 An abandoned wife takes a victory lap of sorts, giving an excoriating commentary on her friends, lovers and family.
Lise Mundus is a celebrated poet. Her husband, Vilhelm, is an equally famous newspaper editor. After twenty years of marriage, he has abandoned his wife. From a psychiatric ward, Lise publishes a lonely hearts ad, searching for a lover. She takes up with Kurt, an aimless drifter who lives above her flat. The relationship is pretty meaningless to Lise, just a way of filling in the empty hours. What really gives her life a semblance of meaning is a steady stream of exasperated, ironic and often comical commentaries on Vilhelm and his many lovers. Lise is also critical of herself and her own behaviour in the relationship, although the tone of these self-reproaches is breezy and glib. As this mad, patchwork narrative barrels along, we know a reckoning is ahead, for in the first page we learn that Lise is already dead. Vilhelm’s Room was Danish poet and author Tove Ditlevsen’s final novel, published in 1975. It is a bit of a train wreck, but one you can’t look away from. The story jumps all over the place, characters come and go erratically and the narrator’s voice is hard to pin down. Sometimes it’s Lise narrating, sometimes a third person narrator, sometimes it’s hard to figure out who’s who. That might make it sound like a challenging read, and it is to a degree, but the novel’s extraordinary psychodynamics - the ex-lovers, the self loathing, the sexual competition, the painful loneliness- make it compellingly universal. Our darkest moments are here laid bare in a prose that is both despairing and witty. The reader doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Interspersed through the madness are insightful passages where Ditlevsen discusses relationships, childhood and personal struggles. If Vilhelm’s Room has a theme, it is the latter. Lise is flighty, cheerful and witty, even if this is at core a very rancid type of wit, the enjoyment of Vilhelm’s character assasination. Underlying all this is a serious mental illness. Lise talks in earnest about suicide, claiming the thought of it is her only happiness in life, as it provides her the freedom to choose when her misery will end. Tove Ditlevsen’s final novel is shocking and raw. It’s also darkly comic, with a nervous energy that propels the story. The book should perhaps come with a warning, especially anyone suffering from mental illness. Brilliant and original, but also deeply saddening. (Translated by Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell.) Vilhelm's Room, by Tove Ditlevsen. Published by Penguin. $26.99 Review by Chris Saliba  A man troubled by war tries to lose himself by impersonating someone else.
While roaming the scarred battlefields of Verdun in north eastern France, a German man named Wilhelm Bettuch comes across the corpse of a dead surgeon, Hans Stern. A working class baker himself, Wilhelm decides to steal the papers of this professional man, return to Germany, and impersonate him. Things go surprisingly smoothly. Posing as Hans Stern, Wilhelm discovers he has a wife, named Grete. She recognises him as her husband, and any differences in personality she puts down to the traumatic effects of war. Hans/Wilhelm also discovers that neighbours and friends easily recognise him. But a troubling inner voice says he will be caught. The family dog, Nero, treats him suspiciously. And family friend and prosecutor Sven Borges claims to be on his tail. When Hans/Wilhelm is summoned as a witness in a court case, he risks serious consequences. Peter Flamm (real name Erich Mosse, 1891-1963) was born into a Jewish family in Berlin. First published in 1926, A Shadow of Myself is on one level about survivors of trench warfare during the First World War, but on another level it delves into themes of self and presentation of self in society. Hans/Wilhelm (the two are somehow convincingly mixed into one entity) very much hides behind a mask, his inner self a roiling ocean of doubts, anxieties and fears. The text denies the idea of concrete personality and identity, that hard surface and false veneer we try to wear. In an extraordinary passage, Flamm describes individuals as mere expressions of biology and mysterious nature: “...our parents aren’t our father and mother, not their blood alone, we have every animal inside us, every plant, all of them speaking their muffled language, as embryos we still have all their shapes, breathing with gills, we’re fish and reptiles and animals, the whole of creation is inside us…we’re all brothers, we’re all one, there’s no guilt because we’re not ourselves…” The novel’s narration is paced like a thriller, as Hans/Wilhelm constantly fears detection. Even though he is surrounded by friends and family, and lives in a bustling city, he is nevertheless haunted by a terrifying isolation, a world that can never understand him. In tone and atmosphere, A Shadow of Myself is reminiscent of Kafka’s nightmare existential classic The Trial (the framing device Flamm uses is that of a courtroom confession, where Hans/Wilhelm tells his story.) A hundred years after it was first published, this exceptional work of war time fiction can now be enjoyed by English readers. (Translated by Simon Pare.) A Shadow of Myself, by Peter Flamm. Published by Pushkin Press. $32.99. Review by Chris Saliba  A Dutch youth itching for some excitement in his life gets more than he bargained for in this classic coming of age novel.
