22: Nothing Holds Back the Night by Delphine De Vigan

Nothing Holds Back the Night by Delphine De Vigan

Bloomsbury, London, August 2013.
Review published in The Townsville Eye, 9 November 2013.

‘What’s she done, what’s she done?’ Delphine De Vigan’s thoughtful exploration of her mother’s extraordinary life and death begins with this question on a Wednesday morning when she finds Lucile dead in her apartment. Lucile was a feted child model in 1950s Paris, third of nine children in a family that was at one time the subject of a television documentary showcasing the ‘perfect family’. Common sense tells us there is no such thing, and De Vigan does not don rose-coloured glasses for her mother’s story. She interviewed Lucile’s surviving brothers and sisters and listened to her grandfather’s taped history to make sense of the family, to discover how they shaped her mother’s life. De Vigan draws out stories of an overbearing patriarch, accidental deaths, acrimonious divorce, painful accusations, terminal cancer, and suicide. Lucile’s adult life was punctuated with delirium, despair and hospitalisation which had its inevitable impacts on Delphine and her sister Manon’s lives. Lucile was a singular woman; elusive, glamorous, a daughter, a sister, a mother. Nothing Holds Back the Night stands as
De Vigan’s tribute to Lucile.

Verdict: Tragic

Beyond The Lavender Keeper Reading Map

We did it! Jo and I continually advocate for (intra and interlibrary) collaboration and staff development in reader services as a result of our research project. To support Fiona McIntosh as touring author for Get Reading! to three Queensland libraries, five of us got together to create the Beyond The Lavender Keeper Reading Map. It's available online now through our libraries and on our blogs. View it online or download the pdf to print.
I think the Get Reading! guide online should have a link to Trove like we have the catalogue links so that people could see if their libraries have each book. 
You can download the first chapter of The Lavender Keeper to read via GR! 

Thanks so much Sally Pewhairangi (Waimakariri Libraries), Jo Beazley (Toowoomba Regional Libraries), Louise Pieper (Gold Coast Libraries) and Tina Cavanough (Moreton Bay Region Libraries). I enjoyed working with you all, and I hope your communities love the reading map!

We collaborated on Googledrive and email.

 I've also added the books to our library's GoodReads account so there is another way to  discover the titles. 

My favourite story so far was Kate Morton's The Secret Keeper. The quote I used perfectly encapsulated the story and the theme of betrayal for me: 'The pair of them huddled together and Dolly listened as Vivien said, 'Go to the railway station and buy yourself a ticket. Get on that train and ride it all the way to the end of the line. Don't look back.' '

I love these comments about our previous reading map:

(Cath Sheard) Wow! I love what you and Alison have created. It’s informative and visually exciting. 

(Paul Brown) ..There is even a Trans-Tasman partnership happening at the moment between a New Zealand and an Australian librarian in the construction of a highly visual and engaging Reading Map.

Are you one of the many who have enjoyed The Lavender Keeper and its sequel The French Promise? Are you inspired to go beyond these with our map? Happy reading!

September - Get Reading! Australian

I love the anticipation leading up to September when we launch the national Get Reading! program!
The GR! team makes it very easy for us; they create the guide and send print copies to registered libraries and bookstores which will be snapped up quickly by keen readers. There is so much online http://www.getreading.com.au/ including

• the guide, 
• a newsletter, 
• first chapter downloads, and 
• an app (find your nearest bookstore and library)
• the hasthtag #getreadingAU at @getreadingAU

The list of Australian books that make the guide is released to the public on 1 September and not before. But as a registered library, our library recognises that to best promote the books to our community, we need staff to know what the titles are, and what the books are about. That's just good reader services practice. We:

• distributed the books to staff rooms with a comment sheet. We encourage staff to read the books or dip into them and share their thoughts. Some people have already read some of the books. Others will discover them for the first time. 
• registered for the GR! author touring program and have booked an author whose book was one of the most enjoyed books of 2012 
• have worked with four other librarians across Queensland and New Zealand to create a reading map that begins with the guest author's book. 
• include Get Reading! as a series heading in our catalogue to help people searching for the books (and have included a website link to the catalogue too).

