This will hurt me...

The city, as seen from atop the SkyTree, Sumida, Tokyo, Japan. April 2016. Earthlings by Sayaka Murata Oh my. My oh my. What is the right word to describe Earthlings? Disconcerting is close, but does not seem quite powerful enough. It's very Japanese and extraordinarily dark. I'm not sure what to make of the conclusion, but it somehow seems appropriate. It's as if Roald Dahl – in the fashion of George whipping up his marvellous medicine – grabbed a handful of David Lynch, a sprinkling of Mishima and four cups of Andrea Dworkin and minced with the setting on "gross-out". Not for everyone, but it will certainly stay with you. 

Gull on a rock, Rocky Cape National Park, Tasmania. April 2020. Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia by Anita Heiss (ed.) It is hard to directly compare a book such as this with works of literature, as collections of essays penned by a wide range of contributors (most of whom are not writers) are by their very nature uneven. That said, this is an affecting compilation of experiences of Australian Aboriginals: male and female, young and old, straight and gay, rich and poor (and everything in between). It can be hard going at points, and I must say it is a blunt reminder of the casual, everyday racism face by far too many in Australia. While I wasn't surprised at some of the tales, I was disheartened to hear that the experiences of some of the younger contributors were as appalling as those I grew up with. For example, I had hoped that the continued offhanded (to the point of ubiquitous) use of "abo" in daily life had disappeared by now. Seems not. While not quite the thing t...

  Bird on a wire. Geilston Bay, November 2020. There Was Still Love by Favel Parrett Ideally, I'd give this 3.5, but I have opted for three as I found the character of Malá Liška underdeveloped to the point of frustration. Given the novel balances the lives and extended families of the twin sisters, the Melbourne side of the equation is lopsided to diminish the story. Otherwise, it was a brisk and moving read.   ★ ★ ★ 1/2

Raindrops on a leaf. Geilston Bay, November 2020. Shuggie Bain  by Douglas Stuart It is hard to know where one is to start with this review. The only certainty is the unease with which its success must have brought the Glasgow Taxi Owners' Association. ' Loved ' is not really an appropriate word, given the dark and desolate subject matter. Yet as a work of art, it is both affecting and remarkable. Even in the blackest moments – and mark my words, things get mighty black – there is a sense of promise and hope that is never quite snubbed out. Our titular hero, as oddly aloof and outcast as he is, somehow weathers through a set of circumstances that would do most of us in. His journey puts even the most tormented of Dickens's characters to shame. The author has done a fantastic job ensuring that even the many villains of the piece have shades beyond the one-dimensional, perhaps aside from Shug Senior and Thatcher herself (although I hold a particular antagonism for the vil...

  Budapest street life. Hungary, April 2018. I thought that I'd mark my return to this blog with a book review. Where better than to start with  Kate Atkinson's  Life after Life . So often, experimental fiction doesn’t quite work. Interesting ideas become irritating, constantly shifting patterns or characters get annoying, and little showy quirks become ostentatious, pretentious and boring in longer form. These are the risks that Kate Atkinson has taken in  Life after Life . In constructing the novel in a series of repeated loops back in time (each loop triggered by the death of our heroine Ursula Todd), the author frees her creative hand in exploring a multitude of alternative possible lives that play out for a girl born into an upper-middle-class family in 1910’s Buckinghamshire. While this may have resulted in a neat little exercise in authorial flamboyance that soon becomes tiresome, I found it a riveting device and one that Atkinson utilises to great effect. The...

Looking back to Manarola, the path from Manarola to Corniglia, Cinque Terre National Park, April 2017. So I managed to read 112 books for 2019. Somewhat ahead of my goal of 80 , and about 110 more than TV shows that I saw. The highlights? Well, I gave five stars to the following: Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones (dogfighting and Hurricane Katrina) Golden Boys by Sonya Hartnett (a wonderfully dark 1980s Aussie suburban coming of age novel) Jarett Kobek's blistering I Hate the Internet (Vonnegut for the post-ironic age) Andreï Makine's dreamlike The Archipelago of Another Life (a chase across the Siberian taiga at the tail-end of Stalin's rule);  Żanna Słoniowska's complex The House with the Stained-Glass Window (a wonderfully translated cross-cultural, multi-generational tale of the women in one particular family in Lviv);  This Is Not a Novel by Jennifer Johnston (an original novel framed around fragments of memory and the ways with which parent...

United Visual Artists, “Musical Universalis”. Dark Park, Dark Mofo 2018, Hobart She grew up in a house where voices were rarely raised. I grew up in a house where they were rarely lowered.