What Charlotte's reading now

August 2008

The Great Arch, Vicki Hastrich

For a synopsis of this novel & more about Vicki Hastrich, click here and here.

The Great Arch - the story of one man's obsession with the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge - is a monumentally beautiful piece of work, and Vicki Hastrich is one of those rare, utterly honest poetic writers, so ambitious in her reach and the magnitude of the novel's architecture (like the Sydney Harbour Bridge itself, which I can no longer drive across without thinking of this book) but at the same time as a writer she seems to be deeply, completely connected to her characters, with love for and understanding of ordinary people.

As with Hastrich's first novel, Swimming with the Jellyfish, the sentences in this novel are full of sheer clean, poetic strength. The Great Arch seems to me to be written with enormous tenderness, which gives its characters their profound humanity, and their pure dignity - even poor, beautiful Ralph, who stumbles and bumbles, but because of his deep belief in the potential of the human imagination, to me never really falls. The Great Arch is exceptionally moving - the balance of comedy and tragedy is something I aspire to in the work I'm writing now, so I'm learning a lot from it. The end, in particular, made me really cry.

Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson

Many readers will know of Robinson's Pulitzer-prize winning novel Gilead, but perhaps not this equally beautiful, small, strange master work - her first novel - published in 1980.

Filled with tidal, poetical threat, Housekeeping is the story of two sisters, Ruthie and Lucille, and their family, haunted by drownings both accidental and deliberate.

Mired in the inhospitable landscape of a town called Fingerbone, densely poetic, the story is a dreamscape that seems to move a few feet above the earth, touching reality now and then, glancingly, before floating forward again, like the tides of the lake at its centre. It's a beautiful, sinister, lyrical work about loss and loneliness, escape and transience.

To learn more about this book and Marilynne Robinson, click here.

The Paris Review Interviews Vol II

If you take a 3-year subscription to the Paris Review, they will send you a copy of this fab collection of past interviews with writers, from Eudora Welty to Philip Larkin to Alice Munro to Stephen King. The Paris Review interviews have long been my favourite discussions about writing (see Favourite sites), and this collection too is full of comforts.

Take this from Toni Morrison on rewriting: "I've revised six times, seven times, thirteen times. But there's a line between revision and fretting, just working it to death. It is important to know when you are fretting it; when you are fretting it because it is not working, it needs to be scrapped."

Or this, from Faulkner, asked how a writer becomes a serious novelist:
"Ninety-nine percent talent ... ninety-nine percent discipline ... ninety-nine percent work. He must never be satisfied with what he does. It is never as good as it can be done. Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."

Of course the book is generally available on its own without a subscription.

To learn more about this book and The Paris Review, click here.