tag:theconversation.com,2011:/uk/topics/fiction-1908/articlesFiction – The Conversation2024-03-20T19:03:44Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2252722024-03-20T19:03:44Z2024-03-20T19:03:44ZGabriel García Márquez’s last novel is a moving testament to his genius<p><a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/03/07/ten-years-without-gabriel-garcia-marquez-an-oral-history/">Gabriel García Márquez</a> (1927-2014) – affectionately known as “Gabo” – started his career as a journalist, but is famous for the novels and short stories that earned him the <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1982/summary/">Nobel Prize for Literature</a> in 1982. </p>
<p>Alongside Peruvian author <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2010/vargas_llosa/biographical/">Mario Vargas Llosa</a> and the Mexican <a href="https://achievement.org/achiever/carlos-fuentes/">Carlos Fuentes</a>, he was the best-known member of the triumvirate that started the boom in Latin American literature in the late 1960s. He popularised the style that came to be known as “magical realism”, influencing later authors such as <a href="https://www.isabelallende.com/en">Isabel Allende</a> and <a href="https://www.salmanrushdie.com/">Salman Rushdie</a>. </p>
<p>His novel <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/one-hundred-years-of-solitude-9780241968581">One Hundred Years of Solitude</a> has sold more than 30 million copies and has been translated into 37 languages. He is one of the most translated Spanish-language authors in the world, alongside Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, and the author of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes.</p>
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<p><em>Review: Until August – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, translated by Anne McLean (Viking)</em></p>
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<p>News about Márquez’s unpublished novel has been making headlines for close to a year. Posthumously published novels can be contentious. They tend to come in four categories.</p>
<p>Some are unfinished or incomplete. These are either fragmentary works, like Vladimir Nabokov’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-original-of-laura-9780141191164">The Original of Laura</a>, or substantial works that were never fully revised to the author’s satisfaction. Franz Kafka’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/amerika-9780241372586">Amerika</a>, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-trial-9780241678893">The Trial</a> and <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-castle-9780241678916">The Castle</a> are famous examples of unfinished, posthumously published novels.</p>
<p>Some are unfinished but partially complete. In this case, we have sections that were fully revised by the author to their satisfaction, but not a full draft. Charles Dickens’ final novel <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-mystery-of-edwin-drood-9781409075257">The Mystery of Edwin Drood</a> falls into this category. When Dickens died in 1870, he had finished and fully revised six out of twelve chapters.</p>
<p>Occasionally, posthumously published books are finished and complete. E.M. Forster wrote <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/maurice-9780141441139">Maurice</a>, his novel about homosexual love, in 1914. He revised it to his satisfaction, but then decided not to publish. He was afraid of legal repercussions due to the attitudes against homosexuality at the time. The novel was published in 1971, the year after his death.</p>
<p>Then there are novels that are finished but unrevised. A full draft exists, but one that we know required further revisions by the author. J.R.R. Tolkien’s <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9780007523221/the-silmarillion/">The Silmarillion</a>, for example, was written after The Hobbit, but was at first rejected. This resulted in Tolkien writing The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Silmarillion was eventually revised, edited and published by Tolkien’s son, Christopher Tolkien, four years after his father’s death.</p>
<p>Marquez’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/until-august-9780241686355">Until August</a> falls into this last category. It is a complete, but unfinished work that Márquez was not able to fully revise to his satisfaction. The novel has been edited by Cristóbal Pera, who also edited Márquez’s memoir, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/living-to-tell-the-tale-9780241968772">Living to Tell the Tale</a>. The published version is based on Márquez’s fifth and last draft, incorporating some fragments from earlier drafts. </p>
<p>It is important to keep this in mind as we read the novel, as well as the reasons why it was not fully revised.</p>
<h2>Literary rumours</h2>
<p>There had been rumours about the existence of an unpublished Márquez novel since March 1999, when the author read a chapter of Until August at the Casa América Madrid, during that year’s forum for the Spanish Society of Authors and Publishers. Three days later, the Spanish newspaper El País published the chapter, which was later translated into English for The New Yorker. </p>
<p>In 2003, another fragment of Until August came to light. It was published as a short story in the Colombian magazine Cambio (owned by Márquez) with the title The Night of the Eclipse. </p>
<p>After that, silence. For a long time, it appeared the rumours had been precisely that, nothing but rumours, until August 2023, when Penguin Random House confirmed the existence of the novel and its publication date in 2024, the ten year anniversary of Márquez’s death. The publication date is doubly significant: the book came out in Spanish on March 6 – his birthday.</p>
<p>Márquez was a perfectionist. He revised his novels meticulously, rewrote them over and over, within an inch of their literary lives. His indisputable masterpiece, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-autumn-of-the-patriarch-9780141917252">Autumn of the Patriarch</a>, took him 17 years. </p>
<p>This is why his children, Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha, now in charge of their father’s literary estate, were at first uncomfortable with publishing Until August. In the preface to the novel, they share their father’s opinion about it: “This
book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.” </p>
<p>As the brothers point out, however, Until August was their father’s “last effort to carry on creating”. In 1999, Márquez was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. Shortly after, in 2002, he was diagnosed with dementia. As his health deteriorated, his writing suffered. Until August was composed during this time.</p>
<p>The “novel” is really a novella. Scarcely 100 pages long, it is divided into six chapters organised around the main character, Ana Magdalena Bach. Ana Magdalena is 46 years old. She is named after Johann Sebastian Bach’s second wife and, like her namesake, she is married to a musician. Her husband of 27 years, Domenico Amarís, is the director of the local conservatory. </p>
<p>Ana Magdalena’s mother died eight years prior to the start of the book. Her last wish was to be buried on a Caribbean island. Every year on August 16, the anniversary of her mother’s death, Ana Magdalena embarks on the one-day journey to lay flowers at her grave.</p>
<p>On her eighth trip to the island, Ana Magdalena meets a man and has sex with him. It is tempting at this point to assume that the book will be about Ana Magdalena’s affair with this man, finding true love, yearning romantically throughout the year to meet him in August. But that’s not it. After that first encounter, Ana Magdalena makes a point every year of finding a new man to sleep with on August 16. </p>
<p>But the book is not about her sexual liberation either. We are expressly told that after almost three decades together, Ana Magdalena and her husband still have a strong and emotionally fulfilling marriage, as well as a steamy sex life involving all manner of kinky escapades that one might associate with much younger couples. </p>
<p>The anonymity of the island allows other elements of Ana Magdalena’s identity to come to the fore and to change her in different ways. Her sexual experiences are diverse. One encounter is with a man who assumes she is a sex worker and, to her great indignation, leaves 20 dollars behind in her copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Another, a hurricane in bed, turns out to be a criminal. Then there are visits to the island when, much to her frustration, nothing happens. </p>
<p>Interestingly, none of the men Ana Magdalena sleeps with is given a name. They are
anonymous, making her the undisputed protagonist and subject of these encounters.</p>
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<p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-magical-realism-51481">Explainer: magical realism</a>
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<h2>Writing against adversity</h2>
<p>Until August glimmers with Márquez’s genius. The narrative voice is enthralling, the plot is cleverly creative. The characters are complex, contradictory and engaging. </p>
<p>Most astonishing is Márquez’s poetic prose, which has been fluently translated by Anna McLean. The cadences of his sentences continue to hit like a hammer to the heart. Take the following passage before Ana Magdalena’s first sexual encounter:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>After the second drink she felt that the brandy had met up with the gin in some corner of her heart, and she had to concentrate in order not to lose her head. The music ended at eleven and the band was only waiting for them to leave so they could close. She knew him by then as if she had always lived with him. She knew he was clean, impeccably dressed, with inexpressive hands accentuated by the natural shine of his fingernails, and with a good and cowardly heart.</p>
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<p>Until August is not a magical realist novel, so don’t expect one. It isn’t <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/leaf-storm-9780241968765">Leaf Storm</a> or <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/chronicle-of-a-death-foretold-9780241968628">Chronicle of a Death Foretold</a> – astonishing novellas and masterpieces of the form, written at the height of Márquez’s creative powers. </p>
<p>It is, however, a captivating book, and a testimony to the challenges Márquez was working to overcome when he wrote it. Books do not exist in a vacuum, they are the product of the circumstances in which they are written. Consequently, Until August is not Márquez’s best work. There are minor contradictions in the plot, some unnecessary repetitions, and a lack of clarity in a couple of passages. The ending is abrupt. It comes with a nice twist that could have been beautifully executed, but it isn’t, so the novel does not have the resolution it deserves. </p>
<p>And yet this is a hell of a book, particularly when we consider Márquez wrote it with one metaphorical hand tied behind his back.</p>
<p>In her Nobel lecture <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1991/gordimer/lecture/">Writing and Being</a>, South African author Nadine Gordimer mentions Márquez’s political commitment to writing. She summarises his views in one sentence: “When it comes down to it, the writer’s duty, his revolutionary duty if you like, is to write well.” </p>
<p>In the face of battle, the writer writes; in the face of illness, he did too. Until
August is the fruit of that labour against adversity, a moving testament of Márquez’s love form and commitment to literature.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-don-quixote-the-worlds-first-modern-novel-and-one-of-the-best-94097">Guide to the classics: Don Quixote, the world's first modern novel – and one of the best</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/225272/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gabriel Garcia Ochoa does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Until August is the fruit of Gabriel García Márquez’s labour against adversity, a moving testament of his love for and commitment to literature.Gabriel Garcia Ochoa, Global Studies, Translation and Comparative Literature, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2254582024-03-18T02:48:35Z2024-03-18T02:48:35ZVanity, money and ‘angry masculine impastos’: Liam Pieper’s Appreciation is a mordant tale of a tragically flawed artist<p>A nuanced exploration of the value and personal cost of art-making runs through Melbourne writer Liam Pieper’s jaunty new satirical novel <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/198119002-appreciation">Appreciation</a>.</p>
<p>Set in the near present, the novel is about Oli – a gay painter from the country who has learned to capitalise on this fact in public appearances – while also reflecting on “toxic masculinity” in a vague, rote-learned way. Oli paints over-sized, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Michel_Basquiat">Basquiat</a>-inspired paintings, with “angry masculine impastos” and “rough impressionist wheatfields”. They have names in an Aussie battler idiom: “Daffo”, or “Thresher”.</p>
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<p><em>Review: Appreciation – Liam Pieper (Penguin)</em></p>
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<p>In the outer orbit of Oli’s universe lurks a flock of art “appreciators”. They are portrayed by Pieper as more interested in the long-term appreciating value of the works they’re bidding on than their artistic merits.</p>
<p>The struggle for artistic survival is the main conundrum at the heart of this mordant romp. Artists compete for a modest elite of buyers who in turn, despite their tastes (or lack of them), hold the keys to the wealth and enduring relevance of a select few (Oli being one of them).</p>
<p>Appreciation is Pieper’s fourth novel, (he has also <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/12/liam-pieper-celebrity-ghost-writer-author-bestselling-book">ghostwritten bestsellers</a>). His first, The Toymaker, a work of historical fiction, won the <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-toymaker-9780143784623">Christina Stead fiction award</a>. His third, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/52016160">Sweetness and Light</a>, deals with similar themes to Appreciation, including drug abuse, relationship breakdown, and an examinination of how larger systemic forces underpin personal relationships and the myths we make about ourselves.</p>
<h2>Meeting the artist</h2>
<p>Appreciation opens with a postmodern meta-reflection on the nature of story, before introducing our hero.</p>
<p>Oli has “just enough distinct elements to him”. He is in his early 40s. He drives a Toyota Hilux. He is a little too cavalier about his health, his life, and those around him. He has an incredible tolerance to recreational drugs and alcohol. Despite his recklessness, Oli is good-looking enough that nobody “has ever told him that the story of how he got his tattoo is not interesting”.</p>
<p>As Pieper writes, Oli</p>
<blockquote>
<p>has a way of shuffling into the room like a very old dog, turning his attention on you, and in doing so lighting up your day.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yet Oli is painfully conceited. At the start of the novel, he gazes at himself in the mirror, in a scene evoking the Baroque painter Caravaggio’s Narcissus. Like the painting, in which Narcissus is entranced by his own reflection, the novel continues in this self-regarding loop, with Oli embarking on a journey of scrutinising his own image.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/who-was-narcissus-216353">Who was Narcissus?</a>
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<p>Oli quickly trades his reflection in the mirror for perusing his social media platforms. As he scrolls, he harvests jolts of validation from followers who’ve deluded him into thinking “somewhere out there, he is loved”.</p>
<p>Several pages later, we discover how deep-seated Oli’s insecurities are when – despite his success, wealth and endless baggies (of cocaine) – he confesses his favourite sensation is being watched. Oli has no shortage of unlikable or even ugly qualities. Still, he does not eclipse the unlikability of Ottessa Moshfegh’s unnamed protagonist in My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), a young woman who tries to chemically sleep for a year.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/my-year-of-rest-and-relaxation-sad-girl-fetishism-or-cuttingly-funny-feminist-satire-188471">My Year of Rest and Relaxation: 'sad-girl' fetishism or 'cuttingly funny' feminist satire?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<p>There is something to be said for Pieper’s exploration, in this novel, of the value of ugliness in contemporary art and its ability to challenge our existing conceptions of what we consider “good”. However, throughout the work, mentions of Oli’s art and art-making emerge as afterthoughts. This echoes the sense that his rise to fame has been less about his paintings, and more about personal brand-building.</p>
<p>Oli has forfeited so much – and received so much – for his artistic success he can no longer comprehend the true shape of what’s on the easel, or in the mirror before him.</p>
<h2>Irony</h2>
<p>Oli’s world is populated by two kinds of characters. There are those who are profiting off his success and working for him, such as his agent, Anton. And there are those who are trying to profit off his work through “appreciation”, such as buyers or The Paperman: a critic and arts editor of an influential broadsheet newspaper.</p>
<p>Anton, an old drug-dealer-cum-friend, plays a somewhat paternal role in Oli’s life, overseeing nearly all aspects of his livelihood. It is Anton who arranges Oli’s television appearance on a program “beloved by a left-leaning audience for its soothing politics”, which ultimately leads to his downfall.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581545/original/file-20240313-26-a337ji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The cover of Appreciation" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581545/original/file-20240313-26-a337ji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581545/original/file-20240313-26-a337ji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581545/original/file-20240313-26-a337ji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581545/original/file-20240313-26-a337ji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581545/original/file-20240313-26-a337ji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581545/original/file-20240313-26-a337ji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581545/original/file-20240313-26-a337ji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>As Anton coolly reminds Oli before he gets up on stage under the influence, “too many wealthy and powerful people have invested in Oli over the years, and too deeply, to let him fuck it up now”. However, by this point in the narrative the odds are higher than even Oli himself.</p>
<p>Critic Northrop Frye, in his influential work <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/318116.Anatomy_of_Criticism?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=Z9hRT5eyrB&rank=1">Anatomy of Criticism</a> (1957), defines satire as “militant irony”. Appreciation is peppered with this irony. Giving a speech at the opening night of a rising artist’s first solo exhibition, Oli unabashedly forgets the artist’s name mid-speech. Later, he circumnavigates the after-party searching for the richest guest to schmooze with, whom he ultimately despises for their wealth.</p>
<p>The resounding absurdity in Appreciation is Oli’s painful lack of self-knowledge and awareness (along with the insalubrious behaviours that sustain his art-making). In turn, Oli’s inability to see people for who they are beyond how they can help him reduces the characters in his world to mere outlines. This way of looking at and perceiving others is filtered through the narration. The art collectors are rendered as all parody, and lack any of the idiosyncrasies that give characters true depth and animation.</p>
<p>In Oli’s head, he has assigned the collectors names like “Baron”, who is scornfully described as a “third generation squatter who had inherited enormous wealth and, with it, limitless reserves of white guilt”. </p>
<p>No character – whether it be artist, critic, buyer, those in favour of identity politics or against – is spared from the sharp strikes of Pieper’s sardonic humour.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/were-laughing-in-an-echo-chamber-its-time-to-rethink-satire-95867">We're laughing in an echo chamber: it's time to rethink satire</a>
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<h2>Oli’s tragic flaw</h2>
<p>On a live television panel “broadly themed around an ongoing national identity crisis”, Oli is confronted with what <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13270.Poetics">Aristotle describes</a> as <em>hamartia</em> — a tragic character flaw that leads to their own undoing.</p>
<p>When pressed by an audience member as to whether his work is perpetuating the toxic masculinity he claims it tries to subvert, Oli is exposed as a woke-fraud. Then, after a clumsy tirade by Oli, the same audience member poses the possibility that he might, in fact, not be a very good artist.</p>
<p>After the burn of public humiliation, a disgruntled Anton explains to Oli that the only path towards salvaging his tainted image is to perform the demoralising task of writing a memoir – and, of course, going on a tour to regional schools.</p>
<p>Despite the gags and Oli’s overwhelming unlikability, his journey to try to rectify his self-destruction results in a great digging into his psyche and past. As Oli reconstructs windows of early adolescence with the help of a ghost-writer, a deep tenderness is stumbled upon. </p>
<p>As these past episodes are recounted, a meditation on the early formation of Oli’s artistic identity develops. A new type of character, Rio, also enters the story. Rio is different from those who dominate Oli’s emotionally numb, transactional present. He is wholly unique and effectively drawn – a hum of the real reverberating through the novel and bringing with it emotional subtlety.</p>
<p>However, as Frye reminds us, in satire the “sardonic vision is the seamy side of the tragic vision” where the “sublime and the ridiculous” are “convex and concave of the same dark lens”. As with Appreciation, in the echo of laughter are shards of truth and tragedy: what has been lost, exploited or given up in the pursuit of an uncompromising vision.</p>
<p>Appreciation is a literary page turner with no shortage of dramatic flair. The wry and incisive narration is reminiscent of the theatrical work of Oscar Wilde.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/225458/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Georgia Phillips does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The novel Appreciation is a literary page-turner with no shortage of dramatic flair.Georgia Phillips, Lecturer, Creative Writing, University of AdelaideLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2237692024-03-06T13:23:23Z2024-03-06T13:23:23ZFive fiction books to inspire climate action<p>Numerous books warn us about the climate crisis, and many offer solutions. If everyone read all of these books and behaved accordingly, perhaps the planet would be home and dry. However, most people don’t read them. Most people read romances, whodunnits or superhero stories.</p>
<p>To address this, I set up the Green Stories project in 2018 with free <a href="https://www.greenstories.org.uk/writing-competitions/">writing competitions</a> that encourage storytellers to embed climate solutions into stories aimed at mainstream readers across a variety of formats, from radio plays to novels. </p>
<p>The focus on solutions derives from my research into the effects of <a href="https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/eco.2019.0023#:%7E:text=Readers'%2520reflections%2520(N%2520%253D%252091,proenvironmental%2520intentions%2520than%2520catastrophic%2520stories.">catastrophe v solution-focused climate fiction</a> on readers and found that solution-focused stories were more likely to inspire <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-missing-ingredient-to-fight-the-climate-crisis-positive-fictional-role-models-177684">pro-environmental behaviour</a>.</p>
<p>I have also written a novel called <a href="https://www.dabaden.com/habitat-man/">Habitat Man</a> – a rom-com with a hint of cosy mystery which weaves in entertaining and educational green solutions such as wildlife gardening, seasonal food, and natural burials. <a href="https://www.dabaden.com/habitat-man-in-research/">A survey of 50 readers</a> showed that 98% of of them adopted at least one green solution as a result of reading it.</p>
<p>Many climate-fiction writers fear that an optimistic approach could lead to complacency. But my <a href="https://www.greenstories.org.uk/research-on-how-people-respond-to-stories/">research</a> suggests eliciting fear is more likely to lead to either paralysing climate anxiety, denial, or self-protective behaviours (think buying up all the toilet rolls). </p>
<p>One size doesn’t fit all, but those who are inspired to climate activism by the dystopian approach are already well served by the market. Currently, few novels exist which focus on solutions or which engage readers who prefer genre fiction.
I’d love to see more such stories on the bookshelves. </p>
<p>Here are my top five recommendations, including recent favourites and upcoming releases that inspire environmental behaviour change.</p>
<h2>1. Fairhaven</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.greenstories.org.uk/fairhaven/">Fairhaven</a> is a novel of climate optimism by Steve Willis and Jan Lee set in Malaysia. Through the eyes of an engineer turned celebrity, it sets out a blueprint for how low-lying countries can protect themselves against rising sea levels and store carbon.</p>
<p>This conforms to a new term gaining popularity – <a href="https://www.dabaden.com/social-science-fiction-or-thrutopia/">“thrutopian” fiction</a>. Such fiction presents positive visions of what a sustainable society might look like if we do it right and shows how we can get there.</p>
<h2>2. The Ministry for the Future</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/kim-stanley-robinson/the-ministry-for-the-future/9780356508832/">The Ministry for the Future</a> by Kim Stanley Robinson also takes a <a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://thrutopia.life/&source=gmail-imap&ust=1710162042000000&usg=AOvVaw00EYaX22oE6w1QYodW4-E2">thrutopian approach</a> in that it imagines a United Nations ministry that must lead the human race to a sustainable future.</p>
<p>The author covers all aspects of how we might get there, from technology and engineering to harnessing the power of finance. There are disasters along the way, but it provides a plausible outline of how we might address some of our more intractable challenges. </p>
<h2>3. Green Rising</h2>
<p>Fiction can warn of the dangers of wrong turns. <a href="https://www.walker.co.uk/Green-Rising-9781406384673.aspx">Green Rising</a> by Lauren James is young adult fiction about teenagers with superpowers. It’s a romantic thriller and a call to arms for climate action.</p>
<p>We may not all have the superpowers of the young protagonists, but it’s not hard to make the connection to what we can do. I like the way that this narrative warns of the dangers presented by billionaire enthusiasts who are content to let our beautiful planet die and divert resources towards space age dreams of mass planetary expansion.</p>
<h2>4. Finding Bear</h2>
<p>You can get two-for-one with children’s fiction, which is often read aloud to young children and so engages parents too. <a href="https://www.hannahgold.world/finding-bear">Finding Bear</a> is a sequel to Hannah Gold’s heartwarming adventure story, The Lost Bear. </p>
<p>April, the young daughter of an Arctic researcher, returns to Svalbard when she discovers a polar bear she once befriended has been shot and injured. April has agency – she challenges the adults, stands up for the Arctic wildlife she loves and follows her instinct. Without her relentless drive, change may not have happened. The underlying message – that every one of us has a valid voice, no matter how young or insignificant we may feel – shines through. </p>
<h2>5. No More Fairy Tales</h2>
<p>This Green Stories project teamed up climate experts with experienced writers to create an anthology of 24 short stories, <a href="https://habitatpress.com/no-more-fairy-tales/">No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save the Planet</a>. Each story and climate solution links to a <a href="https://www.greenstories.org.uk/anthology-for-cop27/solutions/">webpage</a> where readers can find out about the solutions that inspired them. Most stories adopt the thrutopian approach. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576832/original/file-20240220-24-nkr53z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Teal and yellow book cover with green tree and title: No more fairytales, stories to save our planet" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576832/original/file-20240220-24-nkr53z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576832/original/file-20240220-24-nkr53z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=762&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576832/original/file-20240220-24-nkr53z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=762&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576832/original/file-20240220-24-nkr53z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=762&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576832/original/file-20240220-24-nkr53z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=958&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576832/original/file-20240220-24-nkr53z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=958&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576832/original/file-20240220-24-nkr53z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=958&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">No More Fairytales includes 24 stories, with a focus on solutions.</span>
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<p>One story imagines eight people in a citizen’s jury debating the most effective climate policy, and then there’s a murder. This combines the universal attraction of the whodunnit with raising awareness of the most transformative climate solutions. </p>
<p>This story has been adapted into a full-length stage play. A condensed dramatic monologue version, <a href="https://www.greenstories.org.uk/theatre-in-education/">Murder in the Citizens’ Jury</a>, will be performed in <a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/murder-in-the-citizens-jury-tickets-838482653187?aff%3Doddtdtcreator&source=gmail-imap&ust=1708971981000000&usg=AOvVaw3BripYVkCGhiY6IIWxxOW3">Southampton on April 20</a> to coincide with Earth Day, when the audience will vote during the on-stage citizen’s assembly.</p>
<p>The setting itself is a climate solution. Representative democracy in an age of misinformation and vested interests, dominated by four-year electoral cycles, may turn out to be constitutionally incapable of initiating radical climate policies. </p>
<p>Rebooting our democracy to prioritise long-term decisions could be a vital part of the transition to a sustainable society and compelling stories like this connect people to alternative future possibilities. </p>
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<img alt="Imagine weekly climate newsletter" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/434988/original/file-20211201-21-13avx6y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/434988/original/file-20211201-21-13avx6y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434988/original/file-20211201-21-13avx6y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434988/original/file-20211201-21-13avx6y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434988/original/file-20211201-21-13avx6y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434988/original/file-20211201-21-13avx6y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434988/original/file-20211201-21-13avx6y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><strong><em>Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?</em></strong>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Denise Baden is affiliated with Habitat Press and the University of Southampton</span></em></p>Climate stories that focus on solutions are more likely to inspire positive environmental action.Denise Baden, Professor of Sustainable Practice, University of SouthamptonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2229802024-02-28T04:38:20Z2024-02-28T04:38:20ZGail Jones’ One Another explores the life of Joseph Conrad and the transformative potential of reading<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578466/original/file-20240228-26-wuvfsk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C5%2C4000%2C2988&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Otago (1884).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:StateLibQld_1_53436_Otago_(ship).jpg">State Library of Queensland. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), the famous Polish-born author of <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/219/219-h/219-h.htm">Heart of Darkness</a>, <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5658/5658-h/5658-h.htm">Lord Jim</a> and <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/974/974-h/974-h.htm">The Secret Agent</a>, among many other novels and short stories, is not a writer usually associated with Australia. Yet lying just off the banks of the River Derwent near Hobart there remains a haunting reminder of his presence – the partially submerged wreck of the Otago, a sailing ship he once captained when he was a roaming seafarer serving in the British merchant navy. </p>
<p>As a mariner, Conrad visited Australia numerous times (though, ironically, not Tasmania). The Otago, as with other ships on which he served, became the subject of many of the works he wrote in England when his sailing career ended. </p>
<p>A fictionalised version of Conrad, the man and the writer, forms half of Gail Jones’s new novel <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/one-another">One Another</a>. Significantly, Jones wrote the novel in Hobart, while taking up a writing fellowship at the University of Tasmania. </p>
<p>The Otago wreck is a pivotal image in the book, providing a symbolic meeting-space between the novel’s two main characters and marking a place where the past intrudes, in a bodily way, into the present.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-conrads-imperial-horror-story-heart-of-darkness-resonates-with-our-globalised-times-94723">How Conrad’s imperial horror story Heart of Darkness resonates with our globalised times</a>
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</p>
<hr>
<h2>A tale of two lives</h2>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577778/original/file-20240225-28-y23p92.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577778/original/file-20240225-28-y23p92.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577778/original/file-20240225-28-y23p92.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577778/original/file-20240225-28-y23p92.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577778/original/file-20240225-28-y23p92.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577778/original/file-20240225-28-y23p92.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577778/original/file-20240225-28-y23p92.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577778/original/file-20240225-28-y23p92.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>One Another interleaves the life of the celebrated writer (born Jósef Teodor Konrad Korseniowski) with that of Helen Ross, a young Australian postgraduate student of literature, who is writing her PhD thesis at Cambridge University on “Cryptomodernism and Empire” in the works of Joseph Conrad. </p>
<p>The narrative moves between them, reconstructing fragments of Conrad’s life and works, while narrating Helen’s attempts to write her thesis in the middle of her increasingly toxic relationship with Justin, a psychologically damaged fellow Australian. </p>
<p>Although these two lives are separated by time and distance, the narrative gradually and non-chronologically reveals parallels and crossings between them. The motif of journeying and outsider status is shared by both. </p>
<p>The orphaned Joseph is helped by his Uncle Tadeusz to leave Poland on the death of his father. He embarks on his peripatetic life, first in the French and then the British merchant navy. Later, he becomes a British subject.</p>
<p>Helen leaves what she sees as the constriction of Hobart to study in England, the colonial centre, in 1992. Although the text only occasionally draws attention to specific dates, the year is significant. While overseas, Helen hears of the Australian High Court’s Mabo decision, something that she recognises as “momentous”. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577777/original/file-20240225-18-er43pd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Photo of Gail Jones" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577777/original/file-20240225-18-er43pd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577777/original/file-20240225-18-er43pd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577777/original/file-20240225-18-er43pd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577777/original/file-20240225-18-er43pd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577777/original/file-20240225-18-er43pd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577777/original/file-20240225-18-er43pd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577777/original/file-20240225-18-er43pd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Gail Jones.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Heike Steinweg/Text Publishing</span></span>
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<p>This underlines another common thread between the two characters: their awareness of the violence of colonialism. Each has been complicit, however tangentially, in imperial and colonial practices. Conrad witnessed the “historical cruelty” in the Belgian Congo in his role as a steamboat captain on the Congo River. Helen is a settler-colonial Australian from Tasmania, a site of violent dispossession of its Indigenous peoples. </p>
<p>As dislocated “foreigners” in Britain, Joseph and Helen both experience British culture as unfriendly. Joseph never loses his Eastern European accent and is self-conscious about his “broken English”; Helen’s Australian accent is regarded as “uncouth”. </p>
<p>Both characters are writers, and both lose a crucial manuscript – a traumatic loss that has apparently afflicted a number of other authors listed in the text. Joseph leaves the only copy of his first book, <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/720/720-h/720-h.htm">Almayer’s Folly</a>, in a café in Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse train station; Helen leaves her thesis on a train. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/in-j-m-coetzees-latest-story-collection-questions-of-the-soul-become-urgent-as-the-body-becomes-frail-206406">In J.M. Coetzee's latest story collection, questions of the soul become urgent as the body becomes frail</a>
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<h2>Reading as encounter</h2>
<p>Helen’s “profound attachment” to Conrad has its childhood beginning when her father takes her on an unexpected road trip to show her the wreck of the Otago. But Helen does not attribute her interest in the writer to this sighting of the sunken ship. It is not an “epiphanic moment” or a “neat or mythic beginning”. Rather, as Jones writes: “What began was a kind of dreaming towards this emptied body, the boat.” </p>
<p>Helen’s absorption of Conrad’s life and work is indicated towards the end of the novel when she mirrors his language of the sea, alluding to a dream she has had as </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the dark shipwreck that she has been caught in. No shape here: just her own mind tossed and unsettled. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This oceanic language of global and personal flow is a feature of the novel. In less skilful hands, it could become somewhat predictable, but Jones’s poetic way with words and imagery keeps it fresh and relevant.</p>
<p>To read a Gail Jones novel is to become absorbed in narrative patterns of looping time, often cinematic imagery, and interrelated literary allusions. The motif of immersion is particularly apt in this novel, not only for its connection to Joseph’s ocean voyaging and the references to a number of drownings and near-drownings. </p>
<p>The immersive experience of reading itself is a strong thematic thread, as it is in much of Jones’ work. It is evoked as an intimate aesthetic and philosophical encounter between reader and writer, or reader and text – and is perhaps another implication of the “one another” of the title. </p>
<p>The novel gradually introduces the reader to the complex pasts of its two main characters and, in the case of Joseph, his literary works. One Another includes some wonderfully perceptive and often intriguing short analyses of Conrad’s novels and short stories. These interpretations draw out the thematic connections between the stories of Joseph and Helen: loss, loneliness, friendship, violence. </p>
<p>There is one section that simply lists, in order, all the words from Heart of Darkness that have the negative prefixes “in-”, “im-” and “un-”. Other sections enumerate details of Conrad’s life and world under headings such as “Illnesses he suffers”, “The body” and “Accidents”. </p>
<p>These snippets can be read as extracts from the handwritten index cards that Helen has compiled for her thesis. Early on, she describes her lost manuscript as “fragments of a life intersected by literary-critical notations” – an accurate description of parts of the novel we are reading. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577787/original/file-20240226-31-zet7wz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C5687%2C3779&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Photograph of the wreck of the Otago, Derwent River, Hobart." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577787/original/file-20240226-31-zet7wz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C5687%2C3779&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577787/original/file-20240226-31-zet7wz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577787/original/file-20240226-31-zet7wz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577787/original/file-20240226-31-zet7wz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577787/original/file-20240226-31-zet7wz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577787/original/file-20240226-31-zet7wz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577787/original/file-20240226-31-zet7wz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The wreck of the Otago, Derwent River, Hobart.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Steve Lovegrove/Shutterstock</span></span>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/time-is-arrested-in-gail-jones-beautiful-new-novel-of-war-and-art-salonika-burning-195187">Time is arrested in Gail Jones' beautiful new novel of war and art, Salonika Burning</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Creative biography</h2>
