GatesyRead

Brian Castro’s Street to Street felt like a novel meant for me to read. This might sound like a very egotistical thing to say, but what I mean is that I sense that I am well equipped – by virtue of my particular background and sympathies – to appreciate its virtues and I think its purposes. Castro is quite a busy author and I have read only a few of his books: Double-Wolf (1991), The Garden Book (2005), and The Bath Fugues (2009). He is a writer drawn to writing about artists and outsiders, and in Street to Street , he finds his subject in the dual narrative of that Sydney, belated Romantic poet Christopher Brennan, and a (beautifully) flawed academic and would-be Brennan biographer, Brendan Costa. In order to manage the ending, a more shadowy friend-of-Costa makes an occasional narrative appearance (and I think is a less successful voice than Costa). One of Castro’s principal sources for Brennan’s life is Axel Clark’s Christopher Brennan – A Critical Biography (1980). Some ye

I read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia in 2015 and was impressed by his depiction of Barcelona, and the intimate picture of his involvement in the POUM in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. I think I expected something similar of Down and Out in Paris and London , which is of course quite ridiculous, given not on the different cities but also the civilian life he sets out to describe. I suppose what I mean to say is that because Orwell has such a huge reputation for political insight (from later works) I had possibly expected more social commentary or critique of an intellectual kind. What Orwell does instead, of course, is to write a memoir in which he documents his experiences of poverty in Paris, and in London. In themselves, both depictions are devastating critiques, without the ‘argument’ (the experiences of poverty he describes largely speak for themselves). In Paris, Orwell – or his speaker in the case of that necessary separation between writer and actor, even in a memo

Back in the 1990s, a fiction subgenre emerged in England parallel to the men’s magazines (or rather, lad’s magazines) which popularised views of a new version of masculinity, more hip, more ‘Cool Britannica’, fluid to a degree and yet ultimately re-presenting the experience of prolonged heterosexual adolescence. Alain de Botton’s three novels – Essays in Love, The Romantic Movement and Kiss and Tell were written at the high-brow end of this spectrum, integrating de Botton’s reading of philosophy, psychology and literature within an accessible romantic love story of the boy-meets-girl, move-in-together, break-up and learn-something-new variety. As a more genuinely accomplished novelist, Nick Hornby was more successful, with film versions of High Fidelity and About a Boy to boost the book sales. His stories were about flawed-yet-likeable males who needed to learn something, by means of the same romantic cycle. Another example was Mike Gayle’s novels, such as Mr Commitment and Turning

This is a very well known collection of perfectly written short stories by the American writer, Raymond Carver. They are best read with a glass of beer, or wine, or something stronger if you can keep your head. I am going to confess that this was my first Carver experience; I wouldn’t be original in saying that the economy of style reminds readers of Hemingway and that thematically the collection could also be placed alongside of Richard Ford’s short story writing ( Rock Springs ). So, we are talking about masculine prose, which manages to be both serious, sad, without "funny" irony, and yet also resonates in that human vein which American short story writers seem to manage better than anyone. A few examples of what’s in the collection – more for myself than for anyone who might be kind enough to read this blog. ‘Why Don’t You Dance?’ is the opening story, and it’s a story that speaks deeply through things that aren’t said (in that Hemingway notion of the omisson). A man lo

Gail Jones’ 2002 novel Black Mirror holds my interest for a number of reasons. First, Professor Jones is one of the leading lights at the Western Sydney University’s Writing & Society Research Centre where I am currently enrolled in a doctoral program. Second, the novel explores modernism, and an Australian artist in Paris and London; and a young researcher who goes to see the elderly artist in search of some personal truths. When I read about the nature of the novel, I feared a little (as writers do) that my own thoughts and ideas may have already been captured by this prize-winning writer. However, Jones’ book is quite different to the one I hope to write, and having read it, I can breathe more easily. What follows is then just a few observations. The novel opens in the viewpoint of the young Anna Griffin, about to interview the famous surrealist, Victoria Morrell. The same rainy scene is then told from Victoria’s perspective; and so quite easily and naturally, the reader un

