Category Archives: Australian Women Writers Challenge 2014

2009, 296 p.

For some reason, this book seemed to take me an age to read. Perhaps it was the structure of alternating chapters as it swung between two related men, forty years apart, which made it rather too easy to put down.  Once put down, its dual-narrative structure also required more back-tracking than usual to pick up again.

Frank has left Canberra after breaking up with his girlfriend, moving to a shack amongst the canefields on the north-east coast that was originally owned by his grandparents. He’s a damaged, angry, fragile man, estranged from his widowed father, with few apparent friends. It takes him some time to tentatively reach out to his neighbours and their daughter, and settle uneasily into sporadic work.

Forty years earlier, Leon was growing up in Sydney, the son of a pastrycook and Jewish refugees. His father had felt compelled through gratitude to his new country to join the Korean War, but came back home a shattered shell of a man. Leon, in turn was conscripted to Vietnam, and when he returned from Vietnam, he too was a damaged, angry, fragile man, traumatized by his war experiences and unable to settle.

These men feel much, but do not – can not- verbalize it. They are largely unreachable, encasing themselves in a masculine armour and a restlessness that deflects any attempts by others to reach the softer part of them. Women here are either idolized or uglified. There’s a hum of violence that runs underneath their stories.

The real strength of this book is its depiction of place, which is so crystal-sharp that you can picture it in your mind. Flipping through the book, I find myself surprised that there is as much dialogue as there is, because to me it seemed a very intense and silent book.

But I don’t think that I actually engaged in it at an emotional level although perhaps the writer has intended that, by mirroring the brusqueness of the male characters. With my disjointed reading of the book, it took me an inordinate time to work out the relationship between the two men, and it became an intellectual rather than emotional challenge to see how the two stories intersected. I’m not sure that I actually liked the book. I admire the writing; I doff my hat to such a strong debut performance; and her rendering of setting is very accomplished, but it just left me a bit like her characters- cold.

I’ve posted this review at the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

2013, 294 p.

I see that Debra Adelaide’s book of short stories Letter to George Clooney has been shortlisted for Kibble literary prize for an established female writer.

I can think of many reasons why a collection of short stories should be nominated for major literary fiction prizes, but I also still have niggling reservations. What about the ho-hum stories in a collection? Do the constraints of the genre render particular criteria impossible? But having said that, this book really does deserve the highest accolades and recognition. It really is good.

As I have said many times before, I find it rather difficult to review a collection of short stories. The curatorial act of choosing one story to include over another, and the ordering of the stories within the volume suggests to me that in a collection of short stories there is another creator at work: the editor. In this case, Debra Adelaide is an editor herself, so perhaps she ‘owns’ that aspect as well.

Looking at the book as a whole there seemed to be several stories that deal with writing, and stories of a similar theme presented together- or am I imposing this order onto it? To me, the first two stories deal with writing; the next two with rituals. The fifth story ‘The Harp Society’ and the sixth ‘Glory in the Flower’ involve performances of some sort, while the seventh ‘Chance’ and ‘The New Millenium’ address ways in which technology have affected our lives. ‘The Pirate Map’ and ‘The Moon Will Do’ are both administrative challenges of a sort- the first to find the ATO office, the second to complete the instructions on a chain letter.  ‘Harder than your Husband’ and ‘Airlock’ both involve work places of different types. The final story, and the one that gives the collection its name absolutely stands alone.

Even in a collection of the quality of this one, there are one or two short stories that stand out. For me, there were two. The first, ‘Chance’ had me laughing maliciously, having dabbled in the waters of middle-aged internet dating myself. It’s the story of a woman away on a romantic weekend with a man she has met on the internet and the awful, intimate messiness of plunging early into relationships as we tend to do.

The second standout story is  ‘Letter to George Clooney’. I don’t want to talk about at all because to do so would diminish it. It is brilliant. Read it for yourself.

I have posted this review on the Australian Women Writers Challenge site.

2005, 302

As it happens, I finished reading this book at about 4.30 a.m.  Some hours later, over breakfast, I read that Maya Angelou had died.  I haven’t read any of Angelou’s work, but I was interested to see that she had written six memoirs, covering the period of time up until she turned 40.  My, I thought, what sort of a life would sustain six memoirs?

I had had the same thought when I finished Mandy Sayer’s book, and saw that she had won the National Biography Award and the Age Non-Fiction Book of the Year for an earlier memoir, Dreamtime Alice.  I read this current book, Velocity mainly because I was interested in reading her new book The Poet’s Wife.  I’m wedded enough to chronology to want to read the earlier book first, both in its production and in its time span.  However, my response to Maya Angelou’s prolific memoir output could apply here as well: what sort of a life sustains three memoirs with how many more to follow? One that has rootlessness and dysfunction at its core, it would seem, along with a strong vein of intelligence and a sense of self that somehow sustains the writer to endure it.

This is not to say that I didn’t find it engrossing, because I did.  I read it in two middle-of-the-night reading gulps, when I’m not wanting to read anything too taxing.  Nonetheless, it was probably an odd choice.  In many ways it’s a “look-away-I-can’t-help-looking” type of book, where one bad choice leads to another, and where you’re almost crying out in pantomine-audience style- “don’t do it!”. The violence, both physical and emotional, is not exactly bed-time reading.

Each chapter starts with an italicized episode which acts as a sort of preview for something that will arise later on.  It was quite an effective technique, although it usually made my heart sink.

The rootlessness is laid down in her life right from the moment of conception.  Her parents are drifters and party-animals, and after their marriage breaks down, her mother embarks on a series of toxic relationships that culminate in the controlling and violent Hakkim, a younger Lebanese man who Mandy fears.  Mandy is shifted from one school to another, as her mother keeps being drawn back to alcohol, depression, helplessness and this evil man.

