together and we, the hapless readers, had to assemble the pieces to know which event we were reading about and how the characters related to each other. There is a helpful ToC, which shows us that we travel mostly chronologically from France 1912 and then to England from 1920 to 1984, and then we’re in France in 1910, Estonia in 1980, Paris in 1908, Dorset in 1912, and then whoosh! Suffolk in 2010 and Finland in 2025. LOL I could have done with a family tree too.

But that would have missed the point, of course, because the structure is meant to convey scattered images that persist in memory.

Author: Anne Michaels Title: Held Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2024, first published 2023 Cover design by Carmen R Balit ISBN: 9781526659125, pbk., 220 pages Source: personal library, purchased from Benn’s Books, $22.99

22 Comments

Posted in 21st century , Battlefields (settings) , Bloomsbury , Canadian authors , FICTION — OTHER , Michaels Anne , Read in 2024 , Transnational (settings) , War, armed conflict & its aftermath | Tags: Anne Michaels , BOOK REVIEWS , Held

You Are Here (2024), by David Nicholls

This is the blurb:

Sometimes you need to get lost to find your way . . . Michael is coming undone. Adrift after his wife’s departure, he has begun taking himself on long, solitary walks across the English countryside. Becoming ever more reclusive, he’ll do anything to avoid his empty house. Marnie, on the other hand, is stuck. Hiding alone in her London flat, she avoids old friends and any reminders of her rotten, selfish ex-husband. Curled up with a good book, she’s battling the long afternoons of a life that feels like it’s passing her by. When a persistent mutual friend and some very unpredictable weather conspire to toss Michael and Marnie together on the most epic of ten-day hikes, neither of them can think of anything worse. Until, of course, they discover exactly what they’ve been looking for. Michael and Marnie are on the precipice of a bright future . . . if they can survive the journey.

It is the mark of a cunningly clever author that (a) You Are Here does not have the predictable ending and (b) it does. But I am not, of course, going to tell you how it works out.

Narrated from both protagonists’ point-of-view, this is how the novel, and Marnie’s story, begins:

In all her youthful visions of the future, of the job she might have, the city and home she might live in, the friends and family around her, Marnie had never thought that she’d be lonely. In her adolescence, she’d pictured the future as a series of imaginary photographs, densely populated, her friends’ arms around each other, eyes red from the flash of the camera in the taverna or lit by the flames of a driftwood fire on the beach and there, right in the centre, her own smiling face. The later photos were harder to pin down, the faces less defined, but perhaps there’d be a partner, even children among the friends she would surely know and love all her life. But she hadn’t taken a photograph of another person for six years. The last time she’d had her picture taken was at Passport Control, where she’d been instructed not to smile. Where had everyone gone? (p.3)

Even more dismal is the introduction to Michael. He’s a geography teacher on a school hiking trip and he’s *yawn* pontificating about the ‘mighty forces beneath your feet’ while deftly dealing with the adolescent male who makes every teacher’s life a challenge:

This valley wasn’t always here: it was created, gouged out by a great glacier, because ice is a moving thing, just a couple of feet a day but scouring and chewing away with these great teeth made of stone, snapping off boulders, gnawing into rock in a process we call … a process we call? ‘Anyone? That’s right, glacial erosion, consisting of …? Wake up, you lot, you know this. Yes, abrasion and plucking! Why’s that funny, Noah? Any reason why the word ‘plucking’ is funny? Tell the class. No, I thought not.’ (p.7)

So it comes as a very pleasing surprise that the word ‘unputdownable’ was invented for this book…

Michael and Marnie have a bossy friend who cajoles them both into going on this hike. Her matchmaking is not subtle: to coax Michael out of his misery she has also invited ‘outdoorsy’ Tessa (who doesn’t turn up) and for Marnie, there is stylish Conrad (who worries about getting his posh shoes wet). Her adolescent son, Anthony, comes along too, a reminder that Michael and Marnie have met before, long ago when they were godparents at his christening. The plan is that Michael is going to walk west to east across Britain, from the Irish Sea to the North Sea, while the others will drop out after three days and take the train back to civilisation. There will be no tents, because they will stay at pubs along the way…

Michael can’t wait till they all leave and he will have the solitude he craves, and Marnie — who has not readjusted after the long months alone in lockdown — is stressed merely by being in the company of other people. (She’s a copy-editor who works from home.) He travels light, with just one shirt that he launders overnight. She has brought three dresses and ambitious unrealistic plans to bring the silvery tinkle of cocktail-bar laughter to the humble country inn…

And they are both stubborn.

David Nicholls is a screenwriter as well as an author so I bet this gets made into a film… but I don’t envy the actors who will need to be (literally) dripping wet most of the time!

Author: David Nicholls Title: You Are Here Publisher: Sceptre (Hodder & Stoughton, Hachette) 2024 Maps by Barking Dog Art ISBN: 9781444715453, pbk., 349 pages Source: Kingston Library

21 Comments

Posted in 21st century , BOOK REVIEWS , British authors , England (settings) , English authors , FICTION — OTHER , Nicholls David , Read in 2024 , Social novels | Tags: BOOK REVIEWS , David Nicholls , You Are Here

Marking Time (1991, The Cazalet Chronicles #2), by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Once again, I romped through the novel utterly absorbed. But as we would expect of a novel that follows the uneasy ‘peace in our time’ and begins in September 1939, it has a darker tone. It’s also narrated differently. The girls — Louise, Clary and Polly — have their own chapters. They are narrated in third person each from their point-of-view, covering 1940 and onward as the Autumn-Winter of 1940 rolls over in 1941. The other chapters are third person covering the perspective of the family, some of the staff as their numbers dwindle, and a couple of new characters.

This narrative technique enables the inclusion of complaints in the novel. In Clary’s journal and the interior monologues of Polly and Louise, these girls can complain in private about the way the war impacts on them, in a way that would have been unacceptable if expressed within the family. Not just because it would have been ‘poor form’ and a breach of ‘keep calm and carry on’ but because even as teenagers, these girls understand that their family is better off in material ways than many others, that Londoners under the Blitz were losing their homes, their possessions and their lives, and that people everywhere were suffering bereavement with the loss of loved ones in the services.

Still, they all have their anxieties. The fathers of these three girls all join the war effort one way or another, and any time spent away from home is cause for anxiety. (An anxiety not deserved by the womanising Edward, who is only too pleased to be able to continue his affair and enjoy the nightlife in London.) And when disaster strikes, these different narrative voices show how hard it was for people still immature to endure the loss. The matriarch is stoic and there are only a couple of glimpses of her private pain, and the boys, trained from birth and their horrible boarding schools to suppress emotion, act out in misbehaviour that today would be recognised for what it was. The others weep in private.

One of the themes that comes through time and again in the laments of the teenage girls, is that life goes on regardless during a war. There is still tension over that difficult period when adults sometimes expect the obedience of children but at other times expect them to understand things and behave like adults. In this upper middle-class family, these issues occasionally seem archaic, as in the squabble over mealtimes. Adults dine late in the dining room, while children eat elsewhere and the growing girls find the company of the younger ones tiresome.

#Musing Babies and children have always had and still do have their own requirements, anarchic or otherwise, but The Offspring graduated from that as I did, with a substantial snack mid-afternoon and then dinner at seven at the table, either joining in or respecting (ignoring) the conversation and eating what was put in front of him or going without. I don’t think that’s how families do it these days…

Whatever about that, the arrangements falter when staff shortages begin to impact on the family. Previous sojourns at this house were during the summer holidays but as winter comes, there are other privations. In the absence of coal to ‘keep the home fires burning’, the children are deputised to chop logs but they are all often cold. Really cold, especially Miss Milliment in her attic bedroom, for which (having had to give up her flat in London) she is pathetically grateful though this home is contingent on there being young children for her to teach, and she knows it. Despite belated assurances (because nobody thinks about her very much), she fears that this ‘home’ relies on grace and favour. (Which it does).

