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'An Australian writer and a Mexican scientist fall in love reading great Latin American books aloud. But it takes a decade of journeys across the region, together and apart, for them to learn to read each other.
Requiem with Yellow Butterflies is a love story and travel memoir that unfolds against the turbulent backdrop of Latin America in the 2000s. It takes us on a 1200-kilometre question-mark shaped loop through the newly socialist republics of the “pink tide,” to a requiem mass for Mexico’s disappeared and eventually back to Australia.
Through evocative, unexpected pairings of southern hemisphere places and authors – Jose María Arguedas’s Andes and Judith Wright’s Cooloola coast, the Argentine pampa and the central Queensland brigalow country – the book explores distinct but parallel postcolonial literary traditions, the disordering state of love and the strangeness of coming home.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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James Halford, Requiem with Yellow Butterflies
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 79 no. 1 2019; (p. 173-177)
— Review of Requiem with Yellow Butterflies 2019 single work novel 'In the 1870s, the American novelist Henry James invented the “inter - national novel” as a kind of storytelling in which he played the manners of one nationality against those of another and recorded the result. In 2010, the Japan-born English novelist Kazuo Ishiguro asserted: “I am a writer who wishes to write international novels. What is an ‘international’ novel? I believe it to be one, quite simply, that contains a vision of life that is of importance to people of varied backgrounds around the world” (Ishiguro n.p.). How did things get so much less interesting?' (Introduction) -
Sliding Vistas
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , June - July no. 412 2019; (p. 55)
— Review of Requiem with Yellow Butterflies 2019 single work novel'Requiem with Yellow Butterflies begins, aptly, with a death. Sitting at his office in Brisbane, the author receives news that Gabriel García Márquez has died at his home in Mexico. Across the world, there is a mushrooming of obituaries. Garlands of yellow butterflies are draped from trees and buildings; outside Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes, paper butterflies rain down like confetti. From Madrid, Elena Poniatowska eulogises: Gabo ‘gave wings to Latin America. And it is this great flight that surrounds us today and makes flowers grow in our heads.’' (Publication summary)
-
Sliding Vistas
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , June - July no. 412 2019; (p. 55)
— Review of Requiem with Yellow Butterflies 2019 single work novel'Requiem with Yellow Butterflies begins, aptly, with a death. Sitting at his office in Brisbane, the author receives news that Gabriel García Márquez has died at his home in Mexico. Across the world, there is a mushrooming of obituaries. Garlands of yellow butterflies are draped from trees and buildings; outside Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes, paper butterflies rain down like confetti. From Madrid, Elena Poniatowska eulogises: Gabo ‘gave wings to Latin America. And it is this great flight that surrounds us today and makes flowers grow in our heads.’' (Publication summary)
-
James Halford, Requiem with Yellow Butterflies
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 79 no. 1 2019; (p. 173-177)
— Review of Requiem with Yellow Butterflies 2019 single work novel 'In the 1870s, the American novelist Henry James invented the “inter - national novel” as a kind of storytelling in which he played the manners of one nationality against those of another and recorded the result. In 2010, the Japan-born English novelist Kazuo Ishiguro asserted: “I am a writer who wishes to write international novels. What is an ‘international’ novel? I believe it to be one, quite simply, that contains a vision of life that is of importance to people of varied backgrounds around the world” (Ishiguro n.p.). How did things get so much less interesting?' (Introduction)
Awards
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cMexico,cCentral America, Americas,
- Queensland,
- 2000
