Tag: fiction

When Things are Alive They Hum by Hannah Bent

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The beauty and emotion of When Things are Alive they Hum by Hannah Bent starts on the cover with the title. This is a story about resilience and love – familial, sibling and romantic. It revolves around the theme of living with disability and the story contains an unfiltered look at what disability means for both the individual and those around them, including the influence of the cultural lens on disability.

You are magic. Very few people will ever be able to see the world like you do.

Sisters Harper and Marlowe, both in their twenties, have a deep bond shaped by life events, including the death of their mother in childhood, their culture, and that Harper lives with Downs Syndrome and the heart problems that commonly accompany that condition. A delightful thread in the story is that Harper call her condition Up Syndrome and their stepmother is ‘stepmonster’ 🙂

When things are alive, they hum. You can hear it if you put your ear to the chest of an animal or if you lean close close close to a plant. My own hum goes dum dum da da dum da dum.

Marlowe returns from the UK to Hong Kong to be with Harper after finding out her sister needs a heart transplant to survive. When the Hong Kong medical system refuses the transplant due to Harpers Downs Syndrome, Marlowe becomes desperate. She is so determined to save her sister that she fails to pay attention to Harpers wishes. Harper is in love with a young man who also has Downs Syndrome and they want to get married.

It is not a secret that when things die they still hum; it just changes. After the dum, da drumming of a heart, it becomes a feeling that floods the air like music.

When Things are Alive they Hum is a beautifully written and moving story inspired by Bents own sister with Downs Syndrome. Told in alternating points of view by the two sisters, the reader gains a deep insight into their lives, hopes and very different perspectives on Harper’s plight.

Book review: Theo of Golden by Allen Levi

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Self published by Allen Levi in 2023, Theo of Golden is a quiet, slow moving story that holds a deep mystery most of the way through it.

How is it, Theo wondered, that a piece of paper – a letter, a photo, a ticket stub, a sketch, a painting – is suddenly transformed by placing it in four bits of wood beneath a pane of glass? What does it mean that we place permanent boundaries around transient moments? What does it say of humankind that we take such trouble to freeze specific memories, that we devote such energy to capturing and preserving the “minute particulars” of our lives?

Theo is an old man in his 80’s who arrives in the town of Golden as a stranger. After visiting a local coffeehouse, The Chalice, and contemplating 92 pencil drawn portraits of local residents hung on the walls. Theo decides he will buy the pictures.

There is no virtue in advertising one’s sadness. But there is no wisdom in denying it either. And there is the beautiful possibility that great love can grow out of sadness if it is well-tended. Sadness can make us bitter or wise. We get to choose.

Theo purchases the portraits one by one and writes to their subjects requesting a meeting in the local park. He meets them on a park bench and gives them their portrait. The locals leave their interactions with Theo feeling like they have been truly seen. But almost no one knows who he is and he never reveals his surname, dodging any too personal questions.

It’s hard enough to define what art is, much less ‘good art.’ I wonder if there is such a thing. Maybe there are just good responses. But I guess if a work of art makes us see something familiar in a new way or makes us feel something we ought to have felt all along or shows us our place in the world more clearly, maybe then it qualifies as ‘good.’ If it makes us better somehow, maybe that’s what gives it value.

Theo of Golden is a beautifully written and enchanting read (aside from a couple of bumpy spots). It is written in a form that resembles a parable. At its core it is about the power of kindness and connection. I found it a heartwarming story – and may have cried a little at one point.

Book review: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

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The Correspondent is an epistolary novel made up entirely of letters. Septuagenarian Sybil Van Antwerp has been a letter writer since she was a girl. She writes to her brother Felix, her friend Rosalie, the son of a former colleague, authors, newspapers, and an anonymous correspondent – those letter are never sent. Sybil lives alone, is prickly, outspoken, feisty, and obstinate and has just discovered she will gradually lose her sight.

But I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction. By and large a lonesome walk out in the wildness of hills and wind. Mountains. Snow. And sometimes there is someone to come along and walk with you for a stretch, and sometimes (this is what I’m getting to) sometimes you see in the distance some lights and it heartens you, the lone house or maybe a village and you come into the warmth of that stopover and go inside.

