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Sunday afternoon blues
Today sees me with a touch of the blues. Instead of revelling in the blue of a summer sky I’m staring out of the conservatory windows at wall to wall grey sky and heavy rain. So frustrating to be able to look out onto the garden and see all the jobs that need to be done and not be able to get out and do them. My lovely rose bushes look very sad and forlorn after the thunderstorm on Friday. The sweet peas need a bit of propping up so they can climb up the trellis and there are some new perennials I bought last week to fill in gaps in the borders that are still sitting in tubs awaiting planning. Sigh. Sigh and triple Sigh. I really hope this isn’t going to be another one of those wash out summers which are a specialty of dear old Blighty. That never happens in books does it? There, the summer is always perfect. Girls get to wear floaty dresses and sandals, everyone goes off for picnics by the river (such idyllic scene marred only by the discovery of the odd body or two) or linger late into the evening on their patio/terrace/lawn amidst the remnants of the barbecue.
You know, I think those people campaigning for the UK to leave the EU have missed a trick in showing the link between our membership of the EU and the crap summers of recent years. They’ve blamed every other woe to befall UK on our membership so why not rubbish summers? I bet if they were to promise warmer, sunnier times if we voted for an exit, they’d do a roaring trade.
Amid all this doom and gloom I did have one reason to be cheerful this week. Earlier in the month Kim at Reading Matters hosted a giveaway of Richard Flanagan’s back catalogue to mark the fact Vintage Publishing has just repackaged his works for UK readers. Her timing was perfect because I had only recently read his Booker prize winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North which bowled me over and left me wanting to read more of his work. Amazingly I won. So yesterday morning bright and early the postman greeted with this delightful package of five of his novels: Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish, The Unknown Terrorist and Wanting.
The delivery didn’t include the plant by the way – just the books I should emphasise. I tried taking my own picture of the collection but it wasn’t anywhere as good as the one Kim did on her post. My only dilemma now is to decide which of these titles to read first. I’m leaning towards The Sound of One Hand Clapping which Goodreads describes as “A sweeping novel of world war, migration, and the search for new beginnings in a new land…. The Sound of One Hand Clapping is about the barbarism of an old world left behind, about the harshness of a new country, and the destiny of those in a land beyond hope who seek to redeem themselves through love.”
Doesn’t that just get your heart fluttering with anticipation?
Maybe instead of just staring at the rain I should cover my windows with pictures of these books. That should deal with the fit of the blues shouldn’t it?
The Snow Kimono by Mark Henshaw
Some pieces are small, others large, but all are calculated to deceive, to lead one astray, in order to make the solution of the puzzle as difficult, as challenging, as possible. In our tradition, how a puzzle is made, and how it is solved, reveals some greater truth about the world.
This quote comes from an episode in Mark Henshaw’s The Snow Kimono in which a professor of law tells a story about his father’s fascination with traditional Japanese jigsaw puzzles. It could equally describe the way Mark Henshaw’s narrative is constructed. Each chapter builds on the preceding one, enabling the story to unfold one layer at a time and bring with it ever-deepening insights and fresh revelations.
The novel opens in Paris in 1989. Retired police inspector Auguste Jovert receives a letter from a woman in Algiers, where he once served as an intelligence officer. She claims to be his daughter. Back home in his apartment he finds a stranger waiting for him – Tadashi Omura, a former professor of law of the Imperial University of Japan who bears a strong resemblance to the Emperor Hirohito. Omura begins to relate the story of his own lost daughter Fumiko and his friend, the arrogant and brilliant novelist Katsuo Ikeda. As the story of a fractured friendship, lost lovers and orphaned children unfolds, Jovert cannot help reflect on the parallels with his own life which, like Ikeda’s, is built on a lie.
Each strand of the narrative pivots between various characters and locations, in France, Japan and Algeria. It’s written in a slightly off-beat enigmatic style which keeps readers uncertain how everything fits together and how it will all end. Many of the tales use beautiful evocative imagery.
Behind me, the mountain peaks blaze like white teeth in the first rays of the sun. Darkness seeps back into the earth. The grey-tiled rooftops of the village, clustered together like sleeping cattle, begin to surface.
or in another scene:
Banks of cloud the colour of egg white hung low and flat on the horizon.
The Snow Kimono is a meditation on love, loss and betrayal but one whose meaning becomes evident only in stages. Omura counsels Jovert early on in their relationship that if he wants to understand, then he needs to change his perspective. “In Japan we have a saying. If you want to see your life, you have to see it through the eyes of another. But what if what you see is not what you want to know.” Jovert, reminiscing about his career comes to appreciate that the techniques he used in his career would not be sufficient to reveal the truth about life “… life, unlike crime, was not something you could solve. What people told you was not always the truth; the truth was what you found out, eventually, by putting all the pieces together.”
