May 2016

From the Committee Annual general meetingThis will be held in the Library on 6th June, 2016 at 10.30am. All members are very welcome to attend. All Committee positions are open so if members would like to nominate themselves or a friend, please contact our secretary, Bronwyn Meredith on meredithkeller@bigpond.com. I would also like notify you that a motion will be put that “any annual member who has not paid membership in the last two years will be declared non-financial”. We look forward to seeing you at our meeting.

Winter raffleTickets went on sale at the end of April, in time for the Sunday Markets and are also on sale every Saturday morning. The raffle is on display at the library and tickets may be purchased from our ever helpful library staff at the circulation desk. So far, tickets sales have been great, but do not worry if you have missed out because we will be selling tickets at the May and June Sunday Markets and in the library as previously mentioned until the end of June. The raffle will be drawn on 30th June.

Armidale author talk at the libraryThis will be on Saturday morning - 21st May at 11am. The book is called Girl on the Edge by Kim Hodges. Kim lectures in Sociology at Southern Cross University at Coffs Harbour. This book is a memoir of growing up in a small country town, Coolah, and her feelings of alienation, identity and belonging.

Sydney Writers FestivalThis will be live streamed in our library which is an exciting initiative. There are flyers available on the counter of the circulation desk. The sessions will be on this Friday 20th May from 10am to

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5.30pm and also on Saturday 21st May from 10am to 12.30pm. No bookings are required.

International Film Festival fundraiserThis will be held on Thursday 26th May at 7pm. Tickets are $17 and available from Hilary Hutchinson on Hilaryhutchinson@gmail.com. The movie is a feel good French movie called The Belier Family (La Famille Belier).

The committee looks forward to seeing you all at our AGM where you will feel most welcome.

Book Review

Fish Change Direction In Cold WeatherPierre Szalowski(Translator Alison Anderson)Reading Pierre Szalowski’s novel and describing it to other people, I found it impossible to avoid using the word charming.

It falls into the category of books like The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Frye and A Short History of Tractor driving in the Ukraine. A group of diverse, sometimes eccentric characters, often placed in conditions of hardship are brought together under a quirky book title and grow closer and meet self- realisation through their interactions.

These books are the equivalent of boxes of assorted chocolates, you can dip in and come out with delicious caramel fudge but there is always a chance that that you will end up with a mouthful of sickly nougat. By this criteria, Fish Change Direction In Cold Weather is a tangy lime cream.

Its only first person narrator, who is nameless, is a young boy caught up in the whirlpool of his parents’ dissolving marriage. The book begins with his wish that the sky will help him and it obligingly does so, by sending a severe blizzard and ice storm rampaging over Montreal. Despite the well-meaning efforts of the Quebec

emergency services the ice storm brings change to the people in his neighbour hood.

We meet them one by one. Boris the Russian immigrant and brilliant mathematician, whose PhD project gives the book its title; Julie the warm, if somewhat naïve stripper; Alex the boy’s bullying best friend and his ne’er do well angry father and Michel and Simon the deeply closeted gay couple who have to masquerade as brothers.

Szalowski then takes his characters through an interweaving dance as they meet, connect, disconnect and grow into a cohesive community. Like the piscine subjects of Boris’ experiment they change their directions in cold weather and grow in wisdom through increasing intimacy with other people.This could be sentimental but it is not. Szalowski has a deceptively simple writing style, which gives the book considerable warmth and immediacy and moves lightly between humour, pathos anguish and even despair. He explores the characters’ emotions and subtly shares their motivations with delicacy and compassion. He takes the reader inside the petty meanness and loneliness of “Mum” and “Dad’s” failing marriage, the isolation of Boris, and the wariness of Julie.

He is particularly good portraying the thoughts of children and their interactions with adults. His depiction of the confused emotions of Alex, the school bully and his angrily bemused father felt very real.

I particularly liked the humour of the book. The scenes where Alexis, Alex’s homophobic father meets Michel and Simon and accepts their humanity were a particular favourite and at times the book made me laugh out loud.

This book can be found in the large print section of the library. It is well worth seeking out if you want to enjoy a well- written, beautifully translated Canadian novel.

New in the Library

Larissa MacFarquhar writes, in Strangers drowning, of grappling with impossible idealism, drastic choices and the overpowering urge to help. It may be reassuring to know that the Federal Parliamentary Library also has a copy of this book. They also have Richard Bourne’s Nigeria: a new history of a turbulent century and Jack Shenker’s The Egyptians: a radical story. Why travel to Canberra to read them, when your local Armidale Library has a copy? Be informed before your parliamentary representative.

It’s probably also reassuring to know that the Parliamentary Library doesn’t have copies of Van Leeuwen artisan ice cream (though one of the authors and proprietors of the New York business is an Australian), nor of A passion for gardening (in which the nominatively-determined author, Twigs Way, tells how the British became a nation of gardeners), nor, indeed, of Yann Martel’s new novel, The high mountains of Portugal.

Another illuminating treasure about Portugal is The global city, an extraordinary book on the streets of Renaissance Lisbon, examining the riches brought there by fifteenth and sixteenth century trade with Africa, India and the Far East. Margarette Lincoln shows specimens of the seventeenth century London world of Samuel Pepys, including its engaging trinity of plague, fire and revolution. Leighton Pugh has also found Pepys to be an immensely attractive character: for Naxos Audio Books, he has recorded Pepys’ unexpurgated Diary onto 116 hours of listening CDs. “How best to listen to it?”, asked the Times reviewer: “As it was written, I

suggest, in regular daily instalments as you commute, work out in the gym, or walk the dog”.

