Tag: Novel

Read https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/Unbury-the-Dead/Fiona-Hardy/9781923046771

Best mates Teddy and Alice are hired hands with flexible moral boundaries. Whatever the mess, they can be relied upon to fix it with no questions asked. But sometimes it’s not as simple as cleaning up.

Teddy is searching the suburbs for a missing teenager with her occasional sidekick Art, while Alice’s mission is to drive one of Australia’s richest men along Victoria’s east coast to his final resting place before anybody finds out he’s dead. But when a surprise revelation sees their cases collide, Teddy and Alice turn the tables on their wealthy employers to shake out the truth.

Unbury the Dead is a superbly fresh and pacey high-stakes drama with two irresistible heroines.

Unbury the Dead | Book by Fiona Hardy | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster AU 

Unbury the Dead takes the reader on a suspenseful journey exploring the world of fixers set in Victoria.

Best mates Teddy and Alice are hired hands with flexible moral boundaries. Whatever the mess, they can be relied upon to fix it with no questions asked. But sometimes it’s not as simple as cleaning up.

Source: Fiona Hardy – Unbury the Dead by Australian Arts Review

It is a reminder that opening up coffins can reveal more than expected. With this I was reminded about something from Trent Dalton’s Gravity Let Me Go

Everyone has a storage box of life … Are you the skeleton in your closet

Source: Gravity Let Me Go by Trent Dalton

What I enjoyed about this novel is that every choice has a consequence and no one is untainted. Everyone is both good and bad.

He was a man who deserved to be found, because everyone does

Source: Unbury the Dead by Fiona Hardy

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Farewell_to_Arms

A Farewell to Arms is a novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway, set during the Italian campaign of World War I. First published in 1929, it is a first-person account of an American, Frederic Henry, serving as a lieutenant (Italian: tenente) in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army. The novel describes a love affair between the American expatriate and an English nurse, Catherine Barkley.

A Farewell to Arms – Wikipedia by A Farewell to Arms – Wikipedia

Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms follows Frederic Henry, an American ambulance officer in the Italian army during World War I, and his love affair with the English nurse Catherine Barkley. I wrote a longer response here.

I listened to this book via Libby.

Continue reading “📚 A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway)”

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_(novel)

Written as a dark, comic fable, the story concerns an advertising executive, Harry Joy, who briefly ‘dies’ of a heart attack. On being resuscitated, he realizes that the life he has previously drifted amiably through is in fact Hell – literally so to Harry. His wife is unfaithful, while his son is selling drugs, and his daughter is a communist selling herself to buy them. In one of the novel’s more shocking scenes, glimpsed through a window, incest occurs.

Redemption comes in the form of Honey Barbara – a pantheist, healer and prostitute. In the words of the book’s blurb “Honey is to Harry as Isis is to Osiris. Together they conquer Hell and retire to the forest where their children inherit the legend of paradise regained.” But Harry must die for a second time to be truly saved.

Bliss (novel) – Wikipedia

I remember reading Bliss a long time ago. However, it was interesting to return to it. Although a different novel, there was something about the capturing of place that reminded me of Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus. I was also intrigued with the way in which Bliss can be considered a story about stories. That is, stories about identity, about advertisements, about nationalism, about myth, about the said and unsaid.

Highlights

He did other American things (for he was an American), like insisting on iced water at table and then drinking spirits throughout the meal, which was noticed by everybody and not always approved of. The town had an ambivalent attitude towards Americans, envying their power and wishing to reject it and embrace it all at once. In business you could never be sure whether it was an asset or a liability to be an American.

 

Bettina did not give up her dreams so easily. She spoke of New York to no one. She secretly married it to another dream, rolled the two together, harboured them within her and let them grow. She cultivated Americans and read their magazines. She saved money and put it in a special account. She did exercises to preserve her body for that time of arrival.

 

‘There are three sorts of people in Hell. Captives, like us. Actors. And Those in Charge. What do you think?’
‘Who are the Actors?’
‘Most of them. They work for Those in Charge.’
‘To persecute the Captives?’
‘Yes.’
‘They’re Actors; acting; not what they seem.’
‘Mmmm. What do you think?’

 

While she waited she became more American than the Americans. She supported their wars, saw their movies, bought their products, despised their enemies. Even their most trivial habits were adopted as articles of faith and there was always iced water on the table at Palm Avenue.

 

‘It is an epidemic,’ Adrian Clunes said angrily. ‘And wait. You wait for another five years. This,’ he tapped the paper, ‘is what we get for how we live. And believe me, it is just hotting up.’

 

Walking was the best thing when you hurt. It was better than dope and better than eating. It was better than fucking and better than sleeping. You just emptied your mind of everything so that the inside of your head was like an empty terracotta jar and no matter what happened you kept it empty. You guarded its emptiness with your eyes and your ears and you did not even stop to consider where you were going. In this way you always arrived at the right place.

 

‘You think you’re a real smart dude,’ Ken said to David, ‘but those coppers aren’t dumb. They’ll know you knocked off that ticket.’

Note: Harry Joy or Mr Joy, David Joy travelling as Bettina. Examples of fluid identity.

