Welcome to ABC Arts' monthly book column: a shortlist of new releases read and recommended by The Bookshelf's Kate Evans and critics Declan Fry and Cher Tan.
All read voraciously and widely, and the only guidelines we give them are: make it a new release; make it something you think is great.
The resulting list includes a page-turner about a beautiful grifter walking a fine line of survival; a dystopian tale where a man falls in love with a doll as the world changes around him; a (mechanical) horse chase across Europe; and a memoir told through a series of letters
The Guest by Emma Cline
Chatto & Windus (Penguin Australia)
Emma Cline's first novel, The Girls (2016) — about a teen who falls in with a Manson Family-like cult in late-60s California — was a popular and critical hit. The American author's second is a page-turner, too. It's fresh, surprising – and stressful.
The Guest immerses us in the world of 22-year-old Alex: a grifter who uses her body, her looks and her youth to get by. She has to, because she doesn't have much else: no money, nowhere to live, no family that we know of.
When we meet Alex, she's staying with an older man named Simon, somewhere by the beach. We're in wealthy America, in an unnamed resort town outside the city; a place where the residents are so sure of their place in the world they leave their shoes at the edge of the sand, tuck their keys and wallets under towels, have no idea that someone as hungry and desperate as Alex might be sizing them up, working out how to steal that confidence.
She seems so charming, she looks so great. All her clothes were selected and paid for by Simon, and she wears them with a sense of style learnt through careful observation. She knows how to play a part, when to look down, when to be silent, when and how to be whoever these men want her to be.
But behind that veneer, she's avoiding increasingly angry texts from an ex she ripped off; she's been banned from bars and restaurants back in the city; and her flatmates have kicked her out.
You cannot look away from this young woman – walking a knife's edge of survival, on an increasingly brittle blade. The story takes place over a week, in which Alex's fortunes change, and we have no idea where she'll end up. We have to keep watching, breath held as tightly as a pickpocket reaching into a fancy leather bag. KE
Owlish by Dorothy Tse
Scribe
A Kafkaesque atmosphere pervades Dorothy Tse's debut novel, Owlish, which is set in the fictional country of Nevers — a stand-in for contemporary Hong Kong that is becoming more sinister by the day.
Nevers was also the site of the French prison camp where German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin was detained in 1939. The name is a clue to Tse's inspirations and intent: Benjamin contributed great works that interrogated how totalitarian regimes infiltrated and shaped minds, writing of Paris's serene arcades during Nazi occupation, "that things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe."
Tse's novel (superbly translated by Natascha Bruce from the original Chinese) follows Professor Q, an unhappy "lowly assistant professor" angling for tenure at Lone Bird University, where he works. His marriage is uneventful and routine. The only joy he derives in life is when he is in his study at home, amid his antique dolls and other collectables, acquired during trips overseas.
When Q's mysterious friend Owlish suddenly gets in touch, it leads him to Aliss, a doll he becomes smitten with. Before long, reality and unreality collide: Q throws himself into an obsessive relationship with the doll, oblivious to protests by students on campus, random disappearances and the draconian measures inching their way into day-to-day life. Eventually Aliss gains a certain agency, and we are taken into a nebulous world that exists in parallel to the one in Nevers.
Tse, best known for short stories that blend the quotidian and the bizarre, is a master at evoking disorientation. In Owlish, she borrows from the Western canon to create what can be described as a fairy tale gone rogue. The surrealist narrative is conjured to great effect, with Tse explicitly appropriating the storylines and techniques of Lewis Carroll, the Brothers Grimm and George Orwell, amongst others. These are authors who have a particular flair for using the destabilisation of narrative reality as a device to comment on the fantastical horrors that pervade life under repressive regimes, and Tse applies this cheeky thievery with panache.
Despite a dystopian bent, a buoyant mood simmers beneath Owlish. Tse seems to suggest that if we do bother imagining new worlds, we might be able to break the spell of propaganda. CT
August Blue by Deborah Levy
Hamish Hamilton (Penguin Australia)
English writer Deborah Levy's "living autobiography" trilogy – Things I Don't Want to Know, The Cost of Living, and Real Estate – combines life story, analysis, and reflections on writing and on gender politics. The books hum with energy and intelligence. Her fiction, too, is impressive: Swimming Home, Hot Milk, The Man Who Saw Everything and a number of others.
Her latest novel is August Blue – and what a beguiling, puzzling, finely-layered piece of work it is.
This first-person story begins with our narrator in Athens, watching another woman buy two mechanical horses. They're some sort of battery-operated, large, dancing automata – which the narrator desperately wants for herself, for reasons that aren't at all clear. The other woman is aware of her scrutiny, knows that she – the narrator – is famous. She buys them anyway, and disappears – leaving her hat behind. The narrator takes the hat. The rest of the novel, which moves across Europe and in and out of the past, includes a sort-of chase and series of glimpses between these women and the talismanic horses and hat.
But maybe, just maybe, that other woman is really a doppelganger, a double, a shadow-self. Maybe the narrator is not chasing a horse's tail so much as her own life, ambition, mysterious history and relationship to art and creativity.
Because the narrator is renowned concert pianist Elsa M. Anderson, 34 years old, who was adopted as a child by a piano teacher in order to become a prodigy. How did that work? She's not sure either. We meet Elsa at a point of crisis: On stage three weeks earlier, with her hair dyed blue in a moment of rare defiance, she suddenly stopped playing the Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No 2, and instead played a few minutes of her own work, her own creativity — and then walked off stage.
