NUMBER: 109

Genre: Fiction; Origin: US; Pages: 250

Satisfaction rating: 9.0

OVERVIEW:

When a dying millionaire hires Philip Marlowe to handle the blackmailer of one of his two troublesome daughters, Marlowe finds himself involved with more than extortion. Kidnapping, pornography, seduction, and murder are just a few of the complications he gets caught up in.

MATTHEW’S COMMENTS:

Whether it be film or literature, I’ve never been much of a genre fan. While I do have a soft spot for science fiction, it is  still a rare occasion when I choose to invest a couple of weeks to read it. Realistically, I’m more likely to watch an escapist Hollywood blockbuster every now and then. As for detective fiction, it has never really been on my list.

I decided it was time to give Raymond Chandler a run only because I’ve seen The Big Sleep appear on all manner of top literature lists from critics of all persuasions – and the fact I found a collected works for $8 at the markets. Surely, such universal praise must mean something?

Quite naively I had initially made an assumption that The Big Sleep would be full of tired twists and the usual turns, such narrative devices that have become commonplace in what I know of pulp fiction and certainly the epidemic that is occurring on television. And, in many ways it does. But the difference here is that Chandler is largely responsible for the imitators.

What I love about this book is that I had no idea how good authentic hardboiled crime can be. It is clear that Chandler has a great wit and a deft hand – not just pl inot structure, but more importantly, character development and dialogue. The one-liners never stop.

I’m not sure if it was the concise writing of The Big Sleep  or its infectious protagonist Marlow, but I was left wanting more. I just kept on reading into the next novel in the collection. This is not faint praise, I can count on just one hand the number of times that I have done this with an author.

FURTHER REFERENCES:

Read more on Google Books

Read more on Wikipedia

NUMBER: 108

Genre: Fiction; Origin: US; Pages: 250

Satisfaction rating: 8.5

OVERVIEW:

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food – and each other.

MATTHEW’S COMMENTS:

To come…

FURTHER REFERENCES:

Read more on Google Books

Read more on Wikipedia

NUMBER: 107

Genre: Non-fiction; Origin: US; Pages: 300

Satisfaction rating: 2.o

OVERVIEW:

In 1940, John Steinbeck set out on an expedition with his friend Ed Ricketts, the biologist on whom he based the character of Doc in Cannery Row. Taking a sardine boat, Western Flyer, out of Monterey, California, they embarked on a 4,000-mile trip into the Sea of Cortez that combined the scientific collection and observation of marine life with high adventure, philosophy, ethics and art. The log of this journey gives a much rounder picture of Steinbeck – and his beliefs about man and the world – than any of his fictional works.

MATTHEW’S COMMENTS:

There are two fundamental things lacking in this book, despite being described in the blurb above. The first is ‘high adventure’, the second is the promised ’rounder picture of Steinbeck’. It is the latter I was hoping for when I finally got round to reading this novel after it sat on my shelf for a year or two. The wait wasn’t worth it, to say that this was a hard book to complete is an understatement. In fact, I even had a break from it for about three weeks, but I have to admit to be completely bored with the process of collecting marine life.

Yes, a little naive given the subject matter. However, I thought this work might give greater insight in to the influential relationship between Ricketts and Steinbeck. Largely it doesn’t. The strangest thing about this book is that it is written not from Steinbeck’s first person perspective, but rather the single perspective of himself and Ed Ricketts. So while we read charactures of the deck hands and captain we never read about the two authors. From my perspective this is a lost opportunity to broaden the base of the book from marine exploration to a personal adventure.

There are glimpses of adventure as the explorers engage with local communities, and there is certainly passages of philosophy which help resurrect my interest, but this was few and far between. Having now read 11 of Steinbeck’s novels I would suggest that the combined weight of his fictional work builds a better understanding of the man that this slice of non-fiction.

That said, the saving grace in this edition is the heartfelt, and at times quite funny, obituary for Ricketts written by Steinbeck following an untimely car accident. This 50 page introduction is a wonderful addition, without the substance between the two men would be lost.

