Review

Dennis Altman’s new novel, Death in the Sauna, begins with, yes, a death in a sauna. The respected virologist Pomfrey Lister is found lifeless in a London gay venue, days before a major AIDS conference that he is chairing. His naked corpse is transported home and a death certificatepronouncing natural causes is produced. This hasty denouement is ostensibly aimed at concealing the salacious nature of Lister’s demise, which might overshadow both the conference and his legacy.

The potential for Australian literature to address the history of colonised people in this country and elsewhere is of great consequence. New perspectives not only rewrite history to include ‘herstory’, but also reconsider what we believe and broaden our view of ourselves as active contributors to our collective and individual past. A spate of recent books has attempted to do this: Anita Heiss’s Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray: River of Dreams (2021) and Geraldine Brooks’s Horse (2022) are two that come to mind.

Melanie Saward, a Bigambul and Wakka Wakka writer living in Tulmur (Ipswich), is a fresh and insightful storyteller. Her first Young Adult novel, Burn (Affirm Press, $34.99 pb, 296 pp), is a tumultuous narrative about an Aboriginal youth, Andrew, and his obsession with lighting fires. It has a touch of Trent Dalton’s Brisbane struggle street, but the story draws us into psychological observation in Goori Andy’s cries for help and his longing for his parent’s attention. The novel begins with a bushfire lit by an unknown arsonist, in which a boy dies. This tragedy frames the narrative as we go on the journey with Andy and his mates Trent and Doug, wild teenagers who like to smoke dope and eat at McDonald’s. They are innocents in a world that ignores them as the author interrogates relationships between the lads and several irresistible young females.

Elena Ferrante declared Elsa Morante’s début novel Menzogna e sortilegio (1948) ‘fundamental’ to her literary formation. The novel is now available unabridged in English for the first time as Lies and Sorcery, in a brilliant translation by Jenny McPhee.

Like Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, Morante’s novel begins with the loss of the woman closest to the narrator, propelling a first-person epic to recover a shared past. However, this novel has little of the visceral realism that Ferrante has become famous for in the Anglophone world. It is instead a delirious mix of ghost story, romantic epic, and Künstlerroman that remains almost as difficult to categorise today as when it was published at the height of Italian neorealism.

Through the gates of a kindergarten in Melbourne’s inner-north, a man strikes up a conversation with two little girls, which violently alters the course of their lives. The bolder of the pair, a child who ‘runs at life’, goes with him. The meeker stays behind, becoming the serial predator’s only known survivor.

Max Easton’s second novel begins in early 2022 when an ensemble of thirty-somethings loosely connected through mutual friends and subcultural scenes decide to lease a four-bedroom share house. The house in Sydney has its flaws. Mould colonies grow on ceilings and walls in a ‘rich spectrum’, aided by a series of La Niña weather events. Situated just off a main road and surrounded by high-rise apartment buildings, the property offers little in the way of privacy. The fascia gutters are blocked by champagne corks popped from the apartment balconies above.

What does it mean to narrate the humiliations of ageing, loneliness, and death in the first person when your background is working class? For such a writer, saying ‘I’ is political too, said Annie Ernaux in her Nobel Prize lecture, because it involves claiming an authority rarely granted in other parts of life. Ernaux uses her incendiary, affectless ‘I’ not just to recount one individual experience, but to transcend it. For ‘I’ to speak to the reader it must become, she says, ‘transpersonal’.

In Working: Researching, interviewing, writing, published in 2019, the great biographer Robert A. Caro tells of his writing methods and the lengths to which he goes to gain a better understanding of his subject. Reading Tim McNamara’s Paul and Paula, I was reminded of Caro’s way of research and writing and of his determination to place himself in his subject’s milieu. McNamara spent considerable time in Vienna researching Paul and Paula, stalking the streets for clues, and his efforts show. He writes with verve about the book’s three main characters – Paul Kurz and his wife, Paula, and the city of Vienna, before and during the Nazi occupation – and his search to uncover and understand their stories.

The smallest, dullest link in the fateful chain binding John F. Kennedy and his assassin Lee Harvey Oswald is that both men were big fans of the fictional spy James Bond. In the immediate aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, when investigators searched the tiny boarding room in Dallas that Oswald rented for $8 per week, they found the four Bond books that citizen Oswald had assiduously borrowed from a local library.

One of these was From Russia with Love, Ian Fleming’s novel from 1957, which has at its heart the cat-and-mouse relationship between Bond and the crack SMERSH assassin Donovan Grant, who is tasked and determined to take out Bond, and with him the agency he represents.

In 1957, Michael Benthall, a director at the Old Vic, took a chance on a young woman straight out of drama school, casting her as Ophelia in a production of Hamlet starring John Neville and Coral Browne. I was lucky enough to be in the audience with my mother when Judi Dench, a velvet-voiced cherub in virginal white, made her début. An infinite variety of stage and film performances have gone by since then, but none has erased the memory of her stage presence that night.