Author: Jody Guerow

I’m not an academic, nor am I an expert or an authority on any particular subject. I’m just a person that gets excited about a good story in whichever format that comes to me and wants to share the experience. I love to read and I try to do the best I can to stay informed with the time that I have.

The Trauma Cleaner

By: Sarah Krasnostein

Review: This is a book that can shift the emphasis from empathy for to empathy with. It makes us question what defines a flawed person and whether there is such a thing? Is the ‘flawed person’ just a banal line used to grab attention and allow for a perpetual state of victimhood? Or is it merely a state of being for every one of us? Sarah Pankhurst is no victim. Her story is about awakenings both for Sarah and those that she touches and works with. It’s about the backwards and forwards journey towards those moments. It’s about the big battles that people face to get through each day and where they find their comfort and safety. As a reader, we’re challenged to an awakening of our own, one of real and unjudging compassion. Sarah opens our mind to what could be any one of us, while encouraging us to question societies progressiveness, or lack thereof.

Pages: 261

Genre: Memoir

Book Blurb: A woman who sleeps among garbage she has not put out for forty years. A man who bled quietly to death in his loungeroom. A woman who lives with rats, random debris and terrified delusion. The still life of a home vacated by accidental overdose.

Before she was a trauma cleaner, Sandra Pankhurst was many things: husband and father, drag queen, sex reassignment patient, sex worker, businesswoman, trophy wife…

But as a little boy, raised in violence and excluded from the family home, she just wanted to belong. Now she believes her clients deserve no less.

Sarah Krasnostein has watched the magnificent Sandra Pankhurst bring order and care to the living and the dead – and the book she has written is remarkable. It is not just the compelling story of a fascinating life; it is an affirmation that, as isolated as we may feel, we are all in this together.

Book Blurb Source: Krasnostein, S., The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman’s Extraordinary Life in Death, Decay & Disaster, Text Publishing, Melbourne, Australia.

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The Erratics

By: Vicki Laveau-Harvie

Review: Be it a book, film or theatre performance, I judge it on how it makes me feel. It’s not just entertainment I seek, it’s an emotional response that I want most of all. This can be the pleasure of undiluted joy and perhaps the excitement of having my curiosity tapped into, or even the provocation of overwhelming sadness. Laveau-Harvie’s memoir has the sheen of comic levity offering just the right amount of balm to her family’s story, it’s the abrasiveness and the toxicity of the destructive co-dependent relationships that really prickles. For some it may even prompt questions about the longer-term effects of our own familial ties and their residual effects, like those we see with the two sisters’ lives we glimpse into. It certainly is riveting, as all traumatic stories are.

Pages: 224

Genre: Memoir, Autobiography

Awards: Finch Memoir Prize 2018, The Stella Prize 2019

Reviewer: Jody

Book Blurb: Dark, sharp, blackly funny and powerful, this is memoir, wielded as weapon, with the tightly compressed energy of an explosive device.

‘We’ve been disowned and disinherited: there’s not changing it, I say. When something bad happens to them, we’ll know soon enough and we’ll deal with it together. I don’t realise it at the time, but when I say that, I imply I care. I imply there may be something to be salvaged. I misspeak. But I’m flying out anyway. Blood calls to blood; what can I tell you.’

This is a memoir about a dysfunctional family, about a mother and her daughters. But make no mistake. This is like no mother-daughter relationship you know.

When Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s elderly mother is hospitalised unexpectedly, Vicki and her sister travel to their parents’ isolated ranch home in Alberta, Canada, to help their father. Estranged from their parents for many years, Vicki and her sister are horrified by what they discover on their arrival. For years, Vicki’s mother has camouflaged her manic delusions and savage unpredictability, and over the decades she has managed to shut herself and her husband away from the outside world, systematically starving him and making him a virtual prisoner in his own home. Vicki and her sister have a lot to do, in very little time, to save their father. And at every step they have to contend with their mother, whose favourite phrase during their childhood was: ‘I’ll get you and you won’t even know I’m doing it.’

A ferocious, sharp, darkly funny and wholly compelling memoir of families, the pain they can inflict and the legacy they leave, The Erratics has the tightly coiled, compressed energy of an explosive device – it will take your breath away.

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My Year of Rest and Relaxation

By: Ottessa Moshfegh

Review: I experienced this book as a slow burner, physically. Frustrated and tense I struggled to find a reason to continue beyond the first half; its bleakness was suffocating. And then I saw something else, a reminder of a line I used only a few months back – “I wish there was something I could take that would make grief go away”. What initially felt like indulgent escapism became a book about re-calibration and – quite literally – a renewal of a mind and body. My appreciation became visceral, the metaphors made sense as life for the protagonist emerged through death. With prose that’s sharp, witty and strangely poignant, I too came out the other side – dare I say – rested and a little more restored.

