March 2015

From the CommitteeTrivia night  This was held on the 6th March at the Golf Club, and it was an extremely successful evening all round. Everyone appeared to thoroughly enjoy themselves, all questions were set for a mature audience! - and we made lots of money...most important! The committee members are grateful for the ongoing support from the community. We made approximately $2000.

Baby packs Since January, the committee members have made 91 packs! Lots of babies are being bone at the Armidale Hospital, and we are delighted that the Sister has told us that these Baby Packs are very well received by the new parents. Winter raffleI apologise for giving you incorrect information in the last newsletter. The Committee has decided that it is only five months since our Christmas raffle, and it is too soon to expect our local businesses to contribute to another raffle, and also for the community to buy more tickets! Watch this space for future information on our next fundraising function, for example a film night. If you have any idea for a fund raiser, we would be delighted to hear from you. 

FRIENDS OF ARMIDALE DUMARESQ LIBRARY

NEWSLETTER

MembershipThis was due at the beginning of the year. If you have forgotten, it is not a problem. Just pay the Library staff on your next Library visit.Book review

All the Light We Cannot See Anthony Doerr

Two main protagonists dominate this 530 page historical novel, which is set mostly in France and Germany during the Second World War

Marie-Laure, who lives with her father near the Museum of Natural Science in Paris, has been blind since the age of six years. Her father has made a miniature model of their surroundings so she can memorise the layout. When she is twelve, the Nazis invade and occupy France, forcing Marie-Laure and her father to flee to Saint-Malo where her great Uncle Etienne lives by the sea.

Werner Pfennig is an orphan who lives with his sister Jutta in the German mining village of Zollverein. He is exceptionally gifted with respect to the building and maintenance of radios. In this way, he comes to the notice of influential Nazis who organize his transfer to a Training School where brutality is the order of the day. Werner never really fits in at this Academy but seems resigned to his time there. Eventually, his job is to track down radio transmissions of the Resistance.

The lives of these two characters intersect late in the novel. Also woven through the story is a fantasy about a mythical diamond, which has magical powers. Several characters, including an old Nazi soldier, Von Rumpel, search for this gem.

Commencing in a prologue set in France in 1944, the novel then moves backwards and forwards in time from 1934 to 1944 with final additions in 1974 and 2014. The chapters are short and roughly alternate between the two main strands of the narrative. The prose is carefully constructed using many adjectives, and this made me consciously aware of the language to the detriment of the story. The overblown writing does tend to recede as the book goes on and the

author becomes more immersed in conveying the story. I didn’t feel the characters were well developed and I didn’t find the book convincing, but I am sure many people will find it a good read.

Marnie French.

New in the Library

As autumn comes slowly on us, some thoughts turn to shelter and winter comforts. The Library can help direct these thoughts in new and satisfying ways. For instance, Building better: sustainable architecture for family homes presents project ideas from around the world which are both practical and inspirational. Dino Joannides provides one hundred delicious combinations in Semplice: real Italian food: ingredients & recipes; there are a further 70 in Hunan: a lifetime of secrets from Mr Peng's Chinese kitchen; and Dhruv Baker’s Spice: layers of flavour features delights such as star anise hot chocolate.

Taste with travel comes from Mimi Thorisson’s A kitchen in France: a year of cooking in my farmhouse, and James and Kay Salter’s Life is meals: a food lover's book of days. Julian Baggini weighs up more than just ingredients in The virtues of the table: how to eat and think. Visual delights in front of the fire could include Rendez-vous

with art, in which Philippe de Montebello and Martin Gayford converse about art they found in six countries on two continents.

