Omar El Akkad, American War

 

- This novel by acclaimed journalist Omar El Akkad, who was born in the Middle East and raised in Canada and the US, is an extremely powerful condemnation of the warmongering character of America. His most recent book is the superb non-fiction work One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (which I reviewed here).

- Set in the future, in the years 2074-2095, it tells the story of the Second Civil War between the 'Blue North' and the 'Red South'. It depicts in graphic detail the ugliness and depravity of the conflict. 

- Its focus throughout is on personal and family relationships, and not on social realities in the future. There is nothing much on technology, no one has phones, there's nothing on the economy or global relationships, no mention of China or India. The only exception is the existence of a new nation in the middle east, a unity of all previous Arab nations. (No mention of Israel).

- But there are a lot of references to climate change. The weather, whatever the season, is unbearably hot with frequent and severe storms. Interestingly, while many US states are mentioned, the state of Florida is not. It's not on the map of the United States we're given in the opening pages of the book. We're to assume it simply disappeared by rising sea levels. 

- The causes of the new war are because the South vigorously resisted the Federal Government's decree to eliminate all ruinous fossil fuel corporations and government operations. All power is solar, including cars and trucks. 

- Ruins and decadence are everywhere, as is extreme poverty. We're confronted with the ugliness of authority and the military. It's also, in a serious way, anti-men. Men need wars because fighting is in their bones, fundamental to their nature. Women, on the other hand, mostly want peace and reconciliation, for the benefit of their children. The author is clear that this could be any war America has fought since its inception. 

- The principal character in the novel is the young woman Sara T. Chestnut, who goes by the name Sarat. She's strong, fierce and determined, and she fights for the South. She's African-American. 

- As the novel progresses we're taken on Sarat's journey and the family members and other characters she befriends during her life. She becomes highly respected in the Southern states and wanted by the North. She's a killer.  

- She is eventually captured and brutally tortured, but she survives and is freed when the war is officially over. But then she takes serious revenge. 

- The novel comes to a very satisfying resolution in the end. But it is still horrific. This is America after all. War is embedded in the national character. 

Colum McCann, Twist

 

- Colum McCann's novels are always worth reading. He tells big stories full of big characters and fills them with ruminations about virtually every dimension of humanity. Twist is no exception.  

- The story is told by Anthony Fennell, an Irish author and journalist who is researching an essay on undersea cables that link the entire world's internet and media communications. Unfortunately the cables are frequently snapped by vessels, debris, eruptions and earthquakes. Specialised boats staffed by a team of mechanics and technicians are always on call to locate and fix the broken cables. 

- A cable has snapped off the Congo in East Africa, downing the internet for virtually the entire African continent. A repair boat departs from Cape Town in South Africa, captained by John Conway, an Irish seaman and expert diver. He is highly respected by his team. But is Conway really who he proclaims to be? That mystery lies at the heart of the novel. 

- We are reminded of the the greed, the mining, and the plunder by the colonialists against the impoverished indigenous tribes of Africa. The discarded wires, for example, left abandoned by the repair boats are always melted down by the villagers to help them buy food. 

- After the Congo expedition is successfully completed Conway suddenly disappears, never to be found again. But we readers join him in Alexandria in Egypt, where he's posing as a local fisherman. He’s training himself in deep diving where he'll be able to hold his breath for long, ten minute or so, periods. He intends to bomb a number of cables using a thermite mixture. 

- And he’s successful. But then he disappears and no body is ever found.

- The media across the world widely covers these 'terrorist bombings', and five months later report that Conway's skeleton has been found washed up on a beach in Northern Libya. 

- There are other dimensions to the story: partners, lovers, and children particularly, that add richness and texture to it. 

- But, in the end, the question most readers will ask is: what on earth is the meaning of all this? What is Colum McCann's point? What, even, was Conway really on about? Why would the temporary destruction of the internet, of worldwide communication systems generally, be anything more than an insane and petty act of revenge? An anti-colonialist gesture? Sure, OK, but...

- An enjoyable tale, but it's just adventure writing. That's about it. 

Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

 

- This is an extraordinarily powerful book. Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives as a US citizen in the United States. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of one hundred novels that shaped our world. 

