Tag Archives: Novella

More Lies from Richard James Allen

Posted on 13 Oct 2021 | Leave a comment

Richard James Allen, More Lies (interactive Press 2021)

Rae Desmond Jones, poet and one-time mayor of Ashfield, is quoted on the back cover of More Lies saying it was ‘like swallowing a tab spiked with speed – with Raymond Chandler’s spook dealing and watching from the corner’. It’s a clever way to encapsulate the weirdly surreal noir, high-velocity, trippiness of the book, and perhaps there’s a hint of the narrator’s intrinsic unreliability in the inconvenient fact that Rae Jones died four years before the book was published.

It turns out, according to Richard James Allen’s unusually informative Acknowledgements, that though this slim volume can be read and enjoyed in a single sitting, it has been a long time in the making: a first draft was written in the 1990s; a version was performed as a monologue at the 2000 Sydney Writers’ Festival; adaptations for stage and screen were created but never made it to performance. Rae Desmond Jones had plenty of opportunity to read it after all.

In the first of 34 short chapters, the unnamed narrator is strapped to a chair, being forced to keep typing by a ‘divine creature’ to whom he has just made love, and who is now holding a gun to his head. He tells us that he’s been caught up in a planned assassination and a drug-running scheme, that he has to keep typing because the noise provides a cover for his criminal captors. But soon he admits that he’s lying – or perhaps not. Anyhow, his situation changes dramatically, and improbably, and soon he’s typing on a laptop in a jail cell. And so it goes: localities change; characters change names, motives, identities and gender. The narrator is a self-confessed liar caught up in a Kafka-esque nightmare, or is it a Dada-esque dream? Occasionally he breaks into verse. Through all his vicissitudes – sometimes he seems to be in a hard-boiled detective novel, sometimes an episode of Breaking Bad, sometimes a dark existential tract, sometimes a spoken word event – he keeps typing, reasonably sure that none of the other characters will read his text, but not at all sure he can trust the reader – that’s you or me – whom he addresses with deep suspicion.

You can see why I had my doubts about the blurb from Rae Desmond Jones.

Confused? Well, read the book. It won’t clear up your confusion, but it will amuse, and while it’s at it, it may stir up some thinking about the nature of fiction.

The book was launched in a cheerful, well-attended zoom event, where Richard James Allen read the first couple of chapters. You can see a recording at this link.

I’m grateful to Interactive Publications for my complimentary copy.

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November verse 7 & Jeanette Winterson’s Weight

Posted on 11 Nov 2020 | 5 comments 
November verse 7: Pick your myth
Trump's confidence is his Achilles'
heel? He's sulking in his tent.
Freud's Oedipus was doomed to kill his
dad. Camus' Sysiphe was meant
to be heureux. And Jeanette Winter-
son: will Atlas represent her?
Did those old poets know us all,
no life too big, no fate too small?
I dip into the well of fable,
ornament of childhood days,
and find Perseus in the maze.
With Ariadne's thread, he's able
to find his way. But I'm not sure
I'm ready for a minotaur.

This verse was prompted by a piece of US political commentary and by:

Jeanette Winterson, Weight (©2005, Canongate 2018)

Weight is Jeanette Winterson’s contribution to Canongate’s series The Myths. Other titles in the series include Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus, the Scoundrel Christ and Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy.

Weight is a lively retelling of the Greek myth of Atlas, the Titan who was condemned to hold the heavens on his shoulders for eternity. This being Jeanette Winterson, there’s quite a lot of rhapsodic testifying as to the myth’s deeper meanings and its personal significance for the writer.

The retelling focuses on Atlas’s relationship with Heracles, who briefly relieves him of his burden. There’s a bit of rough humour at Heracles’ expense and reflections on their different kinds of strength: Atlas can hold still and Heracles is a man of action. Heracles comes close to stealing the limelight as the narrative follows him to his marriage to Deianeira and his horrible death in the burning shirt of Nessus. But Atlas has his quiet surprises as well, such as when Laika, the astronaut dog, comes into his life.

