Pen Hanley

  • John Tesarsch's brilliant novel
    John Tesarsch’s brilliant novel

    John Tesarsch’s The Last Will and Testament of Henry Hoffmann (Affirm Press, 2014) is a masterpiece. I’ve reviewed a lot of books in the past twenty plus years, (in local magazines and 85 for The Canberra Times, and more recently in this blog) but I have never described a novel like that. This one deserves it. I simply could not put it down and I am in awe of the author’s mastery of the form.

    The novel deals with the theme of death as a catalyst for examining life – the past life, in this case with its extraordinary secrets, and life in the present for the survivors, who include the three children of Henry Hoffmann. When Henry unexpectedly dies they must deal with his idiosyncratic will.

    The eldest of Henry’s progeny, Eleanor, very bright like her father, is teaching at a boys’ school and trying to find the time to do her PhD. Sarah used to be a concert pianist and now simply immerses herself in her music, after suffering debilitating stage fright. Robbie is the black sheep whose real estate deals and secrecy have led him into financial woes and made his wife Carla very unhappy.

    Tesarsch’s first novel The Philanthropist (Sleepers, 2010), also a story of family secrets, was very readable and competent but this second one is lifted to another level. With its engaging and increasingly compelling plot The Last Will and Testament of Henry Hoffmann moves through the settings of Melbourne and to its north during the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, to Vienna during World War II and to contemporary San Francisco. The plot moves at a fast pace while simultaneously we gain a deeper knowledge of the characters.

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  • William Davis: forthright and funny and convincing

    In the 1990s I was a Research Assistant at the Australian National University. It was a time when some of my older male friends and ex-boyfriends began hitting their forties and whenever I ran into one of them he would start talking about his knee problems from old Rugby injuries. This happened several times within about a month. It was weird. And boring.

    I’d be on my way to Chifley Library or The Gods café when suddenly I’d be waylaid by the long, tedious tale of the knee injury, the different methods of diminishing the pain, and the impending surgery. They would be wearing some kind of knee bandage in blue or red. They would go on and on and on about their knees. With youthful callousness I called them (to my girlfriends later) The Knee Bores.

    You will be happy to hear, Dear Reader, that Fate delivered me the comeuppance I deserved for being so callous and superior. In due course, albeit in my fifties not forties, I too developed a knee problem, even though I had never played Rugby.

    Luckily for me, the Physiotherapist to the Royal Family, Sarah Key, rescued me. I heard her on the radio talking about walking barefoot along Prince Charles’ back. That got my attention. I went straight to the Uni. Coop Bookshop (at the University of Canberra where I was by then) and bought her book, The Body in Action (Allen & Unwin, 2006). (more…)

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    ‘62 people are as wealthy as half the world.’
    I haven’t been blogging lately because I took on two small writing jobs, and, like most writing jobs – big or small – they took longer than anticipated. Plus I was visiting my beautiful nieces and their progeny and returned late last week. But now the writing jobs are (nearly) finished and I’m back here.

    Finally we got a new fridge at our house. The previous one was an old biological specimen fridge that we got for free from a university biology/zoology department (Bozo at ANU) nearly ten years ago. Like most people I put stickers, postcards, photos and bits and pieces on the fridge, which I delete from and add to from time to time. When the new one came I took them off and culled them all for a fresh aesthetic start.
    One of the bits of paper held up by my wooden pear magnets was an article from The Sydney Morning Herald, 18 Jan. 2016. The headline says:

    ‘62 people are as wealthy as half the world.’

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  • As one who has digested and recommended Marie Kondo’s The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up (2 Nov ‘The life-changing magic of Marie Kondo’s book on the Japanese art of de-cluttering), I am pretty good at throwing away old pieces of paper and notes in the rubbish bin. But I do keep some stuff, for example, miscellaneous bits of scribble, other people’s descriptions I admire, and quotations, all of which I think of as ‘compost’ because out of these scraps I can be inspired to create a new piece of writing.

    One of the quotations saved is by Truman Capote (McCall’s November 1967):

    ‘To me, the pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music the words make.’

    I loved that description – inner music. We can get it by writing and by reading. The inner music we hear as readers is what is made by a particular writer’s style. It’s a joy to discover different pieces of music and to have the time to rediscover the pleasure of the inner music my own words make as I write fiction again.

