The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton

Is it possible for a book of 800+ pages to make you wait more than 500 pages for some feeling of it 'kicking in'?

Yes

Is it possible for a book to be almost stupefyingly boring for more than half of it, for it only to start to spin faster and faster on some centrifuge so that by the last page, you have been gripped and drawn inwards, and are almost breathless and rigid with joy while reading those last few words?

Yes

Is it possible for a book to lose your attention not once but several times, so that you put it to the side and read - from cover to cover - maybe four or five other books?

Yes

It is possible that a book you were on the verge of giving away, and about which had said things like 'it's killing me' and 'I just don't get it' and 'this book is so fucking confusing', made you want to finish it like no other book you've ever read?

Yes

This is the book. I am full of awe for Catton's application of form, and for how she somehow made me finish this book. It's a book filled with trickery - sparkles - sleight of hand - and a thing that lives somehow on its own. It's so quiet, it rocks you to sleep for most of the reading experience, and it does seem to me that it's the experience of reading this book that is the greater thing here.

I know this is hyperbole but man, it's what I'm feeling right now. It's a sneaky sneaky fucker of a thing, and magic in the way that its very long tail whips right around a corner at the end, and slaps you over the head. It wakes you up, for you have fallen almost into coma, the words sliding across your eyes. You're not taking anything in. Who the hell is he again? (Check the front page reference). And who is that? What is she doing? (Check the front page reference again. Blame heatwave. Brain is not working. Usually it works better than this.) That front page reference doesn't really help - it's like a whisper, so faint; you know you are meant to be getting something, but what, what? It's like there is water across your eyes, something plugging your ears.


You give up, almost, and then someone on twitter says it's a fabulous book.

But, you want to say, and finally you do: But didn't you find it really hard to follow?

Someone else on twitter goes yes, so hard to follow! I want to give up. I don't get it!

Something has taken you by the hand, something that reached out from page 509 or so. You go back to that page to check what it was, and you CAN'T SEE IT. It doesn't matter, you race to the end. You start to feel glimmers of understanding, but you know it's only a fraction of the whole.

You finish. You flirt with the idea of going back to the beginning, reading that first half again. Now you will understand more, see more. It's like the gold in the river, the colour almost blending with the soil. You think you see something, but no. A trick of the light. A sparkle of nothing. But yes, there it is. There is something.

I am exhausted and exhilarated.

The Luminaries. I recommend and I caution. It's an absolute motherfucker of a thing.

Windy old Melbourne Town

September always seems windy. My daughter was born in September, and I remember the trees thrashing outside the window as I walked the flat, my mother sitting on the couch timing contractions.

Since we got back from Hong Kong, we've been pretty busy. Princess had her wisdom teeth out last Thursday so I've been nurse: dispensing medications from the infirmary (a kind of table thing in the hallway), making soft food, taking her ice packs, making her swish salt rinses, mashing food, heating up tinned Campbell's soup. That sort of thing. The swelling is going down but she's still got a bit of bruising. I was a bit anxious because she'd never had anything other than a local anaesthetic before and she gets heart palpitations (which I again need to get checked out by a cardiologist) BUT it was all okay, and I could put away the catastrophising scenes of doom that filled my head as I sat in the waiting room. The dentist had also said one of the teeth had a hooked root and was perilously close to a large nerve in her jaw. There a no signs that it's not gone perfectly well.

It's the second week of the school holidays (third for P) which means no teaching for me and lots of writing time (ordinarily, and the last couple of days I've managed a lot of writing.) I've been walking the dog, continuing my healthy with my food. Day before yesterday I chopped off my hair. It had grown very long, down my back, and while I kind of liked the wild woman effect a side ponytail gave me, when I got up Saturday morning with what other people call bed hair and I call playdough hair, I realised the ends were just so ratty and all uneven (because I have this thing, you see, where I cut my own hair) and so I went into the bathroom and pulled it forwards and chopped it off on either side. So it's just past my shoulders, or on them, a long bob and a bit hacked at the back. Good for summer.

We finished Season One of Orange is the New Black. It is fucking amazing. Alex, have you managed to see any of it? I recommend moving it to the top of your list right now. We are pottering through West Wing, up to about early Season 5. And we re-borrowed Sopranos from Clokey's sister on the weekend and so I'm watching that (again, for me) with Princess.

Seriously, too much goodness.

Clokes and I are watching Big Brother but that's all I'm watching on tv. Did not re-invest in either X-Factor or any other reality tv. The other day caught five minutes of Winners and Losers. Oh my god. How can people watch it? It's so saccharine. Reminds me of what little I've seen of that Asher Keddie show, but much worse. The state of television is terrible and people moan about reality tv?

Reading: am reading various books. I am struggling to settle and go deep. Am flicking between different ones, including reading printed-out articles, interviews all to do with writing (The Paris Review series of interviews are amazing, if you like long-form and even writers you don't read, they are always insightful and interesting.) They go back to the '50s man, and you can search by decade or by person's name. Sometimes I think it's the best thing on the Internet.

I have started Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries, which is on the shortlist for The Booker Prize. She's twenty-seven, it's her second book and I hate her. She uses an interesting form in the book which is partly why I'm reading it; partly too I'm reading it because it's so frigging long, more than 800 pages and I'm curious to know how she sustains it well enough to be shortlisted in such a prestigious prize; alsoam curious to see how's she's done it at all. I also bought the shortest on the shortlist, Colm Toibin's The Testament of Mary.

Writing: over the weekend I wrote a long piece to submit to a journal that has a theme of SEX. I don't write sexy stuff but I'm a sex ed teacher so thought to angle it from there. We shall see. Then this morning I rejigged a piece I'd done on gadgetry and my hate for Apple products, and incorporated some commentary on the hate people have for Jonathan Franzen (and to a lesser extent, Tim Winton.) Not sure what I'll do with that, it's pretty ranty. And THEN I got an email last Tuesday from one journal to say they wanted to print something I'd submitted (it's a creative non fiction piece, kind of) and then last night, an email from a small publishing house who want to include a poem I sent them in their annual collection of stories. So. A few little things happening.

My big writing thing: I have to get my second manuscript to my agent early November. She wants to get it to publishers I think in February. They are keen to see it which is good but so much pressure because what if it's terrible?

Let's just look at this for a moment to calm down:  Putting time in perspective