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Book Club - by Suhaili

Literature - Book Club

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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

January 19th 2008 09:35

The 2nd book I've read this year is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, a pre-eminent Jewish writer and possible all-round genius of literature. This book was awesome. I read it in two days flat... which is no mean feat, but I happened to be working both days and I had other stuff on so in order to read it all so quickly I had to use every spare moment in those two days to breathe this book in like it was the stuff of life. I didn't plan it this way, it just happened. It's that kind of book.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close occupies a space amongst many other works of post-9/11 literature. Sometimes it seems like 9/11 happened just so all these weighty minds in Serious Fiction Land would have something New and Important to talk about. Obviously I'm not pointing any fingers here or appropriating blame to certain famous authors, I'm just saying, hey, some people have benefited from what happened on September 11. Art lives off this kind of stuff. This book is far from the least amongst this trend, and it manages to be very funny without diminishing the tragedy in any way whatsoever.

Basically, it's the story of this 9 year old kid and he's a weird genius/possible Aspergers candidate (he plays the tambourine and writes letters to Stephen Hawking and Ringo Starr). Anyway, his dad dies in the trade centre during 9/11 and the kid finds an envelope in his dad's closet with the name Black on it and so he decides to go and visit every person with the name Black in New York. It's very cool. Mixed up between this story are the voices of two other characters, both very distinct and different from our narrating hero, but equally as intrinsic to the story and his life. To reveal any more of the book to you would be to spoil it and I'm not in a spoiling mood, so JUST GO READ IT. RIGHT NOW.

Oh, you're still here?
Well, did I mention how cool this book is? Foer employs all kinds of narrative quirks and gimmicky devices to keep the book cracking along (as well as significant photographs), and it's through his use of these unusual techniques that he manages to create something above common fiction - something of real substance - without sacrificing any story or entertainment value. As such, it was pretty much a unique reading experience for me... I've never read a book like it (duh, that's what unique means!) So if you pick this book up and read all the superlative gushing on the cover about it being incredibly moving and extremely funny... well, do not take it for publishing company-paid propaganda, it happens to be very true in this case!

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The Removalists

April 4th 2007 09:14

I thought I'd review something a bit different today. In my hot little hands I have this play by David Williamson, 'The Removalists', a rather sharp and snappy piece of Australian rhetoric that I picked up out of a bargain bin. I like reading plays sometimes... they're so easy to get through. It's all dialogue, and it usually only takes an hour or two at the very most. I don't particularly like watching plays as they're performed, I just prefer reading them as the themes and ideas and great dialogue seems to get absorbed right into your head... like a direct line through your skull. This play in particular is quite good too, it helped send David Williamson on his way to becoming Australia's greatest modern playwright (and possibly our greatest playwright of all time) and the beauty of it is that it's accessible to nearly everyone too. No flowery language, no boring scenes, no esoteric conversations.

The play opens on Simmonds, a police sergeant, interviewing Ross, a newly recruited constable. As Simmonds tries to get to know his new subordinate, and Ross attempts to retain some form of independence and righteousness, we are introduced to this tiny police station that manages to get by without doing any real work. Enter Kate and Fiona, sisters, who have come to report domestic abuse that has been visited upon Kate one time too many by her aggressive husband. Simmonds isn't particularly keen to actually arrest anyone, but he does sense an opportunity for some extra-curricular activities of a sexual nature, and so he and Ross agree to help Kate take all the furniture she and her abusive husband bought together. This sets the scene for an eventful and explosive evening at Kate's place that goes anything but to plan.

Primarily, this is a text concerned with violence and aggression, and the role of these forces in the Australian character and the dynamics of our relationships with one another. It quickly becomes clear that Sergeant Simmonds is a bully and a hypocrite, and through this Williamson taps into our convict-founded society's deep-rooted distrust of authoritarian figures. But whilst Simmonds might be the least sympathetic character in the play, it's worth noting that are no real entirely likeably characters in the cast altogether. By the play's end you're left with an acute sense of discomfort that the levels of inner ugliness that pockmark the psyche of each and every character is all too familiar to our everyday world.

The play suggests that everyone is, at some level or another, capable of violence. Through microcosm it demonstrates how violence and authority are used as tools to gain leverage, and how there is no actual justice when personal aggression and motivations are involved. Ross's transformation in the last stages of the play suggest that our own Australian brand of aggression is a latent thing too, called to the fore by situation rather than historical or social hardship, and the evolving relationship between Simmonds and Ross shows the way that our alpha-male and authoritarian figures attempt to enforce comformity via the threat of violence. Even the presence of the two female characters is coloured by such aggression... Simmonds' whole reason for helping Kate is motivated by sex, and this in turns fuels his caveman-like demonstrations of strength and superiority over her husband.

