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Accrued Naps

For the first time since we opened over 11 years ago (!) I’ve taken a huge swathe of accrued leave – the whole of January and February – only to learn how much you can sleep if only you have the time. And of course, how much you can read when ‘certain circumstances’ make leaving the house an unattractive option, if not downright dangerous.

I often use the holidays to read books that have come out earlier in the year but which I missed at the time. This summer, it was Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle, an epic narrative centring on the marvellous Marian Graves, an aviatrix in the early 20th Century. From poverty-stricken upbringing, to marriage with a domineering and abusive bootlegger, who buys her her first plane, to flying during WWII, then her ‘disappearance’ as she escapes her husband, Marian’s story is full of adventure. It’s interspersed with the contemporary story of a disturbed Hollywood actor who will play Marian in a movie. The Hadley Baxter sections aren’t quite as riveting as Marian’s, but the contrast between the two women, and what Hadley eventually learns from Marian’s life, make it work. A fabulous, if somewhat old-fashioned, narrative to totally immerse yourself in. Who doesn’t love a plucky heroine, whose life choices are way ahead of her time?

Quite different in structure and tone is The Candy House by Jennifer Egan (Manhattan Beach, Visit from the Goon Squad). Some of the characters from Goon Squad reappear here and like that book, the story jumps from character to character. The downside of this, for me, is that it’s hard to get to know or ‘root’ for any one of them, but as usual with Jennifer Egan, they are all beautifully drawn. The futuristic setting in which there is new technology which allows people to download every memory they’ve ever had and share it with others, creates the intellectual and philosophical crux of the novel, without it being overly dystopian. ‘Knowing everything…’ Egan writes ‘…is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it’s all justinformation.’ A rubric for the 21st Century perhaps.

In the purely theatrical sense I can go along with ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, where the audience is in a compact with the actors to accept that what is happening on stage is ‘real’. However I have much more trouble with it in the narrative sense – whether it be science fiction, fantasy, or one of the many dystopian books now being published, so I was hesitant, even somewhat scared (after the horrors of A Little Life), to pick up To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara. But of course, I am in the hands of a masterful writer and was immediately entranced by her alternative history of America. I have only just started the book though and have heard that the last dystopian section is quite brutal. It may be a literary crime and a grave disservice to the book, but I may just skip that bit.

Finally, a new Australian novel, published by the excellent new Ultimo Press. Australiana by Yumna Kassab is a truly beautiful novle set in an outback town brought to its knees by drought. Kassab has a pared-back style all her own which meshes seamlessly with her subject matter and her characters. The sensibilities and the writing make it a country mile away from the crime genre known as ‘rural noir’. It’s always so wonderful to be introduced to a new Australian literary voice (this is her 2ndbook). Also coming from Ultimo this month is Jack Ellis’s second outing, Home and Other Hiding Places, which I’m looking forward to and will write about next month.

If nothing else pleases us in 2022, let it at least be another year of great books and good reading. It gets so many of us through!

See you On D’Hill Morgan