The reader learns about Sybil’s life through the letters written over ten years. She tells us about her legal career, her divorce, her children including the death of her son, and her two suitors. She has lived a full life with friendships, regrets, love, guilt, grief and forgiveness.

And yes, I will go into the year as you said: boldly, unapologetically, head up and not taking bullshit from anyone with a penis. You seem a worthy person to offer such advice.

Letters provide Sybil a way to connect with people that is within her comfort zone. The Correspondent is a beautifully crafted, character driven novel about finding connection and solace in literature. I read the story on recommendation from a friend – it took me a little while to get into it, but once captured I was totally absorbed.

I have found it to be absolutely astounding, all the trouble living has turned out to be. Things nobody ever warned me about. I wish someone would have thought to say to me, earlier on, ‘Sybil, over and over again serpents will emerge from the bottom of the sea and grab you by the feet.’ Of course I didn’t say anything of the sort to my own children, and I probably never would.

Book review: Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

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Expat freelance digital creatives Anna and Tom live highly curated lives in Berlin. The novel describes in detail their tasteful, plant lined flat with Danish furniture and time spent at gallery openings, parties, cooking and experimental orgies in search of authentic experiences. They work from home in their flat as website graphic designers, filling their breaks with social media updates – so they spend most of their time online.

They lived in a country whose language they didn’t speak, in a job with unclear boundaries and no fixed hours or base, and which was, to a great extent, subject to the whims of their clients and social media contacts. The environment where they slept and worked, and which they themselves had chosen and shaped, was the one tangible manifestation of who they were. That apartment and those objects weren’t merely reflections of their personalities: they provided a foot­hold…

The couple spend 10 years in Berlin from the early 2010s and we follow them as their friends gradually move away, the city is gentrified, their youthful joy ebbs away and their lives begin to feel empty. Possibly because they are so focussed on their things and their image in the eyes of other expats that they fail to build real connections, not mixing at all with local people. Eventually they move to Lisbon, then Sicily, then back to Berlin in search for what is missing.

They flew, then drove. The sensation of winding their way through the Mediterranean hills with their bags piled up on the back seat immediately made them feel like they were on an adventure; but the landscape gradually lost its splendour the further they drove from the coast, until it looked like any old countryside, which was what it was.

Perfection is a tribute to Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties set in Paris. How do we live when we become constrained by our own projection of an image of a perfect life? I was a little surprised that the story kept me engaged as not much actually happens. The reader is simply watching the couple’s years roll by through the disconnected gaze of the author. The search for perfection comes at the cost of authenticity. Read Perfection as a reality check on what is actually important in life.

Book review: Stinkbug by Sinead Stubbins

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Satirical corporate gothic novel Stinkbug by Sinéad Stubbins is a foray into the lunacy of corporate culture. 

Edith had been a copywriter at Winked for seven years. It wasn’t a place where people’s job titles were things like ‘Studio Ninja’, but they did say things like that in the office, and only sometimes in an ironic way

The story revolves around Edith, a reliable and responsible copywriter at Winked. She goes on a three day corporate retreat with other selected colleagues to a place called Consequi, a remote mountain getaway. Winked is anticipating a restructure and Edith sees the retreat an an opportunity to demonstrate her ongoing value to the company.

It was hard not to think of the upcoming retreat as somehow being connected to a new sacrifice. There had been rumours about a restructure for months. Usually when Winked’s CEO came to the office, which wasn’t often, he would strut between desks booming, ‘How are we!’ to terrified juniors he didn’t know the names of, clapping them on the back. Now the CEO just rushed into meeting rooms with senior staff and mystery third parties—crucially, the rooms without glass walls. After the meetings, he would appear in the corridors massaging his head and then would be gone again.

Soon after arrival, participants phones are confiscated and they are subjected to an increasingly bizarre series of activities until workplace dynamics and collegiate camaraderie begin to disintegrate. Soon Edith becomes the pariah and must choose to embrace her otherness or conform. She chooses resistance. 

You’re a stinkbug and they’re worried if they come near you, your stench will get all over them and they won’t be able to wash it off.

