‘Summertime’ by J. M. Coetzee

“Oh wad the power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us” – Robert Burns- Scottish poet.

‘Summertime’ is probably my favorite J. M. Coetzee novel so far.  Before I had read ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, ‘Life and Times of Michael K’, and ‘Disgrace’.  Coetzee has a very readable style, direct and succinct.  I guess what had kept me from reading more of his books is that the writing seemed rather dour, gloomy, and somewhat humorless.

The plot of ‘Summertime’ is that a young writer is putting together a biography of John Coetzee, the famous author.  He has never met John Coetzee who is now dead, so he interviews five people from South Africa, four women and one man, to get information about Coetzee for his book.

Is J. M. Coetzee, John Coetzee?  That is the question.

The time period in Coetzee’s life that the biographer is covering is the early 1970s.  This is just after Coetzee had spent time in the United States.  He had sought permanent residence there, but was denied during the Nixon administration due to his involvement in anti-Vietnam War protests.  In the early Seventies, Coetzee is living with his rather worn out father Jack out in a rural area of South Africa.

I liked these five separate interviews, the variety of these different narrators in ‘Summertime’.  The first interview is with Julia a married woman who had a sort of an affair with Coetzee.   It could not be called a love affair, because John is much too cautious at this point to get into a love affair.  Here are some of the words that Julia uses to describe John Coetzee.

“A loner, socially inept, repressed in the wider sense of the word.”

“He was not what most people would call attractive.  He was scrawny, he had a beard, he wore horn-rimmed glasses and sandals.  He looked out of place like a bird, one of those flightless birds, or like an abstracted scientist who had wandered by mistake out of his laboratory.”

“He had no sexual presence whatsoever.”

“He gave a smile, the first smile I had had from him.  Not an attractive smile, too tight lipped.  He was self-conscious about his teeth which were in bad shape.”

“In his lovemaking I think now there was an autistic quality…sex with him lacked all thrill.”

“He was what I call a gentle person, a gentleperson.  That was part of his problem.  His life project was to be gentle.”

“I know he had a reputation for being dour, but John Coetzee was actually quite funny.  A figure of comedy.  Dour comedy.  Which, in an obscure way he knew, even accepted.  That is why I still look back on him with affection if you want to know.”

“In the middle of the night John woke up and saw me sleeping beside him with no doubt a look of peace on my face, even of bliss, bliss is not unattainable in this world.  He saw me – saw me as I was at that moment – took fright, hurriedly strapped the armor back over his heart, this time with chains and a double padlock, and stole out into the darkness.  Do you think I find it easy to forgive him for that? Do you?”

I can’t help but laugh when I think of the author, J. M. Coetzee, writing this section of the book where this woman Julia describes all these quite unflattering intimate love-making details.  Imagine the real Julia reading her descriptions of John Coetzee as written by the author J. M. Coetzee.  Do you think perhaps J. M. Coetzee, through the eyes of Julia, is being awfully hard on John Coetzee?

The other sections of the book contain similar insights, but for me the high point of the novel is this first section.  Is this the first time someone has attempted to write his own biography through the severe objective eyes of others, rather than an all too forgiving autobiography?

‘Shyness and Dignity’ by Dag Solstad
Translated from the Norwegian by Sverre Lyngstad

The early pages of ‘Shyness and Dignity’ are about a high school teacher teaching his class of bored, barely listening, almost hostile seniors who need to take this class in Norwegian literature in order to graduate from their Oslo, Norway high school. He is lecturing them regarding Henrik Ibsen’s ‘The Wild Duck’. The teacher is in his early fifties and has been teaching high school most of his adult life. This would seem to be unpromising material for fiction at best, but due to the quality of the writing I found it entirely fascinating. I liked the allusions to Ibsen’s play to which the teacher has found a new insight after having read the play many times. The entire novel is written as the teacher’s interior monologue, and could best be described as intense realism.

After the class a strange unexpected event occurs. On the teacher’s walk home, it begins to rain a little, and he decides to open his umbrella. He presses the button several times, but the umbrella won’t open. Then he tries to force the umbrella open by pulling on the ribs, but that hardly helps at all. He notices by this time that a crowd of students are now watching him, and this makes him so angry he attacks a nearby water fountain with the umbrella, banging the fountain in a savage fury. He notices that the umbrella is coming apart, so he throws the umbrella on the ground and starts jumping on it, trying to crush it. Then he picks it up again and bangs it against the water fountain some more. By this time the twisted metal ribs are cutting into his hand and the blood is trickling out on to his shirt. He notices the students around him are staring open-mouthed, motionless around him. Their faces look ridiculously astonished which makes him even more furious, so he chases after them with the smashed umbrella. The students quickly get out of his way, and nobody is hurt.

The teacher realizes that life for him as he has known it for twenty years is over for him now. The students will tell everyone about their teacher’s strange behavior, and he will be the subject of gossip for months. The school faculty and principal will find out about it, and although they may try to downplay it, the students’ parents will put pressure on the school to get rid of him. Besides the teacher feels too embarrassed to return to the school. The teacher’s worries are not so much for himself as for his wife and daughter.

This all occurs before page forty of the novel, and the rest of the novel is the teacher’s intense looking back on his entire adult life, from college onward. This novel proves the idea that any life can be fascinating when looked at closely with the right perspective. The writing in ‘Shyness and Dignity’ is expressive on what is going on in this teacher’s mind, and the reader shares the high points and low points of his life. The precise use of language makes this teacher come alive and makes this novel an excellent read.

Although Dag Solstad has written over thirty novels, ‘Shyness and Dignity’ is his first novel that has been translated into English. This novel was named the best Norwegian novel of the 1990s, and Dag Solstad is the only author to have received the Norwegian Literary Critics’ Award three times.

On the strength of ‘Shyness and Dignity’, Dag Solstad is a worthy successor to those two Norwegian giants, Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun.

Here are some novels written in the 1960s that are nearly forgotten now, but are exceptionally good.

Margaret Drabble (1965)

‘The Millstone’ by Margaret Drabble (1965) –  A long time ago, before ‘Possession’, Margaret Drabble was a famous fiction writer, while her sister A. S. Byatt wrote in near obscurity.  Drabble was one of the first woman writers whose work I followed closely.  The precocious Drabble wrote several novels while still in her twenties, all very popular.  If you wanted to know what the twenty-somethings were doing in London, you read Margaret Drabble. I didn’t start reading Drabble until the late seventies, but was soon addicted.  This novel was turned into a Sixties movie, ‘A Touch of Love’.

