Question 7

Starred review from July 8, 2024
Booker Prize winner Flanagan (Toxic) weaves strands about his parents, Australian history, and the atomic bomb into a mesmerizing narrative tapestry in this dazzling, one-of-a-kind memoir. Flanagan begins with a meditation on how his father was interned in a Japanese POW camp near Hiroshima when the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb. He considers how the experience shaped his father into a man who saw life as a “great tragicomedy.” He contrasts his father with his more passionate mother, and reflects on the ways their combined “life force” saw them through poverty and pain. His examination of their relationship leads him to the affair between British writers H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, and then to Wells’s writings on the atom bomb. Further digressions delve into Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard’s warnings against nuclear energy, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, and Tasmania’s colonial history; recurring themes of mortality culminate in a recollection of Flanagan’s near-drowning at the age of 21. Lyrical prose (“He would smile wanly, his face turning inside out, a concertina of wrinkles compressing his eyes into wry sunken currants”) complements the book’s oblique structure, aiding Flanagan in his construction of a bracing dreamscape that blends fiction, family, and history to illuminate his captivating consciousness. This is masterful.

Starred review from July 15, 2024
The noted Australian author spirals through personal and collective history searching for connections between past and present, but often distrusting those that appear. Flanagan, author ofThe Narrow Road to the Deep North, finds the struggle to create a credible memoir troubling, since most autobiographical work must be constructed from "the lies we call time, history, reality, detail, facts." In this distinctly nonlinear example of the form, the author pulls at threads connected to key, often traumatic events. One of these nodes is the years his father spent in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. Flanagan notes that he almost certainly would have died of starvation were it not for the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima, leaving the author conflicted about the devastating loss suffered in Japan combined with the fact that he would never have existed without the catastrophe. He reaches back to tie the bomb to the life and work of H.G. Wells, who first conceived it in one of his lesser-known novels, and to Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, who was captivated by Wells' novels and who first conceived of the idea of a nuclear chain reaction. Another node is Flanagan's shards of memory of his parents, including his mother's last words before her death at 95: "Thank you all for coming. I have had a lovely time." A third key element of this fascinating work is Flanagan's prolonged near-death by drowning as a river guide when he was 21, to which he refers frequently throughout the book--and then at horrifying length in the final section. "Everything ever since," he writes, "has been an astonishing dream....Perhaps this is a ghost story and the ghost me." A haunting, jagged, sparkling narrative puzzle in which the pieces deliberately refuse to fit.

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August 1, 2024
Booker Prize-winner Flanagan (The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, 2021) presents a memoir of sorts somewhat in the vein of W. G. Sebald's circular and curiosity-driven approach to self-reflection. It begins with Flanagan visiting the Japanese prisoner of war camp his father was imprisoned in and moves into a sometimes-fictionalized dive into the affair of writers H. G. Wells and Rebecca West. Flanagan then presents a fascinating time line tracing Wells' lesser-known works to one of the architects of the atom bomb, Leo Szilard, followed by deep musings about his own existence as a precarious result of circumstances that in some ways relate to the destruction wrought on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Flanagan also considers his childhood in Tasmania, the complexity of his admirable parents, and the tragic violence destroying the natural beauty and the lives of the Indigenous people of Tasmania, a theme of much of his work. This meditative, often beautiful, deeply introspective, and unusual book is one that only Flanagan could produce.

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