Successor to Typhoon Kingdom (2019) which I chose as when I read it in 2023, Everything Lost, Everything FouSuccessor to Typhoon Kingdom (2019) which I chose as when I read it in 2023, Everything Lost, Everything Found by Matthew Hooton is a story of imperial occupation and colonisation unlike any I have read before.
Set at the turn of the millennium and narrated in the first person, Everything Lost, Everything Found is the story of an ageing man called Jack in Muskinaw, Michigan. He is negotiating the last period of his very long life. His wife, Grace, having seen off cancer just a short time ago, is now in palliative care where her dementia comes and goes. In the home they have shared for decades, Jack is having to face up to his own encroaching frailty and the looming loss of independence and the need to sort out his fractured relationship with his daughter Jess. He's in conflict with Jess because of decisions he made when she split from Simon, her Ex.
This brief summary might suggest that Jack is an ordinary man, an American citizen now in retirement from his years as a plumber in a rustbelt city. But Jack has had an extraordinarily traumatic childhood which has shaped his entire life even though his family knows very little about it. How could they? How could they possibly imagine a childhood in Fordlandia, Henry Ford's grand colonial enterprise in the Amazon rainforest?
tells us that
... was established by American industrialist in the Amazon Rainforest in 1928 as a prefabricated industrial town intended to be inhabited by 10,000 people to secure a source of cultivated rubber for the automobile manufacturing operations of the Ford Motor Company in the United States. Ford had negotiated a deal with the Brazilian government granting him a concession of 10,000 sq km (3,900 sq mi) of land on the banks of the Rio Tapajós near the city of Santarém, Brazil, in exchange for a 9% share in the profits generated. Ford's project failed, and the city was abandoned in 1934.
In effect, Fordlandia was an American colony under occupation by a population sent there from the US.
Jack goes to this swathe of land carved from the Amazon rainforest with his parents.
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It didn't seem to matter that this was Book 3: it is independent of its predecessors.
A prologue introduces the myths that surround the Sister Bells, tIt didn't seem to matter that this was Book 3: it is independent of its predecessors.
A prologue introduces the myths that surround the Sister Bells, tracing their origin back to medieval superstitions and religious beliefs that impact on conjoined twins Gunhild and Halfrid Hekne. Their mother Astrid dies in childbirth, but Pastor Herr Krafft is their protector against zealots who intend to burn them as Satanic monsters. He is able to persuade the villagers of Butangen to trust his interpretation of their existence as a gift from God. The twins survive these and other threats thanks to Krafft, and become skilful weavers. But when, years later, they die and church bells are cast in their memory, these bells arouse superstitious fears because of a mistranslation of the words engraved on the bells. And because it was hidden away, one of the bells remained in the village when the ancient had been sold and removed to Dresden.
(Book 1 in the series tells the story of this bizarre exchange: Pastor Kai Schweigaard wished to replace the freezing cold church where an elderly parishioner had frozen to death at a Mass in Winter.)
When the story proper begins, it is the 1930s, and Astrid Hekne, a rebellious descendant can't restrain her curiosity about the bell locked away in the bell tower. But when she confesses her transgression to Pastor Kai Schweigaard, he recognises something about her spirit, and reveals another treasure hidden away, the Hekne Weave created by the sisters. It prophesises the night of the scourge, and the pastor has spent years trying to interpret it without success.
All this mythic stuff is mildly interesting, but the novel becomes more compelling when it goes on to tell the story of the hunt for the hidden bell and the cloth by and the Nazis under the ...more
I think I'll come back to this one later. I've got too many other reserves in from the library at once, and this one demands slow reading because therI think I'll come back to this one later. I've got too many other reserves in from the library at once, and this one demands slow reading because there are so many Bunerong words that I can't work out from context. I have to keep stopping to look them up in the glossary and that stops the flow of the reading. ...more
Reading The Remembered Soldier is a totally immersive experience. In a mesmerising translation by David McKay, it is, at 562 pages, a long book, yet iReading The Remembered Soldier is a totally immersive experience. In a mesmerising translation by David McKay, it is, at 562 pages, a long book, yet it has a very small cast of characters and only one perspective. The reader can know only what the central character knows — and he is a soldier found wandering amid the carnage of the Great War in 1917. In 1922 he still has total amnesia and lives in a the Guislain psychiatric asylum run by the Brothers of Charity.
