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Hello and welcome to Hear This. I'm Frances Keyland and you're listening to the Vision Australia Library radio show, where we talk about books in the Vision Australia collection here on Vision Australia Radio today. We've got some lovely books, sort of inspired this show is by some reader feedback, so I hope you enjoy the show. And thanks to Bob in the Act for providing a little bit of inspiration for this show this week. He sent an email saying Night Blue, a short debut novel by Angela O'Keeffe recorded in the VA library by narrator Marion Berkeley. This will be of special interest for those who enjoy a novel with a painting as a central character.
It is about the controversial painting Blue Poles, which is in the National Gallery of Australia. It has two narrators, a PhD student observing the painting for her thesis and eventually visiting the Jackson Pollock Museum in New York, and some of his friends, and most remarkably, blue poles itself, who reflect back on the observer with its own account of its life. So the synopsis for Night Blue by Angela O'Keeffe potent, haunting and lyrical, Night Blue is a debut novel like no other, a narrative largely told in the voice of the painting Blue Poles, it is a truly original and absorbing approach to revisiting Jackson Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner, as artists and people, as well as a realigning of our ideas around the cultural legacy of Whitlam's purchase of Blue Poles in 1973. It is also the story of Alyssa and a contemporary relationship, in which Angela O'Keeffe immerses us in the essential power of art to change our personal lives, and by turns, a nation moving between New York and Australia with fluid ease.
Night Blue is intimate and tender, yet surprisingly dramatic. It is a glorious exploration of of how art must never be undervalued. Let's hear a sample of Night Blue by Angela O'Keeffe, narrated as Bob said by Marion Berkeley.
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My next home was an apartment on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. There was a window nearby and its curtain was always open through the window. I could see over a large park with many trees. There were tall buildings along the edge of the park with the sky resting above. I watched that sky change from grey to blue to dark blue, with the lights from the building shining upwards. It was never black. Over time, I witnessed the trees in the park lose their leaves. I witnessed snow fall through bare branches and new leaves form. I noticed that although each tree in the park stood alone, none could be described as lonely. That, even though said at a distance from others, stood in such a way as to invite in the space around them as if the space itself were a presence.
An odd giddiness began to pervade me. A desire to reach like the trays towards the open space. And so it was at that window. I first sensed my destiny. Destiny might seem a grandiose word, but there is nothing closer. I'm not saying that I knew that in 1973, I would become the most expensive modern painting in the world, that I would travel to Australia, where I would be both derided and admired. That 1st November afternoon, I would witness the anguish of a prime minister. I'm not even saying that these things were my destiny. At least they weren't the central parts of it. Instead, they were the outer workings of something far more private.
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That was Night Blue by Angela O'Keefe. Angela is spelled [spells author's name]. And that book is a novella, as Bob also said, and that runs for three hours and 40 minutes. Another book by Angela O'Keefe, which isn't in the library, but which looks just as, um, interesting, is The Sitter. And that's the compelling and playful novel that's narrated from beyond the grave by Mary Hortense Figueroa Cezanne, wife and frequent subject of the French painter. Another unusual approach to artists and their work there. Angela O'Keefe grew up with nine siblings on a farm in Lockyer Valley, Queensland. She completed a master of Arts in writing at UTS and her first novel, Night Blue, was shortlisted for the Glenda Adams Award for New Writing and the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, and she was awarded to the 2023 Varuna Eleanor Eleanor Darke Fellowship.
And there's a magazine online called The Westerly Magazine. Its website is simply Westerly Mag, Westerly Mag. Com.au and they have a review here of Night Blue and the reviewer, Elly Fisher writes Night Blue is a novel of emotion, primarily grief, desire and longing. And, she adds, perhaps a realization is what draws O'Keeffe's novel to a satisfying close the understanding that rather than being a piece of historical fiction, Night Blue, the novel is instead a romance, but not as we know it. That is the Westerly Magazine. And that was an, um, and that was a review that's got a lot in it, that review. So the westerly a little bit about the magazine here that I've been looking at, it's been running since 1956. Western Australian magazine publishing lively fiction and poetry as well as intelligent articles. It's also got a strong international reputation and is listed in some of the world's major cultural indexes.
