Twenty-five years of reading at Aesop

1988 The Fatal Shore , Robert Hughes ‘The sandstone is the bone and root of the coast.’ Provocative Australian intellectual and art critic Robert Hughes has a confident, dictatorial tone but is no Polonius; to borrow a phrase from another on this list, he has ‘done the reading’. Part of the progressive ‘Sydney Push’ group of intellectuals, including Clive James and Germaine Greer, Hughes has done much to draw Australian art to international attention. The Fatal Shore is a defining piece of Australian literature, tracing the continent’s history of colonisation from its beginnings in convict life. The historian Manning Clark illustrated the power of The Fatal Shore by noting that, in Hughes’s hands, Australian history could be ‘the greatest show on earth.’ 1989 The Remains of the Day , Kazuo Ishiguro ‘Tonight, I find myself here in a guest house in the city of Salisbury.’ This former grouse-beater for the Queen Mother has made the poaching and dressing of individual memory his specialty. In The Remains of the Day, the lone voice is Mr Stevens, a butler with many years of dignified service to the house of Lord Darlington. As the estate to which Stevens has devoted his life is purchased by a title-seeking American émigré, the servant reflects on the missed opportunities within his hitherto selfless existence. As Salman Rushdie puts it, this is a story ‘both beautiful and cruel’ in its depiction of the inevitable leaking of time and the capacity for human regret. 1990 Daddy, We Hardly Knew You , Germaine Greer ‘It is silly of me, a middle-aged woman, to call my dead father Daddy.’ Greer said, ‘The more people we annoy, the more we know we’re doing it right.’ By this logic she is a success. She observes the Australian mind’s eye with an ophthalmoscope; the light is painful and unrelenting. Original and irrepressible, her prolific, polemical body of work is in the tradition that includes both Mary Wollstonecraft and Christopher Hitchens. In Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, Greer documents the pentimenti of her paternal family history, responding to the concealed, congealed truths and origins of her deceased father. This is raw and intimate material, as worthy for its intelligent and absorbing digressions as for its moving account of a woman still seeking the love of an unaffectionate, and now unreachable, father. 1991 The Famished Road , Ben Okri ‘In the beginning there was a river.’ Born in northern Nigeria, Ben Okri was raised in London and has published poetry, drama, fiction and non-fiction. Awarded the Booker Prize in 1991, The Famished Road is the first in a trilogy following spirit-child narrator Azaro as he straddles a fantastical dream world and a dust-in-the-mouth modern African city. Azaro’s simultaneous locations – privy to impending disasters and witness to the bounded rationality of human endeavour – express the wider, complex and often harrowing history of a continent where the membrane between tradition and modernity is mostly permeable. Okri continues to live in London, combining writing with his role as honorary Vice President of English PEN, the international fellowship of writers working to promote free expression. 1992 Leviathan , Paul Auster ‘Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin.’ Paul Auster occupies the interstices between fiction and something more or less objective: concrete facts enveloping characters loosely drawn from those that populate the author’s own life. In Leviathan, writer and cigarillo smoker Peter Aaron (whose wife, Iris, is connected to Auster’s partner, Siri Hustvedt, through a semi-palindrome) constructs a memoir of his friend Ben Sachs. Sachs, who dies while building what would now be called an IED, and Aaron himself are caught in Auster’s familiar lattice of randomness and determinism. Despite being one of America’s most successful postmodern writers, Auster retains a decidedly traditional commitment to the centrality and propulsive power of narrative.

