Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle, Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life.

 

- A novella in fragments. 63 pages. The front cover is a photo of the unnamed narrator sleeping next to a potato. That sums it up. The personal story of a complete loser, full of ex boyfriends and so-called former friends, and a boring mother. She was bullied at high school. She has aches and pains, bad Tinder dates, unsatisfying sex, bad skin, no money, no ambition and irregular casual work which she's hopeless at anyway. It's not surprising she's unsatisfied with her rather miserable life and the grooves she's stuck in. She refers to her condition as 'Depersonalisation Disorder'. 

- In a way the book is also about dumb boyfriends. They are worse than useless, all of them, but never short of offering advice as to how she should get her act together.

- What lifts off the page is an exquisite existential meaninglessness. New Zealand author Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle quite brilliantly captures the emptiness of so many lives and the vacuity of so much of our contemporary social fabric. 

- Her writing is sublime. There are constant swirls and shifts in the telling. The focus often changes mid sentence, which is mesmerising. This is attention deficit disorder on full display, and deadpan humour brings it vividly to life. 

- It could be said that it's hardly a challenging venture to write a little novel like this. It could be dismissed as a slight, playful, comic take on a twenties-something lifestyle. But that would be overlooking the honesty and truth of it, the minute dissection of the everyday stuff we are all contending with. And the way it creeps up on you and stays with you, and demands you read it again, and again.

- Hugely enjoyable this. Hugely. 

Sebastian Faulks, Snow Country

- Once again Sebastian Faulks has written a hugely enjoyable novel with characters struggling on the margins of a society under immense political pressure and contending with the realities of revolution and war. 

- The central focus is Austria leading up to and after the first world war, and the subsequent emergence of fascism in Europe. Austria was a premonition of Hitler's Germany. The young journalist Anton and the poor and uneducated Lena, who turns to prostitution to support herself, are contending with the fragility of societies being pulled apart by political and economic pressures from all sides. Good people are suffering and dying, and lives and relationships struggling. Other characters in the novel bring these tensions vividly to life. 

- Vienna was also the centre of psychoanalysis in the Freudian tradition and the contentious debates around treatments and therapy. The human mind and its subtle dynamics became a central focus.

 ...'I came to have a low view of the human creature, the male in particular. He seems to be a deformed animal.'

'What do you mean?'

'We are obsessive,' Anton said. 'We appear to have bigger brains than other creatures, but we behave in a way that's contrary to our own interests. These harmful passions that drive us mad with love or with the need to slaughter one another. We don't seem very well...evolved.'

- Snow Country is the second in Faulks' Austrian trilogy, the first being Human Traces published in 2005 which I haven't read. But I did enjoy immensely his last novel Paris Echo set during the Nazi occupation of Paris in the early 1940s. (See my review here). Faulks' gift is to write love stories set in fractious times, and to bring the personal and social brilliantly alive. 

Miles Allinson, In Moonland

 

- In lucid and engaging prose Allinson takes us on one family's inter-generational journey that is a sheer delight to read. The characters are struggling, financially and personally, and live on the margins. But they have mostly resisted social conventions, opting for authenticity and community. It’s a gently told and measured story, especially at the beginning, but its power builds and becomes absorbing. 

- At first we meet Joe, his hippy parents and their friends. It's the 1970’s and his marriage is on the rocks. 

- His father Vince was prone to violent rages and he committed suicide. He was a heavy drinker and likely abused by his father. His friends and lovers were all New Age marginals, living on the edge. As the story progresses we recognise the scars left on sons and daughters by parents and grandparents. They are carried down the generations and impossible to escape from.

- Joe sets out on a journey of discovery. His father had secrets and he wants to uncover them. He knows Vince spent a year in an ashram in India as a member of a cult run by a swami called Bhagwan. It was mostly Western innocents seeking transcendence and meaning - and sex. But Vince wasn't so innocent. His propensity for violent outbursts got the better of him. There was an incident.

- In the ashram Vince became close friends with a charismatic American Kurt. Twenty or so years later Kurt is now old and sick, but still living in India. He's agreed to meet with Joe. Kurt is fascinating and he raises the novel to a new level. He also had an angry and abusive father, and his views on the ashram experience are now clear: ‘All that fascist, corporate mysticism really gives me the shits…(Bhagwan) was just an empty vessel…a complete and utter fucking loony-tune’. 

- Joe is desperate to hear from him what happened to Vince, his father. What caused his unwillingness to share his experiences? Why was he so troubled? Kurt refuses to be honest, choosing to honour an unwritten agreement with his old friend. 