- It is beautifully written in often poetic prose. He focuses on the abject racism and colonialism of the West. His prime focus is today's genocide taking place in Gaza, but he also digs deep into the many issues over the last few decades that have defined the anti-Arab character of much of what the West, led by the US, has done. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the disgrace that is Guantanamo Bay are central.

- The concept of 'terrorism' is examined in depth. As an Arab he feels the abject racism constantly. The supposition is that if you're an Arab then you're probably a terrorist. 'Terrorism as a societal designation...is applied almost exclusively to Brown people.'

- One aspect of the book that impressed me was his hatred of the centrist Democrats, led by Biden, who continued to support Israel at every level as the genocide proceeded. Their vetoing of the UN resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire for example, their continued funding, the deliberate withholding of aid and destruction of infrastructure, the ordering of residents into 'safe zones' and then wiped out there. The same framing is always used: 'The barbarians instigate and the civilised are forced to respond. The starting point of history can always be shifted'. 

- Continuing to support the Democrats when they continue to support Israel’s genocide is morally wrong. It doesn't matter that the Republicans might be worse. What matters is who you vote for. 'There is something stomach-churning about watching a parade of Biden administration press secretaries offer sincere expressions of concern for Palestinians as the same administration bankrolls their butcher'. 

- He condemns the media and their management for demanding that 'the journalist cannot be an activist, must remain allegiant to a self-erasing neutrality. Yet journalism at its core is one the most activist endeavors there is. A journalist is supposed to agitate against power, against privilege. Against the slimy wall of press releases and PR nothingspeak that has come to protect every major business and government boardroom ever since Watergate. A reporter is supposed to agitate against silence...So instead, the coverage shifts to a flattened mode, listing claim and counterclaim, measuring the impact on poll numbers...Listing one position and then the other and letting the reader make up their own mind fails entirely..' 

- El Akkad's chapters on the cascade of institutional gutlessness in the arts and higher education worlds are superb. The same thing is happening in Australia, as we know. 'There are young people all over the West  risking expulsion and defamation, risking their livelihoods, their entire careers, to protest the killing. There are Jews being arrested on the streets of Frankfurt, blocking Grand Central Station in New York, fighting for peace. There are indigenous communities who have suffered the Western World's most unspeakable atrocities and still find the will to stand up for an occupied land on the other side of the planet, who recognise a thing for what it is.'   

- An honest, personal, radical assessment of the Western world's sick and violent behaviour over the generations. An essential and inspiring read. 

Diana Reid, Signs of Damage

 

- Prize-winning Australian author Diana Reid's third novel once again focuses on personal and family relationships and their intricate dynamics. She takes a microscope to her main characters and is relentless at examining them in detail. In this novel she explores the legacies of broken families, abandoned children, and sexual abuse. She digs deep but does it with extreme subtlety and compassion. 

- The book becomes, as it proceeds, more of a murder mystery than anything else. An intriguing one, right to the end. If 'end' is the appropriate word.  

- The chapters alternate between what happened in 2008, and what's happening now in 2024. Abuse in France in 2008 and the longterm effects still felt in 2024. 

- The main character Cass was trapped in an old icehouse on the grounds of a large villa in France when she was thirteen. The door closed after her and she was imprisoned in the small dark place for three hours. Later in life she started to suffer frequent seizures, which could have been epilepsy, or something else, perhaps a neurological reaction to abuse. Psychosomatic, in other words. 

- The other main character is Anika, Cass's long time friend. She was also groped in the icehouse during the same holiday in 2008. She's a delightful character, rebellious but a thinker. 

- Who was the perpetrator? 

- Reid tells the story in sometimes dense prose, and too frequently bogs the reader down in psychological analysis, nevertheless we're totally sucked in. So as it proceeds the novel becomes unputdownable. 

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Jeremy Cooper, Brian

 

- This is a delightful story of a sad, lonely, middle-aged man who gets hooked on movies. He sees a movie every night at the British Film Institute. His favourite movies are Japanese, but as the years progress he becomes an expert on quality films, their directors, producers and actors. He joins a small group of film buffs who talk each night about the movies they've seen, and becomes friendly with Jack, another isolated man living alone. Jack is fascinated by musical scores.  

