AustLit

'The bag of drugs is sitting untouched on the kitchen bench beside the cans of diced tomatoes and chickpeas I’d earlier quarantined. They – cans not drugs – may be useful, I think, although in less apocalyptic times, I might prefer to soak dried chickpeas to make hummus or chana masala. The chickpea glut follows a 9pm masked assault of Harris Farm Leichhardt and the fact the ex has recently turned up unannounced with a care package of more canned pulses, organic brown rice and greens than I have room to store. An Amma devotee never known to hug spontaneously, he’d stood at the mandated distance of one Kylie Minogue on the other side of my gate (less gateless gate than gate that never shuts properly, the broken latch, I observed as he handed me the box, one of the ten thousand things now unlikely to be repaired…).' (Introduction)

'A coming-of-age story set in Angola in the period leading up to the colony’s independence, Saudade focuses on a Goan immigrant family caught between complicity in Portuguese rule, and their dependence on the Angolans who are their servants. The title (saudade means ‘melancholy’ in Portuguese) speaks to the longing for homeland that haunts its characters, and especially the young girl who is the book’s protagonist and narrator. Suneeta Peres da Costa’s novella captures with intense lyricism the difficult relationship between the daughter and her mother, and the ways in which their intimate world opens up questions about domestic violence, the legacies of Portuguese slavery and the end of empire. The young woman’s intellectual awakening unfolds into a growing awareness of the lies of colonialism, and the violent political ruptures that ultimately lead to her father’s death, and their exile.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

This piece focuses on the events leading to the death of German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin. Benjamin took his own life whilst detained in a hotel in the border town of Port Bou after his attempt to flee occupied France was thwarted by border police. The authorities had intended to send the group Benjamin travelled with to a concentration camp. However, the order was overturned in the morning following his suicide and Benjamin's fellow refugees were allowed free passage into Spain. There is also reference to a series of radio scripts for children that Benjamin broadcast during the early 1930s when he worked for the new radio stations of Berlin and Frankfurt. The scripts were lost, presumed destroyed, until ten years after his death.

Source: ABC website, www.abc.net.au (Sighted: 30/05/2007)