reeling and writhing

Prime Minister's literary awards are in

Finally. The news is out on this year's PM's literary awards.

Minister for the Arts Peter Garrett has just announced the winners of the 2009 Prime Minister's Literary Awards.

The winner of the 2009 Fiction award is Nam Le for his book of short stories The Boat. The judging panel was impressed by the daring scope and excellence of its execution, the generous breadth of its emotional and social traverse and the excitement generated by every story.

In 2009, two books and three authors share the Non-Fiction award. The winners are Evelyn Juers for House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann; and Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds for Drawing the Global Colour Line.

Both books explore important racial, moral and political issues of Australia's past. The Non-Fiction judging panel said "With great intellectual authority and international research Evelyn Juers, Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds tell their stories magnificently."

The link for this Bookforum review of The Boat comes from Nam Le's reviews page on his website - scroll right on down...

The most recent Latrobe University Bulletin  carried these remarks on Reynolds' and Lake's prizewinning book, here, and the Cambridge University Press catalogue entry includes (somewhat chunky bits of) reviews. 

And my March '09 review of House of Exile, with links to other sources, is here.

review: The Ghost Poetry Project by Nathan Curnow

Curnow, Nathan. The Ghost Poetry Project (Puncher and Wattmann).
 
Nathan Curnow took himself across Australia to spend a total of ten nights in the most haunted places he could find, an innovative approach to post-colonial interrogation of historical space if there ever was one. Places visited included Fremantle Arts Centre, once a lunatic asylum, Monte Cristo, the most haunted house in Australia, a parsonage at Port Arthur and an old store on Norfolk Island (one of the book’s most beautiful poems, 'Whaling Song', comes from this part of the book).

This poetry collection has not one, but two narrative frames, the most obvious being the travelogue through these spaces to collect raw material, crossbarred throughout by Curnow’s own history with childhood insomnia, night panics and hauntings, and his young daughter’s fear of bunyips.  As Kevin Brophy writes, “this book must have the strangest ever provenance of any collection of poetry in Australia. Only a vampire or a Nathan Curnow could have done this…these poems come drenched with the bloody and violent deaths central to the history of European occupation in this country. But they are not ghoulish or sensational. They are the real thing, ‘both transparent and completely solid.”

(Update: Kevin Brophy's launch speech can be read here at Famous Reporter.)

Highlights of this collection for me included the section on Picton, containing a ghastly incident with a ghost train in a tunnel, the Monte Cristo group and several poems from the lunatic asylum, including one about a love letter thrown over the wall.

The poems about the Richmond Bridge are evocative, the first a picture postcard, complete with ducks, lunches and cameras released from buses. This idyllic entry point, reminiscent of more famous poems about bridges, dissolves quickly to night inspections of the oldest bridge in Australia which may contain a body in its arches, with a passing, ghastly nod to Billy Joe McAllister. The haunted hearse from Sydney, Elvira the Cadillac, has only been slept in once before, by a ghost investigator: the poems in this section are cheekily underlined by Curnow’s claim that he fell asleep.

just waiting for me to find it - bookshow of the century

...and it has no silly visuals, no annoying fake bookshelves, just pure refreshing chat. ONCE A WEEK at this stage, anyway, tune in not just to Lake Wobegon, but to Louise Swinn and Zoe Dattner's radical new take on conversation around books, the Twenty-First Century BookShow.

First seen on the Overland blog, where Jeff casts a sober eye on how we will continue to talk about books, and where.

I know where I'm going to be every week. In this instalment, listen to Zoe talk about YA novels and hiding in the library, and Louise discuss the problems of short story dissemination and the first Cutwater anthology. In one take, like Ella, including a sneeze. FAB.

See you next week sometime, as there's lots going on and I'm off to watch Episode 3 over lunch.

a web of writing that reads itself

Poets have embraced online communities, and Andrew Burke of Hi Spirits has pointed out this one, newly relaunched in a social network format.

I like the look of their virtual book tour, with its implications for the future of the reviewing of poetry.

final word comes from the floor

”Look straight ahead; never reply with a word in the papers; if in your writings you become polemical, then do not direct your polemic against this or that particular attack; never show that a word of your enemies has had any effect on you; in short, appear as though you did not at all suspect that there was any opposition.”

(Ibsen to George Brandes, quoted here at Ed's blog, within his interview on Alain de Botton's recent adventures in the blogosphere.)

