Money to Burn, by Asta Olivia Nordenhof

Asta Olivia Nordenhof is a Danish novelist and poet. Money to Burn is the first novel is a seven part series, or septology. 

Married couple Maggie and Kurt run a farm. Both have their problems. Kurt is a sometimes abusive partner, and Maggie has suffered sexual abuse with other partners, and with Kurt. In the midst of these relationship details comes the story of the burning of the Scandinavian Star passenger ferry, which killed 159 people. A real life event mired in possible financial scandal, did Kurt invest in this apparently dodgy business?

Award winning Nordenhof is also a poet, and this sensibility informs much of Money to Burn. The narrative style is fragmentary and jumpy. Readers will find it hard to get a footing, but this is perhaps the idea. The oddest thing is the sudden dropping in the middle of this short novel the Scandinavian Star ferry fire, a major disaster that occurred in 1990. No doubt how this is related to the main characters is fleshed out in a further six novels. (Nordenhof  lists the novel titles to come. I don't know how many have already been written, besides the second installment The Devil Book.)

I thought Money to Burn was okay - just - and perhaps maybe, just maybe, I'd be intrigued to see how the story is developed in a second book. However, by the end of Money to Burn I was tiring of the two main characters. They were pretty unappealing. 

Experimental fiction for the adventurous.

Translated from the Danish by Caroline Waight. 

West of Rome, by John Fante

John Fante (1909-1983) was an American-Italian novelist and screenwriter who wrote autobiographical fiction about his hardscrabble youth and poverty stricken upbringing. The famous Charles Bukowski was a fan and brought about a revival in the author's works. West of Rome consists of the novella My Dog Stupid and the short story "The Orgy." Both were published posthumously.

My Dog Stupid

Henry Molise and wife Harriet have four adult children that are driving them nuts with their various problems. When a stray dog arrives, it's the last thing that Henry wants. But as his children grow fond of the dog, they reluctantly keep him, calling him "Stupid". 

The 130 novella, presumably set in the 1960s given its cultural references to interracial relationships and draft dodging, basically follows the hopeless twists and turns of this unhappy but reluctantly close family. Henry pines for some imagined idyll in Rome, and talks about going on an extended holiday there, but is continually dragged back into familial bickering and fighting. There seems no escape from miserably domesticity. 

The Orgy

A ten-year-old boy describes working with his bricklayer father. His "papa" has a friend, named Frank Gagliano, who is also a bricklayer. The boys mother, a devout Italian Catholic, absolutely loathes Frank and considers him the very devil. When the boy's father is given a useless old mine, the two friends start spending their weekends there, drinking, eating and not doing much digging. The wife suspects they are up to no good, possibly womanising. She instructs her ten-year-old boy to go along and keep an eye on his father. What the boy witnesses shocks him beyond all belief.

"The Orgy" is a forty-page story, and the better of the two. It's gripping, funny and written with precision. It seems that Fante has spent more time polishing it. My Dog Stupid is really good too. A very enjoyable read that provides amusing portraits. But as I was reading it I wondered if this was something the author was still chipping away at and if he would have wanted it published. Either way, John Fante fans will be grateful for both works. And new readers will find a good introduction to this wonderful author.

The Umbrella, by Tove Ditlevsen

  

Tove Ditlevsen (1917-1976) was a Danish poet and author. She is finding late fame with English readers due to recent translations of her fiction and notably her three volume autobiography, The Copenhagen Trilogy. As part of Penguin's Archive series, ten stories are published in this handy little volume celebrating 90 years of Penguin books. (I think all the stories are taken from a Penguin Modern Classics edition of her stories called The Trouble With Happiness.)

For those new to Ditlevsen, her writing is on the gloomy, existential side. Volume one of her memoir Childhood described an unrelentingly miserable upbringing, one in which a sensitive child is misunderstood by peers and parents alike. In The Umbrella, the stories concentrate on joyless marriages that are endured and offer little in the way of personal fulfillment or development. The couples often misunderstand each other and a sense of shame permeates everything. 

True, that doesn't sound too appealing. But for readers who like slow moving, intimate fiction that explores the human psyche in detail, then Ditlevsen is the ticket. At a hundred pages, with most of the stories lasting about ten pages, The Umbrella is a good place to dip into some moody Danish fiction.

What is the True Value of Work?

I wrote the following piece after a speech given by Australia's Reserve Bank deputy governor that unemployment needed to rise in order to keep inflation down. The piece was submitted to Melbourne's Age and the Guardian, but was not accepted for publication. I still think it's a pretty good piece, so publish it here below.

