I’ve been slack about keeping up my French; I haven’t read anything since 2023 when I read Quatre Soldats (Four Soldiers, 2003), by Hubert Mingarelli. But with encouragement from Rachel at Yarra Book Club, I’ve enjoyed buddy-reading one of Colette’s later works, La Chatte.

Readers who are better at French than me, or readers who read it in translation, will have a deeper appreciation of this novella, so feel free to put me straight if I’ve misunderstood something. I read about half of it with the dictionary by my side (so many plant names!!) and the rest in waiting rooms, ploughing on even if I didn’t understand everything — and enjoyed it much more.

It’s a story about a mismatched couple, and it’s not much of a spoiler to say it ends badly — depending on your point of view. IMO Camille is well rid of Alain…

They are very young. La Chatte was first published in 1933, but these days, a couple would most likely have a trial marriage of some sort and she’d have sent him on his way tout de suite. So, reading it almost a century later, the story is a reminder of a time when couples did marry young, and had to learn to adjust to marriage when immature and without much experience of life. But it’s also a reminder of a period of change in expectations about women, and how men did, or didn’t, adapt to that.

Camille is a modern girl. She is adventurous and bold. She is independent, uninhibited, vivacious (not demure!) and she doesn’t readily submit to others. She speaks up for herself and doesn’t defer to men or to older women who expect respect i.e. her MIL Maman. Camille loves new, modern things like airy, light-filled houses and Roadsters. She likes to dance and is relaxed about her own sexuality. And #understatement she dislikes Alain’s cat Saha.

What’s brilliant about this book is the way that we see so much of Alain’s perspective, both his thoughts and words, but the more we read the less we like him. He loves Camille because she’s pretty but he expects her to be always attractive for him. He doesn’t really see her as a person in her own right. Moreover, everything he says and does reveals him to be vain, immature, nostalgic for the past and unwilling to grow up. His room is cluttered with stuff from his past that he won’t let go. He is ridiculous in the things he says to and about the cat. He’s totally absorbed by it because he identifies with it. (He thinks it has dignity and (oh please!!) has an affinity with elite humans.) He cossets the cat and whispers sweet nothings to it, treating her like a woman.

This couple squabble about everything. The book begins with a game of cards. Alain reacts childishly when Camille doesn’t agree that the cat’s tricks are amusing, and he sulks off to bed. It is only a week to the wedding but he doesn’t want to give up his nights with the cat. Maman rebukes Camille for being scornful about Alain, and this is not the only time this middle-class mother condescends to Camille.

Alain and Camille argue a lot about the house they are to have. She wants it to be an extravaganza and he doesn’t really want to move there anyway. (He’s aghast when she mentions planning the house for the children they will have.) The cat comes to symbolise everything that’s wrong in this relationship: she thinks its habits are dirty (and when it comes to bones on the carpet, so do I), and she gets fed up with Alain justifying destructive habits like attacking the curtain cords. He says it’s because Saha thinks the cord is a snake, and she retorts that Saha has never seen a snake.

Why doesn’t Camille see the red flags? I guess because it’s 1933 and she doesn’t realise that his way of dealing with conflict is to bait her and then when she arcs up, he just shrugs his shoulders. She thinks that the cat is her rival (and puts her hatred into action) but there’s much more that’s wrong with the relationship than just his soppy obsession with a cat.

I thought at first that the atmospherics were wasted on me because it was such labour to keep translating words I didn’t know, but when I realised that the laburnum is a poisonous plant, I began to see that the garden is not a paradise. Alain loves to sit overlooking it with the cat on his lap, but it’s often gloomy, more like a walled-off prison.

I did wonder if I’d missed something about Maman. She seems a bit stunned by the brevity of their marriage, but is she perhaps rather pleased to have her only son back at home?

Author: (Sidonie-Gabrielle) Colette (1873-1974).
Title: La Chatte (The Cat)
Publisher: Le Livre de Poche (Hachette), 2004, first published 1933.
Preface by Nicole Ferrier-Caverivière
Cover design by Léonor Fini
ISBN: 9782253011712, pbk., 189 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from Language International 21ドル.95

I had a wonderful day yesterday at the 2026 Melbourne Jewish Book Week (MJBW). The theme for this year was ‘Connections’, and I certainly felt connected when I met up with authors and publishers who I know personally. It’s always nice to be able to thank an author F2F for a book I’ve enjoyed and also *wink* let others know that I am waiting not-so-patiently for the next book. The atmosphere was great, the bookshop was irresistible, and the ‘picnic lunch boxes’ were better than usual. But the best connection of the day was when The Spouse met up with an author with whom he’d been at university more than 50 years ago!

Our first session of the day was titled ‘Hamas and its Two Million Hostages’. The keynote speaker was Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib in conversation about his essay in the current issue of the Jewish Quarterly (on the TBR) with Kylie Moore-Gilbert, whose book title speaks for itself: The Uncaged Sky, 804 Days in an Iranian Prison (2022, see my review here. Kylie Moore-Gilbert was an excellent choice of interviewer and Alkhatib’s appearance via Zoom from the US was warmly received in an audience of mostly progressive Jews. It was good to hear a cautiously optimistic view of events. If you are a regular reader you know that I don’t post about current wars, so suffice to say that here is the program description:

For almost 20 years, Hamas has ruled Gaza and prepared for a battle that it knew it could not win. As Ahmed Fouad Alkhatibwrites in his Jewish Quarterly essay, their path to victory has rested on sacrificing the lives and livelihoods of over 2.2 million Gazans. Ahmed is a Palestinian American humanitarian activist and blogger. In this live Zoom event, he will be in conversation with Kylie Moore-Gilbert, renowned Middle East expert, author, academic and former hostage of the Iranian regime.

You can buy a copy of JQ or subscribe as I do here.

The Spouse went off to hear ‘Remnants: When The Past Comes Home’ with Sophie Stern, Joseph Toltz, Michael Visontay and moderator Benjamin Preiss while I headed off to the Beth Din Book Club, with Bram Presser (author of The Book of Dirt, 2017, see my review) and writer and critic Tali Lavi talking about Howard Jacobson’s Howl. (On the TBR). As most people know by now this was the first novel to tackle the aftermath in London of the Hamas attack on October 7th, and by all accounts it’s a discomfiting read, especially for those of us who have Jewish friends and relations navigating antisemitism anywhere. I’ve also bought two hostage memoirs but haven’t wanted to read them yet either. There’s a review at The Guardian here, and a very different one here.

We went to the next session together: Rachel Cockerell in Conversation with Michael Visontay, author of Noble Fragments (2024) see my review. Rachel talked about her new book, Melting Point, Family, Memory and the Search for a Promised Land (2024). Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction (2024), Melting Point tells the fascinating story of her forebears who were pioneers of a would-be Jewish Promised Land in Galveston Texas. This is the book description:

On June 7th 1907, a ship packed with Russian Jews sets sail not to Jerusalem or New York, as many on board have dreamt, but to Texas. The man who persuades the passengers to go is David Jochelmann, Rachel Cockerell’s great-grandfather. It marks the beginning of the Galveston Movement, a forgotten moment in history when 10,000 Jews fled to Texas in the lead-up to WWI.

The charismatic leader of the movement is Jochelmann’s closest friend, Israel Zangwill, whose novels have made him famous across Europe and America. As Eastern Europe becomes infected by anti-Semitic violence, Zangwill embarks on a desperate search across the continents for a temporary from Australia to Canada, Angola to Antarctica. He reluctantly settles on Galveston, Texas. He fears the Jewish people will be absorbed into the great American melting pot, but there is no other hope.

In a highly inventive style, Cockerell uses exclusively source material to capture history as it unfolds, weaving together letters, diaries, memoirs, newspaper articles and interviews into a vivid account of those who were there. Melting Point follows Zangwill and the Jochelmann family through two world wars, to London, New York and Jerusalem – as their lives intertwine with some of the most memorable figures of the twentieth century, and each chooses whether to cling to their history or melt into their new surroundings. It is a story that asks what it means to belong, and what can be salvaged from the past.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only person in the audience who’d never heard of this settlement!

We went to the next session together too. ‘Death, Grief and Finding the Light’ featured moderator poet and critic Magdalena Ball with Katia Ariel (Ferryman, The life and deathwork of Ephraim Finch, see reviews at Goodreads here); Joanne Fedler (Bring Us Home from Sorrow, see GR reviews here and my review of The Whale’s Last Song (2024) here) and Andrea Goldsmith (The Buried Life, 2025, see my review here and reviews of her other novels here.)

I was curious about Andrea Goldsmith’s inclusion in this panel about grief, because although there is a death in her most recent novel The Buried Life, it is more about other losses, the kind of losses that one accumulates along the way, partly because there are aspects of the self that are buried. Her characters find a love that is new, so it is uplifting even though there is sorrow. I liked the way, referring to her own bereavement when her partner Dorothy Porter died, she talked about how one ‘carries the person on’, and this really resonated with me because it’s true that the relationship changes and becomes something different in one’s ongoing life.

Our next session was the rather sobering ‘Nazis in Australia, Fact, Fiction, Print and Screen’. Chaired by Simon Holloway, (Manager of Community and Corporate Programs at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum), it featured journalist Mark Aarons, film-maker Dan Goldberg, and novelist Danny Ben Moshe. Mark Aarons is the pioneering investigative journalist whose 1986 ABC radio documentary series Nazis in Australia was the catalyst for the formation of the Special Investigations Unit (SIU, 1987-1994) for war criminals under the Hawke government. Dan Goldberg is the documentary film-maker whose ‘Hunt for the Last Nazis’ is currently screening on SBS, and Danny Ben Moshe is the author of The Watchmaker’s War (2026), see my review here.

In response to Simon Holloway’s question ‘why now? Dan Goldberg said that it’s because enough time has elapsed for some to have forgotten, but also for some to still be alive. Well, I am of an age to remember the SIU and its collapse. I remember feeling very conflicted about it at the time. I’m no lawyer but it seemed obvious to me that the age and frailty of those giving testimony was going to make convictions almost impossible, but I also felt that the three very old people who were charged, deserved — at the very least — the stress that their lawyers were claiming. And then I felt guilty that I was assuming they were guilty when under Australian law they were entitled to be presumed not guilty until convicted. It was morally wrong, of course, that it had taken so long for these alleged war criminals to be uncovered among us, and it was The Watchmaker’s War that alerted me to the messy history of allowing them to migrate here in the first place. There was consensus among the panel that there is a case for finding out why, after all this time, the archives are still heavily redacted.

My next session was called ‘Intersections, Shared Histories, Different Journeys’. Chaired by Brazilian-Australian author and academic Marcelo Maghidman, it featured Merav Fima , Ayelet Tsabari, and Sanjiva Wijeshina. This session showcased the diversity of the Jewish experience through Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi and non-Jewish perspectives, and this is a diversity that I have only just begun exploring because I grew up among Ashkenazi (eastern European) Holocaust survivors and have only recently started learning about the Iberian Peninsula and Middle Eastern Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews. (People who talk such rubbish about Israel as a coloniser really ought to learn a bit of Jewish and Middle Eastern history!)

