Theresa Smith's Blog, page 35

Book Review: Haven by Emma Donoghue

About the Book:

Three men vow to leave the world behind them. They set out in a small boat for an island their leader has seen in a dream, with only faith to guide them. What they find is the extraordinary island now known as Skellig Michael. Haven, Emma Donoghue’s gripping and moving novel, has her trademark psychological intensity – but this story is like nothing she has ever written before.

In seventh-century Ireland, a scholar and priest called Artt has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind. Taking two monks – young Trian and old Cormac – he rows down the river Shannon in search of an isolated spot on which to found a monastery. Drifting out into the Atlantic, the three men find an impossibly steep, bare island, inhabited by tens of thousands of birds, and claim it for God. In such a place, what will survival mean?

Published by Pan Macmillan Australia

Released 30th August 2022

My Thoughts:

Emma Donoghue just keeps on giving and giving with every novel she releases. She has such versatility, both in terms of style and subject. This was an entirely different novel to anything I’ve read before. For a start, it was set in the seventh-century, and I have never read historical fiction set that far back to date. It was also quite spiritual in the sense that the three characters are Christian monks, their lives dedicated to a faith still quite new to Ireland. For Cormac in particular, the oldest monk of the trio, he still has a living awareness of the old pagan ways, his family died of the plague before he was a Christian and they died as heathens according to his new faith. His conversion to Christianity is not as altruistic as what would normally be required for a monk, there were other factors at play for him. For Trian, the faith is his salvation, as we come to know more about as the novel nears its end. For Artt, the priest and scholar who takes Cormac and Trian with him on his zealous crusade, faith is everything, all he lives for, and unsurprisingly, the means to his ends, that is, the way he intends on immortalising himself.

‘Artt finds himself wondering if perhaps tales will be told about him. Is it arrogance to think it? The legend of how the priest and scholar Artt set off, with just two humble companions, in a small boat. The extraordinary pair of islands he found in the western ocean; how he claimed the higher one for God, and founded a great retreat in the clouds. The glory of the books reproduced there, and then generations of the copies’ offspring. The ceaseless hum of prayer always rising from that little hive.’

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‘Privately, Cormac can’t see why the tasks of chapel-building and book-copying are so much holier than food-preserving. And he’s tempted to point out that if you stint men of nourishment, their strength for work will shrink accordingly, and their lives on earth will dwindle. Why can’t the Prior see that this bird meat is a bounty of time in concentrated, fleshly form? But he presses his lips shut. He gave up the right to argue when he vowed obedience. Monks should be humble as slaves.’

The setting of this novel is richly realised. Such an impressive feat to bring a remote and island to life within the context of the seventh-century. The isolation and desolation went hand in hand. As the season changed and the supplies dwindled, the desperation felt by Trian and Cormac was visceral. Artt’s mania was frightening. He truly had lost all sense of reason. The other aspect of this story, which I don’t want to say too much about as it would entirely ruin the novel for you, was handled with sensitivity and I was levelled by the way the story panned out. Cormac is the true hero of this story, I felt it early on but as the novel progressed, it became more and more apparent. I loved the way that conservation was woven into the narrative via Trian’s conscience over the hunting he was implored to do by Artt. You got a sense of looking down a lens through history and seeing it all from the beginning, where we went wrong and why we are where we are today with so many lost species and a dying planet.

‘He finds himself wondering what makes it permissible to eat fish on a fast-day. Is it because fish are less like men than pigs or cows are, so less likely to rouse baser appetites? Trian’s never understood why, in the Garden, at first Adam and Eve ate only fruits and nuts, but after the Flood God told his people, Everything that lives and moves will be meat for you. Well, the important thing’s not the grasp the rule but to obey it.’

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‘The Prior insists it was for this that God established birds on the Skelligs in clamorous crowds when he first created the world. But Trian struggles to believe that such a variety of lightsome and beautiful birds have formed in their translucent ovoid caskets, broken out of them, walked, cried out to their brethren, taken flight, over and over for these thousands of years…all so Trian can now fling them down to flame and char on a cooking fire.’

I’d say I’ve reached the point now where there is nothing Emma Donoghue could write that I wouldn’t read. I have a couple more unread on my shelves, time to get them down and get them read so that I can then wait impatiently for her next release. Highly recommended, for so many reasons. This one is sublime literature.

Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.