- Northern Irish by birth, Brian has lived and worked in London all his adult life, and has always been estranged from his family. His father died when Brian was a baby and his mother abandoned him. He's never been in an intimate relationship, and has never had sex. He works as a clerk at the local council, and doesn't like any of his co-workers, and they return the favour. Apart from his boss who sees him as a dedicated worker.  

- He goes to a local Italian restaurant each day for lunch and always has the pasta special. Lorenzo, the owner, and his wife and family treasure him as a customer and he is attracted to them. 

- One thing I really loved about this novel is the dozens of familiar movies that are dissected by Brian and the buffs each night. I've seen most of them over the years and agreed with most of their insights. French, Italian and German directors, as well as Japanese, are a prime focus. 

- And there's this: The buffs...were driven to neurotic distraction by the mid-film munch of a Mars Bar or, worst of all, the maddening crinkle-crunch of a packet of crisps. My pet peeve too!

- Jeremy Cooper has written a wonderful book. It's only 180 pages long but it's packed with insight and beautifully written. 

- I must end with this:

The principle of good behaviour had always mattered to Brian. Certain conduct he condemned as bad manners, thoughtless. Like being any more than a minute or two late for an appointment. Brian incessantly worried about failing to arrive on time, for anything, anywhere, and for safety's sake wore a watch on either wrist in case one went wrong - though the benefit, he admitted, was marginal as he had no means of knowing, if they differed, which of them was accurate. One of the few things which made him demonstrably angry was a latecomer to the cinema pushing by and blocking his view of crucial early shots of a movie. He had been known to refuse to get to his feet to let people pass and had twice written to the Chief Executive of the BFI to plead for the cinema's doors to be barred from entry once a film was in progress.

Han Kang, We Do Not Part

- This newly translated novel by 2024 Nobel prizewinner Han Kang is a frequently strange but in the end mesmerising tale of death, vulnerability, and the savagery of war. I'm a great fan of Kang, having read two of her previous novels The Vegetarian and Greek Lessons. She's a savage critic of South Korea, her home country, laying bare its misogyny, social conservatism, and ugly political history. 

- Under Japanese occupation until 1945, and then torn apart by the war between America and Russian-supported North Korean communists from 1950-1953, the scars run so deep in so many citizens that the effects are still profoundly felt decades later. Hundreds of thousands of citizens were brutalised and executed by the police and military forces of Japan, America and North Korea. 

- Kyungha, a writer, lives alone. She was a former journalist but now she barely survives in a non air-conditioned, dilapidated apartment. She's isolated and lonely, and eats little. Any meaning in her life seems to have evaporated. We soon learn why. She suffers from vivid dreams and nightmares, as well as harsh migraines.

- She has one real friend Inseon, who was a photojournalist and is now a carpenter. She made documentaries, one featuring an old woman who fought the Japanese in the 1940’s, and escaped a shower of bullets. Inseon also lives alone in the island of Jeju, south of the mainland, with only two budgies to keep her company. When Kyungha visits Jeju on her friend's request to look after her surviving budgie for a month she finds the bird dead. 

- It's winter and it's constantly snowing and bitterly cold. Snow buries, an apt metaphor for a land of ugly secrets. There are black tree stumps littering the landscape. Also suggestive of the dead.  

- This is not an easy novel to read. Structurally, it meanders over time frames, leaving the reader confused, and there's a constant meshing of reality and dreaming. Yet, in a way, this is Kang's point. What is real? Is it the snow, or is it what's underneath? Why hide the ugliness? 

- Like Kang's other novels, We Do Not Part (there is so much meaning in that title) is a powerful whack in the stomach. In today's war-torn world it's an awakening. 

Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza

 

- This new book by celebrated Indian political essayist Pankaj Mishra is a masterpiece. It is so incredibly enlightening, thought-provoking and challenging. It's a reflection on Israel’s transition to a right wing, genocidal state over the decades.  

- It's full of quotes from major Jewish activists, politicians, thinkers and writers wrestling with the challenges the Jews faced after the Holocaust. The writings of Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Jean Amery, James Baldwin and many others are examined in depth. They convey deep insights into the struggles and debates over the last century after the founding of Israel.  

