Book Review - The Yellow Elephant : Improve your memory and learn more, faster, better By Tansel Ali

Written by two-time Australian memory champion Tansel Ali. In this book Tansel explains how he turned his average memory into an extraordinary one. In The Yellow Elephant the practical exercises and provided tests help you to learn and build techniques to improve your memory quickly.

The benefits of an improved memory enable you to learn faster, reduce stress, save and improve your focus. I found that the section on brain training for kids was very interesting and easy to apply in Chapter 8. Also the Mind mapping information in Chapter 5 was an interesting concept. Definitely an informative and beneficial read. Anne

Book Review—Peru by Gordon Lish

At the tender age of six, Gordon murdered Steven Adinoff in Andy Leiblich’s sandbox. After witnessing scenes on the television of violent acts from a prison in Peru, Gordon begins to remember this event. But as he remembers, as he interrogates whatever details his memory is willing to conjure, his thoughts take on a new form, until the very murder at the centre of Gordon’s reminiscences becomes uncertain.

Unlike other memory narratives where the process involves the clichéd “peeling an onion” technique, where removing layers of details reveals the truth, Peru works the opposite way. “There is nothing I will not tell you if I can think of it”, Gordon promises us, and so he circles around the facts of the matter as well as seemingly inconsequential details that will not yield. The flurry of repetition both immediate (“Steven Adinoff is not even the half of it, Steven Adinoff is not even a smidgen of it. For instance, for instance—speaking of the cellar for instance”) and in recurring passages (the coloured man and the Buick, the matriarchal nanny, Andy’s sister in the cellar, the hoe striking into Steven Adinoff’s head) all add to this swirling around that both confirms as it casts doubt. To add to this blurring of the real and the false Lish, the author, uses his real given name (Gordon) for the protagonist and dedicates the novel not only to his real family but also and the fictional(?) deceased boy. Even the basic assumptions of what is ‘real’ and what is fictional are not guaranteed.

Frightening with its allure of the obsessiveness of memory, Peru is a haunting look at a gruesomely twisted childhood nostalgia.

Andreas

Book Review—The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara

Norton Perina is a renowned immunologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine. His fame is owed, quite simply, to unlocking the key to immortality. This comes courtesy of a rare turtle, found only on the Micronesian island of Ivu’ivu, where those who manage to reach 60 are given eternal life by consuming the turtle. But this gift has its cost, as those chosen few eventually become The Dreamers, doomed to senility and eternally wondering the island of ever fading memories. After fame, Perina adopts many children from the island. The problem however is that he is a paedophile, and this his account of his rise and downfall.

The novel owes a debt to Nabokov, first in its academic paedophile protagonist and secondly in its style being his self-indulgent confessions. Perina is nowhere near as veil a creature as Humbert, and also lacks some of his deviant charm. But his story is perhaps more fascinating, as well as more troubling tragic. The superficial semblance to Lolita is clear, with Perina even having Nabokovian pastimes (note his desire to collect insects rather than participate in his studies), but there is also the overpowering influence of memory. The whole work is Perina’s attempts to look back on his life from the confines of prison, ever deeper into the mirrorlike “sea of time” yet unable to reconnect with the life now past, just like The Dreamers he found on Ivu’ivu so many years before.

Tragic and worrying, The People in the Trees is a richly told and engrossing narrative.

Andreas