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launching Rebekah Clarkson’s novel ‘Barking Dogs’

by Patrick
26 Feb

In early February 2017, I launched Rebekah Clarkson’s novel Barking Dogs (Affirm Press). This is a reasonably close approxmiation (I’m pretty sure) of what I said:

In these dire — but hopefully hopeful — days we suddenly find ourselves living through, I doubt I’m the only person who is filtering virtually every event, action and thought through the reality, and the reality show, that is Donald Trump, President of the United States of America, President of Australia (like it or not), and leader of the free world. In the last couple of weeks readers have been running in droves to certain sorts of fiction: to George Orwell’s 1984, to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, to Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and more. Maybe these readers are seeking ways to understand the inexplicable. Or maybe they are retreating into fantasy worlds to, as Billy Joel might say, ‘forget about life for a while’. Maybe they’re not reading these books at all: maybe there’s comfort enough in just buying them and setting them on prominent display. Maybe it’s a combination of all of the above.

Whatever the reasons, Orwell, Atwood et al. are selling by the truckload. What has that got to do with Rebekah Clarkson’s Barking Dogs, a terrific new novel in stories about deceptively everyday moments and featuring an ensemble of characters — families, couples, singles, youth, kids — living ordinary lives in Mount Barker? A good deal, I suggest, because the best fiction not only entertains us, important thought that is, but also challenges us to understand ourselves, including our own — and our community’s own — foibles and failings. Barking Dogs sits firmly in that tradition: this is a book to turn to in 2017, just as much as, say, a dystopian vision of the near future that was published in 1949. We need today’s voices as well as yesterday’s voices, however infuential. And Barking Dogs is a book that focuses on big questions — including death and loss, ageing, gender politics and more — but that also finds meaning in backyard blitzes and in building off the plan.

The unifying glue for these stories is the town of Mount Barker, just up the freeway from Adelaide: ‘Mount Barker is a very different town from when Edna and Brian’s chidlren were young and they’d come through here as a family, in the truck. It was like a little country town back then, even with the milk factory and the tannery, though they’re long closed. These days Edna thinks of it as a maddening jigsaw puzzle of shops and schools and houses. Every new shop seems to want to sell her a pizza. An all the silly estates with their big, God-awful houses and man-made lakes and ostentatious entrance gates.’

It’s the fine detail in Barking Dogs that resonates, often delivered in a sentence or a phrase: ‘you could reach over the fence and open your neighbour’s toilet window’; or, ‘Forty-one years ago his grandfather had said, disappointment undisguised, that Malcolm was “not really a man’s man”’; or, ‘I watch my three items slide along the conveyer belt. Milk, white bread, miniature muffins’.

In the pages of Barking Dogs, Mount Barker the place comes to life like a living organism: its spirit, its contradictions, its growth. But the real force of Barking Dogs is the rich cast of human characters, and the small and big challenges they confront or avoid. There is an elderly widow called Edna, who is irritated by her daughter and the strange and superficial modernised world she chooses to lives in. When Edna gets a rare chance to look after her small grandkids, things don’t go quite to plan: the issue is minor, but the effect is devastating. Then there’s a 12-year-old girl called Janis who is in possession of a terrible letter written to her friend, Maddie B (‘not Maggie G’) by a boy. The portrait of Janis — not least, the fierceness of her emotions — is startlingly authentic. But also, ‘She is named after Janis Joplin, which is totally embarrassing’. And then there’s Graham, a small business owner — his new shop, Winners, sells trophies and medals. Graham sits, pained and distracted, through a meeting with his son and the school headmaster: ‘He’d just seen the school’s pamphlet on redemptive justice; this was going to take a while’. Graham, it seems, is out of sync with the world around him: how to make his business work, how to engage with others, how to parent, how to be a partner to Jenny, how to network, how to keep track of his Bluetooth. But he’s trying, in his own way, at least some of the time.

