Monthly Archives: December 2010

2010, 320 p.

The three famines of this book are the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, the Bengal famine during WWII and the Ethiopian famine of the 1970s and 80s.  Keneally has written about two of these famines previously- the Irish famine in The Great Shame, and through his fictional work Towards Asmara– and so, in one regard, this is a well-tilled field for him.  This book, however, is a comparative text and  he draws out commonalities between the three famines- the role of the evil figurehead who comes to personify the famine; the whistleblowers who make the famine known to the wider world and the ideologies and administrative incompetence that lie behind the political acts that so often exacerbate the famine.  Indeed, instead of famine being the failure of crops or rain, it is the result of egotism, politicking, ideology and willful blindness, often during a time of war.  Plenty and famine perversely seem to be able to exist simultaneously.  He writes of the physical effects of famine and poverty, and the paradox by  which nutritional alternatives are spurned in the yearning for familiar food. He highlights the restlessness that drives the migration patterns of starving people – a timely reminder in the face of such anxiety over ‘illegal’ refugees and people movement.

I have a few quibbles over the book, however.  It is clearly written as a layman’s guide, rather than an academic text, and  even this is marred by several editorial mistakes including dates. At times chapters cover all three famines, while other chapters are devoted specifically to one famine alone.   I wish that he had written a final chapter, drawing the three famines together, but instead the book splintered off into a string of other smaller famines that blunted the impact of the book somewhat.  Keneally is a prolific writer on a wide range of topics and a much-loved public personality, but I just wish that this was a tighter book than it is.

2010, 185 p

At first blush, this might seem a rather inappropriate book to be reading just as Mum died, but I found it oddly soothing.  In the opening lines of the book we learn that the author’s grandparents committed suicide together in 1991, and the preparations for this suicide run throughout the text, written in the present tense, minutely hypothesizing about their movements on that final day.   It is a day of banalities: picking flowers from the garden and placing them in vases,  taking the dog to a neighbour who is oblivious to their plans, prising open the capsules containing the drugs that will kill them, and ignoring the phone call that they suspect is a family member.  There’s a calmness and purposefulness that I, at least, found reassuring- quite apart from the ethical questions that their actions raise.  As the title suggests, this was an excluding love as well as an exclusive one.

Interwoven with the present-tense rundown of their last day is a Who-Do-You-Think- You-Are type reconstruction of her grandparents’ lives, stitched together  from the accounts of relatives and her grandparents’ surviving friends.  Her Hungarian Jewish grandparents themselves had said little of their wartime experiences – “we don’t talk about that”.   Her grandfather had survived the concentration camps; her grandmother had spent the war in hiding.  Following the Russian re-occupation of Hungary in 1956 her grandparents fled to Denmark as refugees, where they spent the rest of their years, grateful to Denmark for the sanctuary, but steadfastly Hungarian.

This is only a short book, which is perhaps a good thing as the tension in waiting for the suicide is rather drawn out.  The book is beautifully written and I suspect, beautifully translated with a warm, loving narrative voice that is quietly accepting of her grandparents’ decision.  There is no fear of death here,  and this is a good thing for me to read just at the moment.