An image of shelves in a library
The interior of dBieb, Leeuwarden. Image by Raymond Snijders via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
17 October 2024 / 0 Comments

My (Northern) Summer Reads for 2024

One of the first things I do whenever I move to a new place (trust me, I’ve lived in enough cities, towns and villages to know what I’m talking about here) is to visit — and join — the local library. There’s something comforting and consistent about libraries the world over that grounds me.

Growing up in Australia, the town library was always free to join. The same applied in Sweden, where I lived for 11 years. Sure, you might need to pay a token amount for a late book but if you were interacting with a good librarian — and let’s face it, they’re all good — they’d usually waive it.

Therefore, it was a bit of a shock to discover, when we moved to France in 2022, that we had to pay for the privilege of borrowing books from the local médiathèque. But our kids could still join up for free and I guess it was also a price I was willing to pay to have access to English-language books.

Fast-forward to 2024, and I was very curious to find out what kind of library experience awaited me in Fryslân. Of course, living in a village of 200, I hardly expected to find a library close by. But the Dokkum and Leeuwarden bibliotheken (libraries) are just 12km and 15 km away, respectively.

While the bibliotheek in Dokkum is cute and cosy, the city library in Leeuwarden, known affectionately as dbieb, is probably one of the best libraries I’ve ever visited. Housed in Het Blokhuis, a former prison on the edge of the old town, dbieb is full of character and colour.

The interior of dbieb, the Leeuwarden city library, which is housed in a former prison. Image by Raymond Snijders via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).

As part of my personal imburgeringstraject (LOL), I signed up for a vakantieabonnement (holiday subscription) over the summer, just to find out whether it would be worth paying EUR 57 per year — which is pretty steep, compared to what we paid in France — to become a full member.

This week, my trial subscription expired. While I went through the motions of weighing up the pros and cons of a full year’s membership, I knew deep down that I was going to join no matter what. I suspect that’s just due to the accumulated effect of 50 years’ exposure to libraries and books.

All of which is a long-winded way of getting to the list of library books I actually borrowed and read between July and September this year. I have posted these lists before (see this example from 2005: cripes, what a time that was!) but it’s not something I’ve done systematically. Well, let’s change that!

And screw GoodReads!

This time around, rather than simply list all the books I’ve read as a form of passive-aggressive humblebrag, I thought it might be worth adding a few words about my impressions of them. More as a way of remembering what struck me as interesting than a contribution to Pseud’s Corner, mind.

So, without further adieu (I’ll stop now):

My ‘uninterrupted, sustained, silent reading’ (USSR) list for July-September 2024

