Fiction

I suspect that, like me, most readers are inclined to approach any new work of fiction that explores the writing life with a kind of wariness verging on dread, but two recent Australian books prove that metafiction can still be stimulating, and that the Künstlerroman is not yet an exhausted literary form.

There are critics who have suggested that J. M. Coetzee’s writing lost its edge when he emigrated from South Africa to Australia. I don’t necessarily agree, though it is undeniable that the move coincided with a shift in the tone and emphasis of his work. There is a harrowing quality to the novels up to and including Disgrace (1999) that all but disappears from those that followed. The tendency to anguish over intractable moral questions is still very much in evidence in the later novels, but their cultural burden feels less crushing, as if some of the weight of inherited postcolonial guilt has been lifted. It is not as if Coetzee’s adopted home lacks for its own history of violent dispossession and racist subjugation, but the embrace of a new life in a new country seems to have afforded him the opportunity, if not exactly to reinvent himself, then at least to reorient himself as a novelist, let his guard down a little, write in a more relaxed and ironic register, conceive works that are less tightly buttoned in a formal sense, and re-examine some of his defining themes in ways that incline away from the historical and toward the philosophical. Some of the unusual atmosphere of Coetzee’s two most recent novels, The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and its sequel The Schooldays of Jesus, can be attributed to the fact that they push this tendency to an extreme.

‘The strangeness of Macris’s stories are not derived from uncommon states; rather, everyday, mundane events are amplified within selves that are captive to modes of behavior within social formations.’ Anthony Uhlmann on Inexperience and other stories

‘Pessoa’s heteronyms owed their existence to his theosophical beliefs, modernist aesthetics and his translation work as much as to his bicultural upbringing. In Letters to Pessoa, Michelle Cahill anchors his spirit figures in history and her own life. At the same time, the kaleidoscope of identities assumed in relation to the canonical names they write to are merely spectral mediums: they do not cohere into a stable entity, nor do they have any direct tie to the author. They do, nonetheless, allow her to work with and through aspects of her postcolonial, diasporic selves. Her family’s origins in Goa, once a colony of Pessoa’s Portugal, and her own birth in Kenya, another ex-colony of Britain, like Pessoa’s Natal, make her another potential avatar of his many heteronyms, as he becomes one of hers: another figure for whom writing offers both exile and private homeland.’

‘How could such a book have fallen out of print? In this little hotel’s self-closed world, with its closed-in days, Stead analyses the legacy of the war, Cold War attitudes, and the rise of international money laundering and tax evasion: forces of history written into the nature of her characters. ‘There are communists even in this country, in Switzerland,’ declares the old American eugenicist Mrs Powell. ‘Why don’t you get busy and stand them all up against a wall?’ The Little Hotel is the shortest of Stead’s novels but it is not minor: all the satiric ambition of her other novels finds dramatic concentration here.’

What is particularly exhilarating – and ultimately frustrating – about “53 Days” is the sense that Perec himself hasn’t worked out where the book is going.

It is unsurprising, then, that testimonials and critical assessments of Modiano’s writing should so often resort (as I have already done) to vague terms like ‘mysterious’ and ‘atmospheric’ and ‘haunting’. But the element of uncertainty is not only thematically significant on both a personal and a historical level; it also renders these two levels indistinct. Modiano’s books are not simply preoccupied with memory and the elusiveness of the past; they are troubled by the fragility and impermanence of human relationships, which are depicted as unreliable and contingent. The world of his novels is one of coincidences and fateful encounters. It is a shady world of criminal dealings, in which people are unforthcoming or evasive, origins are unknown or unclear, identities are falsified. It is a transient world of hotels and cafés – a world of passing acquaintances and broken family connections, in which people are apt to run away, commit suicide or disappear without explanation, and characters are disturbed by feelings of emptiness and loss.

In Zero K DeLillo brilliantly balances the wildly different scales of his subject matter: the macro focused issues of planetary disaster, global capitalism, techno and primitive warfare, and the micro relations of family relations and individual identity. He consolidates a focus on the abstract relations between the individual and the global, which has become a major formal preoccupation of his novels in the twenty-first century.

My research and reading confirmed what I’d suspected all along: most interesting texts don’t fall into easy categories. That’s why I wanted to turn my attention to Katz, a writer who understands the art of storytelling and revels in the expressive possibilities of language …

The world in which we find ourselves begins to blur around the edges, its parameters shifting and changing. Precisely how we are to understand the room and its relationship to Shelley’s consciousness is never clear, and becomes less clear with each new encounter between the world within and outside its walls.