Which Writer Wrote

This week’s WWW was written by a Wolf, Woolf or Wolfe…all exceptional writers.

However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summer afternoon.

Answer published on Friday

The Anatomy of Wings by Karen Foxlee: Book Review

Karen Foxlee’s is a voice of confident originality.  She was named Best Emerging Author  in the 2006 Queensland Premier’s Awards and The Anatomy of Wings shows that the judges spotted a winner.

Despite having enough hooks and lures to make you want to turn pages, the story is essentially character driven and what delightful characters Foxlee coaxes from her pen.

There’s the three sisters:-
Beth is at first an enigmatic mystery who eventually epitomises the small-town girl slipstreaming into the vortex of a troubled few before taking a couple of wrong turns and spiralling into the abyss.
Danielle has a Milwaukee back brace for her curvature of the spine and a desperate wish for a perm.
Jenny is our young narrator who, in retrospect is able to tell us more than her own perspective and who in the ‘here and now’ is a vibrant original voice with a highly sensitive eye.

The best supporting role must go to Nanna who drives a Datsun Sunny and lives in a demountable council flat filled with dusty Virgin Mary statuettes.  Nanna is filled with love and religion and believes in miracles.

The girls’ mother and father are also finely drawn.  But – to continue my theme – there are so many interesting cameos that I can’t resist mentioning some of the support cast:-

Cousin Kylie, with her “brittle bones and bucked teeth and a bad temper” and a “very small amount of retarded-ness”.

Mr and Mrs O’Malley who talk incessantly (Mrs) or sing (Mr) while trying to avoid the pain in each others’ eyes.

Trail-bike-riding mysterious bad-boy Marcus with his thick lustrous black hair and come-to-bed eyes (we all knew one).

The Shelleys, so-called because “two had the first name Michelle and one was Rochelle and the leader, Deidre, had the last name Schelbach” (89)

The structure of The Anatomy of Wings is unusual: there are no chapter names or numbers, apart from those that deal specifically with the inhabitants of the five houses within Dardanelles Court (the sisters live in number 4) but they do not flow chronologically as one might expect.

The prose flows effortlessly (in the way that some writers manage to meticulously craft perfect sentences so that they appear to have come from nowhere).

Consider the way Foxlee handles a storm. 
Here’s the storm’s distant approach:- “It came out of the west, tentatively, like a lady gathering up her skirts before stepping inside a doorway.”  Its imminence is announced thus: “Every flower, every branch, every leaf, every twig opened up its heart and waited.  The classroom filled with this scent of the dry earth waiting.”   Finally, the storm arrives with an explosion of thunder and deafening rain.  “Above us the wind was playing the roof like a wobble board” .  And then “the storm took a deep breath and blew open a row of louvres at the back of the classroom”. (249-252)

 Finally it was over, leaving a different place than what had been there just hours before.

When we walked home the whole world had changed.  Small rain tiptoed on roof-tops.  A hawk hovered surveying the damage. The clouds had drifted away.  Water rushed out of downpipes in fountains.  Everywhere raindrops sparkled. (252)

After I completed my review, I checked out some other perspectives on Goodreads, where I discovered some readers were nonplussed about the references to Beth seeing angels.  I didn’t feel this confusion myself but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I ‘got it’ as the author intended. 

Some people believe that as one gets closer to death, ‘angels’ are visible and I think the girls’ grandmother believed Beth had somehow straddled the boundary of heaven and earth when she fainted.  I took the continued references to be analogous:  family members and friends could see Beth drifting away, could sense and smell and feel the spectre of loss about her.

In life, there are people who seem to carry an aura of early death with them and  when they die, it comes as less of a surprise to friends and loved ones: it’s as though the death has been foreseen and is therefore not unexpected.  Likewise, in the novel, Beth carries this aura of angels and death as some sort of preparation for her end. 

In a subliminal way, the angels fit nicely with Jenny’s love of birds and with the wings she so meticulously draws in art class.

Of all the wings on the wall the wind chose mine to tear free.  For a brief and beautiful moment my yellow wings were released from their pin and floated upwards into the room.  The whole class held its breath.  They flapped three times, gained altitude on the updraught, hovered briefly and then fell to the floor. (252)

When I read that passage, Beth and her angels were at the forefront of my thoughts.

