The Rosie Project - Graeme Simsion (Review) & the Miles Franklin Literary Award Winner for 2013

You know drill, the standard problem everybody has every so often, you haven’t rebooted your computer for a while, it seems to be running about as fast as an ultra-marathon competitor up again Usain Bolt, you go to flick to another window and you could go out and make a cup of tea, and of course this only happens when you’re in a hurry and need to do something quick smart – like submit an overdue report!!! What next? Alt-Control- Delete of course. Check your physical memory, your kernel memory – not a lot of physical memory? Time to reboot.

I generally don’t see reading fiction as similar to a failing computer, but after hitting four novels from the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award straight after finishing four from the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, I started to think I was getting a little jaded. I was becoming hyper critical. A novel that would generally rate five stars was getting a lukewarm response from me as it had a slight flaw or was just not as gripping or engaging as the masterpiece I’d read before it. In a world of Dan Brown being the number 1 best seller on name alone, online stores filled with cheap, passable (an in some cases downright unreadable) fiction I was bemoaning a novel that had won the Costa Book of the year for not doing as much as it could have. I had maybe lost my marbles (note the “maybe”).

So it was time for me to Alt-Ctrl-Del. I decided a local novel that was going to be reviewed as part of our Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Local Radio Book Club would make a nice change. I could read it, submit a review and see if the general population agreed with my learned opinions. “The Rosie Project” it was….

Have you ever been in one of those awkward moments where you go to meet the parents of a newborn, you see the tiny little babe and your first thought is “That is the ugliest child I’ve seen” or “I thought Rosemary’s Baby was fiction” and your second thought is “ahh, how cute…he looks just like his…..oh no what do I say now? Dad’s ugly but he might belt me, mum’s ugly too but you can’t offend a female about such things….ummmm….siblings….cousins….” It’s a bit like reviewing a book that really has bugger all to offer. This one was six years in the making, you can’t go all savage now, some poor “former” IT consultant, has put his life and soul into his first novel, THIS IS HIS FIRST BORN.

So here goes. An annoying caricature who is that thinly veiled as autistic or suffering from Asperger’s is presented as our “anti-hero” the disorder signs and his whole manner are meant to be humorous, so a whole section of the community who suffer social issues are now demeaned. This “lovable” rogue obviously has no real friends and he plans his day to the minute, refers to every person he meets by their BMI rating and after a few failed blind or internet dates and stumbling from a visit to lecture a group of “Aspies” he magically believes that the best way to meet his life partner would be to set up a “Wife Project” where he can circulate a questionnaire and find his perfect match. A bit like answering an internet questionnaire about your dating preferences but with a bit more venom.

Throughout my life I have been criticised for a perceived lack of emotion, as if this were some absolute fault. Interactions with Psychiatrists and psychologists – even including Claudia – start from the premise that I should be more ‘in touch’ with my emotions. What they really mean is that I should give in to them. I am perfectly happy to detect, recognise and analyse emotions. This is a useful skill and I would like to be better at it. Occasionally an emotion can be enjoyed – the gratitude I felt for my sister who visited me even during the bad times, the primitive feeling of well-being after a glass of wine – but we need to be vigilant that emotions do not cripple us.

I diagnosed brain overload and set up a spreadsheet to analyse the situation.

Of course our hero works with a so-called friend who has a large sexual appetite and a challenge to sleep with as many women from different nations as possible. Of course he’ll help our poor demented fool, there’s something in it for him.

To cut a long story short our hero meets the totally incompatible Rosie, she doesn’t know her real father’s identity so our superman (being a genetic scientist who pay attention to everything except ear lobe sizes or eye colour apparently) helps her collect DNA from 30 odd possible fathers. In the meantime they fall in love.

This child isn’t totally horrendously ugly, the writing isn’t poor, the story is set in Melbourne, there are a few laughs at other’s expense of course and it helped me to appreciate the writing I’ve been slowly growing accustomed to. Await the film, it will be better than “Death in Brunswick” but not a lot.

