GatesyRead

It is hard to call yourself a Don Delillo fan when he has published 15+ novels and all you have read is Endzone (see earlier review), White Noise , and the short story collection The Angel Esmeralda . Still, I’m a fan. White Noise is a novel I’d heard about and perhaps wondered about for a long time. It was published in 1984, in the midst of the 1980s escalation of the Cold War and it has everything you would expect from a great novelist. A clever setup – Jack Gladney, lecturer in Hitler studies no less, is a man with a certain nervousness around his family and a insecurity complex coming in part from his lack of familiarity with the German language.  Then the catalyst for change: a chemical cloud, an ‘airborne toxic event’ which hovers gigantic nearby and causes the evacuation of the university town where Jack lives, like a radiation cloud gone astray from its nuclear referent. Around this event the novel circulates, crackles even, with brilliance, particularly in dialogue. ...

I very much enjoyed these Euro-Australian short stories, with an author A. S Patrić born in the former-Yugoslavia, and bringing to his fiction not only the ‘outsider’ perspective on Australian culture, but the alienation of Kafka, and something of the hard-edge of Raymond Carver. ‘Memories of Jane Doe’ could be a Carver story, or else Richard Ford – and yet sadly (thematically) also straight out of the Australian news. ‘Doe’ deals with the disappearance of a young European dreamer at the hands of a violent chef, with a wry and sad comment on a restaurant-owner who might turn a blind eye to preserve her business. ‘Among the Ruins’ sounds like Borges, but is the ‘backstory’ of one of the men who arrest Joseph K in Kafka’s The Trial , and here we are in European territory. This movement of sensibilities and styles intrigues me very much. In ‘The Flood’ a self-educated European-Australian taxi driver takes an older man for a drive in his taxi, with suitcases and an ‘outmoded code of...

Paul Ewen is a New Zealand writer who lives in London. His character Francis Plug manages to be both witless and funny at the same time, in the manner of Flight of the Conchords taking on New York with their folk-rock (in this case, Plug is an English gardener and would-be novelist). The Australian Text Publishing edition includes the summation that the book is ‘an affectionate satire on the world of literature’. It is comic, and many of the misadventures are of the more genteel kind, but I am not sure that the satire can be described as ‘affectionate’. In fact, what I liked best about Francis Plug’s How to be a Public Author was the juxtaposition of Plug’s generous eccentricity (albeit in an alcoholic haze) and the intolerance, indifference and meanness of both the middle-class audiences of literary events, and their self-satisfied authors. There are a few exceptions in Plug’s recollections of his visits to book readings, but Ruth Rendell’s “SHOO! SHOO!” (178) cuts to the chase. ...

It is a painfully smug habit to begin a review by referring to other books you have read by the same author. In my case these are All Souls (1989); A Heart so White (1992) and Dark Back of Time (1998). All Souls involves a Spanish academic and an affair, and is – according to Penguin Books – ‘a masterpiece of black humour’. A Heart so White involves an investigation into the past of the narrator’s father, with echoes of Macbeth. A Dark Back in Time is so strange that it is it attracts reviews with words like ‘extraordinary’ and ‘dazzling’ – a sure sign that no one can make head nor tail of what Javier Marías had in mind when he wrote a book with a character named Javier Marías recalling the sources of his earlier writing. The Infatuations , I am relieved to say keeps its digressions and literary allusions under tight discipline, paradoxically through sentences that can only be described as ‘extraordinary’ and ‘dazzling’. This novel is difficult to describe without giving away ...

I have 13 Paul Auster novels on my bookshelves (14 if you include The Red Notebook ) and each one of them has been duly read and loved – with degrees of love, admittedly, but always love. I bought 4321 when it was released but baulked at it until December 2018. When you read the first of its 866 pages, you can understand that a commitment of time is needed. Not only that, but because the story is really 3 alternatives to 1 story (or 4 closely related, alternate stories) there is no use reading a few pages each day because you will just get lost. In the end, with other duties to attend to, I started in the holiday period and set myself the goal of getting through 50-60 pages a day, and that is an approach I can recommend for this weighty tome. Before starting the novel, I had understood the narrative strategy of providing the reader with different pathways for the main character, Archie Ferguson. However, it took me a few chapters to work out what was going on. Chapter “1.0” acts as...

Clive James has in recent years been serialising his struggles with leukaemia in a series he calls ‘Reports of My Death’, which such headlines as ‘My new wheelchair is a thing of beauty and precision’. This is Clive James to a T: beautiful phrasing, unending humour, and the temerity to put himself at the centre of every phase of his life, and assume that interest will follow. It does, because his sentences are that good. The Preface of Unreliable Memoirs , for example, opens with this beautifully balanced pair: ‘Most first novels are disguised autobiographies. This autobiography is a disguised novel’ (1). The first chapter, ‘The Kid from Kogarah’ introduces the voice of the main character in this novel, the egotistical man writing the memoir: ‘I was born in 1939. The other big event of that year was the outbreak of the Second World War, but for the moment that did not affect me’ (3). What follows in this first book of James’ memoirs (there were three initially, and two more in r...

All of Richard Flanagan’s novels are different. Death of a River Guide takes a tour through a drowning man’s Tasmanian family history; Gould’s Book of Fish is Flanagan’s masterpiece – a historical tale of a convict forger and fantasist. Then there was Wanting set in Dickens’ London and Bass Strait; the just-ahead-of-its-time tale of political manipulation in the age of terrorism – TheUnknown Terrorist ; and finally a well-deserved Booker winner, T he Narrow Road to the Deep North where torture on the Thai-Burma death railway is set against the present life of Dorrigo Evans. The earlier novels are more obviously ‘literary’ (I haven't read The Sound of One Hand Clapping but its description sounds poetic).  Flanagan seems adept at a more popular mode in Terrorist and Deep North (or, at least, a more straightforward one). If  Carey is Australian progressive rock; and Winton is Australian folk; then Richard Flanagan is  a one-man Supergroup, comfortable enough in ...