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Sam van Zweden

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Questioning

The last few weeks have contained more questions than I’ve had to ask in quite a while.

I’ve found myself a spot reviewing books for RMIT’s magazine “Catalyst”, which is incredibly exciting. It’s a really well-produced glossy thing, with an incredibly patient and helpful editor. The last few weeks have seen me drafting and re-drafting before submitting, then re-drafting and re-editing, re-working, re-submitting. My final submission was something I’m proud of. It was a hard task to review a whole collection in just 500 words, but I feel like I gave it a pretty good shot, and produced something I’ll be proud to see in print.

Writing reviews for print is new to me. As was raised in a comment on my last post, reviews for my blog are quite a bit different – they can be almost throw-away, conversational pieces full of half-baked impressions. I’m not entirely sure I’m happy with this difference, and want to move LGWABP toward a more permanent style of reviewing.

All this aside, the whole process of writing a review for print, to be put before an editor, made me realise how much I don’t know. I’ve sent out copious emails to various people in the last few weeks.

“Do I put ‘ed’, or ‘edited by’?”
“What’s conventional to include at the top of a review?”
“Invert the paragraph? What does that mean?”
“What’s a word for overly comprehensive, in a negative way?” (This question did get a pretty fantastic reply in the form of a metaphor about an obsessive lepidopterist whose rampant cataloging robs his obsession of beauty… Unfortunately that didn’t make it into the review, but by far the best answer possible to such a question. Thanks, Tully!)
“Can I have a random subjective paragraph in here?”
“How academic does this need to be?”
“Do I italicise the title, or put it in inverted commas?”

Even though I’ve been reviewing books for ages now, both for TV and for my blog, there’s so much I still need help with.

Somehow this gets me excited – I’m actively seeking out things I don’t really know how to do. Forcing myself out of my comfort zone. Getting stuff done.

I’ve got a similar project coming up – I’m writing an article about a new local not-for-profit organisation, which I’ve never done before, nor anything like it… But I know I’ve got plenty of people to ask when I run into questions, and that I’ll be learning and expanding my skill set. Wish me luck!

 

A question to the floor: this new gig with Catalyst means that more than ever I’m keen on keeping abreast of new-release books, preferably before they’re released. So my current question is, how do I do that? Do I just need to keep tabs on publishers’ websites, or is there somewhere that brings all publishers together and talks about future releases from everywhere?

 

The BAS review will appear in RMIT’s Catalyst, which comes out on the 14th of February.

3

Reviewing: The Problem of the Accidental Steal

I’ve recently finished reading “The Best Australian Stories 2010”. I’m reviewing it for publication, so I have pages and pages full of notes. I feel awkward scribbling in the margins of reviewing books, though it does sound like a more effective strategy. There’s something about defacing books I own that I just can’t come to terms with.

I plan on sitting down tomorrow, when everything’s had a few days to percolate, and making sense of those notes. In the mean time though, many other people who bought the book recently are finishing it too. I exchanged impressions with Alec Patric yesterday, which I found helpful in expressing some of my ideas about the stories. I talked to another friend last night about what I’d expected from certain authors in the collection and what I hope for them in future. Talking to people helps me get my ideas straight before I start writing.

However, I feel a little hesitant to read printed reviews. I have ideas about what I liked and didn’t, and suspicions as to why, but overall I’m still a baby reviewer and at times I feel like I don’t have the literary knowledge to say things with conviction in case someone tells me I’m wrong.

This morning in my Google Reader feed appeared Claire Zorn’s review of the collection on the Overland website.

The uncertainty of my own authority mentioned above means that I’m torn as to whether or not I should read this review. Overland – that’s got some heft. Good writing, authoritative voices, established opinions.

I have two options. I can ignore the review until I’ve written my own, insuring that my ideas are all mine. Or I can read the review and risk an “accidental steal”.

You know the ones. You’re reading a lot of Jane Austen, and somehow her language starts showing up in your own writing. You’re listening to a lot of hip-hop and you accidentally end a sentence with “yo”. It’s not done on purpose, but things influence you. The external worms its way in. Especially really good things – it’s natural.

