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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

November 2009, no. 316

Crab & Winkle: East Kent & Elsewhere, 2006–2007 by Laurie Duggan

In the ‘March’ section of his new collection, Laurie Duggan writes, ‘(but I am the neighbours) // (I am, perhaps, Neighbours)’. The couplet points to several things: being an Australian in England; Duggan’s persona of observant neighbour; the banality and plurality (‘neighbours’) of Duggan’s perspective. The plurality is one of many levels: Duggan’s neighbourly approach is applied not just to the physical world but to ideas, reading, poets, music, politics and history. He is, paradoxically, a neighbour to himself and his own writing.

From the Archive

November 2006, no. 286

Advances - November 2006

More than a recorder Still they arrive, though slowing to a trickle in recent days – the reader surveys that we sent out with the…

From the Archive

October 2009, no. 315

‘La Mian in Melbourne’ by Kim Cheng Boey

On Little Bourke Street it’s the bewitching hour
of winter dusk’s last riffs playing
long mauve shadows down the blocks,
waking the neon calligraphy, its quavering script
mirrored on the warm sheen of the Noodle King

where a man slaps and pummels the dough
into a pliant wad. He takes a fist-sized ball
and starts his noodle magic, stretching the bands,
the sleight-of-hand plain for you to see,
weaving a stave of floury silent music.