I couldn’t have picked two more different books to review…

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Calming, rhythmic, with an existential edge – I started this after I finished An Inventory of Losses and there were some interesting similarities, most obviously the question ‘What does it all mean…?’

Honestly, not much happens in this little but thoughtful book, however, I kept reading for the beautiful descriptions of what the astronauts saw as their station orbited Earth. Harvey’s writing is lush.

Outside the earth reels away in a mass of moonglow, peeling backward as they forge towards its edgeless edge; the tufts of cloud across the Pacific brighten the nocturnal ocean to cobalt.

The astronauts reveal their backstory – mostly focused on how they came to be in the job – and reflect on what was happening in their lives on Earth.

In his email her brother said … that it must be nice to be with five others all the time, your floating family, he called it. Up here, nice feels such an alien word. It’s brutal, inhuman, overwhelming, lonely, extraordinary and magnificent. There isn’t one single thing that’s nice. … She finds she often struggles for things to tell people at home, because the small things are too mundane and the rest is too astounding…

But these parts were fleeting. Instead, Harvey’s efforts go toward describing the rise of dawn; the purple of dusk; the sliver of moon; the lights of cities, delicately picking out the coastlines of continents. It’s all so pretty and somewhere about halfway through I decided this book is the reading equivalent of listening to a lullaby.

Beneath them the South Pacific now passes in absolute night, an endless pit of black, and there is no planet, just the gentle green line of the atmosphere and numberless stars, astonishing solitude, everything so near and infinite.

And to return to my observation about the existential nature of this book – toward the end, one the astronauts reels off a list of human ‘contributions’, and the randomness of the list serves to highlight both the wonderous and the banal –

…the igniters of fire, the hackers of stone, the melters of iron, the ploughers of earth, the worshippers of gods, the tellers of time, the sailors of ships, the wearers of shoes, the traders of grain… the mixers of paint, the binders of books, the crunchers of numbers, the slingers of arrows, the observers of atoms… the gobblers of pills, the splitters of hairs, the scraters of heads, the owners of minds, the losers of minds…

and then

In the closing second of the cosmic year there’s industrialisation, fascism, the combustion engine, Augusto Pinochet, Nikola Tesla, Frida Kahlo, Malala Yousafzai, Alexander Hamilton, Viv Richards, Lucky Luciano, Ada Lovelace, crowdfunding, the split atom, Pluto, surrealism, plastic, Einstein, FloJo, Sitting Bull, Beatrix Potter… unfriending… the Burj Khalifa, Billie Holiday… Thermos flasks, the Cuban Missile Crisis, thirty summer Olympics…

4/5 – sublime.

The Exotic Rissole by Tanveer Ahmed

This memoir found its way to my reading stack because it filled a gap in a reading challenge. Tanveer tells of his experiences growing up in a Bangladeshi family, in Australia. The family settled in Sydney’s west, and the opening chapters focus on Tanveer’s nervous start to school (when he had no English) to eventually finding a best mate, Daryl Lynch (Lynchy). Lynchy loved visiting the Ahmed house, where Tanveer’s mother would feed him curries, but all Tanveer wanted was to visit Lynchy’s, where rissoles were served. Finally his wish was granted –

We bit into them while sipping our SodaStream-manufactured soft drink. A rush came over me as I tasted the exotic, spice-free rissole bursting across my taste buds. It was worth the wait.

Tanveer’s story is similar to that of many children of immigrants – pressure to succeed academically; to meet cultural expectations, despite having left Bangladesh as a 4yo and therefore not having full context; to make his family proud. Tanveer did well, winning a scholarship to a prestigious private school and going on to study medicine, eventually specialising in psychiatry. There were some ‘wobbles’ (according to his parents) – a brief foray into acting, and marriage to a woman who was not from Bangladesh. But the good outweighed the bad.

This book was published in 2011 and I found parts of it extremely dated. The language Tanveer uses to describe people is focused on appearance (lots of chubby/ obese/ fat people are mentioned) and the chapter on his residency in Alice Springs perpetuates harmful stereotypes about Aboriginal people. Other anecdotes are assumed humourous (notably the chapters on his cricket team and residency in a psychiatric hospital) but again, in 2024, are tone-deaf.

2/5 – overall, disappointing.