So that's just westerly mag. Com.au and there is a digital archive on this website so you can dip back into past copies. Thank you, Bob, for that unusual sounding book. Um, by Angela O'Keeffe. It put me in mind of one of my favorite books, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, a young boy in New York City, Theo Decker miraculously survives an explosion that takes the life of his mother alone and determined to avoid being taken in by the city as an orphan, Theo scrambles between nights and friends apartments and on the city streets. He becomes entranced by the one thing that reminds him of his mother a small, mysteriously captivating painting that soon draws Theo into the art underworld. Let's hear a sample of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. It's narrated by David Peter.
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Though I had decided to leave the suitcase in the package room of my old building, where I felt sure Josie and Goldie would look after it. I grew more and more nervous as the date approached, until at the last minute I was determined to go back for what now seems a fairly dumb reason. In my haste to get the painting out of the apartment. I'd thrown a lot of random things in the bag with it, including most of my summer clothes. So the day before my dad was supposed to pick me up at the barbers, I hurried back over to 57th Street with the idea of unzipping the suitcase and taking a couple of the better shirts off the top. Jose wasn't there, but a new thick shouldered guy. Marco V, according to his nametag, stepped in front of me and cut me off with a blocky, obstinate stance, less like a doorman than a security guards. Sorry, can I help you? He said.
I explained about the suitcase, but after perusing the log, running a heavy forefinger down the column of dates, he didn't seem inclined to go in and get it off the shelf for me. And you left this here? Why? He said doubtfully, scratching his nose. Jose said I could. You got a receipt? No, I said after a confused pause. Well, I can't help you. We got no record. Besides, we don't store packages for non tenants. I'd lived in the building long enough to know that this wasn't true, but I wasn't about to argue the point. Look, I said I used to live here. I know Goldie and Carlos and everybody. I mean, come on, I said. After a frigid, ill defined pause during which I felt his attention drifting. If you take me back there, I can show you which one.
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That was The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Donna is spelled [spells author's name]. And I remember discovering this book. I think now I this is terrible because I can't remember who recommended it. Or maybe I just picked it up because usually I remember who recommends books, but I just loved this book. It's a big one. So look, if you're looking for a long, engrossing read, it is 32.5 hours long. Donna Tartt tends to write books that are quite long. I thought this book was a very beautiful and the beginning I found very hard to read with this poor boy, coming to terms with the death of a parent and the loneliness of grief and the picture The Goldfinch that accompanies him all throughout his life and is, um, wrapped up in all of his belongings. The art world have been dying to find out where it is, but he keeps it close to his heart and it weaves in and out of his life as perhaps the only constant thing. And he doesn't even understand why he's so obsessed with it. Its importance to him is phenomenal.
There are other books by Donna Tartt in the collection The Little Friend, which is also a wonderful book, The Secret History, and I'm just going to go straight to Wikipedia for a bit of a rundown. So Donna Louise Tartt was born in 1963, and she's a novelist and essayist, so she's only written those three books, A Secret History in 1992, which really launched her onto the literary scene, The Little Friend in 2002 and The Goldfinch in 2013, which was adapted into a 2019 film. She was included in time magazine's 2014 100 Most Influential People list. She spends about ten years on each of her novels. I remember reading also that she was, um. Her partner was Bret Easton Ellis for a while back when they were budding writers, when he'd released American Psycho and she had released The Secret History. But they have since parted ways a long time ago.
I think the next book is The Last Painting of Sara DeVos. This is by Dominic Smith. In 1631, Sara DeVos became the first woman to be admitted as a painter, as a master painter to the Guild of Saint Luke in Holland. 300 years later, at the edge of a wood, her haunting winter scene of a girl watching skaters at dusk is her only surviving work. It hangs in the bedroom of a Park Avenue coupe of a wealthy manhattanite, a descendant of the original owner. Meanwhile, in the grungy reaches of Brooklyn, an Australian art history grad student struggling to stay afloat in New York agrees to paint a forgery of the landscape for a dubious art dealer. Half a century later, she's a prominent curator back home in Sydney, but. Mounting an exhibition of female Dutch painters of the Golden Age. Both versions of At the Edge of a Wood by Sarah DeVos are en route to her museum, threatening to unravel her life and reputation. Let's hear a sample of the last painting of Sarah DeVos. It's, um, a fiction book, and it's by Dominic Smith.