Rationing is introduced, and Mrs Cripps in the kitchen struggles on in this enlarged household with less help. Of all the characters, she seems to be the only one who has switched off and ignored everything that does not directly concern her. In her conversations with her would-be beau, he mutters dark observations about the war and she has no idea what he’s talking about, she merely responds with ambiguous agreement. I don’t think this is the author being dismissive of working-class characters, I think it’s a depiction of how some people coped by deliberately avoiding news of the war.

In the course of this novel we learn more about Rachel and Sid’s repressed relationship, and we see how Hugh and Sybil’s long-standing habit of shielding each other from their real concerns, plays out and impacts on their hapless children when real trouble strikes. Louise, who has reason to avoid her father, strikes out on her own in pursuit of her dream to be an actress and endures privation well beyond those of her family back in the apparent safety of Sussex. But like the others, though she has grasped the implications of premarital pregnancy, she has no knowledge of how it actually happens, which makes her vulnerable, and it’s a bit surprising that her more worldly BFF Stella Rose doesn’t enlighten her. Perhaps it really was a more naïve era, there’s an extra-marital pregnancy or two as well, despite there being some methods of contraception (though Louise doesn’t understand what she’s being told by one of the other actresses.)

That naïveté extends to the younger cousins too. Polly and Clary are 16 at the end of the novel, and Lydia and Neville are 10 and 11 respectively. Some of their conversations seem too babyish for children of that age, but perhaps that’s because children are so much more ‘knowing’ these days.

Book Three, ‘Confusion’ has just come in on reserve at the library, and it will take all my self-control to defer reading it till I’ve finished my current novel!

Author: Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923-2014) Title: Marking Time (The Cazalet Chronicles #2) Publisher: Pan Books, (2021, first published by Macmillan 1991) Cover design by Lucy Scholes, cover illustration by Luke Edward Hall ISBN: 9781529049435, pbk., 592 pages Source: Bayside Library

15 Comments

Posted in 20th century , BOOK REVIEWS , British authors , Chunksters (450 pages+) , England (settings) , English authors , FICTION — OTHER , GayLit / LGBTQIA , Historical Fiction , Howard Elizabeth Jane , Read in 2024 , Series , Societies in transition | Tags: BOOK REVIEWS , Elizabeth Jane Howard , Marking Time , The Cazalet Chronicles

2024 Readings Prize Winners

The 2024 Readings Prize winners have been announced.

New Australian Fiction Prize Winner

Thanks for Having Me by Emma Darragh

Children’s Prize Winner

Wurrtoo by Tylissa Elisara

Young Adult Prize Winner

We Didn’t Think It Through by Gary Lonesborough

Gab Williams Prize Winner

A Way Home by Emily Brewin

Readings has special Prize shortlist packs available at their website.

Children’s

Posted in Readings Prize | Tags: 2024 Readings Prize

2024 NT Chief Minister’s Book Awards winners

The biennial Northern Territory’s Book Awards are a smaller affair than the Australian Premiers’ awards which gain much more attention, not least because they vie from time to time to offer the biggest prize pool. But the NT — with a population of only about 250,000, about half of whom live in the capital Darwin — compensates for having a small literary community with distinctive rules: as you can see from this press release, it’s a literary prize for stayers: only published authors residing in the NT for over a decade are eligible.

The winners of the Chief Minister’s Book Awards were announced on 17 October at a ceremony in Alice Springs / Mparntwe, at Red Kangaroo Books. Started by the NT Writers Centre in 2009, the Chief Minister’s Book Awards have celebrated excellence amongst published authors residing in the NT for over a decade. The awards are held biennially and have developed into the premier prize for NT authors, shining a light on the talent, flair and originality of Territory stories. Awarded to Northern Territory-based authors with books published in 2022 and 2023, winners received $10,000 in prize money and shortlisted authors each $1,000. The Chief Minister’s Book Awards consists of three categories: Fiction, Non-fiction and Children’s, with three authors shortlisted for each prize this year out of a total of 24 entries. The NT Writers’ Centre administers the Awards with generous support from the Northern Territory Government and the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

So, although I’m not sure when they brought in this rule, changes of the awards’ name and other changes to various categories, the NT Awards are for genuine Territorians.

The 2024 winners are:

Hush by Ciella Williams (Fiction). This is a play, so it’s not a book one can buy. See here.
Living in Tin by Linda Wells (NF), available as an eBook, now on my TBR
Tangki Tjuta Donkeys by Tjanpi Desert Weavers (CYA), based on the animated film (see the trailer here)

Because I like to support NT writers when I hear about them, I’ve bought To Kill a Crested Bellbird by David Jagger, shortlisted for the Fiction prize, and since I was there anyway at Red Kangaroo Books ….

… the only bricks-and-mortar independent bookshop still standing within 1500kms, Red Kangaroo Books has survived and thrived in the remote town of Alice Springs in central Australia and has been trading for over a decade.

… I also bought the 2020 Fiction winner Walking with Camels by Leni Shilton, which is the fictionalised story of Bertha Strehlow, wife of Carl Strehlow, whose story I read in Journey to Horseshoe Bend (1969, reissued 2015), by his son T.G.H. Strehlow. BTW I’m going to have to add To Kill a Crested Bellbird to the Goodreads database, it’s not there at the moment.

Congratulations to all the authors, publishers and editors, to everyone involved with this award — and a special shout out to the NT Writers Centre who provided the information for this post in a user-friendly format so that I could publish the news quickly!

Update, a little later the same day: When I was adding David Jagger’s book to the GR database, I had to hunt around for things like the ISBN and I discovered that you can read the book on open access at Trove. So if you’re not in a position to buy the book and you don’t mind reading books on screen, this is the link.

Previous winners of the NT awards

An Intruder’s Guide to Arnhem Land by Andrew McMillan (Book of the Year)

Every Secret Thing by Marie Munkara (Book of the Year), see my review
The Red Highway by Nicholas Rothwell (Best Nonfiction)
The Devil You Know by Leonie Norrington (Best YA/Children’s)
The Hard Light of Day by Rod Moss. (Book of Year)
Iwenhe Tyerrtye – what it means to be an Aboriginal person, Margaret Kemarre Turner OAM (Best Nonfiction)
Twinkle by Nick Bland (Best YA/Children’s)
Northern Voyagers by Alan Powell (Book of the Year & Best Nonfiction)
Savannah Dreams by Lolia Stewart and Elaine Russell (Best YA/Children’s)
One Thousand Cuts by Rod Moss (Book of the Year)
The Long Weekend in Alice Springs by Craig San Roque and Joshua Santospirito (Best Nonfiction)
Barry Jonsberg: My Life as an Alphabet (Best YA/Children’s) ( I read this one to my students and they loved it.)
Nona and Me by Clare Atkins, &, Highway of Lost Hearts by Mary Anne Butler (Joint winners, Book of the Year)
Tambora Travels to Sumbawa and the Mountain That Changed the World by Derek Pugh (Best Nonfiction)
My Two Blankets by Irena Kobald (Best YA/Children’s)

Broken by Mary Anne Butler (Book of Year)
Living in Hope by Frank Byrne with Franny Coughlan & Gerard Waterford (Best Nonfiction), see my review
Too Many Cheeky Dogs by Johanna Bell & Dion Beasley (Best YA/Children’s)
Walking With Camels – The Story of Bertha Strehlow by Leni Shilton (Best Fiction), on order from Red Kangaroo Books
Stranger Country by Monica Tan (Best Nonfiction)
A Song Only I Can Hear by Barry Jonsberg (Best YA/Children’s)

You can also check out FourTripleZed’s review of The Last Free Man and Other Stories by Lewis Wolston which was shortlisted.