Unlike the stereotype of asylums as cold and brutal places, this asylum is a gentle refuge. Given the name Noon Merckem because he was found at noon at a place called Merckem, he passes his days in a reassuring routine regulated by the church bells calling them to prayer. He works in the garden, he goes to mass, and he tends his fellow inmates when they suffer horrific nightmares. Unlike those shattered men tormented in their sleep every night , he remembers nothing, only the past years in the asylum.
There were many men like him, and when the war was over and the years passed, there were efforts to reunite them with women whose husbands were reported missing. Advertisements were placed in the newspaper, and the responses were matched with military archives to eliminate most of them. The novel begins with one woman's disappointment, and Noon feels anguished for causing her such intense grief.
And Noon feels so guilty and miserable about the whole thing, he had thought he would finally discover who he is, but all he's learned is who he isn't. The man he's painstakingly built out of nothing over the past four years, all the habits of his Monday afternoon routine, which he clings to like the banister of a rickety staircase, have lost their meaning, every one of them, and deep inside him, dark and untethered to the world, panic stirs, and the fear of that all-consuming panic comes in waves and is almost as unbearable at the panic itself.
And he tells Dr De Moor he can't do this, and Dr De Moor tells him to go to the dormitory for a little rest, and in an hour, he says, you can meet the third woman, and no, Noon says, I can't, and he hears the desperation in his voice as if listening to the voice of a stranger. And he feels Dr De Moor's gaze resting on his face, a cool, appraising look, and he must look bad, because Dr De Moor says softly, all right, tomorrow, you can meet the other women tomorrow, and he says there are only two more, one who thinks she's his mother, and another who claims he is her husband, and who knows, who knows, maybe one of them is right...
(This patterning, of paragraphs that all begin with 'And' creates a sense of continuity in Noon's thoughts.)
The next day brings Julienne Coppens, who identifies him as her husband the photographer Amand, and against medical advice, she insists that he return home with her. They have a trial of one month, during which time he comes to feel safe and cherished yet lives in fear that she will return him to the asylum because even in what should be a familiar place, he still doesn't remember anything. Not even his children Gus and little Rosa.
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It's good to have something comparatively undemanding to read alongside muddling through a challenging novel. Not knowing enough about it, I did not It's good to have something comparatively undemanding to read alongside muddling through a challenging novel. Not knowing enough about it, I did not expect Günter Grass's The Tin Drum to be so confusing, and so it's daytime reading. I needed something to read in bed, and this historical novel about the Japanese Occupation of Hong Kong was ideal.
Especially since it coincided with my little rant at Yarra Book Club where .
In Australia, our literature and TV rarely explored how Japan had behaved in the countries they occupied throughout southeast Asia and Asia, and if we did come across any stories about it, they were through an Australian lens, not about what happened to the locals. When you think about it, it’s odd that historical war fiction from Australia is mostly all about the European war, and hardly ever about the Pacific War close to home.
When Sleeping Women Wake begins with a prologue in Shanghai in 1906. It introduces an eight-year-old orphan girl and her mistress, not much older, and their eventual departure for an arranged marriage into an elite family. The novel proper then shifts to Hong Kong in 1941, their refuge when the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) broke out.
In China, 1937 is when WW2 began, and just as Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany until 1941, China fought Japanese imperialism alone for four years, when the attack on Pearl Harbour finally prompted the US to join the war. You don't need to know any of this to enjoy the novel, but you can learn more about the 1937 Battle of Shanghai from this video:
[You'll need to visit my blog to get the URL, see below.]
The novel reveals the social conditions for women in patriarchal pre-communist China. In 1941, Mingzhu, First Wife to Wei Tang and the mother of Qiang, is often humiliated by his second wife Cai because she had produced a son. Mingzhu's sole ally is the maid Biyu who over the years has bridged the class divide to become like a sister, but there is no question that Tang rules with absolute authority in his home. (Mingzhu is expected to feel grateful that he allows her to read.) But like many, Wei Tang had misplaced confidence in the British to repel the Japanese attack on Hong Kong, and his family is torn apart in the chaos of the Occupation.
Mingzhu and Qiang are separated, and their 3rd-person limited PoV narratives alternate along with Biyu's as the story progresses.
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A Piece of Red Cloth is said to be a ground-breaking work of historical fiction for two reasons: partly because of the way it has been written and parA Piece of Red Cloth is said to be a ground-breaking work of historical fiction for two reasons: partly because of the way it has been written and partly because it is a story based on Australia's pre-colonial history.
