SWF: The Uncommon Reader, Wood, Williamson & Gleeson-White

It was a grey, cold and wet start to the 2013 Sydney Writers’ Festival (SWF) today, but I kicked it off in great style with ‘The Uncommon Reader’. Tegan Bennett Daylight chaired an engaging panel discussion with respected critics James Wood, Geordie Williamson and Jane Gleeson-White on what books have inspired them, from their formative years through to their predictions on the classics of tomorrow. I’ll just pick out a few talking points…

There was a discussion about the moment they began to feel like they wanted or needed to reply to books. James said it wasn’t until university that he was taught to read better, at which point he began to be a better reader, or observer, of the world as well. I think this is true of all us readers.

Both Geordie and Jane spoke of the enthusiasm that works such as Wood’s The Broken Estate allowed them to have. Jane said she still reads with a child’s enthusiasm now, something that was evident when she spoke about her favourites.

For James, he wanted to be able to write about things that made him want to burst out and say ‘this is bloody good!’. He writes not for academics, but for other readers.

Tegan asked a great question about what are the books that these avid readers return to, time and again. For Geordie, it is V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival. From Naipaul, post-colonial literature emerges. It’s not a perfect book, but it’s a most ‘writerly’ book, something he leafs through when he feels a little stale.

James also admires Naipaul, noting A House for Mr Biswas as a very funny and poignant work. But for him, ‘the one’ is Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, a favourite of mine too. It has, he said, the thing so many works of fiction lack: the ideal ending.

Jane gets excited about any new translations of works by Homer and Tolstoy. But the two works she picked out are F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, with its ‘flawless prose’ (she read a passage of this out, endearingly trying not to cry!), and a favourite of mine: Emily Bronte’s  Wuthering Heights (my review).

Thoughts then turned to books and writers of today that will last. Tegan offered Alice Munro and Kazuo Ishiguro. Geordie split the discussion into local and international contexts. For his local, he gave Tim Winton, admiring Winton’s ability to pull off writing that appeals to a wide audience and is also ‘pregnant with intelligence’. He had a smile when saying Stephen Romei had rung him to say the new Winton has just been delivered (expect it on your nearest bookshelf soon! – no title was given). For a global context, he offered David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a ‘generational shift’, and praised the first page of Wallace’s unfinished work The Pale King.

James echoed Geordie’s praise of the opening to The Pale King, and agreed with Tim Winton. To that he added his admiration for Peter Carey, saying that while he liked his more recent works, he is eagerly hoping for the next ‘great novel’ from him, something to rival Illywhacker (my review) and Oscar and Lucinda (my review). (Given they are two of my favourite novels, I couldn’t agree more!) He also noted Christina Stead’s The Little Hotel. For his international, he picked out W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, (which is featured in Wood’s most recent work of criticism The Fun Stuff and Other Essays). 

For Jane, it is Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. But the one that ‘knocked her socks off’ recently was Atomised by French author Michel Houellebecq, which had James Wood nodding too. Jane was positively gushing in her praise, and has blogged about Atomised at Bookish Girl.

For all that, the one author not mentioned, but mentioned by an audience member in a question was Jane Austen. Geordie swung this to Tegan, who re-reads every Austen each year, (and is an admirer of Northanger Abbey, whereas Jane Gleeson-White said she’s more a Persuasion fan (as am I).

I left with the feeling that if I had only attended one session at this years’ festival, then this would have been a great one to choose. The reading list alone would keep me going with great reads for a good while. The panel spoke with intelligence, wit, and above all, enthusiasm about the thing that brings us all together: books.

I’ll have more SWF musings over the coming days and weeks.

Advertisement

Read Full Post »

Five Bells by Gail Jones

Gail Jones is a cerebral writer and a consummate wordsmith.  Talking at last month’s Sydney Writers Festival about her novel Five Bells she was asked whether the ‘literariness’ of a book is important to her.  Her reply was an unequivocal yes.  The Dilettante’s kind of writer!

