FRIENDS OF ARMIDALE DUMARESQ
LIBRARY
NEWSLETTER
April 2014
From the Committee
Fundraiser
The FOADL Committee has chosen the excellent movie The Grand Budapest Hotel
for their next film fundraiser. The movie will be showing at the Belgrave Cinema
on Thursday, 8th May at 7.15pm. Tickets cost $17 and are available on the night
at the cinema, or from committee members. The contact numbers are Jan on
6772 5856 and Marnie on 6772 6351. The movie has had excellent reviews from
the ABC and all the newspapers. There will be a raffle and a lucky door prize.
Baby packs
At our last meeting on the 14th April, Trudi Laffan from the Child and
Community Services came to talk to us about our Baby Packs. She was very
supportive and enthusiastic about our project and gave us some excellent input.
She suggested that our packs could include some indigenous and culturally
diverse material. Therefore we are currently gathering information on extra
appropriate material that could be included in our packs.
Home Services
Attached is a pamphlet which contains information about the home library
service. This is an excellent service for people in the community who cannot get
to the Library.
Armidale Youth Spectacular
This wonderful evening is on Friday, 9th May at 7pm in Lazenby Hall. The
performers will be High School children from a variety of local schools and
members from some local dance groups. Expectations are high for great
entertainment. Tickets are on sale at the door: adults $10 and children $5. The
funds raised by the Civic Precinct Committee will go towards the new Town
Library and Performing Arts Centre.
Book review
Unreliable Memoirs
Clive James
This short autobiographical work by Clive James details his childhood in Sydney
in the forties and fifties and culminates in his time at Sydney University. The
book abounds in humorous tales of childhood escapades, often told with
apologetic recognition of his foolish behaviour. The theme of ‘bad behaviour’
runs throughout the book with James reminding readers that he does eventually
behave more responsibly in the future. There is a plethora of material about
James’s sexual fixations during adolescence and his need to be popular and
noticed by others. The latter led to his acting as the ‘bad boy’ or the ‘class clown’
at school, but James does have some moments of reflection and regret about this.
At University James is attracted to literature and he is clearly destined for a
literary life. The book contains many literary allusions and there is also an
element of false modesty, with assertions such as neglect of studies, yet high
achievements. Missing from James’s account are details of his widowed mother
who clearly supported him through all his escapades and studies. He treats her
badly but we find out nothing of her responses.
I enjoyed this book and found it an easy read. It is well written and humorous,
revealing a young man coming to terms with his place in the world. As James
tells us, the memoir is unreliable but in spite of this we get a very good picture of
him as a young man.
Marnie French.
New in the Library
In deference to this month’s public calendar, our listings start with war and
religion. Australia 1943: The liberation of New Guinea is the first detailed singlevolume study of Australia's military operations in the Pacific during 1943 Australia's 'finest hour' in the Second World War. Margaret MacMillan joins the
streaming centennial publishing avalanche with The war that ended peace: the road to
1914, and turns out a fine book in analyzing strategic, social and personal
contributions to the juggernaut of World War One. Darryl Hart’s Calvinism: a
history has a suitably severe cover and a thoroughgoing text covering its 500-year
span from sixteenth-century Zurich. Miles Hollingworth gives us Saint Augustine
of Hippo: an intellectual biography, confessing that “in writing this book I have had
the sensation of having written the story of one of the world’s great novelists.”
Further reflections are packaged in Rithy Panh’s The elimination: A survivor of the
Khmer Rouge confronts his past and the commandant of the killing fields. The book’s
own cover outlines it this way: "Rithy Panh was only eleven years old when the
Khmer Rouge expelled his family from Phnom Penh in 1975. In the months and
years that followed, his entire family was executed, starved, or worked to death.
