Gillian Dooley

Gillian Dooley reviews 'The Simple Act of Reading' edited by Debra Adelaide

January-February 2016, no. 378 • 21 December 2015

Let's start with the title. The act of reading is anything but simple, as Fiona McFarlane and Gabrielle Carey both point out. Eyes, brain, and mind cooperate to create from a series of symbols with no intrinsic representative value a coherent message, or some amusing nonsense, or a persuasive argument, or a boring anecdote, or a parade of transparent lies. Debra Adelaide has collected several pre ... (read more)

Gillian Dooley reviews 'Settling Day' by Kate Howarth

December 2015, no. 377 • 30 November 2015

Kate Howarth is the child of a single mother, father uncertain, brought up by her Aboriginal grandmother. She in turn becomes pregnant at sixteen. Determined to keep her son despite the pressure to give him up for adoption, she marries the father. The marriage doesn't go well and Kate leaves without her son, hoping to come back for him when she is settled, but things don't go as planned and she do ... (read more)

Gillian Dooley reviews 'How to Write a Thesis' by Umberto Eco, translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina

September 2015, no. 374 • 27 August 2015

In 1977, before personal computers and the Internet, Umberto Eco published How to Write a Thesis. It has remained in print ever since, but only now is it available in English. The book hasn’t been updated and makes no concessions to technological change. Space is devoted to card indexes and manual typewriters, offering alternatives if the student owns an IBM Selectric. Eco advises choosing a the ... (read more)

Gillian Dooley reviews 'A Guide to Berlin' by Gail Jones

September 2015, no. 374 • 25 August 2015

I sit in a safe room with the winter sun on my back and read of violence and menace in an icy city. Gail Jones’s Berlin is so bleak and the novel’s dénouement so shattering that I need that brief benign warmth. This is not, I hasten to protest, a spoiler: the book begins by foreshadowing a scene of guilt, shock, and death, to which the novel’s action then gradually unfolds. Jones’s oeuv ... (read more)

Gillian Dooley reviews 'The Poets' Stairwell' by Alan Gould

June-July 2015, no. 372 • 28 May 2015

In 1977 the aspiring poet Alan Gould travelled through Europe with his friend Kevin Hart. Just such a tour forms the narrative thread for Gould’s latest novel, The Poets’ Stairwell. This is a roman à clef and those in the know will enjoy the identification game. More interesting, though, is the intellectual journey; Gould’s virginal twenty-seven-year-old hero, Claude Boon, slowly defining ... (read more)

Gillian Dooley reviews 'To Love a Sunburnt Country' by Jackie French

January-February 2015, no. 368 • 01 January 2015

Jackie French, according to the press release for her new adult novel To Love a Sunburnt Country, has written over 140 books in a twenty-five-year career. Many are for children and teenagers. I have only read one other, A Waltz for Matilda (2012), the first in ‘the Matilda Saga’ for teens; but these two books share at least one character and several characteristics. One of these is size − t ... (read more)

Gillian Dooley reviews 'Personal Effects' by Carmel Macdonald Grahame

May 2014, no. 361 • 30 April 2014

A woman, married but alone, stands at a window in a high-rise apartment in Calgary watching the snow fall. Later she might unpack a carton, go out to eat, go to bed. That is about all that happens in the present time in Grahame’s Personal Effects. The rest is memory. This woman, Lilith, from a coastal town in Western Australia, ruminates on a life story filled perhaps with more loss than than mo ... (read more)

Gillian Dooley reviews 'In So Many Words: Interviews with writers, scholars and intellectuals', by Cassandra Atherton

February 2014, no. 358 • 19 January 2014

I have often thought that a large part of achievement is just fronting up; having an idea and acting on it, however unlikely success might seem. What you need is a resolution (or the disposition) not to be discouraged by failure and to be pleasantly surprised by success. If it doesn’t work, you try something else. You make the most of any opportunity. You should also jettison a conventional sens ... (read more)

Gillian Dooley reviews 'The Night Guest' by Fiona McFarlane

December 2013–January 2014, no. 357 • 01 December 2013

The depredations of time on the ageing human is an unusual topic for a young writer to confront, especially in a first novel, but why not, if the negative capability is not wanting? After all, it’s common enough for an older writer to inhabit young characters. The difference is, of course, that a young writer hasn’t yet been old. In Fiona McFarlane’s first novel, The Night Guest, the main ce ... (read more)

Gillian Dooley reviews 'Boy, Lost' by Kristina Olsson

July–August 2013, no. 353 • 27 June 2013

Boy, Lost is a sad and shocking memoir, unique in particulars but not in broad outline. Domestic violence and psychological sadism lie at its heart. ... (read more)