2007 in review: #1 — Best reads of 2007: fiction

There’s a tag for that so if you hit it you’ll find them all duly noted. Just as well, as I would never have remembered them all.

However, cutting out a couple of eccentric entries, I have pared the list down to a First Fifteen.

 

Author	Title	Post
Janette Turner Hospital	Orpheus Lost	Welcome to our nightmare
Elmore Leonard	La Brava	Contrasts in my recent reading and viewing
Andrew McGahan	Underground	The novel Andrew Bolt hates and Zadie Smith’s 21st century classic
Zadie Smith	On Beauty	Easily the best novel I have read so far this year*
Dai Sijie 戴思杰	Mr Muo’s Travelling Couch	Sino-Gallic firecrackers
Kate Grenville	The Secret River	May have been, very possibly…
Anne Holt	What Is Mine	Promised review catch-up
Reginald Hill	The Death of Dalziel	More reviews of good stuff from Surry Hills Library
Alexander McCall Smith	Blue Shoes and Happiness	Two very different works of crime fiction
Robert Drewe	Grace	Robert Drewe Grace (2005)
Michael Nava	Rag and Bone	Book and DVD backlog
Andrew O’Hagan	Be Near Me	Negotiating dangerous ground
Salman Rushdie	Shalimar the Clown	as above
Milan Kundera	Ignorance	Milan Kundera Ignorance (2002)
Karin Fossum	When the Devil Holds the Candle	Two crime fiction novels

 

The top five? Ignorance, The Secret River, On Beauty, Orpheus Lost, The Death of Dalziel.

Welcome to our nightmare

 Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital (Australia May 2007; USA Canada October 2007):  

I’ve always been intensely interested in examining ordinary human beings, people without political agendas, who are suddenly caught up in the fist of history and crisis. If someone happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, what happens to their lives from that point onwards? How do they negotiate life, history, politics thereafter?

I suppose I can trace the birth of this intense interest to something that happened to me when we were living in a village in South India in 1977. I was with my two young children in an exceedingly ramshackle taxi heading from the village to the city market in Trivandrum. It was a time of political upheaval in India. Riots broke out, and suddenly our taxi was surrounded by a mob waving the banners of the Communist Party of South India. The taxi could not move forward. Our taxi driver was very frightened and was trembling violently. The rioters were drumming on the taxi roof and windows. The children and I were in the back seat and I felt that weird and absolute calm which is actually shock. I had an arm around each child and can still vividly remember the two dominant thoughts in my head: 1) I must make the children feel safe with me and 2) No one will ever know what happened to us. In fact, the tense situation only lasted a few minutes and then the crowd let the taxi move slowly forward. Since then, I’ve been aware of how suddenly and how randomly political events of which one is only dimly aware can disrupt a life.

This has to be in my top three best reads of 2007!

Against certainty

Julie Galambush interview. (If that doesn’t work… or here.)

Allow me to recommend a book as a Top Read of 2007 even if only three people in Australia have read it. The Reluctant Parting by Julie Galambush (Harper Collins 2006) is one of the clearer and more authoritative accounts of the context and origins of the New Testament that I have read. It does not venture too much into the speculative and fanciful, as some in this area do. Galambush has good judgement as an historian. An even greater blessing is that she is readable!

Contrasts in my recent reading and viewing

I’m a sucker for film noir. Play “spot the movie” with this.

So I have enjoyed Elmore Leonard’s La Brava: wickedly good. The novel is a riff on the idea of film and celluloid, what is and what isn’t simulacrum… Makes it sound quite pomo, doesn’t it?

“He’s been taking pictures three years, look at the work,” Maurice said. “Here, this guy. Look at the pose, the expression. Who’s he remind you of?”

“He looks like a hustler,” the woman said.

“He is a hustler, the guy’s a pimp. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Here, this one. Exotic dancer backstage. Remind you of anyone?”

“The girl?”

