In translation

While more conventional writers advertise their moral delicacy in dealing with vastly disempowered characters, Melchor’s relentlessness makes that strategy look like condescension. Hewing close to her painful material – and refusing to let her narrator philosophize about it or apologize for it – Melchor reveals something distasteful in the common notion that the task of fiction is to ‘convey the humanity’ of people in extreme circumstances. Hurricane Season demands instead that we assume the humanity of its characters. Is there a better condition of entry for a novel to set its readers?

My first response to COVID-19 was not to go back home. Home for me is in the Hunan province in the south of China, next to Hubei. It had been a difficult decision to make. The virus coincided with the Chinese New Year; it was like a bomb thrown into a mine field. But I also knew that it was the time when I was most needed at home.

Most fiction treats workers as fully external creatures, carrying their physicality as a symbol of their position within the division of labour; Weiss presents them as the authentic bearers of our collective human cultural destiny. It is a question of how these workers, who pay for the very possibility of culture with the surplus created by their labour, attain it, and even come to represent it, themselves. By sheer force of will, and the necessity of an inner compulsion, these young men and women return from the shop floor, physically exhausted but spiritually on fire, to study, debate, and reflect.

There have been, in recent years, many attempts to explain when a novel makes the definitional leap from ‘fiction’ to ‘autofiction’. It has turned out to be a difficult task. Writers of autofiction write about their lives, but then so do many authors who escape the label.

But the Cavafian corpus resists the absurd opposition that is imposed on it – erotic versus historical, homosexual versus patriotic. Rather, Cavafy’s erotic sensibility actually defines his outlook on society and history, and is not separate from it.

‘Sanary and Meranda’s story can be seen as more than a simple tale of altruism, it is a reminder of the close links that have bound New Caledonia and Australia together.’

Serialised in 1909-1010, The Poison of Polygamy by Wong Shee Ping is the first novel of the Chinese Australian experience. It recounts the story of a man from southern China who tries his luck on the Victorian goldfields.

There is something deeply interior about the traumas that set Schweblin’s stories in motion, something that seems to correspond more to atmosphere and mood than plot.

What seemed like it was going to be a finely worked piece of anti-pastoral art is confused by a gestural obviousness akin to stadium rock.

What came first: the projection of women’s qualities (wiliness, treachery, dependency) onto translation, or the projection of translation’s qualities (submissiveness, restraint, inferiority) onto women?