July 2014

From the CommitteeAnnual general meeting This was held last Monday, 14th July at 10.30am. We have a wonderful new President, Mary De Gabriele, our Vice President is Christine Stephen, who, with her excellent experience as our last President, will take over the President’s role when Mary is unavailable. Our secretary is the hardworking and diligent Bronwyn Meredith, our Treasurer is the esteemed Judy Wilford and our Publicity Officer is the busy Mary Macdonald. Our hardworking committee members are still on board for another year. I am sure it will be as successful as last year.

Christmas raffle We have decided to hold a Christmas Raffle this year instead of our usual Winter's Warmer Raffle. Even though it was very successful, we thought a change was a good idea (and no selling raffle tickets at the freezing Sunday Markets)! Please feel free to donate any items you like for our raffle later in the year. I will remind you in coming newsletters.

Library donation We have decided to donate $3000 to the Library, which is to go towards eBooks. This new service has proved very popular with the public and there is a need to expand the number of titles available. We wanted to donate money towards the purchase of Large Print Books but we had to refrain on the advice of the Library Manager, Ian Greenhalgh, due to severe lack of space for the extra shelves which would be needed to hold any new books in our present, outdated library. It is a shame, as we had

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raised funds for large print books. We decided, instead, to direct some money towards much needed heaters and shelving for the conference room upstairs.

Online servicesThese have all proved very popular with the public. The most popular items are magazines, but the books and the talking books have also been well received. If you are experiencing difficulty with this service the competent library staff are always willing to help.

Day on the gravelThis will be held by the Precinct Committee. This will be on 19th October and will be held in the car park where the new library will be built and it will be marked out where it will be built. They are planning on having two stages at either end of the area and continuous performances to entertain the masses. It should be an exciting and entertaining day

Book review

SomeoneAlice McDermott

This novel is set in the period between the two World Wars, and concerns Irish immigrants living in America. It is principally the story of Marie Comerford and her family, and ranges from her childhood to her old age in a retirement village. Chronologically, the narrative moves backwards and forwards in time, piecing together Marie’s adolescence, family relationships, marriage, and work. The immigrant families’ close association with the Catholic Church also forms a major part of the narrative. Marie’s scholarly brother Gabe, briefly becomes a priest and his loss of faith and subsequent mental illness are portrayed with insight. The novel also details the destruction of communities with progressive urbanisation.The title of the book, Someone, could be taken to mean that there is always someone to help or to offer hope when life seems unbearable. At one point Marie asks her brother “Who’s going to love me?” and he replies “Someone”.

This is not an exciting or adventurous book. It is a simple story of ordinary people searching for a better life, and is beautifully told in understated prose. The characters are drawn with sympathy and understanding, and the reader is made to feel a part of their joys and their fears. This book is an excellent read.

Marnie French.

Chris Adrian and magical realism

I discovered Chris Adrian on the new books stand in our Library. The novel is Gob’s grief, first published in 2000 in the USA by Vintage Books, but this is the 2013 Granta Books edition published in Great Britain.

Chris Adrian was thirty in 2000 and his first novel received high praise in the reviews. He was listed among the best twenty authors in the States under forty so I think the critics were hedging their bets. It is of interest to the kinds of books he writes that Adrian is also a fellow in pediatric hematology-oncology and it is also relevant that his brother died in an accident when quite young.

Gob’s grief is set around the time of the American Civil War and recounts the stories of several people who have lost loved ones, mostly brothers, in that war. The characters are a combination of fictional and historical figures and the events and settings cross back and forth between history and wild imagining. Gob and Tomo Woodhull are the fictional twin sons of the real Victoria Woodhull who was a ‘nineteenth-century proto-feminist’. In August 1863, the twins are eleven and have decided to run away to fight in the Civil War. At the last moment Gob backs out while Tomo carries on as planned, and is killed in his first battle. Gob grows up in a state of profound grief and guilt which leads him to want to be a doctor, and also to begin to make real his dream to build a machine that will bring Tomo back to life.