- The blurb on the dust jacket describes the book well:

The world after Gaza takes the war in the Middle East, and the bitterly polarised reaction to it within as well as outside the West, as the starting point for a broad re-evaluation of two competing narratives of the last century: the West's triumphant account of victory over Nazi and communist totalitarianism, and the spread of liberal capitalism, and the global majority's frequently thwarted vision of racial equality. At a moment when the world's balance of power is shifting and a long-dominant Western minority no longer commands the same authority and credibility, it is critically important to enter the experiences and perspectives of the majority of the world's population.  

As old touchstones and landmarks crumble, only a new history with a sharply different emphasis can reorientate us to the world and worldviews now emerging into the light. In this concise, powerful and pointed treatise, Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by our present crisis - about whether some lives matter more than others, why identity politics built around memories of suffering is being widely embraced and why racial antagonisms are intensifying amid a far-right surge in the West, threatening a global conflagration. The World After Gaza is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present and future. 

Rachel Kushner, Creation

 

- This latest novel by acclaimed British author Rachel Kushner was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. I had not read any of her previous three novels so was attracted to it. And the back cover blurb was very enticing. Basically it's an ode to social protest and resistance, full of all sorts of whacky outsiders who hate what the government is doing to their rural communities in the provinces of France.

- Does it all add up to a powerful novel? No, not really. But it does have likeable elements, particularly the ending. 

- It's a mishmash of amateurish anthropology, astrology, sociology, philosophy and politics. One local and aging 'primitivist' in particular, who lives in a cave because that's what the Neanderthals did, is the main inspiration to the local communities. He writes long emails about how wrong and anti-human our modern civilisation is. ‘The world ruled by capital would not be dismantled. Instead, it had to be left behind...I deplore violence in all its forms'. 

- The other main person of influence in the commune is an 'activist', not a deep thinker. He has long been the head of a radical farming cooperative who are organising a huge and possibly violent protest against corporate and government plans to modernise the region by building massive dams, tunnels and agricultural operations that would effectively destroy the local communities. Capitalism must be destroyed and governments brought down, 

- The main character, thankfully, is a thirty-four year old American woman. She is a former FBI agent who is now privately contracted and has been instructed to insert herself into the commune to spy on their plans. 

- She gradually develops a real affection for the compound. The farming, the maintenance, the creche, are all impressive, and the people 'real'. ‘There are no politics inside of people.’ 

- There is plenty of drama as the story comes to a climax. It's by far the best part of the book, and the only really absorbing part in my view. 

(Here's an interesting bit: a politician has been invited to open the annual agricultural fair. He is accompanied by a Michel Thomas, a celebrated and mysterious author. Kushner must surely be satirising Michel Houellebecq! ‘Thomas was always at the scene of the crime, a bystander and observer to society’s convulsions….with a talent for washing up on the shores of chaos’). 

Melanie Cheng, The Burrow

 

- Melanie Cheng has written a sensitive drama of death, pain, sadness and profound regret. 

- In an unnamed city in Australia a baby named Ruby drowns in a bathtub. Her grandmother, who was bathing her at the time, had suffered a minor stroke. This beautiful novel digs deep into the emotional repercussions of this tragedy on the baby's family over the years to come.

- A feature of the novel is the pace of the unfolding of the full story. Cheng is in full control. The details emerge slowly and surely. Each short chapter is narrated in turn by the family members - the father Jin, the mother Amy and the older daughter Lucie. Lucie was six at the time of Ruby's death and is ten now. The other narrator is the grandmother Pauline. 

- The family live in a gentrified inner-city neighbourhood. They are renovating their house which is a bit of a shambolic construction site with the facade covered in blue tarp. The grandmother has broken her wrist and is staying with them for a few weeks. There is tension. She is not liked by Jin and barely tolerated by her daughter Amy. But she does get on well with Lucie and her new pet rabbit. 

- Covid restrictions still in place. Home schooling, social distancing, and mask wearing are all mandatory, and travelling beyond a limited area is severely restricted. This greatly adds to the pressures on this family. 

- Cheng introduces other elements into the story that add to the drama very effectively. The strenuous relationships between the adults are compounded by various events. 

