Lost for Words by Edward St Aubyn

At some point I started thinking it had lost its way – or perhaps it was never really clear that it had a way. But it’s fun and I don’t see why that can’t be enough. Certainly I am going to read some more St Aubyn.

The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme by Andreï Makine

It’s not so easy to get Makine novels in Australia. In the end the purchase of this, along with a couple of others, was convoluted. I discovered what was supposed to be the best, or thereabouts, secondhand bookshop in Melbourne, Fully Booked. It has no web presence, no email, no phone number. Strictly in person purchases. Luckily my friend Noela doesn’t live far from Thornbury  and was happy to make the trip, no doubt being an avid reader herself was an inducement. I gave her a list of authors I was after, including Makine. Then, on her next flight to Adelaide, Noela delivered them, fittingly, in a French bistro.

I cannot claim to be happy with this book. At the time I was reading it, I thought it was because I was between a couple of truly sensation authors – Murnane and Ejersbo – and however good Makine is, maybe he doesn’t cut the mustard in that company. But now I read that it is the third and last in a series and I haven’t read either of the others. I loved the setting, how he writes about his Russia. The love story aspect to me had something false about it and maybe that’s because he used it as a rationale for what he wanted to write. The ending in France is unsettling to say the least and I wonder what French nationals thought of it. It seems I have to read numbers one and two, and then revisit this one, much as it feels like a stand-alone to me.

Somebody online said that Makine’s great theme is how we in the present undervalue, for no good reason, the past. The historian in me agrees. Maybe that’s why I am drawn to reading him.

 

Revolution by Jakob Ejersbo

For Christmas I found myself the second and third in Ejersbo’s African Trilogy. The first volume, Exile, is a relatively conventional narrative tale, an unusual world seen through teenage eyes. The second volume takes the form of shorter and longer pieces about many of the characters that appeared in the first volume, or will in the last. Part set in Denmark, but mostly in Tanzania, the descriptions of life in that part of Africa are so intense, so graphic – words making pictures in a way pictures couldn’t – that one feels absolutely present, even in a world that couldn’t be further away from one’s own…Exile was good, Revolution is remarkable.

This trilogy is shaping up to be one of the twentieth century’s great literary achievements. The last volume to come.

A Season on Earth by Gerald Murnane

It was a shock, coming to this from Murnane’s first, Tamarisk Row. Not that there aren’t ongoing themes, young male experience, Roman Catholicism, gambling, isolation from culture. But this one is very focussed on the teenage boy and therefore on sex: how it fits in with RC and gambling is the overarching story of A Season on Earth. I do wonder if people now can read this, especially since Roman Catholicism is so marginal to life in Anglo-Saxon countries, not least here in Australia. The shock, though, is the style. Where Tamarisk Row was a struggle – pleasurable, but nonetheless difficult – A Season on Earth is easy. If you don’t want to read a lot about Roman Catholicism and the teenage boy’s relationship with it, this book is not for you. But there is always humour, or something approaching humour there, it is not a story of dour epiphany. Recalling my primary school attempts to fast-track sainthood whilst avoiding any pain, which involved much research to find saints who had nice lives (needles in a haystack), it was easy to empathise with the young protagonist’s attempts to negotiate the facts of a teenager’s desires, if not urges, with his supposed religious feeling. It’s here that the gambling comes out and that involves deal-making with God, another RC habit which will be familiar to those brought up in that unkind religion.

Still shaking my head about this one and have put it on my ‘I’m moving on but I can’t get you out of my mind’. Perhaps that’s a recommendation to read it.

 

Magpie by Peter Goldsworthy and Brian Matthews

Not one of my GR friends has read this! Not one person on GR has reviewed it. It’s an even worse cold-shouldering than Australian books get in general and I’m guessing that’s because it has the wrong number of authors. Don’t let that put you off, this is a hilarious short novel – I would have called it a novella, but I guess that’s the kiss of marketing death along with joint authorship.

Spoilers follow.

Should you happen to be an Adelaide person, then the particulars of the university merger will seem somewhat prescient. I loved the description of the military influence on the merger – no doubt this is the case, some 32 years later as it actually unfolds. Oh, and the tone of the book has it all just right. Apparently it is no accident that in the real world now, the joint committee calls their get-togethers the Future University meetings. Magpie gets the FU tone perfect. Talk about crystal ball.

But this is just a small aside in the book. The major theme is writing and publishing, and in this case, I think it’s better to stay schtum, other than to say it’s clever, witty, and if you have ever wondered if fictional characters should have rights, then this is the book for you. Highly recommended.

Women Falling Down in the Street by Kate Jennings

Kate Jennings is one of those authors I intend to work my way through, but it’s easier said than done. Even Snake, which is more or less an Australian classic and had a commercial publisher, is hard to get hold of.

It may be problematic with this collection that they seem simple, but aren’t. Being, however, easy to read, that can escape one’s notice. They also feel intensely personal, like they come from the author’s life but she doesn’t want to say so. I’m undecided, after the dazzling Moral Hazard, what to make of this lot. I think ‘Observations’ would be a better description of the pieces that ‘Stories’.

Closed for Winter by Georgia Blain

I thought this, her first, was an improved version of her second book Candelo. But still, it has the same monotony of repetitious reflection and non-action throughout. I suspect I’ve picked up another of Blain’s in my travels and whether I should open it or not is the question.

