Joe Cinque’s Consolation

Running

Today: 8 kms

This week: 21 kms

I have not run early in the morning for many, many many weeks and today I was out before 6am. I run from home to my regular beach route (North Rd, Brighton to Glenhuntly Rd, Elwood and back again). A very pleasant run, I must say.

And, a I stretched very well. Very obedient boy.

Helen Garner: Joe Cinque’s Consolation

Yesterday evening I finished Helen Garner’s book titled “Joe Cinque’s Consolation”. This is a book that narrates the story of a university Law student who not only talks about murdering her devoted boyfriend but she actually carries out her plan in bizarre circumstances; albeit to say she is now out and has completed a postgraduate qualification.

This is the first time I have fully read one of the works written by Garner, who is a well-known Australian writer. She has been known to controversy, particularly because of her book “The First Stone”, which is an account of a sexual harassment scandal at Ormond College, one of the residential colleges of the University of Melbourne.

The book was recommended to me by a good friend who is a Melbourne-based editor and who is writing a book about the death of someone in her family. At the start I was reluctant to read Garner’s book but my friend persuaded me – for very good reasons. Garner’s ability to put herself as one of the protagonists in the book is impressive. She seems to muster a sense of righteousness, which is not quite my sense of evenness. It took me about ten pages to get into the story, which struck me as a chronicle of a foretold murder. Indeed, the girl had had spoken at length to friends of her intentions to kill her boyfriend. She had also organised a number of farewell dinner parties where she was expected to execute her plans.

In fact the key points of the story are outlined in the initial pages of the book, but Garner had the ability to distil ample details of the court trail and the aftermath of Joe’s family. It is indeed the sense of grief and loss that makes Garner’s book a good read. Indeed I found the book remarkable in that sense, mainly because in recent months I have mentally reconstructed the weeks subsequent to the kidnapping of my brother amidst the uprooting that occurred in Guatemala in the early 1980s.

Garner’ book is not a thriller or a psychological mystery (as pompously described by an Australian media outlet). This is a book that reconstructs the death of a man who had no time to react to the plans of his girlfriend and a chronicle of the pain and despair of a family of migrants that feel powerless that justice cannot be served for an innocent victim.

As I was reading the last forty pages of the book I was listening to Natalie Dessay (Airs d’operas francais) sing Gaetano Donizetti “Acte II from La fille du régiment" (The Daughter of the Regiment). The following verse struck me:

C'en est donc fait
et mon sort va changer,
Et personne en ce lieu ne vient me protéger!

So, it’s done, and my life is about to change,

And there’s no one here to help me!

This is exactly how Joe Cinque may have felt in his final weeks of his life. His girlfriend killer had been planning his death for weeks. His death occurred after a dinner party at their house. The book starts with the transcript of the emergency call made by the killer herself to the ambulance. Indeed very powerful start to the book.