Six Degrees of Separation - Where will Shopgirl lead me?

Last month, a tweet from Whispering Gums introduced me to the 6 Degrees of Separation meme.

Annabel Smith and Emma Chapman began the 6 Degrees of Separation meme in 2014 and now it is managed (is that the right word?) by Kate at Books are my favourite and best. The idea is that Kate nominates a book and, on the first Saturday of the month, participants reveal chains of six books that all connect in some way. 

This month's book is Shopgirl by Steve Martin. Damn, haven't read it. Thank goodness for Google! Steve Martin's heroine is an artist making a living selling gloves at Neimann Marcus in Beverley Hills. Already I'm stumped. I'm working with a book by a comic, set in California, featuring a heroine who is both artist and shop assistant. 

My first stop is Shopaholic Abroad by Sophie Kinsella. This is the only book in the 'Shopaholic' series I've read. It's a frothy confection of romance and fashion and dazzling New York. At the risk of spoiling the end, the book's heroine Rebecca finds her calling working in Saks Fifth Avenue. So my first link is based on the occupations of the heroines.

Now I'm in New York I feel like I'm on slightly firmer ground and the city is my next link. It seems impossible to go past Anita Heiss' Manhattan Dreaming. Her heroine Lauren, a curator at the National Aboriginal Gallery in Canberra, receives a fellowship at the Smithsonian. It's been years since I read it and loved it. Heiss is a genre-hopper. She has done some outstanding work, not least being The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature. Her most recent book is Our Race to Reconciliation, for younger readers. I always learn from her work so it's on my to-be-read list.  

Another Indigenous writer I admire is Kim Scott, which brings me to his third novel That Deadman Dance (2o10). This book won so many awards, including the Miles Franklin in 2011. Set on the south coast of Western Australia, it tells a story of the early encounters between black and white.

There are many strands to That Deadman Dance: epic coastal journeys, whaling sequences that will make you gasp in wonder, injustice, understanding and loss. But it is the characters - flawed, credible human beings, embodying their history but never mere ciphers - who stay with you: Menak, the tribal elder, both wise and cantankerous; Jak Tar, the escaped sailor, who takes (and is given) Binyan as his resourceful wife; Bobby Wabalanginy, the dancer, the go-between, who has to grow old to know fear; Chaine, the entrepreneur, who gives and then takes and whose cosseted daughter Christine reads The Last of the Mohicans and wonders at the shining manhood of her childhood companion, Bobby; and Cross, who "encourages ideas of entitlement" in his Noongar friends: his bones are exhumed and ceremonially reinterred on higher ground while Wunyeran's are dishonoured and scattered.

SMH review by Morag Fraser, 13/1/2011 

I almost didn't finish it. I remember putting it aside over Christmas and wondering if I'd return to it. When I did, early in 2011, I galloped to the end - and what an ending it was! Have you ever felt a book punch you in the guts? That's how I felt at the end of That Deadman Dance and six years later I'm still recalling that feeling. 

Now I'm in Western Australia, I'm going to link to Dorothy Hewett. Perhaps best known as a poet and playwright, Hewett wrote three novels: Bobbin' Up, The Toucher and Neap Tide. I read the last two when they were first published but that was some 20 years ago. Maybe I should have gone with Rudyard Kipling's Kim? Although I haven't read that.

Dorothy Hewett used to live in the Blue Mountains and that provides a link to Delia Falconer's The Service of Clouds, which was set in Katoomba in the period 1907-1926. (I'm a bit horrified to discover it was also published nearly 20 years ago!) I remember this as a very lyrical first novel about photography and clouds and love and the effects of World War 1. The experience of reading it remains imprinted in my memory. Perhaps its because I spent a year living in Katoomba when I was 6, a year that is also imprinted on my memory. The Service of Clouds, though, is also a novel about that moment in the early 20th century when life changed irrevocably for small communities such as those in the Blue Mountains and it talks about the war without ever taking you to the front.

So my last link is to another novel which reveals the impact of World War 1 without ever taking you to the frontline. It is, of course, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Another book about a woman wanting to be an artist, about the effects of war, about a coastal journey. I've read it many times since being 'forced' to read it a uni. It improves with each reading - as Margaret Atwood discovered. 

Well, that was harder than it looked. I'm looking forward to seeing where Picnic at Hanging Rock leads me in July. I might begin thinking about my chain tomorrow.

Paris Dreaming - Anita Heiss

2017 Reading Calendar - February

Anita Heiss' novel about a young woman's journey of self-discovery is part of my own 'Paris dreaming'. Published in 2011, I read it before I was able to spend 8 weeks in Paris in 2012, before the Charlie Hebdo attacks in 2015. Rereading it now, I'm reminded that it was one of my first 'guide books' to the city. It also has an innocence and an awareness of the traumas to come.

Ostensibly contemporary women's fiction, or 'choc lit' as Heiss herself has described it, Paris Dreaming is, like all of Heiss' work that I've read, politically aware. On the surface, this is a novel about discovering your self and your true love in one of the most romantic cities in the world. Libby Cutmore is over men and focusing on her career. She may not be interested enough in fashion or food to keep her friends happy, but she is ambitious and determined to make a contribution to the promotion of Indigenous art on an international scale. I think she has a lot in common with Carrie Bradshaw - no matter how much she protests she doesn't need a man, you know she just hasn't met her 'Big' yet. And you know by the end of the novel that she will.

That, though, is just what's happening on the surface. Rereading Paris Dreaming, I was reminded of four things:

• how much I learned about Paris and, especially, the Musee de Quai Branly and Australia's involvement in it;
• the political environment - in Australia but also in France. Libby's friendship with the young Roma seamstress, Sorina, provides an early insight into the impact of the recent mass influx of refugees in Europe. The novel also references the riots on Paris' council estates in 2005-06, as well as the Cronulla riots that occurred at the same time;
• what it's like to read about your own city (Canberra) in fiction. Heiss isn't always complimentary - how many cities compare well to Paris? - but there is something special about reading about your own place; and
• how much I learned about Indigenous Australia, it's art, culture, and politics.

This, I suspect, is really the point of Heiss' writing and it's something she has spoken about. At the 2014 Australian and New Zealand Festival of Literature and Arts, she is reported by Philippa Moore as saying:

“I wanted to connect with Australian women to talk about Aboriginal art, culture, politics, social justice and issues that I am passionate about, and issues that I think all Australians should be engaging with ... But I had to think about ways to engage women who may never have had a cuppa or yarn with an Aboriginal woman before, who may have seen us marching about Black Deaths in Custody or the NT intervention but never understood why. Or worse still, had never thought about us at all.”

This is something I think Heiss does extremely well in her fiction. Whether it's the 'choc lit' Paris Dreaming and it's forerunner, Manhattan Dreaming, or her more recent novels, Tiddas and Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms, Heiss helps me to better understand the lives and the issues faced by Indigenous Australians in a way that is very accessible.

You can read Paris Dreaming for the city and the romance and it will reward you. But if you read it just a little more closely, you will finish the book with an enhanced understanding of what it means to be an Indigenous Australian.

Want more?

• Anita Heiss' website has lots of interesting reads and links
• Whispering Gums' review of Paris Dreaming
• 'From chick lit to choc lit' - Philippa Moore's article on Anita Heiss at the 2014 Australian and New Zealand Festival of Literature and Arts