He was merely sewing together the bright patchworks of lives, legends, myths, beliefs, hearsay into a splendid cloak that gave a richer glow to all their lives. He knew when it was right to tell one story and not another. He knew how a story could give strength or hope. He knew stories, important stories, so sad he could hardly tell them for weeping.

And also he gave value to a story so that it was something of worth, as important, in its way, as a strong house or a good dam. He insisted that the story was not his, and not theirs either. You must give something, he told the children, a sapphire or blue bread made from cedar ash. And what began as a game ended as a ritual.

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_the_King

The Return of the King is the third and final volume of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, following The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. It was published in 1955. The story begins in the kingdom of Gondor, which is soon to be attacked by the Dark Lord Sauron.

The Return of the King – Wikipedia by The Return of the King – Wikipedia

There were two things that surprised me on re-reading The Return of the King, one being the return to The Shire after it all, the other the pace at which everything happens. It is interesting to contrast these two points with Peter Jackson’s adaptation.

I was encouraged to re-read this book after finding an audiobook read by Andy Serkis.

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Towers

The Two Towers, first published in 1954, is the second volume of J. R. R. Tolkien’s high fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings. It is preceded by The Fellowship of the Ring and followed by The Return of the King. The volume’s title is ambiguous, as five towers are named in the narrative, and Tolkien himself gave conflicting identifications of the two towers. The narrative is interlaced, allowing Tolkien to build in suspense and surprise.

The Two Towers – Wikipedia by The Two Towers – Wikipedia

It is interesting returning to a book that you know. One of the things that I had forgotten was that Saruman does not die.

I was encouraged to re-read this book after finding an audiobook read by Andy Serkis.

Read https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9781460713334/gravity-let-me-go-the-astonishing-new-novel-from-the-bestselling-author-of-boy-swallows-universe-and-lola-in-the-mirror/

How will you ever know how the story ends, if you let the story go?

Source: Gravity Let Me Go: The astonishing new novel from the bestselling author of BOY SWALLOWS UNIVERSE and LOLA IN THE MIRROR
by Trent Dalton

—

Trent Dalton’s Gravity Let Me Go is a novel that interweaves a gripping true-crime murder mystery with a deeply personal exploration of marriage, ambition, and self-deception associated with the ‘storage box of life’.

The story is centered on Noah Cork, a true-crime journalist in suburban Brisbane who has just published the scoop of a lifetime: a book about a cold-blooded killer who used his own letterbox to leave clues leading to a dead body. However, it is as much about his life and family as anything else.

As Gravity Let Me Go opens, Noah Cork is celebrating the release of his debut non-fiction book: an investigation into the murder of local mother Tamsin Fellows.
It’s a scoop that arrived in the nick of time, as Noah considers giving up crime writing for good. The note in his mailbox, signed “TF”, sends him hunting for clues, via the local reservoir, a church cemetery and a long-abandoned house.
In that house, he finds Tamsin’s remains in the oven — an image that haunts him. He thinks he sees her skeleton everywhere, whether in his closet or waiting for a bus, which he attributes to a “post-book-publication mental breakdown”.
But Noah isn’t only haunted by Tamsin. He feels guilty about the six months he spent writing the book in his shed, ignoring his wife, Rita, and two daughters, Erin and Clem.

Source: In Trent Dalton’s new book Gravity Let Me Go, the bestselling author interrogates himself by Hannah Story and Claire Nichols

I always find myself conflicted with Dalton’s writing. It is always so easy to get pulled into, yet something also feels strangely off. I wondered if it is that there is always something magical about Dalton’s world. For example, this book reminded me of Marcus Zuzak’s The Messenger, which also has elements of magic. At the least, there is something magical about Dalton as a speaker and his seemingly openness and humility. However, I was intrigued with Beejay Silcox’s description of ’emotional performance’:

Gravity Let Me Go feels like an earnest book. A hand-on-heart book. We’re told that it’s the author’s most personal story yet. But emotional performance is not the same as emotional depth. Dalton’s high-yield gamble is that we can’t tell the difference. Noah certainly can’t. And so his self-castigation passes for atonement; his sentimentality passes for courage; his terror at losing his family passes for loving them well. And his ethical queasiness passes for journalistic integrity.

Source: Gravity Let Me Go by Trent Dalton review – ocker crime caper plagued by more than a beleaguered ballsack by Beejay Silcox

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howards_End

Howards End is a novel by E. M. Forster, first published in 1910, about social conventions, codes of conduct and relationships in turn-of-the-century England. Howards End is considered by many to be Forster’s masterpiece.[1] The book was conceived in June 1908 and worked on throughout the following year; it was completed in July 1910.[2]

Howards End – Wikipedia

Howard’s End is a novel about connections with place, class and people. I am intrigued to compared it here with D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and the way the two novels of the time explore the question of class.

I listened to Steven Crossley’s reading via Audible.

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fellowship_of_the_Ring

The Fellowship of the Ring is the first of three volumes of the epic novel[1] The Lord of the Rings by the English author J. R. R. Tolkien; it is followed by The Two Towers and The Return of the King. The action takes place in the fictional universe of Middle-earth. The first edition was published on 29 July 1954 in the United Kingdom, and consists of a foreword in which the author discusses the writing of The Lord of the Rings, a prologue titled “Concerning Hobbits, and other matters”, and the main narrative divided into two “books”.

