The History Listen on ABC RN has a good podcast based on David Sornig’s excellent book Blue Lake which I reviewed here late last year. This podcast doesn’t so much re-tell the story as bounce off it creatively, and it’s well worth a listen.
And to see an amazing clear photo of the lake from 1869, check out the ABC RN History Listen webpage about the program.
Posted in Podcasts 2019, Uncategorized
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
Posted in Uncategorized
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.
Posted in Uncategorized
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
Posted in Uncategorized
The Massey lectures seem to be the Canadian version of Australia’s Boyer Lectures. The speaker is given a wide scope when they are invited to talk about “whatever they want”. Jennifer Welsh, as a political scientist, chose to speak of The Return of History. She is referencing Francis Fukuyama’s bold declaration in 1989 of ‘The End of History’ and his book, as she says, is the “dancing partner” to her lectures. Each lecture is conducted in a different Canadian city, taking her across the country over the series.
Jennifer Welsh is Professor and Chair in International Relations at the European University Institute in Florence (Italy) and a Fellow of Somerville College, University of Oxford. From 2013 until 2016, she was the Special Adviser to the United Nations Secretary General on the Responsibility to Protect.
In the first lecture “We Were Wrong“, she points out that liberal democracy has had an uneven trajectory, starting with the French Revolution and American War of Independence, with little of the inevitability of success that Fukuyama suggested. Before WWI, she says, there were only ten democracies; they doubled post-WWI but decreased again in the 1930s when the very idea of liberal democracy was questioned. By 1941, there were only nine again and the world looked to be on the edge of “a new dark age” as Churchill put it. The numbers of democracies quadrupled in the 1960s with decolonization and by the late 1980s, when Fukuyama made his bold claim of the “end of history”, half of the world’s population could be said to be living under democracies. However, from the viewpoint of 2016 (and this viewpoint has been oft-repeated since, and indeed intensified), democracy is in trouble. She sees that the world is divided into two groups: a liberal democratic core on the one hand, and on the other a large portion of the world “where the sun of history still shines”. They are separated by a gulf of incomprehension. She cautions us to recognize that liberal democracy was not inevitable. Indeed, she argues, history is back with a vengeance.
In the second lecture ‘The Return of Barbarism’ she argues that while history is returning, it is with a modern twist, exemplified by the IS’ use of swords to behead, similar to in medieval times, and the twenty-first century use social media to distribute that same beheading. ISIS, she suggests, is a product of 21st century interventions in the Middle East, and its spread is rooted in the failure of the Arab Spring. We have seen such things before. She draws parallels between the influx of foreign fighter to ISIS with the bolstering of Republican fighters in the Spanish Civil War, and she reminds us that some of the siege footage coming out of Madaya in Syria evokes the Siege of Leningrad during WWII.
“The Return of Mass Flight”, the third lecture, examines the question of refugees. She points out that in 2015, there were 65 million forcibly displaced people, the highest number in history. One in 113 people was either a refugee, asylum seeker or forcibly displaced. She goes through the development of the UNHCR (which was expected to last only three years) and the creation of the Refugee Convention, and asks ‘What is so different about today’? She points to four things: first, that it is quantitatively different; second, Europe’s response of fences and walls; third, the multiple motivations for immigration and fourth, the reliance on new technology exemplified by images of refugees with smart phones, which tends to undercut our idea of what a refugee should look like.
‘The Return of the Cold War’, Lecture 4, starts off with the Ukrainian Revolution of 22 February 2014 – something that felt momentous at the time, but soon began following a familiar trajectory. At the time of her lectures (2016), events in Syria, the emphasis on power supply through gas lines, and the revival of espionage all seemed to be following an old story too. However, she sees at least three differences between the original Cold War and current events. First, we do not see now the deep ideological challenges that underpinned the Cold War in the 1940s and 50s. Second, the original Cold War was global in scope, whereas now it is in the geo-political realms. Third, the status of both the USSR and US is different. Still, as she warns, it would be possible to get back to Cold War status again, and both sides need to look at their own actions if we’re to avoid that. Instead – and here’s her ‘history but with a twist’ theme coming through again- what we are seeing now is a modern hybrid of ‘sovereign democracy’ where elections are used to delineate the lines of power, and appeals to nationalism insulate the government from outside influences e.g. migration and foreign interference. She draws parallels between the Allied triumphalism at the end of WWI, and the smugness of the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.
