Peter Singer/Pushing Time Away

As Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and one of the world's best-known modern philosophers I knew of Peter Singer but didn't actually know he was an Aussie. Pushing Time Away is only one of his many publications - including Practical Ethics, How Are We To Live?, and Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals, published in 1975, regarded as the starting point for the worldwide animal liberation movement. So, this is pretty illustrious company. I love my meat and haven't read anything else by Singer, but very much enjoyed this peculiar little conceit. A conceit because its not really a memoir, or hard history, or even an extended obituary - while being a good example of all three.

Singer's approach is simple enough - he never knew his maternal grandfather and discovers some letters that pique his interest seventy years after his grandfather dies. What he discovers is possibly what many of us wish to discover, that his grandfather was an intriguing, successful individual, revered in his own time. What he also discovers is what most of us can never hope to - his grandfather was similar to his grandson in many ways, was a celebrated writer, thinker and teacher, and was a contemporary and a confidante of Sigmund Freud, no less. Singer is a humble man, though, and seemingly grounded about his own success, so refrains from holding his grandfather in awe, and relates the story of his chequered life with sincerity, strong research, and, at times, comedy. This last quality is noteworthy because his grandfather, David Oppenheim's final years and fate are devastating, and hard to read after the illustrious ears of his youth and early professional life.

Oppenheim was a teacher and intellectual in early 20th century Austria - a period experienced by many as a Golden Age of thought, enlightenment and culture when Vienna was at the forefront of these prospects. We now know that this was a chimera - it took a world war to prove this - and David is one of the many walking casualties of that horrible war. He returns a decorated soldier but distant, chased by memories of carnage and loss. And things get progressively worse. He loses the inspiration to write, is frustrated professionally, and eventually becomes an enemy and ultimately a victim of the Nazi regime. David is a Jew in the darkest period of Jewish history, and all the more pathetic for his inability to see the dangers of the political situation as it steadily declines. Singer is proud of David's intellectual achievements, but he bemoans his scholarly remoteness: "in the hour when he needed it most, David's understanding of his fellow human beings failed him". David Oppenheim dies unheralded in the walled town/camp of Theresienstadt, Poland, one of the many millions.

His wife, Amalie, survives Theresienstadt and emigrates to Australia, bringing with her the many letters written to her by David throughout his life, and thus giving Singer the primary sources for his book. They provide a fascinating insight into he courtship, marriage and life of David and Amalie. In fact, for me they are the strongest part of the book. Singer touches on many historic moments but never belabours the historical detail, allowing the letters to specify one family's experience. He returns to some of the places of his grandparents' life, including, in one memorable passage, the school in Vienna where David taught classical languages and culture. It must have taken great restraint and sensitivity for Singer to relate the circumstances of his grandfather's demise without reverting to bitterness - although it may have just been a resignedness; it being pointless to begrudge the past really.

The most telling factor, that Singer keeps returning to, and which inspired him to write the book, is the closeness in intellectual rigour and even ethical positioning between David Oppenheim and himself. Considering he had never read any of his grandfather's writings or spoken to anyone in his family about his leanings, they arrive at an uncannily similar place. So, this is history, striated with family legend, and informed by a burning desire to understand humanity shared by two practical philosophers who never meet. It is not a light 'read', by any means, but a worthy project by a very confident and informed writer who is unforgivingly human. And if only we all had such a wealth of letters and published material from our own families, we might all be tempted to 'push time away' and find the things that bind us across the generations.

The wrap-up:
Australian themes - As a memoir, this book is written by an Australian emigre who is unconcerned by Australian themes.
Australian characters - Not so relevant in non-fiction, but the apparently tough-minded immigration officials who hinder the Oppenheim's emigration to Australia and thus seal their fate are chillingly real.
Australian settings - The Australia that the family members who do make it out come to is only thinly drawn.
Australian voices - Is there something particularly Australian about trying to delve into one's past?
Australian focus - Singer's focus is clear and Australia is just the end point.

Christos Tsiolkas/The Slap

Having been seriously affected by this novel, I haven't written anything or even read much for a week now. I've also changed jobs in the interim so The Slap will always stand out as the book that bridged two very different careers.

