Author: penwithlit

Without the poetic element in our own being, and without our poets and their great poetry, we would be brutes, or what is worse and what we are most like today: vicious automata of self will.

Albert Hofstadter

I wish I had time to finish this book, but it’s due back at the library. (As usual, *shrug* I have borrowed too many books at once).

However, it’s the ideas in the Introduction that interest me most.  Brigid Rooney surveys the literary landscape from the 1940s to the present (i.e. the early 2000s at her time of writing) and so her primary interest is in the activism of Judith Wright, Patrick White, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Les Murray, David Malouf , Helen Garner and Tim Winton.  Of these only the last three are still living: Malouf is in his 80s, and Garner is not far behind; only Winton is younger than I am.  However, I am more interested in the writer-activists that spring to mind from my recent reading: Indigenous writers exposing Australia’s Black history such as Alexis Wright, Marie Munkara, and Anita Heiss; authors tackling the issue of climate change…

Penelope Fitzgerald ought to be to the novel of the next two hundred years what Jane Austen was to the last two hundred. Her irony is better, her observations sharper and she writes with the wisdom of age and misery not youth and precocity. Having initially squandered her gifts and then suffered hard luck she was able to choose more ambiguous moral stories then she might have done if she’d flourished earlier on.

Her moral vision was enhanced because she was an underdog. Her husband was an alcoholic who lost his career. They lived on a houseboat on the Thames which sank. She had to move into a small council estate flat and teach undergraduate entry to Oxbridge. She was, briefly, homeless. Her old-world snobbery and upper middle class upbringing were less than useless to her in these conditions.

Her unworldliness was extensive. Her children said she didn’t know what…

I first read this book about twenty-five years ago when I was little older than Laurie Lee was in this memoir. It begins in 1934 with Laurie embarking on a journey from his home in the Cotswolds where he heads eastwards along the south coast of England and then towards London. He is young, clueless and naive, but therein lies the appeal of the book. The young Laurie is looking for adventure but doesn’t quite know where or how to find it. Coming to the end of a labouring job in London Laurie decides to travel abroad and when he notes that he knows the Spanish phrase for ‘Will you please give me a glass of water?’ he decides to get a one-way ticket to Spain. Arriving in the north-west city of Vigo he walks slowly southwards, with his fiddle-playing being his only source of income. By the end of…

This has everything I want in a novel. It’s a good old-fashioned love story, there’s a trial with a shocking revelation, and it’s set in Cambridge in 1912 in a fictional college run by a blind master that’s never had anything female in apart from Starlings. There’s also an asylum run by an eccentric, although we never visit it. The London scenes are as vibrant as the Cambridge ones. The depictions of rain, cycle accidents, high table, London bridges, newspaper offices, rectories and hospital wards are all excellent. Penelope Fitzgerald has a genius for detail. She believed in ghosts (there’s a poltergeist in The Bookshop), but this novel is not definitive either way. It is a book about mystery and certainty; anyone who reads it as being in favour of science of the occult is not reading it closely enough. The discussion of physics reminds me of what someone…

Après Tree of Life, auréolé de la Palme d’or en 2011, Terrence Malick revient en compétition au Festival de Cannes 2019 avec Une vie cachée.