Category Archives: Book reviews
Outsiders in India: Anjum Hasan’s Lunatic in My Head
Imagine a city where you can tell a person’s social position, what language they speak and their background just by looking at them. Anjum Hasan’s Lunatic in My Head tells us that Shillong, in India’s north east, is such a place:
Firdaus knew that the woman waving to her from the window of the beauty parlour, her friend Sharon, was a quarter British, a quarter Assamese of the tea-planter variety, and half Khasi.
Firdaus is an outsider, a teacher at the Loreto Convent. She has no Khasi blood, unlike the majority of Shillong’s inhabitants – she is a dkhar, an outsider, a ‘permanent guest of the hills-people’. Four years into her PhD, and she still thinks of ‘English literature as a vast grey 19th century amorphousness’. Her supervisor, Dr Thakur, is as scattershot and adamant with his advice as Thor on a bad day, and her thesis topic is sadly undercooked: ‘Something like the values of characters like Elizabeth Bennet … how she manages to get around … prudishness and arrogance and that sort of thing.’
Another local, Aman Moondy, is preparing to sit the Civil Services exam. It’s his second attempt; having been assured by his philosophy teachers that there was no future in that ancient art of knowledge, the exam seems like the only way out of Shillong. What he really loves is music – Aman’s band, The ProtoDreamers, imagine themselves as Pink Floyd and as the trigger for a new creative scene.
This part of India bears the marks of its neighbours – Bhutan, Bangladesh, Burma and Nepal. Chinese restaurants jostle for space among the kwai (betel nut) sellers and aloo-wallahs. But this doesn’t mean that its inhabitants attend harmoniously to life and each other. Instead, Firdaus and Aman are uncertain of their welcome. For dkhar, violence can bloom like a terrible flower: see a street vendor pummelled for fun by Khasi youths.
Eight-year-old Sophie feels alienated, too. Not only from the people in the Ladybird books she has read (‘Jane, will you help Mummy bake a cake?’), but also from her parents. In fact, she thinks that she’s adopted – how else can she become Khasi, like the others?
Anjum Hasan was born in Shillong. She writes it as a loose tangle waiting to be tightened – racially motivated acts span the gamut from merely rebarbative to fatal. Lunatic in My Head is an immersive way of discovering a part of India we know so little about.
Anjum Hasan will be appearing at the Melbourne Writers Festival. In The Communal Voice, she will share her thoughts on using many voices in fiction (with Barbara Trapido and Eduardo Antonio Parra), and on September 5 she will be Imagining India.
Norman Doidge’s The Brain that Changes Itself
This week, I received an email asking me what books had changed my life. Social pressures aside (should I say Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities when I mean Mötley Crüe’s The Dirt?), some books effect such seismic shifts in knowledge that they easily stand up as life-changing. Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself is such a book. While reading it, I had to reluctantly let go of what I’d though were established facts about how the brain works. Two examples, if you will.
Established Fact #1: Each brain function is processed in a particular, predetermined location.
Having the dilettante’s grasp of psychological principles, I was pretty sure that it was possible to map the brain according to which parts did what. For example, the left part of our brain is verbal and the right part is where our visual and spatial abilities always reside. Right?
Well, no. Doidge visits a twenty-nine year old woman, Michelle, who was born with only the right hemisphere of her brain intact. But she is, as Doidge puts it, ‘a demonstration that … half a brain does not make for half a mind.’ Michelle can read, carry out conversations and pray – because her right hemisphere has compensated for the missing part.
Established Fact #2: Brain cells die at astounding rates and cannot be replenished.
We’ve all had older and wiser people warn that we’d better use it or lose it, and there’s probably no older nor wiser than Nobel Prize winner Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who in 1913 declared that adult brain nerve paths die and are never regenerated.
But several studies that show that animals form new brain cells – ‘neurogenesis’ – through exercise and mental activity. Californian researcher Frederick Gage suggests that this is because ‘in a natural setting, long-term fast walking would take [an] animal into a new, different environment that would require new learning’.
These are heady discoveries, and there are more to be had in The Brain That Changes Itself. The book is a delight, due to Doidge’s ability to combine painstaking research with a keen narrative sensibility. The personalities found in this book – whether that of someone who is a prime example of the brain’s fascinating plasticity, or a scientist who has radically changed the way we understand the brain – are as vivid as the science is interesting.