I had read Merav Fima’s short story collection Late Blossoms (2025, see my review here), and she is also the author of the forthcoming Sephardic migration novel The Rose of Thirteen Petals and the Pomegranate Tree (Running Wild Press, 2026). Ayelet Tsabari is a Canadian author of Yemeni heritage and I had also read her collection The Best Place on Earth (2016, see my review here) so I was very pleased to (at last!) be able to buy Songs for the Broken Hearted (2024), thanks to The Avenue Bookstore who ran the festival bookshop.

But Sanjiva Wijeshina was unknown to me (and to my libraries), so I have bought his book for the Kindle because it sounded fascinating. Sri Lanka, Serendib & The Silk Road Of The Sea is about about Sri Lanka’s role as a major hub in Indian Ocean trade since ancient times. The catalyst for writing it was his discovery of correspondence between Sri Lankan and Jewish merchants. I knew there were Arab merchants trading in Indonesia long, long before it was unified under that name but although I read something about the Silk Road so long ago I can’t even remember its name, there’s obviously a lot more to learn!

Alas, I was about half way through this most interesting session when I began to fade because my (annoying) heart just isn’t pumping enough oxygen through the system. I retrieved The Spouse (and chauffeur) from his next session and so *pout* I missed The Art of Satire (with Steve Toltz! A Rising of the Lights is on my TBR) and ‘The Human Touch: Creativity In The Age of AI’ and the closing session with Jonathan Freedland via Zoom with Tali Lavi.

Alfred Heart Health had better have fixed this up before the next LitFest I go to or There Will Be Complaints!

This month’s starter book for #6Degrees hosted by Kate at Books are My Favourite and Best is Land by Maggie O’Farrell. I haven’t read it, and I’m unlikely to because although I enjoyed After You’d Gone (2000), I haven’t ‘got on with’ her other novels that I’ve bought and so I recycled them unread.

The surname O‘Farrell reminds me of Margaret Atwood’s dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), where the women are given a patronymic-style name combining ‘of’ with the first name of the man who holds them captive as in ‘Offred’ or ‘Ofwarren.’ Probably, few of us today think of the cover without thinking of images from the overwrought TV adaptation but mine was the 1987 Virago edition, read so long ago there’s no review here on the blog. But it also had a very interesting First Edition cover which Wikipedia tells me was designed by Tad Aronowicz with a collage by Gail Geltner. The way this artist has combined a Stalinesque authoritarian figure with Medieval iconography of the virgin with child is just brilliant. Cover design that shows how well the designer has grasped the ideas within the book is rare these days.

No, let’s not talk about AI depredations that are making inroads into creative culture, it’s just too depressing.

This makes me think of the inverse of an artist being inspired by writing: that is, of art inspiring some writing. Last weekend I went to the Jewish Museum for an uplifting writing session with the inimitable Lee Kofman, co-editor with Tamar Paluch of Ruptured (2025, see my review). Towards the end we visited the current exhibition of works by the photo-artist Anne Zahalka so that we could be inspired to write about it. If you are in Melbourne don’t miss the opportunity to see this exhibition, it’s on until September. You can see from this link how brilliantly Zahalka subverts iconic Australian imagery: I chose to write about the photo on the left which subverts Max Dupain’s iconic B&W photo, ‘Sunbather’ (1937).

If you read my review of the photographer Olive Cotton (2025), you might remember how I responded to a quotation about the creative enterprise behind her most famous photo ‘Teacup Ballet’:

Here we see the photographer doing the job of an office-dogsbody, buying the cups and saucers, and waiting until the day’s work was over before tackling the creative task that had been on her mind all day. This was when Olive was working with the famed photographer Max Dupain: they had known each other at school, and shared a love of photography. They married and were together for six years, but Olive’s role in the studio was not an equal partnership.

So you will know why I want to read Max Dupain, A Portrait (2024), also by Helen Ennis. It is (amazingly) the first biography of this most famous and influential 20th century Australian photographer. The bio was highly commended at the ACT Literary Awards 2025, shortlisted for the Mark & Evette Moran Nib Literary Award 2025, and longlisted for the 2026 Magarey Medal.

But first I want to re-start reading Peter D Mathews biography of John A Scott, From Poet to Novelist (2022). I started reading it, and read bits and pieces of it about the books by John that I’ve read, (of which only N (2014) is reviewed here on the blog) but I never finished the bio or reviewed it.

But now is the time because #Scoop! John has a new novel coming out in September and #LuckyMe! I have had the opportunity to read it. The Boy Who Loved Dolls, of course, brilliant and I am looking forward to being able to publish my thoughts about it closer to publication date, but in the meantime you can pre-order it from Puncher & Wattman. (The cover is very dark, but so is the book!)

So there we are, from a bestseller to more of a literary niche with The Boy Who Loved Dolls…

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Next month (September 5, 2026), we start with your book group’s current selection if you have one, or start with the book that you’re currently reading. That’s going to be The Hungry and the Fat by Timur Vermes!

For a while it was possible to take out an annual subscription to Pushkin Press, and City of Lions was one of the books that came to me in 2016. It’s a pair of essays, nostalgic in tone, for a city that was one of many that bore the brunt of 20th century nationalism. See Wikipedia for its history: it’s long and complex.

This is the book description:

Lviv, Lwów, Lvov, Lemberg. Known by a variety of names, the City of Lions is now in western Ukraine. Situated in different countries during its history, it is a city located along the fault-lines of Europe’s history.

City of Lions presents two essays, written more than half a century apart – but united by one city.

Józef Wittlin’s sensual and lyrical paean to his Lwów, written in exile, is a deep cry of love and pain for his city, most of whose familiar faces have fled or been killed.

Philippe Sands’ finely honed exploration of what has been lost and what remains interweaves a lawyer’s love of evidence with the emotional heft of a descendant of Lviv.

With an illuminating preface by Eva Hoffman and stunning new photographs by Diana Matar, City of Lions is a powerful and melancholy evocation of central Europe in the twentieth century, with a special resonance for today’s troubled continent.

Józef Wittlin’s essay is a lament for a city that he knew as Polish. He was a poet and a novelist and it shows in the way that he evokes the city of his memories. By the time he wrote this essay he had escaped the Nazis via Paris to New York, and in 1946 he was coming to terms with all that had been lost. It is not just a lament for the vibrant multicultural city, rich with fascinating characters and history in every street, and not just for all the Jewish and Polish people who were murdered, but also for the nationality of the city. Over time Lwów had been subject to numerous empires as overlords but it had not lost its original distinctive character.

• In the 19th century it was Lemberg, under the Austro-Hungarian Empire’
• Post WW1 it was Lwów, in independent Poland;
• In WW2 it was Lvov under the Soviets; until
• in 1941 it was Lemberg under the Nazi occupation; and
• in 1944 it was Lviv after the Red Army liberated it and it became part of Ukraine.

But in the wake of WW2 it had been ethnically cleansed and the Allies at the Yalta Conference had assigned it to Ukraine where it is now known as Lviv.

Philippe Sands’ essay — written half a century later — refers to Wittlin’s as an idyll, but it’s not meant pejoratively. Sands is the internationally recognised human rights lawyer who wrote East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. (2016, see my review). He visits Lviv time and time again in homage to his grandfather, Leon Buchholz, one of the few members of his family who survived the Nazis, but who never spoke of the murders of those who did not. But Lviv is also the heart of East West Street, because the two men who worked long and hard to bring crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide into international law during the Nuremberg Trials, were both born and educated in Lviv. He retraces their steps but is appalled to find how little acknowledgement there is in modern Ukraine of the atrocities that took place there, or of the Polish Jewish lawyers Hersch Lauterpacht or Raphael Lemkin and their legacy. Even worse, he meets the sons of two prominent Nazis, only one of whom repents his father’s crimes. The other still supports his father’s actions and feels free to triumphantly announce that among friends who share his views. Sands’ essay is a lament for lost values of common decency, which flourished so briefly after WW2.

The essays are accompanied by B&W photos of the old city. The photographer, Diana Matar investigates issues of history, memory and state sponsored violence, through images.

See also ‘Lament for a Lost World’ at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings.

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Other titles from my Year of Pushkin Subs are:

• Madame De (1951) by Louise de Vilmorin, translated by Duff Cooper, see my review
• The Third Tower, Journeys in Italy (1936) by Antal Szerb, translated by Len Rix, see my review
• A Childhood (1978) by Jona Oberski, translated by Ralph Manheim, see my review
• Life of a Counterfeiter (2014) by Yasishi Inoue, translated by Michael Emmrich, see my review
• Rendezvous in Venice (2003) by Phillipe Beaussant (but I read the French version instead, see my review)
• Yevgeni Onegin (1883) by Alexander Pushkin, translated by Anthony Briggs see my review

I still have three Pushkin titles to read from that year:

• The Crew (1923) by Joseph Kessel, translated by André Naffis-Sahely
• The Flight (1939) by Gaito Gazdanov, translated by Bryan Karetnik
• Odessa Stories (1931), by Isaac Babel, translated by Boris Dralyuk

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I read this book at this time for #20Booksof Winter hosted by Annabel.

To see my progress, click here.

Authors: Józef Wittlin and Philippe Sands
Title: City of Lions
Introduction by Eva Hoffman
Translation of My Lwów by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Photography by Diana_Matar
Cover design by David Pearson
Publisher: Pushkin Press, 2016
ISBN: 9781782271178, pbk with French flaps and maps on the endpapers , 158 pages

South African author Karen Jennings (b.1982) came onto my radar as one to watch when her sixth book, An Island (2020, see my review) was longlisted for the 2021 Booker. I also read Crooked Seeds, (2024, see my review) longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the Women’s Prize in 2025. And though her Wikipedia page is a bit of a muddle, the bio section provides an interesting snippet which has a bearing on the genesis of her latest novel, First of December.

From 2023-2024, Jennings was a postdoctoral writer in residence as part of the Cape Panel Project at the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past (LEAP), Stellenbosch University.

The LEAP website tells me that

The Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past (LEAP) is dedicated to the quantitative study of African economic and social history. It brings together scholars and students interested in understanding and explaining the long-term economic development of Africa’s diverse societies. Since 2023, LEAP is a Type-1 centre within the Department of Economics at Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

What has this got to do with the novel? I am interested in novels which tell the stories of societies in transition, and First of December tells a story of one decisive week during the transition from slavery in the Cape, South Africa. A transition which had decisive consequences for the economy as well as for individuals.