I see connecting themes in the collection, and I think I’ve nutted out stylistic approaches, strengths of the stories. I have a half-baked review in my head. Claire’s review is sitting in my Google Reader feed, but I can’t decide whether I should read it yet or not, lest my review echoes hers too much.

I wonder if you’ll be able to tell from my own review whether I decided to read it or not?

11

The Wild Things by Dave Eggers Review

I never read Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are as a kid. I can recognize the book, and I knew it was popular, but somehow it was a title that I just never had much to do with.

Recently this book was turned into a film, which expanded on Sendak’s original picture-book story. There was much discussion about the film being too adult, and not in the general feel of the children’s story. I saw the film, and I agree, it’s not appropriate for children – but I don’t think it should have been. The kids about my age and older who grew up reading Where The Wild Things Are are the people who watched the film, and it was appropriate for that age group.

Lesser known is the fact that at around the same time, the picture-book was adapted to a novel, written by Dave Eggers, who also wrote the screenplay. The novel diverges from the story of the film in parts, but generally feels the same and has the same message – it’s not as dark as the film though, and I think you could almost read this novel to a kid (probably about 8yo+) and have them understand it and get something out of it.

The story is about Max, a young boy whose parents have not long divorced. Max is having trouble with his sister not caring about him any more, and his mum giving her attention to a new man, Gary. Max plays up and causes trouble – his mum tells him he’s caused “permanent damage”. While she’s referring to the house, Max sees it as emotional damage, and runs away from home in confusion. He gets in his boat and tries to steer toward the city, where his father is. Somehow though, Max drifts out to sea and lands on an island full of creatures who are as wild as Max. They make him their king, and during his time on the island, Max learns that it’s impossible to please everyone all the time, and that there are very real consequences for the things he decides to do. By leaving his home, Max learns to see the wild thing inside himself.

Written in a very simple style, Dave Eggers has written a touching story which could speak equally to adults and older children. Though the language is uncomplicated, the story is by no means one-dimensional. Eggers here absolutely disproves the rule of “writing what you know” as being the most effective way to write a moving story. He makes utterly unreal creatures more human than many of the characters I’ve read elsewhere, showing that all you really need to have is a point. And a way with words – oh, Lordy! Has Dave Eggers got a way with words! (The idea of Max being “half boy, half wind” just kills me!) He paints beautiful imagery, and is consistent with it. Metaphors appear and re-appear , ideas weave their way seamlessly through the narrative as character motivators (such as Carol’s attachment to the idea of the sun dying).

Even though the story is set in an unnamed land, inhabited by unreal wild creatures, I found myself on the verge of tears by the end of the book. Each character had an absolute purpose in the same way that real people do. I felt like I’d wandered into a firmly established and very real situation in much the same way as Max had, and there was no point in the story when I didn’t believe or care about what was happening.

I’m a bit of a Dave Eggers fan, having recently read How We Are Hungry and just about wetting myself over its brilliance, and having a fairly obsessive attachment to A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius. A children’s book adaptation though? Really?

Yes, really. Don’t let the premise put you off. Dave Eggers has written in a super-tight way, true to his usual form, and has turned fantastical characters into something very real that will stick with you.

0

Mistakes You’re Allowed To Make Post-Nobel Prize

“FROM THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE” – there it was, in big fat caps, right across the front of the dust jacket. While I haven’t picked up many books purely for that kind of endorsement, when reading something with a grabbing announcement like that I would hope I could trust that it’s a piece of writing with some merit. At least, a little more merit than a random airport novel. I can put some faith in the fact that it will have an effect on me. Unfortunately, this faith was entirely misplaced in JM Coetzee’s “Diary of a Bad Year”.  

Published in 2007, four years after Coetzee received the Nobel Prize for Literature, “Diary of a Bad Year” is a story told through three narrative strands, which run alongside one another throughout the book. Each page, for the most part of the novel, is divided into three parts. Each part is dedicated to a different narrative voice: one is comprised of the essays of a “fictional” writer (referred to as J.C – what a coincidence! How meta!) who is writing for a German collection of essays by writers; the next voice is that of J.C himself, as told to his private diary; the last is the account told by the woman he hires to type up the manuscript of the above essays. The typist influences what the writers considers in his essays, and in his diary he reflects on his relationship with her. She talks about her relationship with her partner, who conspires against the writer.

