Book Reviews
From the Age & The Australian 2014 - 2017
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia by Sofija Stefanovic
Penguin Random House
From Belgrade, Serbia to Bentleigh, Melbourne, Sofija Stefanovic tells the story of her family’s immigration to Australia when Yugoslavia is ‘a powder keg’ on the cusp of the ten- year Balkans War. She is five. It is 1987.
The daughter of urban intellectuals, Sofija’s father is an engineer and ‘a fan of the west’ who wants to migrate. Her mother, psychology academic and ‘a loyal child of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’, does not. Her parents compromise. The family will go to Australia, gain citizenship after the requisite two years and, depending on what’s happened to their country, will return. Or not.
In this classic coming-of-age story, Stefanovic’s crafts fragments of memory into a chronological narrative that deftly weaves her personal story with the broader political one. She remembers herself as a child who was eager to please and be seen, loquacious, clever, thoroughly un-sporty, and mad about films and books. Also curious, Sofija listened in on adult conversations about a country in flux. “I was eavesdropping on my parents while pretending to play with the Lego set that my mother had got for my birthday from the international store…”
Over time, she formed her own opinions and recognised the complexities that come with age. “There were, I realised, different ways to be an immigrant and different techniques for dealing with being out of place.”
There have been many Australian memoirs in recent years exploring the caught-between-two-worlds conundrum and, although Stephanovic’s explores similar territory, she doesn’t rely on the laugh-a-minute approach or dysfunctional family saga to maintain narrative momentum. Focusing on her psychological and moral growth from youth to adulthood, she is careful not to get lost in personal anecdote or navel-gazing, but to keep an eye to the outside world.
‘…there were plenty of Serbians who opposed the war, like us, and there were opposition movements in Serbia that never got any airtime. There were perpetrators and victims on both sides.’
Stefanovic is a storyteller first and foremost. She is a regular at The Moth in New York, where she now lives. But what happens in her life is not so much what matters as what she makes of it.
“The Yugos aren’t my people, I told myself, at the same time remembering I never felt like an Aussie either. I considered whether I could get away with calling myself ‘a citizen of the world’ should anyone ask.”
At times the prose falls flat or is too predictable in its strictly chronological set-up. And the story’s pace can stall if there is too-long-a-slab of historical-political context. The writing is most generous and affecting when Stefanovic writes about her immediate family, and funniest when describing her precocious childhood self – “Can you become the centre of attention when English is your second language?” – and her teenage years trying on different identities for size. “My friends and I called ourselves ‘alternative’ – yes, I wore glasses, but I also carried vodka in a little water bottle to parties.”
When she visits Belgrade at the end of high school, the war is over. Things have changed. Yugoslavia is now not a single country but seven separate ones. “As we trudged along the streets, it became apparent that the place I missed was my life before anything bad ever happened.”
The prologue and epilogue – marvellous scenes from the Miss Ex-Yugoslavia contest where Stafanovic is shooting a documentary for film class – find the perfect balance between participant and commentator, two roles she’s been navigating her whole life. All dressed up in beauty-queen finery, a 22-year-old Stephanovic sneaks a look from behind the stage curtain at the audience: “I know that some of the people in this room … were ethnically cleansed from their villages,” she writes.
‘… could they have guessed they’d end up here years later, in a club on the other side of the earth surrounded by ex Yugoslavians from all sides of the war?
The Hot Guy by Mel Campbell & Anthony Morris &
Girl in Between by Anna Daniels, 2017
Two novels penned by authors experienced in writing for film and television have hit the shelves recently, both of which could be categorised as similarly themed chick lit – their protagonists both funny, bawdy, 30-something women dedicated to finding ‘the one’. Yet between them, these novels prove this form of genre fiction is a broad category.
The Hot Guy, co-written by film critics Mel Campbell and Anthony Morris, is rom com 101 and sited firmly in the screwball film comedy tradition of the 30s and 40s.
Adam, the eponymous ‘hot guy’ of the title, is an earnest and unwittingly handsome movie nerd trying to raise finance to direct his next short film – a work that delves unpretentiously into the ‘Dark Side’. Provisionally titled Metadata, it’s about ‘the essential asymmetry of the panopticon’.
