Readings.com.au: Reviews

The Two Kinds Of Decay: Sarah Manguso

2008-09-29T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Annie Condon, freelance reviewer

Sarah Manguso was a 21- year-old college student when a rare blood disease – Chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy (CIDP) – first affected her. The disease caused symptoms such as fatigue, paralysis and balance problems.

Manguso initially thought she had a pervasive head cold, but after several hospitalisations and visits to specialists, she began to grasp the seriousness of her condition. This is a beautifully written memoir. It is unusual in that the language is spare and poetic – quite different from the ‘tell all’ memoirs so popular at the moment.

Manguso has previously written two volumes of poetry, and the collection of short stories Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape. The brevity of her memoir is a testament to her ability as a writer. She describes painful and traumatic medical procedures without sentimentality or self pity. She takes the reader on a journey through nine years of hospitals, procedures, professionals and side effects.

Manguso writes toward the end of the book: ‘This is the usual kind of book about illness. Someone gets sick, someone gets well.’ There is nothing ‘usual’ about this memoir. Read it, and it will stay with you.

A Most Wanted Man: John Le Carré

2008-09-29T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Martin Shaw, Book Buyer for Readings Carlton

Earlier this year John Le Carré’s son Nick published his debut novel to considerable acclaim (The Gone-Away World) - and I’ve got the theory that Dad wasn’t going to let himself be outdone in 2008! For, with A Most Wanted Man, Le Carré delivers one of his most consummate-ever performances, a novel that will delight those who savoured the early Cold War novels (like The Spy who Came in from the Cold) while also being (as ever) a trenchant diagnostic of the West’s wilful ineptitude – this time in response to the post-9/11 world and the spectre of terrorism.

We are in Hamburg (such a clever choice – that still-sparkling jewel of mercantile capitalism, although better known now for its tawdry connection to one of the most lethal terrorist cells the world has ever known) and in Tommy Brue’s world of merchant banking, all is as it should be. Mind you, the wife isn’t doing much to hide her liaisons, and life is certainly lacking a little frisson ... Until he takes a call from a young human-rights lawyer, Annabel Richter, whose client, an asylum-seeker of indeterminate, possibly Chechen, origins, has turned up at the Hamburg railway station. One of his only possessions is the name and address of Tommy’s bank, and what appears to be a code number. Tommy is in no position to demur – his bank, under his father’s direction at that time, and much to his present regret, had made a fortune providing its services to high-ranking Russian colonels as they seized assets and built up vast fortunes during the break-up of the Soviet Union, and if there is a claim on these funds Tommy has no choice but to accede.

Our young man, Issa, is presumably seeking his inheritance from his father – but he is not all that he appears, and the money is not his primary object. A re-energised Tommy makes a pact with Annabel to come to his aid ... But meanwhile, the Western intelligence services are falling over themselves to get their hands on this obviously (Middle-Eastern appearance and all that! ) ‘most wanted man’.

Booksellers I know who’ve read this book all get that far-away look when they talk about A Most Wanted Man – it simply purrs with magnificent characters, an intriguing plotline and the writing skills of a man who is quite simply the best in his genre. The pleasure’s all yours now: make yourself comfy and enjoy this literary highlight of 2008!

Oh (Ohio): Lambchop

2008-09-25T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Dave Clarke, Readings Carlton

Oh (Ohio) continues the Lambchop tradition, where each successive record represents a new stage in the evolution of their distinctive sound. It’s a natural process which has seen them progress from their shambolic early recordings to the off-kilter pop experimentation of What Another Man Spills to the joyful soul of Nixon and then, pointedly, it’s polar opposite, the piano-led minimalism of Is A Woman.

Oh (Ohio) finds Kurt Wagner delving deeper into himself. The fundamental nature of the band has altered and Lambchop has become ‘more and more a vehicle for my songs and myself as an artist’.

Only By The Night: Kings Of Leon

2008-09-18T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Declan Murphy, Readings St Kilda

In which the Followill boys continue their rather prolific output and drop record number four. Their particular brand of bearded, Baptist, boogie-infused rock may not be to everyone’s taste, but for my money KOL are one of the slickest acts around – and besides, they have clearly shown that there is considerable depth to their sound with last year’s fantastic Because of the Times.

Only by the Night certainly seems to pick up where they left off, with a continued effort to beef up and expand upon their undeniable qualities. The band explores elements of dark and light to great effect and front man Caleb just goes from strength to strength as a singer. There is growth here and it’s a joy to the ears.

Dilettantes: You Am I

2008-09-18T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by James Power, Readings St Kilda

You can always rely on three things: 1.The Tigers will finish ninth. 2. The Espy will be packed on a Sunday arvo 3. You Am I will deliver a great album.

