Thinking about Alice

I can remember the first time I heard the name Alice Munro.

It was 1980, and we (my partner, our two-year-old and me) had spent a week driving through British Columbia to Banff. We'd skipped stones on enormous glassy lakes surrounded by fir trees, eaten at diners where there were pick-ups with guns and dead deer in the back, stayed in strange little cabins, given a lift to a hitch-hiker who told us about bears, and stopped off at a little town covered in deep snow where we bought a little soapstone carving of a beaver.

Almost back to Vancouver again, afternoon sunshine coming through the windows, the radio had a story about this Canadian writer. I knew at once (it was falling in love at first mention) that I would love her writing, and after dropping off our hire car (our 'little red sporty car', the newest car we'd ever driven) I walked into the first likely-looking bookshop (smallish, independent) and asked if they had any books by Alice Munro.

---Ah, our Alice, said the assistant.

 I bought all the titles they had and posted them home, later buying others when we went to the UK.

My favourite is The Beggar Maid (and see how worn, how well-thumbed, how faded it has become.)


From a page taken at random:

She grew tired, irritable, sleepless. She tried to think admiringly of Patrick. His lean, fair-skinned face was really very handsome. He must know a number of things. He graded papers, presided at examinations, he was finishing his thesis. There was a small of pipe tobacco and rough wool about him, that she liked. He was twenty-four. No other girl she knew, who had a boyfriend, had one as old as that.

Then without warning she thought of him saying, "I suppose I don't seem very manly." She thought of him saying, "Do you love me? Do you really love me?" He would look at her in a scared and threatening way. Then when she said yes he said how lucky he was, how lucky they were, he mentioned friends of his and their girls, comparing their love affairs unfavourably to his and Rose's. Rose would shiver with irritation and misery. She was sick of herself as much as him, she was sick of the picture they made at this moment, walking across a snowy downtown park, her bare hand snuggled in Patrick's, in his pocket. Some outrageous and cruel things were being shouted, inside her. She had to do something, to keep them from getting out. She started tickling and teasing him.

Rose comes from a small town; she's a scholarship girl. Patrick is rich and snobbish. They marry. It doesn't last.

I'm seldom try to analyse why I like particular writing; I simply like to read and absorb.

But to attempt to explain my lasting love for Alice Munro:

No one writes about women like she does, with such tight, interesting, honest writing. There is not one boring sentence. She writes about people in small towns, people who clean motels or farm, or make jam - as well as about academics and women who often have an artistic bent. You come away feeling that all lives are interesting, all people important. (There are no dull people, only dull writing.) And like all my favourite people, she is often funny.

I don't think I've mentioned that she writes short stories, not novels, but you probably know that. The Beggar Maid is a series of linked stores, about Rose, and her stepmother Flo.

Each of her stories has extraordinary depth. She builds the story like someone constructing an arch, with blocks of narrative going back and forth in time. Right at the end there is often the brick in the centre of the arch - the telling scene or detail - that holds the whole thing together and makes it work.



I think that perhaps, when I started writing a few years after discovering her, her example gave me the courage to write about the people in the small towns and rural places where I live.

Once upon a bookcase...

It's that time of year again, and now I seem to have disappeared down the rabbit hole and have turned up somewhere in the UK, being interviewed by another Jo, here.


And there's a review of the girl, as well.

Thank you, Jo!

...her head bowed in shame...

It's less than a week since we lost Julia Gillard, our first female Prime Minister. Apparently, she didn't go down well with the voting public, and was replaced in a leadership spill by Kevin Rudd, who, according to a new book, relentlessly stalked her for the leadership since she replaced him in 2010.

I'm not a diehard fan of Gillard, but she did a more than competent - I'd say admirable- job in the circumstances. I simply don't get why the public prefers Rudd. After Gillard was gone, a sentence kept going through my head. It's the final sentence of The Bookshop, by Penelope Fitzgerald, about a woman who opens a bookshop in a small town, and it fails.

As the train drew out of the station she sat with her head bowed in shame, because the town in which she had lived for nearly ten years had not wanted a bookshop.

As Julia Gillard said in her parting speech, her being a woman didn't explain everything about why she had lost, but it also didn't explain nothing. And in the weeks, months, and even years prior to her departure from the leadership, she was subjected to a sickening amount of bullying in the media and elsewhere.

