Tag: book review

Book review: The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh

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If you like well crafted detective fiction with a bit of gruesome content, The Cutting Room, debut novel by Luise Welsh, could be for you.

Rilke works in a Glasgow auction house that sells the contents of deceased estates. Business is tight so he jumps at the chance to clear out Miss McKindless’s deceased brothers house, unperturbed by her need for haste and instruction that he alone must deal with the items in the attic and destroy them. The house has some good stuff that will sell well, he thinks.

John had said McKindless would be revealed through his library, but John was a bookseller; he formed his opinion of everyone through their books.

When Rilke ascends the stairs to the attic he finds a stash of rare pornographic books and old black and white photos in an envelope. The photos portray the sexual torture and murder of a young woman many years earlier in a room with French looking furniture. Rilke isn’t sure if the photos are real or staged, but is disturbed by the images and decides to turn detective.

We, the readers, are drawn into Rilke’s life as he cruises for men and hangs out with a caste of interesting and dubious characters – drug dealers, transvestites, shady book dealers, pornographers, bent cops, and his Merlot swilling boss Rose who colludes with him on a plan to skim off the profits of the sale.

People have died for love, they have lied and cheated and parted from those who loved them in turn. Love has slammed doors on fortunes, made bad man from heroes and heroes from libertines. Love has corrupted, cured, depraved and perverted. It is the remedy, the melody, the poison and the pain. The appetite, the antidote, the fever and the flavour. Love Kills. Love Cures. Love is a bloody menace. Oh, but it’s fun while it lasts.

Originally published in 2002, there are exquisite details and plenty of fascinating characters with dubious morals in The Cutting Room. It’s a grisly, creepy crime novel written with a literary flair.

Book review: Wifedom by Anna Funder

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Who hasn’t read, or at least heard of George Orwell’s Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four? I still have images in my head of Old Major calling his friends together to overthrow the humans, and of Winston being tortured by the thought police. I can sense you all nodding, but do you know who Eileen O’Shaughnessy was? I didn’t.

Orwell’s work was essential in this task. It was a joy, even, revisiting his writing on the systems of tyranny ‘with theft as their aim’, and the ‘vast system of mental cheating’ that is doublethink. It was his insight… that allowed me to see how men can imagine themselves innocent in a system that benefits them, at others’ cost… But his insight into the rapacity of power… never extended to relations between the sexes. Orwell stayed blind to the position of women, though he’d been buying girls for a few rupees a time.

Eileen, Oxford graduate, the woman who gave up her own ambitions to enable Orwell’s work was almost erased from history, that is until Anna Funder discovered her and wrote Wifedom. Orwell biographers barely make a reference to Eileen. And while Orwell referred to his ‘wife’ on occasion in his writing (37 times to be precise according to Funder), it was never by name, and he never mentioned her feats of bravery or her contributions – perhaps because they might have outshone his own.

Eric had decided that he mustn’t let his work be interrupted & complained bitterly when we’d been married a week that he’s only done two good days’ work out of seven.

Eileen ran their farm and raised their adopted child so he could write, cared for him when wounded and sick, visited Orwell on the front, worked at the headquarters of the Independent Labour party in Barcelona during the war, protected him from arrest, and typed up and saved his manuscripts all whilst under the gaze of communist spies.

Eileen knows her life is riddled with spies but feels she can manage it.

Memoir, fiction and fact swirl through the pages of Wifedom, as Eileen is pieced together and rescued from patriarchal erasure by Funder through fragments of facts and six letters written by Eileen to her friend Norah Myles. I found Wifedom to be a compelling read and feel a need to revisit it already.

Book review: After Story by Larissa Behrendt

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In After Story by Larissa Behrendt, Jasmine, a city lawyer, takes her rural mother, Della, on a ten day literary tour of England six months after the funeral of her father. The two Indigenous women have a fraught relationship, primarily as a result of a family history of trauma. They both want to improve their connection.

Aunty Elaine would remind me that there is more than one way to tell a story; there can sometimes be more than one truth. ‘The silences are as important as the words,’ she’d often say. There is what’s not in the archive, not in the history books – those things that have been excluded hidden overlooked.

Soon after landing in London they hear a story about a young girl going missing on Hampstead Heath. The news irritates the long held grief from the abduction and death of Jasmine’s older sister Brittany twenty-five years earlier.

The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.

The story is told from the two very distinct view points of the women. Della, who knows nothing about literature and has never traveled, compares what she sees and hears with her own experiences and that of her ancestors – absorbing, learning and critiquing. Jasmine reflects on the lives of the authors and how their experiences influenced their work, which leads her to consider the impact of past trauma on one of her clients in Australia, gradually extending her contemplation to her own mother’s history.

