May-June Reading Round Up
Here are some highlights from my May-June reading list: two Australian debuts, two historical fiction novels with speculative twists, and two works in translation. Such symmetry! Well, it was Gemini season after all.
The Adversary by Ronnie Scott
A fast-paced novel set over a languid, Melbourne summer. When our unnamed narrator’s best friend and housemate Dan finds a new boyfriend, his world is tipped out of balance. The new couple encourage him to make friends with the enigmatic Chris L (known for only wearing sunglasses and silver capes) and Vivian, the mysterious visiting American. The novel follows these men and the complex intricacies of their friendship, love, intimacy and desire. It is propelled by the voice of our narrator and his amusingly eccentric social observations. A lighthearted, playful and hilarious read.
Fire Country by Victor Steffensen
After the summer bushfires in Australia, this feels like essential reading. Victor Steffensen is an Indigenous land management expert who has written about how the revival of cultural burning practices can help sustainably restore the land. It is a personal and accessible account of Steffensen’s interest in cultural burning and his mentorship under two Indigenous Elders. He says in the introduction: “This is just one Aboriginal fire story of many across Australia that are calling people back to country to put the right fire back onto the land. The fire is just the beginning of understanding the important journey ahead for us all.”
The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell
This epic historical family saga is set in “The Old Drift,” a colonial settlement on the banks of the Zambezi river. It opens with the naming of Victoria Falls by “a goodly Scottish doctor,” who was searching for the source of the Nile. However, the locals call these falls “Mosi-oa-Tunya, which means The Smoke That Thunders.” This colonial erasure and violence is just the beginning of the story of this place. We are warned about the slippery nature of origins, about searching for what we can’t find, and taking what isn’t ours: “Where you sought an origin, you find a vast babble which is also a silence: a chasm of smoke, thundering.” The writing itself is thunderous: ambitious, exciting, and compelling. And what a cover!
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
This historical novel follows the story of Hiram Walker, a slave (known as the Tasked) on a plantation in Virginia called Lockless. He discovers he has a powerful gift called Conduction, which allows him to travel great distances through space and time. Once he escapes from the plantation, he uses this gift as part of the Underground Railroad, a network of abolitionists (including Harriet Tubman) who provide passage for slaves seeking their freedom. This is a powerful and emotional coming-of-age narrative about the brutalities and degradations of slavery as well as the complexities of freedom, family, home, and survival. While this is Coates’s debut novel, it has the same urgent, political conscience as his nonfiction works “Between The World And Me” and “We Were Eight Years In Power.”
The White Book by Han Kang
This Korean author’s meditation on the colour white takes us into the territory of grief, loss, death, perfection, fragility, and impermanence. The book is composed of short fragments like prose poems which return again and again to the death of her mother’s first child, to snow, to winter, and cold cities. I particularly loved the culturally specific idioms and connotations of “white” in Korea - from laughing whitely (to force a polite laugh) to the white robes you gift to your future parents-in-law (silk for the living, cotton for the dead). This is a chilly, poetic book that leaves you seeing the world in a different way.
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
“Ribbon, bell, emerald, stamp. The words that came from my mother’s mouth thrilled me, like the names of little girls from distant countries or new species of plants. As I listened to her talk, it made me happy to imagine a time when all these things had a place here on the island.” In this world, the Memory Police can make everday objects (and people) disppear - if you can remember the past, you are in danger. This is a book about memory, control, fear, and loss by a great Japanese writer. First published in 1994, it has recently been translated into English. It’s the first of Ogawa’s books I’ve read and has a similar atmosphere to “1984:” dystopian, claustrophobic, and unsettling.
Emily Riches is a writer and editor from Mullumbimby, currently living and working in Sydney. She founded Aniko Press to bring passionate writers and curious readers together, discover new voices, and create a space for creative community. You can reach her at emilyaniko@gmail.com.