What we're reading: Blaine, Carr
Each week our wonderful staff share the books that they've been enjoying.
Rosalind is reading Australian Gospel by Lech Blaine
Australian Gospel is outstanding. Blaine paints such a vivid picture of place, situation and character that it is difficult to believe that he wasn't present for each scene of this book. With an assured and charmingly ocker voice, Blaine takes us through his noteworthy family history. The genetic child of Tom and Lenore Blaine, he has four permanent foster siblings, three of whom were the progeny of Mary and Michael Shelley, Christian fanatics who loathed the Blaine's lifestyle. The Shelley's are desperate to get their children back, and much of the book is focused on their efforts to do so, and the impact it has on the parents both biological and foster, as well as the foster children.
This is a delicate story told boldly; Blaine masterfully and respectfully threads the many narratives together to create a book that is profound, heartbreaking, hopeful and bloody funny at times. I am really looking forward to seeing Lech Blaine in conversation with David Marr at A Day in Carlton – even though I have read the book I feel like I could listen to this story forever.
Australian Gospel is available from 5 November, but you can pre-order now.
Baz is reading A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr
I recently got around to this novella that I’d been meaning to read for a long time and I loved it – of course I did. It has a bit of everything, all the elements I look for in fiction. It has a reputation for being ‘tender and elegant’, and it is both these things. It’s wonderful. But the vibe of gentleness it gives was (pleasantly) a little misleading, and I found that this wasn’t as . . . soft? or serious? in its tone as I thought it would be. The narrator, now an old man looking back at an idyllic little time in his life, was in his twenties a good-natured guy with a comic mind and sense of mischief. Carr’s playfulness was delightful. The narrator holds sadness and trauma, too, and the funny moments in the novel are balanced beautifully with the poignant ones. The pathos is handled nicely – when it comes, it comes lightly.
