Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Why do humans hold on to stuff, oddments we don't use and yet can't quite throw out? It's not just you and me. Australia's oldest library is crammed with stuff that isn't books. Terrible paintings, old menus, human hair. Is this history or hoarding? I'm Annabel Crabb. Come and have a rummage through the story of us told by our stuff.
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Not sure what to read next? Well, this is your weekly guide. What's new? What's interesting? What's reserved on your next library visit? Hello and welcome to ABC Radio National's The Bookshelf. I'm Kate Evans.
And I'm Cassie McCullough. And yes, this is where you might just find your next favourite book. And we've got some brilliant guests today. More on that in a moment, Kate. But I believe you've got...
Well, a confession. A confession, a correction, a moment of shame. A few weeks ago, we were talking here on the bookshelf and I was getting excited, as I often do, about the West Australian writer, Noongar man, Kim Scott, talking about his book, That Dead Man Dance. But did I say it was by Kim Scott? No, I said it was by Kim Williams, the ABC's chair. Well, that's one way to get a pay rise, Kate.
LAUGHTER
Did it work? Well, it's a terrific book, but Kim Williams might have been surprised to find that he was also the author of Benang. And I have another confession coming, but, you know, I'll save my shame on that one until later in the show, Cassie.
I love it. Okay. All right. We'll find out what that is a bit later on. But let's get to the books we're reading today. The latest from one of our favourites here at the bookshelf, actually, Elizabeth Strout, the creator of the much-loved Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton. Each of those characters have their own series, but this new one is called The Things We Never Say.
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Chapter 2: What is the latest book by Elizabeth Strout about?
Did you know much about him?
Oh, look, I'm so ashamed. I mean, I knew Pabst's name before I came to Kehlman's novel, but I was always a great fan of Murnau and Lange. They were the big cheese for me in that kind of early German expressionist era of cinema. But Pabst seems to be a little bit closer in sort of a documentary style, I think probably to the playwrights of that era. He's more of a Brechtian character.
And there's a hilarious moment in, well, it's not hilarious, it's horrible, really, in the novel where Pabst has returned to Germany during World War II and Goebbels drags him in for a meeting. And basically the first thing he says to him is, oh, Red Pabst, you're here. So that particular kind of left
leaning, more interested in the kind of socioeconomic grind of the Weimar era, rather than just glossing it over with lots of shiny things. That seems to have been Pabst's stock in trade. But what's fascinating, obviously, in this book is that somebody who obviously is kind of on the right side of history in so many respects gets dragged down into the fascist gutter.
Yes, that's really what the heart of this story is about how complicity creeps and creeps until before you know it, you've sold yourself down the river.
Kaleman calls it soft moral bankruptcy and it's a portrait. It's soft moral bankruptcy for sure.
Yes, and a brilliant one. But perhaps the real person who, I mean, this is a novel and it's important we say that because there have been additions and subtractions in the way Daniel Kaelman has decided to write it. But he was in France in World War I as a very young man when it broke out and he was detained and held there until the end.
So he had first-hand experience of the privation of being a prisoner of war and In that camp, he created drama and theatre, apparently. And then when he came out, he was very committed to communicating through the new medium of film as an artist. And you mentioned Brecht there. He actually worked with Brecht and Kurt Weill on Threepenny Opera.
Tried to translate opera to the theatre, which probably wasn't successful, but would have been interested, but also very much engaged with the avant-garde and involved with the big names of the day. He made Greta Garbo, who she was. He kind of is credited with teaching her how to be in front of a camera.
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Chapter 3: How does Robert Forster describe his novel 'Songwriters on the Run'?
Can I just jump in to sort of clarify how that sort of cinematic view is rendered on the page? I mean, are we inside one perspective or like what's the voice of the book? Who's telling us the story?
Well, look. There's three main parts inside the brackets of this very old man, Franz Wilczek, who's appeared on this show. And we say we have a little snippet at the end of him back in the sanatorium. But the main body is outside, which is Los Angeles, Hollywood, then inside and then after.