Pages: 289

Genre: Literary Fiction

Reviewer: Jody

Book Blurb:A shockingly, hilarious and strangely tender novel about a young woman’s experiment in narcotic hibernation, aided and abetted by one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature. Our narrator has many of the advantages of life, on the surface. Young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in a apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents in college, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

This story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs, designed to heal us from our alienation from this world, shows us how reasonable, even necessary, that alienation sometimes is. Blackly funny, both merciless and compassionate – dangling its legs over the ledge of 9/11 – this novel is a showcase for the gifts of one of America’s major young writers working at the height of her powers.

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The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire

By: Chloe Hooper

Review: A search for answers often comes after a tragedy like Black Saturday bushfires on February 7, 2009. And having lived through Ash Wednesday in 1993, my memories are still deeply etched and vividly sensory. There was a disturbing level voyeurism to reconcile, but I knew I was in capable hands after reading Cloe Hooper’s previous non-fiction/true crime book ‘The Tall Man’ some years back. While some parts are a visceral experience to read, it’s Hooper’s neutrality, compassion and perception that are the balm.

Hooper’s book centres around the site of the Churchill fire where it was found to be the act of an arsonist. Each side of the story is recreated: the victims, the investigators, the lawyers, the community, the arsonists family and the arsonist himself. Hooper’s skills lie in the exploration of the complexities of context and the psychology of not just the individual but society. While it’s a harrowing recreation, Hooper doesn’t seek to blame, defend or justify, she researches and reports, leaving the reader to contemplate how and why.

Pages: 272

Genre: Non-fiction

Published: October 2018

Reviewer: Jody

Book Blurb: On the scorching February day in 2009 that became known as Black Saturday, a man lit two fires in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, then sat n the roof of his house to watch the inferno. In the Valley, where the rates of crime were the highest of n the state, more than thirty people were known to the police as firebugs. But the detectives soon found themselves on the trail of a man they didn’t know.

The Arsonist takes readers on the hunt for this man, and inside the strange puzzle of his mind. It is also the story of fire in this country, and of a community that owed its existence to that very element. The command of fire has defined and sustained us as a species – understanding its abuse will define our future.

A powerful real-life thriller written with Hooper’s trademark lyric detail and nuance, The Arsonist is a reminder that in an age of fire, all of us are gatekeepers.

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On Reading…

Reading is an exquisite gift, particularly when a book impacts you in such a way that it dents the soul. Not all books do this, yet they too have their place.

Coming from a family of predominantly non-readers I was fortunate to be indulged and never censored in my choice of reading material. Earliest memories are of the ‘Golden Books’ range from the supermarket. I still remember being devastated at the ending of ‘Frosty the Snowman’ while wishing I had a friend like ‘Casper the Friendly Ghost’.

My oldest friend Nat and I spent a few winters consuming the Trixie Beldon series. I still recall the method Trixie would use to memorise the details of a scene, at the time I was sure I too would need this skill when I became a detective. A love for the mystery genre took hold of Nat, while I went on to horror. In year seven there was Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot’. I was terrified, unable to sleep with the book cover facing up. I still love a psychological thriller be it a book or movie. When I need a quick fix, I pull out Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’. Old nursery rhymes and fairy tales hold a particular fascination and I’ll randomly open ‘Grimm’s Fairytales’ and marvel at the truly frightful scenes we read as children. As an adult, it’s probably the only short story form that I’m regularly drawn back to.

In 1991 I bought ‘American Psycho’ by Bret Easton Ellis; R rated, cellophane wrapped and found on the top shelf, I was curious. There’s still a bookmark in page 247. I just couldn’t go on, this represents real horror to me.

Before the library was built at my primary school, I would spend hours in the book room. Always alone as it was the size of a small walk-in- robe and only one person would be able to fit at a time. Here I found Charlotte Bronte’s ‘Jane Eyre’. I was captivated by the register, tone and momentum of the style even if I didn’t know it at the time. A master to be revisited.

Every now and then I’m drawn into the world of the self-help genre and Stephanie Dowrick’s ‘Finding Happiness’ is divinely positive and life affirming, living in my bedside drawer for whenever I want a fix. Aspects of Stephen Covey’s ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ have become part of my core. It’s my compound book, I absorb a little more every time I dip into it. However, it was Roald Dahl’s ‘James and the Giant Peach’ that rescued me when a junction in life rendered me unable to read for a year, allowing me to escape into the mind of a genius. Reading is so much about headspace at the time that occasionally a book chooses me, not I it. Such as it was with the cover of Catherine Therese’s ‘The Weight of Silence’. I still smile every time I see it.