The blurb on my copy of this book promises “three dynamic and charged voices”, and a book “about how we choose to read”. I was also promised by the jacket an “original” book. I feel cheated on all these points apart from one, and even then it loses its power by seemingly being the only point of the book.

Nabokov said that “There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter”. The great authors, according to Nabokov, are those who can combine all three of these things successfully.

Was I enchanted by “Diary of a Bad Year”? No. Not at all, and this was deeply disappointing. I’ve been entirely enchanted by post-modern writings by other people – Italo Calvino, Borges, Georges Perec. I don’t think post-modern writing is past its best-before date at all: Mark Z Danielewski and Dave Eggers are prime examples of well executed recent post-modernist writing. It can still be done, and done well, in new and surprising ways. They play with form and expectations, they jump into your head and fuck shit up and leave you screaming “WOAH!”.  JM Coetzee did not enchant me in this way at all.

What about a good storyteller, then? No, not that either. The three narrative voices of “Diary of a Bad Year” are very one-dimensional, very slim offerings. The essayist’s voice stands alone easily as it is from another genre.  The voice of Anya (the typist) however, mingles with J.C’s voice in such a way that it’s entirely inconsistent and unconvincing. Coetzee has tried to give Anya a distinctive voice by way of her word-play and flippancy:
“At first I was just supposed to be his segretaria, his secret aria, his scary fairy, in fact not even that, just his typist, his tipitista, his clackadackia…” (pp25-6).
While this creates a very strong voice in places, Anya’s inconsistency as a character means that she dissolves into something more like J.C’s voice, and this doesn’t seem intentional on Coetzee’s part. At the start of her account, Anya is concerned with the effect her “delicious behind”, but later considers the wider implications of the existence of an individual dimension. In the incredibly small space given to each character, Coetzee fails to tell a story that readers invest in. I didn’t care what the writer’s essays discussed, I didn’t care if the writer got it on with Anya, and I didn’t care whether Anya’s partner ripped the writer off or not. I just wasn’t affected by the story at all.

This leaves one more of Nabokov’s traits of a great writer – being a great teacher. Roland Barthes talked about the “writerly text”, which enlists collaboration between writer and reader. “Diary of a Bad Year” certainly does that – readers must work. However, Bathes talked about such texts producing what he called “jouissance” – “bliss”. The only feeling this book provided for me was frustration. As the blurb promised, it is a “book about how we choose to read”. So the point of “Diary of a Bad Year” seems to be simply to teach. As an academic, this might be expected of Coetzee. As a winner of the Nobel Prize, he now has the space to publish experimental work and actually find a market for it. I could forgive all this, if the book actually taught me something, or engaged me in some way. It did not.

I feel like the pitch for “Diary of a Bad Year” would have been enough to impart all the wisdom this book had to offer. The tricksy, clever, post-modern gimmick just isn’t enough to make the book good. It’s a good idea in terms of exploring an interesting point, but badly executed and altogether uninteresting to read, offering little to nothing in terms of storytelling and enchantment.

1

Review: Mama Mia by Mia Freedman

Having much respect for what Megan from Literary Life has to say, I took this book recommendation. Grudgingly, mind you. I shuffled off to the library in search of Mama Mia by Mia Freedman, the ex-editor of Cosmopolitan and editor-in-chief of a  jumble of other ACP magazines. She has also worked in television and written columns for newspapers, and now blogs.

I’m not particularly fond of women’s magazines like Cosmo and Cleo. I’m sure they’re great for some people, but for me, they just make me feel like being a woman is a game that I’m playing but I don’t know the rules for. Which is a pretty lousy way to feel. Once I got past needing Dolly and Girlfriend to guide me through puberty, I got those things out of my life. However, Mia Freedman’s Mama Mia was recommended to me as a book with countless insights to the publishing industry, so I thought I’d better give it a whirl.