1993 Remembering Babylon , David Malouf ‘The boy had elaborated this scrap of make-believe out of a story in the fourth grade Reader; he was lost in it.’ David Malouf, born in Queensland to Lebanese and Portuguese Jewish parentage, has brought meaning to many at Aesop. He is concerned with ‘the place of language, not just as a means of communication but a way of apprehending and organising our world.’ Remembering Babylon explores cross-cultural journeys and the centrality of landscape to human existence. Drawing on the true story of Gemmy Morrill, Malouf’s juvenile castaway is inducted into an indigenous tribe and, exiled from both existences, lives as a ‘black white man’ as the British colonial project transforms the Australian continent. 1994 What I Lived For , Joyce Carol Oates ‘God erupted in thunder and shattering glass.’ Nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, What I Lived For is the twenty-second novel (under her own name, at least) from the eminent, but by no means merely emeritus, American of letters. JCO, as her admirers know her, knots disparate narrative threads in the Memorial Day weekend of Jerome ‘Corky’ Corcoran, a nickel-and-dime politician and businessman. Oates’s ability to inhabit the recesses of this particular psyche is matched only by her engendering simultaneous disdain and sympathy for him in the reader. As James Carroll noted in the New York Times, ‘Oates has written an engrossing, moving study of desperate, lonely and lost souls, of America itself in the midst of decline.’ Considering that What I Lived For was published during the budget surpluses and benign 6 per cent unemployment of Clinton’s first term, JCO’s sensitivity to invisible carcinoma is acute. 1995 Arabian Nights and Days , Naguib Mahfouz ‘Time gives a special knock inside and wakes him.’ Cairo-born Naguib Mahfouz’s citation for the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature described him as one ‘who, through works rich in nuance – now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous – has formed an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind.’ Although the ensuing publicity and monetary rewards did not substantially alter the author’s modest way of life, they allowed his and other Arabic fiction to be exposed to an international readership. These stories comprise a vivid re- imagining of, and homage to, the classic One Thousand and One Nights. Mahfouz views mortality and moral responsibility within the frame of contemporary Egypt – political corruption, social justice, religious fundamentalism – to create tales of intoxicating detail and universal reach. 1996 Infinite Jest , David Foster Wallace ‘I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.’ The known master of excessive, addictive and irreverently incorporated detail. Foster Wallace’s juggernaut of 972 chapters (replete with diagrams, footnotes, footnotes to footnotes and academic references) progresses slowly, permitting manifold diversions. These include prescription drugs, advertising, grammar, physics and the disassembly of beds. Moving between the elite Enfield Tennis Academy, the deliberately redundantly titled Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House and the terrorist activities of various Quebecois, this novel is concerned with and about our post- modern, hyper-consuming, TV-sedated existences. On the evidence of this work alone, Foster Wallace’s suicide at forty- six was a heavy loss for literature. For an equally absorbing and nuanced posthumous view of the author, locate Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Farther Away,’ originally published in The New Yorker. 1997 The God of Small Things , Arundhati Roy ‘May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month.’ The God of Small Things remains Roy’s only published novel to date; she has concentrated on political writing since the release of this emotive and technically adept Booker Prize winner. Here, she traces the circumstances of twins, Estha and Rahel, after the childhood drowning of their visiting English cousin Sophie Mol. Roy depicts the caste and class prejudices, traumas and general eccentricity of their extended family – and by extension those of India too – against the lush landscapes of Kerala. Elevating, engrossing and, in the author’s own description, ‘an inextricable mix of experience and imagination’.

1998 Underworld , Don DeLillo ‘He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.’ Underworld is cerebral, mordant and unflinching. It provokes a rich awareness of a half century of modern American history, beginning on 3 October 1951. (DeLillo has commented that the front page of the New York Times for the following day contained symmetrical headlines of two ‘shots heard around the world’: the ninth-inning victory, from near-certain defeat, of the Giants over the Dodgers and the ominous second Soviet nuclear test, in Kazakhstan.) Ostensibly tracing the life of Nick Shay from his Bronx childhood to middle age in the Southwest, Underworld is also a tangle of characters, intersecting story- lines and sport, violence, celebrity, conspiracy, consumption and waste. Writing in the London Review of Books, Michael Wood explained: ‘The evoked image or moment, instantly intercut with another image or moment...is about as close to simultaneity, or a split-screen, as one could get on pages that run in lines.’ 1999 Disgrace , J. M. Coetzee ‘For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.’ J. M. Coetzee is one of only two – the other is Peter Carey – who have twice received the Booker Prize. Disgrace examines the consequences of power enforced with total brutality in post-apartheid South Africa. Professor David Lurie, self-obsessed but suddenly vulnerable, seeks refuge on his daughter’s remote farm after his affair with a student. After father and child are attacked by three local men, Lurie’s earlier misogyny is reflected and amplified in his own daughter’s suffering. Coetzee’s minimal, lucid prose belies a coruscating work; the spare form also maintaining the tension between resisting and recreating the Western literary tradition. 