Jones spoke about the genesis for the work.  She was on a late night ferry and the words of Kenneth Slessor’s famous poem, Five Bells, came to her.  The poem was written as an ode to cartoonist Joe Lynch, who fell from a Sydney ferry and whose body was never found.  Jones said she could well imagine the poem being written just after the event so immediate was its sense of grief, but noted it was written twelve years later.  The ‘persistence of grief’ is something that she finds quite powerful – ‘you think you’re done with it, but the past keeps coming back.’

The way grief and memory inform the lives of the four characters whose lives are drawn together on this single day in and around Circular Quay is the cornerstone of the book.  It is like, said Jones, the wake of a ferry – the way water is churned out and then eddies back in on itself, returning and revolving.  Time and memory operate in the same way.  Slessor himself, in his notes on his poem said that time was like water rather than the tick of the clock.  Pei Xing, one of the protagonists of the novel, recalls a day when, as a girl, her father told the story of The Overcoat, how that story adds to the memory of the day’s other events.  She thinks: “It was there, years later, like breath on a plane of glass, a human trace to see through.”

The wake of the ferry, the way memories fold back up to the surface of our life, form not just a thematic premise for the book, but they also form the basis for its structure.  Here is Jones’ cerebral mind at work.  The story starts out with the arrival of the four into Circular Quay on this sunny Saturday, then, like the ferry wake, folds back to their individual starting points that day, then comes back through the day in a lineal progression.  But always through this progression the memories of past events and backgrounds constantly churn to the surface.  It’s a wonderfully symbolic structure.  It works on its own, but knowing why she chose to fashion it in this way gives it extra meaning.

Of course when you write a story that takes place in one day, particularly one in which the poetry of the prose is a strong feature as it is here, then you immediately place your work alongside other great ‘single day’ works, such as Joyce’s Ulysses and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.  To me the particularly poetic character of Jones’ prose sets it up against Mrs Dalloway quite markedly.  There are other links between them too.  The passage of time is central to both books.  ‘Five bells’ is one of the half-hour marks of an eight-bell-long four hour watch on ships.  In Mrs Dalloway we have Big Ben marking out the hours (which was Woolf’s original title for the book, so well utilised by Michael Cunningham in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours).  There are other similarities too, but I won’t go into those as that will risk others’ enjoyment of them, but Jones said she was aware of borrowing from those books.

The other thing that I remember from reading Woolf’s novel is just how vacuous and unsympathetic the characters in it are.  This brings me to the four protagonists in Five Bells, each of whom are new arrivals inSydney.  Two of the four, Elise and James, grew up for a time in the same class in school in remote country town inAustralia.  They were teenage lovers, and now, both inSydney, have agreed to meet up.  When they were in school they shared a teacher who wrote unusual words on the blackboard, one of which was ‘clepsydra’: an ancient water clock, again reflecting the confluence of time and water.  It’s their secret word, and it’s a lovely reflection of Slessor’s ‘time as water’ observation.

James is Jones’ first extended male point of view protagonist in any of her novels.  He is a man who cannot let go of his tragic past, a past that even Elise is unaware of.  Jones said she was keen to make sure he had some form of progression, some change throughout the day.  I think she manages this, albeit somewhat obliquely (more on obliqueness below), for he decribes himself as ‘unconnected’ at the start of the story, but by the end – without giving the game away – he is in a way very much connected to the others.

Then there is Catherine, an Irish journalist, who leftDublinin part because of the death of her heroine, Veronica Guerin, the real-life journalist assassinated after she revealed the truth about the drug trade inDublin.  Catherine is also struggling to cope, in her case with the death of her brother.  Jones said that writing often is generated out of a sense of loss.  We all lose people, places, childhoods, she said.  Jones is a great supporter of PEN, and wanted to pay tribute to the heroics of writers including journalists and translators.

The fourth protagonist, Pei Xing, is a Chinese immigrant, survivor of the Cultural Revolution.  Jones said she is the moral centre of the book, and it is easy to see why.  She travels from her home in Bankstown, across the harbour to visit someone from her past every Saturday, someone to whom she gives forgiveness when such forgiveness seems impossible.  Her scholarly parents were abducted and killed while she was young and she herself is later imprisoned.  Her father was an interpreter and there are many references to interpreters in the story, including many references to Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak.  The theme of translation was something Jones wanted to portray as part of the way we all connect with each other, and, I believe, how we connect to ourselves.  Pei Xing’s ability to sense the future is used in a lovely way to offset the potential darkness in the story.

