Hobart-side:

Award-winning writer, regular writer for The Owner Builder magazine, and blogger Sharyn Munro will be at the Hobart Bookshop on Thursday May 13th from 5.30. Pete Hay will introduce her, and Sharyn's books 'Mountain Tails' and 'The Woman on the Mountain' will be available.
Event supported by the Tasmanian Greens.
All welcome to this free event.

The Hobart Bookshop
22 Salamanca Square
Hobart Tasmania 7000
P 03 6223 1803 . F 03 6223 1804
hobooks@ozemail.com.au

Book slut and tanka

With a name like mine sometimes it is difficult not to be slutty about books. I have seriously indulged lately - and one little tome that I can now justify the purchase of was just used for the first time. The (Penguin) 'Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory' has just saved me from a potentially awkward conversation with Chris Gallagher, the lovely director of The Tasmanian Writer's Centre (TWC) (see earlier blog post). TWC are holding a series of workshops throughout April and May (excuse late post, but I have been far, far away). Their workshops include ones on creative non-fiction (a genre I love to pieces beginning with Capote's 'In Cold Blood'), Haiku (yeah yeah, know all about it, did it in grade 6) and Tanka. Tanka. Lovely word, solid and quite visceral - but what on earth? 'A Japanese lyric form of thirty one syllables in lines of five/seven/five/seven/seven syllables. Also known as Waka or an Uta it originated in the 7th Century and is regarded as the classic Japanese poetic form.' (Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory' Penguin, 1999 p901.

Isable Allende, the nature of arguing and the notion of trash.

....last night I finished "Island Beneath The Sea' by Isabel Allende. I feel dirty and disappointed.
What has changed since 'Eva Luna' and 'House of Spirits' curled my teenage toes?
Well, I have changed and so has Allende - and she has changed more than me.
Both Eva Luna and 'House of Spirits' stand up today and resonate for what they are - harbingers of the end of the boom in Latin American Magical Realism. Yes, lacking the scope and depth of Garcia Marquez or Llosa - though spirited and delightful reads about magic lived in real life.
Allende's literary career began then - and her writing career has boomed since.
She struck lit dirt with the sweet yet dark stories of Eva Luna - and it has been downhill since then.
With her latest offering, I felt as if my synapses shrivelled up and cowered, before eventually breaking off and clogging my entire brain as I continued to read.
For a woman who has lived through personal tragedy she has an inordinate ability to skim the surface, the scummy and un-nourishing surface, of the human condition.
I got in to a 'discussion' last week with a friend, quite a heated one, as neither of us are skilled at argument to foment conversation - about whether it is better to read 'trash' than to not read at all - a week ago I believed it was better to read than not - better read than dead, if you will allow me that distortion, though having finished the Allende, I feel it important to delve deeper in to that notion.
In this casestudy 'Island Beneath the Sea' is the trash. It is predictably mainstream 20th Century Latin American: historic, hysteric, histrionic.
Beginning in the 1700s on the island of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) it tells the inter-generational story of a French plantation owner and his slaves.
It is impossible to believe that Allende does not have a researcher - and in some parts of the book it seems she is quoting directly from the researcher's notes - or the things she jotted down as she spoke with historians, copied from historic sources in the library or transcribed from her personal shorthand as she watched documentaries.

So - why is reading trash better than reading nothing:

1) one becomes aware of how one does not want to write
2) 'Trash' often features time and place of social and political import- and this provides the reader with opportunity to glean what the author has learned from their researcher.
3) reading is always better for the brain and mind than zonking our in front of the television (the song is quite simply NOT 'books; drug of a nation'). There is more active brain activity when reading than when watching the box.
4) we read for different reasons; to transform, to inform, to entertain, to waste time, to enhance time. All of these reasons are as valid as the other.

So - yes, even after the saccharine torture of 'Island Beneath The Sea' I still think that it is better to read 'trash' than to not read at all.

