Perverse nostalgia
May. 25th, 2005 07:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
threemonkeysCruising through Dymocks the other day I happened to notice that there is now graphic novel version of He died with a felafel in his mouth. I was a little tempted to buy it but reason prevailed - I already have the original book after all. Anyway, after Dymocks I wandered down to Book Mark. Having seen the afore mentioned John Birmingham title I thought I'd check the relevant section the see if any other JB titles were there. Sure enough there was The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco - a sequel of sorts to the original.
I have now finished reading it. Many good belly laughs. Perhaps not as many as the first one but still enough to make it huge fun. It is a strange thing. I have no desire to go back to the crazy anarchic flatting days but I do have a certain nostalgia for those days. These two books feed right into that. It helps that Birmingham tells these yarns very well. The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco is a more structured story and a little more contrived compared to the original. I suspect that the author had to so more reworking and tweaking of the source "true" stories to fit them in. Or perhaps he wanted to create a book that would be easier to make into a film. Although I did like the movie of the original - it left out 99 percent of the book and strapped on a bogus story but it still captured just enough of the spirit to have the right effect.
I have now finished reading it. Many good belly laughs. Perhaps not as many as the first one but still enough to make it huge fun. It is a strange thing. I have no desire to go back to the crazy anarchic flatting days but I do have a certain nostalgia for those days. These two books feed right into that. It helps that Birmingham tells these yarns very well. The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco is a more structured story and a little more contrived compared to the original. I suspect that the author had to so more reworking and tweaking of the source "true" stories to fit them in. Or perhaps he wanted to create a book that would be easier to make into a film. Although I did like the movie of the original - it left out 99 percent of the book and strapped on a bogus story but it still captured just enough of the spirit to have the right effect.
