In which Netty is Carved up by Raymond – in a good way, of course

Writing a successful short story seems to me to be akin to writing good comedy – it’s all about timing and brevity. The American writer and poet Raymond Carver has these qualities in spades – and then some. So then, welcome to Carver’s world, courtesy of his selected short-story omnibus “Where I’m Calling From”.

This is the first of two collections of short stories Andy and I are tackling in ANRC10, and it’s a cracker to kick off our year of books. Carver has been called many things – the master of minimalism, the US laureate of the dispossessed, a dirty realist, the American Chekov (I have never read Chekov, but Carver was obviously a fan – he namechecks him in this collection’s introduction and the Russian author’s demise is the subject of the final story “Errand”). Carver may well be all of the above; what he certainly is is a bloody good writer who demands to be read, reread and widely recommended.

My previous experience of Carver is three-fold – the Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly based his 1988 song “Everything’s Turning To White” on Carver’s short story “So Much Water So Close To Home” (included in this collection and also the name of Kelly’s album from whence the track originates.) This story is also one of the dozen-ish threads (about half of which are in this collection) that forms the storyline to Robert Altman’s 1993 film “Short Cuts”; it also is the basis of the 2006 Australian film “Jindabyne” (which I am remiss to have not yet seen). And I was a page or so into “Why Don’t You Dance?” when I realised why it seemed all so familiar – it was made into a 2004 Australian short called “Everything Goes” (with Hugo Weaving and a young Abbie Cornish). It’s brilliantly, understatedly acted – see it by all means if you can track it down.

“Where I’m Calling From” was first published in 1988, the year of Carver’s death, at the age of 50, from lung cancer – 37 stories selected by the author, spanning some 28 years and published here basically in chronological order. Carver states in his introduction: “If we’re lucky, writer and reader alike, we’ll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly.” Certainly, that is the response the majority of these tales demands.

The laureate of the dispossed, indeedy – Carver’s short stories are bleak, melancholy, brutally realistic. There’s the sense that’s there’s not much hope of redemption or cause for optimism for his flawed, all-too-human characters. (Andy warned you I was going to say that, didn’t he?) These stories deal with the mind-numbing minutiae of daily life, the drudgery of domesticity and waking up next to the same person day in and day out all your life, fleeting flights of fantasy and the actuality of being reeled back into an unsatisfactory but inescapable reality. Carver married and bred whilst still in his teens; he and his first wife worked a succession of blue and lower-white-collar jobs, and Carver notoriously struggled with alcoholism, which he didn’t kick till the mid-1970s. And these are the traits he bestows on and imbues in his characters. He knows these characters inside out because he has walked a thousand miles in their footsteps.

Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom. There are moments of lightness and deftness in Carver’s writing; there is humour – both obvious, then more sly and blackly comic. But the skilfully rendered pathos and perfect weighting of these stories is what impressed upon me the most. Don’t think you’ll want to go and throw yourself off a bridge after reading Carver – you most certainly won’t. But neither should you expect to skip off down the garden path with a rainbow suspended over your head. And this is far from a bad thing.

It would be easier for me to list the stories here I didn’t particularly care for, or that left little impression on me, than otherwise.
So, then, my favourites, in no particular order: “What Do You Do In San Francisco?” – a postman keeps tabs on a young family who has moved into his small town; “Neighbours” – a couple becomes obsessed with the lifestyle of the neighbours for whom they are apartment-minding; “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” – two couples spend an evening drinking and talking; “Boxes” – a man’s difficult, demanding mother spends the good part of a year planning a move interstate; “Elephant” – a man juggles the financial demands of his family members.

The collection includes Carver’s last eight stories – published in the UK as a separate volume – when, for mine, he was really hitting his stride as a writer. There’s a consistency to the writing and an assurance in the endings more obvious than his earlier work. No doubt he died way too young, but he has left behind a not-insubstantial body of work – six volumes of fiction (discounting this one and “Beginners”, as referred to in Andy’s blog) and another six of poetry and a couple of volumes of essays et al.

Read them all, Salman Rushdie? Sounds like damn good advice to me.

Where I’m Calling From – Andy bows his head in the presence of the freakin’ awesomeness that is Raymond Carver

Apparently I swear too much in these blogs. Not that I’ve had a warning from WordPress or anything, it’s just that the last couple of times anyone’s had anything to say about what I write they’ve said something along the lines of, Ooooh, naughty words.

I like naughty words. I swear a lot. Swearing is fun, like drinking too much and shagging like a rabbit. I’m a lowest-common-denominator kind of a guy, I guess. Sorry about that.

Raymond Carver didn’t swear much, or at least he didn’t in his short stories. There’s quite a few goddamns and Jesus Christs, a handful of f words (do I really have to lower myself to “f words”? Seriously?), and if memory serves just the one c word (“c word”! “c word”!) in Where I’m Calling From’s 430 pages. Of course there’s also huge amounts of excessive drinking, quite a bit of sex that people probably shouldn’t be very proud of and enough smoking to wipe out a small European country. Did people really smoke this much in the ’70s and ’80s? Wow. I tried to take up smoking as a teenager but it just sort of struck me as conceivably one of the stupidest things anybody in the history of civilisation could have dreamed up.