There have been, to put it mildly, words on Twitter and in other places this week, leading to this discussion of reviewing response etiquette in The Telegraph by Philip Hensher, taking a somewhat unfortunate (but by no means unusual) delight in the hurt he has occasioned.

But let's begin at the beginning. So, first author and sometime reviewer Alice Hoffman got excited about the review of her latest book and decided to voice her concerns on Twitter, then deleted her cranky tweets which included the reviewer's email address and phone number.

Then Alain de Botton, no less, went onto a blog to make his disaffection with reviewer Caleb Crain both real and permanent.

His interview with Ed Champion on Ed Champion's Reluctant Habits has now attracted the suggestion that de Botton is somewhat naive.

some remarks on Susan Varga's novel, Headlong (with reference to The Spare Room)

Susan Varga, Headlong. University of Western Australia Press, 2009. Review copy provided.

Recently Helen Garner was criticised by some for using her outstanding novel, The Spare Room, to describe the brutal reality of dealing with anger and grief while caring, for daring to approach that side of caring that we like to pretend doesn't exist: she was criticised for being truthful about that within fiction, for refusing to make her fiction about caring 'pretty enough', and for being honest about her real-life sources.

Susan Varga is successful at invoking that kind of brutal reality purely through the immediacy of detail she provides and the speed with which it is accumulated. Sometimes she moves too quickly to the next stage without giving enough attention to 'inscaping' the force of those details. Things move so fast in the first half of the book that it is difficult to pause for a minute and absorb the horrifying rapidity with which Julia, recently widowed, succumbs to the grip of incapacitating, severe depression.

On page 73, therefore, I could not quite keep up with her daughter Kati as she baldly states her belief that she will soon assist Julia to die. Some of that necessary detail is filled in at a completely different pace in part two of the book, giving it a structure that swings open and shut from the middle like an artist's handmade book.

I can't think of a precedent for such a structure and it seemed risky to me, making this book provoking in two ways; one is listening endlessly to people seeking answers to life and death questions throughout, while also asking, can Varga pull this challenge off?and flipping back to the beginning chapters while reading the second half.

It's worth reading Headlong just to see how she figures that out, but also this book is very compelling simply for the portrayal of the frightening collapse of Julia after her husband's death.

Review: Look Who's Morphing by Tom Cho

Review copy provided.
Some of the stories and short prose pieces in Tom Cho's first collection, Look Who's Morphing, are perfect magazine pieces, the kind that gives a literary mag a shot of Viagra if it's too uniform in tone.
Taken all at once, the effect is somewhat unsettling at first, but a completely unhealthy and all consuming obsession with pop culture on the part of this writer does not wear thin, as Cho is playful enough to keep things fresh and lively (see this interview at Peril magazine for more on that).

If I was writing his profile for an Internet dating service I guess I would say that 'Tom Cho has quite an imagination and a great SOH.'
'The Exorcist' and 'Dinner With Auntie Ling and Uncle Wang' were both very funny - everyone should have a possessed relative to inspire them when writing grant applications, and an uncle who has some C++ bugs in his system, shouldn't they? Of course they should.

'Today On Dr Phil' succeeds admirably in making both theory and pop culture look silly together. Intellectualise first, and then riot in the studio. I would like to see what Cho could do with Blazing Saddles, let alone what his Uncle Shen can do with a streetcar named lingerie and the " v*g*nas of strangers".

And I would like to see what he can do with novellas - 'CockRock' is a clever take on Swift and it would be good to see him, shall we say, fully extended. I also liked the short and pithy 'Dinner With My Brother', where Chinese names are discussed - 'if patchy employment history has a name, then that name must be Tom Cho'. 

This collection is a sparkling and polymorphous addition to that history - the energy drink you have when you're not a transformer, but kind of wish you were. I want to see him skip and hop through clover again sometime soon.
(A great time for the Giramondo website to do a morph, as well. Looking GOOD.)

Elise Valmorbida: News and reviews

Disclaimer: I studied French and English with the author of these books nearly thirty years ago.
I have not laid eyes on her since, or communicated with her about her writing, but have been following her work with interest for a long time since I found and read her first book, published in Australia as Matilde Waltzing.
Elise Valmorbida now lives in London where she has a communications agency and teaches creative writing. She has a new novel coming out this month in the UK, and has recently written two books which I bought and read a little while ago, and have reviewed quickly here today.