Return to Dust by Dani Powell (Best Fiction)
Peace Crimes by Kieran Finnane (Best Nonfiction)
Tjanimaku Tjukurpa: How one young man came good by NPY Women’s Council Uti Kulintjaku Watiku (men’s) group (Best YA/Children’s)
Mum’s Elephant by Maureen Jipiyiliya Nampijinpa O’Keefe. Illustrated by Christina Booth (Special Mention)

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Posted in NT Literary Awards | Tags: 2024 NT Chief Minister's Book Awards

‘Bridling’ (2023), by Nadia Davids, winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing

As a regular reader of the JRB (Johannesburg Review of Books), I always keep an eye out for interesting books and authors from the African continent, especially those who are prize-winners.

This year, South African writer Nadia Davids won the 2024 Caine Prize for African Writing, an annual prize for a short story by an African writer published in English. Davids won for her short story ‘Bridling’, (published in The Georgia Review in 2023). It’s one of the most unsettling short stories I’ve ever read.

‘Bridling’ is described by the judges as

… an impressive achievement, a triumph of language, storytelling and risk-taking while maintaining a tightly controlled narrative about women who rebel.

The narrator auditions for a forthcoming production which reproduces artworks that feature ‘the male gaze’. She is charmed by the director, who is smooth and charismatic and utterly convincing when he talks about the welfare of his actors although the production places demands on the audience and performer.

The main idea is this: we, a company of women performers, will stage various artworks by men (and men only) depicting women. We’ll create facsimile tableaus of the works, remaining absolutely still while audiences walk around the staging area viewing us as though we are an exhibition. “We are literally Live Art,” an actor we all call Medusa said earlier during her costume fitting. The director responded that the work is, in fact, “intersectional,” which Medusa translated when he was out of earshot as “A bit of theatre. A bit of museum. A bit of discomfit for everyone involved.” (‘Bridling’ in The Georgia Review 2023, p.474, republished at SquareSpace.com )

The narrator has a demanding role:

I’m playing a seventeenth-century bad woman, or, more accurately, I’m re-enacting a drawing of a seventeenth-century woman who’s been punished for “gossiping, or nagging or snapping,” or just talking, I guess. I’m in full costume—stays, scratchy dress, bare feet, dirty fingernails, doleful vibe, topped off with this mask—a “scold’s-bridle,” it’s called. It’s as weird and unsettling as it sounds; all leather and steel with a wooden bit—the kind for a horse— placed in my mouth to stop my tongue and make me drool. We haven’t decided yet how my character ended up like this (it’s a process , we agree, an unearthing ); a sentence from a magistrate maybe, handed down after a complaint from her husband, but just as likely from a butcher or baker or candlestick-maker or a random farm boy with a grudge, or what ever a seventeenth-century incel was back then. ( ibid. )

The article at the JRB tells us that

Davids is a writer, theater-maker and scholar. Her plays (At Her Feet, What Remains, Hold Still) have been staged throughout Southern Africa and in Europe. Her debut novel, An Imperfect Blessing, was shortlisted for the UJ Prize for South African Writing and the Etisalat Prize for Literature . Davids’ short fiction and essays have appeared in The American Scholar, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Astra Magazine, The Georgia Review, the Johannesburg Review of Books and Zyzzyva Magazine . She has taught at Queen Mary University of London and the University of Cape Town and is the President Emeritus of PEN South Africa. Davids and the shortlisted writers, Tryphena Yeboah, Samuel Kolawole, Uche Okonkwo and Pemi Aguda, will have their stories featured in the 2024 Caine Prize anthology, Midnight In the Morgue and Other Stories , to be published by Cassava Republic Press*. The collection will also include stories from this year’s Caine Prize workshop, which was held in Salima, Malawi. ( Johannesburg Review of Books, 17 September 2024 .)

You can read Nadia Davids’ story ‘Bridling’ here.

*The Cassava Press website says that New South Publishing are the agents for distribution in Australia. They don’t appear to do eBooks.

Posted in 21st century , Davids Nadia , FICTION — OTHER , PRIZES AND AWARDS , Read in 2024 , Short stories , South African authors , Unspecified setting | Tags: 2024 Caine Prize , Nadia Davids

Struggle of Memory (1991) by Joan Dugdale

Well, it was to be expected… 10 terrific books in a row, at some stage there has to be a dud.

Readers may remember that I became interested in women’s war fictions when I read Donna Coates Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend. And amongst my thoughts about Part 1, which is about the flaws in women’s WW1 war fiction, I declared that

With the exception of Brenda Walker’s The Wings of Night (2005), I haven’t read any of the books that support these claims, (and don’t intend to).

I must have had a rush of blood to the head when I succumbed to buying Struggle of Memory…

It’s one of those novels derived from personal family history, and an unpublished thesis, and Dugdale had grievances about WW1 wartime internment on her agenda. It was inspired by the true story of Carl Zoeller, a Brisbane merchant unearthed by her husband Richard Zoeller’s research in the Australian Archives, and amplified by Anne Macneill’s unpublished thesis The Enemy in Our Midst . (Occasionally the impulse to use all the research takes over: by the time I waded through a jarring nearly two-page bishop’s sermon tirade, I’d forgotten that Dugdale acknowledged in the Introduction that it was based on a sermon published in The Argus of 1915.)

Part One is titled ‘Of Colony and Empire’, and it’s a confusing mishmash of an ageing woman’s resentful memories about her loveless childhood. Miriam’s mother was ‘worn out’ by the time Miriam was born, (but not too worn out to be delighted by her first grandchild Isobel) and Miriam’s future is delegated to the bizarre governess Miss Spender who fails to teach her either the accomplishments expected of a young woman or anything in the way of an education. There is no explanation for why this idle and vacuous woman isn’t sacked, which is odd, because Miriam’s ruthless father Joshua Wemyss has no time for fools. Prosperous and snobbish, rabidly anti-Catholic despite the expedience of marrying one, and politically ambitious, he owns a sawmill near Noosa and is indifferent to the injuries it causes, including to Flash Sam, the young man that Miriam fancies in a half-hearted way. He is also indifferent to the plight of the dispossessed Indigenous people, referring to them in language I will not repeat here.

Miriam’s sisters marry but she is Not Interested until she meets Otto Gluck. And just as Joshua is characterised as a one-dimensional patriarch, Otto is characterised as An Ideal Husband. Generous, affectionate, at ease in all sorts of society, prosperous, cultured and clever, and as we discover in Part Two ‘Australians All’ he is also loyal. When Miriam (who is a snob) demurs about socialising with the staff of his medical supplies business, he gently chides her about the importance of reciprocal loyalty. Dugdale labours this point, that Gluck loves Australia, its people and its opportunities, and has infinite faith in its fairness, its justice and his acceptance as an Australian.

And because of the blurb on the back cover, the reader knows about the coming betrayal of those beliefs.

In Australia Otto Gluck was far from the battlefields of the Great War, yet his life was destroyed by that cataclysmic event. This moving historical novel is based on the true story of a German-born merchant who was interned and eventually deported from Australia. In 1939, Otto’s reclusive widow Miriam is impelled to remember the events of her life. Recalling her childhood years on a timbermill near Noosa, she comes to realise that the colonial values which brought prosperity to her family — and to Australia as a nation — are the same as those which branded Otto ‘an enemy alien’.

