Today’s post contains my taster reviews of Boy Lost: A Family Memoir, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves, Alone in the Classroom and The Blue Book … all worth a look.
Boy Lost: A Family Memoir
As she boarded a train to escape her violent marriage, Kristina Olsson’s mother, Yvonne, had her first-born son snatched from her arms. It was the summer of 1950 and Yvonne would not see Peter again for nearly 40 years.
Olsson probes this hidden history with acuity and sensitivity guessing a number of its facts “from glances, from echoes, from phrases that snap in the air like a bird’s wing, and are gone”. She cleverly places her family story in the context of Australia’s history of stolen children.
Like Olsson I wonder why this was allowed to happen. Why, for so long, people in our nation so intentionally looked away. Olsson is to be applauded for facing down the silences in her own family and regarding grief in our nation.
Not an easy book to write … but a very moving one to read.
Kristina Olssen, UQP, $29.95
The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves
I’m addicted to crawling into the heads of people who are trying to work out their problems — so this book hit the mark.
A month after completing it I am still thinking about the man who describes, during each of his psychoanalytical sessions with Stephen Grosz, a holiday house in which he finds a particular kind of freedom.
I didn’t see the end of this one coming and it haunts me.
But that’s psychoanalysis I guess. While it may work to achieve a kind of defining narrative, it also seems doomed in this endeavour. The notion of “closure”, for example, Grosz describes as “an extraordinarily compelling fantasy of mourning”. He writes, “It is the fiction that we can love, lose, suffer and then do something to permanently end our sorrow.”
Grosz demonstrates that the real value of psychoanalysis is to allow a person to feel “alive in the mind of another”. He also shows how paranoia cushions the more painful reality that people may actually be indifferent to us.
These case stories from Stephen Grosz’s 30 years as a psychotherapist are fascinating and well written. They will make you think more deeply about pain and the power of listening.
Stephen Grosz, Random House, $29.95
Alone in the Classroom
Among Nicholas Shakespeare’s best books of 2012 was Elizabeth Hay’s novel Alone in the Classroom, which he said was “by my favourite living novelist . . . a story of murder and obsessive love in prairie Canada, and better even than Alice Munro”.
Amazing praise!
Hay’s novel Late Nights on Air is a book I take down from the shelf regularly to remind myself of its heart-breakingly good prose. While Alone in the Classroom didn’t slay me so thoroughly, it did intrigue me enough to keep me following its twists and turns.
Anne pieces together the life of her aunt Connie Flood. She learns how her aunt’s life intersected, in the 1930s, with her former student Michael Graves and her principal Parley Burns, who was suspected of assaulting Michael’s younger sister.
Emotions run high, love changes Anne’s life and the story gets even more complicated …
Elizabeth Hay, McClelland, $22.95
The Blue Book
I am usually a huge fan of A.L. Kennedy so it worried me that The Blue Book did not move me more. I have most often found her work eviscerating and peppered with characters that crawl about under my skin.
Not so here.
The combination of the luxury liner setting, the fortune telling backstory and the spiky nature of the middle-aged lovers as they test their capacity to reunite left me cold.
I also felt that Julian Barnes had executed a similar surprise ending in Sense of an Ending but had done it much better.
Beth is a tough cookie, blisteringly self aware and bored with her boyfriend Derek. Derek is an ordinary bloke who wants to pop the question on their voyage but gets seasick, which means he is stuck in the cabin bed for many days.
Arthur Lockwood, a fake medium, is also on the boat and Beth’s prior love affair and partnership with him is slowly revealed. Their love and work was played out in bleak English towns and in dank hotels. The pair extracted money from people who needed to be healed of their hurts and Arthur and Beth obliged these people with their trickery. They are not without heart and a desire to help people (which sometimes, apparently, works) but their subterfuge and the fact that they cannot commit to one another wears thin.
In reconnecting, Beth and Arthur walk on eggshells around each other. In Beth’s case this is partly because she has carried a secret relating to her and Arthur for too long …
Recent Comments