While we’re all still talking about Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby, let’s have a look at another reimagining of Fitzgerald’s classic novel.

Creating any kind of adaptation is always a tricky business, but adapting a novel as intensely loved by as many people as F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby seems particularly fraught with danger. Nicki Greenberg’s graphic adaptation of Fitzgerald’s classic story demonstrates the possibility of using the specific qualities of a different medium to re-envision rather than simply recreate a text.  By translating the story into a visual medium, Greenberg captures the emotional essence of the source material and offers the audience a very different reading experience.

Presented as a loving tribute to Fitzgerald’s work, Greenberg focuses her interpretation through a nostalgic and whimsical aesthetic that emphasises the visceral emotion of the text. The Great Gatsby can be interpreted in many different ways, and often it is the more cynical or critical layers that are discussed. Yet filtered through Greenberg’s perspective, it becomes primarily a story about love, yearning and loss. The sepia wash and gentle shadings of light and dark over her thin, delicate linework immediately saturate the novel with a feeling of nostalgia and romance. (more…)

Taylor Swift Speak Now tour, Rod Laver Arena 14 March 2012

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this before, but I love Taylor Swift. It’s all true – I’m a big romantic dork, and I like to play Sparks Fly at full volume and dance around by myself, and lie on the couch brooding to You’re Not Sorry, and sing Mean in my head whenever I feel pissed off at someone.

Taylor Swift is the girl I want to be in a lot of ways. I admire her gutsiness and her passion, and the way she manages to be so nice and lovely and genuine all the time. I like how dramatically she throws herself into love, and how honestly she tells her stories, and how she’s just quietly a tiny little bit of a bitch – but in a classy and hilarious way.

Whatever else you think of her, the girl can put on a show, and seeing her last week at Rod Laver Arena was pretty magical. She appeared in a shimmer of gold, singing Sparks Fly in a spangly flapper dress that glittered gorgeously in the light. With her incredibly pale skin and delicate frame, Taylor Swift always kind of looks like a tiny china doll, but she has a vivacious energy that just fills the whole stage. She just sparkles – even when she’s sharing the space with ballerinas, staircases, gazebos, trees, snowflakes wedding dresses, balconies, arched bridges and fireworks. (more…)

The complexities of sibling relationships and the bittersweet passage of time are at the heart of this charming little gem of a novella. Short, meandering, and told with Anna Gavalda’s characteristic lightness of touch, Breaking Away has a warmth and hilarity that belies the depth of emotion simmering beneath the surface. This is the latest of Gavalda’s works to be translated into English, and it can be easily devoured in one sitting – from the very first paragraph, the greater challenge would be to put it down.

Most of the story takes place during a car trip. Garance, her sister Lola, their brother Simon and his wife Carine are driving out of Paris to a cousin’s wedding in the country. Garance has the hilariously acerbic wit that makes many of Gavalda’s heroines (particularly those of her short fiction) so memorable, and she delights in winding up the already overwound Carine. But when she’s not busy mocking her sister-in-law, her thoughts meander throughout the past, reminiscing about her siblings, the childhood they shared and the paths their lives have taken. (more…)

Like a lot of people, I’m fascinated by the brain. I love reading about neuroscience and psychiatry, but I’ve never formally studied science beyond year 10 in high school – so it’s always exciting to find a book that covers interesting aspects of the field in a way that is accessible and engaging to someone like me.

In Phantoms in the Brain, neuroscientist VS Ramachandran (with the help of writer Sandra Blakeslee) weaves together the stories of some of his most interesting cases and the discoveries he has made about the “phantoms” that lurk inside the human mind. These phantoms are the things that cause the most absurd of disruptions, like being able to feel and even move a limb that has been amputated, or seeing cartoons in the middle of a giant blind spot, or becoming convinced that your parents are in fact imposters who just happen to look exactly like your real parents.

It’s these strange disorders that provide insights into the normal workings of a functioning mind – it’s when things go wrong that we can start to learn how things should be working. Amazingly, the entirely bizarre starts to sort of make sense, and even if his theories don’t necessarily explain everything (as no theory in neuroscience ever really can), or even turn out to be correct they are definitely thought provoking.

