Books Roundup

The Albatross
Nina Wan (Pan Macmillan Australia, available now)

The Albatross is our Debut Spotlight for May! Read an interview with first-time author Nina Wan here, plus watch an exclusive reading on our Instagram!

The Albatross begins as Primrose Li takes a detour to Whistles, a waning overlooked public golf course. The neglected green reflects Primrose herself, and it is there as she finally does something just for her.

This book acts as a snapshot of Primrose’s domestic life in the outer suburbs of Melbourne with her husband, daughter, and a building sense of dread. When asked why she gave up her job in journalism she states: ‘It was a little tiring to have a view about everything, take a position for or against. It took its toll.’ But the true proverbial ‘albatross around her neck’ is not revealed until later and is far more devastating.

Wan has written an insightful, reflective book on finding your way.

Primrose’s life lacks purpose, and the meandering prose is a mirror of this. As a protagonist she is initially hard to discern. But this is a book about second chances and as Primrose continues to practice, golf acts as an extended metaphor. With each swing, her power, voice and joy begin to return: ‘Every nerve in my body is alive with the unexpected delight, the satisfying bliss of arrival’.

Alongside this comes a rumination on what it means to belong. With her marriage reeling from illness and potential infidelity, Primrose is faced with Peter, the boy she loved twenty years ago who is now serendipitously living across the road. We see flashbacks to their quiet youthful relationship, set against the backdrop of the early 2000s with the faint smell of Lynx in the air. Peter and his Chinese Australian family, with their harp in the window and their yacht, represent the immigrant dream of assimilation and prosperity that Primrose’s parents seek. These snapshots of young love show us Primrose’s burgeoning understanding of difference still hasn’t matured despite the passing of time.

Primrose reflects on those moments with Peter’s family: ‘It was like peering into the future and knowing in your heart that you were in the right place despite all the feelings of not quite belonging.’ While Primrose feels on the periphery of Australian culture, Peter’s class and wealth shield him from marginalisation. It is not until the latter half of the novel does the plot really kick in as Primrose is challenged to finally use her voice.

In golf, an albatross—three-under-par in a single hole—is considered even more impressive than a hole-in-one. ‘It’s a thing of beauty. One. Two. It must be very deliberate, very thoughtful, one superb shot followed by another.’ To truly succeed, you need more than a fluke—but to take action. For Primrose, this is addressing her marriage, her cultural identity and what exactly she wants for her future.

The Albatross tackles a lot of topics—illness, young love, marriage, mental illness, isolation, marginalisation, trauma—and not all to the depth they deserve. But ultimately, Nina Wan has written an insightful and reflective book on finding your way.

—Rosie Ofori Ward

Anam
André Dao (Penguin Books Australia, available now)

Anam follows a Vietnamese protagonist, the child of refugees, as he works through the complex history of his family. A particular focus is the life story of his grandfather who survived Chi Hoa prison. The unnamed narrator is faced with both the past and the future, as he works to build a positive life with his partner Lauren and their daughter Edith.

The narrative proceeds as a journey through the atrocities of war and colonisation, the intergenerational grief of migrant families and the endless search for home and justice. The book wades heavily through the past and is slow with plot in the present. I was craving for the protagonist to do something beyond ruminating in the past traumas of his lineage. Dao is aware of this stalemate and writes consciously about the difficulties of processing and expressing emotionally intense experiences. His style contributes to the feeling of inertia experienced by refugees, or the debilitating tensions migrants living between identities and histories can experience.

The writing uplifts during sections dedicated to the protagonist’s grandfather, imbued with warmth and weighty emotion.

‘I looked at other people, wrote Mai, and then thought about myself. I was not moved at much as I wanted to be. I tried to take control of my mind, to kindle a flicker of humanity in my bronze-cold heart. Lauren often says the same about me, but instead of bronze-cold, she says that my heart is flinty. It’s not a criticism, she says. It’s just a fact: that’s how you do the work you do.’

