AustLit

‘She wanted to photograph time: everything lost to time, and everything returned by it.

'Anna grows up in a third-storey unit in Parramatta with her adoptive Russian mother Sophia. When her teacher Miss Glass gives her a Box Brownie camera, small acts of observation coupled with the art of photography become her escape. On visiting the suburb of Castle Hill with her schoolfriend Lisaveta she falls into a seductive world of gardens and orchards.

'At the Thompson’s place she embarks on a mission to photograph the orchard by night and day. It is there she meets Friedrich, an older man of German origin but from the Soviet Union, who lives in a shed on the property. She eventually learns that he was once a celebrated writer, his ambitions destroyed by the war.

'As events unfold Anna realises that her connections to the orchard and to Friedrich are deeper than she ever could have imagined. The mysteries and secrets of the past unravel in the most shocking, tender and unexpected of ways. 

'Set in Sydney, and in Russia, Past Life is a glorious novel about the various ways the gifts and traumas of the past play out in the present. It is the affecting story of relationships across generations and William Lane’s most hauntingly beautiful work to date.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Small Forest is a collection of nine short stories. The stories are linked by recurring concerns, such as the return of the repressed. The effects of music and the nature of relationships between generations are other concerns. In ‘Vivien’s Fingers’ a new parent tries to learn the piano, in an attempt to maintain an inner life separate from her young child. ‘Children’s Hospital’ depicts a ward of children suffering anorexia, while ‘Uncle Dan’s War’ explores the effects of post-traumatic stress on a returned POW. The protagonists are varied in these stories – and variously haunted.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'William Lane's disarming new novel, The Word, brilliantly satirises the ways in which we use language to define our lives. Kenric is an oddball advertising eccentric who possesses an unusual gift for language. The brands he names, sell. Yet he comes to believe advertising uses language too cynically. He is inspired by Maria to abandon the corporate world and establish a small residential community called The Word. The idealistic community relocates from Pittwater to a warehouse in industrial Mount Druitt, gathering about it others concerned with the misuse of language.

'The Word is both a charming ensemble piece of unforgettable characters, and an astute and humorous exploration of the ways in language beguiles, creates connections, but also misleads. Lane understands the human tendency to seek answers and directions in the unlikeliest of individuals but is happy to show us the folly of doing so. As such the novel parallels current world trends, while evoking with candour Sydney's watery beauty and suburban harshness.'  (Publication summary)

‘Shoals of fsh sucked the last oxygen from the shallows, and cross-hatched the channel in rippling, reefng river-muscle. Pink clouds of galahs out-screeched even cicada song. And around that bend in the water, the bridge, the town and the railway did not exist. A jet descended towards the metropolis – a city not so distant that it could not put a glow on the ridge at night. The plane was lost from sight, and the past followed.’ In the spirit of Emily Bitto’s The Strays and Favel Parret’s Past the Shallows William Lane’s third novel The Salamanders is an achingly beautiful love story. Outside Sydney Arthur lives in a hut by the river, the detritus of suburban life gradually encroaching. When Rosie, the adopted daughter of his fathers’ second wife returns from England to visit. their time together raises childhood memories of their father Peregrine, a famous and controversial artist, and what happened at a holiday by the ocean years ago. With poetic power Lane explores how art can become life, how we as adults can never really escape the past and the influences of our parents, and how we might embrace the beauty of the moment as we journey towards reconciliation. ' (Publication summary)

'This essay explores repetition, in both content and technique, in Christina Stead’s novel, The Man Who Loved Children. I indicate how the Pollit family is shown to repeat itself and societal structures through language, ceremony, and family folklore. Content merges with form, I argue, when so many aspects of the novel’s plot and characterisation are repeated, either in pairings or oppositions. I assume a degree of difference is implicit in repetition, and consider the reading effects deriving from this inherent tension in repetition in the novel – as dramatised in the children’s resistance at times to replicating their father and mother, for example. In regard technique and repetition, I focus on Stead’s practice of presenting the same material in ways both particular and general, which I argue is a form of repetition hitherto largely unconsidered by narrative theorists. This presentation of the same material in different ways – the particular and the general – is powerful because it allows Stead to deploy both the advantages of the particular, which is good for dramatising, and the advantages of the general, which is effective for creating atmosphere and indicating larger connections and allusions, for instance to myth, allegory, and legend. I suggest that some reading effects of these repetitions include the production in the novel of meaning and form. I also consider how the repetitions enable Stead to show the return of the repressed, and acts of repression. The essay concludes by considering whether Stead’s blending of the particular and general might have implications for the classification of the genre of The Man Who Loved Children, and other Stead works in which repetition occurs in similar ways.'

