Kirjailijakuva

Amanda Curtin

Teoksen Elemental tekijä

5 teosta 92 jäsentä 8 arvostelua

Tekijän teokset

Elemental (2013) 45 kappaletta
The Sinkings (2008) 28 kappaletta
Inherited (2011) 11 kappaletta
Kathleen O'Connor of Paris (2018) 7 kappaletta
Australia (Trav Bug) (1992) 1 kappale

Merkitty avainsanalla

Yleistieto

Sukupuoli
female

Jäseniä

Kirja-arvosteluja

I found it difficult to start with, the writing didn’t flow for me. I decided to apply the rule of 50. I got past 50 pages and the story caught me and I was away.
It has a brutal beginning, I wonder if that was really necessary?
A skilful working of the stories of Little Jocks origins then life in Australia; and Willa, the narrator’s life.
The book has an interesting tension in that you know more than the narrator, and are waiting for her to discover what you know.
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
GeoffSC | 2 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Jul 25, 2020 |
I really like Amanda Curtin’s fiction, starting with my belated discovery of The Sinkings (2008) and then being bowled over by Elemental (2013), so I confess to a frisson of disappointment when I realised that her latest book was a biography of an artist I’d never heard of. I shouldn’t have worried… Kathleen O’Connor of Paris is every bit as captivating as Curtin’s fiction.
It’s not actually true to say that I had never heard of Kathleen O’Connor. I should admit instead that her name hadn’t registered with me, even though I had (of course!) visited the NGV’s 2013 exhibition ‘Australian Impressionists in France’ and seen a couple of her paintings. What’s more, I even have the catalogue by Elena Taylor, which has a chapter on ‘Expatriates’ and beautiful full colour plates of ‘Luxembourg Gardens’ 1913 and ‘Two Cafe Girls’ c 1914. (Neither of which, alas, are available online because the former is held at the Royal Perth Hospital Art Collection (!) and the latter is in private hands).
I shouldn’t really begin with the paintings, because, honestly, I read right through the whole book without ever venturing outside its pages, but I will mention here that this handsomely produced edition includes 13 full colour plates on gloss paper in the central section, and numerous B&W reproductions of O’Connor’s paintings and other memorabilia throughout the text. But by the time I sat down to write this review it was too much of a temptation not to go searching with Google to admire O’Connor’s oeuvre on my nice big desktop screen. (I have listed below the sources I found so that you can do this too).
The amazing thing about Kathleen O’Connor is that she was in Paris at all. Like most young ladies of her time, she was expected to grow up and get married to some eligible chap from the social scene in Perth. (Her parents had relocated there from New Zealand, for her father C.Y. O’Connor to take up a position as Engineer-in-Chief of Western Australia.) With no independent income of her own, Kathleen set off with her widowed mother and sister for a trip ‘home’ to see the UK and Irish relations, and then refused to go home with them. She knew what she wanted to do, and she was determined to do it. And true to the stereotypes of the artist-in-the-garret, (though she negotiated a small allowance from her family) she lived in penury, moving from one attic to another and getting by on the proverbial smell of an oily rag.
But she loved Paris. La Belle Époque was a wonderful time to be an artist in Paris, where the artists clustered in Montmartre and Kathleen claimed she could eat well on next to nothing in Paris in the years before the war: ‘five francs [about twenty-five cents] bought two good dinners.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/02/10/kathleen-oconnor-of-paris-by-amanda-curtin/
… (lisätietoja)
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
anzlitlovers | Feb 9, 2019 |
First of all I need to tell you that this is not crime-fiction. It is part of my challenge to myself to occasionally read outside my comfort zone. I am grateful to Bernadette at Reactions to Reading for recommending it to me.

Fish Meggie sets out to give a 21st birthday present to her grand daughter Laura - the story of her life, so that Laura will know her origins. She describes people and places that Laura has never heard of and a life so tough that it would be beyond Laura's wildest imaginings. It is a life that brings Meggie Tulloch from Scotland's northern islands to Fremantle in Western Australia.

