Tag Archives: feminism

A challenge! Australian Women Writers in 2012…

Posted on by
2

Yes, I’ve taken up a challenge!  Leading up to the inaugural Stella Prize, the aim of the Australian Women Writers Challenge is to raise awareness of the depth and breadth of Austalian women’s writing.  I’ve signed up for the ‘Miles’ challenge level – to read at least 6 and review at least 3 books by AWWs this year!  You can also choose what range of genres you would like to read in – I’ve chosen to be a ’Dabbler’ (more than one genre).  ‘Dabbling’ sounds like not too much pressure, no?

I have my eye on some Charlotte Wood novels (I read The Submerged Cathedral and loved it), Fiona McGregor’s Indelible Ink, and I’m currently reading Janine Burke’s The Heart Garden - non-fiction about Melbourne artist patron Sunday Bailleu and the Heide set, and enjoying it very much.

So stay tuned this year for discovering some new/old Australian writers of the female persuasion… As always, reading recommendations welcome!

Geography – Sophie Cunningham (2004)

Posted on by
2

We recently looked at Sophie Cunningham’s non-fiction work, Melbourne, and this week I’m delving into her first fiction work, Geography.  This is a travel narrative on two levels: a physical journey from Australia to Los Angeles to India and back again and an emotional journey of a woman coming to grips with an obsessive love.

The narrator, Catherine, begins her story in the present, chatting in India with a newfound travelling friend, Ruby.  Just upon the point of telling her life story, Catherine begins to doubt the worth of telling such a potentially clichéd tale at all:

People are bored with stories of obsession.  With women in their late thirties who are single, the reasons they might be so…

‘I like stories,’ Ruby says.  ‘It’s one of the fun things about travelling – hearing people’s stories.’

Yes, it is, and Cunningham proceeds to intersperse the narrative of her re-discovery of India with flashbacks to her obsessive LA-based love.  As she flags, people do sometimes get bored with obsessive love stories – perhaps because these tend to involve a lot of repetition – ‘she loves him / she hates him / she loves him again’, etc… Obsessive love narratives can make you want to slap the hopeless heroine and tell her to get a grip.

Well, I did occasionally feel the urge to slap coming on, but this is just testimony to Cunningham’s skill at communicating the depth of the obsession.  As usual, the object of the obsession is hardly worth all that angst – the reader can clearly see he is arrogant, uncaring and untrustworthy.  However, we are also given entry to Catherine’s headspace and we see that, from her point of view, her love interest, Michael,  is endlessly intriguing and promises to open up new avenues of experience.  The excitement of being with him is tied up with that exciting feeling of ‘being overseas’ , wherein every little action – opening the door to a new hotel room, driving past a famous house, is experienced at a kind of heightened level of reality.  Being in love with this man, Cunningham implies, is at some level being in love with exotica and otherness and unknown-ness – all the things that are part of travelling to new places.  The connection between physical and emotional geography is made explicit through Catherine’s quoting of the metaphysical poet John Donne:

Licence my roving hands to go

Behind, before, above, between, below

Oh my America, my new found land…

Can such love survive the transfer to the more ordinary turf of her home country?  The obsession seems likely to falter under less cosmopolitan conditions…

For those inclined to dismiss Los Angeles as shallow, materialistic and crowded with fake overly-tanned airheads, Cunningham persuasively mounts a case for it being Not Such a Bad Town After All.  Catherine enjoys the scenery, the old art deco architecture, the exotic feeling of starring in your own movie.  Cunningham has a particular skill for capturing the joy of travel and she makes LA seem fresh and interesting, despite its overexposure on bad TV shows for so many years.