Life-changing, brain-changing … what more could you want?
Norman Doidge will appear at the Melbourne Writers Festival. He is one of the eight writers who will discuss what it means to be human in our Keynote Address #1: Eight Ways to Be Human. In The Brain That Changes Itself: Judge for Yourself, see footage of people with ‘incurable’ conditions, who underwent neuroplastic change. He will also appear in conversation with Perminder Sachdev, author of The Yipping Tiger, to discuss The Amazing Brain.
Jake Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice
When it comes to genre, I’m usually more True Blood than true crime. But it’s a wrench to resist Jake Adelstein’s story, as told in his book Tokyo Vice: Jewish-American kid applies for a job at a Japanese newspaper (and not just any newspaper; it’s the Yomiuri Shimbun, which has the highest circulation of any newspaper in the world) and despite his Japanese language score being in the bottom ten, he’s called in for an interview and he gets the job, only to end up sitting opposite a member of the biggest organised crime group in Japan, who is relaying a death threat from his boss. Just another day in the life, really.
Adelstein’s first posting is in half-rural, half-suburban Urawa, a ‘place considered so uncool by urban Japanese that it had spawned its own adjective, dasai, meaning “not hip, boring, unfashionable”’. But, as unfashionable as it is, Urawa is where he cuts his teeth as a police reporter. Navigating the complex spatial politics of the Yomiuri’s office (“Who the hell told you could sit down here!”) and getting up to speed with the house style (“I’ll expect you to know it within a week.”) are small tasks compared to learning how to update the office scrapbooks.
Starting out in any profession is a big ask in any case, but being an American who works for a Japanese newspaper has its own challenges. Adelstein’s first kikikomi (interviews related to a crime) are comedic adventures, with potential interviewees mistaking him for a salesman. The cultural differences serve him well, too, sometimes; “dumb gaijins” can get quite handily behind police tape.
Adelstein is a chummy and deft translator of Japanese culture: from the Japanese reverence for language, as exemplified by the concept of kotodama – the spirit of language that resides in every word; to the underbelly of Japanese culture, which makes our Underbelly look like Play School. Eventually, Adelstein scores a post at the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Press Club, where he begins to cover the extraordinary crime syndicates of Japan – the legendary yakuza.
As Adelstein explained in an interview on WNYC, the yakuza are more Wal-Mart than West Side Story. On one end of the spectrum, there are the members who ‘own’ the illegal immigrants peddling counterfeit wares on the street. On the other end, you have the supremos who launder money through their innumerable – and legitimate – loan businesses and hostess bars.
It would be hard not to admire the seemingly unassailable extent of the various yakuza enterprises, except that, unavoidably, regular people get hurt or disappear. Adelstein’s career path takes a turn when he becomes involved in the story of Lucie Blackman, a British girl who went missing while working as a hostess in Tokyo’s infamous Roppongi district. In this quest, Adelstein straddles the line between impartial observer and passionate truth seeker. And it wasn’t to be the only time he came face to face with the ugly side of Tokyo.
Jake Adelstein will be a guest of the 2010 Melbourne Writers Festival. He will appear in conversation on September 4 (free event), The Real Life of Crime with Robert Richter QC and Mark Dapin, and Worldwide Crime with Malla Nunn and Louise Welsh, both on September 5.
Unlikely but Super Sad True Love Story
Some books are such unlikely candidates for me that tracking their path to my bookshelf is like a walk with a drunken sailor. The improbable player here is Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. First, it’s one of those books that translate so well to marketing copy that I feel like I’ve already read it. I was browsing through publishers’ forthcoming titles a couple of months ago and alighted upon this description:
In the very near future … a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But don’t tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, proud author of what may well be the world’s last diary. Lenny … loves Eunice—a cute but impossibly cruel 24-year-old Korean-American woman.
There’s nothing wrong with this copy, right? But there’s a little familiar tinge of ‘Oh god – Woody Allen’s secret memoir’, dystopian America, lone future bibliophile … yadda yadda … got it.
