Rebecca Lim, Tiger Daughter

 

- Well known children's author Rebecca Lim's new novel Tiger Daughter recently won the Children's Book Council of Australia 2022 Book of the Year award for older readers.

- High school friends Wen and Henry share a Chinese migrant background and they're studying hard for an entrance exam to gain admittance to a prestigious selective school.  

- Wen’s father, a former doctor, failed four times to be admitted as a specialist in Australia. He is now working at a Chinese restaurant, a profound humiliation he simply cannot deal with. He is an angry, abusive, authoritarian father, and Wen hates him. She seethes with loathing. He utterly refuses to allow her to mix socially with her friends. Her mother, likewise, is treated with contempt, so has become servile and afraid of him. 

- The story is a simple one, defined by anger and abuse. As readers we are engulfed in their miserable lives, and it's hard to take, only minimally redeemed by Lim's central focus on food and cooking, and the bonding it creates.

- Wen rages inside, but like her mother, never confronts her father. As readers we yearn for that.

- The resolution that this tale absolutely needed is absent. There is one, but it's tepid and disappointing. 

Emi Yagi, Diary of a Void

- This award-winning first novel by Japanese author Emi Yagi is a stunningly good satirical portrayal of what being pregnant actually involves for a young, lonely woman.  

- Shibata has a rather empty life. She works in the corporate world in Tokyo where women are second class. Their job is to get the coffee, clean up after meetings, refill the printer, and work at their desk until  8-9pm at least. 

- She realises that if she were pregnant she’d be surely treated with much more respect. So she decides to get pregnant by faking it. All of a sudden her male colleagues start treating her with care and kindness, including her section head who is usually demanding and annoying. He and his wife tried but could not have children. But now that Shibata is pregnant, he becomes a considerate human.  

- She's permitted to leave work around 5pm, and she realises how much she enjoys the busy streets and trains, the fresher food in the supermarkets, the opportunity to see movies, visit art centres and music performances, and having more time to eat and cook.   

- She also, of course, has to keep up the pretence of being pregnant by stuffing towels under her clothes. Luckily for her she begins to put on weight. She enrols in an aerobics class for pregnant women, attending four days a week. She enjoys their company a lot, especially relishing their tirades against their unsupportive husbands.

- As her pregnancy nears the end Shibata's sense of herself and her worth changes. She's adept at fooling her colleagues but she's also fooling herself. And at times, the reader. We wonder, perhaps she is really pregnant? 'Whoa, it moved', she feels at one point. And the obstetrician she finally visits, at week thirty-six, is convinced he can see the baby in the rather fuzzy ultrasound. 

- Yagi's prose is tight and sharp, and she doesn't miss an opportunity to skewer with precision: Everything on the screen was as flat as an old sock run over in the middle of the street; She had a face like an anteater.

- Of course we wonder how it will all end. Week 40 is here, and she can feel that the baby has moved down into position. 

- The ending, as it turns out, is superb. 

(This review in the New Yorker is excellent) 

Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man

 

- Mohsin Hamid is the Man Booker shortlisted author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West, a story of love, loss and rediscovery in a time of unsettling change. 

- His new novel, The Last White Man, despite its title suggesting more of the same, is unfortunately a complete dud. It's riddled with a feeble sentimentality, the exact opposite of 'powerful' as the back cover blurb heralds. 

- Hamid has given us two stories - one exploring racial tensions in a town in America, and the other celebrating family love and devotion. They don't integrate at all. It's a confection that just doesn’t work.

- Anders is white but one morning wakes up brown. He works at a gym. The clients like him a lot.…or they had, for it did not quite feel that way now….because his sense of being observed, of being on the outside, looked at by those who were in..

- Oona, his girlfriend, is into meditation and mindfulness, and she teaches yoga. Her twin brother died a few years previously from a drug overdose. She moves back in with her mother. As more and more whites are turning brown racial animosity is becoming nasty. Gangs are on the prowl at night.   

- Anders’s father remains unconcerned. He's a retired and now ailing construction foreman, and life-long smoker. Anders spends a lot of time in the family house now, looking after him. Oona’s mother sides with the whites. We needed our own places…the dark people could have their own places… 

- Finally the whole white community has turned brown, apart from Anders's father, the last white man, who dies instead. 

