Judith Beveridge
Dennis Altman
In any given year we will read but a tiny handful of potential ‘best books’, so this is no more than a personal selection. Here are two novels that stand out: Stephen Eldred-Grigg’s Shanghai Boy (Vintage) and Hari Kunzru’s Tranmission (Penguin). Both speak of the confusion of identity and emotions caused by rapid displacement across the world. The first is the account of a middle-aged New Zealand teacher who falls disastrously in love while teaching in Shanghai. Transmission takes a naïve young Indian computer programmer to the United States, with remarkable consequences. From a number of political books, let me select two, both from my own publisher, Scribe, which offers, I regret, no kickbacks. One is George Megalogenis’s The Longest Decade; the other, James Carroll’s House of War. Together they provide a depressing but challenging backdrop to understanding the current impasse of the Bush–Howard administrations in Iraq.
... (read more)Grennan takes another corded strand between his fingers,
moves it through a plane, then interlaces it to add dimension,
utility, beauty; then he takes a swig from his bottle,
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Grennan sucks in air along his gums and yells
again to Davey who is filling the trough
of the gunwhale with scrabbling crabs. Far off
lightning slips down the sky like a forkful ...
It’ll be dawn before the sawing’s done; all night
cutting it up, yet by dark’s end, a pine,
or cypress moon, fragrant, awaiting finish. I watch
that they haven’t already given
my colourless signature; of your
hands other than to shade
your eyes as the sun burnishes
the windows, then carries on
to the grey porticos of the square.
I see pigeons on the gold-lit roof
of the Cathedral of St Christopher,
and as I stir my brush about
my palette – scarlet is what
I pray for; scarlet that flows under
a vanquished bridge; that lives
with finches in the tops of trees
because, desire, you said,
should always live on the wing.
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Just admire this ewer, this flasket,
this carafe – aren’t they more elegant
than the living heads of giraffes?
It’s the silence. Even by the river, my ears are straining. It’s the silence. At this moment it’s a warmish humid silence with the grass outside lushly mesmerising the eye.
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