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Reviewing the Text Classics: The Commandant by Jessica Anderson

2012-05-17T00:00:00Z

This week we're putting the spotlight on the new Text Classics series. Today our very own Chris Gordon looks at Jessica Anderson's novel from 1975 - The Commandant.

It’s peculiar to Australian history - the penal sites around our coast and the heartbreak they caused. Recently I was fortunate enough to visit the Tasmanian site and while reading Jessica Anderson’s novel, The Commandant the vision of the tiny huts and cells was vivid. Of course, Anderson’s novel does an excellent job of realising what these barbaric sites did to humanity. In fact the whole discourse of the novel centres on this very fact.

The Commandant is the story of Patrick Logan who rules the penal colony of Moreton Bay, NSW with an iron steel. He is not afraid to have the prisoners whipped and ridiculed for the most minor of affronts. His rule though is questioned by the arrival of his sister-in-law, the wonderful Frances. Frances is one of those impressive heroines of Australian fiction. A fiery, courageous young woman who is aware politics, and therefore justifications, are changing. Her relationship with her sister the naive, but sweetly lisped Lettie, Patrick’s wife, reflect the shifting attitudes of the 1830s in Australia.

Carmen Callil mentions in her introduction the gift Anderson (pictured left) gave us by writing The Commandant. Anderson is best known for Tirra Lirra by the River, but as Callil points out this novel is so more powerful because of the historical references and the great gift of Frances, a character that Australia would be a lesser place without. A woman not afraid to question power and to bring the sincere definition of duty to resolution.

Of course we need to acknowledge Text Publishing for bringing this astonishing novel back into print. On par with My Brilliant Career this novel deserves a place in both feminist and Australian history.

The Commandant is out now in paperback ($12.95) and ebook ($9.84).

Readings will be hosting a special discussion panel on the Australian Classics with Peter Craven, Ramona Koval and Text publisher Michael Heyward at Readings Hawthorn on Tues 22 May, 6.30pm. Bookings and details here.

Christine Gordon is the Events Coordinator for Readings and is a committee member of The Stella Prize.

Q&A with Ruby J. Murray, author of Running Dogs

2012-05-17T00:00:00Z

Jessica Au from Readings St Kilda chats to Ruby J. Murray about her debut novel, Running Dogs.

Photo courtesy of Brad Dunn

How did Running Dogs begin for you?

I was working in communications for a large intergovernmental development organisation in Jakarta at the time, and things were… hectic. Political fall-outs, earthquake disaster responses, an enormous amount of change within the organisation. The only fiction I wrote during the whole year was the opening to a short story: three children sitting in a car, looking out to where their father is teeing off at an eerie golf driving range at a big sports complex in the city centre. The children were sitting in darkness, and the father didn’t know they were there, watching him.

The day after my contract ended I flew out of Jakarta and into the Northern hemisphere’s winter in a kind of exhausted shock. I sat down in a café, looked at the snow, and thought: I have this one page. And I’m not ready to leave Jakarta, not yet.

Indeed, Jakarta runs through the book as a living, breathing force; full of ‘crowded kampong’, ‘silent malls’ and ‘the slow burn of sambal’. How much of an impression did your time there make on you and what are your feelings towards the city now?

A city like Jakarta forces you to love it, or hate it. You can’t be indifferent to it. And if you choose to love it, you have to work at loving it. Because it’s not an easy place, and it’s certainly not always a loveable place. Estimates of the population of the city alone rage from 10 to 15 million; the Greater Metro area is around 27 million and growing. It’s polluted, and congested, frequently filthy, and hauntingly beautiful in ways you would never expect. Jakartans call the city ‘The Big Durian’ because it’s stinky and prickly and most people hate it… but if you acquire a taste for it, you’ll have it forever.

So: I love Jakarta. Except for when I hate it. It’s fiercely modern; it provides a window on to where the world is going. It’s always one step ahead and one step behind.

You cross effortlessly between two eras: 1997, during the childhood of Petra, Isaak and Paul and just before the fall of Suharto, and the more contemporary Reformasi period, when Australian expat Diana arrives in Indonesia. How much research did you do?

A lot. It’s an old academic procrastinatory technique. Research forever and don’t write anything. I did a lot of desktop research, and even read a whole year’s worth of The Jakarta Post newspaper, which was a weird experience; knowing what was going to happen and watching it unfold before me, day after day. I sat in the Newspaper Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria muttering at the paper, ‘No! Don’t do it! No! They’ll be shooting people at Trisakti University today, don’t go!’

I also talked. To everyone I could. The stories that come out when you start in on the Indonesian revolution in the late 1990s are amazing. Jakartans can take anything in their stride.

A colleague of mine was actually at Trisakti when the police opened fire on a crowd of students demonstrating for Suharto’s resignation in May 1998. Once, when I was leaving the office to go to an anti-corruption demonstration, she told me to ‘remember my toothpaste’. When I asked what she meant, she said: ‘to put under your eyes. For the tear gas.’ As if I was just being silly and forgetful, leaving the office to go to a demonstration without toothpaste in my handbag.

Petra, Isaak and Paul, lead expatriate lives of relative privilege, and as a result observe many brutal shifts in power and game-play. Yet they are also very much on the periphery – both hypersensitive to their adults’ moods and painfully unaware of the wider repercussions of their actions. There’s a certain tragedy in that. Do you feel this is true of many childhoods, not just the Jordans?

I don’t know if their childhood is tragic, exactly. Certainly not compared to the lives of a lot of the children around them. And kids aren’t passive, either. They’re actively involved in their own lives, and they can be pretty horrible; tribal, and working out the boundaries. That continues as we’re adults, too, all that boundary work. We talk the talk but stumble the walk.

I guess… as children we do bare witness to the adult lives around us, and in some ways we’re soaks for their mores and hypocrisy. I think kids are often acutely aware of the fact that grown-ups are despots who aren’t following the rules.

