A beautifully evocative historical novel set in the Norwegian archipelago. 

It's 1932. Ivanna “Wanny” Wolstad longs to enter the male dominated world of hunting and trapping. An independently minded woman, she runs her own taxi in Tromsø, in Northern Norway. A chance meeting brings her into contact with Anders Sæterdal, a trapper heading out to Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. She manages to persuade a reluctant Anders to take her on as a partner. And so begins a year of adventure, wonder and incredible hardship. The unlikely partners shoot bears, trap foxes and battle the unforgiving cold. Over time, Anders puts aside his male prejudices and comes to a grudging admiration for Wanny's pluck, courage and ingenuity. Their partnership matures into one based on respect and mutual appreciation.

Based on the real life of trapper Ivanna Wolstad, Robyn Mundy's Cold Coast is a remarkable achievement. It tells Wolstad's story in a gorgeously intimate prose, with page after page of stunning nature writing. Mundy has clearly studied her subject matter in the field as the descriptions of wildlife, landscape and weather sing in a distinct poetic voice. (An interlocking narrative follows the life of a young fox.) While there are plenty of descriptions of killing, skinning and eviscerating animals, they are thankfully not gratuitous or stomach churning.

A perfectly balanced novel mixing natural history, biography and feminist concerns into an aesthetically pleasing whole.

Cold Coast, by Robyn Mundy. Published by Ultimo Press. $32.99

​This review first published at Books + Publishing. 

Natalia Ginzburg's classic autobiographical novel of family life during wartime.

Ostensibly written as a novel, renowned Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon reads mostly like a comic memoir. Despite there being plenty of hardship and heartache throughout, the tone is kept light as a souffle. Novels usually have some plot, or if no plot, then central characters to focus on, but Family Lexicon has a diffuse feel, jumping from person to person. Ginzburg's father, however, does work as a centrifugal force in the book's narrative, along with mother Lidia, both of whom are eccentrics in their own way. Giuseppe is always thundering his disapproval at this, that and the other, variously describing the idiocies of the world as “doodledums” and “nitwitteries”. Lidia, more sanguine, but zany nonetheless, enjoys art and all things beautiful, passing idiosyncratic comments on the fashions of the day. She is forever youthful, blessed with a lightness of being.

Bubbling away behind the broad cast of characters is the looming Second World War. The family is staunchly anti-fascist. They are also of Jewish origins. With the Germans advancing, they are forced to go into hiding. Young Natalia marries resistance organiser Leone Ginzburg, who is tortured and dies in prison, but this fact is remarked upon almost in passing. Through all these tragedies and difficulties, the family ploughs ahead, their same old sense of humour and interpersonal relations intact, seemingly unchanged by war. Perhaps this is one of the novel's central themes: war affects people differently, and life does go on, despite everything.

While the narrative does sometimes have a feeling of stasis, surprising considering the dramatic events of Mussolini, fascism and war, Family Lexicon has the comic tone of Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals. A humane and generous portrait, but one that captures all the maddening imperfections of family life. 

Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg. Published by Daunt Books. $19.99

Review by Chris Saliba

An upper-class English family strolls through a series of scandals and disasters, displaying a cool sense of irony and self-possession.

English novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett has a reputation as an expert dissector of middle-class family life, possessed of a savage wit. Her admirers are legion, although like Proust and Joyce, she seems to be more talked about than read. Pushkin Press now publish two of her novels, More Women Than Men and A House and Its Head.

The Edgeworth family comprises patriarch Duncan, his wife Ellen, and two daughters, Nance and Sibyl. Duncan’s nephew, Grant, also lives with the family. It’s 1885 and the family live in excellent circumstances, with staff attending to their needs. They also live in a well-to-do street, with busy neighbours doing their constant rounds. Duncan, the father, is somewhat of a tyrant, but none of the children, or neighbours for that matter, take him too seriously. Suddenly Ellen falls ill and takes to her bed. A doctor is called and despite his intervention, she starts fading fast. This illness will start a whole series of queer occurrences: unlikely re-marriages, adulterous affairs and finally, the killing of a child in his cot.

