Reviews

What becomes evident is not so much a portrait of Daylight as a reader, but her skill as a critic, her ability to distill enough detail from a work to understand – and convey something of – its essence, to trace the author’s thinking and engagement with the world.

These stories are written in what might be called the deliberately unambitious style of contemporary realism. What is original in them is their structure: they work like fables, though they have a novel’s pacing. They are set in London, Wollongong, Moscow, Sydney, Azabu, on the Atlantic coast of Spain, in Hong Kong, in Kyushu, in Oxford, in a small town near Mount Kosciuskco; even on Mars – and, like fables, they are set nowhere. The characters pay strikingly little attention to place; they speak to each other in much the same way in Wollongong and on Mars. There is rain to be seen, but it is soundless, it has no scent; it does not touch the skin. In these stories, the fable’s clarified settings – a well, a tree, a trap – find their equivalents in the settings of the global city: rooms – bars and restaurants and cafes – and people talking.

Australia has an obsession with and an expertise in creative accounting. Governments have for years declared that we’re too small a nation to contribute significantly to climate change, while crowing about our status as the world’s number one coal exporter. (Being both the world’s smallest continent and the world’s largest island might have given us the world’s largest chip on the shoulder.) We send our coal overseas and claim that we’re no longer responsible for what happens to it. The logic is flawed, but it’s also embedded in us. We’ve ended up at a point where nation states make agreements about emissions targets and behaviours as though the atmosphere can read our maps.

It has only been four years since Mununjali Yugambeh poet Ellen van Neerven’s first volume, Comfort Food, appeared. While central to both collections are the experiences of young queer First Nations identity in settler Australia, Throat extends the work of Comfort Food from the retrospective of the four years that have passed since its writing. And, certainly much has happened.

The Yield is about the elementary miracle of rediscovering oneself; of finding, in the neon-lit recesses of lived and historical pain, a home. It is about the history of this continent as told through the history of Wiradjuri culture. And it is about the fact of this culture existing as a living, breathing work in progress.

His characters are men I have known, men with whom I have lived, hooked-up, been frustrated. They skirt around what they ought to say and try to reinvent themselves and downplay their opportunities and make geographical excuses for their oddities.

History runs in parallel tracks: there is the way things have been told, and the way things were. As in: not colonised, but civilised. And to be made civil, to be made ‘adequate in courtesy and politeness’, as Merriam-Webster defines it, makes it sound like a favour. Language obfuscates. It’s a way of controlling the narrative, forcing the eye into a narrow aperture. A single perspective becomes the singular perspective, which is how colonial literature came to skew mainstream cultural understandings of that period. Mirandi Riwoe seems determined to widen that aperture and, then, to shift the perspective entirely.

In relentless succession, Yumna Kassab’s fictions scrutinise the psychopolitics of displacement in a political landscape fortified by a warrant for Islamophobia.

‘This novel haunts crossing spaces, the liminal zones of libraries’ public privacies (laundering, humming, existential despair), hallways and elevators. And many of us are reading Weather in locked-down homes without much sense of what might happen next. Kazim Ali, writing about the magic of the poetic line, notes: “Something exists in the here and now with no dependence on before or after.” This is the space Offill observes, collecting shards and slivers of questioning.’

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.