Things which inexplicably still exist

1. Faxes
2. Cheques
3. Cash
4. Cage eggs
5. Fixed (non-cordless) landline telephones
6. Landline telephones
7. Plastic cutlery
8. Blank video tapes
9. Cask wine
10. Telephone directories
11. Non-recyclable packaging
12. Magazines which treat soap characters as real people
13. Greeting cards
14. State governments
15. Weekday newspapers in print form
16. Leaf blowers
17. Reality tv
18. Single-ply toilet paper
19. Reconstituted juices
20. Royal families
    

Blogging the Booker 14: In a Strange Room

The final book on this year's Booker Prize shortlist - and the final of my trip through the longlist, since I'm skipping the remaining two - is Damon Galgut's In a Strange Room. Galgut was an author of whom I was entirely unaware until this longlist, but I had read some glowing reviews of this book, so even though I wasn't able to get my hands on a copy until after The Finkler Question was announced as winner, I was still quite keen to read In a Strange Room.

In a Strange Room is a slim book - 180 pages in smallish hardcover, but another way of viewing it is as three linked novellas published together (indeed, I believe the three sections have been published separately in magazines). Each section is essentially self-contained - there's no references from one to the next. And since Damon Galgut is a South African writer (the only one on this year's longlist, if memory serves) writing in the first person about a South African writer named Damon, there might be a tendency to wonder how autobiographical In a Strange Room is. I've no idea, so won't speculate and don't much care.

The three sections deal with three different journeys Damon went on, as he writes about them years later. It's not entirely accurate to say that this book is written in the first person - most of the time, older Damon writes about younger Damon in the third person, only occasionally switching to the first-person pronoun. This provides a measure of detachment, of distance, in his descriptions of his younger self. And it works quite well, at least so far as I was concerned, not least because of the extra weight it gives the passages where middle-aged Damon refers to younger Damon as 'I'.

Each of the three journeys is given a title/theme: The Follower, The Lover, The Guardian. In each, he travels somewhere and meets someone (or travels with them), and it is these relationships that In a Strange Room is about (as well as being about travel itself). I felt that each section was more about the relationship and less about the travel than the previous one - in the final section, the travel seems almost incidental, a setting for the relationship more than anything else.

In a Strange Room is a quiet little book - reflective, sparse, a little detached as the narration illustrates, and essentially introspective. The first two sections in particular are about things not said, not done, rather than dramatic actions or plotting. Scenery and setting is described, but this is not a travel brochure. I found In a Strange Room engrossing and touching, both in low-key sorts of ways, and am glad it made it to the shortlist, and that I got around to reading it. As I've said before, in some ways the winner of the Booker is a little irrelevant to me - my pleasure is in getting to know some new authors, and also sometimes seeing a favourite author get some more attention.

So, while I was both a little surprised and disappointed that The Finkler Question won this year's prize, I'm still glad to have read most of the longlist. I hope you've enjoyed my idiosyncratic little reviews too. If it had been up to me, the shortlist (from the longlist) would have been (in no real order):
David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Paul Murray, Skippy Dies
Andrea Levy, The Long Song
Emma Donoghue, Room
Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room
Peter Carey, Parrot & Olivier in America

Four of those six made the judges' shortlist, so I can't feel too antagonistic to them (even if the two they missed were probably my favourites, or at least in my top few).

And, of course, at least my record of not really rating the winner has continued for another year. But, I guess, there's always next year...

Next: no more Booker longlisteds for me! But stayed tuned for reviews of whatever I happen to be reading (random is a nice way of putting it), and perhaps I'll even start posting about non-book-related things now that my Blogging the Booker series has drawn to a close...

Book review: The News Where You Are

What Was Lost, Catherine O'Flynn's first novel, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2007 - but sadly didn't make the shortlist, despite being one of the best novels I read that year. Her followup, The News Where You Are, was published a couple of months ago, and I finally got my hands on a copy last week (note: the fault was all mine). I'm disappointed that it didn't make this year's Booker longlist, because that would have exposed it to a greater audience, but I'm sure it will still find a happy readership.

