Review

Jacob Rosenberg completed the manuscript of The Hollow Tree shortly before his death in October 2008. Born in Lodz in 1922, he lived there until he was deported to Auschwitz, where he lost his entire immediate family. He was later a prisoner in the Woflsburg and Ebensee concentration camps. In 1948 he and his wife, Esther, emigrated to Australia, where they raised a family and built a successful clothing business.

In a delightful memoir of a boyhood spent in Mussolini’s Italy, Umberto Eco recalled that the heady days of the Liberation in his small town near Milan were encapsulated in the taste of Wrigley’s Spearmint, given by an African-American GI (New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995). After the years of ‘palefaces in blackshirts’, these Americans appeared like exotic time travellers from the future. At the same time, the boy discovered that, unlike the long-winded Duce, large slabs of whose bombast schoolchildren were expected to commit to heart, the leader of the local partisans addressed the cheering crowd in the piazza with a few well-chosen and rhetoric-free words. Equally astonishing was the discovery that newspapers could carry opinions other than those mandated by the state.

Having disposed of World War I in a couple of brief chapters, our shell-shocked soldiers wonder what to do next. During the war, sinister balloons carrying out surveillance had hovered over the trenches. This now gives Axel Glover and Edward Llewellyn an idea. They have become mates in an understated English way, never making eye contact.

‘The first time I saw Axel Glover he was standing stark naked in a wide shaft of sunlight,’ begins the novel, which is written in the largely monologic voice of a diary or memoir. It records the lives of these two ‘very deep friends’ who, having survived the war together, commit to the somewhat eccentric adventure of ballooning to ‘New Albion’, in the Western Pacific of the imagination.

The design of this book is something of a mystery, not least because it presents as a critique of design, seeking to recuperate something that has been lost through ‘the graphic orthodoxies of cartography and architectural drawing’. This lost cultural component, the ‘dark writing’ of Carter’s title, is variously evoked as mythological, participatory, creative and recreative, as a body, a form of movement, a certain kind of substance.

In eleven-year-old Grace’s world, the ‘saved’ number 11,423 people. Four of those are part of her immediate family; her twin brothers, her mother, and her father, who encourages his daughter’s inquisitive nature and who ‘probably has more interesting thoughts than any other home lighting warehouse manager in Australia’.

This edition of Griffith Review is one of several local journals to take the ‘global financial crisis’ as its latest theme. A range of writers address this ‘crisis’ and other ‘major recessions’ throughout history. The journal opens with Julianne Schultz’s essay about how the global economy has worsened following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Other contributors investigate the impact of recession upon the media, consumer culture, the banking industry and the workplace. Examples are drawn from Australia, Britain, America, China and Dubai. Reference is made to Gordon Gekko, the anti-hero of Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street (1987). Gekko’s mantra, ‘Greed is good’, has come to define the 1980s, but viewers, as Schultz observes, tend to ignore the battle between ‘local enterprises’ and ‘clever schemers’ that is central to Stone’s movie. Schultz suggests that the schemers appear to have won.

Hilda, a seventeen-year-old living in Los Angeles, is obsessed with dead celebrities. She and her friend Benji collect remnants from sites of tragedy or scandal – bricks, tiles, photographs of bloodstains – material suggestive of the enigmatic past. This ‘trivia’ deadens the things Hilda would rather not think about, including the death of her own parents. Hilda befriends an old man named Hank, who harbours his own dark secret and has met celebrities in his job as a Hollywood pool cleaner. Later in the story, a screenwriter named Jake feels like a conflict-creating device or distraction.

Gerald’s murdered great-aunt has left him her entire fortune of £20 billion, and an envelope full of clues. Instead of enjoying a trip to the snow in Australia, thirteen-year-old Gerald finds himself heading to London on a private jet with his parents to attend her funeral. Meanwhile, the world’s most valuable diamond has been stolen, rather comically, from the British Museum, and no one can figure out how. With the help of two new friends, Sam and Ruby, Gerald must solve this double whodunit.

This accessible new anthology collects the work of 125 women poets writing on the theme of motherhood. As well as having general appeal, it will introduce younger female readers of poetry to topics close to their own bodily, emotional futures.

One of the best things about the latest issue of Westerly is the cover, a detail from Helen Norton’s painting The shores of the excommunicated. Norton’s image is a wonderfully disquieting take on the modern Aussie beach. It inspires fresh ideas and imaginings, it unsettles, it punctures complacency, it provokes counter-reactions, but it also entertains – typifying what literary magazines should do.