Detective fiction
Arnaldur Indridason - Arctic Chill
Arnaldur Indridason - Voices
Stieg Larsson - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Asa Larsson - The Savage Altar
P.D. James - Death in Holy Orders
Karin Fossum - Black Seconds
Donna Leon - The Girl of His Dreams
Hakan Nesser - The Mind's Eye
Alison Goodman - Killing the Rabbit
Dorothy Johnston - Eden
Shane Maloney - Sucked In

Other fiction
C.K. Stead, The end of the century at the end of the world
Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost
Alex Miller, Journey to the Stone Country
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders

Middle East
Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the present
Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: notes on a vanishing landscape
Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: an everyday occupation
Neve Gordon, Israel's Occupation

Travel writing
Geert Mak, Amsterdam (for the author it should probably be 'history')
Penelope Green, See Naples and Die
Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

History
Eric Hobsbawm - An Interesting Life
Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China
Ray Jones and Joe Lubow, Disasters and Heroic Rescues: true stories of tragedy and survival in California
Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli
Milton Osborne, Before Kampuchea
Drusilla Modjeska, Stravinsky's Lunch
Stanley M. Burstein, The Reign of Cleopatra
Noel Olive, Enough is enough: a history of the Pilbara mob

Political economy
Pierre Bordieu - The Social Structures of the Economy
Paul Krugman - The Conscience of a Liberal
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine

I went to the office yesterday and, because the campus has closed down for the holidays, walked over to the shopping centre for lunch. Then of course I did a tour of Borders. They have a lot of stuff, but only in the most popular genres, so I basically just went there to see what new detective stories were in stock. I came away with two and sat up most of last night reading the Icelandic one. It was a good story about immigration, racism, adolescence and bad weather.

To cheer myself up I read Moll Flanders. What an interesting book!

It doesn't have any chapters, just goes on and on in a stream of consciousness for more than 300 pages. Without clear breaks it was very hard to put down!

Enough is enough: a history of the Pilbara mob, by Noel Olive (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2007)

A colleague of mine was giving out autographed copies of this book by his father to people he thought might be interested. The author-father learned about the Pilbara through his work as a lawyer on the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in the late 1980s and spent some time in the 1990s working as "co-ordinator" for one of the Aboriginal communities in the area.

The Pilbara is 1600 km north of Perth. The first white settlers arrived to set up pastoral ventures in 1863 and the history from then on is pretty shocking. A difference from the Israeli case in the last book that I read, is that at first the colonists made no attempt to separate the indigenous population from their land. In fact they needed the population to work the land. The Aborigines stayed on, in slave-like conditions, because the work enabled them to stay in contact with their land. However, if they happened to get fed up enough to try to leave, they would be brought back in chains.

In 1946 they struck. Two Aboriginal elders and a white man collaborated in organizing the strike (they planned it in great secrecy over a four year period!) and the white man helped striking workers to earn a living from mining. This in turn enabled them to buy some pastoral properties in the 1950s and, by providing some choice in the means of living, forced the owners to start paying wages.

The mining boom started in the 1960s and separation of the people from their land began in earnest as the Pilbara became well and truly globalized. The process was interrupted temporarily by the High Court's Mabo decision in 1992, followed by Wik in 1996. The first of these over-turned the concept of terra nullius, the second provided opportunity for shared title and shared usage to be established. The state and federal legislatures moved fairly quickly to nullify any implication that might lead to Aboriginal self-determination. Nowadays, as always, living means surviving.

The style of the book is a bit annoying. It's one of those history as a series of facts books and, perhaps because Olive is a lawyer, it is a book of advocacy rather than analysis. The facts hit you in more or less chronological sequence, but without much apparent rationale (other than moral outrage that is). The title is also wrong (and has been changed in subsequent editions) because it is not in fact a history of the Pilbara Mob ('Mob' in this context means Aborigines). Olive reproduces a little material from interviews he did and describes a tiny bit of local culture, but it is actually a story of white settlement in the region.

This passage, quoted from another book,* made me want to go there:

Western Australia's Hamersley Range sprawls across the ancient Pilbara plateau like a tribal scar, raised and livid. Rivers have torn open its flanks and iron-rich gravel spills like dried blood over the plains. Dusted with green-gold spinifex and sprinkled with white-stemmed eucalypts, the Hamersleys display colour with a savagery that borders on the surreal. It is a landscape unlike any other on Earth.

A walk into one of the winding gorges does nothing to dispel the feeling of unreality. Smooth pavements and sheer walls, composed of neat rectangular ironstone blocks, create the illusion of a rusting city. Water slides across terraces and chatters down stone steps into deep, still pools, shaded by giant fig trees and native pines, and birdsong echoes eerily. Geologically, this walk represents a step backward in time of almost 2.5 billion years. It is a journey that leads to the heart of a biological event that reworked the face of the Earth and changed the course of its history.

