Review

So here we are. A house in Dosson, a village ‘almost joined to’ Treviso, which in turn is not far at all from Venice. A casa aperta, an open house, one to which friends and colleagues of the owner, a well-regarded musician, are drawn, not only by their confidence that a simple permesso will ensure welcome but because the owner ‘believes implicitly in the civilising effects of hospitality’. The maestro wants his friend to write a book. It will be about ‘music and art and culture and my friends and food and where I live’. He loves to cook and obliges the appointed scribe with a list of kitchen accoutrements, which will cover all occasions. It is admirably short and begins with ‘3 pots (one big one for 10 people, one medium one for 6, one little one for 2)’. Thoreau’s central explanation of his furniture comes to mind as a rejoinder to a casa affollata: ‘I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.’ The book will include recipes, the writer decides, and it does. She tells the reader, ‘Maybe the book will get sorted out, maybe not.’

Helga Griffin (née Girschik), conscious that memories differ and that her own is not infallible, is careful to respect the other people implicated in her story. Aware of her responsibility to them, she is nonetheless committed to breaking what she calls the Schweigen, the long silence. Sing Me That Lovely Song Again is highly apposite in its account of the damaging experience of internment. During the years of World War II, the Girschik family were incarcerated as enemy aliens in a camp at Tatura, in northern Victoria. They were displaced persons. The adults were fated to spend what should have been highly productive years trapped in a frustrating stasis that was to have long-term effects. For the children, this experience must have been formative. How were they to understand their confinement and the distress of the adults? This resonates strongly when we consider the ‘illegal aliens’ or refugees, many of them children, recently locked up in detention centres in this country. Although Griffin does not make this parallel explicit, it is implicit in the way her narrative situates her family’s experience within a larger historical context.

Debra Dean’s novel, The Madonnas of Leningrad, is an exploration of memory and demonstrates how that most mysterious of faculties can both save and fail us. Utilising parallel narratives, Dean tells the story of Marina, a guide at Leningrad’s Hermitage Museum in 1941. As the German army advances, Marina and her colleagues labour to remove and conceal precious works of art. Later, the employees of the Hermitage and their families live in the museum basement, and try to survive the harsh winter with limited provisions.

Both a scholarly resource and a good read, Castieau’s diaries, effectively edited, enliven and enrich our sense of colonial Melbourne. Castieau’s modest standing adds to the diaries’ significance as they record the dailiness of life, combining the public and the private: work, life around town and ‘the domestic minutiae of everyday life captured in his relentless record’. What makes Castieau exceptional are the span and detail of the diaries: ‘His workaday life does not obscure the more important issues of colonial life – getting on, enjoying oneself, establishing a reputation, being part of the world.’

Glen St John Barclay and Caroline Turner’s Humanities Research Centre offers the first historical overview of this prestigious Australian National University-based institution. Their book is an extremely dense yet remarkably comprehensive and well-written homage to one of the key international sites of scholarly research in the humanities.

Sit down to read this book: it may give you a severe case of déjà vu. At the Typeface is an anthology of articles originally published in the Victorian Society of Editors’ newsletter between 1970 and early 2001 (since then the newsletters have been appearing online at www.socedvic.org). And, no surprises, the issues that trouble editors today have a long provenance: editors are underpaid and undervalued; marketing departments have more sway than editorial ones; publishers keep costs down by a reliance on freelancers; neophyte editors find it difficult to gain practical experience when there are few in-house positions.

The story is told of how Theodor Herzl and Sigmund Freud once lived, unbeknown to each other, on the same street in Vienna. Thus did the lives of the father of modern political Zionism and the father of psychoanalysis, for one tantalising moment, almost intersect ... Herzl, a man of action in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, who sought to transport Jews from the dangers of Diasporan life to the safety of a state all their own; and Freud, a thinker whose intellectual achievements were born of the Diasporan experience and who resolutely rejected the overtures of the Zionists to join them in Palestine. Herzl, who famously and passionately declared, ‘If you will, it is no dream’ – a motto adopted by the early Zionist movement – and Freud, who even more famously devised the tools for coolly interpreting dreams. This story, recounted in The Divided Self (and attributed to an Israeli ambassador to London in the 1980s), encapsulates the main purpose of David Goldberg’s spirited survey of the Jewish condition: namely, to defend the superiority of Diasporan Jewish life over its Zionist alternative.

What shapes might poets use to house and craft their various perceptions? Given the absence of a narrative framework, particularly within lyric poetry, what are the possible images and contents through which poetry might weave its insights, and thereby build a tangible structure able to communicate the ephemera of experience and idea? In her most recent collection of poems, M.T.C. Cronin, surely one of the most significant poets writing in Australia today, works explicitly within the artifice of a given structure – a series of poems, titled for alphabetically organised flowers, each with its own specific dedication.

Peter Porter, in his introduction to John Kinsella’s new collection, notes that ‘we are all familiar with the surface details of American life. Kinsella does not have to footnote his poem: we recognise his instances immediately … We all speak American.’ Given that Kinsella now lives and works in the United States, Porter also identifies ‘the disillusion at seeing a great exemplar close up’ as one likely catalyst behind the poetic polemic that constitutes this book. Yet it is the surface, the broad impressionistic sweep that we in Australia have absorbed over decades of exposure to American life in our newspapers, magazines, television programmes and popular music, with which Kinsella often engages. One senses that the poet, whether up close or at a distance, would find much about the United States with which to take issue. Nevertheless, his engagement with, and rupturing of, surface in this long poem, or sequence of poems, seems apt. Kinsella smatters the text with allusions to film (ranging from the Marx brothers to Carrie), popular music (George Gershwin to Jefferson Airplane) and numerous other trappings of American life. In doing so, he takes popular culture’s immersion in artifice and turns it against itself.