Books

When Colleen first got the idea for the One Shot World Tour: Best Read with Vegemite, I immediately wanted to search out a lesser known Aussie writer to talk about. Only I wanted someone so lesser known I’d never heard of them. So, of course, I e-mailed Justine. She got back to me with a great list, but I’d been searching the wonderful Inside a Dog archives too, and one of the names she mentioned had already clicked with me there: Ursula Dubosarsky. The local library only had one of her books, The Red Shoe, which had been published in the U.S. this past May. I reserved it, hoping it was as good as it looked.

Reader, it was even better. I always know I’ve found a winner when I start reading aloud to Christopher within the first two pages. This one, I was reading from so much I think he thought it was a Margaret Mahy novel at first. And there are similarities there — particularly in the deft, brilliant use of third-person omniscient narration, but I’m writing a paper on that so I will spare you the writing wonk.

The Red Shoe begins with a Once Upon a Time, older sister Frances being begged by charming, high-spirited young Matilda to read her a story. Frances proceeds to read Hans Christian Andersen’s rather gruesome version of "The Red Shoes." As it gets darker and darker, Matilda can barely stand it, breaking in with: "I don’t like this story," said Matilda definitely. "I don’t want to learn to read if stories are like that." After being read the dubious "happy ending," Dubosarsky finishes the opening segment with these devastatingly perfect, understated paragraphs:

Their mother had some red shoes, with golden buckles and shiny black heels. They made a clicking sound on the pavement, like a tap dancer. Matilda loved those shoes.

"Red shoes," whispered Matilda under the blanket.

And she lay there quite still, listening to the sounds of the morning, but somewhere inside her she thought she might be afraid.

(Aside: This is a really stupid thing to admit, but I have a huge prejudice against big chunks of italicized text in books. And yet, this opening bit is just such a chunk, and there are a few others within the book — they’ve proved to me it can work without being distracting.)

There’s a gorgeous sense of dread, of shadows conjured, in the opening, but there are also moments of intense humor. Set during the 1950s in Sydney, the novel travels between the view from inside each of three sisters — Matilda (the youngest), Frances, and Elizabeth, Dubosarsky perfectly captures the differences that come from being the younger, older, or middle child, and also from being these specific girls. The humor comes naturally from those things. From eldest sister Elizabeth’s nervous breakdown at 15, which brings their father home — briefly — from the merchant navy in WWII to try and deal with it. Or from Matilda’s own skewed view of the world, spying on the strange men who move in next door.

Perfectly conjuring the period, and yet creating a completely accessible story, Dubosarsky contrasts chapters focusing on the family with interstitials from the Sydney newspapers of the time, stories of polio, the H-bomb, and a defecting Russian spy (who happens to under the watch of those strange men next door).

This isn’t a fantasy novel. There is magic in it though, even if it’s not really magic. There’s Matilda’s invisible friend Floreal 22, who came out of a radio show of The Argonauts, and the fairy story at the start, and a general sensibility that readers of smart fantasy will find appealing. But it isn’t a light novel, by any means, despite the humor infused throughout. It explores the weight events of the world can put on families, and the complexities of families themselves. And yet, it comes to a stunningly, legitimately hopeful ending.

Nothing here is heavy-handed. Everything is perfectly balanced. It’s a beautiful, beautiful novel. I can’t wait to get my hands on more of Dubosarksy’s work.

See also: Her own explanation of how she learned about the Petrov defection and why she wrote the book.

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And here endeth my contributions to the fabulous day of Aussie love. I’ll post the direct links to everything everybody did later on at the end of this post.

This isn’t going to be a long one. Newsflash: Margo Lanagan rocks.

I haven’t gotten to read any of her surely delicious novels yet, but I’m hoping to remedy that soonest (they aren’t available U.S.-side yet). Her short stories though, are a continual delight. New ones as anticipated as much in our house as someone discovering a previously unknown, even-more-delicious form of chocolate. (This would be known not as milk, dark, white, etcetera, but as GOD.) I believe that, predictably enough, "Singing My Sister Down," the first story in Black Juice, was my initial discovery of her work. Chocolate. God. Etcetera. (Although I actually recommend you read the story last, after all the other stories in Black Juice, just to save it for yourself like a secret.)

But if you haven’t read her yet, don’t listen to me. Listen to Jules and Eisha. They had a stellar co-review of Red Spikes, the new collection, yesterday (I meant to read and review it for today as well, but didn’t get my copy in time — boo), and today they have a fabulous interview with her. And, yes, it includes the Pivot at the end. (Yay!) And there’s even a process porn question:

7-Imp:  Since we’re sort of sharing you with Gwenda of Shaken & Stirred for this One Shot World Tour event, we’ll ask a Gwenda-like question: Tell us about your writing process (starting wherever you like: getting the idea, starting to write, under deadline, etc.).

Margo:  Have you got a spare hour or two? I can talk process-porn until the cows come home — and I loved reading about everyone’s work habits in the Summer Blog Blast Tour, so keep asking, Gwenda!

