by Alex Miller
(chosen by Fairlie)
Theme: Miles Franklin Award winner
In choosing this book, I looked at the full list of Miles Franklin Award winners. Many of my first choices were too long to fit our page length limit. As we had read and mostly all enjoyed Alex Miller's Lovesong, I thought I would choose another title by the same author.
About the author:
Alex Miller has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award twice, first in 1993 for The Ancestor Game and again in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. He is also an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, in 1993 for The Ancestor Game. In 2008 he was awarded the Manning Clark Medal for an outstanding contribution to Australian cultural life. His books are published internationally and widely in translation. In 2012 he was awarded the prestigious Melbourne Prize for Literature and he is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
(general biographical detail from the publisher's website
What the publisher says about the book:
Steven Muir, August Spiess and his daughter Gertrude, and Lang Tzu all acknowledge a restless sense of cultural displacement, an ambivalence in their relations with the culture of European Australia. Steven left England for Australia as a young man and his one attempt at returning is unsuccessful. August Spiess, although he speaks frequently of returning to his native Hamburg, fails to make the journey, as does his daughter Gertrude. Lang Tzu's very name defines his fate: 'two characters which in Mandarin signify the son who goes away.'
The 'game', however, does have winners. For despite their yearnings for the home of their ancestral dreams, a desire to belong somewhere that is truly their own, none of Miller's characters leaves Australia, and each in their own way comes to see that to be at home in exile may be a defining paradox of the European Australian condition: the paradox of belonging and estrangement that perhaps lies uneasily at the heart of all European cultures.
The Ancestor Game, which Robert Dessaix described as 'one of the most engrossing books I've read in a long time', is an enthralling journey into the ancestral dreams and present dilemmas of a rich cast of characters.What we discussed about the book:
- The role of myth and storytelling in memory.
- The relationships between history, fiction and truth. What constitutes each?
- How do others' expectations inform our own memory of identity - e.g. Dorsett?
- Does the history of intimate and small moments inform our reading of a novel far more than the the history of politics or economics?
- What were the links between the various characters? How did know Steven know Lang?
- How we kept track (or didn't) of the family tree aspect of the Fengs (for instance...who was Feng 3?)
- Was it immediately obvious that this was a novel, rather than a series of short stories? How did we make those links?
- Who was Gertrude's mother?
- Were we able to easily traverse the jumps in chronology?
- What was the point of the fire on the deck of the boat?
- Why did so many people who had written on-line reviews (e.g. on Goodreads) give up on this book?
- Is there some kind of cosmic message that so many of the books we've read this year feature the concept of Janus (looking forwards and looking backwards)?
In other news, we discussed:
- Concerns about non-stick frying pans and their health implications
- On-line dating criteria...how specific should you be in your description of what you're looking for?
- Leadership selection processes at schools...is there a perfect system?
Range: 6 to 8
Average: 6.75
Next book: The Dinner by Herman Koch (chosen by T-Rex)
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