Thirty years later, after having become a respected filmmaker, Panh decides to
question one of the men principally responsible for the genocide, Comrade Duch,
who's neither an ordinary person nor a demon - he's an educated organizer, a
slaughterer who talks, forgets, lies, explains, and works on his legacy. This
confrontation unfolds into an exceptional narrative of human history and an
examination of the nature of evil. The elimination stands among the essential
works that document the immense tragedies of the twentieth century, with Primo
Levi's If this is a man and Elie Wiesel's Night". Bruce Rich paints another kind of
grim picture in Foreclosing the future: the World Bank and the politics of environmental
destruction, but there must be some truth in his account if our Federal
Parliamentary Library has also bothered to buy a copy.
New biographies include Paula Modersohn-Becker: the first modern woman artist by
Diane Radycki, and Karl Marx: a nineteenth-century life by Jonathan Sperber
(which, as reviewers in the Guardian and the Los Angeles Review of Books agree, is
wonderful in painting the 1840s but blinkered in trying to consign Marx’s impact
to the nineteenth century alone). Patricia Ebrey examines Emperor Huizong, ruler
of China from 1082 (when only 17 years old) to 1125, when, under military
pressure, he feigned a stroke to allow his son to ascend the throne in the hope that
he would be better able to resist Manchurian military pressure.
Leo Damrosch has written a new biography of Jonathan Swift: his life and his world,
portraying a “restless, combative, empathetic figure, a man of biting wit and
powerful mind, and a major figure in the history of world letters”. Philip Short,
too, has taken on a complex project with Mitterrand: a study in ambiguity. His liner
notes describe “a man of exceptional gifts and exceptional flaws who, during his
14 years as President, strove to drag his tradition-bound and change-averse
country into modern world. As a statesman and as a human being, he was the
incarnation of the mercurial, contrarian France which Britain and America find
so perennially frustrating”.
But wait, there is more: Hammarskjold: a life by Roger Lipsey tells of the second
secretary general of the United Nations who was killed in 1961 while en route to
ceasefire negotiations in the Congo (the Library also has a related title, Who killed
Hammarskjöld?: the UN, the Cold War and white supremacy in Africa by Susan
Williams). Jonathon Cott has republished Susan Sontag: the complete Rolling Stone
interview ten years after the death of this provocative author. One hundred and
twenty eight years after Emily Dickinson’s death, New Directions publishers in
New York has published The gorgeous nothings - a full-color facsimile edition of her
manuscripts, which reinforces the sense of her being a precursor of concrete
poetry, especially with “her use of gestural dashes and crosses as punctuation,
[and] her increasingly attenuated line lengths” (New York Times review 5
December 2013). We also have Robert Graves’ Selected poems and Billy Collins’
(US Poet Laureate 2001-2003) Aimless love: new and selected poems.
The usual suspects of cookery and gardening are again represented this month.
US kitchens have Gabriel Rucker in Le Pigeon: cooking at the dirty bird and Paul
Bertolli showing us Cooking by hand; the UK has Florence Knight in One: a cook
and her cupboard, James Morton puffing up Brilliant bread, Lynne Hill sharing
secrets of The Clandestine Cake Club cookbook and Daylesford Organic Farm
Gloucestershire demonstrating A love for food: recipes and notes for cooking and eating
well; Andy Ricker is American but offers Pok Pok: food and stories from the streets,
homes, and roadside restaurants of Thailand; Sharon Salloum is Australian but
presents Syria in a luxurious light in Almond Bar: a place of heady spices, creamy
tahini, tender lamb, fragrant rosewater and fresh, salty cheeses, with recipes for
black hummus, pumpkin kibbeh, almond-crusted scallops, sour cherry kebab
balls, fig sorbet and semolina fudge.
Andrea Heistinger and Timber Press translate a German original into The manual
of seed saving: harvesting, storing and sowing techniques for vegetables, herbs and fruits.
Jenny Condie takes us through The gardens of Venice and the Veneto. Donna Leon
segues out of the garden in My Venice and other essays (“The author of the
Commissario Guido Brunetti series presents humorous, passionate, and insightful
essays about her life in Venice that also explore her family history, her former life
in New Jersey, and the idea of the Italian man”).
