reeling and writhing

see where a single step will take you

Some notes on Lisa Dempster's book Neon Pilgrim (Aduki Press, 2009)

Although talking to her online and at a couple of launches, and hearing her speak at EWF, makes me feel that I know Lisa Dempster a little, it is only in reading her first, tough little book, this travelogue called Neon Pilgrim, that I feel several layers of her lie uncovered to all comers, in much the same way she slept out in the open in rudimentary shelters during most of her 1200 kilometre trek around Shikoku, the smallest of the four main islands of Japan.

I feel a bit shy offering this reading, too, as Aduki kindly offered me a copy and I completely forgot how rarely I read contemporary travel writing - it is hardly fair to compare a work like Neon Pilgrim to In Patagonia, and I hope I'm not doing that unconsciously here.

Taking her cue from a seminal English-language account of the 88 Temple Pilgrimage, Japanese Pilgrimage by Oliver Statler, which she picked up in a small community library in the midst of a bout of depression and social withdrawal, Dempster returned to the island she had spent her sixteenth year in as an exchange student to take up a pilgrim's staff, don a white vest and walk herself back to health. This spiritual and physical exercise not only caused her to lose ten kilos in fifty-odd days but clearly changed her life as well. There is naturally a strong emphasis on physical struggle in this book, and that is part of its rugged charm.

now gods, stand up for carnies

Maud has reviewed Will Elliot's terrific debut novel, The Pilo Family Circus, now published in the US by Underland Press, for NPR. (I reviewed it for the Australian Literary Review when it was published here, in the October issue in 2006.)

Maud's review is at NPR in the Books We Like segment.

She quotes from its introduction in which a 'literary bigtop master', Katherine Dunn, compares the book to 'Kafka, Chandler, Swift, Orwell, King and The Three Stooges.' There's an excerpt to read.

I called The Pilo Family Circus " a fiery allegory for our times, a Jungian dragonfest in which there is a kind of twisted honour amongst slaves, thieves and carnies." (Not online, unfortunately.) So I am mightily pleased to see it's being read by the haute bloggerie and hope it rises to attention elsewhere as well in the States, having attracted some strong notices in the UK on its publication there in 2007.

Elliot has written an essay for Largehearted Boy's Book Notes feature, too, and you can read it here. He has a memoir coming out with ABC books next week, and is currently at work on a fantasy project, The Pendulum Trilogy. I shall have to start a category called 'Go You Good Thing'.

Review: House of Exile, by Evelyn Juers

Review copy provided.

If you have time to look through the transcript of this interview (or to listen) you may feel that Ramona Koval gives Sydney academic and writer Evelyn Juers something of a gruelling time over her biography of Heinrich Mann and his second wife, Nelly Kroeger-Mann, but that's not quite the case.

Some of the issues faced by Juers in writing House Of Exile, a collective biography of writers and intellectuals exiled from Germany in the thirties, are covered in more detail there than I will attempt here.

I've read a couple of biographies like this - the most memorable that comes to mind is A. Frances Johnson's 2007 novelised study of the life and art of Eugene von Guerard, Eugene's Falls.

The construction of Juers' book is admirable. As she explains in her interview, the pre-war period is covered with an eye on more poetic facts than the years after Hitler comes to power, and provides a welcome breathing space before same.

I was very impressed by the care she took to weave so many people's stories together in the later sections without losing focus; the events of the war are a powerful focus, I suppose, but it would not have been difficult to wander off following somebody and lose a reader here or there.

There is no risk of that in this formidable enterprise which is nonetheless humane and warm; Juers speaks of 'cold facts warmed up' in the interview, and her unerring ability to point up small details gives urgency and life to what is for the most part an overwhelmingly bleak period in European history. It's certainly not just about Nelly and Virginia's cakes and coffee.

There is a lightness and warmth to Evelyn Juers' invented backstory for Nelly Kroeger-Mann that is most appealing, counterpointed as it is with the cinematic backdrop of Berlin and prefaced by the rise to prominence of those éminences grises, the brothers Mann.
Helen Garner is right; she has an unerring eye for the detail that will bring a scene alive, and an ear for prose rhythms that make this kind of literary biofaction irresistible.

