Review: ' Pilgrim's wilderness ' by Tom Kizzia

 Parts of this post originally appeared on book Riot.

In 2002 bought Papa Pilgrim, a retired, Ultra religious family man, a 420-acre mining area in the middle of a park of the State of Alaska. Ignoring the warning of the local park officials, bulldozers Pilgrim the way of a 13-mile through the park to the small town of McCarthy so that his wife and 14 children could get to their house.

At first, many of its rural neighbors-sided with Pilgrim when the National Park Service came down on his small improvement project. As time passed, however, it became clear that life at the compound Pilgrim family not as rosy as it turned out. In Pilgrim's wilderness reveals the story of a charismatic outlaw journalist Tom Kizza and his final feud with its neighbours, the Government and his own family.

The blurb for Pilgrim's wilderness described the book as a mix between Into the Wild and Helter Skelter, which were comparisons I could not ignore it — I'm a total sucker for eccentric true crime books, especially those written by journalists. The setting of the book, the edge of one of the final frontiers of America, was another attractive piece of this story.

Although the ultimate reveal of Pilgrim as a physical, mental and sexual abuse psychopath is what makes this book outrageous, there is also a ton of interesting back and forth over property rights and life on the edge of the border. I was fascinated by the tensions that have arisen between the Government and the citizens of McCarthy on issues of resources and private property. In some ways I wish that the Central antagonist, Papa Pilgrim, had not turned out to be such a crazy dude because it distracts from that conflict. But I'm a nerd, so of course I think that Government would.

The story of how Pilgrim's children, especially his eldest daughter, finally got to him escape is incredibly courageous. I can not even imagine their lives, although Kizzia does a great job setting the stage and tell their stories sympathetic and honest. If you true crime and can handle a story about a large sociopath, then is Pilgrim's wilderness a book you will want to pick up.

View the original article here

Review: ‘Slow Getting Up’ by Nate Jackson

 If you’ve been paying attention to my recent “Currently” posts, you know that one of my favorite things about fall is football season. I really only got into football in the last few years. As a kid, I used to hate sitting through Sunday afternoon Vikings games. But it’s something my family, in particular my dad, loves, and watching games together is something we’ve bonded over.

Part of my growing understanding of the game is finding books that get inside the huddle, so to speak, and address the economics and social impact of the game on owners, players and fans. Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile by Nate Jackson is a look at the NFL from what could be considered an “average” player’s perspective:

This is not a celebrity tell-all of professional sports. Slow Getting Up is a survivor’s real-time account of playing six seasons (twice as long as the average NFL career) for the San Francisco 49ers and the Denver Broncos. As an unsigned free agent who rose through the practice squad to the starting lineup, Nate Jackson is the talented embodiment of the everyday freak athlete in professional football, one of thousands whose names go unmentioned in the daily press. Through his story recounted here — from scouting combines to preseason cuts to byzantine film studies to glorious touchdown catches — even knowledgeable football fans will glean a new, starkly humanized understanding of the daily rigors and unceasing violence of quotidian life in the NFL. Slow Getting Up is a look at the real lives of America’s best twenty-year-old athletes putting their bodies and minds through hell.

Commentators and news organizations spend a lot of time profiling and featuring and praising the franchise players on a team, but an NFL team is a lot more than the star quarterback. In this book, Jackson represents all of those unnamed players, the guys who have to play through the preseason to just make the team and who can be let go or traded with nearly no notice. These are the majority of the players in the league, and their experience is important. Jackson is an entertaining and honest spokesperson, even if I don’t think he’d consider himself a spokesperson, as such.

This is certainly not a book to read if you enjoy the unvarnished, tv-produced story that most sports journalism and game commentary puts on the game. Life in the NFL for most players is simultaneously brutal, boring and brief. Few get the chance at stardom, and in the league’s pursuit of good entertainment, you get a bunch of young men who are overpaid without enough to do during the off season. Jackson doesn’t give a particularly flattering view of that side of football.