- This is a short novel (184 pages), but it's very emotionally powerful, and enriched in the end by compassion and generosity. 

- I loved it. 

Michel Houellebecq, Annihilation

 

- I've long been a fan of celebrated French author Michel Houellebecq, having read all his novels over the years. He offers a delicious immersion in all things French - politics, history, class, culture, food and wine. And of course sex.

- His latest novel is his longest yet at 525 pages. But it's probably his best. It's about family relationships and the drama of politics. Families are rarely the source of happiness, but politics and work are. Annihilation focuses on parents, siblings, couples, friends, and work colleagues. Relationships are under the microscope. And we're taken inside the political world because a Presidential election is the background to all that's happening on the personal level.

- Houellebecq is a delightful literary show-off and never ceases to drop quotes from noted authors and poets, so we're constantly confronted with challenging, enriching ideas, and wit. ‘…she had probably nodded off over her Anita Brookner’.

- The principal characters are Paul from Finance and his wife Prudence from Treasury, ('They were in complete agreement about value added tax’). They split up eventually, and had not 'fucked' for ten years. (In all Houellebecq's novels couples don’t ‘make love’ or become ‘intimate’ - they ‘fuck’). Paul's boss Bruno, who has been the Minister of Finance, is now a key member of the Presidential candidate's team.

- Houellebecq lobs in plenty of challenging ideas. He loves babyboomers for one. The years 1945-1975 were the best. After the triumph over Nazism, hope, joy and economic opportunity became central. ‘Popular culture production had proved to be aesthetically superior to the cultural production of the elite’. Nevertheless ‘..we can no longer stand older people….it's why we park them in specialised places..’

- A new President is elected and we're reminded of Trump. He wants to remove the position of Prime Minister, reduce the House members, and enshrine more power to the President. It will be a ‘post-democracy…democracy is dead as a system, it’s too slow, too ponderous’.

- Three terrorist attacks occur over the course of the election, one killing 500 people. The terrorists are described as anarcho-primitivists, like the Unabomber in the US. Such radical political movements are not unfamiliar to Houellebecq readers. As social guardrails and fences collapse, so does political order. The comfort and security of earlier conservative times is missed. And ‘…a lot of people today had become very stupid; it was a striking and indisputable contemporary phenomenon....Family and marriage: these were the two residual poles around which the lives of the last Westerners were organised in the first half of the twenty-first century...It seemed obvious to Paul that the whole system was going to come crashing down’. 'The concept of decadence...Europe as a whole had become a distant, ageing, depressive and slightly ludicrous province of the United States of America’.

- The last hundred or so pages focus on Paul's severe illness. He is diagnosed with cancer of the jaw. The medical specialists recommend a major operation including removal of his tongue, and intense radio and chemo therapy. Houellebecq dives deep into the medical details and treatment options, and the decisions Paul is confronted with. The survival rate over the next five years is very low.

- At least he and his wife Prudence re-discover their intimacy and begin to once again have frequent sex. It becomes the real joy in their lives.

- There are various dramas of life and death, of parents, partners, family, friends, and society as a whole in this amazing and very enjoyable novel.

- I highly recommend it. 

(Unfortunately it is very poorly edited. It's full of so many simple errors - wrong words, missing words, commas instead of full stops, etc. For example: ‘It couldn’t have been later than five o’clock on the morning’; ‘in the end how found a space five hundred metres from the house’. Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, is a highly professional publisher, but its standards have fallen to a real low if this book is any guide.)

Michelle de Kretser, Theory and Practice.

 

- Michelle de Kretser's latest book is an intriguing mix of fact and fiction. It explores major issues on the 'theory' side such as modernism, feminism, racism, and colonialism, and others on the 'practice' side such as mothers, writers, lovers, friends, and enemies.

- It's hard to describe it as a memoir, as it indulges in the cliche of the unknown narrator. (However a name is dropped right at the end, for some reason).

- We're in the mid-80's when literary scholarship was heavily influenced by French poststructuralism which was conquering the humanities generally. Philosophers such as Derrida and Foucault popularised 'formlessness and mess'. Liquid and non-linear styles became an authentically female way of writing too.