The Fellowship of the Ring – Wikipedia by The Fellowship of the Ring – Wikipedia

With Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo Baggins sets out on the journey to destroy the one ring to rule them all, a journey destined only for him, supported by friends and comrades along the way. With Frodo’s help along the way, it encourages me to re-read Joseph Campbell’s work on the hero’s journey in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The Fellowship of the Ring sets up the departure, with Frodo’s call to adventure, his initial reluctance, his mentors and aids in Gandolf and Aragorn, and his crossing of the threshold in leaving the shire and engaging with the road of trials. Interestingly, both books were published at the same time.

I was encouraged to re-read this book after finding an audiobook read by Andy Serkis.

Continue reading “📚 The Fellowship of the Ring (J.R.R. Tolkien)”

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit

The Hobbit is set in Middle-earth and follows home-loving Bilbo Baggins, the titular hobbit who joins the wizard Gandalf and the thirteen dwarves of Thorin’s Company on a quest to reclaim the dwarves’ home and treasure from the dragon Smaug. Bilbo’s journey takes him from his peaceful rural surroundings into more sinister territory.

Source: Wikipedia

I stumbled upon a reading of Tolkien’s books by Andy Serkis, the actor who played Golem in the film adaptation. I had read the book before and seen the films. Coming back to it, I feel like that there are so many moments were the narrative could break and fall apart, the journey stops, but there is always something which keeps it moving, a gift or a discovery.

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_(novel)

Kim is a picaresque novel by English author Rudyard Kipling. It was first published serially in McClure’s Magazine from December 1900 to October 1901 as well as in Cassell’s Magazine from January to November 1901, and first published in book form by Macmillan & Co. Ltd in October 1901. The novel is notable for its detailed portrait of the people, culture, and varied religions of India: “The book presents a vivid picture of India, its teeming populations, religions, and superstitions, and the life of the bazaars and the road.”[1] The story unfolds against the backdrop of the Great Game, the political conflict between Russia and Britain in Central Asia. The novel popularized the phrase and idea of the Great Game.[2]

Source: Wikipedia

Kim by Rudyard Kipling follows the life of Kimball O’Hara, an orphaned Irish boy living in Lahore. It provides an insight into British India. It was interesting to compare the insight into colonialism with E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India.

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_and_Lovers

Sons and Lovers is a 1913 novel by the English writer D. H. Lawrence. It traces emotional conflicts through the protagonist, Paul Morel, and his suffocating relationships with a demanding mother and two very different lovers, which exert complex influences on the development of his manhood. The novel was originally published by Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd., London, and Mitchell Kennerley Publishers, New York. While the novel initially received a lukewarm critical reception, along with allegations of obscenity, it is today regarded as a masterpiece by many critics and is often regarded as Lawrence’s finest achievement. It tells us more about Lawrence’s life and his phases, as his first was when he lost his mother in 1910 to whom he was particularly attached. And it was from then that he met Frieda Richthofen, and around this time that he began conceiving his two other great novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love, which had more sexual emphasis and maturity.

Source: Wikipedia

D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers is a novel that recounts the life and relationships of Paul Morel from childhood into adulthood. Along the way, it unpacks Morel’s relationship with his mother and two women, Miriam and Clara. The novel does not necessarily provide a linear structure with clear outcomes and resolutions. Instead it captures the messiness and ambiguity of life that lingers long afterwards. Celebrating the 100 year anniversary, Blake Morrison captures it well:

For those new to his work, Sons and Lovers is the place to start. Though it came after The White Peacock and The Trespasser, it reads like a first novel. This isn’t only because it’s life writing, recreating scenes from the author’s own experience. Nor is it because the story concerns childhood and adolescence and all that go with them, including fear, shame, self‑consciousness, emotional hypersensitivity, sexual awakening, and the hubristic certainty that (as Paul Morel puts it) one is “going to alter the face of the earth in some way”. There’s also the freshness and intensity with which Lawrence presents the Morel family – as if this was the only family in the world where the parents don’t get on, the father drinks, the mother resents her son’s girlfriends, money is short, art and literature become a refuge, and so on. At 27, Lawrence was well-educated and widely read, but the style of Sons and Lovers is wonderfully unknowing – no distancing English irony breaks the spell. Irony wasn’t in Lawrence’s nature, and at the time he wrote the book he didn’t have the leisure for it anyway.
…
It is a difficult novel to classify, whatever the terms – not quite a Bildungsroman, a novel of growing up, since Paul isn’t exclusively the focus of attention; nor a Kunstlerroman, a novel about a writer or artist, since Lawrence, unlike Joyce in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, treats aesthetic aspirations as secondary to an emotional and sexual education. “Gothic” or “pastoral” won’t do, either, though there are elements of both. Perhaps “social-realist” comes closest, though not if it implies Dickens or Trollope. “A book which is not a copy of other books has its own construction,” Lawrence wrote. He was remaking the English novel, which is why Sons and Lovers fits none of the categories.