The glorious Jan Morris, like Clive James, continues to write and publish with full awareness of approaching death – that is, by celebrating those joys which brought them pleasure in life. Her latest confection, Ciao, Carpaccio! is subtitled an infatuation, and applies as much to Venice as to its most enchanting painter. Eden Collinsworth evinces some of the same reflective civility in I stand corrected: how teaching Western manners in China became its own unforgettable lesson.  Another guide to respectful global behaviour is provided by The Monocle guide to good business, a companion volume to the Monocle magazine’s guide to better living: from city to neighbourhood, museum to newsstand, hotel to coffee shop; a quality-of-life directory that takes you from the macro to the micro.

Australian businessman Remo Guiffre has applied his entrepreneurial skills to publishing his own life’s anecdotes in General thinker. Pico Iyer, a once-inveterate traveller, has had a think too, and realised that The art of stillness: adventures in going nowhere is worth cultivating. Jason Siff goes beyond again, exploring with Thoughts are not the enemy: an innovative approach to meditation practice.

Reverie and the sublime are two of the ten themes explored by William Ewing in Landmark: the fields of landscape photography. Autumn colours in the landscape signal the end of vigorous plant growth, but Olivier Dupon reminds us of nature’s abundance in Floral contemporary: the renaissance in flower design; and Michel Pastoureau reminds us in Green: the history of a color that its associations with nature are only of recent origin: it has other connections with life, luck, and hope, disorder, greed, poison, and the devil, childhood, love, and money, Nero, Islam and the middle class.

The shifting perspectives of history are also explored with different prevailing feelings. Andrew Roberts wants to be definitive in his gusto and confidence about Napoleon the great. Jenny Uglow looks askance and asks ‘what of those left behind?’ in a fine social history, In these times: living in Britain through Napoleon's Wars, 1793-1815. Mark Greengrass examines a rich earlier European tapestry with Christendom destroyed: Europe 1517-1648, using Martin Luther, Thomas More, Shakespeare, Montaigne and Cervantes as touchstones in this contribution to the Penguin History of Europe.

Even coming closer to home in time and space does not guarantee agreement. In the current rash of Anzac publishing, Douglas Newton stands out in Hell-bent: Australia’s leap into the Great War by examining events during the days of peace which preceded commitment. Bettina Stangneth totally re-assesses Eichmann before Jerusalem, revealing the unexamined life of a mass murderer, including notoriety among a global network of National Socialists after the collapse of the Third Reich. Alexander Kluge’s book, first published in Germany in 1977, is matter-of-factly called The air raid on Halberstadt on 8 April 1945. The liner notes set the scene this way: On April 8, 1945, several American bomber squadrons were informed that their German targets were temporarily unavailable due to cloud cover. As it was too late to turn back, the assembled ordnance of more than two hundred bombers was diverted to nearby Halberstadt. A mid-sized cathedral town of no particular industrial or strategic importance, Halberstadt was almost totally destroyed, and a then-thirteen-year-old Alexander Kluge watched his town burn to the ground. WG Sebald’s comments on the book, reproduced in an appendix, observe that Kluge only refers directly to himself in one sentence, and that “experience in the real sense was simply not possible because of the overwhelming rapidity and totality of the destruction and can only occur by way of the detour of later learning”.

Less mainstream (and the more intriguing for that) are other new titles like Back in the USSR: heroic adventures in Transnistria. I’ve included a map to show the location of the only country in the world

not to have recognised the collapse of the Soviet Union; unrecognised by any United Nations member state; and one of only four members of the Community for Democracy and the Rights of Nations, along with the other post-Soviet ‘frozen conflict’ areas of Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Abkhasia. Gerard Russell’s book, Heirs to forgotten kingdoms: journeys into the disappearing religions of the Middle East, looks at the shadow side of statehood, visiting groups like the Druze, Yezidis (mentioned in last month’s newsletter), Zoroastrians and Samaritans (who now number only 750 adherents).

Survival of belief and its expression against the odds seem admirable human traits. Angus Kennedy writes of a related quality in his Being cultured: in defence of discrimination. Fiona MacCarthy examines creative strength in Anarchy and beauty: William Morris and his legacy 1860-1960. Gianfranco Malafarina brings us the thirteenth century in glorious fresco and gold leaf with The basilica of St Francis in Assisi.