And so I sit with my head bowed in shame, because the country I have lived in for over 60 years, did not want a female Prime Minister.

Baby bites book

Perhaps you would fancy an 'Ode to an Eider-Duck' 

Telling his praises with never a pause:

How he was born a duck, lived - yes, and died a duck,

Hampered by nature's inscrutable laws.

(AA Milne, written when he was a schoolboy, from a poem quoted in his autobiography, It's Too Late Now.)




One of the highlights of my day, most days, is going down to the creek to feed the ducks. Often I think how ducky they are, how happy to simply be ducks - and just as well, as they will never be anything else.

My turning up is greeted with such excitement (it's the food I bring - poultry grain mix). Little Duck honks, and Pierre, her paramour, often get out of the water and waddles around with his friends, one or two wild ducks (Pacific Black Ducks), so happy are they to see me.

Just recently I remembered this verse on the destiny of simply being a duck. It's part of a longer poem quoted in AA Milne's autobiography, It's Too Late Now (1939).

 'The title,' he said,  'means that heredity and environment make the child, and the child makes the man, and the man makes the writer; so it's too late now ... for me to be a different writer.'

You are what you are (just like the ducks).

I bought my old copy (not a first edition, but a third, still printed in the year of first publication, 1939) almost 30 years ago, at the height of my interest in children's literature, from an antiquarian bookseller.

Here it is, photographed just now on the window-sill of the attic in bright dappled winter sunlight. Almost half way down the spine there is a small piece  out of the dust-jacket, where my baby bit into the book. I kept the piece stuck in with tape, but that has aged and fallen off over time. My baby turned 28 last month.

I think now that the reason I like this book so much is because it has the imprint of my baby's infant teeth. Some people save the first pair of booties - I have a book with baby teeth marks.

Nasty old ladies and eccentric young girls

Reading Elizabeth Bowen


I had a Rip Van Winkle moment last week. Influenza (or something remarkably like it) having kept me at home for a month, I was on my way to Brisbane. Stopping in the town of Murwillumbah (where I grew up) I got out to take money from an ATM. It was a new-fangled model I'd not seen before. After trying to put my card into the receipt slot, I took out my glasses to look at the machine properly, studying it closely, looking at every part, averting my eyes all the time from a horrible transparent green perspex bubble, which flashed, continuously. This, of course, turned out to be the slot for the card. At a newsagent upstairs, where I went to buy a paper, a woman was buying instant lottery tickets, all with peculiar names. 'I'll have three Shazams and two Pookie Ookies." Or something like that.

Then, at a service station, while observing a very resigned-looking woman fill her car (it was an ugly place, on the highway, with no pleasing thing in sight), it struck me that the rest of the world wasn't working their way through the works of Elizabeth Bowen. (Though there are some women, as I write this, doing exactly that, you may be sure, Mildred.)


When you spend a lot of time with an author over a short time you begin to see patterns in their work. A comment in one book becomes a major thread in another. When I mentioned this to Underground Man, who is going through a bit of an Elizabeth Bowen blitz as well, he said at once, 'Nasty old ladies and young girls.'

Well, yes.

Her young girls, and by this I mean teenagers, are particularly appealing. And though Bowen's books are set roughly from the 1920s to the 1960s, the period she wrote in, they are very like girls you meet today.  Portia, in The Death of the Heart (1938), is heartbreaking in her belief in the importance of real feeling against the cynicism, neglect and betrayal of her elders. Her friend, Lilian, is a hoot (and let's not forget the importance of humour in Bowen's work - I laugh, often).  When Portia asks Lilian what she is doing tomorrow, Lilian replies:

'Confidentially, Portia, I don't know what may happen.'

(And then there is the dear, lolloping, spotty, eager-to-please Pauline in To The North - and her friend Daphne. And the dreadful Theodora in Friends and Relations: 'She was spectacled, large-boned and awkwardly anxious to make an impression.' Theodora forces herself on people and is forbidding and opinionated. She will make a dreadful old lady.)

Portia, Bowen's most intricate and sympathetic portrait of a young girl, doesn't understand the world at all.

