Reviews
Post- Poundian places: The Collected Blue Hills by Laurie Duggan
The Blue Hills poems are so palpably about place that one needs to try to ‘place’ their author before going any farther. If the English language poetry of (almost exactly) the last one hundred years falls into two broad groups – the Non-Poundian and the Post-Poundian – then Duggan belongs to the latter.
Anatomy of difference: Far from the Tree by Andrew Solomon
In Far from the Tree, Andrew Solomon… forensically examines families in which children turn out to be not what their parents had fondly expected. The title is a twist on the proverb, ‘The apple never falls far from the tree’. His question is: But what happens when they do?
Tales of the city: Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man mystery
Somerton Man is one of Adelaide’s great cold cases. The place is built of such true crime stories. On the surface, these narratives tell us, Adelaide is a charmingly ordered, picture-book city. But step carelessly and you could fall through a hole into a parallel world of violence, murder and intrigue.
Avuncular question marks: The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee
Now, we have a new novel with the bizarre title (for Coetzee anyway) of The Childhood of Jesus. It comes with a cover of a young child in sunglasses and dress-up cloak and is like nothing on earth, and not much else in the history of literature.
I refuse to Rock and Roll: J.M. Coetzee: A life in writing
J.C. Kannemeyer describes ‘What is a Classic?’ as ‘one of the most important lectures of [Coetzee’s] career’. It is certainly one in which a number of key themes intersect. As Kannemeyer observes, it is especially striking for the way Coetzee relates Eliot’s ideas to his own experience…
The late unfunny ones: Philip Roth
During my formative years, when I was still a baffled undergraduate, this was a magical name amongst the friends I counted as readers, and even to older acquaintances a generation removed from our contemporary gods but not so dismissive of the notion of greatness as to not bend at the knee to the prowess of a novelist in the highest flight.
Precarious images: Cumulus: Collected Poems by Robert Gray
Leaving home, returning home, catching trains and ferries, watching the weather from the window of a hospital or hotel room, renewal and self-betrayal: these are the starting places of Gray’s poetry.
The Provincial and the Princess: The Voyage by Murray Bail
Murray Bail’s two most recent novels, The Pages and The Voyage, have a repentant air about them, an acknowledgement of limitation and failure, which is all the more striking when set against the encyclopedic ambition characteristic of his earlier novels.
Radiant, everlasting: Dear Life by Alice Munro
Among my collection of Alice Munro’s books, the two most prized are the ones that she autographed for me on a visit to Adelaide in March 1979. One was my copy of her first book of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968). The other was the Women’s Press reprint of Lives of Girls and Women (1971), which my students and I were reading as part of a class on women’s writing.