I reviewed Alex Miller’s Lovesong for The Big Issue. It’s a lovely book exploring the ownership of one’s story and the proposition that when someone tells you a story it becomes a gift. Ken, an ostensibly retired writer, has returned to Melbourne after a sojourn in Venice. Before long, though, he’s captivated by the exotic smell of pastries wafting out from where the drycleaner’s used to be, the beautiful dark-eyed woman who runs it and her husband, an Australian man with beautiful hands, ‘the hands of a capable man’. He discovers their names – Sabiha and John Patterner – and clamour arises within his writer’s heart for the ‘ancient buried sorrow’ he sees in Sabiha’s eyes; the ‘simple love story between them, this Aussie bloke and his exotic bride’.

There is a lot of pain in this book, but Lovesong is also unexpectedly playful. Ken’s circumstances mirror Miller’s own: Ken’s ostensible last book was called The Farewell – a barely disguised Landscape of Farewell; and the accomplished writer cherishes his memories of the Tunisian city El Djem. John Patterner is not free of Miller’s arch self-mirroring, either. Patterner’s Melbourne University education, favoured North African restaurant in Paris and country town provenance are all lifted, bare-facedly, from Miller’s own history. ‘Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait,’ says Ken (pace Lucian Freud) to a nosy interviewer.

Miller is a fantastic writer who is equally capable of the lyrical and the laconic. An example of the latter:

The coffee was steaming. His mother had named Tip for the white tip on her tail. John had not given names to his animals. His father’s old horse had been a big lumbering brown gelding named Beau. A great farter. A monumental farter. When his father spurred Beau up the bank of the creek the horse let out a series of mighty farts. Real stinkers. It would take your head off if you were tailing him too closely.

The other thing is that Miller has a real knack for names. I don’t know how many times I read a modern realist novel or short story and roll my eyes at the names. Wrong names can pull you right out of a narrative – if they’re too sterile, too pretty or too odd, they don’t work. Of course, it’s hard to pick monikers that could come out of a phone book without just flipping open the White Pages. But it’s not often you come across an author with the knack for picking proper nouns that lend a heartbeat to what is really just ink on a page. Sabiha and the two Hourias; John Patterner; Andrea and Tumas Galasso; Ken and Clare. Just kind of strange enough, kind of pedestrian enough, just they-live-right-round-the-corner enough.

Romance is a narrative space that has birthed some enduring clichés: I’d Take a Bullet for You; I Knew I Loved You before I Met You; What Took You So Long? These phrases are attractive because they create a paradigm in which there is only one choice, in which the tragic and the correct are one and the same thing. So it is with the exhortation to ‘Let the Right One in’: this imperative expresses the commentator’s capitulation to life’s generous and resolute pairing strategy. There’s one person out there for you, and when you find them, you let yourself love them, and you let them be with you. But any of us familiar with love’s angled horns knows that love is not the cakewalk that the easy gait of these phrases makes it out to be. What happens, for example, when a person grows to love a predator; when a human falls in love with a vampire?

Oskar is a young boy who imagines the earth of Blackeberg, his hometown, drinking the blood of his bullies; a lonely and damaged child whom older children in his school and apartment block take advantage of: selling him stolen toys at exorbitant prices and calling him ‘Little Pig’. Nosebleeds and wet pants are daily problems, and he’s chubby from the confectionery he regularly swipes from stores. His troubles show no signs of abating, and filter through even to how he spends his time waiting for his mother to come home from work – a scrapbook he keeps under a stack of comics contains clippings about grisly crimes from newspapers and the Home Journal. So it’s no wonder that Oskar is intrigued when a young boy is killed in nearby Vällingby.

His loneliness, however, is about to come to an end. In the courtyard of his building one evening, Oskar is imagining himself the attacker and his bully, Jonny, the victim, when a young girl he’s never seen before joins him outside. Eli is quiet but strange, wearing only a thin pink top against the freezing cold. She moves like a cat. There’s something broken about her, too: her first words to Oskar are not ‘Hello’ or ‘Hi’, but ‘I can’t be friends with you. Just so you know.’ She smells bad, though she looks like a doll, with her pale, white face and dark hair. Two children used to being alone, their interaction prefaced by antisocial stabs: it’s a heartbreaking premise for a novel’s axial relationship. But it’s delicately handled by John Ajvide Lindqvist, as is every passage in which the children’s rapport is the focus. In particular, the way they finally breach their own defensive barriers to become friends – in the committed, obsessive way that children can foster – is beautiful and quick, an insect’s hop between leaves. Since both are accustomed to being almost alone in the world, their love for one another necessitates a rare brand of support and trust. And that’s even before Oskar discovers why Eli is so strange, for she is, of course, a vampire.