Recent hand wringing over interest rates has given us a peek at how the unemployment sausage is made. When inflation is too high, interest rates are raised, thus reducing demand in the economy and increasing unemployment. (Interest rate hikes have lifted unemployment from 3.5% to a current 4.1%). There is a sweet spot in this balancing act, officially called the “non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment”, or NAIRU for short. It’s where unemployment is not too low to put pressure on inflation, but not too high that the economy is slipping into recession. The RBA currently guesses everything is just right at an unemployment figure of 4.5%. Zero percent unemployment, surprisingly, is not really full employment. Full employment is how much the economy can bear without causing inflation. 

This all begs the question, should the unemployed somehow be reclassified as essential workers? While for decades it has been received wisdom to think of dole recipients as a drag on the community, the opposite may be true. 

I confess to having been unemployed for a period in the early nineties, during what then treasurer Paul Keating described as the “recession we had to have”. Unemployment hit eleven percent. No one thanked me for being one of the government’s foot soldiers, bravely holding the nation’s precarious economy together. In fact, I experienced the opposite. I saw my stocks plummet to junk bond status when I told a real estate agent I was unemployed. 

Unemployment, it could be argued, is in the eye of the beholder. In anthropologist David Graeber’s book, Bullshit Jobs, he posits the theory that John Maynard Keynes’ 1930s prediction that automation would usher in a 15 hour work week has largely come to pass. Graeber speculates that modern economies now create fake jobs consisting of useless busywork.  “Automation did, in fact, lead to mass unemployment,” he writes. “We have simply stopped the gap by adding dummy jobs that are effectively made up.” The book quotes testimonials from people who have found themselves in mind numbingly pointless jobs and cites a British pollster who found that 37% of respondents thought their jobs made no meaningful contribution to the world.

My own career has had its fair share of these dummy jobs. In the public service I sat in a dingy  room reading D.H. Lawrence because there was nothing to do. When I landed a job at a prestigious university, I was thrilled. But it soon became clear there was also nothing to do and I was sent on long walks through the university to kill time. Over a decade in the world of finance did require real work, but it also had its fair share of bread and circuses. There were training sessions where the team building activities seemed more appropriate for a kindergarten, not a room full of adults; productivity initiatives involving dress ups, live performances and spinning fortune wheels; and propaganda sessions where the company fed us gobbledygook about its mission and performance. 

If the “Bullshit Jobs'' thesis holds true, could this problem also plague our executive class? Recent high profile cases have called into question the performance of some of  the country’s top CEOs. Prime minister Anthony Albanese called one recent CEO’s performance a “shocker” and “epic fail.” But if this is failing, it’s failing upwards, with huge paypackets and eye watering bonuses. 

Our business elites should perhaps be considered more of a ceremonial class, there to give  confidence that the economy is being guided by the hand of men and women of supernatural ability. The tangible output of this class, beyond giving speeches, enjoying long lunches and commenting on market conditions, is hard to quantify. A baker at the end of the day produces a loaf of bread. But could Alan Joyce fix a plane engine?

How do we decide what work is valuable or not valuable? Does a big paycheck really mean you’re a useful member of the community? Could voluntary or unpaid work be more important? In Australia, unpaid work, performed mostly by women, is valued in the hundreds of billions per year. A women’s strike would bring the nation screeching to a halt. Disgruntled taxpayers may wonder how the unemployed are spending their days. Most likely they are busy scavenging cheap food, making repairs to desiccated clothing and running to appointments on foot, to save the train fare. They are not partying. 

Politicians have made a meal of demonising the unemployed. Paradoxically no government or central bank really wants full employment, as it would set off inflation. A lot of time and energy are wasted in dancing around this truth. Instead we opt for dubious work for the dole schemes and Robodebt scandals. Surely we could better spend our efforts by accepting reality, raising the dole to a living wage and creating a more ennobling nomenclature for those given the unenviable job of balancing the nation’s economy. 

by Chris Saliba - April 2025

Weights and Measures, by Joseph Roth

A frustrated minor official finds he is not as perfect as he thought he was

​In the District of Zlotogrod, during the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Anselm Eibenschütz is appointed the inspector of weights and measures. His job is to make sure traders are dealing fairly with the public and not short changing or acting otherwise fraudulently. Eibenschütz is not a particularly happy man. He has left the regimented life of the army, which he found quite to his liking, as it took away the need for him to really make choices in life, and now finds himself dealing with petty, small town problems. Everyone, it seems, is an adversary. His wife doesn’t help matters, as she is mostly indifferent to Eibenschütz's plight. She makes things even worse when she embarks upon an affair and becomes pregnant to another man. 

Meanwhile, in the village of Szwaby, Eibenschütz comes across tavern owner Leibusch Jadlowker as a part of his travels. Jadlowker is a dark, shadowy figure with a dodgy past and another dangerous adversary to deal with. A complicating factor to this animosity is Jadlowker’s mistress, Euphemia Nikitsch. Despite Eibenschütz’s high moral standing, he starts up an affair with Euphemia and soon becomes obsessed, causing him to pursue a path that is hypocritical and possibly compromising. 

