Enjoyed our Big Weekend of Books, but want more great reads to snuggle up with over the winter months?
Our trusted gang of avid readers — The Book Show’s Claire Nichols and Sarah L’Estrange, ABC Arts’ Nicola Heath and critic Declan Fry — have picked their favourites from the last month for you.
All read voraciously and widely, and the only guidelines we give them are: make it a new release, make it something you think is great.
They take us from hotly anticipated follow-ups to a moving ode to sisterhood, to an examination of how acknowledging extinction could save us all. All you have to do is read on.
Parade by Rachel Cusk
Faber / Allen and Unwin
Rachel Cusk’s fiction-making is porous and, in Parade, she continues to experiment with the way narratives form through conversations and recollection.
Each of Parade’s four sections — The Stuntman, The Midwife, The Diver and The Spy — tells the story of an artist identified only by the initial G.
Uniting each iteration of “G” is a concern with artistic creation’s excessive quality, how it demands communion with the innermost parts of the creator even as it tends to outstrip self-knowledge. As she writes in The Spy: “Why did work have to be identified with a person, when it was just as much the product of shared experience and history?”
For those interested in the arts, part of the fun of the novel is in identifying Cusk’s biographical models for “G”. They include the artist Louise Bourgeois, writer Norman Lewis, painters Paula Modersohn-Becker and Georg Baselitz, and the director Éric Rohmer.
Yet the stories lose nothing for those who come to them without this biographical knowledge. Indeed, Cusk’s anonymisation of aspects of her narratives seems designed to encourage new ways of fashioning and understanding “character”.
Dedicated Cuskians will recognise a number of the author’s tropes: the architecture of experience, the relationship between fiction and reality, transitions between old lives and new, and the numerous opportunities for metaphor and abstraction afforded by everyday objects. (Especially valuable to Cusk are objects offering some kind of representational or mimetic quality: mirrors, paintings, rooms.)
The furnishings of a house, a chance violent encounter on the street — all of these can lead to unexpected realisations, determining the shape of a life.
Even compared to the fierce interiority of Cusk’s Outline trilogy, Parade is a cerebral work. The narrative of each chapter is pointillist; clusters of small details making up a whole. The detail here lies in response and reflection, like Don DeLillo stranded in Suffolk.
As with much of her work since her memoir Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, a major theme is how divorce goes on fostering new separations in life, severing aspects of selfhood and prior experience from identification with one’s surroundings.
Everyday things — a place, a person, a time — reveal themselves as coordinates. In their absence, a person might be freed in ways that prove liberating, but also, at other times, terrifying, a kind of freefall into unfamiliarity.
Cusk writes like an angel, furnishing the inner life of her characters with an exquisite, wiry sense of perception and attunement. Parade speaks to the reader with a rare kind of truth.
— Declan Fry
Lies and Weddings by Kevin Kwan
Penguin Books Australia
Kevin Kwan invited us into the world of Asia’s uber-rich in his hit 2013 novel Crazy Rich Asians. His latest, Lies and Weddings, has everything we’ve come to expect from a Kwan novel — extravagant parties, extreme wealth, a monstrous mother-in-law and a triumphant love story — but with the glamour pushed to new, glittering heights.
In the UK, we meet Rufus Gresham, a surfer, artist and the future Earl of Greshamsbury. His mother, Lady Arabella, is a former Hong Kong supermodel who’ll go to extreme lengths to see her son married off to the right woman — preferably to European royalty. The last thing she wants is for Rufus to fall for the girl-next-door, the good doctor Eden, who has grown up alongside the Greshams and has no desire for money or titles.
It’s pretty clear where this is all going. In fact, the book takes most of its storyline from the Anthony Trollope novel Doctor Thorne, first published in 1858. Lies and Weddings is part of a series of novels Kwan is writing, inspired by classics from the Western canon (his last book, Sex and Vanity, was inspired by E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View). It’s a refreshing twist, populating these old, white stories with modern, Asian characters.
