Josephine WilsonCritiques

Extinctions won the Miles Franklin Award in a strong field, so my expectations of this novel were high. It didn't disappoint, but I thought it was still a bit lacking.

The novel concerns widower Frederick who has just moved into a retirement village. He has brought with him the detritus of a lifetime's collecting esoteric modern design but has, in the process, failed to maintain his relationships with his family and has turned into something of a curmudgeon.

As Wilson reveals more of Frederick's history, his story just gets sadder and sadder, but she doesn't really let us empathise with him much. He is as cold, clinical and useless as the Danish chair that he prizes, and never fails to do the wrong thing. His family and friendships are as dysfunctional as can be imagined, but Wilson seems to sheet most of the blame home to him. Deeper currents in this story are hinted at, but Wilson does not explore them much and the ending is pretty inconclusive.

EXTINCTIONS (2018), a novel by Josephine Wilson, had lots going for it - set in Australia, written by an Australian, old folks (widowed,retired teachers) newly moved into a 'senior' community as protagonists, some complex family dynamics, including a brain-damaged son, an adopted biracial daughter, grief and loss, with some family secrets thrown in, adultery, drug addiction, some sordid aborigine history, etc. All this, and I found it at a library sale in mint, like-knew condition for just fifty cents! It was a must-buy, and turned out to be a riveting read. You wanna know more? Read the book. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER½

Professor Frederick Lothian has had a tragic life. >ii
Fed is a 69-year-old retired academic engineer when we meet him. He's living at St Sylvan’s retirement village. He dislikes most people, especially his next door neighbour, Jan. But she plays an instrumental part in him changing his life.

We get to know this irascible, impetuous and unaware man intimately. He doesn't understand figurative speech, his wife or his two children. One of his children is an adopted Aboriginal girl, Caroline. The other, his son, Callum, is a paraplegic, the result of a car crash.

Fred retired from life long ago. He doesn't like anyone. He disconnects his phone. Enter Jan, his chatty next door neighbour who has dozens of budgerigars. She helps make Fred realise he has been clueless to his family's feelings and needs. We learn about Fred's catastrophic past by flashbacks. I found these forays into the past interrupted the narrative flow.

Extinctions was the winner of the 2015 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript and the 2017 Miles Franklin award.

4.5 Fred is in the latter part of his sixties, living in a senior village, and not very happy about that fact. His wife has died, and though we know he has two children, their is a rift between them, though the details are not yet apparent. Those are revealed as we read further. His thoughts are at times amusing, but he seems stuck on himself, or within himself. Quite pompous, and wants to keep away from most of the other residents, not get involved in this life he now finds himself within.

This is one of those questionsuiet books, that slowly works it's way into the heart of the reader. A family, missed opportunities, regrets, blindness, and an inability to see what went wrong. This changes as almost against his will he is bull dozered by the wonderful elderly lady who lives in the small house, next to his. Jan, is amazing, doesn't let Fred off with his excuses, but eventually has a most positive influence on his life. Quite amusing at times, sad too, when we find out more about his past.

Alienation, the sense of never belonging. Australia's indigenous people, and the harm done to them in the past, that carried into the present. Strong characters, strong writing. A story of moving forward, finding ones place, and finally forgiving oneself. A lovely, heartfelt story.

ARC from Edelweiss½

A grumpy old engineer reflects on his life
It is a complex tangle of relationships that examines life-changing events
I wasn't expecting the illustrations and was surprised and intrigued by them½

I must admit that how the book would eventually develop I did not foresee after reading the first initial pages. The book central character is a retired academic engineer called Fred Lothian who is living in a retired village in Perth Western Australia. He is living a deliberately solitary life and is consumed by regrets at the life he has chosen and by the consequences of his past actions. His failure to confront the past which he must ultimately do to achieve some semblance of peace and self awareness is characterised by surrounding himself with clutter and the detritus of his former life that he is unable to discard. When Jan a friendly and loquacious neighbour unexpectedly enters the scene Fred must reassess and confront the secrets, half truths and lies that have consumed his previous life.

This is a story of redemption and coming to terms with the past and the extinction referred to in the title relates to the personal as well as the natural. I liked the way the narrative developed as like peeling an onion we gradually got to learn little by little the true events that shaped and perhaps in some ways traumatised Fred's life and accounted for his subsequent actions.

