Andrea Goldsmith
Andrea Goldsmith is a Melbourne-based novelist, reviewer and essayist. Her literary essays have appeared in Heat, Meanjin, Australian Book Review, Best Australian Essays, as well as numerou ...
What We Knew: Terror, mass murder and everyday life in Nazi Germany by Eric Johnson and Karl Heinz Reuband
by Andrea Goldsmith •
From a tiny corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch edited by Gillian Dooley
by Andrea Goldsmith •
I am reading Robert Fagles’s translation of the Iliad (Penguin, $26pb, 0 14 027536 3). Achilles is sulking in his ships while the Trojans and Achaeans slaughter each other. Choreographing the moves with astonishing wilfulness are the self-serving, all-powerful gods. The brilliance of the poetry keeps the brutality always in the high beam. Every spear thrust, every disembowelment, every spillage of brains, every spurt of blood is revealed with lyrical clarity. The violence is unrelenting; this poem is almost unbearable.
... (read more)