Joe Speedboat is exactly the kind of coming of age stuff that I have fallen out of interest with, but I couldn’t resist the simple cover, the arresting title and the author Tommy Weiringa, who intrigues me (from the Netherlands, and born the same year as me, etc..). It’s the tale of resentful, wheel-chair bound Frankie, crippled at a young age in a rural harvester accident but encouraged by the always busy, confident and freewheeling Joe. His unlikely progression in life towards amateur arm-wrestling, and unrequited love for the blonde amazonian P.J made for an always interesting read. 3.5 stars.
A bit like Lincoln in the Bardo, with it’s odd subterranean, psychic plot, Lanny by Max Porter is a fascinating and sometimes frightening read about the fate of a boy, and the adults and ghosts who influence and surround him. This is not a book to be recommended lightly, as it really is of quite radical structure, though very short. A triumph though – and to think Kim got it for $2 at the Op shop. 4 stars.
Next was the completely different, longish, bestselling book A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles. After the raw earthiness of Lanny, this felt like such a controlled, on-the-rails affair which I was lukewarm about until the unexpected exhilaration of the last section. When I repeatedly read phrases like “Now in all of Russia, there was no greater admirer of the written word than Count Rostov” I felt like I was reading a fairytale for a child. Large sections of it felt a bit that way, and it started to grate on me. An aristocratic man is confined to lifelong detention in a fancy hotel, and through detailed knowlege of people, place and habits, plots an unlikely eventual (decades) escape. Depsite the length, the characters still felt like 2 dimensional caricatures. 3 stars.
There’s a lot of sex talk in Yellow Dog by Martin Amis (2003), and I mean a ridiculous obsession with it, and it’s to the book’s detriment. Otherwise I was enthralled by the disjointed sophistication of it – the earthy asides, the humour, the broken banter and the feeling the Amis is making you work very hard to piece it together. It reminded me of Australian David Foster and his genius-like wordplay and pieced-together logic. The crude originality and lack of telegraphing made for a shocking but thrilling experience in an age that one reviewer called an antidote to “the prevailing literary piety”. A lot of people hate this book! – 4 stars.
From a book that celbrates societies’ worst to one that champions bold open minds and vulnerability, The Museum of Modern Love was quite the unexpected revelation. Written by Australian Heather Rose, it fictionalises characters around a real life artistic event in a U.S Art Gallery in 2010 by Marina Abramovic (and won the 2017 Stella Prize for Fiction). I was captivated from start to finish. 4.5 stars.