It wasn’t exactly a revelation in terms of publishing tips and tricks – I’m not interested in going into women’s magazines, but in terms of dishing the dirt on big Australian names, Mia Freedman has done pretty well.

That’s not to reduce the book to a gossip-fest: far from it. Mama Mia is equal parts about Mia’s career, and her life outside of her career, as a mother and wife. It made me laugh out loud, multiple times. It made me cry. Like real, tears-down-the-cheeks crying. I didn’t expect that.

The book is brutally honest, from Mia going into labour screaming to everyone around her “I need to POOOOOOOOO!” (that was a laughing moment), to wondering over her ‘failure’ at keeping her baby alive (tears here), followed by years and years of IVF.

The ‘mothering’ part of the memoir talked to me a lot more than the ‘magazines’ – however, the ‘magazines’ parts weren’t uninteresting to me, and I was surprised to find that there was only one part of the book that I was shaking my head at. “No, no I just can’t relate to that” – Mia talked about how all women bond over clothes shopping. *spew*

The tone of the memoir is conversational, and perhaps this is why there was only this one point that I felt I wasn’t a part of.

Mia Freedman has lived a life very memoir-worthy, and she’s written a book which speaks to readers as if they’re her friends. It’s honest, it’s funny, it’s heartbreaking, it’s accessible.

Overall, it’s pretty great.

4

What Alice Forgot Review

Sometimes you fall out with people. You don’t choose to, but you drift apart and eventually one day they’re not there any more.

When you talk to people about it you say, “Oh, they’ve changed.”

Only, they haven’t. Or they have, but you have too. We all change, and it’s so gradual that we don’t really notice.

Liane Moriarty’s What Alice Forgot looks at this idea.

Thirty-nine year old Alice Love goes to the gym and has a fall. When she wakes up she believes she is 29, pregnant, and still madly in love with her husband Nick. Not only is she not pregnant, but she now has three children and is on the verge of divorcing Nick.

There are flowers from another man in Alice’s bedroom. There’s a mysterious card in her bag from another unknown man who talks about “happier times”. Alice’s eldest child is an absolute monster, far from the harmless “Sultana” she harboured in her belly ten years prior to her accident. Alice Love is now in utterly unknown territory. And she’s horrified to find out that the 39-year-old Alice Love is an absolute bitch: not someone she likes at all!

This story is nicely told, with the narrative shifting between three points of view. One is a third-person subjective point of view from Alice, another is Alice’s sister’s therapy journal, and the third is the utterly endearing blog kept by Alice’s grandmother. While having three points of view in the story has the potential to go awfully wrong, Liane Moriarty has executed this beautifully. 

The story gripping, showing the reader peeks of the life that Alice has forgotten, masterful in its release of information. 

Liane has written a novel that falls through your hands like grains of sand – I thought “yes, just one more chapter”…”just one more!”…each night that I sat up reading it, and chewed though the entire thing in 3 sittings.

It takes a lot for a book to make me cry. But this one did.

It also made me think for a long time afterwards about the ways people change, and I wonder what myself five years ago would think of myself now?

2

Neon Pilgrim Review

I’m officially on holidays, so I’m finally munching through some of the “to-be-read” pile. The first thing I picked up off that pile was Neon Pilgrim by Lisa Dempster, which I bought from the EWF Page Parlour a few weeks ago.

I should probably flag it here that I interviewed Lisa for Yartz just before the Emerging Writers’ Festival, and she seemed absolutely lovely. I’ve also been following her blogging for a while, so I went into this book with an already reasonably good opinion of Lisa and what she’s been up to. I have to say though, that this book boosted that by about a hundred percent.

Neon Pilgrim is about Lisa’s journey along the henro michi – a back-breaking trek, 1200 kilometres through Japanese mountains, all the way around Shikoku. No small effort.

