tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2373685754153409132024-03-19T14:28:27.649+11:00BooknotesPeter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.comBlogger431125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-67310964413953890942024-03-10T18:03:00.000+11:002024-03-10T18:03:05.602+11:00Hannah Ritchie, Not the End of the World<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgusnWfpJgcnotm5zc_IAzCFM4BmFRd_03jviTx0z1O6Pz64dPxxnUIRp_uFq-OngMdEwLLLGa6-6Xx56v635K4YNfWCABvYGMv2SM1oiHE4sZ-1KFkkRTOJQNVlRTTNNA8JyfVBZwIjdKt2hT4T3sGsM2FlNl2ot3G2-louzTFyUp48dvysgbYqxKbApTE/s4032/IMG_2083.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgusnWfpJgcnotm5zc_IAzCFM4BmFRd_03jviTx0z1O6Pz64dPxxnUIRp_uFq-OngMdEwLLLGa6-6Xx56v635K4YNfWCABvYGMv2SM1oiHE4sZ-1KFkkRTOJQNVlRTTNNA8JyfVBZwIjdKt2hT4T3sGsM2FlNl2ot3G2-louzTFyUp48dvysgbYqxKbApTE/s320/IMG_2083.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222;">- This is a stunningly good book and highly enlightening on the serious environmental and sustainability problems the world faces today. Dr Hannah Ritchie is senior researcher in the Programme for Global Development at Oxford University. She clearly outlines all the problems we face yet she remains positive and hopeful. We can, if we work together and with determination, solve them. This is the challenge of our times. </span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">- What I very much enjoyed about the book is Ritchie's clarity of thinking and writing. She clearly navigates so many difficult terrains in plain, non-academic English, providing not just loads of valuable information and data, but insight and sense. And the book has a very personal flavour. She's describing her own journey. </span></p><p>- I can do no better than the back cover blurb to describe the book in detail:</p><p><i>Feeling anxious, powerless or confused about the future of our planet? This book will transform how you see our biggest environmental problems - and how we can solve them.</i></p><p><i>We are bombarded by doomsday headlines that tell us the soil won't be able to support crops, fish will vanish from our oceans, that we should reconsider having children.</i></p><p><i>But in this bold, radically hopeful book, data scientist Hannah Ritchie argues that if we zoom out, a very different picture emerges. The data shows we've made so much progress on these problems, and so fast, that we could be on track to achieve true sustainability for the first time in history. </i></p><p><i>Packed with the latest research, practical guidance and enlightening graphics, this book will make you rethink almost everything you've been told about the environment, from the virtues of eating locally and living in the countryside, to the evils of over-population, plastic straws and palm oil. It will give you the tools to understand what works, what doesn't and what we urgently need to focus on so we can leave a sustainable planet for future generations. </i></p><p><i>These problems are big. But they are solvable. We are not doomed. We can build a better future for everyone. Let's turn that opportunity into reality. </i></p><br /><p></p>Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-20402896947040762592024-02-25T11:10:00.002+11:002024-02-25T14:23:17.304+11:00 Peter R. Neumann, The New World Disorder.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzIVKxgrFAr8CMwCVrwUcAlYjw-47YGMk6JBI_ZHz3pntEFgK3eFdfnjXkvgZWy6vepA2TqKwOEGz_Qkj6-gO7_zKKd1YAMaqWvZqIHdGN5w913LOKzGtpQbvqhEI0RvlcoVsI7VrxRty24lkMAWjuDHPkS5toRkkhgJbViHj65w3iZZ7esS-MaH8w7cGU/s278/Neumann.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="278" data-original-width="181" height="278" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzIVKxgrFAr8CMwCVrwUcAlYjw-47YGMk6JBI_ZHz3pntEFgK3eFdfnjXkvgZWy6vepA2TqKwOEGz_Qkj6-gO7_zKKd1YAMaqWvZqIHdGN5w913LOKzGtpQbvqhEI0RvlcoVsI7VrxRty24lkMAWjuDHPkS5toRkkhgJbViHj65w3iZZ7esS-MaH8w7cGU/s1600/Neumann.jpeg" width="181" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white;">- I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It's a</span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">bsolutely brilliant on every level, as well as being superbly written in crystal clear prose. It has been translated from the original German by journalist David Shaw, and it's rare that translations are this good. Neumann is currently Professor of Security Studies at King's College London and is an internationally sought-after expert on terrorism and geopolitics. </span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial;">- <i>The triumph of the West had seemed unstoppable not that long ago...but now the West is under pressure, and it has only itself to blame. Over the last thirty years, through a mixture of naïveté and arrogance, it has lost its global advantage. Today's challenges are profound: the rise of China, climate change, and the polarisation of society. </i>(back cover blurb)</span></p><p><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">- As a reader I'm an obsessive </span>underliner. Sentences that encapsulate fundamental insights and meanings demand to be remembered. While reading this book I virtually underlined every paragraph. </span></p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">- Neumann's chapters on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are magnificent. He condemns the profound ignorance and naiveté of the US and its conservative commentators. <i>The 9/11 attacks showed that the West was vulnerable; the wars in the Middle East exposed the limits of its military power, and the collapse of the financial markets revealed the contradictions inherent in its economic model. </i></span><div><span style="background-color: white;"><i><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></i></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>- </i>He also obliterates Putin and puts his war on Ukraine into perspective. Putin's a posturing Eurasianist with the power fantasies of a populist imperialist. </span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- He's also excellent on the creation of the EU and the disaster of Brexit. And quite pessimistic on the world's dismal failure to address the challenges of climate change. </span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- In summary, this is a book that deserves to be widely read. I hope it becomes an international bestseller. </span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /><div><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><div><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><div><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div></div>Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-80134150910399707652024-02-08T13:32:00.002+11:002024-02-08T16:24:41.730+11:00 Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuEGpg8qqUvcaK-jQAMBLOfM1OriC5QSOW_LLXdWA-XKYTewB-RnzDu2ftAlExhcYdts6r1zurHdNY-eJKbwI5-6CGnk3LHlAp_iacw6y646__p_-Osu1IWmuKXA9L0p2_VWtnJQJnqcVp9dJlxpbpF43pQ34heb8liOSKlf0rwPnlSOZtOFhAKd4Rhs5m/s240/Stevenson.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="240" data-original-width="210" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuEGpg8qqUvcaK-jQAMBLOfM1OriC5QSOW_LLXdWA-XKYTewB-RnzDu2ftAlExhcYdts6r1zurHdNY-eJKbwI5-6CGnk3LHlAp_iacw6y646__p_-Osu1IWmuKXA9L0p2_VWtnJQJnqcVp9dJlxpbpF43pQ34heb8liOSKlf0rwPnlSOZtOFhAKd4Rhs5m/s1600/Stevenson.jpeg" width="210" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- There's no doubt Benjamin Stevenson is a brilliant comic writer. His gift shines through on virtually every page. </span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;">- Ernest Cunningham, the fictional author of the best-selling <b>Everyone In My Family Has Killed</b> <b>Someone</b>, is writing his follow-up <b>Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect</b>. Ernest continually breaks the fourth wall, telling us all what he's doing and why, which makes it so charming. </span></p><p><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;">- The train is the Ghan, running from Darwin to Adelaide, and the luxury carriage is hosting 'The Australian Mystery Writers' Festival' featuring six internationally successful authors. (Note to ed: there should be no comma after Writers). A couple of murders take place. </span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial;">- The book has a serious problem however. It's hard-going. The story is clotted, the narrator fussy, and he drowns the reader in so much detail the experience is like drowning in mud. </span></p><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- It gets really tedious and alienating towards the end, as the incestuous, mind-boggling connections between all the characters are revealed. Our omniscient, first-person narrator somehow knows everything, indulging in his own cleverness. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- But he does satirise the mystery thriller genre exceptionally well, particularly the ‘butler-dunnit’ model. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- And I must say he portrays the regular modus operandi of the publishing industry and its many players very accurately. The Oxford Comma also plays a part!</span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- But, all in all....meh!</span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-46062100561474901112024-01-31T12:13:00.001+11:002024-01-31T12:13:34.082+11:00 Yumna Kassab, Politica<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjVd0TbuqkUOOKtr8YOPUNfxkTQDX5hlARODaqQ8hofEL778f-wrCiKqOBCDYg2nY3onv5lyPI0W5eLPdO-tWGYlbuyIVS1qT64s1uXvR42MgPux0tgvzinFv7-Cf2-0vXRhQ8cN24O1Bjm9_CMbpK7QhaiyUbSikfzXvT3eYCN7df0TEZ8yAfVuFGwpIl/s278/Politica.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="278" data-original-width="182" height="278" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjVd0TbuqkUOOKtr8YOPUNfxkTQDX5hlARODaqQ8hofEL778f-wrCiKqOBCDYg2nY3onv5lyPI0W5eLPdO-tWGYlbuyIVS1qT64s1uXvR42MgPux0tgvzinFv7-Cf2-0vXRhQ8cN24O1Bjm9_CMbpK7QhaiyUbSikfzXvT3eYCN7df0TEZ8yAfVuFGwpIl/s1600/Politica.jpeg" width="182" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white;">- This new novel from Yumna Kassab is a challenging read. I was really </span>enthralled by her two previous novels <b>Australiana</b> and <b>The Lovers</b>, but in <b>Politica </b>she adopts a more nebulous style, exploring the world of her many characters in a <span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">suggestive, less realistic, way. </span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">- 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. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">- 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. </span></span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">‘They mean to erase us from the face of the earth. This is one continuous tale of dispossession and displacement’.