A&R

Bates and Middleton are certainly valiant in their attempts to make a giant hollow rampaging male ego appear cute in Big Bad Bruce. Just look at it go! Indiscriminately swallowing everything in sight, making its way through the world astride a giant throbbing machine. But don’t toss this big glossy number aside – it can serve an excellent purpose. Treat it, allow me to suggest, thus.

Who made the best Sachertorte in the world? Andrew Riemer’s mum. The recipe is lost now, but it came from the Ursuline nuns in Sopron, a small Hungarian town where Andrew Riemer’s mother grew up. This information comes early in The Hapsburg Cafe, which is an account of the author’s second visit to the places of his childhood (the first account being recorded in Inside Outside). I waited and waited for him to go to the Ursuline Convent in Sopron and get the recipe, but the duffer never did. Even though he called a part of the book ‘Remembrance of Things Past’. Men. What’s a Madeleine when you could have a Sachertorte?

I was given these books for review just as I was finishing W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz. Its combination of fictional characters, information about language, architecture and war, and visual images reminded me that reading has so many functions. We read in order to imagine, to learn, to make discoveries. My admiration for Austerlitz also put me in mind of national differences. On the cover is a photograph of a child dressed as a pageboy and holding a feathered hat. His serious gaze and self-conscious posture mark him as a product of a culture where the intellect has precedence over the physical. Pale hair and a gently rounded face indicate his European origins, but otherwise it is almost impossible to relate him to any Australian child.