Suddenly I found the museum stuffy. When Aunty Elaine would talk about it, our culture felt alive – the sewing of possum cloaks … the gift of telling stories. They were living and breathing, not relics of the past, frozen in time. Looking at the artefacts surrounding me, I couldn’t help but feel I missed an opportunity with Aunty Elaine to capture her knowledge.

After Story is beautifully written with a rich caste of supporting characters and plenty of humour to balance the more serious content – and who doesn’t love a literary themed novel. Other themes include family relationships, the justice system and racism. Highly recommended.

Book review: Out of Breath by Anna Snoekstra

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The Australian outback is a beautiful, bizarre and dangerous place – where lots of people go to get away from their lives or themselves, or to find themselves. Out of Breath by Anna Snoekstra is a cultish psychological thriller about naive foreign tourists who disappear in the outback.

Jo’s life in England turned upside down when she was very young – she was rejected by her mother and bought up by an ambivalent father. At twenty-seven she is looking for a place where she feels she belongs. She drops out of Art school and a toxic relationship in London and travels to Sydney, Australia to start afresh.When her relationship with Eric in Sydney fails as well and she needs to fulfill visa requirements and working remotely for a period, she heads to a mango farm in northwest Western Australia.

Things soon start to get creepy and weird – can you hear the foreboding music?

He holds his nose and she sees his mouth open, a huge breath, then he’s under. She sees the bobble of his bum, his feet splashing the surface. Then nothing. Silence. Jo finds she is holding her own breath. After a few seconds, she lets it out. Ho-jin doesn’t come up. She scans the water, looking at the heads, the people sitting on the sand bed. No one is moving.

I thought Snoekstra did a great job of capturing the beauty, isolation, eccentricity and slight creepiness of the outback. It’s not surprise that around 40 people lose their lives in it each year.

There were many moments in this novel where I cringed at the naivety and stupidity of the main character who either had no common sense about the perils of the Australian outback – or simply didn’t care enough about herself to worry about them. Either way I think Jo’s near death experience in the desert made the idyllic community she stumbled into seem or the more utopian…but I guess that’s the vibe cult leaders set out to create.

What do you do when you have joined an paradisal tight knit isolated community and discover it is not what it claims to be? You’ll have to read this psychological thriller to find out…

Book review: Stasiland by Anna Funder

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Australian author of the narrative non-fiction book Stasiland, Anna Funder developed a fascination with the former East German ministry of state security Stasi while working in Berlin. She placed an advertisement in a newspaper looking for ex Stasi to interview.

Betrayal clearly has its own reward: the small deep human satisfaction of having one up on someone else. It is the psychology of the mistress, and this regime used it as fuel.

A number of notable ex-officials came out of the woodwork and spoke to Funder. Each unique weirdo had sold their soul to the devil for success in the GDR, then lost their power when the Berlin Wall came down.

He can switch from one view to another with frightening ease. I think it is a sign of being accustomed to such power that the truth does not matter because you cannot be contradicted.

Funder also tells the story of those who were part of the resistance. People subjected to surveillance and suffering at the hands of the Stasi and the bizarre and inflexible rules imposed in the GDR. The long lasting effects of the persecution they suffered is evident in their lives after the Wall fell when Funder meets them.

She is brave and strong and broken all at once. As she speaks it is as if her existence is no longer real to her in itself, more like a living epitaph to a life that was.

I found Funder’s visit to the puzzle women heart wrenching. This is a group working to restore the documented evidence of what happened in East Berlin, shredded by the Stasi to cover up their crimes using thousands of paper shredders. The task is projected to take 375 years.

For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.

Stasiland effectively uses black humour to provide relief from the sad stories. Funder’s observations are sharp and her prose vibrant to produce an important historical account of life behind the Berlin Wall.

Book review: Alyzon Whitestarr by Isobelle Carmody

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Alyzon Whitestarr by Isobelle Carmody is a 2005 paranormal young adult fiction novel with broad ranging themes including the power of creativity and the senses, asylum seekers, good versus evil, and living with disability.

Alyzon Whitestarr was just an ordinary kid in a family of artists and musicians. An accident leaves her in a coma for a month and when she wakes she discovers she’s developed extrasensory perception. Colours are more vibrant, her memory is sharper and she can read people using her sense of smell.

The deepest wounds aren’t the ones we get from other people hurting us. They are the wounds we give ourselves when we hurt other people.

