Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is an ABC podcast.
Hello there, readers. This is the Bookshelf on ABC Radio National and on your podcast device. I'm Kate Evans.
And I'm Cassie McCullough. And the first thing we want to know is, have you read Tara June Winch's The Yield, which won the Miles Franklin Literary Award for 2020 just a week ago? That book is the one we're looking at for our next book club session, which is next week. So you haven't got much time for that.
And we also want you to read Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career. And we're keen to know your thoughts about both these books ahead of the show. So send us an email or head to the ABC Book Club Facebook group.
So get ready for next week. But right now, let's get stuck into three novels. Luke Horton's The Fogging.
Now, that's debut Australian fiction. And also English writer Daisy Johnson's intriguing story, Sisters.
and an almost familiar world full of electronic pets in Argentinian writer Samantha Sweblin's book Little Eyes.
Were you watching when I dropped the seeds from the window? Were you watching when I built walls from paper and glue?
Samantha Schweblin is an Argentinian writer who mostly lives in Berlin now, although I did read that she's back in regional Argentina at the moment, caught out by the pandemic after visiting her family.
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Chapter 2: What themes are explored in Samanta Schweblin's Little Eyes?
But Kate, you see, even like that you've just had to explain all that and what you were explaining before, this was part of my problem with this book. It just felt like half the book was taken up with explaining how these creatures or toys or whatever they are worked. There was so much exposition, exposition.
You know, you could turn to any page in this book and you've, before it really takes off, which takes a long time. It's just, and maybe something's lost in translation because it was written in Spanish. Like here, for example, I've just opened it at any page. It goes, the Kentucky's box was nearby, still sealed. She wondered if she could return it once it was open.
Then she sat up and placed it on her lap. She pulled off the security seal and opened the packaging. You know, just sort of on and on with this description. unfurling new cords from their neat coils, pulling the cellophane from two different kinds of adapters, smelling the charge as plastic. And then the creature had three wheels of smooth rubber hidden under its body, one in front, two in back.
Just sort of endlessly I felt the premise of the novel had to be explained and explained and each character had to discover the capacities of these sort of Tamagotchis for 2020, you know? I mean, I'm standing like a, I mean, as a proud representative of Gen X, you know, I love my digital stories as much as anyone else, but this book made me feel old.
Whereas it didn't feel like exposition to me, I guess, because she's explaining this invented technology, but where the exposition isn't there is in all the ideas behind it, which I thought she drew out really quite subtly. So... Like what?
Tell me.
Well, if it's a book about surveillance and how we interact with technology and loneliness and connections across the world, then I thought they were being drawn out in really quite interesting ways with these very human stories. So, for example, so we met Amelia, an elderly woman living alone in Hong Kong and Her son gave her a dweller link. So she didn't have one of the creatures.
Instead, she was watching and she didn't even know where she was or what she was watching. There's a translation ability in this creature. So on her screen, she's somewhere. And she doesn't know where she is. We don't know where she is. And eventually we discover that she's in the flat of a young woman called Eva in Erfurt in Germany.
And so we keep coming back to this elderly woman who's trying to make sense of what she's seeing, what it means to be looking at somebody else, then starting to see things about this woman's relationships and sexual life. And I thought all of that was actually done quite subtly.
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Chapter 3: How does the character of Kentucky function in Little Eyes?
That's how I would say it if I was asked to give a polite description at a dinner party.
LAUGHTER
Well, I think we can definitely agree that it's interesting. Samantha Schweblin's Little Eyes is translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell and it's published by One World.
Time now on the bookshelf to meet today's guests. Let's begin with a bookshelf regular, academic and TV writer, Mark Sutton. Hello, Mark. Hello, it's good to be back. When we say TV writer, that doesn't mean that you write about what's on the TV. You write what goes on the TV.
I have, yes, that is correct. We should have specified at the start. No, I write what goes on TV occasionally and then, like a lot of people in TV, I have long gaps between those times where I don't write anything that's on TV.