(I don't know what this biological event was, but I do know that people who are astrobiologists, interested in the origins of life, go up there to dig about.)

* The Voyage of the Great Southern Ark by Reg Morrison (according to Olive) or Maggie Red Morrison or Maggie and Reg Morrison or Reg and Maggie Morrison (according to Google). I need to get hold of a copy to find out who is the true author!!!

ETA: National Library catalogue says Reg and Maggie.

A summary of the argument goes like this:

• Israel has always intended its occupation of the West Bank to be permanent, but has fudged this by using so-called 'temporary' measures and acting arbitrarily. This gave Palestinians the illusion that the occupation might one day go away.


• The early stages of the occupation were characterized by a policy of 'normalization' stemming from the 'colonization principle'. The occupying authority attempted to improve the economic welfare of the population and to modify their behaviours towards acceptance of Israeli rule.


• However, this was done without accepting Palestinians into the Israeli demos. In fact the Israeli strategy (as with other colonial strategies) was to separate the Palestinians from their land and resources, especially water. Palestinian people were thus administered in one way and their land and resources in another (i.e. by a policy of seizure and annexation).


• This was a major contradiction in the mode of control implemented by the occupying power since it succeeded in eliminating class and other divisions among Palestinians and fomenting the nationalist movement that erupted in the first intifada in 1987.


• Israel responded to the first intifada by reorganizing its power in the OT. It brought in an external group that had little connection to the leadership of the intifada in order to put an end to the uprising. The Palestinian Authority was established as a means of outsourcing control over the occupied population. The PA was then deprived of the resources that had previously be supplied by Israel to manage things like health, education and other infrastructure, but it was massively enabled to expand its police and bureaucracy. Together with the cutting off of access to jobs in Israel, this made employment in the OT dependent on PA patronage.


• The delegitimization of the PA came about not through its corruption (though that certainly existed), but as a result of the structural features of Israel's management of the occupation through outsourcing of control.


• These structural features of the occupation also explain the rise of Hamas.


• There has been a major change in Israel's mode of control over the OT coinciding with Oslo and the second intifada - namely the shift from the 'colonization principle' to the 'separation principle'. Israel no longer cares what happens to Palestinians. The rules of engagement have changed so that Israel employs much more violence and more lethal forms of violence. It ignores not only international law, but its own laws (not that these were ever really enforced). The politics have shifted from the politics of life (traditional colonial 'mission civilisatrice') to the politics of death.


• The one thing that hasn't changed, however, is the separation of the population from the land and resources. Israel will continue to annex the land. The Gaza model (of an open air prison controlled at the borders and from the air) will become the model for the Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank.

Things Gordon doesn't discuss.

• What will happen to the colonization principle within Israel itself? So far it seems to have been quite successful in blunting Palestinian nationalism there.


• He describes the rise of Hamas as a tragedy for those aspiring to secular democracy in the region, but there's nothing about the religious fundamentalist trend in his own country, not to mention Zionism itself. It seems to me to be an oxymoron to talk about a secular Jewish state. (like Judaism is something other than a religion?). And how can you talk about a democracy that excludes the native population?

I think the book is a very powerful argument, but it needs to go back a step to look at the origins of this occupation in the logic of the Zionist project.

The term sui generis, reminds me rather a lot of terra nullius - a term that was successfully used by British colonists in Australia to pretend that there was nobody here before them. They're similar in the sense that when you're establishing a colony by force you really need to find a suitable concept that makes you feel comfortable about destroying the rights of the colonized.

Immediately following the war... [military advocate general Colonel Meir Shamgar] advised Israel to rethink its position vis-à-vis international law. Together with a number of other officials, he formulated a policy that rejected the applicability of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention - the most important humanitarian law pertaining to the occupation of conquered territories and their civilian population - to the OT. Shamgar's rationale was that the West Bank and Gaza Strip should not be considered occupied territories because the two regions had been seized by Jordan and Egypt during the 1948 War and thus had never been an integral part of a sovereign state. Consequently, he maintained that the West Bank and Gaza Strip should be considered "disputed" rather than occupied areas; they were, he claimed, sui generis.

Shamgar's focus on the status of the land ... rather than the population (with national rights to self-determination) was, as Lisa Hajjar cogently observes, a strategic legal maneuver to separate the land from its inhabitants. (p. 26)

Reading about the system of surveillance and permits that was put in place within weeks of the 1967 war, the word that most immediately comes to mind is 'Stasi'.