Book Review: The Pachinko Parlour by Elisa Shua Dusapin (trans. Aneesa Abbas Higgins)

About the Book:

It is summer in Tokyo. Claire finds herself dividing her time between tutoring twelve-year-old Mieko in an apartment in an abandoned hotel and lying on the floor at her grandparents: daydreaming, playing Tetris, and listening to the sounds from the street above. The heat rises; the days slip by.

The plan is for Claire to visit Korea with her grandparents. They fled the civil war there over fifty years ago, along with thousands of others, and haven’t been back since. When they first arrived in Japan, they opened Shiny, a pachinko parlour. Shiny is still open, drawing people in with its bright, flashing lights and promises of good fortune. And as Mieko and Claire gradually bond, their tender relationship growing, Mieko’s determination to visit the pachinko parlour builds.

The Pachinko Parlour is a nuanced and beguiling exploration of identity and otherness, unspoken histories, and the loneliness you can feel within a family. Crisp and enigmatic, Shua Dusapin’s writing glows with intelligence.

From the author of Winter in Sokcho, which won the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature.

Published by Scribe

Released 30th August 2022

My Thoughts:

This melancholic little novel orbits around displacement, both culturally and within one’s own family. Claire, our protagonist, identifies as Korean, yet can’t speak the language. She grew up in Switzerland speaking fluent French and also speaks Japanese, learnt as a means of communicating with her Korean grandparents who have lived in Japan since the Korean war. However, her grandparents still speak Korean, her grandmother in particular refusing to speak Japanese, so there is a three pronged barrier between them: generational, cultural, and language.

Just as it was with her first novel, Winter in Sokcho, Elisa Shua Dusapin writes with such an immersive style. I was plunged into Japan, the setting of the novel, but also immersed into Korean culture, the two at odds with each other, given the context of why so many Koreans are settled in Japan. This is not a long novel but it covers a lot of ground and gives the reader a good grasp on the historical context needed for understanding Korean settlement within Japan and the neighbourhood dynamics resulting from this.

The character Mieko was a sad one for me to read about. Everything about her life was grim, father long gone, mother grieving the abandonment whilst pretending it isn’t permanent and trying desperately to turn Meiko into a whole other type of person – seemingly a non-Japanese one. Then there’s a line dropped in about a classmate of Meiko’s, who’ll I just remind you now is only ten years old, who ends his own life over the summer holidays. What an awful childhood and what sort of adults are these children growing up into? Incredibly sad. This insight into Japanese culture via Meiko and her mother does nothing to recommend Japan to the reader.

Claire’s main purpose for the trip to Japan is to accompany her grandparents on a return trip to Korea, their first since leaving after the war. For weeks, nothing is actioned and her grandparents don’t even seem to want to go. It’s not until after Claire is quite ill with an ear infection that they give in and make plans. Even so, things don’t go as Claire envisages, and by the end of the story, we see her coming to the realisation that the trip to Korea might actually have been more about her discovering her roots than a trip down memory lane for her grandparents.

I really enjoyed this and read it rapidly. Once again, the translation is flawless and you forget you’re even reading a translation. I am now pretty much a fan of Elisa Shua Dusapin and look forward to her next release.

Thanks to the publisher for the copy.

The Week That Was…

Joke of the week:

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What Zeus has been up to:

Feeling at one with his bed…

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What I’ve been watching:

I never got to watch this the first time round but always wanted to, however, it was on Foxtel and back in the early 2000s, I did not pay for TV. It’s 20 years old, but feels so relevant and familiar in so many ways. I can see why it won so many industry awards back in the day. I’m loving it. It also stars a few of my favourite actors.

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What I’ve been reading:

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Until next week…

Book Review: Faithless by Alice Nelson

About the Book:

Set between India and England, Faithless is the story of Cressida, a writer and translator, and her consuming love for Max, an enigmatic older writer – and married man.

Cressida’s passion for Max engulfs her from the first giddy rush of sensation when she meets him in the mountains of southern India. It is a desire so potent it delivers great stunning blows to her heart. And yet she can share it with almost no one.

Then Cressida meets Leo, and she is forced to choose: between a life of passion or a desire for some peace of mind; between her romantic idealism and the possibility of a steadier, attainable happiness.

As the years unfold with both these men, a fragile young child, Flora, also finds her way into Cressida’s life and heart, and it is Flora who forces Cressida to confront her own capacity for love and deception, and to accept the compromises life forces on us.

