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Book Review: Her Father’s Daughter – Alice Pung

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Part two of a series of reviews from the Contemporary Australian Writing reading list from RMIT. In this review, I look at ‘Her Father’s Daughter’ by Alice Pung.

Her Father’s Daughter – Alice Pung
Black Inc. Books 2011

Something has to be said for a book that can make you shed a tear before you even finish the prologue. I seek them out, even if it seems a little macabre, because I think a text is pretty special if it can move you like that. Alice Pung’s Her Father’s Daughter is a beautiful and often gut-wrenching memoir about her parents, particularly her father and how her relationship with him was influenced by what came before: Cambodia, the Killing Fields, Pol Pot, ‘the black bandits’ and finding refuge in Australia.

Before reading Alice’s moving personal story, I had only surface details of the Killing Fields and the atrocities that went on in Cambodia. And it’s the introduction to the details through a personal individual human story that makes the book so successful at getting across the toll on human lives during the time. How many died exactly? That’s a statistic that you can brush over in a second, it doesn’t embed itself quite like the images that Alice creates for us so we don’t forget.

And the images created are vivid, often touching with her beautiful use of metaphor. It’s used sparingly for greater impact and allows the reader to be carried along by sparser prose for the rest of the time. I feel it’s quite successful in that balance, allows us to know a little bit more of what Alice is feeling than the more minimalist texts on the list.

What I found striking about the book is after the prologue, I expected it to be mostly about her father’s story in Cambodia but for much of the book, Alice tells anecdotes about her relationship with her father but it sets us up for the second half, with questions and conceptions of her father in our mind that leads to an understanding of the first part of the book.

The stories and images that make up the second half are graphic and disturbing. I think it’s important that Alice didn’t flinch away from the details. These stories of genocide are so often toned down, or just not talked about and they are blemishes on our history that need to be remembered. The only criticism was that I was looking for more, for how her father and mother got to Australia as refugees fleeing what Alice had just presented for us.

It would have been timely given the debate about asylum seekers coming by boat when at that time, Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees arrived before the introduction of the detention centres we see today. Alice remarks at the beginning about how her father wishes she didn’t write about such issues. It’s part of his defensive character and how he wishes to just move on and forget about his history despite Alice’s questions. Has she written about this elsewhere? I’d really like to read about it.

If Her Father’s Daughter had just been something more than a broad history, a human story to a history I didn’t know the details of, than it would have done its job, but it’s more than that, it becomes no longer just a history but a vivid illustration about how those events affect the present day, how her father sees the world and how it affects her. It’s quite an incredible feat of narrative and language.

Poetry (sort of) Review: Ashes in the Air – Ali Alizadeh

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I used to think there was a divide between ‘page’ and ‘performance’ poetry. I was clearly in the later camp and didn’t think I liked much poetry for the page, except perhaps Sylvia Plath. But Ashes in the Air by Ali Alizadeh was part of showing me that it’s just a matter of finding page poetry that you like, understand and can connect with.

I’m not exactly sure how you read a poetry book, let alone review. I suppose everyone is different. I basically read it cover to cover, perhaps like you’d read a prose novel, with a pause after each poem to think and breathe. I stopped at a few poems in particular, either to read them over because I was really moved by them or because a first reading was not sufficient and it took me a few more to gain full understanding, or at least enough to get something out of it. I think perhaps you read poetry books a few times and keep coming back to it. Or that’s how I intend to approach it.

But I think reading poetry collections in general can feel a little foreign, to even spoken word poets like myself. I was force fed a bit of poetry in school, but never really made it a habit, beyond being struck by Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’ and ‘Meatworks by Robert Gray. They are two poems in particular that I remember as moving me. I was introduced to spoken word much later and found it accessible, much more than some of the poetry I read in various literary journals and so my opinion about the page and stage divide began to form in my head.

