archytas's reviews
1670 reviews

"I don’t wear my scars on the inside anymore. I am not afraid of being vulnerable, of being seen as weak. And if that means I am not a man in the eyes of other men, then I will die on the broken ice of the frozen archipelago. A real man feels and suffers and cries and shakes and winces and flinches and starts and self-soothes and flails and asks for help and breaks down and reconstitutes." - Daniel Browning
Some of this continent's best writers are collected into this volume, and it was a job trying to work out which ones to talk about. Well, not entirely, because Browning's ever-more-confident voice in Bundjalung for Queer, swoops and soars between sorrow and joy, love and fuck-you-all in ways that my words can't do justice too. And Alison Whittaker's searing Around the waist is one of those essays you feel you have lived life to read. I can't stop thinking about it. She brings such lyricism, propelled by this potent combination of power and vulnerability, that somehow seems to pass courage through the page. I'm probably not making sense, which again, just read the damn essay.
For others, Evelyn Araluen brings us a meditation of trying to live at a moment loaded with hopelessness (my words) "How will I remember this time in the long future? Will I think back with nostalgia, with a sad sorry fondness for the girl who tried to write herself into an understanding of a world that didn’t need to be distilled, but rather dismantled? Will I be angry for all the time I wasted not learning, not doing, not working? Will I remember what it was like to be afraid, to be lonely, to be so angry at my powerlessness against history, against the unending wars of modernity?."(her words) Futile rage feels less futile when rendered so lyrically.
And Jaenine Leane brings a cyclical, rythmic approach to calculating the spin of years in Power of Balance, along with Melanie Seward's poignant Future, Present, Past, one of the few contributions that builds memoir heavily in approach.
There is a lot here - this collection deserves some attention it seems not, so far, to have gotten. We are still learning, I think, how to listen to First Nations writers, without confining the kinds of narratives we expect. This collection is often surprising, and all great writing should be.

This book did suffer from the feeling that it was less novella and more first act of a novel (the third act/novella is due out this year, and it may be worth waiting to see if the three are collected into one volume for a better reading experience). It also probably suffered from my deep love for Muhamad’s And What Can We Offer You Tonight which set me up, and I loved this less.
Annoyances aside, The Annual Migration of Clouds does an excellent job of sketching out a society of the frontier, dystopian type, and provides an unsettling exploration of self, thanks to a fungal parasite whose effects on the brain are poorly understood.
All in all, it was a good set-up. Just a little slight for a meal.

Books set in the cultural revolution are not likely to be lighthearted. But heft and weight are not the same thing as bleak, and here Li spins a story, or a set of stories, so packed with humanity that although you know this will not end well for anyone, the journey is nourishing.  Yis cast of characters are far from saints. The book begins with a complex martyr, a young woman facing execution for defying a regime when she was 18. However, s a 16 year old, she led her peers in tormenting and denoucing villagers as a fervent Red Guard, likely causing the deformity of a now 12 year girl who makes one of the main cast of the novel. Along with the 12 year old, Yi presents us with a young child, a often frighteningly callous social misfit, two warmhearted vagrants, the martyr's parents and a wealthy singer as focal characters. 
Li's characters are generally lost  - seeking love and comfort, food and sex, and most of all a sense of human connection. But in this most fraught of worlds, thier interior lives can't be straightforward. The martyr's father emotions are eroded beyond grief, leaving him unable to see his daughter's passion as anything but destructive. The singer, playing an imitation of perfect womanhood, is consumed by a quiet desperation that becomes unbearable. The children pantomime lives distorted by fear, want and pretence.
All must decide how much to risk for what they want, or who they want to be.  But rarely do those choices turn out the way they expect. Li has a great capacity for suprise - a kind of sad, bitter-tinged, surprise mostly, but also in the way characters find their humanity in the most surprising places, even to them.  I was slightly dreading this read, noting that it was likely to be grim, but in reality I looked forward to picking it up, checking in with the characters and how they forged their way.  We are more than our worst moments, and more than the worst things we experience. It is in the act of living that this book finds its song, and in this, it is an indictment of those things which would rob us of that.