FURTHER REFERENCES:

Read more on Wikipedia

NUMBER: 106

Genre: Fiction; Origin: Australia; Pages: 150

Satisfaction rating: 8.0

OVERVIEW:

David Malouf’s imagination inhabits shocking violence, quick humor, appealing warmth and harsh cruelty with equal intensity. He shares tales of bookish boys, taciturn men and intimate stories of men and women looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on.

This is a comprehensive compilation of Malouf’s shorter work. Stories are set in the stark and challenging Australian interior and the more lush and mysterious coastal enclaves; others are set in Australia’s past. The youthful dreams, physical desires and mental despair of Malouf’s richly varied characters as they explore their place in the world are always moving and universal.

MATTHEW’S COMMENTS:

I love short stories as a medium, often the shorter the better, think Raymond Carver. That said, there is unfortunately one problem, they are hard to read on public transport and that is where I do most of my reading. No matter how good or bad there is nothing worse than having to bookmark a short story with only a page or two to go.

Nevertheless, I still find myself giving them a go every now and then. My most recent effort is the collected works of David Malouf, a much appreciated birthday present from my partner. I’ve heard many good things about Malouf’s shorts and this clutch of four collections was just the place to get started, I wasn’t going to let the train get in the way.

Prior to this I had read three of his novels and they have been a mixed bag – from the splendors of Remebering Babylon to the bleak An Imaginary Life with the enjoyable Johnno falling between. So it may come as not surprise I was unsure installment of the anthology was going to bring.

Every Move You Make is a collection of seven short stories originally published in 2006. Although I felt the momentum falter towards the end I have to level most praise for the opening 40-pager, The Valley of Lagoons. A wonderfully emotive coming of age tale that is equal parts dark and menacing while enveloped by a warm embrace.

If you are wanting comparisons I would immediately think of Tim Winton’s latest novel, Breath. Each share effortless prose and emotive themes of independence of youth, or growing boys to be precise. Surely, Malouf must have been, and still may be, an inspiration to Winton, I can also see parallels to The Turning.

For now that’s it, I’ll leave the other three collections for the time being, but it won’t be long until I return. Malouf has a unique Australian voice that I’m finding increasingly hard to resist.

FURTHER REFERENCES:

Read more on the Random House site.

Read more on wikipedia.

NUMBER: 105

Genre: Fiction; Origin: Australia; Pages: 150

Satisfaction rating: 7.0

OVERVIEW:

A tale of love and loneliness in two parallel stories. Arabella Thorne, a cultured and eccentric schoolmistress, travels to Europe accompanied by a shy schoolgirl and the jealous Miss Edgely. Meanwhile, the Australian novelist Diana Hopewell answers a letter from Miss Peabody, an incompetent clerical worker living in a London suburb, and the ensuing correspondence between the two women changes Miss Peabody’s life and personality dramatically.

MATTHEW’S COMMENTS:

There is no doubt that Jolley’s The Well had a lingering effect on me, while I don’t think it was perfect I have since given it to two people to read and find myself thinking often of it. After just this one novella I was pretty sure that Jolley’s work would feature highly in my log over the years to come. But my interest is not just in her work, to be honest I’m fascinated by the woman. First and foremost is the fact that she didn’t have her first book published until she was over 50 years old, then followed she made hay while the sun shone completing over 15 works before her death in 2007 at 84.

I was given a recently published biography of Jolley, but before getting stuck in I thought that I should really read at least one more book to give me some greater context to the account of her life. I went into a second hand book shop and bought the cheapest work I could find, that how I ended up with a $3 copy of Miss Peabody’s Inheritance. It was a lucky dip that in many ways paid off.

In short, the book didn’t quite pack the punch of The Well, but it does display Jolley’s ability to breakdown traditional narrative structures and create a unified theme from disparate characters and tangents. This willingness to experiment bodes well for her more accomplished works that I plan to tackle over the next few months. Whereas The Well was an essay of power filtered through a gothic fairytale of an old lady, a young girl and a farmhouse, Miss Peabody’s Inheritance takes more of a comedic approach to exploring a similar dark tone.

