Updates

It is bracing, to say the least, to see one’s review being itself reviewed by such an erudite meta-critic as Dr Ben Etherington. No writer – certainly no book reviewer – can complain if a reader finds his or her work to be lacking in insight, deficient in sensibility or stylistically irksome…

Everyone’s a critic, usually a bad one. But if Apollo e Dafne, Tristan und Isolde or a Dickinson poem come along, then even very good criticism is no use either.

I enjoyed Nicholas Jose’s marvellous story of the attempt to transplant cricket in China, and of the Chinese spin bowler so wily that he became a coach at the Bradman Museum in Bowral, where he wisely adopted the name of Bruce. A friend suggested that he might have been inspired by Bruce Doolan, but I prefer to think otherwise.

The bunyip version of the ‘international’ style that Emmett Stinson writes of became very recognisable to me as a publisher of Australian literary fiction in the 1990s. Gestural, smooth, economical, all the requisite ‘gaps for the reader’ in place. It’s still around, and makes for an inconsequential and decontextualised literature.

The most compelling reason for doubting Anna Funder’s fictional capabilities was expressed by the writer herself a few years ago. Taking issue with the German film The Lives of Others, she informed the journalist in a Sydney Morning Herald interview that the story could not be believed…