AustLit
Alternative title:
ABR
Issue Details:
First known date:
2017...
no.
392
June-July
2017
of
Australian Book Review
est. 1961
Australian Book Review
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Latest Issues
Notes
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Only literary material within AustLit's scope individually indexed. Other material in this issue includes:
- Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness' by Arundhati Roy
- Varun Ghosh reviews 'Audacity: How Barack Obama defied his critics and created a legacy that will prevail' by Jonathan Chait and 'We Are The Change We Seek: The speeches of Barack Obama' edited by E.J. Dionne Jr and Joy-Ann Reid
- Robin Gerster reviews 'Việt Nam: A History from earliest times to the present' by Ben Kiernan
- Letter from Paris by Phoebe Weston-Evans
- Kevin Rabalais reviews 'Between Them: Remembering my parents' by Richard Ford
- Miriam Cosic reviews 'A Perfidious Distortion of History: The Versailles Peace Treaty and the success of the Nazis' by Jürgen Tampke
- Dilan Gunawardana reviews 'Such a Lovely Little War: Saigon 1961-63' by Marcelino Truong, translated by David Homel
- Simon Caterson reviews 'Code Breakers: Inside the shadow world of signals intelligence in Australia’s two Bletchley Parks' by Craig Collie
- Johanna Leggatt reviews 'Depends What You Mean By Extremist: Going rogue with Australian deplorables' by John Safran
- John Rickard reviews 'Of Labour and Liberty: Distributism in Victoria 1891–1966' by Race Mathews
- Michael Winkler reviews 'The Mind of the Islamic State' by Robert Manne
- Danielle Clode reviews 'Wild Man From Borneo: A cultural history of the Orangutan' by Robert Cribb, Helen Gilbert, and Helen Tiffen
- Paul Hetherington reviews 'Some Things to Place in a Coffin' by Bill Manhire
- Diana Glenn reviews 'Claretta: Mussolini’s last lover' by R.J.B. Bosworth
- Adrian Walsh reviews 'The Production of Money: How to break the power of bankers' by Ann Pettifor
- David McInnis reviews 'Shakespeare’s cinema of love: A study in genre and influence' by R.S. White
- Michael Morley reviews 'The Political Orchestra: the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics during the Third Reich' by Fritz Trümpi, translated by Kenneth Kronenberg
- David Latham reviews 'A Pure Drop: The life and legacy of Jeff Buckley' by Jeff Apter
- Sophie Knezic reviews 'Biennials, Triennials, and documenta: The exhibitions that created contemporary art' by Charles Green and Anthony Gardner
Contents
* Contents derived from the 2017 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
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Salt Blood,
single work
podcast
'It is quiet and cool and dark blue. At this depth the pressure on my body is double what it is at the surface: my heartbeat has slowed, blood has started to withdraw from my extremities and move into the space my compressed lungs have created. I am ten metres underwater on a breath-hold dive, suspended at the point of neutral buoyancy where the weight of the water above cancels my body’s natural flotation. I turn head down, straighten my body, kick gently, and begin to fall with the unimpeded gravitational pull to the heart of the Earth.' (Introduction)
- Publisher of the Month with Henry Rosenbloom, single work interview
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'Snake Like Charms' by Amanda Joy and 'The Herring Lass' by Michelle Cahill,
single work
essay
'Michelle Cahill and Amanda Joy have produced two engaging and proficient collections of poetry. In their different ways, each revels in worlds of perception, imagination, and poetic craft.' (Introduction)
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'Like Nothing on This Earth : A Literary History of the Wheatbelt' by Tony Hughes-d’Aeth,
single work
essay
'In his Epilogue to this major study of the West Australian wheatbelt and its writers, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth describes his work. With no ‘exact precedent’ in Australian scholarship, it is ‘best thought of as an amalgam of literary history, literary sociology and literary geography’. To achieve this, Hughes-d’Aeth traces the idea of the wheatbelt through intensive readings of the work of eleven writers. In their writing it is a created place, ‘an entity sustained by human imagination’. The literature captures and records the changes, broadly environmental and social, that have impacted on it.' (Introduction)
- Liked In Prisoni"Walking the streets, reading his books", single work poetry
- Black Door with Snowi"Warm billowing swill of night, I hold you back, I pull you tight.", single work poetry
