Reviews

In Zero K DeLillo brilliantly balances the wildly different scales of his subject matter: the macro focused issues of planetary disaster, global capitalism, techno and primitive warfare, and the micro relations of family relations and individual identity. He consolidates a focus on the abstract relations between the individual and the global, which has become a major formal preoccupation of his novels in the twenty-first century.

My research and reading confirmed what I’d suspected all along: most interesting texts don’t fall into easy categories. That’s why I wanted to turn my attention to Katz, a writer who understands the art of storytelling and revels in the expressive possibilities of language …

What we are meant to think about are words, about the capacity of language to do other than what it seems to be doing. As someone with a professional interest herself in what tricks language can get up to (‘the sonic out-wraps the saying, the canon is in it for kicks’, the voice of ‘Subvoices’ tells us), Smith has much to say (2016, p. 90). She lets us off lightly of course, as we are disarmed by her sharp wit, but however playful the poetic surface is, the worries about language are real and are communicated.

A parallel narrative to the rise of Whiteley as an artist is the detailed account of his sexual promiscuity and his growing dependence on alcohol and drugs. This ‘other thing’ implied in the book’s title, unfolds for the reader like a train wreck caught in slow motion with drug busts and encounters with customs colouring further an already colourful biography.

[The Media and the Massacre] is, in fact, something more fragile and rare, especially in the largely unreflective world of Australian media. It is a journalist meditating thoughtfully, and at length, on acts of journalism.

The world in which we find ourselves begins to blur around the edges, its parameters shifting and changing. Precisely how we are to understand the room and its relationship to Shelley’s consciousness is never clear, and becomes less clear with each new encounter between the world within and outside its walls.

The most inspired writing in Journey to Horseshoe Bend is in Strehlow’s narratives of ‘storied land’. Many ancestral stories relating to animals — wallabies, emus, fish, birds, snakes — are lucidly and meaningfully given.

In this excellent new book, [Horne] identifies Robeson as a neglected precursor to the modern Civil Rights movement. ‘[Y]ou cannot fully appreciate how the Jim Crow system came to an end without an understanding of the life of Paul Robeson,’ he argues. ‘[I]t was only with Robeson’s fall that King and Malcolm could emerge as they did; the undermining of Robeson created a vacuum that these two leaders filled.’

Skovron’s work falls across a number of complex cultural modes. While he has many important things to say about the migrant experience, he also has much to say about more general issues relating to human ontology, as well as to his experience of living in Sydney and Melbourne.

But can this Nordic Untermensch, with his Tolstoyan and Proustian ambitions, in length if not quite in scope, keep us interested? The short answer is yes, and compellingly so, if not for obvious reasons.