<p>In many ways, then, One Another is a novel about the transformative potential of reading. It expresses the sense of intimate connection poetically, describing Helen’s “conjuring” of Conrad as “a flow into fiction’s otherness that welcomed and accommodated her”.</p>
<p>Jones has based the events in Joseph’s life on Conrad’s autobiographical writings in <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/687/687-h/687-h.htm">A Personal Record</a>, his published letters, and numerous biographies and works of literary criticism. But the novel is an imaginative reconstruction of significant moments in Conrad’s world, not a historical study. </p>
<p>The genre of biofiction is one in which Jones has particular skill. Her early short-story collection <a href="https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/C259431">Fetish Lives</a> (1997) reimagines in fictional form the lives and deaths of famous writers and artists. In her recent novel, <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/salonika-burning">Salonika Burning</a> (2022), she rewrites the World War I experiences of four real-life characters, including Australian writer <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/franklin-stella-maria-sarah-miles-6235">Stella Miles Franklin</a>, as a fictional thought experiment. But as she writes in the author’s note, Salonika Burning “takes many liberties and is not intended to be read as history”.</p>
<p>In One Another, Jones is similarly inspired by historical events and people to write her own version of their interior lives – their thoughts and emotions, as well as of their bodily being. </p>
<p>The novel begins, for example, with Joseph’s dream of his parents, “the unquiet dead”, and ends with a moving imagining of his dying thoughts, as he “sinks as he has always wanted to sink, washed by kind waves, closed over by sway, hearing no language at all but that of the ocean”.</p>
<p>Unlike a conventional biography, One Another suggests that “for both Joseph and his biographers, there will always be the element of the hidden”. And as Helen comes to realise, the life of another is always only partially accessible: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Seeing in fragments. That was how she now thought of it. Seeing one’s own life, and another’s […] those forms of shaped meaning that might found the merest understanding. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This fractured vision – referenced in the text’s approximation of T.S. Eliot’s line in <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land">The Waste Land</a> about fragments “shored against ruins” – implies a modernist sensibility, whereby fragmentation can create its own “forms of shaped meaning”.</p>
<p>Once again, Jones has written a richly evocative novel that warrants attention, both for its fascinating subject-matter and for its outstanding writerly qualities. One Another adds to her already impressive, diverse and highly-regarded oeuvre. Importantly, too, it is also a novel that adds to our understanding of the processes of writing and reading the lives of others – and one that situates Australian literature within a globalised world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222980/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sue Kossew does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Gail Jones has written a richly evocative novel that warrants attention, both for its fascinating subject-matter and for its outstanding writerly qualities.Sue Kossew, Emeritus Professor of Literary Studies at School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2221602024-02-21T19:11:58Z2024-02-21T19:11:58ZGuide to the classics: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We inspired Orwell and influenced the Western imagination<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575490/original/file-20240213-16-bwem2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3394%2C2376&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Wassily Kandinsky – Composition 8 (1923).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wassily_Kandinsky_Composition_VIII.jpg">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>This year is the centenary of Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/we-9780241458747">We</a> – a major influence on George Orwell’s dystopia 1984, as well as an important early contribution to the burgeoning genre of science fiction. </p>
<p>We and 1984 (published in 1949) were crucial influences on Cold War western imagination of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state. But Orwell had never been there, and Zamyatin wrote his dystopia in 1920, a time of chaos and civil war just three years after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and two years before the Soviet Union formally came into being. </p>
<p>Both novels portray a state in which the individual has been merged into the collective: “I” has become indistinguishable from “we”. The state is run by a remote but all-seeing leader (the “Benefactor” in Zamyatin, “Big Brother” in Orwell), who is revered as the font of wisdom and universal wellbeing. The leader is backed up by a secret police (the Guardians, the Thought Police), who organise the disappearance of potential trouble-makers. </p>
<p>Life is meticulously regulated according to a state plan, leaving only a minimal personal sphere. In Zamyatin’s novel, houses are all glass. The only time the blinds can be lowered is for the regular hour of sex with a registered partner. Thinking differently is an offence against the state. </p>
<p>In both novels, falling in love is the fateful assertion of an “I” that is not part of “We.”</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-orwells-1984-and-how-it-helps-us-understand-tyrannical-power-today-112066">Guide to the classics: Orwell's 1984 and how it helps us understand tyrannical power today</a>
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<h2>An instinctive satirist</h2>
<p>Zamyatin wrote his novel while living in a special House of the Arts in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) under the protection of the writer <a href="https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Maxim_Gorky">Maxim Gorky</a>, who used his clout with Bolshevik leaders to shelter writers and artists from the worst privations of the Civil War period and the newly established revolutionary police, the <a href="https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/state-security/state-security-texts/the-all-russian-extraordinary-commission-for-struggle-with-counter-revolution/">Cheka</a>. </p>
<p>It might be assumed that Zamyatin was one of many members of the Russian intelligentsia who, having been fashionably radical under the Tsar, recoiled from the reality of rampaging mobs and social and political breakdown that led to the Bolsheviks taking power in October 1917. In fact, Zamyatin had been a Bolshevik, although he was no longer an active party member.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1075&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1075&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1075&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Yevgeny Zamyatin c.1919.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zamjatin.jpg">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>He was born in 1884 in Lebedian, a town 370 kilometres south of Moscow, undistinguished except for its race track. His father was a priest (the lower rungs of Orthodox clergy were allowed to marry) and his mother, surprisingly, a pianist. This would have made them provincial intelligentsia, marginal to almost all their neighbours. </p>
<p>Judging by his bleak memories of Lebedian, Yevgeny was a lonely child who took refuge in reading. Having become a socialist as a teenager, he joined the Bolshevik party in time to participate in the revolutionary upheavals of 1905 in the capital, where he was a student at the St Petersburg Polytechnic. </p>
<p>Arrests and exile to the provinces followed, but he nevertheless managed to graduate as a ship-building engineer. He also started writing, winning praise from the critics for his vivid portrayal of provincial boredom and inertia in a novella, <em>Uyezdnoye</em> (A Provincial Tale), published in 1913. </p>
<p>The Russian government sent Zamyatin to England in 1916 to work on the building of ice-breakers at the Newcastle docks, so he missed the February Revolution and the ferment that followed. He returned just before October in an “antiquated little British ship”. The journey took about 50 hours, the passengers in lifebelts the whole time due to the threat from German submarines. </p>
<p>His late arrival for the revolution was something he always regretted – it was like “never having been in love and waking up one morning ten years married”. But it is difficult to imagine Zamyatin succumbing to the euphoria that gripped the Russian intelligentsia in 1917. He was a born loner and instinctive satirist, whose usual response to collective enthusiasm was to dissent. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/world-politics-explainer-the-russian-revolution-100669">World politics explainer: the Russian revolution</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<p>It was the oddness of the situation after October that struck Zamyatin first. He remembered the winter of 1917-18 as “merry, eerie […] when everything broke from its moorings and floated off somewhere into the unknown”. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mikhail Bulgakov (1928).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%9C%D0%B8%D1%85%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%BB-%D0%91%D1%83%D0%BB%D0%B3%D0%B0%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2.jpg">Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>Revolutionary Russia, with its privations, dysfunctions, identity adjustments and lofty rhetoric, provided many opportunities for satire. The genre flourished throughout the 1920s in the work of writers such as <a href="https://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/literature/mikhail-zoshchenko/index.html">Mikhail Zoshchenko</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mikhail-Bulgakov">Mikhail Bulgakov</a>, and <a href="https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Ilf_and_Petrov">Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov</a>. </p>
<p>This was for the most part the satire of insiders, rueful and affectionate, rather than that of regime critics. Bulgakov, to be sure, ran into political trouble in the late 1920s with his novel <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita">The Master and Margarita</a>, but the books of Ilf and Petrov, featuring their Soviet conman hero <a href="https://russiapost.info/culture/ostap_bender">Ostap Bender</a>, became Soviet classics, loved by generations of Soviet children as well as adults. </p>
<p>Zamyatin’s satire was colder and harsher. To be a heretic, whether the regime was Tsarist or Soviet, was an internal necessity for him – and, he argued, for “true literature”. He despised the “nimble” writers and artists – “futurists”, “proletarians”, and so on – who jumped on the Bolshevik bandwagon and curried favour with the new regime, proclaiming themselves “the court school” and filling the air with their “yellow, green and raspberry red triumphant cries”. </p>
<p>In the highly political and factionalised world of the arts in early Soviet Russia, this disdain was energetically returned. Denunciation in the literary journals was one of Zamyatin’s perennial problems. He had trouble with the Cheka, too, which arrested him several times. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The first edition of We (1924).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Weyevgenyzamyatin.png">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Written in 1920, We was turned down for publication by Soviet censors. An American publisher, E.P. Dutton, would produce the first complete edition in 1924, in Gregory Zilboorg’s English translation. The novel would not be published in the Soviet Union until 1988.</p>
<h2>Cogs in the machine</h2>
<p>We depicts a future society in which almost everyone willingly, even eagerly, sacrifices their individuality to become cogs in the machine, with the Guardians there to deal with any dissenters. </p>
<p>Clearly, Zamyatin’s experiences with the Cheka, the censors and his conforming writer colleagues were part of his inspiration. The Benefactor’s “socratically-bald head” was no doubt a swipe at Lenin, but his moral smugness probably owes something to <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Feliks-Edmundovich-Dzerzhinsky">Felix Dzerzhinsky</a>, the first head of the Cheka. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=692&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=692&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=692&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lenin – Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lenin_(Petrov-Vodkin).jpg">Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For educated contemporaries, however, the Benefactor had loftier literary antecedents: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Inquisitor">Legend of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov</a> and Vladimir Solovyev’s Antichrist in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Solovyov_(philosopher)">Tale of the Antichrist</a>. </p>
<p>Both of these stories have a spokesman for institutionalised collective wisdom (the established Christian church) make the argument against a heretic (Jesus), with whom the authors’ sympathies lie. Zamyatin – a priest’s son, though he had abandoned Christianity in his youth – called the emerging orthodoxy of the Bolshevik Revolution “a new branch of Catholicism, which is as fearful as the old of every heretical word”.</p>
<p>The totalitarian society described in We may have been the Soviet future, but it was far from the Soviet reality when Zamyatin wrote. In the first years after the revolution, the Bolsheviks were trying to run Soviet Russia under an improvised system later called “War Communism”. This meant nationalising everything in sight and using force, rather than market relations, to extract grain from the peasantry and feed the cities and the Red Army, which was fighting foreign-backed White Armies on multiple fronts. </p>
<p>Soviet Russia was indeed cut off from the world, as Zamyatin’s dystopia is by the Green Wall, but at this point that was not the Bolsheviks’ choice. It was the result of war, foreign intervention and economic sanctions. The Bolsheviks believed in economic planning, but it would be ten years before they would seriously try to implement it. </p>
<p>In other words, the Bolshevik government in 1920 was as incapable of achieving the seamless regimentation of We’s dystopia as it was of building the space-craft that provides the novel with its science-fiction theme.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Zamyatin’s novel is often read as a prescient foretelling of Stalinism, ten to 15 years before it came into being. That could be. But Zamyatin was also drawing on a more immediate source: the vision of a regimented and mechanised Soviet society of the future – seen as a utopia, not a dystopia – that was being trumpeted by the same futurist and “constructivist” artists whose embrace of the Bolshevik Revolution Zamyatin found so suspect. </p>
<p>A particular target, mentioned several times in We, was the worker poet <a href="https://monoskop.org/Aleksei_Gastev">Alexei Gastev</a>. Like Zamyatin, Gastev was a longtime Bolshevik revolutionary. In 1920, he set up a Central Institute of Labour whose mission was to train workers to function like machines. </p>
<p>This revolutionary version of the American capitalist concept of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/science/Taylorism">Taylorism</a> was aimed at maximising worker efficiency to increase productivity and profit. It did not go down well with the Soviet industrial ministry, still less with Soviet trade unions. It was closed down at the end of the 1920s, about the time serious industrialisation got underway. </p>
<p>But revolutionary regimentation of life, the cult of the machine, and submerging of the individual in the collective were staples of the “futurist” imagination, explored not only by Gastev, but the poet <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/vladimir-mayakovsky">Vladimir Mayakovsky</a>, the theatre director <a href="https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Vsevolod_Meyerhold">Vsevolod Meyerhold</a>, and constructivist artists like <a href="https://www.theartstory.org/artist/tatlin-vladimir/">Vladimir Tatlin</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Vladimir Mayakovsky c.1920.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Majakovszkij.jpg">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>The revolutionary avant-garde had great artistic achievements to its credit, but tolerance was not one of its characteristics. It bullied writers and artists who did not conform to its ideas, frequently appealing to the authorities (usually the Communist Party, but sometimes the Cheka) to put their opponents out of business. </p>
<p>That is one of the subtexts of Zamyatin’s 1921 essay <a href="https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1921-2/death-of-a-poet/death-of-a-poet-texts/zamiatin-i-am-afraid/">I Am Afraid</a>, as he was one of the major targets. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Association_of_Proletarian_Writers">Russian Association of Proletarian Writers</a>, a group claiming (with only partial accuracy) to represent the Party, imposed a dictatorial local rule on literature in the 1920s. It gave Zamyatin a relentless bashing – particularly after parts of We were published (perhaps without Zamyatin’s knowledge) in bourgeois Czechoslovakia. </p>
<p>This was the context of Zamyatin’s famous <a href="https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1929-2/proletarian-writers/proletarian-writers-texts/zamiatins-letter-to-stalin/">letter to Stalin</a> in 1931. Stalin was already looking more like the Benefactor than Lenin had ever done, but he occasionally intervened to protect writers who were the Association’s victims. Zamyatin asked permission to go abroad with his wife because he was unable to work in the “atmosphere of systematic persecution that increases in intensity from year to year”. He named, in particular, the Association’s Leningrad branch and the weekly literary journal it controlled. </p>
<p>Zamyatin phrased the request to leave, which Stalin approved, as a temporary one. He left open “the right to return as soon as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little men”. </p>
<p>In fact, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers was dissolved by government decree on Stalin’s initiative the next year. Zamyatin’s sometime patron, Maxim Gorky, who had departed for Europe earlier, returned to the Soviet Union. Zamyatin did not. </p>
<p>Perversely, although English was his best language and he was often called “the Englishman” in Russia, he went to France, a centre of Russian émigré culture, whose opinion-makers he anticipated would boycott him because of his Bolshevik past. </p>
<p>After some unhappy and lonely years, still a Soviet citizen, Zamyatin died of a heart attack in Paris in 1937 – the year of the Great Terror which, had he remained in the Soviet Union, would probably have killed him.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-stalins-great-terror-can-tell-us-about-russia-today-56842">What Stalin’s Great Terror can tell us about Russia today</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222160/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sheila Fitzpatrick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Yevgeny Zamyatin was a born loner and instinctive satirist, whose usual response to collective enthusiasm was to dissent.Sheila Fitzpatrick, Professor of History at the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2218672024-02-20T19:56:50Z2024-02-20T19:56:50ZThe Zone of Interest: the dark psychological insight of Martin Amis’s Holocaust novel is lost in the film adaptation<p>Martin Amis, who died last year, was always very concerned about his future place in the literary canon. He said that, since the “truth” about writers is only revealed 50 years after their death, they “feel the honour of being judged by something that is never wrong: time”. </p>
<p>Jonathan Glazer’s new film <a href="https://a24films.com/films/the-zone-of-interest">The Zone of Interest</a> is based on Amis’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-zone-of-interest-9781448192366">2014 novel of the same name</a>. It will undoubtedly revive general interest in the author’s work. But in truth Glazer’s film has very little in common with Amis’s original novel. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576380/original/file-20240219-28-goulp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576380/original/file-20240219-28-goulp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576380/original/file-20240219-28-goulp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=948&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576380/original/file-20240219-28-goulp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=948&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576380/original/file-20240219-28-goulp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=948&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576380/original/file-20240219-28-goulp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1192&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576380/original/file-20240219-28-goulp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1192&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576380/original/file-20240219-28-goulp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1192&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Its use of the same title verges, in some ways, on travesty. The verbal complexity of Amis’s narrative has been displaced by Glazer’s visual brilliance, but it makes for a completely different kind of artistic experience.</p>
<p>Discussing Nazi Germany in a 1992 interview, Amis said: “In many ways it’s the central event of the 20th century, the culminating event of history.” His novel <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/times-arrow-9781446401408">Time’s Arrow</a> (1991), narrated in reverse chronology, begins with a genteel doctor’s retirement in suburban America before tracing his life story back in time 40 years to depict him dismembering Jewish bodies in the concentration camps. </p>
<p>In 2002, Amis said that he had “unfinished business with Hitler”. The Nazi world in the middle of the 20th century was something to which his bleak imagination constantly cycled back. John Self, the central character in Amis’s best novel <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/money-9780099461883">Money</a> (1982), is characteristically reading a book about Hitler as he contemplates the accumulation of financial resources in New York. </p>
<p>Throughout his work, Amis was drawn to landscapes of cruelty and excess, not only in Nazi Germany, but also the gulags of Stalin’s Russia in <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/koba-the-dread-9780099438021">Koba the Dread</a> (2002) and what he saw as the dehumanised capitalist wastelands of the Californian sex industry in <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Pornoland.html?id=e-ZxOQAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">Pornoland</a> (2004). </p>
<p>His point was that such brutal instincts are woven intricately into the human condition, and that the dividing line between the “normal” and the repugnant is perilously thin.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-pre-eminent-novelist-critic-of-his-generation-martin-amiss-pyrotechnic-prose-captured-lifes-destructive-energies-206069">The pre-eminent novelist-critic of his generation, Martin Amis's pyrotechnic prose captured life's destructive energies</a>
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<h2>A dehumanised environment</h2>
<p>Amis’s Zone of Interest is told by three narrators, who consecutively articulate their perspectives in each of the book’s six chapters. </p>
<p>His first narrator is Angelus Thomsen, a Nazi officer who falls in love with Hannah, the wife of Auschwitz commandant Paul Doll, the second narrator. </p>
<p>The third narrator is Szmul Zacharias, one of the Jewish prisoners spared from death because of his potential usefulness. Szmul’s job as <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/sonderkommandos">Sonderkommando</a> at Auschwitz is to clean up the detritus of exterminated bodies. </p>
<p>Thomsen is entirely eliminated from Glazer’s film, which also restores to Doll the German name <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/rudolf-h-ouml-ss">Rudolf Höss</a> – the SS officer who was one of the historical models for Amis’s character. </p>
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<span class="caption">Richard Baer, Josef Mengele and Rudolf Höss, Auschwitz (1944).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Richard_Baer,_Josef_Mengele,_Rudolf_Hoess,_Auschwitz._Album_H%C3%B6cker.jpg">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>Amis put a lot of scholarly effort into ensuring factual accuracy for his novel, as the acknowledgments in his book amply testify. But his particular contribution was to get under the skin of history, as it were, and to recover the imaginative landscape that licensed such horrors.</p>
<p>In this sense, it is crucial for the novel that Paul Doll is presented as a vicious type and not just a specific Nazi commander. Though he is a caricature with recognisable affinities with other thuggish characters in Amis’s novels, he inhabits a post-human world where violence has become unsettlingly normalised. </p>
<p>Thomsen comments several times in the novel on the “tuxedoed appearance” of the black and white cat Maksik, who delights in tormenting and devouring mice. This overlap between human and animal is characteristic of Amis’s radically dehumanised environment. It is a world in which human beings are dissected and reduced to the “natural wastage” of their body parts, literally but also metaphorically.</p>
<p>This is not, of course, to suggest that Amis’s novel lacks a clear ethical perspective. He mentions in his acknowledgments the “moral solidity” of his position on the Holocaust. But he also says that his priority was to investigate closely “the moods and textures of daily life in the Third Reich”. </p>
<p>Rather than just an expression of horror, Amis’s novel probes how such “disgusting” practices could have entered into the realms of human consciousness. </p>
<h2>A psychic space</h2>
<p>The resonance of Paul Doll as a fictional character derives from the way Amis allows us to enter into his thought processes via his first-person narrative. Doll resembles other Amis characters in his vulgarity, aggressiveness and voyeuristic tendencies. He insists, though, that his elimination of emotion and refusal to show weakness is “completely normal”. </p>
<p>Similarly, Thomsen’s narration draws in the reader, not only through his distaste for Doll’s excesses, but through his romantic affection for Doll’s wife, Hannah. Thomsen also refers in familiar terms to his “Uncle Martin”: Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann. This adds to the illusion of Amis’s character being at some level a real human being, with regular social interactions and feelings.</p>
<p>In Glazer’s film, Hannah’s name is changed back to her original German prototype, Hedwig Höss. This again serves to alienate rather than engage the viewer. </p>
<p>In Amis’s novel, the relationship between Hannah and Thomsen is presented quite sympathetically. To Hannah, Thomsen comes to seem a “figure for what was sane. For what was decent and normal and civilized.” Though Amis’s Hannah has become part of the Nazi establishment through her marriage, she eventually becomes appalled by it. </p>
<p>During World War II, the Germans euphemistically classified the area surrounding Auschwitz as a “zone of interest”. For Hannah, this zone is primarily psychological rather than geographic or administrative. The most telling aspect of National Socialism, she thinks, was that in this world “you looked in the mirror and saw your soul”. The reflecting glass reveals uncomfortable aspects of the human psyche:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Who somebody really was. That was the zone of interest.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The film sticks rigidly to the Nazi sense of spatial enclosure. But Amis’s novel represents the liminal zone more as a psychic space, with characters moving uneasily from one side of the line to the other.</p>
<p>This is why Amis took issue in a 1985 interview with the notion “that what I’ve been writing is satire”. He argued that he was merely reflecting the way people actually behave. </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/moral-ambiguity-and-the-representation-of-genocide-is-there-a-limit-to-what-can-be-depicted-177537">Moral ambiguity and the representation of genocide – is there a limit to what can be depicted?</a>
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<h2>Cloacal dreams</h2>
<p>There are several references in The Zone of Interest (and other Amis novels) to the Irish satirist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jonathan-Swift">Jonathan Swift</a> (1667-1745), a famously scatological writer. Doll’s “cloacal dreams” highlight what Time’s Arrow calls the “fiercely corpocentric” universe of Auschwitz: one that is “<em>made</em> of shit”. </p>
<p>This immersion in filth has parallels with the work of great American writers whom Amis admired inordinately. These included Saul Bellow, whose novel <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Augie_March">The Adventures of Augie March</a> (1953) obliquely embraced the violence of Chicago gangsters, and the Russian expatriate Vladimir Nabokov, whose <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita">Lolita</a> (1955) entered the criminal imagination of a paedophile. </p>
<p>Both Bellow and Nabokov preserved a strong ethical and political compass, but the power of their fiction emerged from a willingness to confront a chaotic and disturbing world. Amis’s fascination with Donald Trump during the latter part of his career showed again his interest in exploring how darker lusts for power become a compelling force, even within more mundane and supposedly civilised societies. </p>
<p>Amis’s memoir <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/experience-9780099285823">Experience</a> (2000) recalls how his cousin was killed by serial murderer Frederick West. It also discusses the process through which powerful creative writing “comes from the back of your mind, where thoughts are unformulated”, rather than the front. </p>
<p>Amis always took issue with the more polite tradition of the liberal-humanist novel, because he suggested people often do not behave for good reasons. He described himself as working within a looser form of comedy, where “laughter in the dark”, as Nabokov put it, becomes integral to the work of art. </p>
<p>When The Zone of Interest was first published, Amis said it was not well received in Germany because Germans “make an absolute division between what is comic and what is serious, and no interpenetration between the two”. </p>
<p>Yet his earlier Nazi novel Time’s Arrow was welcomed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which regarded the book as a serious imaginative treatment of the Holocaust. It was only English critics, Amis claimed, who accused him of trivialising the subject.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/lolita-why-this-vivid-illicit-portrait-of-a-pervert-matters-at-a-time-of-endless-commodification-of-young-girls-189688">Lolita: why this 'vivid, illicit' portrait of a pervert matters at a time of endless commodification of young girls</a>
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<h2>The Martian school</h2>
<p>The Zone of Interest, like other Amis novels, is organised around voice rather than plot. In this case, there are three distinctive voices allowing access to the characters’ inner worlds. This is entirely different from the aesthetic of Glazer’s film, which minimises dialogue and works instead through visual tableaux and sound effects. </p>
<p>Glazer takes care to reconstruct with minute accuracy Höss’s idyllic family home just outside the Auschwitz camp. His aim is to frame the domestic routines of the Höss family household within a “Big Brother” format, capturing the smallest details of everyday life. He emphasises the Nazi capacity to keep the large-scale horrors of the concentration camp, operating just beyond these family walls, out of sight and out of mind. </p>
<p>Adaptation, with its combination of different sources, is always a problematic form. Glazer’s film has its distinct technical successes in its deployment of sound and vision, along with the cool objectivity of its focus. </p>
<p>But in verbal terms it carries nothing like the charge or challenge of the original novel. Amis represents the Nazi world as not just objectified and distant, but, in more sinister and amorphous ways, as still a living part of the human condition. </p>
<p>Amis’s fiction was strongly influenced by the “Martian” school of poetry pioneered by his friend Craig Raine in the 1980s, which imagines how planet Earth might appear when viewed from the perspective of an extraterrestrial visitor. In The Zone of Interest, Amis represents our familiar world from a radically unfamiliar angle. </p>
<p>For all of its virtues, the clinical realism of Glazer’s film never aspires to this level of unsettling insight.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/221867/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Giles does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In The Zone of Interest, Martin Amis represents our familiar world from a radically unfamiliar angle.Paul Giles, Professor of English, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, ACU, Australian Catholic UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2166312024-02-12T19:10:33Z2024-02-12T19:10:33ZCan ChatGPT edit fiction? 4 professional editors asked AI to do their job – and it ruined their short story<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574573/original/file-20240209-30-jdrrpv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C17%2C4000%2C2646&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Main images Shutterstock/sea background Pexels.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock/Pexels</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Writers have been using AI tools for years – from Microsoft Word’s spellcheck (which often makes unwanted corrections) to the passive-aggressive <a href="https://www.grammarly.com/">Grammarly</a>. But ChatGPT is different. </p>
<p>ChatGPT’s natural language processing enables a dialogue, much like a conversation – albeit with a slightly odd acquaintance. And it can generate vast amounts of copy, quickly, in response to queries posed in ordinary, everyday language. This suggests, at least superficially, it can do some of the work a book editor does.</p>
<p>We are professional editors, with extensive experience in the Australian book publishing industry, who wanted to know how ChatGPT would perform when compared to a human editor. To find out, we decided to ask it to edit a short story that had already been worked on by human editors – and we compared the results.</p>
<h2>The experiment: ChatGPT vs human editors</h2>
<p>The story we chose, <a href="https://meanjin.com.au/fiction/the-ninch/">The Ninch</a> (written by Rose), had gone through three separate rounds of editing, with four human editors (and a typesetter).</p>
<p>The first version had been rejected by literary journal <a href="https://overland.org.au/?ol_section=section-fiction">Overland</a>, but its fiction editor Claire Corbett had given generous feedback. The next version received detailed advice from freelance editor Nicola Redhouse, a judge of the <a href="https://thebigissue.org.au/issue/fiction-edition-2023/">Big Issue fiction edition</a> (which had shortlisted the story). Finally, the piece found a home at another literary journal, <a href="https://meanjin.com.au/fiction/">Meanjin</a>, where deputy editor Tess Smurthwaite incorporated comments from the issue’s freelance editor and also their typesetter in her correspondence. </p>
<p>We had a wealth of human feedback to compare ChatGPT’s recommendations with.</p>
<p>We used a standard, free ChatGPT generative AI tool for our edits, which we conducted as separate series of prompts designed to assess the scope and success of AI as an editorial tool.</p>
<p>We wanted to see if ChatGPT could develop and fine tune this unpublished work – and if so, whether it would do it in a way that resembled current editorial practice. By comparing it with human examples, we tried to determine where and at what stage in the process ChatGPT might be most successful as an editorial tool.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/authors-are-resisting-ai-with-petitions-and-lawsuits-but-they-have-an-advantage-we-read-to-form-relationships-with-writers-208046">Authors are resisting AI with petitions and lawsuits. But they have an advantage: we read to form relationships with writers</a>
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</p>
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<p>The story includes expressive descriptions, poetic imagery, strong symbolism and a subtle subtext. It explores themes of motherhood, nature, and hints at deeper mysteries. </p>
<p>We chose it because we believe the literary genre, with its play and experimentation, poetry and lyricism, offers rich pickings for complex editorial conversations. (And because we knew we could get permission from all participants in the process to share their feedback.)</p>
<p>In the story, a mother reflects on her untamed, sea-loving child. Supernatural possibilities are hinted at before the tale turns closer to home, ending with the mother revealing her own divergent nature – and looping back to offer more meaning to the title: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>pinching the skin between my toes … Making each digit its own unique peninsula.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The story used for the experiment, about a mother and her untamed, sea-loving child, hinted at the supernatural.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mae I. Balland/Pexels</span></span>
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<h2>Round 1: the first draft</h2>
<p>We started with a simple, general prompt, assuming the least amount of editorial guidance from the author. (Authors submitting stories to magazines and journals generally don’t give human editors a detailed, prescriptive brief.)</p>
<p>Our initial prompt for all three examples was: “Hi ChatGPT, could I please ask for your editorial suggestions on my short story, which I’d like to submit for publication in a literary journal?”</p>
<p>Responding to the first version of the story, ChatGPT provided a summary of key themes (motherhood, connection to nature, the mysteries of the ocean) and made a list of editorial suggestions. </p>
<p>Interestingly, ChatGPT did not pick up that the story was now published and attributed to an author. Raising questions about its ability, or inclination, to identify <a href="https://theconversation.com/writing-is-a-questionable-business-but-what-to-make-of-john-hughes-one-of-the-most-prolific-plagiarists-in-literary-history-200897">plagiarism</a>. Nor did it define the genre, which is one of the first assessments an editor makes. </p>
<p>ChatGPT’s suggestions were: to add more description of the coastal setting, provide more physical description of the characters, break up long paragraphs to make the piece more reader-friendly, add more dialogue for characterisation and insight, make the sentences shorter, reveal more inner thoughts of the characters, expand on the symbolism, show don’t tell, incorporate foreshadowing earlier, and provide resolution rather than ending on a mystery. </p>
<p>All good, if stock standard, advice.</p>
<p>ChatGPT also suggested reconsidering the title – clearly not making the connection between mother and daughter’s ocean affinity and their webbed toes – and reading the story aloud to help identify awkward phrasing, pacing and structure.</p>
<p>While this wasn’t particularly helpful feedback, it was not technically wrong. </p>
<p>ChatGPT picked up on the major themes and main characters. And the advice for more foreshadowing, dialogue and description, along with shorter paragraphs and an alternative ending, was generally sound. </p>
<p>In fact, it echoed the usual feedback you’d get from a creative writing workshop, or the kind of advice offered in <a href="https://www.hachette.com.au/stephen-king/on-writing-a-memoir-of-the-craft">books on the writing craft</a>. </p>
<p>They are the sort of suggestions an editor might write in response to almost any text – not particularly specific to this story, or to our stated aim of submitting it to a literary publication.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574574/original/file-20240209-19-cw9b1e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574574/original/file-20240209-19-cw9b1e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574574/original/file-20240209-19-cw9b1e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574574/original/file-20240209-19-cw9b1e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574574/original/file-20240209-19-cw9b1e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574574/original/file-20240209-19-cw9b1e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574574/original/file-20240209-19-cw9b1e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574574/original/file-20240209-19-cw9b1e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">ChatGPT’s editing advice was not specific to the story.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Stage two: AI (re)writes</h2>
<p>Next, we provided a second prompt, responding to ChatGPT’s initial feedback – attempting to emulate the back-and-forth discussions that are a key part of the editorial process. </p>
<p>We asked ChatGPT to take a more practical, interventionist approach and rework the text in line with its own editorial suggestions: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Thank you for your feedback about uneven pacing. Could you please suggest places in the story where the pace needs to speed up or slow down? Thank you too for the feedback about imagery and description. Could you please suggest places where there is too much imagery and it needs more action storytelling instead?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That’s where things fell apart.</p>
<p>ChatGPT offered a radically shorter, changed story. The atmospheric descriptions, evocative imagery and nods towards (unspoken) mystery were replaced with unsubtle phrases – which Rose swears she would never have written, or signed off on. </p>
<p>Lines added included: “my daughter has always been an enigma to me”, “little did I know” and “a sense of unease washed over me”. Later in the story, this phrasing was clumsily suggested a second time: “relief washed over me”. </p>
<p>The author’s unique descriptions were changed to familiar cliches: “rugged beauty”, “roar of the ocean”, “unbreakable bond”. ChatGPT also changed the text from <a href="https://www.mq.edu.au/research/research-centres-groups-and-facilities/healthy-people/centres/centre-for-language-sciences-clas/australian-voices/australian-english">Australian English</a> (which all Australian publications require) to US spelling and style (“realization”, “mom”). </p>
