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John Barbirolli: The Great EMI Recordings

2010-03-22T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Catherine Koerner, Readings Hawthorn

This 10 CD set includes many of John Barbirolli’s favourite works. It features the lesser known recording of Elgar’s Cello Concerto with cellist Andre Navarra. Often overshadowed by Barbirolli’s better known recording with Du Pre, it is of equal excellence and deserving of a wider appreciation.

Paul Tortelier: The Great EMI Recordings

2010-03-22T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Catherine Koerner, Readings Hawthorn

This 20 CD set includes Tortelier’s wonderful interpretation of J.S. Bach’s Cello Suites; The Dvorak, Elgar, Saint Saens, Shostakovich, Vivaldi and Haydn Cello Concertos; The Brahms and Rachmaninov Cello Sonatas, among others. Plus chamber music and much more.

Lisa Mitchell wins the 2009 AMP Award

2010-03-22T00:00:00Z

Carlton-based singer Lisa Mitchell won the fifth AMP (Australian Music Prize) award and $30,000 on Friday March 12 for her debut album Wonder. She beat out the eight other finalists (Lucie Thorne, Sarah Blasko, Kid Sam, Black Cab, Urthboy, the Mess Hall, Bertie Blackman, Oh Mercy) in a (at times) tensely fought decision.

Dave Clarke (Readings Music Manager) was one of the 27 judges made up from music retailers, musicians and music journalists who spent their Friday morning debating the merits good or otherwise of the Top 9. "Whilst my personal favourite didn't win, I was very pleased to be involved and found those who had Lisa as their number 1 pick were very passionate supporters and made me want to listen to her album, Wonder more closely. Something we hope happens for all of the finalists, as there are some fine albums by artists who mostly don't enjoy huge followings.

"There had been over 200 entries in what has quickly become Australia's premier contemporary music award. Another Melbourne based band Oh Mercy won the $15,000 Red Bull award for outstanding potential. It was a thoroughly enjoyable process to be a part of, although at times it felt like i was part of a political party branch meeting. Let's hope we get another great bunch of albums in 2010 to judge."

Bestselling Books: March 15-21 2010

2010-03-22T00:00:00Z

Ian McEwan's new novel Solar only came out last Thursday, but it quickly sold enough to propel it to the top the our bestsellers list. Lee Child's 61 Hours is the first big crime/thriller book of 2010 and quickly rose up the bestselling list too.

In non-fiction, Waleed Aly's (above) Quarterly Essay is finally out and selling well. His apperance on ABC TV's Q&A last Monday no doubt helped sales along too.

Top 10 Fiction

Solar — Ian McEwan
61 Hours — Lee Child
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo — Stieg Larsson
Alone In Berlin — Hans Fallada
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest — Stieg Larsson
The Piper's Son — Melina Marchetta
The Girl Who Played With Fire — Stieg Larsson
Mr Rosenblum's List — Natasha Solomons
Lovesong — Alex Miller
The Elegance Of The Hedgehog — Muriel Barbery

Top 10 Non-Fiction

Quarterly Essay 37: On The Future Of Conservatism: Where The Right Went Wrong — Waleed Aly
Requiem For A Species: Why We Resist The Truth About Climate Change — Clive Hamilton
The Age Cheap Eats 2010
Shane Howard Lyrics — Shane Howard
The Good Soldiers — David Finkel
Eat Pray Love: One Womans Search For Everything — Elizabeth Gilbert
Childhood Brain and Spinal Cord Tumours: A Guide For Families And Caregivers — Tania Shiminski-Maher, Patsy McGuire Cullen, Maria Sansalone
On Passion: Little Books On Big Themes — Dorothy Porter
Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage — Elizabeth Gilbert
Abla's Lebanese Kitchen — Abla Amad

Barbara Jefferis Award 2010

2010-03-19T00:00:00Z

Brisbane writer Kristina Olsson has won the 2010 Barbara Jefferis Award for her novel The China Garden which was published in March last year by University of Queensland Press.

The $35,000 award is awarded annually by the Australian Society of Authors for "the best novel written by an Australian author that depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society".

Here are the award's shortlised and highly commended books for 2010:

Shortlisted

The Lost Life by Steven Carroll (HarperCollins)
Swimming by Enza Gandolfo (Vanark Press)
The World Beneath by Cate Kennedy (Scribe)
Headlong by Susan Varga (UWA Publishing

Highly Commended

A True History of the Hula Hoop by Judith Lanigan (Picador)
Pink by Lili Wilkinson (Allen & Unwin)

Free recipe for Chocolate Self-Saucing Pudding from The Real Food Companion

2010-03-18T00:00:00Z

Thanks to Murdoch Books here's the recipe for Chocolate Self-Saucing Pudding as found within the new Matthew Evans cookbook The Real Food Companion.

