Fiction

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena hinges on the story of a Chechen villager who, over five days, tries to save a young girl from a Russian death squad. But its ambitions don’t stop at exhaustive research and breaking new fictional ground…

How do you review the ‘experimental novel’? Critic Watch turns its gaze to the reviews of Anthony Macris’ Great Western Highway: A Love Story (Capital, Volume One, Part Two). With a response from Jeffrey Poacher.

To be honest, I had lost track of Javier Marías long before I received the commission to write a review of The Infatuations, his latest novel – apparently a murder mystery. In my ingenuous youth, I had been rather impressed, when not mesmerised, by the style, the themes and the exquisite craftsmanship displayed in novels such as All Souls and A Heart So White. Years had passed, however, and my interest, always capricious, had waned.

Macris uses his full quiver of unorthodox techniques to pierce any familiar sense of reality, just as he introduces a range of linguistic ephemera – emails, journalese, advertising claptrap – to remind the reader that words can’t be trusted, especially in the novel, the most mendacious of art forms.

In the Memorial Room is both literally and figuratively posthumous. It centres around themes of creativity, being a writer, and a writer’s posthumous memorialisation. Frame wrote the novel in 1973, but did not allow its publication during her lifetime.

The Crane Wife begins with a moment pitched somewhere between comedy and wonder. In the small hours of the morning, 48-year-old George Duncan is woken unexpectedly. It is a sound that has awoken him – an ‘unearthly sound … a mournful shatter of frozen midnight falling to earth to pierce his heart and lodge there forever, never to move, never to melt’ – but George, being who he is, assumes it is his bladder.

With The Woman Upstairs, her fifth book, Messud narrows her range, concentrating on a devastated woman recounting a critical event in her life. Nora is an elementary school teacher living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who experiences a ‘Lucy Jordan moment’ when she realises at the age of 37 that her life, like that of the ballad’s heroine, looks small and any hope for change is not for her.

It seems to me that Lucashenko writes both with and against the perception that authentic Aboriginality is derived from the maintenance of land-based cultural practices and spiritual beliefs.

One of the strange contradictions of fiction is that immense beauty can often be found in writing about grief and loss. The things we often choose to look away from or avoid in everyday life can, in the hands of a novelist like Ashley Hay, become rich terrain.

When Fallada handed the final draft of Little Man, What Now? to Rowohlt in early 1932 there were eight and half million people unemployed in Germany. By 1933, a staggering 40 per cent of the population was registered as out of work.