  • Scrublands (Chris Hammer): Surprisingly, one of the only Australian novels in the dbieb collection, Scrublands is a piece of outback noir about a journalist who goes to a small rural town to write an article on the anniversary of a mass shooting. Funnily enough, Chris Hammer is also an Australian journalist. Write what you know, anybody? While I found the story intriguing, the descriptions of the landscape and climate were a little over-egged. I mean, I get it: it’s warm out there in the bush. I know, I lived there. But maybe show me some more of that instead of telling me over and over again how bloody hot it is?
  • Old Filth, Last Friends and The Man in the Wooden Hat (Jane Gardam): This trilogy explores the secret lives and loves of Sir Edward Feathers (aka Old Filth), a child of the British Raj who goes on to become a barrister and judge in post-war Hong Kong. At first glance, I wondered whether this was really the kind of book for me but I found the entire trilogy gripping, poignant and fascinating. Gardam presents multiple versions of Feathers, as well as his wife, his main rival at the bar, and an assortment of other characters. Each book is a profound meditation on memory and secrecy, regardless of the order in which they are read. That being said, I’ve been told by other readers — including my better half — that you do need to read them in order, so maybe ignore my recommendation on this point.
  • Version Zero (David Yoon): Okay, this one was a bit of fun, a cross between arch-cyberpunk and slapstick comedy, involving the obligatory techbro, a programmer romance, some evil dudes and a finale set on a snowy peak in the Balkans. I mean, what’s not to like? I enjoyed just letting this piece of pulp take me wherever its author wanted to go. But there was a darker, more serious side to the novel. Its insights into social media companies’ algorithms and strategies, as expressed by a barely fictional version of Twitter called Wren, certainly remains topical, given that platform’s descent into absolute gobshite territory since the book’s publication in 2021.
  • You Can’t Catch Me (Catherine McKenzie): Not being an expert in the categories publishers and booksellers use to classify literary works, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest this one’s not anywhere near “high-end”. Like Version Zero, You Can’t Catch Me is a thriller that could not have been written prior to the advent of social networks in the early 2000s. Ostensibly about a series of women named Jessica who have been subjected to an online scam, You Can’t Catch Me read to me as if it had been workshopped, edited and focus-grouped to hell, with a corresponding lack of roughness around the edges which would have made it suspenseful moments a bit more realistic.
  • If I Had Your Face (Frances Cha): Full disclosure: I will read just about any book with a Korean author, main character or theme. If I Had Your Face has all three (while Cha was born in the United States she has lived and worked in Korea). As an added bonus, it’s an utterly terrifying glimpse into the lives of young Korean women working in room salons in Seoul. While I’ve spent time living in Gangnam, which is notorious for this kind of salon (not to mention the epicentre of the Korean plastic surgery industry), Cha manages to convey the violence to which these women are subjected, as well as their solidarity and unlikely friendships. I really loved this book.
  • Mayflies (Andrew O’Hagan): Turning to another cheerful subject, Mayflies describes the coming of age of a group of young men in Glasgow in the late 1980s, with a focus on the friendship between the narrator and Tully, a larger-than-life oddball who discovers he has cancer when they are all in their mid-forties. Tully’s euthanasia journey provides the book’s narrative propulsion, but the narrator’s reminiscences about a trip to Manchester’s Haçienda, and the characters’ arguments about 1980s bands and lyrics, make this a really moving portrait of a time and place that’s now receding into history.
  • Sharks In the Time of Saviours (Kawai Strong Washburn): Another novel I wasn’t quite expecting to ‘hit different’, as the kids say, Sharks In the Time of Saviours tells of a Filipino-Hawai’ian family’s struggles with poverty and the co-option of traditional Hawai’ian culture by mainstream US society. Individual family members narrate alternating chapters, with the plot revolving around the disappearance of Nainoa Flores, a young man with an apparent gift for reanimating and/or spirit-summoning animals (including sharks). Washburn sure knows his way around an adjective, and the novel drips with descriptions of the natural environment in Hawai’i and the harsh reality of urban life. Amazing.
  • French Braid (Anne Tyler): Maybe it says more about me than anything else but I’d never heard of Anne Tyler until I came across this book, whose arty cover caught my eye on the dbieb shelves. And wow: I am so glad it did! French Braid tracks an American family from the 1950s to the Covid pandemic (a risky contemporary flourish, handled well). I probably learnt more about Baltimore than I will ever need to know but there’s something so authentic about the way Tyler handles relations between partners, parents and children, siblings, and across generations. On this last point, a scene in the novel involving a train trip to New York by a woman and her granddaughter is heartbreakingly poignant. Just as I felt when I personally ‘discovered’ Joyce Carol Oates, I have a feeling I’ll be coming back to Anne Tyler’s work.
  • Aria (Nazanine Hozar): I picked this novel up on the basis of a quote by Margaret Atwood describing Aria as a Dr Zhivago for Iran. Which I found a bit puzzling but intriguing. Having finished the novel, I can’t say I’m any wiser, although I see what Atwood meant in terms of its historical scope, set against the backdrop of the Iranian revolution. Not only is it long; it’s a pretty tough read, too. I found it challenging to remain engaged in a narrative where most of the characters are unremittingly awful to each other. Of course, it’s not that I want my literature sugar-coated or ‘normal’. There are some amazing poetic moments amid the random acts of violence and clerical machinations, which ultimately make this a worthwhile — but tough — read. And given the state of world affairs, Aria offers a perspective that I suspect might encourage more nuanced understandings of Iran on the part of Western readers.

