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Helen Garner

Monkey Grip Hardcover – April 9, 2019

by Helen Garner (Author), Charlotte Wood (Introduction)

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Inner-suburban Melbourne in the 1970s: a world of communal living, drugs, music and love. In her acclaimed debut, first published in 1977, Garner captures the fluid relationships of a community of friends. Nothing is harder than learning to love lightly. When Nora falls in love with Javo, she’s caught in the web of his addiction, and her life becomes an intense dance of loving and trying to let go.

Print length

352 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Text Publishing Company
Publication date

April 9, 2019
Dimensions

6.5 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

1925773159
ISBN-13

978-1925773156
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Editorial Reviews

Review

‘Monkey Grip (1977), was made into a film, and the precision of her prose, the way she lets her images hint at psychological depths that her characters barely comprehend, feels tautly cinematic.’―The Wall Street Journal; ‘Garner is a natural storyteller.’―James Wood, The New Yorker; ‘Her use of language is sublime.’―The Scotsman; ‘This is the power of Garner’s writing. She drills into experience and comes up with such clean, precise distillations of life, once you read them they enter into you. Successive generations of writers have felt the keen influence of her work and for this reason Garner has become part of us all.’―The Australian; ‘So real that by the last page you feel not just that you have read a magnificent novel but that you have experienced life itself.’―The Times on The Spare Room;

About the Author

Helen Garner is one of Australia’s finest authors. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham–Campbell Prize for non-fiction. Her novels include Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, Cosmo Cosmolino and The Spare Room.

Charlotte Wood is the prizewinning author of five novels and two books of non-fiction, and co-director of The Creativity Clinic. Her most recent novel is The Natural Way of Things.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Text Publishing Company (April 9, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1925773159
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1925773156
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.25 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #508,750 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,038 in Friendship Fiction (Books)
- #5,873 in Women's Friendship Fiction
- #6,921 in Psychological Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
83 ratings

About the author

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Helen Garner

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Helen Garner was born in 1942 in Geelong, and was educated there and at Melbourne University. She taught in Victorian secondary schools until 1972, when she was dismissed for answering her students’ questions about sex, and had to start writing journalism for a living.

Her first novel, Monkey Grip, came out in 1977, won the 1978 National Book Council Award, and was adapted for film in 1981. Since then she has published novels, short stories, essays, and feature journalism. Her screenplay The Last Days of Chez Nous was filmed in 1990. Garner has won many prizes, among them a Walkley Award for her 1993 article about the murder of two-year-old Daniel Valerio. In 1995 she published The First Stone, a controversial account of a Melbourne University sexual harassment case. Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) was a non-fiction study of two murder trials in Canberra.

In 2006 Helen Garner received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature. Her most recent novel, The Spare Room (2008), won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Queensland Premier’s Award for Fiction and the Barbara Jefferis Award, and has been translated into many languages.

Helen Garner lives in Melbourne.

Customer reviews

5 star		43%
4 star		25%
3 star		17%
2 star		7%
1 star		8%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Lyn Williams

I think she is Australia's best female author

Reviewed in the United States on June 15, 2013

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I love all her books, my favourite being The Spare Room. She just has a wonderful way of describing things with not a wasted word.

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linda goodwin

We can't help who we love

Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2014

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Love a gritty book. One review talked about dysfunctional parenting but I saw it differently. It was a different time & different culture. I saw a great love story!

Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2014

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Load of nonsense. Nothing ever really happened. The same events kept happening over and over and no real ending was present.

Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2014

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Boring

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Joseph Jones

A remarkable, groundbreaking novel that captured an Australian zeitgeist

Reviewed in the United States on January 15, 2018

How Helen Garner crafted such an avant-garde, impressionistic, zeitgest-y novel set in Melbourne in the mid 70s is a feat to behold. The reason it seems such a marvel, so unsurpassed, and preceded by nothing worthy of comparison, is because prior to the publication of this book there was very little memorable Australian literature, and our country depicted without embellishment, in its most uncompromising and realistic tone, was scarcely represented. Before Monkey Grip, books about Australia were written with a distinctly English tone, and the colloquialisms were never intoned. They come springing to life in this sensational book and it feels as though Garner has miraculously written a work of elegant prose, but inserted such laconic, crude Australian "Ocker" language into it that it feels almost like a miracle, an anomaly.

Monkey Grip vaguely resembles a European art book, with little in the way of plot, but reverberating with so much evocative imagery and stream-of-consciousness, as well as the political transgressions and offbeat sexuality of Burroughs and other American beat writers. The imagery is beautiful and vividly described, reminiscent of an E.M. Forster novel if it took place in inner-city Australia in the 70s. Perhaps a more accurate comparison would be Jack Kerouac, who captured a generation in America with his book On The Road, in the same way Garner captured a generation in Australia: thirty-somethings living in inner-city Melbourne, with its share-houses, lively art scene, and burgeoning feminist ideals about open relationships, new ways of loving, and living. Both books have become cultural touchstones and a time-capsuel for their respective countries.

Those seeking a book with a formulaic plot, with a clear beginning, middle and end will be disappointed. A common, but tiresome and baseless complaint levelled at this book is that it is "thin on plot". I wonder why people become so uncomfortable when they read a book that doesn't appease their desire for conventional narrative. People looking for an obvious beginning/middle/end should scope out a romance paperback and leave the subversive Helen Garner, with her challenging and gritty depiction of love in the mid 70s alone. Still, I'm not above recommending this to anybody with a healthy curiosity, even if it's not their style. The wording, dialogue and language are rewarding, and I think even the detractors can recognise that, and Garner brings her characters to life in very colourful ways. Nora, in her indecisiveness, and her neurotic desperation for Javo (which brilliantly parallels his neurotic addiction for a heroin hit), will be recognisable to a lot of readers. At one point, Nora says...