I had read Dan Sleigh’s epic Islands (2002, translated by André Brink, see my review) so I had a little knowledge of slavery in the Cape during the era of Dutch occupation, firstly by the Dutch East India Company (a.k.a. the VOC) which traded from 1602-1799 and then by the Dutch government. That slavery powered the replenishment stations (stopovers) at the Cape that enabled shipping on the trade routes to the Indies, and later, to the New World. Between Wikipedia, Dan Sleigh’s novel and the Historical Note at the beginning of First of December, I pieced together a history I did not know.

The Dutch had imported slaves from the East Indies and India, and some from East Africa, Mozambique and Madagascar, and although they did not enslave the local Khoesan people (then known as Hottentots), these were often forced into indentured servitude. But during the Napoleonic War when the French occupied the Netherlands, the British realised the strategic value of the Cape, and took possession of it in 1806 to prevent the French blocking their trade routes. Britain promptly abolished the Slave Trade in 1807, but not the practice of slavery. That was not abolished until 1 August 1834, to take effect from 1 December 1834. (BTW The Boer republics, (the Transvaal and Orange Free State) maintained slavery for decades, until they were annexed after the Second Boer War in 1902).

Why the gap between the dates of abolishing the slave trade and emancipation? Well, I’m no scholar of slavery, but since the transition involved not only ‘training the slaves for freedom’ whereby they had to work as ‘apprentices’ for their masters for a further five years, paid or otherwise, it also included compensation for the slave owners. Can it just be coincidence that a gap of about 30 years is about the same as life expectancy at that time, and that by the time 30 years elapsed there would be fewer slaves alive that a slave owner could claim compensation for?

Needless to say, compensation was not paid to the slaves and there was no provision made for their transition to the new economy.
Do you need to know all this? Of course not, the Historical Note tells you everything you need to know. #HistoryNerd I was just curious about the gap between the dates, and the reasons why the British occupied the Cape at that time….

So…
The story opens a week before that significant date as a nameless slave flees from her master at an Inn. She has no money, nothing but the clothes she stands up in and some food scraps. She had had a love affair with September who escaped some time beforehand because he was beaten for some unavoidable lateness when beating was no longer allowed. His master set him free to avoid hassles in court, and September took off without a backward glance. This girl mourns for him and for the baby she lost as well as she scrambles across the inhospitable landscape, desperately avoiding anything that might lead to recapture..

Also struggling to survive, but in a different way are James and his wife Caroline. She was warned not to marry him because he’s a dreamer and a schemer, but he set her hormones fluttering and here they are in the hot and dusty Cape where he continues to lose their money in his investments. He’s an odd character, a frenzied kind of a man, perhaps these days we might say he is hyperactive and might be okay if he had a bit of Ritalin. He’s in constant motion, like a whirlwind, striding through the streets as if he owns them, and accepting the respect of others because he’s spent money that he doesn’t have, impressing them with expensive accoutrements. His mind is always active, always impulsive, always sensing every opportunity and planning his fortune so as to prove his father wrong. But he cannot take a trick. When the story opens the ship he chartered has foundered in a storm, and the cargo that the newly freed slaves were going to buy to make him rich, is nothing but salvage and even that is being pilfered by the locals in the dark.

Caroline hates him. She is sometimes nostalgic for the romance that has withered and died, but she blames him for their awful life in this miserable colony. She almost died from typhus, and has lost her looks because of it. She can’t cope with crowds and social life, and she has nothing to do, and since James does not even visit her at night, she has no children to assuage her loneliness. The turmoil in the streets and the fear of an uprising keeps her imprisoned at home, where she has no one but loyal, faithful Leah. She thinks that Leah loves her, so you’d think she might be kinder to Leah, but that’s not how it is between mistress and slave… Leah knows that, Caroline doesn’t.

Though there are brief moments of hope, things go badly for the nameless escapee. Hurt, hungry and afraid, she has a week to survive on her own, and the concluding lines don’t augur well for a vulnerable woman.
As the church bells ring to signal the moment of emancipation, she is elated. She has waited so long, and suffered so much on her headlong flight, and now she is with others newly free. She doesn’t want to wait with them to start out for Cape Town in the morning, she wanted to start at once.

…knowing only that she had to go, she had to get outside and start. Coming out into the rain, the fresh night, everything washed clean, walking down the stone steps of the church, out into her freedom, and having nowhere to go. (p.183)

As must have been the case on that fateful day, an uncertain future waits for all of them.

Author: Karen Jennings
Title: First of December
Publisher: Text Publishing 2026
Cover design by Imogen Stubbs
ISBN: 9781923058910, pbk., 183 pages
Source: Kingston Library

Mirandi Riwoe’s third novel A Short History of Longans begins in 2049 with the poignant story of Daniel, grappling with old age, with troubling memories and with the effects of climate change on his beloved longan tree. There has been a ferocious storm and it seems as if this irreplaceable tree is doomed.

Daniel has learned the hard way that solitude is the best way to ward off intrusive strangers who want to rake up a painful past, so he’s wary of an inquisitive neighbour called Olivia. In a novel composed of linked short stories and vignettes, this beginning — and the possibility of friendship blooming in the aftermath of the storm — captured my interest more than any other… so I was sorry to come to the end of ‘Winter’ and find that Daniel’s future, like that of the planet remains unresolved.

‘Autumn’ is set in the year 2000, and this section also shows Riwoe’s skill in depicting elderly characters with respect. Written from the perspective of Wendy, who has early onset dementia, it shows her confusion and her distress about her daughter’s realisation of what her forgetfulness signifies. But it also shows Wendy’s irrepressible spirit.

Not for the first time in reading this book, the Family Tree at the front clarified who Wendy is, and her relationship to Daniel.

In ‘Summer, the novel then travels back a further half-century to Los Angeles and the ambitions of Ruby, hoping to land a role in a film, and finding that her opportunities, such as they are in the era of the ‘casting couch’, clash with her responsibilities to her son back in Australia. Brought up by Ruby’s Aunt Pearl, James doesn’t know who his real mother is. Once again, this is a story that invites the reader to become invested in the fate of the characters.

But…

After these first three characters, there is a marked reduction in the number of pages about the remaining characters. Daniel, Wendy and Ruby get round about 50 pages or so; the reader gets to know them, and is engaged with their prospects. But Maria, Michael and Honora only get between 8 and 12 pages, barely enough to get a sense of who they are and how they relate to their descendants. Eliza only merits two-and-a-half pages, and Ada only five. The penny dropped when I realised that the family tree plays another role in this novel. Its structure mirrors the family tree.

Like many, this family tree reflects the fact that families had many more children in the past, before there was effective birth control. But frustratingly for genealogists — amateur or otherwise — there’s usually more information to be found in more recent generations, while ancestors further back in time are harder to flesh out. This may change in our digital era, but records from the 20th century onward became more comprehensive. Assuming the ancestors lived in a well-ordered, stable society (and that’s a big assumption to make at any time), and assuming that informants were honest and reliable (another big assumption when breaches of custom, mores and law had to be covered up in conservative eras) — there may be government, church, military and newspaper records; letters and journals if an ancestor was literate; and perhaps photos if the ancestor could afford them. There may also be more recent oral history, reliable or otherwise.

18th and 19th century records are less helpful. There may be shipping records, convict registers, and church records of births, marriages and deaths. Occasionally there are newspaper records. Lower literacy levels means that there are fewer letters and journals to access. A novelist who wants to create characters in these earlier periods of history has to rely more on imagination. Or, as in Riwoe’s novel, make a virtue of the reality that not much can be known of the stories of the generations born in 19th century Australia by creating a tapestry of brief vignettes, and weaving among them the tantalising legend of the Chinese ancestor who might/might not have been a bushranger.

Although there are many grievances for these characters, all of whom are Othered in one way or another, the reverse chronology shows that (as you’d expect) racism and stereotyping were more overt in the earlier time frames when there was legal and social licence that allowed it. ‘Spring’ set in the 19th century has rather a lot of characters, all of whom suffer from prejudice against their Irish or Chinese heritage. One shocking incident causes an unintended death but there is a form of redemption for the perpetrator.

While I think it’s fair to say that some readers might find the structure confusing, this is what Mirandi Riwoe has to say about it in the press release:

‘…I love a clue-puzzle novel. I loved what Swifties refer to as Easter eggs.* I love finding links in stories, that ‘aha’ moment. One of the reasons I wrote the novel going backwards was to explore how a character or a person might be perceived in the present, perhaps negatively or with prejudice, but how an incident of revelation revealed in the past might unpack those (present) behaviours or events. I hope that my readers might enjoy some ‘aha’ moments too.’

*I had no idea what Riwoe meant by this. Something to do with Taylor Swift? I looked it up. Yes, apparently so. Enthusiasts find clues in her lyrics, music videos, social media, and even her outfits. Who knew? Not me.

See also the review at the Guardian and at Readings.

Author: Mirandi Riwoe
Title: A Short History of Longans
Publisher: UQP (University of Queensland Press), 2026
Cover design by Sandy Cull
ISBN: 9780702269004, pbk., 256 pages
Source: review copy courtesy of UQP

Reading this book reminded me of how much I used to enjoy browsing in secondhand bookshops. SJ Watson’s debut novel Before I Go To Sleep was one of those much-hyped books that passed me by when it was released in 2011, but by the time I stumbled on it for a paltry two dollars in a secondhand shop, I was curious enough to buy it.

Most of what I’ve read in this genre (which is not much) has been annoyingly predictable, with plodding characterisation and ‘cliffhanger’ chapter endings designed for the movie tie-in. But this one was not like that. For those who missed the hype and haven’t seen the film, (beware: lots of spoilers in the Wikipedia description) this is the book description:

Every morning Christine Lucas wakes without memories. Her past, her present, the people she loved — all are erased every night when she goes to sleep.

Each day she must try to piece her life together. Each day the questions come. Who can she trust when she can’t remember yesterday? How can she love without memory.

And why is she so frightened?

So there are two men in her life. One is her husband Ben, who has placed named photographs in the bathroom so that she can identify who he is, and who patiently answers the same questions day after day, about how she has lost her memory after a traumatic event. The other is Dr Nash, who (unknown to Ben) is helping her to recover her memory, and he does this by providing her with a journal to record her day before she goes to sleep and forgets everything all over again. This is conducted in secrecy because Ben is fed up with quacks trying to cure her.

It’s not a spoiler to note that almost anyone will notice that there are no other people in Christine’s life. No family, no friends, and no visitors to the house. Odd. But the explanations are so plausible that the reader is torn between wondering which of these two men is not what he seems and whether one of them represents a threat to her, or if the odd fragments of memory that surface are her imagination compensating for what has been lost.

So it’s an interesting book, even if it is a bit long for itself. I can’t say much more than that because the whole interest in reading it, is the fun of weighing the evidence and vacillating between solutions to the mystery. I got my two-dollars-worth.

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I read this book at this time for #20Booksof Winter hosted by Annabel.

To see my progress, click here.

