The Year of Down Under

[Addendum - Saturday, May 26, 2007:
I would love to have company in the challenge at any point in the year, if anyone is interested in joining me! I intend to pick a new country every year and undertake a similar challenge. The top contenders for next year's country (when I hope to make this a more public challenge, where it was a mostly personal challenge this year) are China, Japan, and Israel/Palestine. If you would like to join this (Australian) year, drop me a line. If you would like to join me next year, and have an opinion about which of those countries sounds most appealing, let me know. I will keep you posted!]

Greedy soul that I am, I took one look at Tanabata's "Japan Challenge" and Kailana's "O'Canada Challenge" and thought "I must get me one of those." What a delightful idea it would be, I thought, to pick a different country every year and focus on it for 12 months and 12 books. And God knows I don't have enough New Year's resolutions under way! This sort of boundless greed is how I ended up with three middle names.*

So let me declare this the year of my Australia Challenge. Let it be proclaimed far and wide. I am defining the challenge by the Australianness of the author, rather than the subject matter of the book (although ideally many of the books will take Australia as a subject or setting). I include authors who have lived all their lives in Australia, those who were born there and have since taken up residence or citizenship elsewhere, and those who have adopted Australia as their home although born somewhere else.

*****
The books that I already have on my shelf that might claim a place in such a challenge follow:

PETER CAREY
"My Life as a Fake"
"The True History of the Kelly Gang"
"Oscar and Lucinda"

SHIRLEY HAZZARD
"Transit of Venus"
"The Great Fire"

TIM WINTON
"Dirt Music"
"Cloudstreet"

MORRIS WEST
"The Salamander"

BRYCE COURTENAY
"The Power of One"

GERALDINE BROOKS
"Year of Wonders"

DBC PIERRE (Who asserts his Mexicanness over his Australianness)
"Vernon God Little"

ELLIOT PERLMAN
"Seven Types of Ambiguity"

JOAN LONDON
"Gilgamesh"

DAVID MALOUF
"Remembering Babylon"

JESSICA ANDERSON
"Tirra Lirra by the River"

*****
Other books which I might include, but do not currently own:

THOMAS KENEALLY
"Commonwealth of Thieves"

KATE GRENVILLE
"The Secret River"

ROGER McDONALD
"The Ballad of Desmond Kale"

COLLEEN McCULLOUGH
"The Thornbirds"

ANDREW McGAHAN
"The White Earth"

ALEX MILLER
"Journey to the Stone Country"

PATRICK WHITE
"Voss"

MARCUS ZUSAK
"The Book Thief"


[UPDATE: Some recommendations from LibraryThingers that I have just fetched from the library -

MARGO LANAGAN
"Black Juice"

CARRIE TIFFANY
"Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living"

DOROTHY PORTER
"The Monkey's Mask"

NORMAN LINDSAY
"The Magic Pudding"]

*****
Books which are excluded from this challenge because I have already read them (at least those that immediately come to mind):

MILES FRANKLIN
"My Brilliant Career"

THOMAS KENEALLY
"Schindler's Ark"/"Schindler's List"

GERALDINE BROOKS
"Nine Parts of Desire"

ADA CAMBRIDGE
"The Three Miss Kings" (sometimes listed as "The Three Misses King")

JIMMY CHI
"Bran Nue Dae" (I am saddened by the lack of drama on my To Do list for this challenge. I may add more as I do more research. Let me know if you have suggestions.)

So, all in all, I have read very little Australian literature in my life.

*****
Most delightfully, I have already finished my January novel for this challenge. So here is the list so far:

1) "A Child's Book of True Crime" by Chloe Hooper (2002)

I will keep you updated.






*In my family, you are allowed to choose your own middle name when you are 12. At 12, I had already developed a keen sense of the, um, ornate. I aimed for the most complex possible monogram, choosing McClanahan (McC.), Llewellyn (which, I liked to think, would be abbreviated Ll.), and Æmalia (Æ).

First Book of 2007: "A Child's Book of True Crime"

I just learned how to change the HMTL of this blog, all by myself! I changed the LibraryThing widget (admittedly among the easiest of all possible changes to make, since LibraryThing has the code all prepared for you). Now instead of giving a selection of the books I recently read in 2006, it tells you what books I have read in 2007, a list that (as you can see) comes to a whopping total of one.

