Book Notes: "My Brilliant Career" by Miles Franklin

My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Why do movies insist on a happy ending? Thankfully the book does not need to do so. I felt this was a combination of YA fiction, period drama, Australiana, and tragedy all in one. There are numerous references to Australiana that I must now investigate, and it was pleasant to read about fictitious towns based around Goulburn (which is 25 minutes up the Hume from where I now live). I am glad to have read this book, and Miles Franklin (albeit her pen name!) is surely one of Australia's great authors. While the who have seen the movie first (like me) will have had their imagination compromised, reading the book is still a worthy pursuit.



View all my reviews

A Mini-Ethnography: Shanghai-Hangzhou High Speed Rail

Photo by S370/CC BY-SA 3.0

1:28pm, 23rd March 2016

We leave the station slowly and pass under the spaghetti of roads just outside

Speed picks up slightly and the view changes to worn out fields of weeds

Up another gear and warehouses, more spaghetti, quaint houses, a freeway

This is a green, smoke-free train according to the hostess over the speaker

Another gear, beside an elevated freeway

Construction sites, across rivers, yellow flowers in worn-out and unkempt fields

A woman with a tray of who-knows-what. No time to stop and sell

Purple uniforms, 184km/h, 15 degrees

Market gardens amongst rubble, an excavator and construction

Some drinks and snacks, just so, pass faster than the train seems to move

Over another market garden, a creek, a slow train

Another gear and like nothing we reach 300 km/h

1:37pm, 23 degrees inside

Constant rumbling, the slight drone of engines

Barely notice the pace until a sound barrier careens past

With subliminal flashes of market gardens in the gaps

We're off and Shanghai dissipates as if into the perpetual grey sky

Or it would if it ever ended

Hangzhou to Shanghai, 8:18pm

Ticket office over there. No - construction.

Ask police. Downstairs.

Outside, 200m, walk the stairs to the ticket office

No signs for outsiders

Line-up behind the yellow line while nobody else does

¥75 for both but too cheap. First class?

Window 21 is the reply. Back in line, but longer

First class. All done.

Out of the ticket office and straight past where the cops told us to go downstairs

So near and yet so far

Welcome at the entry, passports waved off. But no gate number

Search for the journey number, not too difficult

Seat won't stay up - travelling backwards at speed. Seems to stop more often

Other classes more seats, good to have room to move

But hoiking, hoiking everywhere. A national past-time? The smog?

Hangzhou is quiet in parts. (Arm nearly ripped off by passing luggage!)

People dancing on the deck, old men singing and playing musical instruments

The crowd joins in. Chestnuts, squirrels (so friendly!), the West Lake (so happy!)

Then through the spaghetti and we're back

But then home to buses and slow trains, an airport where the traffic holds up the bus

On the tarmac trying to get to the other terminal. Not so in China

Rich country on the cheap. Poor country shows the way.

Book Notes: "Winesburg, Ohio" by Sherwood Anderson

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I did not know what to think when I began reading Winesburg, Ohio. Hemingway's satire of the novel in The Torrents of Spring had somewhat tainted my first impression of the book. However, on completion I found the book thoughtful, interesting, and, aside from being somewhat vanilla in its description of life in a small American town, insightful. There is a coherence to the various stories that I found in Calvino's Marcolvaldo, despite the work appearing as a collection of short stories based around a protagonist and their relationship to the people, places and happenings in one particular town. I would not be surprised if Calvino was inspired by Anderson. But for the life of me I cannot understand Hemingway's criticism. Yet Anderson had a similar response from Faulkner. I think what makes this work so important is the background story, yet the work speaks to the reader in its own right.



View all my reviews