Book review: Artists, Siblings, Visionaries by Judith Mackrell

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Judith Mackrell dives into the early lives of artist siblings Gwen and Augustus (Gus) John in her biography Artists, Sibling, Visionaries. It’s a wild ride. Set in early 20th century Britain, the artists are both socially awkward but John lived a notoriously bohemian life. He was an adulterer and bigamist who fathered a large number of children with multiple women. There were so many he seemed to lose track of them himself. In contrast, Gwen was an introvert. She was bisexual, fiercely independent, quiet and deeply private. 

People are like shadows to me and I am like a shadow.

Growing up in Wales, the siblings had an inner turbulence in common. They attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London in the 1890s, the first art school to admit women. Later, Gus lived in England while Gwen settled in Paris. 

Gwen and Gus had once thought that money was irrelevant. As students, they’d believed that all they needed was a roof over their heads, materials with which to paint—and their freedom.

Initially Augustus appeared to be the rising star. This was possibly in large part because he was an outgoing and handsome young man in a man’s world. However, his life became so complex that art often took a back seat. It was the shy introverted Gwen who was (posthumously) recognised as the greater painter of the two.

Even now, at twenty-one, Gwen had no control of her own money; as an unmarried woman, she was barred from opening a bank account.

Gwen was the muse and lover of Rodin, 36 years her senior. The relationship was a source of both pain and joy for Gwen and the most significant of her life. It was only after converting to Catholicism she was able to break free of the hold Rodin had over her. Her subsequent, largely solitary, existence in life was marked by a fierce loyalty to her art.

In 50 years’ time I will be known as the brother of Gwen John.

The creative struggle and its tension with commerce are alive throughout Artists, Siblings, Visionaries. The bond and rivalry of siblings pursuing the same profession was also a strong theme. The book focuses centrally on Gwen’s struggle to live a creative life, often relying on her brother for financial support. It highlights how constrained the world was for women of the times. This created tension throughout the book. In Artists, Siblings, Visionaries, Mackrell makes the humans behind the artwork visible with all their dreams, fears, and flaws. It was wonderful to read.

Book review: Things I Don’t Want to Know by Deborah Levy

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Things I Don’t Want to Know by Deborah Levy is a great title for starters. After all, our self protective measures only ever allow us to see what we want to.

At its heart Things I Don’t Want to Know explores what makes a person want to write. How do we keep doing it in the face of adversity? It is a response to George Orwell’s essay on writing, ‘Why I write’. The existential crisis at the opening catches the reader immediately. 

That spring when life was hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn’t see where there was to get to, I seemed to cry most on escalators at train stations.

Levy’s writing is exceptional and sophisticated. The book is a short memoir that transitions between Mallorca, South Africa and England. It has four parts, each chapter titled after one of Orwell’s motivations. Two parts are Levy’s life as she’s writing it. One is about her father, an ANC supporter who was jailed in South Africa when she was a child. The fourth is about being a teenager in North London.

Smoking cheap Spanish filthy sock-tobacco under a pine tree was so much better than trying to hold it together on escalators. There was something comforting about being literally lost when I was lost in every other way…

Majorca is at the beginning soon after the escalator crisis. It chronicles an emotional crisis. It also covers the challenges of being a mother and a creative. The final chapter picks up where the author left off in Majorca. Levy has a connection with a Chinese shopkeeper. This results in a realisation. Anywhere with a power point to plug in her laptop to write is where she wants to be.

I rearranged the chair and sat at the desk. And then I looked at the walls to check out the power points so I could plug in my laptop. The hole in the wall nearest to the desk was placed above the basin, a precarious socket for a gentleman’s electric razor. That spring in Majorca, when life was very hard and I simply could not see where there was to get to, it occurred to me that where I had to get to was that socket. Even more useful to a writer than a room of her own is an extension lead and a variety of adaptors for Europe, Asia and Africa.

Levy was born in Apartheid South Africa. She then lived with her godmother after her father was imprisoned. She never really fitted in. After her father was released the family exiled to England. The chapter on egoism explores her teenage self writing on napkins and wearing lime green platform shoes.

When a female writer walks a female character into the center of her literary enquiry (or a forest) and this character starts to project shadow and light all over the place, she will have to find a language that is in part to do with unknotting the ways in which she has been put together by the Societal System in the first place. She will have to be canny in how she sets about doing this because she will have many delusions of her own. In fact it would be best if she was uncanny.

Things I Don’t Want to Know is worth reading for the prose alone. It is also a fascinating dive into the deep self-reflection of a writer.

