I really hated this book. Why did I finish it? I guess it was only 149pages. And I have been feeling guilty about how many books I have given up on this year. But god I should have given up on this one. It was some kind of love story where a married (but separated) Italian man has an affair with an English woman on holiday. They part because they cannot face the difficulties of his not being able to divorce. I mean I guess that’s why they part? I don’t know, because most of the novel was descriptions. Descriptions of landscape (bad) but also descriptions of unimportant moments (e.g., woman gets briefly lost in church). I fear this was supposed to be poetic but I just found it DUMB.
Tag: australia
NOBODY’S GIRL by Virginia Roberts Giuffre
I thought it was sad that I knew so much about Epstein but so little about his survivors. So I decided to read this memoir. I don’t know what I expected. I knew it was going to be bad, but it was really, really bad. This lady’s courage is just incredible.
It starts off terrible, with her being sexually abused by her father. I’m sorry to say she is seven. He then ‘shares’ her with his friend. Based on the similarity in the abuse, she thinks they were comparing notes. She attempts to run away, and is put in some kind of terrible ‘tough love’ type place. She runs away from there by hitch-hiking, and one of the men who picks her up rapes her at gunpoint. She manages to escape when he stops to answer his phone (!) and the very next person who offers her a ride turns out to be a trafficker. She is the only American underage girl he has, all the others are trafficked from Eastern Europe. By the time we get to Epstein, you fully understand how incapable she was of escape.
Epstein is particularly stomach-churning. He helpfully explains to her that he prefers it if girls ‘pretend to enjoy it’. He trafficks her to other men, one of whom leaves her bleeding from the mouth, vagina, and anus. He tells her ‘it’s going to be like that sometimes’. I don’t know why – it’s not so bad as the other stuff – but one detail that particularly stuck with me is that he often had her rubbing his feet for two hours straight during flights.
The book follows how she got away from him, and about how much energy it took for her to come forward. I had not realized the extent to which she really was the figurehead for getting this story out into the world. It had a huge cost on her, forcing her to relive the abuse many times.
It’s hard to read, and what makes it even sadder is that Virginia seems to understand how hard it is for us to read, and often takes breaks, flashing forward to her current happy life with her husband and three kids in Perth. I’m sorry to say that here it also gets worse. The book begins with a note from her co-author. Virginia had written to the co-author, emphasizing how important it was to her that the book be published, no matter what might happen to her. This sounds ominous, because it is. She unfortunately killed herself once she was sure the book was in its final draft. It turns out that her husband was allegedly violent towards her. I can kind of get that, just from reading the book. He does not seem a great guy (‘he said I could only take 3 of my 6 suitcases’ etc).
She sacrificed a lot to get her story out. She’s an amazing woman, and I am glad I got the opportunity to hear her story and learn from her.
JOE CINQUE’S CONSOLATION by Helen Garner
Apparently I’m on a real Helen-Garner-true-crime kick. This one is another account of a real trial. It is about a university student who hosts a dinner party to celebrate the fact that she is going to kill herself and her boyfriend. The boyfriend is not aware that this is a farewell party, but – get this – most of the other people there are (?!?). She goes on to kill the boyfriend but, in true cowardly form, not herself.
It is really a jaw-droppingly weird story. The girlfriend seems to be pretty sane-ish, but struggling with self-obsession. The judge believes she has some kind of personality disorder, which I could kind of believe, except for that part where she doesn’t even try killing herself, but stands over her boyfriend while he dies slowly over the whole weekend (heroin, rohypnol). She only get four years. Her best friend 100% knew what she was planning, is 100% sane, and gets off scot free. It’s wild. Only of their friends, a 21 year old, gets even close to calling the police, but is shamed into thinking they are not serious. This was in many ways the most interesting part of the story, how none of these students had the courage to follow their gut.
This was an earlier piece of reportage than THIS HOUSE OF GRIEF, and I did not like it as much. It was, for my taste at least, a little bit over-written and overwrought. It was still interesting though, and I don’t doubt that if she has written more of these I will read them.
