Ocean Vuong’s first book, the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), circles obsessively around fathers. (Vuong’s violent father left soon after the family – grandmother, mother, father, son – arrived in Hartford, Connecticut, from Saigon via a refugee camp in the Philippines when Vuong was two years old.)
In its middle is a four-page poem called ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’, which opens like this:
Tell me it was for the hunger & nothing less. For hunger is to give the body what it knows
it cannot keep. That this amber light whittled down by another war is all that pins my hand to your chest.
After war, with violence and trauma in our bodies, what happens to love? How do we connect, body to body?
Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse (2019) is a wide-ranging examination of love, power, the perpetrators of domestic abuse and the systems that enable them. It won the 2020 Stella Prize, was made into a 3-part SBS documentary and is essential reading. Domestic abuse is a national emergency:
‘In Australia, a country of almost 25 million people, one woman a week is killed by a man she’s been intimate with. These statistics tell us something that’s almost impossible to grapple with: it’s not the monster lurking in the dark women should fear, but the men they fall in love with.’
Hill’s book is beautifully written, forensically researched, comprehensive and excellent. It puts domestic abuse in its historical context and canvasses a vast, complicated and ever changing terrain …
‘You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people.’
So writes Olivia Laing at the opening of The Lonely City, which I came to at a particularly lonely moment in my own life: 2020, when all the casual dates, spontaneous beers, snap decisions to eat at my corner bar vanished, all suddenly forbidden by Sydney’s Covid-19 lockdown regulations.
Laing’s opening pages, where she introduces her subject and her own uncomfortable immersion in it, reverberate with such raw pain and fathomless need I found them almost too distressing to read. But I was soon swallowed by her mesmerising prose and fluid meditations on being shockingly alone in the streets and sublets of New York City.
With its themes of climate change in the immediate present and the mostly thankless emotional labour of women, Jenny Offill’s Weather feels uncomfortably close to home in 2020, a year when the domestic realm has become newly prominent – and Covid 19 has thrown the most urgent issue of our time, climate change, into the background of the news cycle and conversation.
Weather quietly animates these questions – the ungraspable heft of climate change, the weight of caring for others – through the daily round of its narrator, Lizzie Benson, in her demanding roles as university librarian, mother, wife, daughter, sister, friend, neighbour and paid email correspondent for her former professor turned futurologist. Her only release from the pressure of these many competing demands is the prospect of an affair.
Anne Boyer’s The Undying is one of the most extraordinary books I’ve ever read. I read it so slowly: it took me from early April until the end of June. Boyer is a poet and her prose is dense and resonant as poetry. It’s so loaded with … meaning? Undoing of meaning?
That this book is impossible to race through is one of its great virtues. In this and many other ways, it’s a perfect text for pandemic 2020: it forces you to slow down, to be deeply attentive and considerate, and, in particular, it brings home to you the fierce reality of a body in pain – and of the life-saving and life-destroying powers of the modern medical and pharmaceutical industries, their ruthless, violent, cost-minimising service to late capitalism in this age of digital media, data and screens.
How different this year looks from the one I sketched onto the calendar on the wall above my desk in January. I was supposed to be giving a keynote in Oslo in March and speaking at a sustainability conference at Yale the following week, as well as speaking at various local writers’ festivals about the new edition of Six Capitals. Needless to say, all conferences and festivals have been postponed indefinitely.
The best thing about the cancelled Oslo-Yale trip was that in preparing for Oslo I read my first Norwegian novel in at least a decade: Vigdis Hjorth’s A House in Norway (2014).
I’m happy to say that a new, fully revised and updated paperback edition of Six Capitals is being published in May 2020 by Allen & Unwin. It seems very timely.
As I write we’re getting stark lessons in how important our communities and beautiful green and blue places are. We must value them in our economic, accounting, financial and legal systems. The new edition of Six Capitals updates the story of four movements that are designed to do just that - to value people and the planet.
Following the death of poet Les Murray on Monday I’ve been recalling an afternoon I spent with him sitting on the edge of the pier at Walsh Bay talking about poetry and life, his obsession with words, his bouts of depression, his experience of ‘erocide’ and abhorrence of mobs. We met up after a session at the 2005 Sydney Writers’ Festival so I could interview him for Good Reading magazine, but our conversation ranged far and wide until the sun was low in the sky, well beyond the assigned hour. He was on song, ebullient, overflowing with words. Here’s the story I wrote for Good Reading, August 2005.
Welcome to my new blog, where I’ll be writing about books I’m reading, art I’m seeing and other meanderings. My last book (Six Capitals) put me in touch with rich and powerful men and women who wanted to care about the natural world and the wellbeing of people, but their thinking seemed to default to returns on financial investments, profits and economic growth. It was as if they could imagine no other way. I’m partly grateful to have had the opportunity to have gone so deep into the belly of the beast of global capitalism, it was certainly clarifying - and partly appalled that I got lost there for so long. Perhaps I spoke the language of mainstream economics too well.