Stinkbug is for anyone who appreciates the perversity of the office world and its tendency toward power games, toxicity and psychological warfare against those who don’t conform to the dominant cultural sereotype. 

Book review: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

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In Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, Kathy, now 31, is reflecting on her experience as a student at an English boarding school called Hailsham. I’ve heard very few good stories from friends who attended boarding schools, but Ishiguro takes the experience to a whole new level.

I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, drift apart. That’s how it is with us. It’s a shame, Kath, because we’ve loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can’t stay together forever.

In this dystopian story, Hailsham was established to indoctrinate its students to prepare them for their pre-ordained destiny – as clones for organ harvesting (think Dolly the sheep). Kathy has spent most of her adulthood caring for her peers who have become donors. Their unsettling reality slowly dawns on the reader via Ishiguro’s trickle of details as Kathy recalls her past. 

We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.

The existence of the Hilsham students is the ultimate form of ‘othering’. They are bred to be sacrificed to extend the lives of the dominant class. The body parts of the Hilsham students will treat life limiting illnesses of the rest of the community – until they expire from losing too much of themselves. The normalisation of this practice is extremely disturbing. The Halisham youth, can, in many ways lead normal lives including having jobs and relationships, but there is a question about whether ordinary life if for all intents and purposes meaningless for them given their destiny, including a short life, is preordained.

We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.

Never Let Me Go is a meditation on life and death, what it means to be human, the shaping of destiny, friendship, the role of art in life and the importance of ethics in science. 

Book review: I See You’ve Called in Dead by John Kenney

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I found I See You’ve Called in Dead by John Kenney hilarious in a laugh out loud way.

One advantage for the dead is that they never have to read your writing.

Bud is a middle aged obituary writer, struggling in the wake of a failed relationship and lack of purpose. On top of all that his recent performance review highlighted a long list of failures – including significant errors in his published work. In one obituary he incorrectly wrote that an 80 year old woman had died by throwing herself off a bridge. What would her grandchildren make of that, his boss asks.

Are we ever fully honest with someone else? I don’t mean to suggest outright lies, but do we really express those quieter, deeper feelings? Those amorphous, hazy things, core things that even we struggle to admit to ourselves. Do we share everything?

Drunk and feeling sorry for himself one night, Bud writes his own obituary and accidentally publishes it to the web. When his company discovers the issue they want to fire him. A legal glitch prevents them – they cannot fire a dead person.

What would you write if you had to write your obituary? Today, right now. What comes to mind? What memories, days, moments? What people and experiences? I realize, at first glance, that the idea of writing one’s own obituary while still alive may sound morbid. It’s not, though. I promise you. It’s a needed reminder of who you are, of what truly matters. Because it’s your life and there’s still time to write it. Before I have to.

While the company tries to sort out Bud’s work situation so they can fire him, they suspend him from work. Bud starts going to the funerals of strangers in a bid to seek meaning in his own life. 

Life prevails. How strange and wondrous. In the midst of death, life prevails, calls to us, begs us, says, Come, please, don’t you dare waste this precious gift.

I See You’ve Called in Dead is a wacky character driven, satirical tale about life, death and purpose.

We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom.

Book review: The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

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Booker prize winner, The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, has a layered and complex narrative. 

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

An old woman called Iris Griffen reflects on her own life, and her sister Laura’s suicide. The sisters came from a wealthy family, with Iris married off to her father’s business rival in order to rescue the family fortunes after a series of incidents threaten to send him broke. Iris is determined to document her story before she dies, with the hope of it facilitating a reconciliation with her estranged granddaughter Sabrina. 

This is how the girl who couldn’t speak and the man who couldn’t see fell in love.

Iris’s telling of her life is interspersed with chapters from her sister’s novel, The Blind Assassin, published after she drove off a bridge to her death. The book made her posthumously famous, giving her a cult like status. The Blind Assassin is about two anonymous lovers having a secret affair. 

Should is a futile word. It’s about what didn’t happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space.

A third narrative is introduced by the anonymous man telling lover a science fiction story about a blind assassin and a sacrificial virgin who fall in love against the odds. A fourth narrative exists in newspaper and magazine stories from the 1930s and ‘40s.