Parallel to the central love story, is the gentle unfolding of Catherine’s travelling friendship with Ruby.  Much younger but perhaps wiser, Ruby is a breath of fresh air compared to the stifling atmosphere of Catherine’s romantic obsession.  As they travel on more deeply into the heart of India and into its spiritual history (beautifully described by Cunningham), the possibility starts to present itself that the friendship could deepen into something more…

What starts out as a contemporary travel story turns into a quite philosophical meditation upon the nature of obsession vs love, and destiny vs choice.  Cunningham brings the reader to some thoughtful conclusions about women and personal responsibility.  What is satisfying about this novel is the willingness to go ‘deeper’, to ask thoughtful questions about the choices of the protagonists and the meaning of the emotions involved.

One of the criticisms of this book when it first came out was that it was too adolescently autobiographical – a criticism which is unfair and patronising.  Women’s writing is often criticised for being ‘too’ autobiographical, even though it is clear this style of writing is present in men’s books as well.  What is implied in this criticism is that the details of women’s lives are simply not of interest to the reading public.  Skilled writers like Cunningham demonstrate the falsity of this assumption and hopefully clear the way for more appreciation of women’s stories by readers of either gender.  (Cunningham herself has been instrumental in supporting the recognition of women’s writing – see note below.)

A note of warning: Cunningham chooses to use the c-word to refer to her anatomy, being one of the women who thinks this word can be reclaimed and stripped of its women-hating connotations.  I happen to disagree.  Parallel to similar discussions about racist language, it may be less offensive for a woman to use this word, but that fact does not thereby strip it of its problematic history.  If you are squeamish about this, you may find some parts of this book a little hard to take.

Verdict: Thoughtful travelogue / love story with a deeper reflection upon the nature of obsession vs authentic love and some evocative travel scenes.  Will make you want to hop on a plane!

Watch out for:  Cunningham has recently been involved in setting up a prize for women’s writing, the Stella Prize.   Expect to discover some excellent new writing through this award… I can’t wait to see who will be the first winner!

 

The Grass is Singing – Doris Lessing (1950)

Posted on by
Reply

Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing is a murder mystery, but an unusual one, because we already know who the murderer is.  It’s not so much a ‘whodunit’ as a ‘why was it done?’.  Set amid the racial tensions of 1940s Rhodesia, the story opens with this intriguing little newspaper snippet:

                  MURDER MYSTERY

              By Special Correspondent

Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front verandah of their homestead yesterday morning.  The houseboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to the crime.  No motive has been discovered.  It was thought he was in search of valuables.

The first important information we learn is that nobody likes Mary Turner – even in death, she scares people.  Why does everyone hate her so much?  The course of the novel is, in a way, an attempt to answer that question.  Mary’s life is a hard one, but it wasn’t always that way.  She has led a somewhat charmed existence, living in one of those big hostel-type houses with a host of other ‘girls’ (Mary is 30!).  We find out that she has lived here for a long time and that her development has been somewhat arrested: she’s never really grown up.  Although life is hard for many women in Rhodesia, she has been one of the lucky ones: she has a ‘career’ (i.e. is a secretary, which is pretty good for those days), she has money, lots of friends and the occasional boyfriend.  She is happy, although clearly lacks any self-awareness.  She avoids all black people.

Into this insular existence comes an upsetting incident: Mary hears an unpleasant remark made by her friends about her when they think she’s not listening.  This event both jolts Mary out of her dreamlike state and acts as a catalyst for the massive change in her circumstances, not the least of which is her marriage to the unfortunate Richard… 

Lessing takes us deep into the troubles of 1940s Rhodesia and its white farming population.  Although some farmers do well, Mary’s husband Richard is not one of them.  Every year is another disappointment and Mary finds herself isolated, dirty, hot and slowly losing her mind. 

Lessing pulls the readers’ sympathy in opposite directions: whenever we start to feel sympathy for Mary, Lessing turns our attention to the more extreme suffering of the black workers, whose problems make all white-people problems seem trivial in comparison.  Mary is irritated with and unkind to the black workers under her supervision – and on one occasion, her unkindness develops into downright cruelty.  And yet… with the arrival of a new house servant, Moses, there seems potential for at least one human relationship to form across Mary’s self-imposed racial divide .  Is there hope for her yet?

