Fiction

Why does the publishing industry elevate white writers over #ownvoices writers when it comes to the experiences of communities of colour? It happens because books like American Dirt and Act of Grace fit comfortably with mainstream stereotypes, they don’t challenge white and Western readers to think and see First Nations people and people of colour in their depth and complexity. It happens because the sensationalist depiction of brutal violence and trauma in the Great White Novel sells. Both American Dirt and Act of Grace have plenty of stomach-turning scenes of gratuitous violence, rapes, and beatings. At a time when there is global concern about the plight facing refugees, migrant children being caged and separated from parents, the horrors of offshore detention and border walls, the publishing industry has peddled us these exploitative and cartoonish depictions that produce an easy empathy rather than forcing readers to reckon with their own positionality in structures of power, and the deeper problems that require action.

Greenwell depicts life in decaying Soviet-era apartment blocks. He shows us hustlers on the make, rent boys obsessed with the latest Apple gadgets; the spectre of syphilis and a chronic lack of penicillin; and residents with a constant desire to flee.

Ask any queer girl, I have learnt, and every single one of us had that one friend, usually in high school, whom we liked a bit too much, who we were enchanted by. Sometimes a very best friend, sometimes a girl on the periphery of a friendship circle, but always, always someone we adored, regardless of whether or not we understood exactly why.

Most fiction treats workers as fully external creatures, carrying their physicality as a symbol of their position within the division of labour; Weiss presents them as the authentic bearers of our collective human cultural destiny. It is a question of how these workers, who pay for the very possibility of culture with the surplus created by their labour, attain it, and even come to represent it, themselves. By sheer force of will, and the necessity of an inner compulsion, these young men and women return from the shop floor, physically exhausted but spiritually on fire, to study, debate, and reflect.

In the context of the now more-or-less complete collapse of the New Left, the pulp novels of the fifties and early sixties deserve reconsideration, since, in some ways, contemporary pop culture today occupies a similar space, in that it’s produced almost entirely by commercial businesses with no relationship to any real social struggle.

Did the student say the Outline trilogy was rendered mostly in indirect speech? Perhaps that is why – to quiver between the untruth of getting it all down and the truth of not getting it down in the right words.

It is to Zable’s great credit that, in giving voice, he does not deign to speak for the marginalised but, rather, writes to amplify.

There have been, in recent years, many attempts to explain when a novel makes the definitional leap from ‘fiction’ to ‘autofiction’. It has turned out to be a difficult task. Writers of autofiction write about their lives, but then so do many authors who escape the label.

Culture might not live off Country, in the city, but all culture will be lost if the child is taken; a child taken by the welfare system loses Country anyway, and at the same time they lose their family.

But the Cavafian corpus resists the absurd opposition that is imposed on it – erotic versus historical, homosexual versus patriotic. Rather, Cavafy’s erotic sensibility actually defines his outlook on society and history, and is not separate from it.