The [carrot and stick] metaphor's inadequacy, however, results from the fact that it assumes a space, indeed a fairly large space, devoid of all power relations. Israel, according to this metaphor, enabled Palestinians to live their lives without interference so long as they behaved well. The carrot and stick were used only when Israel wanted to either encourage or discourage the Palestinians from acting in certain ways. Power, according to the metaphor, is reduced to visible acts of intervention. In reality, however, the grid of controlling apparatuses and practices employed to manage the population was so widespread that it saturated every aspect of Palestinian life, leaving no space untouched. All facets of daily life within the territories were continuously meddled with, acted upon, and shaped, often in order to produce and channel the energy of the inhabitants in directions that Israel considered conducive to its own interests. (p. 46)

*The author, Neve Gordon, is a senior academic at Ben Gurion University, Beer-Sheva. More later.

As I wrote a while ago, this is a distressing book to read. The walk through the city of Hebron is truly appalling. Only in the final chapter does the gloom begin to lift. I don't know if Makdisi is over-optimistic; that is, I don't know if he is really building a whole movement out of just a few instances, but I certainly think he is right about the direction in which things are going and must eventually go. Israel is literally hoist on its own petard; the policies it has implemented, especially over the 4 decades since 1967, will ultimately destroy the Zionist project.

In far too much media coverage, especially in the United States, the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis ends up being reduced simply to sheer violence, and in particular to those forms of violence that lend themselves in one way or another to televisual spectacle. This has the effect not only of decontextualizing the violence of both sides, but also overshadowing, even displacing, the much less visible but equally deadly effects of the Israeli apparatus of bureaucracy and control in the occupied territories, which by its nature does not lend iteself to televised images (unless you can imagine a five-hour video sequence of a man standing in line). p. 268

Hamas is seen [in the US] as part of a regional conspiracy of unacceptable "extremism" rather than as the almost inevitable product of forty years of military occupation. 269

Writing about the election of Hamas in 2006, he quotes Khaled Meshaal:

While we are keen on having friendly relations with all nations we shall not seek friendships at the expense of our legitimate rights. We have seen how other nations, including the peoples of Vietnam and South Africa, persisted in their struggle until their quest for freedom and justice was accomplished. We are no different, our cause is no less worthy, our determination is no less profound and our patience is no less abundant. 272

The object of faith that Hamas held out to Palestinian voters, in other words, was not Islam, but Palestine itself. 272

Which Israel was Hamas asked to recognize, the UN partition of 1947? the outcome of the 1948 war? the outcome of the 1967 war, the annexation of Jerusalem, the territory enclosed by the Wall. Israel itself has never declared its boundaries. (see below)

Reality "on the ground" means that a genuinely independent Palestinian state has already become a geophysical impossibility.

two-thirds of [Palestinians] according to a poll recently conducted by Birzeit University in the West Bank - are calling for an end to the structural distinction betwen Jews and non-Jews and the foundation of a single democratic and secular state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for all citizens, regardless of their religious beliefs. 282

Like-minded Israelis in coalition Palestinians e.g. in the demonstrations against the Wall at Bilin

the aim of these peaceful reformers is not the destruction of the state, let alone its people, but rather the stripping away of forms of privilege and racism that are incompatible with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights... 282

If neither people's former ideal will be realized - if the Palestinians will never recuperate Palestine as it was before the arrival of Zionism, and Israelis will never realize a purely Jewish state - they can at least put aside their two impossible ideals for the sake of a common future. 287

Olmert in November 2003:

We don't have unlimited time. More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution, because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against 'occupation' in their parlance, to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle - and ultimately a much more powerful one.292

Olmert in November 2007, straight after Annapolis:

If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished. 292

The one-state solution was put into effect in 1967, when Israel captured what had remained of Palestine after the 1948 War." 294

Israel has never officially accepted that the West Bank (let alone East Jerusalem, which it claims to have annexed) is occupied territory. It denies that the Geneva Conventions apply there. It has ignored decades of UN Security Council Resolutions....When it even talks about relignquishing parts of the West Bank, it employs the language not merely of 'wrenching concessions' but also of 'generosity'... By definition, however, it is impossible to be 'generous' in returning something that is not one's own. 294-5

My goodness the Swedes are a gloomy lot! I just finished Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, all 533 pages of it (it took several sittings). It starts in territory that I sort of know - financial scandals in a country in which people hardly seem to feel, let alone exhibit, real passion - and ends up with squalid insanity, extreme violence, sexual abuse and Nazism. There is a clever tension in this book. On the one hand, there is the cradle-to-grave security of Swedish Social Democracy (what the right calls the 'nanny state') which can remove people's freedom, particularly those who are seen to be in need of 'nannying'. On the other hand, there is a dark underbelly of a society which allows the rich and powerful to exercise their freedom with relative impunity (not sure that I approve of at least one character's resolution of this problem). One reason for the latter may be the failure to de-nazify after the war - despite it's official neutrality, Sweden had a lot of Nazi supporters and, despite 32 straight years of post-war Social Democratic government, they have remained an active minority. The neutrality may have allowed Swedes to forget about their own contribution to the Nazi war effort, precisely because the country also accepted large numbers of refugees from Nazism. I think they didn't really begin to have a debate about this until the assassination of Olaf Palme, when people started to talk about the irrationality underlying the rational surface. Larsson's book reflects this unease and the questioning of the Social Democratic hegemony that began at the same time. It is also a book about violence against women in a society that has the most emancipated women in the world. Always the two sides of the coin.

