Little Birds

After recently enjoying Anne Enright's The Wren, The Wren, I couldn't get Enright's voice out of my head. I wanted more of her prose. I realised I had never completely read The Gathering (2007) despite it having been on my book shelf for 15 years, so decided it had waited long enough! I plucked the book off my shelf, downloaded the audiobook (read by the author) and immersed myself in Enright's world.

Veronica Hegarty is mourning the death of her alcoholic brother Liam, age 40, from suicide. Veronica's mother and eight surviving siblings are coming together in Dublin to farewell Liam. But first, Veronica has to travel to England to collect Liam's body and bring him home. Bureaucratic delays in processing his remains gives Veronica time to reflect on the past and what might have driven poor Liam to take his life.

Told in the first person, Veronica's memories are opaque glimpses of scenes that may or may not have taken place. She remembers a picnic with her grandmother which included a side trip to an asylum, past lovers, and a terrible event when Liam was nine and she was eight which likely set his life on this trajectory. But she questions her memory of this incident and cannot make sense of what happened.

Veronica tells of her grandmother Ada Merriman, who married the philandering Charlie and was wooed by another man, Lambert Nugent. Veronica allows her imagination to run wild inventing scenes between this trio as she tries to make sense of her own life and where she came from. Her own Mammy is a vague shell of a woman, hollowed out by decades of pregnancy, child birth and loss. Hailing from these women, Veronica is uneasy about her own role as wife and mother.

Her grief causes Veronica to distance herself from her husband and two young daughters, taking late night drives to escape. Her future is intertwined with a past she cannot escape and a present she is discontented with. Despite being surrounded by her family for the gathering, Veronica feels utterly alone without her beloved brother. 

I have mixed feelings about The Gathering and can see now why I didn't finish it the first time. Enright is a gifted writer and there were moments where I was awed by her masterful word choice and sentence composition. On the flip side, I was frustrated by Veronica's obsession with sex and the meandering narrative that led to an anti-climatic gathering of the clan. It felt as though I was waiting for something to happen and I was left with many unanswered questions. But I did love Enright's reading of this novel on audiobook, as she perfectly portrayed Veronica.

The Gathering was awarded the Booker Prize in 2007. I met Anne Enright at the All About Women event in Sydney in March 2024 where she signed a copy of the book for me. Despite not loving The Gathering, I adored The Wren, The Wren, and I am keen to read The Green Road, Actress and other books by this wonderful writer. 

Women's Prize for Fiction Shortlist 2024

  The 2024 Women's Prize shortlist has been announced!  The six titles on the shortlist are:

• The Wren, The Wren - Anne Enright
• Brotherless Night - VV Ganeshananthan
• Restless Dolly Maunder - Kate Grenville
• Enter Ghost - Isabelle Hammad
• Soldier Sailor - Claire Kilroy
• River East, River West - Aube Rey Lescure

Monica Ali, Chair of Judges, said of the shortlist:

This year’s shortlist features six brilliant, thought-provoking and spellbinding novels that between them capture an enormous breadth of the human experience. Readers will be captivated by the characters, the luminous writing and the exquisite storytelling. Each book is gloriously compelling and inventive and lingers in the heart and mind long after the final page.

So far, I have only read Anne Enright's The Wren, The Wren, which I absolutely loved, and definitely reflects Ali's sentiments.

When the Longlist was announced in March, I predicted that Grenville, Hammad, Enright, Kilroy and Maroo would be on the shortlist. So I didn't do too badly with my prediction, getting four of six correct! I am still keen to get my mitts on some more of these titles, and I am really thrilled that Grenville has been shortlisted.

To learn more about these shortlisted titles, there is a summary on each book on my blog, and the judges have released a short video announcing the shortlist below. You can also read interviews with the authors on the Women's Prize website.

The winner will be revealed on 13 June 2024. Better get reading!

Hard No

Federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has always seemed to me to be a hard man. Perhaps it is his decade as a police officer. Perhaps it is his Lex Luther visage. Perhaps it is his tough Home Affairs Minister persona. Or perhaps it is his unwillingness to budge on the issues I care about: the rights of those at the margins as evidenced through his opposition to equal marriage, the apology to First Nations people,  the rejection of the Voice referendum, and his disdain for those seeking asylum. I always had the impression he sees things as black/white, right/wrong, and is uncomfortable with any shade of grey. 

In the latest Quarterly Essay (QE93), Bad Cop - Peter Dutton's Strongman Politics, journalist Lech Blaine looks for the man behind the tough exterior. He explores how Dutton's time as a cop led him to distrust the legal system and lack any kind of empathy for those who may find themselves on the wrong side of the law.

Blaine argues that as Opposition Leader Dutton is determined to play on fear and he is 'a serious strongman for the age of anxiety.' This is certainly true in the way he has weaponises fear for political advantage. I well remember his unfounded claims that African gangs were terrorising people in Victoria, just as his fresh allegations paint Indigenous people as child abusers and refugees as criminals.

Dutton was politically hungry from a young age, joining the Young Liberals at 18 and (unsuccessfully) running for state parliament a year later. He joined the police force and spent a decade on the drug squad, and often draws on stories from his police work when talking about crime. But Blaine sheds the battler myth of Dutton's working class background, highlighting his wealth from investing in child care and property development. He was elected to Parliament in 2021 and rose to Cabinet Minister roles in the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments holding key portfolios of Health, Immigration, Border Protection, Home Affairs, and Defence. 