As you can see below, it looks completely scrumptious. Enjoy!

The 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction longlist announced

2010-03-17T00:00:00Z

The 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction longlist has just been announced. The Orange Prize recognises the writing of female authors as it 'is awarded to the woman who, in the opinion of the judges, has written the best, eligible full-length novel in English'. Here is the 2010 longlist:

The Very Thought of You by Rosie Alison (out in Australia next month)
The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton
Savage Lands by Clare Clark (out in Australia in May)
Hearts and Minds by Amanda Craig
The Way Things Look to Me by Roopa Farooki
The Twisted Heart by Rebecca Gowers
This is How by M.J. Hyland
Small Wars by Sadie Jones
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
Secret Son by Laila Lalami
The Long Song by Andrea Levy
Black Water Rising by Attica Locke
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
The Wilding by Maria McCann (out in Australia next month)
Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed (out in Australia next month)
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey
The Still Point by Amy Sackville (out in Australia next month)
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

The shortlist will be announced on April 20, with the eventual winner to be revealed on June 9 2010.

2010 Miles Franklin longlist announced

2010-03-17T00:00:00Z

The longlist of books in contention for this year's Miles Franklin Literary Award has just been announced. The Miles Franklin is Australia's most prestigious literary award and 'is awarded for the novel of the year which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases'.

Lovesong by Alex Miller (Allen & Unwin)
Read our interview with Alex Miller about Lovesong.
The Bath Fugues by Brian Castro (Giramondo Publishing)
Read our interview with Brian Castro about The Bath Fugues.
Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey (Allen & Unwin)
Read our interview with Craig Silvey about Jasper Jones.
Sons of the Rumour by David Foster (Picador)
The Book of Emmett by Deborah Forster (Vintage)
Read our interview with Deborah Forster about The Book of Emmett.
Siddon Rock by Glenda Guest (Vintage)
Boy on a Wire by Jon Doust (Fremantle Press)
Figurehead by Patrick Allington (Black Inc.)
Read our interview with Patrick Allington about Figurehead.
Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey (Hamish Hamilton)
Truth by Peter Temple (Text Publishing)
Butterfly by Sonya Hartnett (Penguin)
Read our interview with Sonya Hartnett about Butterfly.
The People's Train by Thomas Keneally (Knopf)

Congratulations to all the longlisted authors, and the editors and publishers involved with each book. The shortlist will be announced next month, with the winner being announced on 22 June 2010.

Bulb, Shrub, Shale, Love and Alchemy

2010-03-17T00:00:00Z

My favourite words of the moment are:

Bulb.

Shrub.

Shale.

Love.

and

Alchemy.

Words that sound the most whole, feel the most rounded and give flight to the most expectant of expectations as they come out of our mouths. Words that are onomatopoeic in their creation. They feel, mean and sound as full of their truth, their measure, as full of themselves, as they are so terribly, so beautifully, ordinary in our day-to-day conversations.

So, a book called Bulb will be promising and beautiful, with soft, rounded, tulip-y delights on every page. A book simply titled The Rose, written by THE rose-man, David Austin, has to be absolutely all about roses, and beautiful, so beautiful I'm sure there is a 'scratch and sniff' element in the binding. The Life and Love of Trees similarly, is quite absolutely definitive of our intimate connectedness to trees - even if we don't realise, understand or can't imagine it. From the boreal forest at the edge of the Arctic to rainforests girdling the planet; from giant, unseen, underground life forms to the possibility of life-saving unknown treasures in the high canopies - our life, our need, our love, of trees.

Sissinghurst sounds a little too sharp and sibilant for it's subject matter, one of the oldest estate gardens in England re-designed by the fanciful Vita Sackville-West and now written up as a fascinating history by her grandson, Adam Nicolson, but the story is a joy, a laugh, and an inspiration for the gardening dreamers amongst us. And similarly, Garden of a Lifetime: Dame Elisabeth Murdoch at Cruden Farm is a wonderfully produced history of her garden, with sections originally mapped out by Edna Walling, and followed through over 80 years, by the Dame herself.

