James Ley

James Ley dissects the carnal imagination at work in the English translations of Han Kang’s books.

Dostoevsky’s reactionary sleight of hand in psychologising his demonic revolutionaries was to shift the political ground from the social to the individual.

In contrasting ways, Sam Vincent’s memoir My Father and Other Animals and Rick Morton’s anthology Growing Up in Country Australia complicate clichéd notions of rural life.

Ultimately, it is of little consequence whether or not Morrison is genuine in his religious beliefs. He probably is.

John Hughes can be considered an antipodean writer in several senses, one of which is that he knows how to stand an idea on its head, but the most significant is that his preoccupation with memory and forgetting has its origins in the cultural dislocations of his Australian childhood.

In a quietly melancholy way, Bewilderment is a politically defeated novel, and perhaps in a deeper sense defeatist.

The complexity of Quin’s writing naturally admits any number of conflicting interpretations. Though there is now something close to a critical consensus that she is a crafter of brilliantly multifaceted fictions, there is no consensus about the intent or the ultimate significance of her distinctive literary vision.

Pity the poor writer whose fate is to be harried with opportunities and accolades. Erpenbeck’s deadpan portrayal of herself as a passive yet accommodating figure, somewhat nonplussed by the attention, makes a substantial claim.

‘Ali Smith’s decision to begin her seasonal quartet in the mellow fruitfulness of Autumn and end in glorious Summer now seems like heroic optimism. The quartet was conceived as an exercise in writing to the moment: a sequence of novels written and published at the rate of one a year, set in part at the time of their composition, responding to events as they unfolded in the wake of the bitterly fought Brexit referendum of 2016. The publishing schedule didn’t quite work out: Spring was late. Yet in the very act of aligning a creative embrace of happenstance with the cycle of the seasons there is an article of faith.’ 

The Rain Heron is an exemplary work of popular fiction. People can be a little touchy about such designations, so let me stress that I am imputing no deficiency of craft or intelligence or imagination. Quite the contrary. What I mean, specifically, is that its considerable formal accomplishment is its ability to mould its ideas into a conventionally satisfying shape. It is a richly imaginative work that appeals to a sense of wonder and evokes important themes, but it ultimately remains within established and therefore, in the final instance, reassuring parameters.

Fathoms presents itself as a sensorium – a study in synaesthesia. Its style is in fact a collision between two modes of expression, representing distinct ways of understanding the world. There is the intoxicated, subjective, extravagantly metaphorical mode in which Giggs conveys her thoughts and impressions. And there is the sober, objectifying mode of scientific and scholarly writing – which, of course, comes with its own elaborate technical lexicons and formal tics. Fathoms moves between the two, sometimes holding them apart, sometimes seeking to combine them. Ultimately, it wants to reconcile them.

In certain respects, Davis is as quirky an essayist as she is a short-story writer. The greatest practitioners of the form – Hazlitt, Woolf, Orwell (choose your own) – tend to write in ways that seek to draw the reader into the movement of their thoughts. There is a sense of ideas and arguments being pursued on the page. Davis’ essays are interestingly unlike this. She does enliven them with the occasional autobiographical reminiscence; some of them even have the bones of a narrative structure. In an essay on the now little-read American writer Edward Dahlberg, for example, she undertakes an informal survey, asking every bookish person she meets their opinion of him. But her approach tends to be plainspoken and paratactic. There is often a sense that the thinking is already done and Davis is simply reporting her results, leaving readers to make of them what they will.

I am well aware that academics have been complaining about managerialism and lamenting the fate of the humanities from time immemorial. But I can’t recall a time when the discipline of literary studies, in particular, has seemed as besieged and vulnerable as its does at present.

Our dependence on the environment is the ultimate proof that there is such a thing as the common good.

It is fitting that McGahan’s final novel should draw together several of his defining themes, and that he has fashioned those themes into a satisfying slab of genre fiction.

The Returns portrays the acts of creating and engaging with art and literature as distinct modes of understanding. They are presented as processes that are analogous to, and perhaps even synonymous with, the paradox of selfhood, which decrees that we must live in a state of felt incompletion, constantly plunging into an uncertain future, striving towards some form of renewal or escape, but without ever really escaping ourselves, doomed as we are to drag around increasingly cumbersome sacks of old grievances and regrets.