‘Friday’ by Michel Tournier (1967) – This novel is a re-telling of the Robinson Crusoe story but instead of Crusoe and culture triumphing over nature, here Crusoe reverts to savagery and is only saved by the primitive Friday, all told in the indescribable Tournier style.  I’ve read nearly everything that this French writer has written.  This short book is a good place to start with Michel Tournier, one of the best fiction writers of the twentieth century.  Here is a quote from Tournier.

Everything is a sign. But we need a light or a loud shout to pierce our myopia or our deafness.

‘In a Summer Season’ by Elizabeth Taylor (1961) – Elizabeth Taylor is probably the most under-rated author who ever lived.  Her novels and stories are spectacular.  I’ve read them all.  Perhaps the problem is that she shared a name with a popular actress.  She is finally getting some of the recognition she deserves, since two of her novels have been made into movies during the last five years (‘Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont.’ and ‘The Real Life of Angel Devereaux’)   Here are two quotes from the author Elizabeth Taylor.

Importance isn’t important – Good writing is.

The whole point is that writing has a pattern and life hasn’t. Life is so untidy. Art is so short and life so long. It is not possible to have perfection in life but it is possible to have perfection in a novel.

‘Last Exit to Brooklyn’ by Hubert Selby, Jr. (1964)  a novel about the bleak and brutal life on the back streets and projects of New York.    This book was prosecuted for obscenity in Great Britain and was banned in Italy.   The book is also a novel of immense power and raw poetry.   Selby was a heroin addict.  Selby was also called ‘probably one of the six best novelists writing in the English language’ (Financial Times)

‘Gould’s Book of Fish’ by Richard Flanagan (2001)     A Novel in 12 Fish

‘Gould’s Book of Fish’ is a novel about those convicts who were transported to Tasmania (then called Van Diemen’s Land) by the British government in the early 1800’s, those in charge of the prisons, and those aborigines who lived there. Over the course of 60 years, more than 165,000 prisoners were transported to Australia.

This book has a unique arrangement where each chapter is a fish painted by convict William Buelow Gould.  These fish/chapters are called ‘Kelpy’, ‘the sawtooth shark’, ‘the striped cowfish’, etc.

In the first chapter, there is a very humorous modern story about some Tasmanians preparing fake antique Shaker furniture to sell to the rich fat American tourists.  After this story, I settled in for a humorous ride, little realizing where I would be taken.  Many of the scenes in this novel are laugh riots, often resulting from the vicious idiocy of the overseers back in England and the flat-out insanity of the prison authorities on Van Diemen’s Land.   But humor is not Flanagan’s ultimate destination in this book.

One of the early chapters is devoted to the torture devices used on the convicts.  These devices are ingenious in their cruelty.  The elaborate descriptions of these made-up devices show the lengths to which the prison authorities would go to inflict pain on their convicts.

In one scene in the novel, the scientists back in England want some fresh specimens of skulls of the aborigines and request them of the prison authorities on Van Diemen’s Land.  The prison authorities order the convicts to get the skulls, so the convicts go out and murder and behead thirty six aborigines, ‘blackfellas’ as Gould calls them.  Then the prison Commandant boils the skulls in preparation for shipping them back to England.  Insufferable politically correct prig that I am, I failed to see the humor in these beheadings or the chopping off of arms and legs or the other acts of humiliation done to the aborigines that are portrayed in this novel. These acts were probably done in real life all too frequently.  It’s one thing to fool rich fat American tourists by selling them fake Shaker furniture.  It’s a completely different horrific thing to chop somebody’s arm or head off.

I began to feel very uneasy about this novel.  This novel was not turning out to be the rollicking, good time boisterous picaresque Australian novel it originally seemed to be.  Who can laugh at the matter-of-fact beheading of aborigines for the sake of  a scientific study in England?   At this point I was planning to write a review pretty much berating Flanagan for his callousness.

Only at about page 300 did I find out Richard Flanagan’s true purpose with this novel.  This is when Gould discovers that the prison authorities have been keeping a sanitized version of everything that has been going on in the prison.  This sanitized version of events contains none of the severe torture of the prisoners and none of the beheadings, chopping off of arms, legs, and heads, or other degradations the aborigines were subjected to.  In other words, the official history of the prison on Sarah Island was a complete book of lies.

So despite its appearance, ‘Gould’s Book of Fish’ is not a hilarious rollicking jaunt through Australian history.  It is deadly serious about the desperate, despicable attempts by those in charge to cover up and hide what really happened.  If these books of lies become a part of the culture, it is as though the past did not happen and the people who were there never existed.

Flanagan makes no concessions to the readers of this novel.  Even though Gould is one of the convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land, his writing is in very long and complicated sentences.  The novel is supposed to be written by Gould back in the early 1800’s and in those days sentences were longer.  At that time, writers wrote longer sentences connecting two or more thoughts together with the symbol ‘ & ‘.  This can be difficult for modern readers.  More than a few times I became impatient with the over-written, over-stuffed sentences in this book. Also, as I’ve indicated before, I was completely fooled as to the true nature of this novel for nearly 300 pages.  By framing the book as a humorous picaresque story, I think it was Flanagan’s intent to make the readers uneasy and uncomfortable with what happens, especially to the aborigines.

In preparation for writing this post, I googled Richard Flanagan on the net.  He has taken some courageous stands in Tasmania.

‘Wolf Hall’ by Hilary Mantel

‘Wolf Hall’ is a slice of life, or I should say a full loaf of Tudor life, seen entirely through the eyes of advisor to King Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell.  It’s all there in the novel, the food, the frocks, the Papal dispensations, the plumbing, the trivial and the even more trivial.  Also there are many, many characters in the novel, perhaps as many as actually lived in Tudor times, all roles to be filled for the movie which should start filming any day now.  The Tudor people are religious, superstitious, and all too prone to gossip.  King Henry is rampant, most of the men are rampant, and most of the women are accommodating.  In other words, Tudor life is just like modern times.

“Nothing is running, except the cooks’ noses.”

I’m not sure what type of research Hilary Mantel did to determine that the cooks’ noses were running during this particular dinner, but I’m sure it was extensive.  I’ve read another novel by Hilary Mantel, ‘Beyond Black’ which was very good.  It’s too bad that now Mantel will be consigned to writing historical works about fools, royal and otherwise.  But at least it should be lucrative.   In ‘Wolf Hall’, nearly everyone comes off as a fool except, surprise, Thomas Cromwell and his family.  Thomas Cromwell comes off as an enterprising, thoughtful, and above all steady Englishman.  The audiodisk narrator pronounces the word  ‘What’ to rhyme with ‘Ought’ nauseatingly often, but that may be the fault of the audiodisk rather than the novel.   The audiodisk guy also has the worst French accent ever.

