There's a very warm (and insightful, but I would say that) review of 88 Lines About 44 Women here from ANZLitLovers Blog

Why do they sit in a library of empty, colour-coded books? I’ve never liked it, but even if they had insisted on starting out that way they could have, by now, have quite a collection of books they’ve discussed. Why can’t we at least see them?This might seem petulant but it is a serious complaint: a room full of books says something about the person sitting in it. That’s one of the reasons we collect them, so that visitors can see the kind of person we are. The resident readers on The Book Show are non people, the books they've read don’t stick to them. Last week several purple ones, behind Jennifer Byrne, were even damaged, like they’d fallen off the shelf and somebody had picked them up and thought, who cares.There’s too many of them anyway. The people, I mean. With five people, two of whom are celebrities who need their egos massaged, there’s not enough time or space for any sort of sensible debate. Get rid of the guests, give Mariecke and Jason a go.And while you’re at it get rid of those awful dramatised bits where the plot is revealed. They do nothing for the books and less for the show.If you do all these things you might actually be able to talk about more than two books a month. The show might become interesting. It might even become a force in the literary world.

I'm very pleased to be able to announce that 88 Lines About 44 Women has been shortlisted in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2010, amid some very esteemed company, J M Coetzee, David Malouf, Richard Flanagan, Craig Silvey and Cate Kennedy. The awards will be announced on 17th May, the prize is winning, but also a handy $40 000. For a list of all the short-lists go here.

Am I the only person finding Margaret Atwood harder and harder to read?I say this as a former fan. No, cut the former, a real fan. I think The Blind Assassin is one of the true classics of our time. Alias Grace is a remarkable achievement. Oryx and Crake, simply stunning. But the new book, In the Year of the Flood, damn! What a waste of time. Having bought the thing and ploughed bravely through its tedious pages I have read the kind notices it received with astonishment, and not just a frisson of terror.Now she’s taken to writing for the New York Review of Books. I buy the NYRB because no matter the subject I’m happy to read the articles, if only because of the quality of the writing. But in the two recent pieces I’ve read by Atwood the writing is woeful, a kind of embarrassing twaddle, patronising of both the reader and the author, missing the point of what a review is for. Here is the opening paragraph of one from last year:

‘The Confessions of Edward Day is Valerie Martin's ninth novel, and it's a triumph of her unique art. As usual, it's easy on the ear—Martin writes with amplitude, precision, grace, and wit—but it's hard on the characters. They do not spare one another, and their author doesn't spare them. None of Martin's books ends with kisses all around and happy feasts, and The Confessions of Edward Day is no exception. Reader, be warned: you won't end up in Cinderella's castle. But you'll have a fine time not getting there.’

The review continues for another 3474 words in this same hectoring tone, like a schoolmarm addressing a group of reluctant readers. But if you thought this was a one-off you were mistaken. She adopts the same voice in the latest edition, this time discussing Anthill, the first novel by the acclaimed scientist E O Wilson.It seems clear that Atwood feels it would have been better if Wilson had kept to science. In amongst giving a detailed outline of the plot and taking time out to question why Wilson should have engaged in the exercise at all (‘Those who’ve been at it for a while might have warned him off’) she finds writes the following:

‘Like Wilson, “Raff” grows up in Alabama at a time not far from that in which Wilson himself grew up. Like Wilson again, young Raff takes a great interest in nature, focuses on ants, and goes on to study at Harvard. As you might expect in the work of a first-time novelist, some of these passages most likely contain boyhood reminiscences. The foods of the time and place are lovingly described, down to each sundae with chopped walnuts and each bowl of gumbo…’

‘As you might expect in the work of…!’ This is a book that Atwood is praising, mind. God help you if she didn’t like your work. But then God help you if she reviews your book at all if the piece is made up of sentences such as: ‘Like Wilson, “Raff” grows up in Alabama at a time not far from that in which Wilson himself grew up.’ Is it possible to be more convoluted? Did no-one edit this crap?I wrote above that I read The Year of the Flood with increasing frustration but also a frisson of terror. This last came about because it seemed to me that if someone as good as Atwood could produce such guff without realising it then what hope was there for any of us?(By which, of course, I mean, me.) So much of writing is the business of wading through shit for months at a time, believing your bare feet will somehow, somewhere, pick up a jewel. But what if it really is all shit and there’s no jewel? If Atwood can’t tell that, how might I?I suppose the difference is that someone will be quick to tell me, whereas no-one, not even the New York Review of Books, has the guts to tell her.