If the raw rock of their previous eff ort (the excellent Convicts) was the perfect soundtrack to a hard drinkin’ and fightin’ night out on the town, Dilettantes’s broad brush strokes provide the ideal soundtrack for the perfect road trip. From the opening title track Tim Rogers reminds us what a wonderful lyricist (Dilettantes) he is, Russell Hopkinson and Andy Kent demonstrate how a great rhythm section should operate (Disappearing), Davey Lane skillfully displays how to add radiant piercing colour and subtle tones (Wankers) and You Am I once again illustrate what a bloody great rock band sounds like. As Rogers belts out on Frightfully Moderne- ‘You ain’t seen the best of us yet.’ Highly recommended. Buy this album.

Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

2008-09-11T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Dave Clarke, Readings Carlton

Now that he’s officially a legend, Nick Cave could easily hang up his boots and reflect on what is a remarkable career spanning about 30 years. Clearly, he is in no mood for that. In fact, he’s busier now than probably at any other stage in his career with soundtrack scores (and script writing), side projects (Grinderman) and of course his main outfit, the Bad Seeds.

This is their first project since the awesome double album of 2004 (Abattoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus) and it sounds great. I haven’t had long to digest it (I was only given ‘permission’ to listen to a downloaded version of it today!) but one can safely assume it's worth your $.

Stay Positive: The Hold Steady

2008-09-11T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Declan Murphy, Readings St Kilda

Having given us the rock record of 2006 in Boys and Girls in America, the Hold Steady is back with a vengeance. For those not familiar with their work, these Brooklyn boys produce epic, almost cinematic rock music that owes much to classic era Springsteen and the twin guitar drive of Thin Lizzy but to reduce their sound to a mere pastiche of influence would be to do them a massive disservice. The music is in many ways the soundtrack through which we glimpse an amazing cast of characters who continue to pop up from album to album. It’s a world of cheap thrills, disillusionment and disconnection and it’s rarely been as compelling as in the hands and vocal chords of Craig Finn. Brilliant!

White Noise - The Living End

2008-09-11T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by James Power, Readings St Kilda

From frontman guitar wizard Chris Cheney’s killer opening riff and the rock-stomp driven by the excellent rhythm section of drummer Andy Strachan and upright bass player Scott Owen on the instant classic album opener How Do We Know?, two things become blindingly clear. Number 1: The Living End have got their rousing anthemic punk rock swagger back. Number 2: the kids will be raising their fists and rockin’ out to this album in bedrooms, festivals and stadiums all summer long. Highly recommended. Buy this album.

The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian: Sherman Alexie

2008-09-09T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Alexa Dretzke, Readings Hawthorn

Sometimes the most unpromising circumstances can yield amazing results. Take Junior, an American Indian living on a reservation, add a jaded, clapped-out teacher, who in a moment of clarity and repentance gives Junior some unexpected advice, and the result is an inspiring fictionalised autobiography of author Sherman Alexie.

Junior believes his fate is to live out his life on the reservation as his family have done, which on the whole means poverty, alcoholism and the possibility of a young death (ring a bell?) but his life takes a surprising turn which leads to alienation by many of his reservation peers and initial ostracising by the students of the all-white high school he decides to attend.

Now I can hear you thinking this won’t interest Australian teenagers, but this inspiring story of tragedy, love, sorrow and triumph will have universal appeal, because Alexie’s journey illustrates the power of the spirit to rise out of the ashes of despair and still feel love and understanding, rather than bitterness and shame. This is an evocative story, told with humour and an unflinching honesty, that will resonate in Australia as we face similar dilemmas with our indigenous population.

The Foggy Foggy Forest: Nick Sharratt

2008-09-09T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Callie Martin, Readings St Kilda

Ah, this book had me at ‘Foggy’ and then I found the see-through pages! This book is unique; it combines translucent pages with black shadows, fairy tale characters and guessing game text and it’s brilliant. Black isn’t a colour you usually find in great abundance in children’s books, but here it is combined with bright cartoonish illustrations to great effect. But it’s the cute, quirky details like the bunnies eating ice-cream that I love. Bunnies eating ice-cream!

Home and Away: John Marsden & Matt Ottley

2008-09-09T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Alexa Dretzke, Readings Hawthorn

Imagine if we, everyday Australians, became refugees? Hard to conceive of here, in our safe, cocooned, distant land. We may have to worry about droughts and rising petrol prices, but being displaced – our lives threatened and our dreams shattered –is not something any of us consider could happen.

Home and Away will rip your complacency to shreds and make many squirm at their less-than-humane consideration of detained people. John Marsden and Matt Ottley have produced a picture book about the disintegration of one happy, loving family due to war that is so powerful, so moving and so heartbreaking that every Australian should be encouraged to read it, rather than every prospective immigrant having to answer questions about Don Bradman! I defy anyone who reads it not to feel as though they have been punched in the guts. For ages 11 and up.

