The Mookse and the Gripes discussion

This topic has been created for those of you who are reading any of the Mookse Madness books by Thomas Keneally.
These are the four books that have been selected.

A Dutiful Daughter
Gossip From the Forest
Schindler's Ark
The Widow and her Hero

I will be very interested to read what group members make of A Dutiful Daughter.

I am looking forward to discovering more about Keneally, since the only ones I have read were Schindler's Ark and a rather odd one called Jacko: The Great Intruder that I picked up in a second hand shop a few years ago. I don't really have a feel for what his typical books are like. Keneally is now the only authorr on the list by whom I have not read two of the selected books.

I've never read Keneally, and my library system doesn't have a single one of his books! Quite surprising.

If someone was to read just one (or two) of his books from this list, what would you folks recommend?

Dutiful Daughter ....What a book! I made a Booktube video solely on this work after I finished it a couple weeks ago because I was so anxious to hear what others thought.
It does give away the “shocking problem”, tho that became evident halfway through.
https://youtu.be/P7rkA1LO_qo
I am doing written reviews now for a while instead of videos so I will have a chance to go back and give second thoughts later after reconsidering them (and because I can do written ones in my pajamas!📚)

Keneally is a mystery to me also. I have one book by him, The Daughters of Mars and I haven’t read it. I saw the movie Schindler’s List, but that doesn’t count.

I have finished Gossip from the Forest and was impressed. Like Schindler's Ark it is a largely factual story, about the circumstances that led to the signing of the 1918 Armistice agreement - which makes it timely with the 100th anniversary just a week away. My review

This means I have now read at least two of the books for each of the writers in this competition.

That’s the book I’ll order next. Thanks, Hugh. I was hoping for a WWI book in the mix, but hadn’t looked for one yet.

Val wrote: "I will be very interested to read what group members make of A Dutiful Daughter."

If I have read a stranger book than A Dutiful Daughter, I can't think when. I am not quite sure what to think.

I am not sure what to make of A Dutiful Daughter either. Original but very odd, and I am not sure what Keneally was trying to say with it. My review

I'm half way through Dutiful Daughter (I took a break from The Unicorn because it's not fully engaging me yet) this is a wonderfully odd book! I really like it.

**This post is loaded with spoilers**

Shall we intelligent readers try to unravel this fable? We know that the very beautiful Barbara, daughter of a man who stifles his intelligence and knowledge in order to lower his family’s expectations of him, and a mother who is pious, starts her menstruation completely unprepared. Her parents are shocked and let her know that this base part of her nature is to them unnatural, obscene, and unmentionable, an aspect of their daughter that must not be made known.
She runs away in anger and comes back with her parents literally transformed into animals. A bull with the lusts of an animal and a cow with very obvious, engorged, seeping, foul smelling infected udders. The parents must now be kept secret, hidden, unmentioned, while the dutiful daughter tends to their animal needs. She milks her mother, she lets her father out to find cows to rut.
To further extend the unnatural in this family the brother and sister have an incestous relationship.

There is also Barbara’s great admiration for Joan of Arc, a young woman called by God to be a martyr.

For the four Glovers the universe is their swampy farm and each other, only Damian leaves, but barely. He tries to make himself fall in love so that he can escape his obsession for Barbara. The family seems to love one another as best they can.

I read a few essays about this novel and all point to the same few themes: strict Irish-Australian Catholicism, the parent-child relationship, adolescents girls as witches. All essays agree this book is rich in symbolism. Interesting to note that Keneally went to seminary school.

I loved this book and look for to the others.

There is a transcript of an interview with Thomas Keneally for the Australian Biography project (2002) where he says this about the book:
Yes, 'A Dutiful Daughter' is a mad, early novel of mine that ... I'll say the sentence again. Um, 'Dutiful Daughter' is a fairly eccentric early novel of my mine, but it had a definite purpose. I was trying to create an allegory of adolescence, and it's about a young girl who reaches puberty and immediately, her parents are turned into cattle. Um, and she has the tending of this herd of parents.

It is a good, um, metaphor for what happens to many adolescents. When they reach adolescence, their parents, who have been gods and succourers become the greatest dolts on earth, become swinish, stupid people. And that was the allegory that I was trying to incarnate in 'A Dutiful Daughter'.

Ah, and I suppose I was, um - I've always been attracted to that writing. One of my favourite books is Gunther Grass's 'The Tin Drum', the German book, in which there's a man who is a dwarf - is reduced to dwarfism. From the age of three, he chooses dwarfism, and he grows up in this um, in this shortened, abridged form of himself until the day his father is killed by the Russians during the last days of the war.

And his ah, dwarfism is a metaphor for the, um, for the dwarfism of the German soul under the impact of the 1920s, the Weimar Republic and then the embracing of Hitler. Ah, and I love books that, that carry an allegory of that nature in them, and have experimented with this sort of thing in some novels, as in 'Woman of the Inner Sea', where you've got a woman who has a totem companion who's a kangaroo called Chifley.

And, ah, I, I like that, um, the allegorical, what they call the magic realist, where the dead return and talk to people, and visions occur - sort of thing that occurs in Gabriel García Márquez, although I have to say and it's the truth, that a lot of Latin writers that I know have said, "This isn't magic realism, having the dead come back. In Latin terms, it's a social realism".

Thanks for this, Val.

Thank you for your analysis Wendy.
I think the other three books on the list are all straight historical fiction, less strange, but probably less fun as well. I read "Schindler's Ark" a long time ago and now remember the film better than the book. I haven't read the other two yet.

I don’t plan on reading Schindler’s Ark. I really liked the movie, but since I know the story there are other books I want to read.

I started A Dutiful Daughter thinking it was exactly what he said it was, an allegory of adolescence, but then I thought it probably wasn't when it went on past her teen years.

It is many things it seems.

I have started The Widow and her Hero, which will complete another set.

Hugh, you deserve a trophy! For the reading, sure, but also for helping so many of us know what to look out for!

I was very impressed with The Widow and her Hero, particularly the way Keneally manages to convey both the heroism and the moral ambiguities of war, and using a widow who learns more of her husband's fate many years after the war as the narrator was a very effective and moving device. My review

I agree with Trevor. You are leading the pack in the tournament.

I agree too, and really appreciate the steer toward and away from various books. I am leaning toward shorter ones and the longer ones will have to have pased the Hugh test if I manage to get that far.

I was impressed with "Gossip from the Forest"

In 1914 I found lots of great non-fiction books on the politics leading to the outbreak of the Great War - but I have not really found any in 1918 that deal with the politics of the armistice, so this was an unexpected find.

I think the only ever Booker runner-up and also a book with a direct and tragic link, via the stab-in-the back myth, to the author's more famous Booker winning book.

My review:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...