Richard E. Grant, A Pocketful Of Happiness

One night while trawling the internet, I stumbled across an interview of Richard E. Grant talking about his book A Pocketful of Happiness. I recognised Grant but I didn’t know who he was … if that makes sense. I couldn’t place his face but it was plainly evident from his stage presence, his demeanor, his tone, and the power of his voice, that he was a Somebody. I was captivated. Instantly.

In the interview, Grant talked about his wife. About her legacy. And about the challenge she left him to live every day by finding ‘a pocketful of happiness.’ The sentiment struck a chord with me. How big is a pocketful? What is happiness? Is it something quantifiable? What if it gets lost in the pocket? Or if it overflows? How does one wade through grief and emerge clutching that dustmote of happiness? And all the while, he seemed to be laughing while he cried about his loss. It was the most inspiring and fraught thing I’d seen in a long time.

I’ve since gone back online to find the interview but I can’t locate it. There are many others – Grant talking about his success, his grief, his deep obsession with Barbra Streisand, his Oscar nomination, Joan – his wife. He is brilliant in each instance. That voice, so erudite and rich, so many layers. Those dreams. A boy from Swaziland who imagined himself an actor, who built his dream with puppets on sticks, who believed so deeply that he was worthy. He jumped into his dream and emerged triumphant but still starry-eyed and in awe of those around him. He is both wise beyond his years and still a child. It’s quite magical to witness.

Obviously, I had to have this book. I read it in one sitting. It is magical and sad and filled with a perfect blend of humour and raw sorrow. Even the sense of the absurdity of Richard and Joan’s reality was endearing – Nigella Lawson sends over bread and soup, Prince Charles drops by to sit with Joan, Emma Thompson pops over with her son and Vanessa Redgrave arrives wtih country flowers and a cooler bag crammed with tubs of ice cream. They eat sitting on Joan’s bed. Joan clearly meant so much to so many people.

This memoir is Richard capturing far more than a pocketful of happiness. It is a song to 38 years of togetherness and it is perfect. It is a testimony to what it means to be truly loved.

Damon Galgut, The Promise

It has taken me a long time to come to terms with this book. Or perhaps it’s a ‘coming to grips’ instead. Reading it made me ache in a way that few books have done in the past. There was something about the language, about the flow, the landscape and its hues. Yes. It made me literally ache with a deep gnawing nostalgia of the type I really haven’t experienced for decades.

I left South Africa as a 15 year old more than 30 years ago. I left under duress. Devastating at the time but with the benefit of hindsight, the greatest gift my parents could ever have given me. A new life, filled with opportunity and options, a whole world of experiences and a gateway to discover it all and my self in the process. I left and now I speak with an Aussie twang, my children are Australian, my home is here but South Africa has never left me and probably never will. And that’s ok. It’s not something that plagues me and it’s only books like Galgut’s that make me feel that invisible forgotten umbilical cord that anchors me.

And because of this history I can’t quite work out what it is exactly that I loved about this book. I know I loved it. The story, the flavour, the flow of the narrative. I loved the characters and the tension between them. But this book made me taste Africa in a way that I hadn’t for a long time and that felt sad or perhaps sad and bitter. Hard to reconcile.

But it’s an important book to read, no matter where you were born. It’s important because it gives sensitive voice to issues that the country is still trying to untangle or overcome. It tells stories from perspectives that we need to consider if we want to heal the fracture of that place – or of any place. Galgut has woven a wonderful tapestry in telling this tale and despite the discomfort that slowly creeps into you as the reader, you will be a better person for it.

Stephanie Wood, Fake

Ourself, behind ourself concealed,
Should startle most;
Assasin, hid in our apartment,
Be horror’s least.

Emily Dickinson, 1891

About a month ago, in The Good Weekend (TGW), I read an article entitled Narcissists, sociopaths et al: Loved on screen, loathed (and misunderstood) in life. I was enthralled. By the title and the incredible writing style but also by the subject matter which resonated so deeply with me on a personal level. A reflection of a time in my life that I am still trying to untangle. The book so intrigued me that I purchased it immediately and waited for its arrival in deep anticipation. I started it yesterday. I have already devoured it, reading until I needed matchsticks to keep my eyes from closing, late into the the night, drooling over every word, every sentence, an unfolding of some deep dark truth, the settling of an understanding that not everyone might appreciate, a sense that in this book I had found a friend. In the writer, a co-conspirator.