The solution to the mystery is pretty obvious from the start - so obvious that you think it must be a red herring - although in the end the mystery that we started with is perhaps not the main point; instead the investigation of the mystery uncovers something else. Actually there are three more or less parallel plots. There is an implausible section set in Australia (on a sheep farm in a desert where there are no sheep, only cattle). He could have researched that a bit better!

There are some irritating glitches in the translation. In the first part square metres and degrees Celsius are translated into square feet and Fahrenheit (for the US market). Later they slip back into square metres, but spaces become implausibly large (e.g. office spaces of hundreds of square metres per person) or the F or C are no longer mentioned so you don't have any idea how cold it really is.

Apparently Larsson delivered 3 novels to his publisher and then died. The next one will be out in English early next year and I'm sure I'll read it.

Another Donna Leon story. This one has an unusual structure in which you get drawn first of all into a story that turns out to be an almost complete red herring. This would be very clever except that I'd read the blurb on the back and kept wondering if I was reading the right book. It isn't until you're more than a third of the way in that you get to the bit where they find the dead girl and it is, after all, the right book. Leon writes stories that provide quite up-to-date commentary on Italian political life without actually mentioning names. But there are some silly touches - for example, the police receive a 911 call, though in Italy the emergency number is 113, or 112 which has become more of an international emergency number.

The British use 999, although they're now switching to 112 as well. 999 always struck me as quite irrational because on the old circular dialling phones 9 was the second last number. In Australia we use(d) 000 which was, at least, the last number on the dial if you happened to be trying to dial in the dark. On the other hand, 111 would be more rational as it also took considerably less time to dial. So I have no idea why 112 is the most commonly used number. /digression

As usual, Leon's story gives a nice sense of the local scenery, food, daily habits of Venetians, etc, and the ever increasing pressure from tourism. Commissario Guido's reading this time seems to be mostly Greek tragedies.

Today I read Hakan Nesser, The Mind's Eye, a whodunnit by a Swedish author, but set in an indeterminate European country with both escarpments and polders and where the people have names that could be Italian or French, German or Scandinavian. I found that interesting - trying to get a sense of where it was, and concluding that it was probably nowhere - whereas most of the other authors I read in this genre do make you feel you're in a particular place. I guessed the outcome two thirds of the way through. The clues were psychological rather than forensic; this seems to be the tradition in Scandinavian detective fiction, as does the rather miserable cop with his dysfunctional family life.

Of the 27 books I've read so far this year, 15 have been non-fiction (what a colleague of mine calls 'narrative non-fiction' in order to distinguish it from things like the Guinness Book of Records which, for some absolutely unfathomable reason, is the bestselling book in this country). Of the 12 works of fiction, no less than 8 have been murder mysteries. Hakan Nesser is one I haven't read before, but there is obviously a major fashion for Scandinavian authors in translation - the book I read today was first published 15 years ago and has only just come out in English. Ten of the 27 were written by women.

Looking at the non-fiction books, I see I have a very strong history bias, but within that category it's a pretty eclectic mix. There's some European, some Asian, some African, some Middle Eastern, some American, some biographical and some not, some political, some cultural. Among the books with a less historical flavour, political economy and travel writing seem to be the main categories.

Back in May I read a book called See Naples and Die, by an Australian journalist called Penelope Green. At the time I said "I kept expecting to come across people I'd met, but I didn't." Well I think I forgot to mention here that some months later I was at dinner with my two friends who come from Naples. There was another guest, also from Naples, and he not only knows Penny Green, he claims to be mentioned in the book! So there you go.

I recently read the following in a review by Raymond Deane on the Electronic Intifada of a book by an Israeli academic:

Israel's Occupation... is less a conventional history than a carefully argued critique of the statist illusions of traditional commentary. By "statism" Gordon means a view of "the Israeli state as a free agent issuing policies unhindered by contingencies" and of Palestinian resistance as "led by people who stand in some free zone and whose beliefs and actions have not been shaped by the occupation and Israel's controlling apparatuses." As against this, he proposes a "genealogy of Israel's forms of control and an analysis of how they interact ..., suggest[ing] that the excesses and contradictions engendered by the controlling apparatuses help ... shift the emphasis among the modes of power ... shap[ing] Israel's policy choices and Palestinian resistance."