Whilst all these are impressive observations in themselves, David Williamson's real genius lies in the way he manages to make it all palatable and entertaining. It's a powerful play but it's also darkly funny, uniquely Australian in it's use of character and dialogue, and written at a time when such truthful representation of our culture wasn't a cliche and could still be taken seriously. The characters come right off the page and into your mind, I could hear every line as if someone was speaking them right in front of me. I could hear the laconic wit, the resentment, the insecurity, the camaraderie and the flirtation in each character's voice as they spoke. It was wonderful.

If you get a chance to read this text, go for it. In our current environment of brah-boys and riots it's every bit as relevant today as it was back in the early 1970s. An true Australian classic.

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Breakfast of Champions

March 26th 2007 02:28

'Breakfast of Champions' was the second Kurt Vonnegut book I ever read (after 'The Sirens of Titan'). It was also the book that really opened me up to this whole other world of literature. It made me into a huge Vonnegut fan and a bigger appreciator of fiction in general. Prior to this I didn't care much for books that weren't TV tie-in fiction for science fiction shows. So I guess this book is, in a roundabout way, to blame for this blog and my interest in books altogether.
'Breakfast of Champions' was written by Vonnegut in 1973 and has gone on to become one of his most well-loved novels. Basically, it tracks the stories of two men... Dwayne Hoover, a second-hand car salesman whose brain has gone haywire thanks to 'bad chemicals', and Kilgore Trout, a pathetic purveyor of sci-fi pulp-fiction whose short stories appear mostly in low-rent pornographic magazines. Dwayne is slowly going crazy, and Kilgore is hitchhiking across America at the behest of a random letter he recieves. Eventually the two stories intertwine in Dwayne's home town, and all manner of other interconnected characters appear for the dramatic ending.

Typically of Vonnegut's work, there isn't really a linnear plot to follow. The book is more about the characters and life itself. Vonnegut makes several observations about the falseness of literature in comparison to reality and fills the book with his own amusing illustrations (including, famously, a simplistic drawing of a human anus), and there isn't a single dull paragraph to be found in this whole book. Kilgore exists as a kind of alter-ego for Vonnegut - he appears marginally in several of Vonnegut's books, though in 'Breakfast of Champions' he actually serves as a major character for once. I think he's one of my favourite characters in literature... he's so wonderfully horrible and out there, and his own science-fiction stories (of which we are told the storylines of several throughout this novel) are great mini-classics too. If anything, these various pieces of microfiction are a good inidcation of Vonnegut's inventive brilliance, and in this short novel he manages to include more hilarious and astounding ideas than most good authors manage in a life time.
Anyway, I don't want to get too much into the finer details of this book for two reasons... one, it might spoil it for you, and two, it's all so complicated and amazing that I wouldn't know what to tell you and what not to tell you. This book, along with 'Cat's Cradle', is probably my favourite Vonnegut novel, and of all the books I've read over the last three years, Vonnegut is probably my favourite author. So this one is pretty close to the top.

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Underground

February 15th 2007 02:36

'Underground' is the latest novel from Andrew McGahan, the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of 'Last Drinks', 'Praise' and 'White Earth', the latter of these the 2005 winner of the Miles Franklin Award. 'Underground' represents a change of pace for McGahan, a novel with a wider political scope that calls to mind science-fiction flavoured literary classics such as '1984' and 'The Handmaid's Tale'. It is also a book that is completely and wholly Australian, dealing with pertinent Australian issues and the sort of things we could be facing in the near future if we aren't careful.

It is the near future in Australia. Leo James is a burnt out entrepeneur and the disowned twin brother of Prime Minister Bernard James, the figurehead of a new right wing Australia. Things have gotten worse and worse for Leo in the new political climate of Australia... ever since Canberra was nuked by terrorists no one has wanted to come here for a holiday, which makes it hard for Leo's recently financed Queensland resort. Leo is at the end of his tether, all boozed up and railing insanely at a cyclone, when he is kidnapped by a covert Australian terrorist group known as Great Southern Jihad. But this is only the beginning, he is rescued from the terrorists by the government's troops... and he is then rescued from them by another group, the Australian Underground. The Australian Underground is a nation-wide organisation made up of people from all walks of life who have one thing in common... they miss the old free Australia and want it back.

McGahan's dystopian vision of the land down under is set only four years from now, but it is very much a changed nation. The nuclear destruction of Canberra has made it possible for the government to waive all sorts of basic human rights... a permenant state of emergency has been declared, all muslims have been rounded up and put into ghettos, almost every major road is blocked off by a security checkpoint, and huge unofficial American military bases dot the landscape. It's an Orwellian nightmare of machiavellian proportions... a bland Prime Minister much like John Howard amasses unheard of amounts of power thanks to the pumped up threat of terrorism, and layers of deception and hypocrisy feed this new order in an all-too-familiar fashion. It's a horrible and realistic vision of a worst case scenario made possible - and the most terrifying aspect of it all is that it's so undeniably and recognisably Australian.

