Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar

‘There is no such thing as a general idea’.

‘Hopscotch’ is a series of journeys through interconnected lives. It is simultaneously a reminder that we each read the same words and form different conclusions.

I have read ‘Hopscotch’ twice: following the instructions provided by Mr Cortazar. I will read it again in the future when I will try to be less concerned about where I am going and more interested in why I am undertaking the journey.
None of the characters appealed to me and yet I found myself caring about the paths they took and the choices they made. The death of the child, Rocamadour, was so harrowing that I almost stopped reading. But I did not. I wanted to see if somehow this event would change the lives that La Maga and Oliviera chose. By then, of course, it was too late.

‘Everything is writing, that is to say, a fable.’

So what is this book about? Who is the narrator? Which points of view does the reader obtain? Is there order in this chaos? Do any of these questions have answers, and are the answers relevant? There is nothing neat about ‘Hopscotch’. The endings are ambiguous, the characters are self-absorbed and the reader is invited to make choices. The novel comes to life and the reader becomes a part of it as the ultimate destination is driven by the choices made.

This novel made me uncomfortable. Yet, simultaneously, I am awed by the skills of the writer able to create such a world, invite me into it and leave the choices thereafter entirely to me. I agree with those who consider this amongst the best novels written this century. But don’t take my word for it: read it for yourself. A word of warning: Do not attempt if you lack balance. You may fall.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Tongerlongeter: First Nations Leader and Tasmanian War Hero by Henry Reynolds and Nicholas Clements

‘The subject of this book, the warrior chief Tongerlongeter, is first named in the records four days before the end of the Black War – the vast frontier conflict that consumed eastern Tasmania from 1823 to 1831.’

When I was a school child in Tasmania in the 1960s, I was taught that Truganini, the last Tasmanian Aborigine, had died in 1869. The how, the who and the why was not part of the curriculum. It was not until the 1970s that I learned this was untrue. Since then, I have been trying to learn more.

Who was Tongerlongeter, and why is he a war hero?  Firstly, while I understand that Indigenous names often have different spellings according to who recorded them, I understand that members of the Paredarerme Nation prefer the English spelling of his name as ‘Tongelongeta’.  Except for direct quotes from the book, I will use that spelling.

This book is both the history of a war (The Black War of 1823-1831) and of Tongelongeta. Colonial records tell us more about the war than the individuals. I read that Tongelongeta and his ally Montpelliatta embarked on 710 attacks during this period, killing 182 colonists and wounding a further 176. So exact, so precise. While we have no numbers of the Indigenous people killed, we are told that the ‘casualties were up to three times greater, and their population plummeted.’

‘The most important lesson driven home by the war was the central importance of the ownership and control of land.’

The British established their first settlement at Risdon Cove, opposite today’s Hobart, in 1803. From the 1820s settlement accelerated along the fertile valleys of the southeast. While Tongelongeta initially restricted his warriors to targeted retribution, the violence against his people continued to grow resulting in accelerated attacks.

By night, Tongelongeta and his people were vulnerable to ambush. They did not attack at night because they were wary of evil spirits. Tongelongeta ’s first wife was taken in one of these ambushes. But during daylight hours, Tongerlongeta and his warriors were formidable foes. They would typically surround a hut, kill the occupants, take what they wanted and then set fire to the hut. They would then vanish. And so, the war continued until an armistice was brokered.

‘After eight gruelling years, the fighting was over.’

On Saturday 7 January 1832, Tongerlongeta and the remaining 25 men, women, and one child, walked down the centre of Hobart with their hunting dogs, spears, ‘shrieked their war song’ to meet the Governor. They were exiled to Flinders Island where Tongerlongeta died in 1837.

I’ll leave the history there. History is usually written by the victors and often not questioned by those on the ‘winning’ side. Perhaps the greatest strength of this book is that it invites us, uncomfortable as it is, to reconsider what we think we know and mourn what has been lost.