But he also captures the pure joy that he and other players have getting the chance to keep playing the game they love into early adulthood. There’s something amazing about the fact that some little boys get to grow up into young men that get to spend every week in pursuit of the thing they love most. Jackson captures the exhilaration of getting the call to play, of starting the first game, of catching the first touchdown. There’s something really wonderful about those fleeting moments that sports fans will understand and appreciate.

I enjoyed the heck out of this book. It’s a quick read, but well written and extremely entertaining. Jackson certainly strips some of the glossy finish off the whole football thing, but I think knowing what goes on behind-the-scenes makes success and failure on the field mean more.

View the original article here

Review: ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ by Cheryl Strayed

 I like to think (and hope) that every person has at least one other person in their life who will tell them what is what. For me, those people are usually my mother and my sister. I know they love me unconditionally, but I also know that they don’t put up with my nonsense. If I’ve gone off the rails in some small or large way, they get me back on the track in the most kind and generous way possible. I’m so lucky to have that.

I tell you that because I think the voice that Cheryl Strayed adopts as Sugar, an advice columnist for the online age, has a lot in common with a family member who loves you but doesn’t let you get away with anything. In her columns, collected together in Tiny Beautiful Things, Strayed practiced what Steve Almond called radical empathy:

Life can be hard: your lover cheats on you; you lose a family member; you can’t pay the bills — and it can be great: you’ve had the hottest sex of your life; you get that plum job; you muster the courage to write your novel. Sugar — the once-anonymous online columnist at The Rumpus, now revealed as Cheryl Strayed, author of the bestselling memoir Wild — is the person thousands turn to for advice. Tiny Beautiful Things brings the best of Dear Sugar in one place and includes never-before-published columns and a new introduction by Steve Almond. Rich with humor, insight, compassion — and absolute honesty — this book is a balm for everything life throws our way.=

The first thing to know about this book is that Cheryl Strayed can write. If you don’t believe me, stop reading this post and go read these two columns: The Baby Bird and Write Like a Motherfucker. I’ll wait.

…

…

…

Finished? Holy shit, right? Cheryl Strayed can write like a motherfucker, and that talent is on display in every one of her lovely, profane, honest and frustrated columns collected in this book. I just can’t even quite articulate just how great each and every single one of them is to read.

If you haven’t read these essays yet, I highly encourage you to pick them up. But, I think this is a book that is better read slowly, a few pieces at a time over a month or two. When you read them back-to-back, you start to see a little bit of repetitiveness in the way that Strayed approaches each problem. That’s not to say her answers aren’t surprising or wonderful to read, just that they have a little less impact taken all together than I think they do taken at a slightly slower pace.

This is a book I will be holding on to, dipping back in and out in those moments when I just need to hear someone kindly and generously tell me to get my shit together.

View the original article here

Sunnyside, by Joanna Murray-Smith

I bought Sunnyside by Joanna Murray-Smith ages ago, when she gave a discussion of the author at my local library, and now I feel quite a fool for have left it so long to read it.  It reminds me that there are some real treasures, moaning on my TBR shelf-about 600 books at last count-but I do like add to it for fear that if I don't buy a book when I see it, it may disappear from the shelves book stores because they are so mercilessly about graves of literary fiction, no matter how good it is.

If you saw my sensational fragment of Sunnyside, you will know that the novel is a comedy of manners satirising The Good Life.  Murray-Smith is a famous playwright here in Melbourne, and she has opted for what is, of course, Mt Eliza on the Mornington Peninsula, such as the setting for a privileged suburb called Sunnyside, with less stylish Frankston disguised as nearby Deptford.  The main industry in Sunnyside is real estate, and the annual event is the real estate agents community Race, the inner city waiters race aping but with brokers with the course Open to inspection implementation boards.

The book begins with the dinner revelation that Molly, wife of David and mother of Justin, has been enjoying himself with the man who cleans their swimming pool.  This causes an existential crisis under their set, wondering if they also miss out on sexual adventure and self-development, and others analysis of the purpose and the direction of their own marriages.  New temptations arise: a sexy old school friend arrives in Sunnyside, and Assistant Professor gets dangerously close to a student.   Children on the cusp of adolescence also have their own existential crisis: school, of course, but also dismay about parental behavior, and anxiety about contemporary problems and their own powerlessness in the face of adult indifference.