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'Year of the Orphan' by Daniel Findlay,
single work
essay
'Daniel Findlay’s début novel, Year of the Orphan, contains all the elements apparently necessary for a successful contemporary dystopian novel. It is also a complex, challenging read, which creates a believable and alarming post-apocalyptic future in the Australian outback five hundred years in the future.' (Introduction)
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'The Last Garden' by Eva Hornung,
single work
essay
'The epigraph to the first chapter of Eva Hornung’s The Last Garden speaks of Nebelung, a time of great prosperity, joy, and hope for new life. Over the page, Hornung shatters any sense of well-being with an extraordinary opening sentence: ‘On a mild Nebelung’s afternoon, Matthias Orion, having lived as an exclamation mark in the Wahrheit settlement and as the capital letter at home, killed himself.’ The prose just keeps getting better as Hornung counterpoints the consciousness of a man driven to murder and suicide with the heartbreaking innocence of his unknowing adolescent son, Benedict.' (Introduction)
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'Datsunland' by Stephen Orr,
single work
essay
'Datsunland, a collection of short stories and the latest from Stephen Orr, is in many ways flawed. The collection is uneven: the final (titular) work is a novella previously published in a 2016 issue of Griffith Review, which overwhelms the earlier, shorter stories, exhibiting the depth and nuance which several others lack. The narratives and characters alike at times are underdeveloped, and rely on well-worn tropes of the Australian Gothic. And the return of objects and places through the stories, (most notably the all-boys school Lindisfarne College), which acts to structure the stories in reference to one another, occasionally feels tokenistic or forced. But despite this, the collection works. At its best, the writing is insightful and strangely beautiful. Even at its weaker moments, it is consistently powerful. Orr holds the collection together with an impression of force and linguistic brutality.' (Introduction)
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'No More Boats' by Felicity Castagna,
single work
essay
'No More Boats is Felicity Castagna’s newest work since Small Indiscretions (2011), a collection of short stories, and her award-winning Young Adult novel, The Incredible Here and Now (2013). This versatile writer depicts a plausible community set in Sydney’s inner west in 2001 and an ageing Italian migrant, Antonio Martone, whose life is falling apart and whose crises coincide with the Australian government’s obsession with secure borders. From the book’s first pages, we sense that Martone will soon reach a point of exasperation and will act out his frustrations with a gun. His actions will coincide with the political manipulation of the MV Tampa and the attack on the Twin Towers. What leads to that moment is the heart of this story.' (Introduction)
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'Gravity Well' by Melanie Joosten,
single work
essay
'Gravity Well opens with Carl Sagan’s famous ‘mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’ quote, suggesting themes of astronomy, loneliness, and humanity’s cosmic insignificance. Though I was immediately smitten with the cover design (a nebula-coloured orb, its top and bottom halves depicting mirrored but not identical female silhouettes amid a sea of cosmic black), I worried that the novel might overdo the astronomy analogies. Yet it soon became apparent that Melanie Joosten’s writing is as subtle as it is intelligent. The astral references are frequent but add interest and depth. All appear well-researched, and many – such as the Voyager Golden Records – sent me googling for more.' (Introduction)
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'As the Lonely Fly' by Sara Dowse,
single work
essay
'Sara Dowse is a fine observer of politics and power. Her new novel, As the Lonely Fly, traverses three continents over fifty years and contains a multitude of characters, but its focus is honed in on three sisters, of sorts. While Chekhov’s play of that name is typified by waiting, Dowse’s story is of continuous flux and upheaval. Clara-later-Chava, Manya-later-Marion, and Zipporah flee from Ukraine’s pogrom-soaked landscape to markedly different lands of promise; America and Palestine – known to them as Eretz Israel, the longed for Land of Israel.' (Introduction)
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'This Water : Five Tales' by Beverley Farmer,
single work
essay