‘There is nothing in the Tasmanian landscape to remind locals or visitors that once an island of patriots fought a desperate war against an invader.’

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Book 3 in my 2023 Nonfiction Reader Challenge. I’ve entered as a ‘Nonfiction Grazer’ and this book should be included under the heading of ‘History’.

Desert Star (Harry Bosch #24) by Michael Connelly

‘Behind you is the library of lost souls. Six thousand unsolved murders. Aren’t they talking to you, sending messages?’

Renée Ballard is back in the LAPD: heading up the cold case unit in the Robbery-Homicide Division. It’s her dream job and she’s been given a free hand (mostly) to build the unit. Harry Bosch may have retied, but there is a case that continues to haunt him: the murder of an entire family by someone who is still free.

Renée Ballard makes an offer to Harry Bosch: work with her as a volunteer investigator in the new Open-Unsolved Unit, and he can investigate the case that still haunts him.

Harry is not a great team player, and Renée has some issues of her own. She has an eclectic team to manage, and politics come into play. There’s another cold case taking precedence: the murder of a councilman’s sister. Can the Open-Unsolved Unit solve both cases?

Harry Bosch may be ageing, may not be as strong as he once was but he is still as wily as ever. This is the 24^th Harry Bosch novel and with one exception I have enjoyed each one I have read. He and Renée Ballard are an effective team, and I thoroughly enjoyed this story.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Undefendable: The Story of a Town Under Fire by Sulari Gentill (Editor), Sarah Kynaston (Editor)

 ‘We were told our town was undefendable!’

On 2 January 2020, the township of Batlow (population 1313) was declared ‘undefendable’, and its citizens were advised to flee while they could. This was during the devastating Black Summer Bushfires of 2019-2020. I remember it well.  Much of south-eastern Australia was on fire or under threat. My personal focus was on Adaminaby (161 kms from Batlow via the Snowy Mountains Highway) and on the fires south-west of Sydney near Tahmoor, and then on fires creeping close to Canberra. There were many fires burning across New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia.

Here are some of the statistics:

34 lives lost.

18.6 million hectares of land and forests destroyed.

3 billion mammals, birds, and reptiles lost.

Horrific fires, horrific damage.

So, how did Batlow manage to survive the fires? While many evacuated, others stayed to fight for their community. This book is a collection of stories, poems and photographs from the people of Batlow. Volunteers saved the town: fighting fires, manning communications, preparing, and distributing food and water, looking out for each other and (where possible) for pets and livestock.

These are some of the stories from those who were there. The editors, Sulari Gentill and Sarah Kynaston, tell us a little about each of the people who have contributed and their connections to the community. Not every property could be saved but given the intensity of the megablaze threatening Batlow, it is astonishing that so much was saved.

And who were the volunteers? From farmers to tradesmen and teachers, from retirees to those who had just finished school. Everyday people fighting for their community and their livelihoods. Each one of them a hero.

This book is important. This is not a media presentation or a political interpretation of events. This book is a collection of memories by those directly affected, by those who fought to save Batlow, those who evacuated and includes a focus on the future.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Book 2 in my 2023 Nonfiction Reader Challenge. I’ve entered as a ‘Nonfiction Grazer’ and this book should be included under the heading of ‘Memoir’.

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

‘She is sixteen years old, not quite a year into her marriage.’

I approached this novel with a degree of caution: some of my friends loved it, others were less enthusiastic, and while I enjoyed ‘Hamnet’, I would have enjoyed it more without a connection to Shakespeare.

At the beginning of the novel, Ms O’Farrell provides this historical note:

‘In 1560, fifteen-year-old Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici left Florence to begin her married life with Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara.

Less than a year later, she would be dead.

The official cause of her death was given as ‘putrid fever’, but it was rumoured that she had been murdered by her husband.’

