Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is an ABC podcast.
Time to step onto the set of an Indian game show, into an earwax removal salon, and we'll also head off to meet an octopus god. Hello and welcome to The Bookshelf. I'm Kate Evans.
I don't know what you had for breakfast, Kate, but it certainly sounds interesting based on what you've just told us. And I'm Casey McCullough, and this is The Bookshelf because, well, you can't read everything. So Kate does it for us, and I help.
And as we hope you know by now, this is where every week we bring you three or four new pieces of fiction with many book recommendations on top of that too, dozens. So why don't you make sure you follow the podcast for this and extra material too?
Yeah, every week you get an additional bonus long conversation on the podcast feed with a writer recommending books, old and new, two for the price of one.
But to turn to the new releases, Australian writer Jamie Marina Lau's Gunk Baby takes us into a shiny, strange shopping centre.
While Jasper Gibson's The Octopus Man takes us inside the funny, manic world of a man who hears the voice of an eight-armed god.
But we'll begin in India with a scheme and a game show and a kidnapping or two.
Well, the best things in life are free But you can give them to the best
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Chapter 2: What is the theme of Rahul Raina's 'How to Kidnap the Rich'?
I was lying in a haze of brown bottles. Rudy was on the floor, face streaked with a little vomit. I was meant to be looking after him. Rudy had been doing coke, a disgusting Western synthetic drug. What was wrong with our drugs, the genteel, natural, oriental ones like opium or cat?
See, I quite liked that voice. I liked that fast, smart-arsey, sort of brutal voice of this novel. It's vulgar, but it's also angry, which is one of the things that I found quite interesting about it. There's a lot of commentary about India and about class and about disadvantage. And, you know, these two young men whose lives are are entwined, Rudy and Ramesh.
There's one description about how very different they are. One's fat, one's thin, one's rich, one's poor. But what they both have in common is their rage.
I like the jokes or the commentary on China as well. I don't know if you picked that up, but, you know, like China and India being these two-speed economies which are, you know, doing really well in the digital technology age but not necessarily taking everyone with them. And, you know, Ramesh's take on China is pretty funny. He doesn't think the Chinese students are the same as the Indian ones.
Yes, and there's lots of asides like that. But it's also set up following some of the conventions of a heist story, a mystery, a double cross. And so, as you said, it starts with the story of a kidnapping because these two young men's lives are intertwined because one of them apparently topped the country and so then he's a money-making machine.
So people want to use him for advertising and for sponsorship deals. And he becomes the face of a new, extremely successful TV program called Beat the Brain. And of course, the TV audience in India is enormous. And the TV producers play that game of here is this smart, middle class boy.
who can answer any questions and they do human interest stories and they line up other people, all of whom he beats, as long as he has Ramesh in his ear telling him the answers. Ramesh who has to be invisible to the whole process, not just because of the fraud, the education fraud that he is perpetuating, but because of where he sits as part of Indian society.
Yeah, he, he's really the lowest of the low. He's, he's, well maybe not even, he's probably, he describes himself as low, low middle class.
Yes, he's not Dalit, he's not an untouchable, but he comes from extreme levels of poverty. And so he comes from old Delhi. And he makes the point that the idea of the real India, the one that people in the West want to see, that is women in mango-coloured saris, men who smelled of hair oil and incense and dragged cows behind them, he wasn't from that India.
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Chapter 3: How does Ramesh's character illustrate the education system in India?
So this terrible upbringing. And the father's portrayed, I mean, he's pretty horrible. Here he is in one bit. Every day Papa stood behind his discoloured copper pot, the Bunsen flame warming his balls, boiling the milk, watered down just enough so that no one can tell. I still can't stand the smell of scalded fat nor the sight of milk froth erupting.
You know, it's just sort of, oh, he's an awful character. He's awfully portrayed. You know, you've got to have a bit of a stomach for it.