Frank Allcroft is a middle-aged local news presenter in Birmingham. Unlike some of his colleagues, who see regional news as a trivial relic, Frank genuinely likes the local focus and has developed minor local fame as the teller of incredibly corny, poorly-delivered, jokes in the news broadcast. His predecessor & friend Phil, who left Birmingham for brighter things with a national audience, has died in a hit & run incident. His late father, a once-renowned architect, is suffering the final indignity, with most of his buildings being torn down & replaced by more modern designs. His mother, determindedly unhappy, lives in an aged-care home. And Frank finds himself increasingly worried about the forgotten people - those whose deaths are barely noticed, and whose lives are swiftly erased.

The News Where You Are is a novel about people's legacies - how they are remembered, how their lives (& deaths) affect those around them, and how we the living continue living without them. Frank finds himself investigating the life & death of Phil's friend Michael, who has also recently died (Phil and Michael were both a generation older than Frank), and tries to track down people who may have known this friend of a friend, hoping to find someone who might remember Michael. He also spends time with Cyril, an unsuccessful comedy writer whose only consistent gig appears to be scripting Frank's wince-inducing puns for the news, and Michelle, Phil's (young) widow. As his father's buildings are being scheduled for demolition, he tries to save at least some of them. And he, along with his wife Andrea & daughter Mo, try to brighten the life of his mother. Through these intertwinning elements, we also occasionally flashback to Frank's childhood, with his self-important father trying to design a better world through architecture, and also to the last few months of Phil's life.

O'Flynn weaves these tiny moments together effectively. While The News Where You Are might sound overwhelmingly melancholy, those themes are handled with a lightness of touch that finds small moments of humour and a warmth towards its characters that keeps the book from sinking into depressing bleakness. Much of this has to do with Mo, who is refreshingly real for a child in a modern novel (she's not brilliantly intelligent or talented, and actually acts in ways that seem familar). Mo's genuine desire to make her grandmother happy, and her interest in some (but not all) of what her father tries to show her are well-drawn characteristics. Frank himself is aware that his increasing interest in the past, and in people who have died, is not entirely healthy, but also recognises that he needs to remember people and deal with his father's & friend's legacies.

In many ways The News Where You Are is a small novel - it's short (250pp) and easily read, and O'Flynn doesn't really go in for huge, shocking plot twists (there is one revelation, but it's underplayed, not so as you'd miss it, but it certainly doesn't feel like a cheap thrill). Yet at the same time, as I've noted, it considers some fairly weighty themes like how we remember and are remembered, and friendship, and relationships with our parents and children.

Highly recommended, and I look forward to Catherine O'Flynn's third book.

Blogging the Booker 13: Trespass

Dear Reader/s,

I have failed you in my attempt to read all 13 of the Booker longlisted novels by the winner announcement. Not because that date is upon us, but because I can confidently state that I won't finish at least one of those 13 now or anytime in the foreseeable future.

That book is Trespass, by Rose Tremain. I tried my best - I honestly did - but I made it less than 40 pages into Trespass (which only runs to about 250pp) before deciding that life is too short to waste on books that bore me utterly. That was over a week & a half ago, and I have had no desire in the meantime to pick it up again*.

A common criticism of the Booker prize is that there is a certain style of novel frequently rewarded (to at least shortlist stage). These novels tend to feature older, privileged, often artistic-class English/Irish people taking stock of their lives. John Banville's The Sea was, in my opinion, an excellent example of this genre, but there have been plenty of less-interesting versions of the same thing. Despite my enjoyment of Banville's book, I have a fairly low tolerance for this style of novel, and thus was not encouraged when I read the jacket blurb for Trespass.

Now, admittedly, there is a sense of danger - as if the book might be in part a thriller, but otherwise the blurb introduces us to the three main characters:
1. Aramon Lunel - "an alcoholic so haunted by his violent past that he's become incapable of all meaningful action"
2. Audrun (his sister) - "dreams of exacting retribution for the unspoken betrayals that have blighted her life"
[The above two live, separately but adjacently, in "the dark and beautiful heartland of southern France".]
3. Anthony Verey - "a wealthy but disillusioned antiques dealer from London" who falls into their world.