Let’s be honest, though, what we’re really here for are the clothes. The parties. The unimaginable wealth. Kwan delights in listing mouth-watering menus, the finest wine lists, every element of a designer outfit. We go from a lava-lit wedding in Hawaii to an airborne ceremony in Marrakesh, with guests floating in an elaborate arrangement of hot air balloons. Every party is more decadent than the last — and Kwan revels in every detail.
This is escapist, entertaining fun. Lies and Weddings is the ultimate luxury read, the perfect book to curl up with on your own decidedly non-designer couch.
— Claire Nichols
Heartsease by Kate Kruimink
Picador Australia
It’s autumn in Tasmania, and two sisters — Ellen and Charlotte, known as Nelly and Lot — arrive at a hotel in the country for a weekend silent retreat. Imposed silence is no impediment to the pair, however, who share a telepathic sisterly connection — and “a half share” in DNA — many will find deeply familiar.
Their intimacy arises in part from shared trauma: their mother, Nina, died when Nelly was an unhappy and impressionable 14-year-old, and Lot, eight years older, stepped in to raise her younger sister.
Two decades later, Lot is a lawyer and mother of two young boys who presents a glamorous and capable façade. In Nelly’s eyes, Lot has always been the model child of the family, a belief confirmed by a memory to which she returns again and again: their mother planting a glorious La Reine rose for Lot and an unappealing, prickly wild rose for Nelly in their garden.
Now a self-medicating 30-something, Nelly still sees her mother’s ghost in windows. She’s stashed an illicit bottle of whisky in her suitcase and tabs of acid (which she calls “restoratives”) in her pocket, and the sisters have barely arrived at the retreat before they sneak off to the pub, where they parse the past over pints of beer.
When author Kate Kruimink won The Australian/Vogel’s Award for Young Writers in 2020 for her debut, A Treacherous Country, the judges applauded the novel’s “assured voice”. Heartsease is a similar triumph. Nelly’s story — in which she explores the present and the past — is told in the first person in a voice that is acerbic, funny and wounded.
Alternating with the sisters’ night-time escapade is another narrative told from Lot’s perspective, and we learn that a catastrophe has befallen Nelly. The two strands combine to create a macabre countdown to the terrible event and its aftermath.
A warning for readers — particularly the sisters out there — Heartsease will absolutely make you cry, but don’t let that put you off. In this gorgeous book, Kruimink balances the messiness of fresh grief with a moving rendering of sisterhood, set against evocative descriptions of the Tasmanian landscape.
— Nicola Heath
Only the Astronauts by Ceridwen Dovey
Penguin Books Australia
This might be one of the strangest books I’ll read this year. Strange — and completely, utterly captivating.
The South African-born, Australia-based author Ceridwen Dovey has given herself an incredible challenge with this collection of short stories. Every story in the book is narrated by a human-made object, floating through space.
The opening story is narrated by Starman. Remember him? In 2018, Elon Musk’s SpaceX company fired a rocket into space. The payload — released into orbit around the sun — was Musk’s own cherry-red Tesla Roadster, with a spacesuit-clad mannequin, Starman, secured in the driver’s seat. In Dovey’s story, Starman is sentient, scared and lonely, doomed to circle the sun for eternity. He’s lovesick too, dreaming of his revered creator. While Musk is never named directly, the inference is clear, and cheeky.
“The happiest hours of my life were spent with you in this very same midnight-cherry convertible, doing wonderful, unspeakable things to each other in the back seat,” Starman says.
From there, things only get weirder. There are stories narrated by the NASA Voyager 1 space probe, by a sculpture on the moon (where Neil Armstrong’s spirit has gone to rest), and perhaps most bizarrely, an adventure story about a group of tampon-astronauts, inspired by the real astronaut Sally Ride, who NASA planned to send to space with 100 tampons (for a one-week flight in 1983).
This is high-concept stuff but, for me, it absolutely works. Ceridwen Dovey might technically be writing about space junk and satellites, but these stories are about humanity — what we build, what we treasure, and what we carelessly throw away.
Just like humanity’s forays to space, Only the Astronauts is a bold project, achieved against the odds. Bravo.