But why the words 'shale', 'shrub', 'love' and 'alchemy'? Because of a number of things, but also because of the exquisite and heartbreaking book by Derek Jarman, Derek Jarman's Garden which was the last book he ever published. In it he documents his shingle and shale, lost-and-found garden created in Dungeness on the coast of Kent in England, overlooked by a nuclear power station. His little wooden shack and garden drawn with driftwood were (are) desolate, yes, but this artist, this extraordinary visionary, could find beauty, belonging, purpose and love in places we wouldn't even notice. To hold this book, to think about a life, a rose, a tree, a shrub and love. That is magic, there. True magic.

Abla Amad

2010-03-16T00:00:00Z

Abla Amad, interviewed by Joe Rubbo, Readings State Library of Victoria Manager

On the eve of the publication of her new cookbook, Abla’s Lebanese Kitchen, legendary Carlton restaurateur Abla Amad took the time to chat with Readings’ resident foodie, Joe Rubbo, about her approach to cooking, the history of her restaurant, Abla's, and her new book.

I arrive at Abla’s late on a Friday afternoon. In the dining room, a few tables of diners still linger over coffee and Lebanese sweets. If you haven’t yet dined at this landmark Melbourne restaurant, then I suggest you do. By coincidence, I was here the night before and enjoyed a terrific meal that was entirely consistent with my memory of the last time I ate here. As a customer once told the restaurant’s owner, Abla Amad: ‘Every time I come here the experience is as good as the last, if not better. Abla, I never want you to change.’ It’s true. I don’t, either. I met Abla that night, too – she still does the rounds of the tables to thank diners for coming – and told her I’d be there the next day to interview her. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I knew someone was coming and I’m not so nervous now.’

In 1979, Abla’s late husband, John Amad, helped her secure the current restaurant location on Elgin Street and, encouraged by supporters and admirers of her cooking, Abla opened the doors. It’s still going strong. Thirty years in business is an amazing achievement in this notoriously fickle industry: a testament to Abla’s skill in the kitchen, which she attributes to her husband’s passion for eating.

She still runs the kitchen, keeping watch over all the food preparation and service with an inscrutable eye for detail. When she emerges from the kitchen, she tells me they are busy preparing for the night’s dinner service: they are fully booked, upstairs and down.

She’s found the time to write a new book too, an updated version of her last, The Lebanese Kitchen. There are many new recipes in this handsome volume. Before we can discuss the book, Abla excuses herself to show it to two regular customers dining by the front window. They want to buy the copy I’ve brought with me – then and there. She has a faithful following, built over many years. In the introduction to her book Abla writes, ‘many beautiful customers have been coming to my place for a long, long time – some of them for twenty or thirty years – and now their children and grandchildren are coming along too’.

Abla came to Australia as a teenager in 1959. It was meant to be a holiday, but luckily for us, she stayed. When she first moved here, she lived with her uncle in Elgin Street, a few doors down from the restaurant. ‘He was a bachelor,’ Abla says, ‘and a good cook. I used to watch everything he did.’

Surprisingly, Abla learnt about Lebanese cooking here in Australia – from her uncle and from a group of older Lebanese women who gathered together to prepare meals for family and friends on weekend afternoons. Abla, out of respect and admiration, refers to these women as her aunties. She used to watch them and help prepare the traditional Lebanese dishes she still cooks today. Her education in cooking for loved ones translates into the generosity of spirit felt in the restaurant today.

She sees The Lebanese Kitchen as a way to pass on her knowledge of traditional Lebanese food preparation, telling me that ‘many young people, the new generation of Lebanese Australians, love the book’.

What’s not to love? It is full of great recipes, adaptable to many different occasions. I like the idea of making the Okra in olive oil with Lebanese rice as a simple mid-week meal. There are also great recipes for mezza – dips, pickles, silverbeet rolls – that are perfect to take to a picnic, or the baked quails for a dinner party.

For Abla, all these dishes recall memories. She remembers charring eggplants for her mother to make a smoky baba ghannooj, eating salads her mother prepared after collecting the silk from silkworms, or cooking garfish for her husband and his friends here in Carlton. These recipes are laced with stories and history: this book is a concise catalogue of an incredible woman’s life’s work.

In approaching these recipes, Abla emphasises patience, cleanliness, and that you show care in what you’re doing. ‘It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, you have to have your heart in it, whatever you do. If you force yourself to do something it never works. But I never, never once forced myself to cook.’

I asked Abla if she herself has ever used a cookbook. The answer was simple: ‘no, never.’ And why would she? But, for the rest of us, we could do a lot worse than having a copy of Abla’s Lebanese Kitchen on our bookshelves.