The book I read today is a kind of personal history of how this process has operated from the other side. Raja Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks: notes on a vanishing landscape, is much more than the title suggests. While it does, through the description of a series of walks taken over the past 30 years, convey the sense of transformation and disruption of an ancient landscape, it also describes the transformation and disruption of Palestinian lives. The book is a story of how the lives of residents of Ramallah have become more and more circumscribed since the 1970s. The old landscape is not only disappearing, but it has also become unsafe for its native inhabitants. Reading this book made me think of the Australian Aborigines. It is an unmitigated tragedy for the ones living through it and the long-term destruction is incalculable.

In one chapter, Shehadeh describes standing on top of a hill near Ramallah and watching the sun go down over the coastal plain near Jaffa (where his family lived and owned quite a lot of property before they were driven out in 1948). He is no longer able to visit that hilltop as it is the site of an Israeli settlement. Things turned bad particularly fast after Oslo which Shehadeh sees as the final defeat of the Palestinian cause. Not only are his walks in the hills threatened by Israeli encroachments (home invasions, the networks of roads that Palestinians cannot use) they are now threatened by the violence of the Palestinian militants. It's very hard to put this book down and feel that there is any hope left for a civilised solution.

There are black and white photographs at the beginning of each chapter - I wish they were in colour because the colours he describes sound fantastic and beautiful.

Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel, Hamish Hamilton, 2002

My mother gave me this book for my birthday 6 years ago (she wrote in it, that's how I know) and I've only just got around to reading it. I like it a lot, although the author sometimes seems more than a little smug. For starters it feels nice. It is just the right size, well made, with a very smooth dust jacket, and has a pleasant font and interesting illustrations. Also de Botton writes very well. I was entertained by this book and it also told me some things that I hadn't really articulated about myself - about why I enjoy certain types of travel and not others.

In the end he suggests that we should slow down, follow the advice of John Ruskin and either draw the things we see or make word pictures. It is only in this way that we can really understand why something is beautiful. (Ruskin wrote DIY books on drawing and gave classes at the Working Men's College that were tremendously popular.) It is not the quality of the drawing that counts, according to Ruskin, but the necessary dissection of the subject into its different elements during the process of drawing that gives one a real "understanding" of beauty.

De Botton also recommends room-travel (after Xavier de Maistre's 1790 book titled Journey Around My Bedroom). Finding his own bedroom too small, he decides to journey around his neighbourhood instead. He traverses his daily route to the Underground station at a more leisurely pace than usual, making drawings and word pictures as he goes. He lives in Hammersmith, home of the Hammersmith Flyover and that huge and incredibly ugly roundabout which are all you ever see of Hammersmith if you travel at the usual pace. Yet even in Hammersmith there is beauty if you look for it!

But that's the end of the book. Before getting 'back home' we find out about the disappointments of Barbados, Madrid with the most hideously boring guidebook ever written, and time spent in various railway carriages, airport lounges, jumbo jets and motorway service stops. He also covers motivations for travel - curiosity and a desire for the exotic - as well as fashions in where and how people find 'beauty'. It is full of references to artists (Hopper, van Gogh) and writers (Flaubert, von Humboldt, Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Edmund Burke, et al.) mixed in with personal experience. This is the sort of travel book that tells you about people - not the local inhabitants of places visited, but the travellers themselves.

Footnote: I have now, for the first time in my life, kept a new year's resolution! I don't usually even bother to make them, but this year I resolved to make the time to read 25 books.

To the Lighthouse has a middle passage - a decade during which the people don't return to the house. But the reader stays with the house, while events in the lives of the people are noted very briefly in square brackets - sort of off-stage. I guess Woolf did this because the regular, sweeping beam of the lighthouse is kind of central, but really I'm not sure. I found myself jumping to the bits in square brackets to find out what happened to the people and then going back and reading about the passage of the seasons (in addition to the lighthouse beam) over the house, and Mrs McNab's half-hearted maintenance of it and the fact that nobody from the family bothered to supervise the hired help properly. Anyway I did really enjoy Woolf's description of the gradual falling apart of the fabric of the house. And then all of a sudden it is restored and the humans reappear, or some of them and we recommence our observations of them. It gives the novel an unusual structure, that section.

Today I read Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. I started it a while ago, having picked it up at the airport on my last trip, and then got out of the mood for reading - probably due to mental exhaustion from overwork. But I've slowed down a lot this week and really enjoyed lying around reading the rest of the book today. It isn't so much a story as a series of observations about relationships between family members and their guests at their holiday house. It's as if the lighthouse goes around and around catching them at different angles. I think Woolf was trying to make two points, one is that men just don't take women seriously and the other is that women are always adapting themselves to the needs of the men in such a way that the men don't ever have to take them seriously.

I resisted reading Woolf until quite recently. I think because of Keynes I never really liked the Bloomsbury set - and one can certainly see some of the class attitudes coming out in this book. So I was quite surprised when I read A Room of One's Own a few years ago and was enthusiastic about it. There's an oblique reference to the Keynes group towards the end of this book, when she writes:

when he had heard of Andrew Ramsay's death (he was killed in a second by a shell; he should have been a great mathematician) Mr Carmichael had "lost all interest in life".