The Bone People and memory

This week, for the first time in a long time, I am getting house mates. I'm a little nervous about this - as it has been my very own space for a long time. There will need to be some compromises on my part - no whole evenings spent in the nude, no smoking inside, no washing up left for weeks on end, and the removal of around four thousand precariously wobbly piles of books. I live in harmony with meat eating slugs and ants. The ants and I have already had to compromise. They avoid the kitchen and I avoid their four lane highway that runs along the step into the toilet. The slugs I have no power over - though they will not slug the way through bicarb.
The ants in the loo are quite lovely, and often I linger longer to watch them streaming back and forwards. They don't sleep, or if they do, they sleep in shifts. There used to be a lithe resident spider in the corner of the toilet too - until my mother visited - and cleaned the room up.
I read Keri Hulme's Booker winning 'The Bone People' many years ago and, when I remember it, my heart leaps in a good way. One of the aspects of the book is that one of the protagonists, whose name eludes me, lives in a magic castle of a house and has fungi that glows on her staircase. I remind myself of this when I welcome spiders and ants in to my toilet.
What else do I remember about 'The Bone People'? and is it really true:
the story of a woman taking refuge a long way from home, a denial of her past that somehow comes back to her. A young boy called Simon. He was force-fed heroin. There must be love somewhere too. The child is damaged, but is redeemed or saved. I remember that the language was not ornate but the images I created from the book were rich rich rich.

I gave this book as a present to dear friends, which means that I truly valued my time reading it.

I will re-read it. Is it still in print? I wonder. The ants scurry.


PS - please note - this is NOT a plea for remedies to remove slugs and ants from indoor living. Do not send suggestions, however well meaning you are.

...this is how I feel.....

My main read/squeeze right now is 2666 by Bolano. It is an epic that he wanted published in 6 parts - but was (posthumously) published as one. Epic far ranging stories set all over and hung together by a series of true murders that happened in the nineties in Santa Teresa, Mexico. His writing is harsh, insightful and beautiful and smashes the face of Latin American writing. It is a visceral (if you'll 'scuse the savage pun) and I feel a deep welling of emotion even thinking about his words.

The Unsigned Author

I peddle, push and purvey.

Though I am the pusher, I am as much of a sucker as those to whom I fob my wares.

My wares are the ether around which the written word resides. The space outside a novel, everything that is, essentially, superfluous to the text. It is the cult of the author and the author as fetish.

I broadcast the story around the story – the author’s life, how they write, what inspires them, what they read, as well as the story of the industry around books; the prizes, legislation affecting the industry, awards and accompanying gossip. I yearn to hear the story OF the author, not just the story By the author.

In Bolano’s book The Savage Detectives, he tells the story of young writers as detectives seeking an elusive poet – they are seeking her, not her words. In 2666 he writes of the intellectuals whose livelihoods are made by another elusive author, in this case the real or imagined BennoVon Archimboldi. He toys with the reader, like me, who appears to need to know where the author sits, stands and lies in order to truly understand and give credence to the story.

Obviously, to know the time and space where the author writes from helps to understand (and to accept in some cases) the attitudes of the text. It places it within a historical or cultural context and if we bring something of our knowledge to that reading, we can glean more from the words themselves.

In the past, without the time and space shattering communication mechanisms such as the internet it was simply not possible to have such a cult around the authors, though we know that there was a demand for Mark Twain on the speaking circuit.

The 2009 arch-version of this circuit is the Writers’ Festival – of which there is a massive proliferation, generally aimed at middle class ladies, that augments the business around books.

Writer speak, reader buy.

And writer sign, reader buy.

One of my favourite childhood memories occurred in C1978 (??) in the Long Gallery. My mother took me to a book signing. The book was The Hills of the Black Cockatoo and the author was Pat Peafield Price. As a child this book took on significance much greater than the story. It became a valued item, something which somehow gave me a lot more than the story itself.

What changed with that lithe little tome, what altered the weight of the words once the author had inscribed it with her magic, her pen and with the hand that wrote the words. What was it that my few nervous childhood moments in the presence of Pat that made this work weightier for my conditioning mind?

I recently encountered a Buddhist monk signing the books of his teacher – and enquired how he, who views the world through lenses of impermanence and non attachment, could justify putting his mark in this book. He answered that that we know sales improve with signed copies, and that will take his teacher’s message further.

It’s true – signed books sell more copies and the cynics say that once a book is signed, if it doesn’t sell, it can not be returned the publisher, though this is less the case than it once was.

A gentle paradox in the face of the increased pecuniary value of the signed book by a dead author is that a personalised dedication from the dead author lessens its value in the auction house, though it has more importance to those who know to whom it was dedicated.

The written word can transform the reader, can vault you to a place you did not know existed, can allow you insight and can entertain – whether the copy is signed or not, yet despite the magical qualities afforded the written word, it is an industry. We consume books and words- just as we consume food, clothes, and widescreen televisions. There are people who work in this industry and need to be paid, there is money to be made from the words and to be able to get the words out there money must be made. The snake eats its own tail.

Of course, there are purists out there – people who consume the text and nothing but (“the words alone transform me, to know of the author’s divorce is merely crass.”)Those who are transformed by the essence – and there are the prurient (“it is absolutely crucial to know what type of drug Kerouac was on when he wrote each book.”) and everyone in between.