The 2013 Miles Franklin Literary Award Winner

Today the Trust Company announced Michelle de Kretser as the winner of the 2013 Miles Franklin Literary

Award for her novel “Questions of Travel”. Speaking on behalf of the judges Richard Neville said “Michelle de Kretser’s wonderful novel, Questions of Travel, centres on two characters, with two stories, each describing a different journey. The stories intertwine and pull against one another, and within this double narrative, de Kretser explores questions of home and away, travel and tourism, refugees and migrants, as well as ‘questions of travel’ in the virtual world, charting the rapid changes in electronic communication that mark our lives today.”

For a full report see http://www.milesfranklin.com.au/news or  for the shorlist visit an earlier post on my blog at http://messybooker.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/miles-franklin-award-2013-shortlist.html

IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Winner 2013 - City of Bohane - Kevin Barry

The city’s mood was a blend of fear and titillation. There was going to be an almighty collision and a small world shudders when giants collide.

This novel’s so chunky you could carve it, y’check me? Imagine you could blend James Kelman’s “How late it was how late” with a hint of Anthony Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange”, a smidge of Nick Cave’s “And The Ass Saw The Angel”, a touch of Jon McGregor’s “Even The Dogs” and a whole bunch of Tom Waits. Set it in a dystopian future, use local (and unknown or invented) slang and have a bunch of anti-heroes about to enter a feud. That would only give you part of the concept.

“City of Bohane” is set in 2052 (you only learn that very late in the novel and the time this novel is set, was to me quite irrelevant) and centres on the ‘bino (tall white character Logan Hartnett who resembles an albino) who controls the degraded area. His flunkies consist of late teenage boys Wolfie Stanners and Fucker Burke and a cat suit dressed lithe Asian girl Jenni Ching. They frequent places such as the Ho Pee Ching Oh-Kay Koffee Shoppe speaking in slang and discussing the return of Gant to the area, Gant’s been gone for twenty-five years, was considered a future leader along with the ‘bino and was sweet on the ‘bino’s now wife Macu. Through this murky underworld runs the river of Bohane, black and bleak, along with bogs, the people from all parts of the city, the weather:

The Rises is a bleak, forlorn place, and violently windy. Too little has been said, actually, about living in windy places. When a wind blows in such ferocious gusts as the Big Nothin’ hardwind, and when it blows forty-nine weeks out of the year, the effect is not physical only but…philosophical. It is difficult to keep a firm hold on one’s consciousness in such a wind. The mind is walloped from its train of thought by the constant assaults of wind. The result is a skittish, temperamental people with a tendency towards odd turns of logic. Such were (and are) the people of the Northside Rises.

We also have gangs of sand-pikeys who keep kidnapped women in cages for “entertainment”, an angina effected editor of the local newspaper who has a thing for hairbrushes, the ‘bino’s mother Girly who lives on Jamieson’s and tranquilizers and spends her days watching movies from the 1950’s but still controlling the whole city, mysterious owners of numerous dodgy businesses and of course gang or clan leaders and more. This is a city on the edge, one that is ready to explode but as the opening sentence says: “Whatever’s wrong with us is coming in off that river”.

Daintily with forefinger and thumb he raised the ankle cuff of his trouser leg and dipped a Croat boot into the water to wash it clean.

Saw a red vibrancy mingle with the tarry brown of the bog water and so quickly disappear in the great mass of the river.

As you can imagine this novel is peppered with extreme violence and language, but amazingly it has humour, tenderness, lost love, grieving and humility. This is not an easy read, by any stretch of the imagination, and I did find myself re-reading numerous sentences or conversations, literally translating them into my own language as at times the slang and inflections are almost undecipherable. But I can guarantee the effort is worth it, Kevin Barry has created a dark world that seems beyond redemption, a place where human life is not at all valued, power and control are the measure of worth – along with your clothes:

Wolfie wore:

A neatly cut Crombie of confederate grey above green tweed peg pants, straight-legged, a starched white shirt, collar open to show a harlequin-patterned cravat, and a pair of tan-coloured arsekickers on the hooves that’d been imported from far Zagreb (them boys knew how to make a boot, was the Fancy’s reckon; if the Long Fella wasn’t walkin’ Portuguese, he was walkin’ Croat).