- The final part of the novel is also fascinating. Joe's daughter Sylvie is now 31 and Joe himself is a beaten, mostly drunk, old man running a caravan park for the aged in rural NSW. We're introduced to a dystopian future. Civil society has been wrecked, mostly by climate change. ‘…the riots, the blackouts, the housing crisis’. There's little meaningful communication between the two of them, but there’s a real connection. And hope.

- I enjoyed this novel immensely. 

Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You.

 

- As a fan of Sally Rooney's two previous novels, Normal People and Conversations With Friends, I wanted this one to be good. Well, as it turns out, it's not just good but absolutely brilliant. By far her best yet. 

- Right from the get-go the characters are attractive and immensely likeable. Eileen spends her working day as a literary magazine editor, ‘moving commas around’ as she says. And of course she's woefully underpaid. Alice is a very successful young author whose royalty advances have made her quite financially well off. (Hello Sally?). She's in high demand for interviews and conferences, and all the other publicity gumph of the publishing world. Both young women are highly intelligent and physically attractive. Like Marianne from Normal People, and Frances and Bobbi from Conversations with Friends they will stick in your mind and stay with you. But they have issues.

- Rooney’s familiar terrain is young friends and young students navigating relationships and sex. Their love lives and often transient relationships are central. Beautiful World is no different, but in this one serious and unresolved tensions emerge that are very destabilising. And it’s far more erotic too, the sex scenes described in more detail and with more intensity. The characters are more adult and mature, now in their thirties. 

- What gives this novel enormous power is that Rooney moves well beyond personal relationships. She’s venturing into philosophical and political realms. As much as anything it’s a novel of ideas - religion, marriage, beauty, morality, creativity, inequality, communism, climate, and others. The book is extraordinarily rich in insight and observation. As Eileen writes at one point, perhaps vocalising Rooney’s own artistic ambitions: Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting.

- Alice and Eileen write long emails to each other addressing all these issues in depth. It's almost as if Rooney is interrogating herself. They are akin to essayistic explorations of life in contemporary times, passionate and personal and brilliant. Alice's reflections on the publishing industry and pretentious other authors who are constantly ‘complaining about bad reviews’ are delicious. They even dissect the Late Bronze Age and the reasons for its demise. So not all fans of Rooney will like this aspect. They’ll be way too challenged intellectually. But Rooney has risen to a whole new level of accomplishment. 

Scott Hamilton and Stuart Kells, Sold Down the River.

 

- If you're a fan of US author Michael Lewis, as I am, you will devour this magnificent book. Hamilton and Kells have the same ability to critique a complex issue by grounding the story in the voices of ordinary participants or victims. In this case the voices of small farmers and Indigenous leaders who bring real world experience and age old traditional knowledge to today's dreadful water management crisis. 

- The Murray-Darling Basin is Australia's greatest environmental asset. Its 77,000 kilometres of ancient rivers, creeks and wetlands, along with its dams and locks constructed over the last century, are an immeasurably important contribution to the nation's food production and regional economy. It covers a million square kilometres - an area larger than France. But because '...the political and economic structures of modern Australia cut across catchment boundaries...The die was cast for more and more fighting over less and less water’.

- The real damage was done in the 1980s, when neo-liberalist free-market economics became fashionable. ‘…the water market was a natural place to experiment with free-market principles…the free marketeers embraced the idea that the decentralised decisions of market participants would achieve a more efficient water allocation than central planners ever could’.

- A principal legacy of Victorian politician Alfred Deakin (and later Prime Minister) in the late 1880s was legislation that ensured water ownership could not legally be separated from land ownership, thus guaranteeing water availability to family farms and communities. A century later that radically changed. 'Unbundling' became the driving reformist agenda. All states welcomed it. And banks too.

- Hamilton and Kells then take us on a deep dive into the practices of the financial traders. They provide plenty of stories and examples. They take us into the Michael Lewis Flash Boys territory of rapacious Wall Street traders who are all about micro-profiteering, not giving a fig about the real world destruction of lives and livelihoods that result. It was all about cornering the market, squeezing everything they could out of it. 

- The book's final chapter, The Betrayal, is compulsory reading. Here's a quote:

Top level regulators and agencies such as the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, the Productivity Commission and the ACCC assembled and published report after report. Between 1989 and 2020 more than 300 major water reports were produced in Australia...Brimming with fuzzy logic, linguistic ambiguity, categorical confusion, statistical insignificance, motherhood statements, statements of the obvious and statements of the obviously false, they are now useful only for recycling...

A once-in-a-generation scandal. A government authorised mega-theft.

This review by Jeff Sparrow in The Saturday Paper is spot on:

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/culture/books/2021/09/30/sold-down-the-river/163067760012378