While Jolley’s story is far from the confronting Lolita, the reader does find themselves at times amused by the subversive undertones of Miss Thorne’s pedophilic tendencies. But this story within a story is little more than a metaphor that offers the downtrodden Peabody cause to act. The Well is a book of manipulation, this book is one of liberation.

For those seeking comparisons, it is clear that many of the character traits, particularly those of Edgely and Peabody, share those of Theodora Goodman in Patrick White’s The Aunts Story. But dare I say it, better developed by Jolley.

FURTHER REFERENCES:

Read more on Wikipedia

Read more at the Elizabeth Jolley Research Collection

NUMBER: 104

Genre: Fiction; Origin: Japan; Pages: 500

Satisfaction rating: 7.5

OVERVIEW:

Kafka on the Shore is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. As their paths converge, and the reasons for that convergence become clear, Haruki Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder. Kafka on the Shore displays one of the world’s great storytellers at the peak of his powers.

MATTHEW’S COMMENTS:

I’ve gotten to the point where I can safely say that I have read quite a bit of Murakami, Kafka on the Shore is the ninth. Those who have read a range of his novels from The Wind-up Bird Chronicle to the Norwegian Wood will know that Murakami can push surreal storytelling from the subtle to strong. Kafka on the Shore is certainly on the surreal side.

I had been saving this work for some time as it is often referred to as one of Murakami’s best works. Perhaps this build up didn’t help but I was slightly disappointed. That said, my overall satisfaction was high, but I would say that this is because of the central storyline but the wonderful characters he has developed,  some of the best I’ve read in any of his works, Colonel Sanders is a fine example.

I have a theory, but maybe this is one for the scholars to throw around. In many of his works like Hardboiled Wonderland and Wind-up Bird, Murakami has a central character that is an outsider to the surreal work in which (usually) he has been thrust by a series of events. These characters give the reader someone to latch onto, someone to guide through the often complex mysteries. The character that takes on this role in Kafka on the Shore is truck driver Hoshino, yet he is only a player.

The upshot is that by the end of the book I was no closer to understanding the central themes although I enjoyed the ride. The most frustrating thing is that Murakami suggests in the final paragraphs that ‘the world is a metaphor’. I’m sure it is, but I might need a little more guidance to understand them all.

FURTHER REFERENCES:

Read more on Murakami’s official site

Read more on Wikipedia

NUMBER: 103

Genre: Non-fiction; Origin: Australia; Pages: 500

Satisfaction rating: 8.5

OVERVIEW:

Beneath the shining harbour, amid the towers of global greed and deep inside the bad-drugs madness of the suburban wastelands, lies Sydney’s shadow history. Terrifying tsunamis, corpse-robbing morgue staff, killer cops, neo-Nazis, power junkies and bumbling SWOS teams electrifying this epic tale of a city with a cold vacuum for a moral core.

MATTHEW’S COMMENTS:

I’m not sure that the blurb on the back of this book does it justice, if anything, referring this gonzo-styled 200-odd year history of Sydney as an ‘epic tale of a city with a cold vacuum for a moral core’ seems needlessly melodramatic. Forget the histrionics, what we have are several extremely well crafted essays on immigration, environment and power.

Each non-linear chapter is thematically constructed as Birmingham navigates the arrival of white colonialists, their struggles against the environment and each other, the strangled birth of the city’s infrastructure and those who seek to control it through politics or crime, or both. All the while, these tangled tales are glimpses of an historic record filtered through Birmingham’s laconic leftest perspective. The best thing about this book is the way the themes retread the same path, building a detailed picture of Sydney, yet never straying from their intended tangent.

Birmingham’s final words suggest that the book was inspired by the technique of Michael Pye in his work Maximum City about New York. I intend to seek this out. I am interested to pinpoint what I like best about this book, the fact that I live in Sydney and have a personal reference, or the fact that the book’s structure is what made it such a page turner.