If you didn’t know Carver was an alcoholic before you read his stories it wouldn’t take long to figure things out once you started chewing through Where I’m Calling From.  His characters  drink a lot, and quite often it’s destroying their lives. It’s interesting that alcohol destroyed Carver’s first marriage, and he really only hit his creative straps in the late ’70s after he gave up the grog. I’m guessing he smoked a lot too. These characters smoke. A lot. In bed. Which is just disgusting and wrong.

It’s widely and notoriously known that Carver’s most famous collection of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, was brutally edited by someone called Gordon Lish, to the point that some even claim Lish ghost-wrote the stories. Last year Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher, published Carver’s original text – despite, I believe, ferocious opposition from the original publisher – in a volume titled Beginners. I haven’t read Beginners yet but it’s a must at some point later in the year.

The stories Carver chose from that book to include in his selected stories are probably not my favourites anyway, although Gazebo is pretty impressive. A partial list of the stories that left me dazzled would include Collectors, Put Yourself in my Shoes, Neighbors, So Much Water So Close to Home (inspiration for a Paul Kelly song of the same name, Netty tells me, and the Aussie movie Jindabyne, which is now a must-see), A Small, Good Thing, Boxes, Intimacy, Elephant and Blackbird Pie. I don’t think there’s anything that binds these stories together other than their brilliance. There are more laughs in some of them than in Carver’s work generally, although that said So Much Water and A Small, Good Thing are pretty much bereft of humour. But then the last page of A Small, Good Thing is possibly my favourite piece of writing in the entire book (although Netty doesn’t like it, and she might tell you why in a day or two, and I’m thinking there might be quite a few people who agree with her).

Netty and I didn’t exactly see eye to eye on Carver’s humour, incidentally. She thought Elephant was hilarious, along with Collectors, but apart from that she felt the stories were grim, almost dour. And they are – there’s plenty of desperation, and a sense of lives that should’ve been different but realistically were never going to be anything other than what they are. I think there’s actually quite a lot of dark humour in here, though, particularly in the dialogue. And I think there’s rather more hope in these stories than Netty is prepared to acknowledge.

I think I’ve read somewhere that Carver is sometimes referred to as the master of minimalism. This is presumably based on the Lish-edited volume of stories and it’s garbage. Some of the stories are parred to the bone – including ones Lish didn’t get his pen to But there’s a sort of lovely meandering quality to some of the longer stories, although admittedly Carver achieves this without wasting a word. I don’t really think the stories from Cathedral and Elephant, Carver’s last two collections, could be described as “minimalist”. Unless it means something other than what I think it means which is entirely possible.

That said this is not a perfect collection. I don’t think there’s a single story that doesn’t work but some of them just didn’t do it for me – one of the Lish-edited stories, One More Thing, I’d almost completely forgotten about until I started flicking through the book again tonight. Whoever Was Using This Bed didn’t really grab me, either. And I wasn’t 100 per cent convinced by Cathedral. As far as the rest go though, while I have my favourites none of them struck me as wanting. Where I’m Calling From is one of the strongest collections of short fiction I’ve ever read. Beyond a shadow of a doubt it will be re-read and re-read, by me and probably by some of my friends. This bloke’s stories are works of genius. But, importantly, he’s not the sort of genius who leaves you thinking writing’s beyond you. If you aspire to write short fiction you should definitely check him out. Reading his stories has been one of the most exciting and rewarding – and motivating (as opposed to motivational) – experiences I’ve had with a book for a long time. Salman Rushdie suggests reading everything Carver wrote, and it doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me.

So there you go. That may well be the first blog I’ve written during the Challenge that hasn’t involved any serious cussing. If you think life would be better with naughty words let me know. That’s certainly my ‘umble.

The Chrysalids and Chaos Walking – Andy explores the Wyndham-Ness

The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham. Chaos Walking, by Patrick Ness. Exploring the Wyndham-Ness, geddit? Wilderness, yeah? No? Oh fuck off then.

Welcome to ANRC10 and an innovation suggested by Netty and promptly dumped on me to kick off. In the next 12 months, in addition to the 12 Challenge books we’ll be reading, Netty and I alternate month by month reading and blogging about favourite books we’ve read before – six books each. So here’s Andy kicking off with a book I first read nearly 30 years ago, a scifi classic that is as powerful and as entertaining today as it was back then when I picked up a copy of it with this cover in a secondhand bookshop in Maffra for a dollar sixty (not 2.40, as the silly person who uploaded this image apparently paid). I think I liked the cover – possibly the most ridiculous cover in the history of publishing. Has nothing – NOTHING – to do with the story. Although I’m told the first US edition of Lord of the Rings had emus on it. Smacks of urban legend to me but if that’s true I guess it trumps this.

The Chrysalids is generally regarded as being a bit of an odd-man-out for Wyndham. His “cosy catastrophes”, as they were sneeringly labelled by another scifi author, were usually set in contemporary England and explored the consequences of humanity fooling with nature and science. The Chrysalids is set in Canada, far in the future, where the impact of nuclear devastation is still being felt and where religious extremism and intolerance (sorry, I suspect that’s a tautology) dominate social relations. In a future world reduced to something like early Victorian conditions, in which physical deviation is regarded as God’s curse and abomination, a group of children slowly come to realise that their talent for telepathy might not be such a blessing after all.

