This is a strange, uncomfortable little book. Arturo Bandini is an aspiring writer in Depression-era Los Angeles, convinced of his own brilliance while struggling to keep his life together. He's vain, insecure, spiteful, passionate and, every now and then, surprisingly kind. It's an irritating combination, but there's something recognisable in it too.

Bandini's treatment of Camilla is easily the hardest part of the book to swallow. His obsession is framed as romance, but through a modern lens there's plenty that's simply ugly and abusive. Fante doesn't make Bandini particularly easy to forgive either. He's a man whose enormous ego seems to be compensating for just how uncertain he is about himself.

What kept me reading was Fante's writing. It's simple without being plain, and occasionally he produces a sentence that made me stop and read it twice. The downside is spending so much time with Bandini's ego. He can be fascinating, but he can also be bloody exhausting.

It's easy to see the connection to Bukowski, although Fante feels less interested in being cynical for its own sake. There's more vulnerability here, and beneath all the selfishness and bad behaviour is someone trying, rather badly, to find his place in the world.

I didn't love it, but I'm very glad I read it.

Australian Outback Gothic, and man, this is one hell of a read. A young teacher gets stuck for a couple of days in the fictional mining town of Bundayabba. And fictional or not, it's a dead-on encapsulation of towns like Broken Hill or Kalgoorlie, good and bad both. He describes the speck of a town where he actually teaches (one store, one pub, one school, nothing else) as a place where "a man felt he had either to drink or blow his brains out." And of the bigger town:

"Peculiar trait of the western people, thought Grant, that you could sleep with their wives, despoil their daughters, sponge on them, defraud them, do almost anything that would mean at least ostracism in normal society, and they would barely seem to notice it. But refuse to drink with them and you immediately became a mortal enemy. What the hell?"

That's the trap the whole book runs on. Hospitality as a closed system with no door out. The drinking that keeps you in good standing is the same drinking that unravels you, and Cook structures a good stretch of the book as blackout after blackout, so you lose the thread of what's happening right alongside Grant.

Grant loathes the place and just wants back to Sydney, but the author clearly doesn't loathe it the same way. There's real fondness underneath all the horror, the kind that only comes from having actually been there.

It's horrific and funny, a warning and a love letter, at the same time. Gothic novel, doing exactly what gothic novels should do.

This was hard going for me, and I don't think that's a bad thing to say about it. The prose refuses to rank anything: exes, memories, moments of the affair all get laid out with the same flat weight, "this one, and this one, and this one." No hierarchy, nothing pointing you toward what matters more. I get why she does it. The whole book is about a woman who can't put her own past in order, so the sentences won't either. But reading it felt like being denied emphasis for 200 pages, and that wore me down.

The content didn't help. This is a woman looking back on an affair with a much younger man, and she's honest about how badly she behaved: holding leverage over him, showing up at his work, carrying anger that's mostly hers to own. I found her genuinely hard to be around. What struck me more, though, is that she's writing all this from inside a stable relationship with her current husband Vincent, and I don't think she never once says she loves him. All the interior life, all the obsession, goes to the man she can't finish writing about. Vincent gets the logistics: his father moving in, the nurses, the Zoo visita. Imagine Vincent, having to read this book about his wife's old, unresolved obsession.

I can see why this won her the reputation it did. The triple layer, a woman remembering an affair, writing a novel about remembering it, and writing about not being able to finish that novel, is genuinely well built.

I understood what she was trying to do with memory, with order, with the impossibility of getting an honest account of your own past down on paper. I just didn't enjoy being inside it. Respecting the craft and wanting to spend more time with it turned out to be two different things.