Audition

I didn't know quite what to make of this novel by Katie Kitamura but it certainly made me think. Audition opens with two people meeting for lunch in a New York restaurant: a middle aged actress and a young man. They don't know each other, but the young man at least is convinced that they have a deep bond, something the woman denies. We learn that her long-standing marriage has been undermined by infidelity, and that she is struggling to unlock a pivotal scene in the play she is currently rehearsing, a hinge scene between two halves of the drama.

With an abrupt switch, we find ourselves in part two. Time has passed; the play is coming to the end of a long and triumphant run, the difficult scene successfully mastered. But the relationship between the actress, her husband and the young man of part one is fundamentally different, and that changes everything.

I think Kitamura is interested in the roles we play, not just in theatre but in everyday life, and perhaps suggesting that we can't see ourselves except in relation to others: as wife to a husband, mother to a child, actress in a cast, daughter to a parent. I found this quite a bleak outlook as it implies that there can be no authentic sense of self, and that all our relationships are essentially performances, whether for ourselves or for the benefit of others. This in turn suggests that there are limited possibilities for authentic connection between people, and I'm uneasy with that conclusion. 

Audition is an intriguing literary exercise, but ultimately one I found difficult to relate to -- maybe that was the whole point! 

Getting Murdoched

I heard about Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson's Getting Murdoched when I went to a Wheeler Centre event a few weeks ago where Dodd and Ricketson discussed their book, along with a handful of 'murdoching' victims whose stories are told in its pages. These guests included shareholder activist and thorn in Rupert's side, Stephen Mayne, David Sharaz (husband of Brittney Higgins), and, to my delight, journalist and author Margaret Simons, who I was able to fangirl at after the event.

To be honest, I never consume any Murdoch-owned content if I can possibly avoid it, so I was largely unaware of the campaigns waged against various individuals (apart from Andrew Bolt's disgraceful invective against First Nations people he deems 'too white', and the hounding of Yassmin Abdel-Magied -- maybe because I was still on Twitter when those scandals unfolded). Getting Murdoched is a punchy, highly readable outline of many episodes of appalling behaviour by Murdoch-controlled press and television, in Australia, the UK and the US. Dodd and Ricketson point out that News reverses the usual understanding of the duty of the press to hold institutions of power to account, by focusing instead on single individuals it judges to be hypocritical, too progressive, or threatening to Murdoch's ideological agenda, and making their lives a misery until they move onto the next target.

I'd watched The Hack, a dramatisation of the UK phone hacking affair, but I must admit my head swam at the complications of the story and the account in Getting Murdoched was easier to follow. What strains belief is that the News organisation has been able to get away with lies, distortion and bullying for so long; but it's so powerful that politicians simply can't afford to offend it. One former employee recalled that, instead of journalists getting out and about to investigate stories, they were chained to their desks just making shit up.

Getting Murdoched is a horrifying but illuminating read. 

Death at the Museum

I've previously read a couple of Janice Hallett's mystery novels for adults (I was shocked to realise that I read the last one three years ago!) and her gift for writing stories using unconventional media (text messages, audio transcripts, emails) is tailor-made for children's books, especially in these days of short attention spans! Death at the Museum is actually second in a series called A Box Full of Murders -- it was published this year and I found it in a street library. Luke and Ava are brother and sister, 10 and 11, and their father has given them a box full of documents which contains a mystery to solve. 

This story revolves around a school excursion to the Natural History Museum back in 1983 which ended with a mysterious death and lots of shenanigans, recorded partly by phone messages left between the museum staff, student notebooks and newspaper articles, which Luke and Ava use to track the events of the day and figure out what actually happened. There are locked lunch rooms, students climbing onto whales, stolen planets, people and animals apparently brought back from the dead, missing gems and misbehaving teachers to deal with.

Luke and Ava are separated during the holidays; I gather their parents split up in the previous book but are still on good terms, though they are dealing with difficult family issues and their dad's job is still a mystery. Why does he have these strange boxes in the attic anyway? That mystery is still to be solved. Death at the Museum is a lot of fun, aimed at upper primary students, and though it deals with murder, it's not very gory and an alert reader should be able to work out the clues along with Ava and Luke. 