As Gob begins to gather a coterie of damaged grieving people around him, his vision extends to making the machine powerful enough to recover all the war dead. First there is Walt Whitman, poet in the real world and kosmos in the novel. He spends the Civil War ministering lovingly to the wounded and watching countless boys die and being

haunted by them ever after. Will McFie’s brother is killed and he builds a glass house from all the photographic plates of the carnage he has taken and developed. Maci Trufant’s brother has been killed and she finds refuge working for Gob’s mother. Her brother sent her sketches from the war and she continues to draw for Gob’s machine after they are married. Pickie Beecher is a boy child who seems to have been born out of the machine and to hover somewhere between the living and the dead. All contribute their art, skill, grief, despair and desire to the machine. Walt, as kosmos, is its essential centrepiece.

This is a quirky and literate piece of writing. It kept my interest to the end; yet curiously, after a while I could not remember what happened at the end.

In 2006 Adrian published a novel called The children’s hospital in which a hospital is preserved afloat, after the earth is flooded beneath seven miles of water. I have not been able to locate this example of ‘medical magical realism’ but am willing to try. According to the Boston Globe “He sails into the inexplicable, seeking meaning, and the reader, gripped by curiosity and admiration, scrambles on board”.

At present I am reading The great night (2011) which, among other things, is a reimagining of Shakespeare’s A midsummer night’s dream. Three people who are suffering from failed relationships are caught in a San Francisco park on midsummer eve. The park is the home of Titania, Oberon and a host of fey creatures that make up their court. Titania’s grief at the death of her Boy (a child they have taken from mortals) causes her to release an ancient menace. Thus far the words I would use for this novel are playful, cruel, poetic, ugly, absurd, courageous and possibly unique.

I foresee trouble for this author if he is unable to stretch beyond grief and desire and if he always has to have several stories going at once and if the same character types crop up in each. In the meantime, and while I am only half way through The great night I will continue reading with this warning in mind: ‘…this could wipe out casual readers, but it is an extraordinary novel’ - Library Journal.

Kaye Mill New in the Library

The Rabelasian Craig Sherborne returns to dynamic Australian fiction with Tree palace, featuring itinerants roaming the plains north-west of Melbourne in search of disused houses to sleep in, or to strip of heritage fittings when funds are low. When they find their tree palace outside Barleyville, things are looking up. At last, a place in which to settle down… Janette Turner Hospital hones her talent for Australia-US relations with The claimant, a contemporary reworking of the Tichbourne case, with an American fortune as the focus.

Jenny Offill has a small, sparkling work, Dept of speculation, to charm and concern about marriage and parenthood. Her publisher puts it this way: she writes “on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all”. Eimar McBride, author of the prize-winning A girl is a half-formed thing, said in the Financial Times: “Nothing I’ve read this year has affected or disturbed me as greatly as …The notebook by Agota Kristof. In an unnamed country at the end of an unnamed war, the central characters – a pair of eerily self-disciplined identical twins – force themselves through a carefully planned programme of dehumanisation. Drawing understated parallels between acts of private, collective and state-sponsored violence throughout, Kristof’s chilling indictment of totalitarianism in all its forms reads like an alternative – and equally dread-inducing – eastern European Nineteen eighty-four. Both stylistically inventive and politically incisive, this is a book to worry readers for years.” If this is too intense for July, try Hunting season by Andrea Camilleri: the author leaves his charming Inspector

Montalbano to display a different, nineteenth century Vigata with mystery and farcical humour, has an amusing cover, and is only 152 pages long.

Alternatively, try These broken stars: Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner have made science fiction glamorous with a stunning cover and a story like this – "Two star-crossed lovers must fight for survival when they crash land on a seemingly uninhabited planet". Kenneth Calhoun does well, too, with Black moon, in which the hero struggles to rescue his wife who has been captured and enraptured by an insomnia epidemic. Karen Fowler sets We are all completely beside ourselves in a 1970s family where the psychologist father's animal-human behaviour experiment on his children has heartbreaking and hilarious repercussions.

