Stories of innocence and bitter experience from a Russian master. Isaac Babel (1894 – 1940) was a Russian writer and journalist best known to English readers for his short stories. He was born into a Jewish family in Odessa, at a time of terrible anti-Semitism. He survived a 1905 pogrom, but his grandfather, Shoyl, was murdered. Babel was a commander during the Polish-Soviet war and witnessed many horrors. With the rise of Stalin, he kept a low profile, his candid writings on the ugly realities of war garnering him enemies in high places. In 1939, Babel was arrested by the Soviet secret police and accused of treason and terrorism. He was executed the following year. Of Sunshine and Bedbugs: Essential Stories is comprised of three parts. "Childhood and Youth" contains sketches from the author's childhood; "Gangsters and Other Old Odessans" concentrates on the gritty side of life in the Jewish ghettos of Odessa, with its dodgy merchants and petty criminals; and finally, "Red Cavalry" chronicles Babel's time in the army and the atrocities he witnessed. The stories are quickly paced, full of lively characters and earthy descriptions. His prose is often humorous and ironic. Here is a passage from the "Childhood" section, about young children recruited for music lessons. “When a boy turned four or five, his mother would drag the tiny frail creature to Mr Zagursky. Zagursky ran a prodigy factory, a factory of Jewish dwarves in lace collars and patent leather shoes. He sought them out in the slums of Moldavanka, in the fetid courtyards of the Old Market. Zagursky showed them the ropes, and then the children were sent off to Professor Auer in St Petersburg. A mighty harmony dwelled in the souls of these starvelings with swollen blue heads. They became renowned virtuosi.” Describing scenes of war, Babel can often shock with brute realism: “He sat leaning against a tree. His boots were stuck wide apart. Without taking his eyes off me he carefully lifted his shirt. His stomach had been torn out, his guts were sliding onto his knees, and you could see his heartbeats.” A bracing introduction to one of the lesser known greats of Russian literature. Of Sunshine and Bedbugs: Essential Stories, by Isaac Babel. Published by Pushkin Press. $24.99 Review by Chris Saliba Six stories comprise this new collection from Pushkin Press by Russian master Fyodor Dostoevsky. In the novella length title story, a state councillor decides to gatecrash the wedding party of one of his office subordinates. A morally vain man, Ivan Ilyich thinks he can infuse some of his lofty values into the common people's celebration. It turns into a mortifyingly awkward evening as the revelers try to keep their superior happy, with Ivan Ilyich feeling terribly out of place. The petty official ends up drinking too much and making a spectacle of himself. The whimsical “Conversations in a Graveyard” features a group of newly dead corpses who discuss various philosophical points, arriving at the conclusion that they should abandon all shame and enjoy their time before they fully decompose. A miserly pawn shop owner chronicles his failed marriage in “A Meek Creature” and in the hilarious “The Crocodile” an obnoxiously ambitious man sees career advancement and opportunity when he is swallowed whole by a crocodile. Living in the crocodile's belly with relative comfort, he sees himself as being a scientific wonder. The last two stories, “The Heavenly Christmas Tree” and “The Peasant Marey” are short autobiographical pieces that touch on themes of the writer's imagination and human kindness. Dostoevsky exhibits his usual brisk pacing and biting satire in these stories. The title story is a brilliant psychological portrait of the gap between how we see ourselves and how the world does. And “The Crocodile”, the other standout story, is delightfully clever and absurdist, lampooning the overconfident type of personality who refuses to see reality. Sharp, witty and vivid, these entertaining and inventive six stories will surprise and astonish. A Bad Business: Essential Stories, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Published by Pushkin Press. $24.99 Review by Chris Saliba A short novel that deals with institutional child abuse in Ireland during the 1980s. It's 1985, a small town in Ireland. Bill Furlong works in a timber and coal yard. He has a family of five girls. It's Christmas and the family are preparing, making fruit cake and writing letters to Santa. Despite all this festive cheer, there is one thing niggling at Bill's conscience. A local laundry, run by the Good Shepherd nuns, is clearly mistreating its charges, although the power of the church means this could never be said out loud. He meets a girl from the laundry – a young woman, really, she's given birth to a child – named Sarah. She's clearly abused, often locked in a shed and kept in a filthy condition. Bill thinks of his own daughters, and also his mother, who had him out of wedlock, and managed to escape a similar fate. Is there something he can do to help? Based loosely on Ireland's Magdalene laundries, homes for “fallen women” where many abuses took place, Claire Keegan has woven a sparse, elegiac story, centring on a good-hearted man who must confront a difficult moral choice. A novel of quiet grace and dignity. Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan. Faber Fiction. $22.99 Review by Chris Saliba A grieving woman finds healing in the Italian countryside. A young woman is invited to the wedding of her friends, Giulia and Fab. The wedding is to be held in an Italian village, where the couple currently live. Travelling by train through the Italian countryside, it is announced the journey must be delayed. An accident has happened on the tracks, possibly a fatality. The young woman, who narrates the story, is triggered. She feels a panic attack coming on. Some breathing exercises help her cope and the journey continues. When she reaches her friends' house, she feels enveloped in love and care. But grief and guilt still pursues her. Back in her home city of Melbourne, she has lost someone. A loved one has died, tragically before his time. She feels somehow she could have prevented this death, but also knows she couldn’t. Torn between grief and a desire to heal, her mind continually returns to Melbourne and memories of what happened. Sunbathing, the debut novel from writer and editor Isobel Beech, follows a pleasingly straightforward narrative. While set in the gorgeous Italian countryside (the descriptions of growing food, the locals and rustic landscape are a tonic), the story regularly weaves back to Melbourne and memories from the past. Based on a real personal loss, this is an autobiographical novel that is succinct, dignified and genuine. Its quiet honesty and empathetic tone make for a moving and cathartic experience. Sunbathing, by Isobel Beech. Published by Allen & Unwin. $29.99 Review by Chris Saliba A Japanese office worker fakes a pregnancy to get fair treatment on the job Shibata is a thirty-four year old office worker. She performs a colourless administrative role for a company that makes cardboard cones. Her male co-workers have simply assumed that she will also do all the menial office tasks, such as cleaning up after them. One day when she is asked to clear away coffee cups she reaches her breaking point. A lie spontaneously bursts from her lips. She announces she’s pregnant and can’t abide the smell of coffee. It makes her sick. Suddenly her life is made much easier. Everyone is solicitous of her health and well being. And she gets plenty of maternity leave. There is now time to cook decent meals and look after herself properly. She even joins a pregnant women’s aerobic club and starts socialising with a group of soon-to-be mums. While life improves, it also gets weirder. How long can she keep up such a lie? Diary of a Void is magazine editor Emi Yagi’s first novel. Like so much modern Japanese fiction, it concentrates on the banalities of office work and the minutiae of urban life. The story’s unusual idea, of a feigned pregnancy to get out of work, keeps the story kicking along as the reader wonders how long the ruse can be kept up. A quirky, yet quietly mad story of personal desperation. Diary of a Void, by Emi Yagi. Published by Harvill / Secker. $29.99 Review by Chris Saliba A warm, innovative, witty new novel from Sophie Cunningham Alice Fox has been struggling for years with her novel. Her agent, Sarah, has misgivings. Does anyone really want to read about Leonard Woolf? Alice claims that he was once a rock star of the colonial era. What Sarah wants to know is: will it sell? But Alice doggedly continues on with her project, researching in English libraries and travelling to Sri Lanka (once Ceylon) where Leonard was once a colonial administrator. This Devastating Fever interweaves two timelines. Alice, between 2004 and 2021 and Leonard, between 1904 and his death in 1969. Alice's world is consumed with climate change, bushfires and in 2020, a global pandemic. Leonard's professional life starts in Ceylon. On one year's leave in 1911 he met Virginia Stephen and married her the following year. While his famous wife is better remembered, Leonard was also a prolific writer. A novel about writing a novel seems like a recipe for disaster, yet Sophie Cunningham has pulled off something genuinely moving. Through Alice's irrational determination to write her novel, and her self-deprecatory wit, we enter into the heart of one of the 20th century's most famous and famously complicated marriages. Deeply humane, full of humour and delightfully gossipy about the sex lives of the Bloomsbury Group, This Devastating Fever is innovative in format, chatty in tone and will seduce readers with its simple, direct voice. This Devastating Fever, by Sophie Cunningam. Published by Ultimo Press. $32.99 Review by Chris Saliba. First published at Books + Publishing Release date 7th September, 2022 The struggles of exploited workers in a 1950s factory. It's 1956. Middle aged Miss Merton applies for and gets a job at the Southern Textiles Dye Works – the Dyehouse. She works in the office area, doing admin and other basic tasks that ensures the factory runs smoothly, or as smoothly as possible. The factory manager is the aggressive and duplicitous Mr Renshaw, a sexual predator who often hits on the young female employees. One such victim is Patty Nicholls. She's an honest worker, hoping to one day marry and settle down. Troubled by Renshaw's attentions, Patty confides in Oliver Henerey, a street smart co-worker who lives in a share house with two socialists. The workers at the Dyehouse plough on despite their troubles. We learn of Miss Merton's emotionally complicated backstory (she's presumed by many to be a dull spinster), how one longtime worker and dye specialist, Hughie, is being unfairly pushed out of his position and the worries for financially stretched Barney, who's wife is expecting a child. As the broad cast of the novel's characters struggle to get ahead, avoid trouble and make ends meets, greater forces than themselves are at work. The upper management and board of directors are keen on rationalising the factory. They want to cut costs. The writing is on the wall. Despite this terrible cloud hanging over the workers, it is Miss Merton who has the fire in the belly. She stiffens her back and is ready to fight for a better future. Mena Calthorpe (1905 – 1996) joined the Communist Party in 1933, leaving after four years. She then joined the Australian Labor Party, aligning herself with the Party's left wing. Calthorpe's politics and her own experiences as a factory worker certainly informs The Dyehouse. It is a socialist novel very much in the vein of novels like Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole and Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered-Philanthropists. This may make it sound dour and stodgy. Anything but! Calthorpe writes in a beautiful, crisp prose, contrasting industrial muck and pollution with beautiful nature descriptions. The joy of sunny days and birdsong is accentuated, highlighting how workers manage to snatch pleasurable moments despite the colourless daily grind. The novel skilfully weaves together a compelling cast of characters and their differing stories, making The Dyehouse compulsive reading. Calthorpe offers realism, but carefully tempered and neatened into a fine artistry. It's a great shock after having read The Dyehouse to realise this classic of socialist literature isn't better known or studied in school. It addresses key issues of the conflict between labour and capital that still rage today. The Dyehouse, by Mena Calthorpe. Published by Text. $12.95 Review by Chris Saliba Intrepid philosopher Isabel Dalhousie investigates an unfortunate family rift, and administers some unwanted medicine. Isabel Dalhousie is a philosopher and editor of The Review of Applied Ethics. She lives in Scotland with her musician husband Jamie, and their two young boys, Charlie and Magnus. On a night out to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, she is asked to join their board in an advisory role. Isabel accepts, thinking it won't take up too much of her time. But her husband, Jamie, knows better. He counsels his wife against getting drawn into other people's affairs, as she tends to do. Her assurances soon become void when a woman named Laura with ties to the portrait gallery asks her to help out in a family dispute. Laura's adult son, Richard, is having political disputes with his father. It's got to such a stage that the two aren't talking at all. Would Isabel have a word or two with Richard to try and call a truce? The Sweet Remnants of Summer is the 17th in Alexander McCall Smith's The Sunday Philosophy Club series. The novel takes up everyday philosophical questions, but written in a pleasing and accessible form, much in the manner of Alain De Botton. This is mixed with a gently comic portrait of middle-class life, reminiscent of Anne Tyler. A neat, enjoyable read that doesn't overstep its brief. The Sweet Remnants of Summer, by Alexander McCall Smith. Published by Little, Brown. $32.99 Review by Chris Saliba Black misdeeds committed in remote New South Wales shatter a small community. On a rural cattle farm in remote western New South Wales lives nine-year-old Parker Davis. He's a rebellious, angry child, much like his mother. The two constantly fight and bicker. It's a relationship that mixes love and hate, but it is the hate which is more bitter and pronounced. Parker's father is a distant figure. Unable to cope with his son he retreats to his farm work, a distant, introverted figure. When Parker's cousin Ruben comes for a visit, the two boys hang out together, but have an uneasy relationship, filled with mutual disdain and rivalry. Ruben is very much a bad seed. A spirit of evil hovers over him. When the two boys come across an unpopular boy named Toby while out walking on the outskirts of the family's property, they do something horrible that will have reverberations for years to come. Parker manages his feelings of guilt through his teenage years by developing close school friendships with Nayley and Hazel. When the three decide to camp together at a regular spot that holds significant memories, along with Nayley's new boyfriend, Jonah, the past comes crowding back in a dramatic way, threatening to blow their close bond apart. James McKenzie Watson won the 2021 Penguin Literary Prize for this debut thriller. It's an eminently worthy winner. Dealing with themes of shame and guilt, Denizen has an irresistibly propulsive quality. The story constantly shifts back and forth in time, creating a sense of suspense and horror as key details are slowly revealed. The tension is pitch perfect and never lags. The rural setting is particularly evocative, highlighting the other themes of the book: toxic isolation, deteriorating mental health and suicide. For readers of Lyn Yeowart's The Silent Listener and Jane Harper, Denizen is sure to be the literary phenomenon of 2022. Denizen, by James McKenzie Watson. Published by Penguin. $32.99 Review by Chris Saliba An evocative and highly original hymn to the Pyrenees by a Catalan artist, poet and writer. Poet and farmer Domènec is struck down by lightning on the Pyrenees mountains. He leaves behind a wife, Sió, and two children, Mia and Hilari. Time moves on, the children grow and another tragedy befalls the family. Hilari is killed in a shooting accident. Like the animals that gain their sustenance on the mountains, human life is also ruthlessly cut down by either natural forces or man's weaponry. The above may make When I Sing, Mountains Dance sound like a straightforward enough narrative. It isn't. These major incidents are almost inconsequential. The novel's real power lies in its idiosyncratic descriptions of nature, environment and history. The story is told through a wide array of voices, some completely unusual – animals, accused witches from the past and even mushrooms. The effect is almost experimental, a rich and strange tapestry of moods, atmospheres and characters. Catalan artist and writer Irene Sola’s second novel may not be to everyone’s taste. The crowd of different narrative voices that cut this way and that may have some scratching their heads. Others may gladly immerse themselves in this wild flower of a book, exulting in its free abandon. This reviewer found it an interesting literary byway, but was thankful for its short duration. When I Sing, Mountains Dance, by Irene Sola. Published by Granta. $27.99 Review by Chris Saliba |
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