Review

Michael Visontay’s Noble Fragments is about second chances, serendipitous connections, and simple good fortune. At its heart is a young man fleeing bankruptcy in Hungary who reinvents himself as a rare-book dealer in the United States and his impact on the Visontay family, which had survived the horrors of the Holocaust to become a classic example of Central European migration to Australia after World War II. The book deftly links an intriguing story about bibliophiles and the addiction that is rare-book collecting with the poignant tale of a traumatised son’s devotion to his father.

Helen Garner has death on her mind. In recent decades, it has permeated her work in fascinating and unexpected ways. There is her novel The Spare Room (2008), which is about a woman’s struggles to care for a dying friend held hostage to dangerous delusions; This House of Grief (2014), a true-crime book about a devasting act of filicide; and, in her most recent volume of diaries, How to End a Story (2021), an account of the death of her marriage to the novelist Murray Bail.

Readers who loved James Rebanks’s autobiographical The Shepherd’s Life: A tale of the Lake District (2015) – a bestseller at home and abroad, translated into sixteen languages, and winner of numerous prizes – will welcome this new work. His first book tells the story of a recalcitrant youth who wants nothing more than to leave school early to work on his parents’ and grandparents’ farm. Eventually, he resumes his studies, which take him to Oxford, and begins his richly evocative account of his life as a Lake District shepherd. What magnifies and deepens this apparently simple narrative and surely accounts for its universal imaginative appeal is that the work he describes is the continuation of a tradition going back more than a thousand years. Against the backdrop of the Cumbrian massif, daily human and animal preoccupations, hardships, and rewards – subject as they are to season, weather, and geography – have changed little since the last Ice Age retreated. In 2017, the Lake District was given World Heritage status, in part for its continuous agro-pastoral traditions.

Lech Blaine. Lucky bastard. Great stories fall in his lap, like butterflies alighting on an open hand. All he has to do is write them up.

Oh, that it were so easy. Earning great material, in Blaine’s case, has meant more travails in three decades than some people endure in a lifetime. Surviving a horrific motor accident that claimed three young lives and profoundly damaged several others was grist for his first memoir, Car Crash (2021). The early death of his father, his mother’s decline through neurodegenerative illness, and managing a Bundaberg motel when his peers were attending university have produced compelling essays.

Raimond Gaita is quoted in his close friend Robert Manne’s new memoir as saying that a ‘dispassionate judgement is not one which is uninformed by feeling, but one which is undistorted by feeling’. That distinction points to one of the many attractive qualities of A Political Memoir: Intellectual combat in the Cold War and the culture wars.

Mark Raphael Baker started writing this memoir on his first night in hospital after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2022. His wife, Kerryn, had died of a rare gastric cancer seven years before. His brother, Johnny, died of oesophageal cancer just two years after Kerryn. He is also reckoning with the death of his elderly father. The emotional intensity of these losses is the foundation of A Season of Death. ‘Three graves in five years,’ Baker writes. ‘While no number of deaths could make me indifferent to what awaits me, watching a sequence of deaths in the family has made me more prepared. I feel as though I have been trained or mentored in the art of dying.’

How does Xi Jinping think? China’s leader since late 2012 is one of the most important but least accessible people in the world. He does not give interviews. His lieutenants do not leak to reporters. His associates do not write tell-all memoirs. The Chinese Communist Party is a secretive organisation that dominates the country’s information ecosystem by censoring speech and crushing dissent. We therefore know precious little about how decisions get made in Beijing.

Dogs have long been a feature of Markus Zusak’s fiction. His pre-fame trilogy of Young Adult novels, centring on brothers Cameron and Ruben Wolfe and their family, deployed the animal as a metaphor for tenaciousness. In the trilogy’s final book, When Dogs Cry (2001), Cameron and Ruben all but adopt Miffy, a Pomeranian whose scrappiness matches that of the brothers and whose death provides the book’s emotional fulcrum. There is a caffeinated hound in The Messenger (2002) and a clothesline-obsessed border collie in Bridge of Clay (2018). Even when, as in Zusak’s best-known work, The Book Thief (2006), dogs are not present, something about the way the author sees them – lovably rambunctious, all rough edges, chaos and, yes, doggedness – permeates the spirit of his two-legged characters.

Neville Wran (1926-2014) was a great Australian success story. His early childhood was spent in the Sydney suburb of Balmain, long before it was gentrified. He won a scholarship to study at the selective Fort Street Boys’ High School and then completed a law degree at Sydney University. Wran subsequently enjoyed a lucrative career as a Sydney lawyer, ultimately becoming a Queen’s Counsel (1968).

In a survey on humanity’s most vital inventions, the British public ranked the flush toilet above mobile phones, beds, shoes, and the combustion engine. Who can blame them? In a well-sewered world, we are protected from many of the infectious diseases that contributed to making our unplumbed ancestors’ lives nasty, brutish, and short. Cholera, hepatitis, polio, and the diarrhoeal diseases that continue to kill more people globally than acts of violence all implicate faecal transmission. It seems only rational to dispatch our excrement as quickly as possible in a cleansing torrent of water.