The non-linear structure and the enigmatic nature of the plot alone would make The Snow Kimono a fascinating novel but add the haunting, fluid, lyrical style and the result is the most remarkable novel I’ve read all year. From the first page I was enthralled. By the time I got to the last page I wanted to start all over again to try, like Jovert, to put all those pieces together.
End Notes
Mark Henshaw was born in Canberra, Australia. He published his first novel, Out of the Line of Fire, 26 years ago to huge critical acclaim. Since then he’s published detective novels under the pen-name of J.M.Calder but under his own name, nothing. Why the long silence? An interview in Sydney Morning Herald may provide the answer.
The Snow Kimono is published by Text Publishing. They took on the publication after 32 other publishers turned it down. The Snow Kimono went on to win the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award in 2015.
The View from Here: Books from Australia
Welcome to the world of books. For our next port of call in the View from Here series we are travelling south to Australia. Our guide is Whispering Gums. And if you want to know what’s so significant about that name, you’ll just have to read on. Oh and don’t forget to look up the website via the link above.
Let’s meet our local expert
I’m a retired librarian/archivist, who still does some ad hoc contract work. After all, I do need some book-buying pocket money! Like most litbloggers
I’ve loved reading all my life. In my youth, I’d assess the success of my birthdays and Christmases by how many books I received. Using this criterion, I now deem these celebrations as very unsuccessful. I receive few books because people aren’t sure what I might have read. Wah!
I started my blog just over five years ago and called it Whispering Gums. This name has nothing to do with being in my dotage (though some might argue differently!). It refers to my love of our Australian gum trees. “Whispering Gums” comes from a line in my old school song, as I described in my first post. (http://whisperinggums.com/2009/05/02/my-name/).
I mainly read literary fiction (with some forays into non-fiction and poetry). My focus is Australian literature, particularly Australian women writers, but I also love Jane Austen, English and American classics, and I like to explore literature from diverse cultures. I’d love to find more time to read translated literature.
Q. What kinds of books are the most popular right now in Australia?
This is a difficult question for a literary fiction reader to answer. Crime is popular here, with Aussie readers joining the rest of the world in being fascinated by Scandinavian crime, but there are many Aussie crime writers too, such as Peter Temple, Shane Maloney, Peter Corris, Wendy James, Dorothy Johnston to name just a few. Other popular genres include fantasy/speculative fiction, and rural or outback family sagas. Historical fiction is popular too, with both general and literary fiction writers. Many of our recent literary awards seem to have been won by books set in the past.
I believe that Australia’s women writers, literary and genre, are experiencing some resurgence. Books by women writers like Gillian Mears, Anna Funder and Michelle de Kretser, have been shortlisted for and/or won major literary awards in greater numbers than a decade ago. And new women writers are appearing, such as Hannah Kent who created a sensation with her Iceland-set novel, Burial rites.
Q. What books do you remember having to study in school that could be considered classics of Australian literature?
Due to a somewhat peripatetic childhood, I probably read more Australian books at school than many Australians of my generation. The absolute standout for me was Patrick White’s Voss, which I studied in my last year of school. It turned me onto White, and I’ve never lost my interest. This novel had it all for a teenage girl – outback drama, romance (of a cerebral and spiritual nature), and angst about life and society. I also read novels by Frank Dalby Davison and Vance Palmer, who are not much read now, and some CJ Dennis and Henry Lawson.
Noticeable by their absence in my school reading lists of the 1960s were Australia’s pioneering women writers, such as Henry Handel Richardson, Miles Franklin, and Christina Stead. Unfortunately, I don’t think this situation has improved a lot.
Q. Who are some of the major writers from Australia that you think deserve more attention? Why don’t we hear more of these writers?
Where do I start? If we are talking attention overseas, I’d say few if any of our writers receive the attention they deserve overseas. Every now and then there’s a flurry when one is nominated for a major international award, like the Booker or the Orange (now Baileys) Women’s Prize. Otherwise, recognition is pretty rare. Why they are not better known overseas is, I assume, due to the challenge of finding publishers overseas. E-publishing may see this improve, but it will also need major overseas reviewers to read and write about the books. I like to think Australian blogs are starting to help a little in this regard.
Tim Winton: Australia’s top must read author?
My favourite under-appreciated writer here and overseas has to be Thea Astley who died in 2004. She had a long and prolific career and was the first writer to win our most important literary award, the Miles Franklin, four times. Only one other writer, Tim Winton, has equaled that to date. She was a fearless writer in terms of subject matter and style, and was deeply concerned about inhumanity and intolerance in twentieth century Australian society.
Australia’s indigenous writers are starting to attract notice – and a few, like Kim Scott and Alexis Wright – have won major literary awards here. But, there is still some general resistance from the wider reading public to engaging with indigenous literature, and I don’t think these writers are well known overseas.