Karen Foxlee featured recently in the ANZLitlovers Meet an Aussie Author series, in which the author confesses to a penchant for therapeutic photocopying.

BOOK DETAIL:
Foxlee, Karen. The Anatomy of Wings, UPQ, 2007.

Which Writer Wrote ANSWER

This week’s WWW was:-

She gave me her factual tone,
her facial bones, her will,
not her beautiful voice
but her straightness and her clarity.

From his humble beginnings on the North Coast of New South Wales to the University of Sydney and then to poet extraordinaire, Les A Murray is a rare gem.  I love his willingness to wade into controversy, his big happy face and – most of all – his poetry.

The quote above comes from ‘Weights’, one of the poems he wrote in memory of his mother who died in 1951(published in the collection The Vernacular Republic: Poems 1961 – 1983, Harper Collins, 1988). Whenever I read ‘Weights’, it reminds me of my own mother (who is very much alive and kicking) and of good, courageous, beautiful mothers everywhere.

Which Writer Wrote

This week’s WWW comes from one of Australia’s most outstanding and influential poets (and a particular favourite of mine). See if you can guess who wrote it and check in on Sunday for the answer.

She gave me her factual tone,
her facial bones, her will,
not her beautiful voice
but her straightness and her clarity.

Ransom by David Malouf: Book Review

The opening pages of David Malouf’s Ransom had me gasping for breath, mesmerised by the poetic language, lulled by the music of the words, wooed by a seductive dance.

Based on one of the earliest poems of Western Literature, Homer’s epic Iliad, it fleshes out the characters of the great warrior Archilles and King Priam.  Priam’s personality in particular is so finely drawn, so recognizable in its regal remoteness that our own reigning Queen Elizabeth occasionally came to mind.

But the character I found most interesting is one realised totally by Malouf.  It is Somax, the carter who is persuaded to transport Priam to Archilles, who stands out. He provides the perfect contrast, in his earthy practicality, to the king’s pomposity.  Poor Somax.  He is “bull-shouldered, shock-headed” and so clearly out of place “in his homespun robe and broken sandals” amongst the dazzling cleanliness and orderliness of the palace courtyard.

Priam, in cavalier fashion, bestows upon Somax the name of Idaeus because that has always been the name of the man at the king’s side (whether or not it had been the same man was inconsequential because, according to Priam, it is “the office and the name that matters, not the person” (97).  While confirming what we know of Priam, it also imparts something of the carter’s sense of self.  He is “silently, sullenly affronted” by the idea that his name should be considered of no import and wonders how the gods will recognize him without it.  Then, when the royal princes start calling him by his new moniker, he smoulders and “in spirit at least, clenches his fist” (100).

Despite their differences, Priam warms to Somax, understanding that the carter is full of good will and that “It was not reverence he lacked, only a knowledge of the forms”. (117) Through Somax, Priam gains some appreciation for the minutiae of life like the feel of cooling water running over his feet, the fish that come to investigate and the wheeling birds, recognizing that these things were always there but there had been no reason previously for him to take notice of them for “They were not in the royal sphere” (122).

Priam and Somax have both lost sons but even that commonality is not fully shared for where Somax knew his children so well, Priam was distanced from his.  “Royal custom – the habit of averting his gaze, always, from the unnecessary and particular – had saved him from all that.” (139)

While noting that it is unnecessary to know anything about the Iliad, Lisa Hill in her review at ANZ LitLovers writes that “for those who read Ransom, Malouf’s imaginative rendering of this episode of The Iliad will forever be an unforgettable part of the original”.

The story ends as we know it will, and yet the end came too soon.

Some other interesting reviews:-
Tom Holland for The Guardian. Holland is ultimately disappointed feeling that “Malouf does not do enough with his source material”, John Clanchy’s  award-winning review for ABR, in which he calls Ransom a “minor miracle of a novel” and Read, Ramble.

Addition 22nd January 2012.
Apologies, book detail not originally posted.

Malouf, David. Ransom. 2009. Random House, North Sydney. ISBN 798 1 74166 965 7

Which Writer Wrote ANSWER

I weighed up these women in my life and decided that none of them would fill the role of a mother.  But then, what did I know about mothers anyway?