Running Dogs is described as a novel ‘about the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive’. Indeed, Diana goes on barely acknowledging the truth about the Jordans’ to herself and, without giving too much away, Petra too has secrets to keep for her family’s survival. Are these kinds of narratives survival mechanisms, or a kind of ignorance?

I think ignorance is a survival mechanism. We’re interpretive animals, we like to put things in a causal order. In a way, stories are imperfect heuristic devices we use to try and explain the world around us; what we leave out of stories can say as much about the story and what it’s trying to do as what we put in.

It’s the development worker in the novel, Diana, who is in control of what you see of the world in Running Dogs. She’s the one who gets the privilege of withholding her own story from the reader. In a way, by keeping the reader ignorant, she refuses to understand herself in relation to what’s happening, or her role in what’s happening.

So, I think the answer is that we use ignorance in a very real way when we go to construct the stories we tell about ourselves and other people. We choose what we want to know, and what we want to ignore: what we will accept as ‘causal’ and what is too difficult for us to confront.

At one point Diana reflects, thinking of the Jordans, ‘all I do is watch’. Do you feel that this is the novelist’s lot as well – to be the constant observer?

I can’t speak for all novelists, but I think there have been times when I would probably have liked to feel that way! If you give yourself observer status, you’re somehow relieved of responsibility for what you’re watching. You have to keep out of the politics of the war zone so you can stay alive long enough to report on it to the outside world, you have to remain unbiased… but no, novelists aren’t journalists, they certainly can’t attempt to claim neutrality, and I don’t think novelists are passive observers. They’re involved, explicitly, in creating the world that we’re all watching.

There’s an old academic adage that runs ‘every description is a prescription.’ I think that novelists have a responsibility to reflect on why they choose to write about the subjects they do, and what they are remaining silent about as well. If stories really are heuristic devices we use to try and understand the world, then they’re potentially very powerful things. Lots of single notes adding to the cultural cacophony.

One of the things that struck me about Running Dogs is its outward glance – it’s a book that goes both beyond our borders, and our more ‘traditional’ storylines. Was this a conscious move? Do you ever feel that Australian literature is too inward-looking?

I wrote Running Dogs because I was in love with a city, and part of me wasn’t ready to leave it. I needed to understand a place; I needed one of those heuristic devices. But the only book on Australians in Jakarta was Christopher Koch’s Year of Living Dangerously. And it’s a beautiful, amazing book, but it’s based in 1965, and it wasn’t enough. So I had to write a new one, about now.

Is Australian literature too inward-looking? There are so many complex answers to that question, but quickly, and crudely, my gut feeling is: yes. But that’s reflective of an Australian culture that’s often too caught up in the ‘myth’ of its rural past, its masculinity and whiteness, in the colloquial digger and the jovial larrikin. There’s a pervasive feeling that we’re somehow a very long way from the rest of the world. But that’s not true, now, if it ever has been.

Putting aside Australia’s internal diversity, there are over a million Australian ex-pats at any given moment. In 2010, 7.1 million Australians travelled internationally, a third of the nation. We’re a hugely mobile population. In South East Asia, especially, the Australian tourist dollar is king, and people do some pretty appalling things while they’re flinging it around. We’re very much part of a region, a community of cultures, and active within it.

I’ve lived as an expat in three countries, now, and as an ex-pat you spend a lot of time looking back at your ‘home’ culture, and at the culture around you, and trying to work out what it means: to ‘be’ a culture, to ‘be’ an Australian or an Indonesian or an American. Ma Jian, a Chinese writer whose work I really admire, once said that the further you get from the mountain, the clearer it becomes. That for him, being away from his culture and country meant that he could see its contours more clearly.

I don’t know how true that’s been for me. I don’t know if things are necessarily clearer. But I’m starting to realise just how big the mountain is, and maybe that’s a start.

Running Dogs is out now in paperback ($29.95) and ebook ($16.99)

A book by Booki.sh

Buy 2 Vintage Classics, Get Beautiful Letterpress Cards Free

2012-05-16T00:00:00Z

Buy any two Vintage Classics - online or in-store - and receive a beautiful pack of limited edition letterpress cards by Sydney design studio, The Distillery.

Classical literature and letterpress are two good things and, together, they make an even better thing. For May, when you buy any two Vintage Classics (still just $12.95 each) and you'll receive a beautiful pack of four letterpress cards, with two bespoke designs by Sydney studio, The Distillery.

You can see the pretty cards below. And here's a look at the the printing process:

Please note: This offer is only available during May 2012 while stocks last. For online orders, please include ‘Vintage greeting cards' in the notes field to claim your free cards.

Reviewing the Text Classics: Cosmo Cosmolino by Helen Garner

2012-05-16T00:00:00Z

This week we're putting the spotlight on the new Text Classics series - next up Jo Case writes on Helen Garner's wonderful Cosmo Cosmolino.

Cosmo Cosmolino (1992) was Helen Garner’s last work of fiction before she pioneered her own distinctive brand of questing, addictive narrative non-fiction with The First Stone.

It’s an unusual book; not quite a novel, not quite a short-story collection; both completely what you expect from a Helen Garner book (share houses, trams, ageing hippies, finely honed ‘kitchen table candour’, as Robert Dessaix put it when reviewing The Spare Room) and a surprising departure (faith, belief, angels, religion). The prose, too, is a mix of classic Garner – deceptively simple observations, dialogue so slyly provocative it makes you gasp – and a more ornate, poetic style: long sentences, images bunched together like bouquets rather than presented as polished, solitary gems in her usual fashion.