<p>In summary, a story where a mother sees her daughter as a “southern selkie going home” (phrasing that hints at a speculative subtext) on a rocky outcrop and really <em>sees</em> her (in all possible, playful senses of that word) was changed to a fishing tale, where a (definitely human) girl arrives home holding up, we kid you not, “a shiny fish”. </p>
<p>It became hard to give credence to any of ChatGPT’s advice. </p>
<p>Esteemed editor Bruce Sims once advised it’s not an editor’s job to fix things; it’s an editor’s job to point out what needs fixing. But if you are asked to be a hands-on editor, your revisions must be an improvement on the original – not just different. And certainly not worse. </p>
<p>It is our industry’s maxim, too, to first do no harm. Not only did ChatGPT not improve Rose’s story, it made it worse. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/two-authors-are-suing-openai-for-training-chatgpt-with-their-books-could-they-win-209227">Two authors are suing OpenAI for training ChatGPT with their books. Could they win?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>What did the human editors do?</h2>
<p>ChatGPT’s edit did not come close to the calibre of insight and editorial know-how offered by Overland editor Claire Corbett. Some examples:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There’s some beautiful writing and fantastic themes, but the quotes about drowning are heavy-handed; they’re given the job of foreshadowing suspense, creating unease in the reader, rather than the narrator doing that job. </p>
<p>The biggest problem is that final transition – I don’t know how to read the narrator. Her emotions don’t seem to fit the situation.</p>
<p>For me stories are driven by choices and I’m not clear what decision our narrator, or anyone else, in the story faces.</p>
<p>It’s entirely possible I’m not getting something important, but I think that if I’m not getting it, our readers won’t either.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Freelance editor Nicola, who has a personal relationship with Rose, went even further in her exchange (in response to the next draft, where Rose had attempted to address the issues Claire identified). She pushed Rose to work and rework the last sentence until they both felt the language lock in and land.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m not 100% sold on this line. I think it’s a little confusing … It might just be too much hinted at in too subtle a way for the reader.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Originally, the final sentence read: “Ready to make my slower way back to the house, retracing – overwriting – any sign of my own less-than more-than normal prints.”</p>
<p>The final version is: “Ready to make my slower way back to the house, retracing, overwriting, any sign of my own less-than, <em>more</em>-than, normal prints.” With the addition of a final standalone line: “I have seen what I wanted to see: her, me, free.”</p>
<p>Claire and Nicola’s feedback show how <a href="https://meanjin.com.au/essays/stet-by-me-thoughts-on-editing-fiction/">an editor is a story’s ideal reader</a>. A good editor can guide the author through problems with point of view and emotional dynamics – going beyond the simple mechanics of grammar, sentence length and the number of adjectives. </p>
<p>In other words, they demonstrate something we call editorial intelligence. </p>
<p>Editorial intelligence is akin to emotional intelligence. It incorporates intellectual, creative and emotional capital – all gained from lived experience, complemented by technical skills and industry expertise, applied through the prism of human understanding. </p>
<p>Skills include confident conviction, based on deep accumulated knowledge, meticulous research, cultural mediation and social skills. (After all, the author doesn’t have to do what we say – ours is a persuasive profession.)</p>
<h2>Round 2: the revised story</h2>
<p>Next, we submitted a revised draft that had addressed Claire’s suggestions and incorporated the conversations with Nicola. </p>
<p>This draft was submitted with the same initial prompt: “Hi ChatGPT, could I please ask for your editorial suggestions on my short story, which I’d like to submit for publication in a literary journal?”</p>
<p>ChatGPT responded with a summary of themes and editorial suggestions very similar to what it had offered in the first round. Again, it didn’t pick up that the story had already been published, nor did it clearly identify the genre.</p>
<p>For the follow-up, we asked specifically for an edit that corrected any issues with tense, spelling and punctuation. </p>
<p>It was a laborious process: the 2,500-word piece had to be submitted in chunks of 300–500 words and the revised sections manually combined. </p>
<p>However, these simpler editorial tasks were clearly more in ChatGPT’s ballpark. When we created a document (in Microsoft Word) that compared the original and AI-edited versions, the flagged changes appeared very much like a human editor’s tracked changes. </p>
<p>But ChatGPT’s changes revealed its own writing preferences, which didn’t allow for artistic play and experimentation. For example, it reinstated prepositions like “in”, “at”, “of” and “to”, which slowed down the reading and reduced the creativity of the piece – and altered the writing style. </p>
<p>This makes sense when you know the datasets that drive ChatGPT mean it explicitly works toward the word most likely to come next. (This might be directed differently in the future, towards more creative, and less stable or predictable models.) </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-entire-industry-is-based-on-hunches-is-australian-publishing-an-art-a-science-or-a-gamble-189621">'The entire industry is based on hunches': is Australian publishing an art, a science or a gamble?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Round 3: our final submission</h2>
<p>In the third and final round of the experiment, we submitted the draft that had been accepted by Meanjin. </p>
<p>The process kicked off with the same initial prompt: “Hi ChatGPT, could I please ask for your editorial suggestions on my short story, which I’d like to submit for publication in a literary journal?” </p>
<p>Again, ChatGPT offered its rote list of editorial suggestions. (Was this even editing?)</p>
<p>This time, we followed up with separate prompts for each element we wanted ChatGPT to review: title, pacing, imagery/description. </p>
<p>ChatGPT came back with suggestions for how to revise specific parts of the text, but the suggestions were once again formulaic. There was no attempt to offer – or support – any decision to go against familiar tropes. </p>
<p>Many of ChatGPT’s suggestions – much like the machine rewrites earlier – were heavy-handed. The alternative titles, like “Seaside Solitude” and “Coastal Connection”, used cringeworthy alliteration. </p>
<p>In contrast, Meanjin’s editor Tess Smurthwaite – on behalf of herself, copyeditor Richard McGregor, and typesetter Patrick Cannon – offered light revisions:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The edits are relatively minimal, but please feel free to reject anything that you’re not comfortable with.</p>
<p>Our typesetter has queried one thing: on page 100, where “Not like a thing at all” has become a new para. He wants to know whether the quote marks should change. Technically, I’m thinking that we should add a closing one after “not a thing” and then an opening one on the next line, but I’m also worried it might read like the new para is a response, and that it hasn’t been said by Elsie. Let me know what you think.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574586/original/file-20240209-30-ckbqbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574586/original/file-20240209-30-ckbqbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574586/original/file-20240209-30-ckbqbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574586/original/file-20240209-30-ckbqbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574586/original/file-20240209-30-ckbqbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574586/original/file-20240209-30-ckbqbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574586/original/file-20240209-30-ckbqbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574586/original/file-20240209-30-ckbqbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Many of ChatGPT’s suggestions were heavy-handed.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tara Winstead/Pexels</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Sometimes editorial expertise shows itself in not changing a text. Different isn’t necessarily good. It takes an expert to recognise when a story is working just fine. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.</p>
<p>It also takes a certain kind of aerial, bird’s-eye view to notice when the way type is set creates ambiguities in the text. Typesetters really are akin to editors. </p>
<h2>The verdict: can ChatGPT edit?</h2>
<p>So, ChatGPT can give credible-sounding editorial feedback. But we recommend editors and authors don’t ask it to give individual assessments or expert interventions any time soon.</p>
<p>A major problem that emerged early in this experiment involved ethics: ChatGPT did not ask for or verify the authorship of our story. A journal or magazine would ask an author to confirm a text is their own original work at some stage in the process: either at submission or contract stage. </p>
<p>A freelance editor would likely use other questions to determine the same answer – and in the process of asking about the author’s plans for publication, they would also determine the author’s own stylistic preferences. </p>
<p>Human editors demonstrate their credentials through their work history, and keep their experience up-to-date with professional training and qualifications. </p>
<p>What might the ethics be, we wonder, of giving the same recommendations to every author asking for editing advice? You might be disgruntled to receive generic feedback if you expect or have paid for for individual engagement.</p>
<p>As we’ve seen, when writing challenges expected conventions, AI struggles to respond. Its primary function is to appropriate, amalgamate and regurgitate – which is not enough when it comes to editing literary fiction. </p>
<p>Literary writing aims to – and often does – convey so much more than what the words on screen explicitly say. Literary writers strive for evocative, original prose that draws upon subtext and calls up undercurrents, making the most of nuance and implication to create imagined realities and invent unreal worlds.</p>
<p>At this stage of ChatGPT’s development, literally following the advice of its editing tools to edit literary fiction is likely to make it worse, not better.</p>
<p>In Rose’s case, her oceanic allegory about difference, with a nod to the supernatural, was turned into a story about a fish. </p>
<h2>ChatGPT is ‘like the new intern’</h2>
<p>This experiment shows how AI and human editors could work together. AI suggestions can be scrutinised – and integrated or dismissed – by authors or editors during the creative process. </p>
<p>And while many of its suggestions were not that useful, AI efficiently identified issues with tense, spelling and punctuation (within an overly narrow interpretation of these rules). </p>
<p>Without human editorial intelligence, ChatGPT does more harm than help. But when used by human editors, it’s like any other tool – as good, or bad, as the tradesperson who wields it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/216631/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Renée Otmar is affiliated with the Institute of Professional Editors, the Australian Society of Authors, Writers Victoria, Small Press Network and Life Stories Australia. She is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Faculty of Health, Deakin University.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Katherine Day, Rose Michael, and Sharon Mullins do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Technically, ChatGPT can do (some of) the work of a human editor. But an experiment comparing three separate human edits of a literary short story to edits by ChatGPT exposes AI’s serious limitations.Katherine Day, Lecturer, Publishing, The University of MelbourneRenée Otmar, Honorary Research Fellow, Faculty of Health, Deakin UniversityRose Michael, Senior Lecturer, Program Manager BA (Creative Writing), RMIT UniversitySharon Mullins, Tutor, Publishing and Editing, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2222992024-02-02T16:25:32Z2024-02-02T16:25:32ZCompleted Dry January? Reading fiction can help newly sober mothers decide what’s next<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/572156/original/file-20240130-27-fh57zq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=88%2C35%2C5841%2C3920&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/european-girl-reading-book-drinking-tea-2124750215">WellStock/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>More people in the UK have gone dry this January <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68019470">than ever before</a>, so drinking, not drinking, and navigating a course between the two, is on many of our minds.</p>
<p>Many of those people <a href="https://alcoholstudies.rutgers.edu/women-increase-drinking-during-pandemic/#:%7E:text=Recent%20data%20show%20the%20pandemic,overall%20population%20increase%20of%2014%25.">are mothers</a>. The pandemic saw an unprecedented <a href="https://www.channel4.com/news/the-frontline-of-britains-lockdown-drink-problem-as-alcohol-deaths-soar">escalation in domestic drinking</a>. With the arrival of high-speed home delivery companies, alcohol became more readily and rapidly available than ever before. For many women juggling not just work and childcare but also homeschooling, alcohol may have seemed to offer a coping mechanism, a way to survive <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/15/smoking-weed-motherhood-son-child-habit">“the grind of motherhood”</a>.</p>
<p>If you’ve been participating in Dry January, you may be feeling relieved, proud or anxious now that the month has come to an end. If you are wondering what to do next, there are blogs, podcasts, memoirs and self-help books on hand to offer advice. But other books can also help. Fiction offers precious – sobering – insights into the impact of alcohol in the lives of women and children.</p>
<p>Two works in particular stand out. Doug Stuart’s Booker Prize winner, <a href="https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/douglas-stuart/shuggie-bain/9781529019292">Shuggie Bain</a> (2020), and the short stories of American writer <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-story-is-the-thing-on-lucia-berlin">Lucia Berlin</a> provide visceral, insider portrayals of the devastating effect of life with and – occasionally, blissfully without – drink for mothers and their children. </p>
<h2>How fiction can help</h2>
<p>What exactly do these works of fiction offer that you might not find elsewhere? Set against intimate domestic backdrops, they provide unflinching accounts of drinking as a woman and mother and where extreme addiction can take you. </p>
<p>One example comes from Lucia Berlin’s short story, Unmanageable, from the collection A Manual for Cleaning Women (2015). On waking – hyperventilating – during the night, the unnamed protagonist sets out on an unnerving trip to a liquor store to get the drink which will enable her to function. </p>
<p>She succeeds, returns home, and sets about making her children their breakfast and washing their school clothes. She is trying to hold it together and paper over the cracks and she very nearly succeeds – but the socks for her sons aren’t dry in time. </p>
<p>Unmanageable offers a glimpse of the experiences of children of alcoholics, as well as their parents. The protagonist’s sons take her bag and car keys in an effort to protect her, but are unsuccessful and must go to school sockless. </p>
<p>In Shuggie Bain, one of the things that Stuart does so brilliantly is combine and move between the experiences of the beautiful, wasted – in all senses – Agnes and her youngest son, the eponymous Shuggie. Over several hundred pages of often excruciatingly painful prose, he shows both how and why Agnes drinks and the impact of addiction on the lives of her children. This includes the astonishing range of strategies they undertake to keep her safe. </p>
<p>In Berlin’s stories it becomes clear that the same mother who heads out to the liquor store in the dead of night had also experienced the effects of drinking on her own mother and other family members when she herself was a child. Threading the stories together, the generational legacies become painfully clear.</p>
<h2>An offer of hope</h2>
<p>Neither work pulls any punches. Shuggie’s strategies are all ultimately futile. But these characters aren’t all doomed. Stuart <a href="https://news.stv.tv/entertainment/shuggie-bain-author-douglas-stuart-says-writing-booker-prize-winning-novel-called-him-home#:%7E:text=Stuart%20insists%20that%20Shuggie%20Bain,addiction%20when%20he%20was%2016.">has acknowledged</a> that aspects and characters in the book reflect his own childhood. His ability to write Shuggie’s experiences at all – as well as his successful career working in fashion in the US – suggests there is a way through. Lives can be turned around, relationships saved. </p>
<p>In another short story, So Long, Berlin describes a mundane, relaxed breakfast with her adult son: “The same son I used to steal from, who told me I wasn’t his mother.” They read the papers, chat about sport and politics, then he kisses her goodbye. “All over the world mothers are having breakfast with their sons, seeing them off at the door,” she writes. “Can they know the gratitude I felt, standing there, waving? The reprieve.”</p>
<p>One of the key insights of these works for those wondering about their own next steps is the extraordinary and often contradictory pressure exerted by what other people think. </p>
<p>Perhaps the most heartbreaking scene in Shuggie Bain occurs at a golf club restaurant where Agnes’s new partner badgers and seduces her until she finally capitulates “because it’s what normal people do”. His inability to accept her as, at that point, a 12-months sober alcoholic, and her fear of what other people think, is something Agnes never comes back from.</p>
<p>As this scene plays out, we feel with and for her: stiffening when wine is ordered, overwhelmed with tiredness and fear just before finally giving in. These aren’t works which point the finger, but which offer insights and understanding, tenderness and compassion. </p>
<h2>No perfect fix</h2>
<p>As the books themselves make clear, fiction doesn’t always work or help. Shuggie’s attempts to entertain Agnes by reading to her from Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World don’t keep her sober. But for the Lucia Berlin character in Unmanageable, literature literally saves her life:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“She was shaking too hard to stand. She lay on the floor breathing deep yoga breaths. Don’t think, God don’t think about the state you’re in or you will die, of shame, a stroke. Her breath slowed down. She started to read the titles of books in the bookcase. Concentrate, read them out loud. Edward Abbey, Chinua Achebe, Sherwood Anderson, Jane Austen, Paul Auster, don’t skip, slow down. By the time she had read the whole wall of books she was better.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ultimately then, as those who have participated in Dry January decide what comes next, looking to the world of fiction has the potential to do a lot more good than dwelling on what other people think. </p>
<hr>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222299/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kiera Vaclavik does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Fiction offers precious and sobering insights into the impact of alcohol in the lives of women and children.Kiera Vaclavik, Professor of Children's Literature & Childhood Culture, Queen Mary University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2108912024-01-25T20:45:36Z2024-01-25T20:45:36ZJ.M. Coetzee’s provocative first book turns 50 this year – and his most controversial turns 25<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571104/original/file-20240124-27-p6w3fe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=71%2C11%2C1859%2C985&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:J._M._Coetzee_Nov_2023.jpg">Photo of J.M. Coetzee: Laterthanyouthink, via Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>J.M. Coetzee, one of the leading novelists of our age, turns 84 this year. Last year, he published <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/the-pole-and-other-stories">The Pole and Other Stories</a>, his 18th book (excluding volumes of criticism, commentary, letters and translations). Its flowering of mature style confirms that this writer remains at the top of his game. </p>
<p>Coetzee celebrates another milestone this year: 50 years of publishing serious, provocative fiction. His work is always formally daring, brave in its social critique and its refusal to play by the rules.</p>
<h2>Dusklands</h2>
<p>Coetzee’s first book, <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/dusklands">Dusklands</a>, appeared in April 1974. It was published by a small press in Johannesburg called Ravan, which had built a modest reputation for oppositional writing under apartheid. Coetzee’s debut was a slim volume with an unassuming – even deliberately dull – cover that belied the incendiary force of the two stories it contained.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569202/original/file-20240114-29-eik4qp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569202/original/file-20240114-29-eik4qp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569202/original/file-20240114-29-eik4qp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569202/original/file-20240114-29-eik4qp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569202/original/file-20240114-29-eik4qp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569202/original/file-20240114-29-eik4qp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569202/original/file-20240114-29-eik4qp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569202/original/file-20240114-29-eik4qp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The first edition of J.M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974).</span>
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<p>Its first part, The Vietnam Project, is set in the United States during the early 1970s. Its narrator, Eugene Dawn, meditates on his work as propaganda-warfare analyst for the US military’s operations in Vietnam. </p>
<p>“I have an exploring temperament,” he declares. “Had I lived two hundred years ago I would have had a continent to […] open to colonization.”</p>
<p>Eugene Dawn’s dreams of “total air-war” precipitate his decline. He holes up in a motel with Patrick White’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/voss-9781742756882">Voss</a> and Saul Bellow’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/herzog-9780141184876">Herzog</a> – novels concerned with the decline of overreaching rational minds.</p>
<p>The drive to explore and dominate also compels the protagonist of the book’s second part, The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee. The story is presented as as a translation, with parodic scholarly apparatus, of a record by a (real) 18th-century explorer. Jacobus Coetzee describes expeditions into the interior of what is now the Western and Northern Cape provinces of South Africa. </p>
<p>“I am a hunter,” he states, “a domesticator of the wilderness, a hero of enumeration.”</p>
<p>He recounts how, in 1760-61, he encounters the indigenous Khoisan people in the hinterlands of the Dutch settlement. He regards them as “completely disposable” and treats them like animals, seeing them as “game”. Their murder by the increasingly unhinged frontiersman is narrated with stomach-turning glee, as Jacobus Coetzee appears to descend into a madness born of megalomania. </p>
<p>“I am a tool in the hands of history,” he declares. “I have other things to think about.” </p>
<p>Each part of this bracing debut, then, offered an implicitly satirical engagement with the excesses of colonial adventuring. The book was formally daring, too. Was this a novel or two novellas, its first readers wondered. How was one to interpret the 18th-century “narrative” that presented itself as a historical document? </p>
<p>The juxtaposition of two widely divergent settings drew attention to what the narratives shared. It connected the narrators’ self-satisfied posturings as missionaries of “civilization” in a bravura indictment of Western Enlightenment discourses.</p>
<p>The boldness and novelty of approach led Jonathan Crewe – the book’s first South African reviewer – to herald of the arrival of the modern novel in the country. Some of the more avant-garde and oppositional Afrikaans writers of the previous decade would no doubt have demurred. But Crewe’s comparison of Dusklands with Joseph Conrad’s <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Heart-of-Darkness">Heart of Darkness</a> remains apt. </p>
<p>Both books feature the “journey of the Western consciousness out of the polity and into the void,” Crewe wrote. Both cast that journey as critique rather than celebration of Western attitudes.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-conrads-imperial-horror-story-heart-of-darkness-resonates-with-our-globalised-times-94723">How Conrad’s imperial horror story Heart of Darkness resonates with our globalised times</a>
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<h2>A revolutionary text</h2>
<p>Rita Barnard, a South African-born academic at the University of Pennsylvania who has taught Dusklands for many years, has observed that her students increasingly baulk at the book’s violence. They resent that they are being asked to occupy the subject position of the white perpetrator. </p>
<p>Barnard has some sympathy with this response. “After all,” she muses, </p>
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<p>revelations about colonial discourse that Dusklands stunned us with in the 1970s are no longer new; my students were already trained to look for silences, racist misrepresentations, and epistemic violence in a text.</p>
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<p>Yet Dusklands was undoubtedly revolutionary for its moment. Nelson Mandela was eight years into his life sentence. The Soweto Rising and the death of Steve Biko in police custody had not yet galvanised internal opposition. Overtly anti-apartheid works were routinely repressed. The formal end of apartheid was still 20 years away. </p>
<p>In this context, it is difficult to conceive of a bolder attack on the ideas of apartheid’s ideologues. No other work had dared to link apartheid’s originary narratives (as the explorer accounts undoubtedly are) to Kissinger-era <em>realpolitik</em>.</p>
<p>For all our laudable attention to trigger warnings, we should welcome fiction that unsettles our complacent sense that philosophical opposition to colonial violence and its legacies might be sufficient absolution. Dusklands forces the reader into uncomfortable cohabitation with characters who are implicated in genocide, but convinced of their moral rectitude. </p>
<p>One hardly need elaborate the ongoing lesson this holds for readers in the present.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/in-j-m-coetzees-latest-story-collection-questions-of-the-soul-become-urgent-as-the-body-becomes-frail-206406">In J.M. Coetzee's latest story collection, questions of the soul become urgent as the body becomes frail</a>
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<h2>Disgrace</h2>
<p>As arbitrarily neat temporal markers would have it, this year is also a significant anniversary for another of Coetzee’s most provocative works. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/disgrace">Disgrace</a> was published in August 1999, five years into the “new” South Africa, and against the backdrop of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the country’s great experiment in truth-telling. It won Coetzee his second Booker Prize, making him the first author so celebrated. </p>
<p>Set in a recognisable present, Disgrace is Coetzee’s most deceptively straightforward realist narrative. Its university setting, similar to the University of Cape Town, generated all manner of misguided speculations about whether it was a <em>roman à clef</em>.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571099/original/file-20240124-29-aevpnj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571099/original/file-20240124-29-aevpnj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571099/original/file-20240124-29-aevpnj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571099/original/file-20240124-29-aevpnj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571099/original/file-20240124-29-aevpnj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571099/original/file-20240124-29-aevpnj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571099/original/file-20240124-29-aevpnj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571099/original/file-20240124-29-aevpnj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Disgrace is a novel that interrogates the transparency of language, more specifically English. Its protagonist, David Lurie, is an academic whose research interest is the poetry of the Romantics. He wonders at one point whether English is a fit medium for communication in post-apartheid South Africa. It appears “tired”, he reflects. </p>
<p>Early in the novel, Lurie goes to see a play called Sunset at the Globe Salon, a farce that offers ironic commentary on his intellectual identifications. The play is set neither in Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, nor in an 18th-century salon, but in a hairdressers’ parlour, where the melodrama unfolds in gloriously creolising English. The sun is going down on an “old” South Africa – and Lurie appears stranded.</p>
<p>Like Dusklands, Disgrace does not shy away from violence – in this case, a violent gang rape of Lurie’s daughter Lucy by three black men. </p>
<p>Lucy is a model “new” South African. She is a lesbian who runs a boarding kennel in the rural heartland, having turned her back on self-satisfied metropolitan social circles. She is attempting to live ethically, with a social conscience. </p>
<p>The country’s ruling party, the African National Congress, took umbrage. In a submission to the country’s Human Rights Commission, they condemned Disgrace as an instance of white racism lingering in media and the arts. Specifically, they objected to the novel’s key moment of crisis – the rape – and Lucy’s suggestion that such sexual violence might be the “the price one has to pay for staying on”.</p>
<p>Coetzee, they averred, “represents as brutally as he can the white people’s perception of the post-apartheid black man”.</p>
<p>What the ANC failed to note was that the rape is not represented. <em>Disgrace</em> might appear to be a realist novel with an omniscient narrator, but it is, in fact, entirely focalised through its white male protagonist, who is in denial about his complicity with prejudice and violence. </p>
<p>Indeed, David Lurie is himself a rapist. Lucy’s rape is mirrored by Lurie’s rape of one of his students, Melanie Isaacs, who is coded as mixed race (a detail readers often miss). He justifies his exploitation of a student as “not rape, not quite that, but undesired … to the core”. </p>
<p>David’s punishment is a retreat into forms of self-abnegation and “service” that the novel invites us to read as ultimately narcissistic.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/patrick-white-was-the-first-australian-writer-to-win-the-nobel-prize-in-literature-50-years-later-is-he-still-being-read-214724">Patrick White was the first Australian writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature – 50 years later, is he still being read?</a>
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<h2>Problems with language</h2>
<p>One of the striking aspects of Dusklands – and part of its boldness – is its insistence on the global connections between oppression and injustice. It insists, too, on addressing a global audience, in a style that refuses to be marked as parochial or nationalist. Its form refuses to endorse any single speaking position. </p>
<p>Barnard puts this eloquently. Dusklands, she writes, “opens up a speaking place that is global, rather than national, or even strictly monolingual or monogeneric”.</p>
<p>These moves have characterised Coetzee’s subsequent work. His novels incorporate apparent contradictions, undermine occasions of narration, and frame narratives as the speech acts of characters who are obviously compromised and unreliable. They undermine the premises of canonical texts and stage outrageous metafictional interventions – as when the writer-protagonist of one Coetzee novel, <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/elizabeth-costello">Elizabeth Costello</a> (2003), shows up part-way through the next, <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/slow-man">Slow Man</a> (2005), and proceeds to direct the plot.</p>
<p>Language makes worlds, and Coetzee’s work has from the outset interrogated the presumption that this is a straightforward operation without ideological implications. Language is never transparent, never innocent of the designs of those who claim to police forms of expression. </p>
<p>Coetzee was regarded by some of his peers as insufficiently engaged with the emergency in South Africa – notably Nadine Gordimer in a <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1984/02/02/the-idea-of-gardening/">famously puzzled review</a> of his Booker Prize-winning novel <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/life-times-of-michael-k">Life & Times of Michael K</a> (1983). But the difficulty of taking positions, when those positions are already taken by people determined to force compliance with one view of historical events or another, is a recurring dilemma for Coetzee. </p>
<p>Only fiction, his 50-year career continues to insist, offers a writer the means to intervene in the world in ways that have relevance beyond immediate contexts. It places the author at a remove from the political demand that we speak, for such speaking is inevitably only ventriloquism.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/summertime">Summertime</a> (2009), the final instalment in a trilogy of memoirs that challenge readers’ presumptions about the genre (it features a biographer interviewing significant figures in the life of the deceased author John Coetzee), a former lover of the author speculates that Dusklands was not only “a book about cruelty, an exposé of the cruelty involved in various forms of conquest”, but also “a project in self-administered therapy”. </p>
<p>This is a joke of sorts. But it is also insightful, in that it acknowledges the part-autobiographical nature of any writer’s work. </p>
<p>Coetzee has been ahead of his readers from the outset. He is implicated in the “translation” of The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee (a distant relative, if not a direct antecedent). And Eugene Dawn’s demanding supervisor at the sinister RAND-like corporation he serves is named “Coetzee”. </p>
<p>All of Coetzee’s works are a self-recriminating interrogations. They address the complicity of writers in events that are too easily dismissed as beyond their capacity to influence. They examine privileges inherited at the expense of others in ways that remain profoundly important. Their honesty and power to discomfort makes them as necessary today as when they first appeared.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/210891/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Coetzee is both Honorary Graduate and holds an Honorary Research affiliation at the University that employs me, but there is no direct benefit to either of us, or to the University, of a reflection on the anniversaries of significant publications independently recognised as worthy of note.</span></em></p>The fiction of J.M. Coetzee is always formally daring, brave in its social critique and its refusal to play by the rules.Andrew van der Vlies, Professor, School of Humanities, University of AdelaideLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2206552024-01-24T19:06:29Z2024-01-24T19:06:29ZHow Dostoevsky overcame his gambling addiction<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570509/original/file-20240121-27-zvcxdt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=4%2C4%2C3190%2C2045&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky – Vasily Perov (1872).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vasily_Perov_-_%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B5%D1%82_%D0%A4.%D0%9C.%D0%94%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B5%D0%B2%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Dostoevsky had to write <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Gambler_and_Other_Stories/The_Gambler">The Gambler</a> in two months. He had no choice. He had accepted 3,000 roubles from a publisher named Stellovsky to keep his creditors at bay. If he failed to deliver a work of not less than ten printer’s sheets (160 pages) by November 1, 1866, Stellovsky would receive the rights and income for all of Dostoevsky’s previous and future work for nine years. </p>
<p>Dostoevsky broke off writing <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2554">Crime and Punishment</a> to take on the seemingly insurmountable task of completing a novel in such a sort period of time. He drew on his experience of being addicted to gambling.</p>
<p>His gambling mania had first seized him in 1863 on a tour of Europe, where he developed a passion for roulette. Dostoevsky soon fell into a pattern of chasing his losses, telling himself that his fortunes would change and he would redeem himself: </p>
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<p>…one turn of the wheel, and all will be changed, and those very moralists will be the first (I am convinced of that) to come up to congratulate me with friendly jests. And they will not all turn away from me as they do now. But, hang them all! What am I now? Zero. What may I be tomorrow? Tomorrow I may rise from the dead and begin to live again! There are still the makings of a man in me.</p>
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<h2>Boundless egoism</h2>
<p>In Crime and Punishment, an impoverished student named Rodion Raskolnikov murders an elderly pawnbroker with an axe. The reader follows his dialogue with himself until he confesses and seeks atonement for his actions. </p>
<p>In The Gambler, there is only a spiral downward with no landing point. Alexei Ivanovich, a tutor working for the family of a once wealthy general, initially shows no interest or desire to gamble. By the end, he is totally addicted to roulette. His character is transformed. From what Dostoevsky calls an aristocratic disinterest in winning (or losing), Alexi becomes a person with a plebeian willingness to lose his very last coin. </p>
<p>The “aristocratic” type gambles only for pure pleasure. The “plebeian” embraces the risk of gambling in the hope of changing his life – if only he can win big enough. </p>
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<p>The novel reminds the reader of what it is like to be drawn into a culture of gambling, where the first win at a roulette table (or in any form of gambling) is burned into one’s memory for ever. </p>
<p>The compulsive gambler holds on to the idea that continued gambling will, through improved skills, lead to proportionally higher rewards. But what takes hold in reality is the erroneous belief that they can develop an infallible gambling system, governed simply by the power of reason, which will allow them to conquer the ever-spinning roulette wheel. </p>
<p>Another trait evident in The Gambler is “boundless egoism” – this was <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/psychology/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/dostoyevsky-and-parricide#:%7E:text=Source%20Citation,%2C%2021%2C%20173%2D196.">Sigmund Freud’s</a> reading of Dostoevsky. As the gambler becomes addicted, he loses all sense of socially motivated feelings, such as sympathy for family members or friends. </p>
<p>For Alexi, an emotional numbness prevails: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am living, of course, in continual anxiety. I play for the tiniest stakes, and I keep waiting for something, calculating, standing for whole days at the gambling table and watching the play; I even dream of playing – but I feel that in all this, I have, as it were, grown stiff and wooden, as though I had sunk into a muddy swamp. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is a heartfelt description of the internal experience of fear, hope, defeat and entrapment. Alexei reflects on where he is in life: his hopes and dreams, the “whole days” spent stuck in one spot “watching the play”. He loses all desire for Polina, his romantic interest at the start of the novel. He has “grown stiff” and “stuck”, despite the love, comfort and connection she might provide.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/crime-and-punishment-is-150-and-its-politics-are-more-relevant-than-ever-69259">Crime and Punishment is 150 – and its politics are more relevant than ever</a>
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<h2>Addiction and revelation</h2>
<p>The treatment of gambling addiction is not a topic in The Gambler – only Alexi’s tragic fall from grace. But without psychiatric knowledge, or perhaps in spite of his personal awareness of what he was describing at the time, Dostoevsky tapped into the raw experience of gambling and the issue of how to understand gambling addiction.</p>
<p>Our understanding of gambling addiction is still evolving. Treatments are being explored and developed. From 1980, the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14459795.2019.1638432">American Psychiatric Association</a> included compulsive gambling in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a form of impulse control disorder, alongside kleptomania and pyromania. </p>
<p>In 2013, gambling was reclassified as gambling disorder, within the substance-related and addictive disorders categorisation. This marked, among other things, a turn towards the investigation and use of pharmaceutical treatments, such as <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2013.00206/full">dopamine</a>, to control the gambling impulse. It is noteworthy, that online gambling or gaming is not classified in this space. </p>
<p>So how does one overcome these challenges when knowledge, while no longer in its infancy, is still expanding? </p>
<p>Dostoevsky offers a potentially valuable example of how one moment or a chance happening can change everything. It might sound counterintuitive to wait for such an event in a modern world such as ours, where advice from professionals or the internet is close to hand, but those cured of gambling addictions have often emphasised the role of chance or sudden revelation in their rehabilitation. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=716&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=716&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=716&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Anna Grigoryevna Dostoevsky, née Snitkin (1871).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anna_Dostoyevskaya_in_1871.jpg">Public domain</a></span>
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<p>Eight days after having completed The Gambler, Dostoevsky proposed marriage to his stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkin. She accepted and they soon went abroad for a number of years. During this period, Dostoevsky gambled heavily, often pawning their belongings so he could gamble further. He would travel ahead to a town or resort with gaming tables, then write letters back to Anna chastising himself for losing all their money. </p>
