Laurie Hergenhan

Why don’t you go and see him?’ said Alper. I had met Alper in a small hotel in Istanbul. Over breakfast, we discovered a common interest in Orhan Pamuk, a distinguished contemporary Turkish novelist. Before leaving Australia, I had read Pamuk’s only two novels available in English translation (Faber), including his latest one, highly popular in Turkey, A New Life, and the previous, The Black Book. These are so complex, weaving such a net of allusiveness to writings of East and West, that they seemed only partly accessible to an outsider. But they left a strong impression. Both books are about a quest: is it possible to have, let alone to know, a distinctive self? Any answer is denied by the characters’ own blindness – their perverse desire, born of fear, to be someone else. This question of self involves political problems of dependence and independence, of national self-determination, problems that have influenced post-colonial countries as well as divisions between East and West. These complex concerns are explored through ‘doubles’ or ‘twinned’ characters, who can ‘turn into’, or even destroy, the other. The conventionalising effects of language and writing complicate the issues.

From Paul Salzman

Dear Editor,

It is a shame that allegations of plagiarism in The Hand That Signed The Paper were trivialised into questions of literary echoes that would certainly not have worried any serious member of that curious entity, the literary community. As someone deeply troubled by the anti-Semitism manifested in the novel, I have been interested to know where the Ukrainian material that ‘Demidenko’ defended as family history may have come from. Perhaps we will never know, but now it seems that the plagiarism issue was really something of a red herring, distracting attention from what was most disturbing about the novel and its attendant prizes. I cannot see that ‘postmodemism’, under any definition, could be blamed for this situation, given that the Miles Franklin judgment is based, I believe, on a bankrupt and outmoded humanism that sees abstract moral truth in literary works without having any sophisticated regard for politics or history.

I have a theory that every second Australian is a closet short story writer. And this is a conservative estimate. According to my theory, the so-called ‘booms’ in the history of the Australian short story in the 1890s and 1950s merely reflected fashions in the book and magazine publishing businesses, not the relentless scratching away in exercise books or thumping of battered typewriters which occupies the waking hours of the determined taleteller and which is, I am convinced, a more popular national pastime than dodging income tax. How else to explain the sheer volume of short stories being published? And these are but the tip of the iceberg – a mere fraction of those that have been and are being written.