I could go on introducing characters, but better that you get to know these people yourself. Personally, I found the experience of reading Barking Dogs like looking at my reflection in the mirror, except with every pore and every flaw magnified. I nodded a lot while reading: a lot. I gasped: the shifts and revelations, the emphatic but open resolutions, are genuinely surprising. I laughed, very often because I experienced a discomforting jolt of recognition. And, not infrequently, I winced at the decisions some characters made, the views they held, the priorities they clung to, as if they were drowning without really even noticing that they were wet.

That’s a fine skill, the ability to make readers wince while also making them want to keep reading. Barking Dogs succeeds because Rebekah Clarkson brings such generosity of spirit, such compassion, such emotional depth, such candour to her storytelling. She’s not dumping on these people, she’s not using them for sport — even when they’re petty or self-absorbed or nasty or pathetic or apathetic. She’s not setting them up to fail or to look stupid for the benefit of her plot. And yet her gaze is unblinking.

In the end, Barking Dogs is a portrait of community: of a particular community, Mount Barker, and of the idea and ideal of community. In this novel of stories, endings always seem provisional. Although this is Rebekah Clarkson’s first book of fiction, the years of slog and persistence in honing her short story craft — of harnessing her particular way of sharing her particular vision — are on full display. Today we are celebrating excellence, but I invite you to take a moment to recognise how much much slog, how much sacrifice, has gone into the making of this object. Congratulations to Affirm Press, too, for choosing to publish Barking Dogs, for seeing the value in stories about the local, the suburban, the small. I also want to recognise Kate Goldsworthy, who edited Barking Dogs.

One of the books I’ve turned to this in the early days of the Trump presidency is English writer and illustrator Raymond Briggs’s graphic novel, When the Wind Blows. I first read it in the 1980s, which is the last time I was terrified about nuclear weapons. It follows the story of an elderly suburban couple, Jim and Hilda Bloggs, living in a cottage before and after a nuclear attack on the UK by the Soviet Union. Even as radiation sickness takes hold of them, they try to maintain their routines … and their innocence. The local and the global come together in the sharpest possible relief. In a different but complementary way, Barking Dogs, captures something very pertinent about Australia’s approach to the global, not least by addressing the insularity of our version of ‘local’. Barking Dog’s small themes are also big themes, and the thoughts and sitautions that fill the character’s heads — from the struggle to conceive a child to the struggle to face death, and everything in between — are stacked with unforced meaning.

February 2017, Adelaide

Categories : Comment, Event, New writing
Tags : Affirm Press, Barking Dogs, launch, Rebekah Clarkson

Stella Prize 2016

by Patrick · Comments (0)
10 Feb

Some brief, provisional and (I’m sure) clumsy thoughts on the 2016 Stella Prize longlist …

I like that the chair of the Stella Prize judging panel, Brenda Walker, has chosen to publish some broad-ranging comments about the Stella longlist. It’s particularly interesing (for me, anyway) that she has chosen to emphasise that ‘Many of the works on the longlist are set in the countryside, adding to a tradition in Austrralian literature that offers both idyllic and unsettling accounts of rural life’. A tempting first response to this is, ‘Ahrrrrrr, not more gum trees’ – and I do feel that way to some extent. But ‘Ahrrrrrr’ by itself isn’t much of a response. For one thing, these books might simply, so far as the judges are collectively concerned, best embody the judging criteria. Fair enough, given the limits and compromises that afflict all judging panels. Still, Walker’s comments invite further discussion. Do Australian writers – in this case, Australian women writers – write stories about the rural better than the urban? And are Australian women fiction writers writing better books – or, to follow the Stella Prize’s criteria, more ‘excellent, original and engaging’ books – than non-fiction writers? I say ‘no’ and ‘no’ to these two questions, but there are no correct answers: it’s a matter of opinion for individual readers (or judges). And answers will differ over time, and certainly from year to year. (As a side question, what does ‘engaging’ actually mean?)