Author: S J Watson
Title: Before I Go To Sleep
Publisher: Text Publishing, 2011
Cover design by W H Chong
ISBN: 9781921758980, pbk., 366 pages
Source: personal library, purchased secondhand 2ドル.00

It’s so long since I bought this novel (at what prompt, I wonder?) that it came as a surprise. It’s the second novel of the late South-African born UK resident Zoë Wicomb, and it tells the story of Marion, the daughter of parents classified as ‘Coloured’ in apartheid South Africa, who had ‘passed’ as White since before she was born.

People who did this in South Africa, were called ‘play-whites’, a deceptively light-hearted term but the subterfuge was deadly earnest. People chose to over-ride the arbitrary classifications of the Population Registration Act of 1950 so that they could access the benefits of a racist society, but the personal cost was profound: a traumatic loss of identity; of family, of culture and traditions; and a sense of belonging. And when apartheid South Africa transitioned into the ‘new’ multiracial South Africa, the personal cost also included guilt and shame when secrets kept for decades were revealed.

Marion’s has been an unhappy life, because the strain of living a lie made her parents’ marriage bitter, and Marion — wholly ignorant of her origins — grows up estranged from all her family and anyone who might give the game away. When she finds out, she is blindsided by the impact on her identity, and furious with her father.

Wicomb treads a fine line between depicting Marion’s reality and avoiding opportunities to create her as a sympathetic character. The reader is not meant to like her or feel sorry for her; but she is meant to represent the consequences of opportunistic decisions made in the immediate aftermath of being suddenly classified into rigid racial categories.

The whole thing came about by accident. Not knowing that traffic police was a job reserved for Whites, (because in apartheid’s warped justifications, how could you have a Coloured man telling a White man what to do!) John applied for a job and the man at reception assumed he was White from the colour of his skin. From there it was comparatively easy to transition from poor rural Coloured to lowly-paid White traffic cop. Although his wife Helen chose to have a #MeToo experience with a town councillor in order to get the requisite paperwork. (One of many secrets she kept to herself until her death.)

By the time the story opens, John is just a crusty old man, on the way to dementia. He has no airs and graces, but is immensely proud of his daughter, his little mermaid. The symbolic significance of this is that Marion is neither one thing nor the other, and with her legs metaphorically fused together, she is, for all her charm and elegance, frigid and infertile.

Her mother, Helen, OTOH, is a rigid, pious woman who judges herself as much as she judges others. It is she who insists on estrangement from everyone and on maintaining the white façade at all times, even in the home, where — despite having little money — she apes what she thinks is the English way of life.

When Marion finally finds out, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is at work. The catalyst for her journey of discovery is a newspaper article about the story of Tokkie, the old Coloured woman who was the family servant, but also — unknown to Marion — her grandmother. This comes at the same time as Marion has just hired Brenda, the first Black woman she’s ever employed, to work in her successful travel agency.

It’s interesting to see how the barriers between them teeter but never fully fall.

BEWARE: SPOILERS

Marion goes searching for the skeletons in her family background and to find the family she never had. This part of the novel is infused with her confusion, dismay, shame and bitterness towards her father and mother (now dead). Despite her quixotic dislike of travel, she abandons a faltering relationship with Geoff and on a whim travels to the UK. In Glasgow she meets up with a charming Zulu man, but that comes to nothing because (with sanctions now lifted) he’s too busy negotiating oil deals between Glasgow and South Africa.

She returns to her father who is by now even more pitiful, but Brenda has been looking after him. The story concludes with a party, with John’s sister Elsie and other guests crossing the racial divide. It seems a rather staged ending, but how else could Zicomb have created a hopeful ending?

You can read more about Zoë Wicomb and her role in the post-apartheid literature of South Africa, here.

Author: Zoë Wicomb (1948-2025)
Title: Playing in the Light
Publisher: The New Press, 2006, first published in South Africa by Umuzi, (Random House) 2006
Cover design by Christine Sullivan/CStudio Design
ISBN: 9781595582218, pbk., 218 pages
Source: personal library, purchased from Readings 27ドル.99

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I read this book at this time for #20Booksof Winter hosted by Annabel.

To see my progress, click here.

Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted on Reviews From the Stackson the first Saturday of each month, but that’s the day for #6Degrees, so here we are, running late. Very late, because there’s been a bit of a hiatus while Jana has been busy with her brand new baby, and I haven’t participated in this meme since March.

For the time being, there is no theme, so we can choose our own. Because ‘U’ is a tricky letter whenever it occurs in this meme, I decided to choose a book with ‘u’ in its title and then run with whatever genre it was in. That gave me Under the Eye of the Big Bird (2016), by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda (2024), and that’s a work of speculative fiction, which dovetails nicely with the #SpeccyFicChal 2026 Speccy Fiction challenge hosted by Book’d Out. Links on the titles are to my reviews.

J

A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (2013), by Jane Rawson

There are only 67 reviews of Speculative Fiction here on this blog, so I decided to include author names as well as titles with the requisite letters for July. That gave me one of my favourites in this genre: Jane Rawson’s A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists. The central character Caddie is one of the most unforgettable in Australian fiction.

Yes, it’s a very odd plot. And until a certain point in the novel I found it altogether too bizarre and I almost lost interest in it. But Caddie – lost, lonely, self-deprecating Caddie – trying so hard to live some kind of a meaningful life despite her bereavement and the horrible state of this future Melbourne in all its ghastliness, wouldn’t let me toss the book aside.

U

Under the Eye of the Big Bird (2016), by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda (2024)

This was one of those books that tweaks itself into something much more interesting just when a reader is fed up with a novel that seems to be going nowhere. My review doesn’t tell you how or why, but Rachel from Yarra Book Club rated it five stars at Goodreads and you can read her thoughts here.

L

Light over Liskeard, (2023) by Louis de Bernières

By complete coincidence the introduction to my review is almost word-for-word what happened this week when there was a Telstra Outage. Only this was worse because all the regional trains stopped running as well, so that people had to wait in near-freezing temperatures for replacement buses. De Bernières novel didn’t seem so speculative back then in 2023 and despite all the promises made in 2023 it doesn’t seem so speculative now when we are all so dependent on the internet. Then again, maybe Q’s idyll doesn’t seem so farfetched.

As life in the cities gets more complicated, and our systems of electronic control begin to fall apart, Q flourishes in the wild Cornish countryside. His new way of life brings him back in tune with his teenage children, his ex-wife, and his own sense of who he is. He also grows close to Eva, energetic and enchanting, who is committed to her own quest for love and meaning.

Y

Fundamentally (2025) by Nussaibah Younis

I had to check with Google to see if this novel about a British deradicalisation program for ISIS brides was speculative fiction to meet my criteria. It seems that it is because for reasons I can’t imagine, deradicalisation programs take place after repatriation, not in the refugee camps where they might begin to solve a problem. Fundamentally was one of my favourites from the Longlist for the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction. It is both heartbreaking and hilarious.

Who would have thought that we might be chuckling over a dark comedy about the deradicalisation of ISIS brides marooned in a middle eastern refugee camp?

The book blurb has this to say:

A bitingly original, wildly funny and razor-sharp exploration of love, family, religion and the decisions we make in pursuit of belonging, Fundamentally upends and explores a defining controversy of our age with heart, complexity and humour.

I wonder if anybody is writing a novel about Australia’s recently repatriated ISIS brides??

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Next month: August. Two ‘u’s! That’ll be a challenge too.

The 2026 Australian Jewish Writer Awards shortlists have been announced. The winners will be announced on the 3rd of August at the Festival of the Spoken Word, presented by Sydney Jewish Writers Festival.

The first thing I looked for was the Fiction shortlist, but they don’t have one. There is a prize: the Szymon (Simon) Klitenik Award for Jewish Fiction is worth 5,000ドル prize to the winner, but the winner is announced at the awards ceremony. It can be a novel or a collection of short stories. (The 2025 winner was Linda Margolin Royal for The Star on the Grave (2024) see my review.)

So who might be eligible for this fiction prize? For obvious reasons, not every Jewish writer identifies publicly as such, and although I’ve read 37 books published in 2025, and three of those were fiction by Jewish authors, maybe there are more in contention for this prize that I don’t know about. We’ll just have to wait and see!

Meanwhile, I was pleased to see that Ruptured — one of my two ANZ LitLovers Non-Fiction Books of the Year — has been been nominated for the Leslie and Sophie Caplan Award for Jewish Non-Fiction. The shortlist is

• Ferryman: The life and deathwork of Ephraim Finch, by Katia Ariel
• All Consuming: Germans, Jews, and the Meaning of Meat, by John M. Efron
• The Holy and the Broken by Ittay Flescher
• Ruptured: Jewish Women in Australia Reflect on Life Post-October 7, edited by Lee Kofman and Tamar Paluch, see my review.

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Michael Gawenda won the 2025 NF award for My Life as a Jew which impressed The Spouse when he read it last year.

Among those nominated for the Bobby Adler Award for Young Jewish Writers is

• Merav Fima for Late Blossoms, see my review
• Anna Jacobson for All Rage Blaze Light, and
• Shaina Rother for They Found Paradise: Retracing the Jewish History of Australia’s Gold Coast.

Past winners were Ellie Bouhadana for Ellie’s Table: Food from Memory and Food from Home in 2025 and in 2024 Anna Jacobson for her poetry collection Anxious in a Sweet Store (2023) see my review.

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The poetry shortlist includes:

• I Never Knew a Song Could Be a Knife by Jessica Chapnik Kahn
• The Copper Pots by Marcelle Freiman
• Sleep School by Leah Kaminsky. I have reviewed two of her novels here.
• Travelling to Jerusalem by Michael Leibowitz
• Ashlonak by Sarah Sassoon and
• Koldre by Gadia Zrihan

See J-Wire for nominees in the playwright category.

Thanks to the Shalom Collective for sharing the news on their Facebook page and for the images of the shortlisted books.

Masterchef Australia 2026 is coming towards the end of its season, with the finals not far off now. A recent episode made me retrieve our copy of Masterchef at home (2025) to see if they had a recipe for choux pastry, which featured in some inspiring éclairs by contestant Petro. Alas, though it does have some appealing sweets and desserts recipes, it doesn’t have anything made with choux pastry.

Remembering that we don’t seem to have cooked anything from this recipe book since buying it earlier this year, I browsed through it to see what might yet appeal. What I found went some way towards explaining the mysterious results of a recent team challenge…

For those who are not Masterchef Tragics like us, the team challenge for this episode consisted of two teams, each led by one of the two judges, Andy Allen and Jean-Christophe Novelli, the only one of the four judges who is a qualified chef. Each team had to cook a two-course meal featuring either pineapple (Andy’s team) or orange (Jean-Christophe’s team). Both teams made equally impressive desserts, but Andy’s team won, with a pork dish that ‘heroed’ pineapple while the judges Sophia Levin (food writer and journalist) and previous contestant Poh Ling Yeow said they couldn’t taste ‘enough of’ the orange in the French duck a l’orange made by Jean-Christophe’s team. We were astonished — and we think he must have been too, though he is too much a good sport to show it.