In the fifth and final lecture, ‘The Return of Inequality’, she says that she’s going to return to the local. Actually, each of the other lectures has an intermission where she speaks to someone local from the city in which the lecture is delivered (e.g. someone of Japanese heritage who was interned during WWII, a director of a refugee centre etc). In spite of her intention to ‘go local’, she directs a lot of attention to the United States, and the increase of inequality world wide. She notes that in this 21st century ‘Gilded Age’ (and she references the original Gilded Age), inequality is bad for society and bad for the economy, it can easily morph into inequality of opportunity, and it has the potential to turn into political power and political influence. She notes that democracy has always been self-correcting and that it has always been anxious. Francis Fukuyama, whose ‘End of History’ thesis sparked her response in this lecture series is still optimistic, but she is more ‘Chicken Little’ than he is.
I enjoyed this lecture series. It was a bit frustrating that I couldn’t download them, so I only listened to them at home through wifi (although I could have paid for them on I-tunes). Still, what a wonderful thing that a lecture series can be accessed months, nay years! after it is delivered, on the other side of the world no less!
Posted in Podcasts, Uncategorized
2010, 887 pages – yes, 887 pages. Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor
Oooffgghh!! That was a long read! I was about to write that I rarely read big chunky historical fiction books but on reflection, that’s not true. I loved Kristin Lavransdatter, I eagerly await the final volume of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, and I really enjoyed Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy. Perhaps it’s that I often read trilogies and suchlike as they are released, several years apart. But I read this book all in one gulp.
I heard about it from a guide who took me on a historic walk in Cordoba last year, and I very much enjoyed reading about places that I had been in Granada, Seville and of course Cordoba.
It is set in 1564, long after the reconquest of Spain by the Christian Kings. However, as we see all too often in the midst of the sectarian wars that still afflict us, mere conquest is not enough to expunge the beliefs, stories and world view of a conquered people. The Islamic Morisco people in 16th century Spain are defeated, but restive, and uprisings erupt across Al Andalus, put down violently with massacres and enslavement on both sides.
Hernando is the son of an Arab woman and the Christian priest who raped her. His stepfather despises him, and he kidnaps Hernando’s one love, Fatima, and takes and mistreats her as a second wife to spite him. He is shunned by the Christians who educate him into their beliefs, and he secretly visits Hamid, an old teacher who educates him into the Islamic beliefs. These two streams of belief, which he can call on when he needs to, mean that he is distrusted by both sides as he moves between the two cultures.
It is his facility with both Christianity and Islamic that drives him to a project to unite the two faiths through the figure of Mary, who is revered by both traditions. I found this part rather tedious and I’m not sure that it was really necessary to the story. But overall, it is a rather driven narrative, which barely takes a breath. Just when you think that things are about to be resolved, yet another twist occurs…and hence the nearly 900 pages.
I hadn’t heard of this book, which is written by a best-selling author. I was surprised for a moment to find that Lisa at ANZLitLovers had read it (until I remembered just how widely she reads) and her review is much more detailed than mine. I wasn’t even sure if it was written by a male or female author, but after reading the sex scenes with too much throbbing manhood for my liking, I decided that the author must be a man. I was not wrong.
To have the book recommended by a Spanish speaker, keen to show the beauties of her cities, is no small thing. It complicates the easy historical concepts of ‘conquest’ and ‘reconquest’, and I very much enjoyed the descriptions. When I was told about the book, I was reassured that I’d be able to find it in translation which is just as well. I doubt that I’ll live long enough to translate a book of nearly 900 pages in Spanish!
Posted in Book reviews, Uncategorized
(From a few weeks back)
It’s a pity that Keira Knightly was case as Colette in this movie. She’s too well-known and I was consciously aware of that throughout most of this movie, except for one striking scene where she becomes very angry. Dominic West was very good, and disappeared better into the character. I must confess to never having read any of her work, and really knew little about her. Still, an interesting take on celebrity and marketing in the literary world of a century ago.
My rating: 3.5 stars
Posted in Movies 2019, Uncategorized
Did I mention to you that I’m off again? This time to Buenos Aires, Colombia and the Atacama Desert in Chile.
You can follow my adventures – and this time I hope that this rather edgy trip doesn’t have any adventures to speak of – at my other travel blog
https://landofincreasingsunshine.wordpress.com
I rather foolishly promised that I would write the first sentence of each entry in Spanish, so apologies to those who don’t read Spanish, and even deeper apologies to those who do!
Posted in Uncategorized
1909, 129 p.