To kick of this month of reading Australian stories, I've recently read Kate Morton's The Secret Keeper, and Josephine Rowe's Tarcutta Wake (review coming soon). I recommend both.

I'd like to see Get Reading! and Love2Read merge to become an almighty force for reading in this country. What does your library or bookstore do to get staff ready for Get Reading! month? I'm planning an article around this topic so all responses welcomed.

twenty - banksy by will ellsworth-jones

Banksy: The Man Behind the Wall by Will Ellsworth-Jones
Published 2012
Review available in ArtGaze magazine December 2012

‘I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit.’ – Banksy.

A bit of a misleading book title; what made you think you were going to meet the real Banksy, see what he looks like, read about his childhood? This book is not shelved in the biography section, and yet it is one of the most interesting unauthorised biographies I have read. Arguably the most recognisable name in graffiti, Banksy appears to have grown up rough in Bristol and early on chose the anonymity for which he is known (or not known). It’s an ironic ploy that has worked for and against him ever since.
Ellsworth-Jones asked, ‘how important is Banksy in the whole urban art world?’ and discovered that Banksy ‘kick-started the market. He’s a household name. Everyone’s grandma knows Banksy.’

This book reveals that everyone’s grandma actually knows Banksy’s art. If you disregard the mystery surrounding him; the interviews in shadow, the disguised voice, the loyalty and closed-shop of his team Pest Control, and the fact that nobody’s saying who Banksy really is, what you have left is the art. The pictures on walls; the stencils, the wry social comment – it all works well with an artist not desperate for his fifteen minutes. Without a preconceived perception of the artist as a man, the art can speak for itself. 

I found myself relating to the author while reading. He’s not involved in the art world except for having an artistic appreciation for location-based art. He didn’t meet Banksy, and only owns a knock-off stencil image despite waiting patiently online while others queued overnight. Whatever your knowledge of or interest in Banksy being labelled a street artist, a vandal, a national treasure or a sell-out, you’ll find this the strongest biography of Banksy you’re going to get to read unless his mother writes an exposé of his early years. Does he even have a mother? Yes, there’s a little about her and a revealing incident from Banksy’s pre-teen years, but no happy family photographs. There are few photographs of any of the pieces referred to in the book, but it’s easy enough to go online to find them. Or go on a cross-country trek as the author did using a guide book to find the Banksy image in its natural habitat.

This contextual element of urban art is explored intelligently by the author. Although Banksy graffities on surfaces that he does not own as is the nature of the art, his celebrity drives people to protect his pieces with perspex or have the wall for their own. Meanwhile his contemporaries are fined or jailed and their pieces whitewashed. Contradictory viewpoints are explored with Banksy saying that ‘public reaction is what supplies meaning and value’, and @ashlee arguing that ‘the point of street art is for it to exist in its natural environment. It is by nature temporary.’ Without the urban desolation of its Detroit factory yard environment, does his ‘I remember when all this was trees’ piece have as much impact sitting in a gallery?

Banksy has an uneasy relationship with galleries. After having snuck some detourned paintings into The Tate, he has now exhibited at Bristol’s Gallery and created a high-price market for street art. Banksy squared this with the audience and himself with Pest Control verifications and posting online ‘For the sake of keeping street art where it belongs I’d encourage people not to buy anything by anybody unless it was created for sale in the first place’. When celebrities and millionaires collect Banksy’s ‘for sale’ artwork, both his personal wealth and popularity increase. Banksy may have been feeling a little hypocritical but felt like he had an important message to convey about the absurdity of paying large sums of money for street art taken out of its context. His ‘I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit’ print may have referenced the 25 million pound sale of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, but it is also confronting (or amusing depending on your viewpoint). A commenter on his website noted this piece was the ultimate ‘portion of irony eating itself’. Whether street art should only be accessible to those who can appreciate it in situ, or however Banksy makes his money, I am grateful to him for opening my heart to street art.

