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FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Call Me Marlowe
Catherine de Saint Phalle, Transit Lounge, $32.99
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With a title that echoes Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled detective novels and the narratorial invocation of Moby-Dick, Catherine de Saint Phalle’s Call Me Marlowe becomes a subtle investigation of trauma, an obsessive search for a tenuous sense of home. Harold Vanek has spent years living in Korea, and now lives in an inner suburb of Melbourne with Marylou, a sex worker he met there. Their love is intensely intimate, though silences have been built into it, and their lives intersect with a colourful milieu of characters. At length Harold’s sense of unbelonging provokes a pilgrimage to the Czech city of Prague, where the history of his birth family, the country’s troubled political history, and the transitory family of people he adopts on his travels, are woven together. It’s a literary novel of emotional intelligence and depth, illuminated by cosmopolitan engagement with the cultural forces and hidden histories that shape the personal.
Over This Backbone
Ya Reeves, Ultimo, $34.99
Another pilgrimage, this time into the high country, is the focus of Ya Reeves’ Over This Backbone. Going it solo across the Australian Alps walking track from Canberra to Walhalla in Victoria is a formidable undertaking even for experienced bushwalkers.
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When 19-year-old Peta makes the trek, she is determined to leave her old self, and her tempestuous on-again off-again relationship with Ben, behind. The track (“this butchered thing” traverses country of rugged splendour that assumes psychological resonance. Peta’s isolation brings unexpected dangers and assistance, also a heightened awareness of her limitations and vulnerabilities. The beauty of the descriptive prose stands out, in what is ultimately a story of resilience and transformation. Peta learns how galvanising a connection to nature can be faced with interpersonal toxicity, how the cliffs of fall that can block our interior horizons may be climbed through reflection.
The Comforting Weight of Water
Rosanna McClelland, Wakefield, $32.95
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Dark climate fiction may well be flavour of the decade in YA fiction, just as novels of nuclear armageddon were in the 1980s when I was a kid. Rosanna McClelland’s The Comforting Weight of Water might almost combine the two strands of modern eschatology, and it imagines a very dark future indeed. An unnamed catastrophe has resulted in a world that warmed intolerably for decades and then sank. A deluge has washed civilisation away, and the Earth receives only a few hours of wan daylight each day. Fearful are the survivors who remain in the flood and mud, and the adolescent protagonist of the novel is feared so much she’s forced to warn other villagers of her approach. She has grown up without social or moral guidance. Her grouchy caretaker, Gammy, isn’t much use, and her adaptations to a new aquatic environment leave her with an evolutionary advantage, and no taste for nostalgia. Original world-building and transhumanist elements make this novel an intriguing take on the genre, though it’s let down slightly by occasionally swampy prose.
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Mr Smith to You
Kerry Taylor, Affirm, $34.99
This poignant novel based on the life of Australia’s first trans jockey, Bill Smith, has been meticulously researched and imagined by academic Kerry Taylor. It begins with Bill in aged care, a cantankerous 76-year-old patient and a challenge for Nurse Maureen Bannon to handle. But the former jockey, known for turning up to the races always fully dressed in silks, has lived a storied life. Bill was assigned female at birth, and his is a hidden life in many ways. Over time, Maureen forges an alliance with her charge, whose health is declining rapidly, and who longs to see a long-lost love, Catherine, one last time. To have even a chance of granting his wish, Maureen must play detective, delving into the secret history of a remarkable man. Mr Smith to You is an empathetic novel that puts imaginative flesh on a pioneering, and deeply private, biography.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
What Are They Thinking?
Daniel Nellor, Australian Scholarly Publishing, $44
Each of the 10 Australian philosophers interviewed by Daniel Nellor for this book has their own definition of what philosophy is.
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But more meaningful and instructive than any broad explanation they might offer is the way their own practice unfolds within these conversations. As Nellor puts it, “Dialogue works well for philosophy because philosophy is not about me, it’s about us”, whether it’s Daniel Halliday making a compelling case for inheritance tax, Margaret Cameron on the importance of the cultural context within which ideas emerge, Christopher Cordner on the centrality of “open-hearted attentiveness” to an understanding of goodness, or Bronwyn Finnigan on the value of thinking of ourselves as utterly interdependent. And it’s not all about rationality, morality and logic. Sometimes, says Nellor, thinking deeply about things heightens rather than lessens the mystery.
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Woman’s Lore
Sarah Clegg, Head of Zeus, $34.99
Beneath the buried cities of what used to be Mesopotamia, says classicist Sarah Clegg, you will invariably find the remains of dead babies, a legacy of the high infant mortality rate in premodern times. Anxieties connected with the potentially deadly consequences of pregnancy and birth, along with men’s fears of women’s sexuality, are mirrored in the legends of female monsters and demons dating back 4000 years. In this spirited work, Clegg distils an impressive depth of research to show how various incarnations of seductive mythic figures such as the Lamia, Lilith, sirens and murderous mermaids were employed by women to invoke protection, and by men to belittle women’s lore and keep them in their place. As attitudes to women changed, so did our idea of the monstrous. These days, if you encounter a Lilith in popular culture, “she’ll probably be portrayed as an icon”.
The Autists
Clara Tornvall, Scribe, $29.99
Here is something for neurotypicals to ponder. From the point of view of Clara Tornvall, who was diagnosed as autistic at the age of 42, so-called normal people can appear “cowardly, dishonest, scared of conflict” and unable to simply say what they think.
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After decades of playing the neurotypical game, she can’t help wishing that “all this pretence wasn’t normalised”. Well-crafted and powerfully unsettling. The Austists asks why neuroscience failed, for so long, to diagnose females on the autistic spectrum and looks to history and literature for signs of these “invisible” women. It also tells the stories of contemporary autistic women and how they differ from men. Most striking is the way Tornvall de-familiarises the neurotypical framework to expose the many blind assumptions that inform “majority culture”. A horizon-expanding book that examines what it means to be at home in the world.
Fighting Fate
Justin Yerbury, Affirm, $34.99
Justin Yerbury and family are swimming at a beach when missiles start raining down on them. In another dream, he is being chased by unknown people in dark clothes.
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Or, he is in a war zone with his troops being decimated around him. Such is the state of mental and physical siege that Yerbury, whose family carries a rare genetic form of Motor Neurone Disease, lives with. As a young man, he committed himself to finding a cure, having lost his young cousins, his mother and his sister to the disease. Now a professor of molecular biologist at Wollongong University, he continues to work with his research team even as MND ravages his body, his only means of communication being movement of his eyes. This is a profoundly sad yet stirring story is of a full life lived with great purpose, spurred by the constant shadow of death and the desire to bring an end to the family “curse”.
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