So, there you have it: my reading list for the (northern) summer of 2024. Having invested in a full year’s membership of dbieb in Leeuwarden, I now look forward to writing a follow-up post in January 2025. Not to put any pressure on myself, of course. Or make promises I can’t keep.

Until then, dears: drop everything and read, srly!

The view from Casa del Pellegrino towards Rapallo and Portofino on Italy's Ligurian coast.
The view from Casa del Pellegrino over Rapallo and Portofino on Italy's Ligurian coast.
16 October 2024 / 0 Comments

Arriving at Casa del Pellegrino

Last week I travelled to the Italian Riviera (now there’s an opening sentence I never thought I’d write), spending seven nights at the delightfully rustic Casa del Pellegrino, a former monastery in the hills above Rapallo that now functions as a retreat centre.

I went there with the aim of working on my novel-in-progress (current title: Kintyre In My Rear-View Mirror) together with two fellow writers, T & G. Although our schedule was fairly loose, we quickly settled into a rhythm of writing, workshopping and, of course, eating.

But getting to Casa de Pellegrino from Fryslân was a story in itself, involving a train from Leeuwarden to Schiphol to catch a flight to Basel, which I’d booked after my NightJet reservation from Amsterdam to Zurich was rudely downgraded from sleeper to seat. Maybe if I was thirty years younger.

I spent a rainy and forgettable night in Basel, then hopped on a train to Zurich the next morning. After taking a a stroll around the old town I boarded a Trenitalia service for Genova (Genoa), just six hours, countless tunnels, multiple delays and a gigantic stretch of the Swiss Alps away.

A rainy night at the tram interchange outside Bahnhof Basel SBB.

Arriving in Genova to brilliant sunshine, I spent the next two days roaming the city’s many atmospheric streets, eating compulsory amounts of foccacia, gelato and pesto Genovese and sculling espresso. I also took a return trip on the Funicolare Zecca-Righi, and checked out the castle ruins at the peak there.

On Sunday, I caught a local train along the coast to Rapallo, gazing out at the umbrella-shaped pine trees and the pastels of the Ligurian architecture. While waiting for T’s train to arrive, I spent an afternoon wandering Rapallo’s promenade and watching cricket on my mobile phone.

To arrive at Casa del Pellegrino from Rapallo, one can take a bus that winds its way through increasingly steep hills to the Santuario Basilica Nostra Signora di Montallegro. From the sanctuary, it’s a ten-minute walk along a path with magnificent views of Rapallo and the Mediterranean.

The meditative path leading from Santuario Basilica Nostra Signora di Montallegro to Casa del Pellegrino.

Or, one can take the funivia (cable car), which is much quicker but comes with a big dose of vertigo. As the funivia was closed on the evening of our arrival, and the bus wasn’t running, T and I took a taxi, and for the steep fare were rewarded with some stunning view of the Riviera unfurling beneath us.

As a special bonus, when we arrived at the sanctuary our bags were whisked across the airspace to Il Pellegrino via flying fox. It really was the golden hour, and we couldn’t have asked for a better introduction to the place where we would spend the next seven days writing our derrieres off.

The view from the restaurant terrace at Casa Del Pellegrino, Rapallo, Italy.

As for the writing itself . . .

I’ll probably need to draft another post about that.

A photograph of green pine trees lining a path next to a house.
Yeonhui-dong Writers Village, Seoul (source unknown).
14 October 2024 / 2 Comments

Human Acts: Han Kang receives the Nobel Prize in Literature

The media frenzy in the lead-up to the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature each year, with groundless speculation on likely winners accompanied by breathless reporting of bookies’ odds, unconsciously skewers the practices of the “literary elite”: a fictional apparatus that only serves the purposes of those who do not read or write.

The decision to award the 2024 prize to Korean novelist 한강 (Han Kang) demonstrates, for me at least, that the Committee values bravery and a commitment to ideals. Her work is extremely difficult to read: not in terms of its “readability”, but rather the devastating way in which she writes about what people are capable of doing to each other.

