GatesyRead

I very much enjoyed these Euro-Australian short stories, with an author A. S Patrić born in the former-Yugoslavia, and bringing to his fiction not only the ‘outsider’ perspective on Australian culture, but the alienation of Kafka, and something of the hard-edge of Raymond Carver. ‘Memories of Jane Doe’ could be a Carver story, or else Richard Ford – and yet sadly (thematically) also straight out of the Australian news. ‘Doe’ deals with the disappearance of a young European dreamer at the hands of a violent chef, with a wry and sad comment on a restaurant-owner who might turn a blind eye to preserve her business. ‘Among the Ruins’ sounds like Borges, but is the ‘backstory’ of one of the men who arrest Joseph K in Kafka’s The Trial , and here we are in European territory. This movement of sensibilities and styles intrigues me very much. In ‘The Flood’ a self-educated European-Australian taxi driver takes an older man for a drive in his taxi, with suitcases and an ‘outmoded code of

Paul Ewen is a New Zealand writer who lives in London. His character Francis Plug manages to be both witless and funny at the same time, in the manner of Flight of the Conchords taking on New York with their folk-rock (in this case, Plug is an English gardener and would-be novelist). The Australian Text Publishing edition includes the summation that the book is ‘an affectionate satire on the world of literature’. It is comic, and many of the misadventures are of the more genteel kind, but I am not sure that the satire can be described as ‘affectionate’. In fact, what I liked best about Francis Plug’s How to be a Public Author was the juxtaposition of Plug’s generous eccentricity (albeit in an alcoholic haze) and the intolerance, indifference and meanness of both the middle-class audiences of literary events, and their self-satisfied authors. There are a few exceptions in Plug’s recollections of his visits to book readings, but Ruth Rendell’s “SHOO! SHOO!” (178) cuts to the chase.

It is a painfully smug habit to begin a review by referring to other books you have read by the same author. In my case these are All Souls (1989); A Heart so White (1992) and Dark Back of Time (1998). All Souls involves a Spanish academic and an affair, and is – according to Penguin Books – ‘a masterpiece of black humour’. A Heart so White involves an investigation into the past of the narrator’s father, with echoes of Macbeth. A Dark Back in Time is so strange that it is it attracts reviews with words like ‘extraordinary’ and ‘dazzling’ – a sure sign that no one can make head nor tail of what Javier Marías had in mind when he wrote a book with a character named Javier Marías recalling the sources of his earlier writing. The Infatuations , I am relieved to say keeps its digressions and literary allusions under tight discipline, paradoxically through sentences that can only be described as ‘extraordinary’ and ‘dazzling’. This novel is difficult to describe without giving away

I have 13 Paul Auster novels on my bookshelves (14 if you include The Red Notebook ) and each one of them has been duly read and loved – with degrees of love, admittedly, but always love. I bought 4321 when it was released but baulked at it until December 2018. When you read the first of its 866 pages, you can understand that a commitment of time is needed. Not only that, but because the story is really 3 alternatives to 1 story (or 4 closely related, alternate stories) there is no use reading a few pages each day because you will just get lost. In the end, with other duties to attend to, I started in the holiday period and set myself the goal of getting through 50-60 pages a day, and that is an approach I can recommend for this weighty tome. Before starting the novel, I had understood the narrative strategy of providing the reader with different pathways for the main character, Archie Ferguson. However, it took me a few chapters to work out what was going on. Chapter “1.0” acts as