<p>Anna believed Dostoevsky needed gambling as a kind of cathartic, physiological release from his daily frustrations. She felt it cleared his mind to concentrate on his writing. By all accounts, she was unsuccessful in reversing the gambling tendency in Dostoevsky. As with most gambling addicts, Dostoevsky oscillated between confessions to his wife, hope for forgiveness, and promises it will not happen again – promises he would then break. </p>
<p>But then, in a letter to Anna in 1871, he shares a life changing epiphany: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>By half past nine I had lost everything and I fled like a madman. I felt so miserable that I rushed to see the priest (don’t get upset, I did not see him, no, I did not, nor do I intend to!) […] But I lost my way in this town and when I reached a church, which I took for a Russian church, they told me in a store that it was not Russian but a synagogue. It was as if someone had poured cold water over me. I ran back home. And now it is midnight and I am sitting and writing to you.</p>
<p>A great thing has happened to me: I have rid myself of the abominable delusion that has tormented me for almost 10 years. For 10 years (or, to be more precise, ever since my brother’s death, when I suddenly found myself weighted down by debts) I dreamed about winning money. I dreamt of it seriously, passionately. But now it is all over! This was the very last time.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And so it was. Dostoevsky lost all interest in gambling for good. He no longer dreamed of winning. The delusion that he might win enough to transform his life had left him as easily as it had arrived. The change in his character was permanent. </p>
<p>The key moment, with its many spiritual echoes was: “it was as if someone had poured cold water over me”. Worthy of comment, too, is his inability to access the familiarity and reassurance of the Russian Orthodox church. Disoriented, he arrives instead a Jewish synagogue. Arguably, it was this strangeness that made him uneasy and vulnerable to an experience, spiritual or otherwise, that had a lasting effect on his view of gambling and its personal consequences. </p>
<p>There is, however, another account that does not quite line up with the timeline of his cure – one that is less mysterious, but of interest nonetheless. </p>
<p>Gambling had been for Dostoevsky a “kind of obsession”, an experience defined by the thrill of “half-hanging over an abyss so as to peer into its very depths and – in certain, though not frequent cases – flinging oneself headlong into it”.</p>
<p>In 1871, Dostoevsky went abroad to Ems for a cure. He had a bronchial condition, the first symptoms of which had appeared as early as 1868. Could it be that his abandonment of gambling was related to his not being able to endure the excitement of gambling? His health had deteriorated to such an extent that he lacked the necessary physical strength; it was physiologically too much for him. Perhaps physical incapacity had a hand in his cure?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/220655/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephen Dobson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Dostoevsky’s sudden recovery from his gambling mania is an example of how a chance happening can change everythingStephen Dobson, Professor and Dean of Education and the Arts, CQUniversity AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2198012024-01-18T18:58:03Z2024-01-18T18:58:03ZTenderness and technical mastery: Anne Michaels’ poetic novel Held expands the possibilities of historical fiction<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569762/original/file-20240117-29-9me2cx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C8%2C5455%2C3063&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kaiskynet Studio/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1974, philosopher and literary critic Hayden White caused a small furore with his magnum opus <a href="https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/11178/metahistory">Metahistory</a>. In the deconstructionist spirit of <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/derrida/">Jacques Derrida</a>, White challenged the “objectivity” of historiography, drawing attention to its dependence on narrative to convey meaning about the past.</p>
<p>Ever since, novelists and scholars have been approaching the historical novel with a heightened concern for its subjectivity.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Held – Anne Michaels (Bloomsbury)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Canadian novelist and poet Anne Michaels has been experimenting with blends of fiction and history as far back as her critically acclaimed debut poetry collection <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/113919/the-weight-of-orangesminers-pond-by-anne-michaels/9780771058783">The Weight of Oranges</a> (1986) and her Orange Prize winning novel <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/fugitive-pieces-9781408805688/">Fugitive Pieces</a> (1996). A deep philosophical exploration of the subjective nature of historical knowledge and memory runs through her smart and poignant new novel <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/held-9781526659118/">Held</a>.</p>
<p>Composed over a period of almost 15 years, Held does not resemble a conventional social realist novel. Rather than focusing on large-scale dramatic happenings, it quietly and discreetly focuses on the internal lives of its characters.</p>
<p>The novel ambitiously spans more than a century. It moves from Cambrai in 1917 to North Yorkshire in 1920, London in 1951, Suffolk in 1984 and 1964, Sceaux in 1910, Brest-Litovsk in 1980, Paris in 1908, Dorset in 1912, back to Suffolk in 1910, before concluding in the Gulf of Finland in 2025. </p>
<p>The result is rich, poetic and formally complex. Each of the novel’s 12 chapters is brief, fragmented and full of erudite meditations on the nature of history, memory and humanity. Each is set in a water-lined location, giving a sense of continuity to the novel’s sweep through time. </p>
<p>Michaels comments, meta-fictively, on the nebulous form of Held when she has a character reflect on the “sea, where, like memory […] the elusiveness of the form is the form”.</p>
<h2>Women hold the line</h2>
<p>Held depicts four generations of one family held together by four strong, intelligent, earnest women. </p>
<p>The family line begins with Helena, a self-doubting but prodigiously talented artist. She runs a photography studio with her husband John, who has returned injured from World War I. Their daughter Anna is introduced with her husband, a Marxist hat maker from Piedmont. We then encounter Anna’s daughter Mara, a doctor, who is, like her grandfather John, drawn to conflict zones, serving in field hospitals in France during WWI. Finally, there is Mara’s daughter Anna, named after her maternal grandmother. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568806/original/file-20240111-27-1vg939.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568806/original/file-20240111-27-1vg939.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568806/original/file-20240111-27-1vg939.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568806/original/file-20240111-27-1vg939.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568806/original/file-20240111-27-1vg939.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568806/original/file-20240111-27-1vg939.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1213&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568806/original/file-20240111-27-1vg939.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1213&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568806/original/file-20240111-27-1vg939.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1213&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Helena, Anna, Mara and Anna share a tendency to agonise over the ways in which they inhabit and find meaning in their historical situations, whether through art, raising children, or politics and social justice. </p>
<p>Their careful deliberations connect them to identifiable historical counterparts. In chapter nine, for example, the physicist Ernest Rutherford and the renowned chemists Marie and Pierre Curie appear. Rutherford and the Curies are gathered in Paris in June 1908 at Paul Langerin’s house by the Rue Gazen to celebrate Curie’s doctorate. The conversation quickly turns to the prominent medium of the day, Madame Palladino. </p>
<p>The discussion reflects the conflict at the heart of the novel. At the centre of Held is the dichotomy between a scientific worldview and the more elusive forces that shape life. In grappling with this theme, Michaels adheres to the principle the Serbian-American poet and editor Charles Simic outlined in <a href="https://archive.org/details/lifeofimagessele0000simi">The Life of Images</a> (2015), where Simic argues that “all the arts are about the impossible predicament” and that writing is a “rough translation from wordlessness into words”. </p>
<p>As a character in Held reflects while standing beside the River Orwell in Sussex in 1984, “it impossible for words to fully witness and describe what the world was”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/anne-enrights-bold-new-novel-the-wren-the-wren-is-the-work-of-a-writer-at-the-height-of-her-power-212193">Anne Enright’s bold new novel The Wren, The Wren is the work of a writer at the height of her power</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Aftermath and image making</h2>
<p>Like Michaels’ earlier novel Fugitive Pieces, Held begins with a young male character grappling with the ramifications of war. It opens in 1917 on a battlefield in France, near Cambrai and the River Escaut, where John lies wounded beside a younger and also badly wounded soldier. The snowy battlefield is drawn in concise but vivid images: “the shadow of a bird moved across the hill; he could not see the bird.” </p>
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<p>Michaels crafts a series of beautiful, annihilating lines that imbue the setting with a hyperreal wash and a rich sense of atmosphere. She relies on the resonance of imagery and objects to evoke emotions in a way that recalls the concept of the “objective correlative”, which was coined by the American painter Washington Allston in 1840 and later applied to literature by T.S. Eliot in his essay <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69399/hamlet">Hamlet and His Problems</a> (1919). </p>
<p>In the description of the mist that “smouldered like cremation fires in the rain”, there is the looming sense of an ending. John’s reluctance to accept the reality of the young man’s death is woven through the imagery. We bear witness to “how alert the dead soldier looked, how absolutely, utterly awake”. </p>
<p>Yet to focus purely on the artistry of Michaels’ image-making betrays the intellectual rigour of the aphoristic reflections scattered through this nimble novel: “faith uses the mechanism of doubt to prove itself”; “loneliness is not emptiness but negation”. In these moments, Michaels’ forces the reader to slow down and savour the gravitas of these observations.</p>
<p>In the fashion of Michael Ondaatje’s postmodern masterpiece <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-english-patient-9781841593395">The English Patient</a> (1992), the stillness of John’s wounded body frees his wandering mind. Michaels burrows into John’s past, carefully rendering his consciousness. Through the mist settling on the battlefield, he has a vision of his wife: “fragments of her – elliptic, stroboscopic – Helena’s dark hat, her gloves”. </p>
<p>In Held, the past is always lurking in the present moment. Michaels superimposes the recollected images of Helena onto the visual backdrop of John’s surroundings, merging images of past and present to capture the sensation of fading in and out of consciousness. </p>
<p>As a series of thoughts, images, feelings and philosophical reflections pass through John’s mind, we discover he is intelligent, precise and mathematical. He is deeply introspective and uses adjectives like “<a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Lagrangian">Lagrangian</a>”. He is the kind of person who “did not believe that the mystery at the heart of things was amorphous or vague or a discrepancy, but a place in us for something to be absolutely precise”. </p>
<p>John’s stream of consciousness moves from intimate memories of the early days of falling in love with Helena to recollections of his childhood, his late mother and his father, who gave up being a sailor for the life of a farmer. He imagines drowning at sea. The longer he lies there, the less the war seems like a concrete reality. It becomes a symbol of the haunting inevitability of loss: a reminder of the transience of life that imbues the narrative with an intensified sense of beauty and meaning. </p>
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<span class="caption">Anne Michaels at the Eden Mills Writers Festival, September 2013.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anne_Michaels_-_Eden_Mills_Writers_Festival_-_2013_(DanH-0169).jpg">Dan Harasymchuk, via Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-cosmic-ocean-of-shame-jesmyn-wards-let-us-descend-confronts-a-history-beyond-the-ken-of-storytelling-214708">A cosmic ocean of shame: Jesmyn Ward's Let Us Descend confronts a history beyond the ken of storytelling</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Poetry and the novel</h2>
<p>Held is a book of symbols, metaphors, vivid imagery and motifs. All the pleasures of poetry flourish in the weave of Michaels’ concise prose fragments. Her formal experiments reveal the possibilities of the historical novel when it combines qualities of poetry. Behind the subjective worlds of the characters’ inner lives, Michaels’ research into history and the science of knowledge is felt, but it never detracts from the unity of the work. </p>
<p>In many respects, Michaels has written the novel Virginia Woolf prophesied in her essay <a href="https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.460958/page/n225/mode/2up">The Narrow Bridge of Art</a> (1927). Outlining her vision for <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-waves-vintage-classics-woolf-series-9781784870843">The Waves</a>, Woolf predicted that in the future we will be forced to come up with a new name for a new kind of book, one that “will be written in prose, but in prose which has many of the characteristics of poetry”. </p>
<p>The organisational logic of Held feels more akin to that of poetry than the novel. Michaels’ subordination of plot to her more meditative and abstract concerns is one of the many reasons. The narrative is more spatial than linear, the novel cohering around thematic links and symbolic repetitions, rather than causal plot connections. </p>
<p>But commenting on the elusiveness of the form seems almost redundant in a work so invested in dissolving its own boundaries. Held is a novel in which the impermanence of things outweighs concrete and temporal distinctions. The lyricism closes gaps in time: “a field becomes a battlefield; becomes a field again”. </p>
<p>Like Michaels’ poetry, this tender but fiercely truncated novel combines its sense of loss, silence, history and identity with a desire to grasp the unquantifiable. The balance of tenderness with technical mastery is enthralling. This profound novel begs for a slow and careful reading to peel back all its layers of raw intelligence and beauty.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219801/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Georgia Phillips does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A deep philosophical exploration of the subjective nature of historical knowledge and memory runs through Anne Michaels smart and poignant new novel.Georgia Phillips, Lecturer, Creative Writing, University of AdelaideLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2202172024-01-16T19:14:52Z2024-01-16T19:14:52ZYumna Kassab’s impressionistic novel Politica considers moral dilemmas and harsh choices in a time of war<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568543/original/file-20240110-29-x5jf1i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=126%2C0%2C5862%2C3989&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Mosaic, al-Aqsa mosque, Jerusalem.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Salajean/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://ultimopress.com.au/products/politica">Politica</a> is the fourth novel by Yumna Kassab, who has made a significant impact on the Australian literary scene since the publication of her debut novel <a href="https://giramondopublishing.com/books/the-house-of-youssef/">The House of Youssef</a> in 2019. </p>
<p>Politica is written in Kassab’s now signature polyphonic style. A variety of abruptly introduced characters (“Um Kareem came here with tears in her eyes”) ponder their possibilities, drift in and out of relationships, and seek personal solace in the midst of a prolonged and violent conflict. </p>
<p>Set in a small community, the novel is sparsely written, with minimal description of character, place or historical moment. It does not let readers anchor themselves in an evolving narrative arc. Instead, it asks them to immerse themselves in aperçus of a bewildered and suffering community. </p>
<p>In this unnamed town or village, the past is ever present, and the present is barely tolerable in the absence of a hopeful future. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Politica – Yumna Kassab (Ultimo Press)</em></p>
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<p>Politica achieves its impressionistic effects through quirky vignettes, poetry, fable, gnomic aphorisms, and arguments between conservative forces and those seeking to redefine their values. World building is at a minimum. We focus on the larger question of how a society copes with a state of endless war, when politics saturates every dimension of life. </p>
<p>Some of the characters are resistance leaders and their heirs; others are ordinary people with everyday aspirations. But they all face urgent questions. Fight or flight? Resist or accommodate? Accept the political as the only authentic option or seek the consolations of private life? </p>
<p>Politica has allegorical ambitions, so these dilemmas cannot be resolved by referring to a describable geopolitical reality. The novel spans decades, yet no particular enemy or threat can be consistently identified, nor does it identify the nation in which it is set. We are somewhere in the Middle East. The war has something to do with the legacy of European hegemony. It may be a civil war initiated by an insurgency, but there are also striking references to a colonial invasion and the potentially genocidal destruction of a culture:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Miss tell me what remains of us once […] our existence has been wiped from the Earth?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The pressing question of the use and abuse of power is posed repeatedly. In particular, the reader is asked to think about the ends that justify violence. What are the injuries to the soul that result from the brutal murders, the betrayals, the fetishising of violence? Abdullah, the original spiritual leader of the cause, muses that </p>
<blockquote>
<p>This is a dirty business. We don’t want to end up dirtier still. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The novel uses early flash forwards to remind us that idealism is always in conflict with political realities. Politics is depicted as a realm of contingency, reversals of fortune and unhoped for outcomes. </p>
<p>Abdullah’s daughter Yasmeen, who sacrifices a comfortable future in order to assume political leadership, later recognises herself ruefully as a mere prop. She appears in a photoshoot with an enemy president – an act that generates feelings of self-loathing, and perhaps leads to her assassination. The incident and its ominous outcome, a media-driven event, have echoes of Yasser Arafat’s visit to Camp David during the Oslo Accords in 2000 and the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981.</p>
<p>Yet in its early sections the novel is not fatalistic about what is politically achievable. The wise Abdullah probes the ethics of a just war and wants to educate his disciples: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wish to teach as I wish to teach my child […] I do not wish to trivialise the value or meaning of a human’s life whether on our side or on theirs. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>When normal channels of social mobility are shut down, the question of how to educate and uplift oneself, one’s family and one’s community arises. In the character of Yasmeen, the novel offers a rewarding variation on male-dominated narratives of anti-colonial resistance. </p>
<p>Yasmeen is Abdullah’s elective successor. She resists her mother’s calls for a more conventional domestic existence and seeks to train herself as a future political leader, stubbornly attending meetings with her father from a young age. The story of her education has elements of a Bildungsroman, as she pursues an adventurous life path in the face of adversity. </p>
<p>Yet from there the novel’s desire to capture the dolorous essence of politics begins to overwhelm any interest in character development. A gallery of figures typical of prolonged warfare emerges for the reader to contemplate. There is the bully who loves power, domination and fighting for its own sake. There is the cunning “rat” looking for the main chance. Cultures of martyrdom are scrutinised, as we witness the pointless demise of a suicide bomber. The humanist Abdullah reminds us not to </p>
<blockquote>
<p>idolise death over life […] Such is the tendency of one who has not yet learned to live. </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568541/original/file-20240110-17-myosut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568541/original/file-20240110-17-myosut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568541/original/file-20240110-17-myosut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568541/original/file-20240110-17-myosut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568541/original/file-20240110-17-myosut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568541/original/file-20240110-17-myosut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568541/original/file-20240110-17-myosut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568541/original/file-20240110-17-myosut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Yumna Kassab.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tiger Webb/Giramondo Publishing</span></span>
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</figure>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/colonial-and-nationalist-myths-are-recast-in-yumna-kassabs-australiana-178881">Colonial and nationalist myths are recast in Yumna Kassab's Australiana</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A moral project</h2>
<p>Maks Sipowicz has written about Kassab’s “<a href="https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/kassab-australiana/">moral project</a>”. In Politica, we can recognise a desire to humanise the protagonists of Middle Eastern conflicts. This is of crucial importance when Arab and Muslim political movements, including that of the Palestinians, are relentlessly delegitimised and dehumanised. </p>
<p>Politica wants to show what a resistance movement might look like from the side of the oppressed. The novel questions the total warfare the West now excuses as a drive for security. Indeed, it is hard not to think of Gaza when Kassab names a chapter “Exile no right of return” or when an innocent child beseeches </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I thought you said they wouldn’t touch the ruins. My family were sheltering there.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yet there is always a danger that a novel seeking to say something about politics will begin to moralise. The tendency becomes more prevalent in the second half of Politica. A war that began with noble ideals comes to resemble a plague laying waste to all who experience it. The novel’s early interest in difficult choices and humane conduct gives way to generalities about the futility and hypocrisy of politics: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Politics is all words. Remember, the truth is somewhere else. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the third section, the conventional Gothic trope of a well that preserves the memories of the dead and witnesses the confessions of the living feels somewhat hackneyed:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is a presence here. She feels it close to the well. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Telling begins to predominate over showing, as sententious nostrums badger the reader:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There may be no witness in the living but the record is always kept. The weight of history is layers, and it does not disappear, no matter how oblivious is humanity.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A once energetic character called Salma, now mature and disappointed, sits vigilantly facing a doorway as a rather heavy-handed signifier of trauma, anxiety and compulsion. </p>
<p>I will admit that I found myself questioning the continuing narrative interest of a community at a standstill. I wanted to understand the cause of the distress and fatigue of characters who are briefly introduced. Is it the corrupt neo-colonial state, the occupying forces, the legacy of Euro-American hegemony?</p>
<p>I think Politica bears comparison with the literary tradition of “civic realism” identified by <a href="https://cla.umn.edu/about/directory/profile/brenn032">Timothy Brennan</a>, which wants its readers to recognise and then oppose a bad reality. That recognition can also be achieved through allegory and magic-realism. Mohsin Hamid’s intricate fable <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/exit-west-9780241979068">Exit West</a> (2017), about migration as a human right, has demonstrated the vitality of indirect narrative techniques. </p>
<p>Yet Politica seems nervous about the enormity of contemporary geopolitics. It prefers bathos in a minor key to the ambitious scope of historical fiction, now an abundant postcolonial genre. </p>
<p>To its credit, Kassab’s novel retains a sense that the political can generate realignments of gender roles, and that small players and working people can become prophetic voices. But it has little to say about the promise of politics, which is also about a much needed transformation in the cause of justice and the human efforts needed to achieve it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/220217/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ned Curthoys does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Politica is set in an unnamed town where past is ever present, and the present is barely tolerable in the absence of a hopeful future.Ned Curthoys, Senior Lecturer in English and Literary Studies, The University of Western AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2200412024-01-14T19:06:15Z2024-01-14T19:06:15ZAntarctica is the only continent without a permanent human population, but it has inspired a wealth of imaginative literature<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568797/original/file-20240111-17-upafl3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C0%2C3860%2C2590&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Christopher Wood/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>When I was working on my book <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Antarctica-Fiction-Imaginative-Narratives-South-ebook/dp/B009ZRNPW4">Antarctica in Fiction</a>, friends and colleagues would joke about what an easy task I had taken on. How many writers would choose to set a novel in a continent with no permanent human population? Surely a dozen or so books would cover it. </p>
<p>To begin with, I too vastly underestimated the work involved. I quickly found that there are many hundreds of novels set in Antarctica, even if you limit the selection to those available in English.</p>
<p>Over ten years later, I still have my work cut out keeping up with the proliferating new titles. Early exploring expeditions continue to be revisited. Contemporary threats to the region – climate change in particular – are generating new, often disturbing, stories. </p>
<p>A question I am sometimes asked is whether people who set novels in Antarctica have – or should have – travelled there themselves. Increasingly, writers do visit the ice continent with national programs, tourist vessels and NGOs. A research project I currently lead, <a href="https://www.utas.edu.au/research/projects/creative-antarctica">Creative Antarctica</a>, has sought to identify Australian writers and artists who have travelled to Antarctica for professional purposes. Our team has found over a hundred of them. </p>
<p>But while a voyage south is necessary research for a specific kind of narrative, my reading has taught me that it is possible to write an excellent novel set in Antarctica relying entirely on other people’s reports. </p>
<p>The five recent Antarctic novels described below offer a reasonably representative introduction to Antarctic fiction as a whole. They range stylistically between literary and genre fiction, and thematically across heroic (and not-so-heroic) explorers, climate warriors, alien invaders and hapless tourists. </p>
<p>Apart from Antarctic tragics like me, few people will enjoy them all, but most readers will likely find something to match their version of cool.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/200-years-of-exploring-antarctica-the-worlds-coldest-most-forbidding-and-most-peaceful-continent-129607">200 years of exploring Antarctica – the world's coldest, most forbidding and most peaceful continent</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2><em>Terra Nova</em></h2>
<p>Set in the early 20th century, Henriette Lazaridis’s <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Terra-Nova/Henriette-Lazaridis/9781639362424">Terra Nova</a> (2022) is a fictionalised version of the “race to the Pole” between expeditions led by Robert F. Scott and Roald Amundsen. </p>
<p>These two expeditions – particularly Scott’s – have generated a long line of literary responses, including Kåre Holt’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6404236-the-race">The Race</a> (1976), Beryl Bainbridge’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/220464">The Birthday Boys</a> (1991) and Rebecca Hunt’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/everland-9780141962221">Everland</a> (2014). </p>
<p>Lazaridis’ version focuses less on the explorers than those they leave behind. The main protagonist is Viola, who is the wife of Heywoud, the novel’s Scott-equivalent explorer. She is also the lover of Watts, the expedition’s photographer, who accompanies Heywoud on his march to the Pole. </p>
<p>Viola is herself a talented photographer. In the men’s absence, she becomes increasingly involved – personally and artistically – in the suffragette movement. </p>
<p>Photographs both reveal and conceal in Terra Nova. Watts captures evidence that undermines his leader’s triumphant claim to priority; Viola’s images of the suffragette protesters on a hunger strike bring out an endurance and stoicism that prompts her to question who the real heroes are.</p>
<p>While the polar love triangle feels contrived, and the parallel between suffragettes and explorers is a little laboured, the novel drives home the broad point that while men were fighting to reach the furthest ends of the Earth, women were fighting simply to be full citizens. </p>
<p>Those interested in gender and polar exploration might also pick up another Antarctic historical novel, Ally Turner’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/All-White-Spaces-Ally-Wilkes/dp/1789097835">All the White Spaces</a> (2022), in which a trans man stows away on a fictional expedition in 1920. Though overwritten at times, the novel makes innovative use of polar-gothic tropes to explore masculinity, grief and survivor guilt in the midst of what Ernest Shackleton famously termed “<a href="https://www.nls.uk/learning-zone/geography-and-exploration/shackleton-and-wordie/south/">the white warfare of the South</a>”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-led-to-antarctic-explorer-captain-scotts-death-178810">What led to Antarctic explorer Captain Scott's death</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2><em>Cold People</em></h2>
<p>What if all of humanity were suddenly forced to move to Antarctica? </p>
<p>This is the premise of bestselling British author Tom Rob Smith’s <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/Cold-People/Tom-Rob-Smith/9781471133114">Cold People</a> (2023). The story begins when a burgeoning holiday romance is rudely interrupted by an alien invasion. The advanced beings give all humans just one month to reach Antarctica or face unspecified but ominous-sounding consequences. </p>
<p>No reason is provided for this required exile, although some suspect the aliens, having witnessed humans’ impact on the planet’s climate, decided to take executive action. In any case, the extraterrestrials exit the narrative as abruptly as they entered, their motivations remaining mysterious. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/567806/original/file-20240104-27-ilr9rm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/567806/original/file-20240104-27-ilr9rm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/567806/original/file-20240104-27-ilr9rm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567806/original/file-20240104-27-ilr9rm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567806/original/file-20240104-27-ilr9rm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567806/original/file-20240104-27-ilr9rm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1162&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567806/original/file-20240104-27-ilr9rm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1162&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567806/original/file-20240104-27-ilr9rm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1162&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Cold People explores how far the survivors, eking out a living on a frozen continent, might be willing and able to adapt themselves in order for their species to continue. </p>
<p>The novel is the latest in a series of post-apocalyptic narratives, in which Antarctica is conceived as a refuge in a damaged planet. The causes range from geoengineering (Gerald Heard’s novella <a href="https://www.geraldheard.com/books/2017/7/15/the-lost-cavern">The Thaw Plan</a>) to a pandemic (Sakyo Komatsu’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/15800498">Virus</a>), nuclear war (David Graham’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_to_a_Sunless_Sea_(Graham_novel)">Down to a Sunless Sea</a>) and climate change (Paul McCauley’s <a href="https://www.hachette.com.au/paul-mcauley/austral-a-gripping-climate-change-thriller-like-no-other">Austral</a>). </p>
<p>Cold People dilutes its impact by exploring too many new ideas at once, but it is worth reading just for the ironic images its strange scenario produces – for example, when the aliens deposit humanity’s cultural heritage on the polar plateau, so that the Statue of Liberty, the Egyptian pyramids and the Taj Mahal sit together on the ice.</p>
<h2><em>The Art of Breaking Ice</em></h2>
<p>Rachael Mead’s The Art of Breaking Ice (2023) is based on the real experiences of Australian <a href="https://www.naa.gov.au/blog/smuggled-antarctic">Nel Law</a>, who travelled to Antarctica with her husband in the early 1960s, thereby becoming the first Australian woman and the first female artist to visit the continent. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568161/original/file-20240108-19-ehqzbd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568161/original/file-20240108-19-ehqzbd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568161/original/file-20240108-19-ehqzbd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568161/original/file-20240108-19-ehqzbd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568161/original/file-20240108-19-ehqzbd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568161/original/file-20240108-19-ehqzbd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568161/original/file-20240108-19-ehqzbd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568161/original/file-20240108-19-ehqzbd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Mead has also visited Antarctica, more than once – something evident in the precision of her descriptions. When a poet and novelist writes about an artist’s experiences in Antarctica, it is hard not to read the work at least partly autobiographically. Certainly, Mead’s artistry is evident in the novel, though more at the level of the sentence than the narrative. </p>
<p>Nel Law is depicted not only as a lone artist among sceptical scientists, but a woman on a ship full of often hostile men. Mead very effectively evokes the discomfort of women subject to men’s unwanted attentions and constant judgement.</p>
<p>Though The Art of Breaking Ice is mostly set over 50 years ago, its subject resonates with recent reports about <a href="https://theconversation.com/women-in-antarctica-face-assault-and-harassment-and-a-legacy-of-exclusion-and-mistreatment-190620">workplace behaviour in national Antarctic programs</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/nel-law-stowed-away-on-her-husbands-ship-to-antarctica-she-was-the-first-australian-woman-to-see-its-crystalline-strangeness-207326">Nel Law stowed away on her husband’s ship to Antarctica. She was the first Australian woman to see its ‘crystalline strangeness’</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2><em>Thaw</em></h2>
<p>Like Lazaridis’s Terra Nova, Dennis Glover’s <a href="https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/thaw">Thaw</a> (2023) deals with Scott’s second expedition, though Glover reimagines the experiences of the actual explorers rather than fictionalised versions of them. He finds a new angle by focusing on lesser-known expedition members, including meteorologist George Simpson. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568155/original/file-20240108-23-h0fb3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568155/original/file-20240108-23-h0fb3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568155/original/file-20240108-23-h0fb3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568155/original/file-20240108-23-h0fb3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568155/original/file-20240108-23-h0fb3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568155/original/file-20240108-23-h0fb3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568155/original/file-20240108-23-h0fb3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568155/original/file-20240108-23-h0fb3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Glover couples this historical narrative with a near-future plot, in which Simpson’s great-granddaughter, a celebrity climate activist, becomes obsessed with the idea that melting ice might be revealing buried artefacts from the expedition. Once she arrives in Antarctica, the second plot accelerates rapidly, the novel coming to resemble an eco-thriller.</p>
<p>The historical sections of Thaw are carefully researched and evoked. Whether or not Glover has travelled to Antarctica, he has certainly spent time immersed in the archives of the <a href="https://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/">Scott Polar Research Institute</a> (renamed the “British Institute for Polar Studies” in the novel). </p>
<p>The near-future characters can feel a little cartoonish and the eco-thriller plot strains credulity. The awkwardness points to the challenges – identified most prominently by Amitav Ghosh in <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/G/bo22265507.html">The Great Derangement</a> (2016) – of writing about something as vast as climate change within the traditional confines of the literary novel. To my mind, a more successful, although much more oblique, example can be found in Jon McGregor’s <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/676211/lean-fall-stand-by-jon-mcgregor/">Lean Fall Stand</a> (2021), the product of a writer’s residency with the British national Antarctic program. </p>
<p>Nonetheless, Thaw is definitely worth reading for anyone interested in Scott, climate change science, and ways in which they might be unexpectedly connected.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-australians-should-care-about-the-south-pole-62050">Why Australians should care about the South Pole</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2><em>Midnight</em></h2>
<p>My final cold book is Amy McCulloch’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/midnight-9780241534915">Midnight</a> (2023), a thriller set on an Antarctic tourist cruise ship. </p>
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<p>The tagline – “When the sun never sets, there’s no place to hide …” – might elicit a groan, and even more worrying is the publisher’s plot summary, which promises “tantalising glimpses of polar bears” (polar bears live exclusively in the Arctic). But there are no such infelicities in the novel itself, which draws from the author’s experience as an Antarctic tourist.</p>
<p>Midnight is one of several recent novels dealing with the Antarctic tourist industry, including Midge Raymond’s romance-cum-disaster-narrative <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/my-last-continent">My Last Continent</a> (2016) and Iliya Prigogine’s modernistic offering <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/112-the-lamentations-of-zeno">The Lamentations of Zeno</a> (2011). </p>
<p>This trend in Antarctic fiction is not surprising, given that <a href="https://theconversation.com/more-than-100-000-tourists-will-head-to-antarctica-this-summer-should-we-worry-about-damage-to-the-ice-and-its-ecosystems-192843">over 100,000 tourists visited last summer season</a>, about 20 times the number of scientists and station personnel. </p>
<p>Antarctic tourists face all manner of peril in fiction, and you can’t help wondering if this isn’t some kind of narrative punishment for their perceived intrusion on Antarctica’s pristine icescape – indeed, Prigogine’s novel makes this explicit. </p>
<p>McCulloch, however, is less moralistic. She takes advantage of the confined spaces and the dangers that can arise on a vessel in an extreme environment. In doing so, she follows a tradition of Antarctic thrillers that goes back at least to Hammond Innes’ bestseller <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-white-south-9781448156955">The White South</a> (1949), set on a factory whaling ship. </p>
