Fiction
The Wall, the Gate, the Balcony: The Snow Kimono by Mark Henshaw
The Snow Kimono not only exemplifies just such a maturation, it gives us a unique opportunity to conduct, with Out of the Line of Fire, a kind of textbook before-and-after comparison. From a certain perspective, that is to say, and without in any way suggesting that it is the same tale, the new novel shares enough key features with Henshaw’s first book that one can think of it as a kind of reprise.
To wit: Bark by Lorrie Moore
The stories in Bark are lifted from the commonplace by the way the characters have the power to see the ridiculous in their situations, and the undimmed verbal skill they display through the trials of life. These qualities – the sense of the ridiculous amid crisis and the relentless wit – are Moore’s particular gift to them.
Intimate perspectives
The vanishing of expression, voice and authorship is integral to El-Zein’s writing. There are arguments being made in The Secret Maker of the World for the aesthetic, ethical and political aspects of the encounter between world and text, though without any kind of polemic. We sympathise with the characters’ flaws and vulnerabilities, but we are never asked to excuse them.
Antarctica starts here: When the Night Comes by Favel Parrett
When the Night Comes is a more modernist project than Past the Shallows. It focuses on the small but significant moments in life that pass almost unnoticed, even by the protagonists, yet have major consequences. Rather than regional Tasmania, the world of fishers, Hobart is the focus: its suburbs, Friends School, and particularly its harbour are deftly drawn.
Remote Viewing: A Million Windows by Gerald Murnane
As the narrator of A Million Windows repeatedly reaffirms, the most important compositional principle in Murnane’s work is a genuine and thoroughgoing respect for the space of fiction as something radically different from everyday reality.
Monstrous Maternal: On Clarice Lispector
For those who happen upon Clarice Lispector’s fiction without the benefit of a critical or biographical introduction, or any sense of the author’s developing international reputation since her death in 1977, the encounter can be as mystifying as it is invigorating.
Pity’s cost: In Certain Circles by Elizabeth Harrower
In Certain Circles, completed in 1971 but not published until now, concerns two pairs of siblings living in Sydney in the years immediately after World War II. Place and time are comparable to The Watch Tower, and Harrower’s central theme of abuser and victim caught in a monkey grip is evident, although it informs only one of several key relationships.
Go ape: Only the Animals by Ceridwen Dovey
Only the Animals consists of ten stories arranged chronologically from 1892 to 2006, each of which is recounted by an animal that has died as a casualty of human conflict. Its engaging animal narrators include a young elephant from Mozambique, a bear that has starved to death in 1992 in the Sarajevo zoo, and even a horny, existentially questing mussel killed at Pearl Harbour.