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Chapter 1: What is the focus of this week's book discussion?
Hi, welcome to the Bookshelf on Radio National, where we talk new fiction every week. I'm Kate Evans.
And I'm Cassie McCullough. And you might have heard us last week when we were kicking off a new monthly book club the ABC Radio National Book Club, and each month we're going to read a book together and talk books in this time, space and podcast.
And thank you for all the suggestions that are coming in for the June Australian Fiction Edition. We've had messages about David Maloof, Thea Astley, Gillian Mears, Frank Morehouse, and as I think we admitted last time, we weren't actually going to take a poll and be entirely democratic about it.
Yeah, I think there was a little bit of dictatorship happening around the choices with a touch of democracy too, Kate. So shall we just commit to the book that we want people to read for the next book club, Kate?
Let's do that. And so after talking to all sorts of people, we've decided Shirley Hazard's Transit of Venus is the book we're going to use to get the party started.
And if you were listening last week, both our guests were fans of that book. Tom Wright and Ailsa Piper both were giving it big raps. So why not? Let's just go with what's the obvious one in front of us. Shirley Hazard. Now, it's a 1980 novel. It's a love story. It spans quite a few decades. It's about two orphaned Australian sisters who, who start a new life in post-war England.
I think there's some star-crossed love in there too, Kate, which might be a bit of a spoiler, but it's in the title.
And that will be for the first week of June. So we'll be discussing that on air, but we'll be talking about other pieces of Australian fiction as well. So get started now, ready for the book club on Radio National.
Mm-hmm. Get reading. Now, you'll find it in libraries. You'll find it in old cupboards. You'll have friends who have copies, probably dog-eared or maybe some pristine ones. They never got around to it. So find a copy of it. We've deliberately chosen one that isn't a brand-new release, so it's easy to get in these locked-down times, although change is coming.
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Chapter 2: Who is Jeet Thayil and what is his novel 'Low' about?
And he searches for what he calls future fossils, which are what will today look like in the deep future? It's a way of casting forward. And he's thinking about what will narrative and myth and image and metaphor be like in the deep future? What are the stories we're telling today that will last? How might I be a good ancestor?
And I think that's something which I often think about and I think it's a beautiful guiding philosophy.
And Michaela Kolofsky, what have you been reading under the pandemic?
I went to a few new things, but maybe like a lot of people, when times become strange, I'm a big rereader. I go back to things that I've loved and that are kind of tried and true. And for me, I actually found myself going back to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, which is one of my favourite novels of all time. It's a big, lovely chunk of a novel.
And I don't know, I think I suppose I find it familiar but also in that wonderful way when you reread works that are so brilliantly crafted. Every time you read it with the eyes of where you're up to, you see new things and notice new things and it gives you new perspectives. So I've really loved rereading that.
But I've also been reading one of the most recent collections of essays by Rebecca Solnit called Whose Story Is This?, which is the old complex, new chapters. And it's really a collection of a lot of her writing about, I guess, about the narratives, you know, who gets to shape the narratives of our times, really.
And that's been, it's a call to arms, it's enraging, it's disheartening to read about some of the, I guess, abuses and exploitations of people, particularly of women, that have happened, you know, around the world. But it's also very empowering and she's a fantastic writer and a very concise writer.
And also, like many people, I've also read Julia Baird's Phosphorescence, which I can't imagine a book that's better timed by accident in its release to have come out during a pandemic because it's about wonder and awe. And the subtitle for the book is, you know, what things sustain us when times go dark.
But let's move on to the books you've both read for us. Michaela, you read Sue Monk Kidd's The Book of Longings, and Billy, you read Chris Flynn's Mammoth, a new piece of Australian fiction. So why don't we begin with that one?
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Chapter 3: How does the narrative style of 'Low' reflect the protagonist's journey?
You were in the hold of a ship. You know, how can this possibly be right? Which also means that Chris Flynn's having a lot of fun with storytelling and with genres of memoir. And in fact, he occasionally has them say things like, yeah, this is why I have a problem with memoir. There's too much fiction in it.
And these are all of the debates and discussions that the Penguin and the Pterodactyl and all the others are having at the same time in this storeroom in 2007 as they're waiting to be sold. And there was a storeroom full of these things in 2007 waiting to be sold.
Including something relating to Hapshetsut, who was the extraordinarily beautiful wife of a pharaoh. Pharaoh herself, I can't remember.
It's only her hand.
Oh, it's only her hand.
It's only her hand. And so people are going, yeah, sure, you're a pharaoh. You know, you could be like, this could be anybody's hand. And then they make the claim that all the other bits of themselves that are scattered around the world are also part of this deep memory and history of who they are.
So there might be a tooth somewhere at the bottom of a river and they claim that they can access that memory as well. So it's both very playful and also very intelligent, I think, this novel. Am I making too much of it there, Billy?
Yeah.
I think it's smart and funny and full of critiques about humanity, about nationalism, about masculinity, about extinction. I think the fact that it's told from a non-human perspective allows Chris Flynn to be really quite fierce in his critiques and his observations about the ways in which humanity interacts with our society.
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