Asako Yuzuki, Butter.

 

- This novel gets clotted with so much detail as it progresses you can’t help but be bogged down. It's 452 pages long and 100 pages could have been cut during the editorial process in my opinion. 

- Nevertheless.....it is a fascinating read. The characters, the food, the ingredients, and the portrayal of the glorious city of Tokyo and its trains, shops, eateries and suburbs is simply wonderful. Having lived in Japan for two years as a young man I relished it. 

- It's a deep dive into the plight of women in Japanese society, and how captured they are by traditional social roles. So many men, particularly older men, are worse than useless when it comes to living and governing their own pathetic lives without depending on women to shop, cook, clean and look after them.

 - The book was inspired by a real case of a convicted Japanese con woman and serial killer a few decades previously. She sucked in three old rich men by feeding them delicious meals. They became obsessed with her and over a three month period they all eventually died of various 'accidents'.  

- The main characters in the novel are Rika, a magazine journalist, and her friend Reiko, formerly in PR. The accused killer is Kajii, currently held in a detention centre. Rika and Reiko both had bad relationships with their fathers. And Reiko was always a good cook. Riko decides to email Kajii to ask her about her recipe for her famous 'beef stew'. A relationship develops between them.

- Besides being a scammer and a criminal, Kajii is overweight. She's obsessed with butter, and insists that only high quality European brands be used. She's also bombastic. As she proclaims to Riko during one of their meetings '...there are two things I simply cannot tolerate: feminists and margarine'. And 'There is nothing in this world so pathetic, so moronic, so meaningless as dieting'. And 'You have to understand that women can never hope to rival men's power'. 

- Obviously Kajii is full of herself. She has her opinions and doesn't listen to anyone else's. Strangely, Rika finds that rather attractive. 

- The novel is far richer than this rather simple story. Yuzuki explores the personal relationships of the women, their partners, their parents and their work colleagues, in depth. There are problems at every turn which intrude into their seemingly comfortable lives. She digs deep and leaves no stone unturned. 

- She also drowns us in the dynamism and rhythms of Tokyo and some other smaller communities in Japan. The restaurants, cafes, retail stores, clubs, subway stations, and of course the food. Many of the Japanese ingredients won't be familiar to many readers but the descriptions of the cooking process are always given in tasty detail. 

- The novel ends with Rika preparing and cooking a large turkey for a group of ten friends and family. It's salivating! 

David Szalay, Flesh

 

- This novel by Booker Prize-shortlisted author David Szalay (pronounced So-LOY) was highly recommended by well-regarded literary critic Peter Craven in The Saturday Paper (April 12). I was persuaded to buy it and am so glad I did. It's magnificent on every level. 

- Fundamentally it's a story about Istvan, a frustrated loner from Hungary who, after three years in a young offenders institution, joins the army and is sent to Iraq for five years. He then moves to London to try to get on with his life.

- Szalay tells this simple story in plain, fact-based, logical prose, without posture or any modernist pretence, which is refreshing. The dialogue between the characters is real and basic. Short utterances and short repeat questions characterise it: 'So', he says. 'What now?' 'I don't know. What do you want to do?' she asks. 'Do?' He's lighting a cigarette. 'Yes'. 'What am I here to do?' he asks. 

- We're absorbed in Istvan’s life and career - his family relationships, his sex life, his marriage, the work opportunities that come his way, his failures, and his eventual depression. And, importantly, there's immense tragedy, sadness and death. In the end, despite his good looks, his compassion and honesty, and his commitment to his career, it all adds up to nothing. 

- This defining incident is central: after two years in London, working as a bouncer at a strip club, he sees an old man in an alley being assaulted by two thieves. He attends to him and calls an ambulance. Later the man calls him and invites him to dinner. He owns a private security agency and offers Istvan a job as a bodyguard to celebrities and wealthy people. He accepts. 

- He is then offered a full time job as a security driver for the very rich Karl and Helen Nyman and their teenage son Thomas. She is forty and attracted to Istvan and they start having sex. It’s ‘intense and exciting’. Not so long afterwards Karl dies of cancer and Istvan and Helen marry. Thomas, however, 'hates him' and is angry.  ‘I think he just married her for her money’. 

- Importantly, Thomas has been left everything by his father. He will inherit it all when he’s 25. A lawyer has oversight. However, as Istvan's career as a property investor develops, he and Helen often extract money from the Trust without Thomas's approval. He eventually finds out and sues them, and it doesn't end well.  

- The marriage survives but a when a tragic, heart-breaking accident occurs, Istvan falls into a state of severe depression. 

- This is a thoroughly absorbing story from a master of the craft. I can't recommend it highly enough. 

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Robert Lukins, Somebody Down There Likes Me

 

- It’s 1996. The wealthy Gulch family live in a mansion in the very up-market enclave of Belle Haven in Connecticut. 

- The successful corporation the family owns has secrets that are about to be exposed by the authorities and the media. For years they've been running a enterprise riddled with fraud and criminality. The real brains behind it all is Honey, the wife of Fax, the actual inheritor. She's the ultimate schemer, whereas Fax is barely cognisant of it, living in his own world of art, literature and music. He's a dedicated student of the cultures of the world…yet in reality an old, sick dunce in the eyes of many. Fax and his books. He never gets to the burdensome task of actually reading them. 

