‘The Memory of Salt’ – a novel by Alice Melike Ülgezer

Reviewed by Ryan O’Neill

The Memory of Salt is the debut novel from Melbourne-based writer Alice Melike Ülgezer. The story takes place not only in several different countries, but also several different time frames, tracing the love affair between Mac, a young Australian doctor, and Ahmet, a Turkish musician, a relationship eventually destroyed by Ahmet’s mental illness. Ahmet and Mac’s story is related by Ali, their child, who is in turns fascinated, delighted and horrified by the behaviour of her paranoid schizophrenic father. As Ali grows up, her relationship with her father becomes ever more complex, and her imagining of her parents’ courtship, fuelled by her mother’s memories, ever more detailed and vivid. (I have given Ali the pronoun ‘she’ though in fact the sex of the narrator is deliberately left unclear.)

Ahmet is wonderfully drawn and he dominates the book. He is a mercurial figure, by turns lovable, violent, clear-sighted, deluded, hateful and pitiable. Even when Ahmet doesn’t appear in the narrative, he overshadows it, as Ali listens, fascinated, to Mac’s stories of their courtship. Mac’s love for Ahmet, and her gradual, horrified realisation that his eccentricities are symptomatic of far more serious problems, are movingly detailed. Mac, dispirited in these sections of the novel, is often contrasted through time shifts with the younger Mac, caught up in a whirlwind of a love affair in a culture very different to her own. Ali, the ‘I’ of the novel, is not as clearly drawn as Ahmet, and this may perhaps be partly due to Ülgezer’s decision to allow the character’s sex to remain ambiguous.

The Memory of Salt is ambitious in its style, which has been described as ‘baroque.’ Throughout the novel Ülgezer uses many Turkish words and phrases, sometimes offering a translation, sometimes not. Hardly a page goes by without the italics of a foreign language appearing, whether Turkish or German. The effect is frustrating at first, but gradually becomes unnoticeable, and is in fact a skilful way of demonstrating the richness of Ali’s cultural heritage. Ülgezer’s descriptions of the many and diverse settings in the novel are generally successful and her writing is at its strongest when describing things that can be seen, touched, smelled and heard, as in the following beautifully measured passage:

The cooling heat of the day had released the scents of flowers and the mosquitoes were tuning up. The yolk of the streetlights was visible over the back fence and we sat outside in the lilac dark and sipped our coffees.

But when her prose drifts from the realistic to the mystic, the imagery of the novel tends towards the nebulous, as in these examples:

My father jerked his head up, his voice dark with thorns.

And she looked out the window at the hypnotics of the darkening land.

If the words ‘hypnotics’ and ‘thorns’ were exchanged here, the imagery would lose little. This nebulousness extends to the title of the novel, which is lifted from an image in the book, but speaks little to its themes. The novel could as easily have been called ‘The Salt of Memory’. On occasions Ülgezer’s imagery does take a leap and land safely on the other side, and she is to be applauded for taking the risk. But when these leaps result in a stumble, as they frequently do, it is enough to pull the reader out of the story.

The Memory of Salt is, if uneven, still a fascinating novel. There are sections of great power, and many passages of excellent writing. If the style is not baroque, it is at least original and a far cry from the dry realism that still pervades much Australian writing. Though it is Ülgezer’s first novel, it has the ambition of a second or a third.

I look forward to reading more of her work.

____________

Ryan O’Neill was born in Glasgow in 1975. He lived in Africa, Europe and Asia before settling in Newcastle, Australia, with his wife and two daughters. His fiction has appeared in The Best Australian Stories, The Sleepers Almanac, Meanjin, New Australian Stories, Wet Ink, Etchings, and Westerly. His collection of short stories, The Weight of a Human Heart, was published by Black Inc. earlier this year. His work has won the Hal Porter and Roland Robinson awards and been shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Steele Rudd Award and the Age Short-Story Prize. He teaches at the University of Newcastle.

