Andrea Goldsmith

Andrea Goldsmith, in her seventh novel, plunges once more into a world of characters whose ideas and relationships swirl and churn around a psychological trigger. This time it is memory in all its errant, bewitching manifestations. Memory plays tricks as the old adage goes, and for the novel’s main characters it is the trick of emersion in an idealised but ruptured past.

Two sisters (Zoe and Nina) live next door to two brothers (Ramsay and Sean) in a Melbourne suburban court of Howard Arkley ordinariness, where they are free to roam, play, and imagine at will, form a gang and dream up adventures under the care of relaxed and indulgent parents. It is an enchanted childhood enhanced by music-making, at which Zoe, Sean, and particularly Ramsay excel. While Nina loves music, she never masters an instrument. This sets her apart.

During 2007 I became enamoured of podcasting. The Canadian Broadcasting Commission’s Big Ideas and Elaine Wachtel’s Writers and Company were among my favourite programs and I would podcast these each week, irrespective of the topic or the interviewee. Thus I heard Alberto Manguel’s CBC Massey Lectures, a series of five wonderful presentations collectively titled ‘The City of Words’. It was not simply the content of these lectures; Manguel’s delivery is lyrical, intimate, andante and almost shockingly seductive. These lectures worked on me as reading does, drawing me in and then spinning me out to numerous other readings. Some of the books prompted by the lectures were rereadings, such as Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and Borges’s stories others were new to me, and some, including Gilgamesh, had long been on my must-read list. Manguel provided the necessary nudge.

What’s the use,’ asks Alice before wandering away from her uncommunicative sister, ‘of a book without pictures or conversations?’ Grown-up readers can probably manage without the former, but it is unusual to find a novel with as little dialogue in it as Andrea Goldsmith’s Reunion, or one that so deliberately ignores the common injunction ‘Show, don’t tell.’

Yet Goldsmith has several books to her credit, including The Prosperous Thief, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2002, and for several years taught creative writing at Deakin University. Presumably she knows what she is doing. In point of fact, not only does this flouting of conventional rules come over as quite refreshing, it is in any case justified by the demands of the narrative.

A Family History of Smoking, the most recent of Andrew Riemer’s memoirs, focuses on the world of his great-grandparents, his grandparents, and his parents. In so doing, it traces Hungary from the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire and its collapse at the end of the Great War, on through the brief springtime of the 1930s and the chaos of displacement and destruction of World War II. It is a rich and rewarding memoir.

Three years ago in these pages, I wrote about the difficulties of exploring and understanding acts of human terror and brutality such as those that occurred during the Holocaust in Nazi Germany (‘Homer and the Holocaust’, ABR, November 2002). I noted that a certain etiquette had prevailed in the ever-expanding Holocaust canon, one that tended to privilege factual accounts – memoirs, histories, personal testimonies from the survivors themselves – over more imaginative treatments; how the former were regarded as more ‘morally responsible’. I noted, too, the paucity of material from German sources and how this had skewed understanding of the Holocaust. I argued that ‘sixty years on, there is something lacking in the way we have sought to understand the Holocaust; something in the approach that seems to confirm what we already know rather than illuminate the new’. What was required, I suggested, was more, not less, imaginative work.

Iris Murdoch’s first book of philosophy, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, was published in 1953 when she was thirty-four years old. A year later, Under the Net appeared, her first published novel. If not for the war and its aftermath – Murdoch worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration for two years – her first published works may have appeared earlier. And yet the years 1944 to 1953 provided fertile ground for the novelist. It was the period of her deep attachments with the great writers and philosophers (Raymond Queneau, Elias Canetti and Franz Steiner) who would seed many of the fictional characters in her future work. She wrote several novels before Under the Net – four or six, she was never quite clear. And for more than forty years she wrote prodigiously: twenty-six novels, five works of philosophy, several plays and a collection of poetry.

'History always emphasises terminal events,’ Albert Speer observed bitterly to his American interrogators just after the end of the war, according to Antony Beevor in Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (2002). Few events in recent history were more terminal than the Holocaust, it might be urged. Yet the singularity of that ‘terminus’ has been questioned in recent years ... 

I am reading Robert Fagles’s translation of the Iliad (Penguin, $26pb, 0 14 027536 3). Achilles is sulking in his ships while the Trojans and Achaeans slaughter each other. Choreographing the moves with astonishing wilfulness are the self-serving, all-powerful gods. The brilliance of the poetry keeps the brutality always in the high beam. Every spear thrust, every disembowelment, every spillage of brains, every spurt of blood is revealed with lyrical clarity. The violence is unrelenting; this poem is almost unbearable.