Lilian had all those mysterious tomorrows: yesterdays made her sigh, but were never accounted for. She belonged to a junior branch of emotional society, in which there is always a crisis due. Preoccupation with life was not, clearly, peculiar to Lilian: Portia could see it going on everywhere. She had watched life, since she came to London, with a kind of despair - motivated and busy always, always progressing: even people pausing on bridges seemed to pause with a purpose; no bird seemed to pursue a quite aimless flight. The spring of the works seemed unfound only by her: she could not doubt people knew what they were doing - everywhere she met alert cognisant eyes. She could not believe there was not a plan for the whole set-up in every head but her own.

Eva Trout, (in Eva Trout (1969) -  one of those books with the heroine's name as the title - Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina - they all meet sticky ends, as does poor Eva) is one of the most appealing characters I've ever met. She is large, handsome and about to become very rich, at 24, when the book starts. Eva is like a large child and remains so throughout. But a very likeable one, strange and vulnerable.

 Like Portia, she is betrayed by those who are charged with looking after her. Like Portia, she is an orphan who doesn't understand how the world works. Her mother died while running away from the family when Portia was small. Her father, an industrialist, whom we gather had an affair with the man later made her guardian, was always absent anyway. So who was she to learn from? No one has ever loved Eva properly (though some people are obsessed with her and think they do) until a child, who was 12 when she was 24, grows up. One longs for Eva to be happy...  But you know what they say about the gun on the mantlepiece in chapter one (though in this book it appears much later). Eva dies in the last sentence. It is all very fitting. I think this might be my favourite Bowen - it is a very strange book. Few people seem to write strange books anymore, and we are all the poorer.

Emmeline, in ToThe North (1932) is also on the verge of an unavoidable, accidental death right in the last sentence. This pattern made me fear for the fate of Jane in A World of Love (1955), who in the last chapter is a passenger in a car going to an airport. The trip is described in such detail that I become sure that Bowen is about to kill her. But she arrives at the airport, and the passenger she is meeting, unknown to her, alights.

But she doesn't die. In the last sentence, she only falls in love at first sight.

Bowen is one of the major novelists of last century. Heir to both Virginia Woolf (whom she knew), and  Jane Austen (to whom she has been compared), the density of her books makes almost every other writer seem superficial. And you need to concentrate.

I liken it to driving along a winding cliff road at the dead of night, rain pouring down, windscreen wipers thrashing. White-knuckled, you keep your eyes on the road. Miss something - a phrase, a nuance - and you're lost.

Re-reading is essential.

And if that makes it all seem a bit difficult, there is also (and here I adopt a Nigella Lawson persona, glancing flirtatiously at the camera before she devours a slice of deep-fried chocolate cheesecake) deep, deep, pleasure.

P.S.  Nasty old ladies? Mostly they are middle-aged and manipulative. But one ( the dying Mme Fisher in The House in Paris is almost pure evil).

Heart on a shelf

....anyway, so the girl found her way to Germany, and got herself translated, and a new dress:

The small matter of the tatt:




She don't call, she don't write, and I haven't yet been sent an author copy, so I have to find out what my girl is doing from the net.

She's as sweet as sugar on top, but several readers have undressed her and found that under that pretty dust jacket are tea stains from two cups, (see - readers undress books just as mothers undress their baby first chance they get after birth to get a proper look). Nice!

(And thanks to a blogger whose link I can't find again for the pictures here at the side.)

And so to my dear readers:


It's gratifying that so many of you have taken my girl to your hearts.

Thanks to the vagaries of Google Translate, I have been able to read early responses to this translation. It makes me realise how lucky I am to have appreciative readers - and I mean by this of all my books in the many languages they've been translated into.

One of my favourite reader's comment from this latest edition (and there are many quotable comments) is this one from Butterblume89:

 She says, "A book which is my new heart on a shelf ..." (thanks again, Google translate, it's beautiful)


Note that she says: my new heart. She will find new book loves, but this is hers, for now. We readers are constantly falling in love - I'm happy that my girl is yours at the moment, butterblume.

Down the toilet

Can that be Franz Kafka poking his head out?

How can you resist a book that ends with a rendition of 'The Internationale'?

Well, that's a rhetorical question, which I will immediately answer: Not at all.






Danika laughed. 'I don't want to be rich, Dad. I'm going to be a socialist!'

