Chapter 1: What are the new book releases discussed in this episode?
ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Morticians and dating apps with an uncanny edge. Asylums full of stories and casebooks saying no change, no change, no change. And finding a lost cat and a lost genius in Paris. New books and new stories here on ABC Radio National's The Bookshelf with me, Kate Evans.
Cassie McCullough can't be with us this time, but we're looking forward to more reading adventures with her next week. A reminder, though, last week here on the Bookshelf, we launched this year's Radio National Top 100 Australian Books Countdown. Fiction, history, non-fiction, children's books from the 18th century until now.
We'll bring you guides and discussions, reminders of books to think about and reread. That's the long game and some very tall book stacks.
Chapter 2: How does the Sydney Writers Festival influence the guests' reading choices?
But right now, let's meet this week's guests. Scholar and literary judge Bernadette Brennan, whose books include biographies of Helen Garner and Gillian Mears, and critic and interviewer BJ Silcox, whose latest essay, Mirror, Mirror, A Stranger in the Looking Glass, is in the current edition of the journal The Griffith Review. Hello and hello. Hello and hello.
Now, we were all at the Sydney Writers Festival last week and were all actually interviewing writers on stage. How was it for you, BJ? I am gloriously exhausted.
I barely have a voice left. I have been doing nothing but talking books for the most part of a week, which is just the most extraordinary privilege and pleasure.
I have had the best time. What about you, Bernadette? It was an amazing festival this year. I had a lovely time. It was just great to be surrounded by so many fantastic writers from around the world. And it's always a great social event as well to catch up with everybody. So I'm very buoyed, but like BJ, I'm also very exhausted, but pleasantly so.
And I have a new list of, or a large new pile of books to read, which is always exciting.
Well, it's time to name names. I mean, what was a writer or book that you discovered or listened to there that has sort of energised you, Bernadette?
Well, the session that was a standout for me was when Claire Wright interviewed Luke Kemp and Amitav Ghosh. And I've got both of those books that they were talking about at that point. Amitav was talking about his book, The Nutmeg Tree from four years ago, which I hadn't read. And Luke Kemp's book is called Goliath's Curse.
And it was one of the most stimulating and exciting discussions I have heard in a
So Amitav Ghosh, the Indian writer, Cassie and I read his latest book, Ghost Eye. I also saw him on stage and he was interviewed by Michael Williams. And he was talking about his Ibis trilogy, which is historical work looking at the opium trade, which implicates the British Empire, the Dutch Empire, the East India Company. And it made me want to go and read that.
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Chapter 3: What themes are explored in Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s 'Said the Dead'?
And her last three in particular, My Education, Trust Exercise, and then Flashlight, which people might be aware of from this show, we talked about it on this show, have just been real treasures for me. And I had the chance to talk to her. And it's just so wonderful when...
The idea you have in your head of the kind of craftmaker, artmaker, thinker is outmatched by the person that you get to speak to.
And Susan was so generous and so funny and so self-effacing, but also had so much to say about what it meant to be a craftsperson who's been working for 30 years on things and thinking and pushing at the same questions of what it means to tell the story of yourself in a world where facts and trust are slippery. So I just loved that conversation.
Every second of it, I feel so deeply lucky to do the job I do that I got to meet her.
And so Susan Joy's latest book is Flashlight, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. And I got to speak to her in that context, along with Roddy Doyle and a stack of other writers. But it's interesting that these books that we're talking about combine fiction and creativity and history.
in a whole lot of ways because Susan Choi's Flashlight takes us into the history of Korea and Japan and America and personal stories, like big and small, and then sort of show us what good writing can do. I wonder if I could throw something else onto the pile that was an unexpected highlight for me. Oh, please. And that was S.A. Cosby. Now, he is a crime writer.
He writes what's described as Southern Black Noir. His books include Razorblade Tears, All the Sinners Bleed, Blacktop Wasteland. So it's crime fiction. It's often quite in your face in terms of both action and violence, but it's written from a black perspective. S.A.
Cosby himself grew up in a poor black family and he was able to reflect on both his writing and storytelling, but also where he himself is positioned. in America. And he was an absolute pleasure to listen to. I haven't actually read his latest, King of Ashes, and it made me want to go and read that as well.
I think maybe a shout out to Anne Mossop for putting this bunch of writers together. What an extraordinary achievement this year really was.
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Chapter 4: How does Chloe Wilson's 'The Thornbacks' blend humor and darkness?
of people who have written and spoken. And they sort of, it's like they've cast their own line down into the deep well and you get a sense of just how deep that well is and how connected we all are to the old deep sense of storytelling. And I was just absolutely captivated by both of them. But the language in Ghost in the Throat is extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary.