THIS HOUSE OF GRIEF by Helen Garner
I chose this book on impulse because Amazon recommended it to me. I had just read a book by the same aurhor, her first, which is why the algorithm though I might like it. That one was a deeply personal memoir of her life in a commune with her junkie boyfriend. This one is wildly different, being a straightforward piece of courtroom reportage.
It was pretty interesting. It tells the real life trial of an Australian man who drove his three children into a dam. They were drowned, but he survived. He claimed he had a coughing fit. His ex, and his family, all testified in his defense, saying he loved his children and would never have killed them. He was also however in the middle of an apparently amicable divorce – his wife was leaving him for the contractor who was doing up their house – and it became increasingly clear over the course of the trial that this mild-manner man in this polite divorce had actually murdered the children to get his revenge.
The story in itself was pretty interesting, but what really elevated it was Garner’s clear, lucid writing, and her close observation of how ‘justice’ actually gets served. The part that I can’t get over is that these poor kids were found unbuckled. It looks like the five year old unbuckled the two year old’s car seat, and the eight year old actually managed to get the window down; but just not quite in time to escape.
MOKEY GRIP by Helen Garner
Here is an book about the author’s experience being a young mother in 1970s Australia. She lived a kind of sincerely hippy lifestyle that I am not sure exists anymore. It’s all communal living, unsupervised children and relaxed attitudes to hard drugs. Also no one seems to have a job. It made me wonder wtf I am doing, really.
What I found particularly unusual and interesting in this book was the immediacy of the writing. She does not worry with backstory or context, you are just plunged right into the day to day. And its a very detailed day-to-day, she goes to the toilet a lot, something that almost never happens in books.
Like try this bit from near the beginning:
“Oh, I was happy then. At night our back yard smelt like the country.
It was early summer.
And everything, as it always does, began to heave and change. It wasn’t as if I didn’t already have somebody to love. There was Martin, teetering as many were that summer on the dizzy edge of smack . . . “
THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG by Peter Carey
Here’s a book so good it’s almost depressing, like: how has this Carey guy done this?
It tells a fictionalized version of the life of the Australian bank robber Ned Kelly, in the imagined voice of Ned Kelly. There’s not a lot in the way of punctuation, and sometimes we run dangerously close to getting a bit cute, but overall it’s amazingly successful. Try this:
“Inside the shanty were much laughing and singing the shadows flitting across the curtains. Harry Power were dancing I heard not a word about the bunions he otherwise were whingeing about night and day. I never knew a man to make such a fuss about his feet.”
Or this, about a bushfire:
“God willing one day I would tell that baby the story of the apple gums exploding in the night the ½ mad kangaroos driven down before this wrath into the township of Sebastopol . . “
Or this:
“. . a number of Chinamen was engaged with a game of mahjong on a wide wooden plank. These was hard looking fellows all dried out and salted down for keeping.”
It takes you right inside his mind, very successfully. He grows up in poverty, the child of a transported man, and very much at the mercy of landowners and their corrupt police. He is almost forced into the life of the outlaw, and is greatly admired by the poor for his success. I always want to believe the life of an outlaw is glamorous, but this book shows what I guess I always suspect, which is that in fact it is stressful and difficult and given the choice we’d all rather be landowners. A fantastic book.
GREEN DOT by Madeleine Gray
Here is how this book begins:
“For some years of my twenties I was very much in love with a man who would not leave his wife. For not one moment of this relationship was I unaware of what every single popular culture representation of such an arrangement portended my fate to be.
Having done well in school but having found little scope in which to win things since then, it is possible that my dedication to this relationship was in fact a dedication to my belief in myself – that I could make a man love me so much that he would leave what he had always known, all his so-called responsibilities, purely to attain my company forever. I offered nothing but myself, you see.”
That, in two paragraphs, is what the book is about. It is pretty sad, overall. Especially sad is the lack of cynicism of the man, who does genuinely seem to love her and to suffer over his inability to choose.