Book review: The Housemaid by Freida McFadden

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Plot twists abound in domestic suspense/psychological thriller The Housemaid by Freida McFadden. It’s got a feel of Sleeping With the Enemy meets Single White Female with its volatile domestic setting. The story involves a wealthy couple, Andrew and Nina. Their hired help, Millie, lives in a room in the attic.  

Sometimes people do exactly what you think they’re going to do, and they still manage to disappoint you.

Homeless ex-con Millie is hired by the frumpy, volatile, and slightly unhinged Nina. Her job is to keep house for Nina, her hot charming husband Andrew, and her precocious blonde daughter. The women of the household always wear white. 

“My mother always says the only way two people can keep a secret,” she says, “is if one of them is dead”.

Millie thinks Nina has hired her without looking into her past. She’s a little taken aback when shown to her small attic room. The window in the room won’t open, and the door has a lock on the outside. She decides to believe that the room was once just a storage cupboard, and it’s better than a prison cell. 

Then again, plenty of men are idiots.

There is also Enzo, the non-English speaking gardener who lurks outside muttering in Italian that the place is not safe. Millie assumes it’s because Nina is so difficult. 

Dad always says that if you’re going to do something wrong, at least be smart enough not to let anybody see you do it.

The Housemaid is full of plot twists, bizarre behaviour, and secrets and lies, like any good psychological thriller. Millie and Nina’s narration takes the reader on a roller coaster ride. Their crazy domestic life includes a doozie of a twist at the end. It’s a compelling fast read for lovers of domestic suspense. The Housemaid left me feeling like my life is comfortably pedestrian. 

Book review: The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong

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The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong is a poetic rendering. It is also a bleak story, both beautiful and sad.

The hardest thing in the world is to live only once. But it’s beautiful here, even the ghosts agree.

The Emperor of Gladness is set in the fictional town of East Gladness, Connecticut. Nineteen year old Hai stands on a bridge looking down at the river and contemplating jumping. He is interrupted by an old woman who threatens to call the police if he doesn’t climb down.

Words cast spells. You should know this as a writer. That’s why it’s called spelling, Labas.

The woman is eighty-two year old Grazina from Lithuania with mid-stage dementia. She demands that Hai come to her when he climbs down, and she adopts him. 

You see, carrots become bright orange because it’s so dark in the ground. They make their own light because the sun never reaches that far—like those fish in the ocean who glow from nothing? So when you eat it, you take in the carrot’s will to go upward. To heaven.

Hai moves in with Grazina and becomes her carer and friend. He also rifles through her medicine cabinet looking for medications to feed his addiction. 

The prisons and madhouses have locked them up, so you think you’re the only one out there losing your mind when in fact there are many like you, trapped in this supposedly free world of work and sleep and endless fucking cakes.

Meanwhile, Hai’s Vietnamese mother thinks he has gone to medical school in Boston. Hai continues this charade, calling his mother to give her updates on his studies, for much of the novel. As Grazina’s mental state worsens, Hai uses various role plays to assist her. Her delusional episodes make her relive distressing scenes from her escape from Nazi-occupied Europe.

It was one of those friendships that came on quick, like the heat on a July day, and long after midnight you could still feel its sticky film on your skin as you lie awake in your room, the fan blowing in what remained of the scorched hours, and realize for the first time in your peep of a life that no one is ever truly alone.

The Emperor of Gladness is about grief, addiction, despair, poverty, sadness and trauma. There is also an enduring hope in the friendship that develops between Hai and Grazina.

Book review: The Windup Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

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I am a fan of magical realism done well. And I loved the oddness of The Windup Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin.

I’m not so weird to me.

Toru Okada quit his legal job in Tokyo, making his wife the primary breadwinner. After they lost their cat, Okada seeks help from a psychic. Then his wife Kumiko goes to work one day and does not return. Okada is overwhelmed by the loss, but the psychics take an interest in helping him. They even start appearing in his dreams. The psychics also have a connection to Kumiko’s brother, a rising politician, whom Okada doesn’t like. After Okada’s wife disappears, he is forced to meet her brother several times. He does this in an attempt to find her and win her back. 

I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.

Okada becomes fascinated by an old soldier’s story. The tale is about being thrown into a Mongolian desert well by his captors at the start of WWII. Okada decides to drop down into a dry well in the yard of a deserted house next door to think.

The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you’re supposed to go up and down when you’re supposed to go down. When you’re supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you’re supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there’s no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness.

Okada’s teenage neighbour, May, calls Okada Mr Windup Bird after the call of a bird he describes to her. They share a fascination in death, and this almost kills him when the teenager traps him in the well. While in the well, he has an out of body experience. This leaves him with a bluish mark on his cheek, a representation of the transformation he then undertakes.

I’d be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.