The four characters are drawn together by a fifth in an oblique way.  Jones said she wanted to study the resonances between people, those interconnections, in the same way that the peals of a bell reverberate and speak to one another – which seems spooky when I think that the very same thing was the theme of my last read: David Mitchell’s wonderful Ghostwritten (see my review here).  When we first meet James, he thinks, [p4]: “So much of the past returns … lodged in the bodies of others.”  The fifth character is a child.  Children are symbolic; each of us as adults carries the child within.

When asked by one audience member about the ‘lack of tension’ in the multi-protagonist structure, Jones said not all meaning lives in plot.  Switching between characters creates risk, she acknowledged, but ‘plot’ was not the most critical thing in the book.  I found each protagonist weighty enough to sustain my own interest.  Perhaps because I knew the symbolic underpinnings before I read the book I gave it a little more ‘room’ in this regard, but each of the characters has a depth to them.  They are sympathetic.  We care for them.  How Jones creates such depth in four characters in only 216 pages is to me a remarkable thing.

I have made mention of the poetic nature of the prose.  There are wonderful descriptions of the iconic Sydney Opera House andHarbourBridge, but particularly the white shells.  Jones eschewed the obvious ‘sails’ simile because ‘cliché is the enemy of good writing’.  She spoke of the need not only to be different, but also to develop images which were culturally relevant to the background of each character.  So for Pei Xing, the Opera House looks “like porcelain bowls, stacked one upon the other, fragile, tipped, in an unexpected harmony.”  James sees them as teeth, whose “maws opened to the sky in a perpetual devouring”.  Catherine sees them as petals of a white rose.  Elsewhere, the shells are described as a fan of chambers; meringue peaks; ancient bones; origami.

There are some lovely links between characters too, the things they see, the people, the music of a didgeridoo player.  There is also a recurring motif in the form of poeple waving to each other in greeting or farewell which I think is a subtle masterstroke – reflecting both the waves of the harbour’s water and the theme of connection between people.  It’s wonderfully done.

Following on from this are other echoes, most notably the use of some of the images of Slessor’s Five Bells.  Ellie thinks of ‘combs of light’ when she watches the ferries come and go at Circular Quay – an image used by Slessor.  There is also an echo of the wonderful line ‘ferry the moonfall down’.  And maybe there are others I have missed.  It is subtle and well done.

I said above that Jones is a wordsmith and part of the joy of reading Five Bells is in coming across unusual words, like: insufflation, susurration, brecciated, betoken, and so on.  There are also wonderful images, like an ‘apron of light’ spilling from a kitchen.  Wonderful.  Woolf would be proud.  There are perhaps a few instances where it didn’t quite hit the right note for me; Jones said she reads a lot of poetry and finds its ‘obliqueness’ attractive, and occasionally the images veered a little too much to the oblique rather than concrete.  Still and all, it is a minor quirk.

Five Bells is a highly enjoyable read.  It ponders in a deep, sensuous, and dare I say ‘resonating’ manner the connections and reverberations between people, the strength of memory and grief – how they alter lives, for better and for worse.

This is the first of a three-book run I’m taking on after attending another session on Sydney in which Gail Jones, Ashley Hay and Delia Falconer spoke about their love of Sydney and the interconnectedness of their books.  (See my musings on that SWF session here.)  Next up another multi-protagonist novel set in Sydney: The Body in the Clouds by Ashley Hay.

The Dilettante’s Rating: I’ve decided to stop giving marks for reviews.  It’s fraught with difficulties and is, in some ways I think, unfair to reduce a whole novel to a mere number, much as it is a neat idea.  I started using them because my musings tend to be long, so I wanted to give readers an opportunity for a snapshot view, but that, perhaps, perpetuates the sense of ‘reduction’ that I now want to avoid.  Let’s instead focus on words.  (I reserve the right to change my mind though – I’m a Libran after all!)