Listen while cooking Bone deep broth, Taylor Chen’s healing recipes with bone broth. Listen while riding (Wendy Williams’ The horse: a biography of our noble companion). Listen while embroidering, especially with tips from Armidale’s very own Judy Wilford: her new book, Embroidered landscapes: hand embroidery, layering and surface stitching, is a magnificent piece of work, beautifully published.

Other new items of Australian interest include John Blaxland’s second volume of the official history of ASIO, The protest years, 1963-1975; a London-published study of Hot modernism: Queensland architecture 1945-1975, featuring the stunning 1959 Centenary Pool at Spring Hill on the cover; and a Texas-published work of fiction, Dodge rose, written by Jack Cox concerning Sydney life, family, property and its legal and financial complications (The Australian’s reviewer called it “a wild, untamed work, one of the most ambitious, unusual and difficult first novels in recent Australian literary history”).

More fantastic fiction this month from Argentina (Julio Cortazar’s graphic novel Fantomas versus the multinational vampires – written in 1975 when the author lived in Paris, but only translated from the Spanish two years ago. The Library also has his selected works in an Everyman’s edition); from Germany (Wolfgang Hilbig’s powerfully apocalyptic account of his nation’s trajectory from 1945 to 1989, The sleep of the righteous); and from Indonesia (Leila Chudori’s Home illuminates Suharto’s Indonesia between 1965 and 1998, showing families and friends snared by political repression and exile).

Elsewhere in the world, Korean researcher Sooyong Park has risked all to tell of The great soul of Siberia: in search of the elusive Siberian tiger (John Vaillant, author of the equally remarkable The tiger: a true story of vengeance and survival – also in the Library, has written the foreword). Madawi al-Rasheed, a Saudi professor of social anthropology, sees guarded hope for her country’s future with Muted modernists: the struggle over divine politics in Saudi Arabia. Alistair Couper is not so sanguine about his area of study (Fishers and plunderers: theft, slavery and violence at sea), but at least he is telling what needs to be known.

Elsewhere in time, Claire Holleran brings to light what we’ve previously only glimpsed in Lindsey Davis’ novels – Shopping in Ancient Rome: the retail trade in the late Republic and the principate. Norman Davies’ Trail of hope: the Anders Army, an odyssey across three continents tells the amazing story of Poles exiled to Siberia by Russians when the Ribbentrop Pact held in 1939, but converted to an army unit when the Germans pressed into Russia. In contrast, Ed van der Elsken brings us images of his travels in the post-war world of 1957-1962 in Sweet life, with its thrown fish photograph on the cover.

Marta Zaraska looks at animal protein with a longer focus: Meathooked presents the history and science of our 2.5-million-year obsession with meat. Animals also feature in Martha Crump’s Eye of newt and toe of frog, adder’s fork and lizard’s leg: the lore and mythology of amphibians and reptiles: the photograph of the cuddled Japanese giant salamander is so staggering, it makes Studio Ghibli movies seem familiar rather than strange. Teri Dunn Chace and Oregon’s Timber Press also provide stunning photographs of the natural world in Seeing seeds: discover the unexpected beauty in seedheads, pods and fruit.

Peter Davidson explores the early evening in The last of the light: about twilight. Shane O’Mara has written a horrible hopeful book on Why torture doesn’t work: the neuroscience of interrogation. And Claire Adida provides her answers to her question: Why Muslim integration fails in Christian-heritage societies.

We have a new centenary edition of The collected poems of Dylan Thomas, the glorious Malian verses of Rokia Traore, singing Ne so, and the London Symphony with a mixed voice choir performing Water night compositions by Eric Whitacre.

There is more music, too, from Mavis Staples (Livin’ on a high note), Dave Gahan and the Soulsavers (Angels and ghosts) and classic Carols from King’s College Cambridge.

The classics are also revisited in print this month. Penguin have published The essential Keynes in 550 pages: the volume (also in the Federal Parliamentary Library) reminds us that amongst other things, Keynes “overturned the orthodoxy that markets were optimally self-regulating, and instead argued for state intervention to ensure full employment and economic stability”. Dennis Washburn offers a new translation of Murasaki Shikibu’s eleventh-century Tale of Genji. And Howard Jacobson revisits Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice with Shylock is my name.

Christoph Ransmayr takes us around the world with his travel diaries, Atlas of an anxious man. Fiction also takes us there, with visits to the Middle East (Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s Thirst: a novel of the Iran-Iraq war, translated from the Farsi, and Hassan Blasim’s Arabic-composed The corpse exhibition and other stories of Iraq), Mexico (Horacio Castellanos Moya’s The dream of my return, from the Spanish), the South Pacific (Michel Tournier’s reimagining of Friday, translated from the French original published in 1967 – “Cast away on a tropical island, Michel Tournier's god-fearing Crusoe sets out to tame it, to remake it in the image of the civilization he has left behind. Alone and against incredible odds, he almost succeeds. Then a mulatto named Friday appears and teaches Robinson that there are, after all, better things in life than civilization”) and Korea (Han Kan’s Man Booker International prizewinning novel, The vegetarian).