The sheer complexity of Lessing’s characters and setting are a tribute to her skill.  We know enough about Mary’s hapless background to understand why she is the way she is and yet… how could we not sympathise with the plight of the black families being used as slave labour?  Racism is the central concern of this novel, but feminist considerations jostle for our attention as well.  Women at the time were expected to drop everything and submit completely to their husband’s life plan, however misguided.  For Mary, this means leaving the girls’ hostel where she felt so comfortable and roughing it in a depressing  and hopeless farm setting that resists her pitiful attempts at improvements.   

The usual colonialists’ plight emerges, of British people who choose to live in Africa without ever developing an understanding of or affinity for the place.  They hate the sun, they hate the bush and most of all they hate (and fear) the black population.  This is the irony of colonialism: that the people who think they are most fit to ‘run’ a country (more fit than its native inhabitants)  are the people who hate it most.  Lessing gives us the beginnings of a psychoanalysis of the relationships between the white population and the bush (particularly the farmers, who farm the land but fail to understand it), the white women and the black men, and the fraught sexual relations within the poor white farming community, with the endless pressures upon ill-prepared wives.

Lessing is an inelegant writer, and I mean that as a compliment.  She has a terse, unadorned style which suits her grim subject matter. She achieves the perfect balance between analysis and plot, so while her novel is a psychological drama with many political and ethical questions being tossed about, it is also a well-paced narrative, which keeps the reader turning its pages until its dramatic climax.  Lessing is too intelligent a writer to hand over a perfectly packaged conclusion to the mystery, so readers will have to make up their own minds as to who, or what, in the final analysis is really to blame.

Verdict: Dark and unrelenting narrative of racial and sexual tensions in 1940s Africa.  An intelligent page-turner.

Watch out for: The quote from T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land on the preface page: it’s the inspiration for the novel’s title.  And check out a lovely website dedicated to Lessing’s Nobel-Prize-winning work here.  

 

Melbourne Writers’ Festival 2011 roundup

Posted on by
Reply

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Melbourne Writers’ Festival finished last weekend – here are some interesting summaries of the Festival from around the web:

 Happy reading!

The Persimmon Tree and Other Stories – Marjorie Barnard (1943)

Posted on by
Reply

Not to buy into the famous Sydney-Melbourne rivalry, but I feel I have rather neglected that Other City, so here finally are some Sydney stories… and I’m so excited to have a discovered a new author!  (By ‘discovered’ I mean picked up this book in the local op shop and by ‘new’ I mean new to me, but it’s still exciting!)  Marjorie Barnard is an Australian author who is mainly known for her collaborations with fellow Australian writer, Flora Eldershaw, under the combined name of ‘M. Barnard Eldershaw’.  However, this particular collection of short stories is all Barnard’s own work, and it is truly amazing work – up there with Katherine Mansfield’s short stories, and that’s saying something!  Many of these stories are set in Sydney with recognisable but not intrusive little tropes of Sydneyside existence dotted throughout.  None of the stories are very long, but they are admirably dense.  Their structure recalls the ‘epiphanies’ of James Joyce’s Dubliners: each story has at least one event that provokes a movement / realisation / understanding, in which an important truth is revealed. 

 

Mostly set in the 1930s and 40s, these are proto-feminist stories in the best sense: they describe with knowing detail and empathy the ebb-and-flow structure and pressures of women’s lives.  The title story is, as expected, one of the best: a woman of middle age is recovering from an unnamed illness.  Her living space is a small quiet room shadowed by the persimmon tree outside, and we are in that room with her.  As the event-less days progress and her body heals, she observes the movements of the woman across the street from her – she (we!) can see into her window and we follow her movements too…  This is a short short story and yet quite intense.  It’s one to linger over and read again, very slowly.  The sick woman muses:

 

My mind was transparent and tender as new skin.  Everything that happened, even the commonest things, seemed to be happening for the first time…

 

This could sum up Barnard’s frame of mind throughout the entire collection: she delivers all happenings as new and wondrous things.  In particular, she has a gift for seeing beauty in the mundane:

 

Behind them was the semicircle of glass and the view, over the shining beetle-backs of parked cars, to the sea.

