Reviews

Feigel has gathered together a half-dozen writers – Graham Greene, Henry Green (the pen-name of Henry Yorke), Elizabeth Bowen, Rose Macaulay, Rosamond Lehmann, and the little-known Hilde Spiel – and traced their lives, loves and works through the first shattering attacks in 1940-41 to the lull, and then the resumption in 1944, as the pilotless V-1 and V-2 attacks began.

Macris uses his full quiver of unorthodox techniques to pierce any familiar sense of reality, just as he introduces a range of linguistic ephemera – emails, journalese, advertising claptrap – to remind the reader that words can’t be trusted, especially in the novel, the most mendacious of art forms.

In the Memorial Room is both literally and figuratively posthumous. It centres around themes of creativity, being a writer, and a writer’s posthumous memorialisation. Frame wrote the novel in 1973, but did not allow its publication during her lifetime.

Wark’s two books work sequentially, although they also loop around the same figures and concepts. They could be treated as histories of the Situationist milieu and its aftermaths, but to do so would miss entirely what makes them such compelling and, at times, hilarious reading.

The publication of The Letters of William Gaddis is significant because it presents the first direct and unveiled access to this ‘reclusive’ author. For those of us who know and love Gaddis’s work, however, there is something discomfiting about such personal revelations.

The Crane Wife begins with a moment pitched somewhere between comedy and wonder. In the small hours of the morning, 48-year-old George Duncan is woken unexpectedly. It is a sound that has awoken him – an ‘unearthly sound … a mournful shatter of frozen midnight falling to earth to pierce his heart and lodge there forever, never to move, never to melt’ – but George, being who he is, assumes it is his bladder.

With The Woman Upstairs, her fifth book, Messud narrows her range, concentrating on a devastated woman recounting a critical event in her life. Nora is an elementary school teacher living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who experiences a ‘Lucy Jordan moment’ when she realises at the age of 37 that her life, like that of the ballad’s heroine, looks small and any hope for change is not for her.

Memory, imagination, dreaming, invention and protean makings: such preoccupations are at the heart of Lisa Gorton’s new poetry collection, Hotel Hyperion. This relatively short and condensed book returns again and again… to related tropes and imagery: weather, mirrors, rooms, crystals, hauntings and strange effects of light.

It seems to me that Lucashenko writes both with and against the perception that authentic Aboriginality is derived from the maintenance of land-based cultural practices and spiritual beliefs.

One of the strange contradictions of fiction is that immense beauty can often be found in writing about grief and loss. The things we often choose to look away from or avoid in everyday life can, in the hands of a novelist like Ashley Hay, become rich terrain.