<p>While McCulloch has not quite hit her stride as a thriller writer – the cliffhangers and one-liners seem parachuted in – she is better on character and setting. Knife-wielding serial killer aside, Midnight recounts many aspects of the Antarctic cruise ship voyage that chimed with my experiences, and the narrative was absorbing enough to keep me turning pages.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/more-than-100-000-tourists-will-head-to-antarctica-this-summer-should-we-worry-about-damage-to-the-ice-and-its-ecosystems-192843">More than 100,000 tourists will head to Antarctica this summer. Should we worry about damage to the ice and its ecosystems?</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/220041/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Elizabeth Leane receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Dutch Research Council and the Australian Antarctic Division. She also receives funding and/or in-kind support from several Antarctic tour operators. She is a board member of the Mawson's Huts Foundation.</span></em></p>Five recent novels about the Antarctic make for cool reading on a hot summer day.Elizabeth Leane, Professor of Antarctic Studies, School of Humanities, College of Arts, Law and Education, University of TasmaniaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2177812024-01-11T19:10:08Z2024-01-11T19:10:08ZSara M. Saleh’s memorable tales of exile, prejudice and resistance reflect the Palestinian experience<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566749/original/file-20231219-19-xrh4eu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=9%2C0%2C6221%2C4147&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nayef Hammouri/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.saramsaleh.com/">Sara M. Saleh</a> is a writer and human rights lawyer. She has won two of Australia’s most prestigious poetry prizes: Overland’s <a href="https://overland.org.au/prizes/overland-judith-wright-poetry-prize-for-new-and-emerging-poets/">Judith Wright Poetry Prize</a> in 2020 and Australian Book Review’s <a href="https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/prizes-programs/peter-porter-poetry-prize/2024-peter-porter-poetry-prize/47-competitionsandprograms/9227-2023-peter-porter-poetry-prize">Peter Porter Poetry Prize </a> in 2021. She has published extensively in literary and poetry journals, and co-edited <a href="https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781760785017/">Arab, Australian, Other: Stories on Race and Identity</a> with Randa Abdel-Fattah. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Songs for the Dead and the Living – Sara M. Saleh (Affirm Press) & The Flirtations of Girls/Ghazal el-Banat – Sara M. Saleh (University of Queensland Press)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Saleh has recently published her second full-length collection of poems, <a href="https://www.uqp.com.au/books/the-flirtation-of-girls-ghazal-el-banat">The Flirtations of Girls/<em>Ghazal el-Banat</em></a> (she self-published <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Wasting_the_Milk_in_the_Summer.html?id=tYtBvgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">Wasting the Milk in Summer</a> in 2016), and her first novel, <a href="https://affirmpress.com.au/browse/book/Sara-M-Saleh-Songs-for-the-Dead-and-the-Living-9781922848536/">Songs for the Dead and the Living</a>. </p>
<p>The Flirtations of Girls/<em>Ghazal el-Banat</em> is a rich collection filled with anger, sorrow, beauty, attitude, wit and humour. Songs for the Dead and the Living is a coming-of-age story, kaleidoscopic in its formal and tonal variation, about a young girl named Jamilah Husseini and her family, spanning three countries: Lebanon, Egypt and Australia. </p>
<p>Palestine is ever-present in both books, which are marked by the enduring effects of the <a href="https://www.un.org/unispal/about-the-nakba/#:%7E:text=The%20Nakba%2C%20which%20means%20%E2%80%9Ccatastrophe,ethnic%20and%20multi%2Dcultural%20society."><em>Nakba</em></a> of 1948, the continued struggle to exist in the shadow of Israel, and the impact of exile and prejudice on Palestinian people forced to flee their homeland. </p>
<p>Saleh’s gaze is unflinching. In her prose and her poetry, she renders unique and memorable the ways people resist, transcend, adapt, make the best of things, compromise, endure, lose hope and faith – and sometimes become something other than they might have been. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-nakba-how-the-palestinians-were-expelled-from-israel-205151">The Nakba: how the Palestinians were expelled from Israel</a>
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</em>
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<h2>Poetics of exile</h2>
<p>In The Flirtations of Girls/<em>Ghazal el-Banat</em>, Saleh depicts bodies and places as sites of division, violence, plurality, opportunity and negation. Her poetics are attuned to the price paid by migrants for leaving their homelands. The final lines of her poem You, An Effigy are:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Nobody told you<br>
the cost of entering was losing your way back.<br> </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Like many of Saleh’s poems, You, An Effigy is formally inventive, assured and subversive. The “effigy” of the title – a woman who must figuratively burn – desires a home. Sensual and sexual, she wants to be held. But she is ultimately isolated on a shabby, sterile street not hard to recognise as Sydney. The poem transforms the woman from an object of sexual violence to an abrasive speaking subject who defies expectations.</p>
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<p>The title of Flirtation of Girls/<em>Ghazal el-Banat</em> refers to an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flirtation_of_Girls">Egyptian film of the same name from 1949</a>, but in Lebanon <em>Ghazal el-Banat</em> can also mean fairy floss. The double-meaning is an indication of the vitality of Saleh’s poetry. </p>
<p>Resolute in her willingness to confront violence head-on, she retains the wit and the playfulness intrinsic to good poetry. Her poems are funny and perfectly improper. They describe the ways women and girls negotiate gender and sexuality, inside and outside of Islam, inside and outside of a broader societal misogyny and patriarchy. </p>
<p>The playfulness is also serious. Saleh’s commitment to poetry as political action is bound up with an aesthetic commitment to art. She deploys poetic forms such as the <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/ghazal">ghazal</a> – a challenging form that originated in Persian poetry – with the same assuredness as she experiments with free verse and concrete poems. </p>
<p>Her writing makes evident the porousness of language, territory and history – and the way borders are policed. Arabic and Australian English are enmeshed. Lebanon, Egypt and Australia are overlaid. Histories and mythologies are interwoven. </p>
<p>English is defamiliarised by the inclusion of the many different “God have mercies”, from <em>alhamdullilah</em> to <em>hasbiyallah</em> to <em>inshallah</em>. Saleh also makes use of common Arabic words like <em>banat</em> (girls) and <em>bint</em> (girl/daughter) and phonetic spellings like “HANDRED BERCENT” (100%). </p>
<p>In this way, English is made to feel capacious. As the third most spoken language at home in Australia, Arabic speaks directly to a lot of people, but Saleh uses the Roman alphabet, so the Arabic words are accessible, either as a phonetic experience or via Google for translation. </p>
<p>Saleh’s prize-winning poem <a href="https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-242/poetry-judith-wright-poetry-prize-border-control-mediations/">Border Control: Meditations</a> subverts the usual identity questions asked at borders, in this case the King Hussein Border Terminal between Israel and Jordan. The questions in this poem are intimate, tender, searing and ultimately heartbreaking. The interrogative is replaced with the personal, evoking a human rather than a number or a problem. </p>
<p>In Reading Darwish at Qalandia Checkpoint, the violence of a checkpoint between the West Bank and Jerusalem is paralleled with Australian racial violence against </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Cassius Turvey, fifteen-year-old Indigenous boy<br>
who was punched and stabbed for being Black.<br></p>
<p><s>The evidence</s> — REDACTED<br>
<s>His rights</s> — REDACTED<br>
<s>This childhood</s> — REDACTED<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The poems Punctuation as Organised Violence and CAPITAL deconstruct bureaucracy and grammar, drawing attention to the arbitrary fictions that determine </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Visa. Policy. Border.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In Orientalism, Edward Said writes of the “uniquely punishing destiny” of Palestinian people, who confront a “web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanizing ideology”. Saleh’s poem Headlines provides examples of the prejudice Arabs and Muslims encounter in Australia:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘caliphate cutie’ / ‘towelhead’ / ‘sand n*gger’ / ‘stone thrower’<br>
On the bus, in class, at the movies<br>
‘they should sterilise you’ / ‘the only good Muslim is an ex-Muslim,<br>
or a dead one’/ ‘don’t blow yourself up’<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>In places, perhaps as only a lawyer can, Saleh writes with the precise awareness of someone who understands that the law is founded on a mythic violence, both arbitrary and exclusionary, but that it is also sometimes capable of delivering justice. </p>
<p>Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt and Australia figure in her poems as homelands and homes, as prisons and traps, as political and cultural realities. They are states of being and of mind – imagined and imaginary. </p>
<p>Cities are an important part of Saleh’s poetics. They are repositories of hopes and dreams, grief and loss. The various laws and languages, foods and streetscapes of Sydney, Cairo, Beirut and Nablus give form to memory. </p>
<p>Saleh’s vision and poetic sensibility is attuned to suffering and precarity. Her poems are about women, Palestinian fathers, a Noongar Yamatji boy, Ethiopian women trapped in the kafala system. She makes visible the suffering of those who pay a price for being something other, something more, than a citizen. </p>
<p>In this way, she is a diasporic writer, challenging the limitations and anachronisms of national borders and identities, which are neither adequate models nor accurate reflections of a world under global capitalism and a planet on the brink of climate catastrophe.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/orientalism-edward-saids-groundbreaking-book-explained-197429">Orientalism: Edward Said's groundbreaking book explained</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<h2>Displacement and dispossession</h2>
<p>Saleh is keenly aware of the double bind of people dispossessed – expelled from Palestine, yet never fully welcomed anywhere else. Home is political, the body is political, and the experiences of displacement and dispossession are understood as forms of material and existential violence.</p>
<p>This awareness is as much part of Saleh’s fiction as her poetry. Spanning generations and continents, Songs for the Dead and the Living incorporates the stories of multiple lives. The novel is divided into three parts: Beit Samra (1977-82), Cairo (1982-85) and Sydney (1984-86), with a short prologue and epilogue. </p>
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<p>Saleh draws on the historical, political and cultural contexts of Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt to tell the story of Jamilah, the daughter of a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother, her sisters, her paternal grandmother Aishah, and Lobna, an adopted orphaned cousin. </p>
<p>The novel follows the family as they flee their home in Lebanon for Egypt to escape the escalating violence of the <a href="https://www.worldhistoryblog.com/Lebanese-Civil-War.html">Lebanese Civil War</a>. The final part of the novel, set in Sydney, sees Jamilah married and learning to make her life as a migrant while her family remains in Egypt. </p>
<p>Saleh uses a traditional narrative form to write against the grain of history, and against the political and cultural context of a world determined to stereotype Muslims and erase Arab suffering. She covers a lot of territory and includes a lot of characters. </p>
<p>Here is a moment to consider the particular formal challenges the novel presents to a writer moving from poetry to prose. How many characters can be rendered effectively in a relatively short novel? What techniques best achieve the goal of capturing rich and storied lives? A more sustained development of Jamilah’s perspective would have strengthened the depiction of the multiple minor characters.</p>
<p>The novel opens with the family at home in Beit Samra, a town on the hills outside of Beirut, where the family comes closest to belonging. They have a house with a garden. Their father is building a business. Jamilah and Lobna attend school. And Jamilah has a first love – a boy with a Russian mother and Lebanese father. </p>
<p>Despite the fact that Jamilah’s mother is Lebanese and her father was born in Lebanon, the family remain Palestinian in the eyes of many Lebanese, who think of them as “a liability”, or more brutally as “bottom-feeders … ruining the country”. They face discrimination. The father is unable to pursue studies because of laws preventing Palestinians from holding certain offices. Even schooling is restricted for children with Palestinian parents, regardless of whether or not they were born in Lebanon. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-wretched-of-the-earth-9780141186542">The Wretched of the Earth</a>, Frantz Fanon identifies this kind of discrimination and inequity as “geographical compartmentalisation”, where depending on race or ethnicity, the same space is experienced differently. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/quotes-from-frantz-fanons-wretched-of-the-earth-that-resonate-60-years-later-173108">Quotes from Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth that resonate 60 years later</a>
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<hr>
<p>When Jamilah’s family are forced to flee, the discrimination continues. Their position is precarious. The possibility of hospitality is conditional. The novel is aware of the way time in narrative is connected to mortality and measured in bodies: it is only when Aishah is on her deathbed that the family learn of her experience of displacement during the <em>Nakba</em> of 1948. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We had a home, and then we didn’t.” That’s how Teta Aishah started it, as though it was some riddle they were supposed to solve. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>A young newlywed in the early months of her first pregnancy, Aishah is woken in the night by an extremist militia, which had earlier gunned down seven people in the coffee house of her village. She flees on foot through the prickly pear trees that surround her house and joins a group of refugees to walk the miles to Lebanon, a country with its own history of colonisation, having only “prised itself out of France’s clutches a few years before”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ghassan-hage-is-one-of-australias-most-significant-intellectuals-hes-still-on-a-quest-for-a-multicultural-society-that-hopes-and-cares-206753">Ghassan Hage is one of Australia's most significant intellectuals. He's still on a quest for a multicultural society that hopes and cares</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>‘Let it be a tale’</h2>
<p>In a <a href="https://meanjin.com.au/essays/borders-identity-literature/">2020 article in Meanjin</a>, Jumana Bayeh asks “what is missing when we read literature as a reflection of national boundaries?” The question seems particularly pertinent to Saleh’s writing. </p>
<p>She dedicates her novel “To the people of ‘<em>kan yama kan</em>’” – the Arabic equivalent of “once upon a time”. The dedication is an invitation to think beyond nationality to what is shared: the telling of stories. Saleh’s literary influences are diverse, from Vladimir Nabokov to Mahmoud Darwish, Ocean Vuong to Anne Carson. The friendship Jamilah strikes up with a bookseller in Cairo leads her to Naguib Mahfouz. </p>
<p>The importance of literary antecedents is paramount; reading is to be eclectic. Language is political, but porous. French, Arabic, slang, profanity, phatic and poetic language are brought together through a universal grammar.</p>
<p>As I was finishing this review, Palestinian writer and academic Dr Refaat Alareer was killed in an Israeli strike. Only a month before, he had posted a poem on social media that concludes: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>If I die<br>
Let it bring hope<br>
Let it be a tale<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The epigraph to Songs for the Dead and the Living is from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s poem <a href="https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/and-we-have-countries/">And We Have Countries</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… The exile tells himself: “If I were a bird<br>
I would burn my wings.”<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Between the universal human trait of telling tales – the once upon a time – and the burning of wings lies all the debris of history, with its wars, invasions, injustices and erasures. </p>
<p>In one of her more sorrowful, circumspect poems, City, Sitti of Grief, Saleh writes that in Arabic the word for human shares its root with the word for forgetting. But the recourse to the tale, to the story – the desire to produce a story that endures – is intrinsic to literature. It is all the more pressing for those who feel the precarity of existence daily, perhaps minute by minute. Saleh’s poetry and prose are urgent tributes to remembering.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/217781/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Hamadache does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In her prose and her poetry, Sara M. Saleh renders unique the ways people resist, transcend, adapt, make the best of things, compromise, endure, and lose hope and faith.Michelle Hamadache, Lecturer, Literature and Creative Writing, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2188012024-01-08T19:16:18Z2024-01-08T19:16:18Z‘Cli-fi’ might not save the world, but writing it could help with your eco-anxiety<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564752/original/file-20231211-17-uxgzy8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C0%2C5961%2C3097&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Morpheus Szeto/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The consequences of climate change weigh on all of us, especially as we face an El Niño summer, with floods and fires already making themselves felt in the Australian environment.</p>
<p>But even outside of being directly affected, there is evidence that mere awareness of climate change can be <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/19/7836">detrimental to your mental health and wellbeing</a>. Terms such as “<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266727822300010X">climate change anxiety</a>”, “<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667278221000444">eco-anxiety</a>” and “<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18027145/">solastalgia</a>” are regularly used to describe the negative emotional states created by thinking and worrying about climate change and environmental destruction.</p>
<p>If just knowing about climate change is emotionally difficult, what is it like spending years focusing on and writing about the topic? Research has looked at the emotional impact close engagement with climate change can have on groups such as <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1755458617301251">climate scientists</a> <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-11741-2_12">and</a> <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1103308818817603">climate activists</a>. </p>
<p>But little time has been given to writers of climate fiction, or “cli-fi” – a relatively new genre of fiction focused on climate change.</p>
<h2>What can a genre do?</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/36205.Cli_Fi_Climate_Change_Fiction">Cli-fi</a> has been touted as one of the ways to help save the world, with an emphasis on how imagining our future might make us reconsider our relationship to the natural world. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Fictions in this genre have primarily imagined <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/we-don-t-need-more-dystopian-stories-despair-is-stopping-us-from-acting-20220905-p5bfjg.html">dystopian worlds</a> where the very worst has happened and humanity is (often barely) surviving in flooded or desolate wastelands. These apocalyptic visions are meant to serve as warnings, to galvanise us to action, making sure this bleak future doesn’t happen.</p>
<p>This seems a good idea in theory, but do dystopian fictions help us engage with the climate crisis? An empirical study of the <a href="https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article/10/2/473/136689/The-Influence-of-Climate-FictionAn-Empirical">effects of climate fiction on readers’ attitudes or actions</a> found little evidence that those who read cli-fi have a stronger engagement with environmental concerns.</p>
<p>There has been some discussion of the <a href="https://www.energyhumanities.ca/news/why-read-fiction-while-the-planet-is-in-crisis-reflections-on-cli-fi-book-clubs">influence of these books on readers</a>. But perhaps the value is not in the reading, but in the writing? Might writing provide emotionally supportive strategies for all of us? Can the act of writing itself counter “eco-anxiety”?</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/can-cli-fi-actually-make-a-difference-a-climate-scientists-perspective-83033">Can 'cli-fi' actually make a difference? A climate scientist's perspective</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Waking in the night</h2>
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<p>We talked to <a href="https://textjournal.scholasticahq.com/article/90091">16 Australian and New Zealand authors of “cli-fi”</a> , including <a href="https://cityoftongues.com/">James Bradley</a>, <a href="http://www.mireillejuchau.com/">Mireille Juchau</a> and <a href="https://jennifermills.net.au/">Jennifer Mills</a>. Their responses made it clear that writing about a climate-changed future does more than bring up the anticipated negative emotions.</p>
<p>Of course, sitting with the climate crisis is challenging. It demands we wrestle with guilt, shame, responsibility, rage and despair. Writers of climate fiction are often drawn to the genre because they are already thinking about the climate and feeling anxious.</p>
<p>Clare Moleta said her climate anxiety was “a bit more concentrated” while writing her novel <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/Unsheltered/Clare-Moleta/9781761104886">Unsheltered</a>, but also that the manifestations of this anxiety were familiar to her: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I had waking patches in the night over that time, where I’d be very intensely imagining something and grieving it […] But to be fair, I do that anyway.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But many of the writers spoke of the writing process as helping, not exacerbating, their anxiety. For some, writing about climate change gave them a sense of purpose. Jennifer Mills, whose cli-fi novel <a href="https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781760558604/">Dyschronia</a> was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2019, stated that “having a book to write gives you something to do. [It] makes you feel like you have some power over the events that are happening around you.”</p>
<p>Climate fiction can be a method of transforming anxiety into something useful. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Allinson">Miles Allinson</a> says that “writing about my own fear put that fear to use, in a way that was, if not comforting, then at least energising”. He argues for the therapeutic aspect of imagining and writing one’s worst fears: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sometimes when you turn towards something and start to live it, with all its difficulties and mystery, then something changes […] It’s actually not as hard as you sometimes think it will be. It’s sometimes more terrifying to close your eyes, I have found.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>James Bradley, author of several works of speculative fiction, including <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/clade-9781926428659">Clade</a> and <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/ghost-species-9781926428666">Ghost Species</a>, observed that the</p>
<blockquote>
<p>process of imagining demands you to think about what happens next […] To imagine the complexity of the lived experience of what lies ahead, and to insist that life will go on and history will keep happening.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>While peering into our climate-changed future can be emotionally difficult, <a href="https://katemildenhall.com/">Kate Mildenhall</a> said it can help prepare us for what is to come: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have to imagine ten years in the future and we have to imagine 50 years in the future. And if we do that, we are forearmed and we also begin to make small changes immediately, we don’t even know we’re making them, just to move towards or away from that future.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Imagining our future lives can offer a sense of hope. We are currently living with bushfires, floods, pandemics and the extreme challenges of the climate crisis; the future is our present and the ways we think about it will dictate the ways we act and cope.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Bushfires near Stacks Bluff, Tasmania.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Matt Palmer/Unsplash</span></span>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/writing-can-improve-mental-health-heres-how-162205">Writing can improve mental health – here's how</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Theraputic benefits</h2>
<p>Approaching writing about climate change as a process, rather than thinking about writing as a product produced by professional authors, is a new method for alleviating climate anxiety.</p>
<p>The mental health and wellbeing benefits of creative writing have been established. Studies have explored how writing can <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2212420919313172">reduce anxiety in those affected by natural disasters</a>. Much of the research in this area focuses on expressive writing or other similar therapeutic-focused techniques that produce quickly written and usually insular work, not intended for an audience. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>This is different from the experiences of the writers interviewed here. Yet, as the writers quoted here have shown, the imaginative process of crafting fictional narratives about difficult topics comes with its own benefits.</p>
<p>In discussing their findings from one of the few studies to focus on the <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/capr.12435">wellbeing effect of writing fictional narratives</a>, Catherine Deveney and Patrick Lawson state: “it is in the craft of writing, the combination of technique and emotional catharsis, that some of the therapeutic benefits of writing can be found”.</p>
<p>We tend to think of writing as a professional activity, but it is an art form practised by amateurs as well as professionals. The 2022 <a href="https://creative.gov.au/advocacy-and-research/creating-value/">National Arts Participation Survey</a> found that one in seven Australians engage in creative writing. The value of such writing is more than its end product.</p>
<p>We need to shift from worrying about the effects of cli-fi texts to thinking about the <a href="https://textjournal.scholasticahq.com/article/35289-creating-new-climate-stories-posthuman-collaborative-hope-and-optimism">benefits of writing creatively as we imagine our possible futures</a>. As Mireille Juchau observes, the sense of control when writing on a difficult topic </p>
<blockquote>
<p>helps to manage anxiety […] Whether it’s climate change, or something else, when I’m preoccupied, writing helps put some order into the chaos.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/218801/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>This research receives funding from Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts at Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alex Cothren and Amy T Matthews do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Research suggests the act of creative writing can have therapeutic benefits.Rachel Hennessy, Lecturer in Creative Writing, The University of MelbourneAlex Cothren, Associate Lecturer, Creative Writing, Flinders UniversityAmy T Matthews, Senior Lecturer, Creative Writing, Flinders UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2185192024-01-02T20:16:26Z2024-01-02T20:16:26ZJaws turns 50: reading Peter Benchley’s novel, you barely mind if its self-loathing characters are eaten by a ‘genius’ shark<p>How many times have you come out of the cinema and heard someone snidely remark they preferred the book, as though this somehow connects them to a richer, more highbrow tradition?</p>
<p>This might ring true when it comes to literary masterworks like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, adapted into <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1343092/">so-so</a> <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071577/">versions</a> nearly four decades apart (equally dull, for almost opposite reasons). But the reverse is often the case with popular fiction, which benefits from the immersive, visceral quality of the cinema.</p>
<p>Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel <a href="https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781447220039/">Jaws</a>, which turns 50 this year, was a smash. Despite critics’ reservations, it was on the New York Times bestseller list for 44 weeks. Yet when we think of Jaws, images from Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film adaptation are what come to mind – along with John Williams’ <a href="https://youtu.be/E-sX2Y0W8l0?si=7H4TUsSRrImq_eh-">iconic theme music</a>. </p>
<p>Spielberg’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073195/">Jaws</a> keeps the simple – and stunning – narrative architecture of Benchley’s novel intact. A shark terrorises a small beach community that depends on wealthy tourists for sustenance. Brody, the chief of police, keeps the beaches open due to political pressure from Mayor Vaughan; when more attacks occur, marine biologist Matt Hooper comes to help. Together, they contract wild shark hunter Quint to help them kill the great white. </p>
<p>But the tone of grand adventure that defines Spielberg’s film marks a major departure from the novel. In Benchley’s work, more energy is directed towards exploring the minor social and political lives of its small-town denizens than in staging an epic showdown between man and beast – and, crucially, it differs radically from the film in its characterisation. In Spielberg’s world, the main characters are likeable, heroic, whereas in the novel they’re petty, broken and bitter, wading through the messes their personal lives have become. </p>
<p>These differences are not simply evidence of a young director’s desire to make the material his own. They map the changing consciousness of American popular culture in the 1970s, from a resolute focus on the violence simmering within United States society and policy (the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War) to an attempt to forget about these things through spectacular, anodyne entertainment. </p>
<p>As we know, Spielberg’s film reshaped Hollywood, virtually single-handedly inventing the “blockbuster” and marking a significant shift away from the existentially charged, sometimes nihilistic, ever self-critical films of the previous decade or so. </p>
<p>Yet the two dominant themes situating Benchley’s novel in a rich American literary tradition also underpin the film: its biting look at small-town politics and economics, and its reverent study of a wilderness awesome and sublime. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/from-jaws-to-star-wars-to-harry-potter-john-williams-90-today-is-our-greatest-living-composer-176245">From Jaws to Star Wars to Harry Potter: John Williams, 90 today, is our greatest living composer</a>
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<h2>‘The shark material is brilliant’</h2>
<p>At the novel’s core is a swift, economically told tale of human versus beast: a classic American adventure in the vein of Jack London’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/white-fang-9780241652664">White Fang</a> or Herman Melville’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/moby--dick-9780451532282">Moby-Dick</a>. </p>
<p>Benchley punctuates this drama with a keen interrogation of the social dynamics of small American communities in the context of the economic pressures of capitalism. </p>
<p>A career journalist, Benchley is effective in describing actions, events and scenery: shark hunting, the ocean, Quint’s boat. The shark material is brilliant – the few times it cuts to the shark’s point of view (recalling Spielberg’s redeployment of the creature’s point of view from <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046876/">Creature from the Black Lagoon</a>), the writing becomes electric, effortless. Benchley is at his best when describing the movements of the shark in the water. </p>
<p>For example, when Hooper is cage diving, towards the end of the novel: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The head was only a few feet from the cage when the fish turned and began to pass before Hooper’s eyes – casually, as if in proud display of its incalculable mass and power. The snout passed first, then the jaw, slack and smiling, armed with row upon row of serrate triangles. And then the black, fathomless eye, seemingly riveted upon him. The gills rippled – bloodless wounds in the steely skin.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But the material about people is less confident – the writing is uneven and trite in places, with moments between characters sometimes strained in order to generate the necessary action. </p>
<p>This includes two subplots Spielberg and team wisely cut from the film. </p>
<p>The first involves a murky connection between Mayor Vaughn and the Mob that is partly responsible for his desire to keep the beaches open, despite Brody’s warnings. It seems both underdeveloped – we don’t find out much about it – and strangely present, with the majority of the novel’s scenes involving the mayor gesturing towards it. </p>
<p>The second, which probably would have been fatal to the film, involves an affair between Brody’s wife Ellen and Matt Hooper. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-moby-dick-by-herman-melville-52000">Guide to the classics: Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville</a>
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</em>
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<hr>
<h2>Characters ‘loathsome in places’</h2>
<p>One of the great joys of the film is the developing friendship between Hooper and Brody, culminating in their delightful final exchange. After the shark is dead and they are kicking their way back to shore, Brody laughs: “I used to hate the water.” Hooper replies, “I can’t imagine why”. Both men are happy to have survived, and to have each other. </p>
<p>In the novel, it’s more or less hate at first sight, with Brody immediately resenting Hooper because he grew up as a “summer person” in the area. Brody is ashamed he’s not one of the wealthy summer people, and tries to hide this through a kind of pathetic machismo, which emerges most visibly in his competitiveness with Hooper. </p>
<p>This obsession with summer people defines much of the dialogue between Brody and Ellen, with Brody’s resentment of the summer people’s nonchalant and emasculating wealth matched by Ellen’s resentment of the fact she used to be a summer person before she married this oaf of a police chief.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565548/original/file-20231213-23-ko2crz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565548/original/file-20231213-23-ko2crz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565548/original/file-20231213-23-ko2crz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=880&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565548/original/file-20231213-23-ko2crz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=880&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565548/original/file-20231213-23-ko2crz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=880&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565548/original/file-20231213-23-ko2crz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1106&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565548/original/file-20231213-23-ko2crz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1106&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565548/original/file-20231213-23-ko2crz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1106&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>The characters in the novel are thus thoroughly unappealing – even loathsome in places. Spielberg famously stated the shark was his favourite character in the novel. </p>
<p>The film’s Brody, anchored by the effortless charisma of Roy Scheider, is a steadfast, stoic working man who loves his wife and children and isn’t ashamed to show it in a gentle, unassuming way. </p>
<p>In the novel, Brody is “jealous and injured, inadequate and outraged”, a chauvinistic beer-guzzling bully, an obsessive – and often self-loathing – jerk. One of our first forays into his consciousness makes this immediately apparent: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sometimes during the summer, Brody would catch himself gazing with idle lust at one of the young, long-legged girls who pranced around town – their untethered breasts bouncing beneath the thinnest of cotton jerseys. But he never enjoyed the sensation, for it always made him wonder whether Ellen felt the same stirring when she looked at the tanned, slim young men who so perfectly complemented the long-legged girls.</p>
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<p>Ellen is also much less sympathetic in the novel (though admittedly in the film she’s a cardboard cutout of virtuous motherhood and wifedom). </p>
<p>She moves around as a shell of a person, a terrible snob disappointed by her social status and too embarrassed and ashamed to do anything about it, “tortured by thoughts she didn’t want to think – thoughts of chances missed and lives that could have been”. Like Brody, she is drowning in self-loathing: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>She made sure that everyone she met knew she had started her Amity life on an entirely different plane. She was aware of what she was doing, and she hated herself for it, because in fact she loved her husband deeply, adored her children, and – for most of the year – was quite content with her lot.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Hooper of the novel is similarly transformed by the film from an arrogant show-off, vaingloriously pursuing fame as a scientist at the expense of everything else, into a smart, responsible and energetic ball of fun, fully embodied by dynamo actor Richard Dreyfuss. </p>
<p>Only Quint – the mythical, Ahab-esque hunter (“Brody saw fever in Quint’s face – a heat that lit up his dark eyes, an intensity that drew his lips back from his teeth in a crooked smile”) – remains fundamentally unchanged, even though his unyielding brutality seems more appealing in the novel than in the film, with Robert Shaw portraying him as an antisocial maniac. </p>
<p>This revision includes the whole dynamic of the Brody family. The delightful moments between the kids and their parents, reflecting Spielberg’s superpower as a director (his talent for bringing sentimental family moments to life), are absent from the novel. </p>
<p>There’s something depressing about Brody’s relationship with his family. He has virtually no interaction with his children, and when he does, it’s like this: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The oldest boy, Billy, lay on the couch, leaning on an elbow. Martin, the middle son, age twelve, lounged in an easy chair, his shoeless feet propped up on the coffee table. Eight-year-old Sean sat on the floor, his back against the couch, stroking a cat in his lap. “How goes it?” said Brody. “Good, Dad,” said Bill, without shifting his gaze from the television.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Is ‘easy to swallow’ better?</h2>
<p>Of course, populating a novel with unlikable characters and depressing family scenes is not a problem in and of itself. Popeye from William Faulkner’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/sanctuary-9780099541028">Sanctuary</a> is hardly likeable, neither is pompous Nick Carraway from <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-great-gatsby-9781784877088">The Great Gatsby</a> – and you’d be hard pressed to find a Dickens novel that doesn’t feature some degree of family strife. </p>
<p>But in Jaws, a “man versus beast” tale, a melodramatic thriller, it creates a flat feeling: we don’t wholly mind the prospect of these characters being eaten by a shark. At the same time, Benchley – despite occasional flaws in the writing – does capture something of the dismal inconsistencies and banalities of being human. The complex self-loathing of the characters contrasts with the brutal and unthinking power – the genius for action and killing – of the shark. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Spielberg ‘buffed out the scratches’ in Bentley’s novel for his film.</span></figcaption>
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<p>The film redacts the frailties and faults of the characters, turning an adult (albeit imperfect) novel into family-friendly fodder. Spielberg took a low-key thriller doubling as a study of a small American community and turned it into the kind of blockbuster that would get people back into – and keep them in – cinemas. </p>
<p>It comes as no surprise that the film also excises much of the novel’s pointed class critique. Note, for example, this description of the summer people early in the book, the haves to the local have-nots: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Privilege had been bred into them with genetic certainty. As their eyes were blue or brown, so their tastes and consciences were determined by other generations. They had no vitamin deficiencies, no sickle-cell anaemia. […] Their bodies were lean, their muscles toned by boxing lessons at age nine, riding lessons at twelve, and tennis lessons ever since. They had no body odour. When they sweated, the girls smelled faintly of perfume; the boys smelled simply clean.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Most, I’m sure, would hold the novel up as an inferior work. At a technical level, they’d probably be right. But while it’s pretentious, it’s also much more ambitious than the film. </p>
<p>Is something easy to swallow necessarily better for the digestion? Only a shark could answer that. The novel is ugly in places. But where it works, it works at the level of great literature.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/surfers-share-their-waves-with-sharks-but-fear-not-193395">Surfers share their waves with sharks, but fear not</a>
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</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Benchley’s novel lingers longer</h2>
<p>One of the outcomes of Jaws was at least a couple of generations of people who, if not exactly afraid to go back in the water, had a tendency to hum the film’s theme to themselves when wading into the surf alone. </p>
