Rachel Cusk, Parade

- Rachel Cusk has many enthusiastic fans, as I sort of am, but she is also immensely frustrating. I wrote this about her last novel, Second Place, published in 2021: 'I was profoundly disappointed. This effort is tedious and uninspiring....It may well be a damning critique of pinched, miserable, cold and unlikeable lives in an uninspiring society. But in any case it's still a tepid rendering.'

- Parade, her new novel, is thankfully a lot better. It's brilliantly written, and while its central focus is much the same, its essential theme and message is more clearly articulated: life as a woman in a world dominated by men, and life as a child dominated by authoritarian and abusive parents. The escape route is art and creativity. 

- It's a challenging read. The deliberate confusion in her story-telling is characteristic. Names are occasionally dropped but their identities rarely clarified. Narrators remain nameless, and artists are just known as 'G'. Time periods are fluid. But we soon understand that these details are irrelevant. Realism is a contested terrain. 

- There are four loosely connected stories, each running for about fifty pages. There is violence, abuse and the creativity that emerges from it. 'We might find ourselves washed clean of the violence of gender…to unsex the human form’. Another reflects on the physical body: ‘The ageing bourgeois couple trapped unto death in their godless and voluntary bondage is the pedestrian offspring of history’. 

- The third story is by far the most interesting. It's called The Diver: a couple have dinner at an Italian restaurant in Paris with friends who work at an art museum. A man had committed suicide there that day. It was very distressing and their discussion is utterly invigorating. It's the best section of the novel.

- Cusk features a lot of talk about mothers, their children and creativity. And always reflects on the body and pain. 

- I really don't think Rachel Cusk likes humans. And many readers will abandon this book. It's a hard read but well worth persevering with. It offers insight after insight, many challenging, and is written with enormous grace and style. 

Peter Turchin, End Times

 

- This is an amazingly good book. It's a work of critical analysis and insight, and despite its often academic flavour it offers an enlightening historical perspective on our current global issues.

- Turchin is Research Associate at Oxford University and Emeritus Professor at the University of Connecticut. He's currently coordinating an innovative outfit called CrisisDB, a massive historical database of societies sliding into a crisis - and then emerging from it. 

- His main thesis is that social and political change is far more predictable than we usually imagine - the emergence of Trump, for example, and why he is highly likely to win the presidency again in November. The overarching dynamic governing the history of all countries and empires is 'popular immiseration and elite overproduction'. When the lower working classes are increasingly less well off discontent brews and turns into anger. The elite cannot protect their wealth or administrative power for too long. Wars and revolutions inevitably follow after a few decades. This pattern is so well established that world history over the last three thousand years or so demonstrates it time and time again. 

- His prime focus is on the US, but he also examines in detail England, France, Austria, Germany, Norway, Hong Kong and mainland China. The major causes of empire decline are evident in virtually every case, as are the reasons for peace, social harmony and stability. Fifty to one hundred years is about it - then radical change is inevitable. America, your time is up. There are simply too many billionaires. 

- I virtually underlined every second paragraph of this book. It was so good.

Joelle Gergis, QE: Highway To Hell.

 

- It would be hard to get a better summary of our current climate change challenges than this extraordinarily good Quarterly Essay by award-winning climate scientist Joelle Gergis. She served as a lead author for the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report.  

- It is a passionate, detailed and very clearly written dissection of how Australia is responding to the enormous challenges the world faces, not only in the decades ahead, but right now. 

- No prizes for guessing how we're doing. We're unbelievably complacent and our governments, including the current Labor one, pathetic. We're simply not rising to the occasion. We're totally locked into protecting the fossil fuel lobby. Sucking their arse, over and over again. 

- As I will explain, there is a 90% chance that the continuation of current climate policies will result in 2.3 to 4.5 degrees of global warming by the end of the century, with the best estimate of 3.5 degrees. This represents a catastrophic overshooting of the Paris Agreement targets, highlighting just how far off track we really are. 

- As a grandfather of five young kids I am personally furious at the intergenerational war we're visiting upon them. There is so much we need to do, but it takes commitment and courage, and we don't have it. It's a moral outrage.

David Nasaw, The Patriarch

 

- On every level, this is a remarkable book. It was first published in 2012. It’s been many years since I've read such a brilliant and engrossing biography. Despite being just under 900 pages long, towards the end I was wanting it to go on for another few hundred. I was that absorbed.