Faithless is a passionate love story and a profound reflection on the nuances of attachment, the nature of desire, the different connections and relationships that sustain us, and the ways that we deceive ourselves and others in the hope that, finally, we can reach stumblingly towards one another.

Published by Penguin Random House Australia

Released August 2022

My Thoughts:

It’s such a marvellous thing to get lost within the pages of a beautiful novel. Four years ago, I read The Children’s House by Alice Nelson, such an exquisite novel that I absolutely adored. Here now, is her latest release, Faithless, one that I actually bought based on the cover and only realised once I got home that it had been written by THAT Alice Nelson, the one whose work I adore, and it bypassed the tbr shelf and went straight to the table beside my reading chair. I am disappointed though that this novel has not received much pre-release (or post-release) publicity. Until I saw it on the shelves at Big W, I hadn’t even heard a whisper about it, nor have I seen anything since. The cover is of course attention grabbing, with the trend of the fed-up woman depicted, but this story is very different to what we’ve come to expect from the novels these covers grace. There is no humour, this is character driven literary fiction, a cascade of introspection that meanders through the decades in a reflective and non-linear fashion. My favourite sort of literary fiction.

“I had always conceived myself as vastly different to my mother, but I began to wonder whether we were so far apart, after all. Stupefied by a hope that would never be realised. How easily I too had accepted a lesser life. All these women waiting. My mother, wasting so many years of her life believing my father would leave Delia. Delia herself, waiting for my father to reform himself and give up my mother.”

Cressida is the child of a relationship that was a long-term affair, and from the age of eighteen, she too becomes ‘the other woman’. I’m generally not a fan of stories about women who have affairs with married men, and yet, I found myself completely drawn into Cressida’s story, and also drawn to her. The narrative is written in the style where Cressida is telling her story to Max, her lover, who has recently passed away. She has fled to the coastal village where he lived with his wife and daughter, grieving, reminiscing, accompanied by a seven year old girl named Flora, who is traumatised and connected to Cressida in a way that we become privy to only as the story progresses. This is Cressida’s second loss inside a year, with her husband Leo passing after a long battle with illness twelve months previous. In between the reminiscing, we witness Cressida’s struggles with Flora, a child who has suffered significantly in unknown ways. These sections are raw and heartfelt, you can feel Cressida’s love for Flora, her attempts to put the little girl at ease and offer her comfort, while swallowing down immense guilt for abandoning her and not knowing what she has been subjected to in the intervening years.

“We forgive everything of a lover, Michael Ondaatje writes. We forgive selfishness, desire, guile – as long as we are the motive for it. But can we forgive these things of ourselves? Deceit, disloyalty, slyness. How fluently I learned to lie, Max, how easily lie after lie spilled out of my lips as if I had mastered a foreign language, or a complicated piano concerto. How easily, in the end, we let go of the things we once held as truths about ourselves. But perhaps we never move past who we essentially are. It’s a kind of wishfulness to imagine that somehow at our cores we are better people than those we turn out to be. That we are merely bent sideways by the burden of our circumstances. Perhaps our childhoods bred us for duplicity, for secrets, perhaps it is something that trickled down to our very essences.”

As much as this is a love story, it is also a story about literature, writing it, reading it, quoting it, living by it. A book about books, if you like. I’m always drawn in by that. Cressida is a writer, so too is Max, this forms the basis of their initial attraction. But they are also readers and that forms a basis of connection between them as well, a shared basis of communication whereby they speak and write to each other in poetry and passages from novels. Even with Flora, there is a literary connection between her and Cressida, a story book she remembers from her early childhood that Cressida used to read to her, and this shared literary memory becomes a building block for their tentative relationship. Indeed, by the end of the novel, we see that the greatest love story of Cressida’s life is still to come, that between her and Flora.

I fell in love with Alice Nelson’s writing in The Children’s House and my adoration bears no abating with Faithless. She is one of my favourite authors, a writer of such piercingly beautiful prose with a depth of honesty and raw feeling that is all too rare. If you are looking for a novel to get lost in, then Faithless needs to go onto your reading pile. Highly recommended for lovers of literature, love stories, and literary fiction.

Book 12 in my 22 in 2022 challenge.

Book Review: Salt and Skin by Eliza Henry-Jones

About the Book:

Grief-stricken and on the verge of a breakdown, Luda Managan and her two teenaged children try to make a home for themselves on a collection of harsh and haunted Scottish islands. 
 