To let Finley have the last word:

 

 

Life Class by Pat Barker

I thought this was a bit of a stinker and I hope I haven’t bought more of the trilogy. Frankly, I have learned more about life from the cat.

Summing up my 2023 reading

I am not a big fan of these sorts of posts, but it struck me recently that 2023 is a year in which I have read a lot of new (to me) authors. Glancing at my reading for 2022, I can see that 2023 was a far better year. I have listed 31 books on my blog for 2023 and only 19 for 2022. Probably that means I read less last year, but with a few bright exceptions I am sure that I enjoyed the fiction of this year more. And if you are enjoying new authors, that means books you know you can look forward to, at least for me, since I largely read out-0f-date fiction.

Without doing naffy things like ranking the authors, I am looking forward to reading more of these in 2024, having been introduced to them this year.

• Kate Jennings (she didn’t publish enough, shakes fist)
• Imre Kertész
• Georgia Blain (she may disappoint)
• Andrei Makine
• Gerald Murnane
• Jess Walter (hard to get hold of in Australia)
• Peter Goldsworthy (actually, he goes back to the very end of 2022)
• George Saunders
• Pat Barker
• Elizabeth Jane Howard
• Helen Erichsen (my only recently published and also debut novel, perhaps I should do this more often, it was terrific)

These were new to me, but we did not get on.

• Janet Frame (did not finish, will not revisit, I think she’s too good for me)
• Geoff Dyer (did not finish, will not revisit, but I feel just a teensy bit bad about that)

 

Tamarisk Row by Gerald Murnane

I’d forgotten that horse racing and gambling on it were once such an endemic part of Australian life. My own upbringing, like the protagonist’s in this story, was RC and poor. Like his mother, mine was virulently anti-gambling. And like his father, mine was addicted to ‘the races’, as they were always called. In the case of my father, this was despite the stories he would tell of those around him, including his own brothers, being unable to afford warm coats in winter because all their money went on feeding the bookies. The difference, however, was that my mother wouldn’t let my father do it ‘for work’, in that way Augustine justifies his relentless losses, and so almost all my father’s bets were purely theoretical….in that way Augustine’s are when he ‘stops’.

Thank heavens my mother held her ground on this. She herself had experienced anguish at the hands of the ‘industry’. Her very decent father suddenly died when she was at the end of primary school, forcing my grandmother to make ends meet for her four daughters and herself by opening a fruit and veg shop. Unfortunately her very decent dead husband had a brother who was quite the opposite. He ran an SP booking racket using my grandma’s shop as the front. Eventually it was raided and there was a most upright, decent, God-fearing sort of woman up before the courts, taking the blame for her brother-in-law. Perhaps the memory of this was partly to account for my mother’s attitudes, but in any case, she would also have been well aware of what happens to the families of those who decide that they are brighter than the trainers and the bookies and the big punters with their scams.

I never lived in small town rural Australia, but every Australian has been through them, they have felt the glazed heat, understood what the local pool means, seen the still smallness of such places. The aloneness that creates the rich imaginary life of small children like Clement. Because others drink with the consequent brutal behaviour as well as bet, his father Augustine sees the extreme poverty through which he puts his family as somehow more acceptable, superior perhaps. However sorry we feel for Clement, we know there is far worse, within the walls of the story and without.

Murnane has both the knowledge that comes of his own fascination with the horses and the understanding, I suppose born from a capacity to stand outside himself, to see it for what it is. Again, it was incredibly evocative for me. There is a moment when Augustine is regretting not the amount he has lost – that is never a source of regret for compulsive gamblers – but the amount he has won. It brought to mine my friend B. with whom I was flatting. We were part of a community which saw itself as a group of pro betters, this was back before computers made ordinary people able to compete. My friends were all numbers people. Some of them were dedicated professional winners. But some, and B. was one, were mere addicts. B. always made sure he paid his rent and his health insurance, but other than that, it was all for the horses. Or rather, for the people who won from people like him. One work day (as the horse betters saw Saturdays) I heard he’d won a lot of money, it was around 30K. I called him and said the kind of things you say at such a moment. But he was sad, just like Augustine was sad with such a win. Addicts think not of what they did win, but of what they didn’t. It was the one they should have had the house on. It was the first time I really felt pity for B. He couldn’t win, even if he won.

This world of horse betting is dying in Australia. Partly this is because there are so many ways to part addicts with their money these days. But it’s also because horse racing is seen as bad for the animals involved. Gone is the culture of Melbourne Cup day, a day which unofficially served as a national holiday throughout the land. My mother, harking back to the period when this book was set, recalled the big hall at Wayville in which school and university exams were held. At the time the race started, pens were downed, the radio put on, and for ten minutes all in the hall were transported to a different place. Murnane has preserved an Australia which is dying, not only because of the horse races, but because drinking has changed, isolation has changed, attitudes have changed.

Some years back the NYT predicted a Nobel prize for him and I can understand why. By the time I was a few dozen pages into Tamarisk Row, I went back to Imprints and bought another eight by him that they had in stock. I haven’t started my next yet because I found this one deeply painful. Not only because of the horse racing, but also because it dragged up memories of the brutality of Roman Catholicism as we children experienced it in that period. Oh, and we can add gender relations into the mix as well. But above all its precise exquisiteness hurt like needles being placed in just the right positions.

Maybe it’s a book to love, rather than to like. But don’t let that put you off reading it.