Wood starts with a Prologue – ‘LOOKING FOR A MAN’. It’s first person narrative and there’s no doubt it’s Wood’s own voice – I know this. I read the article in TGW. It is Wood on the highway a few miles out of town, it’s Wood’s car that starts making a scraping noise, it is Wood who is “looking for a man or traces of him”. It is Wood who doesn’t want to see him. I am familiar with hiding. She is deep in the country. I can taste the red dust. There is a kelpie and a bloke named Des who helps her temporarily repair the scraping noise. Wood qualifies – she’s “looking for a man but without the least romantic intent. It’s long over. These days, more than a year since” they parted, she thinks of him as a specimen. She confides in us, the readers, that once “in his smiling eyes (she) saw good and gentle things.” Once she held him tight and she dreamed and hoped for so much.

Thus the book starts almost at the end of her personal narrative which is really the beginning of her real life. She is unpacking what lay beneath the smiling eyes, what led to the betrayal, trying to understand how she landed up on this dirt road searching for the spectre of her dreams. She backtracks as she takes us on this journey with her. She is a journalist, after all, and she holds our hands as she walks through the love bombing and falling. She nudges us into the swirling abyss that is her deep infatuation with a man called Joe and his apparent infatuation with her. The magic that they swam through together and then the deceit that was uncovered as it became apparent that nothing was true. That Joe had woven so many lies that they bled together like the grief that drowned her when realisation hit. That is the first part of this book and we go on this roller coaster with Wood. Her betrayal is our betrayal. We bleed with her and when she lies on a Sunday morning, curled in a ball, wishing the world would disappear, that her brain would stop, we too wish that we could stop it for her.

If I tried to convey the absurdity of what actually transpired you wouldn’t believe it. But she makes it real with the second part of the book where her skill at research comes to the fore. Here Wood proves to us that people like Joe who are “sad, hollow … full of empty words”, who lack integrity, who can lie and cheat and mislead, people like this actually exist. She proves it over and over again, page after page of evidence, story after story unpacking the unbelievable reality of being in a relationship with a narcissist.

There are so many realisations that resonate. I have to reread the book and note all these pearls down so that I can refer to them later when I too suffer from those moments of disbelief – “Who are you for heaven’s sake? Do you even know? Where is your integrity? Do you really mean anything you say?”

She calls it “wilful blindess”, this thing that allowed her to believe Joe, to believe in Joe. It’s a process of filtering, holding onto some things but letting others go. Love makes it easier to overlook the things that don’t make sense. She talks about catfishing – a term that describes the activities of a person who builds a fake social media profile to trick someone into falling in love with them – and gaslighting – a form of psychological manipulation where the abuser sows doubt over and over again until the person being abused can no longer tell what is real. She talks about films and documentaries, psychological studies, Harvard professors, anthropologists and cognitive scientists. She talks about the shame that comes with revealing her story. “If I share the story more widely, people will see how foolish I have been; they will see what I fear: that for a man to have treated me in such a way, he must have recognised my limited value.”

I want to shake the resilience into her. Instead I look in the mirror and then back down at the book and I keep reading.

Four pages from the end is a page long paragraph that I think is profound wisdom for living and well worth sharing.

Follow a life of adventure and exhilaration and extreme sport. Or be idle and gentle and thoughtful. Lie on the floor of a forest and look at the sky, knit tea-cosies, write a small, perfect entry in a diary every day. Embrace the people you love. Be curious; keep learning, keep asking questions. Listen, really listen, when other people talk. Find humour everywhere. Collect something that makes you laugh … Ignore Marie Kondo, everyone needs a big collection of book. Whatever you do, make art of one sort or another, no matter how average you feel it might be … Focus, focus, focus on something you love doing until you have reached such a state of flow that you’ve forgotten your name and what day it is. Listen to a new piece of music every day… Don’t look with green eyes at other people’s lives; look at where you are and what you’re doing and at all the little wonderful things in your every day… Forget the life you wanted or expected, grab the life you have. Learn to say ‘sorry’ graciously and mean it. Be kind. Roll with the punches, they’ll keep coming, as will change. Nothing ever stays the same. Eliminate self-pity, bitterness, judgement, regret and any grievance more than a month old. You are the architect of your own life. Take responsibility for it, don’t blame anyone else. Smile at stranger…. Look for joy everywhere.