I was irritated at first by the introduction of the Woolfs and their entourage travelling in Europe in the thirties until I realised that part of the purpose (but not all, as you will find) might have been to point up Heinrich's appropriation of Nelly's only literary production.

Here is Leonard, carrying Virginia over his shoulder out of a cafe and into a train after she has been given travelsickness medication, telling her The Waves is a masterpiece. (Given that Victoria Glendinning's excellent biography has now been in circulation for nearly three years, it is good to see this revisited, as well as other things Woolfian which impinge naturally on this narrative.)

Here is Heinrich in 1932, burning his partner's manuscript and rewriting it as his own, telling her it will get nowhere with her name on it:

He explained that it was an important story and that it must be told, but as the Life and Times of Nelly Kroeger, a complete unknown, it would never be published in the current climate. It was a serious life, he added, and that would be its title, Ein Ernstes Leben. And since it was not right for him simply to put his own name on her manuscript, he was rewriting it. The book was finished in July and I like to think that she told him she thought her version was the better of the two, and he agreed.

(Ha! thinks the reader. We can wish.)

And  here, too, in 1940 is Ms Kroeger helping to carry the man who stole her life-story over the Pyrenees to freedom , with the Gestapo hot on their heels. (Mann was sixty-nine, and not fit enough to travel fast on foot.)

It's one thing to write of this as an intensive literary study, as some have suggested, but it is much more. There is so much rich detail that breathes on the page, and is not fossilised by dry language. Juers' writing sings, her quiet asides about research never detracting from the drive forward, but enriching the conversational tone of this remarkable piece of literary life-work. It's a work of great love as well as of scholarship, I think.

And every so often you come across a quotation from one of many famous writers which makes you wonder, is this what sparked her off on this quest? such as Musil's thought that he might 'construct a person from nothing but quotations'. (Fortunately not all of the bitchy asides from Brecht and Musil about Thomas Mann's tendencies to preciousness make the whole picture.)

It is also charming to have questions posed in mid-story about the nature of this kind of writing (something Johnson also did with considerable style as she attempted to rehabilitate von Guerard, regarded by some art historians as a hack), nowhere more strikingly than when Heinrich Mann ponders how to end his own version of Nelly's novel:

We don't know how Nelly ended her own story, but its new author, struggling to compose the final pages, might have looked up from his writing and told her that she deserved a happy ending, a new beginning, and in a fairytale flourish, he punished the bad and rewarded the good. The heroine was arched between biographical truth and fiction like an acrobat whose supple spine describes a backflip, semi-circular...

Not unlike the supple Ms Juers herself. The bibliography contains a long list of sources, many of them in German. 

secondhand news, but expensive enough

Happy New 2009, everyone.

I don't know if this link to AbeBooks 'Most Expensive Books' list will stay put - I receive these via email, not sure where else they are filed on the Abe site once they're old news though. I will keep an eye on that. To add to that, here's a list of books with unusual bindings that are currently passing through the enormous online secondhand booksellers' hands. (There's a rubber book with a zip down the bottom...)

Down at Queenscliff last week, I saw a pretty dark orange, green and cream Spode platter that was also expensive. And prior to that, we dealt with a kitchen island bench in the rellies' holiday house that was pretty busted (and is going to be considerably more expensive).

We emptied all the crockery out after the small, late-sixties legs on the bench had withstood the cracking of the particle board base of the cabinets away from the framing base, and the subsidence of the whole seven foot long bench and cabinets straight into the floor. Three glasses were broken and that was all - fortunately no one had their toes under the cabinets at the time. The plumbing still works, though one sink will not drain properly at an angle of 15 degrees. Funny, that.

This happened at my in-laws' beach house. Moreover, on Christmas Day an entire trestle table gave way at my sister-in-law's house, covered in food in sensible plastic dishes. Nothing was lost.

A week has passed and I have no news of a third thing about to fall, though the family is large enough to be its own population sample...the balcony on the beach house has just been replaced, so at least it won't be that.

When not wrangling kitchens (including cleaning out my own prior to the holiday to make it less welcoming for bugs that like to come over when I'm not there to squash 'em), I am currently trying to read Foster's History of Ireland 1600 - 1972 - I am up to the Famine and some more familiar names, and just about ready to retire and leave the rest for later.