I guess it goes without saying that my reader’s hubris has lately reached kind of toxic levels. Luckily, Shteyngart’s writing appeared in The New Yorker‘s fiction issue. In the 14 & 21 June issue, the editors published the now infamous ’20 under 40′ list, comprising 20 writers under the age of 40 for whom we should have our watchlights lit.
Whatever you think of such lists and their ‘arbitrary or absurd’ cultural foistings (litblog The Millions’ ’20 more under 40′ list, is just one of the reactions around), when you’re The New Yorker, you do sometimes get the cream of the cream, as they say in France. And lo and behold, nestled in the pages is an excerpt from Super Sad True Love Story, titled ‘Lenny Hearts Eunice’.
There’s something of Humbert Humbert’s pathetic effulgence to Shteyngart’s Lenny Abramov in Super Sad, and an extra touch of naive joy. Blithe despite having ‘a so-so body in a world where only an incredible one will do’ and having suffered a demotion – he’s only sourced one potential client in a year for his life-extension company – Lenny recounts his meeting with Eunice in his diary with the fervour of a fifteen year old: ‘I told her she should move to New York with me. She told me she was probably a lesbian.’ Eunice is your typical thoughtless but bright mid-twenties gal: ‘He took me to look at some Caravaggios and then he kind of like touched my butt.’
Shteyngart writes like a kindergartener who’s discovered a pile of crayons made of chocolate: ‘Lenny Hearts Eunice’ is joyful, fresh and rollicking. What really drove it home for me, though, was the book trailer. That’s right, book trailer. I have never watched a book trailer in my life, and I really hadn’t planned to start. But who needs plans when you’re following author and bookseller Christopher Currie on Twitter?
“Shteyngart + Eugenides + McInerney + Gaitskill +Franco = the best book trailer of the year. Enjoy. http://bit.ly/cT5GqC“
Normally, the idea of book trailers fills me with dread. But that’s Jeffrey Eugenides, Jay McInerney, Mary Gaitskill and James Franco, and it’s funny as all get out. Watch out for Shteyngart’s ‘How to act at a Paris Review party’ class. Do yourself a favour and click on that link.
I suppose there’s really no way of not reading Super Sad True Love Story now. Ah, the accidental seductions are always the best.
This is the now
We’re all flat chat, it’s our big week of launches of all kinds, and I know you are all rushing out first thing this Friday, 17th July, to buy your copies of The Age which will contain the festival program. And then, of course, straight to the festival website to book your tickets!
So, very busy, very exciting, and I’m determined to make time to read at least some of the authors coming to this year’s festival before too much time passes. I’m currently enjoying John Boyne’s The House of Special Purpose, a mix of past and present, Tsarist Russia, modern England and wartime Europe. I’m not sure yet whether its a tragedy or a romance; its a story of a life. It’s certainly intriguing and compelling. How lucky we all are to be living in peaceful and prosperous times, here in Australia at this time. It always stuns me how governments in all parts of the world still regard their people as an entity to be plundered, abused, dominated and terrorised; and then get surprised that their people rise up and protest. The old quote is so often ignored. Stupid as well as immoral.
I”m also dipping into David Kilcullen’s The Accidental Guerrilla and Catherine Therese’ The Weight of Silence. And will give them both the time they deserve once this week is over and the festival is well and truly launched.
All our hard work coming to fruition. Wonderful.
Helenka
Festival Manager
On the go?
Hi again,
I’ll try and make sense, even though I’m sharing a ’12 things on the go’ moment with (pretty much) all my colleagues. The festival is hotting up – authors, events and ideas about the ways these two intersect are moving around us at an ungainly speed. It’s fun, but it’s all becoming a little bit of a blur (in a fun way though, pretty much like doing ‘wizzies’ when you were a kid).
Every time my eyes refocus I turn them to a new book. I’ve just started Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency, a Booker nominee and, at this early stage of my reading I can understand why; the language is beautiful, loaded and large, but still light and erudite (if that’s all possible). I’m only 100 pages in and I’ve met almost 20 characters … an ‘epic portrait’ indeed. I already feel like I’d be at home in any of the local pubs (in one of the corners of 1970s Sheffield).
