First Tuesday Book Club: Lots to love about 'Cloudstreet'

JENNIFER BYRNE:

The Pickle family, the Lamb family, all living together at No.1 Cloudstreet. Let's huddle in and share the love. You know you love it, Marieke.

MARIEKE HARDY:

Yes. I love it. And I've read it a couple of times. It's a big book to read a couple of times. But I look forward to reading it again. I will read it several times. I think it paints a portrait of an Australia and an Australian family that in some ways we'd all like to be a part of. It's aspirational in a very strange and beautiful and ethereal way.

JENNIFER BYRNE:

You, however, don't reread it. In fact, you vowed never to reread it.

MAN:

I'm being kind of hardline on this, and I don't do it very often. I reread quite a bit amongst literature that I love, but this is a book that I remember so fondly and that I adored so much when I read it — such a kind of formative book for me when I read it. I read it relatively young. I read it, you know… I read Anna Karenina and I read Great Expectations and I read Cloudstreet. It feels like I read them all along one big summer when I was a teenager, and they kind of seared themselves onto my brain and I don't reread those books because I'm terrified that I might pick it up and it might not be that special book, that artefact that I…

JENNIFER BYRNE:

The magic may have vanished.

MAN:

Yeah. So I kind of… I have my version of the families in that book in my brain, and I'm very reluctant to run the risk of discovering that they're not true.

JENNIFER BYRNE:

But it became your book.

MAN:

But it became my book. And so I don't want to open it up again just in case I go, 'Oh, that's a dud sentence.'

JENNIFER BYRNE:

Well, you know what, Marieke and Jason and I all read it again about two years ago when we did it for the Club.

MARIEKE HARDY:

Mm.

JENNIFER BYRNE:

And you're missing out.

MARIEKE HARDY:

Mm.

JENNIFER BYRNE:

It's just as fantastic.

JASON STEGER:

Yeah, it does…

JENNIFER BYRNE:

In fact, it's even better.

JASON STEGER:

I think the great thing about Cloudstreet is that he writes with a beautifully light touch. It's just superbly done.

JENNIFER BYRNE:

Mm.

JASON STEGER:

And the language is fantastic.

WOMAN:

I've got to say… I don't want to sound like that awful isolationist West Australian that we can do — 'cause I am a Western Australian, you see — but I feel I own this book. And I really do. 'Cause I grew up on the river, beside the river, in Claremont, and I grew up, you know, prawning with the family prawn net and crabbing. Everything. And, I mean, this to me, it just… You know, I could swim before I could walk, and things like that, you know? So, I'm just right here in the heart of this book. I just adore it.

JENNIFER BYRNE:

But, without being geographically expropriative…

WOMAN:

Yes.

JENNIFER BYRNE:

You know what? I'm sure that's true for you, but it's true for us all.