Dutton is ambitious for the top job, and was elected unopposed as Opposition Leader after the demise of the Morrison government in 2022. Yet he seems to ignore the problems within his party which will impact his electability as much as his own persona does. Not only has he done absolutely nothing to attract women to the party, but he has allowed the Liberals to be held hostage by the Nationals, veering further to the right on social issues. 

I like Lech Blaine as an author. His previous Quarterly Essay (QE83) Top Blokes: The Larrikin Myth, Class and Power (2021) was really interesting. Bad Cop is another demonstration of Blaine's skill, creating an informative and compelling profile of Dutton. I had thought perhaps that in reading this essay I would find someway of liking Dutton a little bit. On the contrary, I have come away disliking him more. 

International Booker Prize Shortlist 2024

The International Booker Prize 2024 Shortlist has been announced with six titles of fiction translated into English, from a longlist of thirteen. 

The shortlist is as follows:

• Not a River by Selva Almada (translated by Annie McDermott)
• Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Michael Hofmann)
• The Details by Ia Genberg (translated by Kira Josefsson)
• Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong (translated by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae)
• What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma (translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey)
• Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior (translated by Johnny Lorenz)

Eleanor Wachtel, Chair of the judges writes of this shortlist:

Reading is a necessary enlargement of human experience. Why be confined to one perspective, one life? Novels carry us to places where we might never set foot and connect us with new sensations and memories. Our shortlist shows us lives lived against the backdrop of history or, more precisely, interweaves the intimate and the political in radically original ways. These books bear the weight of the past while at the same time engaging with current realities of racism and oppression, global violence and ecological disaster. Some seem altogether timeless in their careful and vivid accounts of the dynamics of family, love and heartbreak, trauma and grief. 

The prize awards £25,000 to the author and £25,000 to the translator, in recognition of the essential work of translators in bringing fiction to a wider audience. I am keen to read more translated fiction, and some of the titles on this shortlist sound interesting if I can track them down.

The winner will be announced on 21 May 2024.

Stella Prize Shortlist 2024

The 2024 Stella Prize Shortlist has been announced! The twelve nominees have been whittled down to six finalists in the running for this important literary award.

The 2024 shortlist is as follows: 

• Katia Ariel - The Swift Dark Tide
• Katherine Baron - Body Friend
• Emily O'Grady - Feast
• Sanya Rushdi - Hospital
• Hayley Singer - Abandon Every Hope
• Alexis Wright - Praiseworthy

For more information about these titles, see my post on the longlist.

In compiling this shortlist, the chair of the judging panel, Beejay Wilcox, says:

“All of life and death is here in these pages: illness, madness, love, sex, slaughter, parenthood, sovereignty, climate, Country. But none of the books on this shortlist tell readers what to think. They do not hector, lecture or preach. Rather, they open spaces for doubt and self-examination; for disagreement and camaraderie; for rage, absurdity and exultation; for the grotesque and the gorgeous. They invite us in. And they trust us to make up our own minds. This is the quality that distinguished them in the judging room: their mighty generosity.”

I was not inspired by the longlist and am less excited by the shortlist. The only title that interests me is Feast.  Again, I feel the prize should be targeting fiction only - or separated into categories - rather than a catch all. If I had to guess a winner, I would bet on Alexis Wright who is universally excellent. 

The winner will be announced on 2 May 2024.  

Birdsong

Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1877) opens with the famous line 'happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way'.  I thought of this line as I read Anne Enright's The Wren, The Wren (2023), the story of a family and the ways in which complex relationships have intergenerational impacts.   

Nell McDaragh is the grand-daughter of a famous Irish poet, Phil McDaragh, whom she never knew. At age 22 she leaves home to become a writer for a travel blog and starts a relationship with a controlling man who is not the loving boyfriend she seeks. 

Nell's relationship with her mother, Carmel, is fraught and layered with intergenerational trauma. The mother-daughter pair love each other fiercely, but often in unhealthy ways. Carmel has difficulty connecting with people, having been abandoned by her father Phil, who left his terminally ill wife and young family. She also struggles to reconcile a man who writes such beautiful verse with his personal behaviour. One such verse, 'the wren, the wren' he wrote for Carmel, and she holds on to this as proof of his love.

Carmel awaits a visit from Nell and watches an old video of her father being interviewed. With his Irish charm, Phil recounts that his wife 'got sick, unfortunately, and the marriage did not survive'. Carmel fumes as the reason for the marriage failure was her father's wandering eye and his inability to take responsibility for his own actions. Phil died years ago, but his shadow looms large. Carmel's sister Imelda sees him quite differently, forging a wedge between the women.

Enright tells the story in alternating narratives between Carmel and Nell, with Phil's poems scattered throughout the novel. As I read, I listened to the audiobook version where Enright performed Carmel to perfection. I also enjoyed Owen Roe's Phil and Aoife Duffin voicing Nell. I had the pleasure of seeing Enright at the All About Women festival last month, where she read passages from the book, and signed a copy of the book for me. 

Enright's prose is magnificent. She infuses darkness with humour, and creates realistic, fallible humans. Birds recur throughout the novel, as Nell recalls their song, and travels to Australia and New Zealand where she wonders at the exotic birds. Nature is also a theme of many of Phil's poems. The inclusion of this verse was a brilliant way to contrast Phil's outward appearance with the reality of those who knew him.

I absolutely loved The Wren, The Wren - an early contender for my favourite read of 2024. Absolutely brilliant!

The Wren, the Wren has been longlisted for the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction.  Enright is the author of seven novels including the Booker Prize winning The Gathering (2007) and The Green Road (2016) which was previously shortlisted for the Women's Prize. I really must read more of her novels!