Dislocation, alienation and nameless fears abound in The Windup Bird Chronicle. The story is an examination of both the challenges of modern life and the shadow side of Japan. 

Book review: Shooting Up by Jonathan Tepper

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Shooting Up by Jonathan Tepper is a memoir about growing up in the 80’s in a drug slum in Madrid. The story revolves around Jonathan’s father’s calling to try and help those living with drug addiction and HIV Aids. I was intrigued from the start. 

I lived in a household where god talked back.

Shooting Up tells the story of an unconventional family’s dedication to god, and their care and compassion for addicts. A cohort that is commonly shunned by society, but who became Jonathan’s friends. 

Theology, history and poetry books were the only things we brought with us to Spain. Forget Betty Crocker cake mixes, American candy and other things that useless missionaries bring.

Tepper’s parents were Protestant missionaries. His father found religion during a college LSD trip. When he was high, God told him to dedicate his life to Him, and he did. And as a consequence so did his entire family. 

Some American families travel on vacation to Yosemite to learn how Sequoias can grow to three hundred feet or how geysers spew boiling water. Our vacations were visits to drug rehabs to learn if junkies would hurl when they went cold turkey.

The Tepper parents and four blonde sons walked the slums handing out brochures to the local addicts. They also welcomed them into their home to help them. The family set up a progressive drug rehabilitation centre in the San Blas neighbourhood during a time when heroin was widespread, and HIV AIDS was on the rise. 

The most beautiful story anyone can tell is the story of your own life. What do you want to tell with your life? Do you want to live a life of fear and shame, or get off drugs and come with us and life a life of love and hope?

The story is told through the lens of a young boy. This perspective makes it even more powerful. Jonathan is trying to make sense of his parents’ devotion and the chaotic world around him that is just his normal life. In its telling, the memoir explores faith, love, loss, hope and resilience.

My father quoted from John 15:13: ‘Greater love hath no man that this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ The verse was nice, but the way I saw it, from that day we knew Raúl would take a knife for us. That was the highest thing you could say about a friend in San Blas.

Thanks to Jonathan for the advance copy. Tepper is a man I knew nothing about, but after looking him up I’m even more impressed. His upbringing meant he was largely home schooled, but he went on to became a Rhodes Scholar and author of several finance books. Shooting Up is an extraordinary and moving memoir and a very unique coming of age story. Highly recommended.  

Book review: If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura

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If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura is a short quirky novel translated from Japanese by Eric Selland.

 I wonder why people always expect from others things that they themselves can’t or won’t do.

After a visit to the doctor, a thirty year old postman discovers he has a terminal brain tumour. He’s a pretty pedestrian guy. He has few friends and is estranged from his father. He is out of touch with his ex girlfriend and lives with his cat, Cabbage. Cabbage gains the power of speech during the novel. 

Love has to end. That’s all. And even though everyone knows it they still fall in love. I guess it’s the same with life. We all know it has to end someday, but even so we act as if we’re going to live forever. Like love, life is beautiful because it has to end. 

The postman decides to make a bucket list. He arrives home to find the devil in a Hawaiian shirt sitting on his sofa. The devil is called Aloha and he has a proposition. He will grant the postman an extra day of life for each item he agrees that the devil can remove entirely from the world.

In order to gain something, you have to lose something.

The first object the postman selects is phones. No big drama. The absence of phones just seems to make people more engaged with the world. Clocks and movies are next. The postman uses his extra days to connect with people that have had meaning in his life. The agreement works swimmingly until Aloha suggests that cats should disappear from the world. Then the postman has to start weighing up the real value of his own life.

I don’t know whether I’m happy or unhappy. But there’s one thing I do know. You can convince yourself to be happy or unhappy. It just depends on how you choose to see things.

If Cats Disappeared from the World delves into themes such as grief and love. It explores what makes life worth living and the importance of human connection.  

Book review: Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa

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Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa is a historical fiction work about trauma (trigger warning). It is a tense, emotional and absorbing read. The story is narrated by a Palestine woman, Nahr, from solitary confinement. She has spent years in a small cement prison cell as a political prisoner. After a sympathetic guard provides her with pencils and a notebook Nahr begins to fill the pages with an account of her life.

I colonized the colonizer’s space of authority. I made myself free in chains and held that courtroom captive to my freedom.

Nahr and her family had been displaced many times. From Kuwait, her country of birth, Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine, her ancestral homeland. Nahr was subject to an arranged marriage at a young age to a Palestinian man who subsequently abandoned her. She was then tricked and blackmailed into becoming a sex worker by a women called Um Buraq. The exploitation gave her financial independence, but she also lost faith in love and men.

This was what it meant to be exiled and disinherited—to straddle closed borders, never whole anywhere.