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A woman standing in a smock at dawn, grinding pigments and boiling up animal glue on the stovetop. It's the 1630s as far as Ellie Shipley is concerned, and canvas can only be bought at the width of a Dutch loom. A little over 54in, she reads by candlelight like a method actor and makes obscure errands into the supply chain that is, the stock and trade for period conservators and forgers alike. Cold pressed linseed oil that does not cloud oil of spike and lavender. Raw Sienna led white that fumes for a month in a cloud of vinegar. She paints in her kitchenette, where the northern light washes through her grimy windows, and the view gives onto the streaming traffic of the Gowanus Expressway. She sees commuters on the city bound buses, metal ribbons dotted with faces.
She wonders sometimes whether those glazed passengers see her makeshift studio as an after image. In their mind's eye, they see her bent over the stovetop and think she is stirring porridge instead of melting animal hide. The smell itself limits her social life and atmosphere of oxide and musk, set above a laundromat. The apartment has its own weather a tropical monsoon during business hours, and a cooler, drier climate at night. The ceilings carry water marks and the corner above her bed floral dresses with a delicate brocade of mold. In her final year of an art history PhD at Columbia. Ellie hasn't bought anyone home the entire time she's lived in this apartment.
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That was The Last Painting of Sarah DeVos by Dominic Smith, and that was narrated by Elizabeth Oates. Dominic is spelled [spells author's name]. And that book goes for ten hours and 20 minutes. The story is based on a fictional character, but one who is shaped from a blend of known women painters from the Dutch Golden Age. And it's almost a genre of itself that a lot of books that fall into forgery, fiction, literature's fascination with fake art. And this is from an article by Maggie Coe from The Guardian from 2016. And she writes forgery an act done in recognition of a painting's monetary value, evokes its opposite the intimate, almost magical role that works of art play in people's emotional and erotic lives.
And, she says, she adds, in rapid leaps across centuries, Dominic Smith manages to connect the plight of female painters to that of feminist art historians who, like the fictional Ellie, trudged through the old Boys club of the mid 20th century ivory tower to play a major role in resuscitating the careers of women artists, and from the Sydney Morning Herald, and this again is from from Louise Kennerley. In 2016, she writes the last Painting of Sarah DeVos is the fourth novel by Dominic Smith, who is an Australian living in Texas, and she says the plot is so rich that the description of it could sound too dense, but Smith weaves his tale with a light touch.
The book centres on the influence of a painting on three people across the centuries, and that was a review by Louise Keneally. So those last three books were all fiction and modern fiction, but let's go back to a bit of a classic here with The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Dorian Gray somehow manages to keep his youth and beauty, but his portrait mirrors his inner life. While he remains outwardly unblemished, it reflects the development of his vices and shows the ugliness and corruption of his soul. Let's hear a sample of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. It's narrated by David Brown.
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In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty. And in front of it, some little distance away was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hollywood. Whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused at the time such public excitement and gave rise to so many strange conjectures. As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skillfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and, closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might wake. It's your best work, Basil. The best thing you've ever done, said Lord Henry languidly. You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor Academy is too large, too vulgar.
Whenever I've gone there, there have been either so many people I haven't been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I haven't been able to see the people, which was worse. The Grosvenor is really the only place. I don't think I've seen it anywhere. He answered, tossing his head back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at Oxford. I won't send it anywhere, Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows and looked at him in amazement through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful walls from his heavy, opium tainted cigarette. Not send it anywhere. My dear fellow, why have you any reason? What old chaps you painters are you do anything in the world gain a reputation as soon as you have won, you seem to want to throw it away.
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And that was the picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Oscar is [spells name]. And that book goes for about ten hours. This book has had a lot of controversy about it. It was censored in 1890 because of what was seen as its immoral sexual content, both heterosexual and homosexual in nature. There was a short novella length version published in July 1890, and then it was published as a novel length version in April 19th, 1891. Amazon.com calls it an incisive portrait of humanity, a brilliant gothic tale of self-love morphing to self-loathing. There are a lot of different genres attributed to this. Some people call it philosophical fiction. It's called mystery horror, and it was Oscar Wilde's only novel.
