Tracy Farr's Blog, page 21

Lena in Perth

A neat little review of The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt was published under Writing WA recommends… on the Books page (editor William Yeoman) of the Today magazine in The West Australian on Tuesday 27 August 2013:

Tracy Farr’s beautifully written and well-crafted novel combines music and art as she moves the reader around the globe through the dazzling 30s and 40s. This rich novel pays tribute to the life of an artist in all its forms.

Lena in Adelaide

Patrick Allington reviewed The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt in SA Weekend magazine, Adelaide Advertiser, Saturday 24 August 2013:

Farr’s prose soars…this sparkling debut novel captures the spirit of an accomplished woman as she reflects on the arc of her long life.

Maggie reviews Lena

Wellington writer and reviewer Maggie Rainey-Smith has written a lovely review, published on Beattie’s Book Blog this week, of The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt. Here are some snippets from the review to whet your appetite.

This is a debut novel from a very fine writer…I believed in Lena.  I still do, and she lingers with me…Farr has a gift for creating very potent images [and] in these scenes, the writing excels…Farr made me believe.  Isn’t that what good fiction is supposed to do?

Read the full review.

Keeping it short and sweet

It’s been a week for (very) short fiction, for me — a nice change from the long slog of the novel.

Back in May this year, as the deadline for 2013 National Flash Fiction Day (NFFD) competition — for stories of 300 words or fewer — was approaching, the NFFD folks (in NZ Society of Authors Newsletter Friday 17/5/13) asked 2012 finalists “What’s so great about flash?”. Here’s what I said:

My first fiction published in print, back at the tail end of last century, was flash fiction, so it’s a form I’m fond of. Not much more than a single page or screen of words, for the reader it’s a snack, an appetiser, a treat. For the writer, it’s a muscle flex, an idea in miniature, prose wrought tight and reined in. Limits define and refine it, making every word earn its place.

On Friday this week, a special issue of the web zine Flash Frontier was published, featuring the top stories from New Zealand National Flash Fiction Day 2012 and 2013. You can find my story “Beer Goggles” (highly commended in 2012) if you scroll down the page.

There are some great stories featured. I love the clipped sentences, the “sweat and smoke” of Mary McCallum’s “Dead Space”. And how can you go past a story (“Elephant” by Janis Freegard) that starts with an elephant on a beanbag in the corner of the living room?

So, Friday started well with Flash Fiction. But to cap off the day, I was the winner of maximum kudos in New Zealand Book Council’s world-famous-in-New Zealand #fridayshorts. Here’s the evidence:

Each Friday, NZ Book Council tweets six words under #fridayshorts (recently migrated to #rāmereshorts), challenging followers to tell a story in a 140-character tweet, using all six words — plus the hashtag. No prizes, just kudos. A short, sweet end to the week.

Crossing the ditch: guest review in Perth webzine The Starfish

It’s always bothered me how little known in Australia are even some of the best New Zealand writers. When I was asked to write a trio of mini-reviews for Perth webzine The Starfish, it seemed the perfect opportunity to rave about New Zealand writers; maybe I’d even be introducing them to a Perth audience. So I chose three novels that I’d read recently, that I’d loved reading, and that were by some of my favourite contemporary New Zealand writers — Stephanie Johnson, Emily Perkins, and Sarah Quigley. You can read what I had to say about their novels — and a little about my own — in the Books section of The Starfish.

I have to add that, as soon as I saw their homepage, I couldn’t resist writing something for The Starfish. Their homepage features a great big photo of the pavilion at Cottesloe Beach, and that building (and that beach) are key settings in my novel, The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt. I’ll write about that — about the importance of setting, and in particular the importance of that setting for me and for my novel — in a blog post soon.

When I first held you

Fifteen years to the day since I first held my real-life baby, I held, for the first time, my brand new baby. Yes: the advance copy of my debut novel, posted last Friday from my publisher in Australia, arrived in today’s mail. Lena has landed in New Zealand.