Source: Sons and Lovers: a century on by Blake Morrison

Reading Sons and Lovers, I was reminded of Werther in Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. In particular, there is a psychological depth in both books, that explore inner. In a letter to Edward Garnett, Lawrence summarised the plot in a letter making connections with Goethe:

It follows this idea: a woman of character and refinement goes into the lower class, and has no satisfaction in her own life. She has had a passion for her husband, so her children are born of passion, and have heaps of vitality. But as her sons grow up she selects them as lovers – first the eldest, then the second. These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love of their mother – urged on and on. But when they come to manhood, they can’t love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives, and holds them. It’s rather like Goethe and his mother and Frau von Stein and Christiana – As soon as the young men come into contact with women, there’s a split. William gives his sex to a fritter, and his mother holds his soul. But the split kills him, because he doesn’t know where he is. The next son gets a woman who fights for his soul – fights his mother. The son loves his mother – all the sons hate and are jealous of the father. The conflict goes on between the mother and the girl with the son as object. The mother gradually proves stronger, because of the ties of blood. The son decides to leave his soul in his mother’s hands, and, like his elder brother, go for passion. He gets passion. Then the split begins to tell again. But, almost unconsciously, the mother realises what is the matter, and begins to die. The son casts off his mistress, attends to his mother dying. He is left in the end naked of everything, with the drift towards death.

Source: Wikipedia

Bookmarked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_(Maguire_novel) (psychopomp.com)

Wicked is a darker and more adult-themed revisionist exploration of the characters and setting of the 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, its sequels, and the 1939 film adaptation. It is presented as a biography of the Wicked Witch of the West, here given the name “Elphaba”. The book follows Elphaba from her birth through her social ostracism, school years, radicalization, and final days. Maguire shows the traditionally villainous character in a sympathetic light, using her journey to explore the problem of evil and the nature versus nurture debate, as well as themes of terrorism, propaganda, and existential purpose.

Wicked (Maguire novel) – Wikipedia

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire provides a different perspective on the Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. This time, the focus is on Elphaba. Amongst other things, the story explores the question of what it means to be evil:

“Pigspittle,” said Avaric. “Evil is an early or primitive stage of moral development. All children are fiends by nature. The criminals among us are only those who didn’t progress . . .”
“I think it’s a presence, not an absence,” said an artist. “Evil’s an incarnated character, an incubus or a succubus. It’s an other. It’s not us.”
“Not even me?” said the Witch, playing the part more vigorously than she expected. “A self-confessed murderer?”
“Oh go on with you,” said the artist, “we all of us show ourselves in our best light. That’s just normal vanity.”
“Evil isn’t a thing, it’s not a person, it’s an attribute like beauty . . .”
“It’s a power, like wind . . .”
“It’s an infection . . .”
“It’s metaphysical, essentially: the corruptibility of creation—”
“Blame it on the Unnamed God, then.”
“But did the Unnamed God create evil intentionally, or was it just a mistake in creation?”
“It’s not of air and eternity, evil isn’t; it’s of earth; it’s physical, a disjointedness between our bodies and our souls. Evil is inanely corporeal, humans causing one another pain, no more no less—”
“I like pain, if I’m wearing calfskin chaps and have my wrists tied behind me—”
“No, you’re all wrong, our childhood religion had it right: Evil is moral at its heart—the selection of vice over virtue; you can pretend not to know, you can rationalize, but you know it in your conscience—”
“Evil is an act, not an appetite. How many haven’t wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table? Present company excepted of course. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal.”
“Oh no, evil is repressing that appetite. I never repress any appetite.”

Source: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire

I came to the book after the musical and film took over the house. I wondered how the book compared. Interestingly, the musical really hones in on particular relationships, at the cost of others.

As far as I’m concerned, the only good thing that came of Wicked, the book, is that it gave someone the idea to make Wicked, the musical. This play is great! I like musicals in general, and this was better than average. It was everything the book should have been. Instead of being a meandering, slow-moving plot about a despicable character, it tells us about an Elphaba that I can actually relate to. The play is much more focused on the relationship between Glinda and Elphaba, which gave it a much stronger core. In the book, the two were only anywhere near each other in one section.

The musical is focused around both of them, starting at Shiz, the college they both went to, and progressing to their meeting of the Wizard. From there, their paths diverge, but they are still both relatable. They both want to change the world, but Glinda tries to do so by society-approved advancement through government, and Elphaba tries her own radical ways. We already know how this works out for them, of course, but I still rooted for Elphaba because she was clearly a good person at heart with a good cause.

Wicked – Novel vs. Musical – PSYCHOPOMP.COM

Bookmarked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machines_Like_Me (en.wikipedia.org)

The novel is set in the 1980s in an alternative history timeline in which the UK lost the Falklands War, Alan Turing is still alive, and the Internet, social media, and self-driving cars already exist.[1][2] The story revolves around an android named Adam and its/his relationship with its/his owners, Charlie and Miranda, which involves the formation of a love triangle.

Machines Like Me – Wikipedia by Machines Like Me – Wikipedia

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan is an exploration of what it actually means to be human through an examination of machines. The novel revolves around the purchase of Adam, a humanoid robot, whose perfect logic and moral clarity, often highlights the flaws and inconsistencies of human nature.