 

Jillian Schedneck – ‘Abu Dhabi Days, Dubai Nights’

Reviewed by Heather Taylor Johnson

When Geraldine Brooks’ Nine Parts of Desire came out in 2004 a wave of Western women began considering the implications of veiled Muslim women in Arab countries. Some were on the side of ‘oppression’ while others championed ‘choice’, both being of an equally valued feminist persuasion. The largely female consideration stuck, and women today are as interested in the issue as ever. Jillian Schedneck’s debut memoire, Abu Dhabi Days, Dubai Nights, speaks to this audience.

Jillian is young and vibrant, scratching relentlessly at a travel bug; luckily she’s got a plan. Even after she meets an impossibly well-groomed man (in the cultural sense) and enjoys a perfectly thrilling affair with him (which easily manifests into love), she is determined to stick to her plan: teach English in Abu Dhabi; see how the Other half live.

Life without Andres is complex, as Jillian navigates a long-distance relationship and an emergent self-growth spawned from her classroom of female Muslims. Education, for these girls, is secondary to their lives of ‘courting’ without actually physically ‘courting’, because once they leave school, they will become wives. What does this say about Muslim women? What does this say about all women, and Jillian in particular? The story then moves to Dubai, where Jillian continues teaching, though now the classroom is co-ed. Her questions get bigger while her assumptions become double-sworded in this Westernised desert oasis of a city, so different from an hour’s drive in any direction. It is a struggle to remain optimistic, but it is a worthy and life-changing struggle.

Part memoire, part travelogue, Schedneck sees travel as something that will save her. Flip-flopping from disappointment to awe in a matter of two pages, we see that neither Abu Dhabi nor Dubai will save her. It is not until she becomes involved in the City of Hope – a women’s shelter – that we see it is womenwho will save her. Unfortunately this transformation feels rushed. What began so intensely whittles itself down to one paragraph:

As I walked down the quiet street out to the main road, I thought about how I’d like to write about Marnie and her sons leaving the shelter for a new home, Asma finding a sponsor and Evona regaining custody of her daughter. I’d like to write that Fatima and Warkamesh found jobs in households that appreciated their work and that Victoria got her house and yard. But I wouldn’t find out what happened to the women who shared their stories with me; the only thing I knew for certain was that there would be more like them. And I know what they had taught me: that stories are important, that listening matters and that there are people like Sharla Musabih who would never tire of fighting for women’s rights. I had learned, too, that I was no Sharla Musabih – but I would do what I could. (334)

These women’s stories seem to be the crux of Jillian’s story and I’m left wondering why they are jammed into the end of the book. I am oddly left wondering if Abu Dhabi Days, Dubai Nights should have been a different book.

With a topic as exotic as is dealt with here, one would expect aspects of memoire and travel literature to play a role, but it is preferable that only one genre dominate. I am not so sure this is the case in the book. Schedneck’s writing feels most comfortable in the first section of the book, when there is a richness and texture to the language, when there is a sense of fascination and discovery in the narrative, and characters are three dimensional, and memoire is strong. When we get to section two, travel writing takes over. There is a sense of urgency to teach her readers what she’d learned about the country, rather than let the story show us. It is during these slightly didactic moments where she introduces us to her friends. But there are too many friends, and their interactions with Schedneck are so brief that it becomes obvious they are props used only as a way to tell us something more about Dubai. The fact that these friends have no life outside of the dialogue with Schedneck proves that the memoire-aspect of the book has been put in the corner, awaiting a chance to clear its throat.

Cross-genre issues aside, the book is still a page-turner. Schedneck manages to transport her readers into a classroom of drab colour and bright giggles, or a ‘City of Gold’ which truly sparkles, however hollow its soul. Any confusion the reader might feel about Schedneck’s judgment and sense of Truth is due to the author’s constant contradictions within herself, which, rather than work against the flow of the character, work to create a sense of naïve optimism being shattered by that dreaded pull of the ‘coming of age’. Memoire, travelogue: in the end it is a detailed story of one woman finding her grip on the woman she is destined to become.

____________

Heather Taylor Johnson reviews poetry madly for literary journals around Australia and in America. She was a poetry editor for the now defunct Wet Ink magazine. Her second poetry collection, Letters to My Lover from a Small Mountain Town, was published earlier this year. Her third will be out early 2013. HarperCollins will be publishing her first novel, Pursuing Love and Death, in July 2013.