My heart sunk with each successive line from that description, but I tried to give Trespass a fair go. Unfortunately, I found myself unable to do so. Maybe it's a flaw in me, but reading about wealthy people's problems is not inherently interesting. I'm not trying to be a class warrior, but character descriptions like "a wealthy but disillusioned antiques dealer from London" make me roll my eyes, not wonder what could possibly have disillusioned the poor soul. Ditto books about people who move to "the dark and beautiful heartland of southern France" to sort out the mess they have made of their lives.

I would at this point like to remind whoever's reading that I am not even one of those people who necessarily needs to like the characters in his books. I'm quite happy reading novels focusing on completely unsympathetic characters. And it wasn't that Trespass put me off with its unlikeable characters - it just bored me and made me utterly fail to care about any of it.

Anyway, Trespass didn't make the shortlist, so we need not concern ourselves with it any further.

Next: In a Strange Room, Damon Galgut, the only remaining book from the shortlist in my reading list. (I have a copy on its way from the Book Depository, so hopefully will get to read it before the winner is announced mid-next week.) I'll almost certainly not get to Helen Dunmore's The Betrayal or Lisa Moore's February by then.


* Reading in the meantime: Great Expectations, newest McSweeney's, Catherine O'Flynn's The News Where You Are, and some Borges essays. All of which have stomped all over Trespass.

Blogging the Booker 12: The Finkler Question

So, after a short break from the Booker longlist - during which time I read a few other things, including Freedom, Jonathan Franzen's latest (& wonderful) novel, and a 1930s English spy novel - I return to the Booker task at hand with Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question, which has made it through to the shortlist.

One issue I will be facing with these last few books from the longlist is knowing by the time I read them whether or not they've been shortlisted (of the five remaining when the shortlist was announced, two were, three weren't). That means that, to some extent, I'll be evaluating these ones - especially the two that did progress onto the shortlist - in terms of my thoughts of which other books didn't get shortlisted. Two books I really did want to make the shortlist - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet & Skippy Dies - did not, while two books I hadn't read - The Finkler Question & In a Strange Room - did.

All of which to say that I'm possibly going to be expecting a fair bit from those two novels. In fairness, they're on the Booker shortlist, so things should be expected of them.

Enough prologue, however. The Finkler Question is the first book of Howard Jacobson's I've read (or, to be honest, heard of), but it came with a quote on the front cover from Jonathan Safran Foer, who apparently enjoyed it. And, while I've been avoiding reviews of the Booker longlist entries until I've read them myself, I did know that this book has received some quite positive reviews to date.

However, it has left me a little cold. You remember that scene from Being John Malkovich where John Malkovich enters the portal to his own brain? And lands in a restaurant where everyone looks like him & keeps repeating the word 'Malkovich' with different intonations?

Well, The Finkler Question is a little like that, except the word is 'Jew'. We have three main characters - Julian Treslove, Libor Sevcik & Sam Finkler. Treslove & Finkler are late middle-age friends (since school), Sevcik is older. Sevcik & Finkler are Jewish (& both are also recent widowers), Treslove is not. But Treslove - who really is the main character - decides that he wishes he were Jewish, so he tries to become one. Other than his bond to the two other men, his reasons are not entirely clear. He just really, really fetishes Jewishness. Finkler is a celebrity philosopher (writing pop-philosophy books, making tv series etc), but is perhaps best described as a Professional Jew. He is, and indeed all Jewish characters in this book (which is to say: all characters other than Treslove) are, regardless of their level of religious observance, strongly opposed to the actions of the state of Israel. And they talk about it. A lot. To the exclusion of pretty much any other topic, with the occasional exception of sex.

One might call The Finkler Question a novel of ideas, but that's a little exaggeration. It's more like a novel of an idea. And that, for me, was its failing - if you're not really, really interested in the topic of Jewish identity among old, wealthy London men, then The Finkler Question gets a little tiresome. Jacobson can write well, and there are some wonderful sentences or descriptions, but for me this novel is just a little too monochromatic. I made reference in my review of The Slap to how that book often felt like it was inspired by the grand (particularly Russian) novels of the 19th century, in which characters sat around & discussed the problems of the day - social, political, philosophical, theological. The Finkler Question is the same, but with the difference that in those books, things actually happened in between those conversations - we had the Napoleon coming for a visit, shocking love affairs, murders etc. In The Finkler Question, those conversations are only broken up by things like Treslove going on a short holiday with his two estranged sons, reminding himself what a feeble father he was/is. (And even that scene only lasts about three pages.) Not every novel needs those sorts of things, of course - and I'm not even a particularly strong advocate of novels needing to have plots - but all I can say is that The Finkler Question, while well-written, never really grabbed me or made me care about its characters, other than to think that at least a few of them would've been well off to find themselves a hobby.