I’ve never really read travel books before. Something about the term “travel literature” puts me off – I imagine middle-aged intellectuals relaying things like “the rich history” of countries with Western histories much older than Australia’s… While it’s all very interesting, it’s not something I’m keen on dedicating myself to for a whole book. And I’m sure this isn’t even what travel literature entails. It’s just what my mind has made it.

When I heard about Neon Pilgrim though, I felt like this might be something I could relate to, and get something out of reading. When Lisa started the journey, she was a 28 year-old, overweight and very depressed. Having visited Japan as a student, she had heard about the henro michi, and decided that this was what she needed to pull her out of depression.

The pilgrimage is said to be enlightening, each henro (pilgrim) is accompanied by the spirit of Kobo-Daishi, who the walk is done in honour of. The Japanese who inhabit Shikoku believe that by giving settai (gifts) to pilgrims, they too honour the spirit of Kobo-Daishi even though they cannot do the trek. So the journey itself is a respected thing, and pilgrims are helped out a great deal by those who live in the towns and cities that the henro michi passes through.

The book is written simply, there’s no complicated jargon or assumed prior knowledge of Japan or its rituals. The book includes a glossary of Japanese terms used in the book, but most of the time it isn’t needed, as Lisa makes meanings very clear.

Along the way there are fantastic crazy old men, deeply respected veterans who have done the pilgrimage hundreds of times, and kind people Lisa’s own age, who are all doing the pilgrimage for different reasons. There are bears, and spiders, and blisters. Every story along the way has its place, and the pilgrimage becomes a mesh of encounters and problems to negotiate.

I won’t say that the prose is amazing. It’s good – very funny at times, and at others you can really feel Lisa’s frustration. But I wouldn’t call it artful. Artful prose isn’t what this book is about though.

There’s an old Taoist saying, that “the journey is the reward” – while Lisa’s fitness improves, and she meets some wonderful people along the henro michi, the reward in terms of escaping depression is less tangible. I think this is one of the things I loved about the book – Lisa proves to herself that she can still get out of herself and tackle the world, but along the way she still hits that brick wall many times. She doubts herself – in fact, it’s not until temple 76 that she actually thinks that perhaps she will actually reach the end. At certain times in the journey the only way forward is to “step. Step. Step”. And I think this is how it is, and how it’s meant to be – getting through tough things like depression is like that, it’s not “cure!” and then everything’s great. It’s just one foot in front of the other.

At the end of the book there is no definitive ending. Yes – Lisa makes it to the end. But it’s only the end of the henro michi – the start of something much bigger. And I didn’t even find the open ending frustrating, I found it incredibly hopeful. While I know I probably won’t do a trek like this, I have taken a lot from the “Step. Step. Step.” attitude and the idea that accomplishing something is not the end.

Lisa Dempster, the smiley lady you will see at many a literary event, has walked 1200 kilometers and slept in some very crazy places. She has gone through some absolutely insane shit – go shake her hand next time you see her. Or go read Neon Pilgrim. Or both.

1

“The Ask” by Sam Lipsyte Review

I hadn’t heard anything about this book when I picked it up. Then I accepted it into my life and it started appearing everywhere, getting the thumbs up from all sorts of cool people. Having only had time to briefly peruse the blurb, I had no idea why.

By page 5 it was clear – this book is a winner. An absolute, knee-slappingly hilarious, day-changing winner.

Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask features loser protagonist Milo Burke. A failed painter, Milo gets fired from his fundraising job at the arts department of a university and his life starts going to shit. Until Purdy shows up. An ex-schoolmate of Milo’s, Purdy forces the university to get Milo back on board as one of the conditions of Purdy making a sizeable donation to the university. Milo steps back into his old job, but this time it also involves being some kind of horrible-errand-pimp for Purdy.

Sam Lipsyte has written a novel that is incredibly well-balanced. The story is understated, and the language subtle. The story unfolds so that it begins like we’ve just wandered into Milo’s life, and it ends like we just wander out. Nothing grandiose, but by no means a boring story or lack of plot either.