Luda, a photographer, is mesmerised by the extraordinary magic of the islands and soon finds herself condemned by the local community after publishing images documenting the death of a local child. Alienated, Luda turns her attention to the records from the 17th century island witch-hunts and the fragmented life stories of the executed women. Min, restless and strong, tries to fill up the space in their family left by her father. She soon finds comfort in the depths of the icy North Sea and in an unlikely friendship with the elderly and irreverent local ‘witch’. The only thing that beautiful and gifted Darcy cares about is getting marks high enough for entry into university – one very, very far away from his mother. 
 
Until he meets the wild foundling, Theo. 
 
When a tragic accident unleashes ghosts and the echoes of long-ago violence and betrayal into their lives, the Managans are forced to confront the ways that history both hinders us and sets us free. 
 
Drawing on records of the witch trials and folk tales of the northern isles, Salt and Skin is full of tenderness, magic and yearning. It’s a meditation on the absence of women’s voices and stories in history, and the unexpected ways that sites of long-ago trauma continue to haunt the living.

Published by Ultimo Press

Released August 2022

My Thoughts:

Salt and Skin, the latest novel by Eliza Henry-Jones, is a triumph. A delicate balance of fury and tenderness, a vision of raw pain and passion. I am a huge fan of Eliza’s work and have read all her previous novels to date, so I already knew the extent of her talent, yet, even I felt blown away by this one. The way she writes, what she does with words, I can’t even begin to articulate the aching beauty of her prose. She makes you feel so intensely, everything about everyone all at once. She is such a unique talent.

Salt and Skin is predominantly a novel about grief and the deep complexities of the human soul. It’s also a novel of love, of regret, of hope, of history, of women, of prejudice, of resistance. I didn’t feel that any one character was the main character within this novel, but rather, the place was the main character, and all those who inhabited it had an equal weigh in upon the narrative. I was deeply affected by the connection between Darcy and Theo, captivated by Min’s strength, devastated by Luda’s destiny.

I loved the paranormal undercurrent within this novel, the way in which history informed the present, the unexplained woven tightly into the narrative. Climate change is the driving force behind this story, the extremes of weather we are facing and the global consequences of continued resistance to the acceptance that the planet is changing, places are becoming uninhabitable. This side of the story was deeply affecting and powerful in its intent.

Salt and Skin is, and will remain, one of my top reads for this year. It is nothing short of magnificent. Highly recommended to all readers.

Book 11 in my 22 in 2022 challenge.

The Week That Was…

Joke of the week:

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Life:

Put your kids in sport, they said…it will be fun, they said…rugby league knee blow out. We’ll know more about the extent of the damage and treatment next week.

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What Zeus has been doing:

In his happy place, driving and beach play with his humans. What more could a dog want?

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What I’ve been reading:

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Until next week…

Book Recommendation: The Making of Her by Bernadette Jiwa

About the Book:

Dublin 1966. When Joan Quinn, a factory girl from the Cranmore Estate, marries Martin Egan, it looks like her dreams have come true. But all is not as it seems.

Joan lives in the shadow of a secret – the couple’s decision to give up their first daughter for adoption only months before.

For the next three decades, Joan’s marriage and her relationship with her second child Carmel suffer as a consequence.

Then one day in 1996, a letter arrives from their eldest daughter. Emma needs her birth parents’ help; it’s a matter of life and death. And the fragile facade of Joan’s life finally begins to crack.

The Making of Her is a page-turning mother-daughter love story, spanning the 1960s to 1990s, charting one woman’s journey to escape the legacy of the society that shaped her.

Published by Penguin Random House Australia

Released 31st May 2022

My Thoughts:

The Making of Her ticked all the boxes for me. Set in Ireland; a character driven narrative; social and cultural norms of the place and time woven tightly into the story; and a good solid ending that doesn’t necessarily wrap everything up in a neat bow, yet still leaves you feeling satisfied. This is a love story between a mother and her daughters, heart-breaking and uplifting at the same time. I absolutely adored it. Highly recommended.

Book 10 in my 22 in 2022 challenge.

Book Review: The Night Ship by Jess Kidd

About the Book:

ONE SHIPWRECK.

TWO MISFITS.

THREE CENTURIES APART.

1629. Embarking on a journey in search of her father, a young girl called Mayken boards the Batavia, the most impressive sea vessel of the age. During the long voyage, this curious and resourceful child must find her place in the ship’s stratified world. She soon uncovers shadowy secrets above and below deck and as tensions spiral, the fate of the ship and all on board becomes increasingly uncertain.