I could name many others, particularly if we are talking recognition overseas, but would probably end up listing most of our writers! I wonder what Australian writers your readers know and like. Would I be surprised?
Q. Tell us about some of the themes and traditions of literature in your country
The promotion for retired gallery director Edmund Capon’s series the Art of Australia describes his view of Australian art as being part of our “quest to make sense of the vast continent and people’s place in it, from its haunting landscapes and ever-present dangers to i
ts great beauty and extraordinarily diverse culture”. This could also be said of much of our literature.
Our earliest settler literature was particularly concerned with how we relate to and make sense of this vast, dry and yes, ultimately dangerous, land. The underlying themes generated from this can be contradictory, such as stoicism, rejection of authority, spiritual desperation, resourcefulness. Sometimes these have been expressed with a self-deprecating humour, sometimes romantically, and other times grimly. Writers like Henry Lawson and poet Banjo Paterson still form part of our literary psyche, but both tended to romanticise bush people. Modern writers also write about the land, and still explore the hardships involved. Gillian Mears’ Foal’s Bread, Courtney Collins’ The Burial, Roger McDonald’s The Ballad of Desmond Kale are very different examples of modern writing about the bush. McDonald said of his book that “A story about rural life in Australia can never be a success story because it’s all based on failure. But I love the way in a novel you can combine opposites so that while there might be a slippery ride to failure there is also something triumphant in the whole enterprise.” That probably encapsulates much of our “bush” writing I think!
Related to this is the idea of “strangers in a strange land”. Australia is a land of migrants, with around one in four having been born overseas. Their experience is expressed through both fiction and memoirs. Christos Tsiolkas writes novels about European immigrant communities, Alice Pung has written two memoirs about being the daughter of Asian refugees, and Shaun Tan’s graphic and illustrated novels explore the idea of being a “stranger” from various perspectives, including immigrant, and dystopian.
Australia, though, despite its expanse, is highly urbanised, and many of our novelists have and do explore this. A classic is Ruth Park’s Harp in the South trilogy set in the slums of Sydney post-World War 2. Helen Garner, Stephen Carroll, Andrea Goldsmith and Amy Witting write about urban concerns – the young seeking life in the city, others seeking meaning in the suburbs. Our only Nobel novelist, Patrick White set several of his novels in urban areas, though his concerns tend to be pretty existential.
We are now seeing indigenous writing gaining greater recognition. They focus on the impact of dispossession, from both individual and community perspectives. I’ve mentioned Kim Scott and Alexis Wright already, but there are many others such as Melissa Lucashenko, Marie Munkara, Jeanine Leane.
Q. Is there a noticeable difference between literature from Australia and that from your near neighbour New Zealand?
Good question. I haven’t read as much literature from New Zealand as I’d like, but I have read Jane Frame, Keri Hulme, Lloyd Jones, Eleanor Catton, and Fiona Kidman. We are both settler nations, which also have significant indigenous populations. However, our trajectories are somewhat different: the British signed a treaty with the local population in New Zealand, but not in Australia. It hasn’t been smooth sailing in New Zealand but this has provided a basis for further negotiation. Consequently, indigenous literature here has a strong focus on dispossession and the ramifications of two hundred plus years of “invasion”.
And then, our settlements were very different. Australia was established as a penal colony, while New Zealand was established as a religious/independent colony. The harsh lives and treatments of the convicts informed much of our early literature – exemplified by Marcus Clarke’s For the term of his natural life – in terms of the development of cultural mores here, like the mateship and “fair go” traditions, the rejection of authority, as well as our sense of being isolated by a forbidding landscape. These ideas underpin much of our literature, which either depicts them or questions their validity.
Our landscapes are very different. New Zealand has a cooler, more mountainous (particularly in the south), is generally more fertile, and comprises more islands. Australia’s vast, dry, forbidding interior has taken our literature into quite different realms.
But we have similarities too. Our remoteness from Europe (and to a degree North America), and our proximity to Asia, have impacted our respective worldviews, as has the fact that we are both still strongly immigrant nations with 20-25% or our populations born overseas.
Q. There was a poll on the booktopia blog some years ago which put Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet top of the ‘must read novels’ by an Australian author. If the poll were run today who do you think would come up in the top three spots?
I wouldn’t be surprised if Cloudstreet retained its position at the top, or in the top three. After that I really don’t know, but I think My Brilliant Career and Seven Little Australians would remain in the top ten. A cop out I know. I do know what I’d like to see there: books by writers like Patrick White, Kim Scott, Thea Astley, David Malouf – and any of those I’ve mentioned here.
Want to Discover More Countries?
The View from Here series features guest articles on the literature of many countries including India, Sri Lanka, Canada. For the complete list, visit the View from Here page
Interested in Being Featured?
If you’d like to do a guest post to represent your country, please leave a comment with info on how to contact you.
