About book Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey From Down Under To All Over (1999)
When you read a book by Geraldine Brooks, you know you are in the hands of a master. In Foreign Correspondence, she not only gives a typical memoir, but she adds the twist of looking up her childhood penpals. Most memoirs with a twist or angle, really feel forced, but Ms. Brooks's does not. Largely because of how important her pen pals were in her childhood.While growing up in staid suburban Sydney, Geraldine felt closed-in, restricted, and boring. Despite being surrounded by immigrants and refugees - something she only realized as an adult in retrospect - she felt her upbringing was conservative, closed-off, and uninteresting. But also, leaving the country is something that was simply expected in that era. Australia is so far away from everything else, which leads to it being so behind, that all the young people leave, at least for a little while, usually after college. Geraldine was particularly chomping at the bit for her walkabout. When she was still too young to travel, she looked for foreign penpals to introduce her tot he world abroad. She started with a girl on the other side of Sydney (which was actually quite foreign to Geraldine), expanded to an American, a French girl, and two boys in Palestine and Israel, a Christan Arab, and a Jew.As she grew up, she did travel herself, extensively, as a foreign correspondent. She married an American Jew, settled eventually in Virginia, and spent time all over the world in war-torn places, bringing news stories to the public. And as she travelled, she had opportunities to find her old penpals. She was mostly inspired by her relationship with Joannie, the American, who had a rough life but was always optimistic. Geraldine felt guilty when her own life went well as Joannie struggled so much with mental issues and yet really worked hard to overcome them. Joannie was really Geraldine's best friend for ten years, and when Geraldine got in Columbia University's journalism school in New York, she was so looking forward to finally meeting Joannie in person!I had worried that this book would be entirely about the penpals, but it was largely about growing up Australian. And not the Australia of kangaroos and koalas that the rest of us usually think of - the Australia that was a little behind the times, a little innocent, and yet going through changes as it pulled away from England's grasp and tried to forge its own path more. It's interesting to see another country taking such interest in America's presidential elections, and Geraldine's father influenced her international flair with his Zionism and his own travels (an American, he had been a big-band singer in the 1930s).Her writing is so excellent that you don't notice it at all. It's smooth, precise, and eloquent. I admire her way with words and how she's happy for her writing to be in the background, and isn't showy or flashy. I enjoyed it very much and I think anyone would really like it.
Having had domestic and foreign pen pals in my youth, and having read a disproportionate amount of Geraldine Brooks recently, I thought this book would be fascinating. Even the first chapter set up a series of swashbuckling misadventures in foreign lands to find her childhood pen pals. I suppose I was hoping for Holidays in Hell with a defined purpose and uniquely feminine unfortunate situations.Unfortunately, the majority of the book (Part One) was autobiographical about the author's ancestry, childhood and initial correspondence with her foreign friends. Part Two, when she seeks to reunite with her childhood pen pals, comprised a little more than 40% (88 of 210 pages) of the book; what wasn't spent on autobiographical reminiscences was a fairly tame narrative that only alluded to some of the "spicier" situations that were also alluded to in Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women. Since the author was traveling as a foreign correspondent, on assignment from international news media, rather than as a member of the military (or otherwise on clandestine/classified missions), such restraint didn't seem warranted.Of course, as a memoir, it was uniquely structured and very well-written. At times, her writing about her American pen pal seem to verge on "writing therapy" to come to terms with what happened and her "role" in those events. If I hadn't read the book through so quickly, I may not have noticed that. Still, I just would have enjoyed this more if it was true to its "advertising."
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"But the huge spaces, the deep silences, the vast paddocks free of road rules and stranger danger could never be transported to the black-bitumen blocks of suburban Concord. The great dark mass of movement from country to city is made up of little specks like me: children who don't have any land left to visit, except in their parents' memories."I have been penpalling since I was 7 years old and am still in touch with my first pen pal. As a shy child growing up on a farm in South Australia, penpalling was a convenient way to make friends and learn about the world beyond my own, and over the years has taught me many things about people and the world in which we live. This is pretty much the experience shared by Geraldine Brooks in her memoir, FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE. Her desire to learn more about the world through penpalling created the framework for the rest of her life, growing up to become a journalist and Foreign Correspondent. After many years of silence, she decides to seek out the long-lost pen pals from her youth, the results of which are both unexpected and insightful. Through these people, strangers but not, she learns more about herself than she could have possibly imagined.An interesting memoir, beautifully told.
—Sarah
Geraldine Brooks is one of my all-time favorite authors, and I was delighted to find her charming memoir-a book I had somehow missed. My enjoyment was doubtless enhanced by the circumstances in which I read it. I went on vacation with plenty of reading material, but alas, my suitcase full o' books and I failed make contact until the day of my departure-- that's bad. However, Foreign Correspondence was available for download from my public library through Library2Go--that's good! Geraldine kept me company the whole way home from Mexico City. I suspect my seat mates might have wondered a bit about the middle-aged lady who spent the whole trip squinting at the teeny-tiny screen of an IPod Touch, alternating between laughter and tears. Brooks' coming of age in 1960s Australia was remarkably similar to my own growing-up experiences in rural Minnesota. Her Star-Trek obsession, ambivalence about the Catholic Church and her complicated relationship with her "older than average" parents were all subjects I could relate to.
—Ann
I am gradually coming round to accepting the fact that memoirs are not my thing. Even when written by Geraldine Brookswho is one of my favourite authors - of fiction! Sadly I found this book to be quite uninteresting. I would have liked more of the authors experiences as a foreign correspondent and less about her pen pals who were not a very exciting bunch really. My fault for reading a memoir when I know I don't like them. I'll go back to sticking to just fiction and reminding myself that this is the same author who wrote the fantastic Caleb's Crossing
—Phrynne