Adam works at a multiplex cinema with his two sidekicks: Steve, a wannabe actor, and Renton, a film reviewer for blog BackedUpToilet. Just three nerds in a kiosk, riffing-witty on movies and girls, and making choc tops.
Cate is a self-identified ‘funny lady’ and publicity director for a sports stadium, despite hating sport. ‘I hate sport,’ she says to Dave, the car park attendant.
‘Cate’s sense of humour … first disrupted her love life at the age of twelve.’, and now she has been dumped by her uptight boyfriend over a joke. Dejected and lost, she debriefs with her own sidekicks, Vanessa, and Kirsty, while hanging out at their kite flyer and drone club. There’s some nice fast talk in these scenes, too: swipes at vampires, zombies, cat videos, a particularly sharp jab at the current trend for all things ‘bespoke and, of course, plenty of no holds barred boy talk. Think Bridesmaids.
Egged on (and set up) by her friends, Cate picks up Adam at a bar – there’s lots of alcohol saturated prose in both of these books – for a no-strings one-nightstand: to get back in the saddle, so to speak. Trouble is, they actually ‘like’ each other.
So far, so genre.
But Adam isn’t just any hot guy, he’s The Hot Guy; unassuming and drop-dead gorgeous. In fact, so gorgeous that there’s a Facebook page dedicated to the ambition of a ‘night-with-Adam’ – given that a night with this guy will allegedly cure whatever ails you – set up by Adam-obsessed women of the disturbingly named League of Icarus.
So, when serial one-nighter, looking-for-the-gal-who’ll-be-there-in-the-morning Adam makes out with serial picker-of-wrong-guys Cate, assumptions and vested interests abound.
All of this makes for some entertaining and over-the-top set ups: a farcical hostage situation involving The League, followed by a road trip to Adam’s hometown of Ladbroke – where the statue of the Unknown Soldier is of course modelled on gorgeous Adam – for the premier screening of Metadata at the town’s inaugural film festival.
Characters like Adam’s recalcitrant but gratis director of photography are drawn in brisk and vivid strokes – ‘grizzled, inebriated druid shambling’ and some of the best writing is in the three-way shtick on sex and celluloid between the blokes at work, although it does feel like the authors are having just a bit too much fun competing for best-bad film titles.
Girl in Between, Anna Daniel’s first novel was shortlisted for the 2016 Vogel awards. It’s the story of Lucy, who, at 32, low on love, luck, and life, is suffering an extended mid-youth crisis. She’s chucked in her TV producing job in Melbourne and come home to Rockhampton (aka Rocky, ‘Beef Capital of Australia’), moving back in with her parents to finish writing her book, Diamonds in the Dust, and generally sort out her life.
Mum is an African-drumming Cher acolyte (‘Remember what Cher says…’) who spends an inordinate amount of time poring over handy home hints catalogues with Lucy’s zany bestie, Rosie. Dad goes to the jockey club every other night, or so Lucy believes. In actuality he’s battling the black dog and hanging out at the Men’s Shed.
Daniels, herself a kind of latter-day Bridget Jones, hails from Rockhampton and is a writer and producer known for her funny, quirky TV segments. ‘How Not to Interview Russell Crowe’, an edit of her potentially disastrous encounter with the notoriously volatile actor, is pure Bridget, and won the ABC Comedy Segment of the Year in 2004. The sketch is reworked in Girl in Between as an interview with a fading 80s rock star.
In Lucy, the author has created a heroine not far removed, seemingly, from herself. But the lightness and short -segment appeal of her earlier work does not quite translate here, where lots of heart-thumping, body-trembling, blood-boiling, stomach-lurching, pulse-racing clichés choke a narrative already weighed down with signposts as subtle as a Mallee bull. Nods to more serious issues – Mum’s cancer, Dad’s depression – feel tokenistic.
Aussie idioms and vernacular keep both novels tonally consistent, home-grown, and comfy, maybe even a touch exotic, if you’re not a local. In Daniel’s novel we know we’re in Australia because we’re told we are, often, not because we recognise it. Rocky might feel like ‘a pair of Ugg boots – super comfortable, sturdy and secure’, but Porpoise Spit it ain’t.
