Humorous Crime, Escaping to a Convent; Book Reviews

Looking at The Brisbane Times Books Review. 

Even though Why can’t crime be funny? How Benjamin Stevenson combined his skills feels to me like a strange question, it is also an appropriate one for us now. Plenty of detective fiction from the Thirties and Forties was funny; a lot of Donald E. Westlake is also; I rewatched Get Shorty a few days ago, which is a funny crime story). So why are we all so grim nowadays? Well, I hear myself ask me, you are not exactly a barrel of laughs in what you have been writing, with your thinking humanity is in a death spiral, living in a post-industrial factory town still suffering from the opioid crisis. Yeah, but I can see the humor in a woman stealing a car so she can get to an interview as a topless dancer.

That article also has some interesting things to say on what to write and what it takes to get published.

Short takes, What to read: Japanese magical realism and the question of justice, which make wonder if we are not missing out on what is going on in the outer world.

Here is another example of the kind of novel, the kind of writing, we may be missing out: This magnificent and radical novel asks tough questions about life. Which reviews Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood. The subject matter interests me; so does the language of the review itself.

Charlotte Wood’s books have won prizes. Her range is extensive; she has written about creativity, ageing, cooking as well as fiction, although everything filters into the fiction of an accomplished writer. Stone Yard Devotional is daring because it looks at the obscure and therefore the difficult in the contemporary world. Difficult and obscure, but also something that commonly underpins everything we do. In a plainer world, this was called the search for meaning when the concept called God is largely absent – now probably more absent that it has ever been.

But humans yearn for something more, something not necessarily religious, but certainly spiritual. The idea of reverence? The idea of devotion to something larger than ourselves? There’s a witty paragraph where the narrator lists all the things she has “unsubscribed” from to come to this community. The lists amount to her entire external life, trying to save the planet, save the animals, save other human beings. But, for her, nothing is working in the clamour of doing good, being good. Of saving.

This time she might attend to saving herself. She will become an oblate, a person who is not a member of a religious order but one who offers themselves up in some sort of service. The community is as frail and as difficult as all human communities are, but here, in the orderliness and the desire to be at peace in the world, understanding, spiritual and practical, dawns. It also gives the woman time to think, and she increasingly thinks about her mother, whose devotion to her garden was a profound connection to her devotion for her God. 

To my eyes, the Aussie's write their book reviews in a different style than I am accustomed to over here.

The Guardian's review, Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood review – a masterful novel of quiet force reads in part:

This kind of slow accrual is central to the structure of Stone Yard Devotional – it is built of small moments and details, routines and tasks, and the memories they evoke, alongside short interactions and conversations between the narrator and the nuns. The plot is minimal, but finely observed, and because its momentum comes from the growing weight of these incidents and memories, it leaves plenty of space for contemplation – there is work for the reader to do as well.

Stone Yard Devotional is a beautiful and masterful book especially for its ability to dwell within the confusion and complexity of all that it is questioning, and for all of its quiet force.

And for Something Different:

 sch 10/13