Part of the problem of this book is the characterisation of Miriam. Tangled up in the feminist agenda about women not having a separate identity, legally or socially, Miriam is one the most dreary characters I’ve come across in fiction. With frequent intrusive reminders that the narrative consists of Miriam’s memories of how her life was ruined by the treatment of her husband, the reader sees only her ignorance, her idleness, her brooding melancholy, her insularity, her inflexibility and her inertia. Otto is a man of great enthusiasms, but Miriam is not interested in his ideas and is no support to him, not even at social events where she is standoffish and contributes nothing to conversations.

It is hard to understand why he loves her.

Going out of her way to make Miriam an unpleasant character, Dugdale depicts her as anti-Semitic too. After a visit from a Dr Birnbaum and his wife, who admits that in Brisbane they miss Melbourne’s concerts and theatre and significant library, ever -parochial Miriam is surprised to see that…

Otto seemed awed rather than irritated by August Birnbaum. ‘He’s a man of tremendous intellect, Miriam, and I admire that. And he is deeply committed to the welfare of the Germans here. His wife is from a prominent Melbourne family, so it’s understandable that she finds Brisbane a bit of a backwater.’ Miriam privately hoped she would not have to entertain them again. ‘He’s Jewish, of course,’ she told Hetty later. ‘I can’t think what Otto sees in him.’ (p.174)

The German in this novel isn’t anti-Semitic; the Australian is.

Although she has offloaded responsibility for the household to her unmarried niece Isobel, and the education of her children to her rather raffish neighbour across the road, Miriam never travels with Otto within Australia nor takes the opportunity to visit Europe or Asia when he travels there to expands his markets. She is spectacularly dull, presumably to hammer home the point that the German community is lively, cultured, open-minded and clever — and Australians were not.

Prior to the war Otto is an active member of the German Club and seeks to set up a language school so that Australian-born children can learn the language of German culture, but in a rare expression of opinion — even before the war — she is hostile to the idea of the language school. Miriam never tries to learn a word of German, not even to greet people at the club. (Which she might have had cause to regret when she gets deported because her citizenship is rescinded too, but even in Germany she refuses to learn or adapt in any way. And goes home to Australia. Without Otto.)

She’s not even pleased, much less grateful when in the early years of their marriage, he puts ownership of the house in her name. (This title deed in her name is, of course, essential to the coming plot point about the confiscation of German property even though he is a naturalised Australian.) Here she is, with a thoroughly modern proto-feminist husband treating her like an equal:

Her mind acknowledged a gift of great value and the honour of his trust and esteem. In no marriage she knew was the wife the owner of the family home. But her heart quailed at the responsibility his gift implied. (p.134-5)

(Miriam’s idea of responsibility is tidying the linen cupboard which she won’t let anybody else do because she enjoys the sensation of handling the linen.)

I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point that Struggle of Memory is heavy-handed, over-long, burdened by its own research and mangled by its simplistic characterisation. Instead, I’ll acknowledge the reasons why Donna Coates in Chapter 5: ‘Sleeping with the Enemy, Patriot Games in Fictions’ included S truggle of Memory in her survey of women’s war fictions. It’s because it’s amongst the few novels of the WW1 home front, and because unlike novels glorifying the Anzac spirit, Dugdale’s soldiers have negative i.e. realistic experiences of war. But of primary interest is that Dugdale’s novel shows that wives of internees are confined as much as the men in the camps: Miriam isolates herself and her children at home to avoid the hostility of people who had been her friends. The ins and outs of the novel show that women were judged by and punished for what their husbands did (and Otto does do some intemperate things, similar to those documented in Captured Lives, Australia’s Wartime Internment Camps (2018) by Peter Monteath. (See here , paragraph 9). Whatever the rights and wrongs of interning German men, the women had their citizenship and their property taken away because they were not deemed to have a separate identity.

My mother was interned in Belgium by the Germans during WW2. Lucky to be rescued just in time by an enterprising relation, she nearly died of diphtheria there when the camp ran out of food, water and medicines as the battlefront twice passed back and forth between the Allies and the Germans . They were quite right to lock her up, because I have no doubt that — by her own account she was a reckless young woman — even in her teens, she would got herself involved in resistance at some level.

Author: Joan Dugdale Title: Struggle of Memory Publisher: UQP (University of Queensland Press), 1991 Cover design by Christopher McVinish, illustration by Cynthia Breusch ISBN: 9780702225918, pbk., 344 pages Source: Personal library, purchased from Brotherhood Books

Posted in Aus 1991 , Australia QLD (settings) , AUSTRALIAN AUTHORS , Australian settings - Outback, bush & pastoral incl small country towns , Australian settings - Urban milieu incl large regional cities , Australians at War , C20th women writers , DUGDALE Joan , FICTION — AUSTRALIAN , Historical Fiction , Read in 2024 , Scottish authors , UQP (University of Queensland Press) , Victorian authors , War, armed conflict & its aftermath | Tags: BOOK REVIEWS , Christopher McVinish cover design , Joan Dugdale , Struggle of Memory

Dusk (2024) by Robbie Arnott

From Zoo Chat , I learned that rumours of wild big cats abound, and there’s a story about an American serviceman who brought a puma as a mascot to the WW2 US base in the Grampians and released it into the wild when they left. I read more about the numerous panther and puma mascots released in Australia at that well-known reliable source of information, the UK Daily Mail. Quite apart from the practicalities of keeping a puma fed, watered, housed and under control (presumably caged) during the long sea voyage of a troopship to Australia and then at a base, I don’t find it plausible that there was a US base in the Grampians. Neither would anyone else if they’d been there. Strategically, militarily, it makes no sense at all. It’s not even the right kind of terrain to train soldiers for jungle warfare.

Robbie Arnott knows all this of course. And anyway, his story is set in a different era. So why is there a puma wreaking havoc in the Tasmanian bush in his novel? I’ll go out on a limb here: when the twins hunting the puma come in contact with the remnants of the Palawa people eking out a living as peat farmers, I thought that maybe the ‘puma’ killing the settlers endlessly extending the frontier, was an Aboriginal warrior and the savagery indicated by the remains was wrought by a Tasmanian Devil. Maybe the ‘puma’ was one of those resistance fighters I’d read about in Lyndall Ryan’s Tasmanian Aborigines, a History since 1803: Musquito, Mannalargenna, Kickerterpoller (Black Tom) and William Lyttleton Quamby; Montpeliater, Tongerlongter and Petalega; Umarrah and Wareternatterlerhener.

Well, #WrongTheory, it wasn’t. As in Limberlost, Arnott acknowledges Tasmania’s First Nations history but does not have the temerity to offer solutions. ‘Dusk’ is indeed a puma. The reader doesn’t see that the thoughtless human activity of its release had an impact through the puma’s predation on Tasmania’s native animals. The novel is more interested in showing that it injures people as well.

But surely that puma is a metaphor. A metaphor for those who didn’t belong in those lands. For the savagery wrought upon the First Nations of Tasmania and its environment. For the difficulty of restraining lawlessness in wild places.

As always, Arnott’s lyrical descriptions of the landscape are exquisite. The hunt for the puma takes the reader from crude frontier towns to the wild landscapes of the Tasmanian highlands, haunted by loss but remaining obdurate, impenetrable, unpredictable and as beautiful and dangerous as the puma itself.

Arnott revisits some of his other concerns in Limberlost. In Dusk the strengths and limitations of masculinity in fathers and sons play out in Floyd’s body, broken in an heroic effort to save his sister Iris from drowning. Their parents’ limitations seem self-inflicted: both were transported to Tasmania and took to a life of crime, violence and alcoholism after escaping. The legacy they pass to their children is the long-lasting stain of a convict past, skill in repeating similar crimes and the impossibility of redemption in a judgemental society determined to purify itself of its violent past. While Floyd has qualities that transcend the limitations of his body, Iris is the strength of this novel. The narration is (mostly) from her point-of-view, and she, despite her flaws, is the one who has common sense, (limited) optimism, integrity, (mostly) good judgement, and an impulse towards connection with others, forgiveness, generosity and a yearning for redemption.