I have finished and found Antigone Kefala's Sydney Journals deeply refreshing, and now want to read this. I was sent two Mini Shots by Lisa Dempster, having mentioned a couple of her authors here, and thought they were terrific, and particularly liked the miniaturised format.

A Vignette Press Mini Shot looks like a story crossed with a zine, designed to high publication standards and produced with its own graphics, and neat enough to feature in cafes or slip into a bag or glovebox, to have handy in a dull moment. I don't know enough about zine culture to make judgments here, but has this been done with short fiction in other states? looks very Melburnian to me, and of course, great fiction too.

I am also lining up to read Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, on loan from eldest daughter, and really enjoying browsing this, my own Christmas present to me, purchased on the advice of the lovely Daniel at Artisan Books.

If you are ridiculously well off, then here's a link to some of the originals in a gallery. Those, I cannot afford.

The book is a beautifully produced and quite adequate substitute, for the price, and has an absorbing introductory essay about the garden at Eichstatt, the production of the florilegium and its early publishing history. And it's available from the brilliant Artisan Books in Gertrude Street, next door to Vixen (full of more things I can't afford) and just up the hill a little from Arcadia, whose incredible brekkie burgers I can afford.

Be nice to your kitchen cupboards, y'all. Unless you like cardboard boxes, that is.

Today is also incredibly special, windy and hot as it is, as I have (gasp) no more teenagers in my family. How did that happen? I blinked and there it was. Happy birthday, Pat - and many more.

writers I like to read (and read about)

Thanks to Jill Jones for pointing out this feature on Australian poetry at British poetry site Metaroar, which developed organically into a group interview by New South Wales writer Angela Meyer with Jill, David Prater and Paul Hardacre. I will read more of it later, but partly due to my recent communications with him, I have to say I was tickled by David's answers to the questions of the role of poetry in society ('Sometimes I fail to see what role poetry has, other than to keep poets sane'), and things poetry should be able to do but cannot (' I wish it could bring down a government').

I really enjoyed Sophie Cunningham's great piece in The Age this weekend on writers and blogging, where she draws skilfully on her personal blogging experience and then weaves that of others into the article to give a broad and detailed picture of how blogging and writing do and don't mix (among other things). I especially liked the ending quote from fellow Ozblogger Boynton, which first appeared here:

I wonder what writers can learn from blogging? (the electric speed of playful language for one, where ideas seed).

a nose for these things

A compelling review by Brenda Niall appeared in The Age today ( sorry, registration is required for this one already). I will get this book, Body Parts: Essays on Life Writing, after I’ve got hold of Sebald's Campo Santo and there will be much rejoicing ( as was remarked when Robin’s minstrels were eaten).
This is Lee's second book to include material on Woolf ( this one appears in the Amazon catalogue as Virginia Woolf's Nose: Essays on Biography) and she apparently has ' sharp things to say' about the film The Hours. Niall says,

As the reflections of a professional biographer, Body Parts will have special interest for anyone who attempts that craft. Yet it has an unexpected breadth of appeal...the occupational risks of biography, which include narcissism and possessiveness, are everyday hazards in human relationships. Among many wonderful stories about the living and the dead, a few are disappointing...it is a pity Graham McInnes' portrait of his mother Angela Thirkell in The Road to Gundagai was not taken into account in Lee's chapter on the snobbish world of Thirkell's novels. Thirkell's brief exile in Melbourne brought out the worst in her. "Mother was awful," McInnes wrote, "but I loved her."

Brenda Niall has written several bios of Australian writers and artists, and I’ve yet to digest her extended treatment of Martin Boyd’s family, The Boyds. Dipping into it quickly I did find much I had already read in her book about Martin himself.
(For State-siders reading this, Martin Boyd was a lively and urbane recreator of late nineteenth century Melbourne life in his novels, the most famous being the four books known as the Langton Quartet. I adore all of them. More on A Difficult Young Man another time.
By the way, I didn't know Amazon provided citations via email.)

Visitors from Blusterhead, on the other hand, are highly likely to know exactly who Martin was and how famous his nephew Arthur and other family members are in Australia. One of my regrets ( among several, not an extensive list) is that I did not visit Bundanon before Arthur died a few years back. Imagine seeing Australia’s greatest living painter at work, as he was wont to do for visitors... and yours truly missed the opportunity.