Joel Deane

2010-03-16T00:00:00Z

Joel Deane, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

Joel Deane is well known in literary circles as a poet: his collection Magisterium was shortlisted for the prestigious Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2009. He has also been a journalist and a political speechwriter (for Steve Bracks, then John Brumby). Jo Case spoke to him for Readings about his eagerly anticipated, utterly engrossing debut novel, The Norseman’s Song.

This is a wildly original novel – combining the confession of a nineteenth-century whaler with those of an ex-con taxi driver and a dying former journo in contemporary Melbourne, all of their lives steeped in violence. Where did your inspiration come from?

The genesis of The Norseman’s Song comes from a shred of family history and a meeting I had when I was 15 years old. The history is that one of my forebears was a Norwegian seaman who jumped ship in Melbourne in the nineteenth century.

The meeting was with a 95-year-old relative. This old man was the size of a redwood, walked like Frankenstein, had fire in his eyes, ranted about the decline of morals, yet had, I knew, fathered at least one child out of wedlock. I loved how cranky and contradictory that rellie was and decided to write an imagined history about a Norwegian with that old man as the physical template.

At the time, I was 15 and knew I didn’t have the chops or the depth of experience needed to write that book. That’s why I started working as a copyboy in a tabloid newspaper when I was 17 – to season myself. Along the way I held onto what became a 20-year-long daydream about the Norseman – influenced by my experiences as a newspaper journalist and the taxi-driving stories of my father and grandfather. Other stories and experiences fed into that daydream, such as the one about a Turkish soldier’s head that was found in Echuca decades after it was souvenired by an ANZAC. Or the one about the exorcist I once knew who stood trial for the accidental killing of a woman. There are too many to list.

By the time I sat down to write the first draft of The Norseman’s Song that daydream was closer to a nightmare – and it was a nightmare I’d never told anyone about. Maybe that’s why the first draft came out in 33 days straight. Telling aloud for the first time a story that had been internalised for so long was an incredible rush – it’s the closest I’ve come to an out-of-body experience.

The novel has an intimate yarn-spinning quality that draws the reader in – like (the very different) Shantaram, it’s a fabulous work of storytelling. Were you influenced by other ‘yarn-spinning’ works of literature, or by oral traditions of storytelling? What made you decide to tell your story in this way?

Bruce Springsteen once said that he wanted his breakthrough album, Born to Run, to explode in people’s stereos. When I was writing The Norseman’s Song I was fired by a similar ambition: I wanted it to go off like a hand grenade. I wanted it to be a fable like no other. I wanted it to tell a story about men and violence and the lies we tell to rationalise our lives, our beliefs and our histories. I wanted it to be bristling with voices and stories. I wanted it to drag people along for the ride whether they wanted to go or not. The best way to achieve all that was to tell a great story.

My influences were too numerous to list. The ones that particularly inspired me, though, were The Icelandic Sagas, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and, of course, Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness.

Another influence dated back to my days as a journalist. I was struck my the way people talk about incidents – the way they talk around events and come back to them, as well as their verbal ticks. I wanted to write like people think and talk.

This is your first novel, but you’ve also written journalism and – most notably – poetry (which is evident in your prose, particularly your imagery). Do you think your experience in these other forms influenced the way you approached writing a novel?

Definitely. Writing a novel is very different to writing a poem. You need the feel for language as music, which I developed through poetry, to make a novel fly creatively, but you also have a story to tell and, if you want to tell that story, you need the grunt to climb a mountain of 70,000 words – or more.

Poetry is the impetus of all my creative writing, but my fiction is equally reliant on the muscles I’ve developed through years as a reporter, editor, producer and speechwriter. In other words, I know what’s required, physically, to write 10,000 words a week.

The other thing I’ve learned through poetry and speechwriting is that writing is performance. To perform properly, you need to train by reading widely, you need to practice by writing constantly, and you need to improve by revising and editing ruthlessly.

There’s a lot in this novel that is confronting – your contemporary characters are racist and misogynist, shockingly so at times. Were you using these characteristics to comment on our society, or were these merely characteristics you thought these types of characters would have?

I didn’t setting out to write archetypes or deliver a message. What I was trying to do was understand some of the forces that make our nation what it is, for better and for worse. I’m talking about violence, I’m talking about mateship, I’m talking about racism. I wanted to write about an underbelly of contemporary Melbourne through the taxi driver, Farrell. I also wanted to go back to the limits of lived or oral history through the old journo, Bob, as well as inventing a mythic history through the Norwegian.