The twins’ hunt for the puma and the possibility of a bounty takes twists and turns that maintain the tension throughout. Their backstory is gradually revealed, and there are some alarming brushes with death signalled in my edition by solid black pages which are followed by a break in the narration so that the reader doesn’t know who survives. And there is real, frightening, sociopathic evil of a kind usually seen only in crime fiction about serial killers. Dusk would make a heart-stopping movie, that’s for sure.

BTW, it was interesting to see that while Arnott’s previous novels were published by Indie publisher Text, this one is published by Pan Macmillan.

Author: Robbie Arnott Title: Dusk Publisher: Picador (Pan Macmillan), 2024 Cover design: Design by Committee ISBN: 9781761560941, pbk., 252 pages Source: Personal library, $34.99 bought from Ulysses Bookstore on #LoveYourBookshopDay

Posted in ARNOTT Robbie , Aust 2024 , Australia TAS (settings) , AUSTRALIAN AUTHORS , Australian settings - Outback, bush & pastoral incl small country towns , BOOK REVIEWS , FICTION — AUSTRALIAN , Picador , Read in 2024 , Tasmanian authors | Tags: BOOK REVIEWS , Design by Committee cover design , Dusk , Robbie Arnott

Cherrywood (2024) by Jock Serong

It’s on page 77 of Jock Serong’s new novel Cherrywood.

The novel is in two time frames, beginning near the turn of the 20th century, when Thomas Wrenfether becomes the richest child in all of Scotland. He’s only a boy when both his parents die in a car crash, so he lives with his Edinburgh cousins until he comes of age, inherits the wealth, marries the lovely Lucy, and in 1912 they have a sweet child called Annabelle. (Not without some difficulty but that’s the way it was in those days.)

However. Thomas lacks his father’s ruthlessness in business and occasionally gets outflanked by less decent men. Lucy suggests striking out in some other direction and thus sets in train his impressive ambition to use imported cherrywood to build a paddle-steamer to ferry passengers and cargo across Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay. (Those of us who know the bay and its moods have a bad feeling about this.) (And we have a bad feeling about his supplier Ximenon, from Azerbaijan.) (Plus we have a bad feeling that maybe Thomas, despite his best intentions, might inherited The Gene for Impetuous Behaviour from his father. Whose death was the result of an impetuous decision.)

In chapter Five, time shifts and it’s the winter of 1993. Martha is on her way home from work in a taxi. She’s a lawyer with ambitions to work in the Human Rights field but is instead stuck doing corporate stuff for Caspian Lawyers, the powerful commercial firm that occupied ten floors of a glass tower in the central business district. She’s worked hard to get there, but having missed out on her preference…

…she began to see herself as a battery chicken, a productive unit entrapped in a box, selling her life in six-minute pieces to her employers, who on-sold her life to clients, who passed the cost of buying Martha’s life, by then wholesaled and retailed to their clients in the form of some miniscule mark-up. (p.30)

Martha has skipped the obligatory Friday afternoon drinks because she’s got a dinner party with three other junior litigators. She is dreading it. She knows she should get out more, but not with other people who shared a sixty-hour working week. Nevertheless she slips into a pub called the Cherrywood to buy the obligatory bottle of wine… and her life changes.

Well, she doesn’t know that yet, and neither do we, but Jock Serong knows how to lay a subtly enticing trail!

There are many aspects of this novel to love but to remain #SpoilerFree I’ll just mention just two…

Serong has a deft touch when constructing communities. Wrenfether’s workers who build the paddle-steamer, are not just a bunch of workers, they are a community of craftsmen. Eccentrics, one or two of them, and (all but one) highly skilled and memorable as individual characters too. The lawyers at Caspian, however, are not a community, they are savage competitors exploiting their hapless clients and opponents, to gain the approval of the partner who gives Martha the most grief. (If the novel has a flaw, it’s that he, Brandon Manne — a vastly self-assured rooster who strutted the corridors in tight suits and pencil ties — doesn’t get the kind of comeuppance most readers would like to see.) And then there are the people in the pub, (mostly) elusive and quixotic, but bonded by a common cause. It is trust that characterises these communities, and conversely, no one at Caspian Lawyers has it.

Secondly, I was enchanted by the Cherrywood’s voyage down the Yarra. Years ago The Ex, the Offspring and I took the boat as far as we could go up the Yarra, and then we unloaded the bikes and went as far as we could on wheels, carrying them some of the way when the terrain was too rough to ride. It was a magical day, and we had it all to ourselves, which wouldn’t be possible now, I’m sure. But I know what it’s like to be in a boat drifting and ducking under Melbourne’s Yarra bridges large and small, new and old, awesomely high and perilously low. It was a delicious adventure, brought to life for me again in the pages of this marvellous book.

Cherrywood is a compulsive blend of whimsy, intrigue and realism. And at the risk of sounding corny, it is love that sustains the narrative and brings it all together. Strange things happen to tease the reader but the narrative never loses its way. It’s a departure from his historical novel Furneaux Islands trilogy, and different again from his 2017 political thriller On the Java Ridge. (I’ve got two of Serong’s earlier novels too, Quota (2014) and The Rules of Backyard Cricket (2016), both of them OpShopFinds).

Readers of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities will relish the same playfulness, but there’s also an enjoyable sense of unease about the certainty of place which reminded me of Hovering by Rhett Butler.

You can find out more about Jock Serong at his website.

Author: Jock Serong Title: Cherrywood Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2024 Cover design: Darren Holt ISBN: 9781460765357, pbk., 389 pages Source: Kingston Library

Posted in Aust 2024 , Australia VIC (settings) , AUSTRALIAN AUTHORS , BOOK REVIEWS , FICTION — AUSTRALIAN , Fourth Estate , Melbourne (settings) , Read in 2024 , SERONG Jock , Victorian authors | Tags: BOOK REVIEWS , Cherrywood , Darren Holt cover design , Jock Serong

Bliss and Other Stories (1920), by Katherine Mansfield

Source: Wikipedia Commons

Today, October 14th, is the anniversary of the birth of New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield in 1888. It’s an ideal day to read a short story by this magnificent modernist author, who died so tragically young when she was only 34.

Podcasts and short stories are ideal to listen to while doing some housekeeping on the blog, so the discovery of Peter Dann’s recordings of Katherine Mansfield’s short story collection Bliss at Librivox* , has been a real pleasure. His background as a scriptwriter and playwright may have contributed to his expressive renditions of these stories where the author’s voice varies according to gender and the age of the characters. His narrations are exceptionally good and because he is a volunteer at Librivox, the stories are all available for free.

The unnamed ‘Little Governess’ is warned to be very careful, and to make sure that she travels in a carriage for Ladies Only because it’s far safer than staying in a foreign hotel . Peter portrays the lady at the Governess Bureau with a protective concern for her charges as she despatches them into the unknown, advising her that…

…I always tell my girls that it’s better to mistrust people at first rather than trust them, and it’s safer to suspect someone of evil intentions rather than good ones… It sounds rather hard but we’ve got to be women of the world, haven’t we?’ (p.175)

But at the station the girl’s luggage is commandeered by a rough-and-ready porter, and her alarm as she chases after him is palpable in Peter’s narration. She pleads with him to return her luggage because she wants to carry it herself, but he ignores her and she is only placated when he arrives at a compartment bearing a sign that shows it is reserved for women only. Then there is a contretemps over the tip because he is insulted by a mere twenty centimes, while she is determined not to give him the franc he demands. Her success gives her misplaced confidence.

