Newly appointed Aboriginal Community Police Officer Emily Tempest has returned to her roots in Bluebush – in the Northern Territories of Australia – after more than ten years spent traveling the world. The daughter of Motor Jack, a white geologist/gold prospector and an aborigine mother, she grew up in her mother’s culture until she was a teenager and has always felt more comfortable there, despite the educational programs and travels which later took her all over the world. Having returned to live with “her” people when she is in her twenties, she continues to resent the intrusions of the “civilized” white world and the damage it has caused to the natural world venerated by the aborigines. Filled with atmosphere, local color, and nonstop action, the novel opens with a gruesome attack at Green Swamp Well, in which a drunk, elderly prospector is found with his hammer embedded in his throat. Another prospector, also drunk, found asleep near the body, is arrested. Hyland does not sugar-coat any aspect of life in the outback. His characters are coarse, and the action and language are sometimes even coarser. Shootings, explosions, rock falls, attempted murders, a brutal rape, and chase scenes take place even as the author is raising questions about conservation, environmental threats, and the serious problems facing indigenous communities.
Read Full Post »
This breezy commentary by Inez Pereyra, wife of Ernesto, belies her initial shock at discovering a lipstick love-heart, saying “All Yours,” inside her husband’s briefcase and her realization that her husband of seventeen years is probably having an affair. From Inez’s point of view, things have been stressful in the month leading up to this discovery. The housework, she explains, has been “exhausting” because she wants everything to be “perfect,” but life has been bearable, and she has not wanted to go looking for trouble (as her mother did, to her own misfortune). Ernesto has been coming home late, working on weekends, and avoiding her, and except for school meetings involving a senior trip for their daughter Lali, he has been physically AWOL for most of the month. For Inez, selfish and deliberately obtuse, however, “The truth is…why confront Ernesto with some big scenario, when this woman’s going to be history in a week anyway?” In the classic (and very dark) farce which emerges from this opening scene and becomes the body of the novel, Inez exploits her husband’s predicament for her own ends, becoming the perfect wife, even as he continues to remain distant, a situation which absolutely begs for conversion into a play or film. The plot moves at warp speed, with twists and turns, surprises galore, and ironies which will keep even a jaded reader entertained and anxious to see how the author will resolve these issues—and laughing out loud almost non-stop.
Read Full Post »
In her final novel, Brazilian novelist/poet Clarice Lispector (1920 – 1977) writes an eerie, almost supernatural tale of Macabea, a nineteen-year-old woman almost totally devoid of personality, opinion, thoughts, and even feelings. Her story is being told by Roderigo S.M., a writer, similarly isolated, without a long-term idea of what he wants to write, though he says, as he begins the story, that he has “glimpsed in the air the feeling of perdition on the face of a northeastern girl [Macabea].” He tells the reader that his story, whatever it will be, will be both exterior and explicit in style but will contain secrets. He will also have no pity, and he wants the story to be cold. “This isn’t just narrative, it’s above all primary life that breathes, breathes, breathes,” he states. When Macabea arrives in Rio, where she lives with several other girls, she never contemplates her future or thinks much about it at all. “Did she feel she was living for nothing? I’m not sure, but I don’t think so,” the narrator muses. A trip to a fortune teller and its aftermath eventually provide the turning point of the novel. Irony builds upon irony as the author explores who we are, how we know, how we fit into the grand scheme of life, and ultimately, whether there actually is any “grand scheme.” In this odd but peculiarly thought-provoking novel, the reader will often be as confused and conflicted as the narrator, but the book may be unique in its subject matter and approach to writing, and after a slow start, I became enchanted with it.
Read Full Post »
Winner of an extraordinary number of literary prizes in Tasmania, Australia, and England, including the London Observer’s Book of the Year Award, WANTING by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan emphasizes, by its ambiguous title, two of the most contradictory characteristics of Queen Victoria’s reign—the “wanting,” or desire, to conquer other lands and bring “civilization” to them, and the “want,” or lack, of empathy and respect for the people and cultures which they deliberately destroy in the process. The same contradictory characteristics are also reflected in the personal relationships of the socially prominent men and women of the era, some of whom we meet here. As the action moves back and forth between Van Dieman’s Land (now Tasmania) and London and from 1839 through the 1840s and 1850s, Flanagan gives depth to the bleak picture of colonial life, creating an emotionally wrenching portrait of Mathinna, orphaned child of aborigine King Romeo, as she is wrested from her countrymen, exiled on Flinders Island, and brought into the home of the ambitious Lady Jane Franklin. Determined to prove that this savage can be civilized, Lady Jane forces the child to imitate a proper British young lady in her education, dress, and demeanor, allowing her no connections to her past but providing nothing of value in its place. Outstanding and memorable novel.
Read Full Post »
When three-year-old Maria Theresia von Paradis (1759 – 1824) goes suddenly and completely blind one night as she sleeps, there is no dearth of physicians willing to treat her. Empress Maria Theresia of Austria immediately provides all the resources of the court – and of her court physicians. French author/journalist Michele Halberstadt creates a fascinating study of the young pianist, whose blindness has been diagnosed by court physicians as amaurosis, a form of blindness “that appears suddenly without any malfunctioning of the optical system. Its onset is either toxic, congenital, or nervous.” Certainly there is a chance that this wis a kind of hysterical blindness, caused by some trauma, perhaps within her family, but Sigmund Freud and his theories, are still a hundred years in the future, and there appears to be no way, at that time, to discover what it is that is blocking her sight. When Maria Theresia is eighteen, Franz Anton Mesmer, meets her father, and a “cure” begins.
Read Full Post »