Have you ever wondered: What does a conductor actually do? How much effect
does he or she have? Can the orchestra manage without one? Why don't the
players look at the conductor more? Is it necessary for the conductor to play every
instrument? What about interpretation? What happens at rehearsals? Why do
some conductors "thrash around" more than others? Who's the boss in a concerto:
the soloist or the conductor? Read Inside conducting by Christopher Seaman and
have all these questions answered. Jack Challoner takes you on a gorgeously
illustrated tour of the periodic table in The elements: the new guide to the building
blocks of our universe. Adam Phillips brings us more lightly psychoanalytic essays in
One way and another, including thoughts On tickling, On being bored, and Talking
nonsense and knowing when to stop.
Edward Hollis takes his imagination for a walk in The memory palace: a book of lost
interiors. In Banana girl, Michele Lee tells us about growing up Hmong in
Melbourne. Cathy Scott-Clark revisits Mumbai 2008 to describe The siege: 68 hours
inside the Taj Hotel.
Daniel Goleman keeps his achievement caravan on the road with Focus: the hidden
driver of excellence. Jonathan Clements gives Japanese animation the treatment in
Anime: a history. Performance is all in Michael Blakemore’s Stage blood: five
tempestuous years in the early life of the National Theatre. And Michael Carr-Gregg
helps Australian parents with Beyond cyber bullying: an essential guide for parenting in
the digital age.
Finally for non-fiction, two slices of Americana: Double down: game change 2012 is
Mark Halperin’s account of the Mitt Romney-Barack Obama race for the White
House; and The unwinding: an inner history of the new America is George Packer’s
picture of "a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no
longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to
improvise their own schemes for success and salvation”.
Now for a little musical interlude: Kylie Minogue continues down the dance floor
of impossible glamour with Kiss me once; George Michael goes for the full-blown
orchestral treatment in Symphonica; and Kurt Vile and the Violators are having a
surprisingly up time on Waking on a pretty daze. We have also recently acquired
Giuseppe Verdi’s complete works on CD: last year, Decca made this release to
mark the 200th anniversary of his birth; it includes 30 complete operatic
recordings from Oberto (1839) to Falstaff (1893), plus additional CDs from the
well-known (Requiem, Quattro pezzi sacri) to rarities (songs, arias, ballet music,
orchestral, instrumental, choral and sacred works).
Fiction is huge this month, as we acquire the contemporary and ancient, from the
mass market and the avant garde sectors and many places in between – to make
sure that there is something to entertain, inspire and challenge every possible
reader. We’ll start at the big end, with Bernard Cornwell’s seventh Warrior
Chronicles volume, The pagan lord; with Clive Cussler’s ninth Oregon Files
adventure, Mirage; with James Patterson’s seventh Private novel, Private L.A.; and
with Lisa Scottoline’s twelfth Rosato and Associates legal thriller, Accused.
In the second rank of fame, if not output (often stimulated above by co-authors’
contributions) are David Baldacci (King and Maxwell is the sixth in his Sean King
and Michelle Maxwell private investigation series); Andy McDermott (The Valhalla
prophecy is the ninth in his Nina Wilde and Eddie Chase action-packed adventures);
Dean Koontz (Innocence); Paullina Simons (Bellagrand); Louise Mensch –
otherwise known as Louise Bagshawe - (Beauty, built around the perfect storm of
ingredients – Park Avenue, the beauty business and revenge); and Lesley Pearse
(Survivor – “the stunning third instalment in the Belle series”).