And so, I am drawn into the brief imagined life of Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici, the third daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici. Ms O’Farrell takes us into Renaissance Italy, inside the Medici family and their dynastic marriages. Lucrezia leads a sheltered life until the death of her sister Maria when she is affianced to Maria’s fiancé Alfonso. The marriage is postponed until Lucrezia is fifteen years old.

In the winter of 1561, Lucrezia is taken to an isolated country villa by her husband, Alfonso. She is afraid that he intends to kill her: he is erratic and used to getting his own way, and desperate for an heir.

I enjoyed Ms O’Farrell’s descriptions of time and place, of people and their lives and motivation. The tension builds as the story unfolds. While Lucrezia’s fear is palpable, how grounded is it in reality? It is clear that Alfonso is powerful and unpredictable, it becomes clear that he will kill if he considers it necessary to achieve his objectives. Lucrezia is powerless. Or is she?

I enjoyed this novel more than ‘Hamnet’. Why? Because the possibilities Ms O’Farrell introduces into this novel seem entirely plausible. This is the fifth of Ms O’Farrell’s novels I have read. I’ve liked them all, but I confess that ‘Hamnet’ in my least favourite.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño

‘But only I know the story, the real story.’

This novel is narrated in the first person by the ill and ageing Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix over the course of a single evening.  Father Urrutia believes that he is dying, and in a feverish monologue, with a not entirely reliable memory, he revisits some of the crucial events of his life as a Chilean priest, member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a mediocre poet.

‘Words emerging from one dream and entering another.’

In his delirium, Father Urrutia sees various characters, both real and imaginary, as monsters.  Monsters they may be, many of them, in life as well as in fiction.  As Father Urrutia’s monologue ranges from Opus Dei to falconry, to private lessons on Marxism for General Augusto Pinochet, the ‘wizened youth’ reminds him of his shortcomings.  And during this long night, while we hear Father Urrutia’s ‘confession’ and feel his need to find himself without blame in the events he describes, the imagery signals differently.  If the ‘wizened youth’ represents both dormant conscience and repressed consciousness, then it is not a burden for Father Urrutia to bear alone.

‘One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes one’s words and silences…’

The Chilean literary establishment is also complicit: how else can a house used by those with literary aspirations double as a torture centre? This may be satire, but it is highly disturbing as well.

 ‘.. a white shirt as immaculate as my hopes..’

This novel was first published in 2000, and was the first of Bolaño’s novels to be published in English (in 2003).

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott

‘When the men in black suits came, my daughter offered them tea.’

So, the back cover tells me that this novel is ‘Based on the true story behind the publication of an iconic masterpiece. The thrilling plot to change the hearts and minds of Soviet Russia … With the greatest love story of the twentieth century, Doctor Zhivago.’

I was intrigued: ‘Doctor Zhivago’ is a tremendous novel, and I knew nothing about the CIA’s involvement in its publication. Yes, I knew it was banned in the USSR but that was ancient history by the time I read the novel in 2011. I picked up this novel keen to read about ‘the thrilling plot’ and instead became caught up in various romantic entanglements.

I wanted a spy drama. I received tortured romance: Boris Pasternak and his mistress Olga Ivinskaya; Sally and Irina working for the CIA. While the most interesting parts of the book for me were those set in Russia, the CIA-related stuff had me uttering howls of derision and muttering about incompetence.

Yes, I kept reading. I felt compelled to finish the novel. Some of my friends loved this novel, others hated it. I am in the middle. While I enjoyed aspects of the novel, I felt let down by the overall story. Still, I am going to reread ‘Dr Zhivago’, so the experience was not entirely wasted.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

From this morning’s walk along the Yaouk Road, Adaminaby NSW 11/2/2023

From this morning’s walk along the Yaouk Road, Adaminaby NSW 11/2/2023

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller

‘It came through lanes crazy with rain, its sides slabbed with mud, its wheels throwing arcs of mud behind it.’