The novel can be understood as fantasy, set in the real. Situated in the 1980’s, McEwan provides a counter-history where Alan Turing did not die and the UK lost the Falkland War. It is also set the same year that Philip K. Dick released Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

The novel explores a number of questions, including Who is the actual machine? With the food we eat and what it tells us, are we all already templated selves? What is the difference between curiosity and algorithms? What is intelligence? Really, once it feels like once you question one aspect of life, everything comes under question. For example, is serving wine with arm behind the back machine-like? Politics? Bureaucracy? Cultural tradition? In the end, there is something about McEwan’s writing that is one part enthralling, while at the same time uncomfortable.

Continue reading “📚 Machines Like Me (Ian McEwan)”

Read The Idea of Perfection

The Idea of Perfection (1999) is about two people who seem the least likely in the world to fall in love. Douglas Cheeseman is an awkward engineer, the sort of divorced man you’d never look at twice. Harley Savage is a big, plain, abrasive woman who’s been through three husbands and doesn’t want another. Both of them bring all kinds of unhappy baggage to their meeting in the little town of Karakarook, New South Wales, population 1,374.

Being in Karakarook is something of a voyage of discovery for both of them. Unlike Felicity Porcelline, a woman dangerously haunted by the idea of perfection, they come to understand that what looks like weakness can be the best kind of strength.

The Idea of Perfection was a surprise winner of the Orange Prize, Britain’s richest literary prize, in 2001.

Although I read The Secret River a few years ago, I had never read anything else from Kate Grenville. While doing my usual trawling the Audible Plus Catalogue, I came upon The Idea of Perfection.

The novel is set in Karakarook, a fictional town in New South Wales no longer on the main road. It focuses on two visitors with contrary intentions. Harley Savage, a part-time museum curator come to help the town maintain their heritage, and Douglas Cheeseman, an engineer involved in rebuilding an old bridge that has seen better days.

The novel seems to always battle with a desire for a perfection that is never really present. On the one hand, this plays out as something of a comedy.  Kate Grenville has described the book as ‘a heart-warming old-fashioned love story’. Although this might be the case, I think what makes this novel is that there is also always something beneath the surface.

After enough years, the look you put on your face to hide behind became the shape of the person you were

For me, this is epitomised by the discussion of failed relationships, to the point of Harley Savage’s last husband committing suicide.

I think that this contrast between the comedic and the serious is what allows for these investigations.

She never thought about being Asian when he took his clothes off.

I like how Ron Charles captures it:

Readers who are particularly successful and good-looking, please skip to the next page. Kate Grenville has written a book for the rest of us. Everyone who’s ever returned from a great date to discover toilet paper trailing from their shoes will cling to “The Idea of Perfection” like an old friend.
…
“The Idea of Perfection” is perfectly conceived, an irresistible comedy of manners that catches the agony of chronic awkwardness with great tenderness.

Source: The awkward bridge from loneliness to romance by Ron Charles

Read The Violent Bear It Away

The Violent Bear It Away is a 1960 novel by American author Flannery O’Connor. It is the second and final novel that she published. The first chapter was originally published as the story “You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead” in the journal New World Writing.[1] The novel tells the story of Francis Marion Tarwater, a fourteen-year-old boy who is trying to escape the destiny his uncle has prescribed for him: the life of a prophet. Like most of O’Connor’s stories, the novel is filled with Catholic themes and dark images, making it a classic example of Southern Gothic literature.

There was something haunting about The Violent Bears It Away. Whether it be the characters or their fractured experiences, things always feel incomplete, both sad and unresolved.

What exactly does it mean to say that human beings are made “in the image and likeness of God”? Three answers have dominated Western theological ethics—imago Dei as reason, as will, and as love—and Flannery O’Connor’s second novel explores each of these from the inside, as it were, through its portrayal of the distinctive lifeworlds inhabited by three of the novel’s major characters: George Rayber, Francis Marion Tarwater, and the boy Bishop.

Source: Only Love Overcomes Violence: “The Violent Bear It Away” as Case Studies in Theological Ethics by Scott Huelin

In some respect, I was reminded of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Yes, both novels end in some sort of resolution, but it never quite satisfies all that is wrong in the world.

I feel that this is probably one of those books that I could come back to as something of a meditation. I did try diving into some of the commentary, but realised there was a whole different layer that would be a study in itself. It does make me want to read more from Thomas Aquinas.

Read Wise Blood

Wise Blood is the first novel by American author Flannery O’Connor, published in 1952. The novel was assembled from disparate stories first published in Mademoiselle, Sewanee Review and Partisan Review. The first chapter is an expanded version of her Master’s thesis, “The Train”, and other chapters are reworked versions of “The Peeler,” “The Heart of the Park” and “Enoch and the Gorilla”. The novel concerns a returning World War II veteran who, haunted by a life-long crisis of faith, resolves to form an anti-religious ministry in an eccentric, fictionalized Southern city after finding his family homestead abandoned without a trace.

Nick Cave mentioned Flannery O’Connor in Faith, Hope and Carnage:

I did go back and re-read Flannery O’Connor recently to remember why we must value her, but that was only because her books had been taken out of a college library in America, due to some skewed and overly harsh charges of racism.

I had never read anything by Flannery O’Connor before, so I was intrigued.

Wise Blood is a story about Hazel Motes, a returning World War II veteran who, haunted by a life-long crisis of faith, resolves to form an anti-religious ministry. It is an example of “low comedy and high seriousness”.

O’Connor states that the book is about freedom, free will, life and death, and the inevitability of belief.[5] Themes of redemption, racism, sexism, and isolation also run through the novel.