This is important for readers to see where I’m coming from with this review. I have often felt that page poetry requires an advanced education to gain full understanding, which is very much the opposite of something like slam, but Alizadeh’s collection Ashes in the Air really impressed with me with how accessible it felt to me, even though I had to read a couple a few times over. Is that how you read poetry? Is there a right way?

I bought the book after meeting Ali at the Emerging Writers’ Festival in May. In one of the ‘Embassy sessions,’ one of the issues that came up was about the poet’s persona and whether that was important. I feel like it is, and that meeting the poet in question helped to gain an understanding of his work. It’s just a matter of knowing some basic biographical details, perhaps how he speaks and the issues he’s concerned about outside of poetry that allow for this. Does it allow a poet to get to the heart of creating the imagery and poetics without having to labour over explaining details to put the poems in context?

His poetry deals with issues of travel, migration, coming from Iran and living in Australia. The poems that struck me the most were ‘Shut Up’ about an Iranian asylum seeker in detention (I’m always on the look-out for affecting poetry about refugees and asylum seekers in Australia) as well as ‘The Guns of Northcote’ which talks of gentrification and poverty in Melbourne.

Often the choice of how the lines are placed, and where there are line breaks are not obvious to me, with all page poetry, but in this case, it does not prevent me from that simple level of understanding and from there, the more subtle. The form does not force you to live or die in making sense of it, but it allows you to focus on the content of the poems, and the images, which to me seems the most important part. You can write nice sounding poetry, but if it fails to mean anything then it leaves the reader wanting. Alizadeh does not leave me wanting.

Book Review: The Emerging Writer

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An Insider’s Guide to Your Writing Journey

The Emerging Writer
Edited by Karen Pickering
Published by The Emerging Writers’ Festival

I’ll begin with an important (and exciting) disclosure that my piece ‘Occupying Writers’ appears in this important collection about writers and writing, so that may taint my view of the book. In that light, this isn’t particularly objective, but the best way to get an idea about the book is to read it.

Edited by Karen Pickering and published by the wonderful Emerging Writers’ Festival, I really recommend this collection to writers, especially those hovering around that label: ‘Emerging.’ It contains pieces by a whole variety of emerging and emerged writers, on a whole variety of topics, from the technical to the organic and inspirational, from a variety of perspectives, and across a variety of questions and issues.

I read it cover to cover (including an overly critical reading of my own piece) and I guess I immersed myself in it, like I did the festival, but it’s something you can read at your pace, around other books, and look back to for guidance if you’re struggling with something in particular.

There were a few pieces that particularly struck me and gave me a bit to think about. The first was Johannes Jakob’s piece, ‘How to Behave Around a Dying Gazelle.’ It struck a nerve of familiarity with me as he talked about how we as writers, for better or for worse, conflate ourselves with our work, and that success or failure of your writing can feel like it’s a judgement on you as a person. The anxiety of how, or if, people receive a piece of my writing, or if they turn up to a spoken word gig, often feels more important to me than more personal occasions like birthdays, but Jakob’s piece gave me food for thought.

The other piece was by Sam Cooney with the awfully long title, ‘If Kurt Vonnegut Can Start Out Writing Pretty Bad Science Fiction Stories and Still End Up Becoming Kurt Vonnegut, Maybe There’s Hope?’ Cooney manages to articulate something else that I have a familiar feeling about, the struggle to do justice to the events or ideas we’re trying to express through writing. Sometimes writing feels like a real struggle and that you haven’t quite managed to succeed in putting into words what you had in your head.

Other pieces by Maria Papas, Rebecca Harkins-Cross, Stephanie Honor Convery, Tiggy Johnson, Kirsten Innes, Esther Anatolitis and Karen Andrews all manage to do similar things and resonate with me. They have personal resonance with my own writing life, the issues I am facing and the stage I’m at with my writing. I’m sure other readers will have similar or completely different pieces that particular grab them and make them think, clarify and move forward as writers.