I confess I didn’t quite follow a lot of the meditation on the myth’s meaning. Something about boundaries and desire, fate and decision. It becomes personal. Jeanette Winterson finds in Atlas an echo of her own adoption story, her ignorance about her birthparents (this was written before Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, where she writes about her birth mother), and her rejection by her adopted mother:

Having no one to carry me, I learned to carry myself.
My girlfriend says I have an Atlas complex.

The task she took on, first as a rejected child and then as a writer, was to create a world of the imagination, a world that she has had to carry as a great weight.

I generally read Jeanette Winterson’s writing with a mixture of irritation and exhilaration. This book was no different. I’m irritated by her (presumably deliberate) false version of the myth that Atlas held up the whole world, when it was the heavens that he had to hold up in the original story. I’m irritated by the crude dick humour around Heracles (though maybe it’s not meant as humour but, even more irritatingly, as a version of male sexuality). I’m irritated by the way the prose sometimes feels like revivalist preaching, whether the subject is scientific cosmology or the pain of not knowing who your parents are. I’m irritated by occasional lapses of logic. But – and this is why I kept reading and am glad I did – I’m exhilarated by the way the book yokes together a scientific understanding of the universe with images from Ancient Greek myth (Laika nestling in Atlas’ shoulder, for example) and, in the final pages, I’m exhilarated at the notion of Atlas (and so possibly Jeanette) laying down his (and possibly her) burden.

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Simon Leys’ Death of Napoleon

Posted on 30 Dec 2019 | 2 comments

Simon Leys, The Death of Napoleon, translatd by Patricia Clancy and the author (Black Inc 2006)

This book imagines that Napoleon escaped from exile in St Helena through a brilliantly complex conspiracy, and that the man who died on he island was an impersonator. Napoleon starts out planning to contact his loyal followers and regain power, but – not a spoiler really – that doesn’t happen. So what does a great military strategist and statesman do when deprived of his army and any possibility of rebuilding his power base? What effect does it have on him to take on the identity of a lowly corporal? Can his skills be turned to any other purpose, and what happens if he tries to reveal his true identity? It’s an intriguing and entertaining premise, and it unfolds in precisely realised, sometimes very funny, scenes and crystal-clear language.

This is the only work of fiction by Belgian-Australian scholar Simon Leys (real name Pierre Ryckmans), who is best known, I think, as a learned commentator on Chinese politics and culture. Written in 1967 in his native French it was first published as La mort de Napoléon in 1986. The English translation is copyright 1991, and this edition, which includes a fabulously taciturn Author’s Afterword, was published in 2006.

L’Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises de Belgique, of which Ryckmans was a member, comments on its website (link here) that this book ‘seems to have found its true mother tongue in its English translation’. Certainly the cool, ironic yet still respectful narrative voice feels comfortably Australian. Even leaving aside the twist in the title – Napoleon’s death is announced fairly early in the narrative, but our hero, the real Napoleon, lives on – the story has plenty of clever twists and surprises, always justified by character, and the final tragicomic movement should be predictable but wasn’t predicted by me.

I’ve only read one other of Simon Leys’ books – not fiction, but written with a novelist’s attention to the telling detail and the emotional force of events: The Wreck of the Batavia and Prosper (my blog post here). I wonder if we should regret that he didn’t write more fiction.

My copy of The Death of Napoleon is on loan from my Book Club.

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Suneeta Peres da Costa’s Saudade

Posted on 1 Jun 2018 | 7 comments

Suneeta Peres da Costa, Saudade (Giramondo 2018)

saudade.jpg

I recently spent a wonderful couple of weeks in Portugal, visiting countless galleries and museums, walking the Caminho Portuguès, being blown away by the neolithic site at Evora. It’s a great place to visit. One cause for unease, though, was that at least in touristy circles conversation about Portugal’s past generally glossed over or completely ignored unsavoury topics: we heard quite a lot about the Age of Discovery, and very little about colonisation and slavery.

