Booklog for Charlotte

Books to Read

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kusher. Enthusiastic review by Tony's Book World. Audiobook

Books by Arthur Phillips: The Egyptologist, Prague. Both at the public library and audiobooks.

Americanah by Ngozi Adichie. Novel about identity, African-American and American-African. She's a Nigerian who lives in the US and Nigeria. Review in the NYT. UVa, public library, kindle.

The Right Hand Shore by Christopher Tilghman, recommendation by Corinne. Audiobook, public library

Rat by Fernanda Eberstadt. Author of Little Money Street. This is also set in southwest France. Public library.

Paris: a Novel by Edward Rutherford. Audiobook. Sheldon recommendation.

419 by Will Ferguson. Giller Prize winner 2012, reviewed by Reading Matters. Not available yet -- in Amazon for late August, early Sept.

Sky Burial by Xinran. Recommended by Molly.

Goronwy and Me:  A Narrative of Two Lives by Proal Heartwell.

Mr. Churchill's Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal, audiobook recommended by Sheldon.

Snapper by Brian Kimberling.

Purple Threads by Jeanine Leane, an indigenous author. Reviewed by Whispering Gums. Available from Amazon, kindle edition.

The Women in Black by Madeleine St. John

This sweet book is my last for the celebration of Australian Literature Month hosted by Reading Matters. Thank you, Kim, for doing this. It's been great fun to read the reviews and find new authors. In fact, it was Kim's review of this that motivated me to read it.

Bruce Beresford who wrote an introduction tells of meeting St. John at Sydney University, along with that great group of writers including Clive James, Germaine Greer, and Robert Hughes. She had grown up in a privileged setting; her father was a well-known political figure. She eventually landed in London where she worked in bookshops and wrote her first novel, The Women in Black, at age 52. It is the only one of her four novels set in Australia.

The women who wore black are the sales women who worked in the 1950s fictional department store, based on David Jones. That venerable establishment still exists; I hopped off a bus to make a quick tour through it when we were in Australia and stayed in that area in 2009. 

We meet several of the saleswomen and their nemeses and each short chapter moves along the story of their lives for this short period. The book centers on Lesley Miles, a Christmas temp, who chooses the name Lisa to begin her new life outside of home and school. Lisa is an unpromising bookish skinny thing when we meet her, but blossoms during her short stay at the department store. As she becomes more stylish under the tutelage of the sophistocated Magda, she has many wonderful experiences.

Lisa stood, gazing her fill.  She was experiencing for the first time that particular species of love-at-first-sight which usually comes to a woman much earlier in her life, but which sooner or later comes to all:  the sudden recognition that a particular frock is not merely pretty, would not merely suit one, but answers beyond these necessary attributes to one's deepest notions of oneself. 

And later:

Lisette [the name of the frock] was, of course, everything which could have been hoped, have been dreamed; like all the great works of the French couture, it was designed to look beautiful not simply as a thing in itself, but as the clothing of a female form.

Lisa's colleagues Mrs. Williams and Miss Baines also have Cinderella stories, in one case, rescued by the fearfully Continental Magda who turns out to be warm and generous. What a treat this was.

Her novels are available through Amazon, kindle and audiobooks. Three of her four novels are available at the UVa and public libraries (The Women in Black is not). I read it on the Kindle.

Madeleine St. John, The Women in Black, Text Publishing, 256 pages, Kindle version.

Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey

his blog is moving to a new location, booklogforcharlotte.com and this particular post can be found here. The current location will remain available through winter 2019 though no new posts are being added.

I put this book on my to-read list when I read about it on Whispering Gums and found that it was available in our public library here in Virginia. I had misgivings about reading yet another book written in the voice of a teenage boy (the two I read in January were excellent, but they do seem to have an overwhelming interest in beer). But it is Reading Matters' Australian Literature Month, so that clinched it. Had I read Reading Matters' review or the one by AnzLitlovers, I would have skipped it.

I think I read that it was assigned reading in middle or high schools (did I make that up?), and the book did seem to be written with certain strong messages in mind. The story begins with Jasper Jones, the town outcast tapping on the window of a nerdy, glasses-wearing kid (our narrator Charlie Bucktin), seeking help in a terrible crisis. And thus begins a miserable summer when the little town copes with this crisis, Charlie falls in 13-year-old love, and his family falls apart. 

