Archive
At first, you find the claim that you resemble your parents implausible. Later, you find it unflattering. But there are moments when you glimpse someone in a mirror and only belatedly recognise yourself. These are the moments when you realise – it is in equal parts chastening and reassuring – that if you are moving through time as an image of your parents’ past, their image is waiting for you in mirrors: they are the ghosts that haunt your future, as it were.
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Most of a lifetime ago, I read of an exhibit at the Bell Telephone headquarters. It consisted of a box from which, at the turning of a switch, a hand emerged. The hand turned off the switch and returned to its box. If this struck me as sinister, it was because the gambit seemed emblematic of human perversity – of a proneness to self-annulment ...
... (read more)Rachel Buchanan reviews 'In My Skin: A memoir' by Kate Holden
Melbourne woman Kate Holden’s memoir of being a heroin user and of working as a prostitute to fund her habit opens with a quote from Virgil: ‘To descend into hell is easy. But to return – what work, what a labour it is!’ The quote is at odds with the life story Holden constructs in this brave, explicit, and extremely well-written book ...
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A laughing man, according to Flaubert, is stronger than a suffering one. But as Craig Sherborne’s extraordinary new memoir of childhood and youth shows, the distinction isn’t that simple. There is much to laugh at in Hoi Polloi, but this is also a book suffused with pain and suffering ...
... (read more)The kookaburra begets the sacred kingfisher
who begets the rainbow bee-eater
who begets the firetailed finch
who begets the forty-spotted pardalote
who begets the damsel fly
who begets the jewelled beetle
who begets a pentangle of reflected light
that falls on a colony of dust mites
... (read more)(from Peter Henry Lepus in ‘Iraq, 2003’)
Are all Arabs Muslims? Peter Henry asks.
Nobody answers him.
She’s got dark hair that stops
just above her shoulders. Turns up at the ends.
She’s very slim, Max says.
He’s talking to Hamid
about Weasel Smith’s girlfriend,
whom he is hoping to meet
somewhere south of Baghdad.
... (read more)In the park outside my hotel in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio, there is a splendid statue in bronze of President James Garfield, modelled in 1885 by one Charles H. Niehaus and cast in Rome. The pose is oratorical and forms a convenient hub for several witty panhandlers. Somebody has lodged a Panasonic logo high up inside the twentieth president’s lapel. The Cincinnati Club is down the block, a huge post-Albertian palazzo that would have made the Gonzagas blush. For a wedding, floor-to-ceiling arrangements of white and pink roses and several truckloads of lily of the valley effervesce upstairs amid chandeliers, while jungly orchids creep down the front hall banisters – all clearly visible from the other side of the street. Obviously, they have invited only the immediate country. Around the corner is a hat shop from another era, with the elevated thrones of a separate shoe-shine department running down one side, and a fully operational hat-steamer snorting among stacks of boxes behind the wide counter opposite. I find myself being fitted for a beautiful pork-pie hat by Biltmore of Canada.
... (read more)Michael Williams reviews ‘Griffith Review 8: People like us’ edited by Julianne Schultz, ‘Heat 9: Star dust’ edited by Ivor Indyk and ‘Island No. 100’ edited by David Owen
Hands up if you subscribe to an Australian journal. Keep them up if you subscribe to more than one. More than two? If you read them? Cover to cover? Half? More than two articles an issue? Hands up if you look forward to them. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something that makes me terribly tired when faced with the prospect of Australia’s literary and political journals. I stand in front of the (small) shelf made available for them in my local bookshop and try to muster up the enthusiasm I might feel when faced with a shelf of new books; try to feel excited at the prospect of reading them. I have a couple of subscriptions, and when they arrive, I make a point of tearing the envelope open immediately to have a look. And yet I still have to push past a barrier of resistance to sit and actually read them.
... (read more)Morry Schwartz reviews ‘The Accidental Developer: The fascinating rise to the top of Mirvac founder Henry Pollack’ by Henry Pollack
Henry Pollack, the founder of Mirvac, one of Australia’s largest and most successful property development companies, started life in Lodz, a booming Polish textile town. Born in 1932, he belonged to a well-to-do family and became a bookish boy. He writes about his youth with vivid openness, describing not only events but his feelings, thoughts and youthful ideals. With this memoir, written towards the end of his life, Pollack comes close to being the writer he dreamt of becoming as a boy. Memories of his childhood have a fidelity and clarity that may well be the result of a life lopped and restarted at the age of sixteen; those early years are preserved as if in a time capsule.
... (read more)Nicholas Jose reviews ‘Ghost Tide’ By Yo Yo and translated by Ben Carrdus
A friend called me from Beijing recently to ask advice about her novel. She had played a prominent part in the avant-garde art movement associated with the protests at Tiananmen in 1989, and had achieved notoriety in both art and life. Fifteen years on, she wanted to give her own account of events, choosing the form of a roman-à-clef that would be published first in English. But now the Hong Kong agent helping to prepare her text wanted changes to enhance its appeal to foreign publishers. The agent wanted to tart it up, and my friend was unhappy.
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