Saudade, a novella in Giramondo’s Shorts series (whose previous titles include Luke Carman’s An Elegant Young Man and Michael Mohammed Ahmed’s The Tribe), offers a welcome counterpoint to that silence and evasion. It is set in Angola, beginning in 1961, the year the Angolan War of Liberation began, and ending with the declaration of Angolan independence in 1975. It’s not a fictionalised account of the struggle of those years, but the coming of age story whose protagonist-narrator Maria-Cristina, born in Angola to Goanese parent, is three years old in 1961. The war and the process of decolonisation are rarely foregrounded: they affects the characters’ lives profoundly but remain in the background.

For the benefit of readers who know as little about Portuguese culture as I did three months ago, saudade is a pretty much untranslatable term described by Wikipedia as ‘a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves.’ Wikipedia continues, ‘Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never return.’ It’s an emotion that looms large in Portuguese culture dating back, we were told on a walking tour of Lisbon, to the collective feeling of mourning and messianic hopes following the death of King Sebastian in a sixteenth century battle in northern Africa.

In this novella, it hovers over everything: it could refer to the yearning for independence (our protagonist earns the wrath of a ‘teacher from Coimbra’* when she repeats what she has heard on the radio and calls Bartolomeu Dias ‘the invader’); the general sense of dislocation (Portuguese is the official language, but the parents sometimes speak their mother tongue of Konkani, while African characters speak Creole or Kimbundu, which the protagonist doesn’t understand); a sense of not having a place in the world (which is explicit in the case of the young man who is Maria-Cristina’s first real sexual partner); and perhaps in a more diffuse way in a general sense that Maria-Cristina is telling her story as a way of reaching for some understanding of her past, some grounding.

Christos Tsiolkas said on radio recently that when he was young he read for pleasure, but came to understand that sometimes one could read to be challenged. I think of Saudade as a challenging book. Each of its eleven chapters is printed without paragraph breaks, and only sometimes do ellipses indicate where a paragraph would be in a conventionally laid out narrative. We learn Maria-Cristina’s name in Chapter 8. The elements of Angolan geography and history are not glossed. Chapter 2 begins:

The Brazilian mutineers from the Santa Maria did not get to the harbour of Luanda. Captain Galvâo did not start a revolution. None of the prisoners that escaped from the Sâo Paulo penitentiary tapped on our door, entreating us to harbour him as a fugitive. Yet in the days after the revolt at Baixa de Cassanje, there was a telex to say that a client of Papá’s, a German cotton-farm owner, had been killed in a northern reprisal.

That’s surely an invitation and a challenge to readers who (like me) don’t know anything about Angolan history to do a bit of research. I now know that three separate events in January and February 1961 marked the beginning of the Angolan War of Liberation.

Responding to invitations like this (and there are many throughout the book) seems to be a necessary part of reading the book: they ground the narrative in a particular time. At times they more questions than they answer. For example Maria-Cristina has an unsettling sexual encounter with a soldier in a movie theatre, and names the film they are watching. It’s La chinoise. Well, that’s a movie made by Jean-Luc Godard in 1967. If you allow a couple of years for dubbing and shipping, Maria-Cristina is probably about 11 years old, and by doing this calculation we realise that it’s a story of child sex abuse. That’s not how Maria-Cristina narrates it, though. The question I couldn’t shake, though, was: what self-respecting Angolan soldier would go to see a French movie about a house full of students arguing about Maoist politics? I’m not saying this was a mistake. It’s clearly deliberate, and it’s part of the generally unsettling nature of the book. Nothing is simple, nothing is straightforward in a complex world the colonised are fighting back and searching for solid ground.

Saudade is the sixth book I’ve read for the 2018 Australian Women Writers Challenge. I am very grateful to Giramondo for my review copy.

• A city in Portugal

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Ramapada Chowdhury’s Second Encounter

Posted on 17 Feb 2017 | Leave a comment

Ramapada Chowdhury, Second Encounter (Je Jekhane Danriye 1972, translation by Swapna Dutta,  Niyogi Books 2016)

9385285440.jpgIt’s easy for English-speaking readers to forget that a vast amount of writing exists in the world independent of the English language: neither written in English nor translated into it. In India, I’m told, there are a number of languages in which novels can find much greater audiences than the one we Anglophones arrogantly assume to be universal.