In the meantime, it’s not like all these rural-themed or rural-set books are all exactly the same. Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship With Birds, set on the fringe of a town and featuring cows as well as people, is one of my favourite Australian novels of the last decade (it won the inaugural Stella Prize, and it was a surprise to me – just personally – that it didn’t also win the Miles Franklin Literary Award). From this year’s longlist, Peggy Frew’s Hope Farm, a book I reviewed and enjoyed, is set mostly on a farm, but Frew’s focus on hippy lifestyle and culture gives it a distinctive, almost other-wordly feel.

The debate about the relative merits, and the hierarchy, of rural and urban stories in Australian writing is very well-worn. It’s a debate, for example, that has dogged the Miles Franklin Literary Award for years. But part of that discussion about the Miles Franklin involves the historical privileging of male novelists (and, so often, men-centric stories) as well as non-urban stories. But it is intriguing – and, again, it’s a conversation that I think Walker invites – to se the the rural-urban discussion popping up re the Stella too.

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Categories : Comment, New writing
Tags : Australianness, Stella Prize

‘Just Read’ readathon: lit mags, post 1

by Patrick · Comments (0)
08 Jun

In June and July I’m participating in the Just Read readathon, helping to raise funds for the excellent Indigenous Literacy Foundation. For the readathon, I am only reading literary magazines. I finished my first one last night, issue 7 of The Canary Press. One of the things I like about lit mags is the mix of voices and styles and perspectives bouncing off each other — and the mix of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, photography, art, etc. Although The Canary Press stick mainly to fiction (in this issue, there is a script and lots of triffic art work), they still achieve that mix: its spread of writers is international, and they happily publish the living and the dead (in the issue, the dead are Elizabeth Jolley, one of Australia’s best writers of any era, and Moacyr Scliar, who was a Brazilian writer and physician – I’d never heard of him before, which is another thing I like about lit mags, at least when the writing turns out to be good). I’m not going to review this issue here, but I will say that the whole thing unsettled me, which is what I like most about lit mags. My favourite piece — on a first read, anyway — was Lally Katz’s disturbing (to me) script, ‘The Apocalypse Bear – Part 1’.

My next lit mag for the readathon is … I’m not sure yet ….

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Categories : Comment
Tags : Indigenous Literacy Foundation, Just Read, The Canary Press

On the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

by Patrick · Comments (0)
26 Nov

The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is a very different sort of writing prize – and why not. As the Award’s website explains, ‘The nomination process for the Award is unique as nominations are made by libraries in capital and major cities throughout the world. Participating libraries can nominate up to three novels each year for the Award. Over 400 library systems in 177 countries worldwide were invited to nominate books for the 2014 award.’

Awkwardly, the full list of nominated books becomes the ‘longlist’. In 2015, the longlist is 142 books long. That’s such a long longlist that it tends to devalue the term: ‘congratulations to author A for being longlisted for the IMPAC prize’, sounds more than a little hollow.

To an extent, though, the problem is a matter of perception. Many, many more than 142 novels are published in English in a given year, so to be recognised by librarians — discerning book people on the frontline  — is something worth celebrating.

In the meantime, credit to the Award’s administrators for listing all the nominated books. All writing prizes should publish the full list of entered works, not only longlists, shortlists and winners. Not only does the IMPAC publish the full list, it breaks its disclosure down even further by listing the libraries that have nominated books and what those books are. The State Library of South Australia, in my hometown of Adelaide, nominated Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North but also two non-Australians, Kate Atkinson and Philipp Meyer. The other participating Australian libraries — the State Library of Queensland, the National Library of Australia, the State Library of Victoria and the State Library of New South Wales — stuck with Australian nominations: Richard Flanagan (again), Hannah Kent, Melissa Lucashenko, Christos Tsiolkas, Alex Miller, Tim Winton, Chris Womersley and Alexis Wright. It took libraries from other parts of the world to nominate Graeme Simsion and J.M. Coetzee. Again, credit to the Award’s administrators for publicly sharing this information: it’s quite intriguing to see what books librarians in, say, Croatia or Colombo or South Korea favour.