Laura doesn't get to read her Grunnie's journals, written in exercise books in a variety of coloured pens, until she is facing a crisis herself, and at last she understands things about Meggie, and her own mother Kathryn, that have always been a puzzle. Her grandfather, known only to her through photographs, comes to life.

This story is a reminder of what those who lived through the 20th century went through, and how much life has been changed by technology, migration, and wars.
… (lisätietoja)
½
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
smik | 3 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Jun 4, 2014 |
I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt and presume that Amanda Curtin did not set out to deliberately cause me the messy embarrassment of unexpected tears in public. I’ll concede that she wasn’t to know that the tale of Margaret Duthie Tulloch – or Fish Meggie as I will always think of her – would have me sobbing uncontrollably and mumbling about allergies. Though if I’m to be scrupulously honest it wasn’t the story itself – achingly sad though much of it is – that made me cry but rather Meggie’s acute observations about her world and the exquisite prose Curtin has used to express her character’s thoughts. Laced with terms from several local Scottish dialects the book is a sheer delight for lovers of the written word.

Meggie was born of sea people in a tiny village in far north-eastern Scotland in 1891. As if the life of unrelenting poverty and hard work expected by all who were born in that place at that time wasn’t grim enough, Meggie suffered the additional curses of being female and having red hair, which according to local beliefs made her a danger to any fisherman, especially if she crossed his path just before he went to sea. Eighty-odd years after her birth Fish Meggie is ill and decides to write her story – or some of it anyway – as a present for her granddaughter and so begins to fill three notebooks with her memories.

In ELEMENTAL there’s not a trace of the twee romanticisation of poverty and hardship that infuses a lot of the historical fiction I’ve read. Meggie’s life begins with a different kind of childhood from the one we think of as normal today

Loved you were, aye, in the way of those days, a careless kind of love that took all manner of things for granted. But if you had a thought in your head there was none who would stoop to hear it and none to say you mattered the peeriest thing. And if you were a girl, you’d get used to that, aye. You would forever be the last, in a world where the words of men and the ways of shoalfish and the direction of the wind were what mattered.

I canna imagine a child of today taking it into their head that they were not the centre of all else. That the world was not waiting for the next thing they might say (p13-14)

Allowed to go to school only because the law demands it Meggie does develop a devotion to books which lasts her whole life and she also knows the love of her mother, her older sister Kitta and, for a time anyway, that of a stray dog who adopts her as his very own. But with her father and brothers gone fishing for much of the year the only man she has much contact with is her grandfather – a hate-fuelled, ignorant man who makes young Meggie’s life far harsher than it needs to be. As if living amongst a people “steeped in the ins and outs of restraint” and being expected to perform endless hours of back-breaking chores in freezing temperatures weren’t bad enough.

Sorrows do follow Meggie as she breaks away from her dreaded village for a life on her own which eventually takes her across the world to Western Australia but there is laughter and family and a love story too that combine to save ELEMENTAL from falling into the wallowing, misery-lit category of fiction.

As is usually the way though it was the things to which I could personally relate which sent me scuttling for tissues in the aforementioned sobbing incident. I was not quite two years old when the last of my grandparents died so I have no personal experience of any of the grandparental relationships Meggie describes but as both of my parents now have a form of dementia her observation about the differences between memory (a transient, unreliable kind of fact list) and memories (individual versions of the truth which stay with us forever) knocked me for six. As did her notion of her more elusive parent “A father was little more than an idea to me…a man-shaped shadow by the fire”. I stopped reading in public after that.

In case you’re in any doubt I adored ELEMENTAL. Even though it made me cry. In public. Even though I felt physically bereft at the early loss of the narrative voice of Meggie when the book abruptly switched to the voice of her granddaughter and her daughter-in-law for its conclusion.

It is a beautiful book.
… (lisätietoja)
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
bsquaredinoz | 3 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Apr 5, 2014 |

Palkinnot

Tilastot

Teokset
5
Jäseniä
92
Suosituimmuussija
#202,476
Arvio (tähdet)
½ 4.4
Kirja-arvosteluja
8
ISBN:t
14

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