Chapter 1: What themes are explored in Andrew Pippos' novel Luckies?
This is an ABC podcast A Greek-Australian cafe, a boat trip north and sensing a shiver as it runs out the door. Hello and welcome to The Bookshelf on Radio National and on your podcast catcher. I'm Kate Evans.
I'm looking forward to hearing a bit more about that shiver running out the door. I'm Cassie McCullough and hello. This is The Bookshelf, your safe place for fabulous books.
And on this NAIDOC Week edition of the program, we'll be talking to novelist and short story writer Karen Wild about her book, Where the Fruit Falls, and the bookshelf that has made her, or sorry, Cassie, I should say, and me, my shelf and I.
Thank you, Kate. Thank you also for your generosity and allowing the name change of that segment, because I do get a chuckle out of it every time I hear it. And we're also going to check in on Kate Mildenhall's novel. This is an Australian novel. It's called The Mother Fault. And the government has tracking chips inserted into the hands of its citizens in that one, Kate.
So you can't run.
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Chapter 2: How does Karen Wyld's Where the Fruit Falls depict family dynamics?
They know where you are at all times. But how about we begin by sitting at a Formica table with a metal milkshake container or two right in front of us in Andrew Pipos's Luckies.
Andrew Pipos is a former journalist with a doctorate in creative writing. He now teaches at the University of Technology in Sydney and grew up in a Greek-Australian family that had long-owned cafes. Now, these, of course, are very close to my heart and no doubt to yours as well, the staple of country towns and suburbia right through to the centre of our cities.
They're the place where, Kate, you can grab a hamburger, maybe a steak sandwich with a few chips, milkshake, that kind of thing.
And the Pipos family had a cafe in Brewarrina in regional New South Wales for 80 years. And I spoke to Andrew Pipos the other day, and this is what he told me about what that cafe meant to him.
The family cafe to me was just an absolutely critical place for me as a child. It was My first experience of community, it was a place where I heard the stories that informed the way that I looked at the world. It was where I first learned about Greek mythology and literature. And in this book, I wanted to write about the things that I first saw and felt as a child.
And his family, Andrew Pipos' family, interesting he brings up the Greek mythology there. They're from Ithaca, which of course is the home of the king of Ithaca, Odysseus.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of the tracking system in The Mother Fault?
So that mythology and storytelling is embedded in this novel and indeed a sense of tragedy. But he's taken that idea of the family cafe and transported it to Sydney and used it to create a fictional saga that stretches from the 1940s up to the early 2000s in this debut novel of his, Luckies.
Now, Lucky is a person, Vassilis Mallios, and Lucky is his nickname, but nobody can remember why he was called Lucky. He's a Greek-American man who came to Australia with the American Navy in World War II. But I'd have to say, Cassie, he was never particularly lucky in his life, even though it's a life that we come to know fairly well.
Yeah, well, there's a couple of different timeframes working in this novel. And maybe you could explain that. I've got a confession to make. I was distracted this weekend by the American elections and I didn't finish reading this book. But one of the things I was sketching out in my brain was how... these two, at least two time frames fitted into the narrative.
So can you do a bit of the structure for me?
OK, well, the background on this character is that Lucky, he looked a bit like the American musician and showman Benny Goodman, the jazz clarinetist. And in a piece, a sort of classical piece of graft, Lucky and one of his mates decided they'd put on a show where he'd pretend to be Benny Goodman. and they would basically pocket the money and it would be a bit of a con.
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Chapter 4: How does the character Mim navigate her challenges in The Mother Fault?
Now I quite like con artist stories for some reason. I'm fascinated by how people think they can get away with it. So this is part of the important backstory. where Lucky tries to do this show as Benny Goodman, and he meets a woman called Valia in the audience. And he then ends up marrying into her family, marrying into a family of great cafe owners,
and living his life in sydney so that's one aspect of the story begins in the 1940s continues through the 50s and 60s but the story actually begins in 2002 when lucky is an older man down on his luck he has had financial and business success in the past he's just been turned down for a loan he doesn't have his family around him he's just sitting there contemplating what's happened in his life.
Yeah, he's down on his luck. I mean, things have gone wrong, clearly.
But the phone rings, and it's a young woman called Emily, who's an English journalist who has a connection to Australia. Her mother's Australian, her father is an Englishman who had been in Australia at the end of World War II.
and this man who has since died in fact he died by suicide when emily was about seven he had a painting that he had done of lucky's restaurant and she's trying to find out two things why her father had this painting. And also she's been commissioned to write a sort of business-based article about the Lucky's chain of cafes that Lucky had owned.