(more…)

Friends With Benefits is actually awesome

Friends With Benefits is the sort of romantic comedy that explains why romantic comedies keep being made, despite all the ones that make you want to stab yourself in the eye. It’s perfect for one of those nights when you just want to curl up on the couch with a block of chocolate. It has all the things you want from it – beautiful people, beautiful New York, a bit of lighthearted drama that’s predictable but still fun – all without crossing that oh-so-fine line into lamesville.

So I watched it on Saturday night, and it actually kind of made me think. Okay, mostly I was thinking about Mila Kunis’s eye makeup, and what products I might need to be able to copy it. But I also thought a bit about love.  (more…)

Don’t be fooled by the vibe of the trailer – Another Earth is pretty cool.

It’s natural that space is something that’s endlessly fascinating to a lot of us. When you look up into the night sky and really become aware of how small you are, it’s a chilling and kind of sobering experience. Thinking about the vastness of the universe makes everything feel different, and the possibility that there is something else out there, maybe something we could never understand, understandably holds enormous intrigue.

Rhoda is seventeen, celebrating her acceptance to MIT on the night it’s announced that a new planet, extremely close to Earth, has been discovered. Looking up at the blue dot in the sky on her way home, she smashes into another car and kills a mother and daughter. We cut to four years later, when she is released from prison, but still stunned and haunted by the knowledge of what she has done.  She takes a menial job cleaning at a high school and trudges through the days, expressionless, not talking to anyone.

Then she finds herself out the front of the house of the man who did survive the crash, who lost his wife and daughter because of her. She wants to apologise, but instead pretends to be a offering a cleaning service. And then, she is performing a cleaning service, going back there every week to sort out the shambles of his house while he slumps around drinking and wincing from a recurring headache. (more…)

I found some notes I’d scribbled down about books I’d read at the very start of this year and thought I’d finally string them together into something vaguely coherent. Here’s the first installment…

Review: By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham

It would be difficult for anything to compare to Michael Cunningham’s utterly beautiful Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Hours, but his latest offering has that same dark and poignant charm, and is equally, if not more so, compelling.

By Nightfall is about finding beauty and desire in surprising places – and what happens when that desire is focused on objects that don’t deserve it. The story is narrated by Peter Harris, a gallery-owner stuck in a quiet sort of midlife crisis. He goes about his day happily enough, but plagued by an intense yearning for something different, an escape from that oh-so-common dilemma of age, comfort and routine. He has a companionable marriage, a tense relationship with his adult daughter that frustrates him but seems like it might just be a faze, and a job that he likes in theory but struggles to find enough passion for his good-but-not-brilliant artists. (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…)

From my ‘Bookshelf’ column, published in 3008 Docklands magazine.

Review: The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

Carefully distilled into a slim novella, Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending is a sombre and intriguing story that questions the reliability of memory and highlights the limits of self-knowledge. The winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, the exquisitely written book centres on the frustrating puzzle of “not getting it” the first time around, and having to revisit the past to make sense of the memories we construct ourselves.

The novella opens with narrator Tony Webster’s recollections of his final years of boarding school in the 1960s. But it’s a new student, and new addition to his group of precocious friends, who is the real centre of the story. An academically gifted “truth-seeker” and lover of Camus who likes to say things like “that’s philosophically self evident,” Adrian Finn appears to his friends as a model of intellectual sophistication. When a fellow student hangs himself after getting his girlfriend pregnant, the boys are awed- not particularly sympathetic, but rather fascinated by the questionable logic of his action. Adrian tells Tony that Camus maintained suicide was the only true philosophical question.

(more…)

In the first of my ’3008 Bookshelf’ columns for 3008 Docklands magazine, I reviewed The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt by Jon-Jon Goulian.

Jon-Jon Goulian is one of the strangest people I’ve ever met. He’s also one of the sweetest, and his utterly lovable memoir is both heartbreaking and heart-warming, leaving you with an intense desire to give him a big hug – and maybe go out shopping with him.

For anyone who has ever felt like a fish out of water, Goulian’s story strikes a familiar chord. On the surface, there was no real reason why he should have felt out of place. Growing up in the sunny beachside town of La Jolla, San Diego, surrounded by a family of doctors and lawyers and political philosophers, and blessed with a sharp intelligence and talent for soccer, he was all set on a very conventional path towards success. (more…)