Five Bells by Gail Jones

Vintage

2011

ISBN: 9781864710601

216 pages

Source: purchased (and signed!) at SWF 2011

Read Full Post »

The Waves by Virginia Woolf

Is it possible to have a love-hate relationship with a book…?

What’s not to like about Virginia Woolf’s prose?  It overflows with ripe visual and auditory experience, and marks her as one of the lyrical greats.

Regarded as Woolf’s most experimental novel, The Waves (1931) traces the lives of six characters from childhood through to adulthood.  Bernard, Rhoda, Jinny, Louis, Neville and Susan—speak in what Woolf termed ‘dramatic soliloquies’, which are interspersed with sections of prose of one to two pages in length that focus on water and waves at various points of the day.  There is no authorial ‘voice’ or narrator presenting the story for us; we see mainly through the six characters’ eyes.  Events occur, yet there is no plot as such—hardly surprising for an author who saw the main purpose of the novel as the exploration of character.  Woolf’s trademark poetic prose is thus a vehicle for her characters to internalise developments in their lives and understand their sense of identity.  It is interesting that the characters ‘speak’ in these dramatic soliloquies rather than talk to each other and yet one of Woolf’s concerns is interconnectedness!

This interconnectedness is reflected in part of Bernard’s long soliloquy that ends the novel in which he reflects [p212] on his individuality thus:

… it is not one life I look back upon; I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am – Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from theirs.

(By-the-by, I love a good semi-colon, don’t you?)

Consciousness for Woolf is, as Kate Flint writes in her introduction, somewhat similar to waves, “with their incessant, recurrent dips and crests … consciousness is … fluid”.  The language used by the characters links them, with constant references to water, waves and light—a commonality that also links the sections of prose.  In her diary at the time, Woolf wrote constantly of her own state of mind and activities in terms of waves and water.  Of course, water features prominently in some of her other novels, such as The Voyage Out (1915) and the wonderful To The Lighthouse (1927).

Blurring the lines between prose and poetry is nothing new for Woolf, whose stories are rife with lyrical and poetic images.  There is the unforgettable (p73):

Now the day stirs.  Colour returns.  The day waves yellow with all its crops. 

There is line after line of such prose… another example (p7):

Flower after flower is specked on the depths of green.  The petals are harlequins.

We are presented with early clues on how this story will be an exploration of what it means to be conscious: [p8]: “The leaves went on moving. … What moved the leaves?  What moved me heart, my legs?”

How is this for an observation from Rhoda as a child in the classroom she shares with the others:  [p14]:

I am left alone to find an answer.  The figures mean nothing now.  Meaning has gone.  The clock ticks.  The two hands are convoys marching through a desert.  The black bars on the clock face are green oases.  The long hand has marched ahead to find water.  The other, painfully stumbles among hot stones in the desert.  It will die in the desert.

I don’t know how it can be believed that children think in these wildly poetic terms, with such flair, but after questioning that for a moment I realise I don’t care – how can you when writing and imagery is that good?

One of the most striking aspects of the writing is the amount of colour served up by Woolf’s cast of characters, all of whom seem predisposed to note the finest details.  This is carried over into the narrator’s short meditations on waves too.  Take, for instance, the start of the third such section [p54]:

The sun rose.  Bars of yellow and green fell on the shore, gilding the ribs of the eaten-out boat and making the sea-holly and its mailed leaves gleam blue as steel.  Light almost pierced the thin swift waves as they raced fan-shaped over the beach.  The girl who had shaken her head and made all the jewels, the topaz, the aquamarine, the water-coloured jewels with sparks of fire in them, dance, now bared her brows and with wide-opened eyes drove a straight pathway over the waves.

Yet for all its undoubted brilliance, this is a very difficult book to like.  It is difficult to ‘get into’ as they say.  The fact that there is no central protagonist doesn’t assist the reader in this regard, not does the overt lack of plot, nor ultimately does the overly poetic language.  It is not language which most people would use to tell their story, to reflect on the meaning of their lives.  The result is a distinct inaccessibility.