- The narrator tells her life story in this faux-memoir. She was a pianist as a child and excelled at theory and practice. But at the age of eleven she was sexually abused by a music teacher and ditched the piano altogether.

- Her family emigrated to Australia from Ceylon when she was a teenager. She studied English literature at Sydney university and moved to Melbourne at the age of twenty-four. It was 1986 and Marxism and feminism were the thing, especially in Melbourne. She enrolled to complete a Masters on the novels of Virginia Woolf. Critics had become 'torturers', positing, demystifying, interrogating. (As a student in English literature in the 1970's at Sydney University I was immersed in the Leavis tradition of literary criticism, and D.H. Lawrence was my hero. But in Melbourne this liberal humanism was the enemy, and considered reactionary, and Lawrence 'destroyed').

- She shared a cheap flat in St Kilda, and was thrust into the social life all around her - the noise on the streets, the pubs, the sexual encounters in lanes, the prostitution and drugs. She was bright, she was popular, and she made good friends, male and female. And she continually experienced abject racism. She was also enduring a problematic relationship with her mother, and with her friend Olivia who was the fiancee of Kit with whom she was having an affair. So real life, the 'practice' was as torrid as the 'theory'.

- The central focus of her life however was theory. As the book proceeds we're immersed into the disruptive novels of Virginia Woolf. And Woolf's abject racism. ‘…the modernising trajectory of Woolf’s Englishwomen and the ongoing immiseration of the tea-pluckers’. She damns her last novel The Years as trapped in ‘the powerful fiction that the self-fulfilment of British women transcended the imperialism that enabled it’. Woolf was a terrible snob and ‘unforgivably rude about colonials’.

- As the book nears its end the friends move on, some overseas, they split from their partners, and some die tragically. She also tells the story of the celebrated Australian artist Donald Friend and his paedophilic abuse over many years in Ceylon and Bali.

- We're reminded at the end that reality is not like a novel with its well-worn narrative tropes, but is 'random and cruel'.

- Michelle de Kretser has written a 'novel/memoir' that is thoughtful and challenging and quite brilliant on many levels. It's confronting and loaded with intellectual heft. Just what we need in these tempestuous times.

Robbie Arnott, Dusk

 

- I've long been a fan of Tasmanian author Robbie Arnott. His last two novels, Limberlost (2023) and The Rain Heron (2020), were superb. His stories are original and tense, and the writing beautiful. His settings are Tasmania and its wild beauty. 

- Dusk is an action adventure that develops slowly into a fascinating tale of character, strength and the need for belonging. It's a contest between domesticity and danger. Human love, friendship, and community versus evil and its violence and destruction. It's likely set in the mid-1800s. 

- Twins Iris and Floyd Renshaw, are 37 years old. They are labourers, hunters, and travellers, often needing to thieve in order to survive. Their parents were ‘killer-thieves’, who were shipped as convicts from England when they were fifteen. They quickly became rum-addicted. 

- The twins are prisoners of nature - its wild terrains, mountains, rivers, bushes, ferns and trees. And the constant cold, ice and snow. Thank god for salvific camp fire, fish and tea. 

- A bounty has been offered to kill a wild puma (cougar) who has been killing shepherds in the wild northwest.  An expert hunter from Patagonia was hired but disappeared, presumably killed. Iris and Floyd head north to hunt down the puma. 

- Arnott builds the story slowly, frequently going back in time to flesh out Iris's and Floyd's real relationship, its dynamic and frequent tensions. He does this masterfully. Iris reflects on her brother at one point: What Floyd was doing now was presumptuous. And by heading back towards the waterfall’s roar he was, to Iris’s mind, being crass and obvious and judgmental, rather than tactful. 

- Many things happen along the way and the drama builds with an intensity and richness that is absorbing. The ending is unexpected but utterly satisfying. 

- On so many levels this is a brilliant novel. I highly recommend it. 

Ilan Pappe, A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.

 

- This recently published short book is absolutely brilliant. It’s comprehensive, informative and easily the best book on the current genocide in Palestine I’ve read. It's also very clearly written, which is a blessing.

- Pappe is Professor of History at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies and Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. He is lauded throughout the world as the 'most original, radical and hard-hitting of Israel's new historians'.

