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Limberlost

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  It takes a certain skill to write a historical novel that feels present. And it takes craft and heart to make the story of one man’s life feel so important – not as representative of anything, but so that the reader can experience vicariously the trials, tribulations and triumphs of one human being. That human being, Ned, is placed in a landscape and a family – both play their parts to shape the character and the life his consciousness grapples with to find the right way to live. Limberlost opens with the mythic scene of a whale believed to have ‘gone mad’, destroying boats at dusk. Five-year-old Ned is taken out to the mouth of the river by his father as he and his two brothers wait for the whale to ‘explode out of the river and paste them into the waves’ (pp. 1-3). Chapter 2 begins with a leap in time: ‘A decade later Ned lay on a wet bank watching a rabbit graze’ (p. 5). So, a fifteen-year-old boy who desperately wishes to impress his distant father. Ned’s two older brothers...
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Berta Isla

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  The fact that Javier Marías died in September 2022 has no doubt impacted on how I responded to his last novel  Berta Isla  in 2024. Longer term readers of this blog might remember that I have previously spoken  about All Souls, A Heart So White,  Dark Back of Time ,  and  The Infatuations .  Suffice to say that I am one of Marías’s many admirers and was very sad to hear of his passing.  Berta Isla  may not to be everyone’s taste, but he was a writer at the height of his powers, with (one suspects) much more to say. The story concerns a couple – Berta Isla and her husband, Tomás Nevinson – from their teenage years to middle age. By the end of the story, Tomás appears much older, for reasons we will get to, while Berta’s life has passed by in waiting for his return. Most of the narrative is told from Berta’s point of view.   Part 1 – Berta (pp. 3-33) Part 2 – Berta (pp. 37-40) and Tomás (pp. 41-119) Part 3 – Berta (pp. 124-165) Part...
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Fortunes of Richard Mahony – Book 1 (Australian Felix)

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  The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney has been sitting on my bookshelf for years. It’s not that I don’t admire the author: Richardson’s first novel Maurice Guest (1908) is a true favourite I read once a decade. But I baulked at Mahoney – it seemed overly long; the image on the cover looked too colonial; I liked her Leipzig tale so much it was bound to disappoint. At last, I found a reason: research for my next fictional project would require engaging with fiction and non-fiction to do with 19 th Australia. I pulled Mahoney from the shelf, opened the first page, and plunged in. ‘In a shaft of the Gravel Pits, a man had been buried alive,’ reads the opening line. A few pages later, the grim humour of the anonymous colonial death: ‘Who the man was, who now lay deep in a grave that fitted him as a glove fits the hand’ (pp. 7-9). Paul Giles writes that the novel, ‘takes the theme of the self-made man, the characteristically Victorian trope of a picaresque hero which American fiction re...
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Question 7

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  If didn’t find Question 7 as engaging as Flanagan’s works of fiction, I blame myself. I read the book in snippets in the evening and didn’t grasp the connections and flow between fiction and autobiography as might have if I had read more continuously. There is also a feeling that a fiction writer doesn’t have to share the true stories behind the invented stories (here in particular, The River Guide  and  The Narrow Road to the Deep North ). Perhaps I mean, I’d prefer they didn’t. Others think differently, and the book has achieved high critical acclaim. In her Guardian review, Tara June Winch writes: Question 7 is Flanagan’s finest book. It is a treatise on the immeasurability of life, reminiscent of the Japanese tradition of mono no aware , the psychological and philosophical sweep of Tolstoy, and enmeshed in a personal essay that is tuned as finely as WG Sebald’s Rings of Saturn. In his Conversation piece, Dan Dixon provides a justification for Flanagan’...
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Baumgartner

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  After the epic nature of 4321 (900 + pages) Baumgartner is a light work, yet still with Auster’s characteristic depth of thought and playfulness with fictional form.  We open with a writer at his desk, ‘pen in hand … midway through a sentence in the third chapter of his monograph on Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms’ (p. 1). A New Yor intellectual, in other words – but one distracted by something burning on the stove downstairs; the call of UPS (Baumgartner orders books to have a moment of Molly’s company); and a young visitor whose father has severed off some fingers and so Rosita has come instead of her mother, his cleaner (how Auster ). As the reviewers in The Guardian and The New York Times note, the novel begins at pace. Soon Baumgartner has fallen down a staircase in his basement, and has been rescued by a young man on his first day in the Public Service Electric & Gas Company. Chapter 2 introduces a metaphorical idea about phantom limbs and how this might help Baumg...
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French Lieutenant's Woman

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  I was curious to re-engage with  French Lieutenant’s Woman , having read the book at the age of eighteen and not since (closer to 1969, when it was first published, than today). I remembered the novel in different ways to how I experienced it afresh – perhaps the central romance struck me more deeply then, or perhaps I appreciated the little writer-tricks more now. Fowles draws us immediately into the coastal setting of England’s Lyme Bay, where a provincial society is as close minded as the forbidden nature is liberating. In the second chapter, the betrothed Charles and Tina spy the mysterious figure dressed in black – the French Lieutenant’s Woman – so-called because of a known liaison at a time when women of a certain class kept their names intact at all costs. This allegedly fallen-woman is defiant, doubling before Charles with her, “unforgettable face, and a tragic face” (p. 10). From that moment, Charles is smitten (though it will take him some time to admit to the f...
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Elizabeth Finch

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  I’ve been reading Julian Barnes all my adult life and it would take a lot for me to express disappointment in one of his novels. Professional reviewers aren’t paid to be as loyal or generous. Sam Byers describes the novel as dealing in evasion: ‘vagueness layered on vagueness’ ( The Guardian , 14 April 2022). Helen Elliott uses the phrase ‘exasperated sign’ in her heading and concludes that Barnes is out of touch: ‘In 2022 sincerity and authenticity are rumbling irony as the preferred mode for many highly literate readers and writers’ ( Sydney Morning Herald , 7 April 2022). I might confess that a novel that deals with ambiguity and irony would be more likely to appeal to me as a reader than to make me sigh, and although I did wonder about whether there was enough meat on the bones, I still enjoyed the delicate little meal that it was. In Part One we meet Neil, our narrator, and Elizabeth Finch, a dynamic History lecturer – as well as Neil’s immediate companions, conservative...
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