Author: Andres Kabel

Some writers you come to well after they set off on their journeys and such is the case with Claire Keegan. Thrilled by the perfection of The Quiet Girl movie (see my review), I nabbed “Small Things Like These” and found concise, precise bliss. In a small Irish town in the mid-80s, Bill is going about his busy trade as a timber and coal merchant when he encounters a moral wrong which, as Christmas approaches, sends his memories spiraling back into his childhood. Over just 120 pages, the author documents Bill’s ordinary days among his world and his family of five girls, while revealing a heart yearning for goodness. Every page brings to life the world, the man, the ethical starkness, and the seemingly gentle pace actually burns with urgency. The climax is as unforgettable as it is prosaic and inconclusive. One of the outstanding novels of my 2022 reading, Small Things Like These comes with a sticker: unreservedly recommended.

A crackling coming-of-age tale from the heart of multicultural Australia, “One Hundred Days” injects the reader into the tumultuous world of sixteen-year-old Karuna, pregnant and un-partnered, and her generational battle of love and control. Karuna’s mother, a volatile Filipina bride-migrant, passionately still very much imbued with her home culture, takes charge and tries to lock Karuna up in their tiny housing-commission flat, lock her up for her pregnancy term and beyond, for the traditional “hundred days.” Karuna is an engaging, aware, full-hearted innocent, and the hundred days in question tests her and her familial bonds.

The author is an immersive stylist adept at placing a reader (in feverish first person argot) at the juncture between two cultures. The inner city of Melbourne in the 1980s teems with life. A fascinating, enjoyable read, One Hundred Days failed to grip me with character-based plotting high points but provided a healthy, welcome view of a world very different to mine, and for that I am grateful.

Quite why “Raising Raffi: A Book about Fatherhood (For People Who Would Never Read Such a Book)” is subtitled in that way is unclear, but this unusual, clear-eyed five-years-of a-life memoir is a treat. Keith Gessen, a Russian-born emigre with two highly regarded novels under his belt, opens his heart about the perils, pitfalls, and joys of raising Raphael in thronging New York. Framed as nine essays, approximately tracking years zero to five, concerning different aspects of childhood and fatherhood, the author combines a sense of wonder with honest bewilderment. It certainly helps that he is a lucid, gently rhythmic stylist, for one soon feels like a confidant. Scenes can be funny or disturbing, advice is offered but rarely without caveats, practicality spars with morality, and Raffi the boy, together with his mother, emerge from the book as glorious creations. I find it hard to explain the appeal of this quirky, non-How-To memoir, but somehow, Raising Raffi is a pleasure to bask in.

Michelle de Kretser is a formidably talented storyteller whose refined, intelligent tales tickle my mind but rarely enjoin me with her characters. In that respects, “Scary Monsters” reminded me of her other two lauded Miles Franklin Award winners, Questions of Travel and The Life to Come. Like those novels, Scary Monsters teems with intelligence, sparkling storytelling, and subtle connections, but offers protagonists portrayed a little too coolly for my liking.

The novel is a daring marriage of two parts, either of which can be read first. I began with the tale of Lili, an Australian teaching in southern France in the 1980s, a claustrophobic, philosophically imbued portrait of existential longing and Camus-inflected racism toward the local North African immigrants. The second narrative is even bolder, a near-future dystopian satire of an Asian immigrant family (headed by emotionally stunted, ultra cautious Lyle) in an Australia of institutionalized racism and assisted dying. The futuristic satire overflows with imaginative, savage ideas, eventually to the detriment (in my opinion) of any identification with Lyle and his striving family.

Overall, as has always been the case with this novelist’s books, Scary Monsters intrigues and impresses but leaves a halo of ideas well explored but chillingly uninvolving.

Forever a consumer of potentially useful self-help books, I was drawn to ”Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential out of a fascination with how to source and use data. I also opened the book with skepticism, for this is not a topic known for new ideas. Yet Tiago Forte, an analyst, has developed and honed a “system” with tangible chops. In essence (and here I simplify to the point of possible distortion), the author recommends coping with the modern world’s overloaded data flows by taking digital notes on everything, curating and distilling them as you go, and then harnessing digital apps and folders (and a sensible methodology) to transform raw data (both external and internal, i.e. instincts and impressions) into highly effective creative work. I use a similar process (including some of his shortlisted apps) but with markedly lower efficiency and regularity, so during my reading, i could not help but be filled with respect for the “system.” I commend Building a Second Brain to all those keen to master life for creative purposes.

The Strays, Emily Bitto’s whirlwind tale of avant-garde artists in 1930s Australia, left an abiding impression upon me. “Wild Abandon” offers a vastly different narrative, both in content and style, but cements the author’s status as one of Australia’s most ambitious, serious novelists. The novel, written in a grandiose (yet grounded) style that reminded me of both Updike and DeLillo, takes enormous risks and succeeds grandly. Like a modern-day Nick Carroway, naive Australian Will, reeling from hometown heartbreak, embarks on a end-of-days adventure through end-of-days, capitalistic America in 2011. From his druggy excesses in glittering New York, Will ends up as a barely-competent assistant to a PTSD-damaged U.S. veteran coping (almost) with a misfit menagerie of exotic wild beasts in remote rural Ohio. From the start, Will lurches from mishap to mishap, heading for the big crash.

The author’s capacious style soars over the modern and rural landscapes. The portrayals of the lions, wolves and other animals in their cages is magnificent, conveying their raw power, majesty, and beauty. The author does not hesitate to swing from an immersive, lyrical view from Will’s unschooled viewpoint into snap portraits of Will by those he meets, and these disjunctive flights of storytelling are most impressive, reminding me of Rushdie at his best. The plot of Wild Abandon is both luxuriant and relentlessly tense, and the eventual denouement of Will’s road trip is stunning.

Wild Abandon will surely win awards, local and overseas.

When distinguised American novelist Amy Bloom began to notice memory slippage, subtle (and then not so subtle) withdrawal from his usual zestful life, she did nothing, and then there came the MRI and the neurologist’s verdict of early onset Alzheimer’s. “I’d rather die on my feet,” husband Brian says, ”than live on my knees,” and ”In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss” is Bloom’s candid, spirited memoir of the 2020 trip to Switzerland into the embrace of Dignitas, one only a couple of global organizations that enables people to end their own lives with forethought and dignity. Minutely describing the trip, while ducking back in time to the diagnosis phase and the drawn-out period when Bloom battles to find a solution (none is remotely available in the United States), the memoir is simultaneously heart-breaking, refreshingly informative, and humorous, and the author is a lovely, close-up stylist with firm narrative control. In Love is a pacy read that will leave you in tears but also drenched with joy at the love Amy and Brian had.