For those who wish to query Birmingham’s account there is well over 50 pages of sources and biographical notes. Birmingham claims to have spent four years researching the book, recounting that each chapter felt like a PhD. I can see why. The research is impressive, never more so than in the first two chapters which turn in the best results. My only criticism is that the book ran out of steam in the final chapter, Birmingham started to rely on his own experiences a little too much for my liking. This didn’t make the chapter any less interesting but did isolated it in style from the others.

Good to see that it is still in print a decade on, I hope it will continue that way for many years to come.

FURTHER REFERENCES:

Read more on wikipedia.

• There were 34 titles read. 27 novels and 7 novellas. 6 non-fiction works. 13 works by Australian authors, followed by 5 works by American authors and 3 from UK.
• The 34 titles had an average satisfaction rating of 7.2 out of a possible 10.0 from an average of 287 pages per work.
• Richard Flanagan was the most read author in 2008 with 4 novels.
• Books that scored a 10.0 in 2008 were: Lolita, Gould’s Book of Fish, Wanting, Coming Through Slaughter and The Spare Room.
• Books that scored under 5.0 in 2008 were: The Aunt’s Story, The Lieutenant, Ulysses, The Eureka Stockade, Letters to a Young Poet and A Very Easy Death.
• The most read authors since 2006: John Steinbeck (10), Peter Carey (8), Haruki Murakami (8), Graham Swift (4), Richard Flanagan (4) and Tim Winton (4).
• Highest rating authors since 2006: Tim Winton (9.0), Haruki Murakami (8.8), Michael Ondaatje (8.5), Richard Flanagan (8.4) and Peter Carey (8.3).

NUMBER: 102

Genre:Fiction; Origin: Australia; Pages: 250

Satisfaction rating: 10.0

OVERVIEW:

A young Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, is adopted by the most celebrated explorer of the age, Sir John Franklin, and his wife, Lady Jane, to show that the savage can be civilised. When Sir John disappears while looking for the fabled Northwest Passage, Lady Jane turns to the great novelist Charles Dickens for help. Wanting is a meditation on love, loss and the way life is finally determined never by reason, but only ever by wanting.

MATTHEW’S COMMENTS:

For a small book, Wanting is not short on substance. The novel is a return to form for Flanagan, a relief after his last effort The Unknown Terrorist which disappointed me greatly. Now, he has turned his attention from xenophobia to genocide, moving from a contemporary paranoid vision of the war on terror to the horrors of colonial rule in Van Diemen’s Land during the early 1800s, a period which saw the attempted extermination of the indigenous people of the island. Those familiar with Flanagan’s work will also note that the setting is a return to his native Tasmania, a subject of four out of his five novels thus far.

As I read it, this is a story of obsession, an allegory of the colonialist’s obsession with spreading their culture, religion and disease, protecting their legacy, while destroying all else in their path. Flanagan resists drawing on the emotionally charged bloodshed of the systematic hunt for the natives, rather choosing to focus his story on what remains, the embers of a race slowly dying. It chronicles two seemingly disparate stories spread a decade apart, that of Governor Sir John Franklin and his wife’s social experiment in adopting a young Aboriginal girl Mathinna, and that of Charles Dicken’s defence of Sir John Franklin character some years later after he perished in search of the north-west passage. To explain the story further would ruin the book.

Inspired by actual events, Flanagan pulls no punches in doing a hatchet job on both Sir John Franklin and Charles Dickens. And if you believe even half of what is written in this novel you will be left with a sour taste of each man, leaders in their field yet spineless to the very core. I suspect Flanagan’s portrait (which is sourced from many texts listed on his site) may come under some fire, but any such labels will in fact play into the novel’s sub-text, one of perception over fact, a sub-text also featured in Flanagan’s earlier masterpiece Gould’s Book of Fish.

But for me Franklin and Dickens are supporting players. It is the story of Mathinna which provides to depth to this novel, a testament to the fact that a culture cannot be easily bred out of existence, despite the dire consequences. Stories such as this are the very ones discarded by white-man’s history, they are a stain on the legacy of our country, I am thankful that writers with the skill, intelligence and passion of Flanagan are turning their critical eye to these events. For this is not just an indigenous story to tell, but one for all Australians to face up to.

FURTHER REFERENCES:

Read more on the official site.