1989. Gil, a boy mourning the death of his mother, is placed in the care of his cranky grandfather. Their home is a shack on a tiny fishing island off the West Australian coast, notable only for its reefs and wrecked boats. This is no place for a boy struggling with a dark past, and Gil’s actions soon get him noticed by the wrong people.

The Night Ship is an enthralling tale of human brutality, fate and friendship – and of two children, hundreds of years apart, whose destinies are inextricably bound together.

Published by Penguin Random House Australia – Viking

Released 5th July 2022

My Thoughts:

There is far more to this novel than what it at first seems. I will confess from the outset though that I found it rather slow for the first two thirds and it wasn’t until I got to a particular part, at about the 250 page mark, whereby there was a moment of supernatural connection between our two protagonists, hundreds of years apart, that I felt myself shift gears with this novel and become far more invested in it than I had been to that point. It was at this point of connection that many other things began to align, and I could see what the author had set out to achieve with this novel, and suffice to say, as I am not going to share any spoilers, her vision was very clever and imaginative indeed. As the novel builds to its climax in both eras, we see the threads between the dual narrative tighten further and further in a blinding symmetry that was at times breathtaking.

The story revolves around the journey and subsequent shipwrecking of the Batavia. The story will be new to some, familiar to others, either way, the way Jess Kidd writes of the events following the shipwreck is both stunning and horrific. This is a story of monsters, but not the imagined kind, although they do make an appearance, but in a symbolic manner that informs the entire theme of the story within both eras. The monsters front and centre in The Night Ship are of the human variety, the kind that have sunk out of their own humanity, who are willing to shed their human skin for greed and survival. That’s the real horror story embedded within this novel, and that’s the one that had me reeling and unable to put the novel down for the last 150 pages.

“Her nightmares are real, not some child-scaring tale.”

The Night Ship is my first read of Jess Kidd, it certainly won’t be my last. There were aspects I struggled with, as mentioned, the earlier pacing and certain parts of the child narration – just a matter of personal taste – but overall, this is a thrilling novel that I would highly recommend.

Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.

A Month of Reading: July

A very slow month of reading for July, only six books read! Five were review books and one was for my 22 in 2022 challenge. One was a #dnf, so really, I’ve only read five books.

22 in 2022:

#DNF:

Review books:

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Until next month, good reading!

The Week That Was…

What I’m loving on socials right now:

There are heaps of these getting around and some are quite funny. These two are my favourites, perfectly me on both counts!

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What Zeus has been up to:

Speaks for itself, really. But for some reason, someone *Zeus* has recently decided to sit on shrubs. Not happy. He’s snapped a lot of the branches on what was a beautifully lush Strawberry Shortcake. Thank goodness for teenage sons who have friends who leave traffic cones at your house (the less said about that, the better, but for the time being, repurposing!).

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What I’ve been watching:

Loved this! Yes, it was slow for the first half, but that’s my favourite sort of drama, with the foundations being laid down and the slow build. The cast was incredible. Crying my way through the last season of this. It’s so good to see all the story threads from the previous five seasons coming together. It’s such a cleverly written show. Have been meaning to for ages and now I finally am. Hooked already.

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Mordy Moments:

I don’t talk about my little parrot much here on the blog, but over on Facebook he gets a bit more of the limelight. I’m mindful that a lot of people are against caged birds, I am actually not a fan myself, but Mordy is a special case that resulted in me changing for the situation we found ourselves in. We’ve had him for three years now, having rescued him from neglectful owners when he was a baby. He was quite traumatised at the beginning and couldn’t tolerate even the sight of hands from too much rough grabbing and a horrific home butchering job at clipping his wings. He’s come a long way with gentle care and consideration of his fears. He’s very attached to me and has increasingly become more bold in asking for pats and attention, so, my eldest son and I thought it was about time he had a chance at roaming free in a closed room (for safety, he has huge wings now and no flight sense). We hung out for a while together and he was neither scared nor frantic, just curious and friendly. I’m so happy that we have him and his life is now one that he enjoys. He’s certainly enriched my life!

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What I’ve been reading:

This one is taking me a lot longer than I’d like. I’m on the fence but will reserve judgement until the end. I think I might just not be a fan of ship settings. Anyway, we’ll see how it pans out.

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Until next week…