Looking beyond Australia, some libraries have stuck with their own. For example, the Jamaica Library Service’s sole nominee is Jamaican writer A-dZiko Simba Gegele. Other libraries have a mix of local and international nominees. Some have gone wholly international: Barcelona’s Biblioteca Vila de Grácia, Biblioteques de Barcelona, for example, has nominated J.M. Coetzee, Ma Jian and Thomas Pynchon. According the website, 2015 nominations include ’49 novels in translation with works by 37 Americans, 19 British, 9 Canadian, 9 Australian [I count 10, including Coetzee] and 7 Italian authors’. Plus a whole lot of others in smaller numbers . I can’t see it listed anywhere on the website, but my count is 84 men (actually 85, as one book is co-authored) and 58 women.

There’s a great deal more detail to discover about the Award and the many writers nominated — and there are more gaps to consider in what is nevertheless a genuinely international award. For now, one final curiosity: librarians choose the longlist but not the shortlist or the winner. Whatever the reasons for this, the particular and peculiar perspectives (peculiar in a good way) that libraries bring to this exercise becomes diluted.

http://www.impacdublinaward.ie/

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Categories : Comment, New writing
Tags : #IMPACDub20, IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

Miles Franklin Literary Award: a personal shortlist & longlist

by Patrick · Comments (0)
02 Apr

When I was a boy I loved trying to choose sporting teams. I once won a bet with my dad that I could pick the Aussie test team for the first Ashes test against England, 1978-79. I won a day off school to watch the first day of the test, which was a shame, as it turned out, because England ripped through Australia’s batting. (Dad was a minister of religion back then so he knew a bit about playing the odds.)

In the spirit of my exploits as an underage cricket selector – that is, mainly just for the sport of it – I’m posting my personal longlist and shortlist for the 2014 Miles Franklin Literary Award. This annotated list is not a prediction of the actual shortlist: to construct such a list would involve guestimating the Miles Franklin judges’ tastes and motivations. Instead, these are the novels published in 2013 that I’d like to see on the longlist and shortlist.

There are, I think, legitimate questions worth raising about the existence of longlists. Is it ‘the best’, with all longlisters an equal chance of making the shortlist and being the winner? Or is it an opportunity for judges to give a nod to diversity, to honour newcomers and oldtimers who they think deserve some recognition … or who they don’t want to be seen to ignore?

As well as being a straightforward list of the best, longlists can serve a marketing/PR function. They can be an incentive to publishers to bother to enter. They can be a nod to diversity. They can be a bit of fun, a chance for judges to be fluid or creative or inclusive or affirming, ahead of the serious task of picking winners. Maybe longlists are a bit of all of that.

I’m not having a specific dig at the Miles Franklin regarding their longlist – and indeed I was unambiguously excited and proud when my novel, Figurehead, was longlisted in 2010 (as anyone who has had to read my CV will tell you). But in general terms, I find the concept of a longlist perplexing, especially for awards that don’t have hundreds and hundreds of entries.

Having almost talked myself out of bothering with this exercise, here it is anyway:  my personal Miles Franklin Literary Award longlist, in alphabetical order, followed by my shortlist:

Marion May Campbell. konkretion. UWA Press

I reviewed konkretion in Australian Book Review: https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/component/k2/98-april-2013-no-350/1403-questions-and-questing. I raved about it at the time and nothing has changed my view that it is a fine, fine novel. I was disappointed that konkretion wasn’t longlisted for the Stella Prize — that’s not a whinge, just a personal view.

J.M. Coetzee. The Childhood of Jesus. Text

My favourite Coetzee book remains The Life and Times of Michael K, but I enjoyed The Childhood of Jesus as much as my next favourites, Disgrace and the volumes of fictional memoirs. But does it fulfill the requirements of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, that the winning novel should represent ‘Australian life in any of its phases’? The question of refugees is a hugely live one for Australia (or it is, at least, on my twitter stream). But much more significantly, I detected many hints of the city of Adelaide, and its inhabitants, in Coetzee’s novel. I could be imagining the whole thing. I could be projecting my own sensibilities onto Coetzee. But I personally deem The Childhood of Jesus ‘eligible’. That’s my position and I’m sticking to it.