I coveted Patrick White for years, yet he was a beast that eluded me until the ‘The Tree of Man.’ What sublime perfection. White fused pleasure on pleasure. While driving one day, my friend Sandy was reading some of her favourite passages, I didn’t want to reach our destination! I’m a note taker when I read. Across the page (always in pencil) you’ll find symbols, thoughts, ideas to follow up and underlined passages, I see it as my journey through a book. I almost gave up this for ‘The Tree of Man’ as just about every line needed annotating. I want a book to make me feel something, be it pain, sadness, anger, exhilaration or simple joy. White did all that.

Some years back I joined a cult book club and was introduced to science fiction, among them being the ‘The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’. I may not voluntarily revisit this genre but I’m glad I went there. Irvine Welsch’s ‘Trainspotting’ felt like pepper being thrown in my eyes with every line, yet it didn’t take long to consume me with its wit and humour.

When I need my faith in a great story and polished writing restored, I take refuge in the classics. It’s rocks like Leo Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’ or Victor Hugo’s ‘Les Misérables’ that I revisit in my mind often.

The robust debate and controversy of ‘The Slap’ by Christos Tsiolkas was the gift that kept on giving, months of lively discussions followed.

I almost finished the ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ trilogy, my thoughts mattered little as I was truly fascinated that a book could engage and consume conversations of so many men and women. Friends who I never knew to pick up a book were actually reading.

As an apartment dweller and regular traveller, the e-reader now has a firm place, but never for texts or reference material, or poetry, or Shakespeare! ‘On the Road’ by Jack Kerouac came to me as an app and it was an immersive, interactive and sensory experience with photographs and added commentary interspersed. I now have the bragging rights to ‘Moby Dick’. I tackled this monster on a road trip, alternating between the hard copy and an audio stream. Often, I pulled the car over to read alongside the audio, a fabulous tool to combat the density of some of the prose.

My first graphic novel was ‘The Great Gatsby’ by Nicki Greensberg, what a wondrous way to add a new dimension to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. Forevermore I will visualise Daisy as a strange newborn chick and Gatsby as the elusive sea horse.

Lionel Shriver’s ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’ was a physical experience. Hyperventilating and overcome by tears for some 20 pages, I was haunted for months. Such depth and quality of writing is like the undertow of the ocean, if you allow yourself to drift long enough it will eventually take you.

Brain clearing books are my own personal genre and at times I default to them. They don’t demand too much, they simply entertain with a story, offering the balm that we all need when our schedule gets a tad gruelling. Courtney, Picoult, Deaver, Beauman, and some more recent inductees being Moriaty and Harper.

Historical fiction is a fascinating way to passively learn. Dave Eggers, ‘What is the What’, delivered exactly what it said it would “At the heart of this astonishing, soul-wrenching novel is a true story of courage and endurance in the face of one of the most brutal civil wars the world has ever known” by providing an insight into the plight of Sudanese refugees minus the preaching works for me.

I’m not going to speculate what life would be like if I couldn’t read, there will always be a book, no matter what form it takes.  With blindness running in my family I went through a phase of toying with the idea of learning braille. However, reading takes many forms and audio editions are fine too. There’s Alan Rickman reciting Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 130’ -My Mistress Eyes, or Ralph Fiennes’s reading of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ and Noel Pearson’s eulogy to Gough Whitlam is among some of the most emotive speeches ever written. Technology is improving all the time, and someone will perfect the e-reader so that it doesn’t sound so automated and that’s saying nothing about what a pleasure it is to have someone read to you, I’ll take that if that’s my lot in later years!

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Quarterly Bookclub 7 – Wrap

NEXT MEETUP: Friday 14th June 2019

BOOK: ‘No Friend but the Mountains’ by Behrouz Boochani (translated by Omid Tofighan)

I have a dilemma. How do I write about a book that I don’t like? Do I write nothing at all? I’m torn because I take my hat off to anyone who has written a book, published or not. I haven’t. I’m awed by the sheer will and determination one must possess to complete such a project. Right now, I don’t have it. Perhaps I may never have it. Although like a lot of people some part of me believes that there’s a book in me somewhere, at some future time in my life. Who knows? And if there is, will I have the courage to put it out into the world? Because it’s courage and fortitude and resilience that’s needed to open yourself up to not just critique but also criticism. Maybe the answer is to simply not include those books I don’t connect with for whatever reason.

The space I’m in right now yearns for more kindness and generosity in this world. If I put something out to there, am I responsible for the effects of that? Even if those effects don’t find their way back to the subject of my words? Yes. I am.

Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m only going to talk about books that I do like. Perhaps that looks like a 3+ star rating. And, give respect to all that put their labour’s out there for the rest of us to make of them what we will.