The December 17^th issue of the New York Review of Books has an article from John Lanchester about Nabokov’s posthumous novel, The Original of Laura.In it Lanchester discusses the difference between an author’s signature and their style, and, as a way of explaining this he writes:

‘One example might be from one of Nabokov’s most famous flashes of brilliance, Humbert Humbert’s memory of his mother in Lolita: “My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.” It’s hard not to be dazzled by the parenthesis, which is pure signature; but the heart of the sentence, its moment of style, is in the quieter and much less prominent word “photogenic.” You realize that Humbert knows his mother only from photographs. The sentence’s quiet poetry is the poetry of loss.’

I struggle to express how profoundly such a piece of writing moves me. Firstly the Nabokov, which I naturally love, as if his use of words is already part of the mechanism of my blood flow, and reading them again makes it quicken. But then secondly with Lanchester’s analysis of why it moves me, which I had never previously understood.This is the thing, I guess. As a reader, some might say a compulsive reader, since my early teens, I both consume words (and produce them), without really knowing how or why one piece moves me and another does not. I’ve tried to understand it but I don’t think intellectualising necessarily helps. What I’ve learned to do is to trust the quality of resonance which sentences generate within me when I read them or hear them. My own or someone else’s.Occasionally though, I stumble upon examples which are so extraordinary that a certain amount of analysis is essential. Here is one that I recently found in Alexsandar Hemon’s Love and Obstacles:The story is called ‘Good Living.’ The narrator is Bosnian, he is selling magazines door to door in Chicago, the outer suburbs:

‘My best turf was Blue Island, way down Western Avenue, where addresses had five-digit numbers, as though the town was far back of the long line of people waiting to enter downtown paradise. I got along pretty well with the Blue Islanders. They could quickly recognise the indelible lousiness of my job; they offered me food and water; once I nearly got laid. They did not waste their time contemplating the purpose of human life; their years were spent as a tale is told: slowly, steadily, approaching the inexorable end. In the meantime, all they wanted was to live, wisely use what little love they had accrued, and endure life with the anaesthetic help of television and magazines. I happened to be in the neighbourhood to offer the magazines.’

The first time I encountered this passage I had to stop and read it four times, and then ring up a friend and read it to him aloud, twice, over the telephone, before I could begin to think about continuing my life.Take, ‘As though the town was far back of the…’ This ‘far back of’ is a peculiarly American use of English, here used by someone writing in their second, adopted, language. Its unusual word order, the extra ‘of’, seems to deliberately push the suburb further back in the sentence, further away from the place where the numbers were smaller, where (apparently) paradise is.But it turns out that it’s not just onomatopoeic in its placement. It’s also elegant. If I was writing the sentence I would probably have started by trying: ‘as if the town were a long way along, no, cross that out, can’t have a long way along, well then, a long way down, or, a long way towards the back of the long line,’ all of which are unsatisfactory. So I’d rewrite it and rewrite it, and eventually start to question if that was what I really wanted to say when I couldn’t get it to work, perhaps break it up into two or three sentences or try to come up with a different metaphor. It is unlikely I’d have stumbled upon Hemon’s solution: ‘as though the town was far back of the long line of people waiting to enter downtown paradise.’But then he goes on: ‘They did not waste their time contemplating the purpose of human life; …’ This was the sentence I wanted my friend particularly to hear when I called him up but he got lost in the throwaway line, ‘once I nearly got laid,’ and the story that spins off from there. So I had to read it to him twice:

‘their years were spent as a tale is told: slowly, steadily, approaching the inexorable end. In the meantime, all they wanted was to live, wisely use what little love they had accrued, and endure life with the anaesthetic help of television and magazines. I happened to be in the neighbourhood to offer the magazines.’

Here is writing of an extremely high order. When I read something like that I feel as though the game is up. We may as well all go home, Beethoven is amongst us, what’s the use?

