Monthly Archives: March 2019

2014, 320 p.

I was planning my trip to Colombia, so I decided to seek out some books set in Colombia. This book, which won the Alfaguara Prize in 2011 (one of the most prestigious literary prizes in Spain) and its translation by Anne McLean won the 2014  International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. So, it came bearing a hefty reputation!

It thoroughly deserves it. The writing and the translation flow seamlessly, as it shuttles between the drug violence of the 1980s and 1990s Bogota, when the book was set. A rather aimless law professor, Antonia Yamarra strikes up an acquaintance in a billiard hall with ex-con Ricardo Laverde. Standing together in the street outside the billiard parlour, they are shot at. Laverde dies, and Yamarra is injured both physically and psychically. He becomes obsessed with Laverde’s story, and meets up with Laverde’s estranged daughter. Through her he learns that Laverde had been a drug-mule pilot during the 1980s, and she shares with him a cassette tape of a black-box recording that ties together Laverde’s earlier crime and the death of Laverde’s wife. I won’t say any more, because if you read it- and I hope you will- it will spoil the story.

I found this book almost un-put-downable, and the language of both author and translator just swept me away. It’s a page-turner, but it’s also a reflection on fate and death, the ripple effects of violence, and the ease and speed with which events can veer off into other directions. It’s also a sobering look at the violence in Colombia during the 1980s and 1990s, set in a time where the narrator is oblivious to the violence yet to come.  At the end of it, I found myself googling the events of the novel, and felt sobered to realize that, while fiction, it is grounded in fact. Perhaps not the best pre-holiday reading, but certainly an excellent book that fully deserves all the praise it garnered.

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I was going to Colombia (not exactly reassuring reading, I must admit)

My rating: 9/10

Revolutions Podcast: Still the Mexican Revolution goes on. With my recent interest in WWI in Australia, I’ve been alert to the connections between the Mexican Revolution and WWI. Then there were suggestions in some quarters that Mexico should side with Germany against America. Did you know that trench warfare was used in quelling the Mexican Revolution too? The rebels decided that they’d attack the trenches at night, only to be dazzled by floodlights that lit the trench complex.

New Books in Latin American Studies. I’ve only recently subscribed to this podcast. Given the cost of academic books here in Australia, it’s highly unlikely that I will read any of the books discussed, so listening to the authors talking about their books is a good second choice. In a cross-over with New Books in German Studies, historian Daniel Stahl talks about his new book Hunt for Nazis: South America’s Dictatorships and the Prosecution of Nazi War Crimes. It’s a wide-ranging transnational history, dealing with not only South America but the differing and changing responses to calls for extradition over time. For example, during the 1970s when North American interest in the Holocaust was increasing (e.g. film, an second-generation preparedness to talk about what their parents could not) and their demands for extradition of war criminals were becoming louder, many South American countries were led by military generals.

Rear Vision. While I’m in South and Central America (in my head at least, now that I’m no longer there physically), the always excellent Rear Vision has a good podcast that sums up the last twenty years or so of Venezuelan history for a quick-catchup, and another very good podcast explaining how the neo-liberal politics championed by the United States have contributed to the ‘caravan’ of economic and political refugees fleeing Central America.

2018, 320 p.

I read this book during a week when yet another young girl was raped and murdered walking home in Melbourne. As in 2019, so too in 1930. However, I don’t think that Mollie Dean’s rape and murder elicited the same outpouring of anger and grief in 1930 and at least in 2019 we have been spared the prurient exposure of the flaws of the victim, as distinct from the perpetrator.

Mollie Dean was violently raped in a St Kilda laneway at the age of twenty-five. She was intelligent, sexually active and she flitted around the edges of the bohemian scene in 1930s Melbourne. There is little hard evidence about her: just a nondescript photograph, a few bureaucratic reports, and some letters. And yet she has lived on, through the artistic and academic world of which she was only marginally a part. She was painted by the man who was one of the police suspects. Her story was incorporated into George Johnston’s My Brother Jack, which has in turn appeared on stage and screen. Other contemporary writers have taken up her story as well: she featured in a play Solitude in Blue and has recently been fictionalized in The Portrait of Mollie Dean.

Mollie is the focus of the book, but it is also a portrait of the artistic scene in Melbourne, with many familiar names: Max Meldrum, Mervyn Skipper, Justus Jorgensen, Nettie Palmer. Being a north-eastern outer suburban girl myself, I was drawn to the Eaglemont and Montsalvat settings, both being familiar to me.

Gideon Haigh’s treatment of Mollie Dean is non-fictional, and there is a long list of sources in the back. It is a very discursive account – rather too discursive – with every possible connection followed up in Haigh’s network of Melbourne bohemianism in the 1930s. As a result, an index was sorely missed as you found yourself wondering whether you had encountered a name previously or whether it was just another addition to the ever-burgeoning list of contacts and connections.

My rating: 7.5

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library