Yumna Kassab, Politica

- This new novel from Yumna Kassab is a challenging read. I was really enthralled by her two previous novels Australiana and The Lovers, but in Politica she adopts a more nebulous style, exploring the world of her many characters in a suggestive, less realistic, way. 

- She takes us to the Middle East and to an unidentified country, spanning decades of time from the late twentieth century. Some of her characters live throughout that entire period, but most don't. The book has numerous chapters of only two or so pages. 

- Yet Kassab combines poetry and prose in her portrayal of the lives of the citizens of the country through its periods of war and peace. There are families of children, parents and grandparents, and they are rarely safe. Death surrounds them. War takes its victims. They have hopes and dreams, and they find real comfort in each other in their homes and communities. Some believe in the need for revolution and others in the need for negotiation and peace. ‘They mean to erase us from the face of the earth. This is one continuous tale of dispossession and displacement’.

- Of course we think of today's wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and the ugliness of both, but Kassab is careful not to tread on that ground. She generalises and focuses on the individuals caught up in mundane, day to day routines, and their hopes and dreams. But her insights are often profound, and her prose engrossing. 

- One section of the book is titled 1973, where we explore the life of the delightful Salma. She's full of anxieties but she does stuff. She learns to fish, drives to the countryside for a day, travels overseas with Zahra and bores her friends telling them about it later, her nephew Dawood is a bragger, she dreams of the dead, she regrets not emigrating overseas - free education, free hospitals, etc, she can’t afford to buy groceries, the war has stopped but is there peace although there are elections, she resists engaging in politics now, is she a sellout, Ahmed proposed but she declined. ‘There was a war. It broke over them. They never found their way back and they did not find whatever it was they each privately wished for…Her life has momentum but no direction…’ 

- There are many short stories of seemingly unrelated events, but the prime focus is always the people and how they deal with them. Although the war may be relegated to history now, its effects are still felt. 

- Kassab has the gift of forcing you to confront these seemingly simple but profoundly meaningful lives with their rhythms and memories. 

There are many bodies buried in this ground.

   Some of the dead are only bones.

   Others are more recent. Their burial was hurried, done in 

the dark, ground covered so it did not appear disturbed.

   I have watched for many years.

   When the world is troubled, there are more secrets to put

to sleep in the earth, in the night-time when they believe no

eyes can see.

   I watch. There are others - humans - who believe this park

can shelter their terror and their dreams.

  There is always the watcher, one of lightness on the right,

the scribe of darkness on the left, and then the Great One who

not even the smallest detail escapes.

  The world may not see. There may be no witness in the

living but the record is always kept. The weight of history is

layers, and it does not disappear, no matter how oblivious 

is humanity.

- When reading this novel you may be tempted to bail at times, but stay with it. It's well worth it. 

John Gray, The New Leviathans

 

-This new book by celebrated British political philosopher John Gray is highly provocative and challenging. It's a critique of contemporary liberalism in the West, and also of Russia's and China's global ambitions. 

- He bases his analysis on philosopher Thomas Hobbes's treatise Leviathan which was published in 1651. It was condemned and attacked then as a defence of atheism and heresy. Copies were publicly burnt by Oxford University and calls for Hobbes's execution for blasphemy were made. Today Leviathan is universally regarded as a classic work that continues to inspire and explain much of today's decaying world.    

- One thing I liked about Gray's book is that, although he frequently references other scholars and thinkers in an academic style, he never shies away from confidently expressing his own opinions: Western elites are renouncing tolerance in much the same way pagan elites abandoned their old gods. If the process continues, liberal freedoms will soon be forgotten, along with the world in which they were practised.

- He explores in detail the contrasts between Russia and China and the West, their history and ambitions, and his opinions are often confronting: 

The European Union is not an emerging super-state but a crypto-state lacking any military capacity to defend itself. Once the American security guarantee is withdrawn, the EU will be seen for what it is: a geo-strategic vacuum.  

The resurgence of geopolitics has been accompanied by the return of the planet as a deciding force in human events. Climate change and pandemic diseases destroyed [former empires]...wiped out by overpopulation, drought and resource wars. The belief that humans can escape dependency on the natural world is a modern conceit. 

Conceivably, global warming may occur at a rate that makes adaptation impossible...the Anthropocene is coming to an end. Humankind is ceasing to be central in the life of the planet, so that life itself may go on.  

