Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

 

- An Intermezzo is an interlude: a short period when a situation or activity is different from normal. So it's a very apt description of the story Sally Rooney brings to life in her new and hugely enjoyable novel. 

- It's about two brothers and their love lives. And the interlude is the period after their father's death, during which their never really close relationship descends into anger, resentment and deeper separation.

- Peter is older than Ivan by ten years. In alternate chapters Rooney tells their stories. Peter's in short, sharp, sentences, mostly without verbs. He's nearly thirty-three years old and is a successful barrister. His love life is complicated. His ex, Sylvia, is a literature professor of the same age, and their relationship was upended by an accident she had that destroyed her ability to have sex. They are still very much in love though. Peter frequently walks the streets of Dublin as in Joyce's Ulysses.

- The younger brother Ivan's chapters are in standard sentences. He's a twenty-two year old chess champion, who meets a divorcee, Margaret, the program director of an arts venue. They become attached despite her being fourteen years older than him. When Peter finds out about this relationship he condemns Ivan for his immaturity, and they argue aggressively. 

- However Peter has also met another woman, the young and beautiful Naomi, who, ironically, is ten years younger than him and a former sex worker.  

- Rooney’s focus on likeable young people and their love lives in microscopic detail is her familiar terrain. In Intermezzo however she digs a lot deeper and brings sex to the forefront. What part does it  play in deep loving relationships? There are many detailed descriptions of the sexual acts, and she explores the conflicting human emotions involved in all their complexity. Few novelists do that with Rooney’s level of intensity. This is by far the most erotic of her novels. 

- But interspersed throughout are rich conversations about art, culture, history, and religion. So on all levels the novel is deeply immersive and satisfying. 

Don Watson, Quarterly Essay: High Noon: Trump, Harris and America On The Brink

• This Quarterly Essay by well known author and respected political insider Don Watson is not just about the upcoming US election. It’s essentially a sociological read of today’s America. Watson imbeds the campaign in the nation’s history, its full political and cultural character, and how so much has changed for the worst for so many people over recent decades. Detroit being so representative of all that has happened to the struggling working class. ‘If you want to know America, know Detroit. If you want to fix America, fix Detroit’.  

• The central focus is on Trump and why he appeals to so many of the disaffected class.  

• Kamala Harris barely gets a mention until the last few pages. The essay ends with Biden’s resignation and Harris’s official nomination at the Democratic National Convention. Then, obviously, Watson had to submit his manuscript. Unfortunately the turning point, the debate, came afterwards. 

• However Watson absolutely nails what Harris’s weakness is, and how she needs to do a lot more than offering ‘joy’ to win the election. ‘…keep the love but temper the joy. The people whose votes [Democrats] need see nothing to be joyful about. Stop talking about the middle class, as if working people have only themselves to blame for low wages, and rents and mortgages they can’t afford’.

• ‘Once the Democrats allow themselves to be defined by their opposition to Trump, the fight is as good as lost.’ 

• Watson continually demonstrates his insightfulness. He talks to a number of people he meets on the streets, and visits various towns and cities to assess their economic circumstances. 100 miles west of downtrodden Detroit is Kalamazoo, a city of 75 thousand people, which is absolutely thriving. 

• ‘Sometimes the hoopla makes you wonder if Americans will ever grow up, and if we don’t have more in common with the village people of Albania, or Mars. What is it about their longstanding love of marching and mass rallies? Their hand-on-heart, flag-waving patriotism?’ 

Andre Dao, Anam

 

• This novel was recently announced as the winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for 2024. 

• It is certainly not a work of fiction in the usual sense. The people and events described are historically real. It’s more a bio infused with imaginative elements to bring the story alive, a blend of memory and history, and an intellectual journey. The narrator makes no concessions. As an undergraduate he read Derrida, a founding father of postmodernism and poststructuralism, and Husserl and his phenomenology.

• The Vietnamese war is the central focus. His family forbears were South Vietnamese and his grandfather an active supporter of the resistance to the Communist revolutionary forces under Ho Chi Minh. After the war ended in 1975 his grandfather was imprisoned for ten years for being a ‘non-communist intellectual’. The narrator spends a lot of time reflecting on his grandfather’s thoughts, friends, and experiences. He also takes us to Manus island camp, under Australia’s control. It has closed and the ‘boat people’ are being forced out. He became a migration lawyer, defending them. 

• But the narrator eventually realises he’s not retelling the story of his grandfather, he’s questioning it and interrogating it. And what about the contradiction presented by the Vietnamese refugees to Australia - after the war what were they fleeing from? Were they angry about the end of French colonialism and the retreat of the Americans? He now sees he’s writing a story about a story.

• There is a lot more to the novel than what I’ve described here. Dao delves deep into the family’s history - the grandmother, the aunts and uncles, and the narrator’s own relationship with his partner, Lauren, and their baby daughter Edith. All these elements add immense depth to the story, and increase the pleasure of reading it. 

