Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thank you.
Hello and welcome to the Bookshelf on ABCRN, coming to you from the State Library of New South Wales. I'm Kate Evans.
And I'm Cassie McCullough, and here we are surrounded by some of the fabulous people who've shown up to the State Library of New South Wales. It's open day to talk with us about books. Fabulous to see you all. We'll introduce you to some even more fabulous people very shortly, Kate.
But given that we are here at the library, what do libraries mean to you, Cassie?
Well, I was taken to the library as a kid by my dear mother for my entire childhood. And I entered competitions. Sometimes I won them because I was the only person who'd entered them. That's not a lie. That is true. But they're just always been these rare places where ideas are actively encouraged.
rather than suppressed, which is sadly so much the case. I guess I've got two main images of libraries. For me, one is the Dapdo Public Library and going every Saturday to get four hardcovers and four paperbacks and reading them sometimes in the sun, sitting on the steps.
But the other is actually this library here, which is the Mitchell Library, where I spent a lot of time doing historical research and exploring the original materials collection. So all the different things that libraries can do, I think, come up... in those two examples, taking things away from the library and spending time in them as a researcher.
But today what we're doing is we're bringing new releases into the library. So every week we have a collection of new fiction and that's what we're going to be talking about. But before we bring our guests on stage who have also read three books for us, there's one that's just out this week and that's Charlotte Wood's The Weekend. And we're going to start talking about that one.
You're always a part of my heart You're always a part of
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Chapter 2: What significance do libraries hold in our lives?
And so that was a dystopian novel set in a very near future. Charlotte Wood has also written... I mean, she's written a number of other novels, but she's written about creativity in her book The Writer's Room and one I really loved, a book called Love and Hunger, which was a collection of essays partly about generosity and food and connections.
And I think both of those things, both creativity and... generosity comes up in this new book, which is called The Weekend. Who's gone away for this weekend?
Where are they? This is as far from fantasy dystopia as you can get. This is absolute realism set in the contemporary day. It's three women who are going to clean up the weekender of a friend who has died. It's kind of like the Big Chill without the soundtrack and possibly without the laughs either, without the drugs.
And also, I guess, like as far away from Lisa Tadeo's Three Women as you can get, Kate, because they're all in their 70s and they're all looking back on their lives. They don't really like themselves. They don't really like their friends. They don't really like where life's taken them. Their bodies, we are endlessly told, Kate, are falling apart. Yeah. They bitch it out for the weekend.
Well, I'm not sure that they are just looking back though, because one of the things that I found intriguing about this book was the way in which at least one of these characters, Wendy, kept on saying she actually didn't want to look at the past. And something that stays a concern for all of them is their work identity and how they're going to survive.
So partly work and money, but maybe we should meet them all. So Sylvie is the friend who had died, who in a way was the glue that held them together. She's gone. Her partner called Gail has returned to Dublin. So the three of them are left to clean out the detritus of a life.
Yeah, Gail said, take what you like, which is actually, can you tidy it up? Because I'm out of here and I'm going to sell it and take the money and buy a nice place in Dublin.
So there's three women, Wendy, who I mentioned, who ..is a public intellectual whose husband had died, Lance had died many years before. There's Jude, who's a restaurateur, and then there's also an actor. Who would you want to start with?
Well, I was just going to say that, you know, there had been this great... friendship between the four of them. And I think you're right saying that Sylvie, the late Sylvie, was the glue. And here it is. She describes it right here on page 71. Adele and Wendy and Jude did not fit properly anymore without Sylvie. They had been four. It was symmetrical.
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Chapter 3: What new releases are being discussed today?
Yeah, they're brutal, absolutely brutal to each other. And I kind of, I know this is an important book. I'm not going to deny that. I think this is one for the ages. And some of the acute observation of femininity and age are extraordinary. But, here's the but, Kate.
I could hear a but from your very introduction.
There's a but from where I started.
Yeah.
It's incredibly depressing. It's the most depressing, depressing vision of old age. I mean, they go there. No one likes the food that Wendy's brought. No one's brought any presents. You know, there's this dog. We haven't even talked about the dog. Oh, and it is in the lead-up to Christmas. Who's dying and demented and deaf and pisses everywhere. Sorry, it's the library, I shouldn't swear.
Gosh, it's a pretty unrelenting read. It is unrelenting with moments of joy and moments of connection. And there's a simmering anger from Jude, who used to be the restaurateur, who's been having a secret relationship for 40 years. That was a bit saucy, actually. I did like that. Daniel... But Adele, Adele with the great boobs, is an interesting character because she's been an actor.
So she's been in the public eye, but she's running out of money. She can't con her way into somewhere to live anymore. So she's quite a poignant character.
She's still got enough money, Kate, to have a pedicure and have her toes painted electric pink.
but i think that was her ex-lover liz who might have paid for that i'm not sure that she'd be able to get a pedicure the week after this book finishes to be honest but to me it's a story about grief as well it's about the loss of this woman who has defined them yeah and who they don't you know they don't sugarcoat her i mean we only get their version of sylvie but she's obviously meant such a lot to each of them and there's something about stories of grief that i find very compelling
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Chapter 4: How does Charlotte Wood's 'The Weekend' explore themes of friendship?