The obvious implication is that Mr Carmichael was gay, which was a bit of an avant garde thing to write in 1927, but, in addition, one of Keynes' protegés was a great mathematician called Frank Ramsey. Ramsey the real mathematician also died young, of hepatitis, though he was still alive at the time of the Lighthouse. It was fun to be able to notice that.

I also liked the description of the way, as they sailed out to the lighthouse, Cam's perspective on the island they'd left behind changed. At first, as it became distant she thought "they don't feel anything there". Later it became impossible to imagine anything at all existing there - let alone trees, roads and bedrooms.

The Reign of Cleopatra, Stanley M. Burstein, University of Oklahoma Press, 2004

I was given this book for my birthday and it turned out to be quite fascinating. What I knew about Cleopatra is what Joseph L. Mankiewicz had to say about her (and, being 15 at the time I was completely distracted by Richard Burton anyway)! I didn't know, for example, that she was Cleopatra VII or, moreover, that she was the last Ptolemy ruler of Egypt. Also Cleopatra was 50 when she died, which is quite a bit older than Liz Taylor was when she made the movie (about 30 I think). I did visit Alexandria once, in the early 1980s, but there wasn't much to see from that era. Apparently most of Cleopatra's palace, etc., has since sunk into the harbour. They dug up a lot more stuff from under the sea during the 1990s.

Only half the book is actually about Cleopatra. There isn't a whole lot of evidence to go on and so the second half comprises a series of notes/biographies about people or gods who were important in her life, plus some of the primary documents (Caesar was a pretty boring author!). Even so it's quite a slim volume.

Plutarch wrote about her two centuries after her death and is largely responsible for the notion that Mark Antony was destroyed by his passion for the seductress. The story of the asp is also a posthumous invention, but it is apparently true that she had herself rolled up in a rug or something and delivered to Caesar's bedroom. Burstein argues that she was actually an extremely smart ruler who formed (marriage) alliances with Caesar and Antony in an effort to preserve the relative independence of her kingdom. After her death Egypt was completely absorbed into the Roman Empire. There are also some interesting sections on what Burstein calls the 'multiculturalism' of the city. Cleopatra was of Macedonian ancestry, but she worked quite hard to keep the Egyptian population happy. Since everyone was polytheistic, the Macedonians tried to reconcile all the various gods with their own and Isis in particular became popular among the Greeks even if in a somewhat different shape from the Egyptian original. However, it doesn't sound like a very harmonious city. There were ethnic tensions between Greeks, Egyptians and Jews, and a lot of corruption. Burstein doesn't really comment on efforts by some people treat her as part African (Reuben Mamoulian, the original director of the movie wanted Dorothy Dandridge for the role), but judging by the class system he refers to in the city it seems unlikely.

It seems that of her four half-Roman children, only the daughter survived the end of the Ptolemy dynasty in Egypt. She married the king of Mauretania (which was then part of the Roman Empire) and her son was executed by Caligula in approximately 40 AD, ending the nearly 4 centuries old family line of Ptolemy I.

Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith were two painters. Bowen was born in Adelaide in 1893, went to Europe at the age of 20 and never returned. The other was born in Sydney in 1892 and, apart from a couple of 2 year trips to England (you had to go by ship in those days, so it was never a short trip), lived there all her long life. The book about their lives by Drusilla Modjeska is wonderful. Stella Bowen wrote an autobiography in 1940 Drawn from Life, left a raft of letters behind and is referred to in the papers of people like Ezra Pound, Margaret Cole (née Postgate) and Edith Sitwell, so her story is firmly based on documentary evidence. The story of Cossington Smith has a much more flimsy basis - there is way too much speculation for my rather academic taste. Nonetheless it presents an interesting puzzle, if only it could be unravelled. How could somebody produce such brilliant works and be a pioneer of modern art in Australia without ever having participated in the artistic life of London or Paris, having been taught by a Neapolitan impressionist émigré (Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo) and having lived all her life in an outer suburb (Turramurra) of Sydney? The two years living in Winchester, within a short train ride of London, must surely hold some kind of key, but there is no shred of evidence available! Moreover, in interviews given when she was 90 and in a nursing home, she denies such grand origins for her ideas. Yet in 1915 she had painted the first ever clearly modernist Australian painting . Surely you can't paint like Van Gogh or Cézanne when you’ve only ever seen reproductions of the work on the walls of your art teacher's studio?

Bowen was better known during her lifetime as the consort of Ford Madox Ford, a writer apparently well known in England and among the expatriate community in France,though his reputation never made it to the colonies. Her book is really about the difficulty of living with a man and trying to be an artist at the same time. In Modjeska's hands it makes a very gripping story and one from which Bowen emerges with huge dignity, as well as some bloody good paintings. (In her case, however, a lot of the paintings are lost). She and Ford separated in 1928 - he having spent her Australian middle-class capital already - and she struggled with poverty for the rest of her life. But it was only after the split that her painting came good. The story is a very moving one. I think Modjeska (or was it Bowen?) sets up a rather straw-mannish opposition between Love and Art, but it is surely the story of thousands of women of talent who have tried to make something of and for themselves in the face of ego-centric and demanding men.