Karel Ruis is a seventeen-year-old fed up with his dull life and unhappy parents. He wishes for something to happen, anything really. His ennui makes him even wish for a bomb to fall and shake things up. There are rumours afoot that Germany intends to invade his country, the Netherlands. There is an atmosphere of denial and trepidation among the adults. Surely the English will come to their rescue and all will be well. Karel has an uncle, a jolly fat man who claims to have found the secret of a happy life, despite all the personal tragedies he’s had to endure. Uncle Robert gives Karel a letter, to be delivered to a Mrs Mexocos, a Jewish woman. Karel is to wait for Mrs Mexocos to write a reply. He performs this mysterious errand and finds himself enchanted by the woman - an artist - and her Bohemian style apartment. Mrs Mexocos also has a daughter, named Ria, whom Karel immediately falls in love with. The gathering storm of threatened German invasion happens. Karel’s new and enchanting friends Mrs Mexocos and Ria must flee. They book tickets to London. Karel dearly wants to follow, to escape his miserable family and live a charmed life in London. But he must return home, with only heartache for company. When he arrives back in the city he finds the bombs he had wished for have caused untold tragedy. Gerrit Kouwenaar (1923 - 2014) wrote Fall, Bomb, Fall when he was a mere twenty-three. The novel’s depth and maturity suggest an author of a much older age, looking back on their youth. Kouwenaar perfectly captures the flightiness and restless energy of youth. Karel is compulsive and reckless, but also warm and earnest. The text is light and playful in tone, almost humorous, despite the dark subject matter of Nazi invasion and looming Jewish persecution and murder. The novel presents a vibrant slice of life, a time when everything is normal and tomorrow can be trusted in, that is soon to be turned upside down and forever destroyed. First published in 1950 and now translated into English for the first time, this is a literary gem not to be missed. Fall, Bomb, Fall by Gerrit Kouwenaar. Published by Pushkin. $26.99 Review by Chris Saliba  Danish writer Anders Bodelsen (1937 - 2021) considers the high price of living indefinitely.
It’s 1973. Magazine editor Bruno discovers while shaving a weird lump on his neck, causing him to bleed. He visits specialist Doctor Ackerman and is assured it’s nothing to worry about, but some tests will have to be performed nonetheless. What was presumed to be a benign condition, turns out to be terminal cancer. Bruno hasn’t long to live. But extraordinary leaps in science present Bruno with a terrible choice. Doctor Ackerman offers a radical new procedure. He could be part of an early medical experiment where his body would be “frozen down” and then brought up again decades later when a cure was found. Bruno is torn over what to do. He has just started a new relationship with a dancer named Jenny. With limited time to think out his options, he impulsively decides to be frozen down. Twenty-two years later he is revived, but finds changes have been made to his body without permission. He has been sterilised and certain organs have been swapped out for synthetic ones. Society has been divided into two classes - “now-life” and “all-life”. Now-life mortgage their organs and live like “hippies”, not having to work. All-lifers work long and hard hours to afford all the medical interventions needed to keep them alive, ostensibly forever. Bruno hopes to meet his girlfriend Jenny in this brave new world. He persistently asks for a meeting and the hospital authorities keep putting it off, as Jenny has also had some medical interventions. Eventually the reunion occurs. Bruno is shocked by what Jenny has become. Anders Bodelsen was a Danish writer of experimental thrillers. Freezing Point was first published in 1969. It’s a tightly written story that looks at the ethics of medical interventions to prolong life indefinitely. As a sideline, the book also questions the economics of prolonged life. In the imagined society of 1995 and 2022 (the book jumps first 22 years into the future, then 27 years) all resources are directed towards extreme medicine. People who opt to live a natural lifespan sell their organs, while those who wish to live eternally must pay in endless (and by extension, eternal) work. The novel also plays with ideas of narrative, as editor Bruno muses on different modes of storytelling. In a dehumanised future world, it seems that fiction may have died, as Bruno tries in vain to obtain magazines or books to read. A gripping and ghoulish thriller offering the reader plenty of ethical conundrums to wrestle with. Freezing Point, by Anders Bodelsen. Translated by Sophie Mackintosh. Faber Fiction $24.99 Review by Chris Saliba  Award winning Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah addresses the contorted way Middle-Eastern issues are dealt with in media and academia.