<p>Benchley, horrified by the bad rap his novel gave sharks, would go on to become an ecological activist focused on shark protection. In 2015, a shark was named after him: <a href="https://hakaimagazine.com/news/meet-new-ninja-lanternshark/">Etmopterus benchleyi</a>.</p>
<p>Benchley’s Jaws may not immediately grab one as easily as Spielberg’s, and it’s certainly not as technically accomplished. Its position in American literature is minor compared to the film’s in Hollywood cinema. </p>
<p>But despite – or, perhaps, because of – its flaws, the novel is worth reading at a time when the blockbuster has virtually decimated the middle of American cinema, churning out masses of pleasurably forgettable, interchangeable films that float like a thick slick of chum on the water’s surface.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/218519/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ari Mattes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Peter Benchley’s classic 1974 ‘man versus beast’ blockbuster novel doubled as a scathing critique of 1970s America. Spielberg’s film made its characters likeable – and its tone into a ‘grand adventure’.Ari Mattes, Lecturer in Communications and Media, University of Notre Dame AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2185902023-12-26T20:29:56Z2023-12-26T20:29:56ZMy favourite fictional character: Maggie O'Farrell’s rebel Esme Lennox refuses to be the ‘perfect victim’ – even in an asylum<p>“It’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book … a book can also be where one finds oneself,” writes Rebecca Mead.</p>
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<p>There are books that seem to comprehend us just as much as we understand them, or even more. There are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like a graft to a tree. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>After a teacher introduced her to George Eliot, Middlemarch became the book of Mead’s life (eventually resulting in her bibliomemoir, <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/the-road-to-middlemarch">The Road to Middlemarch</a>). </p>
<p>When I was 16, <a href="https://www.hachette.com.au/maggie-ofarrell/the-vanishing-act-of-esme-lennox">The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox</a> by British writer Maggie O’Farrell became the book of my life. </p>
<p>Set between the 1930s and the late 20th century, the novel is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2006/oct/02/socialcare.genderissues">inspired by the real-life stories</a> of incarcerated women that emerged in the aftermath of the Thatcher government’s policy of deinstitutionalisation. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562059/original/file-20231128-17-eamw43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562059/original/file-20231128-17-eamw43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562059/original/file-20231128-17-eamw43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562059/original/file-20231128-17-eamw43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562059/original/file-20231128-17-eamw43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562059/original/file-20231128-17-eamw43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562059/original/file-20231128-17-eamw43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562059/original/file-20231128-17-eamw43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>It centres on Esme Lennox, who survives a childhood tragedy and a cholera epidemic in <a href="https://theconversation.com/colonialism-in-india-was-traumatic-including-for-some-of-the-british-officials-who-ruled-the-raj-77068">colonial India</a>. Shades of Mary Lennox from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-the-secret-garden-and-the-healing-power-of-nature-132269">The Secret Garden</a> (a book O’Farrell loved as a child) can be seen here. (In fact, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p03zwwv8">she has said</a> she unconsciously drew on it.) However, Esme’s story can also be read as an homage to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-yellow-wallpaper-a-19th-century-short-story-of-nervous-exhaustion-and-the-perils-of-womens-rest-cures-92302">The Yellow Wallpaper</a>.</p>
<p>Upon the family’s return from India to Edinburgh, Esme grows up to become a “difficult” young woman. Burdened by Esme’s reluctance to find a husband and her disregard for banal social niceties, her parents incarcerate her in an asylum, where she spends the next six decades. </p>
<p>O’Farrell first read The Yellow Wallpaper at 16. She <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/09/women">was taken aback</a> by Gilman’s “clean, insouciant style” and the way she addressed the subjects of “oppression, illness, madness, marriage”. </p>
<p>And she saw in Perkins Gilman’s work a “demand to be heard, a demand to be under-stood, a demand to be acknowledged”. Those same demands underpin her depiction of Esme Lennox. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-yellow-wallpaper-a-19th-century-short-story-of-nervous-exhaustion-and-the-perils-of-womens-rest-cures-92302">The Yellow Wallpaper: a 19th-century short story of nervous exhaustion and the perils of women's 'rest cures'</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>‘I recognised a kindred spirit’</h2>
<p>I can’t remember exactly what I was thinking when I took up my red biro and selected this novel from the summer reading catalogue my mother subscribed to, but it turned out to be an unexpectedly prescient choice. As I prepared to enter my final year of high school I was already getting ominous glimpses of the not-too-distant future. </p>
<p>My insular community in Perth’s northern suburbs still expected young women to have at least one eye trained on matrimony. While many of my peers and their parents were treating the forthcoming year 12 ball as a wedding rehearsal, I remained preoccupied by a “joke” told by a boy at a birthday party the previous year: “Why are women’s feet smaller than men’s? So they can stand closer to the kitchen sink!” </p>
<p>In Esme, I recognised a kindred spirit, and her experiences rendered visible the misogyny that pervaded my everyday life. I’ve re-read her story countless times: every time, it feels as urgent as ever. But now I’m in my early thirties, she speaks to me differently. </p>
<p>I can see beyond the immediate injustice of her situation and appreciate the subtle ways she resists oppression. Esme learns fighting back is not necessarily the most effective way to challenge power structures. Rather, she learns to “read” the logic of <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-did-the-patriarchy-start-and-will-evolution-get-rid-of-it-189648">patriarchy</a> and switches from overtly defying authority to quietly subverting it.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/girl-interrupted-interrogates-how-women-are-mad-when-they-refuse-to-conform-30-years-on-this-memoir-is-still-important-199211">Girl, Interrupted interrogates how women are 'mad' when they refuse to conform – 30 years on, this memoir is still important</a>
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</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A campaign of disobedience</h2>
<p>Like all O’Farrell’s novels, The Vanishing Act offers a profound literary encounter. The writing is haunting and visceral, managing to be firmly grounded but simultaneously otherworldly. From childhood, Esme is naturally attuned to the minute and magical workings of the universe, finding wonder and serenity in the natural world: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>She shut her eyes, held her breath, and listened. There it was. The weeping, the slow weeping, of rubber trees leaking their fluid. It sounded like the crackle of leaves a mile away, like the creeping of minute creatures. […] Esme tilted her head this way and that, still with her eyes shut tight, and listened to the sound of trees crying.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Esme’s status-conscious family do their best to stamp out her natural curiosity. As a very young child, she is strapped to a chair at lunchtime “[b]ecause, as her mother announced to the room, Esme must learn to behave”. </p>
<p>The restraint prevents her slipping under the dining table where, ensconced within the “illicit privacy of the cloth”, she can see the guests’ “shoes, worn down in odd places, the idiosyncrasies in lace-tying, blisters, calluses, who crossed their ankles, who crossed their knees, whose stockings had holes, who wore mismatched socks, who sat with a hand in whose lap”. </p>
<p>This scene is simultaneously endearing and startling; while it epitomises Esme’s inherent disregard for social convention, it also offers a startling premonition of her constrained future. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562576/original/file-20231130-23-jmhih6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562576/original/file-20231130-23-jmhih6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562576/original/file-20231130-23-jmhih6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=350&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562576/original/file-20231130-23-jmhih6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=350&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562576/original/file-20231130-23-jmhih6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=350&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562576/original/file-20231130-23-jmhih6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562576/original/file-20231130-23-jmhih6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562576/original/file-20231130-23-jmhih6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Like all Maggie O’Farrell’s novels, The Vanishing Act offers a profound literary encounter.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sophie Davidson/Hachette</span></span>
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<p>Despite these punishments, Esme continues her campaign of disobedience as an adolescent. She hides her embroidery down the side of the sofa in attempt to buy herself time to read. She has the audacity to leave home without a hat and to play Chopin loudly on the piano. And at a ball, she is discovered in an armchair with “one leg slung over the arm, a book in her lap, her legs wide apart under her skirt”. </p>
<p>On occasion, she literally fights back. While walking home from school on a foggy winter evening, Esme is surprised by a family acquaintance, Jamie Dalziell, the scion of a wealthy local family and the object of Esme’s mother’s matrimonial hopes. </p>
<p>Believing she is about to be attacked, Esme belts him “round the head with all the combined weight of her books”. Jamie, momentarily offended that Esme did not recognise him, quickly recovers and pressures her to go out with him, but she refuses, reminding him “it’s up to me” and declaring that she’d “rather stick pins in my eyes”. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/in-the-marriage-portrait-maggie-ofarrell-distorts-the-historical-record-to-suit-modern-sensibilities-192182">In The Marriage Portrait, Maggie O'Farrell distorts the historical record to suit modern sensibilities</a>
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</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Restoring agency to the literary ‘mad woman’</h2>
<p>But Esme’s rebellion cannot continue forever. As she gets older, she finds her individual agency is no match for the weight of societal expectation. Following her incarceration, she develops her “vanishing act”, a creative strategy that allows her to rebel inwardly, while protecting her from the punitive gaze of the asylum authorities. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is most important to keep yourself very still. Even breathing can remind them that you are there, so only very short, very quick breaths. Just enough to stay alive. And no more … Think yourself stretched and thin, beaten to transparency. Concentrate. Really concentrate. You need to attain a state so that your being, the bit of you that makes you what you are, that makes you stand out, three-dimensional in a room, can flow out from the top of your head.</p>
</blockquote>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562577/original/file-20231130-15-hom44j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562577/original/file-20231130-15-hom44j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562577/original/file-20231130-15-hom44j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562577/original/file-20231130-15-hom44j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562577/original/file-20231130-15-hom44j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562577/original/file-20231130-15-hom44j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562577/original/file-20231130-15-hom44j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562577/original/file-20231130-15-hom44j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Esme’s ‘vanishing act’ allows her to rebel inwardly, protected from the punitive gaze of the asylum’s authorities.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Hans Eiskonen/Unsplash</span></span>
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<p>It may seem odd to valorise Esme’s wilful self-absence in light of contemporary feminism’s emphasis on women’s strength and agency, and our awareness of the effects of <a href="https://theconversation.com/trauma-is-trending-but-we-need-to-look-beyond-buzzwords-and-face-its-ugly-side-201564">trauma</a>. But while her vanishing act resembles traumatic dissociation, it remains wilful and subversive. And it permits Esme to subtly undermine the authority of the asylum’s doctors and nurses and reject their image of her as degraded and helpless.</p>
<p>This is conveyed most powerfully in the novel’s closing pages, which speak back to the degradation of the “mad woman” through centuries of literature, from <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-charlotte-bronte-still-speaks-to-us-200-years-after-her-birth-57802">Jane Eyre</a> onwards. I don’t want to give the ending away, so I’ll just say that when the asylum closes, Esme makes her unceremonious return to the “community” with vengeance in her heart. </p>
<p>There is a poignancy in Esme’s refusal to embody the <a href="https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/8/21/17760222/asia-argento-jimmy-bennett-sexual-assault-me-too">mythical “perfect victim”</a> – who is devoid of desire, hatred or blame. For my part, I will always cherish the way the older Esme is first introduced, staring through her cell window to conjure an entirely imagined freedom: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>If Esme cares to gaze into the distance – that is to say, at what lies beyond the metal grille – she finds that, after a while, something happens to the focusing mechanism of her eyes. The squares of the grille will blur and, if she concentrates long enough, vanish. There is always a moment before her body reasserts itself, readjusting her eyes to the proper reality of the world, when it is just her and the trees, the road, and beyond. Nothing in between.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/218590/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amy Walters does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Maggie O'Farrell’s homage to The Yellow Wallpaper inhabits a ‘difficult’ young woman who survives tragedy in colonial India and is incarcerated by her family for refusing gender and social norms.Amy Walters, PhD candidate, English Literature, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2157002023-12-19T19:01:35Z2023-12-19T19:01:35ZKnausgaard’s ambitious new novel imagines Europe’s last decades – ending with an ominous star and the return of the dead<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566457/original/file-20231219-27-g8m1rc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=29%2C37%2C4962%2C3697&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Karl Ove Knausgaard</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sam Barker/Penguin Random House</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard is a 21st-century literary phenomenon. Talked up as a <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/167921/will-win-2022-nobel-prize-literature">contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature</a>, he has been compared to some of the greatest writers of all time: Fyodor Dostovesky, Marcel Proust, Roberto Bolaño. His work challenges conventional assumptions about content and form, and resonates with readers across the world. </p>
<p>Knausgaard’s magnum opus – the six-volume, 3,600-page autofictional epic <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/a-death-in-the-family-9780099555162">My Struggle</a> (<em>Min Kamp</em>) – has been translated into 35 languages. It’s sold half a million copies in Norway alone – a remarkable statistic, as Norway’s population is roughly five million.</p>
<p>Cultural commentator <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/12/26/completely-without-dignity-an-interview-with-karl-ove-knausgaard/">Jesse Baron</a> summed up its impact: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Knausgaard has written one of those books so aesthetically forceful as to be revolutionary. Before, there was no My Struggle; now there is, and things are different. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In 2020, Knausgaard followed up his “revolutionary” bestseller with <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-morning-star-9781784703301">The Morning Star</a> (<em>Morgenstjernen</em>), the first in a new cycle of novels. </p>
<p>By turns didactic and entertaining, the action of this enormous novel revolves around the sudden appearance of a massive new star in the sky, which may or may not herald the arrival of Lucifer on planet Earth. The dead seem to be coming back to life. Norwegian <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_metal">black metal</a> might have something to do with it all. (And yes, you did read that last sentence correctly.) </p>
<p>Knausgaard’s new, unabashedly formidable novel, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-wolves-of-eternity-9781787303362">The Wolves of Eternity</a> (<em>Ulvene fra evighetens skog</em>), is set in the same fictional universe. In terms of plot, however, this only becomes fully apparent near the end, when the mysterious star appears in the sky – and it’s revealed there haven’t been any registered deaths in Norway for three whole days. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>The Wolves of Eternity – Karl Ove Knausgaard (Harvill Secker)</em></p>
<hr>
<h2>Early joy at ‘being able to write’</h2>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566203/original/file-20231218-21-l3q7vz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566203/original/file-20231218-21-l3q7vz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566203/original/file-20231218-21-l3q7vz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566203/original/file-20231218-21-l3q7vz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566203/original/file-20231218-21-l3q7vz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566203/original/file-20231218-21-l3q7vz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566203/original/file-20231218-21-l3q7vz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566203/original/file-20231218-21-l3q7vz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Knausgaard, who is arguably the most famous Norwegian writer since <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henrik-Ibsen">Henrik Ibsen</a>, was born in Olso on 6 December 1968. He was raised on Tromøy, the largest island in southern Norway, and studied at the University of Bergen. </p>
<p>As a student of creative writing, Knausgaard was taught by <a href="https://theconversation.com/jon-fosse-wins-the-2023-nobel-prize-in-literature-for-giving-voice-to-the-unsayable-215143">Jon Fosse</a>, the 2023 Nobel Laureate. After graduating from university, he taught at high school in northern Norway and spent time working in a psychiatric hospital. He also had a stint labouring on an oil rig.</p>
<p>In 1998, after moving to Sweden, Knausgaard released his first novel, <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/420071/out-of-the-world-by-karl-ove-knausgaard/9781846558269">Out of the World</a> (<em>Ute av verden</em>). In part concerned with Knausgaard’s relationship with his alcoholic father, this autobiographically inflected book was a hit in Norway. It received the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature: the first time in the award’s history a debut novelist walked away as winner.</p>
<p>Knausgaard is now critical of his first novel. “It is the work of the beginner,” <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/so-much-longing-in-so-little-space-9781787300545">he says</a>, “and it is blemished by an at times obtrusive self-infatuation, the joy of being able to write.” </p>
<p>He is much fonder of his second book, which appeared to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/nov/08/karl-knausard-time-every-purpose">mixed reviews</a> in 2004. In <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-karl-ove-knausgaard-cant-stop-writing-1446688727">Knausgaard’s words</a>, A Time for Everything (<em>En tid for alt</em>) is a novel “about angels, like angels do exist, they really were around. The mystery in the book is where did they go? It’s a retelling of the stories in the Bible.” </p>
<p>Yet he readily concedes “nobody else is interested in [it] because it’s the most fictional” of his novels.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/jon-fosse-wins-the-2023-nobel-prize-in-literature-for-giving-voice-to-the-unsayable-215143">Jon Fosse wins the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature for giving 'voice to the unsayable'</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>My Struggle changed the novel</h2>
<p>Knausgaard is nodding in the direction of My Struggle, which launched him into the literary stratosphere. This <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/why-name-your-book-after-hitlers">provocatively titled</a> autobiographical novel cycle spans six books, published between 2009 and 2011. Taken together, it is the longest novel in Norwegian history.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566182/original/file-20231218-18-zx6i61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566182/original/file-20231218-18-zx6i61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566182/original/file-20231218-18-zx6i61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566182/original/file-20231218-18-zx6i61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566182/original/file-20231218-18-zx6i61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566182/original/file-20231218-18-zx6i61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1189&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566182/original/file-20231218-18-zx6i61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1189&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566182/original/file-20231218-18-zx6i61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1189&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Academic <a href="https://sunypress.edu/Books/K/Knausgaard-and-the-Autofictional-Novel">Claus Elholm Andersen argues</a> this monumental work “has become the preeminent example of autofiction and has changed how we conceive of novels”.</p>
<p>Knausgaard has been <a href="https://electricliterature.com/opening-a-world-an-interview-with-karl-ove-knausgaard/">candid</a> about the fact that My Struggle, which traffics in the minutiae and rhythms of daily existence, “came out of a great frustration” in his life. </p>
<p>The writer, who had recently become a father, was suffering from a severe case of writer’s block. Knausgaard was also stuck in what he <a href="https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-light-behind-the-bookshelves/">subsequently characterised</a> as a midlife crisis:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Another thing is that when I turned forty it was kind of like I was dead. I thought “This is it and it’s going to be like this for the rest of my life”. And the only way for me to deal with that was through literature. It’s difficult to explain but I had to attempt to get closer to life, which is a stupid thing to do but that’s what I was trying to do, to avoid all the structures and forms of the novel.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Knausgaard realised he had to change his approach to writing in order to get closer to life. Speed of composition became “the most important thing” for Knausgaard. He recalls that speed served a practical function</p>
<blockquote>
<p>because I am a perfectionist in my writing, in my way of thinking, and I want to make it into real art, real literature. But I had to fight against that thing in me because I became so critical of my own writing, and I needed to get over that, and the only way I could do it was by speeding up because then you don’t have time to be critical at all. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The goal he set himself was to write a specific number of pages every day. “In that way I simply wouldn’t have time to think, to plan or to calculate,” <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300248517/inadvertent/">Knausgaard explains</a>, “I would have to go with whatever appeared on the screen in front of me.” </p>
<p>The number of pages per day soon started to go up. Five, ten, twenty. <a href="https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-light-behind-the-bookshelves/">Knausgaard holds</a> that this allowed him </p>
<blockquote>
<p>to escape the notion of knowing what to write. If you know what you’re going to write then that’s death for me, then nothing is happening. If I plan something it’s just dead. And almost everything I write is dead in that sense really, but if I speed up then something, all of a sudden, is happening because I can no longer control it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But this new method came with risks. Quality control was an issue. Knausgaard is the first <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThCB9lFvzhY">to admit</a> there is “a lot of bad writing” on display in My Struggle, which deliberately privileges quantity over artistic quality. </p>
<p>This shift became more pronounced as he went along. “When the books started to be published,” <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/karl-ove-knausgaard-the-duty-of-literature-is-to-fight-fiction">Knausgaard remarks</a>, “I had incredibly tight deadlines, which was a great help. Then I couldn’t afford to think about quality, only quantity mattered.” </p>
<p>Knausgaard is underselling himself a bit here. In the reckoning of the literary critic <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/08/13/total-recall">James Wood</a>, Knausgaard’s hypnotic prose is</p>
<blockquote>
<p>intense and utterly honest, unafraid to voice universal anxieties, unafraid to appear naïve or awkward. Although his sentences are long and loose, they are not cutely or aimlessly digressive: truth is repeatedly being struck at, not chatted up.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/tying-the-knausgaardian-knot-struggle-scandinavian-style-36135">Tying the Knausgaardian knot: struggle, Scandinavian-style</a>
</strong>
</em>
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<hr>
<h2>‘No topic is off-limits’</h2>
<p>Knausgaard’s candour is part of his appeal, but he seems to have been genuinely taken aback by the public’s response to My Struggle. <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-karl-ove-knausgaard-cant-stop-writing-1446688727#:%7E:text=Of%20writing%20'My%20Struggle%2C',before%20his%20children%20got%20up">He confessed</a> as much to the journalist Liesl Schillinger:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s bad. I wrote it rather blindly, I didn’t think it was exceptional. I thought this would be a minor literary book, I thought it would be a step down from my other books, I thought maybe it was boring and uninteresting and really about nothing.</p>
</blockquote>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566204/original/file-20231218-21-2eobur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566204/original/file-20231218-21-2eobur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566204/original/file-20231218-21-2eobur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566204/original/file-20231218-21-2eobur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566204/original/file-20231218-21-2eobur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566204/original/file-20231218-21-2eobur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566204/original/file-20231218-21-2eobur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566204/original/file-20231218-21-2eobur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Knausgaard in 2011.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Karl_Ove_Knausg%C3%A5rd.jpg">Soppakanuuna, via Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>Knausgaard’s many readers would beg to differ. We warm to what we might describe as his radical openness, and appreciate his willingness to discuss subjects society tends to regard as <a href="https://lithub.com/karl-ove-knausgaards-feats-of-shame-and-openness/">shameful</a> and taboo. Sexual inadequacy, self-harm, Adolf Hitler. No topic is off-limits, everything is up for discussion.</p>
<p>This has occasionally made life difficult for Knausgaard. Some of his nearest and dearest have <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/10/linda-bostrom-knausgard-i-would-like-to-be-seen-as-a-person-and-author-in-my-own-right">taken umbrage</a> at the way they are presented in My Struggle. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.boilerhouse.press/product-page/dear-knausgaard-by-kim-adrian">Feminist commentators</a> have been troubled by Knausgaard’s opinions about sexuality and gender relations in contemporary Europe. For example, in the second volume of My Struggle, he expressed scepticism about how “modernised and feminised” parameters of “equality and fairness” impact on masculinity.</p>
<p>Knausgaard <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThCB9lFvzhY">acknowledges</a> the criticism his work has generated in some quarters: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am accused of being right-wing and antifeminist or antiwoman even – all kinds of things – but I think if you read the whole book and see it … what I seek is complication.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-autofiction-turns-the-personal-into-the-political-192180">How autofiction turns the personal into the political</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>My Struggle famously ends with Knausgaard declaring he is no longer a writer. However, his output across the past decade directly contradicts that statement. </p>
<p>He’s been a consultant on a new Norwegian translation of the Bible and published several nonfiction books, on subjects as diverse as <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/home-and-away-9781473523906">football</a> and the art of <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/so-much-longing-in-so-little-space-9781787300545">Edvard Munch</a>.</p>
<p>And he has contributed a novel, The Blind Book (<em>Blindenboken</em>), to the ecologically inspired <a href="https://www.futurelibrary.no/">Future Library</a> initiative, a series of original works printed on paper made from a thousand freshly planted trees. It will be held in trust, unpublished, until 2114, when it will be printed and released.</p>
<p>“From a writer’s perspective,” <a href="https://www.futurelibrary.no/#/years/2019">Knausgaard reflects</a>, “it is incredibly fascinating to do something and to know that it is [going to] be published in a completely different setting in a completely different world probably.” </p>
<h2>The Morning Star ‘divided critics’</h2>
<p>The Morning Star, Knausgaard’s first stab at fiction since My Struggle, is a speculative novel set in the here and now, in a recognisable version of our world. It has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/01/the-morning-star-by-karl-ove-knausgard-review-bloated-and-inconsequential">divided</a> <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/karl-ove-knausgaards-haunting-new-novel">critics</a>. Bloated and inconsequential, compulsive and haunting – people can’t seem to make up their minds about it.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566188/original/file-20231218-27-pzngpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566188/original/file-20231218-27-pzngpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566188/original/file-20231218-27-pzngpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566188/original/file-20231218-27-pzngpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566188/original/file-20231218-27-pzngpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566188/original/file-20231218-27-pzngpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566188/original/file-20231218-27-pzngpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566188/original/file-20231218-27-pzngpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Part of the problem, I think, has to do with the sheer scope of the work – which is exactly 666 pages long.</p>
<p>Divided into three sections and featuring nine narrators, the novel, much like My Struggle, is punctuated by a dizzying number of theological and philosophical detours. </p>
<p>Take the following example. One of the narrators, Kathrin, has invited a couple of friends – Sigrid and Martin – for dinner. Martin is a perennial student. By the time we meet him, he has already failed to finish degrees in philosophy, computer science and biology. To Sigrid’s despair, he now wants to write about trees. Here is Martin’s almost painfully earnest take on the topic:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The mind is a kind of place where we become visible to ourselves. But why? What’s it good for? When we see ourselves, we see ourselves from without – the way others see us, in other words. That was what Nietzsche understood, that the mind exists for the good of the community. It’s there for what goes on between people. And that’s where some scholars believe there to be other kinds of consciousness too. Other forms of intelligence. The forest, for instance. The point being that those kinds of consciousness – intelligence, if you will – are so alien to us that it’s hard for us to see that they even exist. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is how characters in Knausgaard’s novels tend to talk. The question being asked here is basically: can a tree think? The answer, according to Martin, is not clear cut:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“So a tree can’t think,” Martin went on. “But the trees can. The ecosystem as an entity can. The fact that such an idea is being talked about now is probably down to people trying to construct forms of AI. We don’t know what that’s going to look like either.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>These passages are typical of Knausgaard, who <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2022/10/why-novel-matters-imperialism-absolute-karl-ove-knausgaard">believes</a> the power of the novel resides in its unique ability to pull </p>
<blockquote>
<p>any abstract conception about life, whether political, philosophical or scientific in nature, into the human sphere, where it no longer stands alone but collides with myriad impressions, thoughts, emotions and actions. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This accounts for the wildly digressive shape of The Morning Star, which is best understood as a contemporary spin on a tried and tested literary genre: <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/06/25/the-gimmick-of-the-novel-of-ideas/">the novel of ideas</a>. </p>
<h2>Wolves of Eternity: ‘deliberately challenging’</h2>
<p>Published in 2022 and translated into English in 2023, The Wolves of Eternity shares several thematic and formal traits with The Morning Star. Like its immediate predecessor, the novel, which starts in 1986, contains a number of first-person narratives. Two in particular stand out. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566183/original/file-20231218-23-c7pa11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566183/original/file-20231218-23-c7pa11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566183/original/file-20231218-23-c7pa11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566183/original/file-20231218-23-c7pa11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566183/original/file-20231218-23-c7pa11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566183/original/file-20231218-23-c7pa11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1121&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566183/original/file-20231218-23-c7pa11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1121&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566183/original/file-20231218-23-c7pa11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1121&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Syvert Løyning has been released from Norwegian military service. He has just moved back home and needs to earn some cash. He eventually finds work as an undertaker. One day, while at home, he happens upon a stash of old letters from his late father to a lover living in the Soviet Union. He gets them translated, and discovers he has a half-sister, Alevtina, who works as a scientist. They eventually meet up in Putin’s Moscow. </p>
<p>The novel ends on an ambiguous and vaguely ominous note, with Syvert leaving Russia and heading back to Norway, which is in the throes of an extreme heat-wave. The morning star is hanging in the sky:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I slung my jacket over my arm, picked up my suitcase and bag and went down to the lobby, where my taxi was already waiting for me. Outside, the light from the new star shone in the grey sky above us, as if through a shroud. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>If anything, The Wolves of Eternity is even more ambitious than the book that came before it. The Morning Star is set in Norway and takes place over two consecutive days in late August. The plot of The Wolves of Eternity unfolds across Europe over decades. </p>
<p>Clocking in at a formidable 789 pages, it dwarfs its predecessor in length, too. Like The Morning Star, The Wolves of Eternity looks to tackle the most daunting and momentous of topics. </p>
<p>The meaning of life and the undoing of death. Scientific and political revolution. The nature of atoms and the history of the cosmos. <a href="https://theconversation.com/where-have-all-the-luddites-gone-exploring-what-makes-us-human-and-whether-modern-technology-threatens-to-destroy-it-202756">Transhumanism</a> and the existence of God. These are but a few of the matters Knausgaard concerns himself with in his new novel. Trees feature, too:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All organisms lived in such pockets of time, whose settings differed from species to species, in which their life cycles ran their course, complete for every individual, filled to the brim with life in time. The trees had no brain either, nor any central nervous system, and this of course defined their existence too, the way systems of sensory perception defined the existence of all things living on earth, meaning that the world looked quite different to a fly than it did to a cow or a tree.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I quote at length from Alevtina’s narrative because it’s important to give you a sense of what you are getting yourself into, if you decide to take the plunge into Knausgaard’s latest. Like My Struggle, it was written at impressive pace to deadline.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Karl-Ove-Knausgaard#:%7E:text=Conversations%20with%20Karl%20Ove%20Knausgaard%20is%20a%20collection%20of%20twenty,writer%20and%20a%20daring%20interviewee.">Knausgaard accepts</a> that The Wolves of Eternity is a very challenging book to read. This is mainly because the plot, in the author’s words, “moves very, very, very slowly”.</p>
<p>Some readers may bristle at (or even be put off by) the prospect of this. But the more time I spent with the novel, the more I came to appreciate that its length and pacing serve a specific, indeed vital, function. </p>
<p>It forces the reader to take stock, to grapple with precisely the sorts of complications Knausgaard is interested in pursing in his work. </p>
<p>This, admittedly, is not for everyone. Still, I think there is something truly remarkable, even admirable, about Knausgaard’s willingness to stick to his guns when it comes to seeing what the novel form is capable of doing and containing. </p>
<p>As to what comes next, I’m not entirely sure. But I’m quietly confident it’ll be suitably epic.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/215700/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexander Howard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Wolves of Eternity is remarkable – and deliberately challenging. Ranging across time and space, it muses on thinking trees, Putin’s Moscow, a Norwegian heatwave and the undead.Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2167502023-12-14T19:19:58Z2023-12-14T19:19:58ZFriday essay: do readers dream of running a bookshop? Books about booksellers are having a moment – the reality can be less romantic<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559208/original/file-20231114-25-gsa01.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=23%2C0%2C7916%2C5297&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/paris-france-23-dec-2018-view-1268337910">EQRoy/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>My mother and I wanted to open a bookshop. We signed up for a CAE course, which was cancelled when the bookseller who ran it went out of business. I learnt this later because I went on to work in a bookshop and the book business is a small world.</p>
<p>As are bookshops. And books. Worlds within worlds within worlds.</p>
<p>My first job was in hospitality. It was hard work; physical labour. I cased city bookshops, handing out my CV, dreaming of a different life. My new boss saw me coming: I spent my first day unpacking box after box. Stacking, shelving – book after book. He tried to teach me they might as well be bricks, albeit in pretty packaging. Not-so-fast-moving, never-moving-as-fast-as-booksellers-might-like consumer goods.</p>
<p>But “handselling”, that mainstay of the independent “High Street” book trade, was everything I hoped it would be. I loved – love – the aesthetic object of the book. The artefact at the heart of an exchange that is rarely as simple as a commercial transaction. (Except, you might say, when someone is buying something as a gift that says “I spent this much. I know this much about you.” But even then, it seemed we were engaged in a storytelling exchange. Swapping literary histories. Imagining reading futures.)</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/all-hail-the-bookshop-survivor-against-the-odds-63758">All hail the bookshop: survivor against the odds</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<p>It wasn’t only the book-based conversations with customers and colleagues that fulfilled my expectations. Part of the pleasure of bookselling was the sense of satisfaction I got in being a <a href="https://www.slv.vic.gov.au/bibliotherapy#:%7E:text=What%20is%20bibliotherapy%3F,comforts%20us%20during%20challenging%20times">bibliotherapeutic matchmaker</a>. Reader, I had been training for this my whole life. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559185/original/file-20231113-19-h5ug4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A photograph of an old fashioned bookshop sign" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559185/original/file-20231113-19-h5ug4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559185/original/file-20231113-19-h5ug4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559185/original/file-20231113-19-h5ug4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559185/original/file-20231113-19-h5ug4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559185/original/file-20231113-19-h5ug4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559185/original/file-20231113-19-h5ug4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559185/original/file-20231113-19-h5ug4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The artefact at the heart of a book sale is rarely as simple as a commercial transaction.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/bookshop-sign-on-steel-plate-vintage-1807258558">sylv1rob1/Shutterstock</a></span>
