A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

You heard! St Johns Park, New Town. June 2011.

Week two into the new job, and I'm slowly picking up reading time. One really top book this week, Tom Keneally's Gossip from the Forest, a novel which reconstructs the minutia of the negotiations surrounding the declaration of an Armistice at the end of World War I. Now don’t let that concept fool you, as this is an engaging and impressive work.

Kenneally paints vivid portraits of the key characters, and infuses a humanity that is often absent in this kind of work. The novel is a fantastic study of the profound challenge of ending a conflict that featured such brutality. As might be expected, the real interest can be found in the vanquished, rather than the victors.

This is magnified as the key Allied negotiators - vain French Marshall Foch and cold British Admiral Weymes - relish their roles as conquerors (even though the the reality was somewhat more complex than that) and that the Germans were something approaching evil incarnate. Compounding the triumphalism, the German aristocratic elite declined to show up and sent four men to face the wrathful victors to bring about a peace. Keneally superbly reconstructs these four, who were sent to plead mercy and were ill-equipped to face such immense anger.

In choosing as its central figure the German head of delegation, secretary of state Matthias Erzberger – a proletarian, civilian, Catholic member of the Centre Party and critic of both German Imperialism and the conduct of the war – the novel explores the individual experience at moments of historical import. The result is both an incredibly human story and an effective novel.

This is a rewarding book, and I’d encourage anyone to give it a go.

Comments

Carola said…

It's a joke? How is owning this?

24 June 2011 at 22:45

Kris McCracken said…

I have no idea who owns this pole.

28 June 2011 at 09:04

Roddy said…

Private poles belong to private builders. They also belong to farmers. Find out if there are any builders in the area and you should have your answer.

28 June 2011 at 16:10

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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