Further sublimity emerges from the pages of Noriko Tsuchiya’s Netsuke: 100 miniature masterpieces from Japan; and from The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp: the Persian book of kings, the most beautiful edition of this epic, reproduced in full despite the dispersion of its pages in real life. Somewhat more ridiculous are the ephemera in Matt Seitz’s tribute, The Wes Anderson collection, looking at the director’s idiosyncratic films like The Darjeeling Limited and The Royal Tenenbaums.

Finally, a herding of the remaining select non-fiction this month, bearing hardly any resemblance to each other: Emily Spivak’s Worn stories collects memoirs from many people about their favourite piece of clothing; Nigel Turvey does not avert his gaze from Cane toads: a tale of sugar, politics and flawed science; smuggled from the Big Apple, a rare copy of Not for tourists guide to New York city 2015; and the first book-length study of A Norwegian tragedy: Anders Behring Breivik and the massacre on Utoya.

Nick Hornby’s Funny girl displays the writer’s usual charm. Stanley Donwood’s Humor, on the other hand, explores sanguine, phlegm, choler and melancholy in a haunting series of short stories. Andrea Levy, author of the million-selling Small island, presents Six stories and an essay.

More stories come out of the wilderness of Vancouver Island, Canada from Eliza Robertson: her Wallflowers collection includes one that won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Even the famous George Pelecanos, author of fifteen novels and scriptwriter for the HBO series The wire, has turned to short stories for the first time in The martini shot. Sarah Jones’ Isabelle of the moon and stars is an Australian novel, described this way: “Ever since the incident two years ago, Isabelle has been stuck in a dead-end job and has struggled to find her feet. It takes all of her determination to ward off The Black Place that always threatens to devour her”.

By night the mountain burns tells of a childhood on a remote island off the West African coast. It is written as fiction, but the author, Juan Tomas Avila Laurel, lives on Annobon Island, a neglected part of Equatorial Guinea, Africa’s only Spanish-speaking country. The scorpion-fish also has an island setting and an autobiographical tone: but Nicolas Bouvier was a Swiss traveller in Ceylon during the 1950s; the book was first published in France in 1981, in English in 1987 and reprinted by Eland Press just last year. Marlon James’ island is Jamaica, and A brief history of seven killings is a novel framed as a fictional oral history that explores the events surrounding an attempted assassination of Bob Marley during the island’s political turmoil in the late 1970s.

Adam Roberts’ Bete imagines a world where nature talks back. In The tower, Uwe Tellkamp recreates the tapestry of Dresden life during those days of 1989 before East Germany was reabsorbed into the greater Deutschland. Boualem Sansal writes in Algerian French, and in Harraga tells of two women in patriarchal Algeria whose lives are complicated by their mutual acquaintance with an harraga - one of those who risk their lives attempting to flee the country for a better life in Europe.

As for DVDs, we can now offer A Portuguese nun (A young French actress in Lisbon to shoot a movie is intrigued by a nun she sees kneeling in the in the chapel where she is filming); Mr Turner with Timothy Spall playing the grunting Joseph William Mallord artist; and The theory of everything with Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking.

Then there are Boyhood, Richard Linklater’s subtle film compiled over a fifteen-year period; The trip to Italy, where Steve Coogan and Rob Bryden continue their banter begun over meals in Britain in The trip; and Robert Morley, Maurice Evans and Peter Finch starring in the 1953 Story of Gilbert and Sullivan.

From the small screen there are DVDs of The newsroom second season, Downton Abbey season five, The fall series two, Black sails the complete first season, and (in response to a request for purchase) the sole Australian Library holding of ABC TV’s The damnation of Harvey McHugh – a 1994 series about a 22 year old public servant, who is battling to hold his position in the snakes and ladders system of a public service department in the process of privatisation.