</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white;">- 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 </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">engrossing. </span></span></p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- One section of the book is titled <b>1973</b>, 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…’ </span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">- There are many short </span>stories of seemingly unrelated events, but the prime focus is always the people and how they deal with them. Although the war may be <span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">relegated to history now, its effects are still felt. </span></span></span><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">- Kassab has the gift of forcing you to confront these seemingly simple but profoundly meaningful lives with their rhythms and memories. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><i><span style="font-family: arial;">There are many bodies buried in this ground.</span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-family: arial;"> Some of the dead are only bones.</span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-family: arial;"> Others are more recent. Their burial was hurried, done in </span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-family: arial;">the dark, ground covered so it did not appear disturbed.</span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-family: arial;"> I have watched for many years.</span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-family: arial;"> When the world is troubled, there are more secrets to put</span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-family: arial;">to sleep in the earth, in the night-time when they believe no</span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-family: arial;">eyes can see.</span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-family: arial;"> I watch. There are others - humans - who believe this park</span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-family: arial;">can shelter their terror and their dreams.</span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-family: arial;"> There is always the watcher, one of lightness on the right,</span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-family: arial;">the scribe of darkness on the left, and then the Great One who</span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-family: arial;">not even the smallest detail escapes.</span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-family: arial;"> The world may not see. There may be no witness in the</span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-family: arial;">living but the record is always kept. The weight of history is</span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-family: arial;">layers, and it does not disappear, no matter how oblivious </span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-family: arial;">is humanity.</span></i></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">- When reading this novel you may be tempted to bail at times, but stay with it. It's well worth it. </span></div><div><br /></div><div><br /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /></div>Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-31117307218463220402024-01-26T16:17:00.001+11:002024-02-25T16:02:56.580+11:00John Gray, The New Leviathans<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgLX0F_Sr48m_WX1NR0XbOAbGgUqI_rjTvZGz-9sNphFP7d6Oxga3lSGVq58GThPsYV6wkQeuJfy8_Mq92NqNojnTA2_3Yb7LcSw0Obe9P_OpGR9eewCMgF_-WKfwuhKkGh1Jb5qNoPBKbf8bPxXKLYQmE2Xhjb1wQ-Nv3YvkusPzyd8gvh8oqftXpNV5h/s285/Gray.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="285" data-original-width="177" height="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgLX0F_Sr48m_WX1NR0XbOAbGgUqI_rjTvZGz-9sNphFP7d6Oxga3lSGVq58GThPsYV6wkQeuJfy8_Mq92NqNojnTA2_3Yb7LcSw0Obe9P_OpGR9eewCMgF_-WKfwuhKkGh1Jb5qNoPBKbf8bPxXKLYQmE2Xhjb1wQ-Nv3YvkusPzyd8gvh8oqftXpNV5h/s1600/Gray.jpeg" width="177" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">-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. </span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">- He bases his analysis on </span></span></span><span style="color: #222222;">philosopher Thomas Hobbes's treatise <b style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">Leviathan </b>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 <b>Leviathan</b> is universally regarded as a classic work that continues to inspire and explain much of today's decaying world. </span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;">- 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: <i>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</i>.</span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">- He explores in detail the contrasts between Russia and China and the West, their history and ambitions, and his opinions are often confronting: </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><i>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.</i> </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><i>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. </i></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><i>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. </i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">- His stance on wokeness is controversial. He diagnoses it as hyper-liberalism, which rejects the necessary compromises. <i>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...</i><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;"><i>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.</i></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">- 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. </span></p><p><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;"><i><br /></i></span></p>Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-25635520664642352302024-01-22T15:05:00.001+11:002024-01-22T15:05:33.364+11:00 Angela O’Keeffe, The Sitter<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOkCnGwPqs6kTxuosnf-6HFlaVz_yCjY9IblnG2SFzIc9w_xW7TT2tHo0R55JG_oEvB91DEMf_Tgr-Y1zN3PL0fA_B9bE8I7rWq9t62f4c69aZgrxJeU63xHCS5BaPLiGetldU-jBnowx8TyKjLBFE7bWm5pC4Yv-WfLKDkmGxmPi0wuGTdNMLc7bGTPaE/s278/The%20Sitter.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="278" data-original-width="181" height="278" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOkCnGwPqs6kTxuosnf-6HFlaVz_yCjY9IblnG2SFzIc9w_xW7TT2tHo0R55JG_oEvB91DEMf_Tgr-Y1zN3PL0fA_B9bE8I7rWq9t62f4c69aZgrxJeU63xHCS5BaPLiGetldU-jBnowx8TyKjLBFE7bWm5pC4Yv-WfLKDkmGxmPi0wuGTdNMLc7bGTPaE/s1600/The%20Sitter.jpeg" width="181" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial;">- 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. </span></p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- 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. </span></span><div><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- 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. </span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">- The </span>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. </span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">- As Hortense admits at one point: <i>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. </i></span></div><div><i><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></i></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>- </i>Georgia <span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">had a baby as a young high school girl. </span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">She had sex with a boyfriend in the back seat of a car, and </span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">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.’ </span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br />- Death is also a focus, including of children. And marriages. <span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><i>Our lives are filled with emblems of loss, and they continue to reverberate in us, and sometimes, after years, they can bring us undone. </i></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span style="color: #222222;">- O'Keeffe has written a beautiful and meaningful novel which I know I will read again.</span></span></div><div><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></div>Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-70002978405353319322024-01-18T15:46:00.001+11:002024-01-18T17:06:16.142+11:00 Anne Michaels, Held<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFCGPdrBi7HRS4gjgF9hyphenhyphenMkv5bKVezmAjrEmxFj86M8V3WHnPoP72wro6SzVWAHNRwtR4oXpP0ixz4zUhdEavE84Yl3evDaVqNo52KlE6VFzikl33VfSOkaZI6uqigpB0ROfYKsXWfgnHJkNsgLI_kegl0h68IQ0M-EMI_erkrTZX0towfZugWh0vSYzaa/s285/Held.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="285" data-original-width="177" height="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFCGPdrBi7HRS4gjgF9hyphenhyphenMkv5bKVezmAjrEmxFj86M8V3WHnPoP72wro6SzVWAHNRwtR4oXpP0ixz4zUhdEavE84Yl3evDaVqNo52KlE6VFzikl33VfSOkaZI6uqigpB0ROfYKsXWfgnHJkNsgLI_kegl0h68IQ0M-EMI_erkrTZX0towfZugWh0vSYzaa/s1600/Held.jpeg" width="177" /></a></div><br /><p></p><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- 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 <span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="color: #222222; font-size: small;">human. There's a deep, underlying mysteriousness to all of our journeys and the connections we have to nature and to each other, the </span></span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">‘…ideas of the visible and invisible, and the rules of space and time’. </span></span><div><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="color: #222222; font-size: small;">- The novel is a paean to love in many ways, particularly family love, and the homes, careers, belongings and memories that bind us together. </span><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="color: #222222; font-size: small;">Interestingly, all the couples featured over four generations are deeply in love. There are no divorces or separations, and friendships are lasting. </span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">- 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: </span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><i style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">To the historian, every battlefield is different; to the philosopher, every battlefield is the same. War has ever redefined the </i><i>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. </i></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><i>- </i>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. </span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><i>- </i>This superb <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/culture/books/literary-slow-food-anne-michaels-antidote-to-a-fast-paced-world-20240104-p5ev8j.html">review</a> of the novel by Leah Kaminsky in The Age is worth reading.