Category Archives: Book reviews

1981,  168 p.

Kimbofo at Reading Matters gave this book five stars, and I felt like reading something Christmas-themed.  It was a good choice: not too long, tinged with sadness,  seasonal enough without being mawkish.

I’m coming to have a great respect for the novella as a genre.  Its extra length encourages you to climb into the characters’ skins in a way that the short story doesn’t; the art of providing back-story and present action is even more demanding, and its brevity allows an intimate, close-up look at a particular circumstance without the need to tether it to a wider narrative sweep.

In this book  Constance, suffering from leukemia diagnosed soon after she has given birth to her daughter as an intentional single mother, returns home to her parents’ house to die.  Both her parents have already died, and her judgemental sister veers between officiousness, support, and pre-occupation with her own life and children.  It is a couple of days before Christmas and ill, and left alone for much of the day, Constance decides that she would like a Christmas tree.  Her sister is pushing hard for Constance to go to hospital to die: Constance refuses, but does accept the offer of  ‘a girl’ to come from the nearby orphanage to look after her.  Very quickly, I came to appreciate Constance’s clear-sighted and rather sardonic humour, and the young exuberance of Brigid, the young girl relishing the relative freedom despite the demanding task she has been asked to take on.  Her doctor and ex-boyfriend, Bill, is just the sort of doctor you would want in such a situation and his friendship goes beyond just the professional relationship.  The Christmas tree itself is small and covered only with blue lights that glow steadily on the otherwise bare tree.

There are three narrative threads, and Constance’s own delirium provides a useful narrative tool to weave them together.  We are living and breathing the slow process of dying in present time, she remembers meeting Jacob the father of her child, and she thinks back  and tries to make sense of her strained relationship with her parents.

This all sounds rather gruelling, and to a certain extent it is.  The book reminded me in many ways of Helen Garner’s The Spare Room, which was likewise short, intense and painful.  By the end of its 167 pages, you exhale with relief that it’s over, not necessarily in a negative sense, but because it’s time.

1999, 310 p.

I’d been meaning to read this for some time, but was spurred into action to read it before Nicole Kidman gives it the kiss of death when it is filmed next year (see Update below).  I hadn’t realized that it was based on a true story until reading the author’s notes at the end of the book, which made me re-think some of my initial skepticism about the details of the ending.

The book is set in various European cities in the 1920s and 30s, and explores the marriage of two artists, Einar Wegerer and his American wife Greta Waud.  It was at Greta’s suggestion that Einar first cross-dressed within their marriage, and his increasing excursions as ‘Lily Elba’ culminated in the world’s first sex-change surgery.

There are a series of triangles in this book: Greta and her relationship with her husband Einar/Lili;  the relationship between Einar/Lili and his childhood friend Hans, who himself took up with Greta; the relationship between Einar/Lily and his wife’s twin brother Carlisle.   There’s another triangle too- Greta has to work through her grief from the death of her first husband Teddy and her loss of her husband Einar as he transformed into Lily.  The complexity of their marriage raises questions about love, acceding to and anticipating a loved one’s wishes, sexuality, gender, loss,  identity and friendship.

The book has a quiet, restrained tone, and falls to its ending with a sad inevitability.   I wonder how it will come over on the screen- the ending is very cinematic.  I hope that Kidman is more in “The Hours” mode rather than “Australia” mode, but I think she’ll need more than a prosthetic nose.

Update: When I wrote this post several years ago, there was talk of Nicole Kidman playing, no doubt, the Lily role that is played by Eddie Redmayne in the film that has just been released.

Elizabeth Bott Spillius

The historian I admire most, Inga Clendinnen,  once said that

“history requires no special training other than curiosity, sharp wits and scrupulous attention to detail- plus a determination to honour the mysteriousness of the people you are studying”

I like that.  I particularly draw comfort from the worthiness of curiosity, and claim ‘curiosity immunity’ when I am being particularly observant (i.e. nosy) about other people around me.  And I think that ‘Family and Social Network’ by Elizabeth Bott satisfied my [prurient? scholarly?] curiosity about family interactions and networks with the wider community.

The book itself was written in the 1950s and has now taken on a historical edge that it certainly didn’t at the time.  It describes a team-based study undertaken by an anthropologist and psychologist and a team of researchers who aimed to interview twenty ‘ordinary’ families with young children.

It was refreshingly honest about the methodological problems they faced: making contact with their 20 families;  reconciling the different disciplinary perspectives of the two lead researchers;  resolving issues about researcher role and the formality and comparability of the research process.   You don’t often read an admission that methodology that

The anthropological method basically consists of messing about with a lot of variables and bits of information in a condition of acute uncertainty, in the hope that eventually one will see relationships one had not thought of before (p309)

Only one of the case studies was written up in great detail, but it was a fascinating one of a working class family with very strong family roots in a particular street in London.  The wife did not work, and saw her mother on a daily basis, and was thoroughly enmeshed in her kin relationships in a way that her husband was not.  The husband and wife had completely different networks, with no joint friendships or social activities.  This was contrasted with a middle class, more mobile family with weaker kin ties and shared friendship patterns.

In the acknowledgments Bott quoted Dr John Bowlby as remarking “It has the merit of being obvious once one has thought of it.  One wonders why one hadn’t…”, and this is very much true of this book too.  For  instance, she observes (and I find myself thinking I knew that… without actually knowing it) that there are ‘connecting’ people in families who bring together other more separated family members; that if there are two or three generations of mothers living in the same place in the same time, a matrilinear stress is more common; that friendships (especially friendships of men) are ‘trimmed” when a couple marries so that they can be joint friendships; that intense identity-forming friends tend to be absent after marriage so that they do not threaten conjugal loyalty and new friendships tend to be join and diminished in identity.  All the stuff of a million soap operas and novels.

At the end of the 2nd edition of the book is a lengthy chapter called ‘Reconsiderations’ where she returns, decades later, to the original study.  She talks about how her categories and opinions have been challenged, changed or firmed, and the relationship of later research to her original work.

At one level, the book seems far removed from Port Phillip in the 1840s but it’s stimulated my awareness of the effects of migration on kin and friendship networks, and how this might be described.

2008, 467 p.

The blurbs on the back of this book led me to think that I would be reading a crime novel,or a thriller but I don’t really think that it was either of these things.

The book is strung together by an unnamed narrator, who nurses a long-held hatred of her sister, Yuriko who was acclaimed for her beauty.  After a separation during adolescence, the younger sister returned to Japan and attended the same exclusive high-achieving high school as the narrator.  The story is then taken up by the sister, Yuriko who instead tells us that the narrator is a needy, manipulative woman, undercutting the authority of the narrator’s telling completely.  The two sisters’ stories are interspersed with the ‘journals’ of  school friend Kazue, and the male Chinese refugee accused of murdering both Yuriko and Kazue. They are only loosely termed ‘journals’ as they include direct speech and act mostly as  a vehicle for the author to present yet other perspectives.

So who done it? Stuffed if I know.  All these voices are deceptive and manipulative.

The book is rather sordid- both Yuriko and Kazue work as prostitutes and the lives of all these people are grubby and joyless.  There is much talk of beauty- Yuriko’s purported beauty; the beauty of bonsai; the beauty of intelligent youth that the school prides itself on nurturing- but it’s a putrid, cloying, trashy beauty.

Perhaps I’m too old, or too Western for this book.