I’m feeling a lot less exhausted today than I did fifteen years ago, even though I’ve been carrying this bouncing baby book for a whole lot longer than nine months. There’s a similar sense of wonderment though, of astonishment — did I really produce this?! — and, yes, I’ve had a bit of a weep today, too. I’ve gazed at it, as we gaze at our babies; I can’t stop looking at it, thinking this is mine. I’ve inhaled its lovely smell, and I’ve tickled its perfect pages (its ten perfect ickle…no, wait…312 perfect ickle pages).

And I’m filled with thoughts and dreams of its future, wondering what its path in the world will be. I want people to like it, to love it, to understand it, to invite it into their homes; I want them to want it to be part of their lives. I imagine people asking me — as they do when you pop out a real-life baby — if there’ll be another, or if that’s it. Yes, I’ll tell them, there’ll be another; I’m working on it, I’ll say, with a nudge and a wink.

Review, Books+Publishing Reviews

The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt was reviewed in Books+Publishing Reviews (feature review, 30 May 2013 newsletter). Grateful thanks to Books+Publishing for permission to quote the full text of this subscriber-only review here.

The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt (Tracy Farr, Fremantle Press, September), 4 stars, reviewed by Katie Haydon, Books+Publishing Reviews, 30 May 2013.

To encompass a person’s whole life in a book is no mean feat, especially if the person has lived a full and adventuresome one. However, author Tracy Farr manages to do this seamlessly. (Dame) Lena Gaunt is old when you first meet her, but it’s quickly determined that age hasn’t wearied her. Since growing up in Singapore, music has been entwined in her life, having played the cello and then excelling at the theremin (or etherphone). With the help of a filmmaker who wants to make a documentary about her, Lena’s story unfolds. Going to and fro from the present time—1991—to the start of World War I through the 20s, 30s and 40s, Lena travels the world and becomes famous. Lena’s tie to the ocean is ever-present and this takes her to New Zealand and then back to Cottesloe in Perth, where she feels most at home. Unfortunately, I can’t give too much away as all is not revealed until the second half of the book. Suffice to say I was completely engrossed in Lena Gaunt’s heartfelt story. Older readers in particular will appreciate this book, as will music aficionados and lovers of the sea.

As well as the review, an author Q+A, On the world stage: Tracy Farr on ‘The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt’, was published on the Books+Publishing website (subscriber-only content), www.booksellerandpublisher.com.au.

The old woman and the sea

The first review of my novel was published last week (in Books+Publishing Reviews, 30 May 2013; subscriber only, I’m afraid), and reviewer Katie Haydon (who gave it four stars) said it would be appreciated particularly by, among others, “lovers of the sea”. I’m pleased she mentioned that. Water flows through the novel; it’s almost a character in it. It’s of central importance to the novel’s main character, Lena Gaunt.

And for me? I have a complicated relationship with the sea. I was slightly scared of it as a child. That’s long-ago me in the photo, pointing to where the baby whale was, one of those childhood episodes that didn’t help: if the baby whale was down there, then surely the mother whale was too; and if they were, then what else was there that I couldn’t see? And so it went, in a terrible spiral, fed by The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher and topped off by Jaws. I remain, as an adult, respectful and a little bit nervous of the sea. It’s intriguing to me, fascinating, but — unlike Lena — I prefer to keep it at a distance, or as a concept, rather than needing to be immersed in it. The sea is a central focus in a lot of my writing — not just this novel, but in short stories like ‘Surface Tension’, ‘The Wee Three Kings’, ‘Yargnits’, ‘Blessed’, ‘The Action of Water’, and ‘Dissolve’. It’s almost (almost?!) an obsession. It’s certainly an inspiration.

Writing The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt, I knew that water was important for Lena. She’s a musician, so I wanted to play around with ideas of ocean waves and sound waves. I wanted sound waves to be present in the ocean waves, as they are in the opening of the novel, when Lena — an old woman — is swimming, and noticing sound and movement and connections.