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><i> </i><br /></span><div><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><div><br /></div></div>Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-47989271650217420462024-01-11T14:15:00.000+11:002024-01-11T14:15:26.741+11:00 Jhumpa Lahiri, Roman Stories<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_mILJFWnDwChiCFJJUIewTbcOedTizxIXi6NN5y1T9Tw_beUyMpJsej2bAHbQ1trxxddHNRXUyrALV4EfIZ5iLmkYMI4zTWye857GDsPAWpO5LVDidvFRP2HaW_wdYr5fwnBKhWJgpd4oxT_sxLWsxDze4nBMhTfkYRFZyfw_s4Aqeuz3bO_cn53jSUCk/s225/Lahiri%20Roman%20Stories.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="225" data-original-width="225" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_mILJFWnDwChiCFJJUIewTbcOedTizxIXi6NN5y1T9Tw_beUyMpJsej2bAHbQ1trxxddHNRXUyrALV4EfIZ5iLmkYMI4zTWye857GDsPAWpO5LVDidvFRP2HaW_wdYr5fwnBKhWJgpd4oxT_sxLWsxDze4nBMhTfkYRFZyfw_s4Aqeuz3bO_cn53jSUCk/s1600/Lahiri%20Roman%20Stories.jpeg" width="225" /></a> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial; text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial;">- This new book by Jhumpa Lahiri is a collection of short stories set mostly in Rome. Her last book in 2021 was a novel, <b>Whereabouts</b>, also set in Rome. I reviewed it very positively <a href="https://notaboutbooks.blogspot.com/2021/05/jhumpa-lahiri-whereabouts.html">here</a>. The two have a distinct flavour. Lahiri is a chronicler of the everyday. </span></div><div><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial;">- In <b>Roman Stories</b> 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.</span></div><div><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial;">- An element I found frustrating at first was her refusal to locate. Nations, races, individuals, c</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial;">ities, suburbs, and towns</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial;"> are all unnamed. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">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. </span></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- 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. </div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">-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. </div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div>Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-8206919009938202842024-01-08T16:30:00.000+11:002024-01-08T16:30:42.264+11:00Pip Adam, The New Animals<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhM3R8bqIXDjmiwX4bLsDB0qiFXBLS2iOKTefs-LKWJ8j1cQKa0Zw6o62IV8HjrnW2aXux7_bP6Z5Yboa_1pzqREMmg6tbIMNHEER-9hPh81xbTJDuBQ8A-YcIxhQ1HM7dOPxItFlTQAPkXa1Seca4P2vRRXNcEAXuIOCY0u5iBgeJgmGp3uB0G0dzX-Jk/s234/The%20New%20Animals.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="234" data-original-width="215" height="234" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhM3R8bqIXDjmiwX4bLsDB0qiFXBLS2iOKTefs-LKWJ8j1cQKa0Zw6o62IV8HjrnW2aXux7_bP6Z5Yboa_1pzqREMmg6tbIMNHEER-9hPh81xbTJDuBQ8A-YcIxhQ1HM7dOPxItFlTQAPkXa1Seca4P2vRRXNcEAXuIOCY0u5iBgeJgmGp3uB0G0dzX-Jk/s1600/The%20New%20Animals.jpeg" width="215" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- Pip Adam's <b>The New Animals</b> 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. </span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">Having loved </span><b style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">Audition,</b><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"> Adam's 2023 novel (which I reviewed </span><a href="http://notaboutbooks.blogspot.com/2023/09/pip-adam-audition.html" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">here</a><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">), I felt propelled to get into this, her earlier one. </span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;">- 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. </span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;">- 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. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- 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: </span><i><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">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.</span><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">..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.</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /></i><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- Adam sprinkles some fabulous observations throughout: <i>That seemed to be the most important factual commodity these days - Anecdote, Opinion. Feeling. The American people were sick of experts.</i></span><i><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /></i><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- 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'.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white;">- 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. <br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /></p>Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-13242380414414906092024-01-03T08:46:00.001+11:002024-01-04T13:40:03.345+11:00Hwang Bo-Reum, Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLfdpl0_Y1W-dE3EH56eGnY1S3R5Z8pjpa8zccfFKJ3XUjgTGW_7nHW1LdBU1bVU7GaTjw9PKfoA3ZJcHobNyd5V34bh2iphM0ftPrUqiC3u36tDWqcl4cBEaaA3tVVLXaT6oBlHWq4xMH-RerMYUkEf12lmOJe6PuBOmXneQNILijQ9mL_BDy71ffWEp2/s252/Hwang%20Bo-Reum.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="252" data-original-width="252" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLfdpl0_Y1W-dE3EH56eGnY1S3R5Z8pjpa8zccfFKJ3XUjgTGW_7nHW1LdBU1bVU7GaTjw9PKfoA3ZJcHobNyd5V34bh2iphM0ftPrUqiC3u36tDWqcl4cBEaaA3tVVLXaT6oBlHWq4xMH-RerMYUkEf12lmOJe6PuBOmXneQNILijQ9mL_BDy71ffWEp2/s1600/Hwang%20Bo-Reum.jpeg" width="252" /></a></div><br /><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 36); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 36); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">- 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. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 36); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">- It's also a critique of today's common workplace practices, like casuals versus permanents. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 36); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">- 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. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 36); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">- 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!). </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 36); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">- 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. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 36); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">- 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. </span></p><p><br /></p><div class="nH" style="background-color: white;"></div>Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-3386291481601506962023-12-25T15:28:00.001+11:002023-12-25T18:42:45.588+11:00 Iain Ryan, The Strip.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgi0ME6bJx8UuogYyH2555SGp_PR8I_xqf5ttcCcx3EkjT6R_X2oDbD57fwbwWnPzM4wkJt2mdOz2GC8E0UqNdqbhxQCVoAa9YAhaEIbrfiDsVrAJM3mZjNmbYcxG0sjMi7F_3wB9wpsYcd0lV5BocK6KUETnOWn1rvLBOtNXTsbnEjYkgqIdHoO8NBXHu_/s225/The%20Strip.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="225" data-original-width="225" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgi0ME6bJx8UuogYyH2555SGp_PR8I_xqf5ttcCcx3EkjT6R_X2oDbD57fwbwWnPzM4wkJt2mdOz2GC8E0UqNdqbhxQCVoAa9YAhaEIbrfiDsVrAJM3mZjNmbYcxG0sjMi7F_3wB9wpsYcd0lV5BocK6KUETnOWn1rvLBOtNXTsbnEjYkgqIdHoO8NBXHu_/s1600/The%20Strip.jpeg" width="225" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">-<span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">I very much enjoyed Iain Ryan's previous novels, <b>The Student</b>, and <b>The Spiral</b>, but this one is a cut above. It's brilliant. </span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">How on earth does a crime writer who is not, and never has been, a cop, write a novel as intricate and informed as this? It's so real, and the characters so believable. There are none of your tired and empty cliches. </span></span></p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- The setting is the Gold Coast in the early 80’s - the criminal underclass, the corrupt police, and the deadening conservative culture and society more generally. We're a decade or two prior to the reforms introduced by the Wayne Goss and Peter Beattie governments. As the key criminal player says at one point: <i>One day, everything I do here on the coast will be legal. The fucking, the gambling, abortions, drugs. The lot.</i></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- A serial killer is on the loose. Detective Constable Lana Cohen from Sydney has been sent up north to work with a bunch of detectives investigating the deaths of eight victims of a serial killer. But the police on the Gold Coast are incompetent, lazy and stupidly blokey. Beer and prostitutes is all they care about. The place</span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"> is known as a ‘punishment posting’. It is where the Force sends its weakest officers. ‘They’re dogs, each and all’.</span></span><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- Ryan thickens the story with a lot of characters and twists, so the reader is challenged to stay with it. But that pays off in spades. He builds an extremely satisfying resolution with some stunning reveals.</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- This is a masterful piece of work. It is easily one of the best crime novels I've ever read, and I've read a lot of them. </span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">- Here are some reviews from authors who know what they're talking about: </span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;"><i>Steeped in the bitter lore of old-school policing and backlit by the gaudy neon of the Gold Coast streets, The Strip is hands done one the the finest Australian crime novels you'll ever read. </i>(David Whish-Wilson)</span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white;"><i>Tense and compelling. </i>(Garry Disher)</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white;"><i><br /></i></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><i><span style="background-color: white;">Iain Ryan's The Strip is an </span>eye popping, nightmarish miasma that sets a new bar for Australian crime. Drenched in sweat, despair and corruption, think David Fincher's <b>Seven, </b>set on the Gold Coast in the 1980's. Except weirder and with more tension. A total triumph in every respect.</i> (Chris Flynn)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>The Strip is bingeworthy reading - a gritty crime thriller reeking of corruption, murder and sex. If you like your heroines flawed and kick-ass and your cops dirty as hell, you'll love Iain Ryan's gripping foray into the underworld of the Gold Coast. Hardly took a breath from first page to last. </i>(Kate Mildenhall)</span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;"><i>If David Peace wrote a novel set in Queensland's Gold Coast in the 1980's, the result would be The Strip. Fast paced, gritty, sharply observed noir that goes hard into the sleaze and corruption of the moonlight state.