Banksy’s site www.banksy.co.uk/index.html

Street art images below by me on instagram

eleven: Australia Dances by Allan Brissenden and Keith Glennon

Australia Dances: Creating Australian Dance 1945-1965 by Allan Brissenden and Keith Glennon,

Wakefield Press, 2010

review published 2010 at M/C Reviews

The country’s dance is a totality, and there is still scope for the development of a national perspective to evaluate and more liberal means to foster contributions to the whole, a perspective based on a greater understanding of the values of dance to individual and social life. (Brissenden and Glennon, 2010, p 4)

Dance enthusiasts will find much to explore in this beautifully presented hardcover book with a gazelle-like William Harvey on the cover.  Ostensibly spanning the twenty-year post-World War Two era, Australia Dances provides a strong in-depth portrait of dancers and dance companies from across Australia, and illuminates the layers of creativity leading to this pivotal time in history. Around eighty years ago Louise Lightfoot and Misha Burlakov presented a two-act version of Coppelia, at Sydney’s Savoy Theatre. Their progression from community concerts to amateur and then professional company is a tale of international collaboration and strategic planning. While Miss Lightfoot covered production and costume design, operational concerns posed a constant dilemma; that is, from where to source musical scores, and how to obtain performing rights from overseas publishers. Ensuring availability of a venue posed problems as Miss Lightfoot remarked, “We always had big studios in buildings which were threatened to be pulled down.” (Brissenden, 2010, p.83)

This post-war period abounded with dancers performing, teaching and creating companies; enhancing the dance culture and its development as an artform. Readers can trace the performance histories of dancers, productions and companies, including David Lichine’s The Nutcracker, Ray Powell’s The Lady and the Fool for the Australian Ballet, Robert Helpmann’s Elektra and Joan Halliday’s Theseus and the Minotaur for The Sydney Ballet Group.

While major groups such as the Borovansky Ballet enjoyed successful seasons, dance flourished across Australia, with companies and groups such as The Sydney Ballet Group and Australian Dance Theatre gaining strong reputations internationally.

Australia Dances is richly illustrated in colour and black and white with many photographs never previously published. These images capture dancers in elaborate costumes and intimate poses. Constable’s costume sketches for the 1951 Borovansky production of Petrouchka capture vibrance (p.15). Aboriginal theatre is represented, as are travelling companies including The Arts Council of Australia. While in this period dance received little government subsidy, its productions built upon one another to become recognised at the national level.

Brissenden notes (p.4) that “the relationship (of dance) with ethnology can lead to a greater historical awareness and closer understanding of other peoples.” It is this global understanding which underpins the development of dance in this country.

Brissenden’s coffee-table book is generously indexed as well as being categorized by state, and will be a rich resource for researchers and dance lovers alike.

seven: the tattooed flower: a memoir by suzy zail

The Tattooed Flower: A Memoir by Suzy Zail

Scribe Publications, Carlton North, Vic, 2006

review published in VATE Newsletter, no. 4, September 2007

Suzy Zail has managed what many of us wish we had done, but find it is too late. She asked her father about his life. They were like most fathers and daughters¾ too lazy to ask questions, too busy to listen. Emil then found he was dying. Motor Neurone Disease shocked Suzy and her brothers out of their detachment. Suzy knew her father was born in a small town in Czechoslovakia but couldn’t remember its name. She could see the modest flower tattooed on his forearm, but not what lay beneath.

In 1944, thirteen year old Emil Braun, his family, and hundreds of other Czechoslovakian Jews were loaded onto cattle trains for the chilling ride to Birkenau. Emil tells his story. The chapters of his past are interwoven with Zail’s revealing account of her father’s final five years. Zail’s lovingly produced memoir portrays her father as a good man, able to leave his tragic Holocaust childhood behind to thrive as an adult in Australia. The Holocaust had been an aberration¾a dark, bleak time in history. It didn’t define humanity and it wouldn’t define me.

