By Cameron Woodhead and Fiona Capp
Rosarita is a slender but beautifully crafted novella.
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Rosarita
Anita Desai
Picador, $29.99
An encounter with “The Stranger” awaits Bonita, a young Indian woman in Mexico, in Anita Desai’s slender novella Rosarita. Dressed in festive garb, the elderly and colourful Mexican has an extroverted manner and a strange story to tell. She tells Bonita she was a friend of her mother’s, when Bonita’s mother was called Rosarita and lived and worked as a painter in Mexico, studying painting under the masters. Bonita has no memory of this. Desai uses a teasing ekphrasis to capture the essence of the tale: one watercolour Rosarita might have created shows a mother on a park bench and her child playing, neither looking at the other, each “absorbed in their separate world”. Bonita probes her recollections of growing up in Old Delhi, and as she begins to believe the stranger’s wild tales, flights of fancy start to fill the silence, and distance, between parent and child. Rosarita is a beautifully crafted and beguiling gem from the 87-year-old Desai, an unexpected ornament to her extraordinary six-decade literary career.
A frenetic satire on making it in business, media or entertainment.
Things Will Calm Down Soon
Zoë Foster Blake
Atlantic Books, $32.99
Author and skincare entrepreneur Zoë Foster Blake is no stranger to fame or business or novel-writing. (She’s into double figures with the latter, and her father is Miles Franklin winner David Foster, for that extra spritz of nepo-baby goodness.) Her latest book combines all three and follows Kit Cooper, a celebrity hair stylist working in film and TV and fashion. Kit’s job requires her to create very particular looks for her clients on demand, and the book opens with her wrestling a star’s curls to resemble “the librarian after she’s taken off her spectacles and shaken out her bun”, then developing the perfect product for that, then starting a successful hair care company. Things Will Calm Down Soon is a frenetic insider’s satire on making it in business or the media and entertainment worlds, with an ear for industry jargon and a sharp eye on the travails and highlights of becoming a self-made woman (while also juggling romance and family). It’s funny, smart, and written with an Energiser Bunny relentlessness that mirrors its main character’s ambition and makes you wonder if or when burnout will come.
Everyone should know the subject of this historical novel.
Rosalind
Jessica Mills
Legend Press, $22.99
Science nerds should know exactly who Rosalind Franklin is; everyone should. A brilliant scientist, Franklin’s pioneering work in X-ray crystallography was instrumental in discovering the double helix structure of DNA. She defied the institutional misogyny rampant in the sciences during the 1940s and ’50s, though her discovery was never credited at the time. Instead, three male colleagues – Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins – were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work on it in 1962, some years after Franklin’s death from ovarian cancer. Jessica Mills’ Rosalind fictionalises her life. The main trouble with it is the existence of Anna Ziegler’s recent play Photograph 51. That premiered on the West End with Nicole Kidman as Franklin in 2015 (and in Melbourne with Nadine Garner in 2019), and it’s generally more elegant and dramatic a portrayal of Franklin’s life and character, her unconventional spirit and indomitable passion for science, the thrill of her achievements and what she was up against pursuing her career. Only pick up this historical novel if you haven’t seen the play.
This collection is largely uneven, with brilliant exceptions.
New Australian Fiction: 2024
Ed., Suzy Garcia
Kill Your Darlings, $29.95
The sixth edition of the New Australian Fiction collection from Kill Your Darlings is so uneven it left me feeling despondent. There’s a brittleness here, a want of craft, a failure to observe architectural standards of short fiction. Quite a few stories have been jerry-built – not usually in a flammable cladding scandal way, but in a manner that militates against lasting aesthetic value. Structure is crucial to short fiction and, for me, rushed or shallow construction inappropriately amplified the sense of futility and defeat that permeates many of the stories here. The exceptions are marvellous – Behrouz Boochani’s Qobad, for example, about a folk hero turned pacificist returning to his home village after a long absence, walks the road to violence with astonishing tranquillity and poise. Others are unambitious, predictable, imprecise. From half-formed speculative fiction inspired by climate emergency to a funny but slight story about a pet owner sidelined by their Insta-famous dog, this volume is still important reading, alas, for Australian writers and publishers.
A captivating fable about a woman on a remote Norwegian island.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
The Place of Tides
James Rebanks
Allen Lane, $36.99
In worldly terms James Rebanks’ life was a success, but he was unmoored by his life of striving. Years after meeting a woman on a remote Norwegian island who spent every spring tending to Eider ducks as her ancestors had done, he joined her for her final season. As he worked with her, preparing the nests where the chicks would shed their down, Anna the “duck woman” told the stories that had kept her returning to this rocky outcrop. In honed prose akin to that of Hemingway, Rebanks weaves a quietly captivating fable about what it means to be true to your roots and your longing to save a dying world. Although he had initially romanticised Anna as a wild loner, he began to see how she has inspired so many others to revive this tradition on other islands. “In this radically pared back life, she had found peace and meaning. She was the waves, the light, and the terns rising and falling on the bay. She was them, and they were her. She was the guardian of this place.”
A collection of thoughtful essays on what animals mean to us.
Our Familiars
Anne Coombs
Upswell, $29.99
One evening, Anne Coombs went to the stable to see her horse Vincent. As usual, he ignored her. Focusing on him, she silently asked, Vincent, why are you always so cranky? The next thing she knew, he was snuffling her hair. There was no way of proving he had reacted to her question, but she knew she was not the first to observe a kind of telepathy between humans and their animal companions. In these thoughtful essays on what animals mean to us, Coombs ponders the emotional, intellectual, ethical and intuitive dimensions of our relationships with animals. While alert to scientific research, she is equally interested in knowledge that can only be gleaned from years of connection with our familiars. Even as they remain a mystery to us, she says, what is not in question is the solace, comedy, sensory pleasures and wordless wonder of our bond with animals we love.
A story of languages lost and reclaimed.
Bina
Gari Tudor-Smith, Paul Williams & Felicity Meakins
La Trobe University Press, $37.99
Most of us can’t imagine what it means to be forbidden to speak our mother tongue, as so many First Nations people were until recently. To be silenced in this way, says Indigenous artist Leah Leaman, is to be “like a lost soul”. To be restored to language is to “find a place to belong and feel like a whole person”, she says. Of the 440 languages spoken across this continent when Europeans arrived, only 40 have been used continuously since 1788. Yet, this history is not simply about loss. It is also the story of reclamation of Indigenous languages and the emergence, since colonisation, of Blackfulla English, Pidgin and Creole languages as means of communicating with non-Aboriginal people and between Aboriginal people who did not share a common language. Despite the dislocation it documents, Bina is alive with the power of language to restore hope and connection to country.
The Western understanding of rest has changed over centuries.
A History of Rest
Alain Corbin
Polity, $34.99
The phrase “rest in peace” has become a mostly empty platitude in an age that places little stock in an afterlife. But for our ancestors, rest was a deeply meaningful religious concept that permeated all aspects of life. How the Western understanding of it has changed is the subject of this slim history. For centuries, Christianity regarded earthly life as an anteroom to heaven and eternal repose, hence the emphasis on salvation. With the secularisation of the notion of rest during the Age of Enlightenment, retreat from the world was extolled by writers such as Montaigne as a means to wisdom and serenity. Rest as an antidote to fatigue and the demands of working life only emerged in the late 19th century following the Industrial Revolution. Having shed its religious connotations, the concept has now been replaced by “leisure”, with its much more worldly temples of rest.
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