</i> (Andrew Nette)</span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></div><div><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /></div>Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-320293404883257642023-12-18T14:06:00.002+11:002023-12-18T16:22:47.474+11:00Paul Dalgarno, A Country of Eternal Light. <p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgukIEPyvS0MISQDHElZuav4dIo2vDED0ozt3kEPf_9D8fHmERLigANBjWjqcHdlfU0D10FxxzA8hZ2-kywqxpCTZdYNMxAL5k-oYfdl8ZB9rsQu5hiJdlT38Vtu2WejaP8L30OMs7W37KmVQaXjDEbFT7jnnlvIqb82339S9zry9x70xP-i9G6rjLw6wTR/s252/Dalgarno.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="252" data-original-width="189" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgukIEPyvS0MISQDHElZuav4dIo2vDED0ozt3kEPf_9D8fHmERLigANBjWjqcHdlfU0D10FxxzA8hZ2-kywqxpCTZdYNMxAL5k-oYfdl8ZB9rsQu5hiJdlT38Vtu2WejaP8L30OMs7W37KmVQaXjDEbFT7jnnlvIqb82339S9zry9x70xP-i9G6rjLw6wTR/s1600/Dalgarno.jpeg" width="189" /></a></div><br /><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- A brilliant and exhilarating novel that creates magic out of the mundane. One of the best novels I’ve read this year, and easily the best Australian one. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- Dalgarno submerges us deep into the ordinary lives of a working class family in Scotland. There's nothing that distinguishes them other than their deep love for one another despite occasional tensions. Margaret and Henry live in a council flat and have two twin daughters Rachel and Eva. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- We span the decades from after World War II to 2021, and although the 'Living Margaret' dies in 2014, the 'Dead Margaret' revisits key events over that period and reflects on them. It doesn't take long as a reader to get used to that authorial device, in fact to love it, as her voice has a gentle touch, and she's a charming and sensitive woman. Like Dante, she reflects, ‘I’m on a divine mission’. (She ain't that divine however - in 2021, during Covid, she doesn’t know why people are wearing masks or social distancing!).</span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- We're told the daughters grow up and have relationships and children of their own. Rachel moves to Australia and Eva to Spain. I use the words 'we're told' deliberately. Dalgarno provides a shocking reveal at the end that throws a whole new light on everything that comes before. I reread chapter after chapter and was, once again, utterly transfixed by his genius. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- Read this and revel in the delicious prose and storytelling. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div>Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-69356817749903728592023-12-09T14:50:00.001+11:002023-12-09T14:59:28.002+11:00Tony Birch, Women and Children<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMfcKBEUwvepJBSQoeK7tgpqQq7RVnmk9tpgsWdd-xuYUEDLQETW4Te3DfJ_Nl05bYMe3hPIER18DvqfOScMLztjfxN2ttaLoQAKRONrqXW3kWpvzVSdAaPLcST-RLObeMYisd2oF73z8sKlNowlVDgja0zBNWIqWLT2VvAknT5Hek6foJG8xgU-k3dHJh/s252/Birch.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="252" data-original-width="175" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMfcKBEUwvepJBSQoeK7tgpqQq7RVnmk9tpgsWdd-xuYUEDLQETW4Te3DfJ_Nl05bYMe3hPIER18DvqfOScMLztjfxN2ttaLoQAKRONrqXW3kWpvzVSdAaPLcST-RLObeMYisd2oF73z8sKlNowlVDgja0zBNWIqWLT2VvAknT5Hek6foJG8xgU-k3dHJh/s1600/Birch.jpeg" width="175" /></a></div><br /><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- I was not a great fan of Tony Birch's previous novel <b><a href="https://notaboutbooks.blogspot.com/2019/06/tony-birch-white-girl.html">The White Girl </a></b>but this one is simply superb. It's an absorbing and fascinating story with multiple layers of richness. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- Joe Cluny is an eleven year old boy who attends a local Catholic school in a working class suburb of Melbourne in the mid-sixties. He's not too bright and is always getting into trouble. His thirteen year old sister Ruby on the other hand is dux of her class and well liked. Sister Mary Josephine and Father Edmond run the school and force all the kids to swallow the very traditional and silly Catholic beliefs and practices. It's profound ignorance dressed up as piety. It's also dangerous and abusive. The cane is always at hand. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><div><span style="font-family: arial;">- Marion is Joe and Ruby's mother, and Charlie is their grandfather. Charlie's shed is full of stuff that fascinates Joe, and his friend Ranji is a scrap metal dealer. They are mature and kindly men that epitomise what real men should be. They also tell stories and read books, which Joe and Ruby find inspiring. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- Oona is Marion’s younger sister. Oona is in a relationship with Ray, a local electric goods shopowner. He is a vicious abuser, as are so many of the shysters that are dotted throughout the community. But she keeps returning to him, believing her abuse won't happen again, and perhaps she was to blame anyway. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- The local priest has an opinion: ‘If she was a married woman, this would not have happened’.</span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- Of course the beatings continue, and get more vicious. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- The way Birch brings all the threads together at the end is immensely satisfying. There were a number of ways things could have gone, but he keeps the story grounded. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- Well worth a read. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div>Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-89344593367211078042023-12-06T08:34:00.000+11:002023-12-06T08:34:53.198+11:00 Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKYo5-sCJ_o3l6J5KxYCsWebo5_BFVspu5prSTgALmyU4jVX5QdD75J5StMktFyegateGMKyEvC8bHQFmCxgauaSUWxWGkCgCFrDk9XH7vSvANkPFUpw25U9exUefJMc4SAXgKJjiUPfDoqu4bF_-fCUpw7pVA_TVsq2YFXgoVVN5lT07eJJebZnk_b4EF/s570/Bernstein.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="570" data-original-width="369" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKYo5-sCJ_o3l6J5KxYCsWebo5_BFVspu5prSTgALmyU4jVX5QdD75J5StMktFyegateGMKyEvC8bHQFmCxgauaSUWxWGkCgCFrDk9XH7vSvANkPFUpw25U9exUefJMc4SAXgKJjiUPfDoqu4bF_-fCUpw7pVA_TVsq2YFXgoVVN5lT07eJJebZnk_b4EF/s320/Bernstein.jpeg" width="207" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">- This novel was shortlisted for </span><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="color: #222222;">this year's Booker, and was predicted to win by a number of critics. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="color: #222222;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">- It didn't win but it certainly deserved its place on the shortlist. It's absolutely brilliant. </span></span><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">(Paul Lynch's </span><b style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><a href="http://notaboutbooks.blogspot.com/2023/11/paul-lynch-prophet-song.html">Prophet Song</a></b><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"> actually won).</span></span></p><p><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;">- Early in the novel our unnamed narrator lands at an airport in an unnamed country, walks towards the automatic exit doors, but 'the sensors did not at first register my movement, however exaggerated, so I had to wait until another recently deplaned passenger passed though the doors...' This says everything about the novel's essential meaning. She is a young woman (negative number one) and, as is slowly and subtly revealed, Jewish (negative number two). </span></p><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">-She goes to her older brother’s mansion in the north of this unnamed country to be his 'retainer' (really a domestic slave). There's a ‘surface placidity...a kind of idiot impenetrability’ to him. He’s a very successful businessman, recently divorced, insufferable and self-entitled, and politically on the right. She's not bothered. She loves him, as she does all her siblings. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- Previously she had been a journalist and an audio typist for a legal firm. She doesn't speak the language of this 'northern country' and the inhabitants of the town she now lives in don't speak English (or don't bother too).</span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- The fact that the country is not named is frustrating at first. But as the novel progresses that lack of specificity amplifies the universality of the treatment she receives - the abject prejudice.</span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- Interestingly, and because of the antisemitism she experienced at school, she doesn't like identifying as Jewish. She ‘gave the impression of being clean and without history, like gentiles, like people unstained by ancestral shame...I steadfastly refused to say the bracha over our classroom Sabbath ceremonies’. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- Bernstein broadens her focus to the subtle savagery of majorities in regard to minorities, whether Jews, Indigenous, or ‘foreigners’. They’re forced to shrink and hide. She depicts victimhood so well. In the local cafe for example the racist vibe is ugly. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- Strange things happen in the town to various animals, all pretty normal, but the residents feel her presence among them is the cause. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- Bernstein provides an interesting twist at the end which is very satisfying and apt. There is no horror or victory or evil but there is peace. 'I know they will not come because they do not need too'. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- I read this novel twice, luxuriating in the delicious prose and subtlety. It's so good. </span></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-83570771936521573792023-11-27T11:43:00.000+11:002023-11-27T11:43:19.545+11:00Paul Lynch, Prophet Song<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfaSnq24WVKfIqsY7E7rPnHJseGoQhZqK408H1Y9a-g_IfDTEkhoZYXiQIosRwzftVh-Z65FT6RDjXcab9t0LXrqccIokTGUDAQptBJFkFLnZcAVYb9euE7IdnJnheAcjJLDgcBRz66TsOqPWCG2ce1BMkNU52dhichRRSsARKcYPRbxSSLFaF-NtjFpwc/s252/Lynch.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="252" data-original-width="173" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfaSnq24WVKfIqsY7E7rPnHJseGoQhZqK408H1Y9a-g_IfDTEkhoZYXiQIosRwzftVh-Z65FT6RDjXcab9t0LXrqccIokTGUDAQptBJFkFLnZcAVYb9euE7IdnJnheAcjJLDgcBRz66TsOqPWCG2ce1BMkNU52dhichRRSsARKcYPRbxSSLFaF-NtjFpwc/s1600/Lynch.jpeg" width="173" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- Today this novel was announced as the winner of the 2023 Booker Prize for fiction, and deservedly so. It's brilliantly written and powerful. In idiosyncratic and multilayered prose, often clotted but always poetic, Lynch is merciless in plunging us deep into the ugliness of war and social conflict. It demands to be ready slowly. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- An autocratic, fascist regime, dangerous right-wing nationalists, has gained power in Ireland, and it hasn't taken them long to unleash terror on who and what they perceive as enemies of the state. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- Eilish and Larry, and their kids Mark, Bailey, Molly, and their baby Ben are the central focus. Larry is the deputy general secretary of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland, so he's a target. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- They are a happy family, but the pressure is building on them. The union is planning a protest march of 15,000 people. Larry is concerned and decides it would be safer not to go, but Eilish says the march must proceed. It does but the police violently arrest many, including Larry. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- 'What she sees before her is an idea of order coming undone, the world slewing into a dark and foreign sea'. This is how societies splinter, and trust eroded. Her father, friends and work colleagues are being ‘visited’ too, and bureaucrats are pressuring her. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- Her oldest son Mark is called up for national service, as are many young men barely out of school. There are protests on the streets but the police are watching them. Mark joined the protest but is now missing. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- Schools are closed, as are offices. A curfew is in place. Eilish's house and car are attacked by thugs. The splintering of the community is increasing. Retailers, neighbours, and old friends are taking sides. It's ugly. The government blocks the internet and all foreign media, and electricity is frequently down. The sound of war is there all day and night. Citizens are imprisoned in their home. Food and water are hard to find. The regime insists it is bombing terrorists. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- The rebel forces are gaining ground, but it's still chaos. Supermarkets are closed, and roadblocks are everywhere. The tension between Eilish and her kids is increasing, which is inevitable. Tragedy confronts them when their house is bombed.</span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">-The way this novel is brought to an end by Lynch is just perfect. It's enormously sad and dispiriting and makes the reader profoundly angry. But is the author offering a glimmer of hope? Given today's awful world, that is debatable.</span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- A profound and original piece of 'fiction' for our times. </span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div>Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-3729926907522409882023-11-16T14:00:00.000+11:002023-11-16T14:00:25.790+11:00 Claire Keegan, So Late in the Day<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcIJ8aAKIuCK4FTyayswnnDQCTUEckQwWWMpngyO6F6vGjCjnaJcsWhwbZqpwgQbkSzR4H_xQULvZiMbmbhlfFd5yFV0dcOi048DWouaWyfiTXzAZlmbF-6KgMCuIYFGbyi82yN6sTaUAM29Brx1H_PccV2mUhqI8wbygKtjemQ2YaalK0alaCvzmSaaXT/s1319/Keegan%20So%20Late.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1319" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcIJ8aAKIuCK4FTyayswnnDQCTUEckQwWWMpngyO6F6vGjCjnaJcsWhwbZqpwgQbkSzR4H_xQULvZiMbmbhlfFd5yFV0dcOi048DWouaWyfiTXzAZlmbF-6KgMCuIYFGbyi82yN6sTaUAM29Brx1H_PccV2mUhqI8wbygKtjemQ2YaalK0alaCvzmSaaXT/s320/Keegan%20So%20Late.jpg" width="243" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial;">- Another beautiful little book from the marvellous Irish author Claire Keegan. I so loved </span><b style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial;">Foster</b><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial;"> and </span><b style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial;">Small Things Like These</b><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial;">. This one is smaller, at only 47 pages, yet it too packs a powerful punch.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- Cathal is a young office bound man in a boring admin job. He meets Sabine, a young attractive woman working in an art gallery. After a while he proposes, she accepts, and brings her clothes and furniture to his house.</span></span></p><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">- But he senses she's an intrusion on his daily routines. He’s upset. ‘Maybe it’s just too much reality’. And as for that engagement ring that cost him 128 euros plus VAT to get it resized for her finger!<i> 'Do you think I'm made of money?' he'd said - and immediately felt the long shadow of his father's language crossing over his life...</i></span><div><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);"><i><br /></i></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);"><i>- </i>One night s</span></span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">he talks to him about misogyny: ‘It’s simply about not giving...to some of you we are just cunts'. She will not tolerate being treated as subservient. </span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">She walks, prior to the wedding day.</span></span><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- It's a simple story. He’s a pathetic inadequate. A little boy who, like his father and brother, calls women ‘cunts’. Once again he just sits in his arm chair, staring at the TV, and that's his life. </span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /></span></div></div><div><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><div><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">- The End. </span></div><div><br /></div><div><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-81269470391048154092023-11-15T16:11:00.003+11:002023-11-15T18:06:20.314+11:00Banana Yoshimoto, The Premonition<p> </p><p><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;"><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtKK9RFnu2d2sGckqviApg80KUuaIdKnditG8gVJ241tNSf5SYw2MfayZ1Xqp7GxIx2-d8LSm4jSDQaA-onqIpd74RkplJZeaS2gJNDKyzZInIjTrhDuYq6CYwUoz0261UiruIfVkQLmsw74gNaAzKkmhN5hOOvDUzpYgYLdZpTLC3E2R_YPW_S3fPPk6z/s252/The%20Premonition.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="252" data-original-width="157" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtKK9RFnu2d2sGckqviApg80KUuaIdKnditG8gVJ241tNSf5SYw2MfayZ1Xqp7GxIx2-d8LSm4jSDQaA-onqIpd74RkplJZeaS2gJNDKyzZInIjTrhDuYq6CYwUoz0261UiruIfVkQLmsw74gNaAzKkmhN5hOOvDUzpYgYLdZpTLC3E2R_YPW_S3fPPk6z/s1600/The%20Premonition.jpeg" width="157" /></a></div><br /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">- Short Japanese novels have become a thing now in the English speaking world. Over the last few years Emi Yagi's <b>Diary of a Void</b>, Mieko Kawakami's two novels <b>All the Lovers in the Night</b> and <b>Heaven</b>, and of course Toshikazu Kawaguchi's bestselling <b>Before the Coffee Gets Cold</b> series have really made their mark.</span><div><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">- Perhaps this is why Banana Yoshimoto's <b>The Premonition</b>, first published in Japan in 1988 has just been re-released in English by Faber. And I thank god for that. This is a Japanese classic, a fascinating, strange, and absorbing story, and exceptionally well translated by Asa Yoneda. And it's only 133 pages long so can be read in one sitting. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /></span><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- A young girl, Yayoi, visits her aunt Yukino aged 30, who lives alone in a neglected, untidy house a short train trip from Tokyo. Yukino taught music at a private high school and has become quite an eccentric. </span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- Yayoi’s parents are upper middle class. Her dad’s a doctor, her mother a nurse. She loves her younger brother Tetsuo. They’ve just moved back into their renovated house and bought a dog. Tokyo's vibrancy with its t</span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">rains, stations, bars, restaurants and parks is on show. </span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white;">- So that's the setting - sort of normal people leading normal lives. Except, as it turns out, that's far from the case.<br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- The young girl dreams, and has visions of people that appear in a strange way to be familiar. She is </span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">very sensitive to the darkness, the stars, the wind, and the trees, as if nature has messages. </span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- One night her brother gets a phone call and leaves the house. Worried, she found him and walked home with him. The next night she herself runs away from home and goes to her aunt's house, where she stays for a long time.</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- That's when she learns the truth about all sort of things, which of course I can't disclose. </span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /></span><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- The aunt becomes the central character from that point. <i>…the dark feminine magic that was her nature…she harboured something vast, lost, and familiar, and it was like a siren call to those of us who were missing parts of our childhoods...</i></span><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;"><i>She had the habit of looking away from things she feared, or found distasteful, or thought might hurt her.</i></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- Also central to the story is Yayoi's and her brother Tetsuo's relationship. </span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">- A wonderful reflection about how life's vicissitudes whack us however good as humans we are. </span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /><p></p></div>Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-63928308757120394922023-11-13T08:35:00.002+11:002023-11-14T09:17:10.567+11:00Clementine Ford, I Don’t<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDMMZHrAA8rm8RsV9jMWpxM5b1Sv9Zv58kkMsO-Q9CFA_YpeHLe-XmoG1gt7psiN8XxG1ZyCjXe-2QyLGh3WFUctWepj8tRGQT2yqIfqXyXWc-FoycwrFa1OVCB7tYnZ_Yzu56H9ANq4SZ8_NrrjE-j-8npc0CBGJKhvbJUHTTjTH814wC4dNn9fS6qH8C/s252/Ford.