Eventually Nahr traveled to Palestine to seek a divorce. Through her husbands brother she got involved with a group of young resistance fighters. This is how she ended up being locked in the concrete cube accused of being a terrorist. 

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

Against the Loveless World is much more than a story about personal trauma and the violence of conflict and war. It is a novel about politics, displacement, the desire for belonging, gender, survival and love. A very powerful read.

Book review: The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe

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The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe is primarily a cosy crime mystery. There is also an element of political auto-fiction. Part of the story is set as Queen Elizabeth II dies. It also incorporates Liz Truss’s 45-day reign as British Prime Minister and explores why things fell apart. 

Any act of writing must also, by definition, be an act of selection; therefore distortion; and therefore invention.

After university Phyl finds herself back living with her parents and working in a Japanese food cafe at Heathrow, Terminal 5. Her ambitions to become a writer are not taking shape. That is until Chris, a political blogger and old university friend of her mother’s, comes to stay. Chris sparks an interest in cosy mysteries and auto-fiction for Phyl. 

How is someone like me supposed to survive in a world like this? Everything that defines me is unsuited for it. My passivity. My idealism. My innocence. I just don’t have what it takes

Chris is planning to attend a far-right conference as he is looking into a think tank hellbent on privatising the National Health Service. He is concerned about his personal safety. And has reason to be.

See it. Say it. Sorted

The conference is being held in a country house in the Cotswolds. It is complete with secret passages and a cast of extreme and eccentric characters who become murder suspects. Chris is murdered, leaving behind a cryptic note.

The presumption of innocence is now the presumption of guilt. The burden of proof is a travesty because the proof is often lies

Detective Inspector Pru Freeborne, on the cusp of retirement, investigates. Meanwhile Phyl is convinced that Chris’s death is linked to dead author Peter Cockerill. Phyl and Chris’s adopted daughter, Rashida, start their own investigation into his death.

You murdered a man to get what you wanted. You murdered another man in order to keep your secret safe. And yet the good fortune that it’s brought you still isn’t enough. You remind me of the people at that conference. Remaking the world in their own image and still not liking what they see.

The Proof of My Innocence is a complex story. Political plotting, a complicated whodunnit, gender and intergenerational issues. Even the title is constructed from homonyms.  Proof as in an early copy of a publication and evidence. And innocence as both naivety and a lack of guilt. 

Book review: Hudson Bay Bound by Natalie Warren

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I spent four days over new year canoeing around 50km of the Lower Glenelg River. It’s a wide, deep, slow-flowing tidal river. The Glenelg originates in the Grampians National Park in Victoria and snakes through Balmoral and Casterton. Then, it flows through the Glenelg National Park before doing a sweeping bend through South Australia. It returns to Victoria to join the ocean at Nelson. The river is lined by an impressive layer of Pliocene age limestone and ferricrete gorges. It also features national park inhabited by an abundance of wildlife, particularly birds and koalas.

The most challenging part of an expedition is committing to do it—accepting the unknown changes that will inevitably occur in you and around you. – Hudson Bay Bound

Upon returning home, I attended to some overdue maintenance around the house and bushfire season preparations. That season then arrived with a vengeance last week. Due to the extreme conditions and already active fires to the north, I cleared out on Friday. I don’t currently have animals to care for and I had somewhere to go so it was an easy decision. I did not return home until quite late after the cool change. Thus the late publication of this blog. 

We need to give rivers room to breathe, to protect and improve not only the water but the land surrounding the river, too. – Hudson Bay Bound

Our forested town on the banks of the Yarra River was spared again this time. My heart goes out to those communities that were, and still are, being impacted by the fires. I also feel very sad for all the animals and beautiful Australian landscapes ravaged by the fires. It’s going to be a long summer.

When in doubt, don’t think too much, and walk around the block in your hiking boots. – Hudson Bay Bound

Circling back to my canoe adventure. I have said before that when I travel I like to read something that has some reference to my journey. At the campsites on the Glenelg I dove into the memoir Hudson Bay Bound by Natalie Warren. Hudson Bay Bound tells the story of two young college graduate friends. They became the first women to canoe the 2,000 miles from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay, completing the journey over eighty-five days in 2011. 

Anything that wasn’t a basic need or a life-threatening issue wasn’t worth a worried thought. – Hudson Bay Bound

Hudson Bay Bound narrates the trials and tribulations of this journey. It describes the people the girls meet and explains what they learned about the population’s connections to the river. Hudson Bay Bound also touches on some of the social and environmental issues along the river. Their quest was inspired by Eric Sevareid and Walter C. Port’s wilderness voyage portrayed in the 1935 Canoeing With the Cree. A quick, easy read for those who like an outdoor adventure.