Of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award shortlisted novels I have completed this was the standout for me, a change of pace from the raft of historical fiction that has been making the shortlists of late – a novel that will challenge and enthral you, another great work to come out of Ireland!!!

Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

Just a quick update on another award that was announced during the week. Tan Twan Eng picks up a further 25,000 pounds (to go with his Man Asia Award) for his Booker Prize shortlisted novel “The Garden of Evening Mists” – my review can be viewed here http://messybooker.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/2012-booker-shortlist-garden-of-evening.html  - the novels he beat, the shortlist, for this award were:

Pat Parker – Toby’s Room

Thomas Keneally – The Daughters of Mars

Hilary Mantel – Bring Up The Bodies

Anthony Quinn – The Streets

Rose Tremain – Merivel: A Man of His Time

IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Shortlist 2013 - Pure - Andrew Miller

I first read Andrew Miller back in 2001 when he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for “Oxygen”. I must admit I did have to take the novel down from the shelf to remind myself what is was about, but I will never forget the Booker that year, it was when Peter Carey won for “True History of the Kelly Gang” (a hugely over rated piece of writing in my opinion) over my favourite Ian McEwan novel “Atonement”. That year also featured Ali Smith’s “Hotel World”, David Mitchell’s “number9dream” and Rachel Seiffert’s “The Dark Room”, which has been wonderfully adapted into the Australian/German co-produced movie “Lore”. I wasn’t reading the IMPAC Dublin Awards until a few years ago so missed the year Andrew Miller won with his debut “Ingenious Pain”. His latest novel. “Pure” is set in Paris, 1785 (or so the back cover tells us), and our protagonist Jean-Baptiste Baratte is awaiting his fate in an anteroom of the Palace of Versailles. We soon learn that he is an engineer by trade (has made a small insignificant bridge on a private property) and the “minister” hires him to clean up the cemetery of les Innocents as it has been “swallowing the corpses of Paris for longer than anyone can remember”. The effects are horrendous, the smell disgusting, the locals their breath is tainted, “it may poison not just local shopkeepers but the king himself.”

And so we follow the adventures of Jean-Baptiste as he works in Paris, hiring ex-miners to clear the graveyard and planning for the demolition of the church. He meets a vast array of characters, the organ player, his host family, the family who live on the cemetery grounds, various miners and ladies of the night. This is a novel which promises much – could Jean-Baptiste be a modern day Faust? Could the impending demise of the cemetery be linked to his own personal demise? The tight language that takes you right into the heart of Paris in the late 1700’s leads you to believe so…

A girl is crossing the burying ground of les Innocents. In one hand, from a length of twine knotted about its feet, she carries a hen; in the other a wicker basket full of vegetables, some fruit, a dark loaf. She was, as usual, one of the first at the market, her slight figure, the thick auburn hair, a familiar sight among the servants who make up the greater part of the early trade. Where she stops, the stall-holder never tries to cheat her. Nor does she need to squeeze and plump the produce, the sniff or haggle like the cook’s maids with their chapped fingers, or those bony matriarchs of pared-down households who live a peg or two above destitution, She is served quickly, respectfully. Perhaps she will be asked about her grandfather’s health, his stiffening joints, but no one will detain her long. It is not that they dislike her. What is there to dislike about Jeanne? But she comes from the other side of the cemetery wall, a place, in this last quarter of the eighteenth century, many people would prefer not to be reminded of. She is sweet, pretty, well mannered, She is also the little auburn-haired emissary of death.

I spent the first half of the novel wondering how the multi layers of death, pestilence, destruction and self-gratification would play out. I then spent the last half of the novel wondering why it was meandering to its logical conclusion. There were great passages describing Jean-Baptiste’s cramping innards, which simply led nowhere, a reoccurring theme of headaches, which simply filled in pages and an “affair” of the heart that simply had no real consequences.

