I bet I’m not the only one drawn to the notion of a complete fresh start, some way of casting the past aside and beginning with a tabula rasa. In Martin Westley Takes a Walk by Sydney author Andrew Humphreys, a businessman wakes up in hospital after being knocked unconscious by a falling kite. He [...]
I missed out on Elizabeth Kostova’s bestselling debut The Historian but I heard so many readers praise it that I was looking forward to The Swan Thieves. The opening promises high entertainment: into the care of Andrew Marlowe, an institutional psychiatrist and hobby painter, is thrust uncommunicative Robert Oliver, a successful painter caught trying to [...]
Also posted in Learning Art |
Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi delivered an absorbing narrative of man among animals, followed by a lengthy modernistic coda that explored broad concepts; the upshot was a surprise literary hit amplified by a Booker Prize. Martel’s apparently arduous follow-up, Beatrice and Virgil, again uses humanized animals but in the service of a much deeper [...]
Point Omega, the fifteenth novel by Don DeLillo, one our most profound living novelists, is longer at 177 pages than a novella, but not by much. Yet the reading experience with Point Omega rivals that of the 900-pages plus of 2666, Roberto Bolano’s masterpiece. Every word, sentence, paragraph and page of Point Omega hums with weight. [...]
Pleasant reading: Mr Rosenblum’s List, by Natasha Solomons, has a cover prefiguring a novel of the sensibility of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society. And so it proves to be. After WWII, German refugee Jack Rosenblum begins compiling a list, his all-encompassing guide to assimilating in Britain. Battling prejudice and his past-obsessed wife, he [...]
Also posted in Science Fiction |
Very little light reading on the go at the moment: The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a companion read to Jonathan Safran Foer’s masterpiece Eating Food I’ve been hanging out for Michael Lewis’s latest, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine Unlike many, I didn’t grow besotted with Yann Martel’s [...]
A couple of books sourced in strange ways and all the more enjoyable as a result: I can recommend the first three books in a quartet by a South African author, John van de Ruit, in the vein of the Adrian Mole diaries: Spud; Spud – The Madness Continues; and Spud – Learning to Fly. [...]
Also posted in Nonfiction |
Very different offerings: Tom Keneally has to be the most prolific Australian author alive, with over three dozen books to his credit. Sometimes his novels lack spark but his latest, The People’s Train, dealing with a fascinating episode of Australian history but also the 20th century’s pivotal event, shines with style and verve. Working off [...]
Strong writers’ voices make all the difference: The debut novel by Australian-born Evie Wyld, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, tackles the cascading effect of violence, the violence of men at war, through generations. Wyld is an evocative, sure-footed stylist, and her portrait of two Australians, one a Vietnam war soldier, the other an [...]
The Miles Franklin Award shortlist (announcement), of which I’ve read the first: Peter Temple’s Truth (one of my Top 10 book of 2009) Alex Miller’s Lovesong Sonya Hartnett’s Butterfly The Bath Fugues by Brian Castro Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones The Book of Emmett by Deborah Forster