The interesting photographs and drawings that accompanied the text lead us to question the meaning of what extinction is and whether we are heading or retreating from this. The full range of emotions from humour to despair are encountered here and the book is beautifully written leaving the reader to question the meaning of existence. It is also an indictment of our treatment of lost cultures and nature and the consequences for members of Australia's Stolen Generations as personified by the character of Caroline.

Sometimes light and sometimes dark this is a novel that will stay in the mind for some time and the ending leaves many questions unanswered which perhaps due to the underlying subject matter is how it should be. I believe this is well worth a read and lends itself for much discussion for a book group.

The first few pages of Extinctions reminded me of A Man Called Ove — a cantankerous old man, Frederick Lothian, former concrete engineer, living in a retirement "village," too grumpy to tolerate his neighbors, shunning his daughter and son. His complaints about the life in the village are amusing and I thought the story would continue in the same vein as Ove , but the similarities ended quickly and the book took on a more serious tone.

A widowed neighbor in the village, Jan, insinuates herself into Frederick's life. Her life story that she reveals to Frederick is full of regrets and failings, which causes him to reconsider his own choices and behavior. He finds himself reluctantly revealing his past to Jan, and over the course of a couple of days, reinvents himself and changes his path.

This book won the Miles Franklin award in 2017, and there are discussions about the recent history of Australian Aborigines (of which my knowledge is sadly lacking). The book is interspersed with photos of architecture and engineering marvels that I found enhanced the story.

It’s the story of Frederick Lothian, but also of the life of his late wife, Martha, who had a vibrant life that he never knew about, and his daughter Caroline and son Callum, who faced battles he never understood or acknowledged. Extinctions revolves around the struggle to be a good parent, when to cling and when to let go, and the unwitting impact that the personal struggles of parents have on their children. The theme of extinctions —the metaphorical deaths of career, adoption, and marriage —runs throughout.
An insightful book with strong character development.

I vacillated between a 3 and 4 star rating for this one, but it is worth reading.

Many thanks to Edelweiss and Tin House Books (W W Norton) for this advance copy.

We read it for January 2018. It is the story of a retired professional man like myself, so triggered reflections of my own experience. It was engrossing, I liked it a lot.

In my opinion, this is a very fine work. It is a multi-level story and every level is thoroughly engaging and worthwhile. It deals with issues of guilt, forgiveness, discrimination, self-esteem, parent-child relationships over three generations, aging, and much more. I was alerted to this book by jeniwren flagging the 2017 Miles Franklin Prize short list, in which this work is included - thanks jeniwren! It is very Australian in its orientation and setting however, and non-Australian readers might be a little confused by some cultural references. My only significant criticism (and this may reflect my declining brain function rather than Wilson's writing) is that sometimes I was momentarily confused by unannounced changes in time setting. I guess the book will also appeal much more to older readers and readers who have struggled with the guilty feelings of their inadequate parenting or partnering.

Extinctions, by Josephine Wilson, won the 2015 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, and I am not surprised: it is an utterly absorbing novel that I was sorry to finish. Do not let this book slip under your radar just because you’re busy with the Silly Season!
Professor Frederick Lothian, a man so given to discontentment that he complains about his own name, is a retired engineering expert on concrete and a pompous hoarder of modernist furniture. He has finally given in to the exhortations of his daughter Caroline and moved into a retirement village but he hates it and he despises all the other ‘inmates’, all moving inexorably towards the annihilation of aged care, and death. (He’s only 69!) And as we read on, we realise that the way he has quarantined himself from any relationships in the village is exactly what he has done throughout his life, even in his own home…

His wife, Martha, is dead, but Wilson’s pen makes her a lively character through Fred’s memories. Based on his experience with the evidently long-suffering Martha, Fred is fond of making generalisations about women, and his default mode is criticism. But there is much more to Fred than being a ‘crusty old gent’, and before long the reader is puzzling about what’s gone wrong in his relationship with Caroline, and about what might have happened to his son. Since the narrative offers only Fred’s perspective we soon realise that he is suppressing his thoughts so much that often he cannot even mention the boy’s name. And in his loneliness he is starting to lose his grip on reality:

Stalked by the ghost of his own unoriginality. Every day it was the same. He woke up – if he had slept at all – with an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach, and the distinct sense that there was something obscure, malevolent and obsessive lying in wait for him, ready to ambush him when he was at his weakest. Thoughts were ghosts. They were zombies. They wafted about in the white heat and dark stillness of St Sylvan’s Retirement Village, tapping on windows, whispering forgotten lines, staging scenes that were supposed to have been deleted from the script long ago. (p.93)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/12/11/extinctions-by-josephine-wilson/