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  • ‘Gosh it’s easy to write a cookbook. Well, it’s easy if your primary role is “quality control”, and all the actual work is done by seasoned professionals and my slave-driven wife,’

    writes David Gillespie in the Acknowledgements of his The Sweet Poison Quit Plan Cookbook (Melbourne, Viking, 2013, p. 199). He states that he ‘did practically nothing (other than eat pudding on a regular basis)’.

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    Having your (sugar-free) cake: two of David Gillespie’s books

    David Gillespie presents the facts about serious and complex subjects (how sugar makes us fat and exhausted and gives us chronic diseases like diabetes Type 2 and certain cancers) simply and clearly. Equally clear are his reasons why we should avoid vegetable oils. The facetious self-deprecating humour in his Acknowledgements quoted above is typical of his style, and at other times the mental dexterity with which he expresses himself is highly amusing.

    The highly unamusing fact is that food manufacturers well know how addictive (and cheap) sugar is, which means ever-escalating profits for them, so they are putting sugar in virtually everything on the supermarket shelves. It’s not just sweet things you need to avoid; it’s all the savoury things too. This means that if you do what Gillespie advises in his Eat Real Food (Viking, 2014), you will be okay. This book is written as simply and compellingly as all his others. The sugar-free recipes work well and taste good.

    The David Gillespie recipes in all his books – see www.howmuchsugar.com – are more consistently better than the ones in Sarah Wilson’s books, which you can see on. www.sarahwilson.com Many of Sarah Wilson’s recipes taste good but some are dodgy. While they look good in the photographs the taste and texture don’t always live up to their food-styled, gorgeously photographed visual aesthetics. I have a hunch about this.

    David Gillespie and his wife test their recipes under the severe conditions of catering for their six children, (a domestic kitchen in Brisbane catering for the palates of childhood, adolescence and the adults) while Sarah Wilson and her hip young Sydney-siders I Quit Sugar team, I’m willing to bet, have more money and more time and are more interested in creating quantity than quality so perhaps some recipes get a tick when they shouldn’t. That said, the Sarah Wilson ones that work (e.g., almond butter bark, I Quit Sugar, p.175) are wonderful, and it is of course a subjective thing, as you see with the positive and negative comments on her website about the same recipe.

    David Permutter’s Grain Brain (NY, Little, Brown and Co., 2013, p. 291) contends that gluten is also a cause of today’s escalating rate of chronic disease. Haven’t we been eating grains for thousands of years? Yes, but the food manufacturers have engineered the grains to contain a much higher concentration of gluten than previously, to give their products longer shelf life. Permutter maintains that today’s low fat, high grain and other carbohydrate diet is the origin of headaches, insomnia, anxiety, autism, depression, epilepsy, schizophrenia, ADHA, inflammatory diseases like arthritis, and dementia.

    Grain Brain: The surprising truth about wheat, carbs, and sugar – your brain’s silent killers contains evidence, recipes and case studies. You can get access to his latest research and recipes etc at www.DrPerlmutter.com

    This book is a controversial best-seller. Many disagree with his theories. His research is not expressed nearly as clearly as David Gillespie’s. The website quackwatch.com disagrees with his findings and Alan Levinovitz ( www.nymag.com/scienceofus.2015.06problems-with-the-grain-brain-doctor.html presents a detailed critique of his research. The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that sugar (the fructose half) is the worst thing that has happened to our health in the last two or three generations.

    An award-winning website about food and flavours is www.bizzylizzysgoodthings.com and it features Lizzy’s beautiful photography as well. She is an engaging writer and her recipes are well and truly tested, and they do work consistently well. Her recipes are not necessarily sugar-free or wheat-free, and neither are Jules Clancy’s – thestonesoup.com – but they are both healthy overall and quick, easy and reliable. My copy of Jules Clancy’s 5 Ingredients, 10 Minutes: Delicious, healthy recipes for tired and hungry cooks (Michael Joseph, 2013) is ingredient-spattered and book-marked all the way through – I use it when I’m tired and hungry or not – it really does take ten minutes and every recipe I’ve made is a winner.