Indeed, the only flaw in this otherwise characterization in perfectly built novel with its devastating conclusion was Grace, the daughter of Harry and Alice.  Alice is an author who has lost her mojo in the slowness of the suburbs, and the speeches that eleven-year-old who Grace in the League public speaking delivers seem strange out-of-place in the sparkling dialogue that flows through this novel.

Murray-Smith offers intriguing food for thought in Sunnyside, often with penetrating insights delivered through her characters meditations on life, love and desire. She dissects the ambivalence of women limited by the relentless route of the female body, (p. 341); the theatrical bust-up that [makes] people think again (p. 359); and marriage as a calendar:

Alice herself had wondered, what would I? What would she without Harry and the children, without the House to restore her to the Earth.  A family gave you instant name, purpose, a future made up of graduates and twenty-firsts, from birthdays, anniversaries and surprise theme of family Christmas with their hothouse arguments and festive nibbles. What marriage gave you was a calendar.  And now ... and now ... Molly had committed this folly, nothing all that great, really, but in this small community, an act of lively assertiveness.  As thoughts words were, Alice thought, one can hear the whispering about the suburban lawns: dare I I dare, I dare? (p. 360)

Sunnyside is an entertaining book, but have trouble now.  There were copies on eBay when I looked, and you may be lucky and find a used copy on garden furniture. Or hunt it out of a library, it's worth tracking down.

Author: Joanna Murray-Smith
Title: Sunnyside
Publisher: Viking Penguin, 2005
ISBN: 9780670042975
View the original article here

Kokoda, by Paul Ham, narrated by Peter Byrne

I'm not really very interested in books about war or military history but I just picked up this audio book in the library because military history part of the history curriculum at school and I felt an obligation to be a little more informed about the Kokoda campaign than I was.

The six-month campaign on the Kokoda track in 1942-3 is iconic in Australia, the stuff of legend.  All our best trained troops fought overseas when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour and she had Southeast Asia ravaged without control, apparently on their way to Australia, a misconception reinforced by the attacks on Darwin and other northern coastal ports.  The task force set out to check the advance in New Guinea was hopelessly poorly trained, ill-equipped and dangerously naive about the terrible conditions in the field, but they managed to get the first defeat against the Japanese.  A heroic victory like that guarantees of more than one preserved work of popular history and there are numerous books on it around, including the print version of Paul Ham Kokoda, 624 pages long and the husband of copy of Peter FitzSimons ' Kokoda, 512 pages, but after reading Stalingrad last year I the enthusiasm to read one of them couldn't muster.  The audio book seemed like a more palatable way to get myself up to speed on the subject.

Paul Ham approach is as Antony Beevor in that it presents the perspectives of both sides of the fight.  The bibliography shows that the author investigated extensively in both Australia and in Japan, and first-hand accounts of front-line troops on both sides.   His sources included official military documents, participants diaries, personal documents and interviews, but it is this personal accounts whereby some aspects of the even more cooling.

Although the analysis deconstruction of Australia's shocking preparedness, are sometimes poor military leadership and the unjustified respect for Macarthur, is what remains in my mind the stories of soldiers fighting, hunger and disease, struggling along the track without medical help, and fight to the death because defeat was unreasonable.  For the Australians was the battle of their homeland; It was for the Japanese to obey the Emperor's command to conquer more uncritical East Asia. It was a ferocious battle: contrary to the rules of war, neither side took many prisoners, and for the Australians, there was the added fear of Japanese cannibalism.  But Ham also faces to Australian atrocities.  I expect most Australian readers would find that if worrying if I did.

In a comprehensive review on the age (which I hope you can still see as Mexican) academic Charles Schencking notes that there are some factual errors, but he is not what they are than the Ham claim says that cannibalism a deliberate policy by the Japanese high command was to dispute.   (Ham also says that the failure of Japanese supply lines that hunger for his troops in a disastrous extent causes a factor.)  This particular atrocity was or was not policy doesn't seem relevant to me because so many of the Japanese atrocities were officially sanctioned that it seems like nit-picking to want to exonerate them on this one.  Japanese treatment of prisoners of war and exploitation of women in prison as so-called ' comfort women ' was and remains outrageous, never apologize, nor fee paid.

