Aussie Author Book Review No 8 - Belinda Alexandra's Silver Wattle plus author interview.

I've just finished reading Belinda Alexandra's Silver Wattle. It didn't take me long as I was rivited! I love her emotive style of writing. She leads me right into the story through her wonderful settings and characters. I loved her two previous novels - White Gardenia and Wild Lavender and have had Silver Wattle sitting on my bookshelf for months.

Belinda brings her love of other cultures to her books, and Silver Wattle begins in glorious Prague. It’s the story of two Czech sisters, Adela and Klara, whose nefarious stepfather murders their mother – and plans to murder them too so that he and his fancy woman can have their inheritance.


The girls flee to Sydney, Australia to live in safety with their uncle and his wife, an Indian who had been saved from committing sete. Indian culture and early Australian bigotry is explored through Ranjana. Things go smoothly enough for awhile. Klara is a talented but highly strung pianist, while Adela turns out to be a gifted photographer who eventually makes a career in film. There is an interesting sub theme about the early days of the film industry in Australia and how American distributers sabotaged the development of Australian cinema which was flourishing, but Adela marries one of these distributers (a) because he clandestinely supports her career and (b) because Beastly Beatrice cons Adela’s beloved Dr Philip into marriage and Adela is on the rebound. Unrequited love is a powerful theme throughout the novel.

Adela's character is the most interesting I think. Belinda Alexandra draws on her own love of wildlife to paint a picture of a character deeply moved by native animals (she raises a pet possum that she plucked from a dead mother's pouch) and wildlife is the major recurring theme in her photography. In real life, the author is a volunteer rescuer and carer for the New South Wales Wildlife Information Rescue and Education Service (WIRES.)

Alexandra keeps the tension going throughout the novel and I couldn't put it down. There were so many mysteries to be solved...

I'm re-posting an author interview from auslit. If you like the sound of this author, read on...
 
Belinda Alexandra – Author Interview

Posted on October 4, 2010 by auslit

For those not familiar with your fiction writing, how would you describe it?
Sweeping, epic stories usually with historical backgrounds. I’m very interested in how massive historical events such as wars impact on the individual lives of my characters. Each story is a journey of endurance, courage, love, tragedy and triumph. My style is clean cut with an eye for sensuous detail and a touch of magic realism.
You have depicted a number of early to mid twentieth century settings in your novels, from the border region of Japanese occupied Russia and China during World War 2 in White Gardenia to provincial France at the outbreak of the war in Wild Lavender, to 1920s Sydney in Silver Wattle, to Tuscany during Mussolini’s rule of Italy in Tuscan Rose. What kind of research do you do for your novels?
Apart from the academic research to understand the history of those times, I pore over as much first hand material as possible – almost like an actress preparing for a part. I read the newspapers, learn the language of the culture I am writing about, read the interior design magazines, popular novels of the day and listen to the music. I even research cookbooks of the country and era to make sure any recipes given are true to the times. For Wild Lavender I learned to dance the tango, which is how I ended up meeting my husband.
You have written, “I’d studied modern history for my HSC but had been bored mindless by the endless essays on the political causes for war. I was interested in the impact these catastrophic world events had on individual people.” What advantages, in terms of storytelling, does concerning yourself with particular characters offer over trying to make your characters symbolise political ideas?
It’s very important to me that my characters live and breathe authenticity – that they are never wooden. Therefore I do spend time focusing on their particular beliefs and mindsets so everything they do and say (even when they contradict themselves) makes sense to their point of view of the world. I obviously have very passionate ideas about world peace, the nature of human beings and animal welfare and some of my characters do too … but as I don’t have all the answers myself and am constantly learning, I put my characters on a search for their own truths. This way they can be inspiring (or dreadful) but they are always human – as opposed to one-dimensional characters voicing political points of view.
Who is one of your favourite fictional characters, and what makes them stand out for you?
Sydney Carton from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. I first read that book when I was 16 years of age and the ability of Carton to transcend life and death through love made a huge impact on me.
You have written, “The end of my novels always comes to me first – I see the end of the story and then I have to work out who these characters are and how they all got to the position they are in.” Could you give us an overview of how you worked back from the ending to develop the story for one of your novels?
This is a bit tricky to do without spoilers. But I can say that working this way gives my work a sense of narrative drive. I see a character that has been through a lot, who has learned something very important, on whom truth and knowledge weigh heavily … and I have to answer what’s happened to them and how they got there.
If you could attend your ideal 2-day fiction writing workshop next weekend, what would that involve?
Not doing any work, I need a rest! Seriously, I love improving my technique and although I do spend time working on exercises most of my improvement comes from studying books where the story grabs me from the opening sentence and gives me plenty of ‘ah-ha’ moments by expressing life through the characters. But my style always has to be my own … so my ideal weekend would be talking to other fiction writers about life, about what inspires them and absorbing the energy that I get from being around other creative minds, but basically being left to work on my style and technique on my own.
Do you read much fiction by Australian authors, and do you have some favourites?
I am always hanging out for the next Kim Wilkins and Kate Morton novels. I love how their stories unfold. I have always admired the styles of Helen Gardner and Drusilla Modjeska. Their styles are different to mine – I often find Gardner’s work a challenge to my vision of beauty, but that’s good. It’s always good to be challenged.
What is the one piece of advice you would most like to offer for new fiction writers?
That good writing is all in the rewriting – whether you do that revision on paper or in your head. Keep working and layering a scene until it is just there so clearly before you in every sensual detail. A scene that breathes with life has a lot of thought behind it, whether conscious or subconscious.
What is next for your fiction writing?
I am constantly challenging myself to become a better and better storyteller. I’m currently working on a novel set during the Spanish Civil War.