On the Calculation of Volume 3

 It may look as if I have been reading nothing but Solvej Balle, but I assure you that's not the case! Book 3 of On the Calculation of Volume picks up where Book 2 broke off, with Tara meeting up with another person who's found themselves trapped inside the 18th November, a man called Henry Dale. The two become fellow travellers, moving in together and comparing notes on their experience, but eventually agree to part, Henry to visit his young son in America and Tara to return to her husband Thomas. But it's becoming harder and harder to maintain any connection to Thomas -- over five 'years' have passed for Tara, while for Thomas, not even a single day has gone by.

The world of the novels gradually opens out still further, as Henry and Tara discover another two people in their same predicament, and at the very end of the book, even more castaways arrive, with the prospect of a large scale project to be undertaken (I must confess I don't fully understand the impetus of this particular character, Ralf, to try to 'perfect' the day -- preventing accidents, collecting data -- when everything resets anyway?)

I'm wondering if I'm feeling attracted to this story because I myself am feeling pretty stuck at the moment with caring responsibilities? I can't say that every day is exactly the same, but there isn't a lot of variation and not much to look forward to. Anyway, I'm still loving the Calculation of Volume ride.

Yesteryear

Caro Claire Burke's novel Yesteryear is super hot right now -- there are 230 people waiting to read it at my local library, and coincidentally I ended up reading it at the same time as my elder daughter, who was lent it by her boyfriend's sister (I acquired my copy from the good old Athenaeum). For a while I was ahead, then I got a late night call: 'Mum, have you finished it? We have to talk about the ending!'

It's hard to discuss this book without giving away the twisty plot. Suffice to say that it begins with Natalie, a trad wife influencer, whose perfectly curated online life doesn't match the messy reality behind the scenes. But then it seems that Natalie has been transported back in time, to a genuine pioneer existence which is a lot less airbrushed than her internet lifestyle... I really can't say any more!

Yesterday is perfectly pitched to address our current unease with the slippage between truth and reality, deceit and curation. We have a collective longing for a simpler time, when we baked our own bread and our children played in nature; but does that have to involve constant child-bearing and submission to our husbands? There are multiple layers of deception and self-deception operating in this novel, and it unspools with dizzying and addictive pace. Yesteryear is compulsively readable, and there are powerful ideas stirring beneath its surface. For once, I agree with the verdict of the masses. Yesteryear is a wild ride, and it's one book that deserves its bestseller status. 

One caveat: I'm certain that someone, somewhere, is planning to turn this into a film or a streaming series, but I don't know how they'd be able to make that work. Stick to the book.

On the Calculation of Volume II

I think I'm becoming addicted to Solvej Balle's series, On the Calculation of Volume. I still think it's not a great title, but in part 2, it starts to make more sense as Tara begins to think of herself as living in a container: a single day, a courtyard filled with sky, the borders of the Roman Empire, with which she becomes obsessed in this book.

I'm not sure how I've become so captured by this story. There is very little incident, and the events that do happen don't have much consequence, because Tara's day resets to 18th November every morning. And yet I'm hypnotised, eagerly turning the pages to find out what she'll do next. The last volume ended with Tara having spent 365 days, a whole year, trapped in 18th November, and hoping that the next morning, time would start to turn normally again, like jumping off a carousel. On the first page of volume 2, we find that's not the case. In this book, Tara devotes herself to trying to construct an artificial year, chasing the seasons north and south to find a copy of spring, summer and winter, instead of her perpetual autumn. Then she takes a deep dive into the world of the ancient Romans, but this doesn't solve anything either. The book ends with a kind of cliff hanger, as we learn that Tara is not alone -- she has met someone else who is similarly trapped in time, but we have to wait till book 3 to discover anything more about him.

I think it's safe to say that I'm hooked. Book 3 is already waiting for me on the reserve shelf at the library.