Yes, the peaks and troughs.
So Mark, with all the pandemic restrictions, your work and with a new baby, what's that done to your reading?
Well, believe it or not, I'm not finding as much time to read as I have done in previous years. I'm one of those people who makes lists of all the books. I read so I can see how I'm going. And I was looking at my list for this year and was embarrassed to come on this show and talk about my reading habits lately. But that's all right.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of the electronic creatures in the story?
I haven't read a lot. And my reading tended to be during the pandemic and during having a baby, I found I've kind of gone into my corner a little bit, which for me basically means... Books that are comforting or easy to read, crime books, westerns, history, because you can pick them up and not read them for three months and then pick them up again and know what's going on.
And also rereading books that I have read before, which I find is kind of an easy thing to do when your mind is a little bit distracted because I guess you can let it wander and you're not going to lose your place because it's kind of, it's like having a spaghetti bolognese. You just know what's in there and it's going to be tasty.
Yeah.
That's right. But Mark, just before we move on, you are also a Dylanologist. In fact, you have a PhD in work you did researching Bob Dylan's lyrics. This was before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
And I was vindicated.
You were vindicated. See, I was right. Now, he's just released a new album and I know a lot of people love it. Are you amongst them?
Yeah, I sure am. I have to say I was resigned to the fact that I thought Bob was never going to release a new album of original songs. You know, we had those five CDs worth of Frank Sinatra covers, which are not to everyone's taste, but I kind of thought, oh, well, I'm content with his oeuvre. You know, he's given enough. I'm happy. And then this album kind of came out of nowhere.
No one expected it to come out. And I'm going to join in the chorus of praise and say that I think it's probably his best album since, at the very least, since 2001 when he released an album called Love and Theft, which was also very good. But for someone who's almost 80 to release an album of this quality, where the lyrics are so precise and poignant and inventive, I'm proud of my boy.
I think he's shown that he earned that Nobel Prize.
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Chapter 5: How do the characters' relationships evolve throughout Little Eyes?
It's certainly, I think, a novel that deserves to be mentioned more often as one of the great books, certainly one of the great Dublin novels to have been written.
that sounds like one worth looking at. And The Awakening, New Orleans, I mean, what's not to like about being taken there?
Well, of course, there's a lot of great books set in New Orleans, but The Awakening, you know, it's a classic. I'm sure a lot of listeners have read it, but it begins on an island in the Mexican Gulf and then moves to New Orleans later. It's written in 1899. And I think in really a lot of ways, it's an early example of what would later we would think of as Southern literature, which kind of
wasn't its own necessarily established genre yet in 1899, but would later become one with people like William Faulkner. But it's also a great feminist work from the late 19th century in which the main character dares to be a woman who has sexual desires and dares to want independence.
And written as it was before A Room of One's Own and having A Room of One's Own and A Space of One's Own is really one of the themes of the book. And I think in a funny way, it's sort of a companion to a work like A Doll's House in the way that feminist thinking and ideology was emerging in literature. towards the end of the 19th century.
And of course, the predominantly male critics of the time found this book to be horrific and insulting. And although it wasn't banned, it was roundly condemned. But it's a great book and I was glad to revisit it.
And you mentioned A Doll's House by Hendrik Ibsen, one of my fantastic favourite plays of all time.
So, Jesse, it's interesting to hear Mark talking about the challenge of women and desire in a novel written in 1899, when I think that's still a theme in your novel published in 2020. But I wonder if you could tell us what else you're reading at the moment.
I have several books going at once towards the beginning of the year. I like Mark. I made a list of all the things that I'd read, but then that slowly trickled, like my record keeping slowly kind of dwindled away. But at the moment, I'm reading a collection of essays by a Taiwanese-American essayist called Esme Weijun Wang, and it's called The Collected Schizophrenias.
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