     

  • The Guardian Weekly ‘Books of the Year’ (18-31 December this year) is where writers and critics present their favourite reads of the past year and it is a reliable guide to some great reading. You can also hear authors speak about their work on theguardian.com/books/series/books

    Popular choices of ‘Books of the Year’ were Ali Smith’s short story collection Public Library, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet and Colm Toibin’s Nora Webster. Kate Mosse recommends selected essays by women under thirty entitled I Call Myself A Feminist (Virago, 2015).

    The uplifting website www.brainpickings.org also lists favourite books of the past year. The first is the late Oliver Sacks’ On the Move: A Life.

    If The Guardian were to ask me, I’d recommend Clare Mackintosh’s I Let You Go (Sphere, 2014). The plot leaps into action from page one, gripping the reader until the end. After a tragedy, protagonist Jenna Gray leaves everything and moves to a remote cottage on the Welsh coast. The novel is written from the perspectives of several characters, in first, third and even second person. I don’t usually read crime novels except for the psychological thrillers of Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell’s nom de plume for her novels in that genre) but, like the Barbara Vine novels, I Let You Go has much more insight and psychological depth than your average crime novel.

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  • The picturesque town of Mallaig is on the west coast of the Scottish Highlands. I was waiting for a coffee at the Mallaig Tea Rooms when I saw a framed scroll on the wall above the little coal fire. It read:

    ‘These are times of more convenience but less time, more knowledge but less judgement, fast foods but slow digestion, tall men but short character, steep profits but shallow relationships.

    ‘It is a time when there is much in the window but nothing in the room.’

    The Dalai Lama.
    It was when I was travelling for six weeks between writing the text of Inspiring Australians and organising the book’s photographs. The quotation put me in mind of my book because a Churchill Fellowship enables the opportunity for time and expansion of thought, for slowly unfolding realisations and deepening rapports with overseas peers. Many Churchill Fellows told me that one thing they really treasured was the luxury of time to think. In the daily work world of back-to-back meetings and multi-tasking to meet competing deadlines there is little time to think.

    Time to think shouldn’t be a luxury. Time to think is a necessity.

    In the time since publication of my book, I have treasured my own time to think (about topics unrelated to my book). I’ve been cycling to the local library and coming away with an enormous pile of books to put in my basket, then riding home and devouring them. In one, Daniel Levitikin’s The Organized Mind: Thinking straight in an age of information overload (Viking, 2015) the author tells us that the brain is not wired to multitask and doing so increases our levels of cortisol and adrenaline. This overstimulates the ‘wrong’ parts of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, and causes foggy thinking, and sometimes aggressive and impulsive behaviour. If students watch TV while doing homework, the schoolwork information goes into the stratium, a region specialised for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organised and categorised in ways that make it easier to retrieve.

    Focusing on one thing reduces the brain’s need for glucose. Multitasking chews up glucose, causing ‘the brain to burn through its fuel so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even a short time. We’ve literally depleted the nutrients in our brain. This leads to compromises in both cognitive and physical performance.’ (The Guardian Weekly Feb. 2015, p. 27)

    Writer Norbet Platt said, ‘The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium.’ Of course the act of putting fingertips to keyboard, though not as pleasantly alliterative, does the same thing. So those of us who write blogs or journals or columns etc are doing the right thing in these times of having no time for reflection. It is our job to reflect. We must think in order to do our job properly. (And must try to in spite of those competing deadlines.)

    American writer Pat Conroy thinks that ‘blog’ is the ugliest word in the English language. But he has a blog (www.patconroy.com) and he uses it ‘as a way to sneak back to his writing without being noticed’.

    I thought that blog was the abbreviated combination of ‘biography’ and ‘log’ like a ship’s log but for a life (even if not aboard a ship). But no, apparently it is short for weblog. I hadn’t read Pat Conroy (Prince of Tides) in years, then my friend Bernadette recommended his memoir, My Reading Life (Random House, 2010), which is enjoyable, funny and rewarding. All Conroy’s life, books have been for him the portal to a wider world. He writes:

    ‘I have always taken a child’s joy in the painterly loveliness of the English language…. What richer way to meet the sunlight than bathing each day of my life in my island-born language, the one that Shakespeare breathed on, Milton wrestled with, Jane Austen tamed, and Churchill rallied the squadrons of England with?’ (p. 300-301)

