Thoughts on Save Me the Waltz, Phantoms in the Brain and How the Light Gets In

Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald

Zelda Fitzgerald is one of those endlessly intriguing figures who seems like a character herself – if she hadn’t existed, someone would have made her up.  Save Me the Waltz, the only novel she ever published and something of a roman à clef, gives us a beautiful glimpse into her life, from growing up in Alabama, to falling in love with a talented man on the brink of fame, to her desperate quest to become a professional ballerina.

If I have my facts right and I’m not just caught up in literary myth, I believe she wrote it as a kind of therapy while she was staying in a mental institution. and apparently old Scott threw a bit of a tantrum over it. Which isn’t all that surprising- the husband character, David Knight, who we can assume is based on him, is talented and charming but also pretty arrogant, dismissive and vaguely misogynistic (although to be fair, this is the 1920s we’re talking about.) More to the point, although Alabama and David start out deliriously in love, throughout the novel their relationship deteriorates into one that is largely silent, strained and disconnected. (more…)

Because it’s a new year and I can’t resist a best-of-2011 post, and because someone asked me to recommend my favourite book from my list of what I read last year, and because choosing a favourite book is a bit like choosing a favourite song, I thought I’d choose nine. This is in no particular order, and a bit of a random selection anyway… but here are some books you should most definitely read if you haven’t already…

A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro

This haunting, poignant novella weaves together two stories that become more and more blurred as they progress. Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living in England, is dealing with the recent suicide of her daughter. Her memories take her back to a summer in Nagasaki where she forged a strange friendship with a woman named Sachiko and her odd and withdrawn young daughter.

A lot is left unspoken, and the sense that things aren’t quite as they seem, that Etsuko’s narration might not be completely reliable, creeps up on you quietly. This was Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel and it shares the melancholy, disturbing feel of the more popular Never Let Me Go, but in my opinion, is perhaps even more chilling and thought-provoking. (more…)

Books by women I read this year

Given all the fascinating debate that has been going on this year about gender in the literary world (if you’re not up to speed, Sophie Cunningham’s essay in Kill Your Darlings issue 6 is pretty great), I thought I’d do a little tally of how many of the books I read this year were by women.

It’s not necessarily an accurate reflection of my entire reading life – I was consciously trying to read more female writing, both because of all the debate and for a now-aborted Masters thesis about female coming of age and female experiences of love and madness – and admittedly most of what I read in the newspaper, The New Yorker etc would have been by men – but still, here’s the verdict: of the 51 books I read this year, 35 were by women. That comes to 69%, which I think is pretty healthy!

Books by Australian women I read this year

But when I look at books by Australian women… it suddenly goes down to 8 books. And that’s only because I’m claiming MJ Hyland as an Australian writer, which I’m not even sure she identifies herself as. Look, I’m not the most patriotic of sorts and we all know how much I long to be in New York, but I do think it’s important that I try to support and engage with the Australian literary scene a bit more, and especially the female presence within it. So, inspired by Ms Angela Meyer of Literary Minded, I’m committing myself to the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012. (more…)

November was a good month, in a lot of ways. There was my first issue of Monument. There were the first lot of warm and sunny days after an endless winter. There were some fun parties, and there was a cute boy or two. And there were the novels I read. Here’s what my month looked like in books…

Cargo by Jessica Au

The slow, sleepy setting of this book is the perfect backdrop for three characters each lost in their own way. The technique of three intertwining stories is effective, and I was impressed with the way Au uses such subtle detail and minimal action to explore such real and relatable feelings.  Gillian’s story is the one that affected me the most. I guess it’s just so easy to relate to that hopeless feeling of young love, or maybe more accurately, young need. She knows Alex is using her and treating her badly, but she’s convinced herself that she’s in love with him anyway, that she needs him desperately. I found her love more believable and more heartwrenching than Frankie’s equally hopeless love for the older deckhand from her father’s boat. Having said that, I also deeply felt Frankie’s yearning for escape, her desire to have a bigger and better life out there in a wider world.

Au’s writing is beautifully understated, with so many sentences that made me stop and reread them to admire the so utterly accurate image they created.  I always feel so horribly jealous when someone so young (and particularly in Au’s case, someone who sort of runs in the same circles, with Melbourne’s young lit scene being the way it is) writes something so good and gets it published, and I definitely feel that way with Cargo. But I also feel very inspired, and I hope that I can learn from it. (more…)