A review in the Weekend Australian of Don Paterson’s new collection of poems (written by Robert Gray) has drawn me back to his earlier works, in particular the afterword for his translations of the Sonnets of Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke, simply called Orpheus.Probably I should be talking about the poems but it is the Afterword which in this case most grabs me. Paterson finds himself ‘dismayed to discover the Sonnet’s recent recruitment to the cause of “spiritual literature”’. He believes that the Sonnets are ‘a strongly non-religious work, and easily capable of an anti-religious interpretation.’Casually reading the slim volume late at night in my bed I stumble upon this paragraph:

‘The two principal religious errors seem to me beautifully refuted in the Sonnets. The first is to think of truth as being in the possession of an inscrutable third party, whose knowledge and intentions can only be divined. However, we are all the thinking that matter is doing in this part of the universe. If the universe has an eye, it sees only through the eyes on this Earth and elsewhere; if a mind it thinks only in these minds …

‘The second error is to think of an afterlife or any reincarnation we are bound for as more extraordinary than finding ourselves here in the first place. This projection of ourselves into a future beyond our deaths warps our actions in, and therefore our sense of responsibility to, the here and now – as well as our negotiations with the real beings with whom we share and to whom we will bequeath a home … This, in a perfectly straightforward sense, is already life after death, as remarkably so as any “you” you might wake as in the future. Factor out the illusion of the unitary self – being a phantom centre created by an evolutionary necessity – and its back-formations of ego and soul, and being here once is the identically equivalent miracle to being here again.’

Suddenly I’m sitting up, wide awake. What Paterson articulates so concisely is something I encounter every time my mind comes awake for long enough to notice where it is I am: that this is all there is, here, in this moment. That this person I’m with, this weather we’re having, this room we’re in, or this mountain that we’re on, is, in fact, the moment, for all its unsatisfactoriness, equal in intensity and possibility to every other moment. The quality of attention which I bring to where I am is the governing factor controlling how important it is, not some external force.It shouldn’t, I guess, surprise me to find such acuity in Paterson. He is the poet who, apart from writing his own poems, also translated the poetry of the Spaniard Antonio Machado, producing the book The Eyes.In the Afterword to that collection, speaking of translation, he wrote:

‘These poems are versions, not translations. A reader looking for an accurate translation of Antonio Merchado’s words, then, should stop here and go out and buy another book – probably Alan Trueblood’s Antonio Machado: Selected Poems, which although it isn’t poetry, at least gives a more reliable reflection of the surface of Machado’s verse. Poems, though, are considerably more than the agglomerated meaning of their words, and in writing these versions I initially tried to be true to a poem’s argument and to its vision … This quickly became the more familiar project of trying to make a musical and argumentative unity of the material at hand, and this consideration, in overriding all others, led to mangling, shifts of emphasis, omission, deliberate mistranslantion, the conflation of different poems, the insertion of whole new lines and on a few occasions the writing of entirely new poems. In the end it became about nothing more than a commitment to a process – what Machado everywhere refers to as “the road”’.

I must off to the bookstore to buy this new collection, entitled Rain. Gray quotes several of the poems in his review. This one caught my attention, from ‘Phantom’:

We come from nothing and return to it.

It lends us out to time, and when we lie

in silent contemplation of the void

they say we feel it contemplating us.

This is wrong, but who could bear the truth.

We are ourselves the void in contemplation.

We are its only nerve and hand and eye.