- Celebrated historian David Nasaw, a distinguished professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, was granted unrestricted access to the Joseph P. Kennedy papers in the John F.  Kennedy Presidential Library.

- What makes the book so interesting is that it is not just a story of the immensely wealthy entrepreneur Joe Kennedy. It’s a story of American and world politics from the Depression in the early 1930’s to the Vietnam War years in the 60’s. It’s an examination of the remarkable Kennedy family, their political dramas, successes and tragedies, but it’s also a detailed analysis of all the global tensions of the time - Hitler’s rise in Germany and his persecution of the Jews; his threat to Europe, Russia and Britain; the radically different approaches of UK prime ministers Chamberlain and Churchill; President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s major economic agenda, the New Deal - and so many other critically important issues of the twentieth century. 

- Here’s a few quotes from the dust jacket: Nasaw tracks Kennedy’s astonishing passage from East Boston outsider to supreme Washington insider. Kennedy’s seemingly limitless ambition drove his career to the pinnacles of success as a banker, World War 1 shipyard manager, Hollywood studio head, broker, Wall Street operator, New Deal Presidential advisor, and founding chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. His astounding fall from grace into ignominy did not come until the years leading into the Second World War, when the antiwar position he took as the first Irish American ambassador to London made him the subject of White House ire and popular distaste. Was he an appeaser and isolationist, an anti-Semite and a Nazi sympathiser?….Why did he oppose the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, and American assistance to the French in Vietnam? 

- During that time period politics was very much characterised by the Catholic/Protestant ‘wars’. JFK was the first Catholic president and he was constantly defending his faith as a private matter. He believed the political realm was secular and his religion private. Senior bishops in the church disagreed and rallied against him. Ironically a large swathe of Protestants voted for him, and without them he would not have won. 

- I was struck by the relevance of the issues and political debates of those years to today’s, particularly the huge post-war investments in social services and infrastructure that were necessary, and had to be funded by large tax increases on the wealthy and on corporations. 

- Finally, what was so refreshing was the civil debates between Republicans and Democrats on domestic and foreign policy issues. It was democracy at its best. The Republican party had not become rotten as it is now. Trump would have been confined to an asylum. 

- So read this magnificent book to be inspired. 

Shankari Chandran, Safe Haven

 

This new novel from the 2023 Miles Franklin award-winning author of Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens has received many positive reviews: 

‘A powerful, well-crafted story’ –Sydney Morning Herald

‘a heart-wrenching yet hopeful tale.’ –The Sunday Age

‘a warm and generous read.’ –The Guardian

‘a fearless novel that reaches into your heart with evocative prose and beautifully drawn characters. It’s also a page turner.’ -–Australian Women's Weekly

‘a powerful tale’ –The Advertiser

‘Chandran's writing is evocative and studded with beautiful imagery’ –Books + Publishing

‘Anyone who read Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens will already know that Miles Franklin winner Shankari Chandran is an expert at sketching communities of people whose dependency on one another is matched by their care for each other. Chandran's new novel, Safe Haven, has it all: a group of refugees only too aware of the fragility of their position; bonds of love and trust; a mysterious death; and similarly beautiful storytelling to her prize-winning book.’ –Qantas Magazine

The problem with these reviews is they're all bullshit!

I read the first 100 or so pages of Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens last year then bailed. I was determined to give Chandran another try and read this new one to the end. I couldn't wait for the end. The experience was insufferable.

It's a cloying, sentimental story, full of characters (mostly women) who are warm and friendly and love and respect each other. And there are also guards (men) at the asylum centre who are ugly, merciless, brutal and cruel. One of them commits suicide - or was he murdered? An officer from the mainland (a woman) is sent to investigate.

That's the plot. It gets convoluted as it resolves because some people are hiding secrets about themselves and their backgrounds. But it all ends well. Love, happiness and justice prevail. 

At times I thought I was reading a Young Adult novel. 

Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos

 

- Love is central in this 2024 winner of the International Booker Prize for fiction. And the power of infidelity. Jenny Erpenbeck is a celebrated German author whose previous novels have won or been shortlisted for multiple awards. 

- In Kairos (the ancient god of fortunate moments) young nineteen year old Katharina meets fifty-three year old Hans on a bus in East Berlin and they become lovers. The time period is the late 1980's just before the collapse of the Soviet Union and before the re-integration of East and West Germany. Hans adores her beauty and intelligence, but he is married. They have to keep it secret. He’s a writer and broadcaster, she a trainee printer and typesetter. They love music and they like cafes and restaurants and films. Their relationship is intense but it's also on-again off-again over the next few years. 