A House and Its Head is heavy on dialogue and light on the inner psychology of its characters. Often concentration is required to keep up with the many different speakers, their names and relationship to each other. Indeed, the writing is so intricate, almost Byzantine, that re-reading over certain puzzling passages is a must. Fans of Compton-Burnett laud her razor sharp wit. And yes, she is often funny, but it’s a beguiling sense of humour. It can be hard to figure out if she’s making a zinger, being cynical, or worse. In sum, however, the total makes for a truly original, even bizarre experience. Her writing is the triumph of surface over the mess and disorder of life. Even when the killer of a young child is revealed, none of the characters experience any trauma, but simply prattle on in their clever, witty ways.

The stagey aspects of A House and Its Head are similar to Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and Jean Genet’s The Maids. The exotic, avant garde novels of Ronald Firbank also come to mind. To highlight Compton-Burnett's artificial style, it's also worth recalling that essayist Susan Sontag listed her novels as the epitome of camp. 

A rich and strange literary byway, an acid trip of a novel, definitely worth a look at.  

A House and Its Head, by Ivy Compton-Burnett. Published by Puskin Press. $19.99

Review by Chris Saliba​

The story of how one of Silicon Valley's dark princes made his billions and wields his influence.

Peter Thiel is not a name as well known as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, yet he's had considerable influence in the tech world and has attempted to push his ideas into the sphere of politics.

Born in West Germany in 1967, his family moved to the United States the following year. A mathematics wiz and chess aficionado, he studied philosophy at Stanford University. His literary influences included Tolkein and Ayn Rand. He soon got involved in campus culture wars through the university's newspaper, The Stanford Review, which Thiel co-founded. The paper's bugbears were political correctness and identity politics, but some of the articles  pushed boundaries into racism, sexism and homophobia.

After Stanford, Thiel went into law, but soon got bored and dropped out of the corporate world. Instead he co-founded PayPal, the electronic payments system that revolutionised online shopping. Thiel was never really a technologist; investing was his true calling. His investments (including an early bet on Facebook, giving him a 10.2% stake in the company and a place on the board) made him a billionaire many times over.

So much wealth, one would think, would result in overwhelming joy, but Thiele remained restless and continued his Stanford University culture wars. When gossip blog Gawker outed Thiel as gay, he sought revenge by suing the media outlet through various proxies, keeping his involvement secret. He would eventually bankrupt Gawker. It was seen by some as deeply disturbing that a billionaire investor could shut down a media company, seemingly at whim.

Thiele's far right activities reached their peak when he met political strategist Steve Bannon and gained entry into Trump's circles. He would publicly endorse Trump at one of his rallies and donate one million dollars to his campaign.

Business journalist Max Chafkin has called his biography of Thiel The Contrarian. This is due to his subject's ability to hold various competing (or flat out contradictory) positions at the same time. As Chafkin writes:

“How exactly could a hedge fund guy who was effectively shorting the American economy also be a wide-eyed futurist? What kind of libertarian sold spy technology to the CIA? What kind of gonzo risk taker says no to an early investment in Tesla?”

The Contrarian reads as both a jaw-dropping biography of a cold nihilist and a well researched history of Silicon Valley, its personalities, energy and ethos. So many tech companies started out as sunny, optimistic, idealistic outfits, promoting themselves as striving to make the world a better place. But as they grew and became more powerful, businesses like Facebook and Google would start courting authoritarian regimes like China. (Mark Zuckerberg requested President Xi Jinping name his unborn child at a White House dinner.) 

A powerful book that raises a lot of questions about the power of technology and the lack of accountability surrounding it.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power, by Max Chafkin. Bloomsbury. $29.99

Review by Chris Saliba