“Come on, Evelyn, the shot. The feeling he gets. The girl trying to look lovely, showing you her treasures, and they’re not bad. But look at the dressing room, all the glitzy crap, the tinfoil cheapness.”

“You want me to say Diane Arbus?”

“I want you to say Diane Arbus, that would be nice. I want you to say Duane Michaels, Danny Lyon. I want you to say Winogrand, Lee Friedlander. You want to go back a few years? I’d like very much for you to say Walker Evans, too.”

“Your old pal.”

“Long, long time ago. Even before your time.”

A best read of 2007, even if the book is almost 25 years old!

How Downer, Howard, Nelson and company are out of the debate…

I wonder if the gentlemen above ever read the magazine on the right, or if they have taken note of such recent books as After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads (Profile Books 2006 — $6.95 at your friendly remainder shop!) It appears a substantial portion of the Right have been embracing reality while we were looking the other way. Just what the implications of this are for the American elections remains to be seen; there are implications for our elections, because there is no doubt that what I am reading in After the Neocons and in the magazine on the right is far more Kevin Rudd friendly than the current Australian government’s ongoing love affair with the failing but horribly dangerous policies of the current US regime. This is not to say all these people are born-again liberals now: far from it. But there is more of reason in what they say and publish.

Fukuyama, for his sins, had been one of the signatories of the Project for a New American Century back in the Clinton era, and we know what that led to. There is a profile of Fukuyama here, and I commend the entire IRC Right Web Program from which that comes.

From the current American Interest: After Bush leads with an article by Barry R Posen.

Bright and shining lies?

Domestic

Andrew Charlton* (right) Ozonomics (Sydney, Random House, 2007) promises to enable me to penetrate past the Australian government’s carefully crafted self-image as “a safe pair of hands”. He is certainly better looking than John Howard… Now I have read a bit of this eminently readable book I am impressed. To be honest, I am not sure if it is because Charlton tells me what I have long suspected — that the “safe pair of hands” is a deception, perhaps a self-deception if you wish to be charitable, a chimera, a myth — or because he is right. Whatever the reason, I am sucked in, impressed, convinced even. I will leave you to make up your own mind, commending the book to your attention. It is a BEST READ 2007 as far as I am concerned.

You may read Charlton in shorter form in the current issue of <a href=”http://www.themonthly.com.au/tm/node/680″ target=”_blan THE NATION REVIEWED

“Interest rates were not only central to the 2004 election. They have been a recurring theme of the past 11 years of Coalition government. Even more importantly, it is almost certain that interest rates will be a major theme, perhaps the major theme, of the next federal election campaign. The story Howard and Costello will tell the Australian people will go, roughly speaking, like this. Under Labor interest rates are always unacceptably high. Under the Coalition they have been and will remain low. They will suggest to the Australian people that interest rates are controlled by governments and directly linked to federal budget deficits and surpluses. As no part of this story is actually true, the next election campaign will be conducted on the basis of a series of seriously misleading or straightforwardly false Howard-Costello claims.”

In the Monthly Comment, Andrew Charlton identifies the myth fundamental to the government’s assertion that only it can keep interest rates low by delivering a budget in surplus. Not only do countries such as the US run enormous budget deficits while maintaining low interest rates; because Australia is a small part of a global economy and prey to its fluctuations, the budgetary actions of its government - its borrowing - can only have a small effect on the nation’s interest rates. By unravelling the central economic claim of John Howard and Peter Costello – that interest rates would necessarily be higher under a Labor government, a claim wrongly given credibility by Labor under Mark Latham during the 2004 election campaign – Charlton points to a far greater concern than interest rates alone. Australians, encouraged by the current government, have accrued record personal debt, leaving them vulnerable to even minor rate rises, and consequently to the economic spin of the Coalition.

