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Delia Falconer

Story collections, especially ones that appear annually, hold out shimmering, Brigadoon-like hopes for their readers: that they will offer a snapshot of the times; capture the collective unconscious of a nation and its writers; and, if selected by a well-known writer, reveal something profound about that author’s tastes. Most editors will tell you that the reality is often different. Their wish-list of writers may have published little to select from that year, and have nothing in the bottom drawer when asked; well-known authors, approached on spec, may offer work that is sub-par but which the editor now feels obliged to take. Thus an anthology may end up as more of a compromise than an ideal selection. On the other hand, some anthologies, such as Kerryn Goldsworthy’s Australian Love Stories (1996), Drusilla Modjeska’s Sisters (1993) or the first two volumes of the long-defunct Picador New Writing (1993–94), have managed to pull off precisely this era-defining gathering of collective energy, showcasing our nation’s literature at a high-water mark. In such anthologies, there is a joyful sense of momentum and confidence: the pieces speak to one another with an almost predetermined charge.

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Cate Kennedy’s name will be familiar to anyone who takes even the vaguest interest in Australian short story contests. Over the last decade, she has racked up an impressive list of awards in regional competitions, but readers are most likely to have noticed her successes in two of the most high-profile ones. In 2001 she took out the prestigious and now-defunct HQ Magazine short story competition; and in 2000 and 2001, two Age short story competitions back-to-back. With such a strong recognition factor, it seems like a smart move by Scribe to publish her first collection. Not only should it appeal to readers looking for new short fiction of established quality, but also, presumably, to the thousands of writers who enter short story competitions each year and who wish to see the gold standard.

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It is eight years since Delia Falconer published her successful début novel, The Service of Clouds. Eight years is a long time. It took James Joyce eight years to write Ulysses (1922). Eight years is one year longer than Joseph Heller laboured over Catch-22 (1961) and about six years longer than it took George Eliot to knock out Middlemarch (1871-72).

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Moral Hazard by Kate Jennings & Judgement Rock by Joanna Murray-Smith

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May 2002, no. 241

From at least the mid-1980s, it has been almost obligatory for Australian reviewers to bemoan the dearth of contemporary political novels in this country. In some ways, this is a predictable backlash against the flowering of postmodern fabulist novels of ‘beautiful lies’ (by such writers as Peter Carey, Elizabeth Jolley, and Brian Castro) in the past two decades ...

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The Tree by Deborah Ratliff

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October 2001, no. 235

American English, with its vigorous ability to get to the core of things, has an implacably visual word for the kind of person this novel is about – the ‘shut-in’. A shut-in is a recluse, perhaps a cinéaste or stay-at-home opera queen. He (I use my pronouns advisedly – the shut-in is usually a ‘he’) has a rich, century-long genealogy in books and on-screen, from Huysmans’s Des Esseintes and Wilde’s Dorian Gray to Sunset Boulevard’s Nora Desmond and Chatwin’s Utz. Alfred Hitchcock specialised in shut-ins; in Australian cinema, Norman Kaye played a lonely voyeur in Man of Flowers. The shut-in has also given birth to a critical tradition of his own. Some critics like Walter Benjamin have suggested that the habit of collecting may be a response to the twentieth century itself, a kind of specialised aesthetic reflex against consumer culture. Because he is associated with brittleness and the arts, the shut-in is frequently depicted as gay or as a sexual neurasthenic: in his wonderful book The Queen’s Throat, Wayne Koestenbaum has made a bravura anatomisation of the coded campness of the shut-in opera fan.

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 A friend describes the sensation as being in the movie set of your own life: everything is familiar, but not quite right. Auckland feels like an Australian city that has simply slipped a little, like the accent, to the east. There are hints of Hobart in the crisp sea and the misty sketched-in headlands. And of Sydney, in the over-abundance of harbour, the narrow streets of Ponsonby, which drop away towards the water, the houses filled with quiet light. Perhaps all Pacific cities look pretty much the same these days: here is the casino, the observation tower, the thirties picture palace turned into a Singapore-style mall, the narrow lane with outdoor tables under braziers; the same stands of Westpacs and McDonalds and Lush cosmetics stores. Perhaps what differentiates one city from another now is the sheer volume of traffic forced through its streets.

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Fathers in Writing edited by Ross Fitzgerald and Ken Spillman

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December 1997–January 1998, no. 197

I am still puzzling over why Ross Fitzgerald and Ken Spillman chose the odd title, Fathers in Writing, for this anthology of personal essays. Because of its academic resonance, I first assumed that this book would be a scholarly analysis of father figures in literature – or, perhaps, following on from the work of certain feminist theorists, that it would look at how different valorisations of ‘fatherhood’ are embedded in language itself. Then, once I learned that this was an anthology of Australian writing, the title led me to expect a collection of extracts from literature previously published. Or, if these were newly commissioned essays, that they would be pieces in which the difficulties and pleasures of the act of writing itself would take centre stage.

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John Docker

Mark Davis’ Voltairean Gangland is one of those rare books that prise open a space for revaluation of the direction of a culture. Like The Dunciad’s evocation of the Grub Street hacks of its time, Gangland exposes tentacular networks of chummy patronage, mutual puffery, and cultural power. Gangland is especially enjoyable on the clown-like behaviour of the ex-Scripsi diaspora – in a curious sexual division of labour, a B-team of male critics, captained by the felicitously named P. Craven, has successfully promoted a coterie of writers like Jolley, Garner, and Modjeska. Compared to those I analyse in Australian Cultural Elites (1974) and In A Critical Condition (1984), this new élite is the most intellectually thin in Australian cultural history. Assisted by a passive, grovelling middle-class readership, it both creates such writers as canonical and then tries desperately to shield their texts from critique and challenge.

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This novel, Delia Falconer’s first, takes the form of a love lament: all about breath in bodies; textures and surfaces; clouds; mountains; photography; colour; gardens; illness. Much more, too, of course, and it is a work that certainly does not warrant such a glib cataloguing of elements and attributes. It is ambitious, and successful ...

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