Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.
Monday, November 10, 2014
Tim Winton: 'By the time I was five I knew. Hospital was trouble'
Many of life’s extreme human moments, good and bad, take place in hospitals but how do we really feel about them? Acclaimed Australian novelist Tim Winton explores his own complicated attitude to an institution that has loomed large in his life
In 1995, veteran folk singer Loudon Wainwright III released a typically mordant song in which he catalogued the births, breakdowns, deaths and near misses of friends and family. Somehow all the health campuses of memory coalesce as a single monolithic entity, a site of inescapable mortality. That hospital, Wainwright senses, will never be done with him; it will always be there, waiting. Hospital. The word itself carries historical notions of shelter, respite and hospitality. The modern institution remains a refuge, a place of deliverance. It’s a bulwark against chaos. Anyone who’s ever needed a hospital in a hurry knows the other-worldly sanctuary it promises. In the Greek islands 30 years ago I once sat in a small boat holding my infant son’s scalp together with my thumbs as we beat into a gale towards the prospect of harbour and hospital. Although the clinic we were trying so desperately to reach was a seedy little affair I’d previously avoided, during that rocky passage it became in my mind a citadel of hygiene and expertise. In extremis, we yearn for that hospital, and yet at any other time, if you’re anything like me, the very word brims with dread. Like the ageing Canadian strummer, I have a lifelong preoccupation with that hospital, an aversion I refuse to call a phobia.
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