That’s what friends are for

The Spare Room by Helen Garner

Canongate 2008, 180 pages

Helen is preparing her spare room for Nicola, an old friend of fifteen years standing. The bed is freshly made with pillows aplenty and there is even a new rug; she visualises congenial evenings reminiscing and playing the ukulele. But Nicola has cancer and she is coming to Melbourne for a course of alternative treatment: intravenous injections of vitamin C and coffee enemas. In the weeks that follow, Nicola’s battle against her illness will turn into Helen’s battle to make her friend accept the inevitable.

I have a reputation among my friends and colleagues for a taste in dark books. When I tell them what I’m reading, they smile and shake their heads: they do not understand what draws me to these stories and sometimes neither do I. So yes, it’s a book about death and how we approach death but it is also a book about friendship and how our friendships can greatly enrich our lives. This time, I’m the one who’s smiling and shaking my head because everything about this novel speaks quality and to dismiss it simply as doom and gloom means that they are missing a treat.

The way we were

When I forgot by Elina Hirvonen

Translated by Douglas Robinson

Portobello Books 2007, 180 pages

Anna Louhiniitty is drinking coffee in a Helsinki cafe, putting off the visit she knows must be made to her brother Joona, an in-patient in a mental hospital. As she sits, she remembers fragments of her blighted childhood and her struggle to help her brother before his illness was diagnosed.

Elina Hirvonen is a film maker and journalist; When I Forgot, her first book, has become the most translated novel in Finnish history. This modest volume is a reflection on the impact mental illness has on a family, of the comfort and curse of what we remember and it would seem fitting that its setting is a country with one of the highest suicide rates in Europe.

One man and his dog

Julius Winsome by Gerard Donovan

Faber and Faber 2007, 224 pages

Julius Winsome lives with his dog, Hobbes, in a remote cabin in the forest land of Northern Maine. He is a loner who gets by odd-jobbing during the summer months and in the winter drinks tea as he reads his way through the library of 3,282 books left to him by his father. But when his dog is fatally shot at close range by a hunter, Julius takes up his grandfather’s WW1 Enfield rifle and goes looking for the killer.

I have a vague recollection of reading a review of this book and making a mental note to look out for it. This is a dark and disturbing story that is sparsely written, but what is perhaps most unsettling is how much sympathy I felt for Julius. A book that I could easily have passed over; I’m so glad I remembered reading that review.

True grit

Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse

Frances Lincoln Children’s Books 2007, 240 pages

Fourteen year old Billie Jo Kelby lives with her parents on their Oklahoma wheat farm. It is 1934 and the family are struggling to make a living as their crops are continually destroyed by the prevailing drought and dust storms. One of her few pleasures in life is to play her mother’s piano and Billie Jo sees her talent for wild music as her means of escaping the dust until tragedy decides otherwise.

I didn’t know when I picked this one up that it was an award winning children’s book first published in 1997, but I do now! The story is written in free verse which makes it very quick to read but belies the depth of the narrative; I especially liked the way in which historical facts are woven into the text – a truly compelling read.

A change of themery

If you are thinking that things are looking different here, then you’d be thinking right. I’ve been tinkering with my “theme” as something about the other one was bugging me – the way that “jump to comments” tag kept mucking up my nicely aligned posts! So although it now seems like my trolley has shrunk, I’ll stick with this one for now.