Wikipedia tells us that Jean-Christophe is a restaurateur of international repute, runs a cooking school in London and

…is a 5/5 AA Rosette and multi Michelin Star award-winning chef who has also been dubbed “The Nation’s Favourite French Chef”, European Chef of Year finalist representing Great Britain, recipient of the prestigious Egon Ronay Dessert of the Year award.

Canard à l’orange / duck in orange sauce is a signature dish in any French restaurant and of course the recipe is included in Jean-Christophe’s Simply Novelli cookbook. The idea that a team led by a Michelin Star chef couldn’t make it properly is bizarre. The question is not why didn’t it win, but how could there be criticism that it didn’t taste ‘enough’ of orange?

The answer, I think, might lie in the choice of recipes that feature in Masterchef at home. I did a quick tally and I think it reveals that about half of the recipes contain chilli. In this cookbook, introduced by Andy Allen and Poh Ling Yeow, there seems to be a preference for the robust spiciness of chilli in Asian cuisine over the subtle flavours that characterise European cuisine.

This predominance explains why we haven’t used the Masterchef cookbook much. It meets most of my criteria for a good cookbook: though the font is a little small for my eyesight, it has a clear layout, and is well illustrated with full colour photographs by Rob Palmer for each dish. It doesn’t waste a lot of space on yada-yada about cultural heritage, it has a clear Table of Contents and a good index, plus also a conversion chart. The desserts section is good: there are plenty of recipes suitable for a reasonably experienced home cook and the ingredients are all familiar and easy to acquire. But as you can see from my tally, there are some sections that are inadequate if you don’t like chilli, or are catering for young children, picky eaters or diners with delicate stomachs. Considering that poultry, pasta, rice & noodles are common favourites in the home kitchen, and this book is marketed at the home cook, there’s not much in this book that will suit. Indeed, if you take out the sweets and desserts, 60% of the recipes contain chilli, some of them in quite startling amounts.

Of course if you’re not keen on chilli for whatever reason, it can be omitted or reduced, but then there’ s a crucial ingredient missing and the result may lack flavour or be bland. That means that for some users about half of these recipes are useless.

My advice to any potential Masterchef contestants is this: make sure you have a good repertoire of recipes that feature chilli!

Editor: Megan Johnston
Title: Masterchef at home
Photography by Rob Palmer
Prop and food styling by David Morgan
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia, 2025
ISBN: 9781761771378, pbk., 172 pages
Source: Home cookbook library, purchased online by The Spouse

The 2026 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards Shortlist has been announced.

This shortlist shows me how valuable this prize is in bringing attention to books from WA, because I’ve only heard of one of the fiction books, and none of the NF. However, I am surprised by some notable omissions. I have read some fine novels that were published in 2025 that I think meet the eligibility criteria. Links are to my reviews.

• The Revisionists (2025) by Michelle Johnston
• The Name of the Sister (2025), by Gail Jones
• You Must Remember This (2025), by Sean Wilson

Fiction Book of the Year

• Chance and Necessity: A Novel of Narrogin and Williams by Rosanne Dingli
• When She Was Gone by Sara Foster
• King of Dirt by Holden Sheppard
• I Am Nannertgarrook by Tasma Walton (abandoned)
• O’Keefe by David Whish-Wilson

Non-Fiction Book of the Year

• My FIGHT with PD: A Neurologist with Parkinson’s Disease by David Blacker
• No Time for Makeup: The Life of a Flying Doctor and Paediatrician by Dr Elizabeth Green
• How Not to Become a Grumpy Old Bugger: A Bloke’s Guide to Living a Better Life by Geoff Hutchinson
• The Shameful Isles: The True Story of North-West Australia’s Fatal Experiment with Medical Apartheid by David Price
• Tjukurrpa Kurranyu. Tjukurrpa in the Front: The Yarnangu foundation for joint management in the Pila Nature Reserve by Jan Turner and Lizzie Marrkilyi Giles Ellis

To see the nominees in other categories, see here.

One of my favourite virtual friends at Goodreads has a very low opinion of John Updike, bracketing him in what she calls The Macho Era along with Roth, Bellow, Kerouac, and Salinger. She recognises that they were writers of their time but she’s lost patience with their misogyny . I knew this before I started reading Rabbit, Run, which is listed in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and it made me think about why I haven’t (yet) entirely lost patience with American writers whose books feature characters I would despise in real life.

I think the answer is that it’s a window onto a world that my generation has largely escaped. This fiction shows vividly why we have books like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), The Second Sex (1949) by Simone de Beauvoir and The Female Eunuch (1970) by Germaine Greer. It’s because Updike gives us an insight into how men thought about us in an era when there was no expectation that they might be better than that. The Australian variant is The Glass Canoe (1976) by David Ireland, equally evocative of an ugly version of masculinity, see my review.

One of the points that Germaine Greer made in The Female Eunuch was that women’s liberation would benefit men too. At the time she was writing, men bore the entire burden of being the family breadwinner. Sure, they had the power. Even when women had the vote, it was still powerful men who ran the world, the economy, the systems of society and its international and domestic rules. But when women were trapped into either the domestic drudgery of marriage or a spinsterhood of poorly paid insecure work, a man was trapped by their dependency too.

Rabbit has left his wife Janice on an impulse, driven to West Virginia, come back and picked up a woman called Ruth, and stayed with her overnight. The next day he goes home to leave the car for Janice, because her father (a used car dealer) let them have it at a discount, so he reckons it’s more hers than his. He wants to be fair, it seems.

He’s walking back to Ruth when the local minister gives him a lift, and although to Rabbit’s surprise, he’s not given a lecture, Eccles asks him to explain himself.

Eccles continues, ‘You speak of this feeling of muddle. What do you think it’s like for other young couples. In what way do you think you’re exceptional?’

‘You don’t think there’s any answer to that but there is. I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball, I really did. And after you’re first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate. And that little thing Janice and I had going, it was really second-rate. (p.92)

Updike’s novel shows us a man who is a has-been at the age of 26. He married Janice because she was pregnant, and he has a soul-destroying job demonstrating vegetable peelers for the domestic kitchen. They have a son called Nelson, and a baby on the way, and Janice, who is as fed up as he is, has a serious drinking problem, one which causes a terrible tragedy in the novel’s conclusion. Ordinary as they both are, they are totally unsuited.

Although I’m not sorry I read it, I don’t need to write much about the dispiriting experience of reading this novel. Wikipedia covers the plot, the characters, the themes and all the rest of it. 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006 edition) says that Rabbit is one of the towering figures of postwar American fiction; it remarks that Updike’s use of the present tense, commonplace now, was fairly innovative at the time, and it notes the distinctive third person narrative:

Although the bulk of the narrative takes place inside Harry’s head, it is not Harry’s voice that we hear, or not exactly. In sensuous, elegant prose, Updike represents Harry’s consciousness in the language that Harry would use if only his mind moved as gracefully as his body once did on the basketball court. (1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, 2006 Edition, ABC Books, p. 531)

What I noticed particularly was when the narration switched to Janice’s almost ‘Joycean’ long interior monologue as the novel draws near to its conclusion. She’s exhausted by her crying baby; she’s hurt physically and emotionally by by Harry’s desire; she’s insecure because he’s left her before and she thinks he’s gone again; she’s stuck in a dingy flat with the two children, and she turns to the only comfort she has at hand: a bottle of whisky. It’s a remarkably powerful depiction of self-indulgent despair.

It’s hard not to conjecture about how this book was received in 1960. In the Author’s Afterword Updike explains how explicit sex scenes were excised from the first US edition, and even more so in the first UK edition. Reading this 1963 restored and rewritten Penguin edition makes me wonder how those early editions sanitised the central character. A reader could not then have grasped how selfish he is, or how he thinks of women as objects for his dominance and his rights over them.

The series consists of four novels and a novella, but although I have a copy of Rabbit at Rest, I’ve had enough of him and this summary at The Browser confirms my belief that it’s destined for recycling. (I have a copy of Couples too, and I don’t like the sound of that either.)

• Rabbit, Run (1960)
• Rabbit Redux (1971)
• Rabbit Is Rich (1981)
• Rabbit at Rest (1990)
• Rabbit Remembered (2001)

Author: John Updike
Title: Rabbit, Run (Rabbit Angstrom #1)
Publisher: Popular Penguins, Penguin Random House, 2008, first published in 1960
ISBN: 9780141037523, pbk, 280 pages including an Afterword by John Updike
Source: Personal library

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I read this book at this time for #20Booksof Winter hosted by Annabel.

To see my progress, click here.

This month’s starter book for #6Degrees hosted by Kate at Books are My Favourite and Best is Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, and judging by 73 reserves ahead of me at the library, it is the new #MustRead novel of the year. Fortunately I read an illuminating review of it at The Lotus Readers, and Kate and Rebecca at Yarra Book Club have read it already, so I have some idea what it’s about, and so that leads me to thinking about the pernicious effects of social media.

(I’ve been watching the public hearings of the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, and the expert evidence about the harmful effects of uncontrolled social media is frightening. It’s not just the harm that we know about even if we’ve never seen it. It’s that getting these things taken down in a timely manner and stopping harmful things such as the livestreaming of the massacre at the Christchurch mosque from going viral is very difficult because the billionaire owners are resistant to having ‘free speech’ curtailed. And if we didn’t already know it, research proves a link between abusive social media and actual harm. )

Allow Me to Introduce Myself by Onyi Nwabineli (2024, see my review) is about a young woman struggling to resolve her identity issues when her mother has used her as a social media influencer since she was born. My generation used to look askance at baby shows judged by some local worthy or celebrity, but now they seem harmless enough even if they did imply that appearance was the most important thing about a child. The Guardian tells me that not so long ago an Australian clothing company’s baby pageant competition was cancelled because of out-of-control parents sledging the appearances of other parents’ infants.

One of my favourite books of 2025 was The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine (2025, see my review.) The story explored the fallout from a group of middle-class teenage boys assaulting a vulnerable girl, and the polyphonic narration includes social media commentary. It shows very clearly how quickly people rise to judgement about things they know nothing about, and should keep out of.

[画像:May be an image of text that says "NORMALIZE NOT HAVING AN OPINION ON THINGS YOU AREN'T PROPERLY INFORMED ON."]

The thing is, for most of us who curate our exposure to social media, it’s comparatively benign. In Catherine Chidgey’s The Beat of the Pendulum (2017, see my review ) social media is just part of the background noise of a life:

This ‘found novel’ is a remarkable experiment in fiction, drawing on – or purporting to be – the language that was all around the author. In twelve chapters named for the months of the year, a life is laid bare through language that is both impersonal (TV, radio, social media, email, SatNav) and intensely personal – her conversations with friends and family, apparently recorded on her iPhone.

