Fiction
Years of Lead: Leonardo Sciascia
25 years after Leonardo Sciascia’s death, Granta has reissued most of his translated titles. These short, acrid tales are written in a dry Stendhalian style. Braided around their assured plotlines are philosophical dialogues on morality and politics, justice and mortality: universal themes with a distinctive Sicilian inflexion.
Not for children? Golden Boys by Sonya Hartnett
Sonya Hartnett has never been one to shy away from controversial subject matter. Her latest novel, Golden Boys, is the story of what unfolds when a new family moves into a suburban Australian neighbourhood one summer. Set during the mid-1970s or early 1980s, it explores a time when children roamed the streets freely, the only constraint on their movement a mandate that they return home for the evening meal. Although this recent past might be romanticised by some as a more innocent time, Hartnett examines its darker side.
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.