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="252" data-original-width="165" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDMMZHrAA8rm8RsV9jMWpxM5b1Sv9Zv58kkMsO-Q9CFA_YpeHLe-XmoG1gt7psiN8XxG1ZyCjXe-2QyLGh3WFUctWepj8tRGQT2yqIfqXyXWc-FoycwrFa1OVCB7tYnZ_Yzu56H9ANq4SZ8_NrrjE-j-8npc0CBGJKhvbJUHTTjTH814wC4dNn9fS6qH8C/s1600/Ford.jpeg" width="165" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="color: #222222;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">- I've long been a fan of Clementine Ford. Her two previous books, </span></span><b style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">Fight Like a Girl</b><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="color: #222222;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);"> and</span></span><b style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"> Boys Will Be Boys</b><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="color: #222222;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);"> were just superb. In her new one,</span></span><b style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;"> I Don't</b><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="color: #222222;">, she delivers once again. Indeed, she surpasses herself. </span><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="color: #222222;">She's passionate, inspirational and very persuasive, a </span><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="color: #222222;">writer of exceptional talent, and thus a real joy to read. </span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;">- Her prose is lively and punchy, and with a delicious comic edge, but what shines through is the depth and detail that supports her argument. </span></p><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- Right from the start she serves up a radical proposition that I initially I found shocking. Yes, her target in the book is patriarchy, misogyny and sexism, but are we to condemn ancient wisdom expressed, for example, in the Book of Genesis and the story of Lilith, and the teachings of Plato, Aristotle, Darwin? But as she carefully dissects the legacies of these beliefs and their power, and the way marriage evolved as a business arrangement to grow a family's wealth, her arguments become increasingly persuasive. </div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div>- She explores the domestic role of women and its history: the male breadwinner/female homemaker, ‘traditional family values’ mindset - <i>The fantasy men have of their Stone Age selves as ripped dudes tearing the flesh of an animal apart with their bare hands is ludicrous. You’re an accountant Jeff. Are you going to bore the wildebeest to death?</i></div><div><br /></div></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- She references some powerful women from history: poet Emilia Bassano who was a strong influence on Shakespeare; pioneering feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft; Olympe de Gouges, an outspoken opponent of the French colonial slave trade who wrote Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen; Emmeline Pankhurst, political activist.</div><div><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- At the other end there's ‘the human-sized lizard known as Piers Morgan' and the Murdoch ‘hate-filled chorus of lunatics'. </div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- Ford leaves nothing untouched. She castigates the whole marriage industry: the cliches of engagements and rings, the boring sameness of banal wedding ceremonies and their dumb speeches, the bridal gown (it must be white) cliches, wives taking their husband’s surname. Why? She asks, is there any real meaning to any of this popular culture, TV sitcom, junk? </div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- We seem to respect the legal obligations of marriage, the 'contract', the oversight of the state that provides institutional protection such as child support. But is that necessary any more when de facto partnerships are also included? </div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- Towards the end of the book Ford becomes more personal. She becomes angrier, providing a description of abuse on every level, destroying the myth of male protection. ‘And I don’t need or want men to provide for me. What I want is the right to provide for myself’. </div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- She describes in excruciating detail the incredibly difficult birth of her son, and the painful ordeal of giving birth in general. The final chapter called ‘Motherfucker' is a searing account of the frequent sexual abuse of young mothers, because men can't wait. </div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- My one criticism of the book is Ford's refusal to countenance the existence, which is obvious to all of us who've lived long enough, of marriages that are successful on just about every level. There are good men, sensitive and caring and committed to their partners and children. Their love is genuine and they are loved and treasured in return. </div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- However, despite this, Ford has written a powerful book that deserves to be widely read. </div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><p>You know, people spit the accusation <i>man hater</i> at me like there aren't five billion fucking reasons why I and any other woman with a brain have no choice but to hate them. But it's not really accurate to say that I'm a man hater. Saying I hate men gives them too much power. What I think I really am is a man <i>seer</i>. I see men in the way we're not supposed to see them, in the endless ways they contradict the myths of their morality and greatness and the ways in which they enforce their hatred of women over and over again. </p><p>I see men for who they are, and I know too many of the secrets they want to keep hidden. It's not why <i>I </i>hate <i>them</i>. It's why <i>they </i>hate <i>me</i>. </p><p><br /></p>Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-68654581234178537122023-11-06T09:45:00.000+11:002023-11-06T09:45:26.227+11:00Tracey Lien, All That’s Left Unsaid<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCu8pxd_zdgr4dl5-SvOCWFeJ2FpXziAiQD9r4mMzm8M0-G__dmwgbvTWaUze3XTSxCNSj3oJz9qXzBLw6KMj60vlcVNgWfmu9QBGic2UCNJYYMphcQdQWyelOq_Xb4xq0rdcvQoVMbL7KXTdnELi9uQI3aFoMIpY_YgFXxbO6tJfIRhPD0eNgC70KRMy5/s900/Tracey%20Lien.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="900" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCu8pxd_zdgr4dl5-SvOCWFeJ2FpXziAiQD9r4mMzm8M0-G__dmwgbvTWaUze3XTSxCNSj3oJz9qXzBLw6KMj60vlcVNgWfmu9QBGic2UCNJYYMphcQdQWyelOq_Xb4xq0rdcvQoVMbL7KXTdnELi9uQI3aFoMIpY_YgFXxbO6tJfIRhPD0eNgC70KRMy5/s320/Tracey%20Lien.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;">- This is an extraordinarily good novel by Australian author Tracey Lien. It has just been awarded the 2023 Readings Prize for fiction. It's a superbly wrought immigrant Vietnamese family drama, set in the outer Western suburb of Cabramatta in Sydney. It starts simply, with a slight YA tone, but builds gradually into a rich and complex story of Western/Asian cultural contrasts, mother/daughter tensions, the power of Asian parents and the obligations the children are made to feel. It becomes a very earthy, gritty and real, narrative. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- Lien has the ability to delve deeply into the lives of each of her characters, as she does for the whole suburb of Cabramatta. They are brought vividly to life. </span><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;"><i>Cabramatta proved that a town could be gorgeous and sick, comforting and dangerous, imperfect but home. </i></span><i><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /></i><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- Her focus is on a Vietnamese family living in Cabramatta. The parents, who barely speak English, escaped Communist rule in Vietnam after the war and managed to get to Australia. The mother at first seems a nasty piece of work, and she's a superstitious Buddhist adherent. But as is slowly revealed there's a lot more to her than that. Her daughter Ky (pronounced 'Key') is an excellent, top of the class school student, who finds her parents frustrating and unlovable. Her school friend Minnie is a cherished soulmate, a bright spunky delight, and she becomes the key player in the unfolding drama that takes place five years later. </span></span></p><p><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">- The central element in the story is that Denny, Ky's academically brilliant younger brother, has been murdered. Was he caught up in the ugly drug gang warfare in Cabramatta? Ky is desperate to find out. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">So we're sucked into a personal investigation and ugly details emerge - of relationships, families, abuse and neglect. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">- But there is also love. And a very satisfying resolution. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">- In today's ugly world it's good to be reminded of that. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /></p>Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-69680096791227820052023-10-30T14:47:00.000+11:002023-10-30T14:47:20.963+11:00Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgKSTC6chfpCrsZJ7xCe2AZx6mHtRxUB8b5kjsGPnXVpahn2-yokH8PTl5i_KlmQSPVc1eo3crzku7sJj3djy9CwpZZ-X-8499RDfgmdtVLXE75jG0KIEEIyTP4UyBzkqHRYfyWzW8R5vdpD1Rc8ksUyl7UgY-A8R03RVQjlysCn24BiFKuG9v_4O3Ywrh/s294/Suleyman%20jpeg.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="171" data-original-width="294" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgKSTC6chfpCrsZJ7xCe2AZx6mHtRxUB8b5kjsGPnXVpahn2-yokH8PTl5i_KlmQSPVc1eo3crzku7sJj3djy9CwpZZ-X-8499RDfgmdtVLXE75jG0KIEEIyTP4UyBzkqHRYfyWzW8R5vdpD1Rc8ksUyl7UgY-A8R03RVQjlysCn24BiFKuG9v_4O3Ywrh/w300-h193/Suleyman%20jpeg.jpeg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">- This is an extraordinarily good book. It delves deep into AI, its revolutionary promise, but also the huge dangers and challenges it presents to society. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">- Suleyman, an AI expert and founding father, has written a powerful, must read treatise on an invention that will radically change all human lives and communities in the very near future. The book is full of detail and for that reason not an easy read at times, yet it is absolutely enthralling. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">- The first few chapters present a comprehensive historical picture about previous technological revolutions - agricultural, transport, electricity, digitalisation - and how thoroughly our lives, economies and societies changed. Suleyman's premise is that the AI wave will be far more rapid and profound. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">- The back cover blurb says it all:</span></p><p><i><span style="font-family: arial;">We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change.</span></i></p><p><i><span style="font-family: arial;">Soon we will live surrounded by AIs. They will organise our lives, operate our businesses and run core government services. We will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy. It represents nothing less than a step change in human capability. </span></i></p><p><i><span style="font-family: arial;">We are not prepared.