- So we're into a story of parenthood, family death, legacy and love. The brown plague plot is receding from centre stage. People are becoming more sensitive, aware and compassionate as the dark skin change becomes widespread. And Anders’s and Oona’s relationship is maturing. Their sex now slow, unhurried…they came close, closer than they had come before. The years go by and their daughter is born. 

- Hamid's writing is introspective, reflective and frequently convoluted in a poetic way, with sentences that require re-reading, and some very long and circular in a pretentious metafictional way. The problem is it gets exquisitely boring as it moves along. Hamid lulls us into a slow meaningless.

- It's meant to be a celebration of love and family but what we're really getting instead is a massive over-dramatisation of the ordinary. The going dark thing is totally unrelated. The parallel stories don’t connect.

- And a major issue in the novel that I find really problematic is the positive portrait of a society that is racially homogenous. Be either exclusively white or brown but don't mix. And where are the African-Americans and Asians? Where is the celebration of multiculturalism? And where are the Indigenous peoples?

- As I said, a complete dud.

Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

 

- Claire Keegan is a celebrated Irish writer. She has won numerous awards, and her previous novel Foster was named by The Times in the UK as one of the top fifty works of fiction to be published this century. 

- Her new novel, at 110 pages more a novella, is set in a small rural community in Ireland. The story is quite simple but it develops into a strikingly powerful moral tale of real weight. 

- The year is 1985 in the depth of winter, and Bill Furlong is the local coal and timber merchant. His business is very successful, despite many other local businesses closing due to the difficult economic times. He's a hard worker, good to his staff, and popular in the town. He and his wife have five young daughters. They are devout Catholics. 

- He had a difficult time as a child. He never knew his father, and his mother, impregnated at sixteen, died when he was twelve. He was reared by Mrs Wilson, a kind and considerate Protestant widow. 

- He’s a loving and generous husband and father, and plans to enrol his daughters at the well regarded St Margaret’s high school. 

- Adjacent to the school is the convent for nuns. They run a laundry operation for local hotels, restaurants and other businesses and households. What is unknown, but what Bill discovers one night as he delivers coal, and a young woman confides in him, is that young pregnant girls are housed there, and their babies sent away for adoption. The are treated brutally, scrubbing floors and working in the laundry all day. He is hesitant to bring the issue up with the Mother Superior, but he is profoundly disturbed by it, and the Mother suspects he knows too much. His daughters may find their future acceptance by the school in jeopardy.

- Bill's character and courage are tested.  

- Keegan provides A Note on the Text at the end. She tells the horrendous story of the Magdalen laundries:

Beppe Severgnini, Italian Lessons: Fifty Things We Know About Life Now

 

- Beppe Severgnini is an acclaimed columnist and an editor of Italy's largest-circulation daily newspaper, Corriere della Sera. He's a longtime Italian correspondent for The Economist and a frequent contributor to The New York Times.

- In clear and engaging prose, he outlines in this new book fifty reasons for rejoicing in being Italian. With wit, sense and intelligence he offers an enlightened perspective on his beloved country, its character and traditions, and particularly how it performed during the the Covid crisis.  

- Here are a few of the chapter titles, the fifty reasons: 

Because we're unpredictable, but not unreliable.

Because in time we let our resentments go.   

Because our North and South fight like an old married couple. 

Because in every lab on Earth, there's a computer, a green plant, and an Italian.      

Because wine is a sentimental education, and espresso is a truce.       

Because we instinctively know what's good and genuine.  

Because small churches are better than grand defenders of the faith. 

Because our policemen don't glare at us, though sometimes they should.    

Because in our parks we love strolling, relaxing and quarreling.   

Because we've elevated complaining to an art form.   

Because we smile, in spite of everything. 

- I was a student for four years in Italy in my early twenties, so this book brought back fond memories of the joy I had experiencing life in this wonderful and stimulating country, and its kind and beautiful people. 

- Beppe has done a superb job here. Well worth reading if you're an Italian fan.

Jay Carmichael, Marlo.

- It might be subtle, underplayed and measured in tone, but this small novel from Jay Carmichael is a damning critique of mid-twentieth century Australian society. 

- It's set in the early 1950s in Melbourne. A young man Christopher arrives by train to Melbourne from his small regional town of Marlo. He's escaping provincialism, or so he presumes.  