 The quote is from Alva’s Boy: An unsentimental memoir by Alan Collins.  I have been up to my elbows in Collins’ work over recent months. He first came to my attention when I reviewed his collection of short stories,  A Thousand Nights at the Ritz and it has been hard to get him out of my head so one of my long-term projects is a study of his work is in relation to our concept of ‘Home’.  Alva’s Boy was completed just prior to the author’s death in 2008.

Which Writer Wrote

Most of us will be feeling refreshed and sharp from the holidays so there are no clues for this week’s WWW.

I weighed up these women in my life and decided that none of them would fill the role of a mother.  But then, what did I know about mothers anyway?

Have a guess and check in on Sunday for the answer.

Raising My Voice by Malalai Joya: Book Review

Normally I like to review fiction; short stories and novels, with a predilection for anything Australian. So it is an extreme departure for me to feel impelled to review Raising my Voice by Malalai Joya (co-written by Derrick O’Keefe*).  Subtitled, the extraordinary story of the Afghan woman who dares to speak out, it is a book not easily forgotten once read and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the history of Afghanistan but, more particularly, those who seek answers about Australia’s military involvement in the country.

In the introduction, Joya (a pseudonym adopted to protect her family) writes that most Afghans her age and younger “have known only bloodshed, displacement and occupation”, a situation that doesn’t appear to be going away any time soon given the current “foreign occupation and an American-backed government filled with warlords who are just like the Taliban” (1).

Born in Afghanistan, Joya’s family fled to Iran when she was four, then moved to Pakistan when the dangers, deprivations and lack of education in the refugee camps became too much to tolerate.  After almost sixteen years in exile, the family returned home to Afghanistan so that Joya could set up classes for girls in defiance of the Taliban.

Joya gives us snippets of life as a woman in a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.  For example, women were permitted to eat ice cream but, unlike the men, they were rarely supplied with seating and had to learn how to hold up the material of their burqa enough to eat it. The Taliban forbade any sort of formal education for women and girls. Lashings, beheadings, hangings: the tactics of the Taliban have been well-documented elsewhere but those of us unaware of Afghanistan’s history may be ignorant of the atrocities perpetuated by the warlords; apparently equally abhorrent. So when the US-led forces allow – and in many cases, even facilitate – these same warlords to enter back into the power rooms, the people of Afghanistan are no closer to democracy and the women and girls no safer than they were under the Taliban. 

When the Taliban first swept into power, many Afghans welcomed them because it meant an end to the killings (80,000 deaths in Kabul alone during the civil war of 1992 to 1996).  According to Joya, the United States played a pivotal role “in nourishing a violent, fundamentalist mentality in generations of young Afghans” (218) which started in the 1980s with the publication of books through the University of Nebraska that were filled with talk of jihad and warlike images.  The books were shipped into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan to fuel a jihad against the Russians but remained in the system long after.  

Today, women remain caged and without access to justice.  Most of the time, women are still prevented from appearing in public uncovered and  require a male relative as a chaperone.  Rape goes unpunished.  Joya says that, “in Afghanistan, killing a woman is like killing a bird” (3).

According to Joya, many of those in power in Afghanistan today should more rightly be tried for war crimes.  She was “shocked and appalled” to see such warlords and other war criminals seated in the first row at the Loya Jirga (official traditional gathering) in Kabul: fascists; fundamentalists with bloody pasts; a sponsor of Osama bin Laden and trainer and mentor of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the alleged mastermind of the World Trade Centre attacks); Jamiat-e-Islami fundamentalists who had issued rules for women that were as bad as the Taliban’s; men known for their ruthlessness; former Soviet puppets and civil war criminals.  Here they all were, after having bribed and muscled their way back into positions of power.  A lesser woman would have been left speechless.  But not Joya.

The voices of the countless widows who had told me of their suffering rang in my ears as I looked around the room.  It was terrible enough to hear about these men and their crimes, but seeing them in person running this Loya Jirga and listening to their speeches was like torture for me.  I had to speak out. (81)

And speak out she did and, despite concerted and continued efforts to silence her, she continues to do so.