The Tattooed Flower is a compelling personal account of the Holocaust for History students, to be read alongside others published decades ago. An early Birkenau incident provides a revealing anecdote about Dr Josef Mengele. Concentration camp cruelty on a daily level is exposed. Indiscriminate slaughter, miserable provisions, isolation of family members – how did the oppressors think these acts made them the better people? Students of Religion will find that bigotry tainted Emil’s earliest school days. Those studying immigration issues will find that Emil left his childhood behind when he docked at Port Melbourne in 1950. People looked happy, he said. The first Australian he met was a freckle-faced boy raised on beaches and pineapple juice. I’ve found my future. Dave, a sympathetic Australian tattooist, covered Emil’s camp number with a simple floral design.

In the 1960s the Brauns were a family of five and Emil Braun Jewellers the biggest diamond-ring-mount manufacturer in Australia. Emil was founder and chairman of the second largest Jewish social club in Australia, and served as Mayor of the City of Caulfield from 1988. Flower is also a creditable introductory biography of a significant Australian. Although the Australian years are not fleshed out, perhaps because Emil chose to remain silent about his achievements, Zail has the scrapbooks to show what kind of man her father was. You wanted to know who I am, Mr Braun said. I’ve talked for nine nights but I can tell you who I am in less than a minute: I’m a man, loved by a beautiful woman, graced with incredible kids. A lucky man.

An insightful memoir.

three: no place like home

No Place Like Home: Australian stories by young writers aged 8-21 years, edited by Sonja Dechian, Jenni Devereaux, Heather Millar and Eva Sallis.

Wakefield Press, 2005.

Review published in API Review of Books, Curtin University of Technology, W.A.
issue 44, July 2006, online

'This is my retelling of a great man who lost everything to a silly colour believing.'¹

Silly colour believings have had an enormous impact on so many lives, and in No Place Like Home young voices reveal the scars of these assaults. This anthology started life as a competition when Australians Against Racism encouraged young writers to submit stories of 'refugee or Indigenous Australians, displaced peoples from recent times or from the distant past'.² The resulting work captures almost forty young writers' explorations of exile and survival and of the rebuilding of their concept of 'home'. Collectively they have recounted 'small journeys and unimaginably huge journeys' on the road to belonging. Every voice builds a foundation for believing in the 'importance and irreplaceable nature of each human life and experience'.³ This book follows Dark Dreams: Australian Refugee Stories by young writers aged 11-20 years in what is hoped will become a series. Displacement and concepts of home are recurrent themes in editor Sallis' own work, including her recent Fire fire. Too confronting to be devoured at one sitting, these narratives should instead be reflected upon at regular intervals.

Each heart-rending story detains the reader with tales of persecution by authorities, exile, and the lengths the displaced will go to rediscover a sense of belonging. With the recent World Refugee Day and debates occurring over the Migration Act, this anthology is a timely reminder that displaced people are more than news items and more than the misinformation spread by comfortable citizens over their laden dinner tables. They are people among us, they may be us. Jasmina writes that 'the footprints follow her in the same way that her experiences will throughout her life'.⁴ These stories reveal people who make a home in Australia with aspirations formed by their experiences.

Comfortable citizens mock, 'If these people want to come on dodgey [sic] boats...'⁵ but are quietly challenged by harrowing personal narratives from Afghanistan, Lebanon, Vietnam, Germany, Iran, China, Sudan, East Timor and Australia. As these writers recount persecutions, rapes, concentration camp atrocities, bullying, bribes, family separations, bombs, landmines, screaming and beatings, there is belief throughout that they will survive; they will rebuild their lives in this paradise land.