Joshua Ferris’ hero wants To rise again at a decent hour after the disturbance of suffering online identity theft, with the creeping suspicion that his online self might be a better version of himself than he is. Viviane, a debut French novel by Julia Deck, is both an engrossing murder mystery and a gripping exploration of madness. Sebastian Barry’s Temporary gentleman is ruefully ruminative on a life of unresolved regrets: he might be “a drinker, a gambler, an absent father, a neglectful husband, a gunrunner and, at the end, a coward, afraid to return home”, as the Guardian reviewer describes him, but Barry’s portrait acknowledges the depths and complications of family life in this tender composition.

Some modern classic short story writers have gathered here this month. Jane Gardam’s The stories have (according to her publisher) all the “originality, poignancy, wry comedy and narrative brilliance of her longer fiction”. Can’t and won’t is Lydia Davis’ first new short story publication since winning the Man Booker Prize. Bombay stories by Saadat Hasan Manto are also short. The New York Times review says Manto may be considered the greatest South Asian writer of the 20th century. The stories in this collection, translated from Urdu, were written after the author moved to Pakistan in 1948, and look back with an aching longing for the city he had just left.

Jussi Adler-Olsen continues the Danish reputation for excellence in police mystery writing with his fourth Department Q novel, The purity of vengeance. Greg Iles’ mysteries are set in the US, and Natchez burning illuminates the Mississippi city of his youth. Peter Swanson chooses Boston for his noir setting of The girl with a clock for a heart.

Here’s where we segue from fiction to non-fiction without skipping a beat. There is a country: new fiction from the new nation of South Sudan has been put together by the indefatigable Dave Eggers-inspired McSweeney’s publishing house in San Francisco. Meanwhile, the independent Hurst publishers of London have added to their strengths in war and conflict studies by putting out James Copnall’s A poisonous thorn in our hearts: Sudan and South Sudan’s bitter and incomplete divorce. Another Bloomsbury publisher also features Africa this month, with Toby Wilkinson reconnoitring The Nile: downriver through Egypt’s past and present.

To the north, the gloriously-named Cyprian Broodbank illustrates The making of the middle sea: a history of the Mediterranean from the beginning to the emergence of the Classical World; John Dixon Hunt looks at The Venetian city garden through the filters of place, typology and perception; and Michael Scott consults the oracle at Delphi: a history of the center of the ancient world.

Place might just be an excuse for Alex Liddell’s encyclopedic indulgence: his 365-page book on Madeira: the mid-Atlantic wine enters its second edition this year. Arnold van Huis, on the other hand, looks to a sustainable future with his inspired Insect cookbook. I’m not sure that Valerie Curtis had heard of Arnold’s book when she composed Don’t look, don’t touch, don’t eat: the science behind revulsion – after all, one of her chapters acknowledges disgust’s diversity.

Here are some Australian non-fiction titles to ease us into a wider world of knowledge and perception. Jean Kittson maintains her comedian’s edge in You’re still hot to me: the joys of menopause. Wakefield Press in South Australia has just published Dino Hodge’s Don Dunstan intimacy and liberty: a political biography. Appropriately enough, The mystery of AE1: Australia's lost submarine and crew, is published by Missing Pages Books. Kathryn Spurling tells how Australia’s first submarine was sent with the Australian fleet to capture German New Guinea, but then simply disappeared after leaving Rabaul Harbour in September 1914. Joan Beaumont also reflects on those times in Broken nation: Australians in the Great War. Malcolm Fraser, increasingly reflective, posits in Dangerous allies that Australia might not be wise to rely on its long-term pattern of strategic dependence, especially if it means following friends into wars of no direct interest to Australia's security.