The Great Feminist Denial: Monica Dux & Zora Simic

2008-09-05T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Chris Gordon, Readings Events Coordinator

This book is about a journey that is shared by many women. The trip of a lifetime! The Great Feminist Denial takes us on a scenic view from past years where women embraced feminism, created their own social consciousness, but then felt a little miffed when the train took a different turn on the tracks. What happened to feminism? What happened to feeling part of a collective; understanding the messages; feeling quietly confidently that the world was ours?

I’ve lived that train trip depicted in this book. So to be honest I read The Great Feminist Denial with glee – it warmed my tired feminist heart, because again I felt part of a collective. In this uniquely Australian book, the authors have collected thoughts from a range of women; interviewed others; listed influential books; named the people we followed and still follow (or didn’t and still don’t); and shared their own experiences. Brilliant. And the best part? Feminism – alive and well – in different shapes – but there for the taking and the sharing. Oh, and if you are a Greer fan – this one really is for you.

Ghost Train To The Eastern Star: Paul Theroux

2008-09-05T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Maloti Ray, freelance reviewer

Paul Theroux writes about travel with an approach that sets standards for the genre. The locations which attract him are attractive in ambivalent ways – politically troubled, socially dysfunctional, or economically idiosyncratic – locations of geopolitical simmering enlivened by his empathy with local lives.

This book is the sequel to Theroux’s career-making 1973 railway adventure, a looping journey across Eastern Europe and the greater Asia continent. In 2006, Theroux relived the same route in railways carriages, sitting rooms and dining halls across the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central, South, Southeast and East Asia. In a region historically and repeatedly torn apart and put together, Theroux describes experiences of change through conversations with ordinary and extraordinary people. Patrician, pedestrian and peasant companions of this sequel journey include writers Orhan Parmuk, Haruki Murakami and the late Arthur C. Clarke; oppressed Turkmenistans and Singaporeans; unhappy Georgians and desperate Indians.

With the same acidity with which he once lacerated former friend V.S. Naipaul, Theroux’s work works because of a lack of inhibition, a willingness to speculate and a discipline for turning naïve observations into cynical provocations.

Petty's Parallel Worlds: Bruce Petty

2008-09-05T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

Russ Radcliffe, longstanding editor of the annual Best Australian Political Cartoon series, takes cartooning very seriously indeed. In his role as non-fiction commissioning editor at Scribe Publications, Radcliffe commissioned a stunning collection of Bill Leak’s finest work, Moments of Truth. To my mind, this impressive compilation of Bruce Petty’s anarchic (mostly cartoon) art – the first book from Radcliffe’s new publishing venture High Horse Books – reads like the second in a series. It’s certainly just as lovingly packaged, with beautiful production values and informative artist’s commentary interspersed throughout. In the introduction, Petty describes his current creative inspiration thus: ‘Now the future is rather a blur, the present is about barricading what we have accumulated, and cartoonists, like everyone else, search for who is responsible.’

This book showcases the range of Petty’s artistic styles as well as his intellectual and moral concerns, incorporating editorial cartoons, street sketches, film images and printmaking. Connoisseurs of cartooning or social and political commentary will relish this book.

China Witness: Xinran

2008-09-05T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Maloti Ray, freelance reviewer

Xinran Xue was born into a wealthy family subsequently undone by the Cultural Revolution; she has since carved out a prolific career documenting the experiences of ordinary people in China. Twenty people, near the end of their life expectancy, are selected as witnesses of the historical everyday, from Xinran’s oral compilations of two decades. As representatives of a generation silenced by inhibition and intimidation, they all lived through immense political and social changes in China over the twentieth century. A military teacher describes a prisoner-of-war city; a descendent of revolutionary martyrs describes life as a political prisoner; a retired acrobat describes the political bureaucratisation of the art; a career shoe-mender describes a central China street of 30 years. Faithfully interviewed narratives are introduced in concise background context.

The value of Xinran’s book is its contribution to a people’s history of China, where such histories are neither acknowledged nor dignified. Xinran’s work, unsurprisingly unavailable in China, is published in 30 languages in 30 locations. China Witness is her fifth book, all of which have been movingly captured in translation by Esther Tyldesley.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: Haruki Murakami

2008-09-05T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

This is, I must say, a rather odd little book. Odd, but intriguing – a combination that Murakami fans will recognise and appreciate. The framework of this revealing, odds-and-sods memoir is Haruki Murakami’s four-month preparation for running the New York marathon. Against a changing backdrop (Hawaii, Tokyo, Boston), the novelist coolly meditates on his love affair with long distance running, which evolved almost in parallel with his writing career. He reflects on writing and running in almost equal measure, talking about how the discipline that his running develops feeds into his writing, and how taking up full-time writing (a stationary activity that burns few calories) necessitated the running.