</span></i></p><p><i><span style="font-family: arial;">Mustafa Suleyman has been at the centre of this revolution, one poised to become the single greatest accelerant of progress in history. The coming decade, he argues, will be defined by this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies. Driven by overwhelming political and commercial incentives, these tools will help address our global challenges and create vast wealth - but also upheaval on a once unimaginable scale. </span></i></p><p><i><span style="font-family: arial;">In <b>The Coming Wave, </b>Suleyman shows how these forces threaten the grand bargain of the nation-state, the foundation of global order. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into disaster, we face an existential dilemma: unprecedented harm arising from unchecked openness on one side, the threat of over-bearing surveillance on the other. Can we forge a narrow path between catastrophe and dystopia? </span></i></p><p><i><span style="font-family: arial;">This groundbreaking book from the ultimate AI insider establishes 'the containment problem' - the task of maintaining control over powerful technologies - as the essential challenge of our age. </span></i></p>Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-35433356168542797892023-10-24T11:52:00.001+11:002023-10-24T13:35:16.300+11:00 Sebastian Faulks, The Seventh Son<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtpeeXvloGsFQG5ler2wdN2dmz1uoDZdrnxkTMejNW3T9QMMDF2BO7cFYVXYgkHzWYqtsNpgDeU0mkVzbnCXGwhXBl7x0xWZfE4Wi_TD3D0s886Qi7cHtjnkfuc7sEW2lx2M74CCV5cQNVFMXvkX1J80pmuzPd6_wQyLzYzLBavf5joxu4WhDWDL6GeHAq/s225/The%20Seventh%20Son.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="225" data-original-width="225" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtpeeXvloGsFQG5ler2wdN2dmz1uoDZdrnxkTMejNW3T9QMMDF2BO7cFYVXYgkHzWYqtsNpgDeU0mkVzbnCXGwhXBl7x0xWZfE4Wi_TD3D0s886Qi7cHtjnkfuc7sEW2lx2M74CCV5cQNVFMXvkX1J80pmuzPd6_wQyLzYzLBavf5joxu4WhDWDL6GeHAq/s1600/The%20Seventh%20Son.jpeg" width="225" /></a></div><p><span style="font-family: arial;">- I really loved Sebastian Faulks's two previous novels <b>Paris Echo</b> and <b>Snow Country</b>. Faulks's gift is to write love stories set in fractious times, and to bring the personal, political and social brilliantly alive. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">- In <b>The Seventh Son</b>, his new novel, he attempts the same portrayal, but unfortunately fails dismally. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">- Talissa is a young post-grad seeking a permanent academic position. She needs money and seizes an opportunity to be a surrogate mother. A clinic owned by a billionaire philanthropist swaps the donor's semen for a manufactured one with genes harnessed from a neanderthal specimen. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial;">- The baby Seth is born. He grows up a pretty strange kid with some intellectual limitations and some unusual talents. He's a homo sapiens and homo neanderthal hybrid. But as a person he's nothing extraordinary. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial;">- Faulks is asking whether human limitations can be overcome or are we stuck with them. As his main character in <b>Snow Country</b> reflects <i>We are obsessive. 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</i>. Can we rise to a higher level of humanity, and one without dementia, schizophrenia, depression, and other mental ailments for example? </span></p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- Obviously this is an intriguing premise, but is it realistic, or just a fantasy? At one point a bunch of scientists are debating these issues in very scientific jargon. As ordinary readers we simply don't know whether they are talking real science. What we do know is that Faulks is enjoying the conversation and teasing and challenging us. </span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- I was way more attracted to the group of friends caught up in this evolutionary drama. They are loving, affectionate, intelligent, kind and passionate humans, with worthwhile jobs. Humanity’s best. What’s to improve? </span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- So I found the main plot line boring and pointless. </span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" />Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-12540209513221379542023-10-16T12:37:00.000+11:002023-10-16T12:37:10.299+11:00Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional. <p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEga7f1ckPEGOeOVDiYXV0Nk0ulnBAY4Er2n06xVqkIdsT7-NvVvg3EukkIEMUpcevlvHTCpqyDcmhcCUu1ovVqiJ9NJEN_vWM8k1roNuG-_VQLqLFc-PhjW3ini6e1r3c-EAjXfbSu2ODrKwwp3Q1ETSKrFyLWvy_HYDf0uUnTHLf220uX1BeC_qTh8s1BV/s450/Stone%20Yard%20Devotional.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="295" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEga7f1ckPEGOeOVDiYXV0Nk0ulnBAY4Er2n06xVqkIdsT7-NvVvg3EukkIEMUpcevlvHTCpqyDcmhcCUu1ovVqiJ9NJEN_vWM8k1roNuG-_VQLqLFc-PhjW3ini6e1r3c-EAjXfbSu2ODrKwwp3Q1ETSKrFyLWvy_HYDf0uUnTHLf220uX1BeC_qTh8s1BV/s320/Stone%20Yard%20Devotional.jpg" width="210" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial;">- She's an unnamed woman, an atheist, separated from her husband, and fleeing to ‘the high, dry Monaro plains, far from anywhere’. Her destination is a small convent. Her parents died. She's alone.</span></p><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- Welcome to the world of Charlotte Wood: a group of women dealing with their plight in a challenging, often male dominated, world. The convent, which welcomes her as a visitor, has half a dozen Catholic nuns who adhere to a daily ritual of Vespers, Lauds, and the Middle Hour. The wife of her old school friend Richard who is the convent's gardener and handyman …<i>thinks there’s something…sick about it. Something unnatural about the way you all live here. </i></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- Wood's two previous novels <b>The Natural Way of Things</b> (2015) and <b>The Weekend</b> (2019) also focused on small groups of women, their group dynamics and individual personalities, quirks and obsessions. </div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- What is intriguing about this new novel is the wider scope of Wood's exploration. Her narrator recalls all sorts of incidents and people that were in some way important to her as a child, a young woman, and an adult. Slowly and surely a common thread emerges. The people that matter to her are not the tepid nuns and their meaningless lives, but the strong individuals she's encountered who go against the grain confidently and fearlessly. Yet she's spent four years as a permanent resident in the convent. She <i>just…didn’t go home</i>. She thinks of <i>the mass graves in which nuns…had buried babies they called illegitimate…the savagery of the Catholic Church…Yet here I am. Wrestle. Wrestle...Choosing disappearance...I had a need, an animal need, to find a place I had never been but which was still, in some undeniable way, my home. </i></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- Sister Jenny and Sister Andrea left the convent a few years previously to go to Thailand where they set up a shelter for abandoned women. Jenny was attacked by an abusive American priest and never seen again, but her bones have now been found. They will arrive at the convent in eight days, brought by Sister Helen Parry. Helen was a classmate St Ursula's High School and rebellious. She was bullied but is now a charismatic, formidable woman, a fighter and a global 'celebrity nun', leading a life of protest for justice around the world. </div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- Her mother was an inspiration. She was kind and an independent thinker, as was her father. They welcomed the Vietnamese immigrants. We're confronted with the extremes of being alive, of quiet servitude at one end, and of fulfilling, challenging immersion at the other. Wood plunges us into the intricacies, and the ideas and reflections they prompt. It's an intriguing exploration.</div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- There are many memories of people our narrator's known in her life. Cleo for example, the beautiful young vegetarian. Everyone in the town hated her. She didn’t mind. All the rebels are attractive, free spirited, charismatic leaders. Following the social rules are foreign to them. There’s a toughness about them. A loathing of shallow genuflecting. <i>It’s been my observation over many years that those who most powerfully resist convention quite peaceably accept the state of being reviled. </i></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- The novel prompts so many reflections it's a joy to read. Perhaps the best Wood has written so far. </div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div>Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-50327998038215470532023-09-28T10:08:00.000+10:002023-09-28T10:08:34.422+10:00Matt Johnson, How Hitchens Can Save The Left.<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwoSNo6jyyXfKOTHIPbaLeIE9XZ_5Wb7NkvCTz1BpPcQthD-Qg1Mqy8dIQDuMwpy3ftZXhiG_3VmugHLE2WhToCdoPIfyLbrgZqbLOXqb-AhnERV2rhAe_NfqDnvHyA7T9ULRLbVKDTr_k0fPK6D-r9Lg6m4MdSgtUl60hJ-O6fGQg98bWlqlnvm9xysP2/s1000/Johnson.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="675" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwoSNo6jyyXfKOTHIPbaLeIE9XZ_5Wb7NkvCTz1BpPcQthD-Qg1Mqy8dIQDuMwpy3ftZXhiG_3VmugHLE2WhToCdoPIfyLbrgZqbLOXqb-AhnERV2rhAe_NfqDnvHyA7T9ULRLbVKDTr_k0fPK6D-r9Lg6m4MdSgtUl60hJ-O6fGQg98bWlqlnvm9xysP2/s320/Johnson.jpg" width="216" /></a></div><br /><p><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">- I've long been a fan of the esteemed Christopher Hitchens who passed away in 2011. I've read most of his books and was inspired by many of his essays, interviews and YouTube clips over the years. This new book by Matt Johnson, an American writer and editor, is a brilliant exploration of Hitchens’s thoughts and beliefs. He was nothing if not controversial, and made many enemies particularly over his support for the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: small;">- The book is superbly written and edited and very comprehensive. It also includes a detailed analysis of current events such as Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the re-emergence of the Taliban's ugly primitivism in Afghanistan. Hitchens's theses become highly relevant and enlightening. </span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">- </span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial;">I highly recommend this book and </span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial;">can do no better than quote this summary from the back cover: </span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"> 'Christopher Hitchens was for many years considered one of the fiercest and most eloquent left-wing polemicists in the world. But on much of today's left, he's remembered as a defector, a warmonger, and a sellout - a supporter of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq who traded his left-wing principles for neoconservatism after the September 11 attacks.