I probably didn’t know I was gay when I first read this but I reckon there must’ve been some unwelcome awareness of otherness banging around at the back of my head. Also at the time I was reading it my mother was involved with a bunch of profoundly evil Christian fascists (and I do mean evil, although I didn’t realise quite how evil until many years later). So the novel’s themes of difference and feared rejection and religious bigotry chimed perfectly (if perhaps subconsciously) with my state of mind at the time and presumably explains why I remember the book so well and have read it so many times – certainly many more times than Wyndham’s other books. I’ve read most of them, Triffids and Chocky a few times, the others only once. But The Chrysalids… I’ve lost count.

Incidentally my mum has nothing to do with Christian fascists these days. Hates the fuckers she does.

Thirty years later (I’m surprised my copy hasn’t fallen apart) The Chrysalids stands up. It’s still a cracking read and it’s still got plenty to say. It’s not perfect, though. There’s been much criticism of the conclusion and while I don’t agree with all of it there are elements of the last couple of chapters that are clunky and contrived. David’s romantic involvement with his cousin (ick) Rosalind comes across as an afterthought when it’s first introduced (Shit, thinks Wyndham when he gets to chapter 10, those two are supposed to be shagging. Bugger. Forgot about that). And his reliance on ellipses…. I don’t know…. but somehow that sort of…. shits me. And given that the book on one level can be read as a plea for tolerance, references to non-telepathic types as cripples whose lives are not worth as much as those who are telepathic sit rather uncomfortably.

That said – Damn it’s a good book. It’s not remotely surprising that Penguin chose it as one of their cheapy orange re-releases last year, and I hope plenty of people either rediscovered it or have read it for the first time. Wyndham was dismissed by scifi critics for many years as a lightweight, a writer whose novels were of no consequence. Bollocks. Triffids may be his masterpiece but The Chrysalids is one of my favourite books ever,  and I’m very happy to have chosen it as the first book to revisit this year.

OK, you’re saying. The Chrysalids. Lovely. What’s this about Chaos Walking and Loch Ness and the rest? What’s he on about?

Chaos Walking is the overall title given to a trilogy of alleged “children’s novels” written by Patrick Ness. The third volume is released in the first half of this year, March I think. I’ve read the first two over the past couple of months. They are astonishing. Astonishingly adult, for a start – Wyndham ostensibly at least wrote for adults but if you asked me whether I’d rather see a 12-year-old reading Wyndham or Ness it’d the Wyndham all the way. Because my god Ness is a dark, dark writer.

The two have a lot in common – telepathy, religious extremism, post-apocalyptic settings (although post-apocalyptic is pushing things ever so slightly for Ness’s books), communities reduced to agrarianism, an adolescent male narrator. I’m reasonably certain Ness has read Wyndham although as far as I know he doesn’t acknowledge it. He’s actually an American living in England so I suppose it’s possible he doesn’t even know who Wyndham is.

Ness has his weaknesses – his reliance on r0cky-stream-of-consciousness first-person narration works brilliantly a lot of the time but occasionally that rocky stream gets a bit too white water for me. And sometimes he seems to be taking his readers to dark, horrible places for no important narrative reason.  But the first two books – The Knife of Never Letting Go, and The Ask and the Answer – make the cliche “compulsively readable” worth using again, and I can’t wait for the third installment, Monsters of Men – although the title doesn’t give me hope of a gloriously happy ending.

So there tis. In a week or so (hopefully) Netty and I will be blogging on Carver. And then Netty will be revisiting… Actually now that I think about it I’m not sure.

To the person who keeps telling us we write too much: Oops. Soz.

And now for the 2010 Challenge …

Andy and I have prepared this year’s list a little differently to those of the previous two years. Rather than a you-pick-six-I’ll-pick-six, most of these authors are on this list by mutual consensus – then it was just a matter of choosing the book. We think it’s an absolute cracker of a list – and I’m hoping for not a Black Swan, Lot 49 or Melancholy Whore in sight!

January – Where I’m Calling From: RAYMOND CARVER
February – Post Office: CHARLES BUKOWSKI
March – Possession: AS Byatt
April – And The Ass Saw The Angel: NICK CAVE
May – Collected Poems: THOM GUNN
June – Fit To Print: JORIS LUYENDIJK
July – The Drowned World: JG BALLARD
August – As I Lay Dying: WILLIAM FAULKNER
September – Black Water: JOYCE CAROL OATES
October – Our Story Begins: TOBIAS WOLFF
November – Johnno: DAVID MALOUF
December – Wide Sargasso Sea: JEAN RHYS

Pretty cool, huh?

In addition, there’ll be 12 extra blogs – six apiece – from us this year as we embark on an adjunct to ANRC2010, which I’ve dubbed Andy/Netty Revisited. We will be rereading 12 books that are significant to us over the course of the year, one every other month. We’re not announcing this list ahead of time, and Andy is first cab of the rank this month. It’s all about value-adding, folks!