But Chidgey has a more nuanced view of social media in her award-winning The Axeman’s Carnival (2022, see my review)

Marnie rescues a magpie that fell from its nest and raises the chick, which becomes her saviour in more ways that one. It is not just that this magpie can speak and narrates the story in an utterly convincing voice... it is also that its presence changes the dynamic in the couple’s relationship and lifts the curtain to reveal it to the wider world.

Social media is both a villain and a hero in this novel...

With remarkable acuity, Chidgey’s next novel, however, shows that interpersonal cruelty doesn’t need anonymity to be harmful. The back story in Pet (2023, see my review) is set in the 80s, before the internet became an inescapable part of our lives and it shows that the menace of influencers is nothing new. What’s needed is vigilance, and a willingness to intervene.

On a lighter note is Duncan Sarkies’ Star Gazers (2025, see my review) which is a satire about politics which has alpacas in a starring role. As the battle between the Breeders Party and the Reformers plays out, Star Gazers is a brilliant exposé of characteristics we’ve all seen in politicians. The villain of the piece is a piece of work called Shona, and she appoints her niece as ‘social media manager’ and I can’t resist quoting this passage again:

Bianca thinks that Pat spends too long on each article. Bianca demonstrated how to get ChatGPT to write the first drafts and then how, with a few quick adjustments to make it seem more human, this method speeds up the process so they can make more content, post more frequently. Bianca knows how to create feel-good clickbait that leads to feedback loops to keep a constant flow going. Pat thinks it is a constant flow of diarrhoea, but for Bianca, quantity beats quality every time. (p.239-40)

I don’t know if I’ll ever read Yesteryear, but I am pleased to see that authors are exposing the rotten underbelly of social media in contemporary fiction.

Image credit: Dr. Dad: Raising Critical Thinkers https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1453957143417100&set=a.345967204216105

Edited 4/7/26 to add links below to

• my review of Art as Life, the Biographical Writing of Hazel Rowley by Della Rowley
• Caroline Baum’s Life Sentences podcasts

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This is very belated news about the 2026 Hazel Rowley Fellowship winner. It was announced in March, but somehow, I didn’t find time to post about it. And I should have because although, sadly, this is the last year of the award, it has been one of our most important awards, providing financial support to Australian biography since 2012. All of us who care about Australian stories owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Hazel’s sister Della Rowley, and the family and friends whose generosity established the award in memory of of preeminent biographer Hazel Rowley (1951-2011).

Click the links to read my reviews of Hazel’s biographies.

• Richard Wright, the Life and Times (2001)
• Christina Stead (1993, revised 2007)
• and on my TBR
• Tête-à-tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre (2005), on my TBR, see Wikipedia
• Franklin and Eleanor, an extraordinary marriage (2011)

I’ve also read Della Rowley’s Life as Art, the Biographical Writings of Hazel Rowley (2021, see my review)

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What follows is from the announcement on the Hazel Rowley Fellowship website:

The winner of the 2026 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship, worth 20,000,ドル is Jennifer Martin, who is writing a biography of journalist Eva Sommer, who in 1956, at the age of 22, beat a field of experienced men to win Australia’s first national prize for journalism, a Walkley Award. When Eva died in 2019 aged 84, this principled, courageous and complex daughter of Jewish immigrants who fought to live and love on her terms had been forgotten: this biography will tell that story.

Jennifer Martin is a Senior Lecturer in Communication at Deakin University, where her research interests include literary journalism and Australian media history. Jennifer won the United Nations of Australia Media Peace Prize for her reporting and has 30 years’ experience as a journalist. She is also the author of two young adult novels.

This year the judges also gave Highly Commended awards, worth 10,000ドル each, to Monique Rooney, Theodore Ell and Ashleigh Wilson. Monique is writing a biography of Australian/New Zealand writer Ruth Park, Theodore is writing a biography of Australian poet Les Murray, and Ashleigh is writing a biography of Barry Humphries.

The announcement on 11 March at State Library Victoria followed a discussion between Tim Byrne and Lance Richardson, our 2020 Fellow, about his biography True Nature: The Lives of Peter Matthiessen (Chatto & Windus, 2025).

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As you can see from this list of previous winners include, the Fellowship has made an astonishing contribution to Australian literature, and there are four more titles yet to come.

• 2026, Jennifer Martin for her biography of journalist Eva Sommer.
• 2025 Michelle Staff for her biography of Bessie Rischbieth and Olive Evans
• 2024 Kate Fullagar for her biography of Marguerite Wolters
• 2023 Diane Bell for her biography of Louisa Karpany and George Mason, ‘The Queen and the Protector’
• 2022 Naomi Parry Duncan for her biography of Gai-mariagal man, published in 2026 as Musquito, the real story of a legendary colonial warrior
• 2021 Mandy Sayer for her biography of Australian silent filmmakers, the McDonagh sisters, published in 2022 as Those Dashing McDonagh Sisters: Australia’s First Female Filmmaking Team, see my review
• 2020 Lance Richardson for his biography of Peter Matthiessen, published in 2025 as True Nature: The Lives of Peter Matthiessen
• 2019 Eleanor Hogan for her biography of Ernestine Hill and Daisy Bates, published in 2021 as Into the Loneliness: The unholy alliance of Ernestine Hill and Daisy Bates.
• 2018 Jacqueline Kent (NSW) for a biography of suffragist Vida Goldstein. published in 2020 as Vida: A woman for our time
• 2017 Ann-Marie Priest (QLD) for her biography of Australian poet Gwen Harwood, published in 2022 as My Tongue is My Own, on my TBR.
• 2016 Matthew Lamb (TAS) for his biography of Frank Moorhouse, published in 2023 as Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths. See my review.
• 2015 Caroline Baum (NSW), for a biography of Lucie Dreyfus (1870-1945). See here for why it never eventuated and the Life Sentences podcasts that replaced it.
• 2014 Maxine Beneba Clarke (VIC) for her memoir, The Hate Race, published in 2016. Read, but not reviewed, sorry! See Brona’s review.
• 2013 Stephany Steggall (QLD) for her biography of Thomas Keneally, published in 2015 as Interestingly Enough. (See my review)
• 2012, Mary Hoban (VIC),for her biography An Unconventional Wife: The Life of Julia Sorell Arnold, published in 2019.

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Joan Lindsay: The Hidden Life of the Woman Who Wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock by Brenda Niall was longlisted for the 2026 Magarey Medal for Biography. Established in 2004 by historian Dr. Susan Magarey, the biennial prize is administered by Association for the Study of Australian Literature and the Australian Historical Association. Only female authors are eligible.

This is this year’s longlist, with the shortlisted titles underlined:

• Fearless Beatrice Faust (Judith Brett, Text), see my review
• Max Dupain: A Portrait (Helen Ennis, 4th Estate)
• Joan Lindsay: The Hidden Life of the Woman Who Wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock (Brenda Niall, Text)
• One Free Woman: The True Story of Convict Hannah Rigby (Jane Smith, Big Sky)
• Code of Silence: How Australian Women Helped Win the War (Diana Thorp, Monash University Publishing)
• Elizabeth Harrower: The Woman in the Watch Tower (Susan Wyndham, NewSouth).

Brenda Niall’s Joan Lindsay was published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the film 1975 Picnic at Hanging Rock, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it were commissioned to take advantage of that. But notwithstanding a generous review of this biography by Catriona Menzies-Pike at The Guardian, I’m surprised that it was longlisted. It is, IMO, an insubstantial biography for two reasons: firstly because Lindsay only wrote two books of any note, i.e. Time without Clocks, (1962, see my review), and Picnic at Hanging Rock, (1967) which needs no introduction because of the iconic film that bears its name; and secondly because Joan Lindsay deliberately curated her own life to guard her privacy, making the biographer’s task very difficult. So, without a comprehensive archive of documentary records, and with most people who actually knew Lindsay (1896-1984) having passed away, Niall had only scraps of information with which to write a biography.

Unfortunately the resulting biography too often resorts to padding out the biography with speculation and unsubstantiated opinions only partly ameliorated with caveats, and with selective use of archival information about the people in Lindsay’s life. Of course, all biographers are necessarily selective in what information they use, but ethically, they owe it to their subject and the reader to be judicious in how they do it. Reading this book has been a catalyst for me to think more deeply about what I expect from a biography…

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Conventional biographies use multiple sources to create a portrait of the subject. Many of them tell the story in a chronological way, i.e. ‘from cradle to grave’, but sometimes tracing ancestry if it’s relevant to the life. There have always been examples of biographies that for one reason or another have sanitised the record, omitting or concealing unflattering aspects, and the task is always more difficult if the subject is still alive. Whether the biography is authorised or not, sometimes the biographer feels constrained about pursuing some angles, and sometimes the subject clams up and refuses to answer questions.

But as in the case of Joan Lindsay, sometimes the subject has decluttered or curated her life so that some things just can’t be known. Nobody’s ever going to write a biography about me, but still, there are parts of my life that I’ve excised. While The Ex was doing his National Service, we maintained a daily, year-long correspondence, and I kept those letters all throughout the years of the marriage, and for some years afterwards. So, hypothetically speaking, if a biographer knew that they had existed, what speculation would their disposal trigger? Probably nonsense. I didn’t dispose of them out of bitterness or out of anxiety about who might find them and jump to conclusions, but because they made me feel nostalgic and it was time to move on.

But those letters would have been a biographer or a novelist’s treasure: a wonderful record not just of a young couple in love but separated by conscription, but a snapshot of daily life during a turbulent era in Australia. Where else would there be a record of the time I concussed myself and the Army wouldn’t give permission for him to come down to Melbourne? Or the time staff in the State Film Centre were in Lockdown because of Moratorium demonstrations in the adjacent park? Or when I risked my job by refusing to make coffee for the OIC because of my emerging sense of feminism? (Yes, I did get a dressing-down from the 2IC, but nobody ever asked me to make coffee again.)

When Brenda Niall took on writing a biography of Joan Lindsay, it was decades after her death in 1984. There were limited documents at her disposal, and the friends and acquaintances who actually knew her childless subject were mostly dead. And since by Niall’s own account Lindsay had long periods of time and solitude in which to write or paint, the paucity of her oeuvre can’t convincingly be put down to wifedom or an oppressive husband. She wrote a forgettable first novel called Through Darkest Pondelayo (1936), Time without Clocks (1962) came almost 30 years later, and then Picnic at Hanging Rock in 1967. In between, her efforts at journalism (for the Women’s Pages) and fiction were sporadic and they mostly didn’t find an audience. She wasn’t part of the Nettie Palmer network of correspondence that supported and encouraged 20th century women writers such as Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw, and it’s not hard to see why not.

And so the biographer speculates, too often to suit her personal agendas about Lindsay’s privileged class background, and with not very convincing feminist interpretations of Lindsay’s choice to defer her own career ambitions in favour of her dynamic husband, Daryl Lindsay.