The eighteen ‘Wolf Hall’ audiodisks have that one characteristic which is the  bane of audiodisks, no clear indication when each disk ends.  Thus by the time I reached the end of a disk, I would have forgotten whatever tidbit of gossip about Anne Boleyn or her sister Mary Boleyn or whatever fine point of papal doctrine by Cardinal Wolsey or Thomas More that began the disk, and I would listen to the whole disk all over again.  One time, I listened to a disk three times before I realized I had heard it all before.

Everything is in this novel including the kitchen sink.  ‘Wolf Hall’ is the kind of historical fiction where the reader is supposed to get lost in the richness of the details of Tudor life.  However, I would have preferred a little focus, some unifying point to the whole thing.  King Henry may have had some fine rugs on the floor, but I really don’t need details about the weave.  I didn’t want to get lost, I wanted to find something, a point or something, that wasn’t there.

Late Elizabethan portrait of Anne Boleyn, possibly derived from a lost original of 1533–36

I don’t know who the film makers will pick to play Thomas Cromwell or Anne Boleyn, but only one actor today could do justice to King Henry VIII – Russell Crowe.  It took Henry seven years of complex negotiations to divorce his wife of twenty years, Katherine, and marry Anne Boleyn.  After that, Henry found a much more expedient method to change wives – beheading.  Soon after the timeframe of ‘Wolf Hall’ ends, both Thomas Cromwell and Anne Boleyn were beheaded.  Of course Anne Boleyn’s baby daughter grew up to become Queen Elizabeth of England where she has been reigning ever since.

‘Under the Snow’ by Kerstin Ekman Translated by Joan Tate

I first heard of writer Kerstin Ekman when her latest book “God’s Mercy’ was selected one of last year’s best by the Internet site Pop Matters. Pop Matters is pretty much my bible when it comes to music, and their description of the book sounded promising. I couldn’t get that novel but did find Ekman’s 1961 novel ‘Under the Snow’. Only after I already had the book, did I find out that Kerstin Ekman is a crime writer, a writer of murder mysteries. I usually don’t read genre fiction with one exception. That exception is Ruth Rendell aka Barbara Vine whose books are so well-written I don’t consider them genre fiction. By the time that I discovered Kerstin Ekman is a mystery writer, I was interested enough to read the book.

Kerstin Ekman lives in a small village in northern Sweden. The novel ‘Under the Snow’ takes place up there near the Arctic Circle. Many of the people in this far northern area and in the novel are Samis, whom we used to call Laplanders or Lapps which are now considered derogatory terms, so from now on, I will use the term Sami.

‘Under the Snow’ has a unique rhythm that you won’t find in other books. The rhythm slows you down and has a definite small town charm all its own. The crime solvers here are a humorous pair, a by-the-book policeman whose regular police job is north of the Arctic Circle and a let’s say eccentric friend of the murder victim, David Malm. There is a lot of humor about drinking coffee, and I know from experience in small towns in northern Wisconsin during winter that coffee drinking is the center of social activity until night time when the party moves to the small bars.

The Samis are not completely integrated into Swedish society, and their participation in certain mystical rites gives “Under the Snow” a distinctiveness. The ending of the novel takes place in a long-deserted Sami village Poropirtti. I read elsewhere that Kerstin Ekman in her later novels deals with the underlying tensions between the Swedish people and the Samis, but in this novel everyone who lives in this small town gets along fine playing mah-jongg, etc., except for that little thing the murder.

Ekman wrote this book quite early in here career almost fifty years ago, and except for the unique style and the Sami mysticism, the novel is pretty much a standard murder mystery. I think the next time I read an Ekman novel, I’ll read either ‘Blackwater’ or ‘God’s Mercy’, her more recent novels. According to other Internet sources, she has moved somewhat away from genre fiction.

As I was looking over the lists of novels I’ve read over the years, I came across these four novels, all written in the 1940s, which I considered excellent when I read them, but have heard little or nothing about the novels or their authors in recent years.

‘Never Come Morning’ by Nelson Algren (1942) – Algren captured the raw underside of Chicago life in this novel about a dirt-poor boxer.  Having read nearly all his works, I am a huge admirer of Nelson Algren’s style; he writes about the hard gritty side of life, but with obvious intelligence and insight. His novels ‘Man with the Golden Arm’ and ‘A Walk on the Wild Side’ are probably better known than this early novel, but this one is excellent.  Perhaps Nelson Algren is best remembered for this quote.

Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.” From A Walk on the Wild Side

‘The Mountain Lion’ by Jean Stafford (1947) –  A brother and sister coming-of-age novel, this story is a tragedy, yet charming and funny by turns.  Stafford is best known as a short story writer and for her unfortunate short marriage to the brilliant but mentally unstable poet Robert Lowell.  I’ve read nearly all of her work including her short stories and her other major novel “The Catherine Wheel”, and they are all excellent.  Jean Stafford is a writer too good to disappear into obscurity.  Here is a quote from Jean Stafford.

Irony, I feel, is a very high form of morality.

‘A Burnt Child’ by Stig Dagerman (1947) –  Stig Dagerman was one of the most prominent Swedish writers in the 1940s.  If you like extreme psychological novels, this is the novel for you.  Wikiquote has a whole long page devoted to quotes from ‘A Burnt Child’.  I’ve also read ‘The Games of Night’, a book of short stories, which is also excellent.  Stig Dagerman committed suicide in 1954 at the age of 31.  If you want to learn more about Stig Dagerman, go to the Stig Dagerman Blog.   Here is one quote from this novel.

I am sufficiently intelligent to be able to differentiate between real falsehood, which is aimed at hurting people, and a wise moderation of so-called truth, whose only object is to simplify life for all concerned.

‘The Bridge On the Drina’ by Ivo Andric (1945)– This novel is probably least likely of the four here to be forgotten because Ivo Andric received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1961, although that may not be a guarantee.   It is the story of some of the people who crossed the bridge during its three and a half centuries of existence.   The bridge is in what is now Serbia, and Andric sees it as the connection between the eastern Ottoman culture and the western Christian culture.   This is historical fiction at its most powerful.   Here is a quote from Ivo Andric.

If people would know how little brain is ruling the world, they would die of fear.

I would really like to hear from anyone who is familiar with these novels and/or authors. Please leave a comment.

“Alien Hearts” by Guy de Maupassant Translated by Richard Howard

Guy de Maupassant (1850 – 1893) is one of the classic short story writers.  He has this natural style that seems almost effortless. I’ve read many of his three hundred short stories and am always willing to read more.  His novels “A Woman’s Life”, “Bel-Ami” and “Pierre and Jean”  are excellent also.  So when I saw this attractive new book, “Alien Hearts” by Maupassant, a new translation in the New York Review Books Classics series, I was eager to read it.

