Thirst for Salt is a first novel by a young writer from Australia. The novel came out this year but it’s not in the least woke. It’s written as if wokeness had never been invented.
Of course, the events in the novel occur in the world that exists in reality and will inevitably produce wokeness. Thirst for Salt is a love story, beautifully written, very touching and depicting a relationship that is clearly completely doomed. This isn’t a spoiler. The failure of the love between the main characters is announced from the first page. As we read about what caused the failure, it becomes clear that the characters collapse under the weight of endless choice and freedom. They have no idea how to proceed to the next stage, how to stop choosing, how to be content with life and not be lured by fantasies of imaginary other possibilities.
The man and the woman in this novel both want family, domesticity, stability, children and love that endures. But they always heard that wanting that is weird, embarrassing. You need “freedom” and “achievement”. So they play at “freedom” until there’s no more love left, and this game is, of course, a lot more damaging to a woman.
This is not an ideological novel. It’s a book about love, and it really reminded me about the early stages of my love with N. Beautiful writing, it’s all set in less inhabited areas of Southern Australia. Extremely memorable characters, and again, no wokeness. I came across this novel completely by accident at a bookstore yesterday, and I’m happy I did. This is why bookstores are great. On Amazon I’d never seek a debut novel by a 30-year-old Australian teaching at Columbia. But at a bookstore one gets a lot more adventurous.
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“This is not an ideological novel.”
It sounds like what someone might put together if they’d given Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” and “The Castle” a read and then decided that the walls of jurisprudence and procedure could just as easily be replaced with abstractions and ideals.
And so (metaphorically speaking) love finds itself imprisoned on the shores of “freedom” in one of several squalid block tenements of reason with labels on the doors such as “aspiration”, “achievement”, “noble idealism”, and so forth, with the major characters not realising that they are making their aspirational misery even more miserable by over-thinking their situations.
“… less inhabited areas of Southern Australia …”
Ever been to Adelaide?
It’s an odd little town because the posh parts aren’t nice and the nice parts aren’t posh.
You could stay in a horrible corporate hotel near the CBD and expect to pay 300+ AUD per night.
Or you could do the sensible thing and stay in a reasonably nice hotel away from it and spend as little as a seventh as much.
I really, really like Adelaide … except for near the CBD, which I find to be mostly horrible in the same way that Omaha, Nebraska is mostly horrible in similar areas.
So that’s probably why the novel sounds more light suburban than urban, because Adelaide’s CBD is not believable as a place where sensible people want to be, and in fact everything scatters around it.
“The man and the woman in this novel both want family, domesticity, stability, children and love that endures. But they always heard that wanting that is weird, embarrassing.”
How to say “woke city problems” without saying “woke city problems”, that’s so cute! 🙂
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No, I think it’s set somewhere halfway between Sydney and Merimbula. Although my geography knowledge is extremely poor, so I can’t vouch for anything.
I’ve never been to Australia but it was a childhood dream of mine to go.
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“I think it’s set somewhere halfway between Sydney and Merimbula …”
Oh, that’s even more cute, check it out on a map if you’d like.
Merimbula is about six hours from Melbourne (pronounced Mell-bin by Australians, BTW) and Sydney but still in NSW. But it’s about three hours from Canberra in the Australian Capital Territory or ACT, so notionally it’s half the way away.
There may be some social things cloaked in the novel that are totally opaque to people unfamiliar with Australia, which makes it possibly a bit more interesting and also perhaps allegorical, and which also possibly makes it worth another read.
BTW, when you say “Southern Australia”, that usually gets interpreted as South Australia or SA where Adelaide is located.
Sydney also spins off light suburbs but in a different way from Adelaide, especially around its suburban train system.
Melbourne is actually much nicer near the CBD and doesn’t do that as much, plus there are nice little alleys to wander, speaking as an Alley Crackpot, of course.
You could fool yourself for a few days in Melbourne thinking you’ve arrived in an English-speaking neighbourhood of Tokyo. 🙂
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Thanks for the recommendation, I’m already reading it and for sure I would never have come across it otherwise. 🙂
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I’m so so glad! I hope you enjoy it.
It always makes me happy when I can unite people with good books.
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I just finished it and wanted to say thank you again. I enjoyed it a lot, more than most books I read this year. Very quiet, thoughtful, and the end was very moving. I liked the portray of the mother-daughter relationship and the old dog. And the ending was beautiful, it was fitting that it ended with her family of origin instead of a new love.
And like you I also enjoyed the Australian setting. 🙂
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I’m so happy!! And I found it completely by accident at a bookstore. I love it when I come across such unanticipated gems. And I love it even more when others also enjoy it.
Thank you for coming back with the update!!
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“no idea how to proceed to the next stage, how to stop choosing”
I’d say less ‘stop choosing’ and more ‘keep choosing the same thing’ I choose to stay in my life as it is now every day.
But the zeitgeist says you have to keep choosing new things, consistently or it doesn’t count as a choice.
Think Home and Garden network… the purest… incarnation of existential fluidity going (I think). No home is good enough, no life is good enough, no redecoration or remodelling is good enough to last….
My favorite is how they alternate shows where people remodel (at tremendous cost) old homes to sell them and shows of people buying houses that have been remodeled (at tremendous cost) and flatly reject most of it so they can remodel it again…
A house is not a dwelling but a blank canvass that people project their neuroses on….
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Those shows are on every time I have to sit in the waiting room of a doctor or dentist office. The “oh, let’s take this half-acre kitchen with granite countertops, rip everything out, and replace it with a marble countertop kitchen. That we also will never use because we obviously don’t cook.
It must be a form of ritual sacrifice.
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I like the ones about wedding dresses more. It often looks like the brides put 1% of the care into finding a husband who’d be a good match than they do into a dress that would match their fantasy.
I’ve never gotten into the wedding mentality so it’s all very quaint to me.
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I haven’t been subjected to that genre. Given how stressful the whole wedding-dress thing was when I got married, that’s probably a mercy. I sewed my own, for eighty dollars’ worth of fabric and trim, after searching every dress retailer in town and finding nothing with sleeves. It was a terrible year for sleeve rot, and for something like three years around the date of our wedding, the famine was so severe that no sleeves could be found anywhere. It didn’t let up until the Kate/William wedding.
That whole industry is completely bonkers and we’d all be better off just wearing our Sunday best like everybody used to.
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