Ashraf is an academic trying to keep his head above university politics. He can’t speak his mind too freely on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict without seeming like an Islamic extremist. His postgraduate student, Jamal, has no such qualms, and posts articles and comments that gets them both into hot water. Hannah is a journalist - the only Muslim in her workplace - trying to shift the lens on reporting Middle Eastern politics. Her stories are often reworked by editors to give a more pro-Western slant. It’s frustrating, but what options does she have? Turn her back on a good paying job (she has a young family to raise), or try to change attitudes from within? When a year 12 student at an Islamic college protests a university’s ties to an Israeli weapons manufacturer, both Hannah and Ashraf are drawn into the affair. The issue presents a terrible personal crisis. Respond honestly, unapologetically highlighting the hypocrisy, falsehoods and blindspots of Western thinking on the Middle East, or compromise and feel you’ve sold out? Discipline is about self-censorship. How false narratives are powerfully embedded. Randa Abdel-Fattah has written an engaging and accessible novel with very relatable characters, highlighting the perilous tightrope Australian Muslims are compelled to walk. Discipline, by Randa Abdel-Fattah. Published by UQP. $34.99 Review by Chris Saliba  A young woman tries to survive the hypocrisy of the corporate world
Marisa is a creative director at an advertising agency in Madrid, Spain. Everything, it would seem, is pretty much perfect. A well paying job, nice apartment, all in all a comfortable life. But she is going through an existential crisis. Her job, she knows, only exists to push vulnerable people into buying crappy products, preying on their insecurities. The people she works with - ambitious, sycophantic, and duplicitous - are stomach turning. They make her feel literally sick. To cope she’s taking a steady stream of tranquilizers. There is one co-worker, however, that she admired. Erika. Sarcastic and ironic, Erika wasn’t the type to bend over backwards to please management, and often dropped zingers that made her attitude plain. But she died suddenly, in mysterious circumstances never explained. Was it suicide? A drug overdose? Misadventure? Rather than investigate too deeply, the superficial office culture moves on. Her death is deemed sad, even tragic, but the bland workday has its own momentum that buries such deaths and disappearances. One day Marisa gets terrible news. Her manager is organising a team building retreat. She will have to travel and stay with the workmates she can’t stand. The trip goes from bad to worse, until Marisa comes up with a plan to subtly sabotage the whole event. Beatriz Serrano is a young writer who has written for BuzzFeed and Vanity Fair. Discontent is narrated in the first person, giving the reader an almost stream-of-consciousness ride through Marisa’s dissatisfied mind. The novel is a rancid comedy, with plenty of excoriating lines about the meaninglessness of modern work. It also provides astute observations on the intersection of feminism and capitalism, and how women have been betrayed by its promise. A withering critique dressed up as a single-woman-in-the-city story, there is much to enjoy in this often heartfelt book. Discontent, by Beatriz Serrano. Published by Harvill/Secker. $34.99 Review by Chris Saliba  A collection of Tony Birch's stand out stories.
Having recently won the Age Book of the Year award for Women and Children, and with a substantial body of work now to his name, it feels like the time has come to celebrate writer Tony Birch. Hence the lushly produced Pictures of You, a collection of twenty-two previously published stories. Birch is a writer who doesn’t stray too far from what he knows. He concentrates on his gritty Fitzroy upbringing, a time when people’s lives played out on the street. It was a time, too, when technology was whatever tools you had on hand, and what you could do with them. In a favourite story, “The Bicycle Thieves”, a foul mouthed neighbor donates a bicycle he cobbled together to some adventure seeking local kids. In other stories Birch tackles his fraught relationship with his father, scenes of domestic violence, terrible working class jobs, the vulnerability of children and the lives of Indigenous people. Considering the difficult subject matter of many of Birch’s stories, they should be harrowing to read. Instead they provide warm, sympathetic portraits of people under duress. These are timeless stories written in a simple, unadorned prose, every word compelling. Pictures of You: Collected Stories, by Tony Birch. Published by U.Q.P. $45 Review by Chris Saliba  A wife dies suddenly. Are suspicious circumstances involved?