Cosmo Cosmolino consists of two short stories and one novella. The unnamed narrator of the first story, ‘Recording Angel’, is, the reader gradually realises, the same person as Janet, the recently divorced journalist and writer of the novella, ‘Cosmo Cosmolino’. And Raymond, the self-absorbed, socially illiterate protagonist of the second story, ‘A Vigil’ (whose boorish negligence contributes to the death of his depressed, substance-abusing girlfriend) is one of Janet’s two lodgers in ‘Cosmo Cosmolino’, now a chastened born-again Christian.

The three stories are united by themes as well as characters: dark maybe-angels appear in the first two and in the third, Raymond is greeted as an angel by mad artist Maxine, Janet’s other lodger. Questions of faith and belief – how it can sustain, resurrect or transform – how misplaced faith can lead a person astray and lack of faith can leave a person barren – are central to all three stories.

Love and family are central too, despite (or maybe because of) the near-total absence of traditional family arrangements. Garner seems to be questioning the sustainability and the fall-out of the share house culture of her (and Janet’s) past; self-made families that drift apart, leaving lonely individuals in their wake.

Janet’s seriously ill friend Patrick in ‘Recording Angel’, who ‘recited [her] life like a poem he had learnt by heart’, has a wife and children who love him with a fierce straightforwardness missing from the other relationships in the book. He teases Janet for her nomadism, and what she later calls her ‘unwifeliness’ (she has ‘no talent for intimacy’). Although Janet privately recognises Patrick’s barbs as his need to contrast her life with his own, and she calls her domestic landscape a ‘blasted heath’ with her tongue firmly in cheek, what we later encounter in Cosmo Cosmolino is exactly that.

Both Janet and the wildly eccentric Maxine are childless; both feel it as an acute absence. When Janet recalls the share house ‘kids’, now scattered and presumably grown, it is bittersweet. Hearing passing schoolchildren, she muses, ‘It was a good sound, she believed with the part of her still believed anything; but it hurt her.’ The empty rooms in the house she owns, once a share house and now the aftermath of a recently failed marriage, are still named for those long-ago housemates who once occupied them. When Maxine and Raymond move into those unoccupied spaces, they are also creating a community of sorts again, though a diminished and ill-matched one.

There is a sense of hope about Cosmo Cosmolino, a sense of faith in community and the families we make, if a nagging sense that the permanence and transience of such families makes them no substitute for the bonds of blood or traditional unions. And there is the idea that loving and believing – even if such enterprises may be doomed to dissolve – is worth the plunge, and far preferable to the alternative of careful, closed-off cynicism.

This is a fascinating book, with flashes of brilliance and scenes of piercing truth. Helen Garner is never boring; she is always an artist. And this gorgeous Text Classics edition is well worth buying not just for its striking cover, but for Ramona Koval’s illuminating introduction, which includes insights from Garner herself and a reflection on Cosmo Cosmolino’s place within her body of work.

Jo Case is senior writer/editor at the Wheeler Centre.

Cosmo Cosmolino is out now in paperback ($12.95) and ebook ($9.84).

A book by Booki.sh

Crime author Peter James's Recommended Reads

2012-05-15T00:00:00Z

We were lucky enough to have British crime writer Peter James in our Carlton shop last week.

He is in the country for the Sydney Writers' Festival and to promote his latest novel Not Dead Yet, which features Detective Superintendent Roy Grace of Sussex CID, who this time is involved in a celebrity stalking case. The book has had some good reviews too including this one from Winsor Dobbin in the SMH.

While he was in Melbourne Peter kindly talked us through some of his favourite books. As always it's a real insight finding out what an author's favourite books are.

Check out Peter's recommended reads below.

Not Dead Yet is out now in paperback ($27.95) or ebook ($14.99).

Clearance Sale at Readings Hawthorn starts this weekend

2012-05-15T00:00:00Z

We are holding a fantastic sale at our Hawthorn shop from May 19-27.

Come along and visit our brand new upstairs events space at 701 Glenferrie Rd and grab some bookish bargains to boot as we head into the colder months.

Please note clearance sale hours are: Mon 9-5pm, Sat 9-5pm, Sun 10-5pm. Readings Hawthorn is open for regular trading hours.

Reviewing the Text Classics: They’re a Weird Mob by Nino Culotta

2012-05-15T00:00:00Z

This week we're putting the spotlight on the new Text Classics series - next up Jessica Au from Readings St Kilda takes a look at Nino Culotta's They're a Weird Mob.

In a way, They’re a Weird Mob reads just as much as a love-letter to the Australian language as it does as a paranorma of immigration and culture-shock in 1950s Sydney.

Nino Culotta, both narrator and apparent author of the novel, travels from northern Italy on an assignment from his boss – to ‘write about what kind of people these Australians are’ for publications back home. To do so, he bunkers down at a hotel in Kings Cross and eventually lines up a job as a bricklayer so that he can get to know ‘Working Australians’.

While Nino speaks almost perfect textbook English, the catch, as he soon discovers, is that most Australians do not. Rather, they appear to converse in a kind of ‘Australianese’, a mish-mash of flattened vowels, strung-together words, slang and subtle quirks of literalism. Nino can barely understand a word of it. Naturally, this leads to all sorts of misunderstanding and mischief. They’re a Weird Mob could easily be viewed as linguistically comedy of sorts, and indeed in this vein it’s as observant and wry as ever, putting a mirror just how impenetrable an exaggerated local dialect can be.

Image credit: W.H. Chong

Nino, for instance, listening to a group of lifeguards at Bondi (‘Wot about Marouba last Sundy? All on ‘e says, an’ falls for it himself. Comes up blue in the face, spittin’ sand an’ seaweed’) decides that they ‘must be speaking the technical language of lifesavers’, which he himself should quickly learn. There’s also a real sense of charm and affection as Nino befriends his workmates, Joe, Dennis, Pat and Jimmy, who he finds to be ‘[s]trangely profane and cynical and abusive, but basically such good men, delighting in simple pleasures’.