One message is that Charlie is a reader and draws lessons from the likes of Mark Twain and wonders what Atticus Finch would do. He quotes Twain: "Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear." And in support of that idea, he champions Batman, a (sort of) ordinary guy, over Superman, who can do anything. I like that one.

Charlie's best friend is Jeffrey Lu whose Vietnamese family immigrated to the town because of the war (the book is set in the mid-60s). Jeffrey, a small but phenomenal cricket player, is excluded from the team, but perseveres and eventually triumphs. His family is nevertheless attacked by an ignorant gang who are repelled by the neighbors, led by Charlie's father. Then there's the racism against Jasper whose mother was Aboriginal. 

This is a book filled with horror stories: the terrible event that Charlie is called on to help with, then he spends an afternoon in the library reading about such unspeakable crimes as an extended torture and murder of a teenage girl in Indiana, the killings by the Nedlands Monster in Perth, and others. Yikes. Don't like to think about that message.

The writing is repetitive and hammers certain phrases over and over and the messages are delivered without much subtlety. This was a book for teenagers, not me. I wrote this on the day Boston was shut down for a massive manhunt for a teenage boy known among his high school friends as a lovable accomplished kid. Now his monstrous deeds define him and devastate us. 

Craig Silvey, Jasper Jones, 2009, 310 pages.

Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany

Another book for Australian Literature Month hosted by Reading Matters. But then you might have suspected that from the kangeroo on the right.

When I was a kid, I asked my mother, who grew up on a farm in southern Indiana what the Roaring Twenties were like for her, imagining I would hear about having lots of money, dancing the Charleston, getting her hair bobbed. She said farmers were never rich, life was always hard on the farm. So, this book held no surprises for me. If the mice don't eat your crop and the drought doesn't come, prices will drop.

Set in the mid-30s in the Mallee, the most unpromising farmland in Victoria, this book tells the sad tale of of an unfortunate couple. The narrator is Jean, a young woman who managed to get an education despite a sad beginning to her life. She has a job on the Better-Farming Train which visits around in Victoria, giving lecturettes, yes, lecturettes, on such topics better wheat production, poultry, sheep raising, raising children, and cooking. On the train she meets Robert Pettergree, who also had managed to get an education despite an even worse beginning than hers. 

Except for a strong physical attraction to Jean, Robert is devoid of human interaction skills and has formulated his list of rules for scientific living which were predictably useless in the real world. Or perhaps they are necessary but not sufficient. Robert buys a farm, marries Jean and sets himself up as an authority on wheat production, promising local farmers that his methods will increase production. First came the plague of mice, then the drought and a resulting dustbowl. So, everyone loses everything, but though Robert encouraged them to spend more on fertilizer, he was hardly the cause of making things significantly worse.

The tone of the book is at times oddly light so you're not sure where the story will go. It's not a happy ending when the good part is that the husband goes off to war and the wife will stay there in the dustbowl and plans to ask neighbor woman to join her in the work. And she plans to go visit an old Japanese friend who has been interned.  By all accounts Tiffany's second book Mateship with Birds, due out in June, is quite good.

Available through Amazon, including the Kindle verison, and at UVa and the public libraries. 

Carrie Tiffany, Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living, Scribner, 2005, 224 pages.

Tirra Lirra by the River by Jessica Anderson

Another book chosen in honor of Australian Literature Month! As I mentioned in a previous post, Kimbofo of Reading Matters has designated this month for Australian literature. For each post about an Australian book sent to her blog, she is making a donation to the Indigenous Literary Foundation. So, besides being its own reward, reading Australian authors has another virtue.

Yesterday my continuing recovery from this wretched cold was considerably improved by reading the short book Tirra Lirra by the River. Nora, now in her late 70s tells us her story as she returns to the place where she grew up, a small town in Queensland, after years in Sydney and London. In these few pages, a whole life unfolds with references of what is to come so that we are prepared for the events when they are revealed to us.

Nora escapes her small town (and unlovely mother and sister) to Sydney with a lawyer who shows up in her town and lives for a few delicious years in a room in one of the beautiful houses on Potts Point. The author says the characters are imaginary and only the houses on the point are taken from life: Bomera, Tarana, Crecy, Agincourt. Those years with like-minded artists come to an end when she and Colin move in with his mother in the suburb where she is eventually imprisoned by Colin and his mother, the Depression and her mental state. 