— Claire Nichols
On Extinction: Beginning Again at the End by Ben Ware
Verso
Francis Fukuyama infamously predicted the “end of history” in 1989, forecasting neoliberalism’s triumph as the ideal system of governance. In the Year of Our Lord 2024, the end of history is either severely delayed or happening at a comically leisurely pace.
That, English philosopher and social theorist Ben Ware suggests, is the problem: any declaration of the end times that keeps the status quo going is useful in frustrating change.
Ware warns of several ways in which business as usual remains intact despite our apparent awareness of the need to shake things up. This ranges from forms of ecofascism (and “eco-masochism”) — in which humans figure as a kind of virus the planet would be better off without — to conceptions of the neoliberal capitalist present as the best of all possible worlds, requiring only tinkering at the edges and a few “Act Now!” imperatives to improve things.
Ware offers something different, a way of confronting these damaged times through active intervention in “what our ‘civilized society’ delivers up: accelerating climate change, ecological catastrophe, endless war, untold economic misery, and a deliberate destruction of the social bond (‘there is no such thing as society’).”
Instead of resigning ourselves to despair, Ware suggests recognising despair as signalling an awareness of disrepair and a consequent rejection of the “endless false promises” of capitalism.
Echoing the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard (one must “despair with a vengeance, despair to the full, so that the life of the spirits can break through from the ground up”), this despair is not a form of nihilism, but a revolt against our nihilistic destruction of the planet and social bonds.
Ware also offers a reading of popular culture through a psychoanalytic lens, recalling Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. The surprise Netflix hit Squid Game, for example — in which debt-ridden citizens of South Korea are forced to compete in a series of life-or-death games with little chance of survival — becomes both an expose of social and economic injustice and a passive reaffirmation of it, discharging the viewer’s moral anxiety about the injustice being represented.
Kirsten Dunst in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, meanwhile, provides an example of rebellion comparable to the opting-out mentality of girl moss culture, refusing “the frantic time of endless flows, feeds, and streams … the mundane crisis time announced by tipping points, climate deadlines, and doomsday clocks”. In Lars Von Trier’s film, Dunst/Justine returns to the moss and the rot and enters another kind of flow, rupturing the way things are.
In Ware’s philosophical tour, with its wide-ranging survey of films, TV, fiction and philosophy, the end looks not like oblivion but a prospect for change.
Ware suggests that we need to consciously intervene in not making ourselves extinct, but instead wiping out those conditions that oppress us. Before the end of the world, we must take on the “collective negation of this world”.
–Declan Fry
To Sing of War by Catherine McKinnon
Fourth Estate
This story begins in the New Guinea jungle and there is singing. It’s World War II and Australian nurse Lotte Wyld is in a makeshift medical tent tending the wounded, wondering if all men are drawn to war “not by hatred or patriotic duty (as most suppose) but by song”.
This thought might appear to be an unexpected distraction in the middle of a battle, but the reference to song signals a connection to a classic. The novel takes its title from the beginning of Virgil’s Ancient Roman epic poem The Aeneid, which tells of Aeneas’s adventures after the fall of Troy.
To Sing of War is the third novel by Australian playwright, critic and essayist Catherine McKinnon and follows her 2018 Miles-Franklin-shortlisted novel, Storyland.
This novel takes place in the last year of the war and comprises three braided narratives set in New Guinea, New Mexico and a sacred island in Japan. The fates of the characters in these different places are entwined in the development of the atomic bomb in New Mexico, under the Manhattan Project directorship of Robert Oppenheimer (who’s also a character in the book).
But it’s the characters in the New Guinea section that carry the heart of the story. Lotte Wyld discovers freedom and agency as a field nurse, although she faces violence on two fronts: the war and the threat of sexual violence on the base.
And there’s her budding romance with Virgil — yes, he’s named after the author of The Aeneid — an Australian soldier who finds himself contemplating the horror of jungle combat against Japanese foes while simultaneously being in awe of the wonders of nature.
This novel asks whether “war (is) always the same plot, just different characters” and it’s the characters in this novel that make it sing.
— Sarah L’Estrange
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