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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.

From the Archive

From the Archive

August 2014, no. 363

Radiance by Andy Kissane

Andy Kissane’s fourth collection, Radiance, is a heartening answer to those who, like publisher Stephen Matthews, lament that ‘many modern poets choose to shroud their work in point-scoring obscurity at a time when clarity and accessibility might encourage more people to read poetry’. Kissane doesn’t address this issue directly, but his book is an important negative instance.

From the Archive

November 1990, no. 126

The Keeper of the Nest by Moira Watson

Comedy and violence co-exist happily in this delightful first novel about a group of weekend bird watchers who themselves become the objects of scrutiny.