Review

When you are languishing in a prison cell, you can become intensely creative. John Bunyan, Jean Genet, and Miguel de Cervantes used their time to write classic works of literature. On the eve of his hanging, Louis D’Ascoyne Mazzini wrote a memoir to explain why he set out to murder eight people. Louis is fictional, the anti-hero of the film Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).

Part one of Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls – a homage to magical realism and some of its greatest proponents, including Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez – presents an unnamed narrator searching for truth in a fantastical library behind a guarded wall. The two further parts also explore the idea of the inhabitation of libraries. Indeed, this will be familiar to Murakami’s readers, for he has written about libraries before. For instance, in his children’s novella The Strange Library (1983) a schoolboy is imprisoned in the under-ground maze of his local library and told to memorise books.

Sally Rooney inspires large quantities of what is known these days as ‘discourse’. This dubious honour is a result of her becoming very successful at a very young age, a misfortune compounded by being cast as a generational representative. She is a ‘millennial’, apparently. Her popularity has not gone unpunished. There have been several high-profile attempts to cut her reputation down to size. She is also Irish, which has led to her being scorned as a privileged white woman, the Irish people famously knowing nothing of suffering and oppression.

Michel Houellebecq’s novels cover a lot of territory. His approach to writing is a totalising one, offering a complex picture of contemporary society, often including its prehistory and its near or sometimes distant future. Annihilation (first published in 2022 and now available in English) bears all the hallmarks of this approach: a description of a sad dinner where two government ministers discuss their failed marriages is interrupted by digressions on the current state of the European car market and the impact of recent constitutional reforms on the upcoming presidential elections; a hospital bedside visit is punctuated by reflections on the French medical system and a comparative analysis of Tibetan and Zen Buddhism. The novel features typical Houellebecqian characters who, in the author’s words, have reached a ‘kind of standardised despair’ and ‘the deterioration of reasons for living’.

In this important book, Colin Golvan – a distinguished senior counsel – recounts some of the most notorious cases of copyright abuses endured by Indigenous artists, their work taken without permission, attribution, or adequate compensation and used on objects ranging from souvenir T-shirts to expensive carpets. An intellectual property barrister, Golvan leads us through the intricacies of these cases with lawyerly precision and poise, championing the role of copyright in bringing justice to Indigenous people.

Michael Visontay’s Noble Fragments is about second chances, serendipitous connections, and simple good fortune. At its heart is a young man fleeing bankruptcy in Hungary who reinvents himself as a rare-book dealer in the United States and his impact on the Visontay family, which had survived the horrors of the Holocaust to become a classic example of Central European migration to Australia after World War II. The book deftly links an intriguing story about bibliophiles and the addiction that is rare-book collecting with the poignant tale of a traumatised son’s devotion to his father.

Helen Garner has death on her mind. In recent decades, it has permeated her work in fascinating and unexpected ways. There is her novel The Spare Room (2008), which is about a woman’s struggles to care for a dying friend held hostage to dangerous delusions; This House of Grief (2014), a true-crime book about a devasting act of filicide; and, in her most recent volume of diaries, How to End a Story (2021), an account of the death of her marriage to the novelist Murray Bail.

Readers who loved James Rebanks’s autobiographical The Shepherd’s Life: A tale of the Lake District (2015) – a bestseller at home and abroad, translated into sixteen languages, and winner of numerous prizes – will welcome this new work. His first book tells the story of a recalcitrant youth who wants nothing more than to leave school early to work on his parents’ and grandparents’ farm. Eventually, he resumes his studies, which take him to Oxford, and begins his richly evocative account of his life as a Lake District shepherd. What magnifies and deepens this apparently simple narrative and surely accounts for its universal imaginative appeal is that the work he describes is the continuation of a tradition going back more than a thousand years. Against the backdrop of the Cumbrian massif, daily human and animal preoccupations, hardships, and rewards – subject as they are to season, weather, and geography – have changed little since the last Ice Age retreated. In 2017, the Lake District was given World Heritage status, in part for its continuous agro-pastoral traditions.

Lech Blaine. Lucky bastard. Great stories fall in his lap, like butterflies alighting on an open hand. All he has to do is write them up.

Oh, that it were so easy. Earning great material, in Blaine’s case, has meant more travails in three decades than some people endure in a lifetime. Surviving a horrific motor accident that claimed three young lives and profoundly damaged several others was grist for his first memoir, Car Crash (2021). The early death of his father, his mother’s decline through neurodegenerative illness, and managing a Bundaberg motel when his peers were attending university have produced compelling essays.

Raimond Gaita is quoted in his close friend Robert Manne’s new memoir as saying that a ‘dispassionate judgement is not one which is uninformed by feeling, but one which is undistorted by feeling’. That distinction points to one of the many attractive qualities of A Political Memoir: Intellectual combat in the Cold War and the culture wars.