As far as the immigrant experience goes, the novel is a light-hearted take, and very much of its time (They’re a Weird Mob was originally published in 1957). There are moments that go towards demonstrating the hypocrisy of casual racism. Nino rides a train next to a man who begins yelling obscenities at a nearby Italian family, who in turn mistakes Nino for ‘an Australian’ due to his northern features and begins complaining to him about ‘[b]loody dagoes’. However, in the end, Nino assimilates easily, and the last chapter, which preaches for ‘New Australians’ to get out there and embrace the local way of living, of ‘[which] there is no better’, and not cleave to their own language and customs, seems incredibly and unfortunately dated.

Another layer to this is that Nino Culotta is in fact not Nino Culotta at all, but the pseudonym of Australian Jack O’Grady (pictured left), who wrote They’re a Weird Mob on a bet. According to Jacinta Tynan’s introduction, O’Grady’s younger brother Frank, himself an author of historical novels, put £10 on the fact that John wouldn’t be able to write any sort of book and get it published. John then spent six weeks penning the manuscript, inspired by the time he spent on a building site where he found he could barely understand a word of the ‘Australianese’ spoken there, and as well by the Italian lessons he had recently been taking from his local barber. They’re a Weird Mob was submitted to publisher Ure Smith by his son, and went on to sell around a million copies, before falling out of print thirty-eight years later.

Jessica Au works for Readings Online and is the author of Cargo. Occasionally, you can find her down at Readings St Kilda.

They're a Weird Mob is out now in paperback ($12.95) and ebook ($9.94).

A book by Booki.sh

A History of Books by Gerald Murnane

2012-05-15T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Will Heyward, Readings St Kilda

On the eighth page of Barley Patch – a work of fiction by Gerald Murnane, published in 2009, the first such work to appear since Murnane decided that he was finished writing novels over a decade earlier, and for that reason alone a very considerable one – the narrator declares:

‘One day, I decided not to go on reading one after another book of a sort that could be called literature – that day was only a few months before the day when I decided to write no more fiction. When I made the earlier decision, I intended to confine my reading in future to the few books that I had never forgotten; I would reread those books – I would dwell on them for the rest of my life.’

Of course, the reader (especially the reader that is, like me, particularly fascinated by and dedicated to the writing of Gerald Murnane) wonders, which books are included in this small but all important selection, which books have stood out from a lifetime of reading? And yet the question is never answered. At least perhaps until now.

In fact, Murnane may have turned whatever reservations he had about reading, writing and publishing into subject matter. A History of Books (which is published with three shorter works) is Gerald Murnane’s tenth book of fiction, and its concerns are writing, reading and memory. It is divided into nine sections, each of which explores in detail the images that have been left in an unnamed narrator’s by certain books. The narrator moves imperceptibly from one memory to another, from one book to another, from image to image, never making pronouncements, always suggesting, giving the reader a glimpse at something beyond the bend. The final paragraph is sublime.

Murnane is one of the most original writers at work any where in the world today. In A History of Books, he is as reflective, elusive, and mesmeric as ever.

Will Heyward works for Readings in Carlton and St Kilda. He has been published in the ABR and a few other publications. He helps edit Voiceworks and is a contributing editor for Higher Arc.

Meet the Bookseller with Alexa Dretzke from Readings Hawthorn

2012-05-15T00:00:00Z

We chat with Alexa Dretzke from Readings Hawthorn about books without words, The Hunger Games and the eternal appeal of Pippi Longstocking.

Why do you work in books?

To work, surrounded by the dreams, ideas and creativity of authors and artists, is never dull. As a buyer, choosing the books is always interesting and promoting children’s books is fun and rewarding.

What’s the best book you’ve read lately?

A wordless picture book may seem a peculiar choice but A Ball for Daisy by Chris Raschka, which won the prestigious Caldecott medal this year, has so much to read in it. This delightful tale of a dog and her ball captures her many emotions with deceptive simplicity and exuberant charm. My choice for a ‘word’ book is John Green’s young adult novel The Fault in our Stars which, in a word, is wonderful.

What have you noticed people buying lately?

You guessed it, The Hunger Games, and yes, it is unputdownable!!!

What’s the strangest experience you have had in a bookshop?

Finding a poo in the kids’ section and I didn’t need The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew It Was None of His Business (picture book) to work out which creature it came from!!!

What’s the best experience you’ve had in a bookshop?

Not the above, obviously. But some of the fun ones we have are when customers have a hazy idea of what a title might be. For example, a customer wanted a title along the lines of ‘Clare’s Spleen’. Hmmm, an unusual name for a kids’ book. Do you mean Clarice Bean?

What was your favourite book as a kid?

So many favourites but I guess I’ll have to go with Pippi Longstocking which, having reread recently, is still wonderful and Pippi is inspirational. Every child needs Pippi in their life and the recent edition with Lauren Child’s illustrations is a perfect match.

Winners of the Aurealis Awards 2011 Announced

2012-05-14T00:00:00Z

The winners of the Aurealis Awards 2011 have been announced.

The winners of the 2011 Aurealis Awards for the best of Australian science fiction, fantasy and horror were announced over the weekend in Sydney, with Pamela Freeman and Kim Westwood taking out the prizes for best Fantasy and Science Fiction novels respectively.

The full list of winners is as follows - congrats all!

