A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

This was recommended by Louise Anne, Ian, Judith, and Sharon. This is the second time I've read this book. I loved it the first, and possibly loved it even more the second time round. I was a little disturbed by how little of the actual story I remembered from my first reading which made me think why do I persevere with this list when I could just re-read the same the book afresh each time. What I do recall from the first reading was a sense of defeat at the lives of our wee tailors. Every time things were looking up, BAM! something would come along and crush them back down again. It was just one bad thing after another. Each time it looked like things were getting better for the tailors something awful would happen that would just leave me feeling despairing for them. It was as if the dye (sorry about the pun) was well and truly cast (oops, sorry). I was left with the sense that the caste system and corruption in India is so entrenched that there really is very little space for hope. Every time in the story when things were going well I was waiting for the next bad thing to happen. But this second time through it didn't seem nearly as grim a story. Even though the world around Dina, the tailors and Maneck is always threatening to destroy them, inside the padlocked safety of Dina's small crumbling flat they find a way to break free of the old world rules and prejudices and briefly experience joy, kindness and generosity with each other. Ultimately their flat is no fortress against these destructive forces and each are brutally dealt with for daring to want something different, and even though it’s terrible what happens to them, there is something about these characters which stopped me being so bound up in the despair. This time around I wasn't so caught by the despair and hopelessness. The “fine balance” was a little easier to see. Initially was difficult for me to think of the tailors lives as hopeful, and thought this was just a too Pollyanna-ish and perverse view of the horror of what they were living through. It's hard to imagine more tragic circumstance for the poor old tailors, and even Dina suffers the crushing defeat of having to return to the protection of her brother. Is hope the capacity to keep going in the face of despair? Sometimes its easier to recognise hope when it looks more like longing or desire, but I wonder if there is another aspect to hope that is harder to recognise. Is it this aspect of hope that carries us through the even darkest moments of our lives - how we just keep going in spite of whatever is happening? Is hope the quiet, unspoken, and unrecognized knowing that gets us through the troughs of our lives? In this sense hope is more closer aligned to just life itself. Interestingly, it is Maneck, who has by far more opportunities and resources, and who actually gets out of India, who finally succumbs to despair and kills himself. This is the fine balance – hope and despair, death and life.

Sons & Lovers - D.H.Lawrence

This book has been torture. There was no one in this book vaguely attractive. In fact desperate as I was for a sympathetic character I found myself missing the drunken horrid father and wished he come back in and give them all a good smack around the ears. I know Australia says no, but really. This book was like wading through thick goo. Think teenage girl diary (or my own come to think of it). Same entry over and over again for years. It never occurred to me that I could abandon ship (how Master & Commander lives on). Then I saw today that I was reading the wrong book. I was bogged down in some oedipal tragedy while I should have been romping through the woods with trousers down and engines pumping while reading Lady Chatterley's Lover. I can't believe I spent so much time avoiding a book that wasn't even on the list. We were all stuck in something dreadful. Paul Morel stuck between his love for his mother and love for Clara or Miriam, and me stuck with a book I hated. Next!

Sorry Kate, but I did end up jumping ship. But I gave it a good try - 235 pages in fact. Less a novel than a manual for building replica 18th century men-of-war in your own back yard. All that detail of gun blocks, sails, rigging, and ropes. In a sense the perfect book to bring on the nod for a good night sleep. Apparently, O'Brian is the master and commander of the historical novel. He is certainly the master of the apostrophe - t'gallants, fo'c'sle. However, beyond or below the impenetrable detail of all things nautical there is the story between Captain Aubrey and the good doctor Maturin. And following in the tradition of many a good sea faring partnering - Ishmael and Queequeg, Billy Budd (who was a foretopman for God's sake) and Captain Vere, the Skipper and Gilligan. Within the first few pages there is a claim about no man should be killed for the odd bout of buggery, and then we have Maturin and Aubrey playing bagatelles on the viola together. And what are we to make of Captain Aubrey's preference to putting 'by the head'. In the end this book sailed me right into my own doldrums. All in all I wanted more swash buckling, parrots and piracy and less of the a'stroph'.

Love in a Cold Climate

Another romp through the British upper classes – house parties, and gossip. Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh were great mates – the wit, satire and contempt for the upper classes are there. But, it’s difficult to see how this book and Madam Bovary get to be on the same list. Perhaps its all the make over tips from that great ‘aesthete pansie”, Cedric who takes over Hampton and sends Lady Montdore off to the spa for an orange juice only diet – although she eventually breaks out and is busted for breaking out and stuffing elevenses down her throat. This doesn’t dampen Cedric’s resolve. He makes Lady Montdore say “brush” before she comes into a room so that “her face is fixed in a very gay smile”. Watch this face!

