Tag: fiction

Book review: Sedating Elaine by Dawn Winter

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Sedating Elaine is a tale about broken hearts, bad decisions and unresolved childhood trauma told with dry, dark humour.

Young Londoner, Francis drinks and takes drugs to avoid her feelings, problems and a girlfriend she doesn’t really want. Inevitably the drugs become her problem when she finds herself in debt to her drug dealer for a lot of money she doesn’t have. Her job in a restaurant won’t raise what she needs before her dealer comes good on his threat and sends his debt collectors around to teach Francis a lesson.

This is the problem when a person makes everyone feel special; it means none of them are special.

Francis is still hung up on the last girlfriend who dumped her. She doesn’t particularly like her current sex crazed girlfriend Elaine who she picked up at a bar one night and has been hanging around ever since. But she asks Elaine to move in and pay rent so she can pay off her debt.

Francis was the sort of person who accumulated incredibly short, intense relationships that ended explosively, beyond repair, well beyond salvaging a friendship

When Elaine moves in with all her stuff and her noise, Francis starts to be driven mad. She craves quiet and alone time, so she decides to drug Elaine to keep her quiet until she’s paid her debt. Then she’ll dump her.

Elaine greeted her at the door wearing g a face of concern and nothing else.

The morally unhinged cringeworthy protagonist in Sedating Elaine will take you on an outrageous rollicking ride through her dysfunctional life. The debut novel was an easy, if uncomfortable read that had me laughing inappropriately all the way through.

Book review: The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

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I have been know talk to trees and animals myself, so a novel that includes the point of view of a fig tree was enticing. The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak is a beautiful story about the turbulent history of Cyprus and its impact on the lives of ordinary people. The story contains three narratives.

Because in real life, unlike in history books, stories come to us not in their entirety but in bits and pieces, broken segments and partial echoes, a full sentence here, a fragment there, a clue hidden in between. in life, unlike in books, we have to weave our stories out of threads as fine as the gossamer veins that run through a butterfly’s wings.

A forbidden marriage between a Greek Christian and a Turkish Moslem during the post colonial violence in Cyprus is so disapproved of that Kostas and Defne Kazantzakis move to England. As young lovers in 1974 they met in secret at The Happy Fig, a tavern owned by two men who understand forbidden love.

That is what migrations and relocations do to us: when you leave your home for unknown shores, you don’t simply carry on as before; a part of you dies inside so that another part can start all over again.

Kosta and Defne’s 16-year-old Ada in London in the 2010’s is grieving her mother’s death when her aunt Meryem arrives and unravels the Cypriot history of Ada’s parents.

So I guess it is in my genes, this melancholy I can never quite shake off. Carved with an invisible knife into my arborescent skin.

The third narrative belongs to the talkative fig tree originally growing at the The Happy Fig tavern. A cutting of the fig is transplanted into an English garden by Kosta.

I wish I could have told him that loneliness is a human invention. Trees are never lonely. Humans think they know with certainty where there being ends and someone else’s starts. With there roots tangled and caught up underground, linked to fungi and bacteria, trees harbour no such illusions. For us, everything is interconnected

The Island of Missing Trees is about beauty and violence, secrets, history, natural history, love, trauma and resilience. The story examines ordinary lives can be recast by societal events, what compels someone to leave their homeland, the adjustments of immigration and the impact of the consequent loss of culture.

Book review: Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

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The title of this book—as titles so often are—is a lie.

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey is an odd, but compelling genre-bending work of fiction. It is written in the style of a biography, including photographs, bibliography and references with footnotes, by a narrator who is a journalist. Biography of X is set in a USA with an alternative history in which the southern states have succeeded during the ‘great disunion’ of 1945 and become a dictatorial theocracy.

The sky was moonless and blasted full of stars, and as I looked at them, exhausted into naïveté, I felt almost fearful of the vastness above me.

X was an eclectic artist, of books, music and art installations. Before her death in 1996, the mysterious X had collaborated with the likes of David Bowie and Tom Waits. She took the name X in 1982. It was unclear whether any of her many prior pseudonyms where her real name.

The first winter she was dead it seemed every day for months on end was damp and bright—it had always just rained, but I could never remember the rain—and I took the train down to the city a few days a week, searching (it seemed) for a building I might enter and fall from, a task about which I could never quite determine my own sincerity, as it seemed to me the seriousness of anyone looking for such a thing could not be understood until a body needed to be scraped from the sidewalk.