What makes Moshfegh an uncommon writer is that beneath the scorn and the dark humour there lurks an authentic Swiftian disgust. Her work has a corporeal, rebarbative, scatological quality. She revels in the grubbiness of the human body, splashes the ordure around like a preschooler in a muddy puddle. Her characters smell bad. And this recurring note of fascinated distaste makes it hard to disentangle their misanthropy from their self-loathing.

“It is not just that the left and right consider each other repellent,” observes Jeff Sparrow in Trigger Warnings: Political Correctness and the Rise of the Right. “It’s also that they find each other almost incomprehensible.” Trigger Warnings and The Death of Truth are notable contributions to what has become a deluge of books and articles trying to explain how we arrived at this point. They offer different diagnoses, but share some basic assumptions. Both propose that the peculiarity of contemporary discourse is, to a significant extent, a product of the culture wars.’

Robinson may be the moderate face of American religiosity, but she takes some pretty wild swings. The more you read her essays, the more it becomes apparent that she is positing a few simplicities of her own. Whatever manifestation of modern thought she happens to be criticising, her argument is basically the same: she proposes, in essence, that such thinking is too narrow, that it ignores or denies aspects of lived experience, and that its understanding of human nature must therefore be considered inadequate. She returns again and again to the core claim that modern thought is, as she puts it in Absence of Mind (2012), a ‘closed circle’ — by which she means, quite specifically, that its assumptions do not and indeed cannot account for her personal experience of religious belief, her intuition that the universe is a place of wonder and abundant meaning.

In November 2016, Michael Mohammed Ahmad published an essay in the Sydney Review of Books titled ‘Lebs and Punchbowl Prison’….

James Joyce claimed that he used the Odyssey as the mythical framework for his modern epic Ulysses because the poem’s…

De Kretser is an ironist without peer in contemporary Australian writing. Her instincts are subversive, her scalpel well-honed. She exposes her characters’ vanities, only to turn our sense of their thoughtlessness and self-regard inside-out so that we might sympathise with their loneliness. Her powers of social observation are as acute as her awareness of the fictions we live by.

It is always a good idea, I think, to resist the temptation to regard the politics of one’s own time as especially awful, but recent history does seem to have provided no shortage of prima facie evidence that there is something a bit unhinged and perhaps even pathological about contemporary conflicts. As Pankaj Mishra and Kenan Malik both argue, the volatility and irrationalism of the present are expressions of widespread feelings of alienation, resentment, anger and hatred. This much, at least, seems obvious enough. The difficult question Mishra and Malik set out to answer is why this should be the case.

Lincoln in the Bardo is a democratic novel in its multi-voiced technique, but it is also concerned with the paradoxical and fragile nature of democracy itself. It raises the question of whether a fractious republic of atomised and unequal individuals, thrown together by circumstance – rich and poor, amusing and unpleasant, masters and slaves, perpetrators and victims – might nevertheless achieve mutual understanding and a common purpose.

Buried in the endnotes of an essay on Angela Carter’s fiction by Lorna Sage – Carter’s close friend and one…

‘There is no subject that exposes the tensions, hypocrisies and flat-out contradictions of the United States’ defining myths – manifest destiny, individual liberty, self-reliance, exceptionalism – as starkly as that of race. It is hardly surprising that some of the most trenchant critiques of the nation’s problematic relationship with its own ideals should be found in the work of African-American writers. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Paul Beatty’s satire The Sellout are unalike in almost every respect, but on this point they share a consciousness, if not exactly an attitude. They have a common set of underlying preoccupations, which follow from the obvious historical fact that the institution of slavery made a mockery of the nation’s declared allegiance to the ideals of freedom and equality. What both novelists address, in their very different ways, is the problem of a nation divided against itself, not simply in a material and tribal sense, but on the fundamental level of its founding ideology. Both recognise that its history of conquest, exploitation and systemic inequality generates a profound cognitive dissonance.’