Source: Wise Blood by Wikipedia

Some have made associations with other post-war texts, such as Waiting for Godot, and the existential response:

In the process of waiting for a sign that Jesus exists and that people can be saved, he digs himself deeper into the existential hole, which can only end with tragedy. He fails to be saved, because in an existential world, there is no one to do the saving. In existentialism, it is always a matter of waiting, of “walking and of meeting—the hope that drives all of O’Connor’s seekers through all the mazes of their existence” (Kennelly 40).

Source: Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood as an Unintentional Existential Novel When Compared to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot by Samantha F Gebel

The connection with the ‘God is Dead’ movement of the 60’s:

The historical “death-of-God” theological movement may help to better understand Hazel Motes as a Christian malgré lui. Nevertheless, Hazel’s Church Without Christ is far from a success, and the historical “death-of-God” movement likewise never attracts many followers. These two similar radical theological movement and institution share the same problems. Thomas Merton indicates, one crucial problem in the “death-of-God” theology is that “it implies a marriage of quietism and revolt which is a little hard to understand. It accepts everything ‘with passivity’ yet waits for some inexplicable breakthrough” (247). Hazel’s preaching shares this same problem; he preaches the truth without Jesus in anticipation for Jesus’s revelation. It is radical in a way, yet it is peculiarly passive at the same time. It achieves nothing. Merton further argues that “[t]he trouble is that isolated insights like those, taken out of their context, transferred from the realm of subjective experience into that of dogma or theodicy, easily form misleading systems of thought” (271). In Wise Blood, Hazel’s preaching similarly misfires and sends the wrong message to his followers. The Church Without Christ has very few members: aside from Hoover Shoats who soon starts his own preaching career and Enoch Emery who follows Hazel in secret, there is only one other follower, “a boy about sixteen years old who had wanted someone to go to a whorehouse with him” (WB 146). Of course, this follower is only a mistake and confesses to be a “Lapsed Catholic” himself (WB 147). In this regard, instead of attracting believers in his “truth,” Hazel only succeeds in alluring the half-believers whose faith has already gone awry.

Source: “The Church Without Christ”: Radical Theology, Secularism, and Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood by Yen-Chi Wu

The postmodern mismatch between signifier and signified:

O’Connor derived this notion of alienation from a panoply of modernists including Hemingway, Steinbeck, Joyce, Kafka, Gide, and Camus, but the high modernists she engaged most studiously in writing Wise Blood were Faulkner and T. S. Eliot. Her early short story “The Train,” which introduces the prototype of Hazel Motes, is redolent in style and theme of As I Lay Dying (1930) (Asals 18). Wise Blood is also a Southern rendition of The Waste Land (1922), its museum mummy, “once as tall as you or me” (O’Connor Wise 98), standing in for Eliot’s drowned Phoenician sailor, “once handsome and tall as you” (1161).4 However, O’Connor revises these modernist sources: Wise Blood shifts the focus of “The Train” from consciousness to visual images (Asals 19), and it uses the mummy image to mock Haze’s “Church Without Christ”–declining the mythic pattern of death and rebirth linked to Eliot’s sailor and exacting a redemption that is more spectacular, grotesque, and personally demanding. She achieves this end by exposing modernist ideology to postmodern surroundings, that is, to a community of “common tastes and interests” (“Catholic” 856).

Source: Learning from Atlanta: Prophecy and Postmodernism in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood) by Joseph C. Murphy

The use of gothic characterists to elicit introspection.

Whereas traditional Gothic literature emphasizes the exterior, either structural or behavioral, to reveal a wicked secret within, O’Connor uses violence and sin as a filter from which God’s grace may be revealed anywhere, and at any time. Supernatural mysteries, in the form of divine influences, are revealed not only inside the individual or edifice, but outside the Gothic “container,” within the natural world. When violent intervention finally occurs, signs of God’s grace are exposed ubiquitously. The dual purpose of the Gothic mode, as an exemplifier of both internal and external supernatural elements, makes O’Connor’s works truly unique. Her stories do more than entertain, they edify through elicitation of introspection.

Source: To Be or Not to Be Gothic: Focus and Form of Literary Devices in Flannery O’Connor’s Stories by Andrew Schenck

Personally, the thing that stuck with me was the mismatch between signs and situations, and the act of misreading. Whether it be the advertising signs, Asa Hawks’ blindness or Hoover Shoats’ Holy Church of Christ Without Christ. In the end, Motes’ death is misread. In some ways I was reminded as much of Don DeLillo as I was of William Faulkner, but then again, maybe that is my own misreading.

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Go-Between

The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley is a majestic novel about an innocent young boy who gets caught in the middle of an illicit and ultimately tragic love affair. The story is told by a now-aging Leo Colston, who recalls the events of the summer of 1900, more than fifty years ago, when he was twelve years old and visiting a school friend on a lavish English country estate. Young Leo is a dreamy, romantic child, highly sensitive to the way others perceive him and still painfully ignorant of the workings of the adult world. He falls under the spell of Marian Maudsley, the older sister of his school friend, who takes a special interest in him. Marian is being forced into a socially advantageous marriage to Lord Trimingham, who has been grossly disfigured in the Boer War. But even as the momentum toward her marriage builds, Marian is carrying on a forbidden affair with Ted Burgess, a hottempered tenant farmer of a lower class. Tricked into acting as a messenger for Marian and Ted during that oppressively hot summer, Leo’s youthful naiveté is destroyed as he becomes ensnared in a devastating scandal that will kill one man and scar Leo for the rest of his life. Described by Ian McEwan as “a strange and beautiful book,” Hartley’s enduring masterpiece about class and sexuality and innocence, set in a vanished golden era, is a hauntingly beautiful, unforgettable work.

