Journey to the Stone Country - Alex Miller.

*SPOILERS*

In Journey to the Stone Country, Annabelle Beck casts away her life as she knows it to follow Bo Rennie, an Aboriginal guy she knew of vaguely in her past, on a sort of journey of self discovery through land symbolic to his and her people in central and northern Queensland. 

I’m disappointed in this book.  When I initially read about it, I was excited to start it because it seemed to have many of the elements I like in a novel...  I love stories about life and people and the internal and external struggles that colour all our lives... but this book left me baffled, annoyed and even a little embarrassed for the author at times!

First of all, the sentence structure!  I know that there are times when an author throws away the rule book when it comes to grammar in order to create certain emotion or symbolism within the writing.  In fact, I love that some authors do this meddling with the rules for sake of art and poetry. (A little like an abstract painter meddles with reality to create a more engaging/beautiful/meaningful piece of art). Some authors do it beautifully – Alex Miller does not.  It just annoyed me that he kept leaving the verb out!  “The muted sound of teevees and radios from neighbouring houses.”  That is not a sentence!   Alex Miller just seems like a literary try hard to me.  Oh God!  The bit where Annabelle was thinking about the stone she found. She could think of the Italian, the French and even the Latin word to describe its weight, but not the English? Lame!!! “The English word gravity, she decided, would not quite do.  Perhaps the poets had been too free with it in the past.”  What the?!  Oh Alex, you’re embarrassing yourself!  And it’s so incongruous with the rest of the writing of the book!

Next, the story line:  It seems completely unrealistic to me that a well educated woman with a whole life in Melbourne would so quickly evacuate from her old life and allow herself to be smothered by the life of a knock-about, rough and ready guy she’s really only known for a few days.  Okay so she knew of him from her past...but seriously?!!!  Maybe this sort of thing does happen.  But it annoys me.  So your cheating, sleazy husband has an affair?  Leave him, sure!  Go on a holiday, leave your troubles behind for a while, have a fling if you really must!  But shack up with a guy you hardly know and start planning on changing your career, uprooting your life, selling your house, selling your inherited family home and cashing in your superannuation??!!!  This is what Annabelle our main character does.  What the hell?  Oh and I hated how Bo suddenly started calling Annabelle ‘my love’ after their great love scene.  I actually laughed out loud when I read the love scene – and then I had to read it out to Benji (my partner) and he laughed too!!!

...Which brings me to the next point:  The alpha male!  I was so annoyed all the way through the novel that Bo was some sort of expert on everything!  I mean Annabelle is a grown woman, an educated woman who’s seen a bit of the world... and she suddenly just has no opinion and no ideas and just looks with her big puppy dog eyes to Bo to see what he thinks!?!?!!! (Okay, so I made up her eyes... but I can JUST imagine!!!)  And that poor Hearn Family - a family whose farm the pair visit along their travels!  Who the hell does Bo think he is telling everyone the right way to do things?!

Speaking of the Hearns... another idiotic part of the storyline:  That they’re talking about wedding bells and babies just because a couple of teenagers got a bit amorous with each other?  Matthew and Trace were probably just lonely and charged up with teenage hormones... But there’s Bo and Annabelle (and The Hearns too, actually) thinking that after a few hours together they’ll be getting married next.  Stupid.

 The description of food throughout the novel was interesting.  It actually made me feel sick that there were no fresh fruit or vegetables eaten throughout the whole book.  All those steaks and sausages!!  But at least this was a fairly realistic representation of the diet of your average central Queensland working class male.  (I grew up in a little mining town quite near to where the first part of the book was set!)  So I admit it was clever and insightful to include culinary (too strong a word?) descriptions.

 So what themes was Miller trying to explore in Stone Country?  If love/romance is one I feel sorry for Alex Miller’s wife.  “You look good in them dungarees Annabellebeck.” ?! Cringe!!!!

I think what could have been the main theme, the difficult relations between Black and White Australia, was left under developed.  The reality of much of Black Australia is heartbreaking and gut-wrenching .  If as an author, you are going to explore this theme, then I think the reader should feel torn and uncomfortable and sick and sad and ashamed ...because that is the reality.  Alex Miller didn’t bring enough of that desperation to the table to make this the gutsy and emotionally challenging novel I was expecting.  (Think of the film Sampson and Delilah - that's what I was expecting.)

Look, to be fair, I didn’t hate reading this book.  Some of the scenery (probably because I grew up in the area) was interesting to read about.  And the scene with old Panya was well done:  pretty sobering and sad and unfortunately probably quite realistic.  This part was hard to read because it was so real and it highlighted many of the irreconcilable problems between Black and White Australia.  But then there was not much further discussion between Bo and Annabelle about it, which was disappointing and frustrating!  I can't believe this one a Miles Franklin Award.

 

P.s. I never really got the point of Arner’s character.  What was the mystery he was hiding?

 

** Adapted from my own submision to a book club  to which I once belonged.

 

 

 

 

The Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz.

Another one from Junot Diaz.  Same punchy, authentic, no holes barred writing style as This is How You Lose Her, we even meet our old friend Yunior again.  (In fact Oscar Wao came before Lose Her but this is the order I read them in, so there you go...).  There is a lot more political stuff in Oscar Wao and we get to go to back to the Dominican Republic and feel what it must have been like to live under Rafael Trujillo - the country's infamous dictator. 