But this is a book that also has a great pace and particularly as it goes on and you get caught up in kidnaps and corruption and trying to work out why they're kidnapped, why Ramesh has his finger cut off, which we find out about on the first page. And so it becomes more and more sort of over the top plot-wise.
So I found it totally engaging, like I was drawn into the pace of it, but it is so fast and so helter-skelter and it just, you're almost tumbling along by the time you get to the end of it.
And the edition that I'm looking at has a quote on the cover from Kevin Kwan, the author of Crazy Rich Asians. So I think it has a particular audience that will gobble it up and love it. And it reminded me of a book, Kate, that we didn't read that... long ago about it was set in India and it was a kind of drug-fuelled, down-and-out weekend, lost weekend, someone heading home to a wedding.
Do you remember that one? I do remember that one. It's called Low by Jeet Thail.
Oh, yeah. I think he's a poet too.
Well, clearly it's the emerging Indian bro novel genre. With drugs.
Rahul Rainer's How to Kidnap the Rich is published by Little Brown.
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Chapter 4: What societal issues are explored in Jamie Marina Lau's 'Gunk Baby'?
They want to be heard. Fundamentally, I think this is a human thing. And so if you say, hey, I'm doing this thing, do you want to have a chat? People will come. If you build it, they will come.
Well, you both collect stories in that case. So Chrissie, tell us what's your latest project and does it involve hundreds of interviews?
It might eventually involve a few interviews but not that many and certainly not in 24 hours. I'm actually working on a non-fiction book about fatness and it's about our cultural and social relationship to fatness because I live my life as a fat woman and it seems to be the last bastion of what people think that they can say nasty things to people if they're fat.
We're no longer allowed to, you know, belittle people because of the colour of their skin or their sexual identity, but we are still seemingly allowed to belittle people if they are fat. So that's actually something that I've been wanting to write for a while, but
Chapter 5: What role does the shopping center play in 'Gunk Baby'?
You know, it's a really difficult topic so I've put it off and put it off and I'm finally wading in and rolling my sleeves up and trying to look at how I feel about living in a fat body and how everybody else feels about me living in a fat body and about the misconceptions that we have.
And you do address some of those things in your book, The Three Burials of Lottie Neen. But why don't we turn now to the books that you have read for us? Micah, as you mentioned, you read the young Australian writer Jamie Marina Lau's second novel, Gunk Baby. And Chrissie, you read Jasper Gibson's The Octopus Man. And we'll begin there.
Oh, he stands in front of And he's staring manically Screaming oh society What have you done to me?
We've talked about this before here on the bookshelf, but it does seem to be the year or maybe a couple of years of the cephalopod. There are books and movies and documentaries. So before we get to the octopus man, Chrissie Neen, why do you think octopuses are so fascinating for writers and artists and everybody else?
Well, they're incredibly intelligent. I did a deep dive into octopuses many years ago when I was writing a book and wanted to use an octopus in the book. And so I went down this rabbit hole of researching octopuses. And really, they are amazing. They have such an incredible intelligence. They can solve puzzles. They get bored really easily, which is why you have to put toys in their tank.
Otherwise, they start taking their tank apart and they'll escape. They're incredible escape artists. Basically, it's like they can get through anything as long as it's big enough to let their little beak through. So they have a little kind of hard beak, but everything else about their body is changeable and movable. They can live on land and in the water. And they have relationships with people.
They like certain people and they dislike other people, seemingly for no particular reason. They're quite amazing creatures.
Yeah. I fell in love during art history at school with the Minoan, the Crete octopus vases and amphorae, the beautiful round clay ceramic vases with tentacles and octopus. They must have worshipped octopuses, I think. Beautiful creatures. Yeah.
Absolutely need to worship octopuses, I think, because they're equally as intelligent, I think, as we are. We just don't understand their intelligence. And I think that's part of this book as well, because there is a worship of octopuses in this book, an actual worship, because we have the octopus god, which is a central motif of this book.
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