Fantasy Novel
Ember and Ash by Pamela Freeman

Fantasy Short Story
'Fruit of the Pipal Tree' by Thoraiya Dyer (After the Rain)

Science Fiction Novel
The Courier’s New Bicycle by Kim Westwood

Science Fiction Short Story
'Rains of la Strange' by Robert N Stephenson (Anywhere but Earth

Illustrated Book/Graphic Novel
Hidden by Mirranda Burton

The Deep: Here be Dragons by Tom Taylor and James Brouwer (illus)

Young Adult Novel
Only Ever Always by Penni Russon

Young Adult Short Story
'Nation of the Night' by Sue Isle (Nightsiders)

Children's Fiction
(told primarily through words)
City of Lies by Lian Tanner

Children's Fiction
(told primarily through pictures)
Sounds Spooky by Christopher Cheng and Sarah Davis (illus)

Collection
Bluegrass Symphony by Lisa L. Hannett

Anthology
Ghosts by Gaslight Jack Dann and Nick Gevers (eds)

Horror Novel
No shortlist or winning novel this year

Horror Short Story
'The Past is a Bridge Best Left Burnt' by Paul Haines (The Last Days of Kali Yuga)

'The Short Go: A Future in Eight Seconds' by Lisa L. Hannett (Bluegrass Symphony)

Peter McNamara Convenors’ Award
Galactic Suburbia podcast – Alisa Krasnostein, Alex Pierce, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Andrew Finch (producer)

Kris Hembury Encouragement Award
Emily Craven of Adelaide

Book of the Week: Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

2012-05-14T00:00:00Z

Hilary Mantel's long-awaited sequel to Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies is our new Book of the Week.

Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall was the book of the 2009 literary calender year, a bestseller, critically acclaimed and winner of the Booker Prize to boot.

Now, comes the sequel (and the second volume in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy), Bring Up the Bodies, which follows the final and bloody downfall of Henry VIII's second wife, Anne Boleyn. The novel picks up in the year 1535. Henry has broken with Rome and created his own church for the sake of his desires, however, as we inevitably know, the tide is turning. Anne has failed to provide a male heir to the throne, and Henry's attention is now falling on the plain but enigmatic Jane Seymour, his current wife's lady-in-waiting. The King's Chief Minister, Thomas Cromwell, observes all of this with his shrewd, pragmatic and ruthless gaze and, combined Anne's plotting behind the scenes, the chess game of power, politics and titles is set to begin anew.

Of course those with a basic grasp of English history know how all of this will pan out. But, as Margaret Atwood noted in her review, that doesn't really matter: 'We read historical fiction for the same reason we keep watching Hamlet: it's not what, it's how.'

And what a how indeed - a how full of bloody theatre, pageantry, sexual power-play, rich detail and slow-winding tension. It is this eye for detail and world-creation that has won Mantel so many readers thus far. As James Wood observed in the New Yorker, historical fiction truly lives when fact is considered 'magic rather than... science'. Mantel in turn 'knows that what gives fiction its vitality is not the accurate detail but the animate one' - her novels are not concerned so much documentary, but with human artistry and texture.

Bring Up the Bodies also received a rave review from Geraldine Brooks in The Age over the weekend.

Bring Up the Bodies is out now in paperback ($24.95) and ebook ($19.99).

A book by Booki.sh

Reviewing the Text Classics: The Women in Black by Madeleine St John

2012-05-14T00:00:00Z

This week we're putting the spotlight on the new Text Classics series - first up is Angela Crocombe of Readings St Kilda on Madeleine St John's brilliant The Women in Black.

I first discovered Madeleine St John when I picked up a second-hand copy of her Booker-shortlisted novel, The Essence of the Thing. It was witty and insightful, with dialogue that was practically jumping off the page, and I was immediately hooked. I assumed St John was English, since her later novels were all set in London, and it wasn’t until years later when Text republished The Women in Black that I learnt more about this previously unheralded Australian ex-pat.

The Women in Black was the only novel set in Sydney, but it has all the hallmarks of a St John delight: a sly, knowing wit, razor-sharp dialogue, and a rollicking pace that keeps you reading long into the night. Set in a department store in Sydney called Goode’s that could well be David Jones, it traces the lives of the women who work in the Ladies’ Frock Department.

Amongst the backdrop of beautiful dresses, we are taken on a wonderful journey through an important moment in time for four women and their families. We witness the flowering of young school-leaver Lisa (who changes her name from Lesley), the desperate desire of Miss Baines to end the whirlwind of pointless dates with unsuitable men, and the transformative impact a beautiful nightgown has upon Mrs Williams and her dumbstruck husband. But the most magnificent character of all is surely glamorous Magda, who presides over the pink cave where the unique Model Gowns, more art than fashion, are displayed. St John provides us with a delicious description of her:

‘Magda, the luscious, the svelte and full-bosomed, the beautifully tailored and manicured and coiffed, was the most overwhelming, scented, gleaming, god-awful and ghastly snake woman…’

Magda is a Lithuanian immigrant in a time when Europeans and their tastes were treated with great suspicion, even referred to as ‘reffos’. However, Magda’s kindness and generosity with young Lisa eventually makes her sophistication less intimidating to the other women.

Although St John was a brilliant student at Sydney University during the heady year of 1963 that produced Germaine Greer, Clive James, and Richard Walsh, it wasn’t until 30 years later, when St John was 52, that The Women in Black was published. She only produced three more novels, in quick succession, before her death from emphysema in 2006. St John’s latter novels all deal with romantic relationships, usually their disintegration, and have an element of claustrophobia about them in their intense scrutiny of what goes wrong, and why. Her intense, economical dialogue between couples in these novels is breathtaking.

While I appreciate the brilliance of all St John’s books, after reading them all in quick succession again recently, my favourite is still, undoubtedly, The Women in Black. The novel is greater in scope, more concerned with place and period, at a time when Australia was still far behind the rest of the world in sophistication and even women working at its most glamorous department store sometimes seem like country bumpkins. This delightfully engaging novel provides a fascinating glimpse into our recent social history and is deservedly a modern classic.

Angela Crocombe is the Children’s Book Buyer at Readings St Kilda, mother to a precocious two year-old, and the author of two books on sustainable living, A Lighter Footprint: A Practical Guide to Minimising your Impact on the Planet and Ethical Eating.