And so it's free, indirect style, I guess, but we're following the life of Pabst, although he's not speaking to us directly. But when he's in Hollywood, that is a fabulous evocation of the poolside scene with the flamingos. And we open at a party where I think it's at an MGM boss's house and there's drinks and there's stars. Billy Wilder's over near the lounges.
And Pabst is trying to get this story up that he thinks will be brilliant. And it's called War Has Been Declared. And it's set on a boat that's going across the Atlantic. And news comes in. It's very fancy. News comes in that war's broken out. And suddenly this very genteel set of passengers turn on each other. And everyone on the boat's out to get each other. And then the news comes in.
Oh, no, that's false. It was false news. And so that's the film. And no one's interested at all.
I mean, I think the important thing to take away from that is that he says what the ocean liner cast that he imagines must now do, having learned that the war was fake, is to carry on as if civilization hasn't been rent apart. And it's that hypocrisy or it's that pretense that everything is okay, which is sort of explored throughout the remainder of the book.
Because at that same party, he's accosted by a very nervous engineer for General Electrics, who's another German émigré who plays golf with the guy holding the party, who takes Pabst aside and said, look... You know, you might be a communist, but you're not a Jew. We will have you back and you can make movies and we'll give you money to make them.
So that's the splinter that is inserted at the very beginning of the narrative. And as we learn and as we know, the historical Pabst got trapped in France at the outbreak of war and ended up going and working for the Germans. They gave him a lot of money and allowed him to do what he wanted, at least at the beginning.
Yes, and Daniel Kaleman has said that he became fascinated with the story of Pabst because it's the flight story in reverse. As many, many people were trying to leave Germany, Austria, that part of Europe, he found himself going back. He'd been called back by his mother. This is in real life. And once he got to Austria... the borders closed and he couldn't leave.
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Chapter 4: What themes are explored in Daniel Kehlmann's 'The Director'?
Congrats again. And Geordie Williamson, who is a brilliant reader and also a publisher for Picador. Now, following on from those two very timely, rather grand novels, I believe this one is a tad different, Kate.
It is a little different. The tagline for the novel, it's called Homebound by Portia Elan, is, this is a book about four women and a robot. It's also a novel about video games and it moves between 1983, 2083 and 2586. And it flicks around between flooded futures, spaceships, maybe, and experimental laboratories. But I think it's really about two intertwined stories.
So, Geordie, the first character we meet, her name is Bex. It's in Cincinnati in 1983. She's wearing ripped black clothes and eyeliner. She's got the punk music turned way up loud. What else shapes her world?
Well, yeah, you've got it quite right. She's a really lovely and engaging figure. You can see that she's just a really odd fit for suburban Cincinnati. Her mother just wants her to be a tidy young woman. She's gloriously messy. She adores her grandmother, even if she doesn't get along with her mum, Boobie. who is, I think, although it's not made explicit, a Holocaust survivor.
So it's a middle-class American Jewish family with a wild young granddaughter and daughter who is grieving at the novel's outset at the loss of her beloved uncle, the one person that she really felt that she could connect with, particularly because of her problem with her mum.
but who has died of something she discovers is called GRID, but it's basically an early iteration of what became to be known as AIDS. So the knowledge of her uncle's death is, is made worse by the secrets that swirl around it, the shame that attends to it.
His sexuality was a secret that he kept from her, although he tried to contact her multiple times before his final death, and she, to her eternal shame, refused to talk to him. But he leaves for her some floppy disks... And those discs contain a game. And we're talking about 1983. This is really early coding.
But it's a period where there's a lot of kind of utopian thinking in Silicon Valley and across the world about what coding might enable human beings to do, the way that it might allow connection, allow exploration, allow communication. kind of democratic play of imagination, you know, and we thought about the early internet was going to be like this as well, and look how that played out.
But at this moment of utopian possibility, these floppy disks become a way for the young woman who has an interest in coding to and who indeed shares a sense of outsiderdom with her uncle, who nonetheless kind of hid it better. And she takes on the challenge that he set out for her of completing the game that he started writing for her.
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