Books that I immersed myself in and was a better writer (so I tell myself) for the experience. We should always be looking for this kind of quality.
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"THE STONE BOOK" - Alan Garner (UK 1976)
"BIG FISH" - Daniel Wallace (USA 1998)
This is another gem of a find I made in an Op Shop (a steal at $2.00!), not very big at about 50k words, but well set out, easy to read.
Subtitled "A novel of mythic proportions" with good reason, this book is a must for any intending fiction writer who wants to get into, not just creativity, but true inventiveness. It's the sort of "out there" inventiveness that Peter Carey uses but (just my humble opinion here folks!) doesn't seem to crack, simply because this one isn't at all over the top. It just indulges in good story telling with a mythic edge - okay, clearly plays about with reality, but only enough so that you can enjoy the unbelievability.
It's done in the First Person, mainly the narrator looking back over the (larger than) life of his father, and their relationship.
And there's a great lesson here for aspiring authors. This is actually Wallace's sixth novel, the first five being rejected by publishers, but he persevered, and now this one is something of a best-seller and made into a movie, and he has novels now in 18 languages. Stickability pays! If you'd like to know more of the guy, check him on Wiki.
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"CROW LAKE" - Mary Lawson (Canada/UK 2002)
I picked this one up by chance in an Op Shop, its slightness of size and the "Winner of the Davy Byrnes Award" across the top caught my eye, and the fact that Claire Keegan is Irish. Never seen her stuff before, but will surely look for it in the future.
The award is actually a top Irish gong, but for short stories, which is what this started its life as, but apparently Keegan filled it out a bit and Faber UK picked it up and published it, presented it as a novel, but at less than 20k words, it's not even a novella, more a long short story.
But this is beautifully simple, clear, (I keep wanting to say "charming" but that sounds way too patronising and doesn't do it anywhere near enough justice), so let's say warm and - struggling here - insightful? Whatever, I loved it. And what made it even more enjoyable was the heap of margin notes all through it, in the hand of a 15 year old girl my guess (including on p57 a very cute flower with the note "1st day back to school after Grease"), who had this set as required text in High School. Interesting thing is, this story was required text in many Irish High Schools, so I'd like to imagine it started its life over there, and emigrated! This one I keep, on the shelf between James Joyce and Jack Kerouac.
It's set in about 1980, in Wicklow (one of our favourite Irish counties) near Gorey on the coast (know it well), of a girl about ten, from an overloaded farm family, who is sort of "loaned" for the summer school holidays to a couple who have lost their only child. Won't say any more as I don't want to spoil the experience for you. (Sorry South Aus, can't see it on the One Library list, but Keegan has several others there to borrow, if I don't beat you to them!)
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What can I say? - great storytelling! For those of you who haven't already read it, get a copy! Well written, balanced, continually involving, especially if, like I did, you Google Street Map Thingo his unfolding walk from deep in Devon, up to Berwick on the Scottish border ("627 miles in 87 days"), much of which we've actually walked/driven over the years.
"SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE" - Kurt Vonnegut (USA 1969)
This is one of those books that you hear and read references to but have never read, not seen the movie, don't really know what it's about - in this case, other than it's an "anti-war" novel.
I'd have to describe it as a hodge-podge, a stark disjointed hodge-podge in which every bit of the negative side of humanity - death, nihilism, hopelessness, sadness, despair, selfishness, brutality - is covered in a detached matter-of-fact narrative. The nearest thing to a laugh in it can only be described as gallows humour or a bleak kind of cynicism. It's said to be anti-war, and it is, but in places it feels more like it's anti-LIFE, as if it's saying - "If I have to be a homo sapiens and have to do these things it's not worth the effort of being alive."
This was Vonnegut's sixth novel and, very roughly, revolves around the fire-bombing of Dresden by the RAF in 1945, in which anything from 35,000 to 250,000 civilians died (no-one is sure, so it depends on which account you read), but they were all mainly women, children, and the elderly. A horror that Vonnegut lived through, as a prisoner of war, while barracked there in a disused slaughterhouse (with many other American POWs) and working in a German factory.
But the Dresden nightmare is only a part of it, as it lurches back and forth through the main character Billy Pilgrim's life and time and place (and space!), but somehow it WORKS! It's like Vonnegut decided - "I'm going to write what I want and how I want and to hell with faddish popularity, you'll read it or you won't and I don't give a stuff either way." No idea if that's how he approached it but that's the feeling you get. Which I heartily applaud.
I can only say that if you aspire to creative - truly creative - writing, READ THIS. But find the above 50th Anniversary Edition as it has a heap of reference material at the end, but best is the 6-8 versions of his first chapter that he laboured over, an insight into the whole art/craft of writing. And there's also an "interview" he actually did (but fiddled with for effect!) which gives a powerful insight into the guy's thought processes. And a letter to his previous publisher (who knocked this one back I think) agonising over dialogue style. And other stuff, letters to home while waiting for repatriation, some articles. Get hold of it! And for a check on the man's life.....