Then comes Australian fiction, led most fearlessly by the rural saga style: this
month Karen Viggers’ The grass castle leads the lists; Elise Ackers’ Ask me to stay is
a close second. Krissy Kneen’s Steeplechase is much more urban and
psychologically dark; Stephen Orr investigates a kidnapping mystery in One boy
missing;
Felicity Young resorts to a grim British setting for her third Doctor Dody
McClelland mystery, The scent of murder; Paul Greenway fools around with Bali and
Oates (“the Australian PM visits Bali to sign the Bali Oil & Gas Access
Negotiation agreement (BOGAN), but officers from ASIO, ASIS and AFP (all
male and incompetent) believe there is a terrorist threat. The Australian ConsulGeneral, assisted by a 60-year-old digital-whiz Granny Geek soon realise that an
apparent terrorist group such as B.U.T.T. may have been created by another
Australian diplomat who was researching a novel about threats to a Prime
Minister visiting Bali to sign the BOGAN agreement... or maybe not!”); and
Luke Carman sets An elegant young man in western Sydney to see what resolutions
emerge from this scenario of fear and intensity.
There are some new editions of old favourites: the other Elizabeth Taylor (19121975) wrote At Mrs Lippincote’s in 1945 – the first novel of the woman who
Kingsley Amis saw as “one of the best English novelists born in this [twentieth]
century”; a fiftieth-anniversary edition of John le Carre’s The spy who came in from
the cold; and new translations of Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin and Leo Tolstoy’s
The death of Ivan Ilyich and Confession. We’ve also purchased a Penguin reprint of
Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, first published in 1935.
Then there are authors somewhat well known for one reason or another:
Scandinavian writers like Per Petterson (Ashes in my mouth, sand in my shoes) are
joined by fellow-Norwegian Erlend Loe (Lazy days) and Swedish suspense author
Michael Hjorth (The disciple – another Sebastian Bergman mystery).
Sherman Alexie (Blasphemy) observes contemporary life among American Indians
in the Pacific north-west. Fatima Bhutto, famous for membership of a premier
Pakistani political family, has released her first book, The shadow of the crescent
moon. Bernard MacLaverty displays his Irish/Scottish sensibilities in Collected
stories.
Then there authors of whom very few people have heard. These are the people
everyone should try, safe in the heart of library lending, because their books are
often short and likely to lead to revelations of difference. So the Argentinian
Cesar Aira (Shantytown), Peruvian-born San Franciscan Daniel Alarcon (At night
we walk in circles), or Tunisian-French Hedi Kaddour (Little grey lies) are all in this
category.
So, too, are Syrian-Algerian Londoner Sumia Sukkar (The boy from Aleppo who
painted the war – intensely relelvant to the current conflict in Syria), the Lebanese
Elias Khoury (White masks – “A journalist researches the death of a civil servant
whose body was found in a garbage pile, uncovering the tumultuous events and
tragedies of the civil war in Lebanon as he questions the man's wife, a watchman,
a militia man, and the doctor who performed the autopsy”), and two Hebrew
mystery writers, Sayed Qashu (Exposure) and Liad Shoham (Lineup).
A more reflective style of Israeli authorship is available through the graphic work
of Rutu Modan – both Exit wounds and The property are available in the Library.
Italian authors, too, are being well translated: Death in Florence: an Inspector
Bordelli mystery is the fourth mystery title by Marco Vichi in the Library; The days
of abandonment, though first published in English eight years ago, is a worthy
addition to two other titles in the Library by one of Italy's most important and
acclaimed contemporary authors, Elena Ferrante; The Mussolini canal, by Antonio
Pennacchi, was named by Margaret Drabble as her book of the year for 2013 in
the Times Literary Supplement for being “an epic account of the rise of Fascism”
and “better than any guidebook, it explains how and at what cost Mussolini
succeeded where Romans, popes and emperors failed”.