I had similar feelings after I read Mrs Dalloway.  She was just too vacuous a character for me to like.  I realise this was the point of the story, to satire such people, and so on this account it is a brilliant satire, but it wasn’t an enjoyable story.  Yet the writing was sublimely lyrical.  It is exactly the same with The Waves.  That said, I feel there are many layers to this book, or at least I suspect there might be, layers which may become more appreciated with a second reading; for instance, it is said that Woolf based the six characters on people she knew, people like TS Eliot.  What is also interesting is how much of her own life comes through into the lives of her six – Rhoda commits suicide, as does the very troubled Septimus in Mrs Dalloway.  One can see the great swings that Woolf herself must have suffered when reading the characters’ observations at the various points of their lives: as children with all their sense of promise, through to old age, when life’s die has been cast, positively or negatively.

What are the parameters by which we should judge a book as ‘great’?  Wonderful language?  Originality and experimentation with form?  The inability to forget it once finished?  Certainly there are others, but if it were just these three, then The Waves could indeed be judged as something approaching greatness.

So how to conclude these musings?  I can see that in some moments I’d read The Waves and think ‘what abstract tosh!’, whilst in others think ‘what brilliance!’  Can you see where my love-hate comes from?

For now, I think I’ll go with something in between, but I’ll never forget the ‘day waving yellow with all its crops’.  Sublime.

The Waves by Virginia Woolf

Penguin

ISBN: 9780141182711

228 pages

Source: The Local Municipal Library.

Read Full Post »

Sydney Writers’ Festival #4 – Sunday

Another damp day in Sydney saw the close of the Sydney Writers’ Festival for 2010.  Peter Carey is giving the official closing address, which along with many of the sessions will be available from the SWF website.  It was another very interesting day.  This is a long post but I assume that readers can see which session interests them and read those summaries:

1. ‘Portraits of a Lady’ with Colm Toibin and Kirsten Tranter in conversation with the learned Geordie Williamson, in part discussing their work’s (Colm’s Brooklyn & Kirsten’s The Legacy) relationship with Henry James’ famous novel, although the discussion covered more than this, with Colm in particular showing his encyclopedic knowledge of James, his life, and his work.  Geordie opened the session with a quote of Virginia Woolf’s review of (I think) Henry James’ Letters; Colm told the story of how Virginia and her sister (and everyone else in London at the time) wanted to impersonate James.  James was a great friend of Virginia’s parents and was over for dinner one evening and was telling a story in his own unique way, rocking on his chair as he spoke, until he rocked a little too far and fell toppled over, but what amazed Virginia was that he kept talking through the entire descent! 

Geordie asked the authors how it was that they squared with themselves the task of taking on the ‘monolith’ of James.  Kirsten told the story of how The Portrait of a Lady itself was James’ response to George Eliot’s Middlemarch, so this gave her a sense of confidence that such a project was appropriate.  Cue Colm’s very witty reason: he used to work a summer job in the motor tax office, ‘sorting paper records covered in dust and grime and dirt’. Said Colm: ‘In the day, I worked in the tax office, and at night I read The Portrait of a Lady'(!)  He was astonished with the idea of a secret held to the end of a story, and was puzzled and intrigued by James, and what appears on the surface to be the ‘style of morality’ but is really ‘the morality of morality’.  Geordie then asked about the different structure that each author took in their novels, with Kirsten favouring a fairly direct use of James’ structure (with some ‘grafted-on’ mystery elements, as well as changing the scandal from infidelity to the artist’s authorship of her work).  Kirsten purposefully did not re-read Portrait before writing her work, though she did dip into it.  Colm stripped out a lot of the original structure.  He noted that a lot of James’ work is poor, some of short stories in particular (often written quickly for money), but also some of his longer works.  Colm said ‘James struggled to write about the English’, but he did have a gift in his great novels of using a very intimate third person narrative which allows the reader to ‘become the character’.  Colm said James did this very well and Portrait is a great example.  In Brooklyn, Toibin said he limits his protagonist Ellis Lacey’s ‘ambition’, but he allows her the ability to observe events and surroundings with ‘full intelligence’.  A question was asked as to whether Henry James would have written great works had he been openly gay; Colm replied that EM Forster wrote a story which was openly gay but it was very bad because everything was given to the reader, whereas in other works his use of metaphor works, and the same could be said of James.  Another observation of Colm was that James, whilst very wealthy, wrote poverty well.  Colm clearly has both the gift of the gab – and the intellect to back it up.  A very interesting session that covered so much more than the premise allowed.