I would argue that the decision of the Nobel judges is not only courageous; it is also a welcome recognition of the fact that the concept of ‘literature’ is enriched by being understood in a broad and pluralistic way. And on this point, Dylan is a particularly astute choice. The judges’ one-line press release acknowledges that the significance of his work lies in the fact that it is larger than itself, that it acquires its full meaning in the context of the American songwriting tradition. He is, I think, a deserving winner of the Nobel Prize not simply because of the uncommon linguistic facility that his work displays, but because he occupies a unique position in relation to that tradition.

There are critics who have suggested that J. M. Coetzee’s writing lost its edge when he emigrated from South Africa to Australia. I don’t necessarily agree, though it is undeniable that the move coincided with a shift in the tone and emphasis of his work. There is a harrowing quality to the novels up to and including Disgrace (1999) that all but disappears from those that followed. The tendency to anguish over intractable moral questions is still very much in evidence in the later novels, but their cultural burden feels less crushing, as if some of the weight of inherited postcolonial guilt has been lifted. It is not as if Coetzee’s adopted home lacks for its own history of violent dispossession and racist subjugation, but the embrace of a new life in a new country seems to have afforded him the opportunity, if not exactly to reinvent himself, then at least to reorient himself as a novelist, let his guard down a little, write in a more relaxed and ironic register, conceive works that are less tightly buttoned in a formal sense, and re-examine some of his defining themes in ways that incline away from the historical and toward the philosophical. Some of the unusual atmosphere of Coetzee’s two most recent novels, The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and its sequel The Schooldays of Jesus, can be attributed to the fact that they push this tendency to an extreme.

It is unsurprising, then, that testimonials and critical assessments of Modiano’s writing should so often resort (as I have already done) to vague terms like ‘mysterious’ and ‘atmospheric’ and ‘haunting’. But the element of uncertainty is not only thematically significant on both a personal and a historical level; it also renders these two levels indistinct. Modiano’s books are not simply preoccupied with memory and the elusiveness of the past; they are troubled by the fragility and impermanence of human relationships, which are depicted as unreliable and contingent. The world of his novels is one of coincidences and fateful encounters. It is a shady world of criminal dealings, in which people are unforthcoming or evasive, origins are unknown or unclear, identities are falsified. It is a transient world of hotels and cafés – a world of passing acquaintances and broken family connections, in which people are apt to run away, commit suicide or disappear without explanation, and characters are disturbed by feelings of emptiness and loss.

‘Anyone who has spent some time in a library hanging around in the vicinity of the low 800s will know that, for all their variety and intricacy, methodological arguments about the interpretation of literature invariably organise themselves around a small number of seemingly unavoidable conflicts, which are constantly being reinvented and given different weight by different schools of thought.’ James Ley on new books on criticism by Rita Felski, A.O. Scott. And Damon Young

‘The critical cliché about Pamuk is that he is preoccupied with the cultural tensions between East and West. The cliché is true, up to a point. In subtle and complex ways, Pamuk’s novels depict a Turkish society caught between the conflicting imperatives of tradition and modernity. A Strangeness in My Mind weaves an examination of the social and political forces that have shaped modern Turkey around a sympathetic portrayal of a decisively ordinary central character, a humble street vendor named Mevlut Karataş.’ James Ley on Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel

‘I have been referring to M Train as a ‘memoir’ by default, but it is something far more ambitious and complex than the word implies. It is a work in an elegiac mode that occupies an indeterminate space between autobiography, essay and fiction.’ James Ley on Patti Smith’s M Train and Collected Lyrics.

‘Purity’s unifying theme, clearly announced in its title, is not ultimately social or cultural or political, but moral and psychological. Its concern with information and technology on a large scale are ultimately subordinated to its interest in the characters’ states of being, which come to be defined by their relationship to Purity (both the character and the ideal). This grounds the novel in the intimate themes of personal guilt and secrecy.’

‘Tsiolkas is hardly the first to find himself lionised by the bourgeois-types he set out to affront. The adversarial or iconoclastic artist is a naturalised and often celebrated cultural figure. But Tsiolkas’ celebrity has become part of a complex dynamic that shapes the reception and interpretation of his work.’ James Ley on Christos Tsiolkas’ short fiction and a new work of criticism on the author.