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<p>Given the sense of community that coalesces around bookstores and the connection between people books can be a conduit for, it’s not surprising books about bookshops are popular. These stories are a genre unto themselves. They are invariably romantic, offering a different kind of (infinite) world within a (finite) world.</p>
<p>There are famous examples from fantasy, such as the wildly popular <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1232.The_Shadow_of_the_Wind?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=WSSOSeTRe6&rank=1">The Shadow of the Wind</a> (2001), and closer to home, the wonderful adventure that is <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45712581-from-here-on-monsters?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=YRktTZ2rbS&rank=1">From Here on, Monsters</a> (2020), both featuring antiquarian booksellers. Nonfiction books such as the 1970 classic <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/368916.84_Charing_Cross_Road?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_16">84 Charing Cross Road</a>, a tale told in letters between a New York writer and a used book dealer in London, rub spines with historical novels such as <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-bookseller-of-florence-9781784709372">The Bookseller of Florence: Vespasiano da Bisticci and the Manuscripts that Illuminated the Renaissance</a> (2021).</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565633/original/file-20231213-15-uckt07.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="book cover: Bookseller of Kabul" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565633/original/file-20231213-15-uckt07.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565633/original/file-20231213-15-uckt07.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=944&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565633/original/file-20231213-15-uckt07.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=944&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565633/original/file-20231213-15-uckt07.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=944&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565633/original/file-20231213-15-uckt07.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1186&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565633/original/file-20231213-15-uckt07.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1186&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565633/original/file-20231213-15-uckt07.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1186&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>More recently there has been a spate of translations. From <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9838.The_Bookseller_of_Kabul?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_23">The Bookseller of Kabul</a>, first published in Norwegian in 2002, to <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62047992-days-at-the-morisaki-bookshop?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=P4yzPqbsMp&rank=1">Days at the Morisaki Bookshop</a>, by Japanese author Satoshi Yagisawa, to <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/welcome-to-the-hyunamdong-bookshop-9781526662279/">Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop</a>, Shanna Tan’s 2023 translation of Hwang Bo-Reum’s 2022 Korean bestseller.</p>
<p>These tales are not only set in bookshops, but revolve around bookselling itself. They describe the day-to-day work in detail, as meaningful: life sustaining and life-changing. A longed-for return to authenticity and more-than-economic exchange.</p>
<p>The reality is a little different. </p>
<p>In a 2019 <a href="https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-237/retain-therapist/">essay for Overland</a> aptly titled “Retail Therapist”, bookseller and writer Freya Howarth articulated the “desirable, intellectual, even romantic” perception of working in a bookshop and the <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-emotional-labour-and-how-do-we-get-it-wrong-185773">emotional labour</a> at its heart.</p>
<p>This non-unionised, highly educated, usually part-time and often under-employed workforce provided a particular service, she wrote. Booksellers care for customers: smile, listen, suggest. And retail work, Howarth argued, has historically been feminised. </p>
<p>The industry’s working conditions have made the news as a result of pay disputes such as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/sep/24/renowned-melbourne-bookstore-in-war-of-words-with-authors-over-traumatic-pay-dispute">a recent one at Melbourne’s Readings bookstores</a> during negotiations over an enterprise bargaining agreement.</p>
<p>After a heated dispute, in which authors sent a letter to Readings calling for “a living wage” for staff, the bookseller became the second Australian bookshop to <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/culture/books/one-of-the-world-s-great-booksellers-ends-a-long-chapter-at-readings-20230727-p5drp1.html">negotiate an EBA</a>. It was hailed by the staff union as “one of the best retail agreements in Australia”. </p>
<p>Still, what was it <a href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/02/job-love/">some old-timer once said</a>? Find a job you love and you never have to work a day in your life. Howarth’s point is that finding a job you love – such as bookselling, or publishing; or I would add academia – may mean you work unpaid overtime for the rest of your life.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/saturday-is-love-your-bookshop-day-5-reasons-why-readers-keep-coming-back-to-independent-book-stores-169445">Saturday is Love your Bookshop Day. 5 reasons why readers keep coming back to independent book stores</a>
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<h2>Contradictory worlds</h2>
<p>One of the most famous contemporary books about bookselling is undoubtedly the Norwegian bestseller The Bookseller of Kabul. Published in English in 2003 (translated by Ingrid Christophersen), this nonfiction narrative by journalist Asne Seierstad tells the story of self-made small businessman Shah Muhammad Rais and his family, with whom the author stayed for four months. </p>
<p>Rais’s store, which opened in 1974, was a gathering place for intellectuals, housing a vast collection of books on Afghanistan, as well as foreign titles – when he wasn’t hiding them around the city.</p>
<p>Rais was repeatedly arrested, interrogated and imprisoned for his views on censorship. Seierstad makes clear her subject’s belief in the power of books and the important role they play in education and liberation. Meanwhile, however, the eponymous bookseller’s two wives were confined to their homes. </p>
<p>Seierstad was in a unique position: as a Westerner she had an outsider’s perspective and was able to move between public and private, male and female domains. She made the unusual decision to write some chapters from different characters’ perspectives, which somewhat compromised the book’s status as nonfiction, but there was no mistaking her political point of view.</p>
<p>This real-life story took a turn when the family later brought legal action against the author. A Norwegian <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/13/bookseller-of-kabul-author-cleared">court cleared Seierstad of any invasion of privacy</a> in 2011 and concluded the facts of the book were accurate. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559202/original/file-20231114-15-titmu6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The cover of Shah Muhammad Rais's book." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559202/original/file-20231114-15-titmu6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559202/original/file-20231114-15-titmu6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=893&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559202/original/file-20231114-15-titmu6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=893&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559202/original/file-20231114-15-titmu6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=893&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559202/original/file-20231114-15-titmu6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1122&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559202/original/file-20231114-15-titmu6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1122&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559202/original/file-20231114-15-titmu6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1122&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Goodreads</span></span>
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<p>But Rais is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/04/bookseller-of-kabul-becomes-asylum-seeker-in-london">claiming asylum in the UK </a>, with his family scattered across the globe. He has published his own version of his story: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2240160.Once_Upon_a_Time_There_Was_a_Bookseller_in_Kabul">Once Upon a Time There Was a Bookseller in Kabul</a>. </p>
<p>Books about bookselling in translation may be the ultimate escapism. They are not literary; they are about literature. (Though too over-the-top an affirmation of the value of books and reading risks the medium contradicting the message.) We read for insight into a world that is usually worlds away from “ours”.</p>
<p>However, there is a sparseness to the prose of these international titles that makes it hard to parse. Is the baldness of the language a stylistic or cultural characteristic of the original? Is it an aspect (intentional? accidental?) of the translation? Certainly, for me, it adds to their foreignness.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565632/original/file-20231213-17-tjeu1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The cover of Carsten Henn's book." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565632/original/file-20231213-17-tjeu1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565632/original/file-20231213-17-tjeu1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565632/original/file-20231213-17-tjeu1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565632/original/file-20231213-17-tjeu1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565632/original/file-20231213-17-tjeu1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1207&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565632/original/file-20231213-17-tjeu1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1207&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565632/original/file-20231213-17-tjeu1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1207&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>In Carsten Henn’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62192261-the-door-to-door-bookstore?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=8XonUolGwM&rank=1">The Door-to-Door Bookstore</a> (2020), translated from German by Melody Shaw and published in English this year, Carl Kollhoff delivers book requests direct to his reclusive customers – whose reading styles are humorously described and readily recognisable. Hares race through pages while tortoises fall asleep while reading.</p>
<p>When a young girl tags along on Carl’s rounds, playing havoc with his system of choosing books for customers, the message is clear: what we want to read is not always what we need. The friendship that develops is charming and heartwarming, with the oddball pair and their worthy work pitted against big, bad business when the boss’s daughter takes over the family bookshop. </p>
<p>(His book also reminded me of a dear friend who used to say there are courtly readers – who, like chaste lovers, never abandoned a book face down, stained it with wine, scribbled in the margins or dog-eared pages. And then there are those like me. Let’s just say my books have lived a life.)</p>
<p>It may be no coincidence that these newer additions to the genre emerged during, or soon after, the world’s long lockdowns. Many of us experienced a desperate desire to find <a href="https://www.window-swap.com/">windows onto a world beyond our own backyards</a>. Invalids are often avid readers (perhaps most famously, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-louis-stevenson">Robert Louis Stevenson</a>) and COVID made patients, prisoners of us all. I would go as far as to say my pre-teen learnt to read, really lose himself in a book, during quarantine. Even when screen time was limited, his Kindle was always available – though the <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12109-022-09899-w">lack of access to physical libraries</a> disadvantaged others.</p>
<p>What better place to escape to – through the pages of a book – than an overseas bookshop? A key feature of The Door-to-Door Bookstore and the titles that follow are their to-be-read lists – which are interspersed throughout, often discussed in conversations between characters. The books themselves might even be seen as portable libraries – or old-fashioned indexes, at least. Annotated bibliographies of what we should read; summaries of what we did, once, but may have forgotten.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557675/original/file-20231106-21-jj3a4s.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557675/original/file-20231106-21-jj3a4s.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557675/original/file-20231106-21-jj3a4s.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557675/original/file-20231106-21-jj3a4s.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557675/original/file-20231106-21-jj3a4s.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557675/original/file-20231106-21-jj3a4s.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557675/original/file-20231106-21-jj3a4s.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557675/original/file-20231106-21-jj3a4s.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Days+at+the+Morisaki+Bookshop&ref=nav_sb_noss_l_29">Goodreads</a></span>
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</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Days+at+the+Morisaki+Bookshop&ref=nav_sb_noss_l_29">Days at the Morisaki Bookshop</a>, translated from Japanese by Eric Ozawa this year, was written by Satoshi Yagisawa in 2010. Twenty-year-old Takako quits her job and takes to her bed when her boyfriend announces, out of the blue, he is marrying someone else. Facing the prospect of moving home, she instead moves into the flat above her eccentric uncle’s bookshop.</p>
<p>A proud non-reader, Takako gradually returns to books as her heart heals.</p>
<p>This book rather heavy-handedly makes the case for great literature as a doorway not only into other worlds, but onto other selves. Or back to a true self for damaged salary-workers like Takako who have been swept off course. The shop is repeatedly described as a “safe harbour”. A place to shelter, regather and regroup – for bookseller and buyers alike. </p>
<p>Books about bookshops may be read as “heterotopias”, a concept Michel Foucault uses <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23696520-of-other-spaces-heterotopias?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=DEWYFL5fsK&rank=1">to describe</a> cultural and discursive spaces that are contradictory or transformative. Worlds within worlds. Parallel spaces such as museums and botanic gardens that mirror the “real” world but are artfully, artificially created curations. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-ideas-of-foucault-99758">Explainer: the ideas of Foucault</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Bookshops are similarly contradictory: though they may be idealised as places of escape and reading may be romanticised as transformative, both are intrinsically bound up with capitalism. They offer solace, but ultimately exist to sell. </p>
<p>Still, the opposite is true too. Books are commercial products but their content escapes the covers. Like <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27712.The_Neverending_Story">The Neverending Story</a>, the “other” world we read about bleeds into our own. Even if a book is banned or burned, once read it is out in the world.</p>
<h2>A love letter and pause for thought</h2>
<p>Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop is an even more explicit love letter to bookselling. Running a bookshop enables the novel’s main character to get out of the rat race and eventually even find her soulmate. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559210/original/file-20231114-21-ul1ah1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Cover of Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559210/original/file-20231114-21-ul1ah1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559210/original/file-20231114-21-ul1ah1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=897&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559210/original/file-20231114-21-ul1ah1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=897&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559210/original/file-20231114-21-ul1ah1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=897&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559210/original/file-20231114-21-ul1ah1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1127&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559210/original/file-20231114-21-ul1ah1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1127&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559210/original/file-20231114-21-ul1ah1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1127&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Goodreads</span></span>
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<p>“I must open a bookshop,” Yeongju says. Throwing herself headlong into this task as a way to change her life, she reinvents her relationship with work. Her story is a blow-by-blow account of her building the business, making conscious choices about employee relations, carving out personal reading time and nurturing a local community in an out-of-the-way neighbourhood.</p>
<p>Given my own early experience in the secondhand and antiquarian trade, along with a short stint at the BooksEtc chain in the UK, it’s hard to argue against the idea of bookselling as an alternate way of making a living. </p>
<p>But it’s not necessarily an alternative one. A bookshop is, after all, a business. One that is battling the behemoth Amazon, as well as an ever-increasing number of entertainment alternatives and ever-diminishing attention spans. Even reluctant booksellers embraced social media and e-commerce during COVID – as Yeongju learns to do.</p>
<p>If bookshops are to survive and thrive, perhaps they do well to “sell” the idea theirs is a different kind of career. A calling.</p>
<p>Robbie Egan, CEO of BookPeople (previously the Australian Booksellers Association), has described bookshops as “third-places”, engaging with their customers in meaningful ways that <a href="https://www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/2022/10/21/222118/what-does-the-future-look-like-for-bookselling/">can’t be reduced to a commercial transaction</a>. It’s about community, he tells me, pointing out how many Australian writers have been – or still are – booksellers, from <a href="https://theconversation.com/fat-people-are-taught-to-hate-themselves-but-kris-kneens-intimate-book-could-create-change-206518">Kris Kneen</a> to <a href="https://theconversation.com/i-will-not-hide-helen-garners-radical-gift-is-the-shock-of-plain-speaking-179090">Sean O’Beirne</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-melbourne-bookshop-that-ignited-australian-modernism-138300">Friday essay: the Melbourne bookshop that ignited Australian modernism</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In a note to readers in Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop, Bo-Reum reflects on writing her debut novel. She describes how she sat at her desk every day not knowing what to write, until the bookshop appeared. “Everything else fell in place.” This letter perpetuates ideas about writing (immersive, inspirational, enjoyable) that are every bit as romantic as the world of bookselling she describes.</p>
<p>Yet of all these recent books, The Bookseller of Kabul is the one I return to. I cannot forget Seierstad’s imagined account of Aimal, Sultan’s youngest son, in a chapter called The Dreary Room. He is 12 years old and works 12 hours a day, seven days a week “in a little booth in the dark lobby of one of Kabul’s hotels”. </p>
<p>Aimal longs to go to school. He wails that his father, a rich bookseller “passionate about words and history”, has him working in a sweet shop as the best way to learn the family business.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/216750/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rose Michael was previously the editor of Books + Publishing magazine.</span></em></p>From Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop, to The Door-to-Door Bookstore, a variety of new novels present bookselling as a source of solace, meaning and escape. What’s going on here?Rose Michael, Senior Lecturer, Writing & Publishing, RMIT UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2179882023-12-14T15:54:09Z2023-12-14T15:54:09Z‘American Fiction’ is a scathing satire that challenges pop-culture stereotypes of Blackness<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563028/original/file-20231201-27-tecr8d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=134%2C0%2C4250%2C2910&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Erika Alexander is Coraline and Jeffrey Wright is Monk in 'American Fiction.'</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Claire Folger/Orion)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In this episode, Vinita sits down with two experts to break down the many layers — and Black stereotypes — in the much anticipated new film, American Fiction.</em></p>
<iframe height="200px" width="100%" frameborder="no" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/edde9889-d430-40cb-b879-4b21d58d2936?dark=true"></iframe>
<p><iframe id="tc-infographic-572" class="tc-infographic" height="100" src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/infographics/572/661898416fdc21fc4fdef6a5379efd7cac19d9d5/site/index.html" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>The lead character of the new movie <em>American Fiction</em> is Monk. He’s a Black man but never feels ‘Black’ enough: he graduated from Harvard, his siblings are doctors, he doesn’t play basketball and he writes literary novels. </p>
<p>Directed and written by former journalist Cord Jefferson, <em>American Fiction</em> won this year’s People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, and it has its much anticipated North American release in theatres this month. It’s been called an “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/sep/10/american-fiction-review-cord-jefferson-jeffrey-wright">incisive literary satire</a>” by the <em>Guardian</em>. </p>
<p>The film, starring Jeffrey Wright, is an adaption of the 2001 novel <em>Erasure</em> by Percival Everett. The book and the film are centred on Monk, a novelist who’s fed up with a white-led publishing industry that profits from Black entertainment and tired tropes. As a Black man who thinks about race but also rages against having to talk about it, Monk gets so frustrated that he decides to poke fun of those who uncritically consume what they are sold as “Black culture.”</p>
<p>He uses a pen name to write an outlandish “Black” book of his own. It’s about “thug life” and is called “My Pafology.” But plot twist: his attempt at satire is lost on his audience and the book ends up becoming wildly successful. Suddenly, Monk is among those profiting off the stereotypes he so despises. The rest of the story explores “<a href="https://variety.com/2023/film/reviews/american-fiction-review-jeffrey-wright-1235718392/">the unfairness of asking individual artists to represent the entire Black experience</a>.”</p>
<p>In this episode of <em>Don’t Call Me Resilient</em>, Prof. Vershawn Ashanti Young of University of Waterloo and Prof. Anthony Stewart of Bucknell University join forces to break down the many layers of Monk’s story and why Black stereotypes remain so persistent in pop culture.</p>
<h2>Read more in The Conversation</h2>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-stories-about-alternate-worlds-can-help-us-imagine-a-better-future-dont-call-me-resilient-ep-7-165933">How stories about alternate worlds can help us imagine a better future: Don't Call Me Resilient EP 7</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/cultural-appropriation-and-the-whiteness-of-book-publishing-79095">Cultural appropriation and the whiteness of book publishing</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/blackkklansman-a-deadly-serious-comedy-101432">'BlacKkKlansman' -- a deadly serious comedy</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/harriet-tubman-film-does-not-deserve-the-twitter-hate-127493">Harriet Tubman film does not deserve the Twitter hate</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/american-fiction-asks-who-gets-to-decide-blackness-219704">'American Fiction' asks who gets to decide Blackness</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Resources</h2>
<p><a href="https://lsupress.org/9780807172643/"><em>Approximate Gestures: Infinite Spaces in the Fiction of Percival Everett</em></a> by Anthony Stewart</p>
<p><a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/08/awards-insider-first-look-american-fiction">First Look: American Fiction Challenges Hollywood’s “Poverty of Imagination” About Black People </a> (<em>Vanity Fair</em>)</p>
<p>“<a href="https://slate.com/culture/2016/09/how-amos-n-andy-paved-the-way-for-black-stars-on-tv.html">How Amos ’n’ Andy paved the way for Black Stars on TV</a>” (<em>Slate</em>)</p>
<p><a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/native-son-richard-wright?variant=41224345419810"><em>Native Son</em></a> by Richard Wright</p>
<h2>Listen and follow</h2>
<p>You can listen to or follow <em>Don’t Call Me Resilient</em> on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/dont-call-me-resilient/id1549798876">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/37tK4zmjWvq2Sh6jLIpzp7">Spotify</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_mJBLBznANz6ID9rBCUk7gv_ZRC4Og9-">YouTube</a> or wherever you listen to your favourite podcasts. </p>
<p><a href="mailto:DCMR@theconversation.com">We’d love to hear from you</a>, including any ideas for future episodes. Join The Conversation on <a href="https://twitter.com/ConversationCA">Twitter</a>, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/dontcallmeresilientpodcast/">Instagram</a> and <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@theconversation">TikTok</a> and use #DontCallMeResilient.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/i0MbLCpYJPA?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Trailer for ‘American Fiction’ (Orion)</span></figcaption>
</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/217988/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
In this episode, Vinita sits down with two experts to break down the many layers — and Black stereotypes — in the much anticipated new film, ‘American Fiction.’Vinita Srivastava, Host + Producer, Don't Call Me ResilientDannielle Piper, Associate Producer, Don't Call Me Resilient, The ConversationLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2172622023-12-03T19:15:54Z2023-12-03T19:15:54ZLydia Davis’ amusing, insightful stories address the estrangements of everyday life – and resist the hollowing of language<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562615/original/file-20231130-27-k1j3l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C14%2C2500%2C1646&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeffrey Czum/Pexels</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Lydia Davis is known for her minimalist fiction – “economy, precision and originality” is how the author Ali Smith once described her style. Her shortest story, Index Entry, amounts to just four words: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Christian, I’m not a. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Davis’ latest book <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Lydia-Davis-Our-Strangers-9781805301899/">Our Strangers</a> is a pageant of quirky observations, dialogue-driven vignettes and gnomic flashes of insight. Among the shortest stories is Overheard on the Train: Two Old Ladies Agree, which at seven words is even shorter than its title:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Everything gets worse.”</p>
<p>“Does anything get better?”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Stripped down to the barest narrative elements of character and event, Davis’ flash fiction requires the reader to actively engage in the production of meaning. We are forced to fill in the blanks to find some sense of resolution or satisfaction. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Our Strangers – Lydia Davis (Canongate)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>The stories in Our Strangers magnify minor conflicts during train and plane commutes, on phone calls with telemarketers, and in online forums. Often these banal scenarios provide subtle but convenient means of reflecting on bigger issues, such as the prospect of death, marriage breakdown, regrets about what we have said, and the effects of capitalism and technology on art, communication and politics. </p>
<p>Our Strangers is an assorted meditation on these and many other contradictions and absurdities of postmodern life. What unites Davis’ disparate stories are the startling moments of misrecognition, misremembrance and miscommunication that intrude on everyday life. </p>
<p>Sometimes, what results is funny. Some of the vignettes read like your standard Larry David scenario, with their combination of bad timing, presumed slights blown out of proportion, and a stubborn refusal to let little things go. </p>
<p>In one story, a woman on a train asks a young couple to mind her bag while she uses the restroom, but in an impulsive moment decides to enlist a more respectable-looking man to watch the couple. The drama escalates when he loudly refuses and the couple discover her treachery. </p>
<p>Many of Davis’ narrators feel alienated from and irritated by strangers going about their daily business. In Those Two Loud Women, Davis taps into the pervasive annoyance when others do not respect our expectations of decorum in public spaces:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Those two loud women – if they’re going to talk so constantly near me on the train, they could at least have an interesting conversation, one that I would like to overhear!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>At times, the futility approaches Beckett-like absurdity. Characters become almost as irrationally irked by conversations with members of their own families. In several stories entitled Marriage Moment of Annoyance, cracks in otherwise functional relationships appear in the most routine interactions: deciding what to have for dinner; asking who was on the phone. One such story of marital annoyance reads, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“[Mumble, mumble].”</p>
<p>“I can’t hear you.”</p>
<p>“Do you want to hear me?”</p>
<p>“No.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Another:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>She was trying to explain something to him.</p>
<p>What she said was confusing, contradictory, and a little incoherent.</p>
<p>“You’re like that <em>insurance document</em>!” he said to her.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Davis exalts these confused moments in which the people closest to us become strange and unknowable. At other times, her register shifts, in quick succession, from quirky humour to heartfelt reminiscences and sobering earnestness. Quietly reminiscent of <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/emily-dickinson">Emily Dickinson’s</a> lyric poetry, the final story When We Are Dead and Gone reflects on the frontier between life and death:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When we are dead and gone, </p>
<p>it might be comforting </p>
<p>to hear the quick knock on the door </p>
<p>and the voice from the far side saying, </p>
<p>“Hóusekéeping!” </p>
<p>though we won’t be able to open the door.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This and other pieces blur the presumed borders between prose and poetry, while reflecting on their part in a storied literary tradition. One story evokes the “condensery” of thoughts and images of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism.">Objectivist</a> poet <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/lorine-niedecker">Lorine Niedecker</a>. Struggling to recall someone she has seen on the train so she can write about him – “That obnoxious man!” – the narrator is suddenly struck by a similar phrase from an untitled Niedecker poem, which begins “The museum man…”. </p>
<p>This sets off a chain of questioning. Did her own phrase make her think of the poem? Or could it be that it “worked both ways: I began the story with those words because somewhere in my memory, though I didn’t know it, was the Niedecker poem”. </p>
<p>The narrator then rewrites her observations in the style of the Niedecker poem. A story that begins as one thing – an ordinary memory – becomes something more extraordinary: a reflection on craft, and the struggle between innovation and tradition. </p>
<p>Other authors alluded to in Our Strangers include Henry James, Franz Kafka, Ezra Pound (and his musician mistress Olga Rudge), Samuel Beckett and William Shakespeare. Several stories dwell on the six degrees of separation that hypothetically connect ordinary people to such extraordinary characters. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562588/original/file-20231130-19-l8er5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562588/original/file-20231130-19-l8er5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562588/original/file-20231130-19-l8er5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=816&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562588/original/file-20231130-19-l8er5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=816&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562588/original/file-20231130-19-l8er5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=816&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562588/original/file-20231130-19-l8er5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1026&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562588/original/file-20231130-19-l8er5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1026&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562588/original/file-20231130-19-l8er5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1026&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Samuel Beckett (1977).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Samuel_Beckett,_Pic,_1_(cropped).jpg">Roger Pic/Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These numbered stories, titled Claim to Fame, centre on marginal figures whose lives orbit well-known individuals, such as Marx’s brilliant daughter <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/11/eleanor-marx-life-review-spirited-biography-socialist-karl-marx-daughter">Eleanor “Tussy” Marx</a>: a socialist editor, journalist, and translator, who, like Davis, translated Flaubert’s Madame Bovary into English. </p>
<p>We are introduced not to the famous burlesque dancer <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gypsy-Rose-Lee">Gypsy Rose Lee</a>, but to her unknown sister, apparently remembered as an actress by her own community. These sideways perspectives shift our collective memories of these famous historical characters, who become somehow more and less familiar to us.</p>
<hr>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/in-the-candy-house-jennifer-egan-delivers-an-inventive-novel-for-a-digital-age-181151">In The Candy House, Jennifer Egan delivers an inventive novel for a digital age</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<h2>Optimism of the will</h2>
<p>Our Strangers also reflects Davis’ broader concerns about literature’s place in today’s political economy of words. This is not least because it opens with a statement on the importance of independent bookselling in an age of monopolistic practices. The book, the publisher advises, “is available for sale only at physical bookshops, Bookshop.org, and selected online independent retailers”. </p>
<p>Davis “hopes this decision will stand as a sign of her solidarity with independent booksellers and encourage further conversation about the vital importance of a diverse publishing ecosystem”. She feels “corporations should [not] have as much control over our lives as they do”. </p>
<p>She is not alone. She joins a growing group of authors who are seeking ways to resist the corporations that monitor, influence and commoditise what we read. Dave Eggers similarly refused to allow Amazon to sell the first run of his novel <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-every-9780241993644">The Every</a> (2021), about the perils of big-tech monopolies. Louise Erdrich’s <a href="https://www.hachette.com.au/louise-erdrich/the-sentence-shortlisted-for-the-women-s-prize-for-fiction-2022">The Sentence</a> (2021), another COVID-era publication about what it means to be restored by books, also opens with a plea for US readers to support independent bookstores, such as <a href="https://birchbarkbooks.com/pages/our-story">Birchbark Books</a>: a “locus” for “literate Indigenous people who have survived over half a millennium on this continent”. </p>
<p>The Italian Marxist theorist <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gramsci/">Antonio Gramsci</a> would conceptualise the root of these concerns as “cultural hegemony”: the ways in which those in power rule not only by controlling the economy, law and politics, but by governing the ideas of an age through the regulation of cultural production. This situation has only escalated since the beginning of the pandemic. While independent booksellers navigated the challenges of lockdowns, Amazon’s profits rose astronomically. That trend has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/26/amazon-quarter-profits-revenue-increase">not declined</a>.</p>
<p>Our Strangers is not a political manifesto. Davis does not write openly about issues that concern her. Rather, she chooses to “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/nov/27/lydia-davis-i-write-it-the-way-i-want-to-write-it">let the preoccupation come out indirectly</a>”. In the story Gramsci, for example, a man overhears his wife discussing the theorist with a friend on the phone, making a note of the credo Gramsci penned in 1929, while imprisoned by the <em>Fascisti</em>: “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” </p>
<p>Although the wife later explains who Gramsci is, the husband initially worries it is an expensive Italian designer she wishes to splurge on, because they “don’t often use the word <em>Marxist</em> in their home”. </p>
<p>The political enters Davis’s collection through such unexpected flashes. Insights are gained through dry humour and ironies produced by misunderstandings and things left unsaid. While Our Strangers depicts deeply personal scenarios, the stories come together as an incisive snapshot of our present moment. The rifts that have opened up in US society since 2016, and deepened during the pandemic, provide the context for these meditations on miscommunication and disconnection. </p>
<p>Davis’ narrators use writing to try to take personal stands against the “wastefulness” of corporations, blasting apart the hypocrisy of their rhetoric. Letter to the U.S. Postal Service Concerning a Poster takes the form of a complaint about a poster for Styrofoam peanuts “co-sponsored by an internet auction service”. The advertisement describes sending parcels wrapped in synthetic materials destined to become landfill as “a kind of love”. </p>
<p>The narrator argues that “people shipping items that have been purchased through an internet auction are strangers to people buying these items, and the transaction is purely commercial”. The letter indicts the government service for selling out to large corporations, and in the process encouraging “the sort of” social and environmental “wastefulness of which our society is already sufficiently guilty.” </p>
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<p>The complaints of Davis’ characters often come across as whimsically self-indulgent, naive and hypocritical. One writes a complaint letter to the eco-friendly corporation Who Gives a Crap, praising their charity contributions, while criticising their “attitude of brutal indifference that is all too actually pervasive in the times we are living in” by using language that might offend the neighbours when their boxes arrive on a customer’s doorstep. </p>
<p>Davis’ narrators can seem to be naive or lacking in self-awareness, but the stories are attempting to address the challenge of what Davis <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/nov/27/lydia-davis-i-write-it-the-way-i-want-to-write-it">in one interview</a> suggested was the most important issue facing the contemporary writer and us all: the climate crisis. What can the individual writer do to make a difference, to effect meaningful change, when corporations are not held accountable? </p>
<p>Many of Davis’ characters struggle to retain their political and moral values, while succumbing to the trappings of convenience and complacency. They also yearn for meaningful connections in a digitally networked social landscape that feels paradoxically disconnecting. </p>
<p>The collection’s title suggests the term estrangement, derived from the Latin <em>extraneare</em>: “to treat as a stranger”. Marx, namedropped in one story, saw alienation as the result of “<a href="https://www.marxists.org/subject/alienation/index.htm">estranged labor</a>”, which reduced people to commodities and social relations to mere exchanges, alienating us from our work, one another and ourselves. </p>
<p>This seems to be an implicit concern of stories such as A Woman Offering Magazines, in which the narrator reflects on her quarrel with a woman selling magazine subscriptions over the phone, “who in the end did not seem like a real woman, or even a real human being”. They are unable to regard each other as real humans because they are locked in an awkward transaction: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I gave her a small bit of my humanity and she annihilated it suddenly, in a lighting bolt […] not because she was angry […] I was no longer useful to her. In fact, we did not really quarrel. And, really, there was no “we”. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>What does capitalism do to our ability to connect with other people? It hollows out our words, Davis suggests. It reduces language to a mere transaction and people to strangers. All the while, corporations try to sell us the idea that their services will bring us the opposite: unlimited connection. </p>