The only rule I set myself during the writing was to not flinch from the ugly stuff. I loath boutique fiction – the kind of books that are more about the novelist wanting to be loved than trying to tell a story that’s never been told before. I’d like to see more novels be true to the meaning of the word ‘novel’.

The taxi driver and his passenger, ‘Bob’, take us on a meandering night-time tour of Melbourne’s suburbs (Doncaster’s ‘houses too polite to tell apart’, Footscray flats, the oft-disparaged ‘Lego-land’ of Caroline Springs). What was the idea behind this tour of Melbourne and surrounds?

The idea behind the tour of Melbourne is that Bob and Farrell’s taxi ride is an odyssey. At the beginning, they’re both lost: Bob is searching for a way to end, Farrell for a way to begin again. The places they go and the people they meet along the way are part of that odyssey. You could say it’s an odyssey of Melbourne’s modern and mythic history. As for Doncaster, I live there and couldn’t resist giving my suburb a walk-on role.

Both ‘Bob’ and the Norseman of the title observe the intimacy of killing (the Norseman says ‘it binds the killer to the killed as surely as consummation binds the groom to the bride’). How integral is this idea to the book?

I’m the kind of person who can’t sit through violent movies – once I made it out to the foyer of a cinema before I fainted. Why, then, have I written a novel that, at its heart, is all about violence – not just acts of violence, but the reverberation of those acts? Hard to say. All I know is that violence both distresses and obsesses me. I guess I’m trying to understand why we do the terrible things we do.

The Woman in Black: Madeleine St John

2010-03-16T00:00:00Z

Toni Jordan tells why Madeleine St John's delicious novels of manners are Australian classics.

Madeleine St John was, until recently, one of those Australian writers more recognised overseas than in her home country. (She was shortlisted for the Booker in 1997, yet few Australians knew her name before last year.) Text Publishing is in the process of resurrecting this remarkably fine, utterly seductive writer, re-releasing her novels in handsome new editions, with endorsements from everyone from Helen Garner to Michelle De Kretser. The Women in Black came first, followed by The Essence of the Thing – and now, this month, A Stairway to Paradise. Toni Jordan looks back over St John’s inviting oeuvre and tries to locate just what it is that makes her books bona fide Australian classics.

I would like to invite Madeleine St John to tea. Or better yet, cocktails. After reading the three of her novels reissued by Text over the past year – The Women in Black, The Essence of the Thing, and A Stairway to Paradise – I feel I know her.

We would meet in a dimly lit bar filled with worn leather couches. She would know the bartender by name. I can see her wearing a simple black shift, something by Gucci or Chanel. She would smoke, possibly balancing a thin ivory cigarette holder between her manicured fingers. She would drink martinis without ever becoming tipsy. She might wear gloves. She would be like the voice of her books: witty and cutting, insightful but ultimately compassionate.

‘Melbourne,’ she might say, tossing her head, ‘is a sad town, not, by the way, a city as they choose to pretend, not that they can know the difference. Sydney at any rate is undoubtedly a city, whereas Melbourne – well, there are of course some serious paintings in the Gallery, but nothing whatsoever more that pertains to a city; except of course for the cake.’

You see the difficulty? With St John, it is tempting to make the classic reader’s mistake: confusing the author with the characters in a book. Of course, she never said this line about Melbourne and especially never said it to me. I never met her and I don’t know if she’d ever been here. I have stolen this from a character in her first book, the glorious The Women in Black. But it sounds like something she might have said.

One of St John’s great literary gifts is dialogue, and every line in each of her books sounds like something that a real person might have said. Authenticity, though, is not the same as entertainment, and St John’s characters are as enthralling as they are true. The Women in Black is set in Sydney in 1960, in the ‘Ladies’ Cocktail Frock’ department of a thinly-disguised David Jones.

Australia is on the cusp of many revolutions: multicultural and sexual, as well as the breakdown of class structures. For some of her characters, the 1950s are hard to leave behind. Miss Baines, speaking about her supervisor: ‘It’s that Miss Cartright who’s a pain in the neck, excuse my French.’

And when Lisa, the teenage temp who’s just finished ‘the Leaving’, asks her mother if she can go to university, she asks her father.

‘No daughter of mine is going anywhere near that cesspit,’ said he, ‘and that’s final.’

I had forgotten that people spoke that way, but they really did.

For European immigrants Magda and Stefan, the world is a bigger place than Sydney, and ‘French’ doesn’t mean ‘pain in the neck’. Stefan is in bed, ‘reading a page of Nietzsche, as was his wont last thing at night’, while Magda was straightening the living room.