Han Kang is probably best known to English readers for 채식주의자 (The Vegetarian), a short but outlandish novel that mines the depths of human suffering. Beginning with a woman’s decision to stop eating meat, the narrative evolves, through changing perspectives, into a terrifying portrait of violence and trauma in Korean society.

As far as I’m concerned, however, her 2016 novel 소년이 온다 (Human Acts) illustrates just why Han Kang is so deserving of the Nobel Prize. A retelling of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising from the point of view of (sometimes murdered) civilians, the book is an astonishing document of political violence that is both shocking and utterly moving.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading and engaging with Korean literature for so long that the awarding of the prize to Han Kang means so much to me personally. In 2018 I travelled to the Göteborg Book Fair to hear her speak about the process of writing Human Acts. It got to the point, she said, where the book was writing her.

Göteborg Book Fair 2019: Hanguk style

Last Thursday, succumbing to the hype, I posted my own breathless FB status update one second after the Nobel Committee made its announcement. A few minutes later, Kim Hyung-seok, who I first met in 2011 during a Cordite Poetry Review tour of Korea, commented on my post that Han Kang had been in attendance during one of our performances in Seoul, something I didn’t know at the time.

HAN KANG YES@!@@

– My Facebook status update on Thursday 10 October 2024 LOL

We’d been in Seoul to meet with Korean poets and to launch Cordite’s 韓 – 濠 (Oz-Ko) issue, a bilingual selection of Australian and Korean works which (for me, personally) was the high point of my time as the journal’s editor. I have to admit, however, that I cringe a little at the idea of Han Kang watching me rant about my idea for an all-purpose PC방 or “Multibang”.

Sparrow dabang (참새 다방)

In the end, I missed a chance to get Han Kang’s autograph at the Göteborg Book Fair as she had left by the time I could purchase one of her books. In a similar vein, I can only hope that Han Kang had departed the Seoul Art Space in Yeonhui-dong by the time I “performed” that night. Is this selfish? Just another writer trying to make another writer’s success all about me?

Over the past few days, all of my social feeds have been flooded with AI-generated posts about Han Kang and her literary oeuvre. It’s a sign of the crisis of content we currently endure but also a reminder to speak, type, write, read and listen. It’s not about me, after all, but about all of us, all of the time. Read Han Kang. Read a book, any book. Write your own post.

Crossposted on Facebook.

unknown person lying on brown bench indoors
Photo by Joyce Romero on Unsplash.
8 October 2024 / 0 Comments

Anthologised and reprised: “Jetlag World”

The last time a poem of mine appeared in a journal was back in 2013. But in the intervening years, the dim flame of my poetic muse has been sustained by the appearance of some of my published poems in a number of anthologies.

Suddenly, these old poems have a new agency. They just “hit differently” the second (or sometimes even third!) time around. Sure, there’s only five of them, but that’s, like, one every two years. And in the absence of any other kind of engagement with the publishing space, I’ll take those odds.

For this reason, I’m very grateful to the team at Vagabond Press (Sydney) for choosing to include my poem “Jetlag World” in its forthcoming Living Systems: Poetry from Asia Pacific anthology.

The front cover of Living Systems: Poetry from Asia Pacific (Vagabond Press, 2024).

“Jetlag World” first appeared in my chapbook Morgenland (2007), published as part of Vagabond’s Rare Objects series in a limited edition of 100 signed copies. The poems in Morgenland were written while undertaking an Asialink residency in Seoul, Republic of Korea, in 2005, with the support of Creative Australia (formerly the Australia Council for the Arts).

During my residency, I worked as a visiting lecturer in the English Department at Sogang University, wrote “live” poems about imaginary cities in PC Bangs (PC방, Internet gaming cafes) and read a lot of Korean literature. I may also have imbibed modest quantities of soju and makkolli over the course of those four life-changing months.

I recall writing the poem, perhaps unsurprisingly, while suffering the effects of jet lag after arriving in (or maybe it was returning to) Seoul on a very crisp autumn morning. Reading the poem now, I am back there again, drinking a can of warm coffee in a convenience store and then heading straight to my campus office in Sinchon, as referred to in the poem’s last lines:

Catch the subway. The morning mist
Has not yet cleared. This day in the
Land of the morning calm is already
Several hours older. Sit in front of
The monitor. Work. Write this poem.