All those ideas. All those ideas. And in fact, apparently visitation dropped by 12% because they got rid of the fiction. But it's really only in the 1930s, the public libraries that we know and all love began to kind of spring up. So there were only really before 1839 or so in New South Wales, only two public libraries.
There were mechanic schools, libraries, parliamentary libraries, circulating libraries, all sorts of other libraries. But in terms of libraries that were supported by the state or by local governments and the state, they really came on after. And then obviously there was a Library Act in 1939. But post Second World War is when the major public library boom came on.
But of course, the other thing about the library that you look after, the Mitchell Library, is that it's full of historical material. And last week on the bookshelf, we were talking about historical fiction and that connection between historical research and the imagination and the way that novelists might use that space in between.
And so, Rowana, I wonder if you could tell us about your latest project, because that's one of the things that you're doing, isn't it? Can you describe the project?
The project relies very heavily on libraries, on public libraries here in Australia and in India and in Scotland. I'm trying to tell the story of Governor Lachlan Macquarie's servant, his Indian servant, and I'm trying to look at the early colony from the point of view of the servants who lived in New South Wales at that time.
And so the only way I can do that, yes, I can Google and look up information online, but I have found that physically coming into the library here, the Mitchell Library and other libraries, has taken my research in completely unexpected directions purely because of the physical material that's present here.
Actually looking at the material that I would not have otherwise found in the big morass of the internet, and then thinking imaginatively about that material and how it affects the research I'm trying to do and the imaginative story I'm trying to tell. So I think libraries, public libraries, are the beating heart of our culture, for sure.
I think they're the center of our culture to which all our veins and arteries run to, but also run from and come back and forth.
Because for me, really, libraries are that connecting point between the work you do in the virtual world, the work you do using landscape as an archive as well, but always coming back to the library as a physical space and a repository of physical material that you cannot find anywhere else.
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Chapter 5: What are the main characters' struggles in 'The Weekend'?
It seemed to confront the idea of being a man or not. And so that was incredibly hard to tease out.
And I should say too that Invisible Boys, Holden's novel, is terribly powerful. And also it's aimed partly at a young adult, a YA audience, which is important too. But the book we gave you to read for us has extraordinary parallels. And so why don't we turn to the books that we've asked each of you to read for us. Okay. Let's get on to our core business.
And we might actually start with the book that you've read for us, Richard, and that's Alice Hoffman's The World That We Knew. MUSIC
Now, Alice Hoffman is an American writer who's written about 30 novels, and we can't list them all, but they include Practical Magic, The Museum of Extraordinary Things, and the one that I remember best before this was The Dove Keepers, a Jewish story of the siege of Masada by the Romans. She takes us right into it. violence and Jewish history, as in fact she does in this one too.
So The World That We Knew, it's set in the Second World War. So Richard, where are we within this terrible war?
Yeah, it's not the world's most cheery book, but it's a Holocaust, but it starts in Germany and in Berlin and with a mother and her young daughter Leah, the mother realises that she's not going to survive, you know, just sees horrible.
And I think one of the interesting things that when we think about the Holocaust, we tend to think about the camps, yet it's actually what comes before the camps and the kind of slowly compressing bureaucracy and horror that was being inflicted upon Jewish people. And so it's kind of starts really from that premise. They know they have to flee.
Leah's mum knows she has to get out of Berlin, otherwise they're all going to die. And they're all profoundly Jewish and wrapped up in that whole kind of Jewish mythology.
And so she decides the only way she's going to be able to get her daughter out of Berlin and send her to Paris, where she has cousins, is to create something she calls a golem, which is a kind of mythical creature that has a human form but has no soul, has no kind of other human attributes.
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Chapter 6: How does grief play a role in 'The Weekend'?
Yeah, great. MUSIC PLAYS
You're my playground love.
Right. Well, before we... What's the word when you disassemble? When you... Leave. Yeah. Oh. Well... Before this merry company parts ways, let's just ask you for a couple of book recommendations, books that you love that you might have read recently, things that you would love others to pick up and have a look at. Richard, let's hear from you first.
Well, I'm always a year behind. The Mitchell Librarian is the chair of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, so I'm always a year behind in terms of what I'm reading. Too Much Lip and The Lebs, I think, are just books that everyone should read. Australian literature that's going into areas that it rarely... goes into.
Too Much Lip by Melissa Lukashenko and The Lebs by Michael Muhammad Ahmed.
Yes, I think they're fabulous. And also my colleague here, Cathy Perkins, has written a book, Shelf Life by Zora Cross, which is about really an unknown literary figure in the 1920s, early 1920s, which is coming out soon.
And you'll be hearing about it on the bookshelf, I can actually promise you.
And I'm going to work a Shelf Life pun into our next show somehow, just now that you've made me think of that.
Anyway, yeah.
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