2. ‘The Boat to Redemption’ – Su Tong in conversation with Linda Jaivin (who also translated).  Another great session.  Su Tong has a wonderfully sunny disposition which came across even through Linda’s interpretation.  Tong’s books have included Wives and Concubines – which was made into the acclaimed film, Raise the Red Lantern – and others, with his latest novel The Boat to Redemption winning the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2009, making a total of seven novels, and over 200 short stories.  The story is set in the Cultural Revolution – the time in which Su grew up.  He saw people with placards around their necks with their crimes inscribed thereon and wondered what their struggles and stories were.  There is violence in his novels, but he defends this by saying that ‘violence was a part of everyday life.’  Su said he is now very awake to the ‘nightmare and corruption of his childhood’ and all its ‘blackness’. 

Interestingly, Linda noted that the title of the novel in Chinese means ‘River, Shore’ – it is set on a river, its narrator a young boy whose father decided to move from the shore to the river and they haven’t set on land since.  Su Tong’s own parents once lived on an island on the mighty Yangtze River, so for him the river was his world.  Yet the feeling of a river lends itself more to poetry than novels, so writing a story about the river proved a great challenge even for someone with his background. 

Su said that he sees himself as a doctor that looks at the ills of humanity and figures out what needs to be done.  He says it is common in China for doctors to cut out diseased tissue and show this to their families; Tong says this is what he does with society, he cuts out the rotten tissue and shows it to us – a nice metaphor.  We then had quite a funny description of how young people learnt about sex in China, with Linda noting the theme of sexual anxiety that it present in a lot of Chinese literature, including Su Tong’s work.  Mothers commonly tell their children when they ask ‘where do babies come from?’ that they come from the mother’s armpit or they are found on the street.  Su Tong was told he was taken from a boat.  He and his friends found out about sex from The Barefoot Doctor, the book given to rural people who were given very basic medical training.  Says Tong: ‘We studied Mao in class, and The Barefoot Doctor at home. 

We then arrived at Linda’s observation about the English translation.  Linda read both the Chinese and English version simultaneously and was appalled at the differences between them.  Important sentences had disappeared, chapters had been moved, and the overall elegance of the Chinese version did not fully come across.  This was meant as a compliment to Su Tong’s Chinese version, but of course, we in the audience suddenly felt like we were getting a far inferior version.  The explanation was that the English translation was taken from his second draft, and not his final draft, the publishers were anxious to get the book out!  Tong blames himself for this, but the obvious question – which was indeed forthcoming from the audience – was: ‘will there be a ‘proper’ English translation published?’  I was certainly thinking this, but I had already bought the book the other night!  Of course, the point that should have been made was: it was the English version that won the Man Asian Prize and had Colm Toibin singing its praises on Thursday night in the ‘Judges & Winners’ session.  So whilst I have not read it yet and will provide a review soon, I’m aghast to think that there are people out there that wont read it because they feel it is a poor book, and I for one am looking forward to reading River, Shore. 

3. ‘Reading Roberto Bolano’ – with Hugo Bowne-Anderson and Chris Andrews (translator of several of Bolano’s works into English), with chair Don Anderson.  Bolano has captured the imagination of many readers since his premature death with his mysterious and incredibly prolific writing.  Don noted in his introduction that Bolano said ‘magic realism stinks’, but he also said of Garcia Marquez, that some of his novels were ‘perfect’ – and this in a nutshell gives us a glimpse into the elusiveness of Bolano.  Hugo spoke at length about Bolano’s works, observing that either of By Night in Chile or Amulet (see my review), are good ways into his work. 