It’s available as a print-on-demand book through Blurb and as an DRM-free EPUB eBook on the Kobo Store.

Book Review: Death of a Ladies' Man – Alan Bissett

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Novels with contradictory or unlikable characters can be a tough read, this is especially so with sexist characters where the reader struggles to work whether the author intends them to be portrayed as such, or whether they want people to be sympathetic. In this light, Death of a Ladies’ Man by Alan Bissett can be a challenging read but worth it for what is says in the end.

Death of a Ladies' ManI bought the Kindle edition after hearing Alan read an excerpt at the opening of the Emerging Writers’ Festival this year, immediately charmed by his Scottish accent, a familiarity with Trainspotting, the snappy style and the working-class character. The writing is fresh and easy to keep reading, but perhaps having Bissett’s accent in your head helps. Incidentally, this is the first novel I’ve read on the Kindle in its totality. Previously, I’d been finishing novels I’d begun reading in print, or using it to read shorter texts.

To the novel’s credit I think, I both loathed and sympathised with Charlie Bain, the passionate and radical English teacher and womanizer at the centre of the story. He is conflicting in the way all good characters should be and I guess, reflective of real people.

There is a divide between his two sides that threaten to collide. At work, he wants the working-class kids to be something, to learn the great writers, to become the socialist he always wanted to be. But in his private life, his urges and habits with women are allowed to run loose, threatening to unravel everything. And though I was confused at the beginning as to what Bissett was trying to say about this character, whether we were meant to like his behaviour, by the end you’re left begging for him to put an end to it and get his life back in order.

And these aspects of Bain’s character shift poetically between teaching, back story and the club scene through a shake up in the kind of traditional narrative form of writing, with Bissett employing stream of consciousness, abstract forms of writing and unusual typography that give an almost hallucinogenic quality to the writing that fits with the constant use of drugs in the novel. Though at times, I’m not sure the Kindle version replicated this properly, but I am yet to see a print edition to see how it was meant to look. That said, these alternate ways of presenting the text and telling the story made for interesting reading, and when he wrote phonetically, it brought me back to Trainspotting again though not quite so overwhelming.

The realistic and contradictory character added with the writing style would make for a great enough novel, but the ending topped it off, with a nice punch in the gut, just how I like it. Death of a Ladies’ Man does what good literature should do, leaving a mark on the reader well after the book is closed (or turned off.)

Book Review: Embassytown by China Miéville

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One of the main problems with having this almost irrational obsession with China Miéville is that I now go into reading his novels with very high hopes, expecting to be grabbed straight away and by the end, blown away. I was very excited to receive a copy of his latest novel, Embassytown, before it was released. This was the first time I received a book free for review. So I am a little embarrassed it took me so long to finish and therefore review, especially due to my high regard for the author.

With Embassytown, Miéville enters the ‘hard sci-fi’ genre and does amazing things, exploring complex concepts of language and translation within a world that is deeply filled in, though I felt like it took long to get into the actual main story to be told.

The novel is set on a planet at the edge of the ‘immer’ – kind of the known area in which space travel can happen via a kind of space-punkish method of travel called immersing which is similar to colonial era travel by sea. On this planet, humans co-exist with very alien aliens, the Ariekei, and Miéville did very well to make them far removed from human beings, with complex language using two mouths and the fact that thought and truth is linked inseparably from speaking.

The differences between our language and there’s, the problems with communication are explained a lot throughout the work, but I never quite got it until the end. It’s a bit hard to explain in a review which is why it’s worth actually reading the book. Anyway, communication is done through Ambassodors, two people, like twins in body and thought, so similar that the Ariekei consider them one being. It is when a new kind of Ambassador comes and communication breaks down that we get our story. But I felt like this all came rather late.