In that light, it’s reassuring to note that the Parliamentary Library also has a copy of Strategy: a history, written by Lawrence Freedman and published in all its 751-page glory by Oxford University Press; and that the Australian Agency for International Development, in its DFAT Australian Aid Program Library, has a copy of a Cambridge University Press volume called How much have global problems cost the world? A scorecard from 1900 to 2050.

Myles Baldwin pictures Australian coastal gardens. Adrian Newstead’s memoir, The dealer is the devil: an insider's history of the Aboriginal art trade, describes his thirty years sitting round campfires with Aboriginal artists all over Australia, and produces the definitive expose of “the first great art movement of the 21st century”. Nicole Vasbinder contributes another in the Milner craft series with The home sewers guide to practical stitches: the ultimate guide to sewing seams, hems, darts...and more.

Nic Bezzina’s self-published photographs of Newtown shopkeepers feature the late Bob Gould on the cover and a glorious range of inner city images inside. Ross Garnaut struggles with Dog days: Australia after the boom, third in a series called Redbacks – “books with bite: short books on big issues by leading Australian writers and thinkers" (we also have the fourth such title: Anzac's long shadow: the cost of our national obsession).

Rebecca Solnit, “a product of the California public education system”, has written fifteen books, about environment, landscape, community, art, politics, hope and memory. We have seven in the Library – most recently Unfathomable city: a New Orleans atlas and a collection of essays most wonderfully titled Men explain things to me: the lead essay begins “I still don’t know why Sallie and I bothered to go to that party in the forest slope above Aspen. The people were all older than us and dull in a distinguished way, old enough that we, at forty-ish, passed as the occasion’s young ladies. …We were preparing to leave, when our host said, “No, stay a little longer so I can talk to you.” He was an imposing man who’d made a lot of money.” Salomon Kroonenburg is a Dutch author, and his Why hell stinks of sulphur: mythology and geology of the underworld explores the subterranean realms with scientific and storytelling filters guiding him. The same dual focus is applied by Mattew Beresford to explore The white devil: the werewolf in European culture.

Inside the rainbow: Russian children's literature, 1920-35: beautiful books, terrible times is a beautifully illustrated compendium of a highpoint in the history of children's literature. In the dark and dangerous world of revolutionary Petrograd, a group of Russian poets and artists, created a new kind of book for children. These artists and writers dreamed of endless possibilities in a new world where children and grown-ups alike would be free from the bitterness of ignorance – and, for a time, their books conveyed learning, poetic irony, burlesque and laughter. Larry Siedentop, too, looks at a talented group of thinkers to help explain how we got here today - Inventing the individual: the origins of Western liberalism points intriguingly beyond the Renaissance to the arguments of twelfth and thirteenth-century lawyers and philosophers.

Wendy Doniger, an American scholar, has had two successive books on Hinduism banned in India. Both are available in the Library. The first, The Hindus: an alternative history, was pulped by Penguin India after a court case alleging the work to be malicious and offending; the second, essays On Hinduism, was threatened as well, and its Indian publisher responded that the book was out of stock, “probably due to various statements made in public as well as the media coverage of …objections to the book published by Penguin.” Another new work investigating Hindu manifestation is The yoga sutra of Patanjali: a biography, written by David Wright and published by Yale University Press as a volume in their series Lives of Great Religious Books (four others are on our shelves). In our continuing ecumenical manner, the Library also has new publications on Buddhism (Secret teachings of Padmasambhava: essential instructions on mastering the energies of life) and Christianity (From shame to sin: the

Christian transformation of sexual morality in late antiquity by Kyle Harper).

From the world of arts, Alfred Brendel composes A pianist’s A-Z: a piano lover’s reader; Gavin Stamp takes a walk to see Anti-ugly: excursions in English architecture and design; Barbara Stoeltie pays tribute to The art of the interior: timeless designs by the master decorators; Daniel Sutherland overturns the combative, eccentric, unrelenting publicity-seeking image of James McNeill Whistler and finds a life for art’s sake; Christopher Lloyd does more than sketch Edgar Degas: drawings and pastels; and James Hall is similarly blessed by the fine production values of Thames and Hudson to match his delicately-chosen examples of The self-portrait: a cultural history.