Ford never understood why I found it so difficult to paint whilst I was with him. He thought I lacked the will to do it at all costs. That was true, but he did not realise that if I had had the will to do it at all costs, my life would have been oriented quite differently. I should not have been available to nurse him through the daily strain of his own work; to walk and talk with him whenever he wanted, and to stand between him and circumstances. Pursuing an art is not just a matter of finding the time – it is a matter of having a free spirit to bring to it.

The title of the book comes from a story of Stravinsky who,apparently, demanded total silence from his wife and kids while he was working,including during lunch!

But Love and being around to pick up the laundry are not the same thing. Cossington Smith also had a home drudge: for most of her life it was her younger sister Madge, who the parents kept at home to look after themselves and her painterly sister. Modjeska shows several pictures of Madge in which she looks unremittingly downcast. After WW2, when the parents were both dead, Madge went back to England and her pre-WW1 fiancé who, despite having married somebody else, had become single again. Of Grace, Modjeska says, "Her lack of domestic proficiency, maintained over a lifetime, was quite an achievement."

Neither woman achieved much recognition during their most productive years. Incredibly,there was a touring exhibition of modern art in 1939 (Picasso, Cézanne, Gauguin and everyone). It had to be shown in department stores because the state galleries (AGNSW and NGV) wouldn’t touch the stuff with a barge pole. In the end, all of the paintings were stored in a basement at the AGNSW for the duration of WW2. Despite protests, the Gallery refused to put them on show and not a single painting was purchased for any collection. They’re all now in major collections in Europe and North America. Modjeska quotes Robert Menzies, he was briefly Prime Minister in 1939, telling the modern artists that they would sink into oblivion because people like him (people with money) would never buy them!

In Cossington Smith's case there were extremely antagonistic reviews by male defenders of 'true art'. She and a handful of colleagues were virtually alone trying to do modern art in this country (and only she and Roland Wakelin didn’t really have the option or desire to escape abroad like Bowen). It wasn't until the Second World War that a new generation of male artists found modernism.They, of course, didn't acknowledge the legacy of their female forbears, but commanded attention as the pioneers of modern art in Australia. Cossington Smith's only champion before 1967 was a female art critic, Edith Anderson, who had access to the press because of her husband's position in the NSW Governor's office. But Anderson was also a lone voice among a chorus of anti-modernist male critics. GCS was by no means the only female modernist whose work had to overcome the male prejudices - there were also Grace Crowley, Dorrit Black, Margaret Preston (Bowen's teacher in Adelaide before the First War), Clarice Beckett, Thea Proctor and Nora Heysen. Roland Wakelin and Roy de Maistre got more attention, but the latter also felt he could survive better in Europe.
I wonder why it is that such a high proportion of these female modernists - Bowen, Preston, Black and Heysen - came from Adelaide?

Edith Anderson and her ear trumpet (from the book). I couldn't resist this - I thought ear trumpets were a myth.


Cossington, the house in Turramurra named after Grace's father's English home village. I drove up there this afternoon to have a look.


The street, Kuring-gai Avenue.


Added to my list:
Stella Bowen, Drawn from Life
VirginiaWoolf, To the Lighthouse
Christina Stead, For Love Alone

This book, by Alex Miller, won the Miles Franklin in 2003 - the second time Miller has won it, but the first time I've read any of his work. The author is English by birth, though he has lived in Australia (mainly Melbourne) for over half a century. The story is set in north Queensland inland of Townsville and Bowen. I'm not sure how to think of it. The main character is female, I suppose because Miller thought it would be easier to see the story through the eyes of a white female than through those of an Aboriginal male. That's all she is really, a device to tell a story. She just walks out of her academic job in Melbourne and goes back to the place of her youth. There she meets an Aboriginal stockman who remembers her, though she doesn't remember him. They go on a journey together, back into the places of his past rather than hers. She is really a receptacle for his story and she slowly works out that the things she feels and sees in these places are often "wrong" (symbolised by the mysterious stone that she picks up and carries back to Townsville). But there's a reason for all this, because the story seems really to be about how white people and black people can coexist (or if they can) in this land where murder happened within living memory.

On the one hand I really enjoyed reading it and on the other hand it all struck me as unreal - a bit too much of a romantic fairy tale set in a part of the world that we southerners call the 'Deep North' and 'red-neck country'. On the one hand the story canvassed a range of possible realities and on the other hand it seemed not to want to confront the actual reality of racism and de facto apartheid. I want to believe in their story, but can't quite.

