GatesyRead

  Like Second Place ,   The Museum of Modern Love was recommended to me by a fellow writer at Varuna House after I had read from my own work-in-progress (a novel about a disappeared Australian painter). Heather Rose’s work was a complete revelation. For one thing, she manages that rare genre of Australian internationalism, with the work set almost entirely in New York (specifically, the Museum of Modern Art). What fascinates Heather Rose is an extraordinary and true MOMA performance by Marina Abramovi ć, the Serbian “grandmother of performance art” (so-named after a four-decades long career). “The Artist is Present” was held between March and May 2010, and during this time 1545 people had the opportunity to sit opposite the artist who held their gaze (and was just, one supposes, present in the moment). Around this true event, Rose creates several characters who visit the performance regularly and whose lives are then revealed to the reader. Arky Levin is a composer of some repute whose

  This is the first of two books about artists recommended to me after I performed a reading of my then work-in-progress-novel which features an Australian artist.  Second Place is a strange little work form a well-reputed author, Rachel Cusk, with ten previous novel publications, as well as works of non-fiction. The plot is summarized on the back cover: “A woman invites a famed artist to the remote coastal landscape where she lives … But as a long, dry summer sets in, his provocative presence soon twists the human patterns of her secluded household”. The Afterword tells us that Second Place “owes a debt” to Mable Dodge Luhnan’s 1932 memoir Lorenzo in Taos , a text that deals with the time D.H. Lawrence came to stay with her in New Mexico. In other words, this book leans on another, and the shared theme is the desired and then regretted presence of the artist figure in one’s second home. (Like having an artist-in-residence in your own backyard, complete with ego, vision, and live-in-l

  I am not sure if I needed to read S weet Tooth , but as a literary spy novel (not quite a thriller) it entertained me well enough. One thing Ian McEwan seems to manage – I say this without proper qualification – is to write a novel from the point of view of a young woman quite convincingly. There’s a bit of a twist on this premise at the end, which you are most welcome to guess at. Serena Frome is a bishop's daughter. The bishop seems a decent man but clearly not close to his family, and embarrassed by anything he can’t sort out from behind a desk. She heads to Cambridge to study Mathematics, being good at it, but sadly not a genius. At university, she starts to write a column on her reading of literature in what one imagines are well-phrased but not necessarily wise reviews. She meets her first boyfriend, and then falls for a married professor – an MI5 man – and so her secretive career begins. It is the 1970s and the Cold War is in full swing. Frome’s conservative beliefs, c

  Juan Mars é ’s The Snares of Memory begins with 48 numbered responses to what appears to be written replies to interview questions posed to a writer/novelist. In this way, Mars é introduces the idea of a writer working on a commissioned film script concerning a murder which took place in 1949. Many of these answers contain refutations of conventional ideas, or ethical statements (“I couldn’t give a damn about national identity. It’s an emotional swindle”). Even better, we have to guess at the questions being asked (the response to Question 40 is simply “Pass”).   10) My next novel will deal with the tricks and snares created for us by memory, that high-class whore.   11) No. If I tell you what it’s about, I’ll spoil it, because this novel is a kind of tromp-l’oeil. Nothing in it is what it seems, starting with the title. (p. 8). So far, so good – Mars é had me hooked from the very beginning. The script, the narrator tells us early on, is based on a true event – a prostitu

  A self-published novel making the Miles Franklin Award shortlist was a first, and a wonderful story. Author Michael Winkler and his agent had tried it everywhere, and no one was interested, so Winkler made the painful decision to print his own copies. I am not sure if it was gumption or a smart agent, but the book ended up being read by some of Australia’s best novelists (J.M. Coetzee and Helen Garner) and things took off from there. The shortlisting means that Grimmish is now published by Puncher & Wattmann, and in the UK by Peninsula Press. The man must be kicking himself. What to make of the novel? The story, as such, is a retelling of Joe Grimm’s 1908-09 tour of Australia, where he seems to have continued his form of being a boxer famous for being able to absorb punishment without the ability to land the killer blow himself. Winkler has done a lot of research, and much of this appears in footnotes written in a playful, academic tone. Some notes explain allusions to other t

I read Malcolm Knox’s Bluebird quite slowly. Reading slowly was partly because it is a big book (485 pages) and – if I am being honest – 2022 seemed to be a tough year and I was often nodding off quickly when I read in the evenings. Let’s say that this is more of a Gates problem than a Knox one.  The book is set in a beachside suburb called Bluebird Beach. It’s near to Ocean City, but far away enough to be able to see its smoggy horizon. Bluebird is “OC’s last secret, the land that public transport forgot” (p.4). Geographically it doesn’t really work with actual Sydney suburbs, but it feels like Palm Beach, perhaps located across Broken Bay about where Killcare sits. The Bluebird folk are down-to-earth types but every house in the suburb is suddenly worth a bomb, and this means change is in the air, and Gordon (our main guy) isn’t happy. He lives is The Lodge, and he sees it as his "mission" to preserve its integrity: The community, like the newspaper and the old Bluebi

  Saga Land  sat on my bookshelf for a few years in a loose queue, and then  I read it all at once, effortlessly and with pleasure. Richard Fidler has teamed up with Icelandic-Australian Kári Gíslason to co-write a narrative that moves between personal story (Gíslason’s search for family and connection to Iceland), mythology (sagas retold with a light touch) and travelogue (shared journeys together across the island).  The chapters are told in the alternate voices of the two authors. Fidler’s voice is empathetic and curious, interweaving retellings of the narrative with connections to the present and Gíslason’s journey from Fidler’s perspective. Gíslason has more at stake in the events of the narrative. He recalls childhood in Iceland, Britain and Australia, and recounts the search for his biological father, both in the past as a young man, and now in the present through his step-brothers and step-sisters, and the famous Iceland genealogical records. The story develops these themes wit

  I picked this book up at Schiphol Airport on a wayward flight that took me from Hamburg to Lyon via Amsterdam. I had just finished reading Martin Amis’   The Zone of Interest   and I was promised something lighter: the road trip of a young man (Jay Parini) and an ancient writer (Jorge Luis Borges). The setting is the Scottish highlands, though first we meet a mature J. Parini, now a successful writer living in Vermont (1986). Memories of his life-changing time studying at St Andrews in Scotland surface when Parini hears of the great author’s death. He casually mentions his youthful journals, which presumably lie behind the details and anecdotes in the account. The blurb at the back describes Borges and Me as a “classic road novel, based on true events”. Most of it rings true; though the brief affair with the Nordic Ailith on the remote Orkney Islands reads like wishful thinking. The story proper begins in 1970. New Yorker Parini has escaped the draft by relocating to St Andrews in

  When I first visited Prague in November 1995, the ghostly presence of the Cold War seemed to linger in the wintry setting, the quiet streets after dark, and the strange shuffling, secretive habits of the owner of the apartment I was renting. And yet it was also very much apart from a decade earlier, when Philip Roth published The Prague Orgy (1985) and the Cold War was in the middle of a charged resurgence. I recently re-read this book and felt not nostalgia but horror. Imagine an era of secret police, disappearances, authoritarian power and personal fear. Yes, it hasn’t entirely gone away from the world at large (Russia, China, Iran) – even if Wenceslas Square is now a place of tourism and high street shopping. In this novella, Roth continues with the character of Nathan Zuckerman, a successful America novelist and protagonist of three earlier works of fiction ( The Ghost Writer [1979], Zuckerman Unbound [1981], The Anatomy Lesson [1984]). The setting is 1976. Zuckerman agrees t