And for those of you who may check out our blogs when they pop up on your news feeds, if you’re not already following us, please consider doing so (just press that little blue button on the top right-hand side of your screen!). It’s free – and not many things are these days! – and we hope it’s informative and entertaining. Please feel free to post your comments – be they bouquets or brickbats – or read along with us. And when we finally score that American cable-show gig, you’ll be able to say ‘I was there at the beginning … ‘

Have a great year of books, guys!

ANRC2009: Netty’s verdict

Let me start by saying that if Andy and my Reading Challenge goes another 10 years, 2009 may well go down as my least favourites of those. (Of course that’s not going to happen because everyone knows the end of the world is nigh, what with the Mayan calender ending in 2012 an’ all – and I can hear the scoffs from my blogging partner from all the way across town as he reads this.) Andy has said before – and I have relayed this train of thought previously – that it’s a “challenge”, and by crikey at times last year it certainly felt like it. Although, thankfully the diamonds outweighed the dross.

Herewith, my ANRC2009 top 12, in descending order:

12. Rabbit, Run – JOHN UPDIKE
I’m sorry, but this is truly a quantifiable piece of shite, with one of the most dislikeable, unsympathetic characters I have ever encountered in my many, many years of reading. Sure, Updike can write some, but that’s overshadowed by this despicable, loathesome, sad and sorry excuse of a character. For mine, one volume of the adventures of Rabbit Angstorm is one volume too many. There’s another three and a novella out there, but I would personally rather be hung upside down by my toenails and slathered in hot wax and goose feathers than ever, ever read any of ‘em.

11. The Black Swan – NASSIM NICOLAS TALEB
Andy, consider this my last and final apology to you for making us read this self-important, grandiose, pompous, unfathomable slab of crapola masquerading as a must-read on global economics. It’s not. Maybe I should have chosen Freakonomics instead … Oh hindsight, what a wonderful thing you are …

10. Delta Of Venus – ANAIS NIN
Very few people write diaries intending that they be read. Very, very few people write sex well. Some of Nin’s erotic sketches contained within this collection are passably OK, but quite frankly if I want titillation, I’ll head to the DVD cabinet.

9. Some Jazz A While – MILLER WILLIAMS
Williams clocking in at number nine should not be seen as a thumbs down. There’s a lot to wade through here, but at its very best Williams’ poetry is highly personal, poignant and thought-provoking.

8. Invisible Man – RALPH ELLISON
An astounding book, as relevant today as it was when it was written some 60 years ago. A simply but beautifully realised fictional study of American race relations by someone who – often painfully – knows the way it goes.

7. The Law Of The Land – Henry Reynolds
Simply a book that every – EVERY – Australian should read. If I was in charge (yes, I know – frightening thought that that is), this would be on all high school syllabuses, and mandatory reading for all new Australians, too.

6. Tree Of Smoke – DENNIS JOHNSON
One of those big, fat, often unwieldy modern American books. Complex in its myriad character and plot threads, but surprisingly readable and ultimately rewarding. And a welcome addition to the canon of twentieth-century war fiction.

5. Liquor – POPPY Z. BRITE
A great romp and a helluva lot of fun to read. Memorable, amiable characters (are you listening, Updike? Even if you were still alive, I doubt it), evocative setting, interesting if somewhat predictable plot, gallops along at a page a minute. Won’t change your life, but will definitely enhance it for a couple of hours. And sometimes that’s more than enough.

4. The White Tiger – ARAVIND ARIGA
The 2008 Booker winner is sly, witty, chock full of the blackest of black humour and well worth taking the ride in narrator Balram’s limousine – as long as you’re not Mr Ashok …

3. Voss – PATRICK WHITE
He might have been a cumudgeonly old bastard, but White well deserves his formidable literary reputation. Voss contains some of the most superb, beautiful, lyrical prose I have ever read. You can see, hear and smell our country in its pages.

2. The New York Trilogy – PAUL AUSTER
Meta-fiction at the very top of its game. Intelligent, clever without being smarty-pants about it, and challenging in the best sense of the word. A mind-fuck of a book, and that is meant as an absolute compliment. And only very, very narrowly pipped into second place by …

1. For Whom The Bell Tolls – ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Astonishing, masterful, compelling. Ernest Hemingway, we are not worthy.

Well that’s 2009 dispensed with. Standby for the 2010 list, on a separate blog coming to a news feed near you ASAP.

ANRC2009: Andy’s Verdict

It’s just occurred to me. If we’d called it Netty and Andy’s Reading Challenge it’d be NARC. Ho ho ho.

I’m not a fan of the summing up. Netty’s forced it on me, basically. She did it last year too. Pushy cow. Anyway here we are at the end of another year of the Reading Challenge (actually the beginning of another year of the Reading Challenge, but never mind that) and I’m supposed to give you my rundown of the year’s books. Netty will give you a list. Netty likes lists. I won’t. I don’t like lists. I’ll just… You know. Ramble a bit. A lot.

