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Showing posts from May 30, 2021

“The new fascism puts on its friendliest smile, helps old people across the street and carries their heavy shopping bags up the stairs.”

Wire, Lindisfarne. April 2021. The Ditch by Herman Koch Reading The Ditch bought to mind someone embarking on a dangerous tightrope walk. I wasn't sure about it at fits, and Koch wobble a few times early on, only to recover. Then we have some more wobbling and it really looked as if he'd fall, only to trick me again and finish the trick splendidly. Koch has taken a huge risk in choosing to locate the entire story inside the mind of an extremely unlikable, egotistical and pompous politician. Deepening that risk is a real sense of paranoia and the emergence of some kind of mid-life crisis or mental breakdown. Yet he pulls it off. Bravo! It's not the most pleasurable read as we meander trough the musings of such a prick, but my word he has impressed me with a virtuoso performance in pulling off that ending. ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

“But it is a lot easier to face the day when you know you won't have to face other people and their happiness.”

The road south, somewhere near Glenora, the Derwent Valley, Tasmania. April 2021. The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley A well constructed little mystery in the manner of Agatha Christie, I struggled with this book only because every one of the ensemble cast is loathsome. This is not new to the genre, but as we find ourselves stuck within a claustrophobic setting - a snowed-in estate in a remote area of the Scottish Highlands - throughout, there's no relief from this boring and snobbish bunch. Quite why novelists seem to struggle to think of characters that aren't lawyers, hedge-fund managers, advertising execs, and consultant-types is beyond me. They're all so dull. Now, we are given a pair of sympathetic characters to offset the ghastly assemblage. But, alas, the wounded heroine (a grieving paramedic) and hero (a traumatised war veteran) are too clichéd to generate anything other than mirth at the hackneyed inner dialogue and overly-credulous thought patterns. I will say...

“Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness.”

Obscure mountain hut, kunanyi, Mt Wellington. May 2021. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak There were elements that I very much enjoyed in The Book Thief , but these were outweighed by moments of extreme eye-rolling. But, first things first: it is far too long. You could trim a good 150 to 200 pages and not lose anything. The broad contours are engaging and interesting but proceed in such a repetitive and irritating fashion that I was willing it to end. This gets to my main problem with the book. Running at over 550 pages with a tiny cast of characters and an omnipresent and all-knowing narrator, how is it possible to finish with very little sense of Liesel, the person at the very centre of the story? Other characters - excepting dear Papa - act so strangely and contrary to what the narrator tells us is true to their hearts that it gets quite jarring at times. This is poor writing, pure and simple. For certain, Death (our narrator) informs us an awful lot of things through...

“I find I do not often have anything to say which it would interest other people to hear. Though other people talk about things I am not interested in and I am happy to listen, so maybe it is not others’ lack of the will to listen but my lack of interest in speaking that is at fault.”

Pied oystercatcher, Lindisfarne Bay, Hobart. May 2021. Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson I shall now repeat the opening sentence from an earlier review. The greatest challenge for the epistolary novel is to create engaging characters who engender enough sympathy (or at least interest in their lives) to hold a reader's interest. Anne Youngson has achieved this admirably in Meet Me at the Museum . This lovely novel consists of an exchange of letters between two very different people at a similar age in life. The correspondence between the practical farmer's wife Tina in England's East Anglia and the precise, scientific widower who is a curator at Silkeborg Museum flourishes as they find the other fulfilling a function that to that point neither had realised that they needed. There is a gentleness here that hints at deeper emotions. Yet, there is an organic way that these two older strangers emerge to serve as allies to help each other reconcile with their grief (on...

"The Impressions remaining from earlier Injuries are kept up by the occasional Outrages of Miscreants whose Scene of Crime is so remote as to render detection difficult; and who sometimes wantonly fire at and kill the Men and at others pursue the Women, for the purpose of compelling them to abandon their Children."

A pair of pandanis, Lake Dobson, Mt Field National Park, Tasmania, April 2021. Van Diemen's Land by James Boyce This book is a worthwhile addition to the works on the early history of what is now called Tasmania. With a primary focus on the first generation of invaders - both convicts and colonisers - while somewhat saddened to find that it is a bit light-on in detail on the island's original inhabitants, the brief glimpse we get is sound. Of more central focus, Boyce explores the significance of the convict presence to the evolution of Van Diemen’s Land. He helps explain the strange Weltanschauung that compelled a tiny group of landowners to expunge both convict and Aboriginal from the formal records and popular memory. Such efforts - including the renaming of the island to Tasmania in 1856 - were not without success. However, I think that Boyce is correct when he observes that "Van Diemen's Land never vanished but, by edict of an embarrassed ruling class, it wen...

“Everyone’s house is built of cobwebs and ghosts – as St Augustine says, the dead are invisible – they are not absent …”

This pile used to be trees, Geilston Bay. May 2021. From Where I Fell by Susan Johnson To this reader, the greatest challenge for the epistolary novel is to create engaging characters who engender enough sympathy (or at least interest in their lives) to hold a reader's interest. Unfortunately, From Where I Fell did not work for me. In the urbane Australian global citizen Pamela, I found a character far too cloying and needy to really connect with. Her accidental e-mail pen-pal Greek-American homebody Chrisanthi is a brash, fussy and outspoken counterpart. I found it more a case of tedious back and forth over tidbits of broken and dispirited lives in what may be an attempt to generate a kind of' opposites attract' spark. It picked up a little bit towards the end, and we move towards something like activation and reconciliation in the lives of both women. I commend Johnson for her bravery in pulling off that ending, but I must confess that I didn't enjoy the journey. ...