The Women in Black is out now in paperback ($12.95) and ebook ($9.70)

A book by Booki.sh

Book Club Evening: Chris Cleave's Gold

2012-05-14T00:00:00Z

Readings invites you to a very special book club on Chris Cleave's long-awaited third novel Gold.

Chris Cleave (author of the Costa-shortlisted The Other Hand and Incendiary) is back with with his third novel, Gold - a visceral, highly-charged tale about ambition, love and just what it can mean to win, and lose, the race of your life.

To celebrate, Readings is hosting a very special book club at our brand new upstairs events space at our Hawthorn shop (701 Glenferrie Road) on Thursday 14 June, from 6.30-7.30pm. The good news is that we're shouting nibbles and wine, and the even better news is that the book club is FREE for all.

Come along for a casual evening of drinks, good company and literary discussion and a chance to share your views with the publishers themselves. There'll also be a raffle with some wonderful book prizes on the night.

To book, please RSVP by Friday 18 May to Ingrid on ingrid.josephine@readings.com.au with your postal address, and we'll mail you our an exclusive advance copy of Gold to read before the discussion.

The Story of My Book: Nathan Farrugia on The Chimera Vector

2012-05-14T00:00:00Z

Nathan Farrugia guest blogs for us about the story of his new ebook, The Chimera Vector - a techno-thriller inspired by dystopian TV and the world of gaming.

If you told me ten years ago that I would write a shamelessly explosion laden thriller that teetered on science fiction and somehow hit number one on the Apple iBookstore SF charts, I would’ve laughed at you. And also wondered what the hell an iBookstore was. What is this sorcery?

The idea for The Chimera Vector – sort of inspired by the Dark Angel TV series and Half-Life video game – was born when mobile phones were bricks and Macs seemed to share the same product design as Fisher Price. With programmed covert operatives, helicopter battles and immortal psychopaths, I guess The Chimera Vector was an absurd debut for an Australian writer. A debut that was redrafted no less than ten times before eventually making its way into the hands of a literary agent, and then eventually making its way into the hands of a publisher. And rejected. Twice.

Most success stories include twenty, even fifty rejections. But I’m impatient so that didn’t happen. The epocalypse was upon us and self-publishing authors were cashing in with Comic Sans book covers and gleeful abandon. I wanted in. And in meant sacrificing The Chimera Vector to the hungry beast of the Amazon.

But first this required a natural talent of mine. Stalking. With a few years of Facebook under my belt, I was ready to stalk an editor through the long grasses of Twitter. Watching as my chosen prey (er, editor) grazed unsuspectingly in a nearby field, I had no idea he was soon to be the publisher of Pan Macmillan’s shiny new digital imprint, Momentum. In a strange turn of events the hunter had become the hunted. And before I knew it, I’d accidentally been published.

Cue ‘splosions?

The Chimera Vector is out now in ebook ($5.99)

A book by Booki.sh

Book Club Evening: Chris Cleave's Gold - Thursday 14 June 2012 at 6:30pm

2012-05-11T00:00:00Z

Thursday 14 June 2012 at 6:30pm

Readings Hawthorn: 701 Glenferrie Rd, Hawthorn, Victoria, 3122

To book, please RSVP by Friday 18 May to Ingrid on ingrid.josephine@readings.com.au with your postal address, and we'll mail you out an exclusive advance reading copy of Gold to read before the discussion.

Classical Music & Mum

2012-05-11T00:00:00Z

Our classical music specialist Kate Rockstrom shares her top picks for Mother's Day.

'Oh no! It's Mother's Day again! Oh bother, bother!' I hear you cry and, following that, the most common complaint: 'My mother is impossible to buy for!' I'm here to tell you that no matter who your mother is, or what she's like, there is something in the classical music world that she will love. Here's a few of my top picks of the new releases.

Ballet & Opera: Sometimes it's just nice to curl up on the couch and watch something spectacular. The Paris Opera Ballet have released a box set of four different productions, so you can watch an act and come back later or sit down and enjoy the full ballet. Meanwhile Opera Australia have released the ever favourite Lakme by Delibes. If you're not sure which opera that is, you'll know the music when you hear it.

Charles Ives, Violin Sonatas: Mum is a real classical music lover and attends lots of concerts of all sorts. Released in January of this year this recording of the Charles Ives Violin Sonatas by Hilary Hahn and Valentina Lisitsa is a must for any classical music fan. Contemporary but accessible, this is terrific for someone who might already have everything else.

Schubert Piano Quintet 'The Trout': For those who love a bit of classical music, but may not know much about it, the Schubert Quintet, nicknamed 'The Trout,' is a favourite and with Melbourne based Seraphim Trio on this recording, it's luscious and wonderful.

Voice of Emotion: Montserrat Figueras was one of the most beloved singers of the past 43 years. Sadly passing away late last year, this release celebrates her life and voice. 35 years of recording is distilled into 35 tracks of extraordinary power. If you know Mum likes a bit of singing, you'll impress her with this recording.

Documentaries: Love a bit of a documentary and delving into the psyche of a musician? Then these two DVDs will definitely suit. Jane Rutter is a well known Australian flautist who, interspersed with French music, narrates about her time in Paris. Meanwhile the 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould is structured around the Bach Goldberg Variations, his most famous recording. A genius, sometimes thought insane, musically brilliant and a perfectionist, this looks at his life and work.

Shower Songs: If Mum likes to have a bit of a sing-a-long in the car or at home with well known tunes then this is a terrific CD. Full of popular songs chosen by ABC presenter Emma Ayres, both new and old, you can't go wrong with this little gem.

I've got a few others that have come out recently that are equally as fabulous so take a look at the classical music homepage for all the new releases.

Kate Rockstrom is a Classical Specialist at Readings Carlton. She regularly performs as a flautist as well as writing about music and books, follow her at www.stonestream.net.