2000 White Teeth , Zadie Smith ‘Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway.’ Cambridge-educated, perfectly poised and winningly self- effacing (see her piece on hair for the McSweeney’s Festival in 2001), Zadie Smith earned her wunderkind reputation with this debut, which was in print before her twenty-fifth birthday. In Smith’s words, novels are ‘kind of personalised, messy objects.’ White Teeth illustrates her affinity for this same organic matter in Dickens and Trollope but Smith is also an artisan of their school, honouring our intelligence with an opening tricolon of parsimonious beauty and possibility. Complex in plot and immense in scope, White Teeth is a fugue for the voices of three intersecting families in pluralist, polyglot North London: a convincing portrayal of how the English live now. Jamaican Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jewish- Catholic geneticists and Bangladeshi immigrants play their parts with humour and charm. 2001 The Corrections , Jonathan Franzen ‘The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through.’ The Paris Review described this as his ‘midcareer masterpiece’ and Bret Easton Ellis recently acknowledged it – together with Franzen’s Freedom – as ‘the two best novels that came out of my generation’. The Corrections captured both critical admiration and bestseller status for its previously obscure author. Franzen drew upon the velleities and carefully caught regrets of his own St Louis upbringing to illustrate the Lambert family. Patriarch Alfred, mired in Parkinson’s disease, and his wife Enid attempt, flailingly, to bring their adult children home for one last Christmas. Franzen’s project – ‘taking the cover off our superficial lives and delving into the hot stuff underneath’ – lives in his description of Lambertian parental, fraternal and sexual relationships and in his creation of each character’s complex inner world. 2002 Middlesex , Jeffrey Eugenides ‘Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome!’ Eugenides recently told an interviewer that ‘[f]iction should be specific rather than general, because people are specific’ and ‘the job of the novelist is to inhabit both male and female’. Calliope Stephanides is born of these twin muses in 1960 as the only daughter of Greek-American parents living in Detroit. Upon reaching physical maturity, the recessive genetic code inherited through her grandparents is activated and Calliope is transformed into an intersex person, recognising in himself that: ‘Like Tiresias, I was first one thing and then the other.’ Over three generations, Eugenides turns his self-described ‘comic epic’ from Greece to the American emigrant utopia, from Calliope to Cal, and from the quadrilateral Midwest to the gritted vertices of Berlin. This is a generous account of a rare individuality, so often confined to the anonymous and unspeakable, but respected through Eugenides’s meticulously honest physiological descriptions meted with genuine compassion. 2003 What I Loved , Siri Hustvedt ‘Yesterday, I found Violet’s letters to Bill.’ Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster met in 1981 at a poetry reading at New York’s 92nd Street Y and married on the following Bloomsday. The facets of their shared existence illuminate many of the critics, painters, academics and writers in What I Loved. The New York Times called the characters ‘people who possess...the leisure of theory.’ Narrated by art professor Leo Hertzberg, the author of ‘A Brief History of Seeing in Western Painting’, Hustvedt’s novel documents both Hertzberg’s world of the creative elect and the fading of his once-lambent vision. Beginning with the substitution of ‘what’ for ‘whom’ in the title, Hustvedt questions whether recollection is memory, or perhaps the memory of memory, and whether Leo only exists as a voyeur of his own life.

2003 What I Loved , Siri Hustvedt ‘Yesterday, I found Violet’s letters to Bill.’ Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster met in 1981 at a poetry reading at New York’s 92nd Street Y and married on the following Bloomsday. The facets of their shared existence illuminate many of the critics, painters, academics and writers in What I Loved. The New York Times called the characters ‘people who possess...the leisure of theory.’ Narrated by art professor Leo Hertzberg, the author of ‘A Brief History of Seeing in Western Painting’, Hustvedt’s novel documents both Hertzberg’s world of the creative elect and the fading of his once-lambent vision. Beginning with the substitution of ‘what’ for ‘whom’ in the title, Hustvedt questions whether recollection is memory, or perhaps the memory of memory, and whether Leo only exists as a voyeur of his own life. 2004 The Plot Against America , Philip Roth ‘Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.’ A plausible, unsettling counterfactual United States of the 1940s. An isolationist, authoritarian Charles Lindbergh is the thirty-third president, displacing FDR from a third term. Mining Lindbergh’s factual, fractured layers of pioneering aviation hero, innovator and reactionary, Roth constructs a nation that keeps its troops and tanks home, leaves Europe to the Wehrmacht and embraces fascism and anti- Semitism. Simultaneously ambitious and intimate in scale while remaining intensely personal, The Plot Against America depicts global events through their impact on the ‘Roth’ family and a seven-year-old boy named Philip. Roth reveals our lives as fragile contingencies, the protean nature of events and the malignant as well as benign paths along which the past and the future irrupt. 2005 Arthur and George , Julian Barnes ‘A child wants to see.’ Julian Barnes is an accomplished essayist and commentator as well as a novelist. His ne critical perception and scrupulous research underpin this re-imagination of the Great Wyrley Outrages. At the turn of the twentieth century, George Edalji, half-Scottish and half-Parsi, was sentenced to seven years’ hard labour for maiming farm animals after a series of anonymous accusatory letters. After Edalji was released – after serving three years – but not pardoned, Arthur Conan Doyle took up his cause. Barnes traverses Edwardian race and class prejudice with a resonant punctility but it is his two incarnate central characters – one brash, well-bred and Anglo- Saxon; the other unassuming, acquiescent and de nitively ‘other’ – who cleave to us. 2006 Half of a Yellow Sun , Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ‘They were standing before the glass door.’ This, Adichie’s second novel, cemented her reputation as a masterful storyteller. Set in the tenuously united Nigeria of the 1960s, Half of a Yellow Sun re-imagines the unique horrors of the three-year Biafran War that divided Adichie’s country along ethnic lines. The frayed relationship between the privileged twin sisters, Olanna and Kaiene, each tangential to the other yet bound to her by notions of duty and familial loyalty, is centre stage. Against the scrim of politics conducted with automatic weapons, the sisters’ stories and those of their respective lovers – a pedantic Nigerian professor, a benighted British expat – are played against a chorus of gossiping village women, penurious servants and practitioners of traditional magic. 2007 On Chesil Beach , Ian McEwan ‘Even when Edward and Florence were alone, a thousand unacknowledged rules still applied’ It’s the summer of 1962. Edward and Florence are impeccants, honeymooning at a hotel on the Dorset coast. Stilled, silenced and striated by the social conservatism of the age, they struggle to name, much less overcome, the fears and expectations of their wedding night and the adult life that awaits with the morning. McEwan, intrigued by the spectrum of innocence (innate, constructed or devolving) since his early fiction, carefully dissects the significance of instants. Those moments – seized, stumbled through or simply missed altogether – become the detritus defining the navigable channels of our lives. 2008 Disquiet , Julia Leigh ‘They stood before the great gateway, all around an empty and open countryside, ugly countryside, at mudploughed fields.’ Nine years after Leigh’s successful debut The Hunter, this novella addresses the unspoken cruelties and continual annealing of domestic relations. In Disquiet, a woman gathers her two young children and flies from her abusive husband in Australia to her family home in the French countryside. Her elderly mother shares the chateau with her son and his wife who, after years of fruitlessly attempting to conceive, have delivered a stillborn daughter. Leigh’s writing is minimalist and deliberately archetypal but imperative, causing J. M. Coetzee to note its proximity to film, with ‘a visually rich action taking place before the inner eye’.

2009 The Museum of Innocence , Orhan Pamuk ‘It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it.’ At the centre of The Museum of Innocence is the concept of hüzün – a sense of pervasive melancholy, loss and listlessness – experienced by Kemal, a young blade in the beau monde of 1970s Istanbul. Despite his impending marriage, Kemal ignites a desultory affair with Füsun, a poor shopgirl to whom he is distantly related. After Füsun disappears and Kemal’s engagement implodes, he searches for her relentlessly and the intensity of his dormant, forbidden love erupts into obsession. Kemal visits Füsun, now married, collecting trinkets and other ephemera from her as ‘the anthropologist of my own experience.’ Pamuk gives simple meals the same verbal depth as fine miniatures; he applies these descriptive powers to a vivid and arresting portrait of Istanbul, caught between the stubborn Bosphorus tide of tradition and the hot wind of liberation and modernity. 2010 Curfewed Night , Basharat Peer ‘I was born in winter in Kashmir.’ Bashrat Peer grew up in Kashmir, describing a ‘fairy-tale childhood of the eighties’ in the spectacular landscape below the Himalayas. His youth disappeared in the nightmare decade when Pakistan and India contested his homeland by any means they deemed expedient. Over 70,000 Kashmiris perished. Peer’s memoir honours the numberless tragedies of this little-known conflict, including the Gaw Kadal Massacre (Indian troops shooting defenceless Kashmiri protesters, demonstrating Santayana’s aphorism by grotesquely echoing and perhaps even wilfully forgetting the Amritsar Massacre, by the British of unarmed Indians, just 70 years earlier). Within this testament of suffering, Peer also describes the hope and wider struggle of the diaspora attempting to re-engage and return, however recognisable home may be. 2011 1Q84 , Haruki Murakami ‘The taxi’s radio was tuned to a classical FM broadcast.’ Written in three parts like its Victorian precursors, 1Q84 displays Murakami’s uniquely postmodern, tectonic style. He summons magical realism, offers poetic descriptions of various urban banalities, creates alternate reality with command-line precision and enriches the mix with meditations on cultural marginalia. Murakami has said that his writing routine is designed to ‘mesmerise myself to reach a deeper state of mind’; his devotees believe that Murakami’s work permits them a similarly privileged access. Here, the paired existences of Aomame, a self-defence instructor and sometime assassin, and Tengo, a lapsed writer, are corroded by isolation and yearning for the not-yet-realised even as they spiral toward collision. 2012 The Chemistry of Tears , Peter Carey ‘Dead, and no one told me.’ Australian-born Peter Carey has enjoyed the admiration of critics and an affectionate public since Oscar and Lucinda, which won him his first Booker Prize in 1988. In The Chemistry of Tears, Catherine Gehrig, a curator of mechanical automata in the London of 2010, finds a more speculative way to inhabit the past. Following the death of her lover and colleague, Catherine is asked to restore a clockwork duck that was commissioned a century before by one Henry Brandling for his ailing son. Discovering Brandling’s journal, Catherine begins to synchronise her grief and anguish with his. Carey’s delicate history of emotional indicia also shows technology’s dual capacity to empower and constrain us, while affirming the still greater potential of human longing.