Spinifex Press

Admirers of Carol Lefevre’s earlier books, and nostalgists in general, will delight in her latest offering. Her artistic eye evokes the patina of a silvering vintage mirror reflecting societal and literary traditions. Both in tone and preoccupations, The Tower (Lefevre’s sixth book) continues traditions cast in several Australian literary classics. Familiar, too, is Lefevre’s favoured form. Several of the book’s chapters have previously been published as short stories, but Lefevre has worked them seamlessly into this novel’s overarching chronicle.

Carol Lefevre has shown herself adept at exploring connection and alienation in different genres. In The Happiness Glass (2018), the ambiguous zone between fiction and memoir forms a creative space within which Lefevre plumbs the intricacies of motherhood and loss; home and exile. Murmurations is imbued with similar tropes, the slight heft of the book belying its ethical density and the scope of its narrative ambition.

Carol Lefevre is the author of two novels and a non-fiction book on Adelaide, all well received and awarded. Yet she is not as well known in her own country as she should be, having spent decades in England. I hope The Happiness Glass will remedy that ...

‘Write about what you know.’ This is probably good advice for aspiring writers. Whether it serves equally well for academics turning their hand to prose fiction is put to a severe test by Diane Bell’s first novel. Evil tells the story of an Australian feminist anthropologist who takes up a position at a small Jesuit college in the US. Like many ATNs (Academics Turned Novelists), Bell’s choice of genre is the academic mystery: it is no coincidence that one of the heroine’s favourite writers is Amanda Cross, otherwise known as the feminist critic Carolyn Heilbrun.

A number of the poems in Lidija Cvetkovic’s first book stem from revisiting places and people in the war-torn country of her birth, the former Yugoslavia, but the poetry springs from an interrelated heritage. An Eastern European sensibility guides this poetry, informing and being informed by laconic Australian understanding. Poems that speak of ethnic and regional conflict, and of self, lovers and family in two continents, are woven into the same breath; and as the inexplicable in human experience is measured, a quiet celebration of human resilience can be heard.

Zeitgeist or coincidence? Spinifex and Macmillan have both just published novels with middle-aged women centre stage. In marketing terms, they have launched a niche product, targeting the middle-aged female consumer. Poppy’s Return, by New Zealand author Pat Rosier, and West Australian Liz Byrski’s Gang of Four boldly foreground women’s midlife issues. Their protagonists bravely confront the multiple challenges of their own ageing, in addition to the care of elderly relatives.

I was once berated by a lecturer in political theory for my undergraduate defence of Marxist economism. He pointed out that even Marx despised this mindless reduction of his work. I subsequently opted for less anal accounts of the human condition, and remain of the view that any half-intelligent person would do likewise. So I was more than astonished to hear non-Marxists of the ilk of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and the senior George Bush demanding that we read their lips as they mouthed: ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’

Holocaust denial comes in many guises. One is the comfortable belief that European nationals were ignorant of the slaughter of their fellow Jewish citizens, and would have been appalled had they known. Daniel Goldhagen’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust has been the most controversial challenge to this so far, but it is not alone. Abraham Biderman, survivor of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, whose memoir The World of My Past had difficulty finding a publisher here but went on to win awards, is reluctant to exaggerate about the Poles. Nevertheless he writes, ‘With hindsight, however, it seems to me that the majority of them were happy to see the Jews destroyed.’