The narrator/author of the biography is, CM Luca, X’s widow. She is obsessed with trying to find the truth about the woman to whom she was married. She is motivated to write the biography after becoming infuriated by another published by someone else that she feels misrepresents her beloved.

This pathetic boy—no biographer, not even a writer—was simply one of X’s deranged fans. I don’t know why she attracted so many mad people, but she did, all the time: stalkers, obsessives, people who fainted at the sight of her. A skilled plagiarist had merely recognized a good opportunity and taken it, as people besotted with such delusion hold their wallets loosely.

Despite their marriage, when X died, Luca did not know her birthplace, date or real name. She sets out to piece together X’s past, untangle fact from fiction and process her own grief through a series of interviews with former spouses, lovers, and friends. Luca trawls through papers left behind by X trying to make sense of who her wife was and by extension their relationship and herself.

We cannot see the full and terrible truth of anyone with whom we closely live. Everything blurs when held too near.

X was clearly brilliant, difficult and troubled in the way that great artist often are. Her relationship with Luca was imbalanced and dysfunctional. Luca traces X’s origins to the Southern Territories and seeks out her family of origin, her roots as a revolutionary or terrorist depending on whom she speaks to.

But I did not find this so awful. Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.

Biography of X is one of the most unusual and ambitious works of fiction I have read in a long time. Its mesh of genres, bending of history, and melding of the real with the imagined is discombobulating and enthralling.

Perhaps your ability to feel it waned, perhaps you are the one who ruins things, it was you, you—and there it was again, that useless, human blame two people will toss between each other when they become too tired or weak to carry the weight of love.

There was so much in this novel, both in form, content and emotion that it took me a long time to read it, but I am glad I did.

Book review: Cleave by Nikki Gemmell

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Cleave by Nikki Gemmell is a story about the relationship between a father and his daughter set against the stark landscape of the desert in the Australian outback.

The story begins with a cheque. The envelope that carried it was bruised with grubbiness and worn thin from too many hands. The envelope took two months to find her. The amount of the cheque was substantial and the typewritten instructions were blunt: hunt him down

Thirty year old Snip Freeman is a nomadic loner and artist based in Sydney. Her grandmother died and left her enough money to buy a ute and a request to return to Alice Springs and find her father, Bud. Dave responds to an add Snip places for someone to share the journey and the two strike up a relationship of sorts. Dave is fascinated by Snip’s free spiritedness, even after she abandons him.

A man told her once she’s the type of woman men never leave. They don’t. She leaves them. She gives them the feeling that any minute she’ll be off, so while they’re with her they’re obsessed.

Snip and Bud’s relationship is complicated. He absconded with her when she was a child after his relationship with her mother ended, cut Snip’s hair and turned her into a boy to disguise who she was. Their reunion almost becomes deadly when the two of them take trip into the desert.

People without curiosity are like houses without books: there’s something unsettling about them.

Cleave was written in 1998, but its outback setting gives it a timeless quality. The story includes Indigenous characters written without appropriation – perhaps a consequence of Gemmell’s personal experience of living in Alice Springs.

Book review: Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

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Who hasn’t asked the question, what if I could go back and say something different, at some point in their life?

It takes courage to say what has to be said.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a gentle story about human frailty, relationships, loss, regret, empathy, containment and time travel. It is the debut novel of playwright Toshikazu Kawaguchi, and would make a great stage play. The story is set entirely in a quaint tiny basement cafe called Finiculi Funicula in a back alley in Tokyo that has been serving brewed coffee for over one hundred years.

But Kazu still goes on believing that, no matter what difficulties people face, they will always have the strength to overcome them. It just takes heart. And if the chair can change someone’s heart, it clearly has its purpose.

Customers who come to the cafe have something to say to a person in their life to whom they cannot speak – the boyfriend who left, the husband with Alzheimer’s, the sister who died, the daughter never met. Each chapter focuses on one person’s desire to revisit a different time to say what they failed to, in order to create a connection with a loved one after a missed opportunity.

The present hadn’t changed—but those two people had. Both Kohtake and Hirai returned to the present with a changed heart.

There are strict protocols in the cafe’s time travel offering, and nothing you say or do will change the present. You must sit, and stay seated, in a particular seat (occupied most of the time by a ghost you cannot force to move) and you must return to the present before the coffee gets cold or risk being trapped evermore as a ghost yourself.

Just remember. Drink the coffee before it goes cold.

