Reviews

For those who happen upon Clarice Lispector’s fiction without the benefit of a critical or biographical introduction, or any sense of the author’s developing international reputation since her death in 1977, the encounter can be as mystifying as it is invigorating.

It is the intellectual foundations of Auerbach’s far-reaching views that are most noticeably illuminated in Time, History, and Literature, a career-spanning collection that includes several essays which are appearing in English translation for the first time.

In Certain Circles, completed in 1971 but not published until now, concerns two pairs of siblings living in Sydney in the years immediately after World War II. Place and time are comparable to The Watch Tower, and Harrower’s central theme of abuser and victim caught in a monkey grip is evident, although it informs only one of several key relationships.

I traversed this colossal biography for weeks, tearing along with Parker, who seemed to leave no stone unturned (including his subject’s kidney stones). Its emphasis on Brecht’s genius and illnesses, its build-up of a multitude of medical, sexual, psychological, literary, intellectual, political and historical stories, produces a kind of Gulliverian perspective: Parker’s Brecht is like a huge Swiftian creature taking prodigious strides through monstrous times.

The wager behind Barish’s book is twofold. Firstly, the book assumes that understanding de Man’s early life will cast some light on his subsequent work as a scholar and theorist. Secondly, and more pressingly, there is the possibility that de Man himself might emerge as a genuine ‘character’; that enough smaller transgressions and indiscretions can be clustered around the fact of collaboration to flesh out a coherent portrait of an anti-hero who never escapes his psychological and moral flaws.

Revisionist, indeed polemical, art histories are possible, although they tend to revise the art and its sequences – its ‘place’ in history – not the history itself. Sasha Grishin’s version, Australian Art: A History, is neither polemical nor revisionist; but it is curious. He takes what he considers to be an innovative, inclusive approach, beginning bravely with the assertion that his history is neither written piece-meal by a committee of experts, nor a frolic of his own, but combines both approaches.

Only the Animals consists of ten stories arranged chronologically from 1892 to 2006, each of which is recounted by an animal that has died as a casualty of human conflict. Its engaging animal narrators include a young elephant from Mozambique, a bear that has starved to death in 1992 in the Sarajevo zoo, and even a horny, existentially questing mussel killed at Pearl Harbour.

The twin pillars of Piketty’s return to political economy are articulated as a pair of twin needs: the need for big data and for the long view. Zeitgeist or conjuncture, take your pick: Capital in the Twenty-First Century is central to it. But it is, of course, not alone. The 2008 financial crisis and the seemingly interminable effort to consign the period it inaugurated to the past has led to a new hearing for a variety of works not simply in political economy, but within an avowedly Marxist tradition.

The task faced by Lee, Fitzgerald’s first biographer, whose output includes acclaimed biographies of Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, is to make sense of these apparent disjunctures in the figure of the writer: her intellect and acerbic wit and insight; her vulnerabilities and the prosaic and at times dismal matter of her life; the contradictions and intricacies of her personal and public lives in the face of more than the usual amount of enigma, silence and secrecy.

Birch’s fiction confronts the reader with rural and urban landscapes of abandonment, scenes of decay and decline. The Promise deals with late modernity’s wastelands and the lives our society is willing to lay to waste. The landscapes are sometimes those left behind after factory work has disappeared from established working class neighbourhoods.