Nina Kenwood, The Wedding Forecast

 

• This wonderful new novel by former bookseller Nina Kenwood is a delightful and emotionally deep romcom. I loved her first two YA (Young Adult category) novels but this one is fully adult and is undoubtedly her best.
• It’s about family, friends, partners, mothers, babies, parents, and relationship failures - multidimensional in a real way. But it’s mostly about love, how hard it is to find, the wrenching life-changing depth of it, and the sacrifices it demands. 
• There’s high drama on every level, and absolutely invigorating dialogue. What I particularly liked was Kenwood’s brilliant comic touch. You can’t help but be absorbed and captivated. The more you read the more you’re sucked in. 
• And as Nina admits in the Acknowledgements: ‘As well as being a romcom, this book is something of a love letter to bookshops and bookselling…’
• Buy this book and you’ll love it so much you’ll buy more copies for your family and friends. It’s that good. 

Malcolm Knox, The First Friend

 

• This is not an enjoyable book to read at all. You’re immersed in the ugly history of the Soviet Union since the October Revolution in 1917 until 1938, just prior to the beginning of the Second World War. 

• Post Lenin the Union was led by two murderous, abusive bullies, Josef Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria. They were merciless in their enforcement of Communist Party rule, and murdered hundreds of thousands of citizens in the process. Their egos were huge and their self-entitlement knew no bounds.  

• The central focus of Knox’s novel is on Beria and his years as the Governor of Georgia. He’s a vicious liar, manipulator and rapist, and has no respect for his staff or colleagues apart from his childhood friend and ‘brother’ Vasil Murtov, who is his driver and assistant. 

• I found it difficult to fathom Knox’s fundamental intent in this novel. Is it just a fictionalised history of a rotten autocracy, or does it have a deeper meaning? It can’t be claimed that it offers any insight into today’s Russia under Putin because the two states are vastly different. There is a contrasting narrative though. Murtov is married to Babilina and has two young daughters Ana and Melo. Their love for each other is real, and in the oppressive and brutal society they must survive in, inspiring. They are courageous and define what it actually means to be human. 

• Another aspect of the tale that enlivens it dramatically is Knox’s comic touch. The dialogue is frequently crude and funny, often blokey in an Aussie way. 

Thomas Piketty: Nature, Culture, and Inequality.

 

• Published recently in English by Australian publisher Scribe this small, 82 page, beautifully designed hardback is an absolute gem. I’ve read all of Piketty’s tomes over the years but this very digestible book summarises his principle concerns and arguments very clearly. 

• The graphs and tables are in four colour, and are gems in themselves. His main focus is inequality and how nations around the world have progressed over the last century in all sorts of ways, but they’ve mostly gone backwards in the distribution of income and wealth. He also includes a chapter on gender inequality, demonstrating we’ve got a lot more progress to make, and one on the climate change challenge.  

• He makes no bones about the fact he considers himself a socialist. In his view capitalism, on so many levels, is simply not working. He argues for governments to take certain goods and services out of the marketplace, and that ‘it should be extended to larger and larger sectors…the trend to remove whole sectors of the economy from the marketplace is one there’s no going back on’. 

• (Unfortunately Australia and New Zealand (Oceania) don’t feature in any of his ‘world’ tables. It would be so good to get this historical perspective on Australia, and where we sit compared to all other countries.) 

David Nicholls, You Are Here

 

- Marnie is a freelance copy editor. She's thirty-eight and divorced. Michael is a geography teacher. He's forty-two and separated. There aren't many readers or viewers of David Nicholls' stories of love and its rocky road that aren't utterly sucked in. He's an immensely gifted writer and I've long been a fan. His prose sparkles with verve and wit, and his stories, although quotidian, are full of profound insight into what basic humanity really is. 

- A hundred pages into this novel I wondered - is this a bit predictable? Typically Nicholls? Two lonelies who find each other? But as I read on I became entranced. The main ingredient in the mix is Nicholls' frequent sentences that burst off the page with comic brilliance.  

- The chapters are short, and the voices alternate - Marnie's and Michael's. A friend has organised a walk across one side of England to the other. It will take eight days. They pass through very English towns like Borrowdale, Grasmere, Glenridding, Stonethwaite and Patterdale, climb steep hills, suffer constant rain and drizzle. But they talk and talk and Marnie in particular is as delightful and cheeky a companion as you could get, although she 'hates walking'! These conversations are the substance of the book. 

- They are both child-free and victims of failed marriages. They tell each other their stories and they are immensely sad. Nicholls details the emotional drainage they suffered and are still recovering from. 

- I obviously cannot comment on the ending, other than to say Nicholls does not indulge in any cliches. You'll just mutter 'what a magnificent achievement'.