- He's offered a job at a garage in Melbourne, to assist the mechanic.

- He meets a range of people, including Morgan, of Indigenous heritage. They feel an attraction towards each other. Morgan and I were both that way. They walk an isolated pathway during a visit to the zoo and are approached by a policeman demanding to see Morgan's ID. He has a Certificate of Exemption under the Aborigines Protection Act, part of the White Australia policy. 'If I see youse again in 'ere', the hoarse voice called, 'even if youse step inside the zoo, I'll string yer up myself.' 

- Christopher rents a house and Morgan stays overnight frequently. Frictions develop however and they separate.  

- Christopher visits the Botanical Gardens and its public toilet and is assaulted by two men. At work the following day, with his face cut and bruised, his garage colleagues tease and humiliate him. He becomes depressed and even suicidal. Morgan thankfully returns to him, and they find comfort in one another. Their conversation, which ends the book, is worth quoting in full: 

He lent his shoulder against the wall, crossed his arms over his chest. I lent my back against the opposite wall, my hands dug into my pockets. 

'Everything we do is by the cover of darkness', he said.

'Or in out-of-the-way side streets.'

'Or godforsaken garden beds.' He paused. 'I'm sick of it.' He stared, soft eyes, at me.' I'm not yours and I'm not asking you to be mine.'

'Neither am I, Morgan. I'm just asking you to stick around.'

- What a dismal time the 1950’s were. A post-war, post-depression generation, with their own secrets buried deep within them, wanted the comfort of security and growing middle class prosperity, and became riddled with a cruel, conservative ignorance and intolerance. 'Perverts' were not tolerated. 

- Carmichael exhibits a soft touch. Nothing is spoken too loudly. Even arguments, if they can be called that, are restrained. But what it depicts in essence is ugly.

- There's a long Author’s Note at the end, where Carmichael provides a history of homosexuality in Australia. How refreshing it is that as a society we're now living in a radically different, far more civilised, world. Despite still having a way to go.  

Adriane Howell, Hydra

 

- Adriane Howell's debut novel is an absolute gem, unique in so many ways. It is beautifully written, complex and intriguing, offering layers of story, history and mystery that build into a powerful whole.  

- Anja works for an antiques auction house. She’s a bright, spiky, perceptive, confident, recently divorced, thirty-one year old. And she just knows her opinions are right. To top it off she can’t handle small talk. What a package! She returns to work after a month's holiday with her husband in Greece on the island of Hydra, during which he deserts her. After two years he's had enough of her relentless fixations. 

- She was raised by a single mother who had a strange obsession with buying new houses and apartments to live in. They were essentially rootless. Her father, Edmond, moved back to Denmark when she was two. He'd also had enough.

- During a deceased estate assessment she discovers a priceless antique chair, but the old mother doesn’t want to sell it. She sits on it, refusing to budge. Anja pushes her off and grabs it anyway, damaging the lady's coccyx in the process. 

- She’s fired from work for harassment of an unnamed staff member. ‘You’re too volatile’ says her boss. Typically for powder kegs like Anja the ordinary will bring them down. She reflects at one point: 'she has a propensity for flirtation with annihilation’. She relocates from Melbourne to an old heritage-listed shack on a naval base on the coast. 
 
- Interspersed throughout Anja's story is another one set thirty years or so earlier. In 1985 Navy Lieutenant Brendan Quartermain is conducting an official investigation into a possible savage animal on the base or perhaps a voracious feral fox. The locals refer to it as 'Anaba'. It's become local folklore, but the lieutenant is sceptical. When one has been cut adrift and there is nobody left to confide in, it’s easy for the imagination to go feral, especially if one is already prone to such thinking. 

- Anja lands a casual administrative job in an antiques compound, and she's good at it. But she seems to be becoming increasingly deranged. She often calls and harasses an unknown person from a derelict telephone booth. And she hears roars and screams at night. 

- The rich tapestry of this novel may for a long time bewilder you, no matter how many times you re-read particular paragraphs. Patience is required but rest assured it will pay off. It all slowly comes together in a powerful, immensely satisfying way. 

-The cover, by the way, is simply magnificent: a beautiful young woman with her arms up fending off reality and exposure, keeping her distance. Perfect.