- Kick is their daughter and Lincoln their son. Lincoln has corporate ambitions of his own. 

- Lukins certainly has a talent for rich, whimsical prose. Honey has just convinced her bowels into motion as Sam answers her call. He's constructed a story of secrets. The characters are wealthy but weak. They are entitled and arrogant but quintessentially boring. They're constantly drinking and drug taking, and basically loathe one another. And they have silly names. It seems wealth doesn't redeem, it condemns. 

- When Kick was in her final year of high school she had two good friends Presley and Mouse. But Mouse went missing on the day of graduation and has never been seen since, ten years later. Lincoln thinks his father was fucking her. 

- Unfortunately the major storyline never resolves in the end. Who ends up a winning or losing business-wise. What the corporate crimes really were. If this were a TV show, viewers would be screaming for a second series. 

- So in a substantial way this novel fails to satisfy. It's an enjoyable read but also frustrating. It's missing real depth. 

Andrea Goldsmith, The Buried Life.

 

- Australian author Andrea Goldsmith has written an extraordinary novel. It's a microscopic examination of love, literature, religion and abuse. She probes deep and is so perceptive, as her characters grapple with their past, their personal weaknesses, and their likely futures. 

- The novel is full of illuminating quotations from ancient and modern writers and philosophers, which add a layer of depth to her story. 

- There are four main characters - Adrian, an academic whose obsession is death and its meaning; his young friend Kezi, a creative paper manufacturer and artist; Laura, a town planner; and Tony, also an academic and her husband.

- The novel is also a love letter to inner city Melbourne, and to its cafes, parks, gardens, flowers and birds. And it's a demolition of the current state of our universities, how they're being so seriously underfunded and mismanaged. 

- Adrian is now forty-three and alone. After ten years his wife Irene dumped him because he was boring. Both his parents died when he was a young child, and he was brought up by his grandparents. He's now finding it difficult to adjust to changes in his life. His interest in death came from his exposure to religion for the first time at university. ‘Life after life? It was an absurdity’. He's recently become a great fan of classical music, particularly Gustav Mahler's third symphony. It comforts him. As does Beethoven and Strauss. He's hooked on YouTube. 

-Kezi (Keziah) is twenty-eight and a lesbian. She is funny, warm and determined but with ‘an undertow of sadness'. She was raised in a weird Pentecostal community called Crossroads, founded by her parents. None of it made sense to Kezi. She became completely alienated from them and has had no contact with them for years. She remembers her parents refused to attend her high school graduation ceremony because she didn’t denounce her lesbianism. 

- She does miss the sense of community though - the comfort, the belonging, the love, the sanctuary. She quotes the bible often, and misses the church hymns and music. 

- Laura is fifty-seven, and a highly regarded urban development planner. She's a tall, elegant Jewish woman. Her husband is Tony, an entitled prick and humanities scholar who thinks he's a genius. Laura was an excellent student at Melbourne Uni, but she considered Tony a cut above with a ‘passion for the cerebral’. Their marriage has lasted for over thirty years, and they are still very much in love, or so it seems. ‘He held her together…Tony meant life to her, Tony gave her life’. But Laura would never get over not having children. Apparently Tony didn't want them. 

- Tony meets Adrian at a party and concludes ‘he’s a fuckwit’. Adrian had never liked Tony, considering him contrived and calculating, always laughing at the expense of others. 'He's arrogant and full of bombast...a third-rate academic...a cardboard cutout intellectual'. 

- Adrian, on seeing Laura for the first time at the party, becomes seriously attracted to her. They meet up for dinner in Carlton (near Readings, by the way!) and talk about books about death. They meet a number of times subsequently. She feels free talking to him. They enliven each other and begin to have frequent sex. 

- She also starts to realize who her husband really was. An abuser and controller, who demanded she obey or be damned. And she also discovers the big lie he's been telling her all along. 

- Kezi, having felt ill for some months, is diagnosed with leukaemia, and has not long to live. She was much loved in life, and is much loved in death. 

- The ending is profound and heart-breaking. There could have been other resolutions to the story, but Goldsmith has chosen brilliantly. 

- I can't recommend this book highly enough. It is a must read, which I predict will win many awards both in Australia and internationally. 

Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza

 

- This is a superb, thoroughly enlightening read. Beinart, in this short book, digs deep into the Israel-Palestine conflict and clarifies every contentious issue in lucid, clear prose. 

- He is a professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York. And he is Jewish. He's frequently under attack by the Jewish lobby in the US, but refuses to be silent. 

- The back cover blurb succinctly describes the essence of the book:

In Peter Beinart's view, one story dominates Jewish communal life: that of persecution and victimhood. It is a story that erases much of the nuance of Jewish religious tradition and warps our understanding of Israel and Palestine. After Gaza, where Jewish texts, history and language have been deployed to justify mass slaughter and starvation, Jews must tell a new story. After this war, whose horror will echo for generations, they must do nothing less than offer a new answer to the question: What does it mean to be a Jew? 

- Beinart explores the origins of the conflict; Jewish beliefs about their ancestry as a 'chosen people'; other examples of racial, religious and colonial divides across the world, such as South Africa, Northern Ireland, and in the US, and how those conflicts were resolved, not totally but as best they could be. His scholarship and wisdom shine through, as does his compassion.

-An essential read. 

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.