October 2017

From the Committee                                               Remembrance DayThis annual event will be held in our new library on 9th November at 10.30am. Our guest speaker this year will be Helen Evans who will give a fascinating talk as usual. Morning tea will be provided by the committee. Don't forget, we now have a working lift if needed. We look forward to seeing you and your friends on this day.

Suggestion boxThis will be placed on the library counter and will be clearly marked as the FOAL SUGGESTION BOX. Please feel free to leave any suggestions for the library or any new ideas for activities or fundraising ideas or functions for the committee to consider.

Book discussion groupThe Committee has decided to hold an Interest Day next year as we realise that this is a very busy time of the year for everyone. Therefore, we were planning on this being held in February 2018 - something to look forward to in the New Year.

The Mayor and CouncillorsThe Committee has extended an invitation for them to visit the new library facilities with us. We may have a few suggestions on how our wonderful new library may be improved!

FRIENDS OF ARMIDALE LIBRARYNEWSLETTER

Book review

The Childhood of Jesus J. M. Coetzee

An elderly man and a young boy arrive in Novilla, a Spanish speaking country, having survived a perilous sea journey. They are given the names of Simon and David and minimal help for their new lives. Simon feels that his life’s work now is to find David’s mother. When he sees Ines, a privileged childless woman in her thirties, he is certain she is David’s mother. The narrative revolves around these characters and their relationships. David is said to be an exceptional child intellectually but he is also petulant and badly behaved. When he refuses to conform at school, consequences are serious for all.

I found this curious book unsatisfying. Having read superlative reviews about it in the past, my expectations were high and indeed, the writing is seamless and polished. However, the characters are not like real people, and the author uses them for the purpose of putting forward his philosophical ideas. It is hard to work out whether this is a thinly designed allegory, using the book’s title as a guide. Is Simon David’s putative father, is Ines his virgin mother? Biblical comparisons could be made, but the author leaves all questions unanswered.

I found this book a strange but compelling read with no profound insights. I was not sure what it was really about, and was disappointed in the lack of a meaningful ending.

Marnie French.

New in the Library

Two Australian approaches to life, both valid in their own ways, are enshrined in Robin Brimblecombe’s CSIRO-published Positive energy homes: creating passive houses for better living and Helen Razer’s outspokenly-active The Helen 100: how I took my waxer’s advice and cured heartbreak by going on 100 dates in less than a year. Other distinctly Australian practices are taken up elsewhere in the global movement of ideas: the dulcet Hampshire village of East Meon supports the publisher of Jennifer Mars’ Getting started in permaculture: over 50 DIY projects for house and garden using recycled materials; and our backyards are not the only places to examine The anatomy of sheds, as Jane Field-Lewis illustrates projects from around the world.

Australian bushfire burns through generations of an Australian family in Eliza Henry-Jones’ novel, Ache. Parisa Reza’s fictional generations grow through Iran’s mid-century tribulations in The gardens of consolation. Basma Abdel Aziz uses a Kafkaesque imagination to paint a picture of Egypt after the Arab Spring: The queue develops after “a centralized authority known as 'the Gate' has risen to power in the aftermath of the 'Disgraceful Events,' a failed popular uprising. Citizens are required to obtain permission from the Gate in order to take care of even the most basic of their daily affairs, yet the Gate never opens, and the queue in front of it grows longer”. Anosh Irani’s The parcel is even more confronting, set among brothels and transgender sex workers in Kamathipura, the red-light district of Bombay. All four of these novels are also held by Canberra’s National or Parliamentary Libraries.

We also have new poetry from Australia (Comfort food by Ellen van Neerven), England (Falling awake by Alice Oswald and An amorous discourse in the suburbs of hell by Deborah Levy), USA (but Jana Prikryl – The after party – was born in the Czech Republic and Solmaz Sharif, whose Look was a finalist for their 2016 National Book Award, was born of Iranian parents in Istanbul).

Further east, Hwang Jungeun writes a novel of South Korea’s underbelly, setting One hundred shadows in a slum electronics market. Eliot Weinberger, editor of The New Directions anthology of classical Chinese poetry, returns with an essay collection, The ghosts of birds, linking his considerations of China and the US. Lao Tzu’s classic Tao te ching returns in a 21st-century translation by Ralph Dale accompanied by atmospheric black and silver photographs. A similar contemplative state may be obtained from Sleep, an eight-hour ambient music lullaby meant to soothe the listener while sleeping. Max Richter, its composer, has also scored for movies (Waltz with Bashir, Wadjda, Lore) and television (The leftovers, Taboo).

Certainty and dream states are examined by wonderfully different authors this month as well. Terry Eagleton may be sure that Materialism is at the centre of current scientific and philosophical debates, but still finds fresh perspectives away from any fixed point of view. We may have relied on Immanuel Kant for two hundred years, but need to remember he offered a Critique of practical reason. James Gleick explores Time travel: a history – not just the inevitable looping paradoxes, but also the porous boundary between pulp fiction and modern physics. And Chuck Klosterman throws this beautiful curly question: But what if we’re wrong: thinking about the present as if it were the past (“We live in a culture of casual certitude. This has always been the case, no matter how often that certainty has failed. Though no generation believes there’s nothing left to learn, every generation unconsciously assumes that what has already been defined and accepted is (probably) pretty close to how reality will be viewed in perpetuity. And then, of course, time passes. Ideas shift. Opinions invert. What once seemed reasonable eventually becomes absurd, replaced by modern perspectives that feel even more irrefutable and secure until, of course, they don’t”).

Raul Ruiz, Chilean director of such films as Klimt and The mysteries of Lisbon, also brought us Three crowns of the sailor, where dream and imagination take flight as a drunken sailor recounts the surrealistic odyssey of his life to a murderous student. Roger Ebert, American film critic, has released the fourth of his books entitled The great movies three years after his death. String theory: David Foster Wallace on tennis has been published eight years after his. David France celebrates victory over death, after a fashion, by

telling How to survive a plague: the inside story of how activists and scientists tamed AIDS. Similar courage and application is attested to by Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon, editors of Kingdom of olives and ash, in which writers (like Geraldine Brooks and Colm Toibin) confront the occupation by Israel of Gaza and the West Bank.

Confrontation is made abstract by the century-old practice of Governing from the skies - Thomas Hippler takes us through a global history of aerial bombing. He opens and closes the story, the Guardian reviewer wrote, in this way: “On 1 November 1911, during Italy’s campaign to capture Libya from the Ottomans, Giulio Gavotti, an Italian aviator, decided, apparently on his own initiative, to drop a bomb on Arab fighters at an oasis close to Tripoli. On 31 October 2011, Nato ended its bombing campaign against Gaddafi by dropping bombs on the same oasis”. Another French scholar, Philippe Desan deconstructs our favourite essayist, revealing, in Montaigne: a life, his deployment of diplomacy for advancement. All the riches and many of the excesses of eighteenth century England are displayed in William Hogarth: a complete catalogue of the paintings. Guge: ages of gold displays the West Tibetan masterpieces of this Buddhist kingdom from the tenth to the seventeenth centuries in a similarly abundant manner.