Tuesday 21 December 2010

Review of Swimming by Enza Gandolfo

Kate Wilks is a swimmer; she moves far more easily in the water than she does on land, and she has been swimming all her life. The symbol of water is all through this first novel by Enza Gandolfo, and makes for a flowing feel, the words sometimes drifting, sometimes whirlpooling, sometimes rushing, crashing, or still.

But Kate, now near sixty, meets up with her ex-husband, the sculptor Tom, at a photography exhibition. Kate is the subject of one of the photographs, naked and standing in the sea; the photographer is her best friend Lynne’s daughter, Tess, both mother and daughter are very important in Kate’s life. But Tom unexpectedly asks her ‘Do you think…we might have stayed together if we’d had children?’ (11).

And this question becomes the impetus for Kate to go back into her memories of trying to have a baby. She digs out an unfinished manuscript called ‘Writing Sarah’, a collection of fragments and chapters that describes her thoughts and feelings as she fell pregnant, only to miscarry each time. The core of the book is Kate’s exploration of what it means to be childless, to want a baby so badly that you give her a name and imagine her so clearly that she almost becomes real. Almost, but not quite.

Go to TEXT to continue reading.

Thursday 2 December 2010

Favourite books read in 2010

These are not necessarily published this year, but the ones I read and enjoyed, in no particular order:

1. Makers by Cory Doctorow
2. Red Dust Road by Jackie Kay
3. The Shaking Woman: A history of my nerves by Siri Hustvedt
4. Killing Time: One man's race to stop an execution by David Day
5. The City and the City by China Mieville
6. The Making of Mr Gray's Anatomy: Bodies, Books, Fortune, Fame by Ruth Richardson
7. Ten Hail Marys by Kate Howarth
8. The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
9. The Lucy Family Alphabet by Judith Lucy
10. Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals by Christopher Payne
11. Brief Lives: Gustave Flaubert by Andrew Brown
12. Baba Yaga Laid An Egg by Dubravka Ugresic
13. Otherland by Maria Tumarkin
14. How We Die by Sherwin B Nuland

and one I'm still reading

15. 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley

and three I really liked

16. The Possessed: Aventures with Russian books and the people who read them by Elif Batuman
17. A Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin
18. Mr Rosenblum's List by Natasha Solomons

If I had to choose, I'd go for The City and the City as my favourite fiction for the year, and 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel tied with The Making of Mr Gray's Anatomy for non-fiction.

Wednesday 10 November 2010

Review of Speaking Volumes by Ramona Koval

Ramona Koval appeared at this year’s Brisbane Writers Festival, being interviewed, along with Anna Krien, by Stephen Romei. She discussed a number of interviews included in Speaking Volumes, making mention, amongst others, of Harold Pinter and Joyce Carol Oates, for quite different reasons. She makes a fascinating interviewee, so open to whatever is asked her, and willing to sing as well – in Yiddish! Although there is no singing mentioned in the book, Koval notes that she and Saul Bellow spoke some Yiddish after their interview ended.

This collection of her interviews with writers contains a large proportion of the ones included in an earlier book, Tasting Life Twice: Conversations with Remarkable Writers, with some updates. The difference is that six of the writers in the 2005 book are not included in the later one, but are replaced by interviews with Margaret Drabble, André Brink, John Banville, Jeanette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi, Anne Enright, John le Carré and Barry Lopez.

Continued here at Transnational Literature.

Saturday 30 October 2010

NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month is about to start. I did participate in this one year, and did get over 50 000 words written, much to my utter surprise. That draft novel sits somewhere on my computer, and somewhere in print form, along with a lot of other stories that never again see daylight. However, it was a good 'practice' novel draft, and writing it so quickly helped me see how difficult it is to develop characters and plot in a meaningful and interesting way. I don't really think I have a (publishable) novel in me, but it was a worthwhile exercise.

I don't want to do it this year, because I actually want to write a 10 000 word essay instead. NaEssWriMo?

Wednesday 27 October 2010

Review of Myths About Suicide by Thomas Joiner

Thomas Joiner's Myths about Suicide is a powerful and important book that aims to attack the stigma around suicide, to 'expose myths' and 'shatter misunderstandings' (10). In it he continues on from his first (Why People Die By Suicide, 2005) but writes with clearer expression and less unnecessary repetition, making for a stronger book and one that better succeeds in its aims.

He divides his book into three main sections after an introduction: 'The Suicidal Mind', 'Suicidal Behavior', and 'Causes, Consequences, and Subpopulations'. There are eighteen myths he deals with throughout these chapters, with discussions of other misunderstood issues included (for example, 'slow suicide', genetics, hospitalization).