Drusilla Modjeska talks to Geordie Williamson about The Mountain

2012-05-11T00:00:00Z

Drusilla Modjeska (author of Poppy, The Orchard and the award-winning Stravinsky’s Lunch) chats to Geordie Williamson about her first foray into fiction, The Mountain.

In 1929, French writer and poet Andre Breton produced a map of the world, one that bore scant resemblance to Mercator’s projections. What Breton’s deeply subjective cartography registered instead was his fellow surrealists’ passions and prejudices. Accordingly, America was a speck, Russia and China loomed large, and the Pacific Ocean dwarfed all other seas. Strangest and most startling, though, was the country that occupied the heart of this map: the Melanesian island nation of Papua New Guinea.

That this map should be reproduced part-way through Drusilla Modjeska’s unsettling and often gravely beautiful first novel, The Mountain, should alert us both to Modjeska’s broad and idiosyncratic learning (the fetishisation by the Surrealists of Oceania is just one of countless fascinating asides) and to the ways in which the author has, throughout her distinguished career as a memoirist and scholar, tried to read the Antipodean experience through a wider, more cosmopolitan lens than our society at large.

But there is a simpler reason for its presence. The Mountain is an engrossing and necessarily encyclopedic effort to give a central place to a country that is so often marginal to our collective attention. The novel’s achievement is to remind us that the peoples and places of Papua New Guinea, who seem so distant from us and who have for so long been subject to our domestic political agendas, have their own ways of being in the world – their own Weltanschauung, or what the locals would call ‘pathways’. In The Mountain Modjeska recreates societies with complex structures of knowledge and feeling, rich in indigenous wisdom. But she also describes a place grappling with drearily common postcolonial tensions: between clan and citizen, coast and highlands, tradition and modernity.

There are few as well-equipped as Modjeska to undertake this difficult task. From her 1979 thesis on Australian women writers to 1990’s Poppy, a quasi-fictional memoir of her mother, and on to the essays on painters Grace Cossington Smith and Stella Bowen that made up 2001’s Stravinsky’s Lunch, Modjeska has made a career out of testing the boundaries between history and theory, biography and the fictive. This new work may be labelled as fiction, yet it too emerges from lived experience.

For, as the author explained to me in a series of emails, she – like Rika, the Dutch heroine of The Mountain – arrived in Papua New Guinea in the years before independence from Australia as the wife of an anthropologist. It was an early experience that goes some way to explaining the fidelity the novel shows to people and landscape in PNG; to its eye for the minutiae of daily life during the pre and post-independence era; and to its subtle appreciation of how Western notions of what is sensible or right might be enlarged by the otherness it encounters.

The Mountain, then, is a bildungsroman in the Western sense – the description of the passage from innocence into knowledge – but one whose drama emerges from a clash of often incommensurate worldviews. Rika arrives in PNG as an innocent, idealistic young bride of an older, Welsh-born academic named Leonard. His ethnographic research takes him to the mountain of the title, a remote region of the highlands whose isolation makes it anthropologically fascinating. There he sets out to film a society unsullied by Western influence.

But, as is so often the case, the presence of the outsider changes things in unexpected ways. Rika has delayed her trip to join Leonard because she has met and fallen in love with Aaron, a handsome and brilliant young local academic who has recently returned from study overseas to teach in Port Moresby. Leonard’s response to their betrayal will tie all their lives to this special place in the decades to come. It is an intriguing back-story, and it lays the groundwork for a narrative of greater range and emotional power than would a strict non-fiction account. Yet Modjeska insists that the decision to turn to fiction was difficult and hard won. Several early drafts were thrown out and first person-perspective was abandoned in favour of an over the shoulder third-person narration:

'Looking back, I think I was always a kind of novelist in hiding and I rather wish I’d learned the art of fiction after Poppy. I guess the reasons I didn’t are complex – to do with having one foot in the university system, probably psychological reasons going back to childhood when I’d get into trouble for my ‘stories’ (my mother called them my embroidery!) and also a deep vein of interest in history which also goes right back to early days of school.'

Just as tough to resolve was the question of relations between history and invented experience, since Modjeska’s academic background had in the past placed her on the other side of the divide. The challenge, she says, ‘was learning to trust the characters as the foundation of the novel and let the history speak through them’. It is a measure of her success that the huge amounts of information contained in The Mountain – from the early years of independence to Highland bark-cloth design, traditional land ownership and forest exploitation – are allowed to unfold through characters’ individual experience rather than editorials embedded in the text.

The question all of this information raises is more personal: to what degree has the author’s life informed The Mountain? While Modjeska is at pains to explain that the novel is not autobiographical, she readily admits how deeply it has been informed by her time in Papua New Guinea (she did go into the field with her then husband, and completed a year at university in Port Moresby before moving to Australia in the early 1970s), by her return trips, and by her wide reading of history, poetry, fiction and anthropology by locals and outsiders. More recently, Modjeska’s efforts to establish small-scale education and arts-based projects in two villages has renewed her ties to PNG:

'I like Hilary Mantel’s phrase "informed imagination" and that’s how I think of it, and what I hope I have come some way towards achieving. So yes, the "history", the background against which the lives and loves of the characters take shape is ‘informed’ and I hope will be recognisable to others who have lived through those extraordinary years, but it is as much an exercise in "imagination"… For instance, while Rika and Aaron are fully imagined characters, the conflicting pressures on them – political, emotional, cultural – are informed by what I have seen, and known (in others) and read.'

When I make tentative mention of one of the few Australian novels of Papua New Guinea that I know of, Randolph Stow’s Visitants, Modjeska’s response is enthusiastic – it is ‘the great PNG novel by an Australian. A fine, fine novel, which does something no one else from the outside has done ‘ – but she then goes on speak of the achievements of local writers, such as Russell Soaba and Vincent Eri, in terms so warm and familiar that I am ashamed to have never heard of them. Nor have I heard of anthropologists like Marilyn Strathern, who Modjeska admires for her critiques of those who would apply Western notions of subjectivity – of the self and its constructions – to non-Western subjects.