So, to return to the point I started with, perhaps I am unfairly judging this book against two that it beat onto the Booker shortlist - maybe I would've liked it better had I read it before I knew how the shortlist would pan out. And I don't regret reading it or anything, but I would be pretty underwhelmed were it to win the prize this year.

(Also: The Finkler Question is the first book I have bought & read via the Kindle app on my iPad. I might post some thoughts on that experience later.)

Next: Trespass, by Rose Tremain (which will invert the expectations I brought into this review, since it will be the first one I've read in the knowledge that it was longlisted but not shortlisted).

Art + Technology

In the absence of a new Booker post (I'm currently reading - & loving - Jonathan Franzen's Freedom... and also marking essay introductions), I thought I'd post a few thoughts on other recent interesting finds.

Despite being barely technically minded, I've always been interested in new technologies - or new uses of old ones, particularly when these intersect with my interest in music or books. And I've come across a few such things recently:

1. Sufjan Stevens releases a new EP without telling anyone.

Sufjan Stevens is one of the most talented musicians of this young century, and both Illinois(e) & Seven Swans are amongst my favourite albums. But it's been a long time since Illinois, his last 'proper' album, and while we had rumours that something was coming soon, a couple of weeks ago he just released a new EP (although - 8 songs; 60 minutes is stretching how Extended something can be before it's just Long) on his website. For $5 (US), it was available for immediate download, and in every audio format known to modern listeners. (Well, except Windows Media, because it sucks.)

Releasing music via internet download is hardly new, of course, but what Stevens did - inadvertently or otherwise - actually created more of a buzz than months of pre-release hype would have done. Because all of a sudden, you could just go and get new music out of the blue from a favourite artist & be listening to it within an hour or two of first being aware of its existence (depending on your internet speed).

And the music's fantastic, by the way. Some of his best work to date - some quieter songs, a la Seven Swans, and some lengthy, more experimental tracks. A few days after the release of All Delighted People, he announced a full album (entirely unrelated to this ep) in October. Yay! A couple of tracks from that have been officially made available for free download, and that's just whetted my appetite.

2. Radiohead essentially give away a free concert dvd.

The main problem with Radiohead's In Rainbows was the fact that its brilliance got overshadowed by the band's marketing strategy (download for as much as you want to pay, in case you've been living under a rock). In Rainbows is - in my opinion - as good as anything they've done. And they have done some very serious good.

And, in a neat repetition of that release, they've done a similar thing with a live concert video from the tour (in Prague). A group of fans got together & all shot the show on video cameras from different places in the audience, and then they edited it all together. And, remarkably, rather than shut the distribution of that video down (as one suspects most bands would do), Radiohead actually gave the organisers the official audio recording of the night, straight from their soundboard, to use on the concert video. Their condition? That the video be made available free to everyone via download.

I've downloaded it (from here) in both Ipad and dvd video formats. It's a tremendous show (especially for someone who's never had the chance to see them live in person), and looks about as good as any 'official' concert video I've ever seen.

Had the band bunged the exact same show onto a dvd & charged $30 for it, I would've paid. But for them to help fans make a free download video just makes me love them all the more. And demonstrates the difference between bands who understand how to use the internet to their (& their fans'!) advantage, and those who are still running from the idea of it.

3. Arcade Fire take Ipod technology in new directions.

So, Arcade Fire released a new album - The Suburbs - a month or two ago. You can buy it on vinyl, cd or, if you're a chump, via Itunes download. On the other hand, you can download it from their website for less than half of what Itunes (Australia) charges. In doing so, not only do you support the band directly, without Apple etc taking their cut, and save a decent amount of money, you also get a vastly superior product.

Why? Well, for starters, they encode their album at a higher bit rate than does Apple, and you get your choice of formats - including several varities of lossless & high-bitrate MP3. You also get the digital booklet in PDF form, featuring all the lyrics & artwork.