As in his first book, he emphasizes the factors that must be present for a person to consider suicide. These are perceived burdensomeness (so the person believes they would benefit others more by being dead than alive), sense of low belongingness (alienation from their community), and loss of the fear of pain and death (such as by habituation to pain, hard circumstances and dangerous situations). He applies these factors to examples of cases, making them clear and understandable.

Review continued at Metapsychology Online Reviews.

Sunday 24 October 2010

Review of Becoming A Doctor edited by Lee Gutkind

There is a theme through these nineteen pieces by doctors and one psychologist, that of remembering the humanity of both doctors and patients. Medical students are often taught that they should keep emotionally distant from their patients, that it will help with their treatment of them, and also with their own self-preservation. But to carry this to the extreme, or to carry it to every single patient regardless of the circumstances, is that appropriate? Or even possible? What sort of person could not get involved, to some degree, with a dying patient they have cared for?

Review continued at Metapsychology Online Reviews.

Saturday 11 September 2010

The Art and the imagination:Explorations in Creative Writing by Kevin Brophy

Kevin Brophy has written two books about creative writing, Creativity: Psychoanalysis, Surrealism and Creative Writing (1998) and this one, Explorations in Creative Writing. Both of these explore areas of creativity and writing that make them decidedly different from most other books on the subject: they are not how-to books, not strictly 'inspirational', nor are they strictly 'scholarly' approaches to literature. They are truly explorations of the vastness and intimacy of creative writing, with particular emphasis on the imagination and surrealism.


Explorations is divided into three main sections: Reading Writing, Making Writing and Talking Writing. Brophy explores Kafka's 'Metamorphosis', the prose poem, gender issues, sentence-thinking, the novelisation of the poem. He gives us samples of his own short stories and poems, as well as those of others, including an excerpt of the strange but moving 'Sheep-Child' of James Dickey.


In my ignorance of this poet and this poem in particular, I sought out the complete verse, and listened to a recording of Dickey reading it. One wondrous thing that books can do is to lead you to other books and authors, and I was completely seduced by this poem I had never heard of before. Brophy introduces this piece in the context of metamorphosis and Kafka's famous story.


Brophy informs the reader in his introduction that this is a book about 'how writing gets done', and also how important reading is to a writer. He continues his references to the personal, with illustrative, and unsentimental, stories of his children and family life, particularly the birth of his first child, his daughter Sophie, in the first chapter. The openness and vulnerability of his writing here is appealing, and relevant to the process of writing in surprising ways. He writes that a 'parent is like an author whose characters have got riotously out of control - but in ways that can make the author see, briefly, what he or she is' (22).

Continued at the now-archived dotlit site.

Sunday 5 September 2010

Review of The Making of Mr Gray's Anatomy by Ruth Richardson

Art and the body

Mr Gray’s Anatomy inevitably reminded me of working as a student in the anatomy lab at university and the smell of formalin used to preserve the bodies. It permeated your white lab coat and remained in your nostrils. The bodies themselves were greyish and shrunken, and kept under plastic sheets on steel tables. Some students took to dissection with aplomb, entering competitions with skilful displays of the brachial plexus or the facial nerve. One or two found the sight of the female breast on a cadaver so disturbing they had to leave the room. Others, like me, just tried to keep up.

Read the rest at M/C Reviews 'words'.

Friday 20 August 2010

Review of Baba Yaga Laid An Egg

When you read Dubravka UgreÅ¡ić, be prepared to go where you’ve not been before.

Ugrešić was born in what used to be Yugoslavia. When the war began in 1991 she fiercely opposed it and was severely criticised as a result. As her startlingly designed website states:

She started to write critically about nationalism (both Croatian and Serbian), the stupidity and criminality of war, and soon became a target of the nationalistically charged media, officials, politicians, fellow writers and anonymous citizens. She was proclaimed a “traitor”, a “public enemy” and a “witch”, ostracized and exposed to harsh and persistent media harassment. She left Croatia in 1993.

Her writings include several novels, short stories, children’s books, essays and critical work, and she was a literary scholar with a particular interest in the Russian avant-garde. Now she lives in Amsterdam, and lectures occasionally overseas.

Review continues at M/C Reviews 'words'.

Wednesday 21 July 2010

Review of The Yipping Tiger by Perminder Sachdev

There are many popular books on neurology, neuroscience and psychiatry, including those by the well known neurologist Oliver Sacks, and the wildly successful title The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge. When he visited Australia recently, Doidge's sessions at writers' festivals were filled to capacity, and it was not difficult to see why: his own speaking style was professional but warm, he could answer any question, and he was offering the hope of our brains being more 'plastic' than we thought, and able to heal from stroke and injury.

Continued at Metapsychology Online Reviews.