“Alien Hearts” is the story of a love affair between a young man about town Andre Mariolle  and Madame Michele de Burne, the hostess to the most elite artistic salon in Paris.  The most acclaimed musicians, artists, and writers attend Madame de Burne’s salon parties.  Mariolle has no particular talent which is one of the reasons Madame de Burne is attracted to him, because it has been her experience that artists are too self centered.

Their relationship begins romantically, and Mariolle is ready to settle in for a long love affair.  However Madame de Burne is not nearly as committed to the affair, and soon she starts making excuses to arrive late for their assignations, leave early, or not show up at all.   Soon it becomes apparent to Mariolle that she is more interested in her conquests at the salon than she is in their love affair.

The entire novel is written from Mariolle’s point of view.  Many pages are devoted to his thoughts on the affair, his feelings of being slighted by Madame de Burne, his jealousy.  His thoughts about his own love affair become self-centered and repetitive.  His annoyance with Madame de Burne becomes annoying.  The reader soon realizes he loves her more than she loves him.   Yet the affair drags on for another hundred pages.

Madame de Burne finally breaks up with him, and after some serious pining, Mariolle takes up with an eager quite young woman who worships him.

As you must realize by now, I’m less than enthusiastic about “Alien Hearts”.  My experience has been that when I dig deep into even the greatest writers’ body of work, sooner or later I come upon a work that just does not live up to their best.  I would recommend with Maupassant, read the short stories first, then read the excellent short novels “A Woman’s Life”, “Bel-Ami” and “Pierre and Jean”.  Only after you have read these and you are still hungry for more Maupassant like I was, read this novel.   Who knows, you may like it.

“Krik? Krak!”  by Edwidge Danticat

Krik? Krak!  Somewhere by the seacoast I feel a breath of warm sea air and hear the laughter of children.  An old granny smokes her pipe, surrounded by the village children…  “We tell the stories so that the young ones will know what came before them.  They ask Krik?  We say Krak!  Our stories are kept in our hearts.”

Sal Scalora, White Darkness / Black Dreamings, Haiti: Feeding the Spirit

I like to read a wide variety of world fiction, and one of the ways I do this is to frequently choose as my next book a book that is completely different from the last one I read.  For example, if I have just read the much-hyped book by the new young hot-shot United States writer, my next book will probably be a classic novel at least 200 years old from another country.  If I notice that several of my recent books have been by men, I will make a special point of looking for a book by a woman, and vice-versa.  If I’ve just completed a 700-page novel, I’ll usually take a break with a book of short stories.

I recently finished “To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf, so I was faced with what to read next.  I came up with “Krik! Krak!”, a book of short stories by Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat. Both Virginia Woolf and Edwidge Danticat are woman writers, but on the face of it, it would seem difficult to come up with two more different writers than these two.  Virginia Woolf was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, the collective of intellectuals, writers, and artists in London in the 1920s and 1930s.  Woolf herself came from a family of acclaimed intellectuals.

Edwidge Danticat was born in Port au Prince, Haiti in 1969.  According to Wikipedia, Haiti is the poorest place in the western hemisphere, and that was before the recent earthquake.   Both her parents emigrated to New York when she was very young, leaving her to be brought up by an aunt and uncle.

But one thing that Woolf and Danticat have in common was a strong vocation to write.  Danticat started writing at age 12 and published her first story at age 14.

Another quality that Woolf and Danticat share is a profound understanding of the importance of mothers within their families.  In Woolf’s novels, the men are so busy with their academic skirmishes, they have little time for the children.  Thus it is up to the mothers, like Mrs. Ramsay in “To the Lighthouse” to take care of the children.

In Danticat’s stories the men are frequently missing, victims of all-pervasive physical violence in Haitian society.  For example there was the TonTon Cahoute, a private volunteer group of farmers beholden to Haitian dictator ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier who murdered anyone who expressed disagreement with the government.  At another time Trujillo, the dictator of the adjacent Dominican Republic, issued an order to murder all Haitians living there. Estimates range from 10,000 to 20,000 Haitians were murdered.

Danticat’s stories, in order to accurately depict Haitian society, necessarily contain severe acts of violence.  In one story, TonTon Cohoute members return the decapitated head of a son to his mother.  In another story a woman is murdered trying to make it across the border to escape Trujillo’s soldiers.  Another story is about the Haiti boat people where a huge number of people over-crowd a boat in a desperate attempt to escape Haiti.

But violence is only one side of Danticat’s stories.  One of the stories I liked best is the longest story in the book, ‘Caroline’s Wedding’  In this story a family consisting of Haitian emigre’s living in New York, a mother and two daughters, prepare for the wedding of the younger daughter.  This is the traditional story where the daughters laugh behind their mother’s back about her funny old ideas, only to find out that she knows a lot more than they thought she did.

One can contrast the two societies of Woolf and Danticat, upper class English academic Bloomsbury and modern-day poverty- and violence-ridden Port au Prince.  But Virginia Woolf’s life and her altruistic suicide (she didn’t want her husband to have to go through another round of her severe mental illness) show that even among the upper classes life still isn’t perfect.  At the same time, Danticat’s Port au Prince shows that even under the worst conditions, love and strong values persist.

“Krik? Krak!” was a National Book Award finalist.  It was a fine read, although it probably will not make my end-of-year list.

In a recent post, Whispering Gums has listed the results of the Australian Book Review’s poll of the favorite Australian novels.  You correctly might ask what right do I have to put together a list of favorite Australian novels?  I’ve never been to Australia, probably won’t get there, can’t even remember meeting in person anyone from Australia.

Somehow Australian fiction has become attractive to me.  The first great Australian novel I read was “The Man Who Loved Children”.  This novel transported me into a world I’d never experienced before.  Since then, quite a few Australian novels have done that for me.

My apologies go to Nicki Gemmell and many other writers whose books I haven’t read yet.  I’ve read and enjoyed several novels by both Peter Carey and Kate Grenville, but their novels are surely much too straightforward for Australian fiction.  If I wanted to read straight ahead stories where point A always leads directly to point B, I would read, god forbid, English novels.  Australian novels are best when they are off the map.