The Go-Between by LP Harley is a story about of innocence betrayed and corrupted. Leo Coulston, a thirteen year old holidaying with a friend in Norfolk, is somewhat unknowingly entangled within an affair that does not end well for either he or those involved.

Written in 1952, Hartley set the book in 1900 to capture a world before where everyone seems to be enjoying themselves, a time before the two world wars changed everything. As Hartley explains:

“I wanted to evoke the feeling of that summer, the long stretch of fine weather, and also the confidence in life, the belief that all’s well with the world, which everyone enjoyed or seemed to enjoy before the First World War . . . The Boer War was a local affair, and so I was able to set my little private tragedy against a general background of security and happiness.”

Source: Introduction to The Go-Between by Colm Tóibín

In an introduction for the New York Review of Books, Colm Tóibín captures some of the autobiographical aspects of the book:

The Go-Between has obvious autobiographical origins. In August 1909, for example, Hartley, who was staying with his school friend Moxey at Bradenham Hall in Norfolk, wrote to his mother, “I sleep with Moxey . . . and also with a dog, which at first reposed on the bed . . . On Saturday we had a ball, very grand indeed, at least, not very. We always have late dinner here. There is going to be a cricket-match today, the Hall against the village. I am going to score.” A year later, he wrote to his mother from Hastings, where he was visiting a Mrs. Wallis, who wanted him to stay an extra day “as she wants me to go to a party . . . You know I am not very fond of parties and I do want to come home on Tuesday. However, they have asked me to write to you and ask if you would mind my staying. I am enjoying myself here but I am sure we should both prefer me to be at home. Of course if you think it would be better for me to stay, write to me and say so; it is only for a day. But still, I do want to be at home again.” It is also clear from letters that the young Hartley, like Leo in The Go-Between, was not a good swimmer, though he was, like Leo, a good singer. Also, Hartley had worked as an army postman in the Great War and knew the thrill of delivering sought-after messages.

… In his book The Novelist’s Responsibility (1967), Hartley mused on the relationship between fiction and autobiography. He wrote that the novelist’s world “must, in some degree, be an extension of his own life; its fundamental problems must be his problems, its preoccupations his preoccupations—or something allied to them.” He also warned that while it is “unsafe to assume that a novelist’s work is autobiographical in any direct sense,” it is nonetheless “plausible to assume that his work is a transcription, an anagram of his own experience, reflecting its shape and tone and tempo.”

Source: Introduction to The Go-Between by Colm Tóibín

Going beyond innocence, the book also touches on ideas of class, culture, memory and sexuality. As Ali Smith has touched upon, it is a book where there is always something beneath the surface.

It is a masterpiece of double-speak and secrecy, somehow both ambiguous and direct. It works a magic on obviousness, so that it becomes a novel about British embarrassment and embarrassing Britishness. It’s a book which subtly, almost mischievously, rejects subtlety: “the facts of life were a mystery to me, though several of my schoolfellows claimed to have penetrated it.” But couched and quiet at its centre is a whole other novel at a further level of knowing, innocence and unsaidness.

Source: Rereading: The Go-Between by LP Hartley by Ali Smith

On finishing the book, I was left with so many questions. For example, what exactly happened to Mrs Maudsley and how long had she had her suspicions? However, these are questions that we cannot and in someway should not actually know. In this way, there are things we must know that we cannot truly know.

Reading it, the seemingly naive innocence reminded me of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, and Macel Proust’s Swann’s Way. Here I am touched by something that Ali Smith wrote while reflecting on The Go-Between:

Books are, in essence, go-betweens, works which conjure rhythm and release across time and history, across places of familiarity and those foreign to us; and personally and individually, too, it’s all a going-between, for every person who picks up a book for a first, then a second, then a third time.

Source: Rereading: The Go-Between by LP Hartley by Ali Smith

I think that this ‘go-between’ relates as much to text-to-self, as it does to the idea of ‘text-to-text’. For example, The Go-Between had me rethinking and remembering Atonement, but I also wonder what it might be like to re-read Atonement while thinking about the influence of The Go-Between.

Commentary

It is a masterpiece of double-speak and secrecy, somehow both ambiguous and direct. It works a magic on obviousness, so that it becomes a novel about British embarrassment and embarrassing Britishness. It’s a book which subtly, almost mischievously, rejects subtlety: “the facts of life were a mystery to me, though several of my schoolfellows claimed to have penetrated it.” But couched and quiet at its centre is a whole other novel at a further level of knowing, innocence and unsaidness.