 

Who ever would think to look at something as boring as a car park and see ‘shining beetle-backs’?  And how perfectly she captures the much-written-about Sydney Harbour Bridge with this one line:

 

…a grey bow drawn across the blue.

 

It’s hard to pick out particular stories when this collection is consistently strong, but I have to mention ‘It Will Grow Anywhere’: in its atmosphere it’s a shorter, antipodean version of The Great Gatsby.  The story begins in an exclusive club overlooking Sydney Harbour, there are glasses clinking and rich people talking and one man begins to tell the story of an unusual woman …  Like Scott Fitzgerald, Barnard exhibits a distaste for the slickness and harshness of the privileged world.  Her sympathies lie squarely with the under-women whose stories we are asked to follow. 

 

In ‘The Dressmaker’ Barnard examines the plight of an overworked woman who must submit to her wealthy bosses in order to support herself.  She must never contradict or answer back to her employers and yet… there is some magic centre of steely self-esteem which rises above the humiliations of her working existence.  The women of these stories are never mere victims: the unifying theme of these stories is women’s strength.  Barnard shows women to be caught in structures not of their own making, sometimes unable to move or make a choice, until she reveals from nowhere a small shaft of freedom opening up and a new reserve of strength previously unseen.  Other notable stories are ‘The Lottery’, ‘The Party’ and the quietly tragic ‘Tree Without Earth’.  Virginia Woolf famously described Katherine Mansfield’s writing as ‘the only writing I have ever been jealous of”; I rather imagine she would have said the same about The Persimmon Tree.

 

Verdict:  Beautifully-written short short stories with strong female characters.  Perfect for slow reading on a lazy afternoon.

 

Look out for: If you’re at all familiar with Sydney, it’s fun to recognise particular streets and suburbs and imagine them in a 1930s/40s setting.

Monkey Grip – Helen Garner (1977)

Posted on by
3

This has to be one of the best opening lines in a novel:

 In the old brown house on the corner, a mile from the middle of the city, we ate bacon for breakfast every morning of our lives…

Makes you want to read on, doesn’t it? Or fry up some bacon?  This is the story of a young woman, Nora,  in 1970s inner city Melbourne.  She's living in various semi-communal situations and trying to be true to herself while looking after her daughter Gracie, amidst all the upheaval and anarchy of the time.  The best quality of this highly-autobiographical novel is its immediacy: from that first page we are plunged back into 1970s counterculture Australia and what an interesting place it is!  Nora lives among people of varying levels of functionality… other feminist single mothers like her, random children (who are brought up by everyone), and some stragglers like ‘Javo’, who is ‘teetering as many were that summer on the dizzying edge of smack’.  Nora is falling in love with him and we know from the start this can’t be good…

Garner’s novel is beautifully written – often quite tender and forgiving towards its hapless characters, but not afraid to show the seedier side of some people’s choices.  Atmospheric, summery, creaky, sweaty… Garner has always been a writer who emphasises physical sensations.  This creates a wonderful feel of ‘being there’ for the reader.  Nora and her funny little daughter Gracie are characters to care about – Nora is sometimes strong, sometimes vulnerable, not always likeable but totally believable.  We want things to work out for her, we want her boyfriend Javo to get off the drugs finally and for the adults in Gracie’s life to stop letting her down.