I hope Wood find her joy. I hope she takes her own advice and keeps enjoying her “thought orgies”. Most of all, I hope she keeps writing.

Garry Disher, The Way It Is Now

And he’s done it again. Not just a gripping story but also a beautifully written one. Disher has a talent. He can capture small town Australia with all of its nuance and tension. His ability to develop complex and layered characters is outstanding and the way that he weaves a story grips me every time. He is simply a great talent and I can’t help but think that he must spend his spare time sitting like a fly on the wall in country police stations, watching interviews and processes, documenting the tilt of a head and the pain on a face or the way suspects move in their chairs. This particular tale has added to it the deep tension between a father and two sons and the mystery of a mother disappeared. The book opens with this and the thread continues to its end. There is also a fragile humanity to these characters which reminded me of my own vulnerability – not just personally but also within the context of my relationships with others and specifically within my own family.

This is a great read for the summer!

Carol Major, The Asparagus Wars

Palpable. That’s the word to describe this memoir. Palpable. And weighted – not weighty or heavy, but weighted in the way that is sits on my heart like a frog might sit proverbially in my throat. I can’t swallow this book away. It’s going to travel with me for a time.

I’ll start with the treasures that this memoir brings.

The letter writing – My dearest daughter, dearest girl and just dearest. What glorious perfection is the structure of this narrative, woven between fragmented recollections and letters, the distant past melting into the not so distant past and all of it swimming against a background of the more distant past. The literal background of battlefields an ideal metaphor for the war raging in Major’s own heart. This structure was perfect. It allowed Major to really bury herself into the heart of the matter, drawing all the strings of her pain together in what is in some way an elegy or a musical tribute to something that cannot be contained. The structure also permitted an honesty that may have been lost in another style.

The places – from Canada to Australia to France and back. Each place captured over the course of the book with tidbits and snippets, a birth, a death, the snow, a battlefield and museum. Trees in cemeteries, yellow flowers and white ants eating away at the foundations – both real and imagined. Major paints each place with such colour and nuance that its visceral – palpable – it unspools slowly captivating. The isolation of the cottage where the letters are written and the death is mourned, it has a smell of this desolation and sorrow, accented by the characters who intrude periodically on the experience. The woman who sells the pickled vegetables, the owner of the cottage, the fleeting love interest. The dead are more real than these vagrants. The dead, the memory of them and the quest to contain what remains.

The insight into government policies relating to disability support – something I didn’t expect to find in this book. The battlefield is not just the fight for survival, but it is the fight for financial support, the fight to maintain one’s dignity and independence to live despite disability rather than to hide and deny. Major’s message is humbling. She repeats her daughter’s words: “Muscular dystrophy shaped me … It’s who I am, and I like who I am. I extend the possibilities of what it means to be human.” We are all shaped by what we experience – both hardship and joy. The way we choose to respond to these things is what makes us unique. Major’s daughter chose her response to illness with clear grace and determination – “Oh, darling” writes Major, “there is so much beauty in that.” And ironically, what penetrates the sorrow of this book is the beauty. And it’s not a fleeting aesthetic beauty. Rather, it’s a deep, penetrating kind of beauty. Something that is rich and magnificent, encapsulated perfectly in unexpected places.

Rhetorical questions – “Where was the frontline?” “Where to begin …?” So much is unanswered which is often the way in grief. How does one make sense of the sorrow? As Major writes: “I am left … in this cold kitchen, still scribbling … The bubble in my throat. The feeling I must hold everything there. I cannot speak, only write these things because it is safe now. You are dead.” And achingly, “What is the larger story of us? Have you got a grasp on that from where you are now? What am I supposed to see? … – as if you are shouting down from the sky.”

The philosophical question that lies in how we classify or clarify our friends or our enemies. What does it mean to be a deserter? Is there a bad soldier? Or a bad person … a bad mother? Even in war, we are connected to our enemies. “As much as I warred with your father, it strikes me now how we were connected. Lillian and me too – because we were so deeply mired in the overwhelming feelings of war. Not better people in what we did but terribly authentic in our exchange.” I couldn’t help but think of the moment elsewhere in the book where Allied troops and German troops congregate on the battlefield and work alongside each other to repair their respective trenches.

