Reviews

above which the lotus, white nenuphar Kannon, the mythologies Ezra Pound, Canto LXXXi At the Irrawaddy Literary Festival in Mandalay…

Names, images and ideas are consumed by one another, literally and figuratively.

‘Rose might be reckoned to have fashioned a body of work intensely linked in themes, preoccupations and techniques. The mention of a few will introduce a longer look at Rose’s fictional world: mutilation, metamorphosis, accidental deaths, artists working ardently in various mediums, the remote shores and landscapes of Tasmania, the impingement of a benign spirit realm on the daily lives of some of her characters, people ostracised or outcast from whatever need, fault or compulsion.’

George Gittoes is an autobiographical artist, almost to an obsessional degree, and like his life-long hero, Vincent van Gogh, he…

The recent victory of nationalist parties in Hungary and Poland, with their anti-immigrant rhetoric, has emboldened the likeminded in their western neighbours; they eagerly await coming elections while entreating Australia’s hardline refugee policy. They have already set the agenda with Brexit and in the United States, where rightwing populism prevails. Liberal and leftist pundits are plundering European history for analogies to understand these developments, invoking the German template in particular. Is Trump a fascist, indeed a Nazi? Or, if not, at least some (or many) of his supporters? Reading The Vanquished suggests that excessive attention is paid to Hitler and the 1930s, the politics of which were over-determined by the Great Depression. To understand the fragility of parliamentary regimes and the authoritarian appeal, we need to return to the origin of the interwar conflicts in the years covered by this book.’

‘It doesn’t matter that Wulf’s The Invention of Nature is a bit breathless in keeping up with its dazzling hero, and a bit coy about his relationships, because above all the book is intelligent, an optimistic history, well researched, well written, and an ecological cri de coeur.’

‘A continued exploration of how mortal weakness, religious ideals and institutional tyrannies are enmeshed has constituted the core of Tom Keneally’s art over a long career.’

Desert Writing brings to readers stories of desert communities and the individuals who form part of them that are not often featured in literature or media. Train lines have been built, and airports made but the places aren’t any closer; these are remote places – far away from Australia’s heavily populated coastal cities, far from major centres; and far from the imagination of the mainstream population. This distance is what makes these places so interesting, their pasts and futures significant.’

What was it like growing up black in Kellyville in suburban Sydney in the 1980s? In her memoir, Maxine Beneba Clarke unflinchingly reveals the co-dependency of victims and perpetrators; the self-hatred resulting from the hatred of others that racism creates in the struggle to culturally dominate and to be supreme. The Hate Race presents both narrator and reader with a mirror in which the reflections are often disturbing and violent.

‘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.’