The stories in Elise Valmorbida's 2007 collection, The Book Of Happy Endings, are interleaved with expressive photos by several contributors and with a romance conducted through letters between two people who meet in a bar.
They are fictionalised accounts of the life stories of love given to the author in London, 'the world in one city', as she puts it, by strangers: "It was a happy task, prompting others to tell their tale."

She paraphrases some East London graffiti in her Introduction, 'it's never too late to have a happy childhood,' in order to capture how meeting with some of these people made her feel: "It's never too late to start a happy ending."

Poetry reviews: Kate Middleton, Adam Aitken

Review copies provided.

Poetry is the only whole thinking - Les Murray, being a tad essentialist.

Discuss. (Only kidding.) I'm commencing an irregular feature here, which you will see belongs to the plain-with-links school of poetry reviewing. My efforts are guided by the instructive and plain-speaking reviewers at the excellent online poetry magazine, foam:e, and by good poetry reviewers - well, everywhere. But especially by Derek Motion and Louise Waller, whose straight talking ways I admire.

Kate Middleton, Fire Season. Giramondo, 2009.

Kate Middleton is a Melbourne poet, musician and librettist. According to ABR, in 2002 she wrote the libretto for the opera Lapse, by Alan Lee, which was performed at Melba Hall and the Museum of Victoria.

In 2005 the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra premiered Natalie Williams's orchestral suite Scheherezade's Nights based on her poems.

In the spare, sinewy title poem of this collection she suggests, with some clairvoyance, that fire is 'something about heroism and the weight of stone /Something about ash.'
Her poem, 'Rainbow's End', published in this collection, won the 2006 Bruce Dawe poetry prize and you can read it here.

This is her first book of poetry, though she is widely published - these two poems on the ABR website are both in this collection, whereas 'Dispatches', at Cordite, is not. Clearly there was plenty to select from - the volume comprises 36 poems and one suite.

The arrangement of the poems reflects the publishing process - they have all clearly appeared as solo items, or maybe in the occasional duet. Nonetheless there are recurring preoccupations with old American film stars, minotaurs, satin, Italy, flowers and love reticulated through classical and literary heroes' lives. The poem 'Desdemona', sitting between a minotaur and a film star, is, like the play, really about Othello, and stunning:

He sings: gentle Moorish notes.
Discerns: the fineness of Canterbury lace. (Who
evern dreamed of such a man?)

Lowering hand over flame
enclosing the fire
within.
A special pleasure
and squalor,
                        blood in the fingertips. Pain
is not pain. Put out
the light.

It is not surprising that a graduate of composition might allow images to reverberate through her first collection, like counterpoint. As with most contemporary poetry, it is necessary to make imaginative leaps sometimes (and here I agree with Derek Motion, writing of Michael Farrell here, that this is not always an easy thing to do, but that nonetheless we should try.)

The poems I enjoyed the most were:
'Fire Season', the sly humour of 'Morning Sonnet', all the film star poems which are very dry, 'Scheherazade's Nights', though I do not understand why bullets are indulged in section 4, 'The Lovers' Holocaust', 'Your Feet', and 'Penelope on the Night of Odysseus' Homecoming'.
There are a couple of poems with wanting at their core that are remarkable, and while a trifle overdecorative ( probably the whole point), 'On A Bronzino in the Uffizi, Florence', finishes with a clever flourish arising from what must have been an irresistible line to play with, if it's original (help me out here, if you know! who does this sound like?):

                                    Her eyes
enumerate a decalogue of sorrows

In another humorous poem, Fat Ben Jonson, she speaks wittily of the "slender line", and certainly is able to cast a wider range of muscular phrases than that undernourished description might suggest.
I'll leave you with the enjoyable thought of this not so new poet counting  down that decalogue:

great riches and heavy fabrics, silence,
soft lips, ribbons and rings, books and bows,
white knuckles and eyes looking down the centuries
that never shed a tear.

Adam Aitken, Eighth Habitation. Giramondo, 2009.

To Mr Aitken, then - this is his fourth collection and though I have read some reviews I am not familiar with his earlier books. Works in this collection have appeared in a whole swathe of publications from Hong Kong, Vietnam, Australia and the US.
Of particular merit within this book is a long suite of poems about Cambodia. Aitken introduces the accounts of French colonial diarists as more than simply padding in his Cambodian poems – that of naturalist Henri Mouhot is a rich reworking, even though Aitken claims:

Let’s be modest, your notes were
hasty, rough, with no claim to any merit
but to record the truth.
Destined as good books are
to see the light.