Tracey Farr. The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt. Fremantle Press

Terrific debut novel about an unusual musician and woman. Emotionally rich and subtle.

Richard Flanagan. The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Random House

Anointed as the favourite, and with good reason … but I’m not convinced it will win. For me, there’s a couple of forced moments in the way that the story links events and people over time. But I’m nitpicking: it’s wonderful.

Nicholas Rothwell. Belomor. Text

Such an strange, shimmering, beautiful, dense  book — is it even a novel?

Graeme Simsion. The Rosie Project. Text

Why not? Not the winner, and a couple of clunky moments, but huge fun.

Christos Tsiolkas. Barracuda. Allen & Unwin

It’s thrilling to watch the way Tsiolkas is interpreting modern Australia.

Alexis Wright. The Swan Book. Giramondo

Breathtaking. Magnificent. Ambitious. Jane Gleeson has written an excellent long piece here:  http://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/going-viral/.

And here’s my shortlist:

Marion May Campbell. konkretion

Richard Flanagan. The Narrow Road to the Deep North

J.M. Coetzee. The Childhood of Jesus

Alexis Wright. The Swan Book

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Tags : Miles Franklin Literary Award

Laura Jean McKay ‘Holiday in Cambodia’

by Patrick · Comments (0)
11 Jul

I’ve just finished reading Laura Jean McKay’s terrific new short story collection, Holiday in Cambodia. What follows is not a review — more an initial collection of thoughts and reactions.

These stories are all set in Cambodia, including late French colonisation, the Pol Pot period, and the messy (still messy) decades that have followed. There’s also a very funny virtual Cambodia (see ‘A Pocket Guide to Phnom Penh’). McKay doesn’t overshape the material by trying to mould the individual stories into some false cohesive whole: the collection is neither too unified nor too disjointed. Reading Holiday in Cambodia quickly as a single (though disparate) work — that is, allowing the different stories, characters and eras to meld into each other — offers greater rewards, I think, than dipping into the book, than separating the stories out.

For me, the standout story is ‘The Deep Ambition of Rossi’, which tells the story of the ‘UNESCO 1951 Bathing Suit Competition’ and in the process captures quite deliciously the politics and the play of the high end of town. It also contains a terrific cameo by a youngish King Sihanouk: ‘The King had a number of publicly recognised concubines, but he wasn’t yet married and took his time greeting the girls. He held Dominique’s hand slightly longer than the others and when he gave it back, it was as a present for her’ (198-99). I also particularly liked ‘Breakfast’, set in 1969 in a hotel/resort where a smattering of French people descend for evening drinks and to be captivated by an unlikely singer, while trying to ignore the evidence of rapidly escalating war (which lingers in the air like a hard-to-pin-down smell). Unlike ‘The Deep Ambition of Rossi’, ‘Breakfast’ seems a little jammed up: there’s a much longer story — a novel, even — straining to get out. But it’s still excellent. (And in contrast, most of the other stories benefit from the ‘snapshot’ treatment that McKay gives them.)

While there are no duds in the collection, political scaffolding now and again shows through. One example: ‘Holiday, I Love You’, about a garment factory, is a little forced, important though the topics of dodgy factories and persecution of unionists are. Several scenes, in different stories, explore Western men’s behaviour towards Cambodian women (prostitutes or otherwise) in compelling and yet somewhat familiar fashion.

Overall, McKay’s achievement is that she has managed to ‘feel’ Cambodia. I’m not saying that her Cambodia is (or isn’t) authentic or ‘true’ (and, anyway, it’s fiction). I’m not suggesting that she’s somehow wriggled her way into the locals’ collective soul: only somebody who knows Cambodia and Cambodians much better than I ever will could accurately comment on that.