So, given this, check out my review on Richard Powers ‘The Overstory’ (create link to blog post). What a popular choice this was for a bookclub read even if we hadn’t all quite made it to the end, but the consensus was that we would all finish. When you read a book about the human exploitation of the natural resource of trees, it’s hard not to think about the merit of buying hard copy books. Some of us are unlikely to embrace the e-reader movement because the time spent with a book is as much a tactile experience as it is an emotional and intellectual one and each of these contribute so much to the experience of reading. Then there are those of us that for practical reasons like the lack of bookshelf availability, the ability to customise the text size and simple convenience are starting to be drawn further into the e-book world. I for one, can add just a little bit of guilt to the mix of buying physical books after reading ‘The Overstory’, but there will always be exceptions!

One of the topics that we discussed was books that have made an impact on each of us. It was fascinating to not only hear our stories but to watch each other as we talked about these experiences, each person’s face gave away so much more than our words could have done on their own. As a follow-up I’ve written a piece called ‘On Reading…’ featuring a tribute to some of my memories with books that have made my reading life to date so vivid.

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Book Review: The Overstory

By: Richard Powers

Review:

The Overstory is nothing short of epic. The writing is original, insightful and challenging. I feel like I’ve been led on a journey through the forest of Powers mind, and it is a place of ‘fluid beauty’ (p.61). Like the central character – the trees – the storyline spirals out like annual growth rings, building layers of sublime narrative to merge the deep connections of humanity and nature. One of the many messages is that we need to listen with more humility and then perhaps we might be able to see.

‘The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story’ (p. 336). And Powers sure has delivered just that, a story that’s impossible not to be changed by.

Pages: 493

Genre: Literary Fiction

Awards: Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018

Reviewer: Jody

Book Blurb:

The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond:

An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling in a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A Hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing and speech impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another.

These four, and five other strangers – each summoned in different ways by trees – are brought together in a last violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest. There is a world alongside ours – vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

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Book Review: Unsheltered

By: Barbara Kingsolver

Review: I’m drawn to family sagas, and Unsheltered is just that. It interweaves the story of two families connected by the same house yet separated by 150 years. While not one of Kingsolvers finest, it’s passable and for me it fits into the ‘Brain Clearing’ category. Structurally, it alternates chapters between the two families, dedicating good chunks each and allowing for reasonably well developed characters, even if it is a tad repetitive at times. It’s certainly a worthy read if for nothing other than the historical references, particularly those relating to the theories of Charles Darwin and the public’s responses at the time.

Pages: 480

Genre:Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Brain Clearing

Published:November 2018

Reviewer:Jody

Blurb:

2016 Vineland

Meet WillaKnox, a woman who stands braced against an upended world that seems to hold normercy for her shattered life and family – or the crumbling house that containsher.

1871 Vineland

ThatcherGreenwood, the new science teacher, is a fervent advocate of the work ofCharles Darwin, and he is keen to communicate his ideas to his students. Butthose in power in Thatcher’s small town have no desire for the new world order.Thatcher and his teachings are not welcome.

Both Willa and Thatcher resist the prevailing logic. Bothe are asked to pay a high price fortheir courage. But both also find inspiration – and an unlikely kindred spirit– in Mary Treat, a scientist, adventurer and anachronism.

A testament to both the resilience and persistent myopia of the human condition, Unsheltered explores the foundations we build in life, spanning time and place to give us all a clearer look at those around us, and perhaps ourselves. It is a novel that speaks truly to our times.

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Book Review: All the Light We Cannot See

By: Anthony Doerr

Review: Filled with beautifully crafted and poetic passages, it’s one of the most absorbing books that I’ve read in a long time. The story weaves around the lives of two families, transcending the WW2 setting to capture such vivid imagery that it’s as mesmerising as it’s sublime with a touch of magical realism.

It’s filled with philosophical passages that made me pause, re-read and take a moment to allow them to subsume into my thoughts. There’s an energy about this book that captured me for the duration, a true gift to a reader.

Pages: 528

Genre: Literary Fiction, Magical Realism

Awards: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2015

Reviewer: Jody

Book Blurb: For Marie-Laure, blind since the age of six, the world is full of mazes. The miniature of a Paris neighbourhood, made by her father to teach her the way home. The microscopic layers within the invaluable diamond that her father guards in the Museum of Natural History. The walled city by the sea, where father and daughter take refuge when the Nazis invade Paris. And a future which draws her ever closer to Werner, a German orphan, destined to labour in the mines until a broken radio fills his life with possibility and brings him to the notice of the Hitler Youth.

In this magnificent, deeply moving novel, the stories of Marie-Laure and Werner illuminate the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.

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