Bengali is one of those languages. It’s the language of the great filmmaker Satyajit Ray and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, and we Anglophones are fortunate enough to have had at lest some of their work translated for us. (Satyajit Ray was one of the names my oldest brother used to conjure up the great world of Culture when he came home from his first term at University – along with Tolstoy, Tchaikowsky and Kurosawa.)

jejakhanedanriye.jpgRamapada Chowdhury’s 1972 novella Je Jekhane Danriye is a gem that would have remained invisible to non-Bengali readers if Swapna Dutta’s love for it hadn’t led her to make it available to us. A film version was released in 1974, but there’s very little information about it on IMDB. The poster for the film seriously misrepresents the book.

It’s a story of young love revisited: two people, each married with a child, meet up again after a twenty-year separation. In their teenage years they had lived near each other and developed a mutual infatuation, which was never consummated in so much as a direct exchange of words. Each of them has cherished the thrilling memory and found solace in it in the midst of humdrum reality, and now it seems a spark has been reignited.

But this is not a Mills and Boon romance. The emotional weight of the book hangs on the question of what twenty years can mean in a person’s life. Not only do individuals mature and make choices, but social mores change: while twenty years previously young people could only gaze raptly at each other from their restricted lives, the current teenagers roam the countryside together day and night. Both main characters agonise over the meaning of their rekindled feelings, for themselves, for each other, for their spouses, and for their children (who are engaged in a teenage romance of their own).

By serendipity, I’ve been reading the poems of C P Cavafy at the same time as Second Encounter. I plan to write a little bit about Cavafy in a couple of days, but for now I just want to refer to the many poems in which a fifty year old man looks back yearningly to objects of desire from his 20s. Cavafy’s poems never test nostalgic desire against any kind of reality. He would probably have rejected Second Encounter‘s meditations as appallingly anti-romantic, but I can’t help feeling he might have been a happier human if he had read it and taken its wisdom on board.

In case you’re interested in learning more: I came across a documentary on Ramapada Chowdhury on YouTube, made, I think, by one of his grandchildren. Now in his 90s, he mentions this little book, which the English subtitles call Where One Stands, and says that it was influenced by ‘One Day after 20 Years’, a poem by Bengali poet Jibanananda Das (there’s a poem at that link called ‘After 25 Years’, which may be the one he means).

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China Miéville’s This Census Taker

Posted on 27 Aug 2016 | Leave a comment

China Miéville, This Census Taker (Picador 2016)

1509812148.jpgA friend who know I’d enjoyed China Miéville’s The City and The City  lent me this very short book. When I asked him if he was recommending it he half shrugged, ‘It’s got a child narrator.’ coming from him, that meant ‘No, but you might.’

What can I say? It’s beautifully written, it’s hard to put down, and even though you realise part way through the book that you’re unlikely ever to know what’s really going on you’re compelled to read to the end.

It begins with the boy – sometimes ‘I’, sometimes ‘he’ – running down from his home on the hillside to tell people in the nearby village that he has seen his mother killing his father. Then he believes on reflection that he has seen his father killing his mother, and persuades everyone else that this is what happened, even though no one can find any proof. And indeed his mother has disappeared leaving a handwritten farewell note, though no one is sure of her handwriting, so as with almost everything in the boy’s experience we don’t know if the note is what it seems. He is made to go back to their ramshackle, isolated house to live with his father,  a maker of keys that may or may not have magical properties, who is loving to his son but every now and then seems to enter a weird state and beat an animal – and possibly the occasional person – to a pulp.

I’ve read a couple of reviews that seem to believe the boy is correct about his father, and that he is finally rescued by a heroic census-taker. I’m not so sure. All I’m sure of is that the boy understands very little of what is happening in the world, and we understand only a little more. There may be an underlying story that we can put together from what he tells us – like the hidden story in Joseph Furphy’s Such Is Life perhaps. Maybe it’s a puzzle that can be pieced together by someone cleverer than I am. There’s an acrostic towards the end, though what it signifies is completely ambiguous.

So this is a very readable, tantalising and grim story that doesn’t quite tell itself: something like The Trial meets What Maisie Knew. Did I mention it’s very short? If it had been much longer, this level of uncertainty would have been exasperating. As it is, I loved it.

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