She looked out from her safe corner, frightened no longer but proud that she had not given that franc. ‘I can look after myself—of course I can. The great thing is not to—(p.177)

Her reflections are interrupted by the sound of some boisterous young men in the next compartment, and her alarm returns, especially when the rude porter tears the ‘Dames Seules’ sign from her door, and deposits an old man and his luggage in the compartment with her. But her alarm is ameliorated when she sees how old he is.

For a moment or two tears brimmed her eyes and through them saw the old man unwinding a scarf from his neck and untying the flaps of his Jaeger cap. He looked very old. Ninety at least. He had a white moustache and big gold-rimmed spectacles with little blue eyes behind them and pink wrinkled cheeks. A nice face—and charming the way he bent forward and said in halting French: ‘Do I disturb you, Mademoiselle? Would you rather I took all these things out of the rack and found another carriage?’ What! that old man have to move all those heavy things just because she… ‘No, it’s quite all right. You don’t disturb me at all.’ ‘Ah, a thousand thanks.’ He sat down opposite her and unbuttoned the cape of his enormous coat and flung it off his shoulders.’

Yes, that is what happens. This vulnerable young woman forgets the wise advice she’s been given, but the ending is not quite what I expected. Mansfield is very good at depicting tiresome women (listen to Peter’s rendition of ‘The Escape’ to see an example, but she’s also highly attuned to the vulnerability of women. (Listen to ‘Pictures’ to see what I mean).

This is the complete list of stories in this Bliss and Other Stories collection:

‘Prelude’ (reviewed here )
‘Je ne Parle pas Français’ (which has a most interesting publishing history, see Wikipedia )
‘Bliss’: the title is ironic. Bertha’s bliss turns to betrayal…
‘The Wind Blows’: a deceptively simple story, but the shifts in the narrative mark it as modernist.
‘Psychology’: the state of the novel as a literary genre, disparaging the psycho-novel despite being a psychological short story itself.
‘Pictures’: a harrowing portrait of the devastating poverty of Miss Moss, a contralto who is down on her luck. Her story is a reminder of Miss Milliment in Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Light Years (1990) , Miss Pettigrew in Winifred Watson’s Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (1938), and Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means (1963) . The authenticity of these portraits of women in dire financial distress suggests to me that these authors, despite their middle-class backgrounds, knew financial insecurity themselves and they empathised with the plight of single women who were worse off than they were.
‘The Man without a Temperament’: I’m not sure whether this was an idealised or an ironic portrait of a loving spouse of an invalid. Given that her husband John Middleton Murray was such a loser, I suspect the latter.
‘Mr Reginald Peacock’s Day’: Peter’s drily ironic narration of this one is pitch-perfect.
‘Sun and Moon’: this seems like a rehearsal for other short stories in which young people’s equanimity is shattered for reasons that adults don’t understand, see my review of The Garden Party .
”Feuille d’Album’
‘A Dill Pickle’: a fine example of how observant Mansfield was of other people’s relationships.
‘The Little Governess’
‘Revelations’
‘The Escape’: a brilliant portrayal of the trials of an ill-matched couple.

Author: Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) Title: Bliss and Other Stories, in The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2007 ISBN: 9780141441818, pbk., 779 pages (comprising these collections: Bliss, The Garden Party, The Doves’ Nest, Unfinished Stories, Something Childish and In a German Pension. Source: personal library

Read KM’s stories free online at the KM Society here or listen to them at Librivox here. Peter has recorded all KM’s stories for Librivox, from these collections:

Bliss, and Other Stories: https://librivox.org/bliss-and-other-stories-by-katherine-mansfield/
The Garden Party, and Other Stories: https://librivox.org/the-garden-party-and-other-stories-by-katherine-mansfield/
In a German Pension: https://librivox.org/in-a-german-pension-by-katherine-mansfield-2/

* Founded in 2005 by Hugh McGuire, LibriVox is a group of worldwide volunteers who read and record public domain texts, creating free public domain audiobooks for download from their website It was founded in 2005 by Hugh McGuire. It’s a terrific initiative, and it’s generous of the volunteers to give up their time to do it. But the quality of narration varies enormously as I found when I accidentally downloaded a recording of a book by Daniel Defoe. So the quality of Peter’s narrations stand out amongst lesser recordings.

Image credit: portrait of Katherine Mansfield: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Mansfield#/media/File:Katherine_Mansfield_(no_signature) .jpg

Posted in 2024 Year of NZ Lit , Audio books , BOOK REVIEWS , eBooks , FICTION — NEW ZEALAND , Freebies , Librivox , MANSFIELD, Katherine , Modernism , New Zealand authors , Novellas & short novels (100-200 pp) , NZ 1920 , Read in 2024 , Transnational (settings) | Tags: #AYearofNZLit , Bliss and Other Stories , BOOK REVIEWS , Katherine Mansfield , Peter Dann narrator

Tamara (1970), by Geoffrey Dutton

1970 was a terrific year in Oz Lit. I was too impecunious to buy books in 1970 but I made up for it afterwards. Among my favourites are

The Bay of Noon , by Shirley Hazzard
A Horse of Air , by Dal Stivens and winner of the Miles Franklin Award
The Vivisector by Nobel Prize winner Patrick White. A Review from the Archives is already in draft form for eventual publication .

And now, also Tamara. It is, admittedly, a rather obscure title by historian, poet, novelist, and author of non-fiction Geoffrey Dutton (1922-1998). In his day he was a prominent figure in the Australian literary scene but maybe not so well-known outside it, and maybe also now forgotten here. He doesn’t get a mention in the 2009 edition of Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature , and though he rated considerable column inches in the 1985 edition of the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, Tamara is mentioned only as a love story set in Russia. Which wouldn’t have made me want to read it.

Yet this is a book that is maybe more fascinating now, than when it was first published, and since Dutton’s fiction doesn’t have much of a presence online, this is a longer review than usual…

Tucked into my copy of Dutton’s third novel Tamara was a printout of a rather churlish contemporary newspaper review by an academic who shall remain nameless. The caustic framing of the title and the dismissive tone of the review may well have discouraged potential readers if they (a) understood what the critic was on about and (b) took any notice of it. It begins like this:

Sartre has explained the Stalinist repression of non-ideological literature (Babel for example) as an attack on the symptoms of that ‘new class’ that Djilas foresees of the professional elite.

In 1970 without the benefit of Wikipedia, did anybody know who Djilas was? More importantly, did they know anything about the USSR apart from Cold War propaganda? Dutton did. The dust jacket on my edition tells me that he’d been there himself, in 1966, to attend a festival to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the birth of Shota Rustavelli , the Georgian epic poet, and he’d managed to wrangle some time away from official scrutiny in Georgia and around the Black Sea. His impressions from this trip inspired Tamara.

This is the blurb from the dustjacket:

Angus James, friend of poets, lover of wine, poetry, and the other serious pleasures of living and, incidentally, distinguished Australian agronomist, is in Moscow for a world conference of soil scientists. By a happy accident he finds himself co-opted as Australian delegate at the festival to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the birth of the Georgian epic poet, Shota Rustavelli. His total ignorance of the latter’s works in no way inhibits enjoyment or curbs his oratory. And then through the mists of rhetoric and strawberry-tasting wine, he catches his first glimpse of Tamara; black-haired, beautiful, and Russia’s greatest poetess. They meet, they love… and the pressures of politicians and ideologues come ponderously to bear upon their idyll.

It is obvious that the Soviets who co-opt Angus know as little about Australia as Australians did about the USSR. It is inconceivable to his Soviet hosts that Angus might not be as devoted to his country’s poetry as they are to theirs. (When I was in Russia in 2012, even the shop girls wanted to show off their knowledge of great literature, not just Puskhin and Tolstoy but also the canon of Western greats such as Dickens and Austen.)