There'd been a huge franchise business all across Australia that had gone bung.
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Chapter 5: What role does motherhood play in the narrative of The Mother Fault?
And one of the reasons that the business had ended was because in 1994, there was a shooting at one of the cafes. So she's trying to do a sort of investigative reportage with a personal story in there as well. So that's what brings the different time periods together, is somebody asking questions and trying to get to the bottom of a set of secrets. that somehow are connected to some cafes.
So there's a few problems that the characters have to solve. Clearly we need to find out what's happened to Lucky and why this amazing chain of franchised cafes called Lucky's failed. We need to figure out why Emily's father... took his life when she was seven and the significance of this painting. And we also have to figure out this character who enters called Achilles.
Achilles is the father of Valia, who is the young woman who Lucky met at his great swindle, his great impersonation moment in Sydney. Now, he is a Greek migrant who came to Australia, who set up a little cafe in the inner west of Sydney. His wife had died and he's left with two young daughters. And they're really interesting characters because they're growing up as part of the diaspora.
They're strongly connected to Greek culture, but they're also little Australian girls who are growing up with their own set of ambitions and hopes for the future. And Penelope, who's the younger sister, she dreams of studying science and going to Sydney University.
Chapter 6: How is magic realism used in contemporary Indigenous literature?
But she's in the thrall of this father who's actually a violent man. So the other thread that goes through this novel, I think, is an exploration of fathers and the roles that they can play.
Yes, and I was reading this really fascinating piece by Peter Politis, a Greek-Australian writer, writing about this book in The Guardian. And one of the things that he picked out as being really ringing true for him was about this type of masculinity. He says, the rendering of my community sings to me toxic men who are bound by Southern European masculinity and the savagely intelligent women.
I can see those women in my mind's eye, alert and daring, reading this, Noel. these characters unleashed a storm of melancholia. You know, isn't that wonderful?
He also makes a point of saying, I don't know him. I don't know Andrew Pipos. But because we're both part of this diasporic Greek community, I have to read this book. I have to review it. And I love the way he set that up. But the comment about those clever women is really something too, because
there is one scene in which the younger sister penelope she's waiting on a letter from the university and she never gets it but it's a letter that represents hope and possibilities and the future and it made me think of sophie laguna's novel infinite splendors that we read recently and the the possibilities of another life that were offered
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Chapter 7: What is the impact of environmental themes in The Mother Fault?
and didn't happen there. And also Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stewart, which is one of the novels on the Booker shortlist. And one of the characters in that carries around a letter accepting him into art school. And it's an offer that he could never take up. So it's those details that I think that stand out for me as a reader because they do so much work, those little details.
And there's a burnt letter in this one that is both moving and tragic.
What attracted me to this book is just the terrain of Greek Australia and Greek Australian cafes in particular. I'm just so fond of them. And back to Peter Polites again, he says, "'Local Greek diners were in every suburban country town of Australia. They saluted Camp Americana with booths and soda fountains and names like the Niagara and the Californian.'
and played an important role in Australia's casual dining landscape before pub counter meals took over. They were also, he writes, the place where Anglo Australians had their first encounters with us wogs. Isn't that great?
And yes, that is the territory that this book takes us right into.
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Chapter 8: What insights does Karen Wilde offer about her writing process?
And perhaps we can keep that in mind when we meet the guest we've got coming up who has actually thought a lot about how things like the history of businesses actually reveal the world to us.
Andrew Pipos' Lucky is published by Picador.
This is The Bookshelf on Radio National on the ABC Listen app and wherever you get your highest quality podcasts. I'm Cassie McCullough, here as always with Kate Evans, delighted to be joined now by the writer Jane Gleeson-White. Hi, Jane.
Hi, Cassie, and hi, Kate.
Hi, Jane. Very happy to be here. Now, Jane, I remember a few years back you wrote this book that was an unlikely thriller. It was a history of double entry accounting. Yes. And it was just a ripping read. It was called, to be precise, Double Entry, How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance.
Yes, completely unlikely book, given that my previous two had been on classics and also, I mean, classic literature and also an incredibly unlikely book to be written, to be even proposed to a publisher.
But yeah, so what I found is not only that this method of bookkeeping, you know, was first codified in 1494, not only did it lead to modern accounting, but effectively it was the birth of capitalism because it was the first the first time that capital even existed as a category.
So bookkeepers and accountants invented the category of capital and the ways that we can measure it so that we can pursue profits above all else. So it turned out to be the most fascinating investigation. I originally thought it was about art and mathematics and Leonardo da Vinci ended up writing.
Being about the roots of evil.
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