But I'm stalling. What to say about Christos Tsiolkas and The Slap? In a few words, it's one of the best Australian novels this century, possibly one of the greatest novels about contemporary Australian life ever written, and definitely my favourite in this reading year thus far. The book is at once clever and matter-of-fact, Tsiolkas's writing style so familiar, so authentic, that the characters and situations leap off the page and cross your path in the street. The eponymous slap, for instance, is so visceral yet almost expected, longed-for by the reader; but then it puts in train such a devastating series of events that you want it taken back, want the book rewound to the sunny, innocent moments before the slap occurred. Like the first scene of Cloudstreet, the slap scene is frightfully necessary.

It takes place in a suburban backyard in Melbourne, surrounded by a cast of players Tsiolkas allows us to get to know by astutely, and thrillingly, entering the lives of eight of them as he takes on their voice for each of the eight chapters of the novel. Each voice is distinct, and this would be an achievement in itself, but Tsiolkas takes it further by using these personas to pin down modern Australia, our preoccupations and presumptions, as precisely and as triumphantly as a butterfly collector. It must be said, that it is more middle class society that is his concern, but that particular Australian middle class that sags and sways over the definitions of other classes like a bloated belly over a belt. For Tsiolkas knows what makes us tick. His keen ear for our narcissistic speech, and eye for our foibles sometimes shock with the recognition of our own inner lives. is Christos looking over my shoulder right now? How can he see what I'm thinking?

And this is not just me, a middle-class, middle-aged middle Australian: he successfully masquerades as a seventeen-year-old gay boy, a seventy-year-old Greek grandfather, a troubled English immigrant, a thirty-something female Australian-Indian veterinarian. There are no excuses for this conscious multiculturalism either. As he says in his brilliant conversation with Sophie Cunningham on SlowTV he felt that this story was not being told on Australian pages - and he's right, not this way anyway. Our writers tend to either mask their multicultural background, like Alex Miller or Bryce Courtenay, or revel in it, like David Malouf or Nam Le. Authors are celebrated as "gay" writers, or "indigenous" writers, and rightly so, but Christos Tsiolkas takes on a new mantle: he is an Australian author, writing about the Australia he sees, and it is populated with third and fourth generation and new immigrants, gays, lesbians, Muslims, Christians, socialists, capitalists, white people, people of colour, the whole lot. I keep saying brave in these reviews but I do believe he is incredibly brave, or maybe just bold, in looking at Australia with an unflinching vision; he is political without needing to become personal.

This is where this novel succeeds so well compared to Richard Flanagan's dire attempt of a few posts ago. The Australia Tsiolkas presents is not always nice, and Howard's years do loom large over the novel in parts, but it is in the daily passage of ordinary people that politics has its most potent manifestations. There is no need for overblown characterisations: we live and love and fuck and feel in this time we are living, and, for my money, novels that recognise and celebrate this will always stun us, make us speak up at barbeques, remind us to keep a healthy perspective on ourselves, our world, and our immediate milieu. The people in this novel are all flawed, like us, and like us, they have within them the seeds for redemption.

I haven't said too much about the novel this time, sorry, but I urge you to just read it, discuss it with others, watch the SlowTV conversation, and let the issues and the urgent comments on our society pervade your life as I have. Can novels change you? Have I changed? Cover blurbs regularly insist that books will do this for you but I'm seldom convinced. Like the old joke about the social workers and the lightglobe, you have to want to change.

The wrap-up:
Australian themes - There are loads of themes here due mainly to the eight-way conversation with the reader, but also because that's the sort of writer Tsiolkas is - he cares about ideas and wants to toss them up in the air and see how they fall. The Australian way, no?
Australian characters - I challenge you to find more authentic Australian characters, more authentically characterised, in any recent novel.
Australian settings - The action is focussed on Melbourne. I was concerned at the outset that I might be in for another Melbourne-as-the-centre-of-the-universe diatribe but it actually made me miss the place.
Australian voices - The speech and thoughts of the characters in this book are devastatingly familiar. Keep watch for your own semantic demons.
Australian focus - Interesting. This book is certainly about Australia, and could only be set in Australia, but the concerns are deeply Human. Christos Tsiolkas is latter-day a Greek-Australian Homer: his words will cross boundaries.