GatesyRead

  Juan Mars é ’s The Snares of Memory begins with 48 numbered responses to what appears to be written replies to interview questions posed to a writer/novelist. In this way, Mars é introduces the idea of a writer working on a commissioned film script concerning a murder which took place in 1949. Many of these answers contain refutations of conventional ideas, or ethical statements (“I couldn’t give a damn about national identity. It’s an emotional swindle”). Even better, we have to guess at the questions being asked (the response to Question 40 is simply “Pass”).   10) My next novel will deal with the tricks and snares created for us by memory, that high-class whore.   11) No. If I tell you what it’s about, I’ll spoil it, because this novel is a kind of tromp-l’oeil. Nothing in it is what it seems, starting with the title. (p. 8). So far, so good – Mars é had me hooked from the very beginning. The script, the narrator tells us early on, is based on a true even...

  A self-published novel making the Miles Franklin Award shortlist was a first, and a wonderful story. Author Michael Winkler and his agent had tried it everywhere, and no one was interested, so Winkler made the painful decision to print his own copies. I am not sure if it was gumption or a smart agent, but the book ended up being read by some of Australia’s best novelists (J.M. Coetzee and Helen Garner) and things took off from there. The shortlisting means that Grimmish is now published by Puncher & Wattmann, and in the UK by Peninsula Press. The man must be kicking himself. What to make of the novel? The story, as such, is a retelling of Joe Grimm’s 1908-09 tour of Australia, where he seems to have continued his form of being a boxer famous for being able to absorb punishment without the ability to land the killer blow himself. Winkler has done a lot of research, and much of this appears in footnotes written in a playful, academic tone. Some notes explain allusions to oth...

I read Malcolm Knox’s Bluebird quite slowly. Reading slowly was partly because it is a big book (485 pages) and – if I am being honest – 2022 seemed to be a tough year and I was often nodding off quickly when I read in the evenings. Let’s say that this is more of a Gates problem than a Knox one.  The book is set in a beachside suburb called Bluebird Beach. It’s near to Ocean City, but far away enough to be able to see its smoggy horizon. Bluebird is “OC’s last secret, the land that public transport forgot” (p.4). Geographically it doesn’t really work with actual Sydney suburbs, but it feels like Palm Beach, perhaps located across Broken Bay about where Killcare sits. The Bluebird folk are down-to-earth types but every house in the suburb is suddenly worth a bomb, and this means change is in the air, and Gordon (our main guy) isn’t happy. He lives is The Lodge, and he sees it as his "mission" to preserve its integrity: The community, like the newspaper and the old Bluebi...

  Saga Land  sat on my bookshelf for a few years in a loose queue, and then  I read it all at once, effortlessly and with pleasure. Richard Fidler has teamed up with Icelandic-Australian Kári Gíslason to co-write a narrative that moves between personal story (Gíslason’s search for family and connection to Iceland), mythology (sagas retold with a light touch) and travelogue (shared journeys together across the island).  The chapters are told in the alternate voices of the two authors. Fidler’s voice is empathetic and curious, interweaving retellings of the narrative with connections to the present and Gíslason’s journey from Fidler’s perspective. Gíslason has more at stake in the events of the narrative. He recalls childhood in Iceland, Britain and Australia, and recounts the search for his biological father, both in the past as a young man, and now in the present through his step-brothers and step-sisters, and the famous Iceland genealogical records. The story develo...

  I picked this book up at Schiphol Airport on a wayward flight that took me from Hamburg to Lyon via Amsterdam. I had just finished reading Martin Amis’   The Zone of Interest   and I was promised something lighter: the road trip of a young man (Jay Parini) and an ancient writer (Jorge Luis Borges). The setting is the Scottish highlands, though first we meet a mature J. Parini, now a successful writer living in Vermont (1986). Memories of his life-changing time studying at St Andrews in Scotland surface when Parini hears of the great author’s death. He casually mentions his youthful journals, which presumably lie behind the details and anecdotes in the account. The blurb at the back describes Borges and Me as a “classic road novel, based on true events”. Most of it rings true; though the brief affair with the Nordic Ailith on the remote Orkney Islands reads like wishful thinking. The story proper begins in 1970. New Yorker Parini has escaped the draft by relocating to...

  When I first visited Prague in November 1995, the ghostly presence of the Cold War seemed to linger in the wintry setting, the quiet streets after dark, and the strange shuffling, secretive habits of the owner of the apartment I was renting. And yet it was also very much apart from a decade earlier, when Philip Roth published The Prague Orgy (1985) and the Cold War was in the middle of a charged resurgence. I recently re-read this book and felt not nostalgia but horror. Imagine an era of secret police, disappearances, authoritarian power and personal fear. Yes, it hasn’t entirely gone away from the world at large (Russia, China, Iran) – even if Wenceslas Square is now a place of tourism and high street shopping. In this novella, Roth continues with the character of Nathan Zuckerman, a successful America novelist and protagonist of three earlier works of fiction ( The Ghost Writer [1979], Zuckerman Unbound [1981], The Anatomy Lesson [1984]). The setting is 1976. Zuckerman agre...

I have had ' Disgrace' on my shelf for a while now, and at last, I felt ready to engage with it. Coetzee is a much-revered writer, so the fault is all mine – the only other Coetzee novel I have read is the experimental ' Diary of a Bad Year' (2007). ' Bad Year'  involves a 72-year-old South African writer who falls for a younger woman. ' Disgrace' begins with a similar premise – 52-year-old Professor David Lurie moves from a falling for a woman whose love he pays for (Soraya) to an even less appropriate target for his affections: a student in his Romantic literature class. Melanie is at first rather passive in the affair, but a menacing boyfriend and a protective, prayerful father put an end to things and Professor Lurie is in trouble with the university authorities. Were he willing to make a public apology, the matter might be put behind him; but he is not and his days of teaching are over. At this point the novel moves from the diary of a bad man to...