1. Patrick White –  as a lifetime achievement award, Patrick White gets first place, so that the six novels ‘The Tree of Man’, ‘Riders of the Chariot’, ‘The Solid Mandala’, ‘Voss’, ’The Vivisector’, and ‘The Eye of the Storm’ don’t take up six places on this list.   White was perhaps the best novelist ever.
2. ‘The Fortunes of Richard Mahony’ by Henry Handel Richardson (Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson) – This is perhaps the one novel that would rank above any individual novel by Patrick White
3. “Harp in the South” by Ruth Park – Life in the Sydney slums with the resilient Darcy family.
4. ‘The Man who Loved Children’ by Christina Stead – This is a satire; the title is ironic.  Randall Jarrell single-handedly reclaimed this novel from obscurity in 1965, and it has taken the acclaimed place it deserves.
5. ‘Fredy Neptune’ by Les Murray – A raucous novel in verse.  I can’t believe that the Australian Book Review left this book off even their longlist.
6. ‘Cloudstreet’ by Tim Winton – the exhillarating, wild, funny story of the Pickles and the Lambs.
7. ‘The Voyage’ by Murray Bail – An Australian piano designer-manufacturer goes to Austria and romance ensues.
8. ‘The Great World’ by David Malouf –  Malouf has written several excellent novels, so I will pick one of the more Australian of his works.  I’m looking forward to reading ‘Ransom’.
9. ‘Tirra Lirra by the River’ by Jessica Anderson –  a humorous story of a woman escaping her marriage by going to London
10. ‘Three Dollars’ by Elliot Perlman –  The Australian Book Review did not mention this novel in their longlist, but they did mention ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’.  I must read that book soon, the Perlman novel not the William Empson classic work of literary criticism which I also own.
11. ‘The Spare Room’ by Helen Garner –   How can someone laugh during cancer therapy?  Read this novel, and you will understand.
12. ‘Eucalyptus’ by Murray Bail –  A humorous fairy tale.  Too bad they didn’t make it into a movie, isn’t it, Russell Crowe?
13. ‘How the Light Gets In’ by M. J. Hyland – Hyland has the clear-headed quirkiness I like in Australian writing.   I hope she doesn’t lose it in London.
14. “Gould’s Book of Fish” by Richard Flanagan – The entire history of Tasmania through the eyes of a prisoner.
15. “Gilgamesh” by Joan London – An incredible journey from the wilderness of western Australia to the wilderness of Armenia told in a blunt and powerful style.
16. “The Watch Tower” – Elizabeth Harrower – the story of a really terrible husband, a domestic horror story.

“To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf

I approached “To the Lighthouse” and Virginia Woolf with much trepidation, having put off reading this book for many years.  “Mrs. Dalloway” I read a long time ago and did not get into it much at the time.  Then I read some critic complaining of the difficulty of following Woolf’s stream of consciousness technique.  I needed no further excuses to avoid reading this book.  But, now, spurred on by high praise for “To the Lighthouse” by Hungry Like the Woolf and others, I decided it was high time I read this book.

I am happy to report that I was able to completely get into the spirit and rhythm of “To the Lighthouse”, and enjoyed it immensely.   I had to re-read the first thirty pages, but this re-reading allowed me to read the entire novel with enjoyment.

The novel is about Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, their eight children, and their several houseguests staying at the Ramsay summer place in the Isle of Skye that is in the Hebrides Islands which are located north and west of Scotland.  The first section of the novel, ‘The Window’, is about one idyllic summer day before World War I.  Cars were still a rarity, and there were no radios or TVs.    The entertainments are going for walks or strolls, fishing or swimming in the plentiful waters, painting, or reading.   Mr. Ramsay is an esteemed academic who somewhat enjoys throwing cold water on his family’s plans to visit the lighthouse the next day by accurately pointing out the impending storm.  But the real center of the family is Mrs. Ramsay, mother incarnate.  A good mother, she is continually thinking about all eight of her children, most especially the youngest, James and Cam.  She is always encouraging others to marry and have families so they can be as happy as she is with her family. Mrs. Ramsay can encourage a young man, just by looking at him a certain way, to propose to the young woman he’s been talking to and walking with.  .  Everyone is enchanted with Mrs. Ramsay’s beauty, and the young woman houseguest, Lily Briscoe, is trying to capture Mrs. Ramsay’s essence in a painting.  The painting is not a realistic representation; it consists of blocks of color, of light, of darkness.

The summer idyll of the first section culminates in a spectacular family dinner, where we the readers are gracefully transported into the minds of each family member and all of the houseguests by Woolf’s stream of consciousness technique.  It is a technique she uses to help the readers to get deeper into all of the characters’ mindsets at the same time.  Here is a quote from “To the Lighthouse” which sums up the stream of consciousness technique.

“At any rate they (the dinner guests) were off again.  Now she need not listen.  It could not last, she knew, but at the moment her thoughts were so clear that they seemed to go around the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that it ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling.”

But all idylls end, and in section two ‘Time Passes’ the Ramsays can no longer visit their summer place, because World War I intrudes.  For several years, the summer house is empty except for the old housekeeper who tries to maintain the large house as best she can.  Some of the Ramsay family members don’t make it to the third section of the novel, because they pass away due to various causes.

Finally in the last section, ‘The Lighthouse’, which takes place nearly ten years after that first day, some of the remnants of the family finally make it to the lighthouse.   Lily Briscoe has returned to the Ramsay summer place to finish the painting she started ten years ago.   But all has changed; the idyll is over.

Somewhere I recently read that “To the Lighthouse” is not really a novel; it is more of a prose poem.  That may be true, but what a transcendent prose poem it is.  I’m quite sure ‘Novel’ is happy to have “To the Lighthouse” in its fold.

“Break, Blow, Burn”

Camille Paglia reads forty three of the world’s best poems

Many of you are probably like me in that you are always on the lookout for good poetry.  Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate a few poets such as Shakespeare, Samuel Coleridge, Alexander Pope, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, and Phillip Larkin.  Yet I don’t have the time or patience to appreciate much poetry.

“A poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.”

Randall Jarrell

Even with the best poets, only a few of their poems will withstand the test of time.  Sometimes you have to wade through hundreds of pages of poems to find that one poem that strikes a powerful chord of recognition.    But when you do find that one poem, you have something eternal that will probably improve the quality of your life.

“Break, Blow, Burn” by Camille Paglia is far and away the best poetry anthology I have ever read.    So many anthologies present their poets and poems like stone tablets handed down from Mount Olympus (Sinai?), but in this book, Paglia does a line-by-line analysis of each poem she reads.  She has insights that get to the root of each of these poems.  She reads poets from John Donne, to Percy Blythe Shelly to Theodore Roethke to Sylvia Plath to, yes, Joni Mitchell.  By her close reading and profound insights into each of these poems, the reader comes to appreciate every one of these forty three poems.

As some of you may know, Camille Paglia is a controversial and irreverent literary critic, and she brings these qualities to her poetry analysis.  But what is most striking about this book is her close analysis and the depth of her insights into each of these poems.  She obviously loves each of these poems.  Her intense understanding of each of these poems causes you the reader to appreciate them too.

I discovered this book about three years ago, and now it is one of those books that I keep close at hand and treasure.

“I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can’t read any poetry.”

– Randall Jarrell

I’m sure this book is being used in hundreds of college classrooms by enlightened English and literature instructors.  “Break, Blow, Burn” would be a perfect gift for any young person who you think is aware enough to appreciate poetry. It is really for anyone who wants to increase the number of poems they appreciate.