But what I think she’s done particularly wall is to tap — in creative and diverse ways — into some of the ways Westerners react to Cambodia. Post-Pol Pot, Cambodia has the capacity to evoke simultaneous delight and horror (as well as being a haven for various types of deeply unpleasant ‘tourism’). For the historically aware visitor, it’s easy, indeed it’s kind of comforting, to tap into this dichotomous reaction — and even to turn it into a virtue, as if perplexity and empathy are themselves deeply meaningful retorts to the long shadow of the Pol Pot period.

One example: to walk around the ex-torture prison, Tuol Sleng, is to experience a horrible, brutal manifestation of the Khmer Rouge’s excesses and paranoia. It’s also to witness Western visitors, by their conversations and by their physical reactions, making heartfelt, genuine but often awkwardly self-aware attempts to publicly ‘take on’ what it all means. Another example: Western fiction set in Cambodia (English language fiction, I should clarify) often centres around a non-Cambodian central character who becomes deeply enamoured by Cambodia and Cambodians and who ultimately dies in tragic circumstances — as if the only way to legitimately and completely empathise with such a long history of war and with the most shocking war crimes imaginable is to literally die for Cambodia. Some of these novels are very good — powerful, challenging and revelatory — but collectively they start to resemble variations on a too-familiar theme. Like these novels, the stories in Holiday in Cambodia are at their most convincing — and entertaining, and funny, and cringe-inducing — when they probe the way that some Westerners react to Cambodia. But McKay offers something different, something fresh.

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Categories : Comment, New writing
Tags : Black Inc., Cambodia, Laura Jean McKay

Miles Franklin Literary Award: the shortlist

by Patrick · Comments (0)
01 May

I posted my personal shortlist for the Miles Franklin Literary Award here a couple of days ago (see earlier post), which consisted of:

Lily Brett Lola Bensky

Brian Castro Street to Street

Carrie Tiffany Mateship with Birds

The official list came out yesterday and it’s rather different to mine (one out of three ain’t bad):

Romy Ash Floundering

Annah Faulkner  The Beloved

Michelle de Kretser Questions of Travel

Drusilla Modjeska The Mountain

Carrie Tiffany Mateship with Birds

All the talk yesterday was about the all-female list (the first time this has happened) and what it all means in the context of the new Stella Prize for Australian women’s writing. The Stella Prize may well have concentrated the minds of the Miles Franklin judges and administrators — and if so, that’s terrific and a win for both prizes. Certainly, the Miles Franklin people are making the most of having an all-female shortlist. But I’m wary of drawing conclusions based on one year’s results: a single shortlist cannot change the past nor predict the future. My wariness stands even if, as I think is extremely likely, Carrie Tiffany wins both the Stella and the MIles Franklin for Mateship of Birds: to me, it’s a novel that stands out from the crowd and it deserves to win the Miles Franklin. It hardly sets a precedent that we won’t be able to tell the two prizes apart in years to come, especially since the Miles Franklin must observe the ‘Australian life in any of its phases’ dictum (eg, Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites, set in 19C Iceland, will be eligible for the Stella but not for the Miles Franklin) and because the Stella isn’t confined to novels only as the Miles Franklin is (technically, plays if no novels measure up).

In predicting that Carrie Tiffany will win the Miles Franklin, I don’t mean to dismiss the other novels. But this is what makes prizes interesting: that different readers will favour different books, will have their favourites. In his article in today’s The Australian (see here), Stephen Romei quotes Richard Neville, one of the judges, as saying, ‘We were aware of the gender debate of course, and in a sense we were damned if we did and damned if we didn’t, but in the end the literature chose itself.’ I understand what Neville’s getting at – that they went with their choices based on merit, irrespective of the politics of the moment, and fair enough too – but books don’t choose themselves: readers choose them and, in this instance, judges choose them. If ‘literature chose itself’, we wouldn’t need judges or awards. I don’t think that the judges ‘got it wrong’ (in the sense of there only being one way to, say, change a tyre) because their shortlist didn’t include Lily Brett and Brian Castro. I think we have different tastes and that we saw different qualities in each of the books: we chose differently. That’s a good thing, and those arguments about the competing merits of books and stories are worth having.