“Economic policy has been one of the Coalition’s key electoral strengths. The great triumph of Howard and Costello has been to convince Australians of a spurious link between his government’s fiscal conservatism and low interest rates. It is a story that may play well in the marginal electorates, but is also one that doesn’t make economic sense. Interest rates have been flat since 1996, when Howard and Costello came to power. Interest rates have enjoyed consistently low inflation, and the nation has enjoyed a benign economic climate and a new monetary policy which has been implemented competently by the Reserve Bank.”

*You may download an MP3 of Andrew Charlton (and Will Elliot) from Richard Fidler’s program on ABC Queensland. There are reviews of the book here, here, and here: “Andrew Charlton is 28 years old and has one of those CVs that makes you jealous. He was a Rhodes Scholar, has worked at the OECD and United Nations, and has spent the last couple of years at the London School of Economics. He has co-written several academic papers and a book with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz.” His LSE home page is here.

Foreign policy

Go to the American magazine of that name and study The Terrorism Index.

Americans are thinking more about the war on terror than ever before. But that doesn’t mean they’ve come to see this issue in the black-and-white terms preferred by many elected leaders. The combination of bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, continued terrorist attacks from Britain to Somalia, and a presidential election in which candidates are defining themselves based on how they would stare down the threats has many seeing shades of gray. Six years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, just 29 percent of Americans believe the United States is winning the war on terror—the lowest percentage at any point since 9/11. But Americans also consider themselves safe. Six in 10 say that they do not believe another terrorist attack is imminent. Likewise, more than 60 percent of Americans now say that the decision to invade Iraq was a mistake. Yet around half report that they would support similar military action to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

Such seemingly incompatible points of view may stem in part from the fact that we are increasingly asked to reconcile a bewildering array of threats—and a nebulous enemy that defies convention. In Iraq, for instance, the same surge in U.S. forces that is meant to help pacify Baghdad only escalates violence elsewhere in the country. In the broader Middle East and South Asia, some of the same countries that are now the United States’ most crucial allies have also been guilty of cultivating the very terrorists we look to bring to justice. Deciphering priorities from such difficult paradoxes can be hard. So, how can one determine whether the war on terror is making America safer or more dangerous?

To find out, FOREIGN POLICY and the Center for American Progress once again turned to the very people who have run the United States’ national security apparatus during the past half century. Surveying more than 100 of America’s top foreign-policy experts—Republicans and Democrats alike—the FOREIGN POLICY/Center for American Progress Terrorism Index is the only comprehensive, nonpartisan effort to mine the highest echelons of the nation’s foreign-policy establishment for its assessment of how the United States is fighting the war on terror. First released in July 2006, and again last February, the index attempts to draw definitive conclusions about the war’s priorities, policies, and progress. Its participants include people who have served as secretary of state, national security advisor, senior White House aides, top commanders in the U.S. military, seasoned intelligence professionals, and distinguished academics. Eighty percent of the experts have served in the U.S. government—including more than half in the Executive Branch, 32 percent in the military, and 21 percent in the intelligence community…

No effort of the U.S. government was more harshly criticized, however, than the war in Iraq. In fact, that conflict appears to be the root cause of the experts’ pessimism about the state of national security. Nearly all—92 percent—of the index’s experts said the war in Iraq negatively affects U.S. national security, an increase of 5 percentage points from a year ago. Negative perceptions of the war in Iraq are shared across the political spectrum, with 84 percent of those who describe themselves as conservative taking a dim view of the war’s impact. More than half of the experts now oppose the White House’s decision to “surge” additional troops into Baghdad, a remarkable 22 percentage-point increase from just six months ago. Almost 7 in 10 now support a drawdown and redeployment of U.S. forces out of Iraq…

And that is just a taste! Go and read it all very carefully and remember it whenever Howard, Nelson or Downer are “explaining” our foreign policy. Our policy???