There is a lot of back story at the start, and even though some of this back story is about the narrator, Avice Benner Cho, I never felt like I got to know her, other than on the surface. The real depth is in the world and the politics of the society, which was fascinating for a time, but to my shame, I put this novel down for a bit when it wasn’t going anywhere fast enough for me to keep reading. It wasn’t until I picked it up again and I got into the second half, and especially much later that it really got moving quickly in the end.

I really wanted to love this book, and I think the story it tells in the end is fascinating, the world Miéville creates so detailed, but there was something about the writing that didn’t grab me. Often it felt like a report, rather than a novel in places. There was lots of ‘telling’ and I kind of felt detached from the events. But perhaps this has something to do with the genre in which its written, something that is very clearly meant to be hard science-fiction, something I haven’t read a lot of. For that reason, I’ve been curious to try and get friends and loved ones that are much more into sci-fi to read it and tell me what they think.

This is worth reading, despite its short-comings, but I think I might go back and finally read the trilogy in search of his better work.

Book Review: Sabra Zoo

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It is not often a debut novelist is able to take on weighty events such as wars and massacres. There are exceptions, of course.

Sabra ZooMischa Hiller’s debut novel, Sabra Zoo is one of those exceptions based on the events in 1982 inside the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut where millions of Palestinians lived after they were expelled from their homeland during the formation of the Israeli state. Following the siege of Lebanon where Israeli forces bombed Beirut and forced the evacuation of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (the PLO), Hiller provides a deep and real description of the daily lives of Palestinians inside the camps but more importantly, the events at the end of the novel, where right-wing Lebanese forces backed by the Israeli state, committed the horrendous massacre inside the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

Ivan, a half-Danish, half-Palestinian son of PLO cadre stays behind in Lebanon after the PLO evacuates the country to live in exile in Tunisia. With most of the city recovering from the devastating siege, he spends his time moving secret messages for a PLO faction and translating for the doctors volunteering at the refugee camp’s hospital. It’s in the hospital that readers see the damage done by Israeli bombs, including to a cheeky teenage boy, Youssef, who Ivan befriends and helps to rehabilitate after his leg was blown apart from a cluster bomb.

Ivan spends a lot of time with a group of volunteers at the hospital as well as one of his father’s associates, Samir. We get a cursory glimpse of a bit of the context in which the events happen such as through Liv, a Norwegian Trotskyist who surprises Faris, a Palestinian friend of Samir’s with her knowledge of Lebanese politics when she explains who the new President, Bachir Gemayel is: “He’s a Phalange, a right-wing Christian. He hates the Palestinians, wants to expel them from Lebanon. He cooperated with the Israelis during the invasion of his own country.”

But it is only through the events at the end that you really see the true extent of what happened in 1982. After Gemayel is assassinated and the Israelis invade, Samir and Ivan with Bob, a Western cameraman, are denied access to the Sabra refugee camp by the Israelis who surround the camp. The next day, walking around with Bob, Ivan and Samir witness the after effects of the massacre in the Sabra refugee camp whilst looking for Faris, who’s disappeared.

The result of the massacre is described graphically through the eyes of Ivan, describing bodies piled in the street, beside mass graves and in one instance, an unborn child torn from the womb lying dead on a table still connected to its mother lying dead underneath.

Whilst some details of the context of the novel are explained, the novel is mostly a description of the graphic events and doesn’t go into a lot of the political issues between the different forces.

Sabra Zoo is a very different kind of ‘coming-of-age’ tale describing how a teenage boy grows up in a very different place to us living in Australia. It is worth reading to get a sense of the sheer brutality that is often described by Palestinians as ‘everyday’ life.

Movie Review: Snowtown

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Snowtown hits you in the guts, and then sticks in your head with a deep, disturbing and utterly real account of one of Australia’s most bizarre murder mysteries.

I will preface this review by laying some prejudices out on the table. I am utterly cynical of Australian film. This is especially the case if it has ‘Australiana’ written all over it and is ridden with cliches. So I went into this film curious but a skeptic. And I don’t think the trailer helps sell it to anyone like me.

