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Timepieces by Drusilla Modjeska

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September 2002, no. 244

According to the back cover of Timepieces, Drusilla Modjeska’s latest collection of essays represents an attempt to follow the ‘paper trail’ of her own life, after ‘nearly thirty years of nosing in other people’s archives’. Readers who have enjoyed Poppy (1990), The Orchard (1994) and Stravinsky’s Lunch (2000) will find much to intrigue them in Part 1 of this collection, which is largely a series of intimate glimpses into her development as a writer. Like Helen Garner, writing and living for Modjeska are clearly two sides of the same coin, and both enterprises imply struggle, danger and passion. Poppy was arguably one of the most exciting books to appear in Australia in the 1990s. Modjeska’s descriptions of her efforts to find the right voice or voices for the book’s complex mix of biography, autobiography and fiction are especially fascinating. While her first book, Exiles at Home (1981), was ground-breaking, the gulf between its well-conducted research and the sophisticated self-conscious memoir that is Poppy is immense. How many graduate students must have the same experience of travelling ‘on forged papers’ in their academic work, of assuming a supposedly disinterested voice that ignores the personal ‘terra incognita’.

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In this ‘memoir about going home’, home is where the heart is. The book’s principal locale is the Tasmania of Martin Flanagan’s Irish Catholic small-town childhood. But ‘home’, in this narrative, isn’t just a place: it’s a state of the self. It’s what one gets back to when life’s useless accretions, confusions and hesitations are peeled away, leaving a self that is pristine – attuned to its true origins, its deepest intimations about the world, and to the values that the unadulterated self lives by, Flanagan’s journey is a quest for the authentic self. A ‘romantic’, he wants to embrace the ‘wild green joy of living’ – a phrase that typifies the passionate intensity of his search.

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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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Picador has done rather well in this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award (worth $28,000), with three of the five short-listed novels: Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, Joan London’s Gilgamesh and Tim Winton’s Dirt Music. Completing the quintet are Steven Carroll’s Art of the Engine Driver (Flamingo) and John Scott’s The Architect (Viking). The winner will be announced in Sydney on June 13.

Perpetual Trustees has been kept busy with short lists, including the one for the 2002 Nita B. Kibble Literary Award for Women Writers. This one, to be announced in Sydney on May 7, is worth $20,000. Three works in different genres have been short-listed: Marion Halligan’s novel The Fog Garden, Jacqueline Kent’s biography of Beatrice Davis, A Certain Style, and Hilary McPhee’s memoir, Other People’s Words.

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Clive James is a fussy A-grade mechanic of the English language, always on the lookout for grammatical misfires or sloppiness of phrasing that escape detection on publishing production lines. Us/we crashtest dummies of the written word, who drive by computer, with squiggly red and green underlinings ...

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Talk about unlikely associations. My first response to the opening chapter of Tim Winton’s latest novel was how its sense of a life at a standstill, awaiting some new impulse, reminded me of Jane Austen’s Emma. Winton’s protagonist, Georgie Jutland, with a string of unsatisfactory relationships behind her ...

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These days I am no longer sure what is memory and what is revelation. How faithful the story you are about to read is to the original is a bone of contention with the few people I had allowed to read the original Book of Fish … certainly, the book you will read is the same as the book I remember reading ... ... (read more)

Following True Stories, published in 1996, The Feel of Steel is Helen Garner’s second collection of non-fiction. It comprises thirty-one pieces of varying lengths. Longer narratives such as ‘Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice’, about a hair-raising trip to Antarctica, and ‘A Spy in the House of Excrement’, about the outcome ...

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Reliable Essays by Clive James & Even As We Speak by Clive James

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October 2001, no. 235

Clive James needs no introduction, though he asked Julian Barnes to provide one for Reliable Essays, a selection from three decades of James’s literary journalism made by his publisher, Peter Straus. The Kid from Kogarah is, as The New Yorker once famously observed, ‘a brilliant bunch of guys’ ...

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Aged twenty-two, I set out for Mexico, with, like Rousseau in Italy, a ‘heart full of young desires, alluring hopes and brilliant prospects’. I was determined to leave the confines of the sleepy metropolis that is Canberra, much as Isabella Bird, though infinitely more adventurous and literate, desired to escape her cloistered Victorian world. This ‘inner compulsion’, as Robyn Davidson describes it in her introduction to The Picador Book of Journeys (something her own books attest to powerfully), is a factor which gives travelogues ‘the power to reconnect us with the essential’. And if, by essential, one means illuminating the human condition in the way that any literature worth the name achieves, Davidson’s anthology gives us a sizeable sample.

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