Books for 2011
This post is for TC, who asked for some book recommendations. Being holidays, the Christmas season, a time to think of friends and family nearby and faraway, all means that the cultural juices are flowing.
So books. I don't think I could go past Anna Funder's book "All that I am", which was repeatedly nominated in the Australian's A-Z Books of the Year. Brenda Walker summed it up best, "about anti-facism activisim in London in the 1930s, recollected by those who have temporarily survived, including playwright Ernst Toller. Terror, intelligent courage, betrayal and deovation are the subjects of this deeply moving novel". So true, had me on the internet, investigating further reading sources of this era, this terrifying time for Western European intelligentsia. In a match, Colm Toibin recommends Evelyn Juer's HOUSE OF EXILE, as explaining what happened to the German intellectuals including Heinrich Mann after 1933...(the expatriates? or those who became the first wave of concentration camp deaths...)
A fortunate Age by Joanna Smith Rakoff, uses the framework/plot of The Group by Mary McCarthy, which I read several times in my late teens/early 20s and naively, at the time, felt stunned by the recognition factor. Now I realise how much of my experiences as a young uncertain female are universal, or universal at least to similiarly educated western women. (Anxiety, uncertainty, vulnerability, easily overawed by dominating people, easily burdened by other people's concerns, intellectually insecure, yearning for something unclear and unstated). What I liked about both books, is the setting in New York, with close documentation of the circle of several 20 somethings (young adult, building a sustainable life, etc). In A Fortunate Age, the author also captures the recent Clinton era, the graduates of a liberal campus, their heritage as affluent offspring of the Reagan era (I imagine them as the cronies of Alex P Keaton). The character portraits are well done; the New York times review favours Dave Kohane, a commitment phobe pianist; I think I liked the character of Sadie best, a privileged scion of the Upper East Side, who should be unlikeable, but represents the best aspects of old fashioned culture-manners and the confidence to pursue education but resist an academic path.
Dabbling on the New York times website, led me to the Christmas weekend magazine, which has an article with Will Self, when he stays in a hotel in his own town, to see what it is like to be a tourist on home turf. I do prefer his journalism to fiction. And there is an interview with Viggo Mortensen who apparently is in a movie called A Dangerous Method, where he plays Freud to Michael Fassbender's Jung. I loved Michael Fassbender in HUNGER and would like to see the next movie by that film-maker, but since The Kid arrived, me and the cinema don't get together too much. (But when we do, it's been the independent flicks at the Mercury: Autoluminescent, the Bill Cunningham biopic, Pure Shit and all that).
Am wanting to read the new Kirsten Tranter novel, the new Jeffrey Eugenedies novel, Five Bells by Gail Jones, loved MELBOURNE by Sophie CUnningham (the way she structured it across a year in the life of a Melburnite, worked for me, the documentary style of a inner city person immersed in the world of books, writing, terraces, cycling, musicians and picnics in the park).
Have also enjoyed trawling for essays by Helen Garner. She confesses to her well being dry, having no new fiction in her, since she wrote "The Spare Room". Was it in Meanjin in which she defends The Spare Room as a piece of fiction, despite it being based on reality; the options it provides to write it the way she wants, fictionalised, rather than the factual nature of non-fiction. She also refers to being visited at home by the real life "Javo" from Monkey Grip (he runs Eklektic, a store of curios in Salamanca Square in Hobart) and how he asked her why she didn't just use real names for all the people in Monkey Grip; calling her bluff on the 30 years she'd spent defending it as a novel. What Helen Garner argues is that even a roman a clef, a novel based on her diary, requires writing and novelising, the ability to draw it into a narrative, an engaging story, and that is the art of book writing. I agree.
Linda Grant wrote "We had it so good" about baby boomers in Islington, I also liked her earlier novel set in 40s Palestine. A few years ago I loved Submarine by Joe Dunthorne (and very much want to see the film, enhanced by it starring another 2 favourite actors, Noah Taylor & Sally Hawkins). Wild Abandon (spoiler alert) which I'm giving to my sister for Christmas, has an excellent character in it, an 11 year old boy who is home schooled, intelligent, innocent and lovable.
