'Swallow the Air' by Tara June Winch

A small story about the childhood of May Gibson, a half aboriginal girl whose traumatizing up-bring is hazily recounted through a mixture of dreamtime legends and heroin induced fantasies. With a father who abandoned her at a young age, a mother who took her life from grief, a Aunty who finds comfort in a bottle as a means of escaping her boyfriends fists and a brother who goes half-mad from it all, one easily sympathies with May in all her innocent beauty as she wanders the continent in search for home. Perhaps then it is her unbelievable purity in amongst tragedy and corruption which stops the novel from being a straight memoir, but rather a dreamlike exploration of finding one’s place in the world after suffering accumulative loss; ‘it was then I felt Aboriginal, I felt like I belonged, but when Mum left, I stopped being Aboriginal. I stopped feeling like I belonged. Anywhere.’

.......................................................................................................

‘I didn’t know it then, but the man would no longer be there and the mangoes would’ve all been packed and sent away in dusty oversized trucks. They would all be bought and eaten, the skin and seed rotted, the yellow dew leather chewed through by worms. Fruit flies would have flown to new flesh. And the dark finger leaves would’ve grown over in pink wax scale, the hibiscus turned black and sweating fragrance of caustic sap and sugar long been buried with the season.’

'Bonjour Tristesse' by Francoise Sagan

Chic lit at its very best which is unsurprising as it would seem the French during certain period could not do anything without having at least a hint of depth. This is a subtle and somewhat understated novella, not a masterpiece by any standards but an admirable effort for Sagan who was only eighteen at the time. In the introduction by Diane Johnson she postulates the thought that much of the insight within the novel is incidental in which Sagan herself might not have been first aware, if at all. The unnaturally hot weather of when I read this book complemented the simple summer-set storyline, following the sometimes amusing other times wrenched antics of Cecile as she comes to the realisation of her own culpability to her maturing as a woman: she may be passively molded into respectability, become a sensational and sensual woman yet whom would be entirely dependable on the likes of men, or actively reject it entirely. One is left at the end to make their own decision as to which path she chooses, I’d like to imagine that she’d go for the latter. ...................................................................................
“Whatever irrelevance one may at first find between the cause and the effects, and although a rule of guidance towards an assertion concerning the root of things may be far distant, it is always in a contract with the generative force of life that one is able to extract the power to love humanity” quoting Bergson.

'The Ecstasy of Owen Muir' by Ring Lardner, Jr.

A slow and often quite work and though it is undoubtedly a satire I was often in confusion as whether to take it in truth and often caught myself contemplating it in all seriousness. Frequently I was reminded of John Kennedy Toole’s ‘A Confederacy of Dunes’, yet unlike Ignatius J. Reily, Owen Muir loses his mounds of flesh and trades his own worldview for that of the Catholic Churchs. The work is a meditation on the rise fundamentalist extremes in the United States during the 60’s, with the specific example of Catholicism, socialism /nationalism and capitalism, each representing a broader social construct, namely religion, politics and economics. In our times we can see the same trends reflected in the rise of religious conservative Tony Abbott*, the debate surrounding climate change and the global financial crisis. Whilst stuck at a church the other night I came upon an article associating socialism with Christianity, it went so far as to draw similarities between the figure of Christ and Che Guevara, ‘[T]rue Christianity is not interested in mere shaping of society. It seeks nothing less than the total overthrow of all gods till Christ rules in every heart’. They proved my point for me.

................................................................................................

‘“You”- to Owen- “talk a lot about love of God, and you”- to Couto- “defend yourself on the grounds of love of country. But God is an abstraction that means one thing to one person and nothing at all to somebody else, and it’s only guesswork whether He gives a damn if we love Him or not. As for love of country, it always gets mixed up with love of a particular government that happens to be in power, and it can be used to justify anything from napalm bombing to making Jews into soap”’.

*when I originally wrote this Mr Abbott was not yet the elected leader of the opposition party, a current example would be the Tea Party protests or the banning of the burka in France, which also demonstrate the crossover of these extremes into one another, in both support and opposition