On 29 October 1945, the New York City branch of Gimbels department store unveiled a new product. Billions upon billions would follow in its wake.
Gimbels was the first to sell a new kind of ink pen, the design of which had taken several decades to come to fruition. The pens, made by the Reynolds International Pen Company, promised an end to the messy mishaps users of fountain pens encountered – leaking ink, smudges and pooling ink blots.
In the end, Li transcends the individual through the way she focuses so singularly on the I, moments of aloneness, and solitary memories, rather than on feelings she has from shared memories. Yu, too, transcends the individual, though he does so by offering his experience as a way of representing collective experience.
A book is many things to many people, and such is the novel Lucky’s. It’s a paper monument to the old Greek diaspora. A fictionalised account of an awfully specific phenomena in Australian history. It’s a saga that encapsulates elements of family drama, true crime and Greek tragedy. Most of all it’s a must-read from a new favoured son of the Eptanisa.
Even in the absence of more incisive social commentary, “White Ivy” is still a highly entertaining, well-plotted character study about a young woman whose obsession with the shallow signifiers of success gets her in too deep.