So books. I don't think I could go past Anna Funder's book "All that I am", which was repeatedly nominated in the Australian's A-Z Books of the Year. Brenda Walker summed it up best, "about anti-facism activisim in London in the 1930s, recollected by those who have temporarily survived, including playwright Ernst Toller. Terror, intelligent courage, betrayal and deovation are the subjects of this deeply moving novel". So true, had me on the internet, investigating further reading sources of this era, this terrifying time for Western European intelligentsia. In a match, Colm Toibin recommends Evelyn Juer's HOUSE OF EXILE, as explaining what happened to the German intellectuals including Heinrich Mann after 1933...(the expatriates? or those who became the first wave of concentration camp deaths...)
A fortunate Age by Joanna Smith Rakoff, uses the framework/plot of The Group by Mary McCarthy, which I read several times in my late teens/early 20s and naively, at the time, felt stunned by the recognition factor. Now I realise how much of my experiences as a young uncertain female are universal, or universal at least to similiarly educated western women. (Anxiety, uncertainty, vulnerability, easily overawed by dominating people, easily burdened by other people's concerns, intellectually insecure, yearning for something unclear and unstated). What I liked about both books, is the setting in New York, with close documentation of the circle of several 20 somethings (young adult, building a sustainable life, etc). In A Fortunate Age, the author also captures the recent Clinton era, the graduates of a liberal campus, their heritage as affluent offspring of the Reagan era (I imagine them as the cronies of Alex P Keaton). The character portraits are well done; the New York times review favours Dave Kohane, a commitment phobe pianist; I think I liked the character of Sadie best, a privileged scion of the Upper East Side, who should be unlikeable, but represents the best aspects of old fashioned culture-manners and the confidence to pursue education but resist an academic path.
Dabbling on the New York times website, led me to the Christmas weekend magazine, which has an article with Will Self, when he stays in a hotel in his own town, to see what it is like to be a tourist on home turf. I do prefer his journalism to fiction. And there is an interview with Viggo Mortensen who apparently is in a movie called A Dangerous Method, where he plays Freud to Michael Fassbender's Jung. I loved Michael Fassbender in HUNGER and would like to see the next movie by that film-maker, but since The Kid arrived, me and the cinema don't get together too much. (But when we do, it's been the independent flicks at the Mercury: Autoluminescent, the Bill Cunningham biopic, Pure Shit and all that).
Am wanting to read the new Kirsten Tranter novel, the new Jeffrey Eugenedies novel, Five Bells by Gail Jones, loved MELBOURNE by Sophie CUnningham (the way she structured it across a year in the life of a Melburnite, worked for me, the documentary style of a inner city person immersed in the world of books, writing, terraces, cycling, musicians and picnics in the park).
Have also enjoyed trawling for essays by Helen Garner. She confesses to her well being dry, having no new fiction in her, since she wrote "The Spare Room". Was it in Meanjin in which she defends The Spare Room as a piece of fiction, despite it being based on reality; the options it provides to write it the way she wants, fictionalised, rather than the factual nature of non-fiction. She also refers to being visited at home by the real life "Javo" from Monkey Grip (he runs Eklektic, a store of curios in Salamanca Square in Hobart) and how he asked her why she didn't just use real names for all the people in Monkey Grip; calling her bluff on the 30 years she'd spent defending it as a novel. What Helen Garner argues is that even a roman a clef, a novel based on her diary, requires writing and novelising, the ability to draw it into a narrative, an engaging story, and that is the art of book writing. I agree.
Linda Grant wrote "We had it so good" about baby boomers in Islington, I also liked her earlier novel set in 40s Palestine. A few years ago I loved Submarine by Joe Dunthorne (and very much want to see the film, enhanced by it starring another 2 favourite actors, Noah Taylor & Sally Hawkins). Wild Abandon (spoiler alert) which I'm giving to my sister for Christmas, has an excellent character in it, an 11 year old boy who is home schooled, intelligent, innocent and lovable.
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