There is only one total and utter and complete and incontrovertibly dismal waste of time on this year’s list and it was Netty’s choice and she insisted it be included despite my reservations and she has since apologised to my on innumerable occasions. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, take a bow. The Black Swan is without question one of the biggest pieces of shit I have ever read in my life. Sure Nick, you’re probably much more intelligent than me, absolutely, your brain like Marvin the Paranoid Android’s may be the size of a planet. Fine. So how about you use that massive intellect of yours and make your ideas, which apparently are earthshattering and groundbreaking and epoch-defining and blah fucking blah, how about you make these blindingly stupendously brilliant ideas of yours COMPREHENSIBLE? And if you can’t do that fuck off and die. You’re a waste of space and so is your book. Netty, you owe me another apology. Now.

Weeee. That was fun.

It’s the other end of the spectrum that stuffs me up. Because there was a lot of really good stuff on the challenge list this year. For sheer escapist enjoyment, particularly in the weeks after the horrors of the Swan, Poppy Z. Brite takes the cake. Liquor isn’t great literature but it’s well written and funny and it has poofters and booze in it and that’s always a good thing. Delta of Venus did not fill me with the desire to pop down to my local secondhand bookshop and pick up a copy of one of Anais Nin’s novels that happened to be sitting in the window but then it didn’t fill me with the desire to vomit, either, and given that the whole book is about flange that is genuinely surprising and also a good thing. The White Tiger was not the best Booker Prize winner I’ve read but it was scathingly funny and gave a viciously satirical insight into the workings of one of the 21st century’s economic superpowers. These three books probably sit somewhere in the middle of my ‘09 Challenge reading – obviously not as excretally awful as the Swan but not really in the league of some of our other books.

From here on though it gets painful. I guess there are another four books I’d say where really good but not as good as some of the other stuff we’ve read this year and in that group would be the poems of Miller Williams (Some Jazz a While), Dennis Johnson’s labyrinthine exploration of the Vietnam War (Tree of Smoke), Henry Reynolds’ polemic on Aboriginal land rights (The Law of the Land) and John Updike’s Rabbit Run – but only just. I have every intention of reading Updike’s other three Rabbit novels and quite possibly some of his other books as well. I was much more impressed with Rabbit Run than Netty was, but…

Actually now that I think about it Voss might sit on the same ground as Rabbit Run. Patrick White, like Updike, is a self-consciously important writer. White’s worse, I suspect. Oooooh, look at me, I’m writing literature. The two of them are as bad as each other, it’s just that I think White is a better writer and so he gets away with it a bit more. Just. Also he’s Australian and that gets him extra points. Voss is an astonishing novel but White’s arrogance is at times as nauseating as his main character’s.

Somewhere long ago I read the phrase “so clever it winks at you” on the back of a book. I’m pretty sure it’s on my bookshelf but I can’t remember which book it is and frankly it’s probably been used more than once. Anyway, it definitely applies to Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. I pretty much despise postmodernism and there’s not a lot about metafiction that I like these days; the fact that Auster can win me over with his interlinking novellas is pretty impressive. I’m told his more recent work simply goes over old ground, which is disappointing. He’s another writer I’m looking forward to exploring more deeply.

Ralph Ellison is not one of those writers, not because I don’t want to read anything else he’s written but sadly because he wrote very little other than Invisible Man. What a novel it is, though, Huge, rambling, visceral, eviscerating, brutal, enlightening, depressing, uplifting… Well, barely uplifting. Occasionally uplifting. But certainly enlightening. It was written, what, 50 years ago? Longer, I think. And I suspect it gives us insight into the way race relations work in the US today, from Hurrican Katrina to the election of Barack Obama. Yippee-ki-yay, motherfouler.

Our final book of the year tussles with Auster for my pick. For Whom the Bell Tolls is just astonishing. I didn’t do it credit when I blogged about it. It is such a finely crafted narrative, told in such carefully honed language, propelled with such superbly controlled energy towards a devastating conclusion. Even the elements of Hemingway’s personality and experience that I find odious – the hunting and the bullfighting and the machismo and the homophobia – either don’t appear in this novel or appear only in support of the story itself. Maria’s whole I-exist-for-no-reason-than-to-make-you-happy-Robert-Jordan thang shat me a bit but it’s more than balanced by Pilar’s protofeminist fiestiness.

Look, there’s a bunch of other stuff I could say but Netty and I have recently been instructed to keep our blogs shorter. Ooops. Fucked that one up. Anyway, I am looking forward to the Challenge of 2010. Netty and I decided on the books this year slightly differently, which I’m sure she’ll tell you about at some point, and the result, I feel, is pretty impressive.

But enough of literature. My boyfriend’s got a lamb roast in the oven. Yumma.

In which Hemingway finds a new fan in Netty …

Things I knew about Ernest Hemingway before reading For Whom The Bell Tolls.
1. He was into guns and wars and bullfighting and fishing.
2. He won the Nobel Prize for literature for his books about guns and wars and bullfighting and fishing.
3. He lived in Cuba for a while.
4. He killed himself.

Things I know about Ernest Hemingway after reading For Whom The Bell Tolls.
1. All of the above.
2. He wrote at least one amazingly, stupendously, awe-inspiring, jaw-droppingly incredible book.

Hemingway made the 2009 Reading Challenge list because I had never read him, and Andy had only read The Old Man And The Sea quite some time ago, and because I had seen Marieke Hardy rave about A Farewell To Arms on the First Tuesday Book Club a couple of years ago (Check out the video at http://www.abc.net.au/tv/firsttuesday/s2183520.htm). During the two years we’ve been doing Reading Challenge I have discovered authors whom I want to continue to read (Phillip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Patrick White) and authors whom I don’t (John Updike, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Thomas Pynchon). I am pleased to say that Hemingway definitely falls into the former category.