One constant throughout all this is her father, Gerry the jazz musician.  It was interesting to read her response to her father’s cleft lip and palate (although she uses the older and more hurtful term ‘harelip’) as I have the same condition myself.  She mentions it several times in the opening chapter, and reminds us of it again after she reconnects with him after a long period of time.  In fact, at one stage she’d been away from him so long that she found it hard to understand his speech again.  Even though she stays with her mother and is dragged from one toxic or vulnerable environment to the next, her father seems a constant source of security, even though he disappears from her life for years at a time, and is in truth just as rootless and unsuccessful as her mother is.  Mandy bathes him in an idealized golden glow that he does little to merit.

This might sound like a misery-memoir, but it’s not at all.  It’s told in a clear-eyed fashion, and while not underplaying the abuse and danger, it does not wallow in it either.  I’m certainly up for reading her other memoirs as well.

I’ve added this to the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2014.

2013, 255p.

Some books seem to shift shape while you’re reading them.  Sometimes it really is the book that changes direction during its narrative, but other times it’s because you, as a reader, adjust your concept of what it is you’re reading as you go along.

Boy, Lost was such a book for me.  To be honest, I started reading it thinking that it was a fiction book narrated in the first-person, beautifully told, with the crystalline clarity of authenticity.  It was only when some facts seemed so concrete and so banal that I started to wonder if it was non-fiction instead.  I turned to the back cover, and sure enough- there it was, ‘Non-fiction/Memoir’.  And I obviously don’t look hard enough at the front covers of the books I read, because under the title, there it is again: “A Family Memoir”.  At the end of the book, Olsson explains how she came to write this book that she felt was not hers, initially, to write.  It is her mother’s story, and her brother’s, and yet even untold it affected the whole family. In this book she is piecing it together and telling it for her family, with their blessing and at their request.  In the closing pages she broadens her perspective beyond her family’s story to reflect on the historical and sociological phenomenon of ‘lost’ and stolen children  among unmarried mothers and aboriginal mothers more generally.

Olsson’s mother Yvonne marries young- too young- to Michael, a Greek post-war immigrant. He takes her to far-north Queensland, where the veneer of a sensual, confident older man soon fractures to reveal a cruel, rigid and controlling man.  In 1950 after enduring three years of marriage to him, the pregnant Yvonne takes her infant son and flees on the train. But Michael appears, takes their son from her arms, snarls a warning to her and leaves.  Yvonne will not see her son for another forty years.

She remarries; she has other children.

This is the story my mother never told, not to us, the children who would grow up around it in the way that skin grows over a scratch.  So we conjured it, guessed it from glances, from echoes, from phrases that snap in the air like a bird’s wing, and are gone.  Fragments of a legend, that’s how it seemed, and it twisted through our childhood like a fiction we had read and half-forgotten; a story that belonged to others, not to us, and to another, long-ago time.  As if the woman at its centre was not really our mother but a stranger, an unknowable version of her…. (p 3)

This is what we didn’t understand, not then: that the past had gripped and confounded her, stalked her dreams.  That every day of her life after her son was taken, she would sift through the memory of it, every terrible second.  Turning each in her hand, looking for ways she might have changed them.  But always she would be stuck at the image of the man, her husband, the terrible smile as he entered the train carriage, walked towards her, pulled Peter from her arms.  When she dreamed of her lost son she would dream of his father.  He would always be walking towards her, wearing that smile. (p. 4)

She was deflected from taking action by people who told her that her infant son  would have a better life with his father than he would with her, a single-mother and waitress. He would live like a little Greek prince, they said, basking in the glory of being a Greek son during the 1950s. He didn’t.  Instead, Peter had a spare, sad life.  He was too young to remember his mother, but the past had gripped and confounded him and stalked his dreams, as well.

I very much enjoyed this book, even though it utilizes two of the stylistic techniques that I usually dislike: very short chapters and use of the present tense.   The stories of Yvonne and Peter are alternated, moving forward chronologically, but not touching each other for much of the book.  Interwoven between their two stories are Olsson’s own reflections on the childhoods of Sharon, her older half- sister (full sister to Peter) and several brothers, as they circle warily this fracture in their family.  Each section is only a few pages in length.  I usually dislike such a ruptured narrative, seeing it as a cop-out from having to tie the narrative together in a logical and pragmatic sense, but in this book it works.  There are abrupt stops, loose ends and silences throughout all their stories, and the structure reflects that well.

The present tense is perhaps more problematic.  In her ANZLitLovers blog Lisa Hill recently referenced some observations by the writer Dorothy Johnston about the ubiquitous use of present tense in recently-published books.   I acknowledge that the present tense brings a sense of immediacy and contingency to the writing, but I find it rather suffocating and anxiety-producing.  This book IS, however, an anxious, hand-wringing book, and I think that the present tense works well here.

The author has inserted herself into the narrative the whole way through the book, but in the closing pages she steps into the light completely. She is at pains to answer the question that has tortured both her mother and her brother: why didn’t her mother try harder to get him back? Her mother’s story of the lost – no, taken- child was replicated in the stories of unmarried mothers, not good enough mothers, Aboriginal mothers.  I think that she provides as good an answer as can be made: that, in L.P. Hartley’s words, the past was a different country, and they did do things differently then.

But that is somewhat of a get-out clause.  While recognizing the pressures and constraints that might have caused people to act as they did, she does not downplay the deep sense of loss that exists at the heart of her family.  Things and people can be re-located and re-identified,  but events have moved on and the past cannot be recaptured. Some losses are never truly found again.

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: Australian Women Writers Challenge 2014.