GatesyRead

I begin by confessing my state of relative ignorance about Don Delillo, or the fact that he is a new acquaintance (take your pick). Up to reading End Zone , I had only read the collection The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories . Actually, that’s probably not a bad way to start, representing works of fiction from 1979 – 2011. End Zone is Delillo’s second novel; the year of publication is 1972 and the world is the midst of the Cold War. It’s a bleak intellectual landscape; the overall tone is a comic take on nihilism and apocalyptic expectations. Or, maybe that’s just my reading on hot January days in Sydney in the age of climate change. Delillo makes a few unusual choices in writing this book which give it startling originality. First, he writes in the first person as a footballer (American Football, that is, in the voice of Gary Harkness, a troubled but evidently talented blocking back). The setting is a small Texas college named ‘Logos’; much of the book concerns the ‘logic behind the

Novels and films that explore the relationship between a young, would-be writer, and a more experienced writer-mentor are not necessarily new but Sean Rabin’s Wood Green has done something a little different with this ‘genre’. The idea seems to appeal: think of the success of Joël Dicker’s The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair – a murder mystery of sorts, with a younger writer living with and assisting his mentor. Then there is the very engaging thriller – John Colapinto’s About the Author, which is not so much about the mentor but the idea of literary theft as a shortcut to success. Sean Rabin plays around with some of these ideas, as young Michael arrives in Hobart to assist Lucian Clarke put together his papers (for posterity, or for some biographical project, yet to be determined). At several points, Michael, who has completed a PhD on Clarke, considers how he might either make use of Lucian’s papers for his own purposes, or else appropriate Lucian’s incomplete manuscript as

Shostakovich’ s life story as a composer behind the Iron Curtain is told here by Julian Barnes in the style of limited-omniscient third person narrative, combined with a narrator who intervenes indirectly but is always present. Writing about power is not new to Barnes – his 1992 novel Porcupine concerned a former dictator in a post-communist society. He has also written before about famous artists, most notably in Flaubert’s Parrot (1984). One might say he brings these two themes together here, with a sympathetic view of a composer whose work and political outlook are compromised by the era in which he lives; yet he strives to compose all the same, and to make use of such tools are irony to deal with the question of State approval under a totalitarian system. I’ve encouraged my students to read The Noise of Time because we are studying literature and film about (and written during) the Cold War era. Much of this is western in outlook; here an established western writer looks back

There must be something crippling in writing about Hemingway. The temptation would be write a review, and then cross everything out, and just have a sentence left (in tribute to the Iceberg theory etcetera). So, in keeping with this spirit, I will try to say very little about the book. Sticking to the facts – I am on my fourth Hemingway book over the last year or two, and in this order: A Moveable Feast, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises. I’ve enjoyed them all immensely. If I had to pick a favourite so far, it would be reading about Robert Jordan’s life in the hills during the Spanish Civil War. There, it seems to me, the writer-expatriate figure of the stories meets his match in the monumental events of the time. The first half of “Fiesta” takes us into the 1920s expatriate life of writers and their waiters (or waiters and their writers). The narrator, Jake Barnes, is part of the action but not as caught up in the rivalries as his compan