There are some wonderful personal reflections here too, on himself (‘I don’t think most people would like my personality’), his love of music, public speaking, and the differences between Japanese and Western culture. He tells the story of how, in 1978, watching a baseball game, beer in hand, a thought struck the then jazz club owner: ‘You know what? I could try writing a novel.’ That’s how his writing career began. It progressed through persistence, discipline and sheer mental hard work. A fascinating read for fans of running, writing or Murakami.

I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Sloane Crosley

2008-09-05T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

Comparisons can be so tiresome. You know, ‘the female David Sedaris’. That sort of thing. Only, they’re kind of irresistible, too. And when Jonathan Lethem makes the Sedaris comparison, too, then at least it’s got a literary pedigree. Sloane Crosley is a twentysomething New Yorker, originally from the nearby suburbs (Westchester), who writes quirky, funny, sometimes poignant pieces about misadventures like accidentally signing on with the boss from hell in her first job in publishing (it’s not having a manuscript thrown at her head that makes Sloane realise she should quit; it’s the way her boss stops talking to her after she misguidedly presents her with a cookie shaped in her likeness).

She writes about being a reluctant bridesmaid in a girly-girl wedding for an almost forgotten high school friend, a passive-aggressive Bridezilla who addresses her friends as ‘ladies’ and changes her surname, along with her husband-to-be, to ‘Universe’. And then there’s the day that, in the midst of moving, she locked herself out of not one, but two apartments. I absolutely love this book and its author. And here’s the icing on the cookie: HBO has just bought the rights, for a TV series that 29-year-old Crosley hopes will ‘have more of a Larry David vibe than a Sex and the City vibe’.

The Racket: Gideon Haigh

2008-09-05T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

Gideon Haigh is quite simply one of the best – and most intriguing – writers working in Australia today. He is amazingly prolific on a variety of subjects, but entirely consistent in delivering elegant prose that engages thoughtfully with his subject and wears its (often considerable) research lightly.

The Racket is a narrative history of abortion in Australia prior to its legalisation in 1968, detailing the Mob-like web of criminal influence that ran the highly lucrative ‘racket’ and fleshing out the stories of the people caught in it, from the abortionists, police and courts; to the hospitals often charged with finishing dangerously half-done jobs; the women and their families who were driven to what was then a dangerous and desperate act; and Bertram Wainer, abortion’s crash-through-or-crash campaigner.

This is not a book that makes moral judgments on either side, but it does give us a local and historical perspective on an issue that is often framed, these days, in terms of the quite different contemporary American debate about right-to-life versus right-to-choose. For me, this book brought home how important it is to have access to safe medical abortions – the alternatives for desperate people, as shown here, are deeply disturbing.

The Angel Maker: Stefan Brijs

2008-09-04T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Sanchia Hovey, Readings St Kilda

After a 20-year absence, Doctor Victor Hoppe returns to a small town in Belgium, much to the interest of its other inhabitants. Their curiosity is stoked by the doctor leaving behind an acclaimed academic posting in embryology and by the fact that he arrives with triplets, each sharing the same characteristics as the doctor – a hare lip and red hair. When asked what happened to the mother, the doctor responds ‘The children do not have a mother, they never had.’ The doctor hires a local woman to look after the infants and it is through her eyes that we begin to realise that something isn’t quite right, with the children or with the doctor.

In the tradition of Miller’s Ingenious Pain and Suskind’s Perfume, this gothic, thought-provoking tale explores the murky recesses between science and religion, rationalism and insanity, morality and ethics. The Angel Maker takes us on a frightening exploration of just how far one man is willing to push scientific advancement to better god.

The Twin: Gerbrand Bakke

2008-09-04T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Dimitri Gonis, freelance reviewer

Helmer is a farmer: a bachelor who lives in the shadow of his dead twin’s memory. His days revolved around his animals; watching canoeists in the canal; conversations with his father, his neighbour Ada and her two boys. He’s also resigned to the fact that he’ll never be the perfect son. That he’s always been more like a superfluous appendage of twins than a person. After his mother dies, he’s left to look after his invalid father alone. He moves him to an upstairs room and begins painting the house. A letter from his late brother’s fiancé changes everything. He soon has a new farmhand, Riet’s son, Henk. Still, he wonders: what exactly is Riet’s motive?

This is an absolutely beautiful work set within the melancholy landscape of a drizzly Dutch winter. The sense of isolation and loneliness is virtually palpable. It’s bleak, at times eerie, like the hooded crow that permanently presides over old van Wonderen’s window. A deeply introspective novel that speaks to one’s innermost voice. The one that ultimately helps Helmer find peace. If you expect to find a gripping plot, you won’t. The Twin is about finding one’s self.