Reviews
The Bleeding Edge: new short fiction
The short story is sometimes viewed as an apprentice form, yet the heterogeneity of the stories collected in these volumes attests to its adaptability in structure, style, voice and genre – and to the particular freedoms it offers as a site for experimentation.
The Writers We Deserve: Their Brilliant Careers & Wood Green
I suspect that, like me, most readers are inclined to approach any new work of fiction that explores the writing life with a kind of wariness verging on dread, but two recent Australian books prove that metafiction can still be stimulating, and that the Künstlerroman is not yet an exhausted literary form.
Novelist of the Sorrowful Countenance: The Schooldays of Jesus
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.
A Real Inexperience: Inexperience and other stories
‘The strangeness of Macris’s stories are not derived from uncommon states; rather, everyday, mundane events are amplified within selves that are captive to modes of behavior within social formations.’ Anthony Uhlmann on Inexperience and other stories
Letters to Who? On Michelle Cahill
‘Pessoa’s heteronyms owed their existence to his theosophical beliefs, modernist aesthetics and his translation work as much as to his bicultural upbringing. In Letters to Pessoa, Michelle Cahill anchors his spirit figures in history and her own life. At the same time, the kaleidoscope of identities assumed in relation to the canonical names they write to are merely spectral mediums: they do not cohere into a stable entity, nor do they have any direct tie to the author. They do, nonetheless, allow her to work with and through aspects of her postcolonial, diasporic selves. Her family’s origins in Goa, once a colony of Pessoa’s Portugal, and her own birth in Kenya, another ex-colony of Britain, like Pessoa’s Natal, make her another potential avatar of his many heteronyms, as he becomes one of hers: another figure for whom writing offers both exile and private homeland.’
The Hunted Months: The Little Hotel by Christina Stead
‘How could such a book have fallen out of print? In this little hotel’s self-closed world, with its closed-in days, Stead analyses the legacy of the war, Cold War attitudes, and the rise of international money laundering and tax evasion: forces of history written into the nature of her characters. ‘There are communists even in this country, in Switzerland,’ declares the old American eugenicist Mrs Powell. ‘Why don’t you get busy and stand them all up against a wall?’ The Little Hotel is the shortest of Stead’s novels but it is not minor: all the satiric ambition of her other novels finds dramatic concentration here.’
Feral with vulnerability: Nelson, O’Shaughnessy and Mann
‘The vulnerable state of speaking ‘freely, copiously, and passionately’, as Nelson writes, demands the unsettling of anything fixed. The freedom to craft, from this unsettlement – from the tilt of failure and into whatever must fall, between what can and cannot hold, resisting a cookie-cutter naming that cuts away what might hover at the edges of existing words and forms – might be where the wounding and suturing enacted formally in each of these works leads to wildness. Nelson says that she writes: ‘Because I do not yet understand the relationship between writing and happiness, or writing and holding’. Perhaps none of us does. Perhaps form – including literary form and the forms of happiness – is always provisional and shifting. Perhaps it is the state of being ‘feral with vulnerability’ that might produce new ways, new understandings of something we think of as truth.’
A Terrible Beauty: Liberty or Death: The French Revolution by Peter McPhee
Balanced and measured though he is, McPhee is aware that the French Revolution is too vital and controversial an event to be subordinated entirely to a historian’s caution. And it is his less cautious, more assertive comments and explanations which make this book not only a great source for learning about the Revolution, but also, perhaps more interestingly, an intervention in the debates surrounding the Revolution’s causes, conduct and consequences.