It occurs to me only upon reflection that I don’t know Major’s daughter’s name. I flick back through the book, anxious that perhaps I skimmed over some important detail. But all I can see is dearest, darling, dearest, daughter. And the pronoun ‘you’. ‘You’ is everywhere and everything. I want to say ‘of course’ – which is what Major herself says toward the end of the memoir, of course you are nameless because to name you would be to successful contain your everything-ness and that is indeed impossible.

There is so much more to acknowledge and appreciate in this book – the love of carers, the importance of family and connections between people, the value of history, the need to remember, the tangle that is life. All of this and yet what I think is embedded in that stone sitting on my heart is the question of life and living – what is real, what is a dream, how are we supposed to live.

“The life I was living was no more than a dream, a story I’d made up, as fleeting as a spider skating on a pond.”

I find myself wanting to see a spider skating on a pond.

Chris Hammer, Treasure and Dirt

The first thing I did when NSW’s lockdown 2.0 finished was head to a store that sold books. I couldn’t help it. I needed to stand and just look at all the titles and flick through the pages, weighing each tome and wondering what surprises it held inside. I didn’t have much time because there was so much else to do, but I quickly chose seven books, embraced them and raced to the check out. My selection covered multiple genres – some of my favourite authors, a few new ones and some unknowns. Four days has passed since then and I’m worried that seven wasn’t enough … I’ve read two already… devoured them simply as though ‘freedom’ has somehow given me space and time to revel in reading. Which makes no sense at all because the one thing I did lots of during lockdown was read. But there was something truly liberating about being able to handle these books that I had chosen off filled shelves in an open store surrounded by other people also perusing titles.

So, Chris Hammer. What can I say… this was not my first foray into his work. Although I don’t generally enjoy Australian fiction, I loved Hammer’s earlier book Scrublands, appreciating his keen sense of place and his well formed, complex characters. I was quite certain that his newest book, Treasure & Dirt, wouldn’t disappoint.

And of course, it didn’t.

Treasure & Dirt transported me to outback Australia. Despite the repeated descriptions of an arid, barren land, I was never bored. Each new image added something to my appreciation of this grand country. I felt rather than saw the earth. It’s hard to explain but Hammer has a specific way of leading a reader to see the place as a significant character in his narrative. It’s quite striking but I truly feel that I ‘know’ Finnigan’s Gap in the same way that I know the characters Ivan and Nell. I empathise with them equally …

I loved the interplay between the spaces that Hammer presents. We start underground, in the prologue, literally descending into the earth to witness the results of a crime in the bowels of a mine and then we are catapulted to the view from a plane in the sky which seems to be “inviting inscription”, a “great expanse of the interior … where the land is flat and forever, too far inland for the rains to persist.” Through the eyes of our protagonist, a detective called Ivan, this view is reminiscent “of Aboriginal paintings, the land from above, imbued with spirit, replete with hidden meanings, of unspoken significance. For a moment, the magic of it resonates within him, the magnitude.” But then, reminded of his position – “he’s a policeman, not a philosopher” after all – “He shakes off the idea … There is a job to be done. There’s nothing special to be read in the landscape; painting it a different colour doesn’t alter its essential emptiness.” And then in the space in between, on the ground – the heat “is ferocious. The sun is almost directly overhead, pouring its unfiltered energy into the rocks and gravel, with little or no vegetation to diffuse it. Such is its power that the metal framework at the top of the shaft” burns their hands as they move passed the rungs of the ladder.

There is something very powerful about the way these spaces intersect and I’ve had to reconsider the action of the story based upon where it occurs. Hammer has cleverly used place to change the tone of even conversations – their intimacy either heightened or lessened depending upon where they take place. The layers highlight the book’s underlying theme which revolves around secrets, what is plain to see and all that remains hidden or buried.

I won’t give anything away about the plot because the book really is worth reading just for that alone. What I will say is that Hammer has given me a new appreciation of the challenges that many Australians face when trying to work the land. It is something that we can easily forget when living in the city and I think that part of the magic of Hammer’s work is that he pays homage to that in a thoughtful way.

Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

How does one review a book like this? How is it possible to even judge a book written by someone with such deep insight into life and living and living while dying? I don’t think it is. In fact, it’s impossible to be anything but moved by Kalanithi’s gracious manifesto which is on so many levels a love song to his young daughter, to his life, his wife, and all that he will never experience.

So do not consider this a review. Consider this instead a series of reflections about this profound and beautiful memoir.

There is no doubt that Kalanithi was an exceptionally gifted human being. Born in 1977 he graduated from high school as valedictorian, from Stanford with a BA in Literature and MA in History and the Philosophy of Science and Medicine and then – despite the fact that he had the option to pursue a PhD in English literature, he switched to the Yale School of Medicine where he graduated in 2007 cum laude winning a prize for his research on Tourette’s Syndrome. He went on to become a neurosurgeon. All of the depth of this intellectual experience is clearly reflected in Kalanithi’s book which blends art and science into a magnificent reflective tapestry.

In many ways, the book’s title reflects this tapestry – when does breath become air? Does it actually become air? What is air? Breathing is a scientific concern, the result of a biological process that involves the exchange of gasses. You can watch someone breathe. But can you watch breath? What does breath look like? It’s easy to see when it’s cold outside and breath takes on a form … but otherwise, how do we know breath? I wonder about a person’s last breath … the final inhalation and exhalation. I am reminded of my Bobba – my grandmother – whose last breath I watched. She was surrounded by family and my Oupa (grandfather). It was quite beautiful to know that we could all say goodbye. There was a ceremony to it and a sense of release that I think we all – her children and grandchildren – felt. I certainly felt comforted to know that my grandfather wasn’t alone in this moment. He took his last breath alone in a hospital room and I always felt that there was an injustice in that … but it’s another story altogether. Kalanithi takes his last breath before the publication of his memoir and the epilogue is in fact written by his wife Lucy. She commences with a poem by Emily Dickinson which sums up Paul’s attempt to reconcile his reflections about life with his knowledge of science and medicine.

You left me, sweet, two legacies –

A legacy of love

A Heavenly Father would content,

Had he the offer of;

You left me boundaries of pain

Capacious as the sea,

Between eternity and time,

Your consciousness and me.

– Emily Dickinson

Lucy tells us that Paul died surrounded by his family … his daughter, Cady, wasn’t yet one year old. A life lived … but not enough.

Yet, despite the sadness that tints these pages, this is a love story on so many levels. It’s Paul’s love for learning – for literature and words and ideas and thought. It’s his love for the human brain, for science in general, for patients and the impact that his work can have on them. It’s his love for Lucy and her love for him which she describes in an interview after his death as a kind of “forever” love. There is so much to learn here about the value of human connections and the importance of knowledge and passion and commitment to challenging oneself on all levels. Paul teaches us to never be satisfied. To always strive to improve because that is part of what makes life worth living.

Most of all, this is a book about the worth of a life. And here it is impossible to improve upon Paul’s own words:

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described, hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.

Yet one thing cannot be robbed of her futurity: my daughter, Cady. I hope I’ll live long enough that she has some memory of me. Words have a longevity I do not. I had thought I could leave her a series of letters — but what would they really say? I don’t know what this girl will be like when she is 15; I don’t even know if she’ll take to the nickname we’ve given her. There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past.

That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.

It is easy to see why When Breath Becomes Air was a finalist for the Pullitzer in 2017. It traverses the human experience with such soft empathy that it is impossible not to appreciate both its literary and thematic value. But is also reminds us that we should take nothing for granted. Dr Paul Kalanithi, for all his commitment to learning and medicine and to understanding what makes a life worth living, never actually practised as a neurosurgeon. His diagnosis came toward the end of his 10 years of training for the specialty. What a profound irony that a man so gifted with so much to live for could die just as his life was about to truly begin.

This is a book abounding in wisdom, beautifully crafted and magnificently profound. Dr Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone, writes the prologue to When Breath Becomes Air. He ends it with the following words:

Be ready. Be seated. See what courage sounds like. See how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way. But above all, see what it is to live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after you are gone, by your words… experience this dialogue with my young departed colleague now ageless and extant in memory. Listen to Paul. In the silences between his words, listen to what you have to say back. Therein lies his message. I got it. I hope you experience it, too. It is a gift.