Lipsyte has an amazing ear for dialogue, with his characters saying absolutely inane things that all of us know we’ve said from time to time. All characters in this novel also seem incredibly adept at slinging insults and horribleness at one another, one of my favourites being when Purdy shoves a big wad of cash at Milo:
“…here’s our severance to add to your other severance. Mix all that severance together. It’s like a jambalaya of fucking severance. It’s tasty and you can stuff your fat treacherous face with it.”
Ah! Would that I could be so coherently hateful!

Milo’s son Bernie brings an incredible amount of poignancy to the novel, however he also has some of the best comedic moments:
” ‘Do superheroes have foreskins? Like my guy?’
  He held up his headless hero.
  ‘Yes. No. I don’t know. Probably.’
…
  ‘Do foreskins help you fly?’  ”

Bernie’s full of moments like this, but in typical not-quite-four year old fashion, he peppers his speeches and musings with wisdom that he doesn’t even know is there, always ready to add a nice commentary on Daddy’s action.

While The Ask is a freaking hilarious read, don’t let that fool you. There’s a truly decent story under all the knee-slapping; a nice sort of questioning of values and what it means to grow up true to yourself.

I’m glad to have spent time between the covers of this one in the last week or so; I was always glad to be there, I never wondered when the book would finish. I’ll be eagerly looking out for whatever Sam Lipsyte brings forth into the world next.

1

Sue Miller, Limited?

I’ve recently finished reading Sue Miller’s “The Lake Shore Limited“.

“The Lake Shore Limited” looks at the relationship dynamics between a group of people, all more or less connected by the death of a man named Gus in the events of September 11. His lover, his sister, his brother-in-law and two men that his lover gets involved with. These characters are all linked not only by Gus but by the incredibly complex emotion of guilt over secretly wishing a lover was gone, even though they’re a good thing.

For starters, I have some mysterious aversion to the use of September 11 as a plot device. Particularly in a poorly-written novel. I’m not even sure what this is about, really – I don’t feel this way about the use of world war 2, or even using more recent stuff from Afghanistan and Iraq. But somehow, the use of September 11 in this novel left a really sour taste in my mouth. It may be the way it was executed… I’ve also recently read Melina Marchetta’s “The Piper’s Son“, which used the following year’s bus bombing in London as part of its story. But somehow Melina Marchetta’s use of such a sensitive subject didn’t seem disrespectful – Sue Miller’s writing feels somehow like she’s laying claim to the emotions of the September 11 victims in a way I really don’t feel comfortable with.

A lot of this book was internal dialogue. The feeling I get is that Sue Miller wrote it as entirely internal dialogue, and then an editor told her that she’d written a bath story. Sue Miller gasps in shock, and promptly plugs in many “as he opened the window, he thought…” and “scooping dog food out of the tin, Billy recalled…” -type things to force her characters to do things rather than just be pensive all day long. With all these obviously forced actions, the writing process Sue Miller’s gone through becomes absolutely plainly visible. When I realised what had happened about three-quarters of the way through the book, I found it so distracting I had trouble reading past my frustration.

When action occasionally genuinely happens, it doesn’t feel strained – the book really might have benefited from a lot more of it.

I have no big problem with books that look at complex emotions. “Lolita” looked at pedophilia in an amazingly empathetic way.  “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” looked at guilt and family dynamics beautifully. “Notes From Underground” features a torn-up and incredibly changeable narrator. I’m totally down with all these books, and many others that tackle really big and difficult feelings: it’s one of the most interesting and important things that literature can do. “The Lake Shore Limited” however, made a really difficult emotion one-dimensional by over-using it.

I like linking characteristics in characters, and maybe Sue Miller had a good idea in doing this. It’s a nice way of creating some continuity in a story, and as far as people go I belive there are those parts that all of us have in common. What’s happened though, is that all the characters have exactly the same feelings. The same reactions, the same guilt, the same struggle. And while I’m sure it’s a somewhat universal emotion, I don’t think that people could possibly all feel it in the same way like the characters of “The Lake Shore Limited” do.

Sue Miller has tried to tackle some really tough things with this book – September 11, universal emotions, the complexity of human relationships. There’s some really strong ideas, but Sue Miller’s limited writing of them means the story falls on its face. Hard.

1

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