Victoria spends her free time gazing at the sleek lines of sky scrapers and the slowly softening sides of Sydney's impressive collection of sandstone buildings. Like many booksellers, she has a secret passion for hand-loomed quilts, and her one true passion in life involves persimmons, a handful of sparklers and a copy of Felicia the Wonder Fairy's Wicked Whizz-Bang Choco-Malt treats. She is an Adopted Aussie from Across the Ditch, and we're not letting her go back home, so nyer. The lady stays!
This Is How by M.J. Hyland
July 2009
HB $32.95
This Is How is a novel that subtly reveals the fragility of human life in an extraordinarily beautiful way. It alludes to the arbitrary and inevitable experience of existence, the uneasiness of life, the power of time, memory and moments past, while referring to the splendor and power of the simple. This Is How is a devastating and uncompromising story, one of a man and his transformations through a series shocking moments of despair: beginning with a humble relocation to a seaside town, and concluding with an unexpected and irrevocable act of violence - one that determines a new life confined within the fortification of the criminal justice system.
In this novel, M.J. Hyland explores the very complex nature of individuality and the nuances of being, through a delicate and brilliantly astute portrait of an outsider. The compelling characterization of Patrick Oxtoby as the obscure, anxious and internalized protagonist, provides the basis for a stunningly refined and virtually timeless novel. Despite the apparent emotional burden, this novel is a celebration of those rare and fleeting moments of beauty, of human connection and tenderness. This is How is a hauntingly seductive novel, one that will linger with you well after the book is finished - although this is hardly surprising, given the talent of the author at hand.
Leviathan
By Paul Auster
1998
PB $23.95
Leviathan is a beautiful interplay between the notion of fiction and fact. It is a novel that is sublimely written, utterly engaging, and overwhelmingly seductive, despite the strong undertones of symbolism and the constant critical questioningof identity, freedom, and truth. What makes this novel fascinating - and a bizarrely believable story - is the constant shift between the narrative of the protagonists (a writer, Peter Aaron, who coincidently shares the same initials as Auster) and the life of Auster himself.
Leviathan is a novel that takes you beyond all expectations, and does so with a sophisticated and complex plot - substantiated by Auster's frequent tendency to digress in order offer up fascinating moments of insight - as well as marvellous writing and an array of intricate and fascinating characters, in particular Maria Turner, the character based on my favourite French Artist Sophie Calle. Leviathan was my first Auster novel and despite the fact it is not one of his most acclaimed pieces, it is a highly recommended and exquisite novel.
Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino
2002
PB $24.95
Invisible Cities is a brilliant novel about the dominance of imagination, the lust of desire, the power of the Other and the evocative nature of 'story'. Italo Calvino uses sublime prose to evoke the extraordinary and yet illusory endeavours of a young Marco Polo, who describes to the Kublai Khan, the exotic and global encounters he pretends to have witnessed. Unbeknown to Khan, Polo is describing, over and over again, the myriad of invented forms of Venice - the very city they both dwell in. These various encounters, the constructions of imagined cities, are filled with persuasive imagery, rich in architectural form and offer suggestive in cultural and social metaphors as a comment on the nature of our perceptions and rituals.
Invisible Cities gives way to a collection of bizarre, beautiful, horrible and terrifying cities - although at times strangely familiar and other times terrifically impossible. It is an innovative story that has been profoundly influential in literary, architectural and many other creative fields, and consequently Invisible Cities is considered a remarkable and masterful book.
Letters to A Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
1929
PB $17.95
Letters to a Young Poet is an emotionally evocative and extraordinarily rare book - a book complied of ten stunningly elegant and compassionate letters written to an aspiring young artist from the renowned poet Rainer Maria Rilke. These treasured letters, each dealing with a different nuance of art and life and tackle issues of truth, beauty, love and nature, are as much surprisingly prescient today as they were when first committed to paper in 1903.
In my first reading I was struck by the influence of Rilke's words - words so pertinent to the nature of my very own creative practice - and later finding myself uncompromisingly seduced by the beauty of his prose which with each consequential read revealing new insights and discoveries. The letters collectively describe the ingenuity and power of art and creative practice, and in doing so become exemplars, tenderly expressed from the prolific poet's hand. And yet, Rilke provides such authority from the position of prosaic honesty and a humbled wisdom, a manner unusually shared among the creative milieu. It is for this reason, I recommend this text to any individual: any aspiring artist, architect, writer, dancer, lover, musician, reader, anyone interested in the production of art, and anyone passionate about life.
My favourite book
Bother! What an ask! In all honesty I would have to say that my relentless passion for exquisitely obscure, wonderfully lyrical and delightfully inspiring architecture, will always lead me back to my treasured Enric Miralles El Croquis (1983-2000). But no! To claim just one book is to deny any mention of those other books! Those divine and hugely influential books, those books that first triggered my perpetual desire to stay inside and spend the day reading, books like Umberto Eco's The Name of The Rose, Paul Sheebart's beautiful Gray Cloth with Ten Percent White: A Ladies' Novel and the mesmerizing Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.
My favourite author Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf was really the first one to introduce me into that all encompassing literary world - and she first did so with quite an effect! It began with her seminal essay A Room of Ones Own, and later led her novels To the Lighthouse and The waves. And since that moment, she has not been out of hands reach. It is the extraordinarily lyrical and the seductively written prose that makes Woolf's writing so lasting. It is the innovative and complex narratives, and the way her novels are subtly held together by beautiful reveries of contemplation, hinting at the nature of the everyday, the meaning of time, and the power of humanity, that makes her one of my favourite authors and that really gives her work gravitas.
What's beside the bed
Of course I always have too many books to read piled high next to my bed, but these are the ones in closest proximity:
Cities without Citizens
By Aaron Levy, Eduardo Cadava, Giorgio Agamben
Augmented Landscapes
By Smout Allen
Space Geometry and Aesthetics
By Peg Rawes
Story of Art
By E.H. Gombrich
David Adjaye Houses: Recycling, Reconfiguring, Rebuilding
By Peter Allison
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
By Geoff Dyer
Zaha Hadid: The Complete Building and Projects
By Aaron Betsky
The Red Highway
By Nicolas Rothwell
The Blue Plateau: A Landscape Memoir
By Mark Tredinnick
Songlines
By Bruce Chatwin