Lola Bensky in Aussie Readers

Dec 31, 2012 Tracey rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2013, fiction, australian

I love Brett's writing style it is concise and to the point. I love how this novel jumps backwards and forwards in time but with Brett's skill you always know where you are. I also love how in the first three or four pages so much is subtly revealed about Lola. There is a great deal to like about this book.

We meet Lola as a 19 year old Australian Rock journalist who is in England meeting a whole host of famous people. While this would dazzle most people, Lola takes it all in her stride. She arr ...more

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Oct 06, 2012 Bree T rated it liked it

Shelves: aww2012, arc, australian, family-saga, post-ww2

Lola Bensky has what many would consider a dream job. She’s just 19 years old and she travels through London and America interviewing up and coming rock stars for an Australian publication. It’s the rise of rock n roll and Lola has been chasing down the likes of Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Cher and Mama Cass, talking to them about their music, their lives and their dreams. Mick Jagger makes her a cup of tea and debates word meanings with her, Jimi Hendrix possibly propositions her a Lola Bensky has what many would consider a dream job. She’s just 19 years old and she travels through London and America interviewing up and coming rock stars for an Australian publication. It’s the rise of rock n roll and Lola has been chasing down the likes of Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Cher and Mama Cass, talking to them about their music, their lives and their dreams. Mick Jagger makes her a cup of tea and debates word meanings with her, Jimi Hendrix possibly propositions her and Cher borrows her favourite pair of false eyelashes, with a line of diamontes and never returns them. It’s a charmed life and Lola is told that she should stay in America and keep working as a journalist and not return to Melbourne for a boyfriend that has probably just been sleeping with someone else anyway.

Behind Lola’s fun life travelling the world is a desperately insecure girl who obsesses about her weight. Her parents are survivors of the Holocaust and her mother is fanatical about Lola’s weight, what Lola eats and what Lola doesn’t eat. To her, anything more than terribly skinny meant either German or someone aiding the Germans. Lola is a tall girl, broad and her mother has been trying for years to shift weight off her. Desperately unhappy, guilty that she lived when all of her family perished, Lola’s mother excels at passing on that guilt. She doesn’t know how to be happy, all she knows is the horrific things she saw and experienced at Auschwitz and they colour her every day life in post-war Melbourne and her relationship with Lola.

Lola Bensky moves through Lola’s life as a rock journalist, through her marriage and motherhood and her shift into writing detective novels well into her adult life. Always she is influenced by her mother and her mother’s experiences which causes her to question things, to seek a deeper meaning in everything there is.

I’ve read Lily Brett before and deeply enjoyed her work so when I was offered a review copy of her latest novel, Lola Bensky, I didn’t hesitate to accept. She writes with understanding and sensitivity of what happened in the second world war. This novel borrows heavily from Brett’s real life experiences – her own parents are survivors of the Holocaust and took six months to find each other again after the end of WWII. Lola has grown up with the shadow of what her parents, in particular her mother, experienced, hanging over her, tinging everything she did, said or thought. She was a character that it was easy to soften towards, to feel sorry for – her wistful interviews with rock stars seem to always lead back to a ‘sad topic’ and quite often she berates herself internally for introducing, or perpetuating these sad topics when she’s supposed to be talking about music, or their hopes and dreams. Despite her knack for dampening the topic of conversation, Lola seems to invoke a natural comfort in those that she interviews and it’s quite obvious they rather like her – Mick Jagger makes her tea and talks of being a role model and why he shouldn’t be. Jimi Hendrix invites her several times to come and see him and he remembers her when he sees her months later, in a different country and comes across to talk to her like a friend.

Lola’s mother has instilled in her, an obsession about her weight. Each week it seems, she tries a new diet, each more ridiculous than the last, in an attempt to shed those extra kilos and become the thin daughter her mother seems to long for her to be. Extra weight means something sinister to someone who spent time in a prison death camp and Lola wants to be thin but can’t seem to find the willpower to stick to her diets. It’s a hard life, living on the road, shifting from one festival for the next to interview musicians and she breaks diets before she even starts them. Her weight gains her attention from her mother and I think that for Lola, even negative attention was good attention, from a woman who was hardly ever ‘there’. Physically, she was in the room and in the same house as Lola, but mentally her mother seemed locked away in her memories, lamenting the people she lost. Lola’s mother Renia regales her with horrific tales of Auschwitz, of prisoners being injected with typhus and cholera so they could be studied, of women being forced to submit for German Shepherds, of the experiments to attempt to glue shut women’s wombs. These are all based on things that Lily Brett heard stories of herself growing up and it’s hard to imagine a child being told of these things, or even a teenager that matter, about people that they know now, or about people that would’ve been part of their lives as relatives, had they not been brutally tortured and slaughtered.

Lola Bensky is a novel that seems light when you first pick it up, littered with stories of famous musicians and her interactions with them. Delve below the surface and it’s a story overshadowed by the heinous acts that occurred during the second World War and how they are influencing lives a generation later and half a world away. ...more

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Sep 27, 2012 Magdalena added it

The year is 1967, and young Lola Bensky has arrived in London to interview a series of famous rock stars for Australian magazine Rock-Out. The book opens with Lola and a very gentile Jimi Hendrix chatting about weight and hair curlers, and continues through a series of interviews with superstars like Mick Jagger, Twiggy, and Pete Townshend to name just a few.

There’s something rather compelling about Lola’s character. Perhaps it’s her wide-eyed innocence, which doesn't seem to diminish as she ge ...more

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