“The Fall” by Albert Camus

First, here are some quotes from “The Fall”

No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.

People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.

Wealth, cher ami, is not quite acquittal but reprieve, and that’s always worth taking.

It hurts me to confess it, but I’d give ten conversations with Einstein for an initial rendezvous with a pretty chorus girl.

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“The Fall” is one of those books that I like to have a pen and some paper close by while reading, because there are many deep and meaningful quotes throughout the novel which I want to capture. Trouble is I would find myself copying several entire pages of the novel verbatim.

This novel starts out in a little bar in Amsterdam, the Mexico City. Our talkative hero Jean-Baptiste Clamence is speaking to a stranger at the bar. In fact the whole book is Clamence’s one sided monologue with this stranger. We never hear a word of the stranger’s side of the conversation, only Clamence.

After a few pleasantries, Clamence begins to explain his entire life to this stranger. Since the stranger never responds, soon it is apparent that Clamence is explaining his life to us, the readers. Clamence, a lawyer, does not charge his clients sufficiently so that they are obligated to him. In his romantic life, Clamence admits that he demands faithfulness from his women, yet has no compunction to be faithful himself. Clamence’s monologue soon takes the form of a confession.

Then Clamence recalls ‘the fall’. He is on a bridge, and there is also a woman on the other side of the bridge. He’s not paying too much attention, and after a few minutes the woman is no longer there. He rushes to the other side of the bridge and sees the woman struggling in the water. She must have fallen or jumped. Clamence does not act. He leaves the bridge, and the next day he will not read the newspaper so he won’t find out exactly what happened to the woman.

What would you do? Would it depend on how high above the water the bridge is? Would it depend on the weather conditions, the looks of the woman, how good a swimmer you are? Would it depend on how busy you were, whether or not you are supposed to meet someone?

As we listen, we begin to wonder if we would be as honest as Clamence if we were confessing our life. Throughout this one-sided conversation, Clamence calls himself a judge-penitent. What does he mean by that?
Clamence tells us what he means as follows.

The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you. Even better, I provoke you into judging yourself, and this relieves me of that much of the burden. Ah, mon cher, we are odd, wretched creatures, and if we merely look back over our lives, there are no lack of occasions to amaze and horrify ourselves.

After listening to this prolonged, honest, and heartfelt confession, each of us needs to decide how prolonged and honest our own confessions will be.

“The Death of the Author” by Gilbert Adair

As you must realize by now, I like and much admire world literature and its authors. However a lot of academic literary criticism leaves me cold.  If I am reading a book and I see the words “the text” that is my cue to toss the book aside.  Semiotics, the theory of signs or semantics in literature, bores me silly.

When I was in college at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, I toyed with the idea of switching my major from mathematics to sociology until I took a course in sociological theory.  At that time, sociological theory was in thrall to the theories of Talcott Parsons and “functional structuralism” (or was it “structural functionalism”?.  Never had there been such a clumsy meaningless name for a school of academic thought until “post-modernist deconstruction” came along. Thus my interest in switching majors came to an abrupt end.

Marshall McLuhan’s slogan of “The Medium is the Message” was floating around at the time to which I asked “WTF does that mean?”

The first-person narrator of Gilbert Adair’s novella “The Death of the Author”, is a famed literary theorist who propounds the Theory of the ‘death of the author’ in which the interpretation of the text exists beyond the author, so the author is irrelevant, thus ‘dead’.  The novella is a pastiche on the real-life story of literary theorist Paul DeMan.  DeMan was famous as one of the main proponents of the literary theory of post-modernist deconstructionism along with Deridda and Barthes.   Then it was exposed that DeMan had written several journalistic pieces sympathetic to the Nazis during World War II.

My problems with this book began when the narrator started expounding the Theory.  I don’t take these kinds of theories seriously because they seem so abstruse and out of date.  Chaucer, Cervantes, and Shakespeare are not at all out of date, but a lot of the academic literary theories from twenty or thirty years ago now seem terribly outdated. As I said before, when I see the words “the text”, my eyes and brain glaze over.  Also some of the sentences in this novella seemed clumsier than they had to be.  Perhaps the obtuse sentences were the author’s attempt to enhance the narrator’s credibility as a literary theorist.

So at the halfway point of this novella, I was considering giving up on it, but it is a short book so I kept reading.  The remainder of the book flowed along smoothly enough, and I did develop some interest in the story.  I did think that all of the other characters besides the narrator were sketchily drawn to the point they made zero impression.   The murders and the murderer did not seem convincing at all, but I suppose they were supposed to be metaphysical anyway.

I realize that I’m skating on very thin ice in being lukewarm to this book, given that The Complete Review gave “The Death of an Author” an A, and both Lizzy’s Literary Life and KevinfromCanada loved the novella.   Perhaps I was expecting a real story with real convincing characters rather than a pastiche. Perhaps I couldn’t get over my disappointment that the author of the title was not a fiction writer.

Besides the issues I have already stated I had with this novella, there are two other unusual things about this book.  One of the strange things I won’t explicate, because it would be a spoiler. The other is that in this short novella, the four opening pages are repeated two more times, word for word, for a total of three times    I could understand repeating a short passage with slight variations to good effect, but four whole pages printed three times with no variations whatsoever?

“Nocturnes” by Kazuo Ishiguro

‘Nocturne’ is an unusual word.  Merriam-Webster defines it as “a work of art dealing with evening or night”.

The climactic point for each of these stories by Kazuo Ishiguro occurs during night time, so these stories are nocturnes.  As well, each story concerns itself with music and/or musicians.  I think Ishiguro was playing on the musical idea of ‘variations’ when writing these stories, because although each of these stories has a unique setting and plot, there are many similarities between all five stories.  They are all written in the first person.  The main protagonist in each of these stories is a not-so-young-anymore guy, a journeyman musician who sort of makes a living playing music none too successfully, but music is his life.  He meets up with a not-so-young-anymore woman, and hilarity and/or heartbreak ensues.

Kazuo Ishiguro is a stylist.  There is a stillness at the center of each of these five stories that makes them compelling.   In this book, he is being playful and charming.  One quality I greatly enjoy in Ishiguro’s writing is what I call “the unreliable protagonist”.  Whenever you read any story or novel by Ishiguro, it will always be in the first person, and you always get the sense that the main protagonist is severely fooling himself.  That’s the sense I got from each of these stories.

Nocturnes are also supposed to be pensive and dreamy.  Just as a good musician does not play his notes mushy to achieve a dream-like quality, Ishiguro does not get vague or unfocused like so much bad dream fiction does.  Instead every scene and detail is precise, note for note.