Review of Rape: Sex, Violence, History by Joanna Bourke

I read this impressive and intensively researched book from the point of view of an educated general reader, a woman and a feminist, but not an expert on rape or sex crimes in general. It is highly controlled, well argued and scholarly, but with little jargon, and she does occasionally interject her own feelings. In fact, she states in the preface that her reason for writing the book was fear, followed by anger at a statistic: 'I read a Home Office report that revealed that only 5 per cent of rapes reported to the police in the UK ever end in a conviction' (vii). This anger does not drive the text, but it indicates the passion that ignited the task, and the book is better because of it. And each section has an epigraph, verses from Cecil Day Lewis' poem 'Sex-Crime', which balances the facts with poetic representation of the injustice of rape and its aftermath.

Continued at Metapsychology Online Reviews.

Sunday 30 May 2010

Review of Source by Janine Burke

This handsome-looking book, with the Ansel Adams photograph on the dustjacket, attracted me, although I paused at the ‘healing’ in the subtitle. It sounded a little flaky, and I didn’t acquaint nature with the healing of any of the artists and writers listed. Some of them did not seem to be very ‘healed’ by anything, such as Jackson Pollock, Ernest Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf. But I was prepared to be convinced that I was wrong.



I was already reasonably acquainted, as most readers would be, with some of these artists and writers, who have been researched and written about by many people before Burke. So I thought that this might be a synthesis of Burke’s own observations from her travels to the territory of each of these great creators, and in a way it is. The imprecise tone in the Introduction and the first chapter, with its decidely banal feel, took me aback, though. ‘Creativity is a place’? ‘The artistic process itself is a journey’? Was it really going to be flaky all the way through?

Review continued at M/C Reviews 'words'.

Thursday 13 May 2010

Review of The Value of Nothing by Raj Patel

It was reported recently that Raj Patel had been declared a Messiah by a religious organisation. Apparently, this was misleading, as the group did not name him specifically. Patel's response was a good-humoured, slightly embarrassed, denial and a statement that we shouldn't be relying on Messiahs of any sort to tell us what to do anyway.



Patel is a writer, activist and academic who has both worked for the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation, and protested against them, as described on his website. Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System was his first book, clear and convincing in its arguments as to why so many people are obese and so many are starving, and why we need to rethink food production. Patel continues to emphasise in The Value of Nothing the need for us to think beyond being mere consumers if we are to change the inequities in our system, to reinvigorate democracy everywhere and at every level, and to understand how power inequalities cause poverty and suffering throughout the world.


Review continued at M/C Reviews 'words'.

Monday 12 April 2010

Review of Smile or Die by Barbara Ehrenreich

The Secret, a book by a former television producer called Rhonda Byrne, professes to contain all that you need to know to be healthy, wealthy and happy, distilled from the wisdom of many thinkers over the ages. The essence of this secret is that if you believe hard enough that money, health or love will come your way, it will. Send your wants out into the universe, and the universe will send you the goods back.

It’s this type of positive or magical thinking that Barbara Ehrenreich criticises in her book Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World. She generally argues her case convincingly, using a good balance of the personal and research material. Some of it is eye-opening, laughable, infuriating.

If you are familiar with the author’s work, you will know that she is a prolific writer about social, cultural and political issues, including women’s rights. Her previous books have included Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage USA and Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. And in an interesting contrast to this current title, she has also written about collective joy, what she feels we really should be aiming for in life, rather than the pale, manufactured imitation represented by positive thinking.

Ehrenreich’s book has eight chapters, beginning with her own experience of breast cancer and the ‘pink ribbon culture’ she encountered, through business and finance, employment, religion and ‘the science of happiness’. She uses humour judiciously, stepping into satire when required.

Continued at M/C Reviews 'words'.

Tuesday 16 March 2010

'Walking in our shoes' - Asylum by Christopher Payne

If my heart could speak,
I’m sure it would say, I wish I were
someplace else today.
Among these books, a great amount of knowledge there must be,
but what good is knowledge where others carry the keys. (201)


These lines are from a poem written by an unnamed (probably unknown) patient on the wall of a basement in Augusta State Hospital in Maine. The first line in blue, the rest in red, the words are large and neat with idiosyncratically placed capitals. Christopher Payne has placed this photograph at the end of the main section of his images in Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals, just before his own afterword. It’s like the final statement on the treatment of mental illness, a combination of acknowledgement that things have improved, but that much remains to be done. Payne’s enabled one of the former patients to have their say, albeit indirectly, after both he, his camera, and Oliver Sacks have spoken for them.



This is a truly beautiful and haunting book, Payne’s skill with the camera evident in nearly 200 pages of photographs of asylums, showing their massive exteriors and some more intimate interior spaces, along with the farms, dairies, gazebos and cemeteries of their surroundings. He shows the extent to which American society wished to provide ‘enlightened’ care for its mentally ill population. Nearly every state had at least one asylum, and by 1948, there were 539 000 patients in these institutions (13).