Like most books on Kokoda, confront the reality of war is reading, I'm not at all sure that there is much in this book that I would like to share with elementary school children ...

Author: Paul Ham
Title: Kokoda
Publisher: Baker Publishing, 2010
ISBN: 9781742148281

View the original article here

Let the games begin, by Niccolo Ammaniti, translated by Kylee Doust

As ethical and aesthetic principles no longer exist, looking like an idiot as a a consequence.  (p. 184)

So says the surgeon Bocchi in this new novel by Niccolò Ammaniti.  He says it's to reassure the writer Fabrizio Ciba, who is concerned that his audience a poem he will recognize plagiarism by Kahlil Gibran.  And that cessation of ethics and aesthetics that plagues of the modern world and Italy in particular, is the theme of this bizarre farce.

Let the games begin utterly unlike the famous that i'm Not Scared, that won the Viareggio Literary Award, was made into a film in countless languages and gripping.  This new novel is absurdist, crude and mocking, and-be warned-it has some Repellent scenes that made me hesitate before plunging on.

Think Federico Fellini, Carnevale, Bacchanalia.  The cover art on the Australian Edition refers to two-faced Janus, the rape of the Sabine women, Artemis the Hunter, Bacchus and an assortment of devilish satyrs and whatnot.  In satirising the State of Italian politics, has drawn on all types of Mythology Ammaniti make this extraordinary book, intentionally designed to shock, disgust and dismay.

While reading this book, I was visiting my parents that Avid cryptic crossword fanatics, so I had access to not one, but two encyclopedias of Mythology, and an old dictionary of Demonology.  Browse through them revealed that Ammaniti Aeneas, which was named after the duty in place of love, and Atreas dispute over joining a throne.  In let the games begin is a pathetic Satanist who unfortunately little his duty as leader of his sect ahead of love, and the throne in dispute is literary kingship.

The novel begins with Saverio, a man whose life bad is synchronous.  He has big dreams to achieve familiarity with the Satanic rituals to rival Charles Manson, but in reality a pedestrian lives life as a failed furniture salesman with a dominant woman whose father owns the furniture store.  His cult, the wild beasts of Abbadon, has members to the rival children of the Apocalypse bleeding, and he is under pressure from his remaining pals, Zombie, a human sacrifice, murder and Silvietta, an initiation ritual with virgins, or at least organize an orgy.

The catalyst for change in Saverio of life is when the rival Satanist who are members has its poaching him membership offers, and he says no. This gives him the courage to say no in other contexts, (leading to a very ugly scene at home), and he almost has a moment of common sense and abandons the cult. But he doesn't, because he thinks his duty lies with the cult, and the only way to keep the respect of his members to do something really violent. (This scenario comes to some readers uncomfortable, the idea that an act of extreme violence, with no prospect of repentance (out of the question as he is a Satanist), an assertion of self-respect is.  It all depends on how seriously you license it, and how much you are willing to grant the author).

Fortunately for Saverio comes Salvatore Caldwell, the richest man in Rome, to the rescue. Under privatization, he has bought the Villa Ada and transformed it into a grotesque fun park.  To celebrate his great achievements, he is holding a party, and every celebrity and corrupt politician has invited to join the fun.  There will be three different hunts: an Indian Tiger-Hunt, a fox hunt and a lion hunt, and guests get to dress up and pretend to be of Ernest Hemingway. With real guns.  Is the singer of hit list that Larita Saverio burns because they gave up heavy metals for sweet love songs and converted to Catholicism among the guests.  All the cult has to do is in the park and they can then be killed with the sword Durendal which Saverio has bought on eBay.