‘There is no law in this country,’ said Magda, ‘against men helping their wives to clear up the mess, is there?’
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Stefan, ‘I think there is.’

St John’s next two books are set in London, her home from the late 1960s. The Essence of the Thing, her masterpiece of manners that was shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize, is particularly rich in these genuine conversations that mix humour with sadness and the familiarity of people who know each other well. When Nicola’s long-time boyfriend, Jonathon, dumps her with no warning, she feels she has ‘died and gone to hell’. It takes her friends some time to realise that Nicola’s perfect relationship has come to an end. Geoffrey says:

‘Not her. That chic little Notting Hill set-up with the deluxe plumbing and the stuffed shirt laying down old claret. No way.’

At first Nicola is struck dumb with grief and shock, but eventually her spirit rises up: when Jonathon says he has no explanation for his decision, she says, ‘If you truly haven’t then I’m well rid of you, because in that case, it looks as if you’ve had a brain transplant, and I hope it didn’t cost much because if it did then you’ve been ripped off. I should see the Trading Standards Officer if I were you.’

Just like in real life, after this spurt of courage Nicola’s resolve falters and she backslides. After Jonathon asks her to leave the flat they own together she moves in with a friend, but she can’t stop thinking about him.

‘I hadn’t done a proper shop for ages,’ Nicola says. ‘There can’t be a scrap of food in the house.’

Her friend Susannah says, ‘You should worry.’ But, just like a real person, Nicola does. And she keeps ironing his shirts. Her friends despair of her.

‘You’re incorrigible,’ said Lizzie. ‘A hopeless case. Wherever did you come from? A nineteeth-century orphanage?’

Nicola’s father has his own advice to give about the straight-laced love rat, Jonathon.

‘He was well camouflaged,’ said Michael. ‘One has a ridiculous prejudice in favour of people wearing traditional costume. Better try one of these chaps with spiky hair and black boots next time around, he might take proper care of you.’
Nicola began to laugh and then to cry again.

A Stairway to Paradise, the latest St John book re-released, is again rich in her trademark dialogue, at once subtle and revealing. Barbara, an aimless young woman working as a nanny, has moved in to Claire and Alex Maclise’s house to care for their two children while Claire is away on a business trip. A lesser novelist would spend pages waxing lyrical about Barbara’s growing attraction to Alex, with whom she is destined to have an affair. St John does it in four lines of dialogue: Barbara talking to the housekeeper.

‘If you could find the time to iron Mr Rochester’s shirts,’ she said to Mrs Brick, ‘it would be such a help.’
‘Mr Rochester?’ said Mrs Brick.
‘Oh, God,’ said Barbara. ‘I must be dreaming. Sorry. I mean Mr Maclise of course. Goodness!’
‘It’s those kiddies addling your brain,’ said Mrs Brick. ‘Kiddies do that to you. You wait until you have your own. Mr Rochester’s the least of it.’

The ‘kiddies’ in this book are wonderfully drawn, funny little people. I can almost feel St John laughing as she wrote them: ‘Nothing so thin, so pale, so stick-like as a little boy. He seemed to be made of wire, his cranium full of tiny wheels and rods all turning, endlessly turning, producing their endless stream of speculations and conclusions, notes and queries’. Fergus, the ‘fiend in human form’ who distracts Barbara from her troubles, is delightful and energetic.

‘What would I do without you, Fergus?’ said Barbara.
‘You’d be in really bad trouble,’ said he.

There’s also a sense of playfulness in the linkages between the books. I loved discovering that Mrs Brick is the housekeeper in both of the London novels. In The Essence of the Thing, Jonathon faces a long drive from his parents’ house, so he listens to a ‘bootlegged talking book ... some footling tale about some shop assistants in an antipodean department store, fretting about their wombs and their wardrobes and other empty spaces – ye gods!’ There are others, but I won’t spoil them for you.

Perhaps St John’s pitch-perfect ear was tuned at Sydney University where she studied English and graduated in 1963, part of that astonishing year that produced Germaine Greer, Clive James, Les Murray, Robert Hughes, John Bell and Bruce Beresford. Her dialogue seems perfect for the screen and Beresford, her literary executor, has announced he will soon direct the film version of The Women in Black, to be called Get it at Goode’s, starring Guy Pearce, Monica Bellucci and Miranda Otto.

If she were alive today St John would be 69. All we have to remember her by are these wonderful lines. Does she really think that ‘the average man I suppose would rather be caught with his prick in his hand than a novel’? Or that ‘the thing that’s wrong with women is that they go on and on, and the thing that’s wrong with men is that they don’t’?