"Smack habit! Love habit! What's the difference? They can both kill you."

I think I'll leave it at that.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Catherine F Hanrahan

Love, sex and drugs in 1970s Melbourne

Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2015

Monkey Grip follows single mother Nora and her loving obsession with Javo, the heroin junkie. They and their friends drift through communal houses, mostly surviving on the dole and having sex whenever, and with whom ever, they please. This book, published in 1977, was very of its time – I imagine it caused a big stir, revealing as it did the reality of the life of junkies and scandalising people with its depiction of strong feminist views forbidding possessive personal relationships at a time when feminism had barely got into its stride.

Nora wanders in and out of bed with Javo, looks after her daughter Gracie, swims in the Fitzroy pool and rides her bike all over inner Melbourne. But no matter how badly Javo behaves, stealing money from flatmates to fund his addiction, disappearing for months at a time, something always draws them back together, ‘and the harder they pull away from each other, the tighter the monkey grip’.

The story is almost plotless, as the characters wander from one house, one party, one sexual encounter, to the next. One of the criticisms levelled at it at the time was that Garner had simply published her diaries. Later she admitted that much of the story had come from her diaries, which makes this book an incredible expose of her psyche at that time, but it doesn’t read like a diary, its better than that. The minutae of everyday life that Garner portrays is really mesmerising and one of the great strengths of her writing, for me at least. I love her casual way with dialogue and how resolutely Australian everyone sounds. They go out the back to the dunny, they talk about people ‘giving them the s***’, and tell people to ‘get stuffed’.

No wonder Australians identified with such local literature, which until then was almost non-existent.

I suppose what I admire most about Garner’s skill is her ability to deliver a line of dialogue with some internal discourse attached to it, that perfectly conveys how the character is feeling in so few words. I just love the minimalism of it. One of the best lines for me is when Nora decides to move out from the house she shares with her friend Rita, and the man she reluctantly thinks of as her current squeeze, asks whether she feels guilty about leaving Rita and her daughter behind.

‘If you can do it and not feel guilty about it, that’s really good. I’ve never done it, that’s all,’ he says.

‘Done what?’ Nora asks.

‘Walked out on someone who needed me.’

And then Garner, sums up just how this affects Nora in just 12 perfect words, and no more:

A great rush of distress and its protective accompaniment, anger, filled me.

It may not seem like the most amazing line of prose, but to me its just perfect. I could read her all day.

The concept of rebelling against monogamy is also interesting – when one of the women says the one thing you can’t do is take another woman’s man, they all glare at her as if she’s just suggested dropping the atomic bomb, and Nora wonders if they think that, then what have they ‘all been agonising about all this time?’ The conversation perfectly captures the problem with open relationships – its a good idea, but in reality, jealousy, possessiveness and love intrude and cause these women to be hurt, multiple times over, as they try to hide their pain from their men and each other.

But eventually Nora and Javo’s dance around each other has to come to a head, and there’s a climax of sorts, but this isn’t the book to read if you need a classical plot and deft structure. Just read it to revel in the words, and the images, and the precise, evocative dialogue.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Emile Klein

A classic contemporary Australian author.

Reviewed in the United States on June 16, 2020

Were you thinking of visiting Melbourne, or a fan of an earlier--more punk--era, or just looking for a distant but familiar land, and of love? Or maybe you're looking for lovely turns of phrase, kind word phrases. Well, here's a book to hold you, or your hands and wants, to pass those moments.

Helpful

BJS

Well, I love this book!

Reviewed in the United States on April 6, 2003

Maybe you have to be "of a certain age" and have lived through a certain time, with all its complexities, to appreciate this book. There was a lot of high and low life in the counter-culture, a lot of confusion, but there were some wonderful experiences to be had as well. I've read this book completely through about six times. I think of it as an old friend with which I will never part. I think her prose is breathtaking in its immediacy; it breathes life. Some of her descriptions of what she sees/hears/observes are so amazingly wonderful that I stop every time I read them to savor them a while before moving on. She is poetic in the true sense: not trying for an effect, but responding with her whole heart to a moment in such a way that your heart also is touched.

12 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

amazrev

Disappointed

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 9, 2020

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Having read another novel by this author I thought I would enjoy this one. However, it was a tedious litany of sex, drugs, road trips and aimless wandering through a rather tedious life by a disparate group of drug addicts and free loaders. This pattern seemed to be on a mobius loop. Not for me.

Sandra Davies

Another example of the undefinable appeal of Australian writing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 18, 2016

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Helen Garner is new to me (which seems shaming, given her place in Australian literature) and another of those Australian whose writing can be described (as it is on the cover of this book) "lyrical" and "rough-edged". In so many ways this shouldn't have worked - so many characters, no plot to speak of, little in the way of explanation - but told in such a way, and with such facility of language and insight, that it was totally compelling.
I need to seek out more.

stephanie carr

50 something? Wild youth? Read this!!!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 21, 2015

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This is a FAB representation of a particular " boho" culture in 70s Melbourne. Anyone who was going and single in the pre HIV era and anyone who has ever lives in a shared house will love this book. Helen Garner is a very underrated author outside Australia. She writes like a dream.

3 people found this helpful

Fortunata

I found it boring and repetitive

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 31, 2015

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I read 100 pages and could not get into it, I found it boring and repetitive.

Elizabeth.

BUY THIS BOOK!!!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 7, 2014

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That's about it. This is my favourite book ever. If you've ever been to, or especially lived in Melbourne, then this will be even more interesting for you with it's unique view of 1970's Melbourne that you won't often read about as Nora cycles her way around the city. Helen Garner is pure genius.

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