'There is a distinct poignancy attached to last things, a sense in which they encapsulate all that has gone before at the same time as they anticipate an end. In the moment of their first manifestation, last things are already haunted by their own absence. This Water: Five tales is the first book by Beverley Farmer to be published since 2005, and has been announced as her last work.' (Introduction)
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'Closing Down' by Sally Abbott,
single work
essay
'Closing Down is about survival and the rituals that allow it; those that keep the fraying edges of life and society together, that stop a relationship disintegrating, that stave off insanity. In her début novel – which won the inaugural Richell Prize for Emerging Writers – Susan Abbott asks: how do you survive when your world is breaking into pieces?' (Introduction)
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'The Fiction of Tim Winton : Earthed and Sacred' by Lyn McCredden,
single work
essay
'Tim Winton is embarrassing to Australian literary critics. It is not that it is impossible to form adequate literary judgements about the nature of his work. It is simply that any judgements one might form seem so totally irrelevant. Winton’s work makes plain a certain disconnect between the interests and imperatives of Australian literary criticism and those of the reading public who buy each of his titles in their hundreds of thousands.' (Introduction)
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'Fragments' by Antigone Kefala and 'A House by the River' by Diane Fahey,
single work
essay
'Antigone Kefala’s Fragments, her fifth book of poems and first since Absence: New and selected poems (1992), is often menaced by the past, like her first collection, The Alien (1973). Here too are some subtly demolishing portraits, as well as buoyant poems such as ‘Metro Cellist’ and the slightly brooding ‘Summer at Derveni’: ‘Afternoon heat / empty of voices / on the foil surface / heads drifting / like heavy ornaments.’ While early work transmuted the impact of her migrations from Romania to Greece to New Zealand to Australia into a pervasive sense of loss, these new poems allude to, rather than relate, such journeys that pass through languages and decades: ‘When they came back / their eyes were scorched / their hands like open wounds / the road, they said, / nothing but fire / no coolness / as they were promised / in the fables’ (‘Pilgrims’ Tales’).' (Introduction)
- Morag Fraser : Critic of the Month, single work interview
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'Finding Nevo' by Nevo Zisin,
single work
essay
'‘Coming out’ stories remain one of the most potent sources for young people to understand their own relationship to sex, gender, and sexuality. Living in a largely heteronormative society, many young people find a place in these stories to validate and challenge their thoughts and experiences. Nevo Zisin’s memoir, written at the age of twenty, covers these areas but also speaks to those living outside sex and gender binaries. In recent years there has been a wealth of resources developed for people who resist such classification, and it has become a burgeoning and popular field in independent publishing. Zisin’s preferred pronouns are ‘they’, ‘them’, and ‘their’. It has been some time since ‘they’ has become the preferred singular pronoun in common English usage, yet many people are still surprised when someone adopts ‘they’ as a singular pronoun.' (Introduction)
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'Griffith Review 55 : State of Hope' Edited by Julianne Schultz and Patrick Allington,
single work
essay
'South Australia remains something of a national contradiction in terms, and this is brought out well in this richly diverse and varied collection of essays and stories. Shifting its focus away from Adelaide to many of South Australia’s older industrial and pre-industrial centres, including Whyalla, Port Augusta, the Riverland, and Clare, Griffith Review’s State of Hope is no tourist guide and does not contain any particularly useful historical overview for those who might want one. However, the editors ask an important question which those living in other states often want to know: what makes South Australia so different? The answers, and there are many, come together piece by piece in the reading of this collection. Few readers will be left unrewarded by at least some of the assembled guests at this particular literary dinner party.' (Introduction)
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Introduction,
single work
criticism
Note: With title: Desert Masterpiece
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 9 Jun 2017 12:56:12