 

Heather Taylor Johnson – ‘Letters to My Lover from a Small Mountain Town’

Reviewed by Subhash Jaireth

It is, I think, a mere coincidence that I started reading this book of beautiful poems just a week after I had reread Osip Mandel’shtam’s gem of an essay ‘Conversation about Dante’. Now, I know that I shouldn’t have done that; should have given more time to let the words of my favourite poet fly away. But it has happened and there is no escaping.

Poetry (like any other art form), to paraphrase Mandel’shtam, doesn’t describe or show the world around us but ‘plays’ with it. The Russian word he uses is razigrivaet and not igraet (play), emphasising, I think, the fact that this act of playing involves tricks; that poetry and thereby poets seem to have fun with the world, or perform with it as if he or she were an actor and the world a mere prop. And because it is a performance, it opens a gap, a sort of cleavage between the world and the poetical word; the relation of equivalence between the two is disturbed. Perhaps that is why any attempt to retell or verbalise poetry is not only misplaced but also imprudent. If a poem can be described, Mandel’shtam argues, it means the poem wasn’t a poem, and that poetry had escaped from it like a disenchanted lover leaving the bed unslept and the sheet unstained. Fortunately there is enough poetry still living in many of the poems of this debut collection by Heather Taylor Johnson.

The collection has forty-eight poems of variable length, shape and style. It starts with a lean but crisp poem, ‘Salida’. Its first line, ‘You have always been’, and the final line, ‘We have always been’, establish the existential certainty of the world the poet and the poems wish to celebrate; the joy is in their dialogic co-existence. From this assurance are born poems which in the words of Jill Jones (cited on the blurb) celebrate the ‘everydayness, the ongoingness of living’, or which as Libby Hart suggests (also on the blurb) ‘sing praises of the natural world and domesticity’, of ‘love, food, shelter and belonging.’

There are poems which look slim, almost anorexic, on the page and there are some which are spread out on the page like lusciously-hipped damsels. For me the slim poems work better. I like the economy of words with which they achieve their effect. Some more wordy ones, like ’14^th Rebirthday’, read like prose-poems or even poetic prose.

Being letters to a lover, all poems represent first-person monologues. However in two poems, ‘An Intimate Discussion’ and ‘Another Intimate Discussion’, two first-person voices (the lover and the loved-one) engage in a dialogue where words are marked in quotes. I would have liked to see more poems of this kind in the collection. Their precision, tonality and simple beauty of images add sculptural clarity and sharpness.

In A Lover’s Discourse Roland Barthes notes that as a lover what is central to me ‘… is my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool.’ The love in these poems seems to lack this tension. The desire which Barthes alludes to adds grief, and melancholy to the voice. Strangely these poems skip over these feelings. I think the voice of a lover utterly confident and assured about his/her love overshadows every feeling. I would have preferred some vulnerability in the voice, a tinge of betrayal, a gesture towards the potential of failure.

These poems are letters to a lover rather than letters of love. There is one poem which demonstrates shades of vulnerability. The poem is ‘Raspberries’. ‘If I could be summer I would open my leaves’, it begins, and unfolds the erotic power of words and images flooding the page and mind of the reader. But the trick is in the word If, which I read not merely as a rhetorical device but as a question posed by the lover, as if she knows that she isn’t that summer that would summon ‘bushels or raspberries’ for her lover to feed him the sweetness of her juices.

I like the poem ‘Obamacare’ for two reasons; firstly because it is different from the rest in tonality of expression and secondly because it captures the musicality, the chanting rhythms, of Obama’s and thereby Martin Luther King’s speech well. In this poem the personal and the public come into co-being and the domesticity of life opens its door, flowing out and letting the world pour in.

To lovers of poetry who want to read this book, I suggest they read it more than once, because I am sure with each reading the hold of at least some of them would grow. That’s how good poetry needs to work.

____________

Subhash Jaireth has published stories, essays and poetry in Australian and international magazines and journals. His book To Silence, a collection of three fictional autobiographies, was published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2011, and his novel After Love will be published by Transit Lounge next month.