Chapter 1: What themes are explored in Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening?
Hello, welcome to the Bookshelf on Radio National, on the ABC Listen app or on your podcast catcher. I'm Kate Evans, tripping over piles of books in my lounge room.
And I'm Cassie McCullough here at ABC HQ. And, Kate, before we say anything else, how good was the big weekend of books?
It was just lovely hearing from writers, hearing from listeners and readers from all over the country. It was, yeah, it was such a pleasure.
It sure was fun. And, of course, you can always find all of those sessions on either the ABC Radio National website or the Listen app. They're all going to be there too for all time, which is fantastic. All right, well, let's get on with today and the collection of new fiction that we have in front of us from the Netherlands, Hawaii and Australia via Malaysia.
Marika Lucas-Rienvoldt, The Discomfort of Evening is a Dutch novel that is also on the shortlist for the International Booker Prize. It's surprising and Cassie Milky.
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Chapter 2: How does Sreedhevi Iyer’s The Tiniest House of Time connect different cultures?
More on that soon.
And Sri Devi Iyer, The Tiniest House of Time, moves between contemporary Malaysia and 1930s Burma. And American writer Kavai Strong-Washburn.
He'll be along later to tell us about Hawaiian literature and the bookshelf that made him.
And just before we head into our program, a reminder that next week is our monthly book club. It's on thrillers and crime. We have some great people joining us. And we're also reading Lawrence Wright's The End of October, a thriller about a pandemic that's eerily prescient.
I wrote the book to be a thriller, but I also saw it as a cautionary tale. And, you know, I wanted people to be advised, you know, a pandemic is something that will happen and we're not prepared. So, you know, those things were a part of my mission. I never intended for the book to come out simultaneously with the pandemic that I was writing about.
Stay home, stay home When the last of your feathers have flown Stay home, stay home, stay home
Okay, well, let's get right to it and meet today's guests. Hilda Hinton is a prison officer and a writer whose debut novel has just been published and it's called The Loudness of Unsaid Things. Hilda, hello. Hi, thanks for having me. Now, you say in your formal author bio that you live in a house with a revolving door for the temporarily defeated.
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Chapter 3: What personal experiences influenced Hilda Hinton's writing?
What does that mean?
It's been a revolving door since my sister moved in when she was about 14 and all her friends followed. My children grew up and during their tumultuous teenage years, various friends would come and stay for varying amounts of time while they fixed up what was happening that left them a I think with the exception of one, everyone's left better than when they arrived.
So your home is the ocean on which couch surfers surf?
Correct. Also with us is historian James Dunk from the University of Sydney, whose latest book is Bedlam at Botany Bay, A History of Madness in Colonial New South Wales. Hi, James.
Hi there.
Why that focus? What does the history of how a society deals with mental health, what does that tell us?
I mean, we've heard about the pandemic, the way it reveals all these fractures and fault lines in society. It's actually the way I feel about mental illness and madness. We can get close to it and follow exactly how it comes about, how it's expressed, how people respond to it. We learn all sorts of new things about
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Chapter 4: How do characters in The Discomfort of Evening cope with grief?
or any kind of society. And so my book does that for the early colonial history of Australia.
So are you saying that you can judge a lot about a society by the way it treats its mentally ill?
Yes, absolutely. We learn so much about the kind of values that we have in our communities and families, but also about the way that the law operates and kind of the place of medicine in society.
And James, how much is that story a story of institutions?
It is a little bit about institutions, but the institutions were fairly late to the picture, the picture that I'm interested in, at least. The kind of first institution wasn't built for about 20 years. And even that was a pretty small affair, kind of a barn, actually, where people just slept on the floor sometimes. And it wasn't a lot of medicine or process there.
And so it's not, you know, the story of the total institution that we have later in later kind of studies of prisons and asylums. It's... very ad hoc and creative and interesting kind of solutions people found to the problems caused by mental illness for persons and families and for the society at large.
Now, Hilde, you've written about institutions and mental health crises in this novel of yours, but that's a personal story for you too, isn't it?
It is.
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Chapter 5: What role does the family dynamic play in the novels discussed?
It's autobiographical fiction and I draw on my experiences of visiting my mum who stayed either at Parkville Hospital private or Royal Park, sort of in the 70s. And that was at a time where children just sort of were allowed to visit and be dropped off and roam the hallways.
And I tried to sort of reflect some of those experiences, not in a sort of trauma way, because it was also sort of fun and irreverent at times, although occasionally dark.
So that's what shaped a large part of your childhood, visiting a mother in a mental health institution?
Yeah, it had a really big effect on me because I felt disconnected from my peers, even my dad in a way, because I didn't understand why nobody spoke about it or talked about it. You know, certainly my peers weren't interested in that sort of thing. They were too busy worrying about Duran Duran or whatever.