McGahan wisely fills his depressing dystopia with action and wry humour. It's probably an insult to compare McGahan to Ben Elton but 'Underground' reads like a souped up version of one of Ben Elton's early eco-thrillers, albeit with more balls. It's basically a heartfelt attack on all that's wrong with our country's current political climate... indeed, McGahan writes on his website for the book - "I knew that I couldn’t just write ‘I hate John Howard’ fifty thousand times over, as cathartic as that might have been". This was an entertaining and informative read, educational in the way that all the great dystopian classics are (and incredibly relevant in this post-9/11 world too). It resonated deeply with me.

Check out the book's website here - Join the Underground

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The Handmaid's Tale

January 30th 2007 08:06

'1984'. 'A Brave New World'. 'Farenheit 541'. 'The Handmaid's Tale'. These are the classics of dystopian science-fiction. Visions of a future not entirely fictitious to our minds, reflective of our current existence as a perversion of ideals. Warnings of what could come forth from the right wing or ultra-conservative stances of our contemporaries. The ultimate in terrifying literature

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Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

December 26th 2006 23:23

'Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha' is the fourth novel by Roddy Doyle, published in the early 90s, and one of his few stand-alone novels. It also won the Man Booker prize - a rather controversial win too, a lot of snobbish types were offended that such a popularist work won the award over more traditionally heavy-going literature-type books. It also happens to be a rather short novel, I knocked it over during a slow day at work

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Disgrace

November 13th 2006 08:08

'Disgrace' is a rather slim and bleak novel about post-apartheid South Africa, personal redemption, shame and the acceptance of pain. It won the 1999 Booker Prize, and caused somewhat of an uproar in it's home country - with charges being levelled against the author for his supposed damaging of the new South Africa's image. Controversy and prize aside, this is a powerful and unsettling novel

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The Kite Runner

October 10th 2006 08:53

'The Kite Runner' is considered to be the first Afghan novel written in English. It was written by Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan who emigrated to America in the late 70s in the wake of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. This book was published in 2003, and tells a moving story of friendship, betrayal and redemption against the backdrop of Afghanistan's ongoing struggles under various regimes - the stable Monarchist-ruled Afghanistan, the ill-fated Republic in the mid-70s, the brutal militaristic rule of the Russians, and the devastatingly insane Taliban regime of the 90s

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Grendel

August 29th 2006 09:30

'Beowulf' is a famous anglo-saxon poem from around the 9th century about a warrior (Beowulf) who slays three monsters - Grendel, Grendel's Mother, and a Dragon. This book by John Gardner is a retelling of the first part of the story from Grendel's point of view

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The Life of Pi

August 28th 2006 09:50

The Life of Pi is a wonderful, fantastic and intense novel that won the Booker Prize in 2003. Part coming-of-age, part-survivor story, part-folktale adventure and part-examination of multiple religions, this is a very complex book told in a simple and engaging manner

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The Van

August 15th 2006 03:29

'The Van' is the third and final book in Roddy Doyle's much-acclaimed Barrytown trilogy, a sequence of entertaining books that focus on the Rabbitte family - a characteristically motley Irish family who live on the outskirts of Dublin.

The Van

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Perfume

August 8th 2006 06:17

Perfume by Patrick Suskind

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is an 18th-century Parisian born without an odour. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, he has a superhuman sense of smell. Patrick Suskind's twisted and grotesque novel follows our protagonist from the very day of his birth onwards, chronicling his life as an oddity and unsung villain, and detailing each and every person who rejects him along the way. I've never read anything like it

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Loaded

July 17th 2006 04:27

Loaded is the debut novel from Greek-Australian author Christos Tsiolkas. It follows 24 hours in the life of Ari - a young man in the middle of a very arresting identity crisis - and we see it all from within his point of view, following his stream of consciousness and his misadventures in multicultural Melbourne. If I was to use one word to describe this book I would use the word 'confronting'.

Ari is - for the most part - gay. He is unemployed, an Australian of Greek background, a drug user, sexually promiscuous and very nihilistic. He doesn't know where he is heading and believes only in music, sex and drugs. He mainly sleeps with men, but he doesn't feel like he's gay. He feels like he fits in with neither the Greeks or the Australians. He doesn't know who he is, he doesn't fit in with society's neat labels and definitions, his world is falling apart around him because his crisis is spinning him towards a melt down

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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

July 6th 2006 07:40

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time' is a very good book that happened to win the Whitbread award in 2003 (see Mortal Engines for more details on the Whitbread award). It can be found in either the literature or children's section of your local bookstore (the Whitbread award is a children's book award but the author wrote the book intending it for adults - his publishers surprised him by marketing it as both a children's and adult's novel

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