The End of the Tour is the product of this posthumous celebrity. This is true in the obvious sense that neither James Ponsoldt’s film nor the book on which it is based would exist if David Foster Wallace had lived. But it is also true in the more complicated sense that the film both relies on and participates in the construction of Wallace as a cultural symbol.

As of this week, Sydney Review of Books has a new Editor. Our small but dedicated editorial team is pleased and excited to welcome Catriona Menzies-Pike, who is stepping into the top job while I move into the role of Contributing Editor. These are uncertain times for the arts in Australia, not least for those of us involved with books and writing, but at Sydney Review of Books we remain optimistic and forward looking.

There was an interesting, if minor, piece of fallout from the clashing protests that occurred around the country last week when former Cold Chisel singer Jimmy Barnes told the Reclaim Australia demonstrators, who had been playing one of the band’s signature tunes ‘Khe Sanh’ at their rallies, that he did not want them using his music … The rebuff was a crowning humiliation for Reclaim Australia, whose rallies were such a disaster that one could almost feel sorry for them were it not for the poisonous garbage they espouse.

It was Bloomsday this week – that annual celebration of James Joyce’s monumental novel Ulysses (1922), which (as everybody surely knows by now) is set in Dublin and unfolds over the course of a single day: 16 June 1904.

Now, I am strongly in favour of ‘excellence’ in the arts, because I am as a general rule strongly in favour of any non-specific concept with positive connotations. But the many writers and artists Minster Brandis appears to be targeting with his evisceration of the Australia Council, though they may well be his perceived ideological opponents, are also people who know and care about art, music and literature; they are the ones creating the culture.

Art is an intervention in reality, a presence. And it is this ontological status that interests Ali Smith, whose most recent novel How to be both (2014) is, I think, one of the most slippery, intriguing and stimulating works of fiction to have appeared in recent years.

Asking people to decide for themselves how much offense they want to take misses the point, unless you are advocating open slather on offensive remarks. Surely the more important question is how, why and to what extent might this be offensive to someone from a particular background or who has particular beliefs.

My view is that the writers who have withdrawn from the PEN event have made the wrong call – though I have some sympathy for their attempt to acknowledge the cultural complexities and the underlying sensitivities of the issues – just as I think it is clear in hindsight that the writers who squirmed and hedged in 1989 when the fatwa was pronounced on Salman Rushdie, those who suggested in one way or another that maybe he shouldn’t have been quite so provocative or offensive, also made the wrong call.

It is Wilson’s central contention that science and the humanities should cease to regard each other as separate or competing endeavours that turns out to be the weakest aspect of his argument. In principle, the idea is a good one, but his characterisation of the humanities is dismayingly reductive, and often condescending. His perspective is, in essence, a form of conventional humanism.

One of many charming essays by Samuel Johnson is number 176 of his Rambler series, first published on 23 November 1751, in which he takes up the subject of criticism. It is a short essay, and not necessarily one of his greatest, but it is one in which his singularly gruff and appealing persona is very much in evidence, in the way that he moves from archness to sober reflection, and on to his rather melancholy moral conclusion.

The release last week of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant, his first in a decade, has sparked an exchange between the author and the venerable science-fiction and fantasy writer Ursula Le Guin. The point at issue was Ishiguro’s apparent reluctance to embrace wholeheartedly the term ‘fantasy’ as a descriptor of his novel, even though it has obvious affinities with the genre.

Next week, the fourth book in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six volume series My Stuggle will be published in English translation. Titled Dancing in the Dark, it focuses on Knausgaard’s teenage years.

To be able to laugh at someone who is being humiliated, it is necessary to feel that they are getting their comeuppance, that their pretensions are ridiculous enough for them to deserve mockery. This is why satire is an edgy business. There is always the risk that it might miss its target, misread the social context and its power relations, and thus appear cruel or unwarranted; there is always the risk that it will be interpreted entirely differently by someone from a different background.

Like The First Stone and Joe Cinque’s Consolation before it, This House of Grief proceeds from Garner’s first instinctive response. All three books are grounded in the idea that to feel something is a kind of fact. All wonder about the meaning and the status of that subjective fact. In this sense, they might be read as essays that question the concept of rationality.