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">In <b>How Hitchens Can Save the Left, </b>Matt Johnson argues that this easy narrative gets Hitchens exactly wrong. Hitchens was a lifelong champion of free inquiry, humanism, and universal liberal values. He was an internationalist who believed all people should have the liberty to speak and write openly, to be free of authoritarian domination, and to escape the arbitrary constraints of tribe, faith, and nation. He was a figure of the Enlightenment and a man of the left until the very end, and his example has never been more important.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Over the past several years, the liberal foundations of democratic societies have been showing signs of structural decay. On the right, nationalism and authoritarianism have been revived on both sides of the Atlantic. On the left, many activists and intellectuals have become obsessed with a reductive and censorious brand of identity politics, as well as the conviction that their own liberal democratic societies are institutionally racist, exploitative, and imperialistic. Across the democratic world, free speech, individual rights, and other basic liberal values are losing their power to inspire. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Hitchens's case for universal Enlightenment principles won't just help genuine liberals mount a resistance to the emerging illiberal orthodoxies on the left and the right. It will also remind us how to think and speak fearlessly in defense of those principles.' </span></p><p><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;"><br /></span></p>Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-88641256267923529412023-09-20T12:58:00.000+10:002023-09-20T12:58:44.275+10:00 Chris Womersley, Ordinary Gods and Monsters.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9U4-sXdQxLu-EDP6gOHaJUbWuv841cIOZuD3-b3Ien1Ok17KdhCEYarsN4JQxIzS2WlAU_zQiBf-NNQJXougR1PSppJjzPk3Hr0kK-O2rOP4fhbK4rgiWPcGlErBImvzg6AOwRdEyrq4z25uJSPqqWSMP2qLiHxHbIAAvuYFV2DOUKLLg1zu6LL_mgH-m/s225/Womersley%20Ordinary.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="225" data-original-width="225" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9U4-sXdQxLu-EDP6gOHaJUbWuv841cIOZuD3-b3Ien1Ok17KdhCEYarsN4JQxIzS2WlAU_zQiBf-NNQJXougR1PSppJjzPk3Hr0kK-O2rOP4fhbK4rgiWPcGlErBImvzg6AOwRdEyrq4z25uJSPqqWSMP2qLiHxHbIAAvuYFV2DOUKLLg1zu6LL_mgH-m/s1600/Womersley%20Ordinary.jpeg" width="225" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white;">- <span style="font-family: arial;">Only a year ago Chris Womersley published his last novel <b>The Diplomat</b>. It was extraordinarily good. Very inner city Brunswick, very gritty, very adult. Drugs were central. But the goodness of people </span></span><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);"><span style="font-family: arial;">prevailed. </span></span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white;">- His latest novel, <b>Ordinary Gods and Monsters</b>, seems to have been written by an entirely different author. It's set in the outer suburbs of Sydney, and it's about teens and their estranged parents and siblings. Drugs are still central, but what makes it very different is its Young Adult tone. It's a bit Famous Five - a neighbourhood mystery being investigated by young people. That doesn't preclude violence or vulgarity. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">- Nick and Marion, both seventeen, live next door to each other and are best friends. They've just completed their HSC. Marion's father has recently been killed in a hit-and-run accident. The story develops from there. </span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">And it's entrancing, with intricacies that are slowly revealed, and in prose that is beautiful and captivating in Womersley's inimitable style. I marvelled at his magical similes. </span></span></p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- There are strange characters sprinkled about, but they add color and movement to the story. One in particular, 'Stretch', an ugly, thuggish, dumb as dog shit, drug dealer, becomes central to the plot as it unfolds. </span><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">Nick, Marion, and Nick's grumpy older sister Alison, are delightful though. As are their mums. </span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- Womersley's suburbia is the ‘the kingdom of ordinary gods and monsters’. We meet and love the gods, but the monsters are part and parcel. Survival is the challenge. </span></span><div><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- As in <b>The Diplomat</b>, the goodness prevails in the end. </span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white;">- Although not your </span>typical Womersley, this novel is a highly enjoyable read.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /></div>Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237368575415340913.post-41598910821487258072023-09-14T13:07:00.000+10:002023-09-14T13:07:08.347+10:00 Keyu Jin, The New China Playbook<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKJc_WiIlYxqv2KDXaszleTF-zkyQJaDbsy7qpktcNrW3o6ca12l8oMJIVZasDIzn3BxT8g1DH3o0tI-QGGLGbj0gpTPrtRJA4oS5FI_kgrRt9dNV9Q_U6BiiRFQO_zWbRcM_GJF6ICYQgmSwkYUOKQCh_82pmAdycmhUQb1KFiY12wPbfOCA2eLeX8m5Z/s210/Keyu%20Jin.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="210" data-original-width="210" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKJc_WiIlYxqv2KDXaszleTF-zkyQJaDbsy7qpktcNrW3o6ca12l8oMJIVZasDIzn3BxT8g1DH3o0tI-QGGLGbj0gpTPrtRJA4oS5FI_kgrRt9dNV9Q_U6BiiRFQO_zWbRcM_GJF6ICYQgmSwkYUOKQCh_82pmAdycmhUQb1KFiY12wPbfOCA2eLeX8m5Z/s1600/Keyu%20Jin.jpeg" width="210" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">-<span style="font-family: arial;"> On all levels this new book is so refreshing. It moves totally away from your standard anti-China, anti-communist cliches. And Jin's prose is lucid and highly readable. </span></span></p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- It addresses issues that are only vaguely familiar to even intelligent people, and the comprehensive detail provided is so revelatory. For example the infamous One Child policy. Where is it now and did it work? Yes, but in a very different way than just limiting unaffordable population growth. It's had a huge and positive influence on the education of two generations of young people due to the massive overspending by parents on their single child. Higher education is now the norm. It was rare before. </span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- Chinese society is now characterised by the coexistence of generations with radically different characteristics. The current generation, for example, is the first to seek happiness rather than wealth.</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- Jin delves deeply into the micro economy of the new China. The rapid growth in private versus government owned firms for example, and the way young entrepreneurs have benefited enormously from the financial and administrative support by l</span><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">ocal regional authorities' commitment to growth and investment.</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- Corruption is being tackled, as is poverty, inequality and pollution. Social media allows free speech and criticism of the underfunding of services such as health and education. The new middle class is becoming increasingly intolerant of poor and unresponsive governments, local and national.</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- Economic and financial management is central to Jin's analysis: <i>China’s structure, with its centralised powers, financial muscle, and administrative capacity for policy implementation, has made it robust…but its growth model is reliable but not flexible. To keep it going credit needs to be pumped constantly into the economy.</i>..</span><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;"><i>Whether measured by breadth or depth,</i> <i>China’s financial system is underdeveloped…Government intervention affects every segment...In the financial system in particular, as in the broader economy in general, China scores high on stability but low on efficiency.</i></span><i><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /></i><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- The chapter on the global technology race is just brilliant. China is a master of leading-edge technology. It's constantly leap-frogging the US. Chinese e-commerce companies are now the most innovative in the world. But the gap with the West in creating the fundamental breakthroughs (‘zero to one’ as it is called) is still sizeable. For example, in the field of microchips China still cannot make its own highest grade chips. Its weak point is talent, which has led to a dearth of basic research because of its emphasis on quantity not quality. However its new generation of well educated millennials is the real hope for the future.</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- In the realm of global trade in goods and services China has leapfrogged from cheap low-end products to higher quality goods. It has moved to the centre of the global supply chain, becoming by 2017 the largest node. </span><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">Protectionism, which is now on the rise globally, particularly during the Trump era, is decidedly the wrong strategy. The numbers convincingly show this. It's technology that is continuing to spur global trade (eg, online purchasing).</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;">- <i>In the future, China will strive to be a bigger and more forward looking Germany, with an unparalleled industrial capacity powered by disruptive technologies.</i></span></span><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white;"><i><br /></i></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white;"><i><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /></i></span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">- (Jin is an associate professor of economics at the London School of Economics. She was born and raised in Beijing before moving to the US and completing a PhD in economics from Harvard University. Because of her focus on the economy she doesn’t address controversial non-economic issues such as free speech; the quality of social services like health and aged care; the imprisonment of journalists without trial; non-independent legal processes; human rights abuses; substantial military buildup; foreign policy issues such as regional expansion in the South China Sea; Taiwan; etc.) </span></span><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /></span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /></div></div>Peter Donoughuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02697552041984454181noreply@blogger.com0