The cream white pain of a girl-woman’s skin, fleshed up and ready for scarring. The smirched recurring dreams of parents caught in their own traps. Claustrophobic love, ‘grubby and slippery and desperate’ (258). The First Floor Ladies Restroom only a temporary escape.
This gruesome witchy tale made me want to hide my cauldron. Or seek the needled poppet that makes my joints stiff and sore. Sparse writing and deep historical acuity makes current gender relations seem louse-ridden and dangerously power-laden. No Samantha in sight.
Proof of the power of the short story. Each vignette carefully traces over the bruises left by teenage vulnerability, showing the destructive power of choice bound by the contingencies in family, finances and friends. Easy to read, a long way from light.
Of its time and place with wisps of early delights (my own with P. G. Wodehouse) but privilege only lasts so long. Rich or poor, we all die. Memorable injunction to ‘practice’ the ‘remembrance of death’ in order to live with intensity.
Deep dive into the Merri and Yarra. Boys I would have worked to befriend and river I would have swum in. Emotive writing, water under change. Swirling flow of an ancestral serpent spitting out the chest-puffing of capital and welcoming the good-hearted.
Traipsing through this museum a hard slog. The narrator’s obsessive love makes the theory of mimetic desire real. A dizzying doubling reflexivity. Read compulsively and reluctantly in patches, taking a breather with other less needy works. Journey done. Cup of tea required.
The Fever of Animals (Miles Allinson 2015) is a clever book but despite that, it drew me in through my cautious love for the surrealists and the way Allinson criss-crosses the fine lines between fiction and fact, study and practice, readers and writers.
A Guide to Berlin (Gail Jones, 2015), after Vladimir Nabokov’s so-named short story, is best for the word at its core: propinquity, attraction through proximity. The idea of speak-memory is its challenge for readers and for writers. Life story lies as unavoidable joys.
Had me at the first paragraph. Got to love an angry honest strong woman. Massud tells the story as if Nora’s done over but who knows? Artists are predators. That’s what they do. NB: Nora (Gnawer) is a fine teacher of children.
The conceptualisation and production of ‘écriture matière’ in this text is breathtaking. Eades takes readers into the ‘glittering abyss’ that includes the breathtaking entry of two boys into this world. Cixous and Irigaray as poets as well as critics. Inspired.
