Category Archives: Book Reviews 2024

Translated from the Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles

Spoiler alert

I can’t really talk about this book without revealing what I learned about it by the end of it, and I suspect that the confusion the reader is experiences is completely intentional on the part of the author. Told as a narrative in three alternating parts, named for their protagonists Harriet, Oskar and Yana, I found myself having to flip back to clearly distinguish the stories of the three characters because events and references kept recurring. I was starting to think that perhaps the problem was me, but having worked out what was going on by the end, I’m reassured that I understood more of it than I thought I did while reading.

There are three journeys, all heading towards Malma Station. (Any such place? I had heard of Malmo, but not Malma). It is a small station, surrounded by forest, with a lake. Our three travellers Harriet, Oskar and Yana are actually all related, but the journeys they are taking are all decades apart. Harriet, a young girl, is travelling with her father to bury her pet rabbit by the lakeside. Her mother and sister live in Malma, but Harriet has not seen them in a long time after the family fractured and the children were divided between the parents. Oskar is Harriet’s husband, decades later, and he is returning to Malma with Harriet who wants to revisit her earlier trip to Malma with her father. Oskar is frustrated by Harriet’s evasions, flightiness and infidelity, and their marriage is in tatters. Yana (whose name we later learn is an acronym for ‘You Are Not Alone’) is the daughter of Harriet and Oskar, and like her mother she too is the child of a broken relationship and she, too, lost her mother. She is travelling with a photo album that she has inherited after her father’s death, and she too is undertaking a pilgrimage to recover lost times. There is a sense of foreboding which pervades the novel as the train makes its way to Malma, but this dread is not always justified. In fact, I found the ending rather an anti-climax, albeit a disturbing one.

The circularity of the book is intentional. Mistakes and misjudgments are repeated across the generations, as children hear adult conversations that they shouldn’t, and are shuffled around like chess pieces. The book is steeped in unhappiness and families are opaque, with an edge of danger.

My library has decided that this book is a ‘saga’ on the label on the side. Even though it’s about three generations, it is not a ‘saga’ in the usual sense of the word. It’s far more intense than that, as these three generations do not so much move on and keep revolving around a hard knot of hurt and betrayal.

My rating: 7/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I think I must have read a review of it somewhere, although I can’t find where.

Translated by Leri Price

Sitting in the warmth, with the red leaves of the ornamental grapevine filtering the late-autumn sunlight, I finished this book feeling as if I had been on a very long journey to a strange land. It is a strange land to me: set mainly in Aleppo, Syria, this book has been translated from the Arabic and I felt the whole way through as if I was listening to a story-telling mode that is unfamiliar to me.

The book opens with a sudden, devastating flood in the village of Hosh Hannah in January 1907. Two women cling to a tree as bodies, wreckage and furniture stream past them in one of those red torrents that we are seeing all too often on the news today. One of the women, Shaha Sheikh Musa is the wife of Zakariya Bayazidi, who is absent from the village that day with his friend and adopted brother Hanna Gregoros as they are off visiting their brothel/casino ‘The Citadel’. She clutches her dead son as the water swirls around them. The other woman is Mariana Nassar, the local teacher. She sees the bodies of Hanna’s wife Josephine and her son being swept past, and those of her family, neighbours, students and family friends from other villages. As Zakariya and Hanna return to the ruined village, the flood marks for them a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, and they carry it with them for the rest of their lives. They bury the bodies, heedless of the distinction between Muslim, Christian and Jew, but they live on for decades later yearning for death to complete the cycle for them.

Just as we saw in Syria over a century later, when the country again ripped itself apart in the latest manifestation of its Civil War, Aleppo and the village of Hosh Hanna were religiously complex communities, with interpersonal links between religious groupings overlaid by deep enmity at a broader political level. Hanna had been brought into Zakariya Bayazidi’s Muslim family after his Christian family was massacred by the Ottoman Turks, and the interconnections between the families of the two men (sisters, nieces, nephews, grandchildren) continued across the novel in a series of lost chances, feuds and unconsummated love. As the twentieth century progresses and religious faultlines harden, politics and history make it harder for breaches to be healed.

I must confess that I found this book very difficult. The text is almost relentless, with only ten chapters in nearly 400 pages and no white space at all to separate one paragraph from the next. The chapters are not headed and so they feel as if they are stretching on interminably. I know little about Syrian history and the book is strangely devoid of descriptions which could help you gain a sense of place. Middle-eastern names are unfamiliar to me, and I kept getting confused between characters. The narrative moves between 1881,1903,1907, 1908, 1915, 1948 and 1951 but not strictly chronologically.