While the Miles Franklin Literary Award does seem to be in the midst of a carefully constructed makeover — it’s a work in progress about which I’ll write more another day — I’m wary of the inference that, because of the Stella Prize, the judges might be ‘in’ on some PR ploy or even that they are using the shortlist to overtly respond to pressure, real or perceived (which is I guess what Neville was responding to with his ‘the literature chose itself’ comment so it’s really only the way he said it that I don’t like). I’m pretty sure, for example, that the fine literary scholar Susan Sheridan — now one of the Miles Franklin judges — needs no help to understand the rich and storied but under-recognised contribution that Australian women writers have made to our cultural landscape — including the Miles Franklin Award’s serious under-recognition of women novelists over the decades.

Incidentally, Susan Sheridan’s recent book Nine Lives: Postwar Women Writers Making Their Mark (UQP) is well worth reading. Brenda Walker reviewed it in Australian Book Review, (February 2011, here).

The Miles Franklin Literary Award winner will be announced on June 19 in Canberra.

 

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Tags : Miles Franklin Literary Award

Miles Franklin Literary Award: from longlist to shortlist

by Patrick · Comments (0)
27 Apr

The Miles Franklin Literary Award’s 2013 shortlist will be announced in a few days time, on 30 April. Here’s the official longlist:

Romy Ash Floundering

Lily Brett Lola Bensky

Brian Castro Street to Street

Michelle de Kretser Questions of Travel

Annah Faulkner The Beloved

Tom Keneally The Daughters of Mars

Drusilla Modjeska The Mountain

M.L. Stedman The Light Between Oceans

Carrie Tiffany Mateship with Birds

Jacqueline Wright Red Dirt Talking

Mainly for the fun of it, I thought I’d name my personal shortlist ahead of the real thing. This isn’t an exercise in trying to guess which books the judges will name but my personal favourites from amongst the 10 longlisted books.

Deciding upon any longlist/shortlist is a subjective act. There’s no systematic or clinical way to measure whether, say, M.L Stedman ‘deserves’ shortlisting more than Tom Keneally. All readers of fiction are human beings. All judges too. It’s hardly news to say that it is  inevitable —and a good thing — that different readers will react differently to the same book (I, for one, couldn’t stomach Life of Pi).

Anwyay, my personal Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlist is:

Lily Brett Lola Bensky

Brian Castro Street to Street *

Carrie Tiffany Mateship with Birds

Although I liked different things about Brett, Castro and Tiffany’s novels, I experienced a similar reaction as I read them: I felt — and ‘felt’ is the word — an intangible sensation, like an elongated sharp intake of breath. Yes, I found myself entrapped within the worlds the writers created, both when I was actually reading and when I was forced to put a book down and get on with real life for a while. Yes, the stories convinced and transfixed and unsettled me from start to finish, and left me a little awed and, at times, more than a little envious. But none of that really captures the sensation I’m trying to evoke, that indefinable ‘extra’.

To have that heightened reaction to three out of ten novels seems to me a bloody good strike rate, certainly better than what I would usually expect. I enjoyed the other seven longlisted novels to varying degrees but none of them quite grabbed me in the way that Brett, Castro and Tiffany’s books did. Romy Ash’s Floundering came closest, and the end of Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel is brilliant. But again, that’s one of the main reasons that I find competitions/awards of this sort so interesting: because different books will transfix different readers. And because disagreement about a book’s qualities is something worth savouring and nurturing.

* I know Brian Castro, and once worked for him at the University of Adelaide. That said, I enjoyed Street to Street more than any of the previous books of his that I have read, except (maybe) Shanghai Dancing.