Her next escape lands her in London where she meets three wonderful friends to live with and finds employment that suits her. They are a happy group who live in harmony. After she returns to Queensland, she has a realization:

I am beginning to see our little coterie at number six through other eyes. We would often say to each other, describing incidents that had happened 'outside', 'Oh, he thought me quite mad.' It was our happy assumption that everyone in the outside world thought us quite mad. But now I am finding that when one is really outside, and alone, it is less of a burden (and much more private) to be thought quite ordinary.

In Queensland she allows herself to remember her life and let it unfold in her mind. She wonders if her account of Colin to everyone at number six was accurate; perhaps she just provided a substitute for the amusement of everyone.  She regrets the realization that they wasted each other. And she notes, "As a rule, when we can't find even one good quality in a person, we are prejudiced, and by that rule I must admit my prejudice." 

She becomes extremely sick as soon as she arrives, and is cared for by neighbors and a doctor whose mother she remembers as a girl. Their stories and their memories of her also unfold in a most appealing way. As the book ends, the sensual pleasures of the warmth and smells and the joys of her sister Grace's old garden enfold us. And I took pleasure in the sunshine and breeze coming in the window, opened for the first time this spring, and the sounds of noisy birds and a neighbor's indistinct voice.

The book can be purchased from sellers through Amazon and is available at the UVA library.

Jessica Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, Penguin Books, 1984, 141 pages.

Australia Felix by Henry Handel Richardson, pseudonym

Henry Handel Richardson is the pseudonym for Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson and I learned about her thanks to a guest post by Tony's Book World on Whispering Gums. Australia Felix is the first book in her great trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, written from 1917 to 1929. Australian Literature Month, hosted by Reading Matters, seemed the perfect time to read this book. The story is drawn from the lives of her parents and is set in Ballarat, the site of a gold rush in 1851 that drew gold seekers from all over the world in the thousands.

When we first meet Mahony, the Edinburgh-trained physician is selling supplies to miners in Ballarat after the first boom is over and the mines are deeper and require more skill to extract the gold. He is a complex character: awkward in social relations, prickly, sure of himself and his own superiority, generous, and kindly when he remembers to be. We hear about the Eureka Rebellion (the only armed rebellion in Australian history if Wikipedia is to be believed), when miners rebelled against the colonial tax on miners collected in the form of a license. It was quickly quashed but public opinion supporting the miners resulted in full suffrage for white males. In this and other matters Richardson gives us a nice historical picture of that area of Australia (Victoria) of the time.

Mahony falls in love with a capable teenager called Polly who returns with him to his hovel in Ballarat and makes it into a much more welcoming home. She has the good qualities he lacks and eventually he comes to rely on her to improve connections to others. The store becomes less and less profitable and eventually he finds funding that enables him to set up practice as a physician. He puts some money in the hands of a capable speculator and becomes quite wealthy as the years pass. He never loses his prickliness and dissatisfaction and as Australia Felix ends, he and Polly (who is now called Mary) leave for Scotland.

What is so remarkable about the book? First, the triology captures important aspects of Australian history and mindset, as evidenced by its popularity. A long description of a ball Mary and Richard have includes the small talk as the group gathers, the musical entertainment provided by the guests, followed by card games and at midnight, food. I love this description of the musical entertainment:

Ladies with the tiniest reeds of voices, which shook like reeds, warbled of Last Roses and Prairie Flowers; others, with more force but due decorum, cried to Willie that they had Missed Him, or coyly confessed to the presence of Silver Threads Among the Gold; and Mrs. Chinnery, an old-young woman with a long, lean neck, which she twisted this way and that in the exertion of producing her notes, declared her love for an Old Armchair. The gentlemen, in baritones and profundos, told the amorous adventures of Ben Bolt; or desired to know what Home would be Without a Mother.

Wonderful writing, truly irresistable! Then there's her complex characters who seem to come alive with their conflicting idiocyncracies. Here's Mahony being insensitive, but able to see it, too late:

"An odd, abusive, wrong-headed fellow," he [Mahony] mused, as he made his way home. "Who would ever have thought, though, that the queer little chemist [a man named Tangye] had so much in him? … But as he laid his hands on the gate, he jerked up his head and exclaimed half aloud: "God bless my soul! What he wanted was not argument or reason but a little human sympathy." As usual, however, the flash of intuition came too late. "For such a touchy nature I'm certainly extraordinarily obtuse where the feelings of others are concerned," he told himself as he hooked in the latch.  