And also destined, I think, to give Aitken a poem where he can revisit l'Indochine:

These days it is not so easy
to discover anything
or to re-discover anything
let alone die looking...

Now we will know how the hunter
was once truly beautiful…

Though he is quick to counter Mouhot’s seductive influence with a brief homage to the deeply cynical trade commissioner Louis de Carne, who predicted India would fall into the hands of Australians:

…I could write all night in my tent
Cobwebbed in ennui and
Sucking on the leg bone of an iguana,
Or recline under the implacable serenity of the heavens,
The all-powerful constraints
Of influences so fatal to human personality
That thought dies away by degrees
Like a flame in a vacuum.

(You can read the whole poem and another, 'Francais', here.)

There is almost nothing of landmines here save the fearsome 'The Scream', but chilling echoes of cruelty are everywhere – try ‘The Wearer of Amulets’ on for size. This suite of poems (has it been published on its own?) builds tenaciously into an indictment of the '70s reign of terror in Cambodia, punctuated by a curious set of aubades (no less than six of them), probably worth reading in sequence themselves, in one of which Aitken wearily complains:

There are poets you know
who hardly sleep.
Your method is different.

The last poem in this sequence, addressed to a Cambodian writer as the person speaking throughout these poems leaves the country, suggests that not enough people can speak of the terror even now (he was last in Cambodia to work on these poems in 2008). The writer he addresses was married off, "let's say at gunpoint":

To forget or not to,
to write or not to – therefore live –
to forgive the monster
is this impossible question

Those who do not read
are still with us
and so few of you who write
with any skill or beauty

We move forward all the same, dear friend
back and forward
across the moat
one more time.

The opening sequence is titled Broken/Unbroken (echoing Jill Jones' prize-winning collection Broken/Open) and contains a poem on fire 'in the Sydney style' in which he pays tribute to Robert Adamson's denims, a poem about relatives and war, a beautiful, resigned poem on Gallipoli ('Ionian'), and the pellucid and quite mysterious 'Force Zero'.

Crossing Lake Toba contains other poems about South-East Asia - Malaysia, Singapore and post 12/02 Bali all accounted for at various points in their histories, as well as a great nine page conversation in tercets with his mother about the niceties of a retiring life in Cairns.

Though I did not, one might read the Cambodian poems first, and then work back - the intensity of that suite certainly lends its power to rereadings of the whole collection. I'm sure it's a part of Eighth Habitation I will visit again. Aitken has a travel and poetry blog with many photos of his Cambodian sojourn, here.

Kate Middleton, Fire Season: Adam Aitken, Eighth Habitation. Both from Giramondo Publishing, 2009.

Review: The Diamond Anchor by Jennifer Mills

Review copy provided.
The foreword to the peripatetic Australian   
writer Jennifer Mills' first novel, like the opening lines of a tale from Hans Christian Anderson, sets up the framework for the whole book, though we do not realise it until we are about two-thirds through.

May McCabe and Grace Harper have wrestled in their adult lives to forget their early passion for each other, and the book is framed as a tale told by one of them in her old age, the one who stayed behind and seems to have melted into the cliffs of Coal, a fictional mining town somewhere in New South Wales.

    May, the proprietor of her family’s hotel, the Diamond Anchor, tells most of the story, as she did in childhood. She is responding to a letter from Grace, long gone from Coal, writing to May that she wishes to open up the past once more, to find out:

“who broke whom, who pushed whom away, who cast the first stone, who can say what split our path into two distinct forks like the tongue of a snake?”

Although the retelling is at length and as detailed as a tapestry, I believe the space taken is warranted, unlike some reviewers who feel this book has overstayed its length. When you pull back at the end and start to reconsider the imagery, the frame, and the movement of the story back on itself like a swallowing snake, the length is justifiable, and signalled clearly at the beginning when seventy-year old May says she is trying ‘to find the thread of the story, to place the lines. To pick up the end of the rope that will pull you home.’ 

Mills allows space for the kind of detail familiar to readers of that great ethnic storyteller of Nova Scotia, Alistair McLeod. Even though she may not be writing of her own people, as he does (is she? I don’t know), the world she creates has a texture that reminds me of his work – toughly lyrical, clean cut but able to incite smoke, mist and seascape to deliver colour and sensuality at an instant. The effects are quietly intoxicating, if slow to build at times - but then, so is McLeod's best work.