Kavalier and Clay

Wow! Bang! Kapow! Splatt! This book packs a punch – the Prague Ghetto and WW2, comic book heroes, morphine addiction, the Arctic Circle, American Nazi bomb plots at Barmitzvahs, a terrible gay rape scene, fathers and sons, sex, love, and loss. This is a great book and definitely should be brought onto the desert island. Thanks to Rachel and Sharon for packing it. Our two heroes, Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, create an enormously popular comic hero, The Escapist, for whom there is no lock or chain that he cannot open to liberate the oppressed and shackled everywhere. It’s no coincidence that this comic book hero is born of Joe, who fled the holocaust, and his Jewish cousin Sam, who is also gay. The story tells how both these men ultimately find the key to their own painful liberation and escape. In this sense the comic book hero is presented here as a golem of their time – those Jewish mythical creatures who are artificially created with supernatural powers. A kosher Frankenstein (duh, just noticed how Jewish that name is). According to Chabon, these creatures are our gestures of hope during times of despair and desperation - our longing for something to free us, to escape, “to slip, like the Escapist, free of the entangling chain of reality and the straitjacket of physical laws”. Rather than join the chorus of the critics of these popular comics which see their escapist fantasies as corrupting, Chabon is suggesting that there is something noble in being able to call forward these heroes who, on our behalf do our bidding or our fighting, and restore the world as a just and fair place. But, the escaping that both Joe and Sam do in the end is not fantasy or fiction. Both Sam and Joe in different ways end up being wound in a final set of chains but manage to escape. And, like the great escape tricks of Houdini, they have their metamorphisis – less a matter of escape, but more a matter of transformation. In the end our two heroes do escape, are transformed, and again it is through love and generosity. The longing and escape into fantasy holds the potential, or keeps the spirit oriented in the right direction. So it got me thinking about the whole idea of hope, and how we can hang onto it in a way where we give up on the present and ironically become hope-less, or how, as in the case of this story, hope is the bright orienting star during the dark stormy nights of despair - it doesn’t lead to hopelessness, but helps us through it. Perhaps this is what Viktor Frankl was referring to when he describes how hope could pull one towards life, and transform our lives, even under the most tormenting of circumstances. I’m also beginning to think about the golem of our own time – ah, easy, the iPad.

Man's Search for Meaning - Vicktor Frankl

It’s one of those books you’ve heard a lot about, but I thought a book about concentration camps would be just too awful. So, when I began reading I was relieved that it was less a detailed account of all the atrocities of life in a camp, and more about the inner psychological experiences of prisoners as they endure the unendurable.

The title of the book says it all really – man’s search for meaning. Frankl writes about the will for meaning, and how we are all compelled to find meaning in our lives. His isn’t a case for religion or dogma, but a call for everyone to find meaning in the living out of our day to day lives – the washing dishes part of life, and also during the most stressful and arduous times of our lives. One of the quotes he uses throughout the book is from Nietzche (yes, he’s on the list somewhere): He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how. Part of surviving the horrors of Auschwitz, for him, was the capacity to know himself, and know that despite all the deprivations, he was always free in how he approached the suffering. About this he said, “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” It is the meaning of one’s life that sustains a life.

He believes that we find meaning in our lives when we look deeper within ourselves and connect our own values and beliefs – our own truth really. He writes about connecting to something bigger than ourselves in these moments, (and throughout our lives) such as our work, our creativity, or our relationships, but ultimately he decides that underlying all of the individual meaning we find in our lives we will find one thing - love. So he presents a lovely paradox, that in times of terrible suffering we oughtn’t forget that we are worthy of suffering.

Finally, once we connect with the meaning of our lives, then there is a responsibility to live congruently, and in fact that is what makes any suffering bearable. He says, “it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly. Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfil the tasks which is constantly sets for each individual.” Oh dear. I got to thinking whether I could accurately identify my own life meaning and values. It’s a great challenge, but even greater is the responsibility which then comes from knowing them.

Rose Boys

This is a book written by Peter Rose, the brother of Robert Rose, both belonging to a Collingwood Football Club dynasty. Their father had been a player, the coach of a grand final team, and vice president. Several uncles also played, one being the president of the club. Robert was the sportsman, and followed the family tradition and played for Collingwood, but he also played at elite level cricket. Peter, is a poet and gay. In 1977, Robert becomes paraplegic following a car accident. Notwithstanding this is a tragic story about real people, it has all the elements of an incredibly powerful yarn with tissue boxes at the ready -sporting heir (golden haired in fact), the gay poet son, and the tragedy.