This book was written to celebrate the golden anniversary of the creation of the Presbyterian Church of Victoria in 1859, combining the Synod of Victoria, the Synod of the Free Presbyterian Church of Victoria and the Synod of the United Presbyterian Church of Victoria. There was one section of the United Presbyterians who didn’t join until after 1870, but in terms of golden jubilees, 1859 was the date. (Mind you, the earlier book I read about Presbyterianism in Victoria dated the coming together of different strands of Presbyterianism to 1867 instead.)
Written as a celebration publication, the text is laid out quite beautifully, with red margins and decorated inhabited initials to mark the start of each chapter. Stewart has used a planting metaphor to organize his chapters, which are titled ‘Seed’ ‘Stem’ ‘Branching’ ‘Pruning and Grafting’ etc.
As this book goes up to 1909, it covers the Charles Strong controversy of the 1880s, which of course had not occurred when Sutherland published his earlier history of the Presbyterian Church in 1877. Charles Strong, who had been the pastor of Scot’s Church in Melbourne (probably the premier Presbyterian church in Melbourne)became the first minister of the Australian Church in 1885 after being charged with promulgating unsound and heretical doctrine and resigning his position from Scots Church. I think that if I’d been alive at the time, I would have been attracted to the Australian Church.
The Australian Church at the eastern end of Flinders Street (near Spring Street). It seated 1200 and opened in 1887 but the Church shifted to more economical premises in 1922. The Australian Church was finally dissolved in 1957. From the Australasian Sketcher. SLV http://handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/258170
The book has several plates showing prominent churchmen, mainly of the past but with some contemporary men (in 1909) as well. So many beards! There are few mentions of women, but there is a section on the Presbyterian Mission Womens Union, famous for its cookbook. I only now realize that I always called it the PWMU rather than PMWU.
The book is curiously silent about the 1890s depression. Perhaps in 1909 it was too soon to discuss such things.
Posted in Australian history, Book reviews, Uncategorized
2018, 352p.
I can’t remember quite why I borrowed this book when I saw it on the ‘New Books’ shelf at the library. Perhaps I’d heard good reviews of it or maybe it was its setting in Shetland that attracted me. I enjoy Shetlands on the ABC and I heard a cracking interview with the author of Vera and Shetlands, Anne Cleeves. What ever drew me to it, it’s a beautiful book that I almost didn’t want to end. It surprises me that the author is a young man. The book felt as if it were written by an older person (think, perhaps Marilyn Robinson’s Gilead or perhaps Elizabeth Strout’s work) in terms of its treatment of the relationships between people, infused with a sensitivity to place and space.
The Valley at the centre of the world is exactly that – a single valley with just five houses clinging to The Road that runs above and parallel to ‘The Burn’, the waterway that runs to the sea. The use of ‘The’ is intentional: there is only one. In its harsh but beautiful isolation, there is a timelessness about The Valley, although people are coming and going. Older man David has lived there all his life, as did his father and grandfather before him. Although he does not consciously think of it this way, he owns the valley. His wife Mary, came there thirty years ago and their daughters Kate and Emma have both shifted away. Sandy, a newcomer, was their daughter Emma’s partner and came back with her to the Valley but the relationship has broken up. He stayed on when Emma left, and with a respectful relationship to his inlaws (do you have inlaws if you’re not married?) and now landlords, he takes over the cottage and croft left vacant when Maggie, a very old inhabitant dies. There is Terry, a morose alcoholic single father, and Jo and Ryan, who have shifted into the Red House from the city, with Ryan a go-getter spiv taking advantage of the cheap rent. Finally, there is Alice, a crime writer (who reminded me not a little of Anne Cleeves herself) who has moved to the valley after the death of her husband. She has decided, somewhat presumptuously I think, to write about the Valley and is particularly drawn to Maggie as a character, hoping to find some secret or depth about this woman who had spent her whole life in the Valley.
The book revolves around the lives of this small group of people, who each have their griefs and flaws. It is a slow book, just as life itself in The Valley is slow. Soap opera? Perhaps, but it’s soap opera written with insight and generosity.
What is striking is the use of dialect in the conversation. There’s a glossary at the front, but it’s more the sentence construction and small words that slows you down as a reader. I don’t subvocalise or even mentally vocalise when I read, so this was a strangely auditory reading experience for me.
I really loved this book, and didn’t want it to finish.
My rating: 9/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library
Posted in Book reviews, Uncategorized
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 