***Possible, if very vague, SPOILERS below***

Last night I finished Chloe Hooper's A Child's Book of True Crime, which was remarkable for its lucid interest in children's thought patterns and their unusual morality. A schoolteacher, Kate, on her first assignment out of university, moves to a small town in Tasmania that can't seem to escape its colonial roots. Kangaroos and wallabies litter the roads and are hunted for pet food, bridal parties take formal pictures in front of dilapidated penal colonies, and children play at being transported prisoners. When the novel opens, Kate is in the midst of an affair with the father of her favorite student, whose mother has written a true crime thriller about a murder that threw the town into chaos some 15 years earlier. The local vet, it seems, had been having an affair with his assistant, when one day his lover was found brutally slaughtered and his wife mysteriously disappeared. Hooper's novel has some striking insights about childhood, fear, and responsibility, but as her main character deteriorates in the last half of the book, so does the novel itself. "The Turn of the Screw" lurks unmentioned in the background of "A Child's Book of True Crime," but James's novella is infinitely more successful at winning our sympathies for its dubiously sane protagonist, and thus is also more fruitful in its narrative ambiguity. Hooper's novel seems, by contrast, to devolve into a sort of gothic chaos, a frenzy which only leaves us as alienated and disappointed in the protagonist as her prissy colleagues.

"A Child's Book of True Crime"
Chloe Hooper
(Australia, 2002)
***

A day in Spain

Yesterday was a day of two mildly disappointing Spanish movies, which are (I fear) doomed to be not only linked but also confused in my future reminiscences.

The first, "Only Human" (2004), is a farce with a promising foundation: successful daughter Leni brings her boyfriend home to meet her crazy Jewish family, telling them that he is Israeli. Only after a great deal of embarrassing conversation about where he did his military service and where his family lives does it emerge that he is, in fact, Palestinian. I felt hopeful about the wonderfully weird characters, from a brother who has suddenly discovered not only a wounded duckling who lives in their toilet, but also religious zeal (he attempts throughout to force his family to observe the Sabbath properly), to a belly-dancing sister and a downstairs neighbor with an unhealthily well-developed sense of "community." In an early scene in the film, Leni's brother purges the fridge of all pork products. Pulling a sausage out of the garbage, his mother cries "What is wrong with this?!?" "It's not kosher!" "Throwing food away isn't kosher!" she replies, dousing the sausage in dish soap and giving it a thorough scrubbing.

If only the whole movie had been this way, based on the subtle clash between absurd but plausible characters. Instead it quickly became one of my least favorite types of comedy: a farce which relies on the extreme and unrealistic stupidity of its characters to herd them into a series of ridiculous situations. If I am exclaiming "Why didn't [the protagonist] just do this???" then the film is a bit too much like a sitcom of the "Three's Company" ilk. Perhaps I should have known better when I saw that Netflix compared it to "Meet the Parents," a film which I despised with an unusual vigor. Too many groans, not enough laughs.


The second film sparked a rare outing to an actual movie theatre, an adventure I had been eagerly anticipating for some time: the new Pedro Almodovar feature, "Volver." The film is almost completely devoid of men, and what few there are manage to be moral cesspools. It is a drama of deception played out between three generations of women: the (ghostly) matriarch Irene and her senile sister Tia Paula, Irene's daughters Raimunda (played by a resplendent Penelope Cruz) and Sole, their friend Agustina, and Raimunda's teenage daughter Paula. For the most part the characters and performances are delicate, although from time to time the scenes had a staginess that I had never seen before in an Almodovar. This is not to be confused with his trademark theatricality, an exuberance which tempers grim plotlines.

For my tastes, however, "Volver" is not grim or weird enough, spending too much time reveling in the sentimentality of the mother-daughter relationship. I wanted MORE transvestites, MORE prostitutes, MORE tiny people climbing into giant genitals, MORE of all the trappings of quirk that make an Almodovar film so delightful, banishing the cloying traces of self-pity or -satisfaction. One scene in "Volver" delivers this, despite a staid cast of characters: the principal mourner return to her family's small town for an aunt's funeral, where she is instantly mobbed by a muttering, pawing gaggle of black-clad women, intent on performing sympathy and stealing her aunt's valuables. Almodovar shoots this from above (a favorite shot of his in this movie, perhaps best described as the "cleavage shot"), emphasizing the herd mentality, the sense of the mourner drowning under surges of condolence which go on and on amidst a mumbled cacophony of "Hail Mary"s. Gorgeous and excruciating.

Almodovar clearly loves all these women, both the characters and the actors. Late in the film, Irene settles down to watch an old movie, and Anna Magnani appears on the screen. Oh, I immediately though, how Almodovar would have loved to work with Magnani, that opulent and stern empress of melodramatic subtlety. What an ode to paradox that collaboration would have been.



"Only Human"/"Seres Queridos" (2004)
dir. Teresa Pelegri and Dominic Harari
***

"Volver" (2006)
dir. and written by Pedro Almodovar
***1/2