Continued at M/C Reviews.

Saturday 27 February 2010

Review of The Good Doctors by John Dittmer

In the light of current debates over health care, this book provides some sobering and relevant insight. Towards the end of his thorough and balanced history of the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR), John Dittmer provides a chapter entitled ‘Health Care Is a Human Right’. It has an epigraph from Aristotle:

If we believe that men have any personal rights at all as human beings, they have an absolute moral right to such measure of good health as society, and society alone, is able to give them. (228)

This chapter details the setting up in 1967 of a community health center, called the Tufts-Delta Health Center, in Bolivar County, Mississippi. It offered free clinical health services to the mainly black community and eventually ‘prescriptions for food’ to treat the malnutrition that was shockingly widespread. The staff ‘attacked the root causes of poor health and deprivation’ (233), organizing sanitation and providing education, with the involvement of the residents a crucial component. It served as a model for the development of other health centers.

Dittmer then leads into a discussion of the efforts by many in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Senator Edward Kennedy and the MCHR, to put forward plans for a national health program, noting that the ‘United States was the only industrial country without a national health program covering all of its citizens’ (236). Those efforts were thwarted by the American Medical Association (AMA), and pharmaceutical and insurance corporations, who all condemned the non-profit approach to medicine, too much government intervention in health care, and the view that health care was a right not a privilege. As there was no consensus as to what sort of plan should be implemented, the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon’s trip to China took attention away from the issue, and there was no consumer push for action, nothing was done. President Clinton tried it again in the 1990s, and was defeated. Now the administration of Barack Obama is feeling the same resistance.

Continued at Metapsychology Online Reviews.

Monday 15 February 2010

Spinning

My partner and I went to the Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art on the weekend, for the second time. There will be at least two more visits, because it's so beautiful and thought-provoking and creative, and because we find it impossible to see everything in one visit. Our brains become full and our lower limbs become sore. We need to go away and think about what we've seen, talk about the images and ideas, read the catalogue, go back again.

Hiraki Sawa. O 2009. Spinning objects, physical and on films, placed carefully around a large space. Three huge screens, showing images of vastness and detail: the moon's surface, the Central Australian desert, the interior of an abandoned house. Birds fly slowly and serenely across the sky, and across the wallpaper. Books with French titles, a Hitchcockian stain on a ceiling: for some reason I found my eyes wandering back to the interior more frequently than staying outdoors. I wondered who had lived there, and whether they missed what they had left behind. Were those books never to be opened again?

Sawa: 'Coming full circle is movement without displacement. In that time, you simply are, and all change is in the looking'. (APT 6 Catalogue)

Tuesday 9 February 2010

Complexities - A History of the 'Unfortunate Experiment' at National Women's Hospital by Linda Bryder

Reviewed by Sue Bond



In 1987 I spent a month in Auckland as a student at the North Shore hospital. A journalist friend drew my attention to an article in Metro magazine of earlier that year that had revealed a scandalous experiment at the National Women’s Hospital, concerning women with cervical cancer. So when I saw Linda Bryder’s A History of the ‘Unfortunate Experiment’ at National Women’s Hospital, I was curious to remind myself of this scandal, and perhaps learn the whole story.




Two women, journalist and feminist activist Sandra Coney and sociologist Phillida Bunkle, wrote the 1987 article called ‘An Unfortunate Experiment at National Women’s’ that alleged Dr Herbert Green, an obstetrician and gynaecologist, had withheld conventional treatment from women with abnormal cells in their cervix (carcinoma in situ or cervical dysplasia) to study the course of the disease. A proportion of these women went on to develop cervical cancer, and some of those died. As a result of this article, the Labour Government of the time set up an Inquiry, lead by Judge Silvia Cartwright, which produced a report in July 1988 that concluded the medical profession had failed patients. Many recommendations of Cartwright were implemented, including national screening and patient advocacy.



Linda Bryder is a medical historian, and was researching the history of the National Women’s Hospital (NWH) when she realised that the cervical ‘experiment’ needed a book of its own. What she has produced is methodical, detailed, thoroughly researched and scholarly, if a little dry at times. It is probably more for academics and medical professionals than the general reader, though the lessons she draws from her research are important for society as a whole. As she states in her introductory chapter, the ‘examination of the Cartwright Inquiry provides a lens through which to explore the relationship between women’s bodies, technology and medicine in the late twentieth century’ (6). I think it also reveals the disjunct between the medical community and the public when it comes to understanding health and disease, and that the media often fails to be the bridge between the two.

Go to M/C Reviews: Culture and the Media to continue reading...