She died of emphysema in 2006, undoubtedly caused by all those cigarettes in her imaginary ivory holder. Text Publishing will be releasing the fourth and final Madeleine St John novel, A Pure Clear Light, later this year.

Second Life

2010-03-16T00:00:00Z

This story belongs to a friend of a friend of a friend, one of those other people who you pass every day without recognizing.

She was on a motorbike. She was crossing an intersection. And then she was caught under a truck somehow, being dragged across the asphalt with the bike sparking beside her. Two paramedic students, who happened to be passing at the time, attended to her body. The news crew arrived and filed the report of her death. The truck and carnage was in the background of the shot no doubt, just out of focus. The reporter would have been standing beside the road looking ruffled, kindly, saddened, urgent.

Except that she wasn’t dead.

The ambulance arrived eventually and she lived, against all odds. Some weeks after that, while she was recovering, she received a package. I don’t know how it arrived, perhaps through a friend of a friend of a friend. It was a DVD. She watches it at every opportunity now. And yet no one else shares the intensity of her fascination. They find it too difficult, too eerie. It’s the news report that never went to air, the story of her death.

In 2002, while the Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz was preparing his Nobel Prize Lecture, he received a large brown envelope in the mail. The letter had been sent to him by the director of the Buchenwald Memorial Centre, the concentration camp where Kertesz arrived, in 1945 at the age of sixteen. Contained within the envelope was a copy of the original camp report from that day, February 18th. In one of the columns, Kertesz was able to read about the death of prisoner #64,921 – factory worker, born 1927. Kertesz had made himself two years older, so that he wouldn’t be classified as a child, and had given his occupation as “worker” rather than student in order to “appear more useful to them.” The war ended before he was able to fulfill the Nazi prophecy.

It would be too easy, as Kertesz himself realizes, to draw from these stories, some belief in an otherworldly order, in some sort of providence, or “metaphysical justice.” To do so, would be to sever “the deep and tortuous ties with the millions who perished and who never knew mercy. But if we are destined to be exceptions”, Kertesz continues, “we must make our peace with the absurd order of chance, which reigns over our lives with the whim of a death squad, exposing us to inhuman powers, monstrous tyrannies.”

Thinking of these stories, I think also, though aslant, almost inappropriately I know, of Tom Ford’s recent, somewhat overrated film, A Single Man, and how, in the face of his immanent suicide, the main character’s world acquires again the colour and smell of miracle. For less than a day, he lives like an angel, drenched in the last beauty of things, in the toxic Californian luminosity. In one particular scene, he stops a woman on the street, so that he can smell the ears of her small dog, a smell that reminds him of buttered toast.

I can understand that desire to watch and re-watch the scene of my own death. I can imagine it becoming an obsession, the desire to feel the drug of its liberation as often as possible – that uncanny trick of time, and the taste of coffee perhaps, since I would watch it over breakfast, and drink coffee that I shouldn’t be able to taste, in the wash of morning sun that I shouldn’t be able to feel washed by.

The privilege which Kertesz shares with this motorbike survivor, is the tangible evidence of his own miraculousness. While the rest of us, survivors in our own less cataclysmic manner, and without the adamancy of such proof, must find our own ways to die, our own ways, every morning, to get reborn.

Pre-school Story Time - Friday 30 April 2010 at 10:30am

2010-03-16T00:00:00Z

Friday 30 April 2010 at 10:30am

Readings Port Melbourne: 253 Bay St, Port Melbourne, Victoria, 3207

Drop into Readings Port Melbourne for Story Time, every Friday from 10.30am to 11.00am.

For children aged 2 – 5 year old. Free event, no need to book.

Please note: This is not a child-minding service. We ask that parents stay with their children for the reading. To find out more please call us on (03) 9681 9255.

Pre-school Story Time - Friday 23 April 2010 at 10:30am

2010-03-16T00:00:00Z

Friday 23 April 2010 at 10:30am

Readings Port Melbourne: 253 Bay St, Port Melbourne, Victoria, 3207

Drop into Readings Port Melbourne for Story Time, every Friday from 10.30am to 11.00am.

For children aged 2 – 5 year old. Free event, no need to book.

Please note: This is not a child-minding service. We ask that parents stay with their children for the reading. To find out more please call us on (03) 9681 9255.