‘Here, Angus,’ said Tamara, ‘let us see what these people have on their bookshelves, it will be of interest to your friends in Australia.’ Angus could not help finding it touching that even the most sophisticated Russians were proud of the passion for reading amongst their people. […] She took him past the piano under its white embroidered cover to the glassed-in bookcase, and pointed out Pushkin, Chekhov, a detective story, translations of Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki , Dickens, Steinbeck, Richard Aldington, anthologies of Avkhasian , Georgian and Russian poetry, piles of a fat magazine called Foreign Literature , one volume of which was the whole of Graham Greene’s The Comedians, and a volume of Novy Mir entirely taken up by Kinglsey Amis’s Lucky Jim . (p.53)

There are allusions all over the place in that paragraph, some of them having different meanings with the passage of time. First of all, despite the rather patronising reflections of Angus, the Soviets were rightly proud of improvements in literacy. According to Britannica, only 24% of people over the age of nine were literate in 1897 and even after the Revolution of 1905 in (still Tsarist) Russia, it rose to only 40% (and that was under a very rudimentary standard indeed ). But by the 1950s under the Soviets, under the Likbez campaign to eradicate illiteracy, genuine literacy was near universal, with textbooks published in 104 languages of the USSR.

But secondly, that book list comprises both reading ‘approved’ under the Soviet regime and dissident works that could land their readers in serious (possibly fatal) trouble. That bookshelf is glassed in, so the titles can be seen by anybody and the risky books are not hidden. That’s an allusion to the Thaw after the death of Stalin i.e. when Khrushchev was in power (1953-1964) and repression and censorship in the USSR eased under policies of de-Stalinization and peaceful coexistence with other nations.

Novy Mir became famous in 1962 for publishing the dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ‘s novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Comedians is a novel that explores political repression and terrorism . The Kon-Tiki expedition is now discredited as a hyperdiffusionist theory of colonialism, while Dickens and Steinbeck were great novelists who exposed the excesses of capitalism. (Steinbeck had also made a postwar visit to Russia, see my review of his 1948 A Russian Journal ). Richard Aldington was an English poet much admired by the Soviets, (see here ), while Abkhazia was a separate republic under the Soviets, and is now contested territory in Georgia. Wikipedia notes in its Culture section, that the Abkhazian code of honour, is very stringent regarding hospitality which perhaps is hinting at reasons why the character of Uglanov is tolerated at social occasions.

Uglanov is a very interesting character. He is the Secretary of the all-powerful Soviet Union of Writers , and husband of Tamara with whom Angus falls passionately in love. As befits his position as leader of an organisation which (in real life) denounced Boris Pasternak and sent others to their deaths, Uglanov is a stolid, pompous character, with no sense of humour, and readers will share Angus’s amazement that he was ever able to capture the hand of the beautiful, intelligent, sensitive poet who is the toast of all Russia and beyond. However, it is his position that protects Tamara when her poetry crosses the political line.

Nevertheless, Uglanov’s adherence to the Soviet rules about state control of literature is stridently on show when they finally get to the conference, and it is chilling. Repression was resurgent under Krushchev’s successor Brezhnev (in power from 1964-1982) and that included a clampdown on cultural freedom. ( See Domestic policies/Repression after Krushchev’s Thaw when the novel is set.)

There is an Author’s Note a note at the beginning of the book:

The events and characters in this book are fictional. There was a Rustaveli Festival held in Georgia, USSR, but it was in 1966 not in 1967 as in this novel, and the events described did not take place in it.

Why these disclaimers and why change the date? Because by the time Dutton published this in 1970, there was renewed risk to Soviet writers after the Trial of the Four i n January 1968.

The Trial of the Four, also Galanskov–Ginzburg trial, was the 1968 trial of Yuri Galanskov , Alexander Ginzburg , Alexey Dobrovolsky and Vera Lahkova for their involvement in samizdat publications. ( See Wikipedia )

Samizdat literature comprised censored and underground publications passed around by dissidents. The four were convicted and sentenced to terms in labour camps.

Dutton must have known that some aspects of Tamara posed a risk to the people he met in the USSR. He might have been naïve in thinking his disclaimers were protection enough.

Angus has only a smattering of Russian words, so when he escapes from the soil conference, he is squired around Georgia by his irrepressible translator Sergei Nechayev, whose patchy command of English is adequate more for expressing his joie de vivre in Georgian life and his scorn towards, Uglanov. In contrast to Uglanov, Sergei is a most engaging character, full of bonhomie, jokes and laughter; he has an astonishing capacity for bouncing back from marathon sessions of drinking champagne. But as a liberal anti-Stalinist poet, he is living life on the edge. In a rare moment that reveals his bitterness about life in the USSR, he castigates Angus for complaining that it’s impossible to joke about his love for Tamara. Angus is a wounded soul: his beloved first wife had drowned when he was sailing his boat off Kangaroo Island, and he had saved Uglanov’s life in the same incident.

‘…All of Russia envies you. Bloody bastard Australian, lover of Tamara Svalova. Not according to Marxist-Leninist principles. Is no justice.’ ‘Oh, shut up.’ It was impossible to think of Tamara in the context of an affair. It was a passion or nothing. He was surrounded by images of drowning. He loved the sea as much as ever, but he was afraid to go into it again. ‘I’m sorry, Sergei. I can’t manage jokes about Tamara. She fills me with despair, not funny stories.’ ‘Ha!’ Sergei glared at him. ‘You talk to a Russian about despair!” (p.50)

Readers of Tamara in the 1970s must have doubted the authenticity of the images of plenty. Angus attends one party after another, boozing on Georgian wine that tastes of strawberries and tucking into lavish bowls of caviar. Those of us brought up on Cold War propaganda have a different impression of the USSR altogether: dour-faced grey officials, monotonous canyons of gloomy Stalinesque apartment blocks and hapless citizens queueing endlessly for basic commodities ( see my review of Vladimir Sorokin’s 1983 The Queue ). The sun never shone in the images we saw of the USSR. Yet in Tamara , the parties that Angus goes to seem more like Renoir’s sunlit ‘Luncheon of the Boating Party’ than anything that might be possible in the USSR.

The two-storey tiled house was surrounded with a garden and plane trees. Honoured guests, they were led upstairs to the parlour and sat down around a bare table, surrounded by vast numbers of sisters, step-sisters, cousins, and two grandmothers each rocking a baby. Down below in the courtyard under a vine trellis fifty or so men were seated, shouting cheerfully at each other, around tables heaped high with every sort of meat and cake and fruit and decanters of white wine and bottles of champagne. A few minutes later Ghorghe’s sister-in-law, a big woman with a face like a Roman empress, came in and unrolled a crisp white tablecloth, which was immediately lost to sight under chickens, sucking-pig, knucklebones of beef, salads, enormous cakes and four slender-necked decanters of white wine. As if there were not enough food, the hostess came back with two hot chickens which she disjointed at the table. ‘Is very special wine,’ said Sergei, after the first toast. ‘Our host is manager of the local wine co-operative. It was indeed, and red gold, nearly the colour of a ripe pomegranate. (p.51)

The romance is, of course, doomed from the start. And Angus knows it:

What was so clear and simple on the terrace in the moonlight above the Black Sea was not clear or simple at all. How simple for Hero and Leander to love each other at first sight with only the Hellespont between them! They were just a boy and a girl. But he was a man in the shadow of his wife’s death, deeply afraid of arousing deep emotion again. He came from an island of peace below the only continent in the world innocent of war on its own soil[1]. And Tamara was married. A Russian, the good wine of her poetry grown from the bloodiest soil in the world, revolution, civil war, invasion, twenty million killed by the Germans[2], God knows how many by Stalin[3], her roots in the compost of corpses, her body and her mind like a vine throwing forth branches and fruit entangled with unbelievable complications of politics and dogma and treachery and bravery. But above all, she was married, to the man whose life he had saved. Angus was used now to young Russians joking with him about the unnecessary rescue of Uglanov. But there Uglanov was, a symbol of the huge intransigent barriers between him and Tamara, a husband and a Russian. Angus was in the position of a knightly victim of courtly love, of a hopeless adulterous passion for an impossible princess in a distant tower unable even to confess his love… (p.49)

This is poetic, but not true. It’s true that back in the 1970s few Australians thought of frontier conflict with First Nations warriors as ‘war on its own soil’ but Dutton, having served in the RAAF during WW2, certainly knew about Japanese bombing raids on ‘our own soil’ in Darwin and other cities on our northern coast.
An understatement, though perhaps accurate for its time. Contemporary estimates are that WW2 deaths in the USSR total about 27 million: about 8.7 million soldiers and 19 million civilians.
Contemporary estimates are that Stalin deliberately killed 6 million of his people, rising to 9 million if foreseeable deaths arising from policies are taken into account.

I’ve read a few novels featuring a travel romance that is doomed from the start, but none as moved me as much as this one. I’m on the lookout now for more novels by Geoffrey Dutton…

About Geoffrey Dutton (1922-1998): ( from Goodreads)

Born into a prestigious pastoralist family in South Australia, Dutton served in WWII and studied at Oxford, before becoming a leading light of 20th century Australian writing. His own fiction and poetry received awards in his lifetime, but his legacy has been in his non-fiction writing. His works included extensive texts on the history of Australian literature, art, politics, culture, biography, and travel. Known to all of the great minds of his generation, including his long-time best friend Patrick White, Dutton’s influence helped to shape post-war Australian literature, and he received the Order of Australia in 1976. His output was featured in at least 200 books, including 40 solo works, by the time of his death. Dutton worked behind the scenes as well, as an editor for Penguin and co-founder of Sun Books , and was crucial in founding the Adelaide Festival of the Arts.

Author: Geoffrey Dutton Title: Tamara Publisher: Collins, 1970 Jacket design: Kenneth Farnhill ISBN: 9780002218337, hbk, first edition, 174 pages Source: Personal library

Posted in AUSTRALIAN AUTHORS , BOOK REVIEWS , Club Reads , Cold War , Collins , DUTTON Geoffrey , FICTION — AUSTRALIAN , Novellas & short novels (100-200 pp) , Read in 2024 , Societies in transition , South Australian authors , Switzerland (settings) , USSR, 1922-1991 (settings) , War, armed conflict & its aftermath | Tags: #1970Club , BOOK REVIEWS , Geoffrey Dutton , Kenneth Farnhill cover design , Tamara

2024 My loot from #LoveYourBookshopDay

Today was #LoveYourBookshopDay so I’ve had a most enjoyable attack of Spendyitis.

First up was Ulysses Bookstore in Hampton. (I started reading Dusk while I was at the car wash afterwards. Fabulous, go get a copy!)

Then I was off to Benn’s Books in Bentleigh. (I bought Held because of Kim’s review at Reading Matters .)

And when I got home I ordered some interesting titles from Readings. Brian Castro is an MRE for me… an acronym I owe to the collaborative writing duo Gert Loveday whose website is here . MRE means Must Read Everything.

# loveyourbookshop

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Posted in MY LIFE with BOOKS | Tags: #loveyourbookshop

Spell the Month in Books October 2024

October’s Theme is: My favourite genre. My favourite reading is contemporary literary fiction which tackles significant issues of the day, but I do enjoy historical fiction which is social history or reveals little-known aspects of history. Sometimes I don’t exactly ‘enjoy it; but feel that I have learned something valuable by reading it.

Links go to my reviews:

O ne Illumined Thread (2023), by Sally Colin-James: One Illumined Thread is linked by the artistic pursuits of three unconventional women. The story begins in the present day with a small scrap of textile in the hands of an unnamed museum conservationist in Adelaide

C hloé (2024), by Katrina Kell: Inspired by the myths and history of the painting that hangs in Melbourne’s Young and Jackson’s Hotel, Katrina Kell’ Chloé is a novel in two timelines that in the 19th century imagines a life for the model, who remains unidentified to this day,

T his Other Eden (2023) by Paul Harding: is what I call Hidden History, and it tells the melancholy story of how a small community of the unwanted were evicted from Apple Island in Maine.

O rphan Rock (2022), by Dominique Wilson: Orphan Rock is a multi-generational historical novel spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exploring Australia’s social history, its multicultural identity and the roles of women.

B arefoot Doctor (2019), by Can Xue, translated by Karen Gernant & Zeping Chen: Barefoot Doctor i s a quiet homage to the barefoot doctors who provided healthcare during the Cultural Revolution in China, but it’s not realism as we know it.

The E lectric Hotel (2019), by Dominic Smith: The Electric Hotel reveals the dark side of the silent film era. Its ‘hero’ films his sister dying of consumption, his love interest naked in a bubble bath, and a stunt involving a tiger which was shot dead when it mauled a trainer who was lucky to survive.

R ed Sorghum (1987), by Mo Yan, translated by Howard Goldblat: Red Sorghum brings together family history and myth, covering the period of brutal Japanese Occupation (1937-1945) and the Chinese Civil War (1927~1950) when the lawlessness was exacerbated by bandits and rival gangs fighting for supremacy amongst themselves. Not for the faint hearted.

Thanks to Hopewell’s Library of Life for reminding me. Her October list is here.

Posted in Spell the Month in Books | Tags: Spell the Month in Books

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Abani Chris
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ENG Tan Twan
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National Biography Award
The National Biography Award celebrates excellence in biography, autobiography and memoir writing. Announcing the winners Lamisse Hamouda’s “powerfully told” and “accomplished” debut memoir, The Shape of Dust, has won this year’s $25,000 National …
Meet the winners of the National Biography Award 2023
Since 1996, the National Biography Award has celebrated excellence in biography, autobiography and memoir writing. With a prize pool of $42,000, it is the nation’s richest prize for Australian biographical writing and memoir. The …
National Biography Award
The National Biography Award, established in Australia in 1996, is awarded for the best published work of biographical or autobiographical writing by an Australian. It aims "to encourage the highest standards of writing biography and autobiography and to promote public interest in those genres". It was initially awarded every two years, but from 2002 it has been awarded annually. Its administration was taken over by the State Library of New South Wales in 1998.
Shortlist announced for Australia’s richest biography and memoir …
The remarkable biographies of celebrated writers Donald Horne, Frank Moorhouse and Shirley Hazzard, pioneering composer Margaret Sutherland, bohemian rebel Bee Miles and a memoir …
Biography Awards and Fellowships
Biography Awards. Awarded annually, the National Biography Award is Australia's most prestigious biography prize. It is open to citizens and permanent residents of Australia …
National Biography Award
The National Biography Award was established in 1996. It is open to Australian citizens and permanent residents who have published a work of biography or autobiography. …
National Biography Award
The National Biography Award, managed by the State Library of NSW, celebrates excellence in biography, autobiography and memoir writing. With a prize pool of $42,000 it is the nation’s …
National Biography Award winner’s announced on ABC …
ABC Sydney host Cassie McCullagh has announced this year's National Biography Award winner during her program Focus on Thursday 26 August. The winner of the State Library of NSW National Biography Award is …
2022 National Biography Award winner and shortlist
The 2022 National Biography Award shortlist has been announced. The NBA is the nation’s richest prize for Australian biographical writing and memoir: • $25,000 for the winner • $2,000 for each of the six …