Prior to this I’ve read Ryu Murakami’s Audition, a short book about a middle-aged man who chances upon the most unique way of finding a second wife … by creating a fake film project which a range of women audition for. I was, after much of what I’ve read about this book, expecting something far more violent. This wasn’t really the case. There is a sense of unease that’s sustained through much of the latter part of the book and it only gets a little gruesome at the end. I look forward to seeing the film version (although I’m a little concerned about the affect on me, seeing the ‘Critical response‘ section of the Wiki page).
I also read Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming (Sleepers Publishing). I’m not going to be able to do this book justice in this short blog, but I really enjoyed it. I wasn’t expecting spec-fiction and also got something that reminded me of David Mitchell, whose Cloud Atlas I loved. Amsterdam’s book follows one main character through a series of episodes in a post-Y2K world … a world that’s gone totally awry, and a world that could very possibly be ours in the too-soon future (Y2K aside). It’s believable, and there’s room in the spaces to let the reader bring their own thoughts to the table.
I’d better go now, given I’m still in the middle of a ’11 things on the go’ moment.
Regards
Steve
Associate Director
J.G. Ballard
‘We live inside an enormous novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.’
J.G. Ballard, 1973
image: www.freeimages.co.uk
When I first heard news that the British author J.G. Ballard had passed away a month ago I was filled with that inevitable melancholy that comes when somebody you admire dies. Ballard didn’t die under any tragic circumstances but I was sad when hit with the realisation that I will never get to read anything new by him. Also, although it was always incredibly unlikely that I would ever get to meet him I know that I now really never will.
Like most of my favourite authors I discovered Ballard via the cinema, which is not something I am ashamed of as cinema is my passion and while not at the MWF I am either seeing films or reviewing them for The Big Issue, my blog Cinema Autopsy or the film program I co-host on JOY 94.9.
I had seen Stephen Spielberg’s adaptation of Ballard’s first autobiographical inspired novel Empire of the Sun when it was originally shown of television but I was way too young at the time to appreciate it. It wasn’t until 1996 when I saw David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Crash that I became completely mesmerised. The central idea that a group of people had become so detached and dulled by modern life, that the only way for them to experience sexual pleasure was to create scenarios involving road trauma, was creating a bit of an outrage at the time. Many people found the film repugnant, boring or meaningless but I was fascinated with its strange metaphor for modern alienation and became an instant fan of Ballard’s. I natural sought out the original novel and found that the film adaptation didn’t even come close to recreating the disturbing pornographic tone of the book. It was an extraordinary read but I felt so sordid reading it!
Ballard’s other books aren’t quite so confrontational but many of them do explore the notion that our middle-class, consumerist, technology-obsessed lifestyle is neutralising our ability to feel anything so to compensate we resort to acts of violence and extreme sexual perversion in order to inject excitement into life again. Ballard’s favourite paradox seems to be that the more we try to be civilised, the more we reduce ourselves to barbarism.
My 5 favourite Ballard books
I not so much of a fan of Ballard’s earlier “science-fiction” writing but from the 1970s onwards he began directly exploring his preoccupation with modernity:
The Atrocity Exhibition (1969)
Ballard was a strong admirer of William Burroughs and The Atrocity Exhibition is a fantastic companion novel to Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. Both books are truly experimental and randomly dipping in and out of their pages produces as much meaning as reading them cover to cover. Disturbing and challenging, The Atrocity Exhibition introduces many of the core concepts that Ballard would later explore in conventional narrative fiction. It also inspired a song of the same name by my favourite band Joy Division!
High Rise (1975)
The residents of a self contained apartment block form tribal groups and fight for control of the building. Curiously this came out in the same year as David Cronenberg’s early horror film Shivers, which is also set in a self contained apartment that self destructs from internal causes (in Cronenberg’s cause a sexually violent parasite in the culprit as opposed to Ballard’s existential attitude toward human nature!)
The Kindness of Women (1991)
Like Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women is autobiographically inspired and covers key moments in Ballard’s life in a fictionalised way. For example, Ballard’s actually wife did die unexpectedly at a young age but the circumstances of her actual death and very different to the scenario Ballard creates in The Kindness of Women. I possibly won’t ever read Ballard’s actual autobiography (Miracles of Life, 2008) because I feel that while The Kindness of Women does not contain the literal truth, it does possess a potent emotional truth.