Well, brace yourself, BJ, because... This is the next book.
This is the next book I want to read.
Look, I have to say her new book, it's called Said the Dead, and it's the best thing I've read in a very long time. But I just realised, Bernadette, something quite important that I didn't tell people listening here to the bookshelf, which is how to spell Dira Nigrifa, because it is an Irish name. Dirin is spelt D-O-I-R-E-A-N-N.
And Nigrifa is sort of two words, N-I with an acute, although it's not called an acute in Irish. And Grifa is G-H-R-I-O-F-A. And so that's Dirin Nigrifa. This new book, it's called Said the Dead. Bernadette, how do we enter this world, this story?
Well, again, since we've mentioned A Ghost in the Throat, we enter this story in a sense back with that same narrator, but some years on.
And what we have is a woman who's moved to yet another rental, who's cleaning up a house, and she gets her mail forwarded to her and she sees a for sale sign and that always captures her imagination because she's forever needing to move to the next rental when the landlord boots her out. That takes a page or two.
So we really get into it in that she sees for sale a new development in what was the Cork County District Asylum. Now, they've already knocked down the internals of most of this asylum and put up some pretty flash apartments. But the latest development, if you like, is that they're going to do up the chapel.
And so it's this sort of expressions of interest to come and have a look at this ruined kind of chapel that is going to get developed. So of course she sees it and it's a sign.
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Chapter 5: What insights does Deborah Levy provide in 'My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein'?
So she sees this to start with. And this is what's written in these casebooks. And she's precisely because she says, this could have been me given a different century. She's very intimately connected concerned with these women instantly, because these are women's voices in these case books. This is from the women's part of the asylum.
She then discovers Lucia, who was the first female, well, qualified as a, you know, got the diploma in psychiatry, I think it was, in Ireland in 1896. But isn't that a great story? That's a great story, and with her sister as well who trains as a doctor.
But Lucia, a 30-year-old, rocks up to this asylum and spends the rest of her life basically there until she retires, raises her children there, has outpatients in her house. I mean, she lives in this asylum and treats these women for all these years. And what she does is, and what the narrator discovers in these casebooks, is that Lucia records the feelings of these women.
She records why they're there. And so many of them are there because of poverty, postpartum psychosis, depression, and then some serious, serious mental disorders. And we get story after story of these women. I won't say too much there. We can talk about that a bit more about naming them and bringing them to life.
But But also it's the thrill of this idea of the stories, the lives, the detail that you find in archival research. When she first enters, this is I think only on page 12 of this novel, she opens the oldest casebook in the archives collection. You have to undo the binding, the ribbon. She found it extraordinarily beautiful with its disheveled bindings and delicate ruined spine.
And I thought, what a beautiful description of something that when you do archival research becomes ordinary. You undo these things, you have to very carefully turn the pages. And what a world you're opening up. What a world.
And what the narrator discovers is that she opens up this world and this world enters her physically and psychologically. The pages, some of them crumble in her fingers, but she has this fantastic line where she says, I am a vessel. I become a vessel for these These words that I'm reading, they come into me. They come into my body, into my soul.
And it's my responsibility to respect them and to tell them back to you. And that's how she says, I need to name them. But then there's the historical and ethical issues of you can't name these people. So she compromises and speaks to the archivist and says, can I give them their first names?
But that also causes her a bit of an issue because then she becomes obsessed and thinks, if I stop once I've started reading these women, these voices, then I am silencing them again. So how is she going to end? And anyone who has experienced archive fever, as you and I have, is how do we leave the archive? We get all of our information and then how do we tell this story to share it with the
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Chapter 6: How do the guests view the role of archives in storytelling?
She's out walking with, she's broken out again from the abandoned chapel and she runs into a man who's walking his dog and the dog stops and just looks at her and doesn't move. And the man says to her something like, you know, he must've thought you're a ghost or something like that. And she laughed too. And then there's a line where she says, you know, the dog was right.
And she says, but it was instead of haunting onwards from death that she was haunting backwards from life so that she actually nails it in that moment and that she's here in this life. She is willfully going back to be part of those women's lives of the past and she's reanimating them and giving them to us.
This idea of haunting rather than ghosts also resists the obvious gothic overtones of what we think happened in asylums. Definitely. Which isn't to say that there aren't distressing things in here, because there are, but she also shows...
the care and attention of workers, doctors, psychiatrists, rather than it just being a litany of horrors, which is often what the whole idea of an asylum and particularly of a historical asylum does.
So BJ, as you're hearing us talk about this book, I mean, I know you've already convinced because this writer is something else, but immersing yourself into this ruined landscape and as Bernadette says,
reanimating these lives are you in oh i'm so in i was already in before i was in this discussion i have the book it's sitting on my bedside table i'm ready to read it i actually just want to leave now and go read it myself it just sounds incredible i'm so caught by that idea of haunting as a way to encapsulate the responsibility we feel responsibility is the word yes Yeah.