There is something vast and distant and enthroned

with which you are one and continuous,

staring through your mind, staring and staring

like a black sun, constant, silent, radiant

with neither love nor hate nor apathy

as we have no human name for its regard

a film directed by Isobel Coixet.Few films I have seen recently have achieved so well, so elegantly, a portrait of the complexity of modern life. Ben Kingsley with his powerful nose and his blunt skull is a wonderful canvas on which to paint the feelings of this older man, Kapesh, as he, in turn, meets, becomes involved with, jealous of, and eventually obsessed by Consuela, played by the exquisite, extraordinary Penelope Cruz. Few films have managed better that difficult task of transferring a novel into film (although it needs to be said that there have been several successes in this field recently: Revolutionary Road and The Reader, but two examples).With Elegy, however, even more than these other two, perhaps because it is such a reflective film, a film which centres its attention on the inner person, a film which succeeds so well at mood and moment through the depiction of simple scenes – a man alone in an apartment without the lights on, a squash ball rolling against the court wall – the rather odd, even mean, question comes to mind: why bother?Elegy, of course, is the film adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel A Dying Animal. The book, which came out only a few years ago, is not large, it is, really, a novella, and was a particularly beautiful object in itself, it’s slip-case dark red, the shade taken from the drapes behind the Modigliani nude which adorned its cover. The title came from the poem by W.B. Yeats. It is a masterful work. It came after Roth had finished the American Pastoral trilogy, the final book of which was The Human Stain. These three novels: that one, I Married a Communist and American Pastoral were notable for a kind of restrained verbosity, an outpouring of words which were, nonetheless, calculated. A Dying Animal is their obverse, their counter-side. It is brief, exact, crude, honest. It might almost be possible to read it in the time it would take to watch the film.Which is why I wonder that someone would bother. The work is already there. Elegy, of course, grants us Penelope Cruz as a siren on whose rocks we can easily imagine ourselves coming aground. But when reading Roth I already had my own siren who looked and felt like herself.It’s not, don’t get me wrong, that I think Elegy was a waste of time. I think it will be out there in the world now, being appreciated by people for years to come. Every one of the actors is excellent, Dennis Hopper, Peter Sarsgaard, the direction is subtle and concise. What I wonder is this: Why can’t film writers make up their own stories? Why do they always have to plunder books? Why do they have to be illustrated novels? Are script-writers so devoid of imagination that they cannot think meaningful ideas up for themselves? Are we as a society so incapable of imagining that people could read that we have to take everything worthwhile in a book and translate it into a picture? Bearing in mind that books so rarely adapt well to cinema if only because films made from books are always going to be a distillation of a certain essence of the story, limited as they are to their prescribed 120 minutes.I think the reason that cinema so often disappoints – failing at what it sets out to achieve – is that, so often, there is an emptiness at the heart of the story. It is a cliché to complain about the proportion of a film’s budget spent on the script, but I refer to more than that: what I mean is that rarely has the script been created specifically for the medium.Cinema, more than any other art, has only the surfaces to deal with and it is one of the miracles of the screen that it can sometimes use these flat planes, these massive two dimensional moving images to point to deeper parts of ourselves. The problem is that the surfaces are so seductive in themselves that more often than not what is being produced are machines for stars to wander about in rather than stories which are designed at their very core to use these tools to pierce the bubble of imagery and touch us. Or even entertain us.The stories are adaptations of stories which moved us when we received them in a completely different form and that form is coded in their DNA. Why should it be otherwise? Consider the disdain with which ‘the novel based on the film’ is regarded. Perhaps, while acknowledging the beauty of Elegy, it might be possible to ask cinema to grow up, to write it’s own tales.