- In the background is the social upheaval surrounding them. Hans in particular does not relish the West. He's always appreciated the Russian state and its communist legacy. ‘…the Russians out of a backwards country created an industrial state in the space of two decades: Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country’. 

- At one point Katharina visits Cologne in the West to see her aunt, her family, and her grandmother for her birthday. She sees beggars on the streets. Manfred, her uncle, trots out the usual ‘lazy, is what they are’ rhetoric. But clothing, food and utilities are a lot cheaper. She even visits a sex shop, something non-existent in the East. Erpenbeck describes what the shop has on offer in one of most extraordinary paragraphs in a literary novel you're ever likely to read. Here it is in full:

She sees all at once all there is for a human to see. She sees penises, stiff cocks with bulgy veins, rosy, pallid, brown, and black, with glistening heads, sees them thrust fat and stiff into slits, into mouths, shoved between breasts, gripped in hands, see female vulvas, their wavy flesh, sees them open, hairy or clean shaven, wet, sullied, dripping, gleaming, stretching, sees pendulous breasts, tits with great dark areoles, and others, pointy pink raspberries, sees gaping mouths, gaping assholes, plump labia, wrinkled ball sacks, everything pushed together, rubbed together, forced apart, thrusting, gagging, sucking, drooling, strings of saliva, here, on the ground of freedom, tits and cocks and cunts, she sees asses and erections, sees massive hard-ons, slutty tongues, sees liquids burst from knobs, ejaculated over buttocks and breasts, into mouths, onto eyelids and tongues, sees slime, spunk, spit, and piss, sees shit...

- Her frequent sex with Hans is usually loving and sensitive but often descends into pain and abuse. He ties her to her bed and strikes her with his belt. ‘A long time ago it was a game. Now it’s deadly earnest.’ 

- His wife, Ingrid, discovers the affair and throws Hans out. But is the marriage really over? He writes: ‘the relationship exists on a plane that (however painful) leaves the foundations of the marriage untouched’. As usual he gets it both ways. He and Ingrid get back together and Katharina gets a job at a Frankfurt theatre, where she has an affair with Vadim.

- Hans won't forgive her for that. He owns her after all. He belittles her, insults her, blames her entirely. They soon drift apart. He loses his job as do so many in the old East Germany. 

- Erpenbeck has written a deep and penetrating (sorry) exploration into relationships, passions, and personal pain. Embedded in political and social structures that govern so much that we may be unaware of. 

Colm Toibin, Long Island

- In his usual masterful way Colm Toibin’s prose is clear, precise, simple and gentle. It's never overdone or elaborate and is a joy to read. In all his novels he shows such empathy for ordinary people and the rhythms of their lives. We're thrust into the very domestic dramas of people and their families living in small communities and towns.  

- In Long Island Toibin takes us back to his powerful 2009 novel Brooklyn and his main protagonist Eilis, a young Irish woman who fled Ireland for New York, deserting her lover Jim. That final, life-changing decision - praised by most reviewers for its rectitude and honor, but utterly wrong in my view for its cowardice and immaturity - was gut-wrenching.

- Twenty years later she is still married to Tony, an Italian, and they have with two teenage children. Unfortunately, Tony has got an unknown woman pregnant. Under no circumstances will Eilis allow the baby to live in her house despite pressure from the woman's husband. 

- At this point Toibin takes us back to Ireland where we meet the widow Nancy, a fish and chip shop owner. We're also re-introduced to Jim, now a bar owner and Nancy's fiancé. Nancy’s best friend was Eilis, and now Eilis has returned to Ireland to celebrate her mother's 80th birthday. So there you have it. The stage is set for competing dramas and tensions. 

- Typical of village life, all the characters are close and nosey. Perhaps it's suffocating at times, a bit cloying and sentimental, but always delightful. However Toibin has the ability to rise to higher levels and confront us with life-changing decisions and moral choices, without becoming heavy handed or preachy. Reality and romance are in conflict and the sacred marriage bond honoured or not. Truth, fidelity and commitment are hard. And what really is love?

- Like Brooklyn, that really got inside the mind and social context of a young person, Long Island is a narrative of incredible power and resonance, and one that won't let you go for days and nights after you've finished it.