I have often heard the argument that Afghan women themselves insist on backing the outrageous laws of the Taliban and the warlords and vilifying their sisters who take a stand against them.  Joya gives credible explanations for this phenomenon, not least of which is the fear that churns within the women (not only for themselves, but also for their children), keeping them in check and ensuring that they tow the party lines. One woman who harangues Joya after her speech at the Loya Jirga, later begged Joya’s forgiveness.  “I had to threaten you with death and attack you.  I was forced to,” the woman told her. 

Joya herself seems to be fearless.  When Lawyer and activist Kellie Tranter interviewed her in Hobart last year for the ABC, Joya confirmed that she doesn’t think about death, concentrating instead on the hopes she has for her country.

The voice she raises is not just the voice of a woman: it is a human voice, working tirelessly for the likes of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, sentenced to twenty years in prison after his death sentence was commuted.  His crime?  ‘Blasphemy’: he allegedly downloaded and circulated an article critical of women’s rights in Islamic societies.  After enormous public pressure, the Afghan student was pardoned 20 months later.

In a book laden with difficult truths and traumatic word images, I did find something to laugh about. Of all the movies that might have flourished on the black market in Afghanistan , I was surprised and amused to read that it was James Cameron’s Titanic that was the most popular.  Children and young adults would organise secret ‘Titanic´ parties.  Market items were named after the movie: Titanic clothes and shampoo, Titanic tomatoes and onions.  Joya found the naming of vegetables after a Hollywood movie especially funny.  So did I.

Afghanistan’s history is bloody and complicated but Joya’s message is simple really; summed up by “no nation can donate liberation to another nation”.  History, Joya tells us, shows that democracy is not something that can be imposed by foreign troops.  She believes that the democratically minded people who have been struggling for human and women’s rights in the country for decades, must be left to continue the fight themselves.  Tough call, but that is the reality, according to Joya.

Pulling no punches, she writes that the truth about Afghanistan and its history has been “hidden behind a smokescreen of words and images carefully crafted by the United States and its NATO allies and repeated without question by the Western media”. (2)  But she goes further than that:

The people of Afghanistan can see very clearly that the warlords are supported and protected by the United States and other foreign troops.  They could not continue their fascist agenda for even one day without the backing of the United States and NATO. (246)

Jonathan Steel is critical of Joya’s “frequent lapses into self-righteousness” and the singularity of her voice (rather than its connection to a movement) in his 2009 review for The Guardian and Jennifer Moreau reminds the reader in ‘Lifting the Veil’ that BBC polling indicates a majority of Afghans support the presence of US forces.  I am not able to comment knowledgeably on the politics of Afghanistan but Malalai Joya certainly seems like a voice worth listening to.

If you want to know more about this incredibly brave woman, there is a wealth of information available at The Defense Committee for Malalai Joya site .

Raising My Voice was published in the US and Canada as A Woman Among Warlords.

* Derrick O’Keefe is the co-writer of Raising my Voice , yet I was surprised that his name does not appear on the cover (he is credited as co-author in Joya’s acknowledgements).  On Canada’s ‘Rabble’ blog , an excerpt is headed  “‘A Woman Among Warlords: the Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice’ by Malalai Joya and Derrick O’Keefe”, but features the book cover with Joya’s name only.

 BOOK DETAIL:
Joya, Malalai. Raising my Voice, Pan Macmillan Australia, Sydney, 2009.
ISBN 978 1 4050 3913 0

Top of the Sixties by David Ayres: Book Review

Top of the Sixties is a fourteen-story collection, much of which – one suspects – is highly autobiographical.  The young band member, who makes a decision to abandon his guitar-playing dreams in favour of a more mainstream day-job kind of life, could easily be imagined as the author himself.  We can see ourselves here too, and recognize the consequences of the life-choices we have made and continue to make.  

These are primarily tales of firsts: the responsibilities and perks of a job; the stress and wonder of young love; the confusion of burgeoning sexuality; the search for identity; the growing understanding of human nature and interaction.