 And later:

 His foolish blunder in response to Tangye's appeal rankled in his mind. He could not get over his insensitiveness. How he had boasted of his prosperity, his moral nicety, his saving pursuits—he to boast!—when all that was asked of him was a kindly: "My poor fellow soul, you have indeed fought a hard fight; but there IS a God above us who will recompense you at His own time, take the word for it of one who has also been through the Slough of Despond."

Looking forward to the next book in this masterpiece.

The trilogy is available at the UVa library and from various sellers through Amazon. It's in the public domain, so I got it for free through Kindle.

Henry Handel Richardson, pseudonym, Australia Felix, 291 pages, Kindle Edition.

A Fortunate Life by A.B. Facey

Kimbofo of Reading Matters has declared that April is Australian Literature Month. What a great idea! Along with the usual commentary on the books I read, I will include information about their availability here in Virginia.

To begin this happy month of reading, I settled on an audiobook version of a very old-fashioned and much loved memoir by A.B. Facey called A Fortunate Life.  Clearly this was not an ironic title, although someone abandoned by his mother, sent off to work (and be horsewhipped) at age 8, who was wounded at Gallipoli is generally not regarded as “lucky.” The book is assigned in primary and secondary schools and surely is meant to give kids a better perspective on their incredibly irritating parents.

He was born in 1894 and the story begins when his father dies in Western Australia and his mother leaves her younger children with her mother in Victoria. Albert, 2-3 years old when he was left with Grandma, recounts in detail their lives over the years. Grandma makes her way to Western Australia to the farm of her other daughter. And when I say "in detail" I mean we hear the names of those who helped them along the way, the meals that were eaten, who washed the dishes, and the events of each day as if we were reading a diary. Albert never went to school and learned to read and write on his own as a teenager.

By the time Albert was 8 he was sent out to work on farms; the first place he went was a disaster as he was mistreated, not paid, and held against his will. He describes the various other farms where he worked and none were ever so bad as his first experience. His stories of life on the farms, later on a cattle drive, and as a professional boxer are great fun to listen to; he has a light, unsentimental touch with much humor in evidence.

There are few evil characters and even his mother, who abandoned him as a baby, refused to allow him to be adopted by a couple who would have given him a good life, and tried to extract his savings when she insisted he come to see her, still gets respect. When he was called a son-of-a-bitch by a bully, he insisted the man take back the slur upon his mother. What??

While he was in Gallipoli, he received a “home comfort” package sent to soldiers by civilians who lived in their home regions. His pair of socks had a note wishing good luck to him and was signed by Evelyn Gibson.  After he was wounded, he was sent home and told that he could only do light work and even work on the trams in Perth had an ill effect on his health. He did meet Evelyn by chance and they married and lived together for almost 60 years.  The two owned and ran various farms, raising fowl, pigs, sheep, and of course we hear how each of those enterprises began and ended.

His message is that if you work hard, don't drink, and use your intelligence, you will succeed handsomely. Only on one subject does he express a view that is at odds with this rosy outlook:

My experience in the First World War and now the Second World War changed my outlook on things.  It’s hard to believe that there is a God. I feel that the Bible is a book that was written by man, not for the good of man, but for the purpose of preying on a person’s conscience and to confuse him.  Anyone who has taken part in a fierce bayonet charge, and I have, and has managed to retain his proper senses, must doubt the truth of the Bible and the powers of God if one exists. And considering the many hundreds of different religions there are in this world of ours and that fact that many religions have caused terrible wars and hatreds throughout the world and the many religions that have horded terrific wealth and property while people inside and outside the religion are starving, it’s difficult to remain a believer. No sir, there is no God.  It is only a myth.

After I finished the book, I realized with a start that it was first published in 1981. The 60s and 70s as I know them do not exist in this book, but I’m glad that Albert did not know about those decades.  Albert’s book is a treasure.

A Fortunate Life is available at the UVa library, in the kindle version, from sellers through Amazon, and audiobook through iTunes.

A.B. Facey, A Fortunate Life, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia, Penguin Books, 1981, 326 pages.  I listened to the Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd. edition, through iTunes.