Fiction

The Memory Artist by Katherine Brabon

Item: The Memory Artist
Author: Felicity Plunkett

by Felicity Plunkett •

August 2016, no. 383

Allen & Unwin $29.99 pb, 300 pp, 9781760292867

Fiction

The Memory Artist by Katherine Brabon

by Felicity Plunkett •

August 2016, no. 383

For Pasha Ivanov, memory is 'a warped wound, with a welt or bruise that had arrived inexplicably late'. As the son of political dissidents in Moscow during Brezhnev's rule, his childhood memories wend between impressions of his mother leaning over the typewriter, her back's incline 'like a mountain, severe and strong', and the activists who gather in their small flat copying banned poems and articles. Among them is the trace of Pasha's absent father and the silence surrounding that absence. As Pasha reaches adulthood, just as Gorbachev with his glasnost or openness arrives, the inheritance of lost history begins to reveal its injuries.

Felicity Plunkett

Felicity Plunkett is a poet and critic. Her latest work, A Kinder Sea, is published by UQP. Her first collection of poetry Vanishing Point (UQP, 2009) won the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Prize and was shortlisted for several other awards. She has a chapbook Seastrands (2011) in Vagabond Press’ Rare Objects series. Felicity was Poetry Editor for University of Queensland Press and edited Thirty Australian Poets (UQP, 2011). She has a PhD from the University of Sydney and her reviews and essays have been widely published in The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Book Review, Sydney Review of Books etc. Her essay ‘Sound Bridge’, a portrait of Indigenous Australian musician Dr G. Yunupingu, was first published in Australian Book Review and anthologised in Best Australian Essays 2015 (Black Inc, ed. Geordie Williamson).