Taking a look back at the original draft of the poem, I’m now kind of glad I chopped out the two final lines:

Welcome to my brain. Every day is
Like a night in deepest jetlag world.

Hits different, don’t it?

Quite apart from the fact that the anthology provides me with the opportunity to take another trip down my own personal Amnesia Lane, I’m very much looking forward to reading the works of some 170 contributors from Australia, Japan, Korea, China, Viet Nam, the Philippines, Myanmar, Singapore, the United States, New Zealand, Mexico and elsewhere.

Cross-posted (and slightly edited) on LinkedIn.

Yellow canoe on body of water
Photo by Jamie Morrison on Unsplash
11 September 2024 / 0 Comments

(Substack) Origin Stories

Davey Dreamnation (1972–?) was an Australalian musician, vocalist, pirate and record-label owner who now lives “in the third person”. No, wait. That’s not what I meant to paste there. But then, where should I begin my Substack origin story?

Maybe I could start by explaining how I came up with my semi-fictitious alter-ego’s name, by fusing the title of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation album with one of my own diminutives. But then, who was I before this Davey came along?

Perhaps I could commence instead with a bloated version of the professional bio I’ve been writing for over 20 years. But “David Prater is an Australian-born writer and editor currently living in the third person” just sounds weird.

I could just begin more honestly. I was born in a hospital on unceded Wiradjuri Country in a settler-colonial city called Dubbo. Of course, Dubbo’s not a “city” in the global sense. But, then again, the Wiradjuri don’t call their Country “Australia”, either.

Even though I no linger live in Australia, as a non-Indigenous person born on unceded Indigenous Country I continue to benefit from the outcomes of the invasion, settlement and ongoing colonialism of that Country.

For the past 16 years I have lived in Europe, first in the Netherlands, then in Sweden and then later still in France. Three months ago my family and I moved back to the Netherlands, to a small village in the province of Fryslân.

A view of the village of Wânswert, Fryslân, with a no-longer-working windmill in the foreground and a no-longer-functional church in the background.

This is where I am writing from today. My window looks over the rooftops of Wânswert, a small village with around 200 inhabitants. From my chair I can see our shed, the old church tower and many green trees.

It’s the end of summer. Just now a hailstorm ripped through town, making merry music on our roof. We’ve got solar panels up there but I am too scared, as yet, to climb the rickety ladder to the rooftop to inspect them.

Yesterday I wrote a post on LinkedIn about an experience I had while riding our two sons home from school. It started out as a kind of career update, albeit not one of those “I’m humbled to announce that I’ve started as X” posts.

Instead, the post drew on my recently concluded time as a Publications Co-ordinator at the International Transport Forum at the OECD, specifically my role as an editor of the ITF’s publications on road safety, cycling and walking.

Each one of the above paragraphs could serve as the opening of an origin story for the Davey Dreamnation newsletter. By listing them all and refusing to elaborate further, perhaps I’m implying that this post is a kind of origin story, too.

Recently I re-read Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being, a book which moves effortlessly between multiple streams of inquiry and narrative threads, built on a rich bedrock of eerie quotes, quirky factoid and cosmic observations.

Maybe it’s possible to “build” this newsletter along similar lines: to embed longer narratives as discrete fragments between more cyclical, time-based or thematic observations. Kind of like Olga Tokarczuk’s Bieguni [Flights] in short chunks.

If this turns out to be possible, then the invitation implied by the subtitle of this post will have been fulfilled. In the meantime, enter the Dreamnation with a patient heart and an inquiring mind. As the Antarctic explorer Lawrence Oates said:

I am just going outside and may be some time.

This is a cross-post of my very first Substack. If you’d like to follow or subscribe, hit this big old link.

« Older posts

About this site

This is [d/dn], the home of David Prater, a writer and editor currently living in the third person.

Category archives
Yearly archives

About David

Search