Although an enjoyable read personally I felt this fell a little flat, that is not to say it isn’t a novel worth reading, simply I believe it is not up to the same lofty standards as a couple of others on the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award shortlist. And how this beat Julian Barnes’ “The Sense of an Ending” in the 2011 Costa Book Awards is beyond me, that doesn’t auger well for me to be venturing onto that list for reading material.

IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Women's Prize for Fiction & Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize Winners

There has been quite a few prize winners announced in the last two days, time to keep you all up to date.

The IMPAC Dublin Literary Award was taken out by Kevin Barry for his novel "City of Bohane". The 100,00 euro prize is the largest for a single novel published in English, and nominations are made by public libraries throughout the globe.  Irish-born Kevin Barry hails from Limerick and lives in Slingo, on Ireland's west coast. He is the author of two award winning short story collections. City of Bohane is his first novel.

More details of his win can be seen at http://www.impacdublinaward.ie/news/kevin-barry-wins-the-2013-award-for-city-of-bohane/

The Women's Prize for fiction has been taken out by AM Homes for her novel "May We Be Forgiven". The award (formally known as the Orange Prize) was tipped to go to Hilary Mantel for "Bringing Up The Bodies", but AM Homes took home the 30,000 pounds for her "dazzling, original, viscerally funny black comedy; a subversion of the American dream" as described by Miranda Richardson the chair of the judging panel.

News report from "The Independent" at http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/womens-prize-for-fiction-2013-hilary-mantel-denied-literary-hattrick-as-american-author-am-homes-takes-the-crown-8646204.html






On the translation front the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize acknowledges the amazing work performed by the translators. It is for book-length literary translations into English from any living European language. It aims to honour the craft of translation, and to recognise its cultural importance.

I understand the winner was Philip Boehm for the translation of "The Hunger Angel" by Herta Muller, the shortlist (chosen from 135 submitted novels) can be viewed at http://www.st-annes.ox.ac.uk/about/oxford-weidenfeld-translation-prize.html

My review of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award shortlisted "Pure" by Andrew Miller is forthcoming and I'll jump straight into "City Of Bohane" and of course post a review.

Congratulations to all the winners, working in the literary industry and winning one of the most major prizes and being the recipient of only 100,000 euros or 30,000 pounds (or in the case of translators a nice night out) just goes to show how low on the economic scale we rate our artists.

IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Shortlist 2013 - The Buddha In The Attic - Julie Otsuka

In the 1920’s a large number of young Japanese women travelled to Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States as “picture brides”. These women were lured by letters and photos of potential working men in the USA, however the men sent old, retouched or even fake photos of themselves posing with luxury items that they did not own. After travelling by boat to their location these brides were met by grooms who were between 10-15 years older than their brides and then taken to live in squalid living conditions. Generally plantations that practiced segregation of the Japanese workers.

Julie Otsuka’s novel follows innumerable tales of these brides. It is not a novel that follows a single bride, nor a group of families, but more a collection of brides. In a poetic style that is raw, short and sparse we follow these women through their harrowing ordeal. The novel opens with the brides on the boat:

On the boat the first thing we did – before deciding who we liked and didn’t like, before telling each other which one of the islands we were from, and why we were leaving, even before bothering to learn each other’s names – was compare photographs of our husbands. They were handsome young men with dark eyes and full heads of hair and skin that was smooth and unblemished. Their chins were strong. The posture, good. Their noses were straight and high. They looked like our brothers and fathers back home, only better dressed, in gray frock coats and fine Western three-piece suits. Some of them were standing on sidewalks in front of wooden A-frame houses with white picket fences and neatly mowed lawns, and some were leaning in driveways against Model T Fords. Some were sitting in studios on stiff high-backed chairs with their hands neatly folded and staring straight into the camera, as though they were ready to take on the world. All of them had promised to be there, waiting for us, in San Francisco, when we sailed into port.

Fifteen of the twenty four sections in chapter one begin with the phrase “on the boat” and every subsequent chapter is similar in style. We follow the women through their journey, their reality upon arrival, their living conditions, their pregnancies, their growing children, their employment, their exclusion and eventually what happens to them once World War Two commences.