My journal is littered with exasperated comments about the shortcomings of this biography, but I’ll confine myself to noting that it was shabby to record that Daryl worked at Sidcup sketching the mangled faces of WW1 veterans under the direction of plastic surgeons — without bothering to name them as New Zealanders Harold Gillies and Henry Pickerill who were pioneers of reconstructive surgery.

I was also peeved by the representation of the Jewish refugee Ursula Hoff AO OBE FAHA as the (suspected) Other Woman in Daryl’s life and by the scant recognition of her astonishing achievements as an art historian and prolific author on art. Arriving in Australia in 1939, Hoff overcame antisemitism and gender discrimination to become the first qualified professional art historian at the NGV, deputy director of the NGV in 1968, and the London Adviser for the Felton Bequest (1975-1983) so we owe many of our finest paintings to her. She also lectured at the University of Melbourne to lucky students of Fine Arts. She published numerous monographs and books, and in our modest collection of art books we have one of hers, co-written with Margaret Plant (1968): National Gallery of Victoria: Painting, Drawing, Sculpture. Niall’s bio is, of course, not about Hoff, but in seeking to talk up Joan Lindsay’s achievements and possible resentments, the tone about Hoff is offhand.

I have held a longstanding admiration for Brenda Niall as a biographer, and have read most of her major works, but IMO Joan Lindsay is not one of her best.

Author: Brenda Niall
Title: Joan Lindsay, the hidden life of the woman who wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock
Publisher: Text Publishing, 2025
Cover design by Imogen Stubbs
ISBN: 9781923058019, pbk., 248 pages including 22 pages of Notes (endnotes); Select Bibliography; List of Illustrations (for a colour insert of 8 pages); acknowledgements; and an Index.
Source: Personal library, purchased from Readings, 36ドル.99

Image credit:

National Gallery of Victoria: Painting, Drawing, Sculpture : https://www.abebooks.co.uk/first-edition/National-Gallery-Victoria-Painting-Drawing-Sculpture/222673866/bd

Toni Jordan’s Tenderfoot, I thought, would be an enjoyable undemanding novel to read while they monitored my recovery from sedation in hospital. A bit of brain fog after the fancy heart tests, but not like having a real anaesthetic. At the library I’d stumbled on the large print edition too, so I settled down to read it with ease and had read about a quarter of it by the time I was allowed to go home.

It turned out to be as expected: smart working class kid coping with family breakup and friend/ex-friend issues at school. At home that night, I finished Thirst first (only because I’d listed it in #20BooksOfWinter), and the next day returned to Tenderfoot.

And found it taking a much darker turn than I’d thought. Maybe I’d had more brain fog than I realised…

Andie is in the last year of primary school when her father, a small-time greyhound trainer, leaves the family and Steve moves in. He’s a big, intimidating man, but he’s patient with her erratic, abusive mother, and he takes an interest in Andie which had me suspecting that he had plans for her which would make me put the book aside. But no, this is a book about gambling addiction and the people who prey on it.

Andie is a smart, perceptive child but she’s only twelve and her perceptions are limited. She doesn’t know what’s going on, only that Steve represents a threat to her mother. She plans before she acts, but she’s too young to understand the complications.

Not the least of which is that Queensland at that time was in the grip of corruption that facilitated illegal brothels, gambling and drugs, with a network of bribery and extortion that went all the way from the local police force to the premier of the state. Tenderfoot is almost historical fiction so younger readers of Jordan’s novel may not know anything about this, but it’s recent history for my generation and the revelations of the Fitzgerald Inquiry (1987-1989) shocked Australia.

Toni Jordan has an article at The Guardian which sheds a light on the autobiographical elements of the novel.

It’s a shame that the cover designer of this edition isn’t acknowledged. I don’t know who did the design for the other editions of Tenderfoot, but that poignant painting of a greyhound in the Aurora edition is pitch perfect.

Author: Toni Jordan
Title: Tenderfoot
Publisher: Aurora, Ulverscroft UK, (2025, by arrangement with Hachette)
Cover image not acknowledged
ISBN: 9781399197021, pbk., large print edition, 295 pages
Source: Kingston Library

Some books find their way onto my shelves by subterfuge, I am sure of it. I have no idea why I paid full price for this apocalyptic (so-called) literary thriller. The only explanation I can come up with is that the initial premise is interesting, and since I bought it during lockdown, perhaps I was trying to keep my favourite booksellers in business.

The book description from Goodreads is longer than this, but this is what’s on the back of the book and it’s probably what featured in Readings’ online catalogue:

Thirst takes place in the immediate aftermath of a mysterious disaster. Eddie, his wife Laura and their neighbours suffer the effects of the heat, their thirst and the terrifying realisation that no one is coming to help. As violence rips through the community, Eddie and Laura are forced to recall dark secrets and question their present humanity. In crisp and convincing prose, Benjamin Warner compels readers to do the same.

The author of this novel teaches creative writing at Towson University and has an MFA from Cornell University. He is also the co-author of the recently published Speculative Fiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. The attributes of speculative fiction are clearly his area of expertise and not mine, so I shall refrain from commenting on the features that IMHO preclude this novel from being described as literary and confine myself to the one factor that kept me reading it.

Imagine that one day, in the place where you live, for unspecified reasons and with no means of contacting emergency services or anyone else, all the public infrastructure fails. Look around your home. What do you have to sustain yourself and your loved ones when there are no water or energy supplies?

This is what I have:

• three water tanks holding about 4000 litres of water; enough potable water in old wine bottles to last two people and a dog for three, maybe four days; and a reservoir of water (which like the tank water would need to be filtered and boiled) from toilet cisterns and the hot water service.
• a pantry with some tinned food that can be eaten without cooking it. Baked beans, tinned tomatoes, some sardines. In the garden, some spring onions and capsicums, an aubergine, potatoes coming along and lots of herbs. Enough to last a spartan week or so.
• a barbecue in the garden that could be used to cook foods out of the rapidly defrosting freezer;
• two mobile phones and a solar phone charger that doesn’t fit either of them because phone companies keep changing the connections.

I am not a ‘Prepper‘, but I have these resources because, anticipating short term disruptions to utilities in the event of heat waves or floods, I took advice from Jane Rawson and James Whitemore’s The Handbook, Surviving and Living with Climate Change, which I reviewed here in 2015. But none of these resources would be any use to me if my neighbours are ill-prepared, because I will either share with them voluntarily or have my resources taken from me. Even nice people behave badly when the survival of their loved ones is at stake. And depending on how long the crisis lasts, there will come a point when sharing, voluntary or otherwise, starts to impact on whether my loved ones and I will survive.

This then, is the premise of the novel, which traces the ineffectual responses of its characters. Australian research about bushfire readiness shows that most people overestimate their preparedness, that they never practise their bushfire plan if indeed they have one, and that when the crisis comes the leader who emerges in the panic is the one who is best at bossing people around but not at multi-tasking or acting strategically. #Surprise! Eddie automatically assumes leadership even though he makes stupid decisions right from the start.

Eddie and Laura in the novel have always taken their suburban lifestyle for granted and they have no concept of working together as a community because they barely know their neighbours. The 2017 edition doesn’t beat about the bush: the front cover doesn’t ask ‘what would you sacrifice for a drop of water?’ as mine does. It states unequivocally that ‘when all water disappears, Thirst won’t be the only killer.’ It’s not really a surprise when we see how quickly the characters are transformed from their previous selves and violence becomes the normal response.

I thought of Erika Dreifus’s Quiet Americans (2011) which I have just read when Eddie and Laura set out to hike to salvation somewhere over the hill. They are not likeable characters, not even in the beginning. They’re just thoughtless, not very bright, complacent and self-absorbed. Though they are not victims of deliberate expulsion, they represent, probably, what most people might be like when they are confronted with having to leave everything they have and seek refuge elsewhere. Like refugees everywhere they have little or no time to plan, little or no understanding of what might lie ahead, and they have to make cruel choices about what to bring and what to leave behind. Being caught up in a crisis doesn’t automatically make people resourceful and resilient if they’re not already like that.

We saw on our TV screens what happened during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. And that happened when authorities knew in advance what was in store. As I write, Europe is sweltering through a heat wave, for which most people are unprepared. This (somewhat smug) ABC article points out some obvious differences between Australian preparedness for heat waves, but it’s hardly practical to talk about Queenslander house design. More useful is for people to learn what can be done to retrofit existing housing to insulate it with trees, awnings, blinds and heavy curtains. (Our house is really well insulated now, but before I had all these things in place, I’ve even used quilts and doona covers over the windows to keep out the heat). And in the short term, people need to know strategies to rapidly cool an overheated body, especially for babies and old people who should be kept in the shade. Running cold water or sponging over wrist pulse points, or dangling a hand in a fountain will cool the body in a minute or two.

So… Thirst, well, not my kind of book. But thought-provoking all the same.

Author: Benjamin Warner
Title: Thirst
Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2016
Cover design by David Mann
ISBN: 9781408865057, pbk., 286 pages
Source: Personal Library, purchased from Readings 27ドル.99

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I read this book at this time for #20Booksof Winter hosted by Annabel.

To see my progress, click here.

Individually, each story in this collection captures the dilemmas of ordinary people caught up seismic events and how the forced choices they made haunt them into any new life they are able to make. But collectively, they form a composite novel exploring memory, guilt, and isolation amid others who know nothing about that past because the urge to ‘fit in’ combines with a desire to forget, to suppress memories and to maintain a stoic silence. And although some of these are stories of American Jews who got out of Germany just in time, and the Holocaust they escaped from is unique in human history, there is a universality about the experiences of that refugee generation. I have read many stories of the refugee experience in memoir and in fiction, and all of them involve hellish choices.

When to leave and when to hang on a little bit longer? Who to bring, and who to leave behind? Who to trust and tell, and from whom the plans must be concealed, for their sake or in case of betrayal? What to bring for a journey where what matters at the final destination cannot be known. I am reminded of Walter Kempowski’s All for Nothing (2006, see my review) when finally the family evacuates to escape the Soviet troops advancing towards Berlin, and of all the Stuff that they take — and have to shed — on the way. It is strange how I have forgotten so many of the details of that book I read only three years ago, but have retained a vivid image of Auntie the unpaid and undervalued housekeeper, plodding along, burdened by heirlooms she cherished as signifiers of the family’s status, and thus her own. And all for nothing…

The chaos of evacuation reminded me of Irene Nemirovsky’s portrayal of the evacuation of Paris in Suite Française. People take all kinds of Stuff, because they have no idea of what lies ahead. Wealthy people take more Stuff because they have it and they have no understanding of what might be needed for survival. Or of what might be left to them after the looters have done what they do for their own survival. Or of what might have value as a family heirloom.

