Reading Foreign Book Reviews

Australian Book Reviews

I repeat myself by writing I do like the book reviews from The Brisbane Times. They have a sprightliness to their writing and in their thinking I find lacking elsewhere. There is also the cachet of finding something new.

I had no idea who was John MacArthur until I read Was John Macarthur a genius or a ‘colonial monster’ and a bully?.

Elizabeth and John focuses on the period from the 1790s until the 1830s, but its intellectual framing is drawn from scholarship on 18th-century Enlightenment thought. To this end, we follow the story of the Macarthurs through a set of familiar episodes – John’s service in the military, their arrival in Sydney in the 1790s, their experiments in sheep farming, the (so-called) rum rebellion, and John’s political and commercial interventions in the 1820s and ’30s – but rather than being a simple story of colonial ambition or burgeoning democracy, it is, surprisingly, a tale of the influence of European philosophical and scientific thought on the early colony.

Wool and kick-starting Australia's agricultural community seems to have been their claim to fame. More importantly, after reading the review, I want to know more about him and to read the biography.

Tom Keneally’s sparkling new novel is a book for our times attracted my attention by foregrounding Keneally's name. As with the first selection, the reviewer has me curious about the novel:

But Fanatic Heart is a novel, and while it owes much to history, and to the journalism and Jail Journal of the historical John Mitchel, the shaping is all Keneally’s. And he is acutely aware of the risks of this “not entirely wisely embarked upon novel of mine”, centred as it is upon a historical figure once acclaimed as an Irish revolutionary, but now (and even in his own time) reviled as a supporter of the slavery institutionalised in the southern states of America.

Many Australian readers now may never have heard of Mitchel; Keneally’s feat is to have brought him back to life and to have recreated the fraught circumstances that made the complex man – and the remarkable woman, Jenny Verner, who was his wife.

Lastly, a book that ought to be making more waves here (that I am at the bottom of the heap and not having heard of this book led me to this conclusion) was reviewed under The questions the scientists have to answer about the pandemic. 

If Dark Winter was written by anyone other than epidemiologist Professor Raina MacIntyre, it might read a little paranoid; as if the author had digested one too many Cold War spy thrillers while in lockdown. Instead it’s written by one of the world’s leading experts on infectious disease epidemics, biosecurity, bioterrorism prevention, vaccines and public health, who is also a professor of global biosecurity at UNSW and head of the biosecurity program at the Kirby Institute in Sydney.

That makes this book so much scarier because the past, present and possible future of disease outbreaks – both natural and unnatural – are dissected and analysed by someone who knows very much what they’re talking about.

Reviews from The Guardian

 I think of The Guardian as an English newspaper, that is regardless of what edition or the writer, there is an English sensibility.

‘Family is the place for madness’: Constance Debré on the book that has shocked France I think is a headline as unlikely to be seen in an American public as its subject.

“There’s always a price to pay for freedom,” says Constance Debré, running a hand over her shaved head and her neck tattoo that reads “plutôt crêver” (“rather die”). The 50-year-old author, who faced a fierce custody battle over her young son after coming out as gay in her mid 40s, adds: “To me, that’s a happier, livelier way to see things: rather than saying there are injustices or blows raining down on you, you realise it’s all because you’re living life in the way you want, seeking out an existence … trying to give life some shape. That’s why life and literature are so connected: it’s the quest for form.”

Debré tore up the rule book of French writing with a bestselling trilogy based on the dramatic turn her life took after she came out. The darkly comic, first-person account of a separated mother’s Don Juan-style conquests of women is interwoven with scenes of her “taking an automatic rifle” to her bourgeois life as a criminal defence barrister from a famous French political dynasty. More than a coming-out saga, Debré likens it to a Saint Augustine-style conversion, a total transformation. The protagonist and narrator, who is not named, is clearly Debré herself, following in a long French tradition of creative writers who draw closely on real-life events – the most notable being last year’s Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux. Yet though the events are real, Debré firmly considers her work fiction rather than autobiography or memoir, because it relies on the literary art of constructing a narrative, creating a relationship between a character and events. “What makes a novel is its form,” she says.

