Kari Gislason

While it may not be a novel’s main purpose, certainly one of its pleasures can lie in how it witnesses the history of the form itself. All novels reveal something of the genealogy from which they emerge, their debt to past traditions and ways of storytelling. Rather as is the case with families, sometimes the further back you go the more striking the resemblance becomes.

Robert Hillman’s Joyful is most immediately a nineteenth-century novel, a detailed work that portrays an entire, sealed world of complex and ultimately connected storylines. The cultural setting is realised in a wonderfully rich Victorian style. Extended studies of social manners, quotes from journals and letters, and the aligning of characters with their passions for books, poetry and music, clothing, all produce a social world that is not only vivid but also ripe for commentary and debate. In this way, the work can stand as a tribute to the likes of Trollope and Hardy, and the combination of the personal and political that they perfected.

Italo Calvino once observed that the ideal condition for a writer is ‘close to anonymity’, adding that ‘the more the author’s figure invades the field, the more the world he portrays empties’. These comments about anonymity were made during an interview on Swiss television, no less. Calvino must have felt his imaginary worlds slipping away as he spoke ...

When Mark Twain arrived in Watsons Bay in 1895, he called out from his ship that he was going to write a book about Australia. ‘I think I ought to start now. You know so much more of a country when you haven’t seen it than when you have. Besides, you don’t get your mind strengthened by contact with ...

However much we may locate the joy of travel in the sudden revelations of a new experience, one of its most enduring pleasures lies in collecting for later. For the collector–traveller, journeys abroad offer an escape from the familiar and, as importantly, a chance to assemble a different kind of education from the one we receive at home, a living textbook shaped by first-hand encounters and the possibility and urgency of adventure.

One way of classifying biographies is to divide them into those that apply their own interpretative framework – be it psychoanalytic, gender-based, socio-historical, and so on – to a given subject and those that aim to meet the subject, on their own terms, or at least in terms that the subject would recognise. There are good and bad things to say about both approaches, but Sue Prideaux’s life of Strindberg (1849–1912) shows that if you get it right, there is nothing quite as satisfying as the latter. Not only does she meet Strindberg on his own ground, but by the close of this extraordinary book you are convinced that, even across the 100 years since his death, Strindberg would seek out his latest biographer as a friend.