Nor is the book written in a way to help the reader. Paragraphs slip back and forward in time without warning, and the author introduces new characters almost at will and with little rationale. Big events happen abruptly. Some chapters are written in a third-person, detached tone, interspersed with italicized segments of Hanna’s autobiography, and then a story-within-a-story written by a minor character. If ever a book cried out for a family tree, it’s this one.

But, if you’re willing to persevere, the book repays the effort. Its closing pages close the circle, enclosing myriad regrets and lost opportunities. But be warned: you’ll have to work hard as a reader with this one.

My rating: 7/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

The first thought that comes into my mind if you say the word “grace” is the physical sense of poise, dignity and a quiet confidence. The other meanings of “grace” seem to me to have been co-opted by religion – particularly Christianity- and I’m rather less comfortable with that. In this book, Julia Baird explores the concept of “grace” in ever-widening circles: Our Souls, Ourselves in Part I; Our Circles in Part II, Our Strangers in Part III, Our Sins in Part IV and Our Senses in Part V. I think that even this structural skeleton of the book highlights its major weakness: trying to stretch the concept to cover too much. It is a digressive book, interweaving research, commentary and her own personal struggle with cancer, and I’m not sure that she completely succeeds here.

As it says on the front cover:

Grace is both mysterious and hard to define. It can be found when we create ways to find meaning and dignity in connection with each other, building on our shared humanity, being kinder, bigger, better with each other. If, in its crudest interpretation, karma is getting what you deserve, then grace is the opposite: forgiving the unforgivable, favouring the undeserving, loving the unlovable.

Which all sounds rather gooey and do-goody to me.

In Part I she does try to define “grace”, noting that it is wrapped in the everyday but still extraordinary (p. 8). Her definition which remains nebulous, comprises three elements:

1. to be fully, thrillingly alive
2. something undeserved
3. the ability to see good in the other and to recognize their humanity

Part I Our Souls comprises two chapters. Chapter 1 ‘2.3 Grams’ considers the 1907 experiment of weighing a soul: the difference in weight between when someone is still alive, and when they have died. Chapter 2: Anonymous Samaritans explores the phenomenon of blood donations, and why people might do something altruistic for people they will never meet.

Part II Our Circles has four chapters, two of which are largely autobiographical. In Chapter 3 ‘Grace Inherited’ she writes of her mother, who visited women in prison, most particularly Katherine Knight who was jailed for life without parole for the horrific murder of her boyfriend. Yet her mother spoke of Knight’s gentleness. This chapter is bookended by Baird’s response to her mother’s death, sitting vigil as she died, and then the grace of a friend afterwards. Chapter 4 ‘Icarus Flew’ continues the theme of grief as she talks about the death of an ex-boyfriend in a Garuda aircrash, and the difficulty of finding a place for grief as a former girlfriend in the hierarchy of grief. Chapters 5 (‘Inhale the World’: An Ode to the Fire of Teenage Girls) and Chapter 6 (‘On Being Decent Men’) are particularly apposite as the spotlight on domestic violence has turned to changing attitudes amongst men and boys – an approach that I find rather insufficient, personally.

Part III Our Strangers is again a bit of a grab-bag. Chapter 7 ‘Other People’s Lives’ points out that we see only a sliver of other people’s reality, and that grace would extend our lens further to see the whole person. Chapter 8 ‘The Comfort of Strangers’ talks about kindness of others, especially during travelling when through unfamiliarity and language problems, we are often at the mercy of people unknown to us. Grace? or just human decency and empathy? Chapter 9 ‘The Discomfort of Estrangers’ looks at the obverse: the harassment of online warriors liberated by anonymity. In Chapter 10 ‘Restlaufzeit: In the Time We Have Left We Must Dance’ she returns to the theme of illness and the precariousness and preciousness of life, both for herself and for others.

Part IV Our Sins is the longest section of the book, and while I found this the most interesting part of the book, Chapter 11 ‘Napoleon’s Penis: What We Choose to Remember’ does not seem to fit into the other chapters, which deal more with forgiveness and justice. In Chapter 11 she discusses public memory, the role of the historian, and what we choose to remember in public figures. Moving then to forgiveness and justice, in Chapter 12 she looks at ‘When You Can’t Forgive’; the expectation that women in particular should forgive, and the potential for weaponization of forgiveness by imposing it on the victim. This is picked up again in Chapter 13 ‘The Stolen Generations: What Does Forgiveness Mean?’ where she reminds us of Scott Morrison’s exhortation that forgiveness be displayed the part of Aboriginal people. This completely ham-fisted ‘suggestion’ was brusquely rejected by indigenous people who bridled at the inappropriateness of placing an expectation of forgiveness onto another person. In Chapter 14 ‘We Will Wear You Down with Our Love’ she turns to truth-telling, and the treatment of Stan Grant by the ABC and other media commentators, especially those from the right-wing press. Chapter 15 ‘The Callus: On Restorative Justice’ refers to the callus, the fibre that knits bones together, and she looks at Restorative Justice schemes as a way of knitting together after injury, starting with the story of Debbie McGrath, who participated in one such scheme eleven years after her brother was killed by his best friend. In Chapter 16 ‘A Broken Place: People Who Have Forgiven’ she explores examples of forgiveness rooted in faith, whether it be Christianity, Islam or Judaism. While I found these interesting, I think that they would have been better framed in a discussion of forgiveness in its own right, rather than trying to squeeze them into a ‘grace’ framework.