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For Debré, style is what counts. Hailed by French critics for her slap-in-the-face narration, she strips the French language back to its most crude and colloquial, subverts punctuation and deliberately goes against the current trend in French writing for plunging into psychological explanation.

“I wanted a style that would be the least verbose, very direct, fat-free, efficient – with as little psychology as possible because I absolutely detest that. I had in mind that well-known photograph by William Eggleston, a naked bulb on a ceiling – just a bulb and three white cables in a red room. It’s banal and it has an incredible strength. I wanted to get back to that concept, which we’ve had in music, art, photography for 50 years. You find it less in literature, at least in French writing, which is deliberately delicate. I wanted to grab events and grab the reader.”

She sounds almost American.

The name Nell Zink I have heard, even though not recalling its context, and so curiosity led me to Avalon by Nell Zink review – the misfit’s tale.

Zink is both a very satisfying and a frustrating writer. Her plots are shapeless but oddly propulsive. Her narrative style is a tissue of quips that strays into glibness, even in her best work. Within it, though, something more substantial is always implicit, and now and then she turns and directly addresses it with a clarity that feels almost violent. Her writing often has a slapdash manner that suggests she’s too authentic to waste sweat on anything as cheap as fiction, and this has the interesting quality of making the reader feel more authentic, too. All these things are present in Avalon, and make it a pleasure, as all Zink’s work is. But one other Zink hallmark goes badly awry here.

Zink likes to situate her characters within subcultures: the world of environmental activism in The Wallcreeper, anarchist squats in Nicotine, the music business in Doxology. She satirises these and mines them for quirky details, but also speaks of them with authority and love. The great flaw in Avalon’s conception is that Zink tries to work this trick with the lowlife world of the Hendersons, but without the intimacy or the love. She has nothing but contempt for these characters, and they remain vague and one-dimensional. All they do is express crass bigotry and demand unpaid labour from the hapless Bran.

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...A lot of authors, even very good ones, write prose that seems designed to win the approval of a focus group of typical readers. When Zink is on form, her writing is a wild ride down a steep hill, into a creek, up the other bank, through a henhouse and finally off a cliff only to land safely in a wagon full of hay. Here is Bran reflecting on Jay’s terrible dancing: “ … it was good, being an authentic part of Jay, but no more made for exposure than his gallbladder or hypothalamus. Only by shutting my eyes could I nullify the critical voice of the advancing darkness we look to for salvation, which was also my voice.” And here is a first kiss: “We kissed like Roland blowing his horn at Roncesvalles, with desperation, yet no host of angels materialised to tell him it was okay to get buyer’s remorse and ditch that girl.” Avalon is worth the cover price for the fun of these sentences alone.

I caught most of Rick Rubin on last night's 60 Minutes, and so I read The Creative Act by Rick Rubin review – life lessons from the bearded beat master.

The Creative Act is, then, not an account of Rubin’s ripsnorting career, wrangling 36th takes out of entitled guitar heroes. It names no names. Rather, it is a distillation of the wisdom Rubin has accrued over decades of bringing records to fruition. If it has an unignorable precedent, it is Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, a set of artistic challenges the British producer concocted alongside Peter Schmidt in 1975 to break through creative blocks (now an app).

Anyone with a passing familiarity with Buddhism, management theory or the self-help shelf will also find plenty that feels familiar in Rubin’s modus operandi. That’s not to say that Rubin is unoriginal or indeed wrong, only that occasionally, these 400-odd pages can read a little like “the 73 unexpected practices of successful creatives”. The tone is gnomic and epigrammatic, and Rubin’s elevation of artistic endeavour to the highest status of human achievement reverberates with a solemn quasi-religiosity – one befitting a hardback with a fabric bookmark – that is hard to square with his ballsy production work on Jay-Z’s epic banger 99 Problems.

You have the world at your fingertips, why not use the internet to expand your horizons instead of hiding in informational silos?

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