The announcement last week of the inauguration of a ‘new but rather hazily defined’ Book Council did not include the information that it will be funded by a cut to the Australia Council of $2 million per year for three years. This is about half of the Council’s traditional literature budget – a massive hit. The Australia Council was informed of this just a few hours before the budget announcements on Monday, and is still working through what it will mean, in a practical sense, for the funding of literature.

The ceremony for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, which were announced in Melbourne on Monday evening, outdid itself in its awkwardness. I wasn’t there (though I did have my spies in the audience), but thanks to the decision to broadcast ‘highlights’ on SBS, I was able to soak up some of the unusually excruciating atmosphere. The Prime Minister seemed to radiate discomfort.

In appropriating Demons for the title of his fourth novel, Wayne Macauley alludes not only to Dostoevsky’s Demons (which he also quotes in the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation), but to the title’s biblical provenance. Near the end of Macauley’s Demons, in the holiday house off the Great Ocean Road where he traps his characters for the weekend, a secret is exposed and the cabin fever gives way to a physical confrontation.

Perhaps the most significant news of the week for the book industry is that the dispute between online retailer Amazon and publisher Hachette has apparently been resolved, though the precise terms of the agreement have not been made public. At issue was the right to set prices for e-book sales. Hachette was unhappy at Amazon’s attempt to use its clout in the marketplace to dictate terms and drive down the cost of e-books in a way that Hachette regarded as detrimental to the interests of publishers and authors alike.

For anyone interested in the arguments about cultural value and authority, the competing interests and agendas involved in those arguments, and the various ways in which particular ideas and works come to be validated and venerated, it has been a week of provocative juxtapositions. One day after the ABC’s long-running television program The First Tuesday Book Club was admonished for not doing enough to promote Australian literature an Australian novelist took out one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards.

In a week that saw the kinds of destructive political emotions that Nussbaum identifies – fear, disgust, contempt – reclaim their place at the centre of the national conversation (they never seem to be too far away), a week in which all the talk was suddenly about limiting freedoms and enhancing powers and increasing surveillance, it certainly didn’t seem to be the case that anyone’s right to be a bigot was being unduly curtailled. Quite the contrary, it was being enthusiastically exercised by a number of our elected representatives.

Libraries are doing it tough. Never have they been so popular (see the American-based but locally relevant PEW study, ‘The library in the city’), and yet so under-funded. The sector continues to grapple with cuts, often leading to reductions in staff, services, book access, and occasionally branch closures. The statistics behind some of the cuts are revealing. In 1939 when the NSW Library Act was first introduced, the state contributed 50 percent of the funding. By 1980 that contribution had fallen to 23 percent. Today, the state contributes just seven percent, leaving local councils to carry 93 percent of the load.

It is the intellectual foundations of Auerbach’s far-reaching views that are most noticeably illuminated in Time, History, and Literature, a career-spanning collection that includes several essays which are appearing in English translation for the first time.

Nadine Gordimer died this week at the venerable age of 90. She was the first South African writer to win the Booker Prize – in 1974 for her novel The Conservationist – and the first South African to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, which she was awarded in 1991. Much of Gordimer’s literary career coincided with the period of apartheid, and the fearlessness with which she addressed its injustices in her work led to the banning of several of her novels in her home country.

At the centre of these books, then, is the paradox of a man trying to be objective about his own subjectivity. The paradox is inherent in any autobiographical endeavour, but there are a number of factors elevating Knausgaard’s intimate revelations above the common run of first-person narratives. The most obvious is the ambitious scale of the project.

As the fifty-something David Shields remarks in How Literature Saved My Life, ‘everyone I know under thirty has remarkably little notion of privacy.’ We are living in an age of idiots, in the etymologically precise sense of the word.

J.C. Kannemeyer describes ‘What is a Classic?’ as ‘one of the most important lectures of [Coetzee’s] career’. It is certainly one in which a number of key themes intersect. As Kannemeyer observes, it is especially striking for the way Coetzee relates Eliot’s ideas to his own experience…