The vampire story can be remade and remodelled endlessly, as a series I’m desperately trying to avoid mentioning by name here has recently shown. Lindqvist’s interpolation of the ancient monster into the contemporary context, along with the ethics, the rules and the history of that special flavour of beast, is a successful and cinematic one – it’s no surprise that Let the Right One In lent itself so wonderfully to a film adaptation. Few Western readers would need to be reminded why the vampire – human-like, eternal, predatory – is so compelling a creature, and therefore so prone to recurring in fiction. Lindqvist’s modern interpretation limps a little with the introduction of a medico-biotic explication of the vampire’s hunger, but is wonderful when focused on the delicate, fierce exchanges between Oskar and Eli.

However, this book is not for the reader who is similarly delicate. Crime fiction, even vampire crime fiction, has traditionally accommodated an author’s interrogation of the socio-cultural landscape. In Let the Right One In, the murders that soon creep from Vällingby to Blackeberg are not the only criminal items of note – Eli’s companion, Håkan, is a paedophile who finds opportunities to indulge his vice at the local library, and searches out people for Eli to feed on. Håkan and Eli’s victims are not anonymous or horror-film-glamorous fodder. Vulnerable people are the easiest victims, and so a child, a cancer sufferer, a monobrowed member of a drinking group and a grandmother all succumb to Eli’s unnatural needs. Key to this aspect of the book is Eli’s body, which Lindqvist explicitly renders as a beautiful blank that allows respective characters to perceive her in a range of dangerous and contradictory ways, whether as an object for experimentation, games or desire.

Though as a vampire Eli needs permission to enter a person’s home, she needs no such consent to enter a person’s heart; she has long honed the skills of cultivating human attachment that enable her survival. But it is not only Oskar’s decision to let her – the ostensibly dangerous one – into his life that creates the emotional cynosure of Let the Right One In. At the centre of this book is the combination of sweetness and despair that follows Eli’s decision to abjure her path of centuries to take the risk of letting mortal love into her life, and what that means for her endless existence. It is a decision fraught with the weighty ethics of love, expressed with touching clarity in this book.

I can’t believe I’m admitting to having read this book. It has an emoticon in the title. Consider its inclusion on this blog a radical sign of my regard for you and this reading documentation project.

So, my family were fairly early internet adopters. I’m not talking crazy-early, but I seem to remember making the transition from playing Asteroids on my dad’s work laptop (amber and black screen, baby) in primary school to keenly exploiting ICQ, IRC and WBS in the first year or so of high school. I loved it. My sister and I used to play word games on IRC all the time. (This is so embarrassing.) Since access rates were much cheaper in non-peak times, I used to get up at 4 am to get on the internet. I had to muffle the dial tone because it was so loud. I’d listen to the Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream very quietly every morning and chat to my best online friend, David, who worked at a tile store in the Western suburbs. Ah, youth!

Probably because of this obsessive internet use, my sister and I were given two books called Chat and Connect, both by Nan McCarthy. We loved these books: the series is essentially a epistolary internet romance. Beverly, an editor (spookily prescient) who is tetchy, sharp and married, and Maximilian – a flirtatious copywriter – meet through an INTERNET FORUM ABOUT WRITING. Behold the power of ‘e-mail’ to connect strangers:

> Private Mail
> Date: Friday, July 14, 1995 1:48 a.m.
> From: Maximilian@miller&morris.com
> Subj: Hello
> To: BevJ@frederic_gerard.com

Beverly, (is that your real name?)

I’ve seen your messages in the Writer’s Forum and you seem to know a lot about computers. I’m thinking of upgrading my old ’386 PC and I’m wondering if you can give me any advice on whether I should buy a PC or a Macintosh.

Also, I noticed in your member profile that you’re an editor. Where do you work? I’m a copywriter…maybe we could get together sometime.

Maximilian (that’s my real name)

> Private Mail
> Date: Monday, July 17, 1995 7:32 a.m.
> From: BevJ@frederic_gerard.com
> Subj: Thanks, but No Thanks
> To: Maximilian@miller&morris.com

Maximilian:

I really don’t like to give advice on whether a person should buy a Mac or a PC, especially because I know nothing about the way you work and what you want to accomplish with your computer. If you’re just going to be doing word processing, it probably doesn’t matter whether you use a Mac or a PC.