Interestingly enough there is a quote attributed to Donald Rumsfeld from October 12, 2001 used as a speech by the local mayor and if I hadn’t read the acknowledgements I wouldn’t have known. It did not look out of place. In fact there were numerous sections that could relate to different races in the right here and now:

It was all, of course, because of the stories in the papers. They said that thousands of our men had sprung into action, with clockwork precision, the moment the attack on the island had begun. They said we had flooded the roads with our run-down trucks and jalopies. They said we had signalled to the enemy planes with flares from our fields. They said that the week before the attack several of our children had bragged to their classmates that “something big” was about to happen. They said that those same children, when questioned further by their teachers, had reported that their parents had celebrated the news of the attack for days. They were shouting banzais. The said that in the event of a second attack here on the mainland anyone whose name appeared on the list would more than likely rise up to assist the enemy. They said our truck farmers were foot soldiers in a vast underground army. They’ve got thousands of weapons down below in the vegetable cellars. They said that our houseboys were intelligence agents in disguise. They said that our gardeners were all hiding shortwave radio transmitters in their garden hoses and when the Pacific zero hour struck we’d get busy at once. Burst dams. Burning oil fields. Bombed bridges. Blasted roads. Blocked tunnels. Poisoned reservoirs. And what was to stop one of us from walking into a crowded marketplace with a stick of dynamite tied to our waist? Nothing.

This is a simple but disturbing read about a generation that has almost been forgotten by the history books, a lament for people long gone but at the same time highlighting the current methods we still employ. Although a poignant tale I did find some of the style quite jarring and repetitive but that’s simply personal taste.

Even though a winner of the Pen Faulkner Award for fiction in 2012 I personally can’t see this novel lifting the IMPAC gong, all three I’ve read before this (“The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Get”, “The Map and the Territory” and “From The Mouth Of The Whale”) all rate higher for me than this novel. The winner will be announced next Thursday 6/6/13.

IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Shortlist 2013 - The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am - Kjersti A. Skomsvold

When I log into Facebook or Twitter I’m now met with a plethora of inspirational quotes, it seems the social media generation is hell bent on improving themselves. I can’t help thinking though that for every influencer there’s someone else being influenced, for every person who wins there is somebody else behind them, for every achiever there is somebody else who didn’t quite achieve. Who gives the underachieving, influenced, loser a voice? And it can’t be too big a voice or else they’ll be trampling on somebody else?

Enter Kjersti A. Skomsvold, from Norway, to put a bit of perspective on this madness. In her short, first novel we are introduced to Mathea, possibly one of the most insignificant and lonely people to ever be put into the spotlight. She is very old and her day consists of avoiding other people, reading the obituaries, watching the news and talking to Epsilon (her husband who you suspect throughout has shed his mortal coil). As Mathea realises she has only a short time left to make her mark on the world she decides to break with all tradition and heads outside wearing her husband’s watch just in case somebody asks her the time – then she would have been of use. Mathea is so insignificant she spends her day wandering her flat contemplating the green carpet, that looks like grass, and going through minor events – some so minor that they actually highlight her insignificance.

I go out into the hallway and sit on the floor in front of the desk. There’s a pile of old telephone books in the top drawer. If someone were ever to ask me if I had a hobby, I’d tell them, yes, I’m a collector. The photo album is in the bottom drawer and the stiff pages creak when I open it. Most of the pictures are from before I was born.

She makes a time capsule and buries it in the back yard of her units (only for it to be dug up and thrown out when a flagpole is installed to celebrate the fact that her units are the cleanest in the neighbourhood). She was hit by lightning twice but when returning to school it was on a significant regal day so nobody noticed, she can’t make eye contact with her neighbours, let alone speak to them, she buys jam even though she can’t open the jars, never gathering up the courage to ask the checkout staff to loosen them for her and more. But the real sadness and reality of her loneliness comes from her ruminations on life.