- The back-cover blurb sums it up: 

The devastation of 7 October 2023 and the horrors that followed it astounded the world. But the Israel-Palestine conflict didn't start on 7 October. It didn't start in 1967 either, when Israel occupied the West Bank, or in 1948 when the state of Israel was declared. It started in 1882, when the first Zionist settlers arrived in what was then Ottoman Palestine. Ilan Pappe untangles the history of two peoples, now sharing one land. Going back to the founding fathers of Zionism, Pappe expertly takes us through the twists and turns of international policy towards Israel-Palestine, Palestine resistance to occupation, and the changes taking place in Israel itself.  

- The Contents summarise the full story:

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. 

David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu, Who Owns This Sentence?

 

- Anybody in the publishing industry who is interested in copyright will find this new book absorbing and extremely enlightening. It not only covers in detail the history of how the notion of protection of creative works developed across the world over the last three hundred years, it doesn't shy away from robustly criticising the misplaced decisions governments have too frequently taken along the way.

- It's lucidly written, comprehensive, and very accessible. It doesn't get bogged down in legal niceties but it's apparent at every turn that the authors are fully across all of them. What is refreshing is that they don’t hesitate to call out bullshit when they see it. And they see it often. ‘…Intellectual Property continues to follow its long trajectory from the sublime to the ridiculous’. 

- The book's main focus is the corporate overreach that has developed over the last 50 years, particularly in the US. And the absurd protection given to all works up to seventy years after the author's death. This post mortem period was also adopted by Australia during the Howard years under pressure from the US. 

- The laws that create the opportunity to sequester and exploit creations of every kind for three or four generations do not have very deep roots and only the last few decades have they acquired such scope, length and power as to allow the accumulation of huge piles of money. That is why copyright now means more than it every did before, and why we need to understand how it suddenly got to play such a large role in modern life.

This book explains where the idea was first sown, how it sprouted, developed and ramified over centuries, and then, in a short space of time, was transformed into the biggest money machine the world has ever seen.

On December 16, 2021, SONY Music Group announced that it had acquired the rights to the work of 72-year-old singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen: the New York Times reported that the sale price was around $550,000,000. 

...the tax it aims to extract from the global audience of Springsteen-lovers over the next century must run into billions.  

Andrew O’Hagan, Caledonian Road

 

- This novel, published in August last year, is a deliciously cheeky and satirical excoriation of English society. O'Hagan has a gift for wonderful comic writing. It's a scintillating, invigorating, skewering demolition. In fact it's extraordinary. O’Hagan is a genius. 

- It's full of interesting characters across the wide social spectrum. And thankfully, it starts with a Cast of Characters, all 59 of them. It reminds the reader who they are and how old they are. I kept flicking back to that every few pages. 

- The principal characters are Campbell Flynn, a professor, art historian and writer; his wife Elizabeth; Milo, a brilliant student and activist (‘A young Irish-Ethiopian with a taste for destruction’); Campbell's tenant Mrs Voyles, who is insane and lives in their basement; and some political and corporate high-flyers who are powerful, abusive and corrupt. 

- And there's the criminal underworld, mostly Polish and Russian, who run the drugs and illegal immigrant operations. At least they don't pretend to be righteous, unlike the entitled ruling class. There's barely a shred of dignity to any of them. 

- The novel is 640 pages long, with many threads and subplots, and heaps of detail. But everything comes together in a very satisfying way towards the end. If society is going to be radically changed, if the anger of ordinary citizens is going to bring about a revolution, if there's going to be justice in the end - then only a small minority will engineer and foresee it.  

- One thing I absolutely loved about this novel is the many quotable lines: 

Maybe that’s what postmodernism was in the end: the naming of emotion, as opposed to having it.

Like most pacifists, he's unbelievably aggressive. He wants to blame his mother for the state of the planet.

When he raised his head, AJ was staring at him. 'You are a middle aged white man' they said. 'And that's that'. 'Strange isn't it', he replied, 'that so many of you, who are so multiple, insist that the rest of us be only one thing'. 


https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/conversations/andrew-ohagan-novel-caledonia-road/103752056