I’m sorry I don’t have time to chat but I’m under a lot of deadlines at the moment.

p.s. Just in case you didn’t notice, my member profile says I’m married.

I trust you get the drift. The rest of Chat is full of inquisitive gems like this: ‘What does “BTW” mean? And why did you put asterisks around one of your words?’ You can check out the rest of the first chapter of Chat here. If you want to. I bet you do. If you don’t, spoiler alert: Maximilian, that wily copywriter, eventually wears down the wary Beverly’s defences with his charm. Then, Beverly and Maximilian meet at a MacWorld conference and have a little fling. Saucy! Eventually, they fall in love. Wow! The internet is awesome!

But, as I said, my sister and I only had the first two books. We couldn’t find the third book in the series, Crash, in any local bookshops. McCarthy wrote the books just as Amazon was starting up, and, being high school kids, we didn’t have the resources to track down the third book overseas. The other week, however, my sister stormed into my room and said: ‘Guess what I bought today?’ I’m a stolid type, so I waited patiently for her to tell me. With a flourish, she brought the book out from behind her back: she’d sourced it from one of Amazon’s second-hand partners. I think it cost her $12, despite the huge orange ‘$2.99′ sticker pasted to the front.

She read it first. It took her about thirty minutes, and after that she dropped it into my hands with a look on her face that said it had not lived up to expectations. Having always been dubious about revisiting the subject of our childhood enthusiasm, I approached it with a kind of enthusiastic disdain, which was resoundingly rewarded.

It’s a page-turner, that’s for sure. Connect ended with Max and Beverly organising a weekend tryst, and in Crash, they have just, um, ‘connected’. They’re now irreversibly in love, and the book is full of the puppyish revelations I’m sure plagued the early days of the internet – or, for that matter, any kind of early romantic relationship. Highlights for me included a twelve-page ‘transcript’ of a forum on copyright hosted by Bev: informative! Lowlights included Max’s description of a sexual act between the two on a pier: gross! And the ending, which is kind of stupidly literal (hint: think about the title).

Thus ends this wander through memory lane. It was pretty enjoyable, I have to say, but extremely trashy. I may have to go dig out Villette or something, to compensate.

So, it was my birthday yesterday. It’s been a big eating week: I went to Barbagallo on Friday (excellent), Movida on Sunday (also excellent) and Cutler & Co last night (I guess that makes it three out of three for excellent). Movida Aqui on Friday. (Note to self: 3265000meals.blogspot.com?) But now I am poorer than usual.

Never mind, here’s some of my sweet birthday stash. In the middle, the slim orange tome whose title is obscured by my camera’s low megapixel count, is Nathan Curnow’s The Ghost Poetry Project (at last!) Under that, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o's Weep Not, Child. Clearly, someone’s been reading this blog, because I now own all of MJ Hyland’s books, too. Bright red, in the middle, featuring the least annoying instance of non-standard quotation mark usage I’ve ever seen: The Paris Review Interviews, Volume 3. I actually received two copies of The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman — it’s a pretty well-targeted choice. Also received one of the gorgeous cloth-bound Penguins designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

I love delayed gratification as much as the next girl brought up in a Catholic household, and I’m waiting on some good ones. The top two people on this page got me a voucher for Better World Books, with which I have just now purchased some long-desired tomes: The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O’Connor, The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill and Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. In the fine tradition of ‘buying oneself a birthday present’, I also bought myself some books online. OMG I JUST LOVE BOOKS LOL.

It’s kind of good to be known as a book lover. People will buy you things they think you would like, or get too scared to buy you things and just ask you what you want. I’ve kept a list of books all year for that reason. And birthdays are good for things that are slightly pricier than your average paperback: wait until you see what my mother and I bought from my work as birthday/Christmas/just being a good kid in general benefactions. (Hint: Oxford University Press makes dictionaries.)

I requested Madeleine St John’s The Essence of the Thing for review on Textual Fantasies because I was fascinated by what critics say about St John. I’d never heard of her, but when Text re-issued her novels, it became possible to read a slew of printed praise for her writing, including, from Michelle de Kretser: ‘It is to be hoped that St John, who is woefully undervalued [in Australia], will at last be recognised as the best novelist we never had’. Big call. So, of course, it was necessary to read Madeleine St John immediately.