But even better than that, they've included a second digital copy, using enhanced files. In short, instead of just displaying the album cover on your Ipod (etc), each song has a different background image. On top of that image, as the song plays, the lyrics are displayed, a line or two at a time, in a vaguely karaoke manner. And they also include other special variations, including some lyric-themed effects (when they sing 'someone cut out the lights', the screen goes black, for example) and a link to a website related to the theme of each song (for play on internet-connected devices like Iphones).

This is incredibly cool. I literally had no idea that this sort of thing was possible. Why has it taken so long for someone to take advantage of the Ipod/Iphone technology in this way? (My only beef is that it doesn't seem to work on my Ipad, which I had thought would be the best platform for it. But even on the Iphone it's tremendous fun.)

I was not previously actually a huge Arcade Fire fan, but heard good things about this album, listened to a few songs on YouTube & saw the cheap download with an interesting-sounding use of technology, so happily plonked down my $8 (US). And I've really been loving The Suburbs, so I'm glad I did. But again: it was through hearing songs on YouTube that I decided this album was worth a shot.

Artists & record labels have to adapt to new technologies if they expect people to continue paying for music. Physical releases will continue to have a place in how people buy music (hell, I still buy vinyl records!), but innovative digital releases like these three will encourage people to pay for legal & interesting releases of quality music. It's worth noting that, in the last month or so, I've downloaded:
- an eight-song, hour-long release in cd-quality audio
- a two-hour concert video, suitable for both Ipad and dvd player
- a complete album, in both cd-quality and enhanced-artwork audio files
all legally, for under $15AUD.

Each of these artists is big enough for this sort of thing to work, of course - they have built-in fanbases and enough people curious enough to have a listen. But, simultaneously, they're also not the three biggest-selling music acts in the world today either. I just hope that more artists - & record companies, for that matter - continue to see that making good & interesting things can actually be all you need in terms of marketing.

Blogging the Booker 11: Shortlist predictions & hopes

The shortlist for the 2010 Booker Prize is announced today (London's today, that is), so I thought it was a good time to provide a quick overview of my progress through the longlist.

The 13 books are (with the ones I've read in bold & including links to my review post):

Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America
Emma Donoghue Room
Helen Dunmore The Betrayal
Damon Galgut In a Strange Room
Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question
Andrea Levy The Long Song
Tom McCarthy C
David Mitchell The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Lisa Moore February
Paul Murray Skippy Dies
Rose Tremain Trespass
Christos Tsiolkas The Slap
Alan Warner The Stars in the Bright Sky

So, I've to date read eight of the thirteen, which I suppose isn't bad progress (given that my plan all along was to get through all 13 by the winner - not shortlist - announcement, which is in about a month). Of those eight, the ones I'd most like to make the five- or six-strong shortlist are:

Room
The Long Song
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Skippy Dies

I think - albeit with the obvious caveat that I've not read the remaining five - most of those are reasonably likely to make the shortlist. David Mitchell is probably safe, and I suspect Andrea Levy is too. Skippy Dies is a personal favourite, in part because it seems an unlikely Booker pick, but is actually really good. Comparing it to The Stars in the Bright Sky demonstrates the difference between a decent read and something worthy of a literary fiction award, in my opinion. Skippy Dies takes a fairly humdrum starting point and makes it great not only by featuring wonderful characterisation, but also by hinting at subtle but effective themes. The Stars in the Bright Sky, on the other hand, seems more like the inspiration for a fun but slightly shlocky tv mini-series (friends growing apart yet remaining bound together, misadventures on a holiday, drug references, one really annoying character, one really mysterious one).

So those are my hopes. Regardless of what happens with the five I've not read - and for all I know the entire shortlist will consist of those I haven't read yet - I'll try to press on through all 13 before early October. (I will prioritise those that get the nod today.)

Either way, I've enjoyed the process so far - I haven't yet hated anything completely, and have read at least two books I probably would've missed otherwise which I really enjoyed.

Hope you've enjoyed it, too, hypothetical reader/s! Has anyone got any predictions or hopes (for the Booker shortlist, not your life as a whole) of their own?