André Dao is a law academic and the co-founder of Behind the Wire, an oral history project documenting the stories of the adults and children who have been detained by the Australian government after seeking asylum in Australia. Writing by lawyers, academics and activists can sometimes have sparse, dry prose. Sentences that are constructed to serve a point rather than serve aesthetic aspirations. The writing uplifts during sections dedicated to the protagonist’s grandfather, imbued with warmth and weighty emotion:

There would be time for all that—but for now both boys lay in the dirt, waiting for the remaining bombers to disappear. Minh said that he was going to change his name, to Son, the Chinese word for ‘mountain’, to show that he was reaching for the virtue of the heavens. My grandfather knew what that meant: that Minh had chosen a nom de guerre, that he would go first to Hanoi, and from there on to southern China, or the mountains, and there join the revolutionaries led by another who changed his name, Ho Chi Minh.

The prose successfully weaves theory, non-fiction and fiction to create a substantial story. The passages outlining the histories and cultural vibrancy of Vietnam are emotional and vivid. Sardonic, funny moments featuring the protagonist’s partner Lauren also provide the best reprieves from the long-winded musings and rhetorical questions.

Anam opens with competing images of the protagonist’s grandparents. They are loving, doting, ‘always laughing, with each other and at me, pinching, touching, feeding me, looking at me, shaking their heads and chastising me, praising my plumpness and my height and my grades’. They are also perceived through the lens of their past: suffering, broken, in exile. ‘One couple speak to me of suffering, loss, exile, forgiveness and redemption and one couple do not…This second couple is harder to write but easier to remember.’

By the end of the book, the protagonist reaches a sense of understanding of both these sides as truthful parts of his family’s experience. However, by focusing the book more heavily on pain and trauma than the human joys which are also present, Dao has missed the opportunity for a more poignant book.

—Anith Mukherjee

Greek Lessons
Hang Kang, translated by Deborah Smith (Penguin Books Australia, available now)

Greek Lessons, the novel by Korean writer Han Kang, has been translated into English for the first time. The translation comes more than ten years after its first publication in Korean; or, in other words, far too late. Anyone familiar with Kang’s Booker-winner, The Vegetarian, knows of her ability to write vividly dark prose that lingers weeks after turning the final page. For such an extraordinary writer, English-speaking fans of Kang have only had a brief selection of translated works to turn to. Greek Lessons provides the antidote.

In Seoul, a young woman finds she has lost the ability to speak. ‘She no longer thought in language. She moved without language and understood without language—as it had been before she leaned to speak, no, before she had obtained life.’ As a possible remedy, she begins attending ancient Greek lessons, where she captures the interest of her language teacher who is quickly losing his sight. Soon they find a deeper pain connects them. For her, it’s the loss of both her mother and the custody of her son. For him, it’s an inability to withdraw from the past, as he forever reminisces over a time before his loss of sight started to close in.

An astonishing love letter to the most tender moments of human contact.

Throughout Greek Lessons, language misses its mark. ‘The language that had pricked and confined her like clothing made from a thousand needles abruptly disappeared.’ Rather, there exists a whole other world of communication. It is a space where all feeling, all emotion, can be captured in a single utterance, a glance, a touch—her finger tracing letters softly on his palm. Kang delves into the most painful moments of life to confront the depths of human connection and anguish. Interrogating the lives of two ordinary people, she explores the trauma of existing in a world that has become, in some ways, cut off.

As the woman’s language becomes more fragmented, so too does the book’s. By the final chapter, the text forms only short, often single-word sentences that fall down the page like fractured thoughts:

Trembling.

Palm.

A full stop.

Warm.

Black Sand.

No, firm fruit. In frozen earth dug buried, laid to rest.

Deborah Smith’s translation ebbs and flows as connections to language are severed and rebuilt. Sentences become broken, as the novel moves between English, untranslated Korean, and Greek. We are left to trace the contours of unrecognisable languages, at the same time as the woman struggles to recognise her own.

Greek Lessons is an astonishing love letter to the most tender moments of human contact. It is soft, beautifully devastating and intimate. And it is an extraordinary commentary on what it means to truly know someone, when words fail.

—Annie Yoshida