Here Ishiguro is playful and at ease, not like in some of his novels.  Ishiguro’s “Remains of the Day” published in 1989 was a major event in modern literary history.  That novel was also written in the first person. I still remember the impact this novel had on me, this story of a head servant who managed his mansion magnificently.   This was the first great example of the unreliable protagonist that I had encountered. As the novel progressed, you got the sense that this head servant was deliberately not seeing what was actually going on in the house where the Lord was trying to drum up support for the Nazis among the upper classes of England. This situation reminded me of all the people who work magnificently on their company jobs, but know enough about their company to know it is doing some very rotten things.  I also fondly remember the movie, where for once the movie with its leading actors Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson got it right.

Ishiguro won the Booker prize for “Remains of the Day” and has been nominated for the Booker three more times since, so when you are reading him you know you are in rarefied quality territory.

“Nocturnes” probably won’t be nominated for a Booker.  I don’t think they nominate books of stories, do they?  Anyhow this is not an ambitious book.  Instead this is a charming way to spend a few evenings with one of our great literary stylists.

“How the Light Gets In” by M. J. Hyland
“Carry Me Down” by M. J. Hyland

Occasionally I will read an author for whom I have a special affinity. This special affinity means that I must read all of their books, because they are speaking directly to me. Over the years, this has happened to me with such authors as Anne Tyler, Alice Munro, William Trevor, Elizabeth Taylor, William Boyd, Rosamond Lehmann, Jennifer Johnston, and Ian MacEwan. Later examples of authors for which I have had this special affinity are Patrick White, Angela Huth, Amelie Nothomb, Graham Greene, and Sebastian Barry. When this special affinity occurs, I no longer have any choice on whether or not I am going to read their books. I am going to read their books. The latest author for whom I have this special affinity is “the mistress of the telling detail”, M. J Hyland.

So far I have read two books by M.(Maria) J.(Jean) Hyland, “How the Light Gets In” and “Carry Me Down”. But I knew after reading less than 100 pages of the first novel that this was a writer who spoke directly to me. My attraction to her writing is almost visceral, but I will attempt to explain it. Justine Jordan wrote a review of M. J. Hyland in the Guardian    MJ Hyland Review ,   she speaks of Hyland’s writing as “a narrative that seems as inevitable and arbitrary as life itself”. This is exactly the feeling I get when reading Hyland’s novels. What happens to the characters in a Hyland novel seems inevitable based on their traits, but the novel takes an arbitrary path to reach the end, just as life does itself. In “Carry Me Down”, the boy John at one point finally achieves some self confidence in school one day only to find out that his family has to move out of the school district that very night. There have been times that life has worked out like that for me too.

Hyland’s characters are not just a collection of traits the author has assigned to them; these characters are complete unique human beings who define themselves by what they do. Hyland has imagined these characters so completely that they take on a life of their own. One thing I’ve noticed about Hyland’s writing is that there is very little extraneous description in her novels. Everything centers on what actually is occurring in the scene. The scenes and the characters are so well-imagined that it is not necessary to have a lot of description.

I suppose that is why I have a special affinity for the above-listed authors, their ability to fully imagine the world of their characters and scenes.

But each of the above-listed authors is unique, and now I will attempt to describe the unique qualities that M. J. Hyland brings to her novels. “How the Light Gets In” is about a female high school student from Australia who is spending a school year as an exchange student with a suburban Chicago family. “Carry Me Down” centers around an eleven year old boy and his family who live in Ireland. Both of these novels center on a family, and Hyland excels in describing the little everyday scenes in family life which reveal the complex dynamics that go on within every family. It’s probably a little early in Hyland’s career to define her as a novelist of the family, but she certainly excels in depictions of families. Judging from the two books I’ve read, she seems to have a striking insight into the souls of young people. Another quality that Hyland brings to her writing is that she does not shy away from the disturbing aspects of family life. This gives her books a compelling tension or intensity that drives them forward. Certainly there are some very pleasant scenes of family life in her novels, but even these reveal the underlying strains among the family members. This is another example of how well-imagined Hyland’s novels are that each scene does not have only one purpose but achieve several purposes at the same time.

So M. J. Hyland deals with the disturbing aspects of family life. I remember Ian MacEwan’s early novels which were always quite macabre though highly realistic. I actually enjoyed his early grim shocking novels more than his later more well-polished novels. What I’m saying is you let great writers have their subject matter and you just watch them perform.

M. J. Hyland is another one of those writers you can’t pin down to any one country. She was born in London to Irish parents, moved to Dublin, lived extensively in Australia, spent a year in Italy, and now is back in London.

“Fool’s Sanctuary” by Jennifer Johnston

Jennifer Johnston is a writer whom I much admire. I’ve read five of her novels. She has the simple dramatic flair and a precision with language that make her novels completely engaging. Her novels tend to be short, to the human point, and she is very strong on dialogue. As I was researching, I found out that Jennifer Johnston’s father was an Irish playwright named Denis Johnston, and her mother was an actress. This novel “Fool’s Sanctuary” would have made an excellent play or, even better, a movie. Maybe someone will still have the good sense to make this book into a movie. The story of this novel is so well framed that the events seem almost inevitable, yet you the reader have such empathy for all of the main characters that you need to be there to the end. Jennifer Johnston is one of the few novelists today whose novels can stand up to comparisons with the very best playwrights.

Fool’s Sanctuary was written in 1987. Perhaps because Jennifer Johnston had already written one much-honored novel, The Old Jest”, about the Irish war for independence, this novel “Fool’s Sanctuary” did not get the recognition it deserved. “Fool’s Sanctuary” is a superb work by a major writer.

I strongly recommend “Fool’s Sanctuary” as well as the other novels of Jennifer Johnston I’ve read. But don’t take just my word for it, for there is a writer in Ireland who was deeply influenced by Jennifer Johnston. That writer is Sebastian Barry. In his introduction to Johnston’s “The Captains and Kings” collection, Barry wrote of “the special shock of reading an original writer for the first time”. Like Johnston, Barry has also written several excellent novels that deal with Irish history. In his novel “The Secret Scripture” he uses a device similar to Johnston’s device in “Fool’s Sanctuary” where the narrator is an old woman in an institution who relates the story of her youth, more an homage than an imitation.

Perhaps the most enthusiastic reviewer on the Interrnet for the works of Jennifer Johnston is Kimbofo at Reading Matters. You can find links to all eight of Kimbofo’s reviews of Jennifer Johnston novels at    Reading Matters – Favorite Authors

It includes a link to Kimbofo’s review of Jennifer Johnston’s newest novel “Truth or Fiction” which was published in November, 2009.

“Too Much Happiness” by Alice Munro

I want to discuss the people in Alice Munro’s stories. It would be facile and easy for me to say that Alice Munro celebrates the rich variety of people and their complex interactions in her stories. You may ask what rich variety? What complex interactions?