We can read the stories of the writer or the writers’ stories. They are all part of a cycle of narrative. Stories within, like Matryoshka dolls, though they’re far from uniform and sometimes impossible to prise apart.

What I really truly don’t understand, though, is why the big fuss that Pearl Jam wouldn’t sign autographs on their recent tour.

...originally published in 'Apple' - Summer '09 '10. 'Apple' is the magazine of the marvellous Tmaggots

TasNoir

Review of ‘No Weather For A Burial’
David Owen
Forty Degrees South, 2009
9780980655520


‘No Weather For A Burial’ is the latest in a series of crime novels by David Owen set in Tasmania that feature the same world weary detective – Detective Inspector Franz Heineken – aka Pufferfish. Yes – Pufferfish is back, after a 12 year hiatus.

‘No Weather..’ is Tas Noir, the setting is as important as the tried and tested scaffolding of most crime novels on which it is strung:

An aging, and no doubt ruggedly handsome, detective with a questionable past and a bitter divorce behind him (Pufferfish) faces down, not only a curious cast of criminals, but also sceptical and thwarting senior police officers to overcome obstacles (after being led down various gardens paths) to ultimately solve one – or possibly more crimes. Plus love interest.

Pufferfish fits the bill – he has been forced to leave his homeland, the Nederlands, under a cloud to eventually arrive in Tasmania and forge a new career in the TPF (Tasmanian Police Force – one of myriad acronyms in the book, others, deliciously include FU, TROG and ABCD – Above and Beyond the Call of Duty).

At the beginning of the book, Pufferfish returns from three months of long service leave, a lot of it having been spent at his shack on Bruny where he estimates he has caught and eaten about four grand of cray, to begin a hunt for the disappeared wife of a Ferntree based, wheel chair ridden Professor of Egyptology. Already the sense of place in this book becoming crucially apparent.

The story is transformed with a king tide revealing a recently dug grave on a remote beach on the ‘Peninsula, building as the search for the identity of the game-hunter’s deer bagged corpse begins - bringing in deer hunters from the midlands, waterfront nightclub owners from’ the Bay, fishermen from the West Coast, ex boxers from the’Bunna and bikers from Sydney. Pufferfish and his cop cohorts have to travel to most corners of the state as well as to Sydney – of course taking the reader with them to experience these places.

‘No Weather’ is a solidly structured novel, though the key to transforming it into one that is better than the average is the character of place – in this case, Tasmania. The state, its climate, its peculiar North, South, East, West parochialism are captured with accurate intensity and hang all the more flesh on the crime scaffold.

The parochial subtleties of this island are rolled out by Owen with an eye for detail and in an informed manner. “Out here Franz, we’re masters of improvisation. We supplied most of the islands wealth but you bastards out East, don’t give a toss,” Owens has a Strahan based character say.

Place is a character crucial in a lot of crime writing– the more extreme the better;
Arnaldur Ingridason’s Reykjavik, Steig Larsson’s Sweden or even Peter Temple’s bushfire shadowed Melbourne are vital to the telling of these stories and without the Tasmanian setting of Pufferfish it would not be as interesting to local readers, or as informative and curious to readers abroad.

And Tasmania is, despite what those of us for whom this is home think, an extreme location.

Owen has an outsider’s eye for observation and an insider’s awareness of nuance, having arrived in Tasmania in the early nineties via South Africa, London and Melbourne – and a writer’s scholarly approach to text – his most recent publications are part of a natural history series published by Allen and Unwin.

Pufferfish’s character is written in the first person and present tense. This results in some strange turns of phrase “we stand, self feeling a tug in the lower back” but also adds to the noir-esque-ness and transports the reader with a gum-shoe gritty detective novel tone. The narrator/writer also has a propensity to have Pufferfish refer to himself in the third person occasionally though this is skillfully written and adds to the ‘voice of god’ style narration that pervades the book.

What is missing in this crime novel, though definitely not lacking, is the often superfluous violence described in florid detail – we are a savvy reading audience, one that is often unfortunately inured to graphic depictions of murder, rape and mutilation on the page and screen. This violence becomes more pronounced when read as the reader is left to create those details ourselves. ‘No Weather’ proves that gratuitous violence is not required to further a plot.

Crime novels are crime novels, they offer the reader the vicarious thrill of having a crime solved before your eyes, there is no pressing need for intellectual engagement – the story is spelt out for you in clear language, the crime novel does not aspire to be ‘art’ or transformative literature – and the reader can rest easy, despite gnawed fingernails and edge of the seat reading – there will be a resolution.