I identify with bananas, for not only am I hunched over, I’ve also got a flower without sex organs and fruit without seed, and therefore I am, according to Buddha, meaningless. And I also believe Buddha was on to something where the hopelessness of all earthly endeavours is concerned, because I feel hopeless; I stole from the grocery store, have Age B. the time, buried a time capsule, baked rolls, turned up the hot plate, tried to plan my own funeral, tried to become a tree, and then the most difficult thing of all – I sued the telephone, which was really too much for me – and yet I’m still sitting here in my apartment and I’m just as afraid of living life as I am of dying. And wasn’t it Buddha who also said that everything is suffering, and I think that if I’d been religious, I would’ve been a Buddhist, and if I’d been a fruit, I would’ve been a banana.

This is a tragic tale, told with humour, but another stripped back bleak and depressing tale – is 2013 the year the anti-depressant chemical companies started funding the publication of novels? At only 147 pages and small in size this is a quick read, but not an easy one – the title holds the key, it’s a novel that brings some perspective back into life.

2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Winner - The Detour by Gerbrand Bakker

Ample make this bed.

Make this bed with awe;

In it wait till judgment break

Excellent and fair.

Be its mattress straight,

Be its pillow round;

Let no sunrise’ yellow noise

Interrupt this ground

Emily Dickinson

I started my last two reviews with poetic references, why not go the trifecta?

This novel makes it three in a row with frequent poetic references, first off we had “Dublinesque” with its reference to a poem of the same name by Philip Larkin, then “Traveller of the Century” with poetic translations throughout and now The Detour which references Emily Dickinson, and more specifically the poem above, throughout. And what better way to open a novel about the fragility of life than with an allegory to the death bed and the preparation of such?

This novel opens with our main protagonist (to strangers she introduces herself as “Emilie”) spotting badgers at a stone circle in Wales. We quickly learn that she has come here from Amsterdam, leaving her husband without notice after a failed affair with a student. She is finalising a thesis on the minor poems of Emily Dickinson and is interning herself in an old cottage. Observing the flock of ten geese in her yard slowly deplete and tidying up the garden. She has chosen a reclusive life for a reason and we can only guess its health related due to the pain and the increasing use of paracetamol. Literally bounding into her life are a local lad Bradwen and his dog Sam, who are hiking the local countryside and are coaxed into staying a night. The stay of course gets longer. Meanwhile her husband discovers a little about the truth of her disappearance, teams up with a Dutch policeman and after tracking her down through a private detective decides to follow her to Wales.

As mentioned earlier the novel has numerous Emily Dickinson references “(she)…noticed for the first time how short the section titled LOVE was and how long the last, TIME AND ETERNITY.” “She couldn’t remember if she had left it open at this page, A COUNTRY BURIAL.” And “since nothing is as real as ‘thought and passion’, our essential human truth is expressed by our fantasies, not our acts.” As you can see this is a novel that demands re-reading, one that have many complex undertows, references and themes. Our protagonist here is most likely not just a hermit locked in the country with her thoughts…or is she?

How on earth had Dickinson done that, withdrawing further and further, writing poetry as if her life depended on it, and dying? The life of the spirit, human truth – or authenticity? – expressed through the imagination and not by deeds.

We have a sparse novel here, one that says more by not saying anything at all, at no stage is there resolution, or explanation, it mirrors life where you really only know part of the story that is happening outside of your own experience. A bleak tale that is grey and misty throughout, dire and dank as well as disturbing in its use of language and setting.

She drifted away on the syrupy flow of the stream, her thoughts stretching out, she was almost asleep. She had just enough time to think how pleasant that was, sleep. How separate from everything else. How free from the things that worry people when they’re not sleeping, the things that scare them, the things that loom before them like a mountain.

In the last twelve months I’ve had the pleasure of reading Deborah Levy’s “Swimming Home”, “The Lighthouse” by Alison Moore both tackling similar themes to this wonderful novel and in a strangely similar bleak, cut back style. Another wonderful novel from the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shortlist and one that is a deserved winner (even though I bounded and smiled more through Dublinesque!!) as it should be on more people’s bookshelves, being read and re-read. Please note there is a later edition available alternatively titled "Ten White Geese" (why I don't know and a banner calling it an "International Best Seller"...hmmm).