Snowtown is a dramatised version of what most people know as the ‘bodies in barrels’ murders that happened in the 90s, committed by John Bunting who is currently behind bars.

Beginning in what seems like an ordinary suburban setting, it quickly shocks you, revealing secrets lurking inside the Adelaide suburb. The very ordinary setting and characters permeates the whole film and makes the story much more confronting. The deliberate move to cast unknown actors from the area was smart and added to the atmosphere. Many of the characters are often mute or underplayed. The subtlety enhances the more climactic moments.

After an incident with a paedophile across the road, three teenage boys are met with a new father figure in John Bunting who mysteriously arrives into their lives as a kind of protector. Jamie, the 16-year-old falls under his wing, even as John’s violent and homophobic ramblings disguised as anti-paedophilia become more and more vicious. The adults sit around the dining room table and talk about what they’d do if they caught one of the ‘queers’ with their boys.

The frame of mind and justification for Bunting’s actions is best summed up when he compares killing ‘paedophiles’ or ‘pinkos’ to Australian soldiers going overseas to killing foreigners and being commemorated during Anzac Day.

For me, I saw the film as shining a light at the hidden violence and viciousness of what are disguised as pure family values when taken to their extreme. There is a much darker story underneath wholesome ordinary suburbs.

It’s significant that this story was not done as a horror film, like other serial killer stories such as Wolf Creek and Ted Bundy. The impact is much greater because of it. The realism and the contrast to the ordinary make the often violent and gory scenes that much stronger and more disturbing. Some of them still sit with me. This isn’t a film for someone easily horrified. And it’s harder to dismiss than the often unrealistic or exaggerated ways in which horror is done.

It’s Daniel Henshall’s performance as John Bunting that holds it all together, the scary part is once again in how ordinary he is, covered in that facade of warmness. He could be anyone’s next-door neighbour and you wonder how this can all go on without people noticing for years.

With the director and writer carefully considering the subject matter, the film is produced extremely well and makes the whole thing quite strong whilst not turning it into something sensational. Something well worth seeing if you’re not easily rattled or disturbed.

eBook Review: Ur – Stephen King

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A quick review for a pretty quick read. Ur is a short novella by Stephen King that he wrote exclusively for the Kindle platform. I started reading it after ordering my Kindle and whilst waiting for the thing to arrive began reading this little tale on the Kindle iPhone app, and finished it off on the Kindle.

UrIt’s about a ‘different kind of’ Kindle that’s delivered to a slightly technologically backward English professor. The first odd thing is that it’s pink, not white or charcoal like the only one’s available from Amazon. The other thing is that is has experimental features not available on any other model. It’s linked to alternate realities and lead this professor to discover some strange things.

It’s not a particularly unique plot, nor is the writing particularly mind-blowing. People are right when they describe it as ‘brain candy.’ But I guess toward the end, King was trying to explore the whole “if you knew Hitler was going to do bad shit before he did, would you kill him?” type plot, except instead of Hitler, it’s an alcoholic so the premise doesn’t quite match up.

It was a fun read to introduce me to the Kindle, though I might’ve thought I was wasting my time if it was any longer.

Book Review: Princesses and Pornstars – Emily Maguire

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I picked up Emily Maguire’s book, Princess and Pornstars upon recommendation from socialist women in order to gain a better and deeper understanding of women’s oppression and one that goes beyond the hard calculated theory but goes into the personal and contemporary. And that’s how I would recommend it to others, especially other men.

Princesses and PornstarsEmily Maguire approaches a variety of issues to do with women, sexism and oppression today in a direct and open way, sometimes using her own personal experience as well as the experience of others to illustrate the issues. Topics range from sex, sex education, consent, body image, role models and porn.