Many Australians speak indignantly about the lack of humanity in other countries, but can they be so ignorant of this country's history? No Place Like Home tells of the relocation of Aboriginal children, asylum seeking children imprisoned for months and returned soldiers snubbed. Sam writes 'I left Iran with my family because we were persecuted for having a different religion', and the reader must question -- is Australia so different?⁶ Andri notes the ignorance he found, 'The other students say that refugees have had it easy ... they do not know what it is to starve'.⁷

After facing atrocities in their homeland, young people had their hopes dashed at Woomera Detention Centre. With despair Yusra writes, 'We were in a prison... it was one of the most painful experiences of my life'.⁸ Various publications offer statistics of child detention in Australia. These real-life stories represent the people behind the parading statistics -- the people to whom we must listen so as to try to understand the heartbreak, the confusion, the determination and hope. A Just Australia, discussing the infamous 'Pacific Solution', implores us to consider that 'the more we seek to deter asylum seekers and refugees through harsh treatment, the more Australia comes to resemble the repressive nations from which they flee'.⁹ If more Australians could read this collection and absorb its meaning, more displaced people may find this country the paradise they expected.

Not all stories feature refugees. A simple story of exile is Nicholas Cooper's The wheat fields: Michael Booker's story where a boy is forced off his farm to attend boarding school. His quiet determination wins through as he returns to his beloved fields.¹⁰ The rhythmic language of the Aboriginal people's stories gently questions behaviours and policies that displaced these people in their own land. An old digger proudly tells his story in A man in green, guiding readers to look beyond the legend to see the person within. In the face of disrespect on his return from New Guinea, Sergeant Upton still finds that 'there's no place like home'.¹¹

Amelia Easton's Eyes closed: Gashka's story invites readers to open their eyes to Gashka's experience. An orphaned Albanian girl separated from her sister and beaten by the matron found humanity in a refugee camp. Amelia recounts an innocent's discourse to take the reader from hope to despair, journeying through betrayal and degradation. Her dispossessor is represented over and over throughout these stories; as the Taliban, Hitler, Hussein, the Khmer Rouge, unnamed soldiers, rebels and ordinary people. Gashka's story builds with fierce strength; tracing her displacement to Italy and new life in Australia. Far from broken after her betrayal, Gashka works to regain her dignity and reclaim her life. Her story reveals a compassionate Australia (not shown too frequently in this collection) with visual symmetry; Gashka opens her eyes, no longer needing to hide.¹²

Australians Against Racism has produced another fine anthology of young people's work. Future opportunities to contribute must be embraced so that more Australians can be exposed to fresh voices in this critical area. Such an illuminating collection should be read far and wide in this sunburnt country so that a little of its spirit may enhance the soil on which we grow; a viewpoint visually expressed in Abbas Mehran's Aboriginal themed cover. As Irene Guo tells us, 'Treasure your life ... there are many people out there struggling to live on in hell'.¹³
Notes
1 FR Hann, 'Hal Hart's story' in S Dechian, J Devereaux, H Millar & E Sallis, (eds), No Place Like Home: Australian stories by young writers aged 8-21 years, Wakefield Press, Kent Town, SA, 2005, p 8.
2 Australians Against Racism, Projects: 2004 'There is No Place Like Home' schools competition, last updated 15 June 2005, viewed 20 June 2006, http://www.australiansagainstracism.org/code/projects.html
3 E Sallis, 'Foreword' in No Place Like Home, p 2.
4 J Kevrick, 'Long road to happiness', ibid, p 19.
5 Australians Against Racism, TV commercial: Negative responses, last updated 15 June 2005, viewed 20 June 2006, http://www.australiansagainstracism.org/code/tvc_response.html
6 Sam, 'A bit of my life' in No Place Like Home, p 27.
7 A Dao, 'Vuot Bien -- the search for freedom: Huong Thi Nguyen's story', ibid, p 61.
8 Yusra, 'The unforgettable moments', ibid, p 56.
9 A Just Australia, 'Treatment of asylum seekers and refugees' in Refugees and Asylum Seekers, The Spinney Press, Thirroul, NSW, p 22.
10 NJ Cooper, 'The wheat fields: Michael Booker's story' in No Place Like Home, pp 104-6.
11 H Upton, 'A man in green', ibid, p 78.
12 A Easton, 'Eyes closed: Gashka's story', ibid, pp131-34.
13 I Guo, 'Injustice -- when you can't tell: Linda's story', ibid, p 18.