I, for one, can't wait to read it.
Click on the kangaroo in my sidebar to read more Aussie Author Reviews.

Aussie Author Review No 5 - Lovesong, by Alex Miller

Aussie Author Book Review: Lovesong, by Alex Miller Time for another Aussie Author Review. Today my rave is about the great Aussie author, Alex Miller. I must admit I read my first Miller novel only a few months ago, loved it, then was pleased to find that Miller has written many more novels. Excellent. Beautiful.

She said nothing to his earnestness, his desire to impress her with his belief, his urgent need to acknowledge between them a binding commitment. She was thrilled to hear it on his lips. But it was too much. It was too soon. It weighted her down. She wanted to hear it and she didn’t want to hear it. What she wanted was to laugh with him. To run and play and hide with him, the way children play and hide and tease each other. This story is at once exotic and homely, telling of the sweetness of love and the sometimes awful cost of it. Sabiha is content working in their small Tunisian cafe in Paris, serving their regular clientele of North African immigrant workers. But when an Australian tourist, John, stumbles upon the cafe, her world begins to change. Soon deeply in love, the pair are married and John becomes part of Sabiha’s world. All that will complete their happiness is for Sabhia to bear the child she has always known she will have. But when the child does not come, a tragic series of events unfolds. In Australia several years later, an aging writer, Ken, meets the couple and their young daughter at the cafe they open in Carlton. Ken is intrigued by the family, and especially by the sorrow he sees in Sabiha’s eyes, and is drawn into their story when John seeks him out as a confidante. Lovesong is a beautiful story of love, loss and passion. Interwoven with Sabiha and John’s story are glimpses of Ken’s story, past and present. With its vigorous undercurrents of melodrama, its tides of sentiment, it certainly approaches the condition of song, perhaps of opera. At its core is one darkly gorgeous woman's inner music, her private pain. It is no ordinary love story but, in a most rewarding way, it is a conventional novel, a genre traditionally rooted in the struggle between desire and constraint .As the title suggests, the story is a smooth as one of the songs which Sahiba sings to her customers, carrying readers through the years and twists of the story and leaving them thinking long after the final note is sung. "A magical tale ... A classical shape and tenor, like a de Maupassant tale fleshed out. And an interesting ending, making the author so deeply complicitous. A little flick like a master calligrapher makes when they lift the brush after a perfect, single stroke." —David Brooks Romance and desire, longing and solitariness, transience and creativity – Alex Miller does it so well. Beautiful. Well worth adding to your reading list. Have a good week, Click on the 'roo for more Aussie reviews. Denise

Aussie Author Challenge, Review No 2

 Book review: The Spare Room, by Helen Garner.

The Spare Room by much-lauded Australian author, Helen Garner, begins with a quote from Australian novelist Elizabeth Jolley: ‘It is a privilege to prepare the place where someone else will sleep.’ This quote quieted my spirit, as did the description of Helen preparing a room for her soon-to-arrive terminally ill friend Nicola, before throwing me into what is a very intimate examination of the burden imminent death can put on the living.

The Spare Room didn’t read like a work of fiction; it seemed a factual account of two friends tested beyond endurance. Some wags have said that Helen Garner has published her diaries and called it a novel. There's some truth in this as I’ve since learned that the writer Helen Garner had nursed a terminally ill friend. Maybe that is why The Spare Room is not at all sentimental; rather it’s cruelly down to earth, a tide that surges between tenderness and brutal truth as for three harrowing weeks the women battle with each other.


When her bohemian friend Nicola arrives, weak and ill, Helen is launched into nursing care. She puts her life on hold and at first pretends to share Nicola's hopes for a miracle cure. Nicola has come to undergo a three-week program of what Helen considers quack treatments.


On seeing the clinic, Helen’s description is telling: it ‘is painted a strange yellow, the color of controlled panic.’ She keeps her murderous anger to herself while seeing her friend naked in an ‘ozone sauna’ while charlatans chatter about the miracle of vitamin C injections which ‘sort of scoop the cancer cells out of your body.’ Nicola laughs at Helen's skepticism and explains that the devastation done to her body is ‘only the vitamin C savaging the tumors and driving them out.’ I, as a reader, think Helen is somewhat harsh – if you are terminally ill with no hope, surely you are permitted to look for a cure that may be illusory, yet offers some little hope.


The Spare Room is powerful. The illness of Nicola, the anger of Helen – it is all over quickly, a few weeks gone by in a few reading hours. Helen shares insights on death: ‘It leaches out virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love.’ She is so honest in the telling.


Carers in our society are usually portrayed as saintly, but Helen doesn’t hide her irritation at taking on the role; having her life disturbed, often making interjections about trips she must take. Nicola’s refusal to face reality and the impact this has on those around her is told very honestly, not a saint in sight.


This novel will haunt me for years for the things that may be ahead – illnesses of loved ones, friendships tested, loneliness, frustration, anger. Maybe there will be a house with a spare room I will be setting up, or perhaps someone will be setting one up for me.


As well-known Australian media personality, Derryn Hinch, says as his sign-off line each day on his radio program – ‘That’s Life.’

For more Aussie Book Reviews, go here.

I first published this review on Bookersatz, where you'll find lots of excellent reviews of all genres.