Joseph Roth (1894 - 1939) was an Austrian-Jewish journalist and novelist famous for his novel The Radetzky March. Weights and Measures is a later novel by Roth, now re-published by Pushkin Press from a 1982 translation by David Le Vay. Despite the novel’s cast of rogues and chancers, cretins and fraudsters, Weights and Measures is a slyly humorous look at the depravity of human nature, written in a crisp, simple prose. The book is set out in a series of episodic misadventures, with short chapters, and the action keeps at a pleasant clip, never boring the reader for a minute. 

The upstanding Eibenschütz, his constant frustrations and self-deceits, acts as a mirror for the reader, making us confront our own ambitions and unpalatable secret desires. A clever and concise study of life’s darker undercurrents.

Weights and Measures, by Joseph Roth. Published by Pushkin. $24.99

FEB 25

Confessions of a Sociopath, by M.E. Thomas

A clinically diagnosed sociopath tells her story​

Confessions of a Sociopath by M.E. Thomas (a pseudonym, as you can imagine), was first published in 2012 and is now re-issued in a Picador paperback. Thomas, whose clinical diagnosis as a sociopath prefaces the book, wrote Confessions as part explainer of her condition and part plea (this may sound strange) for more tolerance of sociopaths. 

Despite the alarming subject matter, and the author’s openness about her abilities to manipulate and ruin people (it is worth noting here that she is non-criminal and non violent), Confessions makes for a gripping, insightful and often darkly amusing read. M.E. Thomas writes with wit and precision about the psychology of sociopaths and examines whether they are born or made. The author’s work as a lawyer and academic comes through in her razor sharp analysis and highly original view of the world. She also makes many interesting references to literature and science when making her points, discussing sociopathic characters in the great novels.

Sociopaths are renowned for their lack of remorse, guilt or negative emotions. As M.E. Thomas slices and dices how we all behave - our guilt, vulnerabilities and weak spots, also our aggressions and tendency to try and manipulate the world - it feels like a confronting therapy session. Strangely enough, Confessions could almost double as a self-help manual. The book prompts self-analysis.

It does seem unlikely that a sociopath should write a book and essentially give the game away  (sociopaths like to work in the shadows.) But Thomas hopes that by explaining her condition, that sociopaths might be able to live more in the open. She lists all the types of work that sociopaths are good at, such as the law and high level business. They see more clearly because they’re less likely to get emotionally involved. She also argues (backing this up with research) that sociopaths brought up in good homes, given structure and an education framework, are less likely to offend criminally. (Thomas was brought up Christian and still practices her faith, writing that religion gives her a rulebook that keeps her out of trouble.)

Confessions of a Sociopath is an unforgettable book. A true original. It rips the mask off the world, showing a side we rarely contemplate in nuanced detail. A must read.

Confessions of a Sociopath, by M.E. Thomas. Published by Picador. $24.99

FEB 25

The Wisest Fool: The Lavish Life of James VI and I, by Steven Veerapen

A new biography of King James VI and I. 

King James VI and I (1566 - 1625) is perhaps best known as the successor to Queen Elizabeth.  His mother was the ill fated Mary Queen of Scots, a mother he barely knew, who was sent to the block to be executed. She wore a wig to the event, and when the executioner lifted her dismembered head up by the hair, it fell and hit the ground, revealing a close cropped grey crown. His most lasting fame rests with the official translation of the Bible, which is still read widely today as the King James Bible. 

Historian and novelist Steven Veerapen has written a spirited and often juicy biography of the king, somewhat trying to rescue his reputation as a coward, fearful of war, while also striving to paint a truthful portrait of his reign. They were politically tumultuous times when James was established on the Scottish throne, with interminable wars raging between Catholics and Protestants. Staying on the right side of these hostilities was a high wire act. Many participants came to a grisly end. When reading about this period, it’s always a shock to realise how young the key players were. 

King James VI and I loathed war and conflict, and so did his best to stay out of harm’s way. In this he was fairly successful, however he could have played the politics better. He spent lavishly and was always in debt, and he had a strong distaste for his subjects, avoiding them at all costs. He could have made his reign run a bit smoother if he had paid more attention to public opinion, and run his finances more responsibly. He was also overly fond of alcohol and rich foods. One wonders if these vices contributed to his death at the age of 58. 

The King’s lovelife is examined in considerable detail. He sired nine children with his wife, Anne of Denmark, with many of them dying young. He also kept a string of male lovers on the side, and showed little interest in keeping his affections for them private. (Probably a hard feat to achieve, as a King’s life had little to no privacy.)

An entertaining and instructive history covering the reigns of three fascinating royals, whose lives intertwined in all sorts of fraught and complicated ways  - Mary Queen of Scots, Queen Elizabeth and King James VI and I. 

The Wisest Fool: The Lavish Life of James VI and I, by Steven Veerapen. Published by Birlinn. $39.99

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