Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.

Ezra is a little lackadaisical in manning the back pocket. Geilston Bay, October 2010.

Friday means Book Club Friday in this part of the world, and a super-busy week has meant that I’ve not had too much spare time to read. That said, I did manage to finish an odd little book from a German author I’d not read before, The Book of Words by Jenny Erpenbeck.

I’ll admit that I struggled through the first fifty or so pages, and I only kept going because it is quite a short novel. It’ll be hard to reflect on it without venturing into possible SPOILER territory, so proceed with caution…

The novel is transmitted through a very fragmented, vaporous kind of narrative voice, which initially reads very much like a creative writing exercise written by a talented, but raw and inexperienced writer. While I don’t mind fiddling about with narrative, the almost deliberately obtuse expression initially jars with what concerns the inner life of a young girl.

Eventually (after about fifty pages, funnily enough), it emerges that this young girl experiences her life in a country under a repressive political regime, whose brutality increasing becomes apparent as the book moves on. One of the things that irked with me was the obvious Teutonic influence – Erpenbeck grew up the former-East Germany – in both style and cultural flags in the story, but its inconsistency with what appeared to be a story set in Argentina during the Dirty War. Thankfully, a kind of resolution emerges.

The book itself is ultimately quite a moving mediation of the nature of life in a totalitarian state, and is ethereal and dreamlike, as well as brutal and shocking. The author has done a great job in triggering a mediation on the nature of repression, with comparison inevitably drawn between Nazi-era repression, the Stalinist German state and South American junta. Ultimately, the fact that the reader is afforded this while all the while remained true through the eyes of a young girl, is a great achievement.

Thus, the book is well worth the (early) effort. It seems a good translation, and at little over a hundred pages it is not a lot to ask for in time. It does demand somewhat more of the reader after the fact, and I think that this one will stay with me for some time.

Currently, I’m enjoying the very-well constructed autobiography of Don Walker, who some may recall as the keyboard player from Cold Chisel. It’s a beautifully constructed bit of work that really breaks convention in terms of biography. I’ll talk about that next week.

As ever, if you are a keen reader (or would like to be), and want to track your habits or see my recommendations or make some of your own, feel free to check out my profile at Goodreads!

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke

In dreams begin responsibilities.

A life at sea, that's for me, only I just don't have the BREAD. That's right, Theme Thursday yet again and I post a photo of a yacht dicking about in Bass Strait just off Wynyard. The problem is, I am yet again stuck at work, slogging away, because I knead need the dough . My understanding is that it is the dough that makes the BREAD. And it is the BREAD that buys the yacht. On my salary though, I will be lucky to have enough dough or BREAD for a half dozen dinner rolls. Happy Theme Thursday people, sorry for the rush.

This will hurt me...

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