And she sang the lyrics, taught to her by Mandy, of 'The Internationale', anthem of socialists all around and under the world.

Rise, people, from your sleep,

Rise, people, from your misery,

The earth is ours again.

We'll break the chains,

We'll change the rules,

We are poor and weak no more.

Now everybody sing!

From Danika in the Underworld, by Ranulfo  (2003)



This is a book that makes me laugh out loud every time (it's damn health-inducing!), a book that makes me want to pick it up and quote bits to people. It's a book whose heart is absolutely in the right place, a right-on, kick-ass (sorry, kick-bottom) read for people of all ages.



Portals


Forget about going through the backs of wardrobes, or down rabbit holes. The entrance to the other world (um, underworld) in this book, is down the toilet.

Which is where Danika goes, to rescue her brother,  Branwell (19th century literary allusion alert in children's book).

There, along with her left-leaning doll Mandy, she faces all kinds of trials, such as being taken to a children farm where they are being fattened up to be turned into burgers for cows. Though resisting the soft, easy life at first, full of fattening food and mind-numbing entertainment, Danika succumbs, and Mandy rescues her.

'I want my TV. I want my TV,' she droned.

Mandy jumped on her shoulder and slapped her hard on the face. 'Danika! Snap out of it!' She slapped her again and again.

'Playstation. Playstation. Playstation.'

'Listen to me, you adolescent imbecile!'

"Pokemon. Pokemon. I must collect them all.'

'Talk stimulatingly to me!'

'Boohoohoo,' cried Danika.

'Why are you crying?'

'I'm not cool. I don't have Nike.'

'Who's Nike? Is he your friend?'

'Mummy, let's go to Mc Donald's. Mummy, let's go to McDonald's. Mummy, let's go to McDonald's.'

'You're beyond my reach, you Zombiegirl.'

Eventually, Mandy 'tied Danika up hand and foot and read Shakespeare to her while feeding her a low fat, sugar-free, nutritious diet.'


It's a book that pokes fun at itself, or at people like me, who love it. But it is also, at heart, deadly serious. Or so I think.

 Ranulfo, I won't ask if you're experienced. But are you serious?

So who is this Ranulfo?


He of only one name (like Prince, or Madonna). His bio at the front of the book is helpful:

"Ranulfo was born on an island called Bohol in the Philippines. He lived in a coconut tree with his monkey friends. Against his will, he was taken to Australia to be civilised. This proved to be a failure so he was sent to a lunatic asylum. He spends his time staring at the wall and writing novels. he is currently working on his third novel made of bricks."

The judging ordeal

I had read Ranulfo's earlier  young adult novel, Nirvana's Children, but Danika would have
passed under my radar if I hadn't been judging the NSW Premier's Literary Awards in 2003-4. I had no trouble convincing my fellow inmates (an independent bookshop owner and a former school principal) to nominate it as one of six short-listed for the Patricia Wrightson Award, but I knew they wouldn't be adventurous enough to let it win. Awards are often compromises on what everyone can agree on (but you probably knew that).


And so to the man himself

He was at the awards ceremony, a gala event full of politicians and literary luminaries (sorry, breaking into cliche here) held that year at the NSW State Parliament House. Former Labour Prime Minister  Gough (Whitlam) walked by as I was in the lobby sipping a bubbly wine. And, gosh, is that Janette Turner-Hospital brushing  past me on her way to the toilet?

No wonder I found Ranulfo lurking after the dinner in the darkened area outside the dining room, solitary with a glass of wine. I don't remember what I said, or he said, except that he seemed shy (horrid judge-lady gushing at him), so I went and gushed at his publisher instead, and she  kindly sent me a copy of Danika's sequel, which wasn't quite as good. (I ended up sending it on its way via Bookcrossing. It started out at Caddie's Coffee shop in Lismore and ended up with someone's kid sister in Melbourne.)



Nirvana's Children



I read a library copy, and now the library doesn't have it any more. And you know me - I forget the content of what I read, but I remember that I found it an extraordinary YA book by anyone's standards. Extraordinary book.

His writing is like Murakami crossed with Dostoyevsky, with overtones of John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces.

I mean it's colloquial, and dark, and fun, and intelligent, and precise, and never dull.

I do wish he'd write more. I haven't seen a new book by him in years.

Ranulfo, where art thou?