Here is a novel which opens with some of the sweetest prose you’re likely to find in contemporary Australian fiction. The sentences are simple, constructed with a delicate economy, wasting nothing, drawing us fluently into the tale. The narrator, whose name we only ever hear late in the book – in someone else’s dialogue – has just returned from Venice to his home in Melbourne. His daughter, Clare, living in his house even though she is thirty-eight, has bought no food, he has to go out for milk. Cross, tired, jet-lagged, he goes around the corner to buy supplies and finds new owners have taken up the old dry-cleaners, turning it into a bakery. The shop is full of customers but even with them, with Saturday morning business, there is time for his eyes to meet those of the proprietor, Sabiha.This, then, is to be her story, or rather that of Sabiha and her partner, the oddly named John Patterner, a name which seems like it should be allegorical for something but doesn’t really turn out to be. It is a story, it turns out, that John will tell the narrator over coffee in various locations in Melbourne over the next few months.The book then, is of that type which is referred to in the trade as a pipe and port narrative, the kind where a narrator, who we are made familiar with, a voice we somehow immediately trust – and those first few pages, the first couple of paragraphs give us good reason to – will draw out someone else’s story. In the old days, of Stevenson, Buchan, Conrad (Heart of Darkness is a classic of the genre: we often forget that the tale we hear is told by Marlowe, sitting on the deck of boat out on the Thames, telling the story to friends as darkness falls). In those days the role of the narrator was really just to listen and record, but, being as we are now all modernists, sharply aware of our ironies, the more recent type always also involve the narrator, him or herself. What we observe, we are all obliged to remember, is changed by the observer.Lovesong is a beautiful novel. No qualification. It’s not just the first few pages that are written with economy and care. My concern on finishing it was simply that I wanted more. I’ve not read any of Miller’s other books. I’ve meant to, all through my bookseller days, hand-selling his books on other’s recommendations, I kept saying, I must read that, and it was the simple force of the prose on those first pages that had me at last get around to bringing this one home. I have, however, heard Miller talk on the Bookshow and various other venues and have been delighted by his way of speaking, his capacity as a story-teller. Those interviews were enough to recommend his books on themselves.This Christmas I’ve been glancing through the best reads for 2009 in the magazines and literary sections, on the blogs, and I note that Miller is one of the few Australians who get regularly mentioned. It is disappointing, really, how few they are, I feel like the question should have been, in at least one blog, which Australian novel did you like most this year? If only to jolt writers to read from their own stable, to be engaged in some sort of discussion with each other about what is possible. And it is in that context that I want to ask Miller for more, to suggest that this novel, rather than being good, far the best Australian novel I’ve read all year, could have been great.Let me begin with John Patterner: He stays in Paris for sixteen or seventeen years. (I’m going to try and avoid giving things away here, for the benefit of people who haven’t read the book, but I’m bound to talk about some elements of the plot, so be warned) I find this difficult to believe. Two years, yes, five even, but this is present time we’re living in, aeroplanes leave for Australia every ten minutes from Europe. Did he not take one to see his parents in all that time? Did they not come to see him? Why did he stay? It’s not that it’s impossible that he might have done that, only that what sustained him for so long is unexplained. I feel that, although this is in part his story, I know him at the end of the book no better than I did when he first walked into the café, he has not developed, he has not become a chef or a host, the only way he has changed is to become more worn.The narrator, too, remains unexplored. We find that Ken is a writer, a retired writer (and don’t we all groan a little at that? Do we need another writer talking to us about his experience? No other profession bangs on about how hard their work is in the way writers do. It’s as if because we’ve got the words we feel we have the right to use them about our own process, which I guess is fair enough, but could we perhaps make an agreement, you know, when you join the guild, not to do it in the novels themselves, please.) As the novel progresses, tensions appear in Ken’s household. His home is invaded by another, someone entirely different to him. This is mentioned but then discarded as a line of interest. It is in no way explored.But more importantly the extraordinary tension with arises between John and the narrator twoards the end of the novel is completely glossed over. I remember years ago reading Paul Theroux, that clever curmudgeonly traveller and novelist, paddling around the Pacific Islands in a canoe. At one point, about half way through the book, he’s talking to someone who asks him not to write what it is he’s going to say. Theroux does immediately the opposite. He doesn’t even pause, he just keeps writing. I had to put the book down. I felt sullied to keep reading. I’ve never read a word of his since.There is a similar tension that arises towards the end of this novel – when the two stories, Sabiha and John in Paris, and the narrator and his daughter in Melbourne, begin to come together – that is ignored in the most curious fashion. The ethical problem is pointed at, but then dismissed, because somehow everything is going to be all right, everyone is going to sit down together and eat Tunisian food, and all the threads of the port and pipe narrative are going to be melted into one by the vigour of the spices. We move into a strange happy ever after land.I’m not sure what has happened, but it’s as if the force of the prose, the wonderful cadence of the story-teller, has won over the content. The words have taken over from what they were saying.Should one read as attentively as this? Should one be ungrateful for what is clearly already a gift? I have no answer to that, only to say that had these elements which were flagged been picked up then something extraordinary might have occurred. And what I wonder is if, because we are writing in such a tight little community, desperate to defend our boundaries, we don’t engage in these kinds of conversations with each other about our books and so, as writers, we don’t hear what we need to hear.