As the author points out, one reason she got so interested in him was because she had no other interests. This part, perhaps unfairly, I just found annoying. Here she is on how all her old schoolmates are getting jobs:
“Obviously we would all need money to feed and house ourselves when school was over; I didn’t not forsee that. Maybe for most of us this would mean having to do stuff for companies or whatever happened in business. KPIs? P&Ls? Circling back? But why were we all talking like the way we wanted to subsist was via indefinitely spending most of our waking hours doing something with very little relation to the formation and development of ourselves, a development which, until this point, we’d been told by our teachers and parents was very important?”
It is a bizarrely youthful contempt for a whole huge aspect of the human experience, which is world of commerce. A not unimportant part of the world, if you happen to live in late capitalism. And she does, oh god she does. Here she is having lunch one day:
“Eating this dry sushi, I am utterly dejected”
So she has standards as to the wetness of her sushi but somehow still feels she should not be weighed down by such petty matters as making an income.
It was a gripping story of terrible choices and I enjoyed it.
SARAH THORNHILL by Kate Greville
I enjoyed Kate Greville’s THE SECRET RIVER so much that I had to go almost instantly to its sequel, SARAH THORNHILL. The first one covered the life of a English convict transported to Australia, and the terrible things he did to build himself a life there. The second one tells the story of his daughter, who has to deal with these terrible things.
Sarah, the daughter, falls in love with a man, Jack, who is mixed race. All is going well until her parents find out, and then they reveal SPOILER ALERT their part in the killing of ten Aborigines some twenty years before. Horrified, he leaves her. Then she does a lot of suffering, both over being left and over guilt about what her parents did.
I wanted to buy it, but I just didn’t. The author seems to live in a moral universe where people are naturally going to be tortured over stuff done before they are born. I would like to live in this moral universe, but the challenge is I just don’t think it exists. I don’t think it exists today, and I definitely don’t think it existed for the Victorians, especially not in that context.
That said, Greville is a banging writer and it’s a great book. Perhaps it is a failure of my own cynicism that I was not able to enjoy it more.
THE SECRET RIVER by Kate Grenville
From the first paragraph of this book I knew I was in safe hands. There is no nicer feeling than opening a book and knowing you can give up your own thoughts immediately. It’s like you give yourself over.
This was a story of a man who grew up very poor in seventeenth century London, was transported to Australia as a convict, and the battles – moral and otherwise – he fought in trying to build a new life there. One forgets how rough people had it in Europe, and how recently. At one point his wife and he discuss quite pragmatically how she can start prostituting herself. It gives me hope for the developing world. It also helps you understand in some ways the context of the terrible things these Europeans did to the Aboriginal people. This conflict with the local people is really a stomach-churningly horrible part of this book.
I am surprised there are not more books like this. This meeting of two worlds in fantastically interesting. I’m surprised I haven’t seen much of it. I can’t for example think of a single example in African lit. You wouldn’t think at this late stage there would be any white space left, but here it is, I guess.
THE GREAT FIRE by Shirley Hazzard
I nearly gave up on this book multiple times. I found the style kind of hard to read, and the dialogue fake-y. And then at some point I sort of clicked into it, and it started to fly by. I worry that the older you get, the less wiling you are to enter into things on their terms, rather than your own. Anyway, I managed it on this one.
The main interest of this story was the setting, which was post WWII Japan/China/Australia. It drips with loss and longing. This is not to say the plot was not interesting: barring some side points about polio and Hiroshima, the main story is about a 16 year old girl and a 32 year old war man who fall madly in love. The girl’s parents, totally understandably, think this is not a good plan, and move her to New Zealand. He eventually follows her there and the novel ends with them having sex.
I did wonder why the girl’s parents were painted as such villains, and some Googling reveals that this story is pretty close to Hazzard’s own life. She too fell in love with a much older man right after the second World War, and was also removed from him. However, in her real life, they eventually broke up by letter, and never actually hooked up. This novel was written some forty years later, after she had gone to visit this guy on his Welsh farm. I guess there is a lot of comfort in fixing history, even if only in the imagination.