I  have been watching Ms Mills for a little while and asked for a review copy of this book because I knew it would be worth investigating, and I am not disappointed. It is important to be patient with the slow building towards the final moments of the book, and with the elusiveness of Grace throughout. Mills has set herself an exacting exercise in allowing one protagonist to both deliver what is essentially a two-hander and to build a place and its people, and the way she carries it out is impressive. Her writing of country is quietly, sombrely magnificent, and her intelligent braiding together of politics of several kinds with their histories and her characters is impressive. This is somebody to keep watching.

Update - this fine interview with Mills at the Sydney Morning Herald.

The Diamond Anchor, by Jennifer Mills. UQP Press, 2009.

House of Exile nominated for Gold

... as Perry has reported, a title I reviewed recently has been shortlisted for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. And deservedly so.
The ALS medal looks to be another award that is selected across categories, as the list includes biography, poetry and fiction.

(The Slap, of course, has been reviewed here too - but I hardly need to link to that review as it has persistently increased the traffic here since it was posted back in November last year. If that's anything to go by, it's either one hell of a popular book, an easily remembered title, or both.)

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. 

Review: Life In Seven Mistakes by Susan Johnson

Susan Johnson has attacked some pertinent subject matter here (apparently the book deals with seven problems attacked by, or attacking, the Barton family over the years, though this was not immediately apparent to me).

The descriptions of making art in this book are beautiful, yet like their creator, they are not allowed to dominate. What does dominate is the parents' story and the parents' life - the weight of this sweet, often funny novel is pitched against Elizabeth's late boomer generation quite deliberately, and one recognises over time that the novelist has made a choice to examine her controlling, self-involved parents as forensically as possible without excavating their hearts, wisely leaving us to fill in those gaps ourselves.

While I did not find the resolution as unlikely as one reviewer has, I did become impatient at times because I realised that I'm one of the strident ones, like sister-in-law Katie, one of the ones that wants a clear, transparent story in which everything is explained and uncovered. (The psychotherapist Adam Phillips has spoken of this desire, in his characteristically half-derisive fashion, as the need to 'translate a person'.)

However the beauty of this book is that it attempts to delicately describe what it is that Elizabeth, her siblings and her parents turn away from uncovering, over and over again through the course of their lives; a psychology lecture is not on the agenda. I read Life In Seven Mistakes with great, school-marmish relief at times that I could spot immediately what it was that Elizabeth should not put up with from her ageing, suffocating parents: no baby names, no rubbishing about her mistakes, no extended holidays with people who talk to her like she is garbage (for Christ's sake, just go visit them and stay in a hotel!!). This woman doesn't set boundaries, and should. Some would find this annoying, and have said as much.

But as Johnson indicates clearly throughout, she hasn't set them with anyone else either. Life has simply happened while she was busy not making any plans in particular, and this seems to be what her parents resent the most, while blissfully ignoring the fact that they were given different life work to do in their time.

While some of this is a bit rushed, there are some very touching moments towards the end as the bullying, self-sufficient patriarch of the family becomes ill and vulnerable, and relationships are sustained in spite of deep hurt and constant misunderstanding as a health crisis is faced.

I enjoyed, as always, reading about Cooma and the Snowy too. I also noted the care with which young family members in the book were depicted, especially the lovely, gangly-legged teenage girls. And not everything was tied up neatly - there were plenty of prickles left over for later, which was quite satisfying. Definitely a 'machine that works' here.

review: The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap is less of a tightly skewed exercise in punishing libertarians than James Ley in his ABR review would have us believe, and more of a satanic version of Neighbours, borrowing where required from its far sexier and more richly cinematic relative Love My Way, and swapping most of the Anglos for their real northern (and increasingly eastern, western and southern) suburbs neighbours.

I adored this book, though I'm not crazy about some of the Vaseline-lensed sex sprinkled throughout, which is borrowed quite happily from pulp romance, along with some rapid-fire dialogue that would sound awful even on television. That old porn writer Hanif Kureishi is less mechanical in this department, and with feeling (though I have not read Loaded, so don't know what else Tsiolkas does better either.)
I could not put The Slap down, walked around the house with it and had it finished pretty quickly given that the house was full of people, people talking to me, eating with me and generally doing stuff. It grew on me in much the same way Love My Way does if you are having the DVD-fest, though it is rather different in tone.

I thought Tsiolkas displayed masterly control of the multiple threads of narrative, probably doing a better job than anyone in the country. I was disappointed in his editors - Moorabbin with ONE B, and some neologisms that should not have got through (Mulitfarious, anyone? perhaps from the Latin root muliere, maybe something to do with women...?)

