Luke Carman
Luke Carman’s debut work of fiction, An Elegant Young Man, won the 2014 NSW Premier’s New Writing Award and was shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal, the Steele Rudd Short Story Prize and the Readings New Writing Award. His essay collection, Intimate Antipathies, was published in June 2019. His collection of stories, An Ordinary Ecstasy, was published in July 2022.
All essays by Luke Carman
A Lotus with a Long Stalk
Luke Carman reviews Sanya Rushdi’s Hospital, a translated novel depicting a linguist’s experience of psychosis and institutionalisation. As Carman argues, the novel’s distinctively ‘minimalist’ style underlines ‘a contingent relationship to sanity’ to which we are all vulnerable.
A Glovebox of One’s Own
By some cosmic sophomoric prank, despite my desire to become what some people call a writer, my true occupation on this earth has always been and always will be captured by the construction ‘a car-man is a car-man is a car-man is a car-man’, and if that formulation makes your skin crawl, try telling me about it, since the only escape from this fate of mine is the one Henry Lawson recommended above, and that salvation is forbidden by religion.
A Drenched Texture
Like so many writers, I turned to this paltry profession precisely because I couldn’t handle the other, more demanding dimensions of life. As a demographic, writers struggle with what others regard as ‘reality’, and we are thereby driven to provide our own fictional supplements to the oppressive regimes of the real. For this reason, I’m generally disinclined towards anyone with a talent for fiction who is also a winner in other, realer ways. If a man is tall, handsome, and a deft hand at reality television – I ask what business he has wading into the nervous territory of writers, who have only their power to generate alternative realities to tranquilise their abnormal eccentricities.
In the Room with Gerald Murnane
There’s nothing superior about a critic who does not know their material, and there’s no excuse for professional readers whose memories for fiction are faulty, but I’d hoped my usual need to plaster over lapses in attention would be less laborious in the company of readers who’d come together to celebrate the work of a writer whose implied author freely admits a failure to ‘follow plots and comprehend the motives of characters’ in the novels he’d read, a trait he once again asserts in the early pages of Border Districts, and one which endeared the author to me for all eternity when I first came across it in Barley Patch, where the narrator justifies his own haphazard textual memory by explaining that ‘a person who claims to remember having read one or another book is seldom able to quote from memory even one sentence from the text.