A Booker winner, a comedy and Hitler’s obsession with Einstein

This week’s reviews include a satire on the decline of journalism and the people who struggle to make a living from it (ahem), a new love story from Call Me By Your Name author André Aciman, the chilling wartime story of Albert Einstein’s cousin Robert and a rags-to-riches sports memoir.

FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK

Universality
Natasha Brown
Faber, $29.99

Human folly is perhaps the only universal in Natasha Brown’s mordant satire on the decline of journalism and the people who struggle to make a living from it. The complexity of storytelling and its indeterminate, ever-shifting power dynamics are both at play in this unravelling of fact and fiction, which begins with a “long read” written by the uninspiring Hannah. Her article is an exposé which goes viral and causes catastrophe for its subject. Can Hannah be trusted, though? And is her delinquency worse than opinion columnist Miriam Leonard, aka “Lenny”? Lenny has sniffed the wind, and her hack-and-slashery becomes more ideologically promiscuous as she changes mastheads. Universality is a courageous, entertaining and deliciously sardonic indictment of the flaws and failings of contemporary media. Brown delights in brutal social satire and in skewering her hideous characters, and the plot unfolds with a twisting relationship to the truth that reads, in the end, like a black comic thriller.

Room on the Sea
André Aciman
Faber, $26.99

From the author of Call Me By Your Name – adapted into the 2017 film starring Timothée Chalamet – comes a different kind of love story. The lovers in this slender novella aren’t brimming with youth like Oliver and Elio. They’re grey-haired paramours who meet while waiting to be selected for jury duty in New York. Paul is a retired lawyer, Catherine a psychiatrist and both have partners who aren’t meeting their needs. They pursue an affair but must decide the dicier question of whether to turn fleeting pleasure into something more lasting. The matter-of-fact narration in Room on the Sea disguises ephemerality. Where the characters in Call Me By Your Name reflect on future selves that they’re too passionately in the process of becoming to fully imagine, this romance is suffused by memory and nostalgia and the regret of roads-not-taken. Delight taken in the present is also a theme, and Aciman achieves a depth of affection – to genuinely like someone is in some ways a more profound and elusive thing than to love them – in this crisp, meditative romance.

The Remarkable Truths of Alfie Bains
Sarah Clutton
Allen & Unwin, $34.99

A precocious almost 10-year-old boy discovers a family he never knew he had in this quirky charmer from Sarah Clutton. Raised by his mum Emilia, Alfie Bains has only ever known Ireland, but when crisis strikes, he learns his mum has lied to him. It seems Alfie has relatives halfway across the world and – thrust into the small town of Beggars Rock in Tasmania – he’s determined to find his father. No one seems keen to talk about this family secret – not his grandmother Penny, nor Cynthia (the woman Alfie suspects of being his other grandma), nor Cynthia’s son Noah (who isn’t Alfie’s dad but could know who is). The story shifts between events that led to Alfie’s obscure origin story a decade before, and his adventures trying to sleuth out the truth about where he came from. The Remarkable Truths of Alfie Bains is a warm and poignant and funny mystery of the self, featuring a loveable, whip-smart kid, and a portrait of a close-knit rural community full of dark secrets and memorable characters.

Twelve Post-War Tales
Graham Swift
Scribner $35

This suite of short fiction from Graham Swift is unified by the shadows and ghosts of World War II, though the stories in it are otherwise immensely various. An elderly woman whose memory is failing muses on a moment she has never recalled – the day her mother died in the Blitz when she was only three years old. A British soldier journeys to Germany in the early 1960s and has a sinister encounter with an official as he tries to find out what happened to a lost Jewish relative. A father is determined for his daughter’s wedding to not be derailed by the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a young woman touched by domestic violence meets a black G.I. with affecting consequence. Twelve Post-War Tales is a subtle, empathic collection written with tenderness and gentle humour, offering diverse portraits of ordinary lives touched by the unfeeling hand of history.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK

The Einstein Vendetta
Thomas Harding
Michael Joseph, $36.99

Just before the liberation of Florence in August 1944, a small unit of German soldiers broke into a villa not far from Florence intending to arrest Robert Einstein (cousin of Albert) who lived there with his family. Sticking to a pre-arranged plan should this happen, Robert hid in the nearby woods, while his non-Jewish wife and two daughters stayed in the villa. The Germans shot them, and Robert heard the shots. Harding, whose family knew the Einsteins, grippingly details events which unfold like a dark thriller. A war crime, it remains a cold case, but this much is clear, the order came from the top. Hitler was obsessed with Albert Einstein and put a price on his head, but Albert was out of reach in the US. And when they couldn’t capture Robert, they killed the next best thing – his family. Chilling and sad. Robert took his own life a year later.

Saving Dragons
Dianne Dempsey
Arcadia, $49.95

Russell Goldfield Jack. Not your average middle name, but Russell Jack, who was born into the Bendigo Chinese community in 1935, is not your average person – as this lively, informed biography demonstrates. But it’s also a timely case study – running from the gold rush years to the present day – of the Chinese/Australian experience. The White Australia Policy was in place for much of the time, and this is also a record of racism. When Jack married his Catholic-born wife, for instance, there was significant community disapproval of the “mixed” marriage. But it’s also an inspiring tale of adversity and triumph that covers Jack’s sporting achievements (he carried the torch in the 1956 Olympics), and, with his wife, his pivotal role in establishing the world-famous Golden Dragon Museum in Bendigo. An uplifting tale that roars.

Battle of the Banks
Bob Crawshaw
Australian Scholarly publishing, $49.95

In August 1947, Prime Minister Ben Chifley issued a 42-word press statement saying the government had set in motion plans to nationalise the banking system. The impact was immediate. It was war. Chifley was convinced that to affect a smooth transition from a wartime economy to a peacetime one, control of the banks was essential. Robert Menzies, who immediately saw his chance to return from the political wilderness, hit the communist/socialist fear button (Chifley was a well-known anti-communist). The battle lines were drawn: the government against an opposition aligned with the banks and wealthy, vested private interests. The campaign was heated, intense and, in the case of Jack Lang and Chifley, got quite personal. A scrupulously detailed study of a big picture moment in Australian politics and the forces it unleashed.

Legends and Soles
Sonny Vaccaro (with Armen Keteyian)
Harper Collins, $22.99

Sonny Vaccaro was once described by a major US sports magazine as “the man responsible for the most points, rebounds, assists and highlight plays in NBA history”. You might be forgiven for thinking he’s the greatest player of all time you’ve never heard of, but, in fact, he’s a marketing guru for shoe companies such as Nike, and had a crucial role in launching some of the greatest basketball players of all time – like Michael Jordan. His memoir is essentially an Italian kid’s rags-to-riches tale, beginning in steel town Pennsylvania, incorporating stories of his father’s bootlegging days, Sonny’s time in gambling, and then cracking a marketing job at Nike and becoming well-known enough for a film, Air, to feature him. It’s easy enough reading, but I suspect you’ve really got to be a big basketball fan to get into it.

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