Pre-school Story Time - Friday 16 April 2010 at 10:30am

2010-03-16T00:00:00Z

Friday 16 April 2010 at 10:30am

Readings Port Melbourne: 253 Bay St, Port Melbourne, Victoria, 3207

Drop into Readings Port Melbourne for Story Time, every Friday from 10.30am to 11.00am.

For children aged 2 – 5 year old. Free event, no need to book.

Please note: This is not a child-minding service. We ask that parents stay with their children for the reading. To find out more please call us on (03) 9681 9255.

Pre-school Story Time - Friday 09 April 2010 at 10:30am

2010-03-16T00:00:00Z

Friday 09 April 2010 at 10:30am

Readings Port Melbourne: 253 Bay St, Port Melbourne, Victoria, 3207

Drop into Readings Port Melbourne for Story Time, every Friday from 10.30am to 11.00am, beginning Friday April 9.

For children aged 2 – 5 year old. Free event, no need to book.

Please note: This is not a child-minding service. We ask that parents stay with their children for the reading. To find out more please call us on (03) 9681 9255.

Bestselling books: March 8-14 2010

2010-03-15T00:00:00Z

The rise and rise of Melina Marchetta continues as her new book The Piper's Son - helped by events with Melina at the State Library and Readings Hawthorn over the weekend - sold more than any other title at Readings last week. See what our St Kilda kids' book specialist Callie Martin thought of The Piper's Son in her review.

Here are our best selling fiction and non-fiction titles from last week, excluding book sales from the Atheist Convention over the weekend.

BESTSELLING FICTION

The Piper's Son — Melina Marchetta
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest — Stieg Larsson
Alone In Berlin — Hans Fallada
Cloudstreet — Tim Winton
A Stairway To Paradise — Madeleine St John
We Are All Made Of Glue — Marina Lewycka
Mr Rosenblum's List — Natasha Solomons
The Pregnant Widow — Martin Amis
Wolf Hall — Hilary Mantel
Lovesong — Alex Miller

BESTSELLING NON-FICTION

The Good Soldiers — David Finkel
The Age Cheap Eats 2010
Requiem For A Species: Why We Resist The Truth About Climate Change — Clive Hamilton
The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution — Richard Dawkins
The Guide To Ethical Supermarket Shopping 2010 — Ethical Consumer Group
Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs — Malcolm Fraser and Margaret Simons
Abla's Lebanese Kitchen — Abla Amad
On Passion: Little Books On Big Themes — Dorothy Porter
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Our Year Of Seasonal Eating — Barbara Kingsolver
Excess: Anti-Consumerism in the West — Kim Humphery

Bestselling books from the 2010 Global Atheist Convention

2010-03-15T00:00:00Z

The Rise of Atheism - the first Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne - took place at the Melbourne Convention Centre over the weekend. The event was an extraordinary success, one of the busiest events that Readings has ever been an official bookselller for.

Thousands attended and lined up after each session to meet and talk to authors including A.C. Grayling and Richard Dawkins (above) - who sat for more than two hours signing copies of his books - The Greatest Show on Earth and the 2006 bestseller The God Delusion.

Read Stephen Bullivant and Lois Lee's article about the Atheist Convention as published in today's Age.

Here are the top ten bestselling books as sold by Readings at the convention over the weekend.

ATHEIST CONVENTION BESTSELLING BOOKS

The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution — Richard Dawkins
50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists — Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk
When God Speaks For Himself — Mark Tier
Thinking Of Answers — A.C. Grayling
The God Delusion — Richard Dawkins
The Life You Can Save: Acting Now To End World Poverty — Peter Singer
God is NOT Great: How Religion Poisons Everything — Christopher Hitchens
Ideas That Matter: Key Concepts For The 21st Century — A.C. Grayling
The Book Of Atheist Spirituality — Andre Comte-Sponville
Free To A Good Home — Catherine Deveny

Ian McEwan's Solar in the news

2010-03-15T00:00:00Z

One of the big literary releases of the year, Ian McEwan's Solar, is out this Thursday (and on March 30 in the US) and as expected it's starting to be covered by many a media outlet.

Nicholas Wroe interviewed Ian McEwan in The Age on Saturday.
Jason Cowley has reviewed Solar in the Guardian.
Lorna Bradbury has reviewed Solar in the Telegraph.
James Urquhart has reviewed Solar for the Independent.
Joel Yanofsky has reviwed Solar for the Montreal Gazette.
Andrew Marr has interviewed Ian McEwan for BBC News.
And Channel 4 News spoke to McEwan too. Watch the interview below.

Readings has Ian McEwan's Solar available at the special pre-order price of $32.95$23.95 up until the book's release this Thursday.