Source: Rereading: The Go-Between by LP Hartley by Ali Smith

The Go-Between is about books as much as it’s about memory. It’s a model of the importance of rereading (and God knows we treat books lightly – we wouldn’t, after all, expect to know a piece of music properly on just one listen), knowledge and innocence so much part of its structure as to make it a knowingly different book on revisiting. Above all, though, it is a text which works like a charm: books are, in essence, go-betweens, works which conjure rhythm and release across time and history, across places of familiarity and those foreign to us; and personally and individually, too, it’s all a going-between, for every person who picks up a book for a first, then a second, then a third time.

Source: Rereading: The Go-Between by LP Hartley by Ali Smith

Highlights

If my twelve-year-old self, of whom I had grown rather fond, thinking about him, were to reproach me: “Why have you grown up such a dull dog, when I gave you such a good start? Why have you spent your time in dusty libraries, cataloguing other people’s books instead of writing your own? What has become of the Ram, the Bull, and the Lion, the example I gave you to emulate? Where above all is the Virgin, with her shining face and long curling tresses, whom I entrusted to you”—what should I say?

I should have an answer ready. “Well, it was you who let me down, and I will tell you how. You flew too near to the sun, and you were scorched. This cindery creature is what you made me.

To my mind’s eye, my buried memories of Brandham Hall are like the effects of chiaroscuro, patches of light and dark: it is only with an effort that I can see them in terms of colour. There are things I know, though I don’t know how I know them, and things that I can remember. Certain things are established in my mind as facts, but no picture attaches to them; on the other hand there are pictures unverified by any fact which recur obsessively, like the landscape of a dream. (pg. 28)

I was in love with the heat, I felt for it what the convert feels for his new religion…And without my being aware of it, the climate of my emotions had undergone a change. I was no longer satisfied with the small change of experience which had hitherto contented me. I wanted to deal in larger sums. I wanted to enjoy continuously the afflatus of spirit that I had when I was walking to Lord Trimingham and he admitted to being a Viscount. To be in tune with all that Brandham Hall meant, I must increase my stature, I must act on a grander scale. Perhaps all these desires had been dormant in me for years, and the Zodiac had been their latest manifestation.

Dimly I felt that the contrast represented something more than the conflict between Hall and village. It was that, but it was also the struggle between order and lawlessness, between obedience to tradition and defiance of it, between social stability and revolution, between one attitude to life and another. I knew which side I was on, yet the traitor in my gates felt the issue differently, he backed the individual against the side, even my own side, and wanted to see Ted Burgess pull it off. (pg. 124)

Nothing is ever a lady’s fault; you’ll learn that.

Lady-killer: what did that mean? I didn’t like to ask too many questions. I did not think, however, Ted would kill Marian: Man-killer, that was what I had been afraid of. Now the fear had passed away, lost its reality with the rest of my life at Brandham Hall. I could scarcely believe that I had once felt I ought to warn Lord Trimingham of his peril. The ninth Viscount would never know that I had saved him from the fate of the fifth. By removing myself I had removed the danger: it was my master-stroke.

Read http://redteamblues.com/
Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow is the first novel in the Marty Hench series. It revolves around Hench, a forensic accountant doing one last job. However, things do not necessarily go to plan.

One of the things that I find interesting about Doctorow’s work is the balance between observing the world and explaining how things work. With Red Team Blues, more than say the Little Brother series, I felt myself enthralled in the story, rather than being endlessly distracted by the technology. Paul Di Filippo talks about a ‘maturing’, but I also think that this series has a different feel, providing a different perspective. Rather than youth, we are given an older perspective, with Marty Hench 67 and ready for retirement.

My only gripe with the novel was that Hench really did not seem like a 67 year old, but then again, his life is clearly a bit different.

I got the Wil Wheaton read audiobook as a part of a pledged associated with the Kickstarter campaign.

Read Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Truman Capote)

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a novella by Truman Capote published in 1958. In it, a contemporary writer recalls his early days in New York City, when he makes the acquaintance of his remarkable neighbor, Holly Golightly, who is one of Capote’s best-known creations.

I stumbled upon Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s on Audible. I have never seen the film and actually had little knowledge what the book was about. The narrative style of trying to capture, Holly Golightly, this larger than life figure in a world of extremes reminded me of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. As WB Gooderham captures:

To start with, let’s take a look at the similarities between Jay Gatsby and Holly Golightly. Attractive, charismatic and enigmatic? Check. Connection with organised crime? Check. Penchant for hosting parties and affected speech inflections (old sport/darling)? Check/check. Cessation of said parties once romance blossoms? Check. Humble origins, changes of identity, driven by dreams and ideals leading ultimately to death and exile? Check, check, check, check.

Read novel by Franco-Czech writer Milan Kundera, published in 1998 by Contributors to Wikimedia projects

Identity (French: L’Identité) is a novel by Franco-Czech writer Milan Kundera, published in 1998. Kundera moved to France in 1975. Identity is set primarily in France and was his second novel to be written in French with his earlier novels all in Czech. The novel revolves around the intimate relationship between Chantal and her marginally younger partner Jean-Marc. The intricacies of their relationship and its influences on their sense of identity brings out Kundera’s philosophical musings on identity not as an autonomous entity but something integral shaped by the identities of others and their relations to your own.

The short novel explores the idea of identity and perception through the relationship between Chantel and Jean-Marc. Central to the story is Chantel’s comment “men don’t turn to look at me anymore” and everything that stems from that.