One of the highlights of a recent trip to
Auckland was the launch of Aorewa McLeod's new novel Who Was That Woman Anyway? Snapshots
of a lesbian life. The crowd in The Women’s Bookshop spilled out into the
street as Stella Duffy did the honours and Aorewa talked about the writing of
the book and read two extracts.
Reviewer Elizabeth Heritage writes in the Booksellers NZ blog: "Who Was That
Woman, Anyway? is an engaging and determined attempt to look at the ways in
which we structure our own identity in terms of gender and sexuality. Why do we
act the way we do? Why do we feel sexual desire the way we do? What determines
who we are attracted to? To what extent is gender a cultural performance, and
to what extent is it biologically determined? Ngaio doesn’t definitively answer
any of these questions; her life in this book becomes a process of examining
and querying and arguing." Read the whole review at: http://booksellersnz.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/book-review-who-was-that-woman-anyway-by-aorewa-mcleod/
I read Cory
Doctorow’s Little Brother partly
because it’s sci-fi-ish, slightly-in-the-future setting makes it background for
the novel I have embarked on. It’s a novel about what happens when “homeland
security” goes, well, mad. Marcus, a 17-year-old who cares about justice, gets
his friends into trouble. Marcus — a fictional character — has been compared to
Aaron Swartz, the internet activist charged with using a university computer
network to, without authority, download millions of academic journal articles
with the idea of making them freely available. Aaron Swartz committed suicide. Little Brother is good, and chilling,
and I plan to read the sequel, Homeland.
When I
started reading Rose Tremaine’s Merivel, I
thought it might be a variation on Hilary Mantel’s magnificent Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. It isn’t. Merivel the character is not a
political figure, he’s much more Montaigne—to whom he refers often—than Thomas
Cromwell. He wants to believe in himself as worthwhile but struggles with his
own past and present dissipations and can’t decide whether he is slave or
friend to Charles II. As a physician of his time, he pays plenty of attention
to bodily functions, smells and (lack of) sanitation. In many ways a foolish
character given to weeping, he survives many changes of fortune.
"Such
are the days and times of every man and, no matter how hard we work and
strive, we can never know when something shall be given to us and when it will
be taken away." (page 286)
I recommend
this beautifully written book.
I don’t very
often give up on a book, but I did on America. And it’s Franz Kafka! I found it a great disappointment compared
to Metamorphosis, The Trial and The Castle. The protagonist of America endlessly introspects on minor
matters, makes and breaks “friendships” oddly and doesn’t seem to learn
anything. The book has a Kafkaesque sense of doom but about halfway through I
couldn’t be bothered finding out any more.
“Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity,” it says on the cover
of Behind The Beautiful Forevers, by
Katherine Boo. I didn’t see a lot of hope as I read of people living grim,
stinking, insecure, violent, self-punishing lives recycling the waste of the
rich on a rubbish dump. One woman’s plan for getting on in the world involved
becoming a slumlord. However,
"Among powerful Indians, the distribution
of opportunity was typically an insider trade." (Page 138)
Katherine Boo
says in an excellent note at the end of the book that it’s all true, including
people’s names. She used interviews, recordings and public records to get the
stories. It’s hard to read about such unrelenting poverty and awful living
conditions, but somehow, once you have started this book, necessary.
"Sunil
thought that he, too, had a life, a bad life, certainly—the kind that could be
ended as Kalu’s had been and then forgotten, because it made no difference to
the people who lived in the overcity. But something he’d come to realise on the
roof, leaning out, thinking about what would happen if he leaned too far, was
that a boy’s life could still matter to himself." (page 199)