Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

ABR Arts

Book of the Week

Chinese Postman
Fiction

Chinese Postman by Brian Castro

In Street to Street (2012), Brian Castro wrote, ‘It was important that he was making the gesture, running in the opposite direction from a national literature.’ In Chinese Postman, Castro’s protagonist Abraham Quin is ‘through with all that novel-writing; it’s summer reading for bourgeois ladies’. Quin is a Jewish-Chinese former professor, bearing sufficient similarities to the author to function as an avatar. Quin and Castro are the same age, have written the same number of books, and live in the same place (the Adelaide Hills). Sometimes Quin speaks as Quin, sometimes the author chooses to make his ventriloquism evident, and sometimes the identity of the narrator is unclear, but the voice is always raffish, erudite, mercurial.

Interview

Calibre Essays

From the Archive

From the Archive

October 2013, no. 355

Simon Caterson on 'Melbourne: City of Words'

To judge by John McLaren’s thought-provoking survey of 200 years of writing about Melbourne, the city’s most insidious negative feature for many observers – wrong-headed though they may be – is dullness. In George Johnston’s My Brother Jack (1964), the narrator David Meredith rails against the suburbs as ‘worse than slums. They betrayed nothing of anger or revolt or resentment; they lacked the grim adventure of true poverty; they had no suffering, because they had mortgaged this right to secure a sad acceptance of suburban respectability that ranked them a step or two higher than the true, dangerous slums of Fitzroy or Collingwood.’ In affluent suburbs like Malvern, Graham McInnes in The Road to Gundagai, a memoir first published in 1965, saw ‘immense deserts of brick and terracotta, or wood and galvanised iron [that] induce a sense of overpowering dullness, a stupefying sameness, a worthy, plodding, pedestrian middle-class, low church conformity’.

From the Archive

December 2009–January 2010, no. 317

Jetty Road by Cath Kenneally

Cath Keneally’s second novel, Jetty Road, is set in the beachside suburb of Glenelg, South Australia. Her subject is the relationship between two sisters in early middle age, and the narrative is fabricated from the daily happenings of their lives. Evie, the older sister by several years, has no children and ekes out a living in a number of part-time jobs as a child-care worker. Paula, matron of an aged care home, has two children: Bert, aged nineteen, and Rosie, six. Neither of the sisters is married.