Her father smells of caramelised sugar and coffee grounds, her best friend Gilly smells of an ocean breeze, and the cutest boy in school smells of something rancid or rotting. Alyzon discovers that an evil virus that preys on people’s souls is what causes the rancid odour, and that the spreaders of the illness are after her family. She rallies the help of her kind hearted (and sweet smelling) friends to fight the wrongness that is infecting people and to try to save her family.

I did enjoy Alyzon Whitestarr, in part I think because is has echoes of a book I loved in my childhood called The Forgotten Door about a boy with extrasensory perception who could read people’s minds and talk to animals. Alyzon Whitestarr has held well despite being written almost twenty years ago, though young people might find the rarity of the mobile phone a bit strange.

Book review: The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland

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The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland is an aesthetically beautiful book. Each chapter is represented by a botanical drawing of a native flower drawn by artist Edith Rewa. There is also poetry peppered through the text, juxtaposing the challenging terrain that the story covers.

In the weatherboard house at the end of the lane, nine-year-old Alice Hart sat at her desk by the window and dreamed of ways to set her father on fire.

Nine year old Alice Hart’s father made her a beautiful desk from eucalyptus when he was feeling remorseful after one of his rages during which he would beat Alice’s mother, Alice and any pets that got in the way. Alice and her mother walk on eggshells waiting for Mr Hart to erupt. The girl reads about the phoenix rising from the ashes and wonders how she could set fire to her father so that he could rise anew with only the good parts of himself in tact.

Wave after wave curled and crested, gathering strength as it raced towards her. She tried to crawl away, scrambling to get further up the beach, but she couldn’t get traction in the soft sand. Trapped, she turned, helpless as the ocean of fire wheeled over her, a swirling wall of flames. Pressure surged from her gut, but when she took a deep breath, all that tumbled from her lungs was a silent scream of tiny white flowers.

A tragedy strikes the family. Alice is the only survivor and is taken in by her gruff, Blundstone and Akubra wearing, whisky drinking grandmother and flower farmer, June. The workers on the farm (called The Flowers) are all troubled women who found their way to June’s refuge.

…life is lived forward but you only understood backward. You can’t see the landscape you’re in while you’re in it.

June teaches her traumatised granddaughter the language of flowers, which become her means of communicating when she can’t find words. Alice didn’t know she had a grandmother and starts to wonder what other family secrets exist, but June is tight lipped. Then, as a young adult, Alice experiences a betrayal at the hands of her grandmother and flees the flower farm to the desert.

Around them, the willowy needles of desert oak trees swayed in the pale orange light. Wafts of yellow butterflies fluttered low over acacia and mulga bushes.  The crater wall slowly change colour as the sun sank, from flat ochre to blazing red to chocolate-purple. The sun slipped under the dark line of the horizon, glowing like an ember as it threw its last light into the sky.

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is both beautiful and brutal. The beauty of the prose, the Australian landscapes and native flowers offset the brutality of themes of domestic and family violence, trauma, secrets and grief. It explores how friendship and language are so important to breaking past patterns. The book has been adapted to film and premiers in Australia on Prime from today.

Book Review: The End Of The World Is Bigger Than Love By Davina Bell

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Post apocalyptic young adult novel, The End of the World is Bigger than Love is mind-bending idiosyncratic and weird, in a compelling way.

We live on a blue planet that circles around a ball of fire next to a moon that moves the sea, and you don’t believe in miracles?

Identical teenage twin sisters Summer and Winter live alone on an island surviving on rations stockpiles by their father before he died. They spend their time reading the classics and hiding from a world destroyed by a virus.

When a stranger called Edward appears, their bubble of existence begins to unravel. Their past is slowly revealed via the alternating points of view of the girls and we see how their world has shrunk from a happy family of world travellers to an isolated family of two.

I will say it again in case you missed it: the world had stopped turning, just like they say might happen in corny love songs if the lovers are ripped apart, and little did we know there were earthquakes rumbling all around the rest of the planet, like deeper hunger pangs, a blanket of fog was settling down on the top of the cold slabs of sea, like when you toss a doona up over your bed and it drifts down in perfect rumples that make you want to lie on top of it immediately.

Edward appears and changes everything. Winter falls in love and Summer become jealous and suspicious of their relationship. But both sisters are unreliable narrators, so the reader is unsure who to believe as their stories diverge. Then the world stops turning.

And Summer isn’t with me. Perhaps she never was.

