Booklog for Charlotte

Books to Read

The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville.  Reviewed in the nyt 9/27.  Fiction based on the life of a British marine who was in the First Fleet and tells of his connection to the Aboriginal culture, checked out (10/23) at UVa library.

The Dairies of Jane Somers by Doris Lessing, recommended by blogger Patience Crabstick.

The Spare Room by Helen Garner, recommended by Reading Matters, set in Australia, available at UVa library, not itunes.

A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark, available at the public library (central)

Australian Voices:  Writers and their work by Ray Willbanks, avail. at Alderman.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Audiobook.  This book, and the narrator Michael Page, were recommended by my friend Jim.  It was a great suggestion; this gave me many hours of happy walking and painting.   Of course you have to love the dear Pip and the good hearted Joe, but what fun are all the characters.  Uncle Pumblechook.  Mr. Wopsle who moves to London and becomes an unsuccessful, but happy actor.  Mr. Jaggers whose law offices are peopled by a raffish lot.  Jagger's clerk, Mr. Wemmick who is cynical at work, but at home in his castle is endlessly kind to his father, referred to as the Aged P.  And Miss Havisham who brings her world to a halt the day she is left at the alter.  Her clocks are stopped, her dining room remains set for the feast, the wedding cake has rotted away and she still wears her wedding gown. 

The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin

Another book chosen for its revelations of Australia.  The Songlines, published in the US in 1987, is a fictionalized account of a journey in the area northeast of Alice Springs with ruminations on the nomadic life.  Chatwin is taken with the idea of wandering as a spiritual path and touches on various nomadic people he has encountered all over the world, as well as references to the nomadic life by a wide range of writers.

But of course he is focused on the wanderers of Australia who travel along their songlines or dreaming tracks, a difficult and complicated topic for us.  These pathways stretch great distances across the continent and have countless rules about who may sing various songs.  The songlines govern interactions among strangers who may know the same song; each song is connected to a species, a wallaby, for example.  Those who sing the wallaby dreaming memorize the points along the wallaby songlines even though they may never travel the full distance.  If they met another wallaby singer, they would know soon they are brothers.  The points or locations along the lines are sacred sites resulting in virtually the whole of Australia being sacred to them.  You can see the inevitable conflict with Europeans.

Bruce travels in the company of an Australian whose father was a Russian; Arcady's job was to interpret the Land Rights Act passed in 1976 which gave Aboriginal owners' the land that was unoccupied.  On this journey he was looking for a path for a railway to Alice Springs which did not disturb any sacred sites.

They visit Enid Lacey, the fictionalized name for Iris Harvey (according to this mention in Slate) who owned a museum and gallery in Alice Springs for Aboriginal art and was one of the first to see the merit in their paintings.  She gave painters supplies, bossed them about, and sold their paintings. 

The Last Judgment by Iain Pears

Audiobook.  A very enjoyable book to listen to, this is a police procedural set in Europe.  Well, one member of the duo is a police woman in the art theft division of the Italian police force in Rome and the other is her partner, an English art dealer.   They tear around Europe with almost no money trying to untangle a complicated murder that is connected to an art theft.  The best part of the plot is that the resolution occurs because of knowledge of art history.  Now that should encourage all those art history majors.  Take that, Click and Clack!  

This book does remind me of the Cara Black series with Aimée LeDuc as the private detective.  The plot of last one I read, Murder in the Marais, had its origins in betrayal during the Nazi years, as did this book.  And both heroines move at an exhausting pace. 

I was concerned the plot might be too complicated for an audiobook with too many strands to keep straight, but I was sorry when it was finished.

In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson

Audiobook.  What a fun book to listen to!  It was such a treat to hear Bryson reading his book, telling of his enthusiasm for Australia as he recounts his extended visits.  He is of course very funny, giving us such important phrases as, "mad as cut snakes," meaning crazy, a description he uses to describe people in Queensland.  And he has the anecdotes to prove it. 

At every turn he has another lethal animal to be worried about; the most lethal being in the world, the box jellyfish (Portuguese Man o' War), the sharks, the 12 kinds of very poisonous snakes, the crocodiles (apparently faster and more worrisome than the alligators in this country), the spiders.  Sometimes he finds he must recount the horror story twice (the young couple left by the cruise boat on the barrier reef, 30 miles from shore).  And sometimes he is just funny (the Prime Minister, who in 1967 vanished when he went for a dip in the ocean, went for "the swim that needs no towel."  

His enthusiasm for many sights, the Great Barrier Reef, the harbor bridge in Sydney and Uluru (Ayres Rock) was genuine.

The Shiralee by D'Arcy Niland

Another book recommended by Reading Matters.  This is the story of Macauley, a nomadic farm worker who travels often on foot with his 4 year old daughter named Buster.  Early on, an old man explains to Macauley, "Some men are like a wheel.  They were made to go around.  They rust if they lie still, and they fall apart.  Some men, they can live in a box, but you're not one of them."  The language is wonderful, spare and tough, but expressive.  I was amazed to find myself reading the details of a violent fight with great interest. 

The setting is northern New South Wales and as Macauley moves from village to village, I could follow his progress on the map.  It's hard to figure the time period of this book; there are some cars, but a horse and sulky are not out of place.  And of course, a man could wander about the countryside with a child, so social services are not in place.

Macauley takes Buster from his wife to spite her when he discovers her in bed with a man, not too surprising a turn of events as he is rolling around the countryside most of the time.  Buster, it turns out, is a wonderfully tough little character who wins his heart.  While there are some very bad actors that we encounter in the book, we essentially come to know this tightly, well maybe loosely, knit community of folks who shear sheep, feed work crews, and hire these itinerant workers.  They are tough, often wildly eccentric folks with a flare for interesting language.