GatesyRead

I bought the hardback of Amos Oz's Between Friends (2012) this year from a good bookstore, on sale for $5. I felt a bit sad buying the book at this price, like a man taking pity on a stray dog at the pound of some undoubtedly good pedigree, misplaced. And that feeling of melancholy lasted with me as I read the book, the fourth I have read by the Israeli writer, peacemaker, and intellectual. This is a short book so I will tell a little of my other readings first. Black Box (1988) is written as a series of letters between divorcees with shared responsibility for their son, Boaz. Just having a character, Alec, as a university professor, travelling between locations as part of the correspondence introduces a political and social complexity. It’s an intellectual book about emotional issues; something that fills me with envy as a writer. In the Land of Oz (1983; 1993) is a memoir of voices of Israel and the West Bank from the 1980s – of both and all sides (if you can see that paradox

I am very intrigued by writers who seem to be able to shift gears so dramatically. Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist is like a Stephen King novel, skilfully written as a genre piece, almost with the trace of the author’s style. If you are a fan of Flanagan’s earlier books, particularly Death of a River Guide and Gould’s Book of Fish, then you will scarcely recognise the prose. But form suits the message here. Flanagan is writing for a wider audience, and he wants to give them a very clear message: we construct our own monsters, from our own fears. This is a case of using a popular form of fiction to portray an unpopular idea; the irrational fears that beset us make us vulnerable to manipulation by government agencies bent on power, and media outlets bent on profit. I wondered whether the title, ‘The Unknown Terrorist’ is something of a play on W. H. Auden’s famous poem, ‘The Unknown Citizen’. Auden writes about a man who has done nothing wrong, and indeed, is a modern saint

Paul Auster is one of my favourite authors, and so even when I don’t think one of his books is as good (read engaging, moving, strange ) as another, I find it hard to criticise. That’s okay – I am a reader rather than a professional reviewer, and I can just voice what I understood about the book and hint at some dissatisfaction, with sending the dog to the kennel without supper. The starting point is that this is a story about a man and a dog. At first, it is more about the man, a dysfunctional Brooklyn poet who has taken a Santa Claus vow to be helpful to others. We wonder - along with our narrator, Mr Bones – whether Willy G Christmas will survive long enough to meet his old teacher and mentor, Bea Swanson, and what it will mean if he does. There is some urgency here, since ‘the smell of death had settled upon Willy G Christmas, and as surely as the sun was a lamp in the clouds that went off and on every day, the end was drawing near’. I’m not sure about other readers, but I t

Strange to say that this is the first Stephen King book I have read, though I come to the table knowing about his brilliance as a plotter, and his authority as a writer, especially in terms of his open advice to would-be authors. This reputation also makes me nervous to be critical; there does appear to be a different set of rules for King and writers of his ilk. So, this will be a neutral review and confined to some simple observations. With regards to plot and structure, the novel concerns a mass-murderer/white terrorist; one without religious impulse (unless you count quoting from Nietzsche – when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you ). On this point, King makes the reader aware of the mass murderer’s reflections on 9/11 on two occasions; the first is the annoyance of someone who is aware of extra security and back-pack checks which restrict his own use of plastic explosives (“they spoiled it for the rest of us” p.252). The second time he ‘muses’ on the terrori

I’m not sure that I would have sought out this book, but it was one the only one I was interested in from the few available in a small bookshop in the town of Crest, in the Drome region of France. It’s a curious book to have in stock when you have only a handful of works in English, and I wonder if I hadn’t bought it how long the book would have stayed on the shelf. Having said this, there are a few trendy types around Crest, so perhaps it would have been picked up by a Dutch hipster in search of 70s American cred. This is all to say, without saying much, that Charles Bukowski’s writing is for the sort of reader who wants something alternative to the mainstream, because that is what is celebrated in the novel – the same code of honour possessed by the beat poets to deliberately provoke and shock brain-dead urban workers and the powers-that-be (employers, politicians, police officers, parents). In a different reading, it’s about the spirit of American individualism, and the ability t

