Reviews

‘The Waiting Room, the debut novel by Leah Kaminsky, and a powerful new addition to the canon of Australian Holocaust literature, takes as its impossible project the redemption of the dead – or at the very least their preservation in the pages of literature.’

‘Gorton’s way of seeing the world and of naming its parts is the quality that sets her debut novel apart from the mass of fiction currently being published in Australia… Most contemporary novels favour substance a long way over style, which can lead to a lot of commonplace sentences. But as one might expect from a poet, Gorton’s every sentence – and not just every sentence, but every phrase and every word – has been turned this way and that in the light of her attention and fitted to the next with the precision of a mosaicist.’ Kerryn Goldsworthy on Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses.

‘Archipelago of Souls is Gregory Day’s fourth novel since his prize-winning debut, The Patron Saint of Eels, first appeared in 2005. But despite this significant output in fiction, various short-listings and awards, and Day’s regular contributions as a reviewer in the mainstream press, his writing seems to have been largely overlooked by contemporary Australian literary criticism.’

‘Truth be told, many writers are angry right now. Perhaps what is most strange about the anger, in Copyfight and elsewhere, is the community indifference to it — that is, our indifference to the damage to the working lives of writers. Mostly we are unmoved.’ Stuart Glover on Copyfight and the long history of trespasses against authors and publishers.

‘It’s as though a well-dressed man has taken off his hat to pat his hair and found a bald spot he then delights in scratching. Never overplayed, and modestly developed, the interplay between the stories of the past and the historian’s self-scrutiny in recounting them is a device that is both charming and revelatory.’ Rosemary Sorensen on Graeme Davison, ‘chattering genealogists’ and family history.

‘In the winter of 1940, during the first months of the Nazi occupation of France, the analogies between the world of the Iliad and the situation in Europe were, for Simone Weil, striking and chilling. There were broken truces, a city under siege, and failed attempts to appease one man’s wrath. That Troy was destined to be sacked seemed inevitable. For Weil, waiting for an exit visa with a battered copy of the Iliad in her rucksack in case she was arrested, Homer’s great epic seemed to be completely of the moment.’ Peter Salmon on Simone Weil and a new translation of the Iliad.

‘The mantle of emerging author can be a heavy one, particularly for those whose work has already garnered critical acclaim at manuscript stage. While these three share the advantage such attention brings them in what is a busy marketplace for new writers, their work displays a marked diversity of theme and form.’ Sophia Barnes on new books by Miles Allinson, Murray Middleton, and Cass Moriarty.

‘Tsiolkas is hardly the first to find himself lionised by the bourgeois-types he set out to affront. The adversarial or iconoclastic artist is a naturalised and often celebrated cultural figure. But Tsiolkas’ celebrity has become part of a complex dynamic that shapes the reception and interpretation of his work.’ James Ley on Christos Tsiolkas’ short fiction and a new work of criticism on the author.

‘Imperium is an allusion-filled, meta-fictional, inter-textual experiment that calls it own literary heritage into question, as if a certain kind of aesthetic experience were also one of the casualties of German history.’ Andrew McCann on Imperium, the first of Swiss author Christian Kracht’s works to appear in English.

In his fifth novel, Malcolm Knox offers a parable on marriage and identity. The Wonder Lover, Sunil Badami writes, ‘constantly forces us, suspended between disbelief and implausibility, to keep questioning our own ideas of love, family, truth, beauty – and, in a way many novels do not, narrative itself’.