1809, Somerset, England. On a rain-swept night, an unconscious man is carried into his home. Captain John Lacroix is home from the war against Napoleon’s forces in Spain. With the help of his housekeeper, Nell, he recovers in body but not in spirit. He is haunted by what happened during the retreat to Corunna but cannot speak of it.

Captain Lacroix is commanded to return to his regiment, but instead sets off for the Hebrides. He hopes to find peace there. And so, Captain John Lacroix sets off, unaware that he is being hunted. Two soldiers, Corporal Calley an English corporal, and Medina, a Spanish cavalry officer have been commissioned to track him down and kill him: he was in charge of the soldiers who committed an atrocity in the village of Morales during the retreat to Corunna.

As John Lovall, he finds a temporary haven and form of peace on a remote island with Cornelius Frend and his sisters Emily and Jane. But Emily needs medical attention, and John accompanies her to Glasgow.

‘He had been acquainted with the Frends less than a fortnight. A man who arrives on the back of a cow, who does not speak about his past.’

The story shifts between Lacroix and his pursuers. While their paths meet, briefly in Glasgow, this is not the resolution of the chase.

‘Medina wrote the list by candlelight in the room he shared with the stranger in Glasgow, the inn he himself had chosen when they came back from Dumbarton, for if he was still taking the corporal’s orders he was also, of late, experimenting with insistence and finding it sometimes worked.’

I’ll stop here. There’s a tension in this story that would be broken (and could ruin the read) if the ending is known in advance. I opened this book and stepped into a world of conflict and violence, with elements of beauty and the possibility (for some) of choice.

Highly recommended.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Sweeney and the Bicycles by Philip Salom

‘His own world is the past and for the past no phones are needed.’

Sweeney lives in Melbourne. He has a terrace house in Parkville, left to him by his grandmother. He also has a room in a run-down boarding house. Sweeney has an S shaped scar on the back of his head, and he steals bicycles. And, as the story unfolds, we learn how Sweeney acquired the scar and why he steals bicycles.

‘Time is and isn’t as we think. Sometimes it is hard to return.’

While Sweeney is central to the story, he is not the only significant character. Sweeney  starts consulting with Asha Sen, a psychiatrist, because of a brain injury he acquired after being bashed in prison. But while the brain injury causes several problems, the real damage to Sweeney was inflicted by his father years earlier. Dr Asha Sen, recovering from knee surgery, has some issues of her own to deal with in relation to her husband and stepson.

One day, on the tram with one of his fellow boarding house residents, The Sheriff, Sweeney meets two sisters – Rose and Heather. A fleeting contact to be sure, but one of significance.

‘The house is dark and still. A man living alone is a man in the shadows.

She’s fast. Her movement through the house is discovery, not navigation, it leaves him trailing behind her as if he is unfamiliar with his own home.’

Every person we meet in this story lives with the consequences of expectations, with memories, and fears. And everyone is (or becomes) aware of surveillance. Sweeney is more aware than most (and disguises his facial features as he steals bicycles). Dr Asha Sen’s husband, Bruce Leach, is obsessed with security and uses the data available from facial recognition technology quite comfortably … until he makes a discomfiting discovery.

The more Sweeney works with Dr Asha Sen, the more self-aware he seems to become, and the more comfortable with the world he occupies.

‘It has occurred to him, he says, that he chooses to be a pentimento. He is the under-image, like those revealed under the imagery, under the paint, of an artist’s canvas. The ghosts under the surface.’

I really enjoyed this novel. I was swept into a world of complicated and diverse people dealing with feelings that I recognise even if some of the issues are outside my experience. I admire the way Mr Salom brought his characters together, how people who seemed powerless were able (sometimes at least) to triumph.

‘Secrets are like nothing else in the world. Damage kept within us is so shameful we cannot tell, let alone explain, because we know that as soon as it’s heard, it’s judged’

So far, I have only read two of Mr Salom’s novels. I have added the others to my reading list.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

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