Reviews

I started Chilean Poet just before Christmas while I was visiting my family in Brisbane and then I finished it during the first days of the new year, while I was ferociously coming down. It was life-affirming and glorious and gently wise and I loved it, needed it. It temporarily restored some sense of hope, like a synthetic serotonin.

In the blurb-saturated present, authors can decry blurbs as corrupt and silly all they like. When they publish new books, however, they will still be obliged to solicit blurbs, and most will provide them for friends and colleagues on request.

There is something rebellious about an art form that takes as its central problem where the edges of objects should be, and why they can’t be elsewhere.

Is this a crisis of aesthetics or a reconfiguration of aesthetics?

Reading Diagnosis Normal now, I find Jane’s sense-making of being a young woman – particularly a clever, literate, ambitious and feminist young woman – in that supposedly liberated but actually pretty sexist decade is useful to my own ongoing project of self-forgiveness, and of grasping the bigger picture. In many ways they are the same thing. We had riot grrl feminism, Bikini Kill and L7 and Hole, but there was also the public shaming of Monica Lewinsky and a pervasive atmosphere of misogyny.

Within the popular imagination, Rumi’s poetry is inextricably entwined with love – a love that is resolutely unfettered, an unconditional love that permeates the cosmos, caressing one and all.

Slowly, Shirley also reveals itself as an anti-lifestyle text. For each sparkling marker of inner-city affluence, there is an equal and opposite undercurrent of dread edging the novel towards murkier territory. The clearest – but also least interesting – instance is the enigma which frames the book: an ostensibly antic affair regarding the narrator’s mother, once a well-regarded celebrity chef whose career was halted many years ago when she was photographed outside her house smeared in blood. Whose blood? What happened?

This object might best be thought of as an ecology, a network of living, changing relations. We woke up early the other morning to read a little before the day became dominated by the rhythms of work. Our cat hurried into the front room, punctuating the silence with a series of yells that seemed to announce his surprise at finding us awake at this hour, and then stretched out on the firm yet inviting pages of the object in question. These pages invite use, suggest inhabitation, become part of the fabric of the house.

The act of reading does not guarantee prompt action, or any action, or the right action. It does not guarantee a particular outcome – or even the first step towards one. It does not turn readers into good people, any more than writing a book means you must be an ethical person.

There is a sub-genre of metafiction that presents to the reader the writer who can no longer write, but who, in the process of writing about his writer’s block, has written the book that you are reading.