In Italian addition, there are two works by Curzio Malaparte, one of the most
interesting and contrary bit-players in twentieth-century Italian history. By turns a
supporter of fascism and communism, a diplomat and journalist, as well as the
designer of a home (the Casa Malaparte, on the island of Capri) which is
recognised as one of the most remarkable examples of modern European
architecture. This building is illustrated in The iconic house: architectural
masterworks since 1900 (also in the Library), is on the cover of A woman like me
(surrealism meets biography) and played a leading role in Jean-Luc Godard’s film
Contempt. He maintained a distinctive awareness of the contradictions inherent in
the positions he adopted, and this is nowhere more evident than in The skin,
recently published in full by New York Review Books for the first time in English.
The blurb on the book reads like this: “The reliably unorthodox Curzio
Malaparte's own service as an Italian liaison officer with the Allies during the
invasion of Italy was the basis for this searing and surreal novel, in which the
contradictions inherent in any attempt to simultaneously conquer and liberate a
people beset the triumphant but ingenuous American forces as they make their
way up the peninsula. Malaparte's account begins in occupied Naples, where
veterans of the disbanded and humiliated Italian army beg for work, and
ceremonial dinners for high Allied officers or important politicians feature the last
remaining sea creatures in the city's famous aquarium. He leads the American
Fifth Army along the Via Appia Antica into Rome, where the celebrations of a
vast, joy-maddened crowd are only temporarily interrupted when one well-wisher
slips beneath the tread of a Sherman tank. As the Allied advance continues north
to Florence and Milan, the civil war intensifies, provoking in the author equal
abhorrence for killing fellow Italians and for the "heroes of tomorrow," those who
will come out of hiding to shout "Long live liberty" as soon as the Germans are
chased away. Like Celine, another anarchic satirist and disillusioned veteran of
two world wars, Malaparte paints his compatriots as in a fun-house mirror that
yet speaks the truth, creating terrifying, grotesque, and often darkly comic scenes
that will not soon be forgotten. Unlike the French writer however, he does so in
the characteristically sophisticated, lush, yet unsentimental prose that was as
responsible for his fame as was his surprising political trajectory. The skin was
condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, and placed on the Index Librorum
Prohibitorum”.
Elsewhere in the world, Julia Franck’s German tale of a single-mother family in
mid-twentieth century East Berlin is called Back to back. Charlotte Randall
chooses a beautiful title for her tale of four marooned convicts off the southern
New Zealand coast – The bright side of my condition. Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation
is the first in a trilogy: one Goodreads community comment said “Never have I
been so freaked out by a book where so much vague, unsettling stuff happens; I
can't even tell you why I was so spooked while I was reading this”; and the
Guardian review was headed ”You'll find yourself afraid to turn the page'”.
Finally, a glimpse of new DVDs in the collection: John Ford’s early silent
western, The iron horse, dates from 1924: the Library of Congress noted its
“reverential, elegiac mythology that has influenced many subsequent Westerns”.
The railroad provides employment for the hero of Nothing but a man – an AfricanAmerican man forced to confront racial prejudice and self-denial when he falls in
love with an educated preacher's daughter. The movie was released in 1964, and
is set against the stirrings of the civil rights movement and a rising wave of
burgeoning Black Pride, accompanied by a fine Motown soundtrack. Travels with
my aunt dates from 1972 – directed by George Cukor, based on the Graham
Greene novel, and starring Maggie Smith.
Chameleon Street is a 1989 comedy based on a true story about a man who
reinvents himself in many different manners to escape boredom: “I don't know
you and I know you don't know me so let's agree to disagree if you want, but as
far as I'm concerned, most people have maybe two or three great moments in
their entire lives. So get it right. If the moment calls, give me the phone. If the
moment drops by tonight, let him in. Make him comfortable. Set him up in the
easy chair, give him a cup of coffee 'cause I am definitely into the moment!”
About Elly is another Asghar Farhadi-directed Iranian film (see also The
separation). This one is from 2009, and is set on the shores of the Caspian Sea.
We’ve also found a copy of Little Lord Fauntleroy in Italy of all places (shelved
here as Il piccolo lord). Made as a TV movie in 1980, it stars Alec Guinness, and
features glimpses of Connie Booth and Patrick Stewart.