LEXI LANDSMAN asks prominent members of the Jewish community to discuss the best three books of the past year that they have read.
ANDREW HARRIS
Freelance photojournalist
ROBERT Mugabe elegises over an empty coffin at a state funeral; bee-keeping in Bosnia helps to explain the meaning of an old man’s life; a son makes sense of his father’s role in the old South Africa – three of my literary highlights for 2009: one shattering novel and two outstanding collections of short fiction.
Shaun Johnson’s incredible postcolonial account of his father’s life on the racial seam of apartheid South Africa, as a liberal-minded civil servant in The Native Commissioner, captures the heartbreaking futility of attempting to affect social change from inside the machinery of an essentially malevolent state.
A thinly veiled retelling of the writer’s own experience exchanging Sarajevo for Chicago, Aleksander Hemon’s Love and Obstacles is a clutch of pithy vignettes dealing with the hurt and humour of immigration, and the trauma of making ends meet as a new arrival, particularly when the family you’ve left is in the midst of a bloody siege.
Petina Gappah’s meticulously crafted short stories of today’s Zimbabwe, collected in An Elegy for Easterly, are populated with flawed characters struggling day to day, sometimes just to feed themselves. She contextualises the tyranny and financial catastrophe of the country within the framework of ordinary lives and, in doing so, brings the real human tragedy to bear.
DR LISA CHIMES
Veterinarian, presenter on Bondi Vet
THE book, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, is a tale of two women who are brought together by war and great loss. Afghanistan’s volatile past serves as a backdrop to this heart-wrenching story about friendship and an unbreakable maternal bond.
Set in Japan, Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, chronicles the transformation of a young girl from a fishing village into one of Japan’s most renowned geishas. Through her eyes, the reader is taken into the geisha culture – a world that has almost disappeared.
Stanley Coren’s How Dogs Think: Understanding the Canine Mind is an entertaining and informative quest into the minds of our four-legged friends. Based on science, this book dispels common myths and misconceptions about dogs, revealing fascinating facts about their learning abilities and intellect.
TOBSHA LEARNER
Author and playwright
AMOS Elon’s The Pity of It All is an extraordinary insight into German Jewry and frankly, the Germans themselves. Tracing the history of Jewish philosophers, revolutionaries and clerics, Amos tracks the complexities of race, assimilation, commerce and trickier issue of conversion with grace and depth. I was spellbound by the descriptions of the literary salons of the 1840s, as well as the ironic tragedy of some of the Jewish leaders in fields as diverse as science and workers rights. Fantastic!
The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes – this is a history of romanticism and how the movement was linked to the great explorers and scientists of the 18th century. Packed with humorous anecdotes, it covers subjects like Joseph Banks’ idyllic (and promiscuous) time in Tahiti, the German-Jewish astronomer William Herschel and many more.
I felt like I was traversing a far more innocent and hopeful era. Then there’s Roberto Bolano’s 2666. A postmodern novel set in a fictional Mexican border town where a serial killer is causing havoc, it subverts the genre by weaving politics, poetry and magic, in parts genius.
Tobsha Learner’s latest novel Sphinx was released late last year.
MARK DAPIN
Good Weekend columnist and author
SHAMEFULLY, I only read two new books this year. The first was Sydney ambo Benjamin Gilmour’s Warrior Poets, an astonishing account of how Gilmour, whose previous movie-making experience hadn’t extended much further than working as an on-set paramedic for Sharon Stone, went to the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan and made the award-winning feature film, Son of a Lion, for a budget of about $15,000.
The second was Nick Cave’s artfully witty novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, which I read in preparation for interviewing Cave, who turned out to be, well, artfully witty.
I spent most of the year researching my own second novel, Spirit House, which I imagined would be the first Jewish story about the Burma Railway. To my surprise, I discovered that at least three Jewish ex-POWs had written memoirs about their time on the line.
On Amazon.com, I found Chaim Nussbaum’s Chaplain on the River Kwai, published in 1988. Nussbaum was the rabbi at Changi POW camp and a string of work camps on the Thai side of the Burmese border. His book is strange, moving and unfairly neglected.
Mark Dapin’s debut novel King of the Cross was released late last year.
ALAN GOLD
Novelist, columnist and literary critic
THIS year has seen a cornucopia of books by, for or about the Jewish community, but three (in no particular order) remain in my memory as outstanding.
Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs is as satisfying and insightful as his earlier works were, but this collection of essays elevates Chabon into the realm of a cultural critic of outstanding range, a modern-day philosopher of the family. Funny, wise, and often too close for comfort.
Susan Varga is an elegant, intelligent writer, and in Headlong, she has fictionalised with great intensity and feeling the harsh realities of the death of a loved one. Sometimes heart-rending, always perceptive, this is a book for today’s generation.
The most surprising and interesting book I’ve read all year is Ida Lichter’s Muslim Women Reformers. Lichter shows how a hundred brave and endangered Muslim women throughout the world are standing up to the patriarchal and confining world of Muslim men. A must-read.
DANNY KATZ
Columnist and author
MUST be a male- midlife thing or maybe it’s AADDD (Adult Attention Deficit Disorder, Dude) but this year I only managed to get through one whole novel from start to finish, The Trout Opera by Matthew Condon, which I enjoyed and admired and didn’t 100 per cent get, but I still finished it, unlike The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, which I only managed to read to page 117, and A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, which I gave up on at page 79 and Starting Over by Tony Parsons, which I have started over six times.
Though it also may have something to do with the fact that I’m a speccy short-sighted git who likes to read in bed at night, which means I have to hold the book over my face really close so I can see the words but then my arms get tired from holding it in this position and then suddenly I’ll nod off and the book will fall on my face and there are few things more painful in a human life than a papercut to the eyeball.
Big Stories From Little Lunch, the complete collection of Danny Katz’s children’s stories, is available now.
ANNA ROSNER BLAY
Managing editor, Hybrid Publishers Melbourne
I LOVED Howard Goldenberg’s Raft, an important and moving account of the author’s many trips to remote Aboriginal communities to work as a relieving doctor. The book opens our eyes to “the bleeding heart of Oz” and takes us beyond depressing statistics with superb storytelling, compassion and intimacy.
The quiet life of a middle-aged Jewish Melbourne photographer is jolted out of complacency by a prediction of his impending death. This intriguing novel, Abraham’s Pictures, tells of Abraham’s journey to India in a quest to unravel secrets that haunt him.
He is forced to question the power of memory, loss and the illusion of the captured moment. Sadly, Peter Davis didn’t live to see his book published, but his words and photographs remain a testament to his skill and compassion.
One of those books that stayed with me long after reading is Cate Kennedy’s Sing, and Don’t Cry: A Mexican Journal, which is a thought-provoking chronicle of the author’s time spent volunteering in a small Mexican village. She learns to love the people, their culture and joy in living, while confronting the reality of poverty and powerlessness. Evocatively written, full of sensual detail and often funny, this book makes us question our Western values and how we live.
