Fiction

James Joyce once famously said that if it took him seventeen years to write Finnegans Wake, then a reader should take seventeen years to read it. In his usual prophetic way, he turned out to be exactly right.

I quite often like, or at least find satisfaction in being bullied, vilified, and made uncomfortable by a book. I have a life!

Japanese author Sayaka Murata erupted onto the world stage in 2016 with the release of Convenience Store Woman, a novel which sold over a 1.4 million copies. As is often the case with non-Western authors who achieve sudden global recognition, the depth and breadth of her oeuvre was downplayed in favour of a narrative of overnight success. Easier to sell the story of an unknown author who has walked out of a vacuum and just begun.

Vernon Subutex follows a theme set in earlier books by Despentes: the status quo sucks, but we’re all complicit in it one way or another, regardless of our political leanings, sometimes even in spite of them.

In Nardi Simpson’s impressive debut novel Song of the Crocodile the fictional colonial town Darnmoor ‘itself is nothing’. It is a construction to begin with and for the sovereign Billymil family it doesn’t exist; they are Yuwaalaraay people, removed from their custodial lands and relegated to the Campgrounds on the edge of the town when Darnmoor was built over their Country.

One summer evening, as fires rage elsewhere in the country, three women at different stages of life are sequestered in the plush chill of the Melbourne Theatre Company watching Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days.

Leonora’s surreal, moving, and satirical novel The Hearing Trumpet was published as a Virago Modern Classic in 1991, which was when I first read it. It was a revelation, moving as it does from a repulsive facility for old women to apocalyptic scenes from a post-atomic New Ice Age. And this year, the New York Review of Books has republished it.

Amid the detours and the fragments, the sky-blue grip of life holds its own against the centrifugal force of illness and death. Which is why I describe these books, in some odd, indefinable way, as invigorating.

There is a peculiar practice in immigrant Sydney that I know well thanks to being born to a pair of Lebanese settlers. It is when a set of beliefs that parents hold true about other ethnicities (usually groups of people who migrated earlier than they did) are told to their children as a kind of forewarning.

The Animals in that Country was published in March 2020. It might be tempting to see the timing of publication as serendipitous, or portentous, depending on your perspective. A novel about a ‘zoanthropathic’ super-flu precipitating wholesale social breakdown, published in the panicked first months of a zooanotic global pandemic. But Laura McKay’s novel, despite its timeliness, is not so intimately tied to the current moment – its vision is broader, and far more interesting. In this particular apocalypse, the foundational threat to human social structures is the emergence of unprecedented insight into the non-human world.