One of the warnings in the books is, be careful what you wish for, because as Dorian is marveling at how young and beautiful he looks when he when he looks at his portrait, he makes a wish that he will always look that way. Making a pact with the devil. This portrait becomes a shame of his. And it's locked in the top of his house in his old school room, and he creeps in to look at it every now and then with a growing horror. And I'm reading here from another interesting website called Interesting Literature. So Interesting literature.com. Uh, that's the name of the magazine. There's an article here by Doctor Oliver Toole from, uh, Locke Burgh University. Oscar Wilde really did turn against the sentimentality of Victorian literature instead of Dickens pulling at the heartstrings. Wilde's novel is a good example of how later Victorian fiction often turned against the values and approaches favorited by early Victorian writers.
It was Wilde who famously said of the sad, sad ending of Dickens The Old Curiosity Shop, which Dickens original readers in the 1840s wept buckets over. He said, one must have a heart of stone to read The Death of Little Nell without laughing. So here he is, mocking the what he thought was an overly sentimental style. And there are lots of Oscar Wilde works in the library: The House of pomegranates, which is a collection of fairy tales. A Woman of no importance, first staged in 1893. A murder mystery. Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other stories. De Profundis, which was written as a letter to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, and it's a letter written during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol. Essays and lectures we have here.
If you would like to explore Oscar Wilde, you can always have a search on the My Vision Australia org forward slash library. Search and search the catalogue and choose your own Oscar Wilde books and works there. And he was famous for his witty remarks and reflections on things. His last words were reputedly just before he died. My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us must go. True or false. The great playwright, poet, novelist and essays um went first. Oscar Wilde drew his last breath on November 30th, 1900, at the age of only 46 years old. The next book is non-fiction, now only non-fiction. For today it is called Brett and it's by Franny Hopkirk. Franny Hopkirk knew Brett Whiteley all his life. He was her brother here for the first time. One of those closest to Brett presents a vivid and movingly personal insight into his life and work.
And there is a warning here contains some coarse language, not in this sample that I'm about to play, which is narrated by Diana Jeffrey. That was Brett by Franny Hopkirk. Franny is spelt [spells name]. And that book is 12 hours and 45 minutes long. Franny Hopkirk was born in Sydney in 1937. She was two years and one week older than her brother Brett. She was really named Wendy, but her father Clem called her Franny, short for Frangipani. Even before Brett achieved artistic celebrity, Franny was painted by artists such as William Pidgeon, a family friend for portraits entered into the Archibald Prize and. At the same time as Brett left Sydney for Florence on his scholarship.
Franny married and moved to New Zealand, where four of her six children were born. She pursued a career as a journalist, author, poet, a publishing this memoir in 2013, and Franny always remained close to her brother Brett, particularly during his troubled final years. And I was reading there from Whiteley the film. Com so just simply that the website is Whiteley the film.com, where it lists the people and a little bit of biography like I've just read out about the main people who feature in that documentary wisely, the film. And there's a review from Belinda Hill here on Amazon.com and she writes a great read, couldn't put it down, and a fascinating insight into the world of Brett Whiteley. Utterly, utterly beautiful and tragic in equal measure.
Thank you for joining us today on Hear This. And thank you for to to Bob from the ACT for giving us today's a bit of a theme and there's so many more books and people may be thinking, oh why didn't you put in the Girl with the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier and other books that might be coming to people's minds. So if you can think of any that I haven't put in today that you've particularly enjoyed, books that centre on art or have an art or a picture as the central piece that propels the narrative of the book or is just a like sits there quietly creating an influence, just let us know.
You can always email the library that's library@visionaustralia.org .... Library at Vision Australia - dot - org or give the library a call and discuss your books and what you like to read. And the telephone number is 1300 654 656. That's 1300 654 656. Thank you for listening to the show, and thank you for the lovely feedback. We get, the useful feedback we get, and the influence that if you contact the library about the show or can contact myself, your influence is in this programming and it is always highly appreciated. I hope you have a lovely week and we'll be back next week with more Hear This.