The great man of American letters certainly packed a lot into his 61 years until, plagued by ill health, he turned his gun on himself (and the concept of suicide is one of the threads explored in For Whom The Bell Tolls – like Hemingway himself, the novel’s protagonist Robert Jordan has a father who kills himself). Notably, he both volunteered in and reported on wars in the early 20th century, including the Spanish Civil War in 1937, in which For Whom The Bell Tolls is set (the book was first published in 1940).

Robert Jordan is an International Brigades volunteer (back in his native midwest America he teaches Spanish at university) who is despatched on a pro-Republican (of which Hemingway was a sympathiser) mission to blow up a bridge in the Spanish Sierra as part of continuing but ultimately futile action against the Fascists. He hooks up with a band of guerillas, led ostensibly by the ever-compromised Pablo, but moreso by his wife Pilar (one of the most fascinating, unwittingly pro-feminist characters I have met in my fictional explorations). Jordan spends three days, three nights and the best part of 400 pages with these mountain-dwelling reactionaries, during which he forms a bond with them, and a budding relationship with the young orphan Maria, who was raped and tortured by the Fascists after they murdered her parents and has since been taken under Pilar’s wing. The last 100 pages, which detail how the mission finally unfolds, gallop along at breathtaking speed until reaching the inevitable conclusion.

Regular followers of this blog will know that the unnecessary wastage of words is one of my prime beefs; not the case with Hemingway, who has a completely different writing style to, say, Patrick White, but the same absolute economy with words. Andy has already well covered Hemingway’s use of archaic language to indicate Spanish dialogue, and the novel way of utilising swearing (“I obscenity in the milk” indeed), so I have no need to reprise that. Suffice to conclude that Hemingway does not have his fearsomely momentous literary reputation for nothing – this is the sort of novel that would leave an aspiring writer throwing their hands in the air, packing it all in and considering a career in something where he/she is more likely to make a worthwhile contribution, say, janitorial services. The last author of Hemingway’s time and ilk that left me as impressed was F. Scott Fitzgerald, which is heady company indeed. Definitely one for the why-the-hell-did-I-wait-this-long category.

For Whom The Bell Tolls is our last book for 2009. Stand by, then, for Andy and Netty’s Reading Challenge 2010 (now entering its third big year, but still no sign of a US cable talk show deal in sight for us … sigh), with more books and blogs coming up than ever before. So stay tuned, fellow literature lovers … Our best-of-2009 and 2010 lists coming right up …

For Whom the Bell Tolls: Andy thinks the bell tolls for… er… well not the decade obviously because that doesn’t end until the end of this year, as educated people understand, but anyway…

Big book. Good book. Important book. Big writer. Good writer. Important writer.
Um.
Sometimes a book just sort of leaves you wondering how you can “comment” effectively. Sometimes that’s because it’s so bad you just want to stab yourself in the brain (ooooh was that the flapping of a black swan??? was it? was it???) but mostly it’s because it’s so good it’s just… obscene. Hemingway’s that kind of writer. For Whom the Bell Tolls is roughly 500 pages. It covers three or four days. They are not three or four important days in the history of the world, or even the history of the Spanish Civil War. But you get to the end of those 500-odd pages and there doesn’t seem to have been a solitary word wasted.
The dialogue, that’s what got me to begin with. And still gets me. It’s something I try to do in my own writing and I fail dismally. Hemingway’s characters exchange a handful of words and the meaning that is communicated is immeasurable. Conversations occur and without any signalling, without any sort of prompt at all you as a reader know, you just fucking know what’s being said. And what’s being said isn’t what’s being spoken.
I like the way Hemingway uses archaic speech patterns to indicate the use of Spanish. I’m guessing this is a modernist literary device, the sort of thing that led to postmodern wankery. Thee and thou suggest that dialogue is being spoken in Spanish; Robert Jordan rarely (although if memory serves I think he does, occasionally) uses these patterns in his internal monologues. And my reference to postmodernism is serious, for what it’s worth. Hemingway is regarded as a modernist writer. Like many modernist writers (Fitzgerald springs to mind) he uses techniques that bring to the reader’s attention the fact that they are reading a story. Postmodernism took that a loooooooong way further. And that wasn’t always a good thing. In fact it usually wasn’t.
These dudes swear a lot but that’s masked by language as well. Although the use of “muck” for “fuck” is not exactly masking. As far as I can tell it’s Ernest saying to the censors of the time Yeah, my characters don’t swear they just use words like muck and milk instead, whatcha gunna do about that then? Although I’m convinced that “milk” is used in Spanish, somehow or other, as an expletive. Muck, on the other hand, is simply Hemingway giving a big FUCK YOU to those who would prefer not to see the word fuck in print.
Um.
Politics. Right. I’m a political kind of a dickhead and obviously the Spanish Civil War was a bit of a political hothouse so let’s talk about politics, shall we?
Um. Er.
If the book has a weakness – and I’ve only read it once, perhaps repeated readings would relieve me of this impression, although I doubt it – it’s Ernest’s total and utter lack of political engagement. Maybe that’s unfair. But if you’d asked me 10 years or so ago to give you an off-the-top-of-my-head assessment of Hemingway’s politics based on the bits and pieces of his that I’d read and what I knew about him as a person I’d have told you he was a bit of a reactionary. Although not a serious reactionary. Just a sort of “I don’t really give a fuck about that shit” sort of reactionary. Robert Jordan isn’t in Spain because he believes in the Republic, he’s in Spain because, um, he likes Spain. And Spaniards. And Franco seems like a bit of a cunt. He’s aligned himself with the communists rather than the anarchists because the communists seem stronger and he despises the lack of authoritarianism that characterises the anarchists. But prior to reading this novel (and right now too, as a matter of fact) I’d always thought that anarchism was a far more accurate reflection of the Republic and what the Spanish people wanted than “communism”, which was pretty much Stalin-funded fascism. But look. I’m biased.
I was impressed though, I must admit, with Pilar’s account of the slaughter in her village in the early days of the war. Make no mistake: if her story was presented as evidence at a war crimes trial today Pablo and possibly Pilar and a bunch of other Republican types would be stuffed. The brutality of the “good guys” is nauseating, as Pilar herself ultimately realises, and any attempt to justify the slaughter of the Fascists is unconscionable. Or at least it is today, in Preston, with an ineffectual prime minister governing an ineffectual democracy. Perhaps if I were a Spanish Republican in 1936 or 37 massacring pensioners whose politics didn’t align with mine might be excusable. I like to hope that it wouldn’t be though.
But this doesn’t have a lot to do with the book. As an exploration of the Spanish Civil War I’m not sure it’s as good as some might suggest – try Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom if the war and its politics and its tragedy are what you want to know about – but as an exploration of one man’s struggles and motivations and the interactions of a small group of decent human beings under extraordinary circumstances, quite simply as a work of literature it’s pretty damn fine. Its sparseness, its brevity (for all its 500 pages), its conciseness are exemplary. I wish I wrote like this, and I don’t. But I can read other people write like this. And that is some consolation.

