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FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Siblings
Brigitte Reimann; trans., Lucy Jones, Penguin Classics, $24.99
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An argument between brother and sister Uli and Elisabeth opens Brigitte Reimann’s Siblings, published for an English audience for the first time. Narrated by Elisabeth, we learn that when they’d “argued in the past, he’d thrown shoes at me and once even a vase”. Now, hot-headed temper has yielded to a “cold, dry calm”. It’s 1960 in East Germany, and Uli looks set to follow older brother Konrad in defecting to the West. For Elisabeth, an artist who believes in the socialist dream of the GDR, Uli’s betrayal is personal and political. Domestic turmoil is filtered through the evils of capitalism, communism, democracy, and totalitarian government. Children blame their parents (who voted for Hitler) for the mess they’ve inherited. Elisabeth sharply rebukes capitalist exploitation, but when her work receives unwanted attention from the Stasi, an ever-narrowing “Party line” draws political idealism and artistic freedom into conflict. This fascinating autobiographical novel, sensitively translated by Lucy Jones, takes a literary star from behind the Iron Curtain and puts her centre stage.
A Spell of Good Things
Ayobami Adebayo, Canongate, $32.99
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Ayobami Adebayo’s second novel weaves together domestic drama, romantic obsession, political corruption, and the obscene social inequality that exists in modern Nigeria. Two families – one rich, one poor – collide in A Spell of Good Things. A desperately overworked doctor, Wuraola has striven to meet the expectations of her mother, wealthy matriarch Yeye. She is anticipated to submit to a match with the volatile son of a family friend, Kunle, without complaint. Meanwhile, Eniola is a boy, big for his age. His family is reduced to beggary after his father loses a teaching job; his education cut short. When Eniola begins running errands for a tailor, he fatefully attracts the eye of a local politician. This novel is peopled by those whose choices are shaped by, and whose lives are swept up in, larger divisions within Nigeria, and the arc of social tragedy it traces is more intense for the depth and spirit Adebayo brings to vividly portrayed characters.
Cellnight
John Kinsella, Transit Lounge, $28
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In Cellnight, the prolific West Australian poet John Kinsella has composed a verse novel written in “spindle” sonnets. It could also be read as a free monodrama, though freedom of thought is almost the only kind of freedom allowed here. Protesting the late 1980s visit of US nuclear-armed warships to Perth, the narrator is arrested, only to witness a Noongar kid become a victim of police brutality. Their eyewitness testimony is rejected by the law – a silencing that recalls the quietness of the cells, where voice is smothered and the frustrated impulse to act upon humanity exists “beyond / policebreath”. Kinsella’s lines are as short and sharp as a prison shiv. The syntax, however, expands into a more elaborate weapon – uncompromising political critique of Australian society, especially the systemic injustices and social power imbalances that dehumanise the most vulnerable, strangle dissent, and compel complicity in the status quo, witting or otherwise.
The Ferryman
Justin Cronin, Orion, $32.99
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Each dystopia springs from the seed of seeming utopia, and the setting for Justin Cronin’s latest novel – a fictional archipelago named Prospera – starts as a particularly seductive mirage. The titular ferryman, Proctor Bennett, takes passengers between the isles, and first stop is always the paradisical main island, where residents may pursue art and self-improvement free of want or distraction. Less idyllic is the Annex, home to support staff tending to the main island’s needs. Then there’s the strange Nursery Isle, where elderly people are sent to be “reborn” and return to society as adolescents. All is not as it appears. Proctor’s marriage – to the daughter of Prospera’s ruler – is under strain; his suspicions grow when he must ferry, under protest, his own cantankerous father to the Nursery. The Ferryman is an intriguing blend of detective and dystopian fiction that keeps the reader guessing.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Graft
Maggie Mackellar, Hamish Hamilton, $35
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To attempt to sum up this beautiful book is to do a disservice to the delicate and finely woven lattice of narrative threads that comprise it, like reducing a glimmering spider web to its geometry. The framing story is a year on a sheep farm in Tasmania during an endless drought and the slog of keeping lambs and ewes alive. But within this framework, a lifetime is traversed, with particular focus on the painful proximity of birth and death, motherhood and loss. Maggie Mackellar’s two children are leaving the nest. Anchorless, she is drawn back into the past, to memories of her own childhood days on her grandparents’ farm and her mother’s vigil in caring for Mackellar’s severely disabled brother. Mackellar dwells close to the earth and it seeps out through her words, inspiring one to reflect on how each of us makes our peace with living between the domestic and the wild.
Hands of Time
Rebecca Struthers, Hodder & Stoughton, $34.99
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In Britain, their craft is considered critically endangered, not unlike threatened species. Only a handful of artisans with the skills to make and restore antique mechanical watches remain and Rebecca Struthers is one of them. Her perspective as a maker and historian of these portable time pieces infuses this beguiling chronicle of how humans have measured time over the millennia. As well as taking us inside the workings of the first watches and the world of watchmaking, Struthers is very much attuned to the natural markers of time from the seasons to the moon and sun, speculating that “the watch emerged from our first efforts to align our inner sense of time with what we observed in the world around us”. The watch is, for her, a personal legacy, an exquisite object and a poignant emblem of our hunger to grasp the ungraspable.
Emboldened
Belinda Alexandra, Affirm Press, $19.99
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We rarely use “emboldened” in everyday speech, such is its slightly archaic, poetic ring. Yet for historical novelist Belinda Alexandra, it is a kind of talisman, a word to conjure hope when everything is falling to pieces around you. The personal circumstances that sparked this book remain sketchy, largely for legal reasons, but we learn that Alexandra fled her house one night in fear for her life. Inseparable from her story is that of her mother, a White Russian, who was driven from home by war and revolution at an early age. The theme of resilience and boldness is amplified through the stories of real women behind her novels: an American spy in World War II, a masterful flamenco dancer and a celebrated landscape designer. These life lessons deal in complex emotions that elevate Emboldened above the platitudes of the self-care genre, finding in adversity the seeds of growth.
Women Without Kids
Ruby Warrington, Orion Spring, $32.99
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Ruby Warrington toyed with calling this book Selfish C—s to reflect what she believes is the prevailing attitude towards women who choose not to have children. But to what extent is not having kids still a taboo? Having wrestled for decades with the overt and unspoken pressures on her and other women to put their wombs to use, Warrington strongly feels that the “mommy binary” – the assumption that mothers are “natural” and non-mothers are defective – still holds. She challenges her readers to consider their motives by addressing where they fall on the “motherhood spectrum”: the many factors from personality, health and family background to ambitions, finances and relationship status that influence the decision to procreate or not. Part manifesto for the “unsung sisterhood”, part consciousness raising manual, this work exposes the pernicious notion of “having it all”.
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