But there is something in the way the story is told that feels that there is much not said. Somewhere in the book Peter Rose writes something like, it’s amazing what you can bury in order to make an icon, and the book is a loyal tribute to football, the iconic status of their family, and the legend of the father and son. But what is the cost of this loyalty? We know that the mother sacrifices her own singing career to devote herself to being a “Collingwood wife” (or widow?), and with some bitterness says to her daughter-in-law who complains about the dominance of football over family life - you wanted him, so up with it. Ouch!

But perhaps my prejudice about football and cricket got in the way. I mean, the roll call of court appearances, violence, sexual harassment, binge drinking, and alcoholism - and that’s just cricket. Remember when rehab meant physiotherapy? So I cant engage with the same level of romanticism about the club, male bonding and camaraderie that Peter Rose describes. This was the cauldron of the suffering for many a boy who didn't 'make the team'. Peter looks on from the outer, and sees the camaraderie enjoyed by his brother when in the company of his beer addled mates at the club and wonders what it would be like to belong.

I think this is the story of the loyal outsider. He fleetingly refers to his sexuality but provides no detail of what impact this had on the family. It feels a huge omission given who this family is. I imagine he would say something about how the focus of the story was his brother and the impact the accident had on them. But, in doing so, Peter has to leave too much of himself out of the book, and it is poorer for it. He refers to all his partners by an anonymous alphabet code _ "A", "B" etc, and the description of being in a 10 year relationship with someone who never inquires about his family makes me wonder about his capacity to "leave himself out".

Apart from a young life struck down, the tragedy for me was how this sporting fixation of the brother did not prepare him for an engagement with life wider than the oval. With no other interests and with sport the only thing to lubricate interaction with men, Robert was bound to have a very unfulfilling life. It really was a restricted life, and I get the same feeling with the telling of the tale. By staying loyal to this sporting family, and keeping the faith, he ended up with a thin story which ultimately left me cold, disappointed and sad for everyone. Perhaps the real story lay in what could not be said.

Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness. Not so much hard to put down, but hard to get down. So, great books needn’t be great reading, and this is definitely a book for which this applies. The oppressive steamy heat; the imposing and threatening jungle; the cruelty, chaos, and incompetence, and the story being told at night on the damp old Thames, leave quite an impression, and it isn’t pleasant.

So, while there is a story of the dark side of western imperialism (is there a bright side?), it wasn’t always clear to me exactly what was happening, when, and to whom. For a moment I thought I was back with Faulkner. Now this might be due to my galloping dementia, but more likely because I was struggling with my very own heart of darkness. I read the book while undertaking a 5 day fruit and vegetable juice only detox. The foul stinking underbelly of colonialism may well have been my own toxic fug – “The horror. The Horror.”

So, it’s all a bit patchy really – the arrival, the journey up the river, the attack, Marlow’s conversion, who Kirtz actually is. But, perhaps this isn’t all that important – the detail that is. The lasting impact is how I felt while reading it, which also might be the toxic shock, but I did feel sombre and think my face often looked like I was smelling something very unpleasant while reading (again, I don’t discount the effects of the pumpkin juice). Although, perhaps when a story is too big all one is left with is the feeling.

Interestingly, this novella is only about 100 pages long, but it has taken the longest to read so far. Just like pumpkin juice seems to find things I’d rather not know was hiding in nooks and crannies of my deep dark recesses, Heart of Darkness perhaps dredged up my own uncivilised capacities. Perhaps the nausea wasn’t the pumpkin juice after all. However, both were hard to swallow. But I’m glad I did it.

Handful of Dust

I just wanted to read this book aloud. The dialogue is hilarious. So charming, so British, so… ouch! Waugh’s dialogue is delivered like a smiling assassin– the set up, charm, seduction, then the killer blow, and no one really knowing where it came from. Then there are the characters - Polly Cockpurse, Mrs Beaver and Princess Jenny Abdul Akbar.

The book begins as a romp through the interbellum and the “bright young things” of that time – house parties, champagne, private clubs, idleness, and gossip. Hmmmm. Plus ca change....

John Beaver lives on the fringes of the upper-classes and is widely known as the person you call when you need a man at the last minute to fill a spot vacated by an invited guest. He rarely misses an opportunity, however it comes. He seems oblivious to the contempt shown him by those he aspires to join – a bit like the Ricky Gervais character in ‘The Office”, but with better vowels.

Lady Brenda ends up having an affair with Beaver. She moves to London and sets up a flat and the couple becomes a regular feature on the London society scene. She leaves her husband, Tony, to the dreariness of English country life and his up-keep of the ancestral home, and hands her son over to the care of the nanny. Silly old Tony becomes the last man in England to find out that Brenda isn’t really studying economics in London. Then the book takes a chilling turn, where Brenda’s callousness is revealed for all its brutality. Then we head off to the deepest jungles of South America where Tony has an encounter which has to be the inspiration for Stephen King’s “Misery”.

