1.
More lists!

The last Book notes mentioned the famous New York Times list of the 100 best books of the century so far.

It's continuing to make waves... Jo Case, from The Conversation, says: "Like many Australians, I was disappointed to see no Australian books on the list." So The Conversation got a few experts together, who came up with their own list. Of which I have read precisely none... All I can claim is that a couple were already on my list. Now there are a few more to add.

Meanwhile, Readings, a Melbourne bookshop that we used to love, also came up with its own compilation. Of these, I'd read a few:

-- The Boat by Nam Le (I read these short stories at the end of 2008, but we were in the UK and also sick at the time, and I don't think I gave them their due)

-- The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan (it was powerful, but I wasn't entirely convinced)

-- The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas (this came out as No. 1 on the list, but I confess I didn't really enjoy it...)

There is, for sure, a lot of interesting literature emerging from Australia at the moment, and I have much catching up to do.


Melbourne, 2010

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2.
A thought-provoking reflection on "the ideological misuse of Holocaust memory" by Marianne Hirsch.

The Velvet Cushion has featured many books highlighting the plight of Jews in 20th-century Europe. Just this year, we've had Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg; The Radetzky March and The Capuchin Crypt by Joseph Roth; The Magician by Colm Toibin; Davita's Harp by Chaim Potok; and The Camomile Lawn by Mary Wesley. See You at the Seaside, by Dorit Rabinyan, looked at contemporary relations between Israelis and Palestinians.

Hirsch's article, entitled Rethinking Holocaust Memory After October 7, pushes back against the "weaponization" of the Holocaust to authorize "retaliatory, eliminationist violence" in the name of security and self-defence, and wonders whether academic approaches (including her own) have inadvertently fuelled "the kind of existential fear of the Holocaust’s return that we are currently witnessing". It's an interesting and nuanced account from someone who not only works in the field of memory studies, and specializes in the inter-generational transmission of memories of violence, but is also the child of parents who survived World War II in collaborationist Romania.

She concludes: "I do not, in any way, deny the existence and growth of global antisemitism, nor the phenomenon of lasting indirect or compounded transgenerational trauma. But we must be aware of how the contagion driving these phenomena can lead to the perpetuation of a culture of defensiveness and denial, of racialized hatred, nationalism and ethnocentrism that can only result in further violence."


Melbourne's sizeable Jewish community is famous, inter alia, for its bakeries

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3.
More on the extraordinary story of John Williams and Stoner.

An interview with Nancy Gardner Williams, the author's widow, gives some poignant detail on his life. He was a radio operator during World War II, and served in China, Burma, and India. At one point he was shot down. He and the two men in the front of the plane survived, but the five in the back died. This period haunted him all his life, she says: "When I first knew him, he had nightmares, he had recurrences of malaria, and that was fifteen years after the war. The nightmares subsided with time, but he still had occasional ones. It never went away. Two and a half years of killing, killing, and killing. It never went away." Which certainly helps to explain his alcoholism in later life.

She also offers some insight into his writing routine. He had time to write only outside the teaching semester, so when he wrote, he wrote hard. Many hours a day. And he planned meticulously: "He was an extremely methodical writer, he took great pains with his writing, and he outlined very carefully. Because he didn’t want to have to rewrite anything."

If he had a philosophy, it would be that all we have is our own selves: "The self as a jungle. Something impenetrable, suffocating, hot, wild. He certainly knew the jungle. The mind is a jungle." The interviewer, Patricia Reimann, adds: "He wanted to choose a motto for Stoner, a line by Jose Ortega y Gasset. In the end, he didn’t use it, but the line was something like, A hero is a man who wants to be himself." Which certainly resonates with the quiet but immensely powerful ending of Stoner.

Also interesting was this account from 2013 of how Stoner suddenly took off across much of Europe. Partly responsible for this popularity was best-selling French author Anna Gavalda. She felt such a deep connection with the book that she asked her editor to buy the rights, and translated it into French. Her prominence ensured that interest rippled outwards across the continent.



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4.
Elif Batuman offers a different take on Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You?

This was my least favourite Rooney, so it was interesting to see Batuman really rating it.

Her appreciation sprang from her own struggles over the course of the summer. "I'm not where I want to be with writing," she says... She tries all sorts of things, but it's August, and nothing is working. When she reads Rooney, she immediately emphathizes with Beautiful World's critique of the publishing industry; with the existential question the book raises: "How can we read or write novels (or care about love affairs) in the face of human misery?"; and with the answer it provides, which she paraphrases like this: "By representing interiority and love affairs compellingly enough to keep you turning the pages -- ideally, persuading you that, when people are fighting for their lives in situations of geopolitical or environmental extremity, that’s what they’re fighting for: the right/ability to live private dramas. And Beautiful World fails or succeeds on these terms; it isn’t trying to create new terms."

We all come from where we're coming from.