At the same time, the celebrity author, Fabrizio Ciba, a bit of an identity crisis.  He is the last time, more known for its famous than he is for writing books, and he haasmi after a Nobel Prize, handicapped by the fact that he's shallow and amoral, and by the look of his essay on poetry, banal.  He is jealous of a young writer who has won the three major Italian literary prizes in a year, and he would like to see the back of the Nobel laureate whose praise he has to sing. All three get invited to the party as well, of course, and eventually crossing paths with the cult.

All this ends in chaos, like you, with some spectacular annoying victims and an unexpected redemption or two would expect.  Some of it is rather chastens, some of it is disgusting and some of it made me laugh out loud. Let the games begin is a bit of a roller coaster ride, which not everyone will enjoy.

Unfortunately, this edition is marred by too many typos and the translation is not very smooth.  There are many strange metaphors such as "drink such as a Frisian at a fountain ' (p. 146), and ' exploding like a football ' (p. 223).  There are idiomatic errors like ' the day to day ' (' day to day ', p. 146) and ' between one and other ', usually rendered ' what with one thing and another. '  Then there are careless mistakes such as "talk to the ' copy-editing (bearing, p. 195); and ' thanks ' (dan, p. 47); ' psycopath ' (p. 185); and unphased ' (unfazed, p. 244);  ' snake ' instead of ' nose ' on p. 280 and "Treaties" instead of discourses (p. 354).   ' Incoronation "(p. 266) seems to be a hybrid of Coronation and inauguration, but I count on an online dictionary, while I am away from home, so I could be wrong.  ' Molasser ' (p. 268) and ' an onanistic topos ' (p. 204), well, perhaps these failures of my vocabulary, but I had no idea what they meant.  I suspect molasser, apparently a kind of dog, should have become as mastiff; but Wikipedia fails me with an onanistic topos.

Author: Niccolò Ammaniti
Title: let the games begin
Publisher: text Publishing, 2013
ISBN: 9781921758461
View the original article here

The Swan Book, by Alexis Wright

Get set for a wild ride with Alexis Wright’s new novel, The Swan Book!  It’s exhilarating, confronting, funny, touching, angry, wise and unforgettable.

I am mildly worried that perhaps I should have re-read it in its entirety more than once before tackling writing about it, because I suspect that repeated readings will reveal all kinds of aspects that I’ve missed or misunderstood.  Indeed, I kept thinking of James Joyce’s Ulysses as I read: it has the promise of the same kind of riches that reveal themselves the more times you read it.  There are allusions and allegories all over the place, myths I recognise and those I don’t, circularities that seem to get lost but perhaps I missed the route, and so on.  But you’re not here at ANZ LitLovers to see what an expert makes of a book like this, you’re here to see what an ordinary, interested reader discovers.  So with that caveat, read on.

It’s not a book that you read to find out what happens, though what happens is fascinating.  The Swan Book is set in a dystopian future where climate change has altered everything.  This in itself if confronting, because a dystopian future conjures up all kinds of hideous scenarios, all of them involving radical, frightening social change as in The Handmaid’s Tale or The Road. But by leaving in place the Northern Territory Intervention and various other social engineering policies that apply only to our First Peoples, Alexis Wright’s novel shows us only too vividly that Australia’s Aborigines are already living a dystopian future: non-indigenous readers have to get used to trenchant criticism very early on in this book, and there is no let up though it’s often delivered with the black humour that seems to be a distinctive feature of Black writing in Australia.  Don’t read it if you’re not prepared to wear it.  The more you think you might not like this, the more important it probably is that you read it.

The central character is Oblivia.  She doesn’t say a word throughout the novel because she is traumatised, the victim of gang rape by a bunch of petrol-sniffing youths.  She also symbolises the way Aboriginal people have been silenced since the European invasion because even when they speak no one listens.  This is most graphically depicted in the blackest of black humour scenes towards the end of the novel when nobody listens to the elders who try to end the farce of endless grief-as-public-spectacle á la Princess Diana.  They explain that a man’s spirit must be laid to rest in accordance with his culture:

All services for the dearly beloved, the mourning, the last respects, country and western music, hymns and special foreign music, were heard continuously, and on a daily basis.  In actual fact, nobody thought a thing about the consequences of unabated mourning.  Certainly no one questioned the excessiveness of sorrow, and whether there was going to be an end point of mourning for Warren Finch.  That was until finally, one day in the middle of a lot of smoke, what looked like most of the countryman’s wildflowers and gum leaves arrived with scores of his ceremonial elders from his Aboriginal Government, and they sung his world.  They said that they were smoking his spirit back to their own traditional country.  His spirit was no longer in this place.  This was when the sky practically fell down, when they – these people (his own people) – wanted to remove the coffin from the cathedral.

