Peter Goldsworthy

Terrific title and a cracking story to follow up. I abhore organised religion so the title was appealing.. Everything is unexpected, the narrator is a woman and a medical specialist, feels like genuine perspective of a woman leader in a man's field, the locations are in Australia and still unexpected. I don't want to give anything away. It's a really fresh story - with a smart narrator, an unusual anti-hero, cool plot twists. Now I want to read it again but do get it.

Peter Goldsworthy can boast of many accomplishments. Not only is he a doctor, currently working as a GP, he has won major literary awards across a range of genres including poetry, short story, the novel, in opera, and most recently in theatre, earning him the Medal of Australia for services to literature in 2010. But from his behaviour and attitude as a young boy and adolescent, few would have believed him capable of such meritorious achievements.

In this frank, often charming, sometimes show more unseemly, memoir, Goldsworthy reveals an early sexual fetish for car cranks, a middle childhood marked by mayhem and mischief, and an early adolescence of obsessive interests including geology, chemistry, pulp science fiction, and a complete lack of self awareness. And through it all, books were his most constant companions, “The most constant furnishings in the ever-changing homes of my childhood were those books. The most lasting friends I made…were the authors of those books.”

Moving frequently at the whim of his father’s employer, the Department of Education, Goldsworthy cycles through the regional areas of Adelaide, and then up to Darwin. While his mother hopes desperately for an electric oven and air conditioning with each move, Peter mostly relishes new territory to explore. Steeped in self absorption he makes friends and enemies in equal measure, indulges in petty theft and makes youthful boasts of prowess, all the while risking life and limb by experimenting with chemistry supplies bought in bulk from local hardware stores.

Eventually his teenage eccentricities, including his affectation for wearing a cravat and smoking a pipe, are exchanged for long hair and a pair of high-heeled, elastic-sided brown suede boots worn to poetry readings and Vietnam protests at university, where he studied medicine.
If not for collapsed lungs and an extended hospital stay at eighteen, Goldsworthy’s childhood may have never ended, but forced for the first time to confront his fallibility Goldsworthy makes the shift into adulthood.

Interspersed with poetry, photographs and sketches of a Molotov cocktail cleverly disguised as a rocket, His Stupid Boyhood reveals ‘the naivety and the precocity, the stupidity and the ingenuity, the rationality and the magical thinking’ p244 of a boy, now a man known as Peter Goldsworthy. show less

I wish I could remember where this recommendation came from! It doesn't seem to have been from LT, and since the book is not even published in the UK, it can't have been from any newspaper reviews. But it was an astounding discovery, from the first page.

Martin has just returned to Australia - with his beloved English wife - after ten years spent in London. One of the first things they do is look up the old friend from medical school whom he has always loved and looked up to. But they find show more Felix dramatically changed - cynical, confrontational, unwelcoming. Despite this, Martin and Lucy try and reach out to him, and there are signs that they are getting through. But what will they need to sacrifice in the process?

I found this book almost breathtaking. Although the storyline is fairly unlikely, the quality of the writing more than makes up for it, carrying the reader along and making the wildest events seems plausible. One example of this is that although Felix is almost unforgivably rude at their first meeting, the reader can completely understand what it is about him which makes Martin and Lucy persevere. And the events of the story unfold with a sort of tragic inevitability.

Goldsworthy also handles extremely well the variations of tone within the story - the drama of the main story, with, for example, the humour and cringing embarrassment of the social occasions involving the pompous senior doctor.

Sample: Our eyes lock. My heart hammers against the bars of its cage. Standard boy-meets-girl disruptions to physiology, but I have never felt them so powerfully. I feel unstable inside, as if all my organs have shaken loose from their bony shelves and leapt out into the unknown.

Recommended for: anyone who is prepared to give this unlikely story a go. show less

In 1964, the unfortunately named Robbie Burns is fourteen years old in the small town of Penola in South Australia. He's bright and precocious, writing endless science fiction novels, surviving the tough world of High School, and becoming mesmerised by his new teacher, the young, glamourous and passionately intellectual Miss Peach, who seems to want to mentor Robbie and help him with his writing.

Miss Peach is unlike anything the town has ever seen before, with her passion for poetry and art, show more her Vespa scooter, her stylish Audrey Hepburn fashions, her Kool cigarettes. The entire school seems to fall under her spell, but Robbie falls particularly hard given he's a teenager and she seems to be singling him out for special treatment.

I do have to say I didn't really get into this novel. It was evocative, but it was obviously all going to end rather badly so I never really wanted to warm to any of the characters. Miss Peach acted badly, Robbie was your typical sex-crazed egocentric teenager who is just far too literary to be totally believable, and most of the adults were unimpressive as well with their jealousies and flirtations with Miss Peach.

Although Miss Peach's housemates and fellow teachers, Miss Hammond and Miss Burke, never seen without a glass of wine and a cigarette to share between the two of them, and never heard without a quip to put down Robbie, are wonderful creations.

I read this for my bookgroup, and I do have to say that everyone else enjoyed it much more than I did! I barely took part in the discussions, because I just didn't care enough about the characters to want to discuss it or think about it beyond the initial read. I didn't hate it, but neither did I love it or even particularly enjoy it.

And while the final coda on memory and its notorious unreliability was excellent, and made me think that maybe it'd be worthwhile to go back and re-read sections, it was just all a bit too little, too late. show less