Diaz delves back into the history of the main characters so much so, that sometimes I got a bit bogged down (although I'd like to have read this book when I was less chronically tired!!!) and lost sight of how it all related to Oscar. 

Oscar Wao. Poor old Oscar is everything a typical "Domo" is not.  He's an uncool, unsexy, overweight, nerdy lover of scifi and a failure with women.  He is trying to find his way in the world, aching for his first experience with a woman and coming to terms with all his failures as a Domo man, his family history, and the fuku that has plagued them.  Fuku?! - Fuku americanus actually. An ancient "Curse of Doom of the New World", unleashed on the world with the "arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola".  Oh and it seems that Trujillo is inextricably linked with fuku - although whether his is its victor or victim is unclear.  Oscar's fuku is also tangled in Trujillo's web.  It's a messy business!

Diaz is unique.  He is funny, edgy and fearless in his depiction of Latino America. He has a way of highlighting the difference between mainstream (aka white) America and it's minority groups, specifically Domos and Latinos.  He doesn't shy away from these differences (eg describing a time in the history of a particular neighbourhood in New York, pre-gentrification as "before the whitekids started their invasion, when you could walk the entire length of Upper Manhattan and not see a single yoga mat".  In the same way he does in Lose Her, Diaz uses Spanish and street slang to get his point across.

"That is good to hear, El Jefe said, I was afraid you might have turned into un maricon. Then he turned to the lambesacos and laughed.  Oh Jefe, they screamed, you are too much.
It was at that point another nigger might have, in a fit of cojones, said something to defend his honour, but Abelard was not that nigger.  He said nothing."

To really get the the whole gist of some of the writing, a grasp of the Spanish language is useful, but some knowledge of local slang more so.  I like that Diaz is sort of sticking his finger up at middle white America - leaving them out of the in joke.  A sort of Fuck You.  Or perhaps fuku?

 

 

*please note I have not been true to Spanish grammer simply because I can't work out how to type accent marks in!

 

This is How You Lose Her - Junot Diaz

 

This is a snappy little read.  Junot Diaz has a punchy, witty writing style.  He is to literature what hip hop is to music.  This is How You Lose Her is a collection of interrelated short stores about American Dominican Republicans. 

Woven together by common characters, common themes and told in different voices, the stories give believable insight into the cultural nuances of Latinos and specifically Dominican's, living in America.  Diaz gives a voice to these (his) people and shines an important light on that fact that there is more to America than is often portrayed in popular culture/literature. 

Sometimes gritty and raw, sometimes passionate, touching and tragic the stories feel very real and you can't help but wonder if there is a bit of autobiographical material in there.  Diaz pays attention to the authenticity of his writing and so throws in a bit of street talk and slang in Spanish where English just wouldn't seem right.  It works artistically and linguistically...the fact that I can speak some Spanish is a bonus...but it might be annoying to an Anglophone reader.  I enjoyed this book a lot.

 

The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs - Damon Galgut

 

I think I am going to have to condense my reviews down if I am going to keep up with my reads... I'm reluctant to use a scoring system which I find too suffocating.  A linear numerical system to describe the thoughts, emotions, concepts, characters, etc etc within a novel?  How to indicate depth?  But maybe I'll try it out... so shall I use the conventional 5 star system?  I'm contorting my face and groaning, but yes, fine, I'll use that.  That way if I get really lazy or time poor I can simply record the score for the novel and move onto my next one.

 

So, The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs.  I had forgotten (until I read the bio on the book cover half way into the read) that I have actually read one of Damon Galgut's books (The Quarry) and really enjoyed it.  What actually attracted me to randomly select this book off the library shelf was not the author, but the title.  It really grabbed me, the incongruity of the words, the imagery they conjured up of suffering, shit, death and blood and of someone finding that beautiful?  It made me feel uneasy and I wanted to know more.  And then I read in the fine print that Galgut is a Man Booker Prize winner and I was sold.  I not a literary snob, but for some reason I always seem to like Man Booker Prize winners...

 

I was rewarded.  I really enjoyed this book.  I read it extremely quickly but that's not to diminish the depth of the content. In the Beautiful Screaming of Pigs, we travel with Patrick Winter on two journeys to Namibia.  One in the present with his mother a divorcee on her way to experience the country's first free elections and to see her new, trendily taboo, black, SWAPO member boyfriend; and one in the past as a soldier completing his military service and fighting against the liberation of an independent Namibia.  Patrick Winter has issues.  He's on medication for anxiety issues, his family life has been and still is dysfunctional, he's dealing with the changing face of his country and all the racial complexities that are inevitable when a new country is finding it's feet and the fact that he once faught against a people with whom he now sympathises. (Plus a few other issues but I don't want to spoil it!) 

 

The story behind the title becomes clear as we look into Patrick's past and as do the feelings it conjured up in me when first I saw it.  There is symbolism in the title that carries through the book, the idea that something horrific and frightening like the screaming of pigs, or a war, or a dysfunctional marriage, or a volatile relationship can often have beautiful consequences is a difficult but unavoidable truth.  It's a book that makes you think.  I like that.