The descriptions of the landscape are wonderful. That part was just pure escapism!

A rather gloomy and gruesome story about a forensic anthropologist. I've read three of Ondaatje's novels now and this is easily the best one.* The figure of Anil is well drawn and reminds me of other expats who've gone back home with some vague idea that they can 'help'. The setting in Sri Lanka is also very evocative.

* The one I haven't read is The English Patient because I hated the movie. (Not fair to the author I know).

At the airport in Phnom Penh they have a set of shelves just full of awful histories* of Cambodia in the bad times. I've read quite a few of them and have no desire to explore the theme further. There was one, however, that looked more promising and so it turned out. Milton Osborne was a junior diplomat in the Australian embassy in Phnom Penh during 1959-61 and he returned as a Cornell PhD student in 1966. The book, Before Kampuchea, is basically a memoir, drawing on his journal of that year, which also dips back and forth to what the place was like during his earlier stay and how it was on a subsequent visit in 1971, during the Lon Nol years. He argues that 1966 was a turning point that led inexorably to the catastrophes of 1970-79, though I would say it's more a case that he could see, in 1966, that things were not going to turn out as he'd earlier expected. (I don't really believe in turning points).

I found it fascinating reading. There is so much about the city that has changed and also not changed. The elite back then was no less venal than it is now, the corruption was no less rampant, the gambling no less prominent, the culture of impunity no less deeply entrenched. There were some interesting details on the dealings of Sihanouk's second wife, Monique, and her family that I didn't know about. There were also four interesting portraits of Cambodians he knew - an army officer, a Catholic priest, a Communist and a prince (from the Sisowath family) - all dead or disappeared by 1979 (the book was last updated in 1984, so there is little chance that the disappeared would not have reappeared by then if still alive). His conversations with all of them throw interesting light on the deep problems facing the country. Of course, the one segment of society to which Osborne had no access was the peasantry and, as he admits, he can throw no light on what made so many of them follow the French-educated intellectual Communists in the end. The sheer incompetence of successive elite regimes (Sihanouk, Lon Nol) and the genocidal US bombing of 1973 must have something to do with it.

My main disagreement with Osborne's line of thought is that he persists in seeing Sihanouk as a nationalist rather than a dynast. I think that Sihanouk's consistent goal was to preserve the Cambodian state in the form of the monarchy and he just took it for granted that his subjects would see things the same way. He assumed, rather than worked to gain, loyalty from the masses. It isn't that he was unpopular, he just had no idea and didn't much care what was going on down at the grass roots. He played statehood in the same way his ancestors had - as a series of deals with more powerful states that, while forcing him to pay tribute, also allowed him a degree of autonomy. He also clung to the French who, in the 19th century had preserved the state (ruled by his grandfather Norodom) from being gobbled up by Thailand and Vietnam. Sihanouk had a good grasp of the past, but he just had no real concept of the nation-state.

* I meant that the history was awful, not that the books were awful.

Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, Penguin Classics edn. I read the whole book on the flight from Sydney to Bangkok. It is fantastic. Levi was a northern painter/writer with a medical training who was exiled to the far south for his anti-Fascist activities in the mid-1930s. The villages he stayed in were similar to - though far more desolate and poverty stricken than - those in the Cilento National Park that I visited last September. Eboli, which is at the northern extremity of Lucania, the province to which Levi was exiled, is just over the mountains from Laurino and Fogna. The culture seems very similar and Levi (who wrote the book during 1943-44, or 8 years after he left the area) was an acute observer of the differences between this culture of the Mezzogiorno and his sophisticated native north. For him it was obviously one of those life-transforming experiences and, reading it, I was gripped by the powerful descriptions of life there as well as his emotionally draining analysis of the hopeless situation of the peasantry. He describes, for example, the way the peasants gave unreciprocated Christmas gifts to the rich and powerful, to whom they were also irredeemably indebted and whose activities on behalf of the state were largely responsible for their poverty. Not only did Christ never venture this far south, the three Wise Men were also an utterly foreign concept!

There are some moments of cheer, as when a visiting troupe of Sicilian players put on a show or the locals do an impromptu street theatre satirising their overlords, but on the whole Levi (who was there for only a year) subscribes to the notion of an eternally unchanging system of oppression - even while demonstrating that in some parts of the province things were slowly changing. He does a great job of exposing the colonial nature of the Italian state in the south - and there are clear lessons for the modern 'aid community' in this - while generally adopting a humanitarian and accepting approach towards the poor, trying to get along with the oppressors so as not to create yet more trouble for himself, but in the end going back to his cosmopolitan intellectual life rather than committing to the project (that he could see was feasible) of reducing the debilitating impact of endemic malaria.

I really want to visit the area next time I go to Italy to see if and how it has changed. Was discussing this over email with I. whose parents I stayed with in Fogna, and he said that Levi's house is still there.