And so it's not a way of putting kind of gothic glimmer on something and making it sort of unheimlich. It's a way of saying, this is how we feel when we engage with the past, the responsibility to tell those stories, but connect ourselves to those stories, which is what I felt so strongly in her first book, that sense of responsibility. We keep the past alive and the past keeps us alive.
And I'm really excited to see what she does with that. Yeah.
The past absolutely keeps this character alive all the way through. And the other thing we haven't mentioned is that we're never quite sure there's three at least, well, there's multiple, this is a polyphonic text. We actually have a narrator who's watching herself, who is called the reader, who may or may not be Doreen Negrifa,
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Chapter 7: What unique narrative techniques are used in the discussed novels?
And it sits in a really old tradition, actually. And I was writing down, I don't know, do you have your favourite sister novels? I have a list of my favourite creepy sister novels. Oh, go on, give them to us. We have always lived in the castle, obviously, is top of that list with the Shirley Jackson novel, which is fantastic, but also Wise Children. I love Wise Children by Angela Carter.
Angela Carter.
Nora and Dora Chance. Yeah, fantastic. That's a wonderful double. There's The Virgin Suicides by Geoffrey Eugenides, which is a big cast of sisters. Daisy Johnson's novel, actually just called Sisters. Sharp Objects, the Gillian Flynn novel about sisters. My Sister, the Serial Killer. So there's a long tradition of... By Aynken Braithwaite. Yeah, Oink and Braithwaite.
There are just so many of them, these wonderful sister novels that in this case, you know, take that idea of biddies and give them bite. So they're sisters sort of imagine sisterhood as Hydra. They're one creature but they've got two heads and They're stepsisters that have sort of melded into this one creature.
They talk to one another and to us for one another and as a kind of collective we that disintegrates. But once you get the voice under your, like once you work out how it works, you're sort of captivated by the way they talk to you with such intimacy. And they do, they lure men out to bars using the photographs of a dead woman, which they have access to because they are rogue morticians.
Now, rogue morticians, hang on. Yes. Explain. Well, they're both morticians. They are like... Basically, this novel had me at Rogue Morticians. This novel was written for me. They work as morticians during the day and they see the damage that happens to women's bodies and their job is to make hard things easy to bury. They airbrush over bruises, they reconstruct faces.
And so for a little bit of fun at night, they use the photos of these beautiful ruined women to lure men out to bars where they spike their drinks and then dot, dot, dot.
Yeah.
And the details of all that airbrushing of bruises and the things that they have to do as morticians was so visceral. I have to confess, I was squirming a bit and it was such a sort of jolt style-wise from what I've been reading with Deryn Negreefa and with Deborah Levy, a book that I'll be talking to you about as well. I actually found it quite hard to keep reading this book.
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Chapter 8: What recommendations do the guests have for further reading?
I don't think you can call it a murder mystery because there are essentially no murders. I don't think you can call it a revenge fantasy because in a sense there's no real vengeful carnage. So I don't know where to put it, which is my favourite collection in the bookstore. Just stick it on the table that says BJ's favourite books.
And so are there other things that you can reveal to us about the plot?
I think the plot is the deliciousness of laughing. So maybe I could read you a section that sort of gives you a sense of it. When you've been on these apps for a while, you start seeing the same men over and over. There's Hunter and Logan and Harry and Ken and 10 to 15 men named Sebastian.
But after a few weeks, there were new people, like fresh gleaming fall of snow, hiding the churned up slurry underneath. Oh look, I said, new profile pictures. Rocco, Zane, Mike, Bruce. The novelty soon wore off, however, and familiar patterns started to emerge. Work hard, play hard, hustle and grind, tech guru, part-time model, part-time influencer, part-time DJ, no time wasters.
And then the photographs. Man at a nightclub holding an oversized bottle of Chivas Regal. Man taking a stone-faced selfie that cuts off halfway down the neck, like the last thing you see before you're strangled. A man using a coffee cup to obscure half his face. A man rock climbing. A man rock climbing. A man rock climbing.
Okay, it does sound quite funny and snappy and makes me feel like I've been out of the dating game for a long time.
Yeah.
It is a very dark and forensic satire of self-curation, particularly male self-curation, what men feel that they're allowed to do, the version of themselves they're allowed to put out there. And then these women go home and rifle through their bedrooms while they're knocked out and then just tuck them into bed like little boys. It's quite something.
This is a much smarter revenge novel than Promising Young Woman was a film. So I feel like it's the Shirley Jackson rewrite of Promising Young Woman.
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