In which Netty officially says “Sorry” to the original occupants of the land in which she lives

So you think you don’t want to read a non-fiction work on land rights in Australia and the history of white settlement? Well, I’m here to tell you think again.

Of the dozen books Tasmanian academic Henry Reynolds has written on Australian Aboriginals, The Law Of The Land is perhaps his best-known. I read the third edition, updated in 2003, with a new conclusion to accompany the revised chapters on the famous Mabo and Wik land-right cases. Surprisingly, my local bookseller tells me TLOTL is currently out of print (I had to borrow Andy’s second-hand copy). Surprisingly, because if it isn’t already (and lack of availability suggests it isn’t), it should be mandatory reading on all high-school syllabuses in this country.

The Law Of The Land was a choice from Andy, always the more political of the two of us. As for me, well, I have to admit my own shameful lack of knowledge of indigenous history and politics. Before I read this book, I knew next to nothing about land rights and native title. I can’t remember ever hearing the term terra nullius (a land belonging to no one). And in 1992 I was way more preoccupied with Kurt Cobain than Eddie Mabo. Hell, I grew up in Tasmania (and even those of us who know little about the Aboriginals know full well what happened to them in nineteenth-century Van Dieman’s Land …) and I had never even laid eyes on an indigenous person until a particular visit to the mainland in my late teens.

So with my lack of credentials already established here, TLOTL was nothing short of an eye-opener for me. Sure, I knew white Australia had treated Aboriginals appallingly, but not to this extent and not this (albeit seemingly unwittingly) ignorantly.

It doesn’t seem to have necessarily been a problem brought about by the British, either – more attitudes having developed from the beginning of white settlement. This from the chapter ‘A Forgotten Legacy’:

“Although it was almost inevitable that the Aborigines would lose their sovereignty to one of the major powers, it was far from inevitable that they would be denied property rights to every inch of their territory. The radical dispossession was not the inescapable legacy of Australian history or of English law. We are legatees of a past that was, to a considerable extent, chosen by our forebears – not the past in general but a particular past, not the law in general but a self-serving version of the law, deeply tainted by the racism of colonial society and corrupted in its ways as the legal systems in the slave colonies of the West Indies. The particular problem of Aboriginal land rights may have had its origin in accident or oversight, but expediency ensured its perpetuation long after it was known that Australia was inhabited and that the native people were in possession of their ancient homelands.”

Damning stuff indeed.

It was tainted from the very beginning, of course. The botanist Joesph Banks, accompanying Captain James Cook on his initial expedition, reported back to the motherland, based on his observations, that the Aboriginals were scant in number and certainly contained to the coastal region, and that there was no life in the interior of the country. And as for the concept that the Aboriginals weren’t entitled to the land because they didn’t farm it properly, well, Jesus Christ almighty (and no, I’m not religious …)

Reynolds is to be commended for presenting the information herein – the majority of which is anchored in more than two centuries of legalese – simply and succinctly. He has taken an often-difficult topic and made it compellingly readable.