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Tags : Miles Franklin Literary Award

Ali Cobby Eckermann’s ‘Too Afraid to Cry’

by Patrick · Comments (0)
25 Mar

This is not a review because I know Ali Cobby Eckermann and have huge respect for her as a poet and as a human being—and because I used to work for Ilura Press, publisher of Eckermann’s memoir Too Afraid to Cry, and remain friends with and admirers of Ilura’s founders, Sabina Hopfer and Christopher Lappas. So, not a review but some brief random thoughts on Too Afraid to Cry:

The word ‘important’ is overused these days but it seems to me that this is an important book. In having the courage to tell her story—the courage to write it and, separately, the courage to publish it—Eckermann offers readers the opportunity to gain a glimpse into the real lives that that make up the collective story of the Stolen Generations. She helps us understand, if we want to, that the term ‘Stolen Generations’ means something real, something contemporary, something tody and tomorrow (though maybe not ‘Today Tonight’), and that it can be something that genuinely and enduringly challenges Australians rather than makes us feel regretful in a passive sort of way … or, just as often, mildly (or not so mildly) resentful that all this inconvenient old history is still getting raised. The idea that a ‘real’ Indigenous person is a ‘traditional Aborigine’ — that is, authentic = pre-European-contact — persists in mainstream Australia (the mainstream mainstream, not only the redneck mainstream), as does the genuinely felt but dogged resort to egalitarianism, as in ‘we’re all equal these days so that’s all right then. Phew.’

I read Too Afraid to Cry slowly, over several weeks, in small chunks. The chapters are often very short, and I usually read one or two chapters at a time. It’s a confronting book, hard to read at times, violent in all sorts of ways—but one of the achievements of Eckermann’s prose is that it didn’t make me want me to avert my gaze but rather compelled me to stare harder at the words. Given some of the events and troubles Eckermann describes, the absence of anger in the prose is remarkable. As a writer who is most at home on the page writing fiction (i.e. making it up), I am in awe of Eckermann’s honesty and her willingness to expose herself. And as somebody who was adopted as a baby, Eckermann’s journey has compelled me to think hard about my own past.

I hope Too Afraid to Cry becomes a book that Australians share and talk about. You can find it on the Ilura Press website here.

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Categories : Comment, New writing
Tags : Ali Cobby Eckermann, Ilura Press, Too Afraid to Cry

The Next Big Thing

by Patrick · Comments (0)
27 Dec

Adelaide writer Cameron Raynes has tagged me to participate in The Next Big Thing, which (see below) involves answering ten questions. You can check out Cam’s excellent books – including his just released collection of short fiction, The Colour of Kerosene – via Wakefield Press here and read his answers to the questions on his Facebook page here. My answers are below: 

1. What is the working title of your next book?

I’m working on a couple of books at the moment but the one nearly in the bag (although I was saying that this time last year) is a novel called Potatoes in all their glory.

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

No one place. Initially, the story was very much about literary forgery but that fell by the wayside. It’s about food and wine, and my home town of Adelaide, and faith and obsession, and wanting to change the world but not having a clue how how. From almost the very beginning of the book’s life, I’ve had a M.F.K Fisher quote as the epigraph: ‘You would be a missionary, bringing flavour and light to the taste-blind.’

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Satire (I hope).

4. What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

For the main character, Henry, who is odd but not quite as odd as he imagines he is, it could go a couple of different ways: maybe Noah Taylor (I still remember his performance in The Year My Voice Broke) or maybe someone like Tobey Maguire. The fact that he got cut from Life of Pi is a big plus for me.

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A specialist food and wine book dealer, Henry, on the cusp of 40, decides that he can save the world through his devotion to food and drink.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I’m represented by Cameron Creswell.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

That seems such as a distant memory, and I eventually cut so much of the first draft (more than 40,000 words) that I can’t exactly answer. A few months, I guess.

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I hate these sorts of questions. In my wildest dreams, Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. There’s a touch of Jonathan Gash’s Lovejoy books, perhaps. But I don’t know. I’d rather not think about it.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My stomach.

10. What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

Given that the book is so much about food and drink, I’m hoping that the book’s publisher will consent to a scratch and sniff edition. I’m not sure how they can make that work for the eBook edition.

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Tags : Cameron Raynes, Potatoes In All Their Glory, The Next Big Thing
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