This book focuses more on the influence of games than the games themselves, and does include rather a lot of ranting about game theory and why it shouldn’t be used to model anything in the real world. Also a reasonable amount of ranting about AI, and some interesting insights into the evolution of game-playing machines like AlphaGo (Clancy was a researcher for Deepmind at one point).
It is an engaging read - lots of interesting insights into a range of topics, from how randomised decision making (corresponding with the invention of dice) is a uniquely human trait, that underpinned lots of social evolutions, through to the way that curiosity and dopamine interact (Clancy contends that dopamine encourages us to explore and stretch boundaries, behaviours which can underpin compulsive gambling or video game addiction, where exploration and pursuit are endless, hampering our capacity to actually do things - this sounds dumb in my summary but is much better put in the book). Clancy views games as an inevitable part of being human (but not exclusively so), but also raises warning bells about how anything we like can be designed to make it difficult to disengage, exploiting rather than enhancing, our biology.
I would have appreciated more on actual games, and the diffuse focus makes it a bit of everything, but it is a good read that will provide plenty of conversation topics, not just for gamers

“Tonight, out means acknowledging that, for a sound to resonate, for us to hear it, it has to make physical contact with us, which is perhaps why the deep rumble of a bassline moves us so. Tonight, I might slap an open palm against the wall, might let my body bend to the bassline, like prostrating to something Godlike, something honest. Tonight, I might find my faith again, I might believe. And if it’s going to happen, it will be where I know myself best: in the moments just before a beat drops, having been teased slowly for what feels like hours, beautiful chords sneaking through the mud of percussion, anticipation at its height, my eyes closed in reverence of this moment, gratitude that I could be taken that high, that I might scrape heaven with my outstretched hands. And it’s not just me; catching another in the same motion, we might be drawn together, drawing so close our heads might touch, two Black crowns in the dim light of this ecstasy. Tonight, out means I’m content to stay in that space, just before the drums drop, in that moment where anything might be possible. So when Nam asks me if I’m coming out tonight, the answer can only be, ‘Of course.’.”
Occasionally there are writers where it feels like the most useful review is just a cluster of quotes, because surely, surely, anyone reading this prose will just want to go and read a whole book of it. Nelson writes with such life and rhythm he stops your breath as you read. Many of his best lines are repeated like a chorus, so that the feeling of the reading has that comfort and release of dancing to a familiar beat, moving in sync with yourself, in a community of others.
It isn’t just dancing that Nelson resurrects on the page. The Small Worlds of the title refers to the communities that we create, the small worlds of friends and family that, Nelson implies, are the stages that matter to our lives. And he starts with the glorious world of teenage love, the dizzying intensity of connection played out against summers of beaches, drinking nights and music. Over three years, he charts the nervous descent into adulthood for a generation who feel the burden of parental expectations that can’t be met, and the impossibility of explaining it is the bigger worlds, not the smaller ones, which have changed in ways that make these expectations impossible. This isn’t just any story of youth, he charts the impacts of colonialism and racism, the lost worlds and those regained, and the ways in which joy becomes defiant in the face of systemic barricades. Nelson writes youth so well, and smartly here, uses stories within stories, to make the older characters own youth sing to us, shading the worlds of their children.
Nelson’s stories richly explore family, what it is to be British-Ghanaian, love and music in ways that are thought-provoking and yes, to be twee, wise. But it is the language, and the ways that he makes that dance, which will pull me back to anything at all he writes. Because it is simply such joy to read, and to be reminded of what a thing it can be to be young.

I know I should be talking about the sharp political commentary here, and I'll get to it. But there is a part of one of these essays where Coates describes the awkwardness, fear and anticipation of deciding to sit in a foreign cafe that felt so exquisitely, sharply true that I heard myself do one of those bracing gasps. Coates is one of those writers I always feel intensely connected to, as if we are in some kind of dialogue based things others don't get. I am experienced enough to know that this is the way those writers feel to, if not most people, then at least many of them. They have some capacity to conjure intimacy, which makes the political writing ever that much more powerful (and must make dealing with fans a real pain).
But this collection is less directly personal that Coates other non-fiction. Here he tackles book bans and the polarisation of the USA, slavery and Africa and, in an essay comprising half the text, Palestine. The latter is based on his ten-day visit, in which he struggles to reconcile what he sees with his previously more positive view of Israel. It is thoughtful, and angry, and worth a read, like the rest of the collection.