The novel was written collaboratively by Leonie Norrington, best-known for her award-winning children's picture story books, and Yolngu cultural custodians Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Djawa Burarrwanga and Djawundil Maymuru. (Merrkiyawuy and Djawundil have collaborated with Norrington before, to co-author Welcome to My Country and Songspirals.)
But, as explained in the Author's Note, the novel was inspired by Leanie Norrington's mentor Clare Bush (deceased) — who adopted Norrington, not in the Western sense, but took charge of the Norrington family's Yolngu cultural education when they were growing up in the 1960s in a remote community in southern Arnhem Land. It was subsequently Clare Bush who worked with Norrington to help her create numerous children's books set in remote northern Australia featuring Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal kids.
Clare, keen to redress the negative and patronising depiction of traditional Aboriginal people and lifestyles in the media, also...
... wanted Australian fiction to include narratives that presented Aboriginal people as they saw themselves, from a point of view that enacted their motives, ambition and philosophy. (p.369)
Together, they worked on an outline for the book, based on pre-colonial oral history about the kidnapping of a Yolngu girl by Makassan traders, but Clare Bush* died before the novel could progress. Never very confident about making the transition to writing for adults, Norrington let the story lapse until some years later when she was asked to finish it by Clare's family, and encouragement and guidance was provided by book's co-authors and Yolngu knowledge holders, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Djawa Burarrwanga and Djawundil Maymuru.
As you can see from , there are other examples of collaborative First Nations writing but I have not come across a fictional narrative before.
The other distinctive feature of A Piece of Red Cloth is that it's historical fiction based on oral history and a culture unfamiliar to most of us. As teachers of Indonesian or Australian history know, there is plenty of empirical evidence about Makassan trepang traders making contact with coastal Aborigines — and since at least 2007 there has been which provides information about including rock art, archaeological evidence from plants to pottery, written accounts in Indonesia, language exchange and
But —as portrayed in this novel — the relationship with the land, the patriarchal nature of Yolngu society and the kinship system with its complex rules and protocols, is as unfamiliar as is their hunter-gatherer lifestyle, their diet, their cooking methods, their tool-making, their ceremonies and rituals, and their beliefs.
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Katherine Brabon's fourth novel, Cure, is a book that will resonate differently among readers of varying ages.
One of the tiresome aspects of growing oKatherine Brabon's fourth novel, Cure, is a book that will resonate differently among readers of varying ages.
One of the tiresome aspects of growing older, is that a life of comparatively good health begins to take on the burdens of chronic conditions. Some of these are merely irritating, others involve lifestyle changes that are annoying, and some are ones that compromise long-anticipated retirement activities. All of them involve seeing more of the medical profession than one would like, but adapting to these changes in the body is usually manageable in maturity. It goes with the territory of ageing. We know it, and we accept it, and we may even be grateful that so far, a terminal condition is not on the horizon.
This is an entirely different situation to being diagnosed with a chronic condition in adolescence, as depicted in Cure. The initial disbelief, the growing realisation that things are not going to improve, and the lifestyle compromises that must be made are bad enough at any time, but Thea, the sixteen-year-old protagonist of Cure isn't even able to make decisions about her treatment independently. Her parents are in disagreement about medication which exacerbates her confusion about what must be done. Her father is a doctor, with a science-based understanding of the situation, while her mother Vera, who has the same condition, craves a cure and goes searching for it online.
Brabon casts a discerning eye on the online landscape that Vera inhabits. Vera is not only a consumer of wellness blogs, she is a writer and she's made a living by constructing identities and scenarios for brands to cater to the ideal consumer. So she's an insider herself, with an understanding of how algorithms manipulate the online content that we see, and yet her own lack of confidence in herself (and her husband's advice) makes her even more vulnerable when she is pregnant with Thea:
And so, when she fell pregnant, Vera was returned to the ineffable reassurance that such a person [from a blog she'd previously followed] — and the internet — could offer. The blogs were still active, though many now had transformed into video blogs on YouTube or pages on Facebook or, later, accounts on Instagram. Vera's pregnancy coincided with the ubiquity of social media accounts, particularly those associated with food or health or the more sweeping and nonspecific lifestyle theme. The posts in these formats were more intimate, the details more minute. She could not believe how much of their life some people were willing to share with strangers. A life laid bare, almost a diary with accompanying photos or videos.
She read and watched posts by young mothers, mothers to be, experts in infancy or toddlerhood or childhood, specialists in gut health and nutrition, sleep consultants, behavioural scientists and even qualified doctors who had branched out into online advice. (p.51)
I am so grateful that none of that existed when I was a young mother!
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