The novel Andrew Bolt hates and Zadie Smith’s 21st century classic

 Underground by Andrew McGahan (2006): Andrew Bolt hated it! Now there’s a literary critic to take notice of, eh! It must be a good book… Andrew Bolt concludes:

It is said that a mark of the great artists is to see us as we really are. If McGahan is a winner of our top literary prize we must conclude this country has no great novelists at all. Truly, ideology does not just blind a writer but strangles his art. How many more examples must Australia endure?

In all honesty I have to say that Underground is not nearly as good as the same author’s The White Earth, but even that novel did not impress me as much as some others:

Easily the best novel I have read so far this year*

 On Beauty by Zadie Smith (2005). “…the sheer novelistic intelligence – expansive, witty and magnanimous – that irradiates the whole enterprise.”

What is it about? I take this summary from the Village Voice article linked to the picture on the right.

…an ambitiously sprawling, gentle homage to E.M. Forster’s Howards End disguised as an American campus novel. Like Forster’s book, it depicts the collision of two very different families: the boisterously liberal Belseys and the deeply traditionalist Kipps. Howard Belsey is a white art history professor in the throes of midlife crisis. His marriage to vibrant African American wife Kiki is collapsing, due to his unfaithfulness. And he’s devoting too much psychic energy to an ideological pissing war with Monty Kipps, an Anglo-Caribbean provocateur who arrives at Belsey’s elite Massachusetts university disparaging affirmative action and generally aggravating the liberal Belseys with his ultraconservative rhetoric.

Book and DVD notes

Personality by Andrew O’Hagan (pb 2004). “O’Hagan takes as his theme the cult of celebrity, which he shows to be a modern malaise grounded in insincerity and manipulation.” Not entirely irrelevant to my thoughts on Andrew Johns yesterday.

This is a remarkable exercise in ventriloquism. Set mainly in Scotland and England, the novel traces the career of a child star, Maria Tambini, gradually revealing layers of past experience through three generations back to World War II, internment, and the fascisti. The mechanism of celebrity and its effects are explored compassionately. Only the ending I found just a bit melodramatic. There is even an Australian connection in that the Dunera rates a mention. In my Best Reads of 2007 for sure!

Sino-Gallic firecrackers

 Mr Muo’s Travelling Couch (or The Complex of Judge Di) by Dai Sijie 戴思杰 (2005). Born in China, writes in French. Dai Sijie is also a film-maker.

Imagine Monkey (above from Aaron Shepard’s retelling) from The Journey to the West meets Cervantes and Rabelais via Freud and Lacan in modern China, ranging from the Cultural Revolution to Falun Gong, from Hainan Island in the south to Sichuan and Chengdu in the west, to Beijing. Imagine a sex scene punctuated by ruminations about Shanghai dumplings. Imagine bizarre scenes evocative of Grand Guignol. Imagine the damsel in distress is called “Volcano of the Old Moon”. Imagine the grotesque Judge Di who fashions art objects from the shell casings of bullets fired in executions. All are in this utterly delightful, very funny novel. The constant uncertainty whether psychoanalysis (whether Freudian of Lacanian) is or is not fortune telling is just one of many cross-cultural jokes that run through Mr Muo’s Travelling Couch. I loved it.

Definitely one of 2007’s top reads.

Just something to think about…

WARNING: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are warned that the following video may contain images of deceased persons.

I spent so much time last night responding to Adrian’s comment on my The Secret River post that I missed Enough Rope on the road in Mt Isa; still that’s not a problem these days, is it? We can all watch it now…

May have been, very possibly…

Substantial additions have been made to this post, thanks to Adrian.

 The Secret River by Kate Grenville (2005).  Grenville has also written one of the best books on writing that I know. (Australian historical fiction)

As I said last week:

I mentioned in my comment on Jim’s post that I am at last reading The Secret River by Kate Grenville, and I am enjoying it thoroughly. I think this reading is partly responsible for my looking into Macquarie connections to Cleveland House here in Surry Hills, a building I see every day! The site linked to the novel there is Kate Grenville’s own site, thoroughly worth exploring, especially the section on fiction and history. The Secret River (that is, the Hawkesbury) attracted some little controversy on that score, much of it misplaced. But I will take that up when I review the novel. You will see I have already given The Secret River a best read of 2007 tag though.

