Claudia Hyles

Shira Nayman’s first novel is full of echoes and resonances. There may even be an echo of Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader. Set at more or less the same time, The Listener has the same immediate backdrop: World War II, its atrocities and aftermath.

Two years after the end of the war, Dr Henry Harrison – the narrator and listener of the piece – encounters a man who will become his most memorable case. Dr Harrison is the director and chief psychiatrist of Shadowlands, a private mental hospital located at White Plains, not far from New York. The exclusive institution is grand, more of a country club than an asylum, with beautiful buildings, extensive woods and formal gardens. Inmates, though voluntarily committed, are known as ‘patients’, not the more egalitarian ‘clients’ or euphemistic ‘guests’ of the present day. Many of them are suffering from war neurosis, a condition that Dr Harrison has been treating for many years. During the war he was required to treat mentally disturbed or shell-shocked officers and to send them back, supposedly cured, to the front. This was to ‘staunch the wastage’, according to the army. Over time he has come to doubt the efficacy of this treatment. By researching complex cases such as that of Bertram Reiner, he seeks to refine his methods.

Piano lessons have been a source of joy or frustration for generations of Australians. By the early twentieth century, there was a piano for every three or four Australians. Skill at the pianoforte was an accomplishment that bourgeois parents desired for their children, especially daughters.

For Gabrielle Carey, the sight of her mother’s bare feet, soles facing, was almost unbearable. Naked and defenceless, she had never seen them from that angle before. Other parts of a loved one’s anatomy could produce such a feeling – the nape of a beloved neck or an innocent elbow – but on this occasion it was the old feet projecting from the elderly and suddenly compromised body, strapped to a trolley, awaiting a CT scan. The daughter ‘didn’t quite know what to do’, which turns out to be a revealing remark. She wonders if she should stroke her arm or not, but before offering any such support she is asked to leave the cubicle.

Strange Museums is a strange book, a kind of fugue whose first theme is introduced by the poem ‘Tortures’ by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. It is a lament of evasion, uncertainty, the reservoir of pain that is the body and the inability to escape. It is enlarged da capo with the author’s discovery of a plaque commemorating the day in 1942 when Jews were rounded up and shot in the town of Piatrk w Trybunalski.

It is the tale of a most unusual journey made through Poland by performance artist and writer Fiona McGregor from May to July 2006. With A A Wojak, her performance partner and former lover, the journey is focused around an international action art festival where the two women, as senVoodoo, perform their confronting work, Arterial. It involves fear and shock, with the pain and risk endured by the artists calculated to take them to the edge. Even in description, Arterial draws a gasp.