The first story in Quiet Americans is ‘For Services Rendered, and it is fraught with dilemmas when help to escape comes from an unexpected source. But their potential saviour is a powerful, very busy man pressured by his wife, and the offer is only to help Dr Ernst Weldmann, his wife Klara and their two daughters. It is risky to ask if the help could be extended to his sister and her family. He is in dispute with his wife about this. And later, when there are Allied trials at Nuremburg and elsewhere, he is again in dispute with his wife about whether to write in support of some clemency for their saviour’s wife. Klara has no doubts about good and evil; Ernst is not so sure.

‘Matrilineal Descent’ is set further back in time, back to the rule of the Kaiser and the unhappy life of a child born to the beautiful sister who dies, and is brought up by his jealous aunt after his father enlists in the Kaiser’s army in 1914.

If, when Jacob left the house late that summer, he had turned back—if he had run home to hold his infant boy one last time, if he had decided he must reassure himself that his child was going to be well cared for—he would have found Josef still screaming, alone, for hours, screaming until there was no sound left to emerge from his poor raw throat, while Emma went about her business, cleaning and cooking and thinking that a child so ill-behaved did not deserve to be fed that day. Discipline. That was what a child needed. (p.57)

People call these ‘sliding door moments’ but sometimes they are more grievous than the comic scenes we see in romcoms. Little Josef survived his aunt, and he got away from Germany just in time too. (The next story ‘Lebensraum’ explains how.) He wasn’t there when his Aunt was deported along with all the other Jews of Altheim.

For Josef in 1944, safely in America and working as a baker in a POW camp for Germans, survival had come about because his grandfather’s death from diabetes. It made his decision to leave easier.

And the dream, his own dream, his own sadness: his grandfather, wrapped in the prayer shawl Josef managed to carry on the ship. Wrapped in the shawl and chanting the prayers and blessings that Josef still recited every day, every Sabbath, every festival, even if he hadn’t entered a house of worship since 1937, since he was last in Altheim, since he last stood at Opa’s still-fresh grave. If his grandfather had lived, Josef might not have left, no matter how much his uncle in the city had tried to persuade him. (p.74)

‘Homecoming’ is heartbreaking. Josef and his wife Nelly are given airline tickets for their anniversary by their son Mickey and his wife Paula. But this trip ‘home’ to try for some reconciliation with the past is in 1972, the year of the Munich Olympics. As news of the atrocity breaks, Nelly sits stunned in the hotel room ( as we did, here in Australia):

Nelly sat on the sofa, sentences coalescing in silence. It is a Tuesday in September. I am in Europe. Two hours from my old home. And the Jews are again the targets.
I have to get out of here.
I have to get out of here.

But instead they continued to sit by the television. Early in the afternoon, Daniel looked over to her.

"Maybe it isn’t the right day," he began. "But do you want to see your father’s grave? Maybe try the apartment again today, too?"

She shook her head. Because it wasn’t the right day. (p.89)

‘Floating’ is a poignant story about being pregnant in the days when there were no anxiety-inducing tests, and the remnants of European Jewry took simple joy in the prospect of rebuilding their families. ‘Quiet Americans’ is about the rudeness of tour guides who have an axe to grind over wartime history, and make assumptions about who their audience is. (I have one of those moments in my store of holiday anecdotes too!) ‘Mishpocha’ has a surprising twist about identity.

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I am not sure how I came to have this title on my Kindle, but alongside #20BooksOFWinter, I am trying to clear the list of Kindle books I’ve listed as ‘currently reading’ at Goodreads but they’ve been untouched for ages. One down, and two to go! One is Touba and the Meaning of Night by Shahrnush Parsipur which is from Iran, and the other is Widening the Skirts of Light: Essays on George Eliot by Rohan Maitzen who blogs at Novel Readings. Rohan lectures on George Eliot at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia so the book was irresistible — because George Eliot is my favourite 19th century English author and Middlemarch is my favourite 19th century novel.

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I shall be away with the fairies while they take fancy pictures of my heart tomorrow so I’m scheduling this for Friday, but with luck I shall be back in the afternoon with no sign of brain fog and ready to read your comments!

Update, after lunch: Thanks for the good wishes, I’m home again, none the worse for wear except a slight sore throat from when they put the probe in. (It’s nothing, compared to having my tonsils out aged 4.) But I’m a bit dopey from the sedation, so I’m going to loaf on the sofa with something mindless on the telly. I’ll get the results next week and then we will have A PLAN.

Author: Erika Dreifus
Title: Quiet Americans
Publisher: Last Light Studio Books, 2011
Cover design not acknowledged
ASN: B004UAYWQ4 (ISBN: 9780982708439), Kindle Edition, 164 pages
Source: purchased for the Kindle from You Know Who.

I bought this so long ago that can’t remember why I wanted it… but I think I read it through a different prism to those who interpreted it as a poignant story about an old woman’s grief. This is a book that will resonate differently, depending on the age of the reader.

This is the book description

Years ago, Madame Verona and her husband built a home for themselves on a hill in a forest above a small village. There they lived in isolation, practising their music, and chopping wood to see them through the cold winters.
When Mr Verona died, the locals might have expected that the legendary beauty would return to the village, but Madame Verona had enough wood to keep her warm during the years it would take to make a cello — the instrument her husband loved — and in the meantime she had her dogs for company.
And then one cold February morning, when the last log has burned, Madame Verona sets off down the village path, with her cello and her memories, knowing that she will have no strength to climb the hill again. Poignant, precise and perfectly structured, this is a story of one woman’s tender and enduring love — as a wife, and as a widow.

I think this novella is more of a cautionary tale, and I think that the author’s flippant and discursive tone is intended to alert the read to more than the story’s diverting context.

Madame Verona and her husband deliberately chose an isolated hideaway for a home. In widowhood, Madame Verona has stayed in this secluded place until one day, when she is 82 and has used up the supply of chopped firewood her husband had left for her, she goes down the hill, knowing that she lacks the strength to climb back up the hill. That’s it. We know what’s going to happen. It’s a choice to die on her own terms. Someone will find her eventually, frozen to death.

Before long #SpoilerAlert we learn that her husband’s thoughtful act of provisioning with the wood takes place after Monsieur Potter is diagnosed with cancer. He chops up 20 years’ worth of wood and then hangs himself. This is framed by some readers as a thoughtful act too, deciding to spare Madame Verona the burden of looking after him. But that is not actually what the text says. He visits Dr Lunette (this isolated village has to make do with a vet) and makes up his mind very quickly. It seems to me that he wants to spare himself. That’s not unreasonable, but let’s not romanticise it:

The only thing Monsieur Potter had really considered while sitting between the skeletons in her waiting room was his hypochondriac tendency. But the pain that had floated between kidney and lung for weeks on end and whose location he, to Dr Lunette’s immense displeasure, was unable to specify to the exact millimetre was, in combination with his nocturnal coughing fits and the threads of blood he found in his saliva every morning, difficult to brush off as a symbol. And since he was, after all, a smoker, she gave her diagnosis without any trace of pity — only yourself to blame — and he accepted it immediately. He had no desire to wait for the immaculate white of a hospital room where he would rot away until the ECG plateaued and a beeping machine called the hospital corpse washers to attention and got them sopping their sponges. (p.44)

Surely the reader who imagines the next step i.e. his wife — alone —finding his body swinging from the tree, and then having to deal with it (remember, their house is remote, a long way from the village) would conclude that this was not an act of love designed to spare her anything. Even if there is a poem in chapter V that tells her not to wait for his time to come. Even if he did chop down a forest of wood to keep her warm afterwards. These are not decisions made jointly by a loving couple. This is him, making decisions for her.

I don’t have any religious scruples about Voluntary Assisted Dying or people choosing to end their own lives, but I do think that (unless there’s mental illness which usually waives moral responsibility), very great care ought to be taken to prevent trauma for those left behind to deal with the fallout. Steven Amsterdam’s thoughtful The Easy Way Out (2016, see my review) explores the impact on a palliative care nurse working in a system where assisted suicide is legal,

Madame Verona is a book that demands to be read between the lines. Yes, she did and does love him, and yes, she complies with his intentions and stays alone in the house until the wood runs out, but this is a fate that befalls anyone who invests everything in one person, choosing to mourn for what is lost, choosing not to make friends with the eccentrics in the village, choosing not to move on, and choosing not to make a new life elsewhere. Preferring to remember their love life than submit to desire ever again. (And she’s only 62 when he dies, remember.)

But in his determination not to make a weepie of it, Verhulst adopts a curious tone throughout. There’s no lingering over Madame Verona’s fate, there are light-hearted digressions even when it doesn’t seem appropriate at all. On the fateful day when Madame V sets off to meet her death, the reader is distracted by a scornful depiction of cyclists…

Four worthless and clearly reluctant roads connected the hill the hill to the rest of the world, and of these four, Madame Verona had chosen, on that February day, to come down the most difficult. The forest path, whose gradient and impassability were such that on weekends an array of idiots worked their way up it on mountain bikes, guys who were convinced that tormenting the body was the price death demanded for a long and limber life. When they finally reached the top they were pale and immediately began guzzling disgustingly colourful regenerative soft drinks, but the effort had undoubtedly given them the courage to sit through another week at a desk where the pot plants summoned up memories of the nature documentaries that consoled their atavism of an evening. (p.29)

And look at the way Verhulst first tells the reader about the fate of Monsieur Potter’s father!

Although his father had hanged himself from a branch at a relatively young age, Monsieur Potter was touchingly ignorant when it came to trees. (p.26)

There is then a two-page digression about how Potter did know a (very) little bit about trees, before we get to…

All this could give the impression that he did know something about trees, but he was never able to tell us what kind of tree his father hanged himself from. That was probably for the best , because otherwise he might have been unable to resist searching for associations and meanings that were possibly non-existent. For the sake of completeness, we should mention his knowledge of palm trees, which he knew mainly from movies and thought of as deformed pineapples. (p.28)

And then when Madame Verona gives Charlo the job of cutting down the tree that her husband had hanged himself from — to the immense joy of the wifeless — it becomes a signifier that she might have cast off her mourning and might perhaps be interested in having a relationship or a fling with one of the men who’ve been fantasising about that possibility from the moment her widowhood began.

Whatever Verhulst intended, for me, this curious tone undercuts any poignancy the reader is meant to feel about these three suicides.

Tender and enduring love? Or a woman who wasted the last twenty years of her life?

Google tells me that Verhulst is widely recognized for his dark tragicomedies, grotesque humour, and poignant depictions of characters living on the fringes of society. Wikipedia tells me that his writing style has been characterized as sarcastic but compassionate. His use of language can be explicit and hilarious.

Let’s just say it’s not for me.

Also reviewed at She Reads Novels.

Author: Dimitri Verhulst
Title: Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill (Mevrrouw Verona daalt de heuvel af)
Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer
Publisher: Portobello Books, 2009
Cover design by Friederike Huber
ISBN: 9781846271564, pbk with French flaps, 145 pages
Source: Personal library.

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I read this book at this time for #20Booksof Winter hosted by Annabel.

To see my progress, click here.