I keep notebooks, where I collect bits of stuff that might be useful, also encouraging quotations. I write first drafts longhand, to avoid aggravating my RSI and becoming keyboard-dependent. This last novel I’ve been writing, I tried to fool myself (because I would otherwise have been too intimidated) that it was just a whole bunch of linked short stories, so I worked on this ‘collection’ awhile before sitting down, admitting it was a novel, and working out which other ‘short stories’ (i.e. chapters) I needed to turn it into a complete novel. Now I’m finishing those off, combing and combing through the word-processorscript, filling up all the white space and adding pages. I can neither compose nor edit on-screen – I need to see the full page I’m working on, and the size of the pile of pages either side of it.

So get yourselves over there and read the rest. And then on to the other stops. (Image from Locus)

Why, yes, as the day goes on I will be getting more relevant to the Aussie theme of the One Shot World Tour: Best Read with Vegemite. Thank you for asking.

Anyway, now I’m going to prattle a tiny bit about Sassy and Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer‘s wonderful book How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time. Because it did, in many ways, change my life — it was a lightning bolt that hit the magazine stand at the Convenience Mart up the road in the middle of nowhere, Kentucky, where I grew up. I’d already stumbled onto some indie music and was obsessed with locating subversive books and movies (loved by teen geeks everywhere), but Sassy made not being all that interested in mainstream stuff legitimate and pointed me toward more, more, more.

This is a relevant topic for today, because it all started with Sandra Yates, an Australian feminist and businesswoman. On her site, she has posted a New York Times article that tells a little of the story:

Then in 1984, she was sent to New York for 10 days, to study whether Fairfax should be publishing magazines in the United States.

Two things happened to Ms. Yates on that trip. She fell in love with New York City, and she got the idea for Sassy.

American teen-agers, to her mind, needed a magazine like Dolly, one that would discuss issues like sex, fashion or suicide without cloaking him in euphemisms, one that would take a tone, in her words, of "hey guys, we’re in this together."

"The teen magazines here," she said, "were like Good Housekeeping for teen-agers, speaking with parental voices and looking like they were suspended in aspic."

At its launch, Sassy had a staff that was basically half-American, half-Australian, and under the helm of the Yates-annointed Jane Pratt. How Sassy Changed My Life tells the story of the magazine from start to finish, delving deeply into the personalities of the staffers — particularly the ones with the magazine early on, during its glory days. It perfectly captures the energy that was peculiar to Sassy, the sense that it was more than a magazine right from the get-go. For girls like me, out in the wasteland, it was a way of connecting to the larger culture, to people with similar interests — sound anything like, oh, I don’t know, blogs and the internerd?

Jesella and Meltzer make a compelling argument that the real successors to Sassy are blogs themselves, focusing on unique, personal voices, more interested in subjective takes than pretending to be some distant god(dess) peering over your shoulder telling you how it is. And, well, Sassy mastered snark before snark was snark. (Also, they tended to use their snark for good, turning it on deserving targets.) And how I miss the presence of a publication for teen girls with feminism at its heart; Sassy believed in the importance of girl power (or, more precisely, grrrl power).

The authors don’t just give the sunshine and roses though — Jesella and Meltzer deal with the fact that there could be a cliquey aspect to the magazine (again, internet, anyone?), particularly for those girls who worked as interns or on reader-produced issues. Sometimes girls that weren’t a certain kind of cool were made to feel not cool at all. But I still say that Sassy was more inclusive than exclusive. And that even if the staff didn’t always walk the walk, the magazine talked the talk and that was all most of us had access to anyway. Sassy’s central message was to do something. Anything. Activism was better than being cool. Creating music or art or whatever was better than being cool. Being smart was better than being cool. Oh, how I miss that.

Ultimately, America wasn’t ready for a dose of healthy Australian straight-talk for teenagers. The magazine wasn’t able to survive lengthy battles with the conservative Christian right, its unearned rep as sex-obsessed, or a round robin of publishers. In some ways, it reminds me of Freaks and Geeks — when that show was cancelled one of the producers said something along the lines of it being hard to be bitter when it was amazing such a show was ever allowed on network television to begin with. Along those lines, I can’t believe Sassy was ever mass-distributed and I’m grateful it lasted as long as it did. I’m thrilled, though, that its legacy has been rescued a little by this book.

I don’t just recommend it for those of us who hearted the mag when we were teens. I think that teen girls today, particularly ones just as dismayed at the pap in the current crop of teen mags, would love it. It would help them see a bit of the History of Teenage Girls and, especially, the History of Teenage Girls and feminism. And, well, that only sounds ridiculous because we’re still conditioned to think of teenage girls as ridiculous and unimportant in many ways. And that sucks. So read the book.

(Full One Shot World Tour schedule at the end of this post.)

Well, this is actually an unscheduled post on the Best Read With Vegemite tour, because it serendipitously came up last night. You guys may recall how much I adored Jeff VanderMeer’s Shriek: An Afterword last year? I still adore it and now it’s out in paperback. Now, Jeff is not Australian (that I’m aware of!) and the book’s set in ficitional Ambergris.

HOWEVER, there was a movie made of the book, featuring a soundtrack by The Church ("Wish I knew what you were looking for," you know), and it’s just hit the Web. Go over to Jeff’s site for all the details and to watch it.

Scheduled stops to follow. I’m posting the full schedule of the other participants and topics behind the cut. Meander their way…

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