And, of course, I’m glad I did. It’s a break-up story, albeit one which is tart and charming. Nicola — lovely, clever, loyal — comes home from a cigarette run to the home she shares with Jonathan to this:

Jonathan shrugged very slightly and then got impatiently to his feet. He leaned an arm against the mantelpiece; if there had been a fire he would certainly have poked it. As it was, he looked unseeingly at the objects at his elbow and moved a china poodle dog. Then he looked up at her again. ‘There’s no nice way to say this,’ he said. ‘But I’ve decided – that is, I’ve come to the conclusion – that we should part.’

Anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of similar words will appreciate the swirling confusion that follows such a scene. Nicola’s first reaction to this giant unilateral shift is disbelief: ‘this is just a sort of joke which I haven’t yet understood’; this quickly turns to shock and anger. Later, she manages to pull herself together into a kind of utterly practical and even hopeful embracer of change: it’s not a book with a lot of wallowing. And it’s as far from psychiatry-era emotional-damage-lit as you can get. Rather, The Essence of the Thing illustrates the wretchedness of a regular end to a regular relationship with endlessly empathetic focus on the kaleidoscope twist such an event usually represents.

St John is talented at sketching character with very few words. It’s not a dense book, and it has very short chapters, which tootles the whole thing along very quickly. In that way, it’s rather televisual. I particularly like her dialogue, which is pithy but veridical:

‘What’s your dad doing?’
‘Watching telly.’
‘Take him a caramel then.’

There are lots of characters in this book, mostly couples: the newly-split couple’s respective parents and different sets of Nicola and Jonathan’s shared friends. But they’re all lively in separate skins, all able to be told apart. St John very lovingly pokes fun at the many foibles a person encounters in life’s cast of friends and family, and occasionally enjoys a joke at the expense of her adopted national character (she moved to England in the 1960s): ‘I must, she thought, just concentrate on what comes next, and try to live through this as decently as I can. She was not British for nothing.’ I also loved the little kid, Guy, who is very good-natured and is constantly exclaiming in the time-honoured British way: ‘Cor!’ (as opposed to: ‘Oh my god, that is so random’). And Nicola herself is wonderful, with her smiles as easy as her tears, her passim French words and her desire just to get on with things after Jonathan leaves.

The Essence of the Thing is a tender exploration of the middle-class break-up: the turmoil and resilience that can still be suffered by the person whose basic physical and financial needs are all taken care of: the emotional niceties of awkward asset dissolution, the solitude and pendulum swings of someone undertaking to demolish a long-term relationship, what to do with the marmalade your ex-partner’s mother has gifted you with, what to do with the collection of china dogs. What is interesting about The Essence of the Thing is how ordinary all the characters and situations are. People are, of course, drawn to stories that can tell them things they might never find out if they relied purely on their own experience: other countries, other lives and other loves. But readers also love to feel the fizz of recognition between themselves and a story, and in that, this book excels.

Today, it was announced that Tony and Maureen Wheeler have made a large endowment to the Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas, which is now called the Wheeler Centre in honour of that fact. So, they didn’t take up my ‘RAD BOOKTOWN’ name idea, then. Pity. I did get tingles from being in the same room as Melbourne’s publishing power couple, though. (Apparently they met each other on a park bench in London and got married within the year. So don’t give that dude in the park the brush-off, y’all.)

Anyway, after the concise and rousing speeches, this:

Witness that fitness, people. (Lady in the red jacket is like: Back off of my food, ladies.) The standard for literary event catering has definitely been set (cabana and Coon cheddar coming in a close second). And I couldn’t behave myself. I think it was pretty obvious that Maddie and I were there as representatives of community radio and, what do you call it, ‘blogs’. We did the ol’ shuffle-over to the food table but didn’t want to be the first people to take anything. We whispered endlessly to each other: ‘I think maybe Jason Steger is going to take a blini. Why isn’t Sophie Cunningham hungry? I’m pretty sure Lynne Kosky will need some fuel after that rousing speech,’ etc. Luckily someone in a suit broke the code and we happily indulged in the very fine foodstuffs until:

…there was very little left. Nobody puts cubes of fish rich in intramuscular fat on miniature pancakes with micro-cress, ikura and cream cheese without expecting me to take at least five of said food item. Behind are crunchy noodle haystacks with peeled cherry tomato halves, people. Somebody peeled cherry tomatoes so that I wouldn’t have to suffer the tannins of tomato skin (nor the nutrients — zing!) Good job, whoever catered the launch.

