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My father died twenty-eight years ago this December. Each anniversary, I watch a movie that we enjoyed together, or would have. This year, a week before the day, I learn that the hotel his company owned has permanently closed. Iâm given this news through an article titled âNew York Cityâs historic hotels are owned â and destroyed â by Asians.â
The Middle-East conflict is perhaps the most intractable in the world. Israelis and Palestinians have been fighting for nearly a century over the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. The world has witnessed a never-ending cycle of tension and conflict, including a number of full-scale wars, with immense suffering on both sides.
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The facing island in Jan Bassettâs memoir is Phillip Island, where her maternal grandparents had a dairy farm and where it seems she was most emotionally at home. Summer holidays there as a child in the 1960s, in the midst of her grandmotherâs extended family and surrounded by familiar tokens of past decades reaching as far back as the early 1900s, undoubtedly sparked her lifelong commitment to Australian history. The title, taken from Peter Roseâs poem âBalnarring Beachâ (âThe facing island, a mortal blue, / beckons, intensifies, vanishesâ), could hardly be more appropriate, compressing in a few words much of the emotional intensity of Bassettâs autobiographical last journey.
Gwen Foster met Lieutenant Thomas Riddell in Brisbane in 1942, when she was twentytwo. âTonyâ Riddell, stationed in Brisbane, was sent to Darwin early in 1943; and between January and September of that year, Gwen Foster wrote him the eighty-nine letters that make up this book. Itâs the chronicle of a year, of a city, of a family, of a friendship, of a war no one could see an end to, and of that stage in the life of a gifted young woman at which she says, âAt present I am unsettled and do not know which way my life will turn.â
These stories are well written and rather depressing. That makes them, I guess, rather representative of what one might call the current state of short-story writing by urban males. One thinks immediately of recent collections by Garry Disher and Nick Earls. There seem to be a few basic starting off points, the most notable being in the delineation of defensiveness and insecurities that give the male characters, who are often the narrators, a sensitive but decidedly uptight response to, well, almost everything. Women, parents, children (their own), and particularly the drab world that has snuffed out some early spark of liveliness or vitality (which is usually rubbed for sympathetic magic in moments of nostalgic recall).