The End of the World is Bigger than Love is a dystopian speculative fiction story about control, love, grief, family, sisters, and survival, all soften by some beautiful magical realism.

Book Review: Release By Patrick Ness

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What happens when you are the gay teenage son of a devout conservative homophobic preacher in a small town? Young adult novel, Release by Patrick Ness is the story of a day in the life of seventeen year old Adam.

They’re your parents. They’re meant to love you because. Never in spite.

Adam knows who he is, but has to hide it from his parents. Knowing that his parents wouldn’t accept him if they knew means he struggles with his self worth and lives a double life. His funny, open minded friend Angela is his solid ground. The ‘yolk’ as he calls it is only till he finishes school. Simultaneously Adam is dealing with an exploitative, lecherous boss, the end of one relationship with Enzo, and the beginning of another with the sensitive, thoughtful Linus.

Why did everyone no longer a teenager automatically dismiss any feeling you had then? Who cared if he’d grow out of it? That didn’t make it any less true in those painful and euphoric days when it was happening.

Release has a dual supernatural narrative about a Queen and a Faun that is set in the spirit world. The queen’s spirit is entwined with a murdered teen and she wants revenge.

It may cost you, my Queen. It may cost you dear.”
“All the best journeys do, faun.”

At first I was confused by the dual narrative, but as the story progressed, I started to anticipate it, wanting to know what that narrative was about. It’s an unusual literary device, and the novel would have been great with Adam’s narrative as a stand alone. But the supernatural-magical-realism twist does add an unusual angle, and right at the end the two stories overlap, entwined by a drop of blood.

Marty: Dad’s right about you. You got lost on your journey somewhere.
Adam: That’s what everyone says who never bothered to go on a journey in the first place

Release is about freeing yourself, coming out, religion, sex, sexual harassment, love, heartbreak, friendship, logical family, toxic relationships and knowing yourself.

Book review: No Friend But The Mountains by Behrouz Boochani

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What is a border? … My whole life has been impacted by the concept of “border”.

Humans have a unique capacity for both kindness, cruelty and survival, attributes that are displayed with stark vividness in this memoir about Australia’s archaic detention policies and what it was like to experience them as an asylum seeker shipped to Manus Island.

For some moments I exert everything to reach something far down inside the deepest existential places of myself. To find something divine. To grab at it… maybe. But I uncover nothing but myself and a sense of enormous absurdity and futility.

The phrase ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ is alive and well in No Friend but the Mountains by Kurdish refugee, Behrouz Boochani. Boochani is a journalist and poet with an education in politics and philosophy. He bore witness to, and survived, Australia’s inhumane detention policies by writing about them. His narrative was written in snatches and dispatched from Manus Island in a series of Farsi text messages over five years. His words were translated to English for the memoir by Omid Tofighian.

For some moments I exert everything to reach something far down inside the deepest existential places of myself. To find something divine. To grab at it … maybe. But I uncover nothing but myself and a sense of enormous absurdity and futility.

The narrative begins on the arduous journey from Indonesia to Australia with a group of mostly strangers gripping to the hope of a safe future beyond their boat that was not seaworthy. Boochani observes his fellow asylum seekers as a mixture of brave, selfless and selfish. As conditions at sea deteriorate, so do the passengers, some displaying their best, and others their worst selves.

The asylum seekers were rescued from their flailing boat and handed over to the Australian navy. A few days later, the men from the boat found themselves imprisoned on Manus Island where they experienced the brutality and degradation of Australia’s immigration detention system and the ‘stop the boats’ policy. The memoir takes us to February 2014 when attacks on the detention centre resulted in the murder of Iranian Kurd, Reza Bharati.

The bureaucratic ranks are determined by relationships of power. Every boss is subordinate to another boss. And the superior boss is also subordinate to another boss. If one investigated this chain it would possibly lead to thousands of other bosses. All of them repeating the one thing: ‘The Boss has given orders.

Nature offered Boochani some relief from the cruel reality of the day to day on Manus. There is beautiful imagery of the sea, mountains, trees, flowers and birds interspersed through observations of his fellow prisoners and captors and the hardships and humiliations they suffered.

The prisoner constructs their identity against the concept of freedom. Their imagination is always preoccupied with the world beyond the fences and in their mind they form a picture of a world where people are free. At every moment their life is shaped by the notion freedom. It’s a basic equation: a cage or freedom.

No Friend but the Mountains won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards Prize for Non-Fiction in 2019. A must read for the socially conscious and those who need to be awoken to become so.

This will take time, but I’ll continue challenging the system and I will win in the end. It’s a long road, but I’ll do it