The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn’t one.

The pieces of the disparate narratives are masterfully bought together in the final pages. The Blind Assassin is a bleak but beautiful tale about lies, coverups, gender, class, family tragedies and the unreliability of memory. 

If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you’d be doomed. You’d be ruined as God. You’d be a stone. You’d never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You’d never love anyone, ever again. You’d never dare to.

Book review: The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana

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The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana is a story about what happens when bored, discontented, testosterone fuelled boy-men who have grown up with distorted prescriptions for masculinity are left to their own devices and go rouge. It is both disturbing and compelling. 

When two men say hello on the street, one of them loses.

Adam and Teddy have a friendship built on competition, oneupmanship and risk taking in their search for identity in a small town on the west Coast of Canada. They have just finished high school. Adam lives with a father who has banned talk of his mother, and the boy gets much of his advice on life, including how to manipulate girls, from books and podcasts. Teddy has a girlfriend, but is unsure about the man he wants to be. Both want to be seen and to be witnessed.

The road though! Endless becoming, a colour palette always and somehow never changing, grey to green to brown to blue to other, occasionally red, very occasionally yellow, whoosh, repeat, repeat, something comes the other way with headlights on, the beauty of headlights in daylight, fence, field, these lane markings like perforations maybe, as if the road or the whole world could unzip any moment now, if there were such a thing as a moment when you’re driving, which Teddy realizes there isn’t. It’s just one long stretch. The road and its contradictions: boredom and excitement, you sit still but you’re moving, there’s a good kind of silence even with the engine noise and the German metal Adam has them listening to. Teddy’s mom used to call this sitting and thinking time. But all Teddy wants to think about is how the world keeps rushing toward them then dropping harmlessly into their wake. 

The boys hatch a plan to go on a road trip and drive as far as they can. They do not tell their families. When they stop so Teddy can buy a gun, we become certain this trip will end badly. They drive on in the sweltering van – unwashed, tormented by insects, fuelled by energy drinks and chips during the day, and bourbon at night. When they chance across a young couple on the side of the road and make a fatal decision, the reader knows there is no going back and we descend into the young men’s inner worlds as they unravel without remorse.   

Both start unconsciously paring their sentences, seeing how minimal they can make them and still be understood

The Passenger Seat is a skilfully crafted debut novel infused with menace and fear. Its sparse prose holds the reader in tension from the outset and leaves them with a lingering discomfort. 

Book review: Past the Shallows by Favel Parrett

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Set in Southern Tasmania, Past the Shallows by Favel Parrett is about three brothers – Joe, Miles and Harry. Miles and Harry live an impoverished life with their abalone fisherman father. The boys mother died in a car accident and their father is a violent drunk. Young adult Joe has left home, but not town, after an altercation with his father. The ocean itself is almost a character – ever present, desolate, and isolated.

Water that was always there. Always everywhere. The sound and the smell and the cold waves making Harry different. And it wasn’t just because he was the youngest. He knew the way he felt about the ocean would never leave him now. It would be there always, right inside him.

Thirteen year old Miles feels trapped working with his father on the fishing boat. Harry who is around eight years old doesn’t have to work the boat as he suffers from sea sickness. He spends much of his time alone until he befriends an old man called George who the local children are afraid of due to deformities. 

There were things that no one could teach you – things about the water. You just knew them or you didn’t and no one could tell you how to read it. How to feel it. Miles knew the water. He could feel it. And he knew not to trust it.

Miles wishes he could leave home or go surfing with his friends. He also feels a sense of responsibility toward his younger brother, to protect him from their father. It is this relationship between Miles and Harry that is the central spine of the book and it is their voices we hear.

Harry picked up an abalone shell, the edges loose and dusty in his hands. And every cell in his body stopped. Felt it. This place. Felt the people who had been here before, breathing and standing live where he stood. People who were dead now. Long gone. And Harry understood it, right down in his guts, that time ran on forever and that one day he would die.

Past the Shallows is a coming of age story written in spare, lyrical prose, about the brother bond, grief, family violence, and the struggles of ordinary life.