Each character who visits the cafe to sit in the chair is troubled by a regret about what they failed to say to a loved one. The time travel offers them the opportunity to remedy their mistakes, hurts and losses and the sweet relief of closure.

If I return to the past, I might be able to set things right..

Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a gentle journey of sadness, second chances, facing reality, and relief through the vehicle of magical realism. The story is a quick and easy read, though I recommend listening to the audio book as I think this format suits it better.

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: 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 Yield by Tara June Winch

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The Yield is a meditation on Australian Aboriginal culture, the impacts of colonisation policies including the removal of children from families and dispossession, inter generational trauma, returning home, identity and a reclamation of traditional language. The story is fiction, but draws on factual historical records.

He was telling her that there was a lot to remembering the past, to having stories, to knowing your history, your childhood, but there is something to forgetting it too…There exists a sort of torture of memory if you let it come, if you invite the past to huddle beside you, comforting like a leech…a footprint in history has a thousand repercussions, that there are a thousand battles being fought every day because people couldn’t forget something that happened before they were born. There are few worse things than memory, yet few things better.

Three different point of view narratives are interwoven through this book. Wiradjuri Elder, Albert Gondiwindi who wrote a dictionary of traditional language, his granddaughter August, in her early twenties, who returns home for her grandfather’s funeral after living overseas for some years, and Reverand Greenleaf, an empathetic nineteenth century missionary who established Prosperous house for the natives to try and protect them from the damaging white policies.

There are plenty things I haven’t done, and it didn’t make my life any worse.

August’s sister who disappeared when August was young has a strong presence in the story also. She hovers, just out of view throughout the novel. The absence of her point of view emphasises the impact of her disappearance, and symbolises what was lost more broadly to NSW Aboriginal communities.

Since she was a girl the ache had scratched further inside her, for something complete to rest at her tongue, her throat. The feeling that nothing was ever properly said, that she’d existed in a foreign land of herself.

The central Aboriginal family in the novel live at Prosperous house at Masacre Plains. The area is under threat from a tin mine planning to gouge a hole two miles wide and 300 metres deep where August’s family home is located. After returning for her grandfathers funeral, she decides to stay and try to help save the town.

I was born on Ngurambang — can you hear it? — Ngu-ram-bang. If you say it right it hits the back of your mouth and you should taste blood in your words. Every person around should learn the word for country in the old language, the first language — because that is the way to all time, to time travel! You can go all the way back.

The Yield is a slow flowing story about reclaiming Aboriginal language, family, loss, the past and current legacy of colonisation, and returning. Despite the serious topics, the novel also makes room for humour and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Book review: Bridge of Clay by Markus Zusak

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Bridge of Clay is the second novel of author Markus Zusak who also wrote The Book Thief.

Five wild brothers, the Dunbar boys live unsupervised in a Sydney suburb amongst badly behaved pets. The eldest, Matthew, who supports the household and is guardian to his brothers, is the narrator.

Each boy stood, slouched yet stiff, hands in pockets. If the dog had pockets, she’d have had her paws in them, too, for sure

Matthew introduces his brothers – Rory who is prone to getting into fights, Henry who makes them all watch bad movies, Clay the dark horse who loves to run and is the central character through whom others are changed, and Tommy who collects stray animals including Hector the cat, Telemachus the budgie and Achilles the mule who has free range of the kitchen.

He, as much as anyone, knows who and why and what we are: A family of ramshackle tragedy. A comic book kapow of boys and blood and beasts.

One day the boy’s absent father, known to them as ‘the murderer’ reappears after disappearing into the outback, leaving his sons to fend for themselves after the death of his wife, Penelope, to cancer. He asks his sons to help him build a bridge. Clay goes to join him to the chagrin of his brothers. The bridge building threads through the 600 pages of the book and represents reconciliation after the destruction of grief.

She couldn’t ever see how broken he was, while the rest of us stood and watched them. She was in jeans, bare feet and T-shirt, and maybe that’s what finished us off. She looked just like a Dunbar boy. With that haircut she was one of us.

The novel tells the scrambled story of the Dunbar tribe starting with piano loving Penelope’s emigration as a teenager from Eastern Europe. Bridge of Clay is a tender, poetic, chaotic and sometimes violent patchwork story about a blush of boys bringing themselves up after they lose their mother to illness and their father abandons them. It is a story about family, grief, what makes a home, forgiveness and love. A complex, yet simply beautiful tale.