Simply put: Everyone should read this book. Don’t just read it and move on. Instead, read it and carry it in your heart, allow it to remind you to live not just any life, but a life worth living. Work and grow and learn and strive, but don’t do it at the cost of living.

David Grossman, More Than I Love My Life

I have to preface my words with an admission. I am a huge David Grossman fan. I love his writing style, I love his choice of material, his themes, the flow of his stories. I love the fact that his literary journey in many ways covers the history of the modern state of Israel. I love that I can read the arc of his work and see into him as an Israeli and as a Jew. I love that I often see flickers of myself in his prose. And I love the tenderness that always floats beneath the surface of his work. I will also confess that I read Grossman in English, although if I applied myself I could probably manage the Hebrew … on some level I’m worried that I would miss the music if I laboured through the original and that seems too tragic to bear.

I knew that Grossman was working on this book because I had the great pleasure of spending a few hours with the glorious Deborah Harris and Grossman called her while we were chatting. I won’t lie – it was one of the highlights of my life 🙂 So I was waiting with anticipation for this book which Harris described as his magnum opus – literally the most epic book he had ever written.

Given what I have shared about my adoration of Grossman’s work, I’ll start with what I thought were the stellar parts of the book. Firstly, the back story which is about Eva Panic (pronounced Punitsch). Apparently Grossman and Panic were close friends for many years and this book pays homage to her story. The story itself is devastating and I highly recommend that any readers of this book also delve into Panic’s life … I started with this article in Ha’Aretz which I thought provided a good foundation and this documentary on YouTube (you’ll have to search for all the parts as it’s broken up into segments). What struck me about Panic’s story is that it sheds light on a Holocaust experience which I think is often forgotten or perhaps neglected – that of rural villagers and communist supporters. While Panic’s own parents were taken to Auschwitz and killed there, she and her husband saved 1500 people from the Nazis. The choice that Panic faces and the repercussions of that choice are unimaginable to me; but knowing this background helped me to empathise somewhat with her as she is depicted in Grossman’s book.

Two things that Grossman always does well are characterisation of people and depiction of place. This book is no exception. Grossman paints his characters so delicately that they appear to be real. They are immeasurably flawed, painfully broken and simultaneously rich and varied. They celebrate love and wallow in loss with ferocious confidence. They are selfish and self-obsessed to the extreme and at times this is painful to read and witness. But it is real. They all need therapy – much like most people I know. Grossman’s Eva (aka Vera in the novel) is exactly the kind of person I would have liked to know. She reeks of history, languages mashed together in her heavy accent (and yes, I could sense the accent even through the translation). She is strong and coarse and bold. She is a fighter, stubborn and resistant but also passionate and while abrasive, she warms gently at startling moments. Reading about Vera I was reminded of Meir Shalev’s beautiful My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner which also took place in a Kibbutz setting and similarly featured a grandmother, although of different extraction. In truth, Vera reminded me somewhat of my maternal grandmother who was both cold and warm in a way that I think only a survivor of some tragedy can be. I leaned in to Vera but I was simultaneously repulsed by her callousness. She is clearly the spine of this book and for me it was her voice that carried the narrative – both her spoken voice and the silences behind which she hid much truth.

There were some interesting moments in this book – the scene at the airport, at Vera’s birthday party, the storm on the island. But while these stand out as particularly strong, there was much about this book that seemed to be lacking. I’m not sure whether it was the weight of the story that overburdened the narrative or whether there was something else at play. What I do know is that this isn’t Grossman’s best book. It’s good. It’s interesting. And the story is certainly worth telling. But it’s not … I don’t have the word exactly. It’s like it’s trying to be something greater than it is… There are moments when Vera is lost in the story and her telling of it and I feel as though Grossman himself was lost in the same thing. As though holding Eva was somehow too great a task – and now that I’ve watched an interview with Eva I can see that this is true. She is larger than life, despite her small stature. She is unyielding and overflowing and glorious – impossible to capture and perhaps it is this that undoes Grossman’s novel.

Undoubtedly, Grossman’s steady brilliance sets a very high standard and it’s fair to say that this book is definitely worth reading because Eva/Vera’s voice should never be forgotten and because memory so easily melts and fades and because Grossman is just such a force in the world of literature. So read it. And read beyond it.