One of the freshest things to read was when Maguire tackles the vilification of both the ‘slut’ and the ‘frigid.’ She is completely unapologetic that women have the right to have as little or as much sex as they desire, for their own personal desire and not just the desire of men. She dismisses the idea that a woman who has a lot of sex must be damaged or have low self-esteem. With the media constantly judging women’s sex lives to the extent they are blamed for being raped, it is welcome that someone is willing to stand up and defend women.

Her openness about female sexuality extends to a call for sex education that goes beyond biology and a frank admission that there is nothing wrong with female masturbation. These are things many feminists or progressives shy away from, but I completely agree with Maguire tackling these issues.

Further to this, I felt the chapter on pornography was an admirable effort tackling the complex issues without just saying ‘all porn is bad’ like when she refuses to judge women who do use porn. I agree with Maguire’s assertion that there is nothing inherently problematic about someone enjoying watching other people have sex on film and that it is the misogyny and sexism in the industry as well as in greater society that is the problem. But I admit to feeling uncomfortable about the attempts to define ‘ethical pornography’ as even the most conscious film cannot escape the oppression of greater society, and Maguire does admit that it has its limitations.

The book is argued under the banner of ‘feminism’ which is described as a broad range of ideas and often I felt like Maguire agreed with many Marxist points on women’s oppression like that working-class men don’t benefit from women’s oppression and that we live in a class society. I often agreed with many of her theoretical points but cannot say I agree with patriarchy theory, that all men oppress all women but I’m not sure Maguire agrees with this either. Sometimes I felt that we agreed on the same point whilst using different terms to describe them.

Princesses and Pornstars is a great way for people, especially men, to gain an understanding of women’s oppression and sexism. Maguire has written very accessible book that doesn’t dumb things down at the same time.

Book Review: Kalinda Ashton's The Danger Game

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Kalinda Ashton’s debut novel, The Danger Game has been talked about around the Australian literature scene as one of the key texts in the last few years and it is easy to see why as it deals with issues of class in such a compelling way with Ashton’s gift of metaphor and description. I definitely should have read this earlier.

The Danger GameThe Danger Game deals with the lives of three siblings in a clearly working-class family, each from a unique point-of-view. Jeremy’s story is in the past as children and his two sisters deal with his death and other situations as adults in the present. Alice is a school teacher and Louise’s story is seen through the prism of a very compelling second-person voice.

There are multiple plots to deal with; what happened to Jeremy, Alice’s school being closed down, Louise’s desire to find their mother, and Alice’s relationship with a married man, Jon, but all of it is seen under a great texture that colours the whole novel. It is put beyond doubt that their lives are shaped by their working-class upbringing and the choices they’re given are confined by this. It is the key strength in the novel.

I loved how it was shown through the little things in their lives such as their father shamefully piecing together a sweet snack with what he had available, eating it with his back to his daughter as they spoke.

And the characters have this healthy distrust of authority that can only be through their own experiences. This and other issues that are dealt with in the novel are explored genuinely through the lives of the characters even to the extent of Alice’s dealings with her school closing down and the union campaign. It never seems forced into the plot.

I also found the writing diverse in how simple some things could be told and then how details are described with striking metaphors. The description fills it all in whilst the plot and characters continue to carry you along. Writing a point-of-view in second person is usually a tough ask but even these chapters are done well and fit with the character.

I cannot help but heap praise on this work though I found it could’ve done with more at the end. I was expecting it to smack me in the face with the build up of tension and dread that fills you whilst reading.

Even without looking at how well the novel is constructed overall, it is significant there is even such a novel dealing with working-class lives that is widely talked about. In a 2009 essay in Spectrum, Emily Maguire speaks about this novel being an exception. It stands out to people like myself because class just isn’t talked about any more, especially in Australian literature. People deny it exists let alone discuss that is systemic.

The Danger Game is an amazing debut novel and one I would recommend highly, especially to emerging writers like myself. I hope that it can influence a few of us to touch on some of the things Ashton has and that there can be a revival of working-class literature. Though, an awareness of class in greater society may be needed first.