GatesyRead

Clive James has in recent years been serialising his struggles with leukaemia in a series he calls ‘Reports of My Death’, which such headlines as ‘My new wheelchair is a thing of beauty and precision’. This is Clive James to a T: beautiful phrasing, unending humour, and the temerity to put himself at the centre of every phase of his life, and assume that interest will follow. It does, because his sentences are that good. The Preface of Unreliable Memoirs , for example, opens with this beautifully balanced pair: ‘Most first novels are disguised autobiographies. This autobiography is a disguised novel’ (1). The first chapter, ‘The Kid from Kogarah’ introduces the voice of the main character in this novel, the egotistical man writing the memoir: ‘I was born in 1939. The other big event of that year was the outbreak of the Second World War, but for the moment that did not affect me’ (3). What follows in this first book of James’ memoirs (there were three initially, and two more in r

All of Richard Flanagan’s novels are different. Death of a River Guide takes a tour through a drowning man’s Tasmanian family history; Gould’s Book of Fish is Flanagan’s masterpiece – a historical tale of a convict forger and fantasist. Then there was Wanting set in Dickens’ London and Bass Strait; the just-ahead-of-its-time tale of political manipulation in the age of terrorism – TheUnknown Terrorist ; and finally a well-deserved Booker winner, T he Narrow Road to the Deep North where torture on the Thai-Burma death railway is set against the present life of Dorrigo Evans. The earlier novels are more obviously ‘literary’ (I haven't read The Sound of One Hand Clapping but its description sounds poetic).  Flanagan seems adept at a more popular mode in Terrorist and Deep North (or, at least, a more straightforward one). If  Carey is Australian progressive rock; and Winton is Australian folk; then Richard Flanagan is  a one-man Supergroup, comfortable enough in his skin to she

Many years ago, when I was a mere intellectual slip of a thing, I wrote an Honours thesis on Peter Carey’s two major novels at the time: Illywhacker (1985) and Oscar and Lucinda (1988). Given that and the fact that I have read all thirteen of Carey’s novels, writing about A Long Way from Home (2017) should be – one would think – a walk in the park. However, I have avoided this task. Perhaps I know too much, or ought to? In such circumstances, one fears to open one’s mouth. The way to overcome this is to write the first thing that comes to mind and avoid mentioning your hesitancy. Or use a Carey technique and write in two voices to construct a complex, ironic view of the subject at hand. The first voice is Irene Bobs, married to Titch, loyal to her husband despite – or perhaps because of -- the localized version of glamour and celebrity he represents. Titch is a Ford salesman, and the son of a once-famous aviator, ‘Dangerous Dan’, who is a bully and a shit-stirrer. Irene is a talen

George Orwell wrote six novels and three non-fiction books. Of the non-fiction, I have now read Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), and Homage to Catalonia (1938). “Down and Out” is – as it sounds – a portrait of poverty; and “Homage” the story of a man who sees a hopeful revolution collapse in the middle of a brutal civil war. Of the six novels, I have now managed (unsurprisingly) Animal Farm (1945), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). Listing these novels and books is only to say the following: I have read a bit of Orwell now, and amid the cleverness and the humanity and the bleakness of view, “Aspidistra” deserves a special mention (or perhaps, a vase) for being particularly depressing. The story is of a young man, twenty-nine as the story who has declared war against money (surely better than war against terror). In doing so, Gordon Comstock resists generations of middle class Comstock’s, who have done their duty and lived staid, stale

This is another book that is hard to characterise quickly. It is French, of course, and Romantic – with a view of history that is decidedly Gallic. It is also based around an unrequired love story worthy of South American magic-realism, complete with an eccentric uncle who creates kites out of the highest hopes of France, so that he becomes a postman-celebrity-rebel and Auschwitz survivor. It is also an ironic story, opening with the memorable line: ‘Nowadays, the little museum in Cléry devoted to the works of Ambrose Fleury only a minor tourist attraction’ (p.1). Ambrose is Ludo Fleuro’s uncle; Ludo is the narrator and protagonist of adventures that include a trip to Poland just before the war breaks out, and a daring role in the French Resistance under the noses of the cultured Nazis who dine in France’s famous restaurant Clos Joli. The idea of a poor boy falling in love with a cold yet alluring (gothic) rich girl draws something from Dicken’s Great Expectations , and like that

For once I am at a bit of a loss as to what to write about a book. Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a complex and highly original novel, and yet I have hesitated to write about what it might all mean, as I considered how I might distil my thoughts about it into a few paragraphs. The result of this has been a pause been reading and an attempt to write – what follows, therefore, is but flawed thoughts on a Pulitzer Prize winning novel. Others – closer to the American and Dominican Republic contexts – can do much more. On form – the novel opens in mock-essay form, as the narrator describes the concept of fukú – a sinister sort of karma – and connect this to the sense of comic-tragic tones of Oscar’s “brief wondrous life”, as well as the dictatorship of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. This is done via lengthy footnotes, in an extravagant manner that reminds me a little of Paul Auster’s Oracle Night. Chapter 1 then transitions from the narrator (‘Our hero was no

The City of Marvels has the form of historical fiction and the light touch of magical realism. The fact that it was recommended to me by a Spanish professor made me read it with an ear for higher meaning – this is so well disguised in the novel that it may not actually exist at all. And yet I think it’s there in spades. The story – a picaresque tale – begins in Barcelona in 1888, and it is the two Barcelona world trade fairs of 1888 and 1929 that situate the story most concretely in time. Early in the narrative, there are, indeed, explanations of Catalan history that might come out of Robert Hughes’ Barcelona --  readable pleas for the uniqueness of the culture and for Barcelona’s status from pre-Roman times. This sets up the background narrator, a shy historian, perhaps. At the foreground is a young, mysterious stranger whose deeds we soon see are unscrupulous, as Onofre Bouvila sets about moving from poverty to power and riches. In the City of Bombs, he begins his jour

In a very fine New Yorker review of John William’s Stoner , Tim Kreider laments that despite the novel becoming an unexpected bestseller in Europe, it remains ‘chronically underappreciated in America’. Kreider senses the presence of not just a great writer, but a wise one – ‘And wisdom is, of course, perennially out of style’ (October 20, 2003). Stoner sold fewer than 2000 copies in 1965 but its modest presence refuses to go away. My “Vintage” copy was given to me by a graduating student – a very fitting gift once you know the story. As a teacher of literature, I take encouragement; this is a novel about a man who teaches novels and plays and poetry diligently, honestly, and as passionately as he can. Not all English teachers are Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society – yet literature can speak through even a dry manner, if we only let the ‘words’ do the talking. William Stoner comes from an unlikely background, as a son of the earth, enrolled initially in Agriculture, until