OK, let us start with a baby. A baby has two parents. Each parent is descended from at least ten thousand years of ancestors. Some of the same ancestors of these ten thousand years may be ancestors on both the mother and the father’s side, since after about five generations we consider even the descendents of brothers and sisters as not related anymore. When we think of our ancestors, we think of our grandparents, perhaps our great-grandparents, and in some cases our great-great grandparents, but in most cases not much beyond that.

So the baby is made up of the traits of all these people from these ten thousand years of ancestry on both the father’s and the mother’s sides. So given all these ancestral factors that go into each child, even a brother and sister or two brothers or two sisters can have completely different inherited traits. In fact two siblings can be totally different from each other. Or they can be very similar, or in the case of identical twins, almost identical.

The father and the mother of the baby may have met and mated in a great variety of different circumstances. The mother and father may have been destined for marriage to each other from almost birth, or, more likely, the two somehow met later on. In some cases, the father may have already left before the baby is born.

The birth of the baby itself is a significant, sometimes traumatic, event in the baby’s life, and can play a role in the identity of the person.

After the baby is born, it becomes part of a family. Each person in the family has a role. Of course, the child who most fulfills the parents’ expectations usually has most favored status in the family, even if the parents are careful not to show favoritism. In some cases, the first-born child so fulfills the parents’ expectations, that whatever the second child does is found lacking. In some circumstances one of the children may turn into the black sheep of the family even at a quite young age. There are cases where such a black sheep will have the persistence to succeed despite the family dynamic, but in other cases may be defeated in many different ways. One common example is the creative or artistic child born to very practical-minded parents. Or the very down-to-earth offspring of artistic parents. Also, the parents’ values may not be unified, where the mother and father have very different values. That may be the best circumstance in some cases. Also there are the interactions between the brothers and sisters themselves.

Then there are the significant life-changing events that occur in everyone’s life such as school, jobs, illnesses, significant deaths, friendships, romances, marriages, divorces, accidents, etc. Each person, given their individual makeup, attaches their own significance to each of these events.

Given all of the factors above, when two people meet, many different things can happen. In some cases one or both persons may have shut themselves off from meeting the other person in the first place. In many cases, when two people meet, they have enough empathy that they become friends. But in other cases, there is no empathy whatsoever between the two and the interaction most resembles a collision. In some cases, two people that are antithetical to each other must necessarily deal with each other on a daily basis.

Back to Alice Munro. Munro deals with these human complexities in her stories. In one story, a woman is going through a life-changing drama. She is so caught up in her own drama, she doesn’t realize that to another person who seems rather peripheral in her own story, she is the center of a completely different story. Alice Munro doesn’t constrict herself to narrow plot paths, so just about anything can happen in her stories, just like in life.

Munro doesn’t shy away from evil. If you are looking for pleasant stories only, stay away from Munro. If you are looking for a pleasant story, the first story in this book will probably cause you to have a heart attack. The first story makes the title of the collection seem ironic. There are also other stories in the book about evil. For Alice Munro, life isn’t about good persons and bad persons. It’s about the circumstances that cause people to do bad things. It’s complicated. It is part of the rich variety of human interaction.

“The Well” by Elizabeth Jolley

“The Well” by Elizabeth Jolley is about as far from Christmas reading as any novel could be. It is about loneliness, obsession brought about by emotional impoverishment, and throwing human bodies down wells. “The Well” happens to be the book I just completed, so I’m going to discuss it now, Christmas or not.

The novel takes place in a remote rural area of Australia. The novel centers on a middle-aged handicapped woman, Hester Harper, and the teenage girl living with her, Katherine. After a lifetime of loneliness, Hester has finally found someone to share her life with in the orphan Katherine who is only too happy to not spend any more time in institutions. But Katherine is growing up and becoming interested in more of the world than just Hester’s small rural place. Hester’s obsessive attempts to keep her young ward Katherine to herself are the center of this novel.

“The Well” can be described as a romance suspense novel. After reading two thirds of this novel the suspense becomes almost unbearable, but one must keep reading the story to find out what happens next. Perhaps the writer that Elizabeth Jolley most reminds me of is Daphne du Maurier, who also takes the suspense to nearly inhuman levels. Elizabeth Jolley was born in England and spent her first 36 years there before emigrating to western Australia. “The Well” has that special oddness I’ve come to expect from Australian novels. Jolley won Australia’s top literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award, for this novel. “The Well” was made into a movie in 1997. This is a short well-written novel, an excellent read.

So if you want a novel to counteract the over-sentimentality and the good will of the Christmas season, “The Well” would be the book for you.

It’s Christmas, and one of the top movies this season is “Disney’s A Christmas Carol”, a cartoon version of Charles Dickens’ novella starring Jim Carrey as Scrooge. Every year there seems to be a new version of “A Christmas Carol” either at the movies or on television or both. Also every Christmas season, “A Christmas Carol” is performed on hundreds of stages throughout the world.

Truth be known, I have never been a big fan of Charles Dickens as a novelist. For Victorian literature, I much prefer “Middlemarch” or “The Mill and the Floss” or “Adam Bede” by George Eliot or “Vanity Fair” by William Thackeray to the novels of Charles Dickens. Over the years, I’ve read several Dickens novels including “Hard Times” and “Great Expectations”, and they just never captivated me. I did quite like Dickens’ French Revolution novel, “A Tale of Two Cities”. Last year, I listened to “Oliver Twist” during my commutes. Many people love this story of Oliver Twist and Jack Dawkins “The Artful Dodger” and Fagin, but for some reason I was pretty much unmoved by the story.

But “A Christmas Carol” is the one exception of Dickens’ works that won me over even when I was a child. This story of the cold-hearted and tight-fisted Scrooge who is completely transformed after being visited by four ghosts on Christmas eve night has always had a powerful affect on me. The Ghost of Christmas Past, The Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Future cover all stages of a person’s life. Scrooge has the opportunity to see his future which is really the future of every one of us, and that causes him to change profoundly. My favorite version of “A Christmas Carol” is the 1951 movie starring Alastair Sim which I try to watch every few years. But just about every version of “A Christmas Carol” has enough of the story in it to affect me. I even brought Scrooge into my daily program which I wrote quite a while ago. I wrote, “Don’t become overwhelmed with bitterness. It looks like I’m very susceptible to this emotion, and it could lead me to become a cold hard person while I am still young. I just have to keep catching myself and remember, just like Scrooge, it’s never too late to change.”

So maybe it’s time I accepted that Charles Dickens, the writer, has had a profound impact on my life. Give the man a tankard of ale, a large helping of roast duck, and some plum pudding. After all, it’s Christmas.