Last year I read and wrote a short reviews of A Moveable Feast , and The Snows of Kilimanjaro , both of which I thoroughly enjoyed. But this book is something else. I read it after reading Paul Preston’s The Spanish Civil War . Now being outside of living memory, the events of this terrible period in Spanish history (and European history) struck me afresh in terms of their terror. For readers at least, the suffering and bravery of Spanish people, and the witnesses to this suffering in terms of various writers, artists, journalists and international volunteers is so well documented that you might ask what a novel can bring, especially when read now. In my case, at least, reading Hemingway after gaining some understanding of the period through wider reading really helped me to imagine and to empathise, and it’s clear that Hemingway wanted this, as well as a broader, more objective view than some might credit. I’m reluctant to try to really review a book that is such a known classic, so I

For one interested in exploring Australian expatriate experiences, the famous essay by Patrick White ‘A Prodigal Son’ (1958) provides a good “in” to this memoir. In the essay, White asks “was there anything to prevent me packing my bag and leaving like Alister Kershaw and so many other artists?” His answer is that as a writer, Australia helped the colours to come flooding back to his palette, and in a Romantic touch, writing became “a struggle to create fresh forms out of the rocks and stones of trees”. Flaws in the Glass could be said to extend these key themes, but in a more personal way. He writes, or publishes the memoir, in 1981, and by now he is a Nobel Prize winning author, aged nearly 70, open about his long-standing partnership with Manoly Lascaris in a manner which in the year of 2016 sounds very contemporary. Like Tim Winton’s Island Home , White lets us know that it is the land that draws him back home and inspires him to write. Although Winton doesn’t say it in the sa

I have come to this novel rather late, having read Eucalyptus when it was released in 1998 and, I must admit, nothing by Murray Bail since (re-reading Eucalyptus to teach doesn’t really count). Homesickness was published in 1980, and I have found a second-hand, first paperback edition from that era. His other books are Holden’s Performance (1987); The Pages (2008) and The Voyage (2012). For a writer like me who churns out a novel every ten years, Bail’s pauses between novels are almost encouraging.   My main reason for reading this novel was to see how it dealt with themes that might be said to connect with the expatriate experience. I read that Bail lived overseas at the end of the 1960s in India, and then in England and Europe from 1970 to 1974. Although Homesickness is a 1980 publication, it is most assuredly a 1970s book; one can almost taste the stale Qantas food and touch the (probably) too-proud wallpaper in Australia House in London, where two of the characters

With the key theme of the environment, this autobiography/memoir suffered in comparison to the more literary 'Island Home' by Tim Winton I was reading at the same time. Leaving aside this rather unfair comparison, Garrett's story reignited my interest in Midnight Oil by giving me a better understanding of Garrett's continuous (rather than broken) passion for politics and debate. While he pulls no punches in his assessment of key Labor figures (describing Rudd as a 'threat to national security' p.424), Garrett shies away from any real detail about the most painful moments of his life, both personal and political. One senses that rare thing - a private man who writes a memoir. Like 'Oils' music, Garrett attempts to shine the light on the issues rather than himself, but he can't help setting the record straight at the same time - and the result is a rather awkward memoir which is a little personal, but at arm's length. This is for Garrett fans wh

Tim Winton’s ‘landscape memoir’ indicates his central thesis: that the sense of place that is unique in Australia is what shapes him, and if we follow Winton’s logic, all of us (if only we would allow it). While the chapters are not completely sequential, he opens in County Offaly, Ireland, in 1988, and ends on Anzac Day (in what feels like a recent reflection). Most of the memoir is about Winton’s Australian life and the local landscape, though he does take us to Europe on occasion– where he feels that architecture cannot compensate for the lack of a wide sky since he ‘was calibrated differently to a European’ (p.14). For various personal reasons of my own travels, I really enjoyed the chapters that dealt directly with expatriate issues: ‘The Island Seen and Felt’, ‘Waychinicup, 1987’, and particularly the essay, ‘The Power of Place’. Winton has spoken on these matters before – that sense in which he is a writer on the wrong side of a continent on the wrong side of the hemispher