By Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Translations
Jumaana Abdu
Penguin, $34.99
From the Hejira onwards, the flight from oppression towards authenticity, freedom and spiritual connection has held profound significance in Islamic thought and culture. For the indomitable Aliyah Asfoor, a severing of bonds accompanies her personal flight, together with her nine-year-old daughter Sakina – both now “uncitizens”, to Aliyah’s mind. Their escape to Shepherd’s Mill in rural NSW becomes a spiritual fugue, and a quest to establish a genuine sense of community, as much as a retreat from grief and disaster. Jumaana Abdu pulls off something remarkable in this novel. Without shying from darkness, the storytelling avoids the deadening, even dehumanising potential that can attend less inspired and emotionally intelligent trauma narratives or stories involving the complications of identity politics. Translations is clearly the creation of that rarest thing in Australian literature – an original mind – and Adbu’s enigmatic, delicate and robust storytelling displays literary talent every bit as critically engaged and eloquent as Nam Le’s.
There’s Nothing Wrong with Her
Kate Weinberg
Bloomsbury, $29.99
After recovering sufficiently from long COVID to write, Kate Weinberg wanted to explore the limbo of debilitating chronic illness – like chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia or long COVID – which remains mysterious to medicine and cannot be easily diagnosed, treated or cured. Successful podcast producer Vita has only her pet goldfish (named Whitney Houston) for company. Struck down weeks after moving in with her new boyfriend Max, a doctor, Vita lies bedridden and enervated. She’s haunted and comforted and exhausted by her few remaining human encounters and guided by the ghost of her own creativity. There’s Nothing Wrong with Her is full of raw, messy, counterintuitive, sometimes funny insights into hidden illness and the failure of narrative – medical, social, even personal – to capture the chaos and uncertainty of living with it. From medical gaslighting to celebrities spinning their trauma on her podcast, it’s also sharp on how we can become imprisoned by inauthentic stories: those imposed upon us, and the ones we imagine for ourselves.
The Temperature
Katerina Gibson
Scribner, $32.99
Author Katerina Gibson won awards for the 2022 short story collection Women I Know. Her debut novel constructs cli-fi through the interior landscapes of six characters in search of a plot. There’s Fi, a green-haired, performative Millennial intern fired for a tweet; Lexi, her climate activist boss, who gets cancelled in the fallout; Sidney, a PhD dropout and poet; Tomas, a working-class single dad; Govinda, a non-binary artist in crisis and Henry, a Vietnam veteran and climate denier. Gibson sort of wrestles her literary brilliance into a series of half-nelsons, trying to subdue the novelistic form rather than dance with it. Acute, empathic character sketches and bravura set pieces? Yes, and yes. A narrative vision that’s more than a palimpsest for authorial concerns with how we might live in a burning world? Not so much. Mastery will come, Gibson is too talented a writer to doubt that, and the book scans better if you ignore the awkward skein of plot threads, reading chapters you like as individual stories, each taking the temperature of Australian society as the global thermometer rises.
Two Daughters
Alison Edwards
Atlantic, $32.99
Going to university in Sydney is a big deal for Ava, who was raised by a single dad in poverty, and her horizons expand further when she wins a scholarship to Cambridge. For Laurie, the cloisters of Cambridge were exactly what was expected for her, and she grudgingly accedes to the desires of her own father, a domineering Marxist professor. When they meet on campus, these two young women with very different backgrounds bond over the loss of their mothers. Their university days are formative, with a surprising connection that unites them as their life trajectories diverge once again afterwards. Alison Edwards’ Two Daughters is written in undistinguished prose though it does bring dry wit to commentary on social justice issues, motherhood, and class. It also blends several genres – Bildungsroman, university satire, rags-to-riches romance, the female friendship novel – in ways fans of them might enjoy.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Madrid
Luke Stegemann
Yale University Press, $39.25
Any history of Madrid wouldn’t be complete without at least one observation from Hemingway, who, invoking an essentialist perspective, said it was the “most Spanish of all cities”. Luke Stegemann’s comprehensive history of the city is both “an expression of love” and “an act of recovery” – for though he thinks of Madrid as “a magnificent story waiting to be told”, he says that it has too often been overlooked because of its apparent plainness, among other things. With passion, a genuine turn of phrase, and encyclopaedic knowledge of the place, he traces Madrid from its ancient origins, and the way it mirrors the turbulence of Spanish history, through to the city’s Hausmann-like modernisation in the 20th century and beyond.
Take Flight
Kathy Mexted
NewSouth, $34.99
Kathy Mexted, in this group portrait of contemporary Australian women aviators, reckons that the urge to fly is primal. Whether it’s a universal condition, it’s true of these 10 case studies. Sacha Dench, for example, a paramotor pilot, spent months in extreme conditions, following the path of migratory swans from the Russian tundra to the UK, her story also taking in an awful crash in which a colleague was killed and Dench severely injured. There’s an astrophysicist, a paraglider, a wing-walker and more. A lively account, Mexted often displays a poetic sensibility as in her description of a hot air balloon rising: “As softly as a mother settles her sleeping infant, we are released like its dreams into the gentle dawn.”
No Autographs, Please!
Katherine Wiles
Echo, $34.99
No Autographs, Please! – great title! – could have been sub-titled “The Chorister’s Progress”, for it’s the tale of an opera performer sloughing off dreams of being a diva and embracing a deeply satisfying life in the chorus. Too often, she points out in commendably light, no-nonsense style, the chorus is dismissed as “singing wallpaper”. Wiles, who has been with Opera Australia since 2007, not only corrects this but gives us a fly-on-the-wall appreciation of the chorus itself; the cramped backstage conditions (like a platform in the Tube), gruellingly satisfying schedules, the camaraderie and the costumes that grant her licence to be someone else. This will change the way you look at, and think of, the chorus.
Kosciuszko
Anthony Sharwood
Hachette, $34.99
The mountain, Kosciuszko, looms large in the national imagination, but few know about the Polish freedom fighter after whom it was named by fellow Pole Pawel Strzelecki. And yet, his life, which Sharwood charts in informed, entertaining detail, was remarkable. Born into a minor aristocratic family, Tadeusz fought in the American War of Independence with such distinction that he mixed with Washington and had numerous places named after him in the US (he never visited Australia), before returning home to lead a doomed attempt at Polish independence. Above all, when there are signs the mountain’s name may be changed to an indigenous one, Sharwood emphasises the deep, genuinely held humanity of his subject.
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