At last! I have actually read the book with which Kate at BooksAreMyFavouriteandBest has started her Six Degrees meme this month. The idea is that she chooses a book, then you identify six titles that are linked either to the starting book or to each other: you can see the instructions here. The starting book is Colm Toibin’s Long Island (and you can read my review here)
So where does Long Island take me? Well, the main character Eilis leaves Brooklyn to return home to Ireland, and so this catapulted me to Michael Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay, which is also set in New York- but I read it before I started my blog. One of the images that stayed with me from Chabon’s book is of the young girls jumping to their deaths from the burning building of the Triangle Shirtwaister factory.
There was industrial bastardry on the other side of the globe in the early twentieth century too, and Annie Besant (pronounced to rhyme with ‘pleasant’) agitated on behalf of the London matchgirls working for Bryant and May. But this was just part of her amazing, varied life, described by Michael Meyer in his book A Dirty Filthy Book (see my review here) which focuses on the obscenity trial that Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh faced over their re-publication of a sex-education book. Annie was later to distance herself from this book when she embraced Theosophy.
As an important figure in Theosophy, Annie Besant has a starring role in Jill Roe’s Beyond Belief: Theosophy in Australia 1879-1939 (see my review here), a 1986 book which I’m pleased to see has been republished as Searching for the Spirit: Theosophy in Australia 1879-1939.
Theosophy sparked the publication of a number of novels based on a belief in Lemuria- an Atlantis-like mega-continent encompassing the Himalayas, Madagascar, Tasmania, Greenland and Siberia before sinking into the sea because of volcanic activity. In these Lemurian novels, the centre of Australia was not desert, but instead an inland sea. Michael Cathcart talks about them in his book The Water Dreamers (my review here) .
A man who dreamed of bringing water to Central Australia was C. Y. O’Connor, who committed suicide when the water in the Goldfields Pipeline did not arrive when it was expected that it would. His daughter Kathleen saw herself ‘of’ Paris, even though she was born and died in Australia, after a long sojourn in Paris. Amanda Curtin tells her story in Kathleen O’Connor of Paris (my review here)
Poum and Alexandre: A Paris Memoir is Catherine de Saint Phalle’s memoir of her parents. The book is written in three parts: ‘Poum’ dealing with her mother Marie-Antoinette, nicknamed ‘Poum’ because of a childish game in bouncing down stair ‘poum, poum, poum’; ‘Alexandre’ dealing with her father; and then a final short coda involving both parents. The author was raised in England, away from her parents, and when she rejoined them in Paris, she could barely speak French and was thrown back into dependence on her eccentric and rather irresponsible parents. My review is here.
So I guess that I’ve globe trotted a bit here: from New York, to Australia, and then over to France. Where did your Six Degrees take you?
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 