CONNIKA

A FLUFFY PINK GRENADE

 

We were down at Emma and Michael's over the weekend - babysitting Hamish and Angus while their parents flew off to Sydney for a wedding.  When we arrived Emma had a wee collection of stuff that I've left or she's borrowed over the past few weeks.  In amongst the collection she had popped in this book that she's recently read.  Am half-way through - great read.  Here's the blurb..."Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee.  He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six.  She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside."  If you're looking for a wee read, here's a good one.

IMPERSONATION OF A STAR

I'm in the middle of reading this book.  Have just finished the chapter ROCKET SCIENCE.  Here's an excerpt after the launch of Ariane at which Mr Botton was present:

For thousands of years, it had been nature - and its supposed creator - that had had a monopoly on awe.  It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing sense of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime.

But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs, and of which Ariane was an exemplar.  Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature.  We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelators.  We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves.

Nature, meanwhile, had become an object of concern and pity, like a former foe arrived at one's gates, bleeding to death.  No longer standing as a symbol of all which surpassed us, the natural landscape instead everywhere bore the scars of our quixotic powers.  We could look up at the diminishing snows of Kilimanjaro and reflect on the ill effects of our turbines.  We could fly over denuded stretches of the Amazon and perceive the rain forest to be no more robust than a single flower in our hands.  We had learnt to feel respect for circuit boards and pity and guilt towards glaciers.

...A little more than a week after my return home, the Lockheed Martin satellite successfully entered its orbit, joining the hundreds of others which necklace the earth.  It now beams down images of WOWOW TV's programmes across Japan, from where it can sometimes be seen on a clear night, impersonating one of nature's stars.

 

WALKING BACKWARDS IN HIGH HEELS

Tania Kindersley and Sarah Vine at www.taniakindersley.blogspot.com (walking backwards in high heels) have just published a new book BACKWARDS IN HIGH HEELS - the Impossible Art of Being Female.  This marvelous quote just about sums up the book.  "Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did - only she did it backwards and in high heels."

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATOO

This book has been on my TO READ list and has now been read.  I just popped in to a review by Robert Dessaix of The Sydney Morning Herald.

"Such a nice, restrained, civic-minded sort of country, Sweden, where everyone rides a bicycle and everything smells of coffee.  So blond, as Malcolm Bradbury once pointed out in a scurrilously accurate attack on it...In keeping with recent Swedish fiction in this genre, Larsson has lacerating comments to make about contemporary Swedish society.  His favourite targets are violence against women, the incompetence and cowardice of investigative journalists, the moral bankruptcy of big capital, the virulent strain of Nazism still festering away beneath all that shiny Swedish fairness.

Even more daringly, he broaches the touchy subject of how responsible a criminal is for his or her crimes.  Once upon a time we blamed inborn rottenness of some kind.  Nowadays we tend to blame poverty, social injustice, parental abuse, a difficult childhood, anything and anyone except the criminal.  As Salander says (The Girl With....) it's as if we no longer believe anyone has a will of their own..."

Go...read...

THE SLAP

   Finished this book which is about the fall-out after a child is slapped (by someone who is not his parent) at a barbeque.

Didn't enjoy - as Emma said "It could have been a great book."  As it was, it threw every "agenda" in your face and the lack of subtlty felt insulting.  In this community of people - family and friends, there was not one relationship that could have been described as - (trying to think of a policially correct term here) - give up -  normal, happy... 

For those who haven't read it, here's an extract from the review by  George Megalogenis in The Australian Literary Review (1 July 2009).

"...A nation's identity is the sum of its dreams divided by its fears.  Apply this formula to Australia in the first decade of the 21st century and there is no raging debate, just a shrug.  The dream is acquisition, the fear is the debt that comes with it.  McMansion divided by the mortgage.  Plasma television divided by the credit card.

Australia as a place is easy to caricature.  It's big, fortunate and fearful of the silliest things.  The value that binds the nation is capital gain.  But Australia as a people is an elusive concept......THE SLAP and THE MARRIAGE CLUB should be read back-to-back because together they describe Australia in all its painful contradictions;  prosperous yet exceedingly anxious.  The characters tolerate one another.  Tsiolkas's inner-city suburbs are big enough to house the nation's tribes;  Legge's inner-city mansion is big enough to accommodate a couple of strangers.  The nation these people live in, though, is intolerant.  It is fixated with consumption and celebrity, devoid of any shared sense of community...The dissonance...has very Anglo origins.  It is the outrage of talkback radio, the banality of fame, the vicous certainty of the blogosphere..."

So, there you go.  I'll be interested to hear if anyone else has read the book and what they think of it.  Can't believe it was nominated for the Miles Franklin Award.  Em's finished BREATH by Tim Winton.  It won the award and she said it was wonderful.  Will put on my list when I get the book.

GILEAD, HOME AND EMMA

Emma has just finished reading Home the sequel to Gilead by Marilynne Robinson.  She was so moved by the book, she has written an essay which you can download here Download Home - essay.

"...And then, there is the dying father, watching his son's suffering and unable to prevent it.  He says, "I can't enjoy the thought of heaven like I should, leaving so much unattended to here, I know it's wrong to think your mother's going to ask me about it...I was hoping I would be able to tell her Jack has come home."  Jack sat pondering his father, and there was something in his face more absolute than gentleness or compassion, something purged of all the words that might describe it.  Finally, (Jack) said, whispered, "I hope you will give her my love."  The old man nodded.  "Yes.  I will certainly do that."