Cocaine Nights (1996)
Of Ballard’s most recent novels many people prefer Super-Cannes (2000) and both novels explore the dystopian idea of an ultra rich community living in luxury indulging in acts of violence to ease their boredom. But I remember being completely stunned by the way Cocaine Nights concluded in a way that I would have rubbished as stupid and unrealistic had it not been for the terrifying way that Ballard takes you through the thought process of the protagonist to make such a conclusion absolutely plausible.
A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (1996)
This collection of Ballard’s non-fiction essays and reviews contains some of his best work. His crisp, to-the-point and highly perceptive style of writing allows him to communicate some amazing ideas within a very small word count. As a budding film critic myself, I find his style inspiring and intimidating!
Thomas
Marketing Co-ordinator
Is it Friday already?
Hey Everyone,
I feel like I’m peering out from under my desk, seeing daylight for the first time. (Accompanied by a sense is one of déjà vu, I might add.) After sneaking, tweaking and just a little freaking, we are just one author away from finalising the Schools Program. It’s been a mostly smooth process, but there’s nothing like a hard deadline to bring it all into focus. (And there’s nothing like the inevitable last-minute withdrawal by writers to make it all blurry again.)
All that said, it’s a delight (relief?) that the Schools Program is now off with our lovely designers (at JWT); we’ll go to print in a week or so and then our snazzy program will be catching the attention of English teachers, librarians and readers of all ages at every school across Victoria. We have an incredible line-up of 51 guests in over 70 events … that’s a 50% increase in both guests and events … not that we think bigger is necessarily better … it’s just that better is, well, better. If you stay tuned to the e-bulletin, there’ll be a bit more info released next week.
In other news I went to a certain inner-city locale with Helenka (Festival Manager) and Tom (our new Production Manager) to see if a venue with David Lynch’s theatrical stylings could further enhance the festival atmosphere. Ohh, it can and with any luck it will. (Actually luck doesn’t play too much of a role in this game.) But more on this soon.
Finally, I’ve been reading a number of books, but thought I’d like to chat about a few. I thought that Tony Thompson’s Shakespeare: the most famous man in London is one to look out for if you’ve got a younger friend (aged 10-15) with a literary bent. Tony is a teacher at Princes Hill who’s been teaching Shakespeare for decades. In this book he gives an engaged and energised account of Shakespeare and the world in which he lived. (And, actually, you don’t need a literary bent at all; it’s a good read full stop.)
I’m also just half-way through The Red Highway by Nicolas Rothwell. I absolutely loved his book Another Country and thought his essay in the recent issue of the Monthly was pure poetry. (I’ll be very surprised if you didn’t read it in a 2009 ‘Best Essays’ compilation.) I find there’s a similarity of tone and timbre between Rothwell’s work and that of Robert Dessaix, but Rothwell’s is so deeply rooted in the Australian outback (and, more precisely, the north) and I love his almost spiritual connection to the land. If you haven’t read Rothwell’s work, try the essay first, and if you like the language and spirit of that you’ll have a fair idea of the way he writes. Also, you can also check him out at last year’s MWF discussing ‘the essay’ with Gideon Haigh, Chloe Hooper and Sally Warhaft.
I must get going. Nice to chat.
Cheers,
Steve
Associate Director
Krissy Kneen
On Sunday I finished reading a fabulous book, Affection by Krissy Kneen. Couldn’t wait to get to work on Monday and send her an invitation to take part in the festival and have just had her response, “Hell yes!” So am very happy. Affection won’t be published until August (Text) – so add it to your must-read list. Its subtitle describes it as a memoir of love, sex and intimacy and it is definitely R-rated. As I read my proof copy on a plane, the man reading over my shoulder beside me had great trouble concentrating on Top Gear.
Krissy is well known for some excellent docos she wrote and directed for SBS and the ABC – one of which was about her unusual family which features again in Affection. Krissy’s writing is poetic and heartbreaking and I was moved by her painfully true recollections of childhood and, later, that too-wide gap between dream and reality that we all paper over with self-delusion.
I knew Krissy when I lived in Brisbane – she works at Avid Reader, one of Brisbane’s best independent bookshops. She is not the only writer on staff – Avid Reader is an incubator of talent. Everyone who works there is busy writing and being published – I’m surprised they find time to sell books. Watch out for Christopher Currie, another excellent Avid writer.
Rosemary
MWF Festival Director