Modjeska’s acknowledgement of these local voices and these criticisms might lead some to wonder at the rightness of an outsider presuming to narrate the experience of a world so removed from the author’s own. But The Mountain’s success – its nuanced description of the confusions and ambiguities that attend characters who are neither black nor white, neither wholly of the traditional past or the globalised present – mitigates against these political complaints.

For all the difference the novel describes, its substance recalls those old Enlightenment principles espoused by Rika’s forbears: Europeans who, in the great Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski’s words, ‘tried to build bridges of understanding with Others’. ‘Referring to these efforts, and carrying on with them,’ concluded the Pole, ‘is not just an ethical duty but also an urgent task for a time in a world where everything is so fragile and where there is so much demagogy, distortion, fanaticism and bad will.’

Geordie Williamson is chief literary critic of the Australian.

The Mountain is out now in paperback ($27.95) and ebook ($14.44)

A book by Booki.sh

British Flute Concertos

2012-05-10T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Kate Rockstrom

Emily Beynon is stunning flautist who is Principal Flute of the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. Originally from Wales, she returns to England to perform work with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. It's a beautiful set of works celebrating the compositions and musicianship of the British Isles. Although many of the works were not originally written for flute and orchestra, the transcriptions are seamless with the flute part.

Massenet: Werther

2012-05-10T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Kate Rockstrom

The opera Werther is a tale of love, loss and family. Opera superstar Rolando Villazon takes the role of Werther in this new recording from Deutsche Grammophon. With Antonio Pappano conducting the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House it's a production that will tug at your heartstrings. I adore the lush orchestrations that complement Villazon's voice.

Q&A with David Vann, author of Dirt

2012-05-10T00:00:00Z

Jason Austin of Readings Carlton chats to David Vann about his latest novel.

Your first two novels – Legend of a Suicide and Caribou Island – are set in Alaska and your new novel, Dirt, is set in the Sacramento region of California. How do you find that you are able to evoke such a strong sense of place in your writing?

My family hunted on the same ranch every year, and as we walked through each part of that landscape, my father and uncle and grandfather told the stories of what had happened and who had been there. Our entire family history was bound to place. I went out country with an Arrernte man and his ritual caretakers near Alice Springs and saw even stronger ties to story and land. Singing up the land really means that the story doesn’t exist without the place and the place doesn’t exist without the story. I love that.

I grew up in Alaska and then California, and all my books are set in landscapes that are very important to me. I don’t outline or plan my books, and I don’t know what will happen each day in the writing. What I focus on is only the landscape and a problem in the character. The collision of these two generates the story, mostly because landscape is a kind of blank page for the unconscious, without any meaning of its own. As I describe the rainforest in Alaska or dry furrows in a walnut orchard in California, the place shifts and becomes strange and starts to speak about the inside life of the characters. This is what I love about writing, the unconscious pattern and transformation.

In Dirt, your main character, Galen, is a devout follower of the New Age movement, to his own detriment. How did you get into the mind of someone who is truly obsessed with the concepts involved in that culture and lifestyle?

I was a true believer myself. In high school, in the early 1980’s, I firewalked and meditated and even tried many times to walk on water. I crashed into various mountain lakes and hot tubs believing that maybe this time my feet would hold.

The main dynamic in all of your novels is between parent and child. Is there something about this relationship which draws you to write about it?

I write tragedy, going back to the Greeks 2500 years ago, and tragedy almost always focuses on a primary relationship, such as father and son (in my book Legend of a Suicide), a marriage (Caribou Island), mother and son (Dirt), etc. This pair of people love each other and want the best for each other but also destroy each other because of inherent flaws in who they are. The tragedy puts them under pressure in a short period of time until they break and are revealed and we, the readers, test ourselves against them and think about our goodness and especially our badness.

Legend of a Suicide and Caribou Island are both based on your own family stories. Other than borrowing Galen’s name from a friend, are there any other similarities or semi-autobiographical elements in Dirt?

As I mentioned above, I was a true believer in the New Age, and it was a wonderful way to live. The entire world was about me, and I was at the centre. It’s been a bummer to lose that and live an inconsequential life since. There are also family stories in the background, but I’m already in trouble with my mother enough, so I shouldn’t go into any detail about that, except to say that my grandfather was abusive to my grandmother. I don’t think abusers should ever be protected, so I feel fine mentioning that. Everything that happens in my books is fiction, but powered by the emotions and psychological of true stories in the background that have been disturbing to me for decades.

Whose writing do you admire and who do you think young writers should be reading these days?

I was very happy to have the chance to discuss Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian on First Tuesday Book Club, and he’s my biggest influence. Next would be Annie Proulx, Marilynne Robinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Flannery O’Connor. Then Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I’m not as influenced by recent works. Currently I’m reading Beowulf in the original Old English every day, our language from a thousand years ago, and also rereading Greek tragedies.

What are you working on next?

I’ve finished the next novel, titled Goat Mountain. When we hunted each fall, we’d sometimes see poachers on our land, and my father would let me look at them through the scope of his .300 magnum bear rifle, with a shell in the chamber. In the opening chapter of Goat Mountain, the boy pulls the trigger, and that causes some problems. It’s a hot and hellish California mountainside, a weekend of hunting gone wrong, and it ended up featuring the holy trinity, oddly, something I never expected. I’m always surprised to find out what my books are about. I certainly never could have imagined the ending of Dirt.

Jason Austin is a buyer and bookseller at Readings Carlton. An avid painter, Scrabble player and reader, he enjoys long walks with nothing but the company of an iPod full of podcasts.

Dirt is out now in paperback ($29.95) and ebook ($19.76)

A book by Booki.sh