Reviews
A victimless crime: Cairo by Chris Womersley
‘We live in a philistine nation but a civilised city,’ said the Director of the NGV, Patrick McCaughey, on purchasing Pablo Picasso’s Weeping Woman for $1.6 million in 1986… In Cairo, Chris Womersley has taken the theft of Weeping Woman and re-imagined it from the perspective of a young innocent from the kind of country town McCaughey was referring to when he called Australia a philistine nation.
Performing reality: The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
‘Why do you invent … and tell lies?’ So asks Reno, the protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers. She has come home with the artist Ronnie Fontaine after a dinner party, during which he told an epic tale. ‘They aren’t lies,’ replies Ronnie. ‘They’re a form of discretion.’
Sensible Seeing: A Place in the Country by W.G. Sebald
In its six essays on five writers and a painter, his gaze operates like a form of scansion, picking up the long and short sounds (moments musicaux as Sebald calls them, via Schubert) in order to get behind the art in all its grief and consolation, to discover the differentiation between the life and the work.
No success like failure: The Young Desire It by Kenneth Mackenzie
The Young Desire It is one of the most brilliant, confident and unusual instances of a Bildungsroman in Australian literature. Nor was it a flash of genius soon extinguished. Scores of poems and three more novels followed, besides extensive unpublished fiction. But how has Mackenzie fared in Australian literary history?
An island of sanity: Gotland by Fiona Capp
Gotland is a memoir-like novel that shuttles between Melbourne in July and October 2010, and the Swedish island of Gotland in September of that year, where Esther’s sick sister, Rosalind, witnesses Esther’s life-changing and possibly life-saving encounter with the sculptor Sven.