What’s striking is the extent to which lists, and labels (books, film titles) stand in for description or observation. Red UDLs, Rooster, KFC, Maccas and Subway are listed like product placements, standing in for character as if anything, anyone, can now be reduced to the brands they consume. It’s a shorthand, but a lazy one.
While both books are unapologetically populist and formulaic genre fiction and Girl in Between does contain some funny deft writing, it lacks sufficient irony or self-reflection to do more than simply fulfils the clichés.
The Hot Guy, written with relish and self-awareness; the authors’ playfulness with the genre smart, not smart-arsed, more homage than piss-take, fulfils the brief more successfully.
The Gulf by Anna Spargo-Ryan 2016
Anna Spargo-Ryan’s impressive 2016 debut novel The Paper House about a woman living with the loss of a late-term pregnancy, demonstrated such writerly confidence that at no time did it lapse into cliché or irretrievable bleakness, despite its themes of grief and depression.
The author’s second book, The Gulf, a coming-of-age story told from the first-person perspective of its equanimous 16-year-old heroine Skye, also deals with tough themes – domestic violence, substance abuse, financial hardship – but again, tempers the harshness with opportune humour and a relatable narrator whose perceptions of the world are both singular and striking. ‘The ache was catching up with me…Mum crept into my brain again with her dressing-gown flapping.’
Skye and her 10-year-old brother, Ben, a funny amateur naturist, and walking encyclopaedia, live in an Adelaide with their needy, struggling mum, Linda, who’s just met another dodgy bloke, Jason, who moves in and insinuates himself into the family. Skye’s immediate assuming of the role of family caretaker suggests a history of maternal neglect. Mum’s done it before, she’ll do it again and so Skye is poised for trouble.Like The Paper House, The Gulf portrays a parent-child role reversal. Linda’s hooking up with toxic men has meant the kids invariably suffer the domestic fall-out. We never know what happened to either Ben’s or Skye’s fathers, but we’re given brief vignettes at the beginning of chapters of Skye’s idealized recollections of her father.
‘One summer…there were kids running everywhere, blurry with their legs pounding the grass and their squealing bouncing out into the valley, and my dad had his arm around me, and he was smiling.’
When their rental flat in Adelaide is sold, Jason convinces Linda to give up her job and move to his place in Port Flinders, a small semi-industrial town in South Australia’s Gulf region, though he makes it’s pretty clear he’d prefer the kids weren’t in the picture.
Skye and Ben navigate the new place with practiced resilience. They go to school, they get lonely, and they deal with their increasingly ‘absent’ mother and with living at Jason’s, where his crippled abused dog, George, who’s chained day and night to the Hills Hoist, offers symbolic reminder of the threat of violence that hangs in the air like a bad smell.
Skye gets a job at the local supermarket where her new boss, Daryl, comes on to her with the grace of a Neanderthal.
‘His lips on my neck. Wet. Air hissed through his nose. Beard on my skin like a cheese grater.’
That Skye appears to take it in her stride is sad testimony to her having seen it all before.
Things aren’t all bleak for Skye and Ben. She meets a boy at school, Raf, whose mother is so welcoming that both kids are struck dumb by such alien displays of parental affection. Ben’s unstoppable curiosity and imagination provide, along with his sister’s care and love, welcome refuge from life’s adversities
Not only does Spargo-Ryan’ prose display a fine eye for detail, but she has a good ear for dialogue too. The easy lingo between adolescents. The middle-aged check-out lady’s small talk with the locals. The reckless banter between Jason and his friends. Characters are revealed via what they say.
Strong Young Adult Fiction like this should not preclude it from being enjoyed by adults. Even if it may need to pull a few punches or deliver a too-tidy-and-hopeful-against-the-odds ending.
Fine by Michelle Wright, 2016
A middle-aged woman named Delia has just been evicted for the fourteenth time. She takes refuge in a dump full of car wrecks and meets a ten-year-old boy named Jay who lives on his own in the ute next door to Delia.
‘He tells her about his collection of rust and tells her he reckons that one day the whole excavator will have turned into crumbling leaves and will fit into his box. Delia says that everything will fit into a box if you wait long enough.’
In these thirty-three finely wrought short stories Michelle Wright demonstrates impressive control of the form, every story offering a powerful glimpse into a world via the juxtaposition of a character’s inner life with their outer circumstances.
Many of these stories are told from the point of view of a child or adolescent, an increasingly common literary device and perhaps a reflection of the burgeoning popularity of young adult fiction.
A child hides beneath his grandparents’ kitchen sink. He is eavesdropping on a conversation about his delinquent mother and nibbling on a family block of chocolate he should wait to share with his mother at her next visit.
‘They sit on the pouf…facing each other with their knees touching. Then Mummy puts one end of the row in her mouth, and he puts the other end in his, and they let it melt square by square…’
Wright’s style is precise, lyrical, and un-tricksy even if occasionally it can feel a little too restrained: as if the hand-break needs releasing to give the writing more room to move.
In a story set in the aftermath of the Sir Lankan Tsunami, Wright endows ordinary things with fresh significance.
‘Near a hotel in Hikkaduwa he picks out suitcases, plastic chairs, a pool umbrella like a javelin in the ground.’
On New Year’s Day a paperboy is up early to do his rounds.
‘As he hops on his bike and turns from the driveway out onto the footpath, he sees the coloured lights strung up under the new neighbour’s carport, still on and looking kind of pretty against the quiet blue sky.’
There are no big shots here. There are people who want new lives. Traumatised couples stumble amidst ruined marriages. Parents grieve lost children or worry about the ones they have. There is a twelve-year-old girl who sets up a street stall selling her prize collection of fifty latest fashion sunglasses to help out with family finances. School kids brave the playground bully. A man working for the dole, rather than tell his childhood abuse story to the police confides in a cleaning lady. There is a prisoner who dreams of becoming an artist and a former champion boxer who ‘fourteen broken noses later returns to his home in Ceylon and begins a new career as a king coconut seller.’
All essentially good people in tough circumstances and all just doing the best they can.
It’s hard to write good people and make them plausible and interesting but Wright can. Her dialogue is true and her voice unsentimental and despite the prevalence of downbeat subjects these stories from the ‘get in get out and don’t linger ‘school of storytelling, are full of compassion.
Invariably they begin in medias res – no set up or preamble – so the reader fills in the backstory, absorbs the subtext and dives straight into the action. And there’s the cracker opening line to hook the reader in from the get-go.
‘When she has burnt toast for breakfast, there’s a trace left on her fingers that smells like cigarettes.’
A woman is studying applied linguistics and her father has a PhD in Middle English. They shared a love of language.
‘My father is dead. My dad is dead. I decide I need to hear the words pronounced, to accept the fact of them and give them voice. Already the words my father spoke are losing shape.’
Even if sometimes Wright’s love of a good metaphor is overstated, themes are gracefully abstracted from central metaphors and minimal plots.
When a woman goes for a swim in the ocean for the first time since her husband’s death, Wright describes the natural world with its power to destroy and to reassure.
‘She turns and looks back out at the water. It’s calm now, but grey and sullen, hungover from its rage… But she knows it’s only physics, just pressures and speeds, energy, and friction. And the human body in all that. Her body.’
Crucially these stories have a sense of something unravelling or unfolding so that the reader wants to keep on reading to find out what happens next and maybe, even, to understand why.
‘I read for pleasure,’ wrote Margaret Atwood, ‘and that is the moment at which I learn most. Subliminal learning.’
After the Carnage by Tara June Winch, 2016
Everyone in After the Carnage has something to kick against.
In Wager, a story about moving beyond your parents and from where you have come from, a son is visiting his mother. Clearly, it’s been a while. They go to the local RSL for tea. ‘I climbed into the Ute next to Mum and the whole world felt out of place.’ Later, over rissoles and chips the mother, drunk, tells her son the usual stories. ‘There’s only one story true, she tells him. ‘I was a no-good mother to you.’
Winch’s characters all speak like ‘real’ people and that’s what makes you care about them.
It’s been a long time between drinks for Winch. Her first book, Swallow the Air in 2006, a semi-autobiographical novel about a Wurundjeri girl in search of her father, won many prestigious awards and catapulted the young writer into the new-emerging-talent-literary-coterie. No pressure.
After the Carnage meets expectation. Here Winch continues to explore themes that coursed through her first book like white-water – inter-generational grief, cross-culturalism, racism, family dysfunction, children in search of ‘lost’ parents… If this is all sounding a bit badges-on-the-lapel, it is not. Winch can pack a punch and break your heart within a few pages and in these eleven short stories the writer moves farther afield into new geographical territory, her characters pivoting on a moment in life when past and future collide in personal crisis, causing them to make some kind of a shift, no matter how subtle.
In A Late Netting, a young man is working as a deckhand on a French couple’s boat, and they appear to be lost. Winch’s use of metaphor is striking:
‘If we had been drawn down a river, at least that knowing river would’ve taken us towards its mouth; a city might have invited us in and set us onto the certainty of a bank. Here, though, all those odds had fallen against us in a panic of horizon.’
Stories vary in tone and style; they can be funny.
In Baby Island, a second-generation Chinese woman – ‘I was an amalgam: the union of my voice and face didn’t sit well with people…’ – is in China selling overpriced Australian education and mourning her childlessness and a recent break-up. We follow her down the empty streets of Guangzhou into a kind of Surrealist baby-buying café.
‘Everywhere there were newly rubber-stamped babies, hundreds and hundreds of babies being quiet, screaming, crying, squirming, throwing food, giggling, staring blankly, rocking, rolling, crawling, climbing shoulders and booster chairs and the fabric of strollers. I pointed to an omelette.’
In Easter, a brother is stationed in Paris on a Stanford Journalism Scholarship. His sister has come to visit him. It’s been nine years since they last saw one another, and as they wander around Paris together, sibling intimacy re-surfaces, as do memoires of childhood.
Memory’s power to both comfort and disturb permeates these stories. Sometimes the memory of a moment in a character’s life is so vividly drawn you can just smell it.
‘I remember precisely being too young and riding the fair dodgem cars… with the night’s linger of boiled and fried meats, the warm wafts of powdered sugar on doughnut batter, even the damp smell of turned gravel underfoot, from night coming on the wet earth of a gullied town oval – each smell was rotated, propelled through the carnival; night from a flashing, jerking car.’
Occasionally a story feels just that bit too abbreviated or there is an unnecessary data dump, but overall, each is satisfyingly complete unto itself, Winch’s prose supple and potent. At their best, these stories offer vivid insights into our complex humanity, pivoting on that moment when we realize things cannot continue as they were.
In Failure to Thrive, a young Nigerian student doing an internship at the UN is determined to break through the glass/class-ceiling and get a foot in the door at Goldman Sachs. ‘They had their own entourage, those … rich kids from the European private schools. Did we all hate them? I think I hated them the most.’
In the book’s titular story, one of the collection’s finest, a man wakes up in a hospital corridor. There has been some kind of explosion. A terrorist attack? Where is his wife? Dazed and confused the man summons images from his childhood in Lahore, his wife, his kids, their move to America… snippets from the past collide with the present. ‘That was the sound, at the restaurant, the sound of the car going into the pool – it was just like the sound of propane bombs on the cherry farm to scare the birds, birds hungry for ripe May cherries.’ After the Carnage More is a layered, richly textured story about violence and hate and about a victim trying to understand it. ‘One can rationalize most things in life, except this – one cannot rationalize hate; hate is irrational.’
The personal is political worldview flexes Winch’s considerable literary muscle. The stories in this book may be about some tough stuff but they are never didactic or sentimental; Winch’s voice is more poet than prophet.
‘When I write,’ Winch has said in an interview, ‘I dredge the gully of what I know best: what burnt me most, what wakes me in my sleep – the value of life.’
Best Australian Short Stories, 2015
Despite ongoing debate about the vitality or demise of the short story form we keep on consuming them, so something about writing, reading, and critiquing “a world seen in a quick glancing light”, as Alice Monro describes it, has got to be working.
Editing a collection of short stories, like the writing of good ones, is knowing what to keep and what to kill, and this year’s Back Inc. offering edited again by Amanda Lohrey, is stronger overall than last’s year’s.
Bi-cultural stories provide some of the book’s best story content– Goldie Goldbloom, Omar Musa, and Jo Lennan. Others – John A. Scott, Jo Case and Gay Lynch deliver on craft – and Annette Trevitt provides some welcome wit.
In Lynch’s The Abduction of Ganymede, set on a train journey from Perth to Fremantle, the narrator is reading Germaine Greer’s, The Boy. As she reads Greer’s exaltation of male youth, she observes warily, ambiguously, a group of adolescent boys; all skittish, dangerous energy fooling about on the train, one of them bulling a younger kid: ‘But he (the beautiful younger boy) is not your responsibility any more than the post structuralist who fell asleep in your bed last night.’ A simple journey-structure, Lynch’s story is both suspenseful and disarming.
While Lynch and many of the other contributors employ more conventional or linear narrative structures – not that there’s anything wrong with that – John A. Scott’s Picasso: A Shorter Life is an engaging and trenchant series of 24 vignettes in the tradition of the Modernist collage. Scott’s use of this inventory or sequence form provides a kind of structural irony as we are invited to glean narrative from carefully placed omissions or gaps within Scott’s story-poem. Picasso eventually emerges as a monstrous big-balled narcissist with a massive talent for painting and using and abusing women.
Other stories such as Omar Musa’s Supernova combine a strong and compelling narrative with an informative and reflective element, reaching beyond the strictly personal experience. A Malaysian-Australian man – ‘I am an Australian resident not citizen’ – returns to Malaysia to vote in the first democratic election in 50 years after 20 years of ‘benign discomfort’ living in Australia. Musa’s finely rendered prose shows us a man caught between 2 cultures, who as a child dreamed of becoming the first Malaysian astronaut and as a man is now preparing to vote for the first time in his country of birth. ‘He admired himself in the mirror. He’d hardly ever been able to wear his national dress during his life in Australia, other than to that awful work function where he had been cajoled to wear it, to show ‘diversity’ of course.’
The story of an Estonian girl living in Tokyo who works as a bar hostess in Jo Lennan’s story, How is your Great Life? is a vivid and aching evocation of place and character, about love and youth, sexual and cultural disorientation: ‘She slept with some of (her college boyfriends) but the sex was awkward, experimental, like she was mimicking a desire, she did not really feel.’
Better Things by Balli Kaur Jaswal plays beautifully, tenderly, with the experience of foreignness in an adopted home. The central character, an Indian student, pretends he has found a house ‘made of red brick’ with a rosemary bush in the front yard, for him and his wife, and that it is only a matter of time before she will be able to join him in Australia ‘I want us to have the best life,’ he said, ‘a life filled with nice things and small worries.’ The student continues to pretend to his wife nightly, on a wonky telephone connection to India, elaborating his dreams, his lies, his plans for an imagined future: ‘Because what would happen if it did not come true? Enough disappointment hovered in the cramped spaces of his flat; hope was a private precious thing.’
Some of these writers are well-known Australian storytellers and others are a revelation. All 20 are terrific. A few are ‘the best’.
The Woman on the Stairs by Bernard Schlinke, 2014
Bernard Schlinke’s latest novel The Woman on the Stairs, set predominantly in a remote seaside town in Northern NSW, revisits the winning formula from his best-selling 1995 book The Reader: young buttoned-up German lawyer falls for beautiful mysterious older woman who disappears and surfaces decades later where both lawyer and woman establish an unusual intimacy. While The Reader uses as its central metaphor, a book, and explores the nature of reading itself, Woman on the Stairs uses a painting and the creative process as its point of departure. Beginning in late 80s Germany the narrative then proceeds to unfold over fourteen strange days in present day Australia. It’s a slow burn this book and as its mystery emerges, so does Shlinke’s prose style relax and open up, just like the lawyer-narrator does eventually. In particular, the author’s characterisation of ‘The Woman’ is vivid, her fierce independence and vulnerability palpable and original. This is a moving and unsentimental story about one man discovering how to love.