Non-fiction

‘Happiness, perhaps more than any other experience, is defined in the negative. That we do not in fact have grasp of a pure state, such as happiness, in isolation from its contraries illuminates something important about how our selves and our realities are structured.’ Anya Daly on a book of essays about happiness.

‘Now that Joseph Roth has been thoroughly absorbed into English, it seems right to ask whether there is a more joyously unbridled – and a more appealing – writer of narrative fiction in the literary tradition.’ Luke Slattery on a new translation of Joseph Roth’s non-fiction.

On Anzac Day, Australian culture anticipates what it confirms: the sending of long-range military expeditions to encourage and support wars in which British or American forces are engaged. Just as there is no serious parliamentary debate over decisions to go to war in the political culture, no interest in ‘war powers’ reform, which might minimise that power in the executive as there has been in Britain, there is little if any questioning of these issues in Australian literary culture either. As Chris Roberts elegantly concludes, Bean’s romance of Anzac excuses our Gallipoli failure by turning ‘failure into heroic achievement’ – or, we could say, by functioning to institutionalise ignorance of our imperial history in a romance that hides behind the false and misleading glory that the nation was born at Gallipoli.

‘We all have an idea that the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns did not turn out well. Dealing with that failure has after all helped to shape the Australian identity. It has given us the Anzac tradition, which rests on a story of heroism in defeat. In his new book on Churchill and the Dardanelles campaign, Tom Curran gives us a penetrating new account of the inception and failure of those campaigns, and so takes us into areas Australian historians have tended to overlook.’

‘Anyone who has spent some time in a library hanging around in the vicinity of the low 800s will know that, for all their variety and intricacy, methodological arguments about the interpretation of literature invariably organise themselves around a small number of seemingly unavoidable conflicts, which are constantly being reinvented and given different weight by different schools of thought.’ James Ley on new books on criticism by Rita Felski, A.O. Scott. And Damon Young

‘The idea of world literature, taken as a whole rather than divided into many national or linguistically based literatures, is a paradoxical one. How can we speak of a “literature” that encompasses far too many languages to master in a single lifetime? Does the term refer to the totality of all the literature in the world, or does it imply a project of canonisation—and if so, who gets to decide which works are included? For the purposes of the study of literature, what constitutes the “world”? The last question might seem the easiest to answer: the world is where we live, the ground beneath our feet. But it’s a more slippery concept than that.’

‘Mayakovsky was not, of course, the first poet or the last to desire a revolution of the spirit, a re-evaluation of all values. For all that he believed that he believed in Communism, it is not hard to imagine Mayakovsky in the clothes of one of the Romantics, or of the Fascists, or of the Beats, replacing the word Soviet with Love or Fatherland or Peace. The difficulty for Mayakovsky, however, was that his desired revolution had happened, the State for which he had cheered actually emerged.’

‘Embarking on a biography of Randolph Stow, an introspective author widely thought to be a recluse in his later years, had not been easy at the best of times, but writing about his time in New Guinea in 1959 was troubling on several levels: not least because during his last months there he had experienced a mental and physical breakdown that brought him close to death.’ Suzanne Falkiner travels to the Trobriand Islands in pursuit of Randolph Stow.

‘The wonder of Barbarian Days is to provide us with a literary experience that is not a stand in for other experiences, that is not an allegory of effort and victory and disappointment and loss that memoir culture has conditioned us to expect.’

‘I have been referring to M Train as a ‘memoir’ by default, but it is something far more ambitious and complex than the word implies. It is a work in an elegiac mode that occupies an indeterminate space between autobiography, essay and fiction.’ James Ley on Patti Smith’s M Train and Collected Lyrics.