The interesting thing about this book was its effortless blend of well-observed local detail  ("I shot a man in Vermont, just to watch him die"), with the hyper-realism common to soap opera, but rarely well managed in novel form. Like the folks who wrote the end of Mullet, Tsiolkas knows this story has to be bigger than real life, soap without the bubbles: dirt, blood and a few broken teeth left in the bath when it's emptied. Yes, some silly things happen: but they do not have to be believable to make the book move and live and have its being, and his control of all threads is mesmerising - he never lets go. I don't think I've really explained what I mean there, but let it be.

I was moved to tears at least twice, firstly by the chapter on Connie's father, and on another chapter on the ageing Greek grandfather, Manoli, visiting his dying friend on a whim after a funeral.

We do need someone in this country writing anger, too, and again I beg to differ with Ley; instead of being weighted against the raffish failed bohemians Rosie and Gary, the anger is spread around this book like an infection (my evidence for this needs to be withheld though, for fear of spoiling the book for others.)
A lot of our novels are damn pretty, unfortunately. Funny, though, that this also happens elsewhere, so that someone like Richard Ford leaches anger slowly through his work and then gets really mad off the page. The stress of writing pretty can't be very good for one's emotional health, if Ford is anything to go by.

And the last chapter simply sings, resurrecting what I understand of Loaded (really must read that now), for a last run around the block, shall we say, before Christos has to really grow up. As Ley noted also, he writes magnificently about teenagers - there's a great little shoplift of cigarettes in the middle which simply shouted "Coles" to me. A very exciting book, much more to my tastes than Dead Europe, which was incredibly well written and conceived, but terrifying. Simply terrifying.

Whatever will he do next?

*Update - November 2009.

I am still receiving comments on this review, which is the most visited post on this blog. I would just like to say, given the number of negative comments I have received here about this book, that sometimes it is helpful to go to a writer's other books as well if you want some perspective on a work that you find disturbing or that makes you deeply critical.

The Slap is a departure from earlier concerns for this writer, which is why I am interested in it - after sex and drugs (Loaded), the sources of violence and racism in Europe as seen by an Australian traveller (Dead Europe) and the vagaries of suburbia (The Slap), I still wonder, what next for this talented writer? I'll certainly be looking for his next book, but this blog is not just here to give readers with a somewhat conventional notion of what a book should be 'about' a voice. I guess I'm a bit disappointed that fewer readers were able to engage with it on this level, and feel I have encouraged some venting of deep antagonisms towards the work without being able to direct readers to view it more constructively. That's probably my fault, and I apologise for that, but would encourage any of you who are unhappy with The Slap to make some time to go deeper into Tsiolkas' other work and try to understand two things: firstly, why it is his voice we're hearing about these issues, and not someone else's, and secondly, why some of us are annoyed by that. For example, why can't a gay man write about the possible roots of male violence for a general audience? why are people being upset by that?

I think The Slap is a remarkably successful, if occasionally unwieldy, exercise in not writing a television soapie as a novel, and I hope it leads a wave of incisive, adventurous suburban writing over the next few years - I would recommend Cate Kennedy's The World Beneath, quite a different book, but noted by reviewer Kerryn Goldsworthy as having a 'beady-eyed' perspective on contemporary society, to anyone who wants something to compare The Slap to. 

Comments on the post will be closed by the end of November (all posts on this blog are now set to have comments closed after a year), as this is the most read post on this blog and if discussion continues, I will have to read it again!! Only time will tell how this book and its many audiences evolve. If you would like to talk further about it after the end of this month, I would encourage you to consider starting a blog yourself...

visualise this

Times Online business correspondent Leo Lewis is looking forward to the upcoming publication of Das Kapital in a manga version in Japan in early December:

Japanese publishers have historically used cartoons to explain thorny diplomatic relations with China, advanced wine-tasting and even the spread of bird flu: the manga version of Das Kapital takes on even the toughest concepts thrown up in the original, from “commodity fetishism” to the precise process by which “the expropriators are expropriated”.

The comic is expected to sell tens of thousands of copies in its first weeks on sale, but is up against stiff competition: anti-capitalist books are the hottest sellers in capitalist Japan at the moment, and it will take something extraordinary to beat the sales of Hideki Mitani’s Greedy Capitalism and the Self Destructiveness of Wall Street.

Link via The Literary Saloon at the Complete Review.