Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is an ABC podcast.
Hello and welcome to the Bookshelf. In a big month for much-anticipated Australian fiction. And today it's Sophie Laguna's new novel, Infinite Splendours. Hi, I'm Kate Evans, back after a few weeks away. And hello, Cassie McCullough.
Hello, Kate. Hello, Stranger. Great to have you back. But also many thanks to Michaela Golowski, who was here in your absence. We had quite a fun time looking at some of those much anticipated Australian books that you mentioned.
Yeah, you got your teeth into some really terrific books there. But this week, we've got some good ones too. Nardi Simpson's Song of the Crocodile, a debut Australian novel that lots of our guests have been mentioning over the last few months.
Also today, a French book, Nicolas Mathieu, and it's called And Their Children After Them. It won the Prix Goncourt in 2018, which is the French equivalent of the Booker or Pulitzer Prize. But it's now in English in Australia.
And, you know, Cassie, I've only recently discovered, though, that the Prix Goncourt, they only received 10 euro in prize money.
That's what I call artistic integrity.
Yeah, it's all about the prestige.
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Chapter 2: What is Sophie Laguna's Infinite Splendours about?
That's right.
But why don't we begin today, Cassie, with Sophie Laguna's new book.
I will not let your shadow hang over me.
Now, Sophie Laguna writes for both children and adults. Her second adult novel was The Eye of the Sheep, and it won the 2015 Miles Franklin Literary Award. But, Kate, when we started the bookshelf, what, three years ago, I said that all summer, everywhere I went... people were reading The Choke by Sophie Laguna. And I said, I have to go and read it myself, but I never did.
So can you give me the cheat sheet on that?
Well, The Choke is a place. It's on the Murray River, but it's also a novel about choking up with your words, losing them. And it's a story about a girl, Justine. She's about 10 years old, raised by her pop, her grandfather, a man really haunted by what happened to him in World War II. The little girl has been left behind by her mother. She's got a violent father who occasionally turns up.
So it's another story by Sophie Laguna about childhood violence, children under threat, as well as a story about what happens to the voice and the stories of children. It's something that she seems to return to, something she's really interested in.
Well, it's certainly in this new book that we're about to discuss, Infinite Splendours. So it begins in 1953 near the Grampians Mountain Range in Victoria, a spectacular piece of countryside, these monsters coming out of the ground in otherwise quite sort of flat ground, a wonderful place.
And it's the story of Lawrence Loman, or Laurie, he's called. He's 10 years old. He's got a younger brother called Paul, and they live with their mum, Louise, who's raising them alone because her husband was killed in the final days of World War II, when, in fact, she was pregnant with Paul. And she works on the numbers at a nearby dairy. I really like that description.
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Chapter 3: How does Nardi Simpson's Song of the Crocodile explore childhood themes?
And we know about the house. We know about the cow, whose name is Gert. And we hear about Mrs. Barry, who lives next door and grows vegetables. So it's not an easy life they're living. There's not a lot of money and they're looking inwards on each other. And there's a sort of imagined presence of this lost father in the house as well.
Yes, and Mrs Barry's house and Beverley are identical houses side by side in this landscape. But the Beverley house, which is Lawrence's family's house, has this space attached to it where there was going to be an orchard planted by the father who never returned. And so...
The house and the land have this sense of possibility lost, opportunity fallen by the wayside, which becomes more and more meaningful as the book goes on. And both these houses in the shadow of the Grampians and in particular, one of the Grampians called Wallace.
And Wallace is always described as him or he, and Beverly is she. And there's, they're almost, well, it's sort of cliche to say that these places are characters in the book, but they're certainly characters in the minds and the life of Laurie.
aren't they? Well, Laurie sees the world through a particular lens.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of the Prix Goncourt in literature?
It's quickly established that he has this immense artistic ability. This wonderful teacher called Mrs Sinclair brings to the classroom some paper, butcher's paper and pencils or crayons or paints or something and tells the children to paint something and instantly, immediately, Lawrence... produces these works.
So much so that Mrs Sinclair, who I just adore, there's Mrs Sinclair's in towns and schoolrooms all around the country and there still are today. She gives him a set of paints eventually to
send him further into this artistic world for you know which he is so clearly belonging to and she also says one day when she sees the painting that really confirms what she suspects she says oh you should take that home to your mother that one i loved that
But the mother's not convinced, is she? She's not convinced that art is a way into the world. And as part of Laurie's particular way of viewing things, he understands that his mother is sort of at the other end of a bridge, that she never crosses back towards him. There's a real, there's a sort of coldness and distance there that's part of her own loss and the toughness of her life.
He would love her to step further along that bridge towards him, but she can't.
But when he brings his report home, which is excellent, and the male teacher, whose name eludes me, says, well, you've done very well, haven't you? And it's this glowing report and she reads it. and puts it down on the kitchen table and wipes tears away. She's so proud of him because of his intellectual capacity, though not so much of his artistic one.
So she's doing what she can, along with Mrs Barry across the fence, who's giving them vegetables from her vegetable garden, as well as just being that neighbourly eye looking after both the boys.
That practical kindness that the woman next door offers is really quite something. But I also really like the way that Laguna has written the relationship between the brothers. I mean, there's a camaraderie there and they do things together, but it's not straightforward.
It actually reminded me of the book, Patty Clark, Ha Ha Ha, and the sort of combination of irritation and love between these boys that they sort of loved him so much he wanted to punch him. kind of description. And I thought that they did that. She did that really well.
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Chapter 5: How does art play a role in the life of Lawrence in Infinite Splendours?
What do we need to know about them?
I think, so Tom isn't, he's not in the book for a long time, and Celie is, and even when Celie isn't in the book, her absence is actually a really huge weight, I think, on her daughter and kind of creates just so much heartache, which really changes the way that her daughter is and parents towards her own children. So, again, that kind of intergenerational trauma that comes through.
I guess I'm thinking about the fact that as we meet them, they're in love, they're young, she's very pregnant. He's an organiser. I mean, he's a bit of a force for change. But it's not a spoiler to say that he dies very early in the book.
Yep.
because that's part of what sets up what happens next, I think. And we're forced to see Celie's resourcefulness. Is that what you'd call it?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, she's called by her boss. He says that she's very business-minded. I think that was the phrase he used. And, you know, she sets up the laundry in town. She employs a lot of campground women, including her own family. In the school, the kids actually describe that laundry as the kind of lifeblood or the arteries of Dunmore.
And it is true, and it's invisible work, and it's work that a lot of black women have done, whether paid or unpaid, over the last few centuries. And this is the kind of work that keeps, you know, rich people in clean clothes and with meals on their tables and their children looked after. And these stories aren't – well, they haven't been told a lot.
And now we have a lot more Aboriginal writers who are telling these stories. And I think it's great because – I think from the 60s and 70s, feminism's always said that, you know, women's work is invisible work. Well, if that's true, then black women's work has been even more invisible. So it's nice to see these stories coming up.
I love the way that she used the physical work of the laundry all through this whole book. I thought it was really clever because we've got the boiling of the copper, the hanging sheets in the sun, going to the back doors of houses to collect these packages of laundry.
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