Total pandemonium broke out between all the different types of mourners and officials one, two and three, with more to follow, told these cheeky people from the bush of some far-flung part of the country with an unpronounceable name that nobody had ever heard of, that Warren Finch’s importance as a man far outweighed any of their cultural considerations, and hum! Peace Brother! Go in peace.  Let that be an end of the matter.  (p. 286)

Then follows a macabre kind of Olympic Torch road-trip round Australia with the coffin in a Fresh Food People refrigerated truck…

There are some unforgettable characters in Oblivia’s curious life.  She was rescued as a girl by Aunty Bella Donna who (being a white European climate change refugee) is then accused of provoking the arrival of the Army in the dusty polluted swamp where they live, unwanted people living in a convenient dumping ground.

What were unwanted people?  Well! They were little people who can’t fight a big thing like the Army in charge of all the Aboriginal children – little pets owned by the Mothers of Government who claimed to love them more than their own ‘inhumane’ families. Disgraceful business! (p. 50)

But it is Aunty Bella Donna, who might have been an angel, who knows how to call the swans which become a guiding light in Oblivia’s life.  These swans derive from Aunty’s stories from Europe, but the ones which descend on the swamp are the affront to philosophical Logic: black Australian swans, not the white European ones that were a king’s own personal property, poached on pain of death, and thought to be the only ones in the world.  (As white people believe themselves to be the most important people in the world).  The black swans are the most important birds of many which are referenced in this book, and they are the ones that trigger Oblivia’s rebellion and escape from the apartment tower where she is dumped by Warren Finch.

This Warren Finch (a finch being a small bird, showy but lacking the power of larger birds) is the character who really messes up Oblivia’s life.  He turns up to take Oblivia as his ‘promise bride’ and demolishes her homeland (the Swamp) as a wedding present.  The way in which Oblivia is forced to submit to removal and subsequent participation in a farce of a wedding in which she cannot even say the words ‘I do’ reminded me of the way 12 and 14-year-old European princesses were traded as collateral in inter-country treaties.  Dressed up like little dolls in jewels and furs, these little girls were packed off to a place they knew nothing about where often they could not even speak the language, to cement alliances and stave off wars.  Oblivia’s role is to be First Lady to the first Aboriginal President of Australia, and it matters not a scrap that she is manifestly unwilling: they digitise her so that she watches herself on TV, doing the things that First Ladies do.  And all the while she is locked up in a tower in a flooded city that is eerily reminiscent of Brisbane, even though Alexis Wright must have been writing this book before those floods took place.

Warren Finch encapsulates the tendency for both government and media to rely on Aboriginal spokesmen as representatives for the diverse peoples of Indigenous Australia.  ‘Anyone would think that he had been the only Aboriginal person on the planet. The only one who had a voice, and could voice his opinion.’ (p. 291)  Warren has, in the process of assuming power in the dominant society, betrayed his own values and abandoned his country.  Wright’s satire of this character is particularly savage.

There were times in reading this long, unwieldy novel when I lost my bearings and floundered in the torrents of language, but I never wanted to stop reading.  Alexis Wright and her publishers have invited non-indigenous readers on a wild ride, but the journey to better understanding is worth it.  I remember Kate Grenville addressing a Melbourne audience – at a Festival of Ideas? the venue is beyond recall but the message was unforgettable – about the need for authors to engage readers in the issue of climate change through fiction: this novel The Swan Book is the one that will make its readers sit up and take notice, because the imagined future is too horrible to contemplate.

Author: Alexis Wright
Title: The Swan Book
Publisher: Giramondo, 2013
ISBN: 9781922146410

View the original article here