<p>One takeaway message from Our Strangers seems to be that literature serves its purpose when it connects us with the community of humanity. At its best, literature provides an outlet for the pessimist to observe and exalt the ordinary, to read and know other people, to embrace them with all their oddities, flaws and predictabilities. </p>
<p>Above all, literature can strengthen the pessimist’s will and optimism, so that we can encounter our fellow strangers as more than their exchange values. This is not the kind of connection Amazon is designed to facilitate, nor the kind of community you sign up to on Facebook, a point Davis comically makes in Pardon the Intrusion, which is formatted like the forum messages posted on a local online marketplace. </p>
<p>The standout title story – among the longer, more allegorical inclusions – hones in on the interpersonal volatility that can arise when unfamiliar people live in proximity to one another. It suggests that, with time, those neighbours one might resent and regard as enemies can “become a sort of family”, bound together by a sense of familiarity and shared experiences that rise above presumed differences.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/217262/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tamlyn Avery does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>What does capitalism do to our ability to connect with other people? Lydia Davis’ stories suggest it hollows out our words – but that the exaltation of the ordinary can connect us.Tamlyn Avery, Lecturer in American Studies, The University of QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2144562023-11-29T19:17:29Z2023-11-29T19:17:29Z‘How is the Great Australian Novel going?’ Not too bad, thanks<p>“How is The Great Australian Novel going?” asks a character in Thea Astley’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well_Dressed_Explorer">The Well Dressed Explorer</a>, a Miles Franklin Literary Award winner in 1962. </p>
<p>When the weighty <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-history-of-the-australian-novel/C6792F09CEC145A73C054BC907384517">Cambridge History of THE AUSTRALIAN NOVEL</a> (as the title reads on its gold cover) landed on my doorstep I wondered if I would find out. Its editor, David Carter, first among equals as scholar-critic of Australian literature, has assembled 39 essays by leaders in the field, himself included, to chart the journey of the Australian version of this shape-shifting form. </p>
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<p><em>Review: The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel – edited by David Carter (Cambridge University Press)</em></p>
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<p>I have read a lot of Australian novels in my time, and written a few. I decided that if I sat down and read the history from cover to cover with open-minded curiosity, I might see what patterns emerged. </p>
<p>Probably no other reader would do this. The chapters on particular topics within a flexible chronology are designed for standalone use by teachers and students. This is a modular and recursive history, in which the past is revisited through a contemporary lens, with an eye on the future. A master narrative is not desired.</p>
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<p>The book has the hallmarks of Carter’s status as respected collaborator, mentor and assessor, and a literary critic grounded in the cultural and material contexts of book production. Most of the contributors are academics in literary studies. Their approaches reflect the trends of the academy in recent years. </p>
<p>Often they draw on research funded by the Australian Research Council, and the work shows those preferences too. For Australian literary studies, that means a turn to digital humanities, notably the collection and analysis of data to develop infrastructure of national significance, such as the AustLit and Trove databases. </p>
<p>It means a concern with “print culture” and the wider environment in which literary works are produced and received. It includes “the transnational turn” – how international perspectives complicate national frameworks – as well as a countermanding focus on locatedness, particularly in relation to climate change. And it means paying heed to First Nations voices in work that passes the “national interest” test. </p>
<p>This is a history shaped, or reshaped, by the glorious advent of literary fiction by Australian Indigenous authors, heralded by Kim Scott’s <a href="https://fremantlepress.com.au/books/true-country/">True Country</a> (1993) and flourishing now. As Iva Polak writes from Zagreb in her essay on “Indigenous Futurism”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) […] as we know, has changed Australia’s literary landscape. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>I was reading my way through this book on either side of the Voice referendum and I could sense the hope as the chapters moved towards the present, culminating in Eugenia Flynn’s remarkable essay “A (Sovereign) Body of Work: Australian Indigenous Literary Culture and the Literary Fiction Novel”. Flynn writes: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>an established canon of Australian Indigenous literary fiction can now be affirmed […] that speaks out to the rest of the majority non-Indigenous literary sector, disrupting Australian literary hegemony. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>As a current development, this poses a challenge to writing its history. The optimistic wave crashed in the world outside the book as I was reading – more like a tsunami – and settler-colonialism reasserted itself with a No. </p>
<p>Time can be a curveball.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/enraged-tragic-and-hopeful-alexis-wrights-new-novel-praiseworthy-explores-aboriginal-sovereignty-in-the-shadow-of-the-anthropocene-202827">Enraged, tragic and hopeful: Alexis Wright's new novel Praiseworthy explores Aboriginal sovereignty in the shadow of the anthropocene</a>
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<h2>An elusive literary beast</h2>
<p>The first third of the book takes us from the colonial period to mid-20th-century fiction. At the halfway mark, there is a good-humoured chapter by Paul Sharrad called “From Bunyip to Boom”, which summarises Australian Fiction from 1955 to 1975. Sharrad concludes that the Great Australian Novel (GAN) had by then “become an unstable narrative […] an elusive literary beast”. </p>
<p>Two-thirds of the way through we reach fiction beyond the Mabo decision of 1992, “when the assumptions non-Aboriginal people […] held about their rights to ownership seemed no longer to be watertight”. With Andrew McGahan’s <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Andrew-McGahan-White-Earth-9781741146127/">The White Earth</a> (2004), the discussion moves to work published in the 21st century. </p>
<p>The present is folded into a bending chronology that looks back in order to project to what is only just coming. In “Uncertain Futures: Climate Fiction in Australian Literature”, Jessica White adopts the term “future anterior”, a verb tense, as a mode for imagining near-future scenarios of catastrophe and post-catastrophe. </p>
<p>In other chapters, unexpected juxtapositions reveal persistence across time. Brigid Rooney’s “Unsettling Archive: Suburbs in Australian Fiction”, for example, places Fiona McGregor’s <a href="http://fionakmcgregor.com/words/indelible-ink">Indelible Ink</a> (2010) alongside Jessica Anderson’s <a href="https://sydneyuniversitypress.com.au/products/123851">The Impersonators</a> (1980) in an overlapping map of Sydney. Paul Giles cites Alexander Harris’s <a href="https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks19/1900401h.html">Settlers and Convicts</a> (1847) as an early case of settler unsettlement, while Lynda Ng takes up the same theme in her concluding chapter on J.M. Coetzee, Behrouz Boochani and “the disquiet generated historically” by both Aboriginal people and non-Anglo migrants “in settler Australian culture”. </p>
<p>A tense sense of “future anterior” runs through this collective history, as writers identify trends in the present that may or may not prefigure an alternative potential ahead. In his introduction, Carter refers to “the imagining into being an antipodean world we will also have to name ‘Australia’.” </p>
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<p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-classical-espionage-novel-with-shades-of-le-carre-the-idealist-explores-the-tumultuous-path-to-east-timorese-independence-213970">A classical espionage novel with shades of Le Carré, The Idealist explores the tumultuous path to East Timorese independence</a>
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<h2>Canon formation and critique</h2>
<p>Carter discusses canon formation and canon critique in his chapter on Australian literary historiography, noting “the ascendancy of academic critics above the men and women of letters dominant” before the 1950s. That situation pertains today. Few of the contributors are creative practitioners or teachers in the cognate discipline of creative writing. </p>
<p>All of the essays are interesting. Some are anxious. Some have flashes of warmth and appreciation, although “great”, as in Great Australian Novel, is pretty much an impossibility. Aesthetic judgements are largely resisted. </p>
<p>A formula emerges, familiar to anyone who has peer-assessed journal articles or research grant applications: fly a theoretical or methodological kite at the start, preferably with an international tail; explore a few carefully chosen case studies as the basis for an argument; conclude briskly with a future-directed uptick. The aim – in key words of approbation – is to “expand” or “recentre” the field. </p>
<p>Carter has argued that Australian literature is as much the creation of Australian readers as it is of Australian writers. Our literature is the totality of the literature we experience, including imports and outside influences, high and low. </p>
<p>It is a powerful idea that I first encountered in the essay “Publishing, Patronage and Cultural Politics”, which Carter contributed to <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-history-of-australian-literature/9E8EC78E77B68B1EE019884118DDF03E">The Cambridge History of Australian Literature</a> edited by the late Peter Pierce in 2009. It manifests here in an interest in all aspects of book production and literary circulation, including sales and accounts.</p>
<p>This history is many-faceted and holistic. In a chapter on publishing, Roger Osborne quotes Carter describing the Australian novel as a “commodity, industry, professional or aesthetic practice, ethical or pedagogical technology, leisure, entertainment, policy object and national space”. </p>
<p>This catch-all conception boils down to a grand definition: the novel in Australia is “a central cultural technology” that “insists on its storytelling power for a wide range of ethical, political and cultural issues, even where written within the bounds of a popular genre form”. </p>
<p>The description recognises the prestige of the novel, whether as bestseller or rarefied prizewinner, while implicitly accepting that everyone has a novel in them and anyone can write one. </p>
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<p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-red-witch-how-communist-writer-intellectual-and-activist-katharine-susannah-prichard-helped-shape-australia-182412">'The Red Witch': how communist writer, intellectual and activist Katharine Susannah Prichard helped shape Australia</a>
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<p>Katherine Bode contributes to a chapter on how the meaning of the Australian novel is changed by the information now available in the <a href="https://www.austlit.edu.au/">AustLit</a> database and <a href="https://readallaboutit.com.au/">To be continued: The Australian Newspaper Fiction Database</a>. Her research shows we need “to look beyond the book” to media such as the periodical press that generated novels in episodic, ephemeral form to understand the grassroots development of fiction in 19th-century Australia. </p>
<p>We need to look beyond the cities for literary communities too, as Emily Potter and Brigid Magner argue in their chapter on the “regional novel”: they recognise that “the region as it creatively emerges is a co-production of writer and reader”.</p>
<h2>Missing pieces of the puzzle</h2>
<p>Yet something like a canon lingers, to judge by the clusters of respectful mentions. After a handful of 19th-century novels, there are Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead, Patrick White, Randolph Stow, David Malouf and, soaring above them with nearly double the number of references in the index, the long-time-comer Alexis Wright. </p>
<p>There are omissions, including some of the best novels and novelists in my opinion. But that’s what happens. A puzzling virtual omission is Helen Garner, who has produced a string of successful novels in a career that has been a constant argument with fiction. Is she anathema to the academy? Or can no one find anything interesting to say about Australia’s great precursor of the autofiction that has swept the world? </p>
<p>At the other end of the time frame, Henry Lawson looks like another diminished figure, as Paul Eggert recalibrates the “nationalist myth of the 1890s”. There is not much place for short fiction in this history. Short story writers, from <a href="https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A27388">Mena Abdullah</a> to <a href="http://www.namleonline.com/">Nam Le</a>, don’t appear.</p>
<p>Among my highlights are Philip Mead on mining trilogies, including <a href="https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/8391700">The Fortunes of Richard Mahony</a> (1917-29); Nicole Moore’s radical recovery of postwar realism, including Ralph de Boissière’s <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/705373">Crown Jewel</a> (1956), set in Trinidad; the attention Meg Brayshaw pays to M. Barnard Eldershaw’s <a href="https://blogs.slv.vic.gov.au/our-stories/ask-a-librarian/tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow-a-lost-masterpiece/">Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow</a> (1947); Elizabeth McMahon on Randolph Stow’s <a href="https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/8266093">To the Islands</a> (1958); Brigid Rooney’s spotting of the “purple theme” of “the little sarsaparilla vine” that emerges “from the darker undertones” in Patrick White’s <a href="https://patrickwhitecatalogue.com/novels/tree/">The Tree of Man</a> (1955); and Jessica White on <a href="https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781760558604/">Dyschronia</a> (2018) by Jennifer Mills. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-case-for-the-fortunes-of-richard-mahony-by-henry-handel-richardson-24474">The case for The Fortunes of Richard Mahony by Henry Handel Richardson</a>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561244/original/file-20231123-15-oi5fh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561244/original/file-20231123-15-oi5fh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561244/original/file-20231123-15-oi5fh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=847&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561244/original/file-20231123-15-oi5fh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=847&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561244/original/file-20231123-15-oi5fh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=847&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561244/original/file-20231123-15-oi5fh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1064&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561244/original/file-20231123-15-oi5fh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1064&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561244/original/file-20231123-15-oi5fh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1064&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Henry Handel Richardson.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Henry_Handel_Richardson,_author,_ca._1920-1935,_photographers_Elliott_%26_Fry_(6963289973).jpg">State Library of New South Wales, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>Emmett Stinson does a compare-and-contrast of David Malouf and Gerald Murnane, finding that “Malouf’s success is in no small part linked to the way in which educational institutions have assigned his works over the years”. And in “The Novel Road to the Global South”, Sascha Morrell takes a scalpel to celebrated works by Peter Carey and Richard Flanagan to diagnose an Australian condition: “a peculiar, backward-looking nostalgia for Australia’s accustomed ‘underdog’ status”. </p>
<p>Elsewhere the issue of “inherent racism” is noted in passing in Australia’s bestselling invasion narrative for Young Adults, <a href="https://johnmarsden.com.au/">John Marsden’s Tomorrow series</a> (1993-99).</p>
<h2>Multilingual writing?</h2>
<p>Emily Yu Zong writes in “The Making of the Asian Australian Novel” that the recent translation into English of Wong Shee Ping’s <a href="https://sydneyuniversitypress.com.au/products/108833">The Poison of Polygamy</a> – a novel serialised in Melbourne’s Chinese Times from 1909 – “has unveiled the earliest Chinese Australian novel and a neglected multilingual lineage of Australian literature”. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561778/original/file-20231127-21-xpm7i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561778/original/file-20231127-21-xpm7i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=871&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561778/original/file-20231127-21-xpm7i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=871&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561778/original/file-20231127-21-xpm7i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=871&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561778/original/file-20231127-21-xpm7i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1095&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561778/original/file-20231127-21-xpm7i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1095&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561778/original/file-20231127-21-xpm7i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1095&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>The question of translation comes up in discussion of <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/legendary-tales-of-the-australian-aborigines-paperback-softback">Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines</a> (1930) by Ngarrindjeri man David Unaipon, in Jumana Bayeh’s consideration of diasporic writing in “The Arab Australian Novel”, and in relation to Behrouz Boochani’s hybrid work <a href="https://theconversation.com/book-review-behrouz-boochanis-unsparing-look-at-the-brutality-of-manus-island-101520">No Friend but the Mountains</a>, originally written in Farsi. </p>
<p>Otherwise fiction in languages other than English barely breaks the surface. That limitation occludes Iwaki Kei’s remarkable novel <a href="https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2019/winter/farewell-my-orange-iwaki-kei">Farewell, My Orange</a> (2013) about African migrants to country Australia, which has been translated from Japanese by Meredith McKinney. Multilingual writing seems to be one part of the “future anterior” that we are not quite ready for.</p>
<p>Literary history can take many forms. I missed the most basic of those: biography. While writers are identity-checked where possible (“Christos Tsiolkas, a second-generation gay Greek Australian man”), few contributors are interested in explaining a writer’s career path. </p>
<p>Top marks then to Beth Driscoll and Kim Wilkins, whose chapter on fantasy, crime and romance fiction provides empirical information on how such stars as Kerry Greenwood and Peter Temple did what they did, and names those, including agents, editors and publishers, who were part of the process. They shout out to the short story as crucial to the networks that underpin the success of Australian fantasy. Fiction is also a form of sociability.</p>
<p>What are novels for? One answer would be that they are for academics to find interest in and make researchable and teachable. They are a means to an important end: part of how “contemporary Australian culture is valued and assessed”, in the words of Imelda Whelehan and Claire McCarthy in a chapter on screen adaptations. David Carter and his team have done a great job of showing how it’s done.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214456/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nicholas Jose has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>A major new history of the Australian novel is shaped by the recent renaissance in Indigenous writing, but there are some notable omissions.Nicholas Jose, Professor of English and Creative Writing, University of AdelaideLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2119402023-11-27T13:48:37Z2023-11-27T13:48:37ZBooker prize: rediscovering the first female winner, the often-forgotten Bernice Rubens<p>One of the most captivating and enigmatic novelists of the 20th century, Bernice Rubens remains largely unknown despite her remarkable literary achievements. She was the <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/the-elected-member">second recipient</a> of the Booker prize in 1970 for her novel <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Elected_Member/V1vODwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0">The Elected Member</a> and its first female winner. </p>
<p>She remains the only Welsh winner in the history of the prize – a fact that perhaps speaks volumes for the way Welsh writing in the English language is perceived and recognised outside of Wales. </p>
<p>Rubens was born in the working class area of Adamsdown in Cardiff in 1923, to Polish and Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. She attended the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, Cardiff (now Cardiff University), where she received a BA in English in 1947. Having taught English and worked on documentary films early on in her career, she only started writing at the age of 30. </p>
<p>Rubens went on to publish more than 20 novels and one work of non-fiction before her death in 2004, but still <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/oct/14/guardianobituaries.books">referred</a> to her own writing as merely “better than most, not as good as some”. </p>
<p>This wry view underplays just how versatile her style and subject matter was, however. And while Rubens was well known and applauded during her lifetime, her work, like so many other Welsh women, is often unknown outside of Welsh university circles, some English literature degrees and more adventurous book clubs. </p>
<p>Some of this relates, perhaps, to the fact that she never really fitted into the Cardiff literary scene and was often overshadowed by some of her contemporaries, especially Welsh poet, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/dannie-abse">Dannie Abse</a>. </p>
<p>But as a working class Welsh-Jewish writer, her ability to unflinchingly explore the traumas and legacies of her own cultural heritage makes her writing especially memorable and haunting. </p>
<h2>Cultural background</h2>
<p>In The Elected Member, Rubens looks at how the façade of a respectable Jewish family crumbles when their beloved son plunges into the depths of drug addiction.</p>
<p>Her 1983 novel, <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Brothers/eM_fD3_TOuAC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=Brothers+Bernice+Rubens&dq=Brothers+Bernice+Rubens&printsec=frontcover">Brothers</a>, explores the experiences of four generations of a family as they face the Tsarist army in Russia in the 1830s, the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/20101343">1871 Odessa pogrom</a> in Ukraine, emigration (to both Wales and Germany) and concentration camps. </p>
<p>The novel exemplifies the worst of human behaviour in relation to marginalised and persecuted people. But it also underlines the need for human connection and, ultimately, hope. No one who reads Brothers could walk away from the experience unchanged. </p>
<p>From a Welsh perspective, her 1975 novel, <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/I_Sent_a_Letter_to_My_Love/tBP9DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=I+Sent+A+Letter+to+My+Love+Bernice+Rubens&printsec=frontcover">I Sent A Letter to My Love</a>, is one of Rubens’ most disturbing and strangely poignant works. Set in the “one-eyed” seaside town of Porthcawl, the novel follows the struggles of unmarried, middle-aged Amy and her disabled brother, Stan, and their close friend, Gwyneth, as they live out their tedious existences. </p>
<p>Much of the novel’s action revolves around the drama that ensues from Amy placing an advert in the personal column of the local newspaper under the pseudonym “Blodwyn Pugh”. Instead of receiving an overwhelming postbag of suitors, Amy receives a single reply –- from her brother, Stan.</p>
<p>Their letter writing becomes increasingly sexual, until Stan starts to develop feelings for Gwyneth. This willingness to confront the quasi-incestuous nature of the siblings’ relationship (albeit unknowing, at least on Stan’s side), is one of the reasons Rubens’ work is so discomfiting. It refuses to be easily labelled or contained in a genre or style. </p>
<p>The novel was later made into a French film, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082182/">Chère Inconnue</a>, in 1982, starring Simone Signoret and Jean Rochefort, which also plays on the novel’s disturbing central plot. </p>
<h2>Defying genre</h2>
<p>Overall, Rubens’ fictions are hybrid and sit between different cultural identities. They are impossible to neatly pigeonhole. Indeed, critics like <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/rubens-bernice-ruth">Hana Sambrook</a> have referred to the “maddening” refusal of her writing to fit neatly into a single category. </p>
<p>However, this refusal to fit is exactly why Rubens is so important. Why should she fit neatly into any category? Why do we put so much value on genre and style being so precisely categorised? </p>
<p>Readers today will find much of Rubens’ back catalogue available second hand. But only a single novel, I Sent A Letter to My Love, has been incorporated into the <a href="https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/library-of-wales">Library of Wales</a> series from publisher Parthian Books, which aims to republish significant works of classic Welsh literature in English.</p>
<p>Rubens sits alongside a small handful of other women writers in the collection, including <a href="https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/library-of-wales/products/in-and-out-of-the-goldfish">Rachel Trezise</a>, <a href="https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/library-of-wales/products/rhapsody">Dorothy Edwards</a>, <a href="https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/library-of-wales/products/the-battle-to-the-weak">Hilda Vaughan</a> and <a href="https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/library-of-wales/products/turf-or-stone">Margiad Evans</a>. </p>
<p>Perhaps the way we immortalise our own cultural history in Wales is part of the reason why working-class women writers such as Rubens are yet to reach a wider audience, beyond the popularity of their day. </p>
<p>However, even more importantly in my view, it lies with the failure of prominent prizes to fully recognise Welsh women’s contribution to literary history. Sadly, it’s a failure that seems unlikely to be overturned any time soon.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211940/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Deininger is a member of the Green Party. </span></em></p>Bernice Rubens won the 1970 Booker prize for her novel, The Elected Member, and is the only Welsh person to have ever won the prize.Michelle Deininger, Senior Co-ordinating Lecturer in Humanities, Cardiff UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2116682023-11-19T18:59:16Z2023-11-19T18:59:16ZWhy are we obsessed with renovation? Amanda Lohrey explores the promise and limits of transforming our environment<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557614/original/file-20231105-17-5b0zvr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=35%2C0%2C5955%2C3988&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dalal Nizam/Unsplash</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The cover of <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/the-conversion">The Conversion</a> is an image of two yellow-tailed black cockatoos ascending against a pale sky, their horizontal outstretched wings crossed by the vertical lines that run from their beaks to their tail feathers.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557196/original/file-20231102-23-6ouuj5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557196/original/file-20231102-23-6ouuj5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557196/original/file-20231102-23-6ouuj5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557196/original/file-20231102-23-6ouuj5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557196/original/file-20231102-23-6ouuj5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557196/original/file-20231102-23-6ouuj5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557196/original/file-20231102-23-6ouuj5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557196/original/file-20231102-23-6ouuj5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Black cockatoos turn up on page three of the novel. Nick Whitelaw and Zoe North are walking the grounds of a deconsecrated church. Nick is keen to buy the church; his wife, Zoe, is “less upbeat”. She is not convinced a church can be converted into a home. Zoe hears the screech of cockatoos and turns to see “their black bodies outlined against the blue of the sky”. </p>
<p>For Nick, the black cockatoos are a good omen, but he overlooks what might be a bad omen: a snake that lies “coiled and sleeping on the worn sandstone steps” of the church. His buoyant tendency to emphasise good signs over bad and his optimistic belief in remaking things will have negative consequences. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: The Conversion – Amanda Lohrey (Text Publishing)</em></p>
<hr>
<h2>Novel ideas</h2>
<p>Literary critic <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/lohrey-paperback-softback">Julieanne Lamond</a> has observed that Lohrey “takes up a common way of doing, saying or thinking about something and baldly asks: why?” </p>
<p>The question Lohrey’s ninth novel asks is: why do we constantly seek to renew our environment? What are the possibilities and limits of such attempted transformations? </p>
<p>The Conversion is set in a fictional town named Crannock. Like the real town of Cessnock in the Hunter Valley, Crannock is an old coal-mining town. The grazing land for which it was also known has been subdivided and converted into vineyards.</p>
<p>The novel’s first section, The Windows, switches between past and present. The flashbacks depict events leading up to Nick’s sudden death. We learn that, in addition to his fascination with converting buildings, he was a therapist with some unorthodox methods.</p>
<p>Events in the present involve the widowed Zoe’s decision to buy the church. She had persuaded Nick to wait a year before committing to the purchase. Returning to Crannock alone after his death, she steps inside the church and admires how the stained glass windows made “soft mosaic patterns of colour on the wooden floor”. The old pulpit, the stone altar, the nave and a large wooden screen (called a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reredos">reredos</a>) are intimidating, but the “vertical space” and light impress her. </p>
<p>“How would you fill it?” she wonders before signing the contract and moving into the church. </p>
<p>Nick’s interest in the church was about neither money nor status, but ideas of conversion. He had expressed his belief to Zoe and their friend Neville Glass that “we become attached to certain places and go on inhabiting them mentally long after we leave them behind physically”. </p>
<p>But Nick’s firmly held beliefs contain contradictions. He told Zoe and Neville that it’s “what you make of the thing” that matters. Yet, in his life he wilfully pursued paths that brought difficulty and personal disaster. His premature death results from circumstances that are, at least in part, of his own making. </p>
<p>Zoe’s decision to take on the church-conversion project is paradoxical. She is haunted by the ghosts of Nick and a troubled young patient who had come into their lives in the year before he died. She wants to exorcise these ghosts, but she encounters other ghosts in the process. </p>
<p>What she fears most is “being stuck with a jaded feeling of the past, a lingering effect of grandiosity combined with an air of melancholy abandonment”.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/intellectual-fearlessness-politics-and-the-spiritual-impulse-the-remarkable-career-of-amanda-lohrey-187354">Intellectual fearlessness, politics and the spiritual impulse: the remarkable career of Amanda Lohrey</a>
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<h2>Orders of conversion</h2>
<p>In her book <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Renovation-Nation-Our-obsession-home/dp/0868408786">Renovation Nation</a>, Fiona Allon describes how the Australian dream of home ownership has become an obsessive nightmare involving market gaming, prestige homes and profit maximisation. Such renovation practices are noted when Zoe’s friend Helen mentions the gutting of a “worker’s cottage” in order to install a “plunge pool”.</p>
<p>This real-estate obsession gives an ironic cast to Zoe’s renovation, given that her church is named after St Martin, a Roman soldier who converted to Christianity, and was sainted for cutting his cloak in half and sharing it with a stranger in need. </p>
<p>The national fetish for conversion even extends to the former reverend of Zoe’s church, who now lives in a “concrete box with floor-to-ceiling glass walls” that overlook fields planted with garlic. His house is “so different from the church and its lancet windows with their pointed arch”, thinks Zoe.</p>
<p>Ideas of transformation are extended in the second part of the novel, which considers the rewards and costs of religious, psychological, artistic and architectural conversions. Each of the novel’s characters becomes involved in one conversion or another. </p>
<p>Zoe employs Mick Hanlon and his son Travis to remove the font (a receptacle used for baptism ceremonies) from the church using their Genie lift. While Mick would like his son to be involved in the earth-moving business he dreams of starting, Travis has other ideas. His hidden talents surface when he performs the lead part in August Strindberg’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dream_Play">A Dream Play</a>, directed by schoolteacher Melanie and staged within the walls of the church. Teacher and students temporarily transform the church interior into a stage and auditorium. </p>
<p>The transformative destruction brought by early settlers is touched upon when Zoe reflects on whether she and others “were intruders, always bending something out of its natural shape”. The catastrophic changes brought by colonisation are also alluded to by Zoe’s new neighbour Berenice Hanlon, who mentions that certain ancestors of Crannock residents had been complicit in the massacre of Indigenous people. </p>
<p>Conversion is associated in the novel with attempts to silence the past. Neville expresses this idea when he likens conversion to “cancel culture”. It is a way of cancelling the “old naysayers, the sermonisers, the ones who told you not to have sex before marriage”. </p>
<p>But Zoe remains uncertain as to how she can put her “stamp” on the church. It is not as if “she could sweep in and cancel the history of a building with a few knick-knacks”. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557624/original/file-20231106-17-g25r82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557624/original/file-20231106-17-g25r82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557624/original/file-20231106-17-g25r82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=592&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557624/original/file-20231106-17-g25r82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=592&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557624/original/file-20231106-17-g25r82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=592&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557624/original/file-20231106-17-g25r82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=744&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557624/original/file-20231106-17-g25r82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=744&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557624/original/file-20231106-17-g25r82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=744&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Charity of Saint Martin – Louis Anselme Longa.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Louis_Anselme_Longa,_La_charit%C3%A9_de_saint_Martin.jpg">Abmg, via Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/big-picture-thinking-in-the-bell-of-the-world-gregory-day-listens-to-the-music-of-common-things-197616">Big-picture thinking: in The Bell of the World, Gregory Day listens to the music of common things</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Vertical light and resistance to conversion</h2>
<p>Zoe opposes the effects created by the vertical lines of the church to those created by the horizontal design of the Reverend’s house. She also harks back to talks with Nick about the architectural “unity” resulting from the “harmony” of vertical and horizontal lines. </p>
<p>The meaning of these lines strikes her after the church’s font is removed:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[…] she sees that the unity of the whole has been tilted out of balance. The church had been a body, and now it had lost a limb. The buyer of a church must impose their own dream, which means they can only live in it if all trace of its original purpose is camouflaged or destroyed: As much as possible, vertical space (heaven) must be rendered horizontal (earth). </p>
</blockquote>
<p>These evocative lines resonate in passages where Zoe observes light filtering to the floor via the high stained-glass windows above. On the one hand, the novel associates this verticality with the authority of priests who “communicated the sacred language” from the pulpit. On the other hand, it reminds us that such priests stood in front of windows whose stained glass stories communicated to the “illiterate”.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558263/original/file-20231108-21-2s137x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558263/original/file-20231108-21-2s137x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558263/original/file-20231108-21-2s137x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558263/original/file-20231108-21-2s137x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558263/original/file-20231108-21-2s137x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558263/original/file-20231108-21-2s137x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558263/original/file-20231108-21-2s137x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558263/original/file-20231108-21-2s137x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">August Strindberg (1886).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Library of Sweden, via Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>I find intriguing this idea that stained glass windows once spoke directly to illiterate church-goers, and I admire very much the novel’s ambitious reach, though sometimes I wondered whether certain characters are vehicles for these ideas. Such non-realistic treatment may be Lohrey’s nod to Strindberg and his deliberate creation of “symbolic” characters for his Dream Play. </p>
<p>Plausibility of plot and character development are occasionally sacrificed in the service of Lohrey’s pursuit of the question of renewal from different angles. But this weakness is also a strength, as The Conversion delves into what it means to change one thing into another thing, exploring ideas of conversion that range from everyday renovation to the allure of religious cults and the meaning of our ever-updating culture. </p>
<p>Mentions of “cancel culture” and Zoe’s trawling of Pinterest remind readers of the internet, raising questions about the fate of the contemporary novel within a technological environment. Do novels continue to deliver truths from within this restless space? Or has the novel – like the colonial Victorian church – been changed? </p>
<p>St Martin’s church may have lost its “mystique” once its font, pulpit, nave and sacristy are removed, but it remains recognisable as a church. The Conversion may not deliver the kinds of characters we meet in a Victorian novel, yet it poses questions that matter to how we read, write and live now.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211668/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Monique Rooney does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Amanda Lohrey’s new novel, The Conversion, poses questions that matter to how we read, write and live now – through a couple’s renovation of a church into a home.Monique Rooney, Senior lecturer in literature, film and new media, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2144592023-11-14T19:06:44Z2023-11-14T19:06:44ZNuclear bombs, artificial intelligence and the madness of reason – in The Maniac, Benjamin Labatut examines the troubling dawn of the digital age<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559028/original/file-20231113-19-y77vl9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=6%2C6%2C4109%2C2733&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">GM Pictures/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>A little over 100 years ago, the great German sociologist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber">Max Weber</a> warned that the growth of modern science would result in the “<a href="https://hscif.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Max-Weber-Science-as-a-Vocation.pdf">disenchantment</a>” of the world. </p>
<p>He meant a world without mystery, without the unknown or the transcendent, and therefore without meaning – a world governed by the grim law of what he called “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_and_value_rationality">instrumental rationality</a>”, where everything is a means to an end and nothing an end in itself. </p>
<p>Weber feared that science and technology might reduce human existence to cold calculation and utilitarian practicality, and destroy any pursuits that do not have immediate, measurable, pragmatic effects.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: The Maniac – Banjamin Labatut (Pushkin Press)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Benjamin Labatut’s <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Benjamin-Labatut-MANIAC-9781805330677/">The