AustLit

Framing her reading by Moira Gatens' examination of difference (in Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality) Jaobs explores the three novels, seeing that in each of them, identity, sexual and familial love, and cross-cultural encounters are interrogated and complicated by an inability to forget the past which over-shadows the business of survival. The refutation of history's domination in these texts represents a powerful re-claiming and re-articulation of identity and individual prerogatives, speaking of reasons to live and love, beyond narrowly prescriptive collectivising narratives of time, people or place.