But, what makes this book even more fascinating is knowing that Waugh actually based these characters on people he knew. Not unlike Beaver, Waugh felt an outsider to this privileged world of aristocratic families, and criticism of Waugh often centres around him being a snob and sycophant. Here is Waugh the great observer, contemptuous and somewhat hateful of the very world he is desperate to belong to. Perhaps this is what makes for great satire – astute observation alongside a good dose of bitterness. The next time my own bitterness moves me to take a swipe at Gen Y for their self-serving ways, or their preoccupation with celebrity and status, I’ll remember “Handful of Dust” and recall that everything old is new again. Well, that and my own longing to be young, callous, and self-serving again.

The Sound and the Fury - Part 2

I feel a bit cheated. There should be some reward for completing difficult books. It's like after a week of starvation and deprivation when you jump on the scales only to find no change. I was hoping that eventually all would be revealed like one of those 'magic eye' pictures where you have to stare at the image in soft focus until the 3D image suddenly reveals itself. Never happened. That's it for me and stream of consciousness writing. The confusion, fog, double guessing, frustration, and sense of inadequacy I can get with trying to fathom my own stream of consciousness. But the critics tell us that this is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. In fact the Modern Library rates it as the sixth greatest English-language novel of the twentieth century. Perhaps its an American thing.

In the end there is no incest only a brother trying to think of a way to share the shame of his sister's promiscuity. Apparently, a hand around the shoulder and a box of tissues didn't cross his mind. Another brother throws himself into the river - although not quite clear when that happened. The 'imbecile' gets castrated, but that fact is well hidden among gibberish about a gate been left open. And all of this is blamed on the muddy knickers of their sister. See what I mean?

I noticed that after spending such a difficult time with all these characters I didn't really know them nor their real story any better. Yet, isn't this why we love reading, to be immersed in the fullness of another's life, or have the world revealed afresh through the eyes of another? Perhaps it's a stalker thing.

In the end I was just frustrated that the richness of the characters and the story itself was obscured by the writing style. I was always too conscious of the author's hand rather than the characters themselves. I'm thinking about smarty pant chefs who so work over the food and your left wishing you'd ordered the steak sandwich. Think all things foam and Shannon Bennett. To me this book is the beginning of the ascendancy of 'the idea' over 'beauty' in Art. Given the books' focus on consciousness and thoughts it's no wonder it feels like the soul is missing - clever but!

The Sound and the Fury - Part 1

What the ***** was that all about. Well at least this book came with a warning, in the form of Richard Hughes' Introduction. He encourages the reader to persevere past the first section which really makes very little sense at all. In fact he suggests reading the book a couple of time. Clearly he has no idea of my schedule. The first section recalls April 7th 1928 as perceived by a 33 year old 'congenital imbecile'. There are 10,000 characters with names that give no indication of gender or whether black or white. There's also a bit of time travelling me thinks. I've made it to the next section June 2nd 1910 and I think there might be a bit of hanky panky going on between brother and sister and an impending suicide, but since I don't know who's who, their ages, their relationship to each other, or what time we are in, I'll hold back on pretending I have any real grasp on anything so mundane as narrative or plot. However, I do have a hunch that someone might have given this book to James Joyce to read, and we know where that got us.

Madame Bovary

Was Emma Bovary written as a sympathetic character? Mostly I think this is a cautionary tale of the destructiveness of always having your eyes set on the horizon waiting for something to happen, " Like a shipwrecked sailor she scanned her solitude with desperate eyes for the sight of a white sail far off on the misty horizon. She had no idea what chance would be... But every morning when she woke she hoped to find it there. She listened to every sound, started out of bed, and was surprised when nothing came. Then at sunset , sadder every day, she longed for the morrow.'

Emma Bovary was blighted with a destructive longing; that writhing, wriggling, restlessness that nothing is right and hoping and searching for that someone or something that will make her feel alive and contented. Miserable, dissatisfied, and enraged she

looked beyond herself in order to feel complete.

I loved the part where she is being seduced by Rodolphe, and interspersed with the flowery deceitful language of his seduction are the cries from the Agricultural Show judges announcing winners for "best manure" or "pigs". It's a lovely juxtaposition between what's real and the artifice of her life and fantasy. Ultimately Emma's 'constant craving' destroys her and her family. The book is a great account of the Global Financial Crisis or of the passions that fueled it - the dissatisfaction with one's lot and an insatiable hunger for things and people we hope will "soften the bitterness of (one's) life".

A more sympathetic reading of Emma might be that her talents, spirit, genius, or self was thwarted by small town life where women were destined to have unfulfilled lives. But, Emma pins her salvation or hope for contentedness in others and not in her own self expression. In this sense Emma does not take her place in the pantheon of courageous women. For her, deliverance from her suffering is achieved by someone else and not herself.