Correspondence

What a pity Michael Wilding’s excellent piece Libraries under threat did not pick up on the demise of the National Drug Sector Information Service (NDSIS), a subsidiary of the Alcohol and Other Drugs Council of Australia, which the Abbott Government defunded in November 2013.

Julieanne Lamond’s illuminating review of Christos Tsiolkas’s Barracuda is a fine illustration of the importance of long reviews. I have been watching the ‘oh gosh, this is fab’ short reviews, and wondering why no one has been able to talk about the faultlines in this ambitious book.

There are a number of aspects of Ben Denham’s article ‘The Curse of Formalism’ that trouble me. The most significant one is that he never actually tells us what he means by a formalist-minimalist alliance, nor does he attempt to describe how this alliance came about.

In his thoughtful and largely generous review of Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century, Paul Stanhope states of my revelation that syphilis was the cause of Britten’s heart disease, ‘It is a shame that Kildea ran with this theory (which has long been rumoured) without testing the evidence more thoroughly’. I think it equally a shame that Paul Stanhope has not read the article ‘Body of Evidence’ in the New Statesman (7–13 June 2013) by cardiologist Hywel Davies, my source for the diagnosis of syphilis.

It is bracing, to say the least, to see one’s review being itself reviewed by such an erudite meta-critic as Dr Ben Etherington. No writer – certainly no book reviewer – can complain if a reader finds his or her work to be lacking in insight, deficient in sensibility or stylistically irksome…

Everyone’s a critic, usually a bad one. But if Apollo e Dafne, Tristan und Isolde or a Dickinson poem come along, then even very good criticism is no use either.

I enjoyed Nicholas Jose’s marvellous story of the attempt to transplant cricket in China, and of the Chinese spin bowler so wily that he became a coach at the Bradman Museum in Bowral, where he wisely adopted the name of Bruce. A friend suggested that he might have been inspired by Bruce Doolan, but I prefer to think otherwise.

The bunyip version of the ‘international’ style that Emmett Stinson writes of became very recognisable to me as a publisher of Australian literary fiction in the 1990s. Gestural, smooth, economical, all the requisite ‘gaps for the reader’ in place. It’s still around, and makes for an inconsequential and decontextualised literature.

The most compelling reason for doubting Anna Funder’s fictional capabilities was expressed by the writer herself a few years ago. Taking issue with the German film The Lives of Others, she informed the journalist in a Sydney Morning Herald interview that the story could not be believed…