As the title indicates, David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel (Hamish Hamilton) remained unfinished at the time of his death. Wallace’s last novel grapples directly with questions such as life’s meaning and of the value of work and society. Siri Hustvedt’s The Summer without Men (Hodder) is a tragicomedy about the war of the sexes and what makes women tick. Jasper Fforde’s One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (Hodder & Stoughton) is set in the fantastical BookWorld in a time of unrest and the impending genre war can only be averted by the diplomatic skills of literary detective Thursday Next. Betty Churcher, former director of the National Gallery of Australia, knew her eyesight was failing, so she set about sketching her favourite artworks in order to commit them to memory. Her sketches are published in Notebooks (MUP). In Notorious Australian Women (ABC Books), author Kay Saunders celebrates the lives of some of Australia’s most fearless, brash and scandalous women–Media Extra.
Archive for April, 2011
Most mentioned this week
BOOK REVIEW: The Taste of River Water (Cate Kennedy, Scribe)
I wonder how many times I have broken some lock,
Searched hastily and withdrawn,
Thinking the room empty,
Overlooked the disguised and waiting gift,
Missed the mountain. (‘Thinking the Room Empty’)
Poetry has the knack, in the right hands, of capturing the poignancy of a particular moment in a memorable or vivid way—of finding the ‘disguised and waiting gift’, as the above passage from Cate Kennedy’s latest collection calls it. Such moments need not be especially extraordinary in themselves in order to bring forth extraordinary insights. Indeed, Kennedy seems adept an extracting striking conclusions from the least epic of events—a joyflight experienced by long-dead family members, for instance, or a couple laying a new floor in their house. Sometimes her conclusions are comic—ever considered the parallels between the endless ones and zeros that are the basis of computing, and the ‘purl purl plain plain plain, purl purl plain’ of a mother knitting? Other times they are powerfully affecting; in one poem she depicts the last excruciating days of a survivor of the 1950s nuclear tests. Kennedy’s career as a poet has evolved in parallel with her success as a short-story writer and novelist and her accessible poems display the hallmarks of a poet increasingly well-practised in her craft. There is much to admire here.
Andrew Wilkins is director of independent press WilkinsFarago and a former publisher of Bookseller+Publisher. This review first appeared in the April issue of the magazine. The Taste of River Water will be published in May.
BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Dream of the Thylacine’ (Margaret Wild, illus by Ron Brooks, A&U)
In their first collaborative work since Fox, Margaret Wild and Ron Brooks again push the boundaries of the picture book form with this haunting allegory of extinction. It tells the story of the last-known Tasmanian Tiger, whose eventual death in captivity in the late 1930s marked the end of an entire native species. Trapped within a cold concrete and twisty wire cage, the thylacine prowls and rages, driven by a deep longing to return to the forest. Yet it is only through death that his dream to be reunited with the land will be realised. Wild’s text is sparse and powerful. With two stories to tell—of what was and what could have been—the book hovers in an unsettling space between fantasy and reality, hope and extinction, and the living and the dying. This duality is captured most beautifully through Brooks’s mixed media artwork. Confronting us with the imprisoned and suffering thylacine, pleading for freedom and understanding, Brooks then contrasts this with the animal’s exhilarating transformation through the wilds of its imagination—pointing towards a universal resilience of spirit in the face of certain death.
Meredith Tate is a freelance writer, editor and reviewer who has worked for a children’s publisher. This review first appeared in the Junior supplement of the March issue of Bookseller+Publisher.
A dose of 1920s glamour …
The May issue of Bookseller+Publisher is hot off the press, with a lovely cover to celebrate the July publication of Sulari Gentill’s second Rowland Sinclair mystery A Decline in Prophets (Pantera Press), which reviewer Pip Newling describes as ‘historical crime with a healthy dose of 1920s glamour, wit and social history’. It’s very on trend, we think, with the buzz around prohibition-era TV drama Boardwalk Empire.
But what else do our reviewers recommend?
The Life (Malcolm Knox, A&U, June)
Reviewer Jo Case found Malcolm Knox’s latest novel a ‘deeply rewarding and utterly absorbing’ puzzle of a book. It’s the story of washed-up former surfing champ Dennis Keith, who is being interviewed by a journalist he nicknames ‘The BFO’ or ‘my Bi-Fricken-Ographer’. Case admires the ‘spiky, roughly hewn prose, rich with surf slang and wordplay, often breaking into sets of sentences that read like a kind of poetry’, as well as Knox’s expert ability to inhabit this ‘idiosyncratic, deeply sensitive, equally aggressive’ character.
Love, Honour and O’Brien (Jennifer Rowe, A&U, June)
‘When Holly Love decides to hunt down Andrew McNish, the fiancé who disappeared under mysterious circumstances and took all of her savings with him, she doesn’t realise that it’s the first step on a madcap ride that will lead her to an eccentric little town in the Blue Mountains, or that she will end up accidentally posing as a private investigator while sharing living space with a psychic, a sweet-natured elderly phone sex worker and a parrot,’ writes reviewer Jarrah Moore, who found Jennifer Rowe’s ‘cast-of-quirky-characters mystery’ ‘endearing and highly enjoyable’.
The Vanishing Act (Mette Jakobsen, Text, July)
The debut novel from Danish-born, Australia-based author Mette Jakobsen won five stars from reviewer Felicity McLean, who describes it as a ‘quixotic story’ that ‘explores the delicate dance between logic and imagination through the minutia of island life’. ‘The Vanishing Act introduces readers to a wonderland of characters so quirky it seems inconceivable they share the same 240 pages,’ she writes. ‘This is a stunning new voice for fans of literary fiction, and reads like a thoroughly modern Hans Christian Andersen fairytale.’
Whispering Death (Garry Disher, Text, August)
Fans of Garry Disher’s ‘Challis and Destry’ series will not be disappointed with his latest offering, writes reviewer Kimberley Allsopp. ‘All the elements that make up a great crime novel are here: an underfunded police unit, strong male and female characters, a distinct setting and the contrasting views of characters within the law and those that operate outside it.’ The story is set in the small town of Waterloo in Victoria, and Allsopp believes ‘the book’s prominent local setting should appeal to readers of Peter Temple’s “Jack Irish” novels’.
Most mentioned this week
Imagine if Jesus had a rebellious, clever sister. Such is the world that author Leslie Cannold as created in her new novel The Book of Rachael (Text). Elisabeth Holdsworth’s novel Those Who Come after (Picador) is about a girl who learns in her adulthood how to pass on the stories from her history. She learns to speak about her father, who was part of the French Resistance and her mother, a Holocaust survivor. The Troubled Man (Harvill Secker) is the tenth and final book in Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series, where Wallander hears about a cover-up of Russian submarines in Swedish waters in the 80s from ex-Navy officer Hakan, who then mysteriously disappears. These three books topped the most mentioned chart with equal mentions this week—Media Extra.