I move my arms in wide arcs in front of me, pushing water out to the sides and back again. I can feel the stretch in my shoulders, the tendons tense and twist. Bubbles form up my arms, trapped in the tiny pale hairs, tickling like the bead in champagne. Moving my fingers in the water effects tiny changes in the waves that effect bigger movements. Action at a distance; just like playing the theremin.

In the novel, water becomes a healing medium for Lena; it’s her ritual and her release. In narrative and geographic terms, the sea both separates and links the different chapters of Lena’s life. It’s where the novel starts, and ends: with the old woman, and the sea.

It’s instrumental

In my novel, The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt, the eponymous Lena Gaunt – musician, octogenarian, junkie – is Music’s Most Modern Musician; theremin player of legend. So, I’ve been thinking a lot about theremins for the last few years, while I’ve been writing the novel. I may even have become a little obsessed with them (OK, disclosure: so obsessed that last summer I embroidered an RCA theremin on a cushion). Because I’ve been thinking about them so much and for so long, I didn’t quite realise just how unfamiliar a musical instrument the theremin is to most people. I’ve been asked if they really exist; or did I just make the whole thing up for the novel?

Yes, theremins exist, and not just on my sofa. So it seems that a short (and slightly random) history of the theremin is in order: a little demystification; something about the sound of it; and a taste of why it belongs in this novel of mine.

The theremin was the first electronic musical instrument, invented and first displayed in the 1920s in New York by Russian inventor Leon Theremin. You may have come across the theremin without recognising it – ever heard the ear-wormy, slightly annoying theme to TV series Midsomer Murders? That’s a theremin. Theremin features in the soundtracks of films like The Lost Weekend (1945) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), sci-fi classics The Thing (From Another World) (1951) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), bible epic The Ten Commandments (1956), and Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994) and Mars Attacks! (1996), among many many more. Its sound — often eerie, melancholic, other-worldly, inhuman — means it’s the classic go-to instrument if you want to indicate crazy, alien, or just plain old going off the rails.

But it’s not just the sound of the theremin that’s disconcerting, unnerving; it’s the way it’s played. The theremin is essentially a box filled with electronics, with two metal antennae protruding: a horizontal loop controlling volume, and an upright aerial controlling pitch. And here’s the thing: you play the theremin without physically touching the loop or the aerial – you move your hands and fingers close to them, close to the machine, teasing it, but you never quite touch it, never quite connect.

It’s not difficult to get noise from a theremin — anyone can wave their hands about and make it squeal — but it’s notoriously difficult to play well.  The best players – like Clara Rockmore, one of the great thereminists, who worked with the instrument’s inventor, Leon Theremin; and like Lena Gaunt in my novel – can make it sound quite beautiful, almost like a cello, or a human voice.

Years ago — when I was still trying to find a way into my novel — I’d started writing notes, circling around a character I had in my head. I knew she was a musician, but I couldn’t pin down what her instrument was, and I needed to do that before I could write much more about her. When I watched the documentary Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey — a history of the theremin and its inventor, Leon Theremin — I knew I’d found it; an instrument you play without touching was the perfect metaphor for how I imagined the main character, Lena Gaunt, lived her life.

The film was also where I encountered Clara Rockmore, the first virtuoso player of the theremin. But I knew I didn’t want to base my character, Lena, strictly on Clara; I had my own plans for Lena, and I wanted the fun of making her up. Film and still images of Clara — from a young girl to an old woman — in the documentary gave me some strong visual cues for Lena. As I developed the character, I aimed to distance myself and Lena from the film, and from Leon Theremin, and from the real life story of the theremin. Clara Rockmore was a starting point for Lena, rather than a model.

A novel year

Fremantle Press will be publishing my first novel this year. Publication is set for 1 October 2013. I’ll post news here about progress towards publication.