GatesyRead

The Midnight Library is Borges-Lite. Think ‘The Library of Babel’ as a novel for twenty-somethings. A confused young woman – attempting suicide – ends up in a library as a half-way house between here and there. On the shelves are an infinite number of variations of the life she has to this point led, and she has a chance to try them all. Until the shoe fits. (The shoe, however, gets tighter and death – real death – is a distinct possibility). Nora Seed has gone to seed – she has walked away from a musical dream and let her brother down in the process; she lives alone after dumping her fiancé; she's a depressive employee of a music shop where moping puts off customers. There’s not much worth living for, she thinks. Once in the library (having taken the red pill or the blue pill, or both) she comes across the manifestation of the kind librarian who looked after her the day her mother died, while still at school. Kindness is returned in the temporary after life.  What would you ch

  The Labyrinth of the Spirits is the final instalment of a cycle known as "The Cemetery of Forgotten Books". Its predecessors include The Shadow of the Wind (2004), The Angel’s Game (2009) and The Prisoner of Heaven (2013). This equates to 2232 pages, and that means I have spent quite a few hours over the years in the esteemed company of the author Carlos Ruiz Zaf ó n, who sadly left us much too early this year, aged 55. The popularity of the series must buoy fans of literature in that the subject of the novels is literature itself, though the context is the dark period of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath in Franco’s Spain. The melding of Letters and History produces a unique blend of genres, including mystery, crime, romance, thriller (and various subgenres, such as literary thriller and political thriller). In this, there is something for everyone – though this last instalment is over 800 pages – so one for those who like their books big, like a big Shiraz.

I am forever playing catch-up with prolific writers like Ian McEwan, who has published 17 novels (and I have managed  to read just 6: Black Dogs, Enduring Love, Amsterdam, Atonement, Solar, Machines like Me ). Solar , I found on the street library, and I am reluctant to put it back. The book deals, in a comic sort of way, with the climate crisis through the story of a Nobel prize-winner, a physicist, who appears to be more interested in his peccadilloes than his protons. McEwan opens his book with a line that only an established male writer could get away with: ‘He belonged to that class of men – vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, fat, clever – who are unaccountably attractive to certain beautiful women’ (3). “Unaccountable” is the key to the sentence: Michael Beard has a string of ex-wives, one on the way out and a lover to compensate; but he has money and a degree of fame, and that (perhaps) accounts for the unaccountable. In the manner of English novels written by men about fl

In a 2013 opinion piece ‘ Misogyny lurks in Winton's world of fiction’ , Nicolle Flint weighed up Tim Winton’s various representations of male and female character in his novels and concluded: …These female characters appear stereotypical. They ''bother''. What remains most remarkable about Tim Winton's writing, in the context of ongoing allegations of sexism and misogyny, is that the literary left leaves the handiwork of one of our most revered cultural icons unexamined. ''Sometimes,'' as Bob Dylan once sang, ''the silence can be like thunder.'' Bob Dylan also sang ‘The Times, they are a-changing”, and Winton has spoken directly about such accusations. ( Guardian interview with Gay Alcorn, 2018): “ I’m writing outside the enclave of the inner city, and what’s happening in the world that I’m seeing is that women are having a harder trajectory than men. And if there has to be a body count, does nobody seem to notice that most of t

I picked up Ian McEwan’s Back Dogs at a second hand book fair on the Central Coast – a first edition with an intriguing inscription from Peter to Spanner ‘computer correspondent, writer and journalist’ and worthy friend to Peter. Spanner sounds like a busy man, but surely not as prolific a writer McEwan. I have read (in reverse order) Machines like Me , Atonement, Amsterdam, Enduring Love and now Black Dogs, and that’s only one fifth of his published novels. This one at least is short – 174 pages with generous margins. Black Dogs starts with a preface in which the narrator confesses to a fascination with other people’s parents, having lost his own to an accident at the age of eight. Soon enough his wife’s parents, June and Bernard, have taken centre stage and it is they who are the subject of the story to unfold. Our narrator, Jeremy, is thus both biographer and storyteller with a writer’s neat tricks, like this one: ‘I have taken a number of liberties, the most flagrant o

Last year at a conference I was reading aloud what I hope will one day be the opening of my next published novel when a well spoken young academic suggested I read John Lancaster's  The Debt to Pleasure . Maybe it was the hint of ego in my narrator, or a suggestion of his unreliability. There is certainly nothing culinary or sinister about my own manuscript. I took up the suggestion, none the less -- listening to others is a trick of the trade I've learnt rather later than most.  Let us start with the novel's epigraph by Bertrand Russell: ‘ My German engineer was very argumentative and tiresome. He wouldn’t admit that it was certain that there was not a rhinoceros in the room.’ Now turn the page to the ‘Preface, Acknowledgement and a Note on Structure’ where author/narrator Tarquin Winot writes (in tiresome fashion): ‘This is not a conventional cookbook. Though I should straight away attach a disclaimer to my disclaimer and say that I have nothing but the highest rega

On Friday 24 January 2020, a small group of Sydney Rush fans gathered to attend a Sydney 'wake' for the recent passing of Neil Peart . The following text was my contribution to the formalities. Rush never toured Australia and didn't really have a hit song here. But Neil Peart's lyrics, and his phenomenal drumming had a great impact on each of our lives.  I've quoted freely from Neil Peart's lyrics, which are available for all to read on the Rush website .  Neil Peart was a prolific reader who thought deeply about his craft as a writer. There are probably lots of great articles out there -- here's just one I found from 1986, after Power Windows was released.  “ The Songwriting Interview: Neil Peart” (Bruce Pollock , Guitar for the Practicing Musician, October 1986, transcribed by Gregg Jaeger).  This is a step away from my usual practice on this blog of writing exclusively about fiction. That's because Neil Peart's work may come with

Paul Auster’s Oracle Night was published in 2004. I must have first read it that year, or else the next. I know I enjoyed it. The premise of footnotes that carry over several pages to set up alternative methods of reading the text stayed with me; the typical Auster trick of running several narratives at once and moving in and out of them astounded me then as now. Part of the reason I returned to it recently was to admire, once again, how smoothly Auster creates a series of embedded narratives. Layer 1: Sydney Orr, Brooklyn Author, is recovering from a near fatal illness. He buys a blue notebook and begins to work on a new story, based on a character from Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (a clue – hardboiled detective fiction rarely ends with events “set right”). This layer concerns Orr’s life as a writer, husband and friend to another writer – a more successful one, and a rival of sorts, John Trause. Layer 2: Footnotes. Orr uses footnotes to explain the story behind the stor