Part V ‘Our Senses’ is only short. Chapter 17 ‘Fever Dreams’ again refers to her experience of cancer, and her determination to be “fully, thrillingly alive”. In Chapter 18, the last of the book, she returns to the idea of ‘grace’, referencing the hymn Amazing Grace, from which she has taken the title.

As you can see, this book wanders off down a number of different pathways, all of which are enjoyable enough to follow, but which do not cohere into a rounded whole. Which is ironic really, as one of the definitions of ‘grace’ that she cites in the book is that given by Marilynne Robinson who described grace as an ethical “understanding of the wholeness of a situation”. This is the definition which most resonated with me, and the one to which I (unsuccessfully, I’m afraid) aspire.

My rating: 7.5/10

Read because: It was on the shelf.

Sometimes, a good essay is more forceful than a book, I reckon. This is what I kept thinking when reading this book, and although the pace picked up and the book ranged more widely once Part I was out of the way, I just felt as if I had been hit over the head with a mallet as the same argument was repeated again and again. I wish it had been a good long-form essay New Yorker-style rather than a 389 page book.

Churchwell’s argument, which she spells out succinctly in her prologue, is that there is a connection between Gone With the Wind, the instant bestseller of 1936 and the later movie adaptation which became the most successful of its time, and the events of January 6 2021 as the crowd, fortified by defeated-President Trump’s support (“So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And we’re going to the Capitol…”) crashed its way into the US Capitol. It is not so much about the history, but about the book and the film as paired phenomena:

‘Gone with the Wind’ provides a kind of skeleton key, unlocking America’s illusions about itself. When we understand the dark truths of American experience that have been veiled by one of the nation’s favourite fantasies, we can see how the country travelled from the start of the Civil War in 1861 to parading the flag of the side that lost that war through the US Capitol in 2021. That journey was erratic and unpremeditated, but America ended up there all the same. (p. 8)

The book Gone With the Wind appeared in 1936, and sold a million copies in less than six months, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937, was translated into at least 27 languages and became within a few years the best selling American novel of all time. The film Gone With the Wind was released in 1939 and smashed all records, and adjusted for inflation, is still the highest-grossing film of all time.

The book, which Churchwell has obviously read closely (and which I have not read at all), is more overtly racist than the film. David Selznick’s film consciously eliminated the novel’s many casually racist slurs, as a result of the lobbying from the film’s Black stars. However, the racism continued in the manifestation of the film as a phenomenon: the Black actors were not invited to the film’s premiere, and when Hattie McDaniel became the first Afro-American to win an Oscar for her portrayal of Mammy, she was sitting at a separate table to the rest of the cast, after Selznick had managed to overturn the Cocoanut Grove nightclub ban on black patrons.

Churchwell’s book follows the narrative of the book and film, starting off with ante-bellum Georgia and the rumblings of war. As Churchwell tells us over and over, Mitchell’s portrayal of plantation life (especially in the book) was gratuitously racist and infantalizing. I was relieved to move onto the post-war section of Churchwell’s book, even though I think I remember feeling (it was a very long time ago) that the film had lost impetus once Scarlett returned to Tara. But in Churchwell’s analysis, it is in the return to Tara that the book takes up its major purpose to reify the Lost Cause into American identity. Scarlett O’Hara is not the heroine of Gone With the Wind, instead the real heroine is Melanie, and it is not a love story, but a story of revenge. It is profoundly anti-democratic and consistent with fascism. And this, Churchwell argues, is what fuelled January 6.

I am not at all well-read in Reconstruction and Jim Crow legislation, many hours of listening to Heather Cox Richardson notwithstanding. I saw Gone With the Wind decades ago and have no particular wish to re-watch it, and I have never read the book and am not likely to do so. This book was too detailed for me, although admittedly I’m sure that it was not written for an Australian audience. I was deeply affected, though, by the sheer and graphic violence meted out by the Klan and other vigilante groups: I had not read this before.

Overwhelmingly, this is an angry book, which is ironic given that anger was the predominant driver of January 6 too. I felt that it was too repetitive in its critique, and would have been much punchier as a long-form essay. It felt a very long , and I was pleased to have reached the end of it so that I could move onto something else.

My rating: 7/10

Read because: I heard about it on a podcast, I think.