A fossilised penguin walked into a bar (and other stories)
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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.
But this week, we're turning to new releases. A weekend in Mumbai with Jeet Thail, imagining the life of the wife of Jesus, and a talking mammoth skull meets a wisecracking fossilised penguin. But Cassie, why don't we begin in India?
Let's go. MUSIC
Jeet Tail is a poet and novelist and a musician from India. His novel Narcopolis was long listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2012 and he's published five volumes of poetry and edited five as well.
He's also a journalist, and while we don't usually need to know much about a writer's personal life, it's relevant to the novel we're about to talk about to say that he's also a former alcoholic and drug user whose wife died a decade or so ago.
His new novel, his third, is called Low, and it's set over one weekend, a lost weekend, I think it's fair to say, Kate. It centres around a guy, his name is Dominic Euless, and he's also the protagonist of Narcopolis, which is that early first novel of Jeet Tales. Now, Narcopolis kind of says it all. That was set in Mumbai or Bombay. And this new book is Dominic Ullis' return for this weekend to Bombay after his wife has died.
It opens, we're on a plane with Ullis. We're not sure why, what's going on, but there he is. He takes a sleeping pill. He wants a glass of wine. I was sort of intrigued by that opening, Cassie, because there was so much happening as well as so much that you really didn't know.
What happened when you opened the book? Well, it's a kind of shambling mishmash of random observations, thoughts, events, the first 70 or so pages of this. And I'll get to why I think that's deliberate. But even the first sentence, we get this positioning of the narrator voice, the narrative voice against the central character. So it begins, from the window of the aircraft, Dominic Euless saw a gleaming slum of tin and tarpaulin close enough to touch. Patchwork shacks crawled downhill, blue roofs weighted with rocks. The shantytown came right up to the edge of the runway and the plane seemed to skim the houses as it landed.
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