We walk and run and explore with Elsa, as she tries to find whatever she's looking for, be it expression or independence or family history — or a pair of mechanical horses, wrapped in newspaper. KE
Anam by André Dao
Hamish Hamilton (Penguin Australia)
It's nice when a novel clues you in early, says "Hey bud, listen up", tells you it's operating on another level and you'd better be ready because if you're not, well, too late. It's happened to me before and it will probably happen again, but for now I value the most recent instance – Anam, the debut novel of Melbourne-based author André Dao.
Anam's first page is a lovely, sinuous series of sentences offered between parentheses. It's about marriage, war, time and separation. It's about the ways in which Anam melds memoir, essay and fiction. It's glorious, and so is everything that follows.
Raised in Melbourne, Anam's unnamed narrator – a lawyer – lives with his partner Lauren and their young daughter, Edith, while studying at Cambridge. He is compelled by a need to write his family's story: a tale of parents who fled Vietnam for Australia, a grandmother who left Vietnam for France, and a grandfather – Catholic, a lawyer and an intellectual – who was detained without charge or trial for 10 years inside Chí Hòa prison in Ho Chi Minh City.
Dao asks: how can we represent what we are unable to imagine? And is it a question of imagination, or of receptivity, availability? Is it a question of metonymy – the ability of one thing to stand in for another, to speak on behalf of?
He coaxes his narrative into the shape it needs, the shape it wants to assume – which may not be the shape an author wants – in order to tell what is, in essence, a compromised narrative, a blend of fact and fiction. The novel's accommodations make space for lost descendants, lost family members, lost time. In this respect, Dao shows us how compromise can be the mother of invention. Because that is what Anam is all about: the compromises we make in order to live.
Anam is a story of refugees and "centres sociaux" (the social housing that members of the the narrator's family end up in, in France), of lives lived across the globe in various states of limbo, and of the waiting that can last so long it is no longer waiting at all but living; living beyond any life you were meant to lead; living against waiting, through waiting.
There is, throughout the novel, also the question of what it means to write another person's story, and of what sort of conversation is possible between the generations — particularly when that conversation involves people for whom political upheaval and migration have created a rupture, a break in narrative time.
The narrator's partner questions his focus on patriarchs at the expense of women such as his grandmother; the narrator considers the way refugees from the colonies and global south seek out the protection and power of the metropole; he wonders what life he can build in the present for his young daughter.
In the days after finishing Anam I often found myself reflecting on its philosophical implications; on its insights, caught like lightning inside of a bottle. One I really loved: how mourning and melancholy – for country, for ancestors, for the lives and stories of those preceding us – are not identical, but can still stem from the same origin point. Isn't that profound? Isn't it something like the mystery of how two people can live in more-or-less similar circumstances – and experience more-or-less similar upbringings – and still turn out completely differently?
Anam's sly sense of humour, the quality of the writing, the sophistication with which ideas are grappled with and emotions depicted – all of this required not only 12 years of Dao's craft, but the decades preceding those years, extending all the way back to his grandparents and 1930s Hanoi.
The book is a testament to the importance of time in letting a story reveal itself; in allowing a story the space and material to come alive; indeed, I want to say – in a figurative sense – to come true.
Because time is never moving in only one direction. It moves in two. Look at it go: onward into the future – where our narrator's daughter will grow up and inherit whatever story awaits her – and backward, into the past, where everything has already happened but somehow still goes on, as if those whom it all happened to were still alive, sharing their little room with us, telling us "It's OK, it's OK, we're here, we're still here". DF
Eleven Letters to You: A Memoir by Helen Elliott
Text
If you wrote your life story as a series of letters to those who had shaped you, whose names would appear on those envelopes?
Literary critic, essayist and journalist Helen Elliott takes this approach in her new memoir, which tracks her life — from her working class childhood to her early 20s; from the outer suburbs of Melbourne and into the world of work — through 11 formative figures.
This is no sentimental exercise – although it contains gratitude and warmth – but rather an intelligent, critical, utterly engaging exploration of a life; a memoir that is willing to look at pain and regret as well as joy.
The stories span from 1950 (when she was three) up until 1969, but they are also imbued with the woman, the thinker, the writer Elliott became.
In the first letter, she addresses "the Misses Stapley", a pair of sisters who lived on the corner, who paid generous attention to this child who would come to the backdoor (of course, never the front), to show them what she knew, to ask them questions, and be shown treasures and insights from their own lives in return.
The following letters address a number of other women, who entranced Elliott by demonstrating the various ways in which women might live in the world – alone, competent, daring; married, flirtatious, sexual – and through them we also see her own parents, and a developing bitterness between them.
All of these people, at various times, really see and pay attention to this girl – allowing her to see herself, her future, her intelligence and ambition in new ways.
Elliott had to leave school at 16, despite being desperately keen to pursue an education, and as she works in the public service (disastrously, hilariously), we then see her working in libraries, close to books and to other vivid characters, both men and women (her friend Lois glows off the page).
In addressing the various versions of "you" who shaped her, Elliott confronts memory, forgetting, regret, survival and a well-honed literary ambition. KE
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