- His stance on wokeness is controversial. He diagnoses it as hyper-liberalism, which rejects the necessary compromises. It is not enough for avowed enemies to be defeated. Hidden heretics must be hunted out, tormented and destroyed. The opportunity for persecution is one of the attractions of hyper-liberalism....The inquisitions staged on Western campuses are a mark of advancing barbarism...If it does not blunder into a global war to restore its lost hegemony, the US may drift on, a florid hybrid of fundamentalist sects, woke cults and techno-futurist oligarchs.

- Gray's book is certainly worth reading. It offers a wider scope on current disruptions and wars that we're immersed in on a daily basis, and challenges us deeply.  

Angela O’Keeffe, The Sitter

- Angela O'Keeffe has written an intriguing short novel that is both subtle and rich in meaning. Her prose is fluid and immensely readable, and I therefore read it twice. It was so good. 

- The fundamental premise is at first strange and slightly off-putting, but it doesn't take long to figure it out and hence get absorbed by the unfolding story. Hortense Cezanne, the wife of the famous French painter Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), who painted his wife's portrait  twenty-nine times, is talking to us about the author of a novel centred on Hortense herself. She refers to her as 'the writer'. She's in the same room as this writer, sitting next to her, and voicing her thoughts. 

- We're in Covid lockdown times in Sydney, Brisbane and Paris. Hortense is intrigued as she remembers the Spanish Flu in Europe a hundred or so years ago. 

- The writer has a daughter, Rebecca, and they are often in contact, personally and by email and phone. They have a lovely relationship. Although there are secrets. The writer adopts the pseudonym of 'Georgia O'Keeffe' to record the truths about her life and marriage, and Hortense's as well. Both women were effected by patriarchal values, amounting to abject sexism and abuse.  

- As Hortense admits at one point: Through it all my husband painted, and I kept house. Because of financial restraints we didn't always have paid help; I did the cooking, the cleaning and the washing of his workspace, his clothes, his paintbrushes; I wrote letters to his dealer to organise the sale of paintings; I was his assistant, his housekeeper, his secretary, his lover, his model and...his muse. We were not equals. He had the power to throw me out on my ear, the power to never give me another franc; at a certain point he changed his will and disinherited me, though by the end of his life he'd made sure that I would receive something. And yet. 

- Georgia had a baby as a young high school girl. She had sex with a boyfriend in the back seat of a car, and was sent by her Irish-Catholic parents to an institution run by nuns. The newborn was forcibly removed from her. Later in life she refused to have children with her husband. She chose divorce instead. ‘I want the baby I had.’ 

- Death is also a focus, including of children. And marriages. Our lives are filled with emblems of loss, and they continue to reverberate in us, and sometimes, after years, they can bring us undone. 

- O'Keeffe has written a beautiful and meaningful novel which I know I will read again.

 

Anne Michaels, Held

- In brilliant and poetic prose, this new and relatively short novel from celebrated Canadian author Anne Michaels offers us a quite challenging meditation on what it means to be human. There's a deep, underlying mysteriousness to all of our journeys and the connections we have to nature and to each other, the ‘…ideas of the visible and invisible, and the rules of space and time’. 

- The novel is a paean to love in many ways, particularly family love, and the homes, careers, belongings and memories that bind us together. Interestingly, all the couples featured over four generations are deeply in love. There are no divorces or separations, and friendships are lasting. 

- Quite surprisingly, however, a major theme in the novel is war. I've not read a more powerful description of the ugliness of war than this: 

To the historian, every battlefield is different; to the philosopher, every battlefield is the same. War has ever redefined the battlefield; we no longer pretend to fight on designated ground, instead recognise the essential substratum where war has always been fought: exactly where we live, exactly where we have always believed we were sheltered, even sacredly so, the places we sleep and wake, feed ourselves, love each other - the apartment block, the school, the nursing home - citizens ingesting the blast and instantly cast in micronised concrete, rigid as ancient Pompeiians in volcanic ash. Snipers, barrel bombs. The strategic bombing of hospitals, to prove how senseless it is to save lives in a war zone, senseless as stopping up a hole in the hull of a ship at the bottom of the sea. What history is war writing in our bodies now? War fought by citizens whose muscles have never before held a gun or passed a child overhead, hand to hand, to a mother in a train car crammed immobile with refugees. The war being written in these bodies, in this child's body....A man's brain spraying across your face. A baby in the womb, a bullet hole in its forehead. Exsanguination. Decapitation. The physics of ballistics in human bone and tissue. Soldiers praying for a successful massacre. 

- Michaels' characters often reflect deeply on other contentious issues that characterised the 20th century and still do today - refugees, oppressive authoritarian regimes, and the struggle for women's equality.  

- This superb review of the novel by Leah Kaminsky in The Age is worth reading.