That still stands, now that I have finished.

The “Secret River” is today a major tourist attraction, and more, just north of Sydney, parts of it indeed inside Greater Sydney.

Promised review catch-up

 This is one I picked up just on spec and it has proved to be one of the best reads so far this year: Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible  by Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet. You may read a very long interview with the two authors/editors there. As Kevin Holtsberry’s review on BlogCritic says, the book is hard to describe, but it works brilliantly for me.

In its most basic form it is a series of essays alternated with stories from life on the road in search of the weird underside of spirituality in America. The road stories are told by the web site’s founding editors Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet. The essays are told by a variety of writers but are a loose attempt to recreate scripture for the modern world. These essays take on various books of the Bible but from sort of angry, modern, heretical perspective. It is as if the authors approach the Bible not as divine revelation but cultural and historical literature to be deconstructed and reinvented. Instead of the traditional Christian “what is God trying to tell me”, they ask “what does this say about humanity?” The result is a sort of religious and literary anthropology. The perspective isn’t exactly hostile but neither is it particularly sympathetic either. It has a certain cynical fascination; interested in exploring the ideas but ultimately rejecting the traditional answers.

When it works it can be quite interesting…

Reading, reading…

Quite a curriculum now appears on my bookshelf, so it is time to catch up a little. But first, did you happen to see First Tuesday Book Club on ABC last night? It was most entertaining: Shane Maloney was hilarious, off to a good start when Jennifer Byrne addressed him in her opening as “Murray” (the central character in Maloney’s excellent crime fiction novels) instead of “Shane”! Maloney’s put-down of Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World was comprehensively bullshit-free: so refreshing! “Like wading waste-deep through kapok…”

Now some quick reviews of my own:

Think space: more on Bishop Spong

Ecclesiastes as transgressive text, and Bishop Spong’s Christianity

I mentioned last week that I was reading Ecclesiastes. It really is an amazing little book. The notes in the OUP World’s Classics Bible (an excellent edition for students of literature) make the point that this strikes modern readers as a truly transgressive text, deconstructing “a great deal of the grandiose, and chauvinistic claims made elsewhere in the national literature of biblical Israel.” Those who try to accomodate the book to orthodoxy and traditional piety “[empty] his words of any meaning whatsoever and [replace] them by meanings derived from other parts of the Bible — a practice virtually anticipated and warned against in Eccles. 12: 10-12.” We are also told the Hebrew is particularly difficult in Ecclesiastes and we should consult modern translations as the 1611 English Bible conspicuously fails in a number of places in this book.

There is still a minority in the USA* which believes that the King James Version (as they insist on calling the 1611 Bible) is itself the Word of God, a monumentally stupid proposition by any standards. Somewhat gay King James, who translated none of it himself, may well have been amused. Just about as silly was the Catholic Church with its centuries of insisting that Saint Jerome’s Latin Vulgate Version was your actual word of God, something the Catholics dropped in the 1960s. On the tail end of that period though the Right Reverend Ronald Knox produced an English version of the Vulgate, though he did constantly refer to the Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek originals. I like Knox’s translation, for all the problems that arise when you translate a translation. In Ecclesiastes he does a splendid job. It isn’t “inclusive” in language, but I really don’t care. While I favour the use of inclusive language myself, I have doubts about retrospectively applying this to ancient texts. It smacks too much of crackbrained but well-intentioned reactions to the use of “nigger” in Huckleberry Finn. Anyway, inclusiveness of language (or the lack of it) is really the least of the Bible’s problems for the 21st century reader, something Bishop Spong tackles head-on in his recent books; but more on that later.