I can’t ignore the specific ‘sense of place’ in this novel – it’s a character in itself: the baked yet-to-be-yuppified flat streets of Melbourne’s inner north – ‘a mile from the middle of the city’.  It’s not that you can’t appreciate Garner’s evocative descriptions unless you live here, but it’s certainly a bonus for Melbournian readers.  We know about the beauty of the Exhibition Gardens where Nora and her friends walk and we know that the ‘University Cafe’ isn’t actually at the university.  The Uni, the Markets, Shakahari, Elgin and Grattan, the Palais… she charts a detailed social geography of her life at the time.  Houses of friends are known simply by the street they’re situated on: ‘Grattan Street’, ‘Rathdowne Street’, ‘Nicholson’…  Nora’s up-and-down life consists of repeatedly trekking between these more-or-less communal local houses, from drama to drama, with the occasional dash down the Great Ocean Road or to Sydney when it all gets too much.

This has to be, for me, one of the top ten Australian novels.  It’s honest, skilfully written and intruiging.  Structurally, it’s divided into short segments somewhat like diary entries, each with its own sardonic title: e.g. ‘Flapping Like a Bloody Bandage’.  In a 1986 interview Garner explains:

It’s based on a diary and that’s why it’s got that rather broken-up structure… But I didn’t think of myself as a writer then.  I was just messing around.

It’s all emotionally real and we trust Garner, who certainly is a writer, to tell us the whole fascinating story of what life was like for her at the time.

Verdict: Believable account of 1970s living on the edge, told with grace and sensitivity.  A must-read, especially if you live in or have ever visited Melbourne.

Random trivia: Monkey Grip was made into a movie in the early eighties starring Noni Hazelhurst – yes, of Playschool fame! It’s worth watching, but hippies don’t look like hippies when they’re given eighties fashions and hairstyles…

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (2003)

Posted on by
2

There’s been much hype about this book, particularly since the making of a high profile movie this year starring Tilda Swinton.  The hype is perhaps not surprising given the novel’s subject matter: all you need to know about the plot is that it revolves around a Columbine-style school massacre carried out by the narrator’s son.  Happily, this novel does live up to its reputation.  It’s written – skilfully – in an old-school ‘epistilatory’ style,  (i.e. ‘Dear Franklin….’.)  This style can sometimes seem claustrophobic and stilted, but Shriver makes you believe in the narrator’s voice, this bewildered mother, ‘Eva’,  trying to make sense of her son’s extreme actions, and wisely pads out descriptions and conversations such that the reader is not frustrated with being confined to one person’s letters.

It’s worth noting that this is the first whole book I’ve read on an electronic reader (the Kindle) and I can report that I definitely ‘forgot’ I was not reading a paper book, so engrossed was I in the narrative.  In fact, my first taste of this book came through downloading a ‘sample’ and from the first ‘letter’ (addressed, as all the letters, to the narrator’s husband) I was hooked -  testimony to Shriver’s formidable story-telling ability.  Painstakingly, letter by letter, every angle and every implication of the crime is examined, through delving into the family’s often very painful past.  And the character of Kevin, the schoolmate-massacring son, is surely one of the most repulsive, mother-scaring characters in the history of literature – up there with Pinkie in Brighton Rock – yes, that evil!

It’s been called a ‘feminist novel’, which is true enough: Shriver knows her politics, understands contemporary culture and for every current debate and argument has a counterargument ready to go, e.g. ‘Bad kids are caused by bad mothers’ versus ‘Some kids are just born evil’.   Eva is not the most likeable character but modern women all over the world will relate to her honesty about the disproportionate burden of childrearing that is placed upon women.  However, Shriver cleverly pitches the politics of the novel in the realms of ambiguity by repeatedly confronting the liberal Eva with challenges to her politics from such characters as her old-school Republican husband and spookily precocious and aggressively argumentative son.

By setting the reader up to care about her characters, Shriver moves us with more and more layers of the tragedy, leaving the reader genuinely affected and haunted by an impressive ending.  Overall, this is an eminently intelligent novel, which proffers no easy answers nor definitive theories, but offers enough contemporary substance to fuel dinner party conversations for years to come.

 Verdict:  Intelligent, thought-provoking and a page-turner.

Watch out for: The twist towards the end – will stay in your memory.