It is often hard to tell, when essays are first published, what lasting impact words will have. This collection is a timely reminder that essays can matter - with a powerhouse collections of words that shifted something in how Australians see themselves, or that opened or accelerated existing national conversations. The collection reads a little like glimpses into Australia's past, with passionately argued essays on the sexism of house design, or the role of the suburb as showing how our sense of ourselves has evolved. All of them are engaging, even if not all seem to hold the test of time (Thea Astley on the Boomers as young folk is a reminder that we were all young once! On the other hand Tim Rowse's afterward moderating his views felt confessional in a human, if unnecessary, way).
The collection has a hefty set of recent contributions - six of the twenty essays were published int he last four years (the only decade not represented here is the naughties, interestingly, possibly a dead conversation for cultural conversation). The impact of some of these essays - Chelsea Watego's Always bet on Black (power) and Michael Mohammed Ahmad's It's shit to be White have had the widely cited, entered immediate conversation impact (and that both deal with racism is reflective of our current national conversations) but it did seem a heavy weighting overall.
But this is a delight to read, and a worthy reminder that what we write about culture matters.

Sometimes the most useful histories are those that keep a tight focus, and here Valasco keeps a very tight focus on the high rise housing developments that shaped Venezuelan politics for decades.  I was drawn to this by the current situation in that country, in which many hopes have been betrayed. The book helps to understand the tangled nature of politics in Venezuela, the long history of both populism and betrayal, and the highly politicised culture. It is jammed with great anecdotes drawn from oral histories - one of my favourites is of student radicals organising out of the buildings, whose support from the locals comes more from parental concern than strong ideological agreement, being told to "leave the bombs at the door" as they are brought in for shelter.
I don't know what lies ahead for this country, but the book is a timely reminder of what has been survived and what the people, in the right conditions, can build.

Pandemic-set novels are on the increase now the requisite time to write has passed, and unsurprisingly, they tend towards the sombre and thoughtful. In Burrow, Cheng gives us a family who've throughly dug themselves in to paralysing grief, so that the lockdown comes as a relief that the world has moved closer to their state. But while parents Jin and Amy are caught into a cycle of avoidance and numbness after the accidental death of their second child, their tween Lucie is pushing forward, as children do, into change. And so, they get a pet.
Given this description, you've probably guessed, correctly, that the pet (and another unexpected arrival) kicks off some kind of healing process for the family. And you are also probably assuming it is slightly mawkish, which would be wrong. The trick here is not in an unexpected destination but in the journey. Cheng maintains a subdued gentle tone throughout, revelling in the moments. It might not be explicable, the book shows, that a bunny jumping can make us feel joy, and it may be fleeting, but it matters. This family don't wrap all their issues up in neat bows - and in changing perspectives, Cheng uses changes of perspective to show how rarely our attempts to connect land as expected. But this is a testament to how we connect at all, in the face of how hard that can be.
(I found parts of this book quite difficult at times. I have a beloved child of the same age in my life, and found it surprisingly difficult to read scenes where her parents were unable to give her what she needed. I found myself googling afterwards to try to reassure myself that Cheng was not writing auto-fiction (in interviews, Cheng says the idea came from imagining her worst fears, not experiencing them).)
I found Cheng's debut collection a little uneven, and skipped her first novel. But here is a powerful voice telling an immersive story in a slight premise. Her caustic wit remains - Jin describes the experience of living in the inner-city when he is from western suburbs as feeling like "the newest guest at a never-ending dinner party". Honestly, there is nothing it feels like Cheng couldn't take on and make it interesting - I'll be grabbing that first novel now.

*There are times in this book when it may seem as if eggs have desires, wants or needs: that eggs wanted to move from the sea to the land; that eggs sought safety in the mammal uterus or hid themselves in crystalline bird eggshells. Nevertheless, eggs – devoid of a brain and incapable of an instructive thought – can clearly do very little else than simply be an egg. Eggs are not capable of knowing their journey. I give them agency at particular moments only to better tell an engaging story.*

Howard has a knack with imaginative prose, and would make for a great introduction to writing about evolution. He conjures up vivid images of the worlds in which eggs evolved, and populates them with creatures just started to swim, crawl, and, yes, lay eggs. The explanations of why the egg has mattered so much are well done, and you may never look at an egg white again quite the same way. However, it did lag at times and, strangely, also lack compelling detail in parts.