Paul Auster combines the picaresque novel and the metafictional novel in this engaging, and disturbing work, The Book of Illusions. Like Mr Vertigo , it is a story of an extraordinary life journey; that story is the tale of the fate of a one-time Hollywood star of the (silent) screen, Hector Mann. Through a series of echoes related to loss and death, the storyteller (Professor David Zimmer) researches the life of Mann. Along the way, Zimmer meets Mann’s biographer and thus Mann’s story is integrated neatly within Zimmer’s narrative. Writing about writers is Auster’s special talent and Auster’s chief technique of story-telling, introduced to us with The New York Trilogy so brilliantly, and continued with variations in (for example) the writer in Oracle Night . In this case, The Book of Illusions plays with text on a variety of levels, including the story of Zimmer’s life, the story of Mann’s life, the narratives of Mann’s films, and the biography of Mann as relayed to Zimmer by hi

To write thoughts on a book such as this is to court disaster. Hemingway may be in or out of fashion, but there is not a sentence out of place in A Moveable Feast and this makes the reviewer incredibly self-conscious – as if Hemingway’s ghost sits alongside and suggests, gruffly, ‘all you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know’ (p.12). Well, here it is: the only disappointing thing about this book is that I have damaged it by leaving a wet towel on top, travelling back from the pool in Nyons in France to the house in Piégon where I write this review. A Moveable Feast takes its name from the epigraph, and the idea that ends the book, that ‘there is never any ending to Paris’ (p.182). It opens, literally, mid-sentence to provide an early, subtle suggestion of this cycle of eating/feasting/drinking/writing/living: ‘Then there was the bad weather’ (p.3). Hemingway’s memoirs, fiction and fact, were written towards the end of his life, but are a

This was one of those impulsive purchases that come from a quick search of the crime fiction section of a local bookshop. The Gunman , published earlier as The Prone Guman , is back in the shops thanks to what sounds like a fairly poor film version, starring Sean Penn, and premised (rather incorrectly) on a good man who has become a hired killer and straightened out, only to be forced to return for one last job due to circumstances beyond his control. Jean-Patrick Machette’s novel has no such redemptive character, although there is something more to the novel that the action-plot which fires it forwards. The novel’s assassin does “want out” but the powers-that-be don’t want to let him go, and betray him to a mafia family whose son he has taken out, some years back. Violence begets violence. The pay-masters are rather sinister, government agencies, with the suggestion of the Cold War behind the scenes (and largely out of sight). Rather than developing the political machinations in

I picked up a second-hand copy of A Single Man in a bookshop in the Blue Mountains. I had wanted to read Christopher Isherwood since quoting from Goodbye to Berlin in my own novel, The Copyart Murders. What I found in this novel surprised me on a number of different levels. First, there was the frankness of the depiction of a gay man who has just lost his partner, Jim – we find out how later in the novel. This is 1964, and I thought about how the issue of gay marriage, topical as it is, is not new in the sense of couples like George and Jim having lived together in all-but-wedlock for years now. The description of the suburban life they have been living, with George’s silence to his neighbours about the true reason for his ‘room-mate’s’ absence is poignant, yet saved from sentimentality by the irony of George’s natural outlook on life. This leads to the second surprise in the novel – the moments of real human insight, hopeful and profound in nature. In this respect, I should have ex

Delia Falconer's first novel was published to great success in 1997, being shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 1998, and reviewed favourably in the New York Times that same year. To me, this book seems to have been around for a long time - perhaps it is because it is the sort of book that appeared on a thinking person's bookshelf, or because I have seen it numerous times in the one house (a friend's cottage in the Blue Mountains, appropriately). Or perhaps it is the subject matter, and that sense of age that comes with moss and mist, and the slow time of the setting - we begin a little earlier than this in introducing the characters, but essentially this is 1907 in Katoomba, with young and delicate unrequited love. Even without reading the review comparisons, the Marquez-like magical realism, or the Australian version thereof - is seen in the spirit-seeking Aunts protagonist Eureka lives with. On another level, the Blue Mountains and the Hydro Majestic in particular

In Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children , the chief protagonist, Saleem Sinai, is born on the exact moment of India's Independence, and is imbued with special powers as a result. So, what might an Australian version of such a novel be? This is a little unfair as a question - but Peter Carey's latest novel, Amnesia has its subject (if not protagonist) Gabrielle Baillieux born on November 11, 1975, at the exact moment the Whitlam Labour government is being dismissed from office by the Governor General and conservative forces. This is the era of the cold war, of the coup against the elected Allende government in Chile, and in Australian terms - of the dramatic end to the first Labour party in office since the end of the Chifley government in 1949. Gaby's birth date, like Saleem's, is symbolic of the novel's intent and themes. In this case, it suggests the American influence over Australian politics; the retributive power of conservative forces when threatened

Mark Henshaw's The Snow Kimono begins in a deceptively straightforward manner with the introduction of Auguste Jovert, former police inspector, now retired Parisian. He meets a Japanese man of his age who introduces himself as Tadashi Omura, a former professor of law, now resident of the same apartment block as Jovert. Henshaw utitlises an omniscient narrative technique that allows him to move between storytellers with ease. For example, Omura's narrative, begins as such: 'One afternoon, Omura was saying, I decided to take Fumiko to see her mother's grave' (p.10). The next six or seven pages follow this line, and then we are reminded of Jovert's place as listener in the present: 'Jovert sat looking across at [Omura]' (p.17). So far, so good, as we learn of Omura's love for his adopted daughter (or the girl he has brought up as his own, from the age of three). Things get complicated from here, so that it is in many ways hard to distil; Omura tells

I picked up Javier Marias's "false novel" A Dark Back in Time on the basis of my enjoyment of two earlier novels - All Souls (1992) and A Heart so White (1995). My memory of these two novels was sufficiently vague for me not to be warned off by a rather enigmatic back-cover description. Of All Souls , I could only recall a university novel in the loosest terms; A Heart so White had a more conventional plot and I enjoyed the bookish narrator, with his marital problems and his overshadowing father. A Dark Back in Time promises to play with narrative structures - the back cover refers to "a man named Javier Marias" and one gets the idea that the writer will be somehow writer, narrator and character in the text. Indeed, this is the case. Fundamentally, Dark Back explores the historical and personal material that inspired All Souls and in that sense deliberately inhabits that space that writers normally take trouble to avoid - that is, the 'shadowland&

Canada is a long novel - 511 pages - but in some respects it's two shorter novels and a postscript. Part One could certainly have been a book in itself, though getting the fuller life perspective is obviously what Ford is after by moving the story forward into Canada from Great Falls, Montana, where the first section takes place, to what happens next and thereafter. To make this a little clearer: Part One - 15 year old Dell Parsons and his immediate family before his parents unexpectedly decide to rob a bank and ruin their lives. Part Two - the same year and the next few months, now in rural and abandoned Saskatchewan, Canada. Dell, on his own, and in bad company through the misguided from-jail-plans of his mother. Part Three - sixty year-old Dell Parson, seeking out his sister before her upcoming death, thinking about his life since the days of his youth. There's nothing in this plot summary that gives too much away, because Ford uses the narrative foretelling technique to

Peter Carey has written some challenging novels over the years - novels that require perseverance on the part of the reader, even though reviewers continue to talk about their ability to 'dazzle'. This reader is an unabashed fan of Carey, and so it was very unusual for me not to push myself a little and finish the novel. Indeed, I was half way through and more-or-less gave up and the hardback sat on the shelf for perhaps two years; in December I reorganised my bookshelves to include a section (indeed, a bookshelf) of unfinished readings. Parrot and Oliver in America  emerged as one I definitely wanted to finish, and so, onto the second half! I don't know if it was the Christmas spirit, but I thoroughly enjoying my second attempt. Fearing I would get shipwrecked a second time, I picked up from where I left off, and although I was initially a bit confused about the characters (particularly Parrot) I was quickly engaged in their American travels. Some familiar themes emerged