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French Lieutenant's Woman

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  I was curious to re-engage with  French Lieutenant’s Woman , having read the book at the age of eighteen and not since (closer to 1969, when it was first published, than today). I remembered the novel in different ways to how I experienced it afresh – perhaps the central romance struck me more deeply then, or perhaps I appreciated the little writer-tricks more now. Fowles draws us immediately into the coastal setting of England’s Lyme Bay, where a provincial society is as close minded as the forbidden nature is liberating. In the second chapter, the betrothed Charles and Tina spy the mysterious figure dressed in black – the French Lieutenant’s Woman – so-called because of a known liaison at a time when women of a certain class kept their names intact at all costs. This allegedly fallen-woman is defiant, doubling before Charles with her, “unforgettable face, and a tragic face” (p. 10). From that moment, Charles is smitten (though it will take him some time to admit to the fact). F
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Elizabeth Finch

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  I’ve been reading Julian Barnes all my adult life and it would take a lot for me to express disappointment in one of his novels. Professional reviewers aren’t paid to be as loyal or generous. Sam Byers describes the novel as dealing in evasion: ‘vagueness layered on vagueness’ ( The Guardian , 14 April 2022). Helen Elliott uses the phrase ‘exasperated sign’ in her heading and concludes that Barnes is out of touch: ‘In 2022 sincerity and authenticity are rumbling irony as the preferred mode for many highly literate readers and writers’ ( Sydney Morning Herald , 7 April 2022). I might confess that a novel that deals with ambiguity and irony would be more likely to appeal to me as a reader than to make me sigh, and although I did wonder about whether there was enough meat on the bones, I still enjoyed the delicate little meal that it was. In Part One we meet Neil, our narrator, and Elizabeth Finch, a dynamic History lecturer – as well as Neil’s immediate companions, conservative Geo
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The Museum of Modern Love

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  Like Second Place ,   The Museum of Modern Love was recommended to me by a fellow writer at Varuna House after I had read from my own work-in-progress (a novel about a disappeared Australian painter). Heather Rose’s work was a complete revelation. For one thing, she manages that rare genre of Australian internationalism, with the work set almost entirely in New York (specifically, the Museum of Modern Art). What fascinates Heather Rose is an extraordinary and true MOMA performance by Marina Abramovi ć, the Serbian “grandmother of performance art” (so-named after a four-decades long career). “The Artist is Present” was held between March and May 2010, and during this time 1545 people had the opportunity to sit opposite the artist who held their gaze (and was just, one supposes, present in the moment). Around this true event, Rose creates several characters who visit the performance regularly and whose lives are then revealed to the reader. Arky Levin is a composer of some repute whose
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Second Place

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  This is the first of two books about artists recommended to me after I performed a reading of my then work-in-progress-novel which features an Australian artist.  Second Place is a strange little work form a well-reputed author, Rachel Cusk, with ten previous novel publications, as well as works of non-fiction. The plot is summarized on the back cover: “A woman invites a famed artist to the remote coastal landscape where she lives … But as a long, dry summer sets in, his provocative presence soon twists the human patterns of her secluded household”. The Afterword tells us that Second Place “owes a debt” to Mable Dodge Luhnan’s 1932 memoir Lorenzo in Taos , a text that deals with the time D.H. Lawrence came to stay with her in New Mexico. In other words, this book leans on another, and the shared theme is the desired and then regretted presence of the artist figure in one’s second home. (Like having an artist-in-residence in your own backyard, complete with ego, vision, and live-in-l
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Sweet Tooth

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  I am not sure if I needed to read S weet Tooth , but as a literary spy novel (not quite a thriller) it entertained me well enough. One thing Ian McEwan seems to manage – I say this without proper qualification – is to write a novel from the point of view of a young woman quite convincingly. There’s a bit of a twist on this premise at the end, which you are most welcome to guess at. Serena Frome is a bishop's daughter. The bishop seems a decent man but clearly not close to his family, and embarrassed by anything he can’t sort out from behind a desk. She heads to Cambridge to study Mathematics, being good at it, but sadly not a genius. At university, she starts to write a column on her reading of literature in what one imagines are well-phrased but not necessarily wise reviews. She meets her first boyfriend, and then falls for a married professor – an MI5 man – and so her secretive career begins. It is the 1970s and the Cold War is in full swing. Frome’s conservative beliefs, c
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Snares of Memory

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  Juan Mars é ’s The Snares of Memory begins with 48 numbered responses to what appears to be written replies to interview questions posed to a writer/novelist. In this way, Mars é introduces the idea of a writer working on a commissioned film script concerning a murder which took place in 1949. Many of these answers contain refutations of conventional ideas, or ethical statements (“I couldn’t give a damn about national identity. It’s an emotional swindle”). Even better, we have to guess at the questions being asked (the response to Question 40 is simply “Pass”).   10) My next novel will deal with the tricks and snares created for us by memory, that high-class whore.   11) No. If I tell you what it’s about, I’ll spoil it, because this novel is a kind of tromp-l’oeil. Nothing in it is what it seems, starting with the title. (p. 8). So far, so good – Mars é had me hooked from the very beginning. The script, the narrator tells us early on, is based on a true event – a prostitu
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Grimmish

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  A self-published novel making the Miles Franklin Award shortlist was a first, and a wonderful story. Author Michael Winkler and his agent had tried it everywhere, and no one was interested, so Winkler made the painful decision to print his own copies. I am not sure if it was gumption or a smart agent, but the book ended up being read by some of Australia’s best novelists (J.M. Coetzee and Helen Garner) and things took off from there. The shortlisting means that Grimmish is now published by Puncher & Wattmann, and in the UK by Peninsula Press. The man must be kicking himself. What to make of the novel? The story, as such, is a retelling of Joe Grimm’s 1908-09 tour of Australia, where he seems to have continued his form of being a boxer famous for being able to absorb punishment without the ability to land the killer blow himself. Winkler has done a lot of research, and much of this appears in footnotes written in a playful, academic tone. Some notes explain allusions to other t
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