So I felt very isolated but I also felt like I was part of something when I was there and that included when mum was home in her flat, often with the same people I saw in the hospital's all sort of gathered together during their up periods.
So these were two facilities in Victoria where your mum was. What do you think about that now? Do you think that just being able to freely roam was in a way normalising or good? How do you reflect on it?
Yeah, I felt it normalising.
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Chapter 6: How does the setting impact the narrative in The Tiniest House of Time?
There was a stark difference between the two. The private one was much more pleasant, not just in the sort of decor and the fittings, but the staff were friendly and interactive and the patients didn't quite seem, yeah, they seemed a little more accessible and a little more together actually. So I much preferred going there to Royal Park where it felt sort of dark and chaotic.
Now, Hilda, you say you've written this novel as autobiographical fiction, but your family story has also become public in a way because your brother is the actor Samuel Johnson. Yeah. And your late sister Connie was a philanthropist and activist. So why now decide to, why turn to fiction and your own life?
Well, I guess I stopped writing when family responsibilities took over. I wrote when I was young. and just sort of stopped for 20 years while I was sort of raising a family. And it was actually after Connie died. She died of cancer. My brother sort of challenged me and said, why don't you go and do the things you've always wanted to do? There's sort of no more family crises.
Chapter 7: What insights does Kawai Strong-Washburn provide on Hawaiian literature?
There's nothing to see here. The kids are grown. And so I set to it.
Gee, you siblings seem to have been as thick as thieves. And how great of him to extend that challenge to you.
Yeah, well, we're always pushing each other to do better, do more. We ask ourselves every day, have I done enough? And we have some robust discussions because we're not always where we think we're at. We're not always achieving as much as we think we are. And as a trio and now a duo, we're certainly continuing that trend.
And Connie, I have to say that I didn't realise when I sent you the book that you've read for us today, that I was sending you a novel about the death of a sibling. So reading is a way to press on bruises, doesn't it? Well, we will get to that. But first of all, let's find out a bit more about your own reading, both of you. So James Dunk, what have you been reading?
Well, I have a couple of small children at home and... I've actually really been enjoying reading with my seven-year-old, my eldest, Aldo Leopold's The Sand County Almanac. I kind of have known about this book for a while. I mean, it's got a book of mythic status in the environmental community, published in 1949, the year after Aldo Leopold died.
But it's just such a beautiful evocation of ecology as a way of thinking and approaching and standing in the world. It has these beautiful essays about thinking like a mountain about how a mountain might respond to the death of wolves or the extinction of wolf species and how it might anticipate the problems that might cause.
Yeah, I mean, it's really been interesting to see how my son is responding to these, you know, it's difficult language, but such wonderful ideas and world-changing ideas laden in these short essays.
So that's from 1949. That's incredible.
Yeah, and I mean, it reads like really fresh thinking, actually. I mean, it's been picked up and used and driven a lot of different kind of movements. I mean, deep ecology takes a lot from him. But yeah, it's wonderfully fresh.
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Chapter 8: What recommendations are made for further reading at the end of the episode?
I've been having a historical crime fiction stage lately. C.J. Sansom, whose main character is a hunchback lawyer in the courts in Tudor England.
Hard to slink around and, you know, make yourself sort of invisible when you're that identifiable. What's his great talent as a detective?
He's also sort of a diplomat and very good at maintaining his ties with the royal family despite all the political intrigue and sort of solving cases for them and helping out at the court. Yeah, but they certainly see him coming and he gets himself into some terrible binds.
Sounds fantastic.
Yeah, and Solari Gentle has a series of books set in 1920s, 1930s, mostly in Australia. And it's a really good look at Australia in those times and very colourful. So I've been really enjoying those series at the moment.
But let's turn to the novels that you've both read for us. So Sridhavi Ayo's The Tiniest House of Time and Marika Lucas Rijnvold's The Discomfort of Evening, which takes us to the Netherlands. And we might begin with that one.
Marika Lucas-Reinvolt is a poet, a dairy farmer and a novelist. They are young, 30 years old, and have already won many awards and commendations, and their novel The Discomfort of Evening is on the shortlist for the International Book Prize. So, Kate, those details, a poet, dairy farmer, non-binary person, do they have any bearing on the novel that you and Hilda have read?
All of those details play out in some way in this fictional world. So we're on a dairy farm in about the year 2000, 2001, in an austere, very religious household. The central character's identity is shifting and The whole, the writing is arresting, it's strange, it is poetic, but it's also all about this sort of visceral milkiness.
The people, the landscape, the smells, everything is described in terms of things like the skin on milk or the marbled flesh of a newborn calf. There are slices of raw meat there. the smell of the milking shed. And even on the very first page, the mother is smearing the children with utter ointment because it's so cold. So it's this very strange, poetic world that we're thrown into.
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