 

Jhumpa Lahiri, Roman Stories

 

- This new book by Jhumpa Lahiri is a collection of short stories set mostly in Rome. Her last book in 2021 was a novel, Whereabouts, also set in Rome. I reviewed it very positively here. The two have a distinct flavour. Lahiri is a chronicler of the everyday. 

- In Roman Stories she focuses on marriages, children, daily incidents, families, food, immigrants, and inevitably, racism. Gently and suggestively she infuses meaning into the mundane. There are lots of reflections on life and its vicissitudes. The perspective is often from middle aged women. They know stuff.

- An element I found frustrating at first was her refusal to locate. Nations, races, individuals, cities, suburbs, and towns are all unnamed. People are  ‘…from another continent’, a character liked ‘…music from my country’. The closest she gets to naming individuals are giving them initials like P, F, or S. This of course helps to universalise her essential focus, but I'm not sure it works. Irritating a reader is hardly wise. 

- There's quite a bit of death and racial abuse in the stories, and many of the characters have very low level, service industry jobs, again branding them as immigrants. There are also authors and academics, but interestingly, these people are usually Westerners, from Italy or 'across the Atlantic', presumably the US. 

-Some of the stories, or parts of longer stories, are powerful and beautiful. Others immerse us in ugly realism. Rebellious teenagers, for example, roam around at night and leave smashed bottles on steps, shoot pellets, assault strangers on streets and rob them. The 'steps' I think are the Spanish Steps, a place of majesty, ancient history and beauty. 

Pip Adam, The New Animals

 

- Pip Adam's The New Animals was originally published in New Zealand in 2017, and has just been released in a handsome new US edition by small publisher Dorothy, A Publishing Project. Having loved Audition, Adam's 2023 novel (which I reviewed here), I felt propelled to get into this, her earlier one. 

- Frankly, I loved it more, if that were possible. It is truly an extraordinary work. There is so much going on in it. It's an immersion in the rawness of ordinary life and its demands and tensions, but at the same time it takes a much wider, more challenging view of human society and its contemporary crises. Adam seems to be suggesting that it's over. Yes, it's that brutal. 

- Her novel explores themes of isolation and connection and despair. We are introduced to a small group of workers in the fashion industry and the contractors they hire to help them design and release a new line of clothing. There's a lot of detail about their personal interactions, frustrations and sex lives. 

- Tommy runs the company. He's ambitious but across detail and smart. A natural leader. Carla, the hairdresser, preparing models for the launch, is a generation older, as are her colleagues. There is real tension between the two generations. Tommy sees it clearly: His generation was expected to fix everything…These forty-five-year old hairdressers and pattern cutters. None of them had ever grown up. They were too busy whining and revolting. It was up to him and his friends...Carla  thought she was living the self-determined life, but she wasn’t. None of them had the money to do that. It was money.

- Adam sprinkles some fabulous observations throughout: That seemed to be the most important factual commodity these days - Anecdote, Opinion. Feeling. The American people were sick of experts.

- The final third of the novel takes us to a whole new place. It focuses on Elodie, the young makeup artist. She and Carla's vicious dog walk towards the sea late at night. The dog runs off and is never seen again (thankfully). Elodie, suicidal, sinks into calm water and seemingly transforms into a sea creature. She's surrounded by plastics and all sorts of discarded rubbish, witnessing rising sea levels, and eventually landing on an ‘island of rubbish'.

- So the ending is a real punch in the gut. We go from hope to planet doom. Adam is merciless, but she's offered us a thought-provoking novel of real depth and meaning. 

Hwang Bo-Reum, Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop

- This novel was a recent best-seller in Korea and has now been translated into English by Singaporean translator Shanna Tan. It's an absolutely delightful read, and full of deep insights into Korean society, work and marriage. It could be summarised as a reflection on what makes for a happy life. 

- It's also a critique of today's common workplace practices, like casuals versus permanents. 

- Yeongju resigns in frustration from her meaningless corporate career and starts a bookshop in a suburb of Seoul. She's had no experience in the book trade, but has always been an enthusiastic reader. It takes a while for her to realise what's needed to make a bookshop successful. She starts on that journey, and it's detailed and very credible. 

- First up she hires a barista and pays him well. He befriends the coffee beans supplier and they have detailed discussions about the art of making topnotch coffee (I learnt so much from that!). 

- A few other support staff are hired and regular events like book clubs and author presentations scheduled. The customer base increases. Discussions on work, happiness, career demands, personal relationships, marriage, and divorce are vigorous and enlightening. Those discussions give the book enormous power. 

- There is so much more to this book than what I've briefly described here. It's full of richness and depth that makes for a highly satisfying read.