I enjoyed the circular nature of some of the tales (in fact the collection itself is circular).  ‘Something for the Weekend’ is a humorous look at the literal way a youth tries to make sense of an adult world of double entendre.  Amidst the odours of cigar smoke and Brylcreem, a youngster is oblivious to the subtle jokes of the men perusing the sports pages while waiting for a haircut.  “A boy of eleven, sitting in a high chair, having his hair cut, is an easy target” (91).  It is years later before Leon – now with a “rakish” style in no need of a barber’s attention – understands why “something for the weekend” was a phrase that made the barber-shop men erupt with laughter.

The dialogue occasionally faltered.  I found myself thinking that a certain piece of information would have been better served through background narrative rather than dialogue and sometimes vice versa.  For example, in ‘Wetton Mill’ John says to his friend Neil:  “You know I don’t believe in God and neither do you.  We could go up to Derbyshire.  We’ve talked about it but never done it.” (103).  In this exchange “you know I don’t believe in God” and “we could go up to Derbyshire” sit well as dialogue but the fact that Neil doesn’t believe in God either and that the boys had talked about going to Derbyshire but hadn’t done so, would have read easier as narrative.   

Sometimes too, a character’s voice is slightly off-kilter.  When David’s brother calls him a “berk” and his experiment “stupid” (‘Out of the Box’) it clicks but, in the next exchange when he says “Of course I know what it is, it’s Dad’s pipe tobacco, you strange boy” (134), it misses the mark. Did brothers in the sixties call each other “strange boy”?  I know my brothers were much more creative with their come-backs so I wasn’t quite convinced.

These foibles aside, there is much to enjoy in this collection, particularly if you lived through the sixties.  Cigarettes abound as they did at the time and are generally referred to  by brand (Keith spies “a large biscuit tin full of packs of ten Senior Service untipped”; Edna “relit a stub of Capstan and inhaled deeply”; Bazz “could josh with the older men and puff on a Park Drive”).  The Rolling Stones, The Who, John Lennon and Elvis Presley all get a look-in.  It’s a world of BSA motorcycles, consumptive poets and expertly shaped quiffs.

While many of the stories are light and fun, Ayres knows how to serve up substance when he wants to. Barry Enoch is a pensioner with a distaste for bacon in ‘Baz to the Slaughter’.  He recalls the part of his youthful innocence that disappeared in the blood-stained concrete surrounds of the abattoirs.

It wasn’t just the padded callipers, on the beasts’ necks, delivering the death-shock and bringing them like a sack of spuds to the ground; it wasn’t just the squealing that sounded like murdered children and drowned every other sound; it wasn’t even the upside-down carcasses that splashed their life-blood all over the white tiled killing floor.  The final straw had been the acrid stink of the hair being singed off the carcases with blowlamps. (77)

Ayres conjures some great visuals.  Consider Mick the drummer in ‘Fret’:

He seemed to bear a grudge against his semi-circular array of skins.  Mick would swivel on his stool as he laid into his kit from one end to the other, the sweat dripping from the end of his nose and the muscles in his arms billowing like mainsails (114)

A sense of private space has always been an important extension of personality for me and I thought of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as I read of a boy surveying his room, concerned over the wrench that a family move would create for him in ‘Out of the Box’.

Ridiculous, he said to himself, that such a tiny space should have such enormous importance for him.  But it did. Here were his test tubes and chemistry set […] Here was his atlas of the world with red biro lines across the oceans and continents […] Here was the essential David, the complete David, the David unavailable for his friends to see. (128)

‘A Gift of Lilies’ is the final story in the collection, in which university student Keith bumps into his old employer, easily recognizable from ‘A Sack of Spuds’ (the first story).  Bart Davies, now in his seventies, is about to propose to his occasional lover Lorna.  As Davies is purchasing a bunch of lilies, Lorna is reminiscing with a friend about the time Bart bought her lilies: “They smell clean, they smell of the future”. (162)

These stories are set in London in a simpler time, a time of greater innocence, and yet much of what Ayres has to say about youthful exuberance, teenage angst and finding ones place in the world are universal.  Top of the Sixties transcends the lines of geography, generation and gender and men of a certain age, in particular, are likely to see something of themselves between the pages.

BOOK DETAIL:
Ayres, David. Top of the Sixties, Holland Park Press, London, 2011.
ISBN: 978-1-907320-09-5
Purchase through the Holland Park Press website