Catherine McCallum's Blog, page 2

Burial Rites

I‘m currently half-way through this amazing novel by Australian writer Hannah Kent, so it’s too early to post a review. There are so many good reviews out there anyway. But here’s a link to the recent Australian Story on the author and her research in Iceland into the execution in 1829 of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the incident which inspired the book. If you have half an hour it’s a fascinating program! Here’s the preview:

Filed under: Australia, Books & Writing, Movies & TV Tagged: Australian Story, Burial Rites, Hannah Kent

Good quotes: Christina Stead

The sensuality, delicacy of literature does not exist for me; only the passion, energy and struggle…  Most of my friends deplore this: they are always telling me what I should leave out in order to have success. But I know that nothing has more success in the end than an intelligent ferocity.

—Christina Stead, 1942

I finally got around to reading the work of Christina Stead, one of Australia’s greatest writers, relatively late and reluctantly, after reading Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 essay in the New York Times on The Man Who Loved Children. The novel, based on Stead’s own dysfunctional family, was first published in 1940 and is her best-known work. It’s a harrowing and visceral read (visceral is my adjective du jour, as you may have noticed). No wonder Franzen liked it so much.

Stead lived most of her life ‘abroad’, as we quaintly put it in those days, but returned to our shores late in life. As Geordie Williamson wrote in The Australian: ‘No wonder her fiction can seem so raw and difficult to embrace. Not for Stead the polite, well-tended prose that hides weeds and prunes hard, presenting a finished formal perfection to visitors’ eyes. Rather, she worked to summon the world in its everyday disorder, its unkempt verdancy. Hers was an anti-style whose grace was fidelity to blind, tangled, fecund life.’

I like this quote, with its memorable final sentence.

Filed under: Australia, Books & Writing, Quotes Tagged: Christina Stead, Geordie Williamson, The Man Who Loved Children, The Weekend Australian Review

Poetry: Philip Larkin

End

My train draws out, and the last thing I see

Is my three friends turning from the light,

And I am left to travel through the night

With this one thought for company:

Even a king will find himself alone,

Calling for songs one night, old songs, will find

The guests departed, nothing left behind

Except the silence, and a clean-picked bone.

—Philip Larkin

Does Philip Larkin, a visceral poet if ever there was one, consider his life ‘a clean-picked bone’? I love that last line. Reminds me of the last stanza of Emily Dickinson’s well-known poem about the snake, one of ‘nature’s people’:

But never met this fellow,

Attended or alone,

Without a tighter breathing,

And zero at the bone.

A tenuous comparison to make, nothing but the bone. I have mixed feelings about much of Larkin’s poetry, but I like this one.

Filed under: Poetry Tagged: End, Philip Larkin

Life After Life

Reblogged from Through the dark labyrinth:

One of the questions I find myself returning to time and again is: what is science fiction? Or, perhaps more accurately, why do we consider book X to be science fiction, but not book Y? The borders are fluid, porous, constantly open to being redefined, reimagined, they are never the same for any two people, they are never the same for one person at different times; yet we always end up drawing distinctions, deciding to read X as science fiction, Y as mainstream.

Read more… 1,477 more words

 

Life After Life is a brilliant novel which I finished reading a few weeks ago and which has been in my mind ever since. It's one of those rare books whose meaning I'll be pondering for years to come. This is a terrific review which I could do no better than reblog here, even though it contains a few spoilers.

Poetry: Bryan Reid

Bryan Reid was the founding secretary of the Johnson Society of Australia and is a true Johnsonian, a person ‘devoted to the works and life and personality’ of Samuel Johnson and of his biographer James Boswell. Bryan is also a journalist, an author and occasional poet, and a dear friend. As far as I know, he’s not submitted any of his poetry for publication, but I think good poetry should be shared, even if it’s in a blog post!  These are two of his poems I love.

Hunting and gathering

Last night I lost adumbrate.

I thought I had it well

and truly penned, but

some time between

my second glass of wine and

my first glass of scotch

it slipped away

back into the thickets

of the Concise Oxford.

Still, I managed yesterday

to rope and tie condign and

corral paradigm, but

I just missed out on

recondite.

Today, I’ve got my sights

set on crepuscular.

If I manage to hang on to it,

and with a bit more luck,

I might be able to

recapture arcane, but it’s

a cunning bugger and keeps

disguising itself as archaic.

Still, I think its days

are numbered and I’ve got

just the place for it

in a letter to an old mate

who hopefully,

won’t know what it means.

 

Lantana

Proust had his madeleines.

For me, on the brink of memory,

it’s a crushed lantana leaf.

No deep breath needed

to shoulder aside seventy years,

and I’m hiding in tunnels of twisted stems

while the Queensland sun

blasts the cool canopy in vain.

A herbal drift of last year’s leaves

carpets the green caves

where we meet, to talk

scandalously of teachers,

breathlessly of Tom Mix

and Randolph Scott

and picture shows we’d never see.

At home, Mum is peeling spuds

against the uncertain arrival

of Dad, fresh from a day of breaking earth

and hiding anger.

Filed under: Australia, Poetry Tagged: Bryan Reid, Melbourne writer

John Glashan, Scottish humourist

This is the battered cover of a very funny book I bought decades ago, a Penguin collection of John Glashan‘s cartoons, published in 1967. I still laugh at his humour, which remorselessly sent up the class system in Britain, National Health red tape, and the freewheeling 60s. He had a distinctive drawing style, combining small figures (often bearded men) with scrawled text and elaborate backdrops.

Many of his cartoons ran over several pages, so I’ve scanned one sequence here and will post others occasionally.

 

 

 

 

Filed under: Books & Writing, Funny Tagged: cartoons, humour, John Glashan

Akropolis is published on Amazon!

Akropolis is FREE for the next four days. If you are interested in reading the ebook on your Kindle or on a free Kindle app (available for PCs, Macs, tablet computers, and smartphones), please visit the book’s Amazon page and download it now.

Akropolis is my first book, a YA Science Fiction novel set in the near future and the ancient past. I wanted to write a book for young adults who are inspired, as I still am, by speculative ideas and ancient civilisations and the nature of survival.

A description of the book is on my Akropolis page, and you can view a PDF excerpt by clicking here:

AKROPOLIS_excerpt

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

— Henry James

I really hope that’s true of Akropolis!

 

Filed under: Uncategorized