So, armed with my newfound knowledge (and a little of it is indeed a dangerous thing), how do I now feel about all of this?

I feel embarrassed that it has taken me 40 years to learn about the true origins of the caucasian settlement of my country. Ashamed on behalf of myself and my ancestors that any of this happened/was allowed to happy. Very, very, very sorry indeed. And it has made me want to do something about it.

Andy’s right. Read this book. Right now.

The Law of the Land – Andy’s brain might be terra nullius, but Australia sure as hell weren’t

The best non-fiction writing makes its readers feel clever. Top of my list of such writers would be Richard Dawkins and Noam Chomsky, although Steven Pinker’s right up there too. Bad non-fiction writers go out of their way to make themselves impenetrable and unintelligible, presumably hoping to trick readers into thinking they’re too dumb to understand what they’re reading when in fact what there reading is a colossal crock of shit (is that the flapping of a black swan’s wings I hear? I do believe it is). Henry Reynolds fall slap bang in the first category. The Law of the Land strips Australia’s founding mythology bare and exposes the vicious hypocrisy of what is essentially a bipartisan political approach to Aboriginal affairs. It’s kind of embarrassing to admit it’s taken me this long to get around to reading it.

And it’s appalling to discover that you, dear reader, having absorbed Netty and my posts and being filled with the urgent desire to dispel your ignorance on these issues, won’t be able to rush out to your nearest bookshop and buy it. Because it’s out of print. I hope that’s only because it’s being re-issued (my copy is the third edition). This is one of the most important works of Australian history ever written. Fuck John Howard’s trivia quiz to get your citizenship, this should be required reading for every Australian and every wannabe immigrant. That it’s out of print is appalling. Oh, I said that already.

It’s also kind of embarrassing to admit that I haven’t had much interaction with Australian Aborigines over my somewhat cloistered 40 years. I went to school with a couple of adopted (stolen? In the late ’70s? Possible, I guess) Aboriginal kids. I called one of them a boong once. Not a great start. While I was at uni in Toowoomba I lived with a born-again Christian family. The mum and dad had worked in the “mission fields” of the Northern Territory in the ’50s and ’60s. They had three “adopted” Aboriginal kids who were adults and no longer living at home when I knew them. They were definitely members of the stolen generation, beyond a shadow of a doubt. One of the adopted daughters had kids, one of the kids was a girl, a cheeky wee monkey, and one day when they were visiting she was having fun and being a cheeky monkey and her “adoptive” grandmother – my landlady – said “That’s the aboriginal in her. And we’ve got to beat it out.” Yup. Lovely people those Christians. Oh yes, and while I lived in St Kilda I saw someone puke on their own shoes and since I’ve been living northside I’ve been told to “fuck off back where you came from you fuckin Captain Cook cunt” at least once on Smith St in Collingwood. Tragically none of this, as far as I can tell, has turned me into a racist prick.

While Henry Reynolds ranges widely over the subject of Australia’s original inhabitants and the process of colonisation/settlement/invasion, his primary focus is the myth of terra nullius – the idea that Australia was “uninhabited” before Europeans arrived. “Uninhabited” in a technical legalistic sense, of course, because clearly it was inhabited in a literal sense – oooh golly, was that a tribe of technically, legalistically non-existent blackfellas I just killed off with my sack of poisoned flour? The doctrine of terra nullius dictated that Australia was uninhabited not because there was nobody living here but because the people who were living here weren’t using the land the way we thought they should’ve been. Oh yes, and they didn’t have a concept of land ownership. Or at least they didn’t think of land ownership the way we thought of land ownership. So they weren’t using the land properly and they didn’t understand property properly. Genius. And it wasn’t until 1992 that it occurred to our country’s finest legal minds that perhaps this was a crock of shit.

The most extraordinary thing about Reynolds’ book, for me anyway, was the revelation that up until the mid to late 19th century most of England’s and plenty of Australia’s minds thought it was a crock of shit, too. In fact a great deal of thought was put into how the Aborigines were to be compensated for land that was colonised and what land was to be left for them to continue their culture and lifestyle. It’s astonishing – and tragic – to realise that while Gippsland’s “founding father” was merrily massacring Aborigines around my home town of Maffra, while settlers in Tasmania were committing genocide, while Aborigines across the continent were being shot and poisoned and herded off cliffs, legal minds in England and Australia were firm in their belief that Australia’s original inhabitants had proprietorship of the soil. The concept of terra nullius existed from the very beginning and ultimately won the war of ideas (until the Mabo judgment in 1992, at least, although by then the damage had been done) but it was not, for some decades after the arrival of the First Fleet, the dominant way in which Australia and the Aborigines were conceived.

Racism always depresses me but racist attitudes towards Australia’s original inhabitants shits me to tears. Whether you grew up in Mount Isa and think boongs are fuckin foul because you saw one puke on the footpath when you were a kid or you’re a newspaper columnist railing about the “myth” of the Stolen Generations, prejudice towards a people who have possibly copped it worse than any other indigenous group anywhere else on the planet is despicable. Reading about the dispossession and injustices these people have experienced over the past two centuries leaves even the most allegedly high-brow critiques of “black-armband history” looking morally bankrupt. As I said before, everybody should read this book. You – yes, you. Read this book.