Chris then gave us a particularly well-constructed talk on what he saw as the five characteristics of Bolano: Energy; Tension; Totality; Ehtics; and, Poetry.  He quoted the opening lines of The Savage Detectives and noted its lack of adjectives as well as the immediate sense of a ‘vibration’ of energy.  Tension is ‘something that Bolano can create out of nothing’, and Chris noted that quite often his short stories, like Poe’s short stories, reveal a hidden structure at the end and what you thought you were reading turns out to be something entirely different.  Yet many of Bolano’s novels eschew endings.  Instead we have very open endings.  Bolano wants to work the reader hard; he attempts to retain a sense of mystery, and wants understanding to be elusive.  In terms of the ‘totality’, both Chris and Hugo noted how Bolano’s works are related and connected.  However, Chris observed that there are many inconsistencies – characters’ reappear in other books but sometimes with different names.  Thus, there is some sense of a plan behind the totality of the work, but not a real plan given all these inconsistencies.  Chris said that these are a small price to pay for the whole.  Ethics: Bolano was quite a moralist in his fiction (if not in life).  His cardinal vice was ‘cosying up to power’, whilst his cardinal virtue is courage – a view that I share wholeheartedly.  Courage in Bolano’s works is often represented by duels.  Finally, poets are everywhere in Bolano’s stories, both as a metaphor for the creative class but also because Bolano himself was a poet before he began writing novels.  Poetry is important to him. 

Chris was asked about the method of interpretation, and gave an interesting insight when he said that often the first translation is very dry and awkward and does not retain the poetry of the original; it takes a lot of work to then arrive at a real sense of the original Spanish in English.  An observation was then made from a member of the audience which the panel agreed with, as do I, when it was argued that had Bolano lived a long life, the sense of a real plan interlinking his entire work may never have been forthcoming, and we would have instead what we have now, a lack of a definitive ending to everything, where, appropriately enough, the session was ended!  Very interesting.  I have The Savage Detectives and 2666 on my shelf, their weight pressing down into the wood, but feel now that I have a much greater awareness of what awaits me. 

4.  ‘Australian Stories’ with Thomas Keneally (Australians – Origins to Eureka), Jack Marx (Australian Tragic), Michael Cathcart (The Water Dreamers), moderated by Richard Glover.  A fun romp through some tall tales, interesting facts, and myths that each author has come across as an antidote to the view in school-children that ‘Australian history is boring’.  Richard opened the session with Mark Twain’s famous quote from his journey to Australia, which Peter Carey used as a quote before his excellent Illywhacker, and which appears in the excellent: The Wayward Tourist: Mark Twain’s Adventures in Australia (see my review), that Australia’s history ‘reads like the most beautiful lies’. 

There were some interesting observations made by each panelist.  For instance, Jack believed that one Australian myth is that of ‘mateship’ – he felt there is nothing special about Australian male bonds than anywhere else in the world.  Tom noted that one myth is the notion that all aboriginals were ‘supine’ to white settlement.  This was an interesting observation for me, for I am well aware that many of the aboriginals of the day openly resisted.  This notion was explored further after a question on why the stories of violence toward aboriginals goes untold.  Again, I found this an interesting assertion, as I was aware of these stories myself, but perhaps they are untold.  Jack observed that the violence continues today, providing the example of the indigenous man killed a couple of years back on Palm Is by a policeman and the lack of punishment.  Michael’s myth is the notion that ‘everyone died searching for an inland sea’, noting the irony that as far as he was aware, the only man to die whilst searching for an inland sea was a man by the name of ‘Poole'(!). 

All-in-all, the session was proof that there is a myriad of interesting stories that constantly fuel and refuel our understanding of the past, and the idea that those things that are swept under the carpet or assumed to be isolated things in our history, and thus unimportant, are actually rife within the primary records of the day, and it is not hard to find facts and myths and wonderful things if we merely open the page – an apt thought on which to end my musings on the 2010 SWF – thoroughly enjoyable, inspiring, fun, and yes, a little damp, but my mind was definitely expanded. 

Let me know your thoughts.  What were your SWF highlights? 

The D!

Read Full Post »