Marcel Danesi gets up close to explore The history of the kiss!: the birth of popular culture. Eduardo Kohn takes us away to Amazonian examples of How forests think: toward an anthropology beyond the human. Josef Koudelka photographs a far less flexible environment: the Wall to divide Palestinian West Bank residents from Israeli settlements.

Other ways of looking at the world are pursued by Andro Linklater (Owning the earth: the transforming history of land ownership); Bradley Garrett (Explore everything: place-hacking the city - in which he recodes closed, secret, hidden and forgotten urban spaces into realms of opportunity); Alastair Bonnett (Off the map: lost space, feral places and invisible cities and what they tell us – which examines Wittenoom, Baarle-Hertog and the LAX parking lot among many other intriguing places); and Patrick McGuinness (whose Other people’s countries explores memory as much as place).

The past is brought to life by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, author of The leopard, in his newly-translated Childhood memories and other stories (first published in Milan in 1961). R Jay Wallace examines The view from here: on affirmation, attachment and the limits of regret. Paul Roberts illustrates the extraordinarily ordinary Life and death in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Gregory Aldrete spends time Reconstructing ancient linen body armor: unraveling the linothorax mystery to show that Alexander the Great’s armies were effectively protected by armour made of cloth.

There is also a return to old blighty in its many guises: Rebecca Mead, American, writes sincerely of My life in Middlemarch, seeing George Eliot as both a great novelist and a role model for bright, ambitious, provincially born girls like herself, eager to escape their intellectually impoverished hometowns; Travis Elborough and Nick Rennison compile 607 pages as A London year: 365 days of city life in diaries, journals and letters; and finally, two books examine The practice of satire in England 1658-1770 - Ashley Marshall writes the broader view and Cambridge University Press offer an extended display from one of its greatest exponents: Parodies, hoaxes, mock treatises: polite conversation, directions to servants and other works by Jonathan Swift.

Deep in the joys of winter, there are books to help us adapt to a life in front of the fire: a rug of craft books, a sward of gardening, a bench of cooking, a gallery of art. Let’s takeoff with The quilter's palette: a workbook of colour & pattern ideas & effects by Katy Denny; segue to the outdoors with Freda Cox (A gardener’s guide to snowdrops), Alice Taylor (The gift of a garden), Piet Oudolf and Henk Gerritsen (Dream plants for the natural garden: over 1,200 beautiful and reliable plants for a natural garden); then return indoors to sample Rainbow tarts: 50 recipes for 50 colours (Emilie Guelpa), Tartine book no. 3: modern,ancient, classic, whole (where Chad Robertson adapts his earlier bread and pastry recipes also held in the Library to incorporate whole grains, nut milks and alternative sweeteners), Community: salad recipes from Arthur Street Kitchen (Surry Hills’ own HettyMcKinnon), My darling lemon thyme: recipes from my real food kitchen (Auckland’s Emma Galloway) and Olives, lemons & za'atar: the best

Middle Eastern home cooking (Rawia Bishara grew up in Nazareth and now lives in Brooklyn).

A feast for the eyes is also available via Veronese (Xavier Salomon, published to mark the exhibition Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice held at the National Gallery, London from 19 March to 15 June this year), Italian Futurism 1909-1944: reconstructing the universe (from an exhibition still running at the Guggenheim Museum, New York until September 1), Show time: the 50 most influential exhibitions of contemporary art (Jens Hoffmann) and The King's pictures: the formation and dispersal of the collections of Charles I and his courtiers (Francis Haskell).

Then we have titles which help with our frailties: Carmel Harrington provides The complete guide to a good night's sleep; and two other doctors, Gerard Sutton and Michael Lawless, tell of The naked eye: how the revolution of laser surgery has unshackled the human eye.