    Winston Churchill was steeped in these writers, as well as Gibbon and the King James Bible, and he loved the English language as much as Pat Conroy does. Unfortunately, most Reports of Churchill Fellows for the last 15 or so years are not written in language found in books like these but in the corporate jargon we are so familiar with now. Churchill would blanch if he could read what is being done to his beloved language. Exceptions include Rifaat Shoukrallah on road safety, virtuoso recorder player Genevieve Lacey and Courtney Page-Allen (digitising 1,535 portraits of Australian soldiers of World War I). All Reports can be viewed on the Trust’s website: www.churchilltrust.org.au

    ‘If you don’t breathe through writing,’ wrote French writer Anais Nin, ‘if you don’t cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.’ Times have changed. Now our culture has plenty of use for the leaden and deceptive obfuscations of managerial language. But although it is everywhere, most people don’t want to waste time on this unreadable bilge so popular with politicians, bureaucrats and bankers. They want to read people who do what William Wordsworth long ago advised: ‘Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart’. That is what we should all be doing, in fiction or blogs, letters or reports, articles or cook books. (Look at Nigella Lawson’s books – a delight to read them.) If you write in plain English with an open heart like she does, and like her compatriots George Orwell and Winston Churchill did, you won’t go wrong.

  • photo(2)The National Association of Professional Organisers (U.S.) claims that we spend one year of our lives looking for lost items.

    Clearly, we would have more time to spend on what is important to us if we didn’t waste all that time on looking for stuff we’ve lost. What is important to me? Books, art (film, dancing, photography, food…), health and love; your list might be different, but simplifying your life will give you more time to spend on those things, whatever your priorities are.

    Courtney Carver’s ‘Be More with Less’ online course tells you how to do this. I subscribed at the beginning of this year. Even though I was often travelling to interview selected Churchill Fellows in my book Inspiring Australians when the webinars were on, you can download them later so I still gained much from the course.

    I was on the right track already, since I’d once lived for a long time in a one-bedroom flat and had lived before that in tiny rooms in Corin House and Toad Hall and Burton and Garran student accommodation at ANU. I’d learnt to keep possessions to a minimum so I could maximize two necessities: space and light, plus have a serene clutter-free life.

    Now I live in a three-bedroom house with a vast study but it’s still important to do what Thoreau advised: ‘Simplify! Simplify!’ And now it’s important to simplify not only one’s possessions but do it digitally too – something with which Thoreau did not have to contend. Courtney Carver’s course helps with digital simplification as well.

    Courtney Carver ‘worked too hard and slept too little’ and became sick, and now has created a saner, healthier life for herself. She shares how she does it on her www.bemorewithless.com site, plus she invented Project 333 – Google that and see how she minimizes her clothes. Whoahh! This is too extreme, even for me. My take on things is: If in doubt, throw it out. But I couldn’t restrict my clothes to 33 items because clothes are self-expression and a way to enjoy colour and texture, but on my body, not just on my floors and walls. But you can adapt the 333 method and swap it for a more realistic number, like 66 or 100.

    But the best thing of the whole course was her recommendation to read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese art of decluttering and organizing. (Berkeley, Ten Speed Press, 2014) This neat little book (translated beautifully by Cathy Hirano) is a gem, a delight. It will make you laugh. It makes me smile just to think of it. I’ve read a lot of these organizing-your-life books over the years and I’ve never seen one like this. It is original and profound. I give away lots of my books once I’ve read them but I won’t be parting with this one. It’s too precious.

    A couple of days ago I opened my Be More with Less email and there was a beautiful series of photos of North American lakes – a snow-covered path, a winter lake with grey satin water, misty pines … and the quotation was by one of my favourite American poets, Wallace Stevens: ‘Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.’ And I was just about to walk around my local one, Lake Burley Griffin!

    When I say ‘around’ I mean what we call the ‘Bridge to Bridge’ walk, which is about five kilometres. Takes about an hour. Walking does wonders for the mind as well as the body. On a long walk your subconscious will sort out problems and come up with a solution. Or the truth. Or at least a truth. You don’t do a PhD in a Postmodern department without being compelled to qualify ‘truth’! For example, the truth from whose perspective?

    From almost anyone’s perspective though, their lives would be improved by spending less time looking for lost things and thus having more time to spend on what is important to them.

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