Tsuneo Asai is a government bureaucrat working in the agriculture department. He has spent many years studiously doing all the right things to advance his career. One day while on a business trip he gets a phone call. The news is not good. His wife, who has long had a heart condition, has suddenly died. Discombobulated and shocked, he leaves the business meeting and goes about organising the funeral and other details. The relationship with his wife, Eiko, had not been a particularly close one. She was his second wife, and their intimate life together had pretty much ended. However, there were details about her death that don’t seem quite right. Why was she in a rather seedy part of town, where there are hotels that serve as a rendezvous point for secret lovers? Could Eiko have had a secret lover? As Asai begins to investigate this possible double life, more and more clues point to a tantalisingly complex story. Famed Japanese master crime writer Seicho Matsumoto published A Quiet Place in 1971. It appears now as a Penguin Modern Classic, with a 2016 translation by Louise Heal Kawai. There are many twists and turns in this gripping crime mystery, and the story takes a shocking, completely unexpected turn half way, pivoting from a tale of a wife’s sudden death to a psychological thriller along the lines of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, The Tell-Tale Heart. Gripping and seductive crime fiction. A Quiet Place, by Seicho Matsumoto. Published by Penguin Modern Classics. $24.99 Review by Chris Saliba  Two men embark on a precarious love affair in late 1980s Wales.
The late 1980s, a small village in Wales. B (main characters are identified by first initial) is a somewhat aimless young man setting out in life. M is eleven years older and owns the local ironmongery business, which he inherited from his parents. They meet at a local pub during a boozy Christmas event and M invites B out on something between a date and an expedition. They visit a scenic hill and share a sandwich and a thermos of tea. They are awkward around each other, yet there is a connection. “Few words. More gestures than chat.” The two men begin a secret relationship, B taking on a job at M’s hardware store and moving into the spare room above the shop. It’s a time of political strife. The AIDS crisis has exploded and homophobia is rampant, especially in a small town. The men exist simultaneously in two different worlds, one of intimacy and togetherness above the shop, but publicly playing socially acceptable roles. A Room Above a Shop is sparsely written, mirroring the fractured, hidden lives of its characters. Anthony Shapland describes a fragile intimacy, eked out in the shadows. The atmosphere is one of fear and vigilance, ensuring the right gestures are made and that secrets are not unwittingly betrayed. It’s a reminder of how societal rules and moral codes can hollow out life and soul, and yet love can still find a way . Readers of Claire Keegan will enjoy this brittle, haunting novel about forbidden love. A Room Above a Shop, by Anthony Shapland. Published by Granta. $29.99 Review by Chris Saliba  A witty, fast paced roller-coaster ride through 1980s New York.
New York in the 1970s was a city in debt and seemingly terminal decline. Its manufacturing base had been eviscerated. Poverty was endemic and crime at an all time high. New York needed money. Then came the 1980s, and Reaganomics and deregulation. Boom! The town was back in business. It pivoted from old school industry to computerised finance. Digitising stocks and money put them on steroids. People became extremely wealthy. Gods of New York covers four years at the end of the 80s: 1986-1989. Mayor Ed Koch sought and won an historic third term. But there was much strife afflicting the city - racially motivated violence, the AIDS crisis, high level corruption, poverty, homelessness, drug addiction and the mentally unwell living on the streets. For every societal ill there was a charismatic if controversial advocate. The list of such characters is mesmerising: Black activist Reverend Al Sharpton, AIDS crisis agitator Larry Kramer, film maker Spike Lee, disease specialist Anthony Fauci and crime fighting lawyer Rudy Giuliani, to name a few. There are also plenty of less famous characters, such as Joyce Brown, a homeless woman turned celebrity. The city had tried to have her institutionalised, but she fought through the courts to be allowed to return to the street. Hovering above the city is Donald Trump, a glittering success and a figure of undisputed economic prowess. Throughout the late 80s Trump would back himself into a corner by over investing in the Atlantic City casino scene, just at a time when punters had no money and were pulling in their spending. And yet the banks continued to lend him staggering amounts of money. His debts became so eye-watering that the banks essentially couldn’t let him fail. Author and journalist Jonathan Mahler does a brilliant job of building a compelling narrative around the events, scandals and crimes of the day. (A lot of time is devoted to harrowing crime cases.) He has a witty style and clever turn of phrase, able to distill the cultural and economic movements of the time into pithy one liners. The picture that emerges of New York is of a place that is terribly fractured and extreme. A city of dreadful poverty, entrenched racism, drug addiction, homelessness and mental illness. Why, one wonders, so many problems in a city that is an economic engine room of the world economy? The book doesn’t end on a cheery note, with Jonathan Mahler asserting that these divisions, between rich and poor, black and white, have only become more entrenched. An entertaining and insightful portrait of a complex city. New York may be cruel and unforgiving, but it produces extraordinary people and cultural movements. The Gods of New York, by Jonathan Mahler. Published by Hutchinson Heinemann. $36.99 Review by Chris Saliba |
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