Lifeline Book Fair

Hard on the heels of my pilgrimage along the booktrail comes the Lifeline Book Fair - a massive event for Canberra, which is largely populated by nerds.  The approach to these magical bazaars always reminds me of the opening of Harry Potter: people with empty bags, baskets and carts (in lieu of capes)  scurrying across roads and huddled in gaggles of barely suppressed glee. On my way in I always look askance at people leaving with bulging bags, wondering if they're making off with the ones I wanted. Indeed the very abundance of books engenders just as much excitement about what you might find as fear of what you might miss.

Canberra's was slightly different from the Brisbane iteration so took some getting used to. There was no unpriced section which meant we were paying around $3 for most paperbacks (instead of Brisbane's fill-a-bag-for-$10). The classics section was pitifully small, but there was a very strong Australian collection. The general fiction section was much smaller, but also less crummy. It was fairly poorly signed (at one point I found myself asking a volunteer “Excuse me, I'm looking for religion”), but I suppose part of the fun of these things is the chaotic and serendipitous journey through the labyrinth.

In case you're interested, here's what I bought for a total of $12.50:

The Flight of the Falcon, by Daphne du Maurier
Tirra Lirra by the River, by Jessica Anderson
Where Angels fear to Tread, by EM Forster
An Imaginary Life, by David Malouf
Mark Twain in Australia and New Zealand, by Mark Twain

And here's what was on my list. If they were there, I missed them...

Anything by Anthony Powell, Eleanor Dark, Edith Wharton
The Practice of the Presence of God, by Brother Lawrence
The Catcher in the Rye, by JD Salinger
Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson

Book Country

This is where I spent yesterday - the southern highlands of NSW.  I started in Bowral, meandered through Moss Vale and Sutton Forrest, thence to Berrima, and wound up at Berkelouw's Book Barn, 3ks down the road - and only about 10 ks from the Hume Highway if you happen to be shuffling from Sydney to Canberra or vice versa.  The region is home to the NSW Book Trail, and is thickly populated with second-hand book stores. I didn't buy much (just Edith Wharton's The Buccaneers at the improbably named Bong Bong Books, and a Georgette Heyer at Sophie's Books - both in Bowral). Berkelouw's, though, is well worth a visit.  I remember vividly my first visit to Berkelouw's in Newtown, hidden away in an alley off King Street, a store of untold wonders.  This one, if possible, is even better. Tucked down a tree-lined lane in the middle of farm country, it's a vast, beamy, lofted structure, its stone flagged ground floor and woody attic both stuffed with books ranging from the rare and costly to the cheap as chips. They also do pretty tolerable coffee in an adjoining saloon.  I drove home to Canberra at dusk  in something of a happy dream. Nothing like books and God's green earth to remind one how good it is to be alive.

The End of The Road

I finally finished The Road over the Easter weekend. It was hard going; a thankless treck across the bleakest territory imaginable. The writing is beautiful, lyrical in places, but the story is utterly and deliberately unrewarding. Some have described it as redemptive, but only in the sense that these survivors - who envy the dead - survive once more. Survival itself is both a compulsion and a curse in this ashen world where nothing grows and you can't see the sun. There is no hope except the next meal and the next evasion of violent death. Though they follow their road through vast tracts of post-apocalyptic America, their lives are as cramped and circumscribed as those of prisoners. They “carry the fire” but they don't know where nor for how long nor who else might be warmed by it. Their journey, like the road, and like the book itself, has no beginning and no end. No meaning except that given by the rare moments of pathos or ease in an otherwise unrelieved struggle. In this sense the book is an allegory of human life. 

Given to survival, whence and why we know not, ultimately unredeemed. A strange book to read at Easter.

The Last Station

I highly recommend this dramatisation of Tolstoy's last days, directed by Michael Hoffman and based on the book by Jay Parini. Unlike other bio-pics, this one is rich and substantial, with lovely performances by the leads, and an engaging complexity at its heart. Helen Mirren is wonderful as the warm, stormy Sofya, thoroughly likable even as she smashes plates and shouts “I hate you!” at her husband. Tolstoy's wife is one of the most sympathetic figures in literary history - a victim of the licence granted her creative husband by himself and his sycophants. The film raises quite insoluble questions about the tension between art and life, and particularly between art and love. Sofya seems to represent the wreckage of ordinary happiness in the wake of extraordinary talent. Her antagonists seem to suggest that his expending love, energy, creativity, and intellect in marriage would mean he had nothing left for writing, and hence for posterity, for the world at large. (James MacAvoy has a great line: “I have never met mankind.”) The film makes of this tension a compelling and subtle drama, but I couldn't help thinking that balance must be possible, that life and literature must be compatible. Yet of how many great writers has this been true?

A Moving Feast

Another apology for prolonged silence. This time my excuse is moving house, which has caused me to reflect on the sheer volume of my volumes - most of my luggage was books, and they took some lugging by a couple of burly blokes. The appeal of ereaders was apparent to them as to me.  A library that fits in your handbag is surely preferable to one that fills two cars and a trailer.

However, now that I've unpacked and reshelved, I have to conclude that an ereader would not do justice to what I've actually spent the last decade and more collecting. Where would I find an electronic version of my beautifully bound set of Poets of the English Language, edited by Auden, picked up at a market for a song? Or of oddities like my Dictionary of Common Fallacies, or my Book of Facts from the 1930s? Or the edition of George Herbert that I hunted for for years and finally found in Archives in Charlotte St, Brisbane, with a price tag that miraculously corresponded with the amount in my bank account - $17.95? Or the edition of John Donne from which I worked while doing my PhD, that I picked up in a charity shop in Reading for £2? These and many others are irreplaceable. Or perhaps I should say undigitisable.

Not to mention their presence in my new home - comforting, inspiring, familiar. Voluminous.