Source: Abstract.

'On the outskirts of Sydney, a boys' boarding school prides itself on the horses it keeps. David, a gifted working class student, receives a scholarship to attend. At the same time Gregory, a new master, is appointed. Both soon learn, from their different perspectives, that what is said bears little relation to what is done. The school isolates itself from the outside world and over the course of several months of rain, the atmosphere inside the school becomes increasingly lawless and violent. School buildings slip away in floods. Underlying differences between various parties in the school turn into open conflicts, and the school community begins breaking up. These tensions are focussed in the conflict between two masters, Val and Mr C. These two men loathe one another, and both recruit boys in the war of ideas they are waging. The Horses seems unique in Australian literature, exploring with great subtlety the complex way in which class can perpetuate itself through the education of its children. Reminiscent of J. G. Ballard’s High Rise, set in an apartment complex designed to isolate its residents from the outside world, and Patrick White’s writing in its satirical impulse leavened by compassion for the individual, Lane’s new novel is never anything less than startlingly fresh and original.' (Publication summary)

'With specific reference to Virgil’s Eclogues, Paul Alpers argues that ‘the poetics of pastoral can tell us something about poetics in general’ (The Singer of the Eclogues 6). He equates song with voice when he discusses aspects of the poetics of voice in Virgilian pastoral, including, ‘self-representation, self-reflexiveness, and the community implied by the song’ (6). In this essay, I explore the poetics of voice in a modern novel, Christina Stead’s Cotters’ England (1966), and highlight links between voice in Stead’s novel and the Eclogues. The discussion of voice leads to a second point, that Stead’s writing treats the particular and the general in ways that recall Virgil’s pastoral poems. In the course of this argument, I also discuss the treatment of the idyllic, and the contrasts and tensions between city and country, in Cotters’ England.'

Source: Abstract.

'Hauntingly beautiful and told with remarkable clarity, Over the Water is the story of an Australian outsider who finds teaching work in Bandung, a city in Java. Seduced by the sights, sounds, and magic of Indonesia, Joe finds himself unwittingly drawn into the lives of three women. Firstly he rents a room in fellow teacher Lisa's house, and discovers that she has a small harem of Indonesian boys living with her. Then there is Danu, a Javanese beauty, who says she is trying to escape an arranged marriage. Danu and Joe find common ground in seeking aspects of themselves 'over the water' - for Danu this means the West, for Joe it means the East.

'Joe also feels a connection with Babette, a reclusive English woman who lives in a crumbling Dutch villa. She is an old friend of Joe's elder brother, Emile, who once lived in Bandung. Her relationship with Emile has long ceased, but Joe makes a remarkable discovery. As Over the Water unfolds, Joe discovers that his identity is not only fragile, it is disturbingly arbitrary. Based at least in part on the author's experiences of living in Indonesia, this compelling debut is the quintessential novel about East and West, and how our dreams manifest themselves.' (Publication summary)

'This paper argues that Christina Stead's short story, 'The Marionettist,' a story from her 1934 collection, The Salzburg Tales, is felt as uncanny. This paper is in part a response to a 2003 paper by Michael Ackland, which traces the debt 'The Marionettist' owes to E.T.A. Hoffmann's writing. This is a debt which, Ackland argues, does not extend to producing uncanny effects. This paper takes a different view, arguing that not only is 'The Marionettist' felt as uncanny, but that it derives its uncanny effects from various sources. Some of these sources correspond to the different classes of uncanny identified by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay, 'The Uncanny.' These classes are the repressed, the surmounted, and the death drive. My reading of Stead's story emphasizes Freud's suggestion that uncanny effects are dependent on timeless, or archaic, processes. In making this point a distinction is made between the content of the processes (for example, what is repressed), and the processes themselves (the act of repressing), and it is argued that only the content is historically susceptible. The paper proposes that this complicates a tendency by recent writers on the uncanny to limit the uncanny to modernity.' (Publication abstract)