And perhaps, this is, at its core the only certain thing - love, and that home is not a temporal thing where a parent protects a child from harm, but a psychological one;  where the child and the parent look at each other, despite their differences, frailties and failings with compassion and love.  This, in fact, is where we find grace, our destiny and finally, 'home'.  and this may be what Robinson wants the reader to understand about the nature of God's grace:  it is more absolute than gentleness or compassion, something purged of all words that might describe it." 

ART

Just been putting a few books together to take down to Canberra tomorrow.  One of them is this beautiful hardback book.  Greer uses the books in the FIVE IN A ROW fashion ie reading one book for a week and doing various craft projects, geography, language, art etc with her girls. 

The artwork in this particular book is just gorgeous and I thought it worth putting up some of the illustrator's thoughts on her mother's encouragement in her early art endeavours.

"...My mother's favorite thing to do was simply to walk outside and look.  She was a painter, and my first painting lessons came from her.  They were really lessons in looking.  She would ask me:  What is the color of the tree shadow?  Is it blue?  Blue green?  Violet?  and what is the shape of the highlight on the copper teakettle?  Oval?  Square?  Diamond?  She was teaching me to paint what I saw, not what I knew.  What I knew could never be enough."

EDNA ST VINCENT MILLAY

  Another quote (by Edna St Vincent Millay) from JUST ME by Sheila Hancock.  This poem is an introduction to the chapter which describes a visit to the home in France which she and John Thaw had shared together.

Your body was a temple to Delight;

Cold are its ashes whence the breath is fled,

Yet here one time your spirit was wont to move;

Here might I hope to find you day or night,

And here I come to look for you, my love,

Even now, foolishly, knowing you are dead.

JUST ME

  I've just finished reading Sheila Hancock's JUST ME.  Her previous book THE TWO OF US is an autobiography with a particular emphasis on her life with her husband John Thaw (Inspector Morse) and coming to terms with his death.

This book as the title suggests is making the adjustment to life without him and covers the two years following his death.

Each chapter's title is a 'place' name - Provence, London . Liverpool, Budapest, Thailand etc and in these places Sheila comes to terms with being there without John, trying to move out into the world on her own and gain a clearer understanding of who she is by examining her past, particularly the period during WW2 when she was a child.

I love some of the poetry she has used in the book.  Will have a browse through it again and post any titbits I think may be interesting to anyone who pops in here.  Here's a lovely quote to get started.

"Attend to what love requires of you which may not be great busyness."

HOME

 I've just finished reading HOME by Marilynne Robinson.  Robinson's previous book GILEAD was set in the same town (Gilead) and both books place particular emphasis on the character of Jack.  HOME could be described as a sequel to the Pulitzer prize-winning GILEAD but it could also be described as the second half of the first book.

I've read a few reviews of the book;  Newsweek, New York Times and the New Yorker but it is the review of Linda McCullough Moore from ChristianityToday.com which I feel spoke best to me of the plot, themes and language of this beautiful book.  An excerpt:

"...But you'll be wanting now to know about the plot of this new novel.  A man, Jack Boughton, comes home - yes, to Gilead - to his father and his sister, Glory, after twenty silent years away.  He gardens, fixes the car, visits the neighbors, and goes to church a couple times.  Then goes away again.

...And if this Jack Boughton is the Prodigal, he's one whose father slaughters not the fattened calf, but any hope of lasting ease.  The Prodigal whose older brother traveled six times to St Louis to search the sorry streets for him.  But Robinson would have Jack be more Lazarus than Prodigal, Lazarus 'with the memory of cerements about him,' no matter he is washed and shaved, his hair slicked down, dressed up in a suit he has dry-cleaned with dabs of gasoline.  Lazarus who wishes they'd all stop studying him, stop falling silent when he walks into the room...He's Abraham - he's told - abandoning Ishmael;  he's Caleb and Joshua still thinking things possible even after forty years of wandering in the desert.  He is David, his sin ever before him, still, man after God's own heart, rehearsing questions about the sins of the fathers being visited on sons.  Jack is Jonah telling God:  I fled because I feared your mercy;  he's Moses stuttering:  God, Please!  Pick somebody else.  He is Joseph, father-favorite, given a coat of many colors woven out of expectations - that he be happy...

It's all been told before.  But that's the point.  The story's old.  All stories are.  We do not read for that.  We read to know just what we are to make of the stories we already know.  We read to ask how are we, knowing what we know, expected to get out of bed tomorrow morning.  To stay alive till then.  Some days to flourish...

...Robinson would have us know things.  Have us know forgiveness precedes not follows understanding.  Forgive, she says, and 'you will be ready to understand, and that is the posture of grace.'  She paints with tiny brush strokes, showing 'Sympathy (that) would corrupt something wonderful, which secrecy and a kind of shame kept safe." 

I could quote and quote from this book.  Read it.  The characters will impress themselves on your heart.  "Hi, I'm Jack!  Hi, I'm Glory!  Hi there, I'm Rev Boughton." 

I think the mark of any great book is that in some way it changes who we are, particularly in the way we come to a deeper understanding of not only others but how we ourselves relate to them and ourselves too.  To take a leaf out of Glory's book I'll quote a scripture!  "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind and love your neighbour as yourself."  For all its Calvanistic undertones, I  believe this is what is at the heart of HOME.