Craig Silvey, Honeybee

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I’m not sure why I was surprised. I loved Jasper Jones, thought it was raw and striking and provocative. I loved it so much that I read it twice… and when Silvey came out with Honeybee I didn’t hesitate, I bought the book immediately. And then, for some reason, it sat on my shelf and gathered dust. I’m not sure why … I can only think that the cover image reminded me of what I thought Scott Monk’s protagonist might have looked like in his book Raw which left me underwhelmed to say the least.

In any event, Silvey’s protagonist stared back at me from the top shelf and every so often I thought “perhaps I should read that” and then was distracted by something or someone and the book remained. Alone.

But yesterday, I read Damon Galgut’s magnificent The Promise. I finished the book and sat there literally feeling bereft because it was done and I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. I flicked through the pages wondering whether to start at the beginning again. It didn’t seem right. And then I felt Honeybee staring down at me and I knew that now was its time.

I suspect there is indeed a deep connection between these two books for me. Galgut’s Africa is my birthplace. It rang deep in me, a bell tolling – but more about that in another post. And Silvey’s book described my home of the last 30 odd years, where I’ve lived most of my adult life, where I arrived as a 14 or 15 year old into that crazy space in between called adolescence and while I wasn’t exactly a ‘honeybee’ in the way Silvey describes, I think we are all honeybees on some level perhaps searching for a place to belong and I certainly felt like that arriving in Australia all those years ago.

So, Honeybee. What can I say. I was hooked from the very beginning. This beautiful tender moment on an overpass, the soft play of the idea of passing over mixed into the darkness, and the simple and honest relationship that develops between these two remarkable characters. I loved them both. Equally. But differently. Sam for his youth and his sorrow and his hollow existence and his sad past and tragic mother and his disconnection and culinary brilliance. Vic for his loneliness and aloneness, his secrets and his great love. And I loved the music that appeared when the two of them were together, a sense that all was right in the world. I loved the resilience of both these men and their deep goodness, despite the challenges that they both faced. I loved the friendship that emerged between them and then between each of them and others. I won’t say more because it will destroy the magic that unfolds between neighbours and like minded souls.

Perhaps the most remarkable element of this book is the strength that each of these characters demonstrates when seeking to bring joy and resolution to the other. It’s the same sentiment that I remember from Jasper Jones. In truth, Honeybee reminded me that some people are just inherently good and that is a wonderful thing.

Diana Wichtel, Driving to Treblinka

Diana Wichtel’s story is, unfortunately, not unique. Her father was a Holocaust survivor and she grew up in a house filled with silences and extreme contrast. She an

d her siblings and her mother grappled with the challenge of living with a man who was so clearly bright and brilliant but also tortured and tormented. He spoke seven languages, played musical instruments like the zither, the banjo mandolin and the piano and had a wonderful sense of humour. But he was also sometimes absent. The motif of this contrast runs throughout the book, beginning with the first chapter which is entitled: Daddy Mad Face, Daddy Angel Face. She writes: “The house seemed to doze when my father wasn’t there. When he came home, it woke up and stood to attention.”

I had the enormous pleasure of interviewing Diana as part of the 2019 Shalom | Sydney Jewish Writers Festival. One of the first things that I asked was what it was like to grow up in this type of home. She shared that it wasn’t easy. She conveys this adeptly in the book through the different genres  that she uses to describe her perceptions  and memories of her father – from snippets of his medical records from Brockville Psychiatric Hospital (“Patient married a girl from New Zealand in 1949. They met in Vancouver.”) to his own letters and memories.

Driving to Treblinka traces Diana’s attempt to ‘know’ her father long after he disappears from her life and his death. Her book sets itself up as an attempt to chase the past, to hold it and perhaps undo parts of it. In a way, reading this book reminded me of the documentary The Last Goldfish which the talented Su Goldfish created about her father and all she knew – and didn’t – about his life.

For many children of survivors, there is a delicate challenge when writing their parent’s story of survival. Diana alludes to this challenge when she retells a dream she had of her father sitting by her bed and reaching out to take her hand. In her dream, she asks him: “Is it ok that I’m telling your story?”

Clearly, the process of writing Driving to Treblinka, has allowed Diana to embrace much of what she did not know about her father, to rediscover him and to ensure that he is remembered by her children and grandchildren who were never able to meet him.