Hello Again, Sydney

One Sydney-sider's experiences moving back to Sydney after a long absence overseas.

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Books again...

So yeah, I did have a bit of a moment the bookstore the other day, but I can't stay mad for long. Words are a big part of my life.

Take this typical day. First there's the usual selection of writing to check out on the bus. I love looking over people's shoulders and reading a couple of paragraphs. Is that rude? Who cares. This morning one person is sitting there with a book of humorous quotes. (Could there be anything less humorous?) Then there was a novel about a woman trying to organise an attempt on Everest. Quite readable, at least up to where the person's thumb covered it up. "Excuse me love, could you just move your hand a little bit?"

Next I'm in at the office where they sometimes give away advance reader copies. I'm chuffed when I get my hands on The Children by Charlotte Wood.



It's on the First Tuesday Book Club this month on the ABC, and having read it now, I can tell you it's excellent stuff. Wrenching story and very tight prose. Although, sometimes I do question today's ideal of efficient language. Will people look back in a century or so and wonder at the brevity of our writing in much the same way that we look back on Victorian literature and wonder at its verbosity? Dickens got paid by the word, is what we're always told. For us, the reader's time is money.

And then, at lunch, I sit down for a fish laksa (God bless working in the city) and pull out Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes.



Here's one that I was supposed to study at university but skipped. It's sat on a shelf or in a box since then, and it never appealed to me. Maybe it's the cover. Anwyay, just as the chilli buzz was kicking in, I came upon this passage which I liked a lot:

"I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women's eyes: there's so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon inevitably carries banal implications. Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty. Her eyes are black: passion and depth. Her eyes are green: wildness and jealousy. Her eyes are brown: reliability and common sense. Her eyes are violet: the novel is by Raymond Chandler. How can you escape all this without some haversack of a parenthesis about the lady's character? Her eyes are mud-coloured; her eyes changed hue according to the contact lenses she wore; he never looked her in the eye. Well, you take you pick. My wife's eyes were greeny-blue, which makes her story a long one. And so I suspect that in the writer's moments of private candour, he probably admits the pointlessness of describing eyes. He slowly imagines the character, moulds her into shape, and then - probably the last thing of all - pops a pair of glass eyes into those empty sockets. Eyes? Oh yes, she'd better have eyes, he reflects, with a weary courtesy."

The book is so postmodern, with all the self-consciousness and reflexivity that that implies, but it's not stultifying. Barnes really has fun with it, and tells a human story in an original way. Hats off.

Incidentally, I did use my book voucher. I was very happy to buy Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen, which (tread carefully: rickety segue) recently popped up on a list of Hidden Gems, along with Playing With The Moon by Eliza Graham.



Cool or what? A huge congratulations to Eliza and if anyone wants to vote for her book, you can check out the full list here.

4 Comments:

At 11:08 pm, Blogger Eliza Graham said...

Thanks for the mention, Mark!

 
At 10:56 am, Blogger Becky Willis Motew said...

PWTM all the way!!!!

What's a fish laksa?

Is it anything like a shiksa?

b

 
At 2:02 pm, Blogger Mark said...

Laksa, b, it's pretty amazing:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/good-living/sydneys-best-laksa/2006/07/24/1153593261201.html

What's a shiksa?

 
At 12:35 am, Blogger Becky Willis Motew said...

http://www.bartcop.com/marilyn-monroe002.jpg

 

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