More seriously, or at least more literarily, the Gala Night is going to be kind of ridiculous. If you like anyone who writes things (Chloe Hooper? Paul Kelly? Cate Kennedy? Christos Tsiolkas? Alex Miller? John Marsden? John Safran? and I’m going to stop there, because the rhetorical value of my question marks will diminish if I just list everyone who’s going to be there. But you get the idea) then you will widdle in your pants for this event. Just saying. The rest of the program’s not much chop though. Some guy called Peter Singer is doing a talk on the lawn, and some woman called Ramona Koval is hosting a monthly event. Huh.

When Maddie and I interviewed John Hunter of Hunter Publishers a month or so back, he brought along a stack of books for us, an expansive gesture that Maddie, better tenacious of her good breeding than I am (sorry, Mum and Dad) took the lead in declining to fully exploit. But neither of us could resist taking one book each from the proffered pile, and there was a dog fight over Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay. I won — spurred by Older Sister Entitlement Syndrome — and Maddie took away the tantalising, not-really-second-place Oink Oink Oink by Eric Yoshiaki Dando.

I’m not usually a scrapper, and I don’t think Maddie is either. But John was describing how he’d discovered Manguso’s writing — she’s a poet and short fiction writer, an Iowa alum — and came to buy the Australian rights to The Two Kinds of Decay, a memoir about her experience with a disease called chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy (CIDP). Both us girls (well, I’m extrapolating from how I felt) were intrigued and touched by the story and its short-sections format, and I got stuck into it pretty much straight away.

Like most human dramas seem to do, Manguso’s sickness crept up on her without any warning. One morning in 1995, when she was washing her face, she couldn’t catch her breath and her hands started tingling. It was a strange affliction that became more severe over the next couple of days, though with the average person’s blithe lack of presentiment for catastrophe, her worry was mostly directed at the collateral effects:

I was concerned I’d caught a strange illness, but I was more concerned that I looked drunk. I was staggering around, even to and from breakfast, and I felt people looking at me and thinking it might be time for an intervention.

Only a day later, she fell down in her university’s courtyard. Her mother took her to the hospital and in twelve hours she was hooked up to a machine and warned that she would be intubated through a hole in her neck if she deteriorated any further.

What followed was four years of medical treatment so intense that ‘intrusive’ doesn’t quite cover it. In CIDP, the immune system secretes antibodies into the blood, and these antibodies destroy the patient’s neurons. To avoid the effects of this self-destructive cycle, Manguso had to undergo apheresis, ‘from the Greek aphairein, to take away’. Her blood was fed into a machine that spun the blood into its separate components, removed the poisoned parts — in Manguso’s case, the plasma — and guided back into the body once mixed with saline and artificial plasma.

The matter-of-fact way in which Manguso describes the effects and the equipment of her illness is simple, though not inhumane or stark. She reports the taste and the cold of the plasma infusions, inescapable because they are inside her; and it’s difficult not to put one’s hand to one’s neck and close the book and be of one’s own body for a moment. Weakness is one of the accompanying detriments of CIDP, with the limbs becoming too impuissant for common tasks. This leads to impossibilities where once there was effortlessness: the section entitled ‘Blood and Shit’ tells of the cheerful nurse who ‘really knew how to wipe an ass’, and Manguso’s gratefulness for the competency with which her favourite staff would accomplish these intimate duties. Less able to be imparted without horror are the tales of professional inadequacy. In ‘The Sikh’:

He tried again and again to jam the tube into my vein. Every now and then he had to stop and apply pressure, as I was bleeding. At one point I thought I felt a jet of blood spurt into my chest cavity, and that’s when I lost my composure.

Months later, after his hair had gone from steel gray to white, my father told me it had looked like a horror movie.

While her writer’s nous enables her to figure her observations as salient themes or lessons, Manguso’s poet sense also conveys understanding in impressionistic flashes. At ‘The End’, she learns to ‘pay attention’; and that ‘to pay attention is to love everything’: a conclusion as comprehensive and inscrutable as monks’ replies to koans.

Not elegiac, but clear and aware, Manguso’s memoir is a bright prism for insight into the matrix of sickness and strength. Written seven years after her recovery, The Two Kinds of Decay uses a structure of fragments to translate life’s linear chaos into something multifaceted and utterly graspable. In a cruel bracket of life where the words ‘prednisone’ and ‘bolus’ and ‘fear’ become daily companions, and doctors and nurses number among the most common cast members, humanity might be a person’s most precious and most tenuous asset. Manguso’s powers of pellucid distillation guarantee the preservation of that humanity in the telling of a story with the power to all but devour it.

***

Next on the list for me is certainly some of Manguso’s poetry. Also, she is working on a novel: ‘it’s called The Guardians, and it’s about surveillance and paranoia’.