Fiction

But can this Nordic Untermensch, with his Tolstoyan and Proustian ambitions, in length if not quite in scope, keep us interested? The short answer is yes, and compellingly so, if not for obvious reasons.

After learning spoken and then written French, Kristóf began writing poems, then plays for the radio and theater, before arriving, at last, at the novel. Kristóf’s trilogy, The Notebook, The Proof, and The Third Lie —published this month for the first time in Australia and New Zealand by Text—is her masterpiece.

‘It doesn’t take long to realise that in The Noise of Time we’re not only in Russia, the fabled disnatured Russia of the Soviet and Stalinist dispensation, but in some gulag of the mind, some imprisoning sterility of the spirit. It takes a little longer — but the presentiment grows like recurrent music — and then there is the distinct realisation that we are reading a particular kind of fiction, a novel in which the writer has one hand tied behind his back.’

‘Helen Garner is known for her shape-shifting – or rather for her genre-shifting. She moves between fiction and non-fiction, making choices about genre in a way that might seem arbitrary to some readers, but to the close reader is most certainly not. Always up for debate is the notion that while a fine fiction writer, Garner does not write novels. This essay is an attempt to engage with this argument, using Garner’s 1992 novel Cosmo Cosmolino as its focus.’

How could it make sense to call a novel published in 2016 by a young Australian writer modernist?

‘In the scattered and incoherent set of margin notes that constitutes a critic’s initial response to a text, a certain word can appear often enough to force a method of interpretation. The first ‘paradox’ I scribbled on Joanna Walsh’s short story collection Vertigo appeared on its second page. A second note – this time modified to ‘paradox (again)’ – appeared soon after, in the margins of the second story. Numerous others followed. By the time I’d moved on to the second of three books published by Walsh in 2015, Hotel, I was merely gathering evidence in a case already decided.’

‘Yuri Herrera’s novella Señales que precederán al fin del mundo is a special case: a work for which translation is a logical extension of its rationale. What I mean is this: when a work is so concerned with arduous journeys, borders, transculturalism and the underworld, reading a version of that work rebirthed in a new form after it has undergone its own transformation is quite fitting.’ Elizabeth Bryer on Signs Preceding the End of the World.

The English translations of Eka Kurniawan’s novels have been hailed for their beauty and situated within a global frame of reference – but when they were first published, critics were fascinated by Eka’s deviance and his willingness to flout contemporary Indonesian literary norms.

‘It’s my argument that, in dramatising and deprecating acts of direct physical violence – however menacing their perpetrators and however innocent their victims – a work such as this war novel and, perhaps by extension, many others associated with other genres in which grisly violence is central, such as horror and crime fiction, suppress the much more prevalent, far more significant instances of symbolic and structural violence that underpin and regulate our supposedly non-warring, peacetime societies.’

‘Re-reading Wide Sargasso Sea now in this, the fiftieth anniversary year of its first publication in 1966, I can’t help feeling that the novel remains just as groundbreaking and heartbreaking. Perhaps we are finally catching up with Jean Rhys and celebrating – with her, despite her – the unequivocal achievement of Wide Sargasso Sea.’