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This is the second from Roddy Doyle's so-called "Barrytown Trilogy" (The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van) and, like the others, draws heavily on his first hand experience of Dublin's working class Northside.
Roddy Doyle is one of my all time favourite writers, and it's been a while since I read "The Commitments" (but watched the movie the other night - brilliant!), and I don't recall ever reading "The Van" (which I must find) or seeing the movie, but - like "Paddy Clarke" - the sheer energy and sense of "being there" just belts out of the pages. This is (okay, what I imagine to be, but geez he has me convinced!) 1990s working class Dublin Irish to the core.
The book is just about totally dialogue, between Jimmy Rabbitte Snr and his family and mates and neighbours, mostly concerning his eldest daughter becoming pregnant after a drunken one-nighter, and how the events that evolve from it affect various people, all done through boisterous and breezy conversations, at home, at the pub, in the street. But Doyle has such a way of capturing the sound of it all! Geez I just love it. Do yourself a massive favour and find a copy. The inventiveness alone is gold to a wannabe writer.
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"A SHORT HISTORY OF TRACTORS IN UKRAINIAN" - Marina Lewycka (2005 UK)
If you're interested in books that burst with life and slightly dysfunctional characters, this one is a must! It's funny, a bit sad, a bit annoying (well, the characters are at times!), and totally human, an extremely clever and entertaining debut novel. I now intend to hunt down her subsequent works.
The opening para sets the mood and the pace brilliantly, and yes I did put this bit up a few weeks back, as an example of how to open a novel...
"Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcée. 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."
The whole novel is then taken up with the efforts of the narrator and her ten year older sister to get this somewhat tarty chancer disconnected from their sometimes irritating love-smitten father in a minefield of conflicting needs, wants, and desires. Yep, sounds like overkill to use the whole book doing it, but there's never a dull moment. And all through it (they all live in modern day England) are the confronting memories - prised out of the older sister - of the ebb and flow of pre- and post-War life in Ukraine as her parents negotiated Fascism, Communism, Capitalism, and the eternal robber barons that surface in a dysfunctional society.
For my money this should've been made into a movie or a mini-series. Find a copy and get stuck in. Now it's back to nothing but short stories for a while.
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"THE KITE RUNNER" (Khaled Hosseini, USA 2003)
Part way through this I bet quids it was fairly autobiographical, but the author was born in the early 1960s, while this is a coming-of-age story set on an isolated "backwoodsy" Canadian farm during WW2. And while it must surely be based at least in part on someone's personal experiences - you just don't fabricate stuff this real! - a great piece of creativity. Just loved it.
15 year old Beth and her rather dysfunctional (by modern urban standards) family and their neighbours live out a very rustic existence, very close to nature, and with grizzlies and coyotes (and the inbred fear of them) ever threatening.
This was a debut novel and justifiably won awards in Canada, the writing style is simple but absorbing, and the infinite detail of these people's daily lives fascinating, but what got me hooked was the subtle blurring of the edges between the natural and the supernatural world, driven by these simple people's superstitions. There's no literary pretension here, sometimes a bit brutal and confronting, but always enlightening and entertaining.
It's by Adeline Yen Mah (born Yen Jung-lin in Tianjin China in 1937) and published in 1997, the true story of this woman's early life in strife-torn China, and within a fairly oppressive household. I'm only about 50 pages in, but it already has me by the throat, simple clean style, set amid fascinating (but sometimes ugly and brutal) times.
"THE SHEPHERD'S HUT" - Tim Winton (Aust 2018)I fell over this recent release by one of my favourite authors while killing time in K-Mart (lordy lordy I do so hate accompanying Herself shopping!), browsed the blurb and the first two pages, and yep, this one's for me. But not at $30-odd. So I hit the good old local lending library website, and sure enough, there's a ten week waiting list.
I checked Amazon for a bargain but then realised that they won't sell into Aus any more because they recently had a barney with our Fed Govt over having to pay GST (our version of a consumption tax) in Aus. I mean, Amazon IS bigger than everyone on earth I suppose so why not get all thingy about having to be like every other retailer.
Anyway, finally my turn, didn't realise I was restricted to two weeks with no extensions, lost it half way through, so have only just managed to land another copy - for another two weeks - to pick up where I left off. And NO way I would've let this one go. It's a great read, as Tim Winton is that cliché of a writer's writer. He can make a page of words jump out at you and get you by the throat and not let go.
Jaxie is a 15-16 year old kid from a dysfunctional home, suddenly parentless, is on the run on his own in the unforgiving West Aust bush, and tells his background story as he goes, in a youthful street idiom. He's struggling to survive, but falls over a shepherd's hut on one of those endless pastoral properties out there in the middle of nowhere at the margins of the good earth. In the hut is a crusty old bloke, and the two of them find a patchy relationship of sorts, and Jaxie stays on for a few weeks till he gets his body and attitudes sorted.
But soon violent outside forces crash into their isolated life, and Jaxie has to dig deep to go on surviving.
This is one of those writings that move fast and steady and keeps you glued to the page, not intending to be "literature", just a bloody good story told well, as only Tim Winton can. Do yourself a big favour and find a copy.
In many ways this is a follow-on from my little dummy-spit ("Don't Say I'm Not Trying") the other day, as I picked this one out of the same local daily's Book Review page just after, and tagged it in our local Library network. Who only gave me two weeks because apparently everyone else wants to read it too. But I just needed to read an Australian novel that HAD been commercially published and HAD been well reviewed by the same paper who seemed to dish mine back to me out of hand. Maybe IT would tell me where I've been going wrong. Yep, just a bit tetchy and pathetic!
On the Aust Nat Uni website, author Kathryn Hind is a "PhD scholar with the ANU School of Literature, Languages, and Literature", and then goes on to talk about her book....
"A 12-times rejected manuscript that was abandoned to gather dust by a first-time novelist, has now hit bookshelves around the country after winning a prestigious literary prize. The novel "Hitch" by .... Kathryn Hind won the inaugural Penguin Literary Prize in 2018 and has been released in bookshops and online. The book is the result of a remarkable journey that at one stage saw Hind set the manuscript aside to work on other projects after a long and disappointing cycle of rejections and redrafts.
'It was rejected by all the publishers who read it. I just couldn't make any headway with it,' said Ms Hind, 'I couldn't work out how to make it the way I wanted it to be. I decided to start something new but my thoughts were never far from "Hitch".'
"Hind said that while the rejections from publishers were always difficult to come to terms with, she never lost faith that "Hitch" could be a success. (Then) in 2017 Penguin Random House Australia launched the Penguin Literary Prize looking to unearth new talented Australian authors. Hitch was one of more than 400 submissions and was eventually named the inaugural winner, a moment Hind said has changed her life."
"A 12 times rejected manuscript". You would have to see this as significant!
I have never had anything rejected more than 4 times, at which point I surrendered and went for self-publish in e-book and paperback. So, is THIS the critical lesson I never learnt? My first success came way too easily and I never properly understood about doing the hard yards? And now too late? Probably. But not for you. This young woman - she looks about early-mid 20s - has a London based Lit Agent and now, because of self belief and persistence, has a good novel on the shelf and lots of prospects. And I'm sure she understands that it doesn't come easily or quickly.
The other thing is, this is not some earth-moving literary work, it's simply a well-written novel, easy to read, a popular subject, set in a very tangible landscape, a mid 20s girl and her dog hitch-hiking around Australia in an effort to escape a couple of traumatic incidents, the inevitable mixed bag of people she meets, some pleasant-ish, some a touch weird, some just bloody dangerous. There's a bit of tension at times, but none of it moves you to joy, tears, or laughter. But it beat 399 other contenders for Penguin's New Writer Award.
The other thing is, it's quite modestly sized at only about 65k words, fleshed out by upping the line spacing and the font size, and printed in the popular (?) "bestseller" size of 150 x 235 mm. You would have to conclude that this is what the agents and publishers are looking for, in writing AND writer - Market-ability.
For me, this was one of those books that you put down and think - geez, now that was a good read! Why the hell can't they all be as satisfying as that?
This bloke knows his stuff, and is as Aus as they come, with a writing style as dry as Gawler Ranges spinifex and as spare as a Bondi bikini, yet slides down as easy as a Bundy & Coke with an egg & bacon sanger on the side. And unlike what I've just written, there's not the slightest touch of Ocker to be found! Just pure and unpretentious literature.
Dizzy is a man caught between the worlds of the whitefella and the blackfella, a manager/guitarist for an Aboriginal country rock band that survives playing tin sheds and dance halls all over the Northern Territory and Western Queensland, yet good enough to hover around the edge of the Sydney music scene for a heady moment when they win an award.
But Dizzy - part Aboriginal himself - is a man lost, spends a lot of the book criss-crossing the Barkly Tablelands country (GoogleMap "Tablelands Northern Territory" and have a drive along the Tennant Creek to Camooweal road!) looking for love and but only finding sex, looking for meaning but only finding rock'n'roll, and looking for his spirit but finding only religion.
If you ever had a yen to experience the Australian Outback up close and personal, read this book. It's full of characters and colour (and yes, black and white and the shades between) and descriptive of nature and the landscape in such an easy style that it's like you're there in his beat-up old EH Holden with him. Do yourself a BIG favour......