Santa’s reindeers do heavy lifting at Christmas but they don’t get much glory (or cake). I raise a glass to my reindeers of 2014. These are the books I meant to garland with fairy lights well before now … but the year jingled away.
Dasher …
Combining classical music and travel: Was this memoir written especially for me? In Cadence: Travels with Music … a Memoir, Emma Ayres cycles from England to Hong Kong with her trusty bike, Vita, speeding her on her way. It’s a challenging ride and quest that helps her explore her growth as a string player and human being. Here’s Ayres on ‘the tonic’ as a musical term: ‘The tonic is a log fire, it’s your children laughing at the window, it’s familiar public transport and the smell of your favourite dish cooking. The tonic is belonging.’ Ayres was host of Classic Breakfast on ABC Classic FM for six years until October and there’s a CD with music handpicked by her you can purchase to accompany the book. A great gift for music-loving adventurers.
Dancer …
Frank Bascombe is back and it’s Christmas time! Hurricane Sandy has flattened houses and roughed up the shorelines of New Jersey and peoples’ psyches are in flux. Frank riffs on marriage, disaster, dementia, real estate and other fundamentals. ‘I’m trying to get in my car before Arnie gets closer. I fear an embrace. It could damage my neck and render me an invalid. Bonding heads the list of words I’ve ruled out.’ In Let Me Be Frank With You, Richard Ford returns to the landscape of his celebrated novels The Sportswriter, the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner winning Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land. If you don’t know Frank, let Ford introduce you. You will laugh and shake your head at the familiarity and strangeness of American life as told through Frank’s candid, witty and (sometimes) inappropriate musings. Grab a turkey leg and a beer on Boxing Day and bust this Christmas cracker open.
Prancer …
Graham Swift’s latest book, England and Other Stories, pranced through my reading world with a light step. Ever-assured, Swift’s writing doesn’t try to be smart or arch — a blessed relief. Swift tells his stories potently and without fuss. Two of my favourites from this graceful collection are ‘The Best Days’, a funereal tale that segues to a memory of strange seduction, and ‘Fusili’, a gut-wrenching reflection on personal crisis. I loved this apt quote from ‘People are Life’: ‘The years flash by if you count them in haircuts.’ Read this cool collection by the pool.
Vixen …
A vixen is a female fox and Vixen a very cute reindeer. Lydia Davis’ Can’t and Won’t and The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis are not so easy to categorise. Perhaps it helps to say that Davis takes just about every approach to writing stories that there can be. I think her shortest story is just four-words long. She writes of the banal and the heady, the mundane and the mean. One of my favourite, longer works of hers is a near-biographical account of Madame Curie called ‘Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman’. Davis has said her style’s concision is a reaction to translating the meandering sentences of Proust. She has also translated Flaubert and Foucalt. The Collected Stories won the 2013 Man Booker International Prize and contains moments of brilliance. But both books are great to dip into to watch a distinctive mind at work. Read the shortest of these short stories in the ad breaks during the cricket (the contrast will be surreal).
Comet …
Penelope Fitzgerald was a late blooming novelist but her work shines like a comet. Back in 1976 she won the Booker prize for her moving book, Offshore. The Beginning of Spring and The Blue Flower — two of her most acclaimed novels — followed and are a must for any serious lover of English literature. Fitzgerald’s spare and beautiful prose and her tenderness towards human beings is a powerful combination. Hermione Lee’s biography Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life illuminates the essence of a writer who suffered some hard times but made enduring art. Here’s Fitzgerald on inspiration: ‘A novel might originate in a story the writer has been told, or read, in a childhood memory, in a haunting image, that might eventually disappear … To describe what’s actually going on here I think you might have to go back to a very ancient definition of the imagination as messenger between the sense and the mind, but a messenger who has an authority of his own because when his time comes he may also rule in his turn.’ This one will light up your tree …
Cupid …
Is it wrong to read the one story 12 or 14 times in a month? ‘Yours’ stole my heart. It’s a powerful evocation of love between an older man and a younger woman. The story is just three pages but every word is a tiny dart that drives to the centre of things. The paragraph that contains the phrase, ‘He wanted to tell her, from the greater perspective he had, that to own only a little talent like his, was an awful plaguing thing’ … may well be my favourite paragraph of any story I’ve read this year (and I’ve read some pearls). Mary Robison’s short story collection Tell Me: 30 Stories was published more than a decade ago. Most of its stories are good but ‘Yours’ is stellar. Read it once a day on your two-week Christmas break and tell me I’m right.
Donner …
Don’t think the title Stoner means this is a novel about drug addict. I pushed through that initial (and wrong) reaction and found one of the truest delights of my mammoth reading year. Stoner is an academic who starts life as a farm boy. He falls for literature, his marriage founders and he does his best to bring up a child, who later turns from him. He is both a rare kind of man and yet quite ordinary. Author, John Williams, thought he was a hero. ‘His job gave him an identity and made him what he was.’ When Stoner looked back at his life he knew that there had been a profundity in studying and teaching literature. Despite the failures in love, it had given his life a beating heart. The book is sad, quiet and profound and champions reading and study. Abbeys Bookshop in Sydney promoted it as ‘the greatest book you’ve never read’. Think: Holiday house, candles on the verandah and sipping Stoner with your summer wine.
Blixen …
Blixen means lightning and, while Merciless Gods probably won’t light up the sky like The Slap, true to Christos Tsiolkas’ form, its stories (written over 20 years) will provoke, delight, vex, anger, intrigue, shock, inspire, antagonise and annoy. The title story ‘Merciless Gods’ is a masterly piece and I loved this extract so much I’m quoting it in full: ‘So much of what we did then seemed to be an effort to convince our friends that we were witty and erudite. Conceited though it might sound, we did believe ourselves to be special, that we stood apart from the common herd of twenty-somethings in the city. That all seems so absurd to us now, but in our defence it must be remembered that we had not yet found ourselves at the other end of stagnant occupations, or relationships that had failed through inertia and predictability, we had not yet discovered that we were as mundane and trivial as everyone else.’ ‘Genetic Material’ is also a nuanced and beautiful tale of a father and son at a pivotal moment. Don’t read this collection if you are shy of profanity, explicit sex of many stripes, pornography, brutality or complexity. Best taken with a late night whiskey chaser.
Rudolph …
This is a book that stands out (like Rudolph’s nose) but I’m having trouble expressing exactly why. If I say Ben Lerner’s 10:04 is a bit like Karl Ove Knausgard’s My Struggle series and a bit like some of Geoff Dyer’s work, or that it’s metafiction that focuses on self-consciousness and writing — these descriptions will only take us so far. Storywise, what we have is Ben Lerner (the narrator) who has recently achieved unexpected literary success, been diagnosed with a serious heart condition and been asked by a friend called Alex to help her conceive a child. Here’s a quote: ‘Part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn’t obtain, how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading.’ When Ben Lerner lets an Occupy protestor shower in his apartment his odd thinking and behaviour is humorous. With Hurricane Irene at the beginning and Hurricane Sandy at the end, climate trouble is also evoked. Quite a mental twister, then, but with lots of layers, gently and gracefully told. This one’s for detox time; drink slowly with carrot juice and a fresh mind.
Recent Comments