When it came to discussing Air by Christian Kracht, my book group didn’t do much discussing. Rather, it was an hour of questions and speculation –
01. My Melbourne International Film Festival picks this week: Continue reading
The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances by Glenn Dixon Continue reading
I’ve had The Circle by Dave Eggers on my TBR stack for eons and I was interested to see how it has ‘aged’. It was published in 2013 – did Eggers intend it as satire? A cautionary tale? Who knows (although it’s no secret that Eggers isn’t a fan of the way technology and the Internet is infiltrating society), but it is horrifying how many of the ‘futuristic’ and seemingly unlikely technologies and scenarios that Eggers furnishes this future world with, actually now exist. Continue reading
I accept that everyone is focused on next year’s reading challenges but I have one last bit of unfinished #GermanLitMonth and #NovNov business to attend to.
I’m going to get straight to why Iris Hanika’s The Bureau of Past Management is such an interesting book – it captures so much of the ‘guilt’ that I have observed in German people my age. A few qualifiers – firstly, people my age did not live through the Holocaust. Secondly, I use the word ‘guilt’ hesitantly because it is far more complex than that. It’s sadness, a need for atonement, it’s fear, it’s shame, feeling accountable, and a sense of needing to repair something that is not their ‘doing’.
Most of the nation’s living citizens were not yet born when the crime happened… All the same, the monstrosity of their forebears’ crime weighed heavily on them, and when they approached this monstrosity, they expected nothing but to unmask their forebears and find criminals. They proceeded without hindrance – it was a continuous loop. The crime was so large.
I was at the beginning-ish part of Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy – far enough in to have a handle on the main players and an idea of where McConaghy was taking me – so I absolutely did not expect a plot-twist, dropped in so delicately that had I been skim-reading, I would have missed it. Wow.
And then there was another one. I was anticipating a gripping read. Continue reading
For years, Lionel Shriver has poked the ‘political-correctness-bear’. In her latest novel, Mania, she does more than poke it – she opens the cage and goes into battle.
Mania is set in a re-imagined present and future, where the Mental Parity Movement has taken hold. It’s a time of ‘intellectual egalitarianism’ – everyone is equally clever, and discrimination based on intelligence is ‘the last great civil rights fight’. As such, words such as ‘stupid’ and ‘dumb’ are illegal (children are expelled for saying the S-word and encouraged to report parents for using it). Continue reading
After Story by Larissa Behrendt Continue reading
The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller Continue reading
Can a book be historical and dystopian at the same time? Yes, it can. Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov (trans. by Angela Rodel) is nothing short of mind-boggling, recreating twentieth century history, alongside an imagined future, where we have the capacity to choose which decade from the past we live in.
The premise of Time Shelter is relatively simple – an ‘enigmatic flâneur’ named Gaustine opens a ‘clinic for the past’ as a way of treating Alzheimer’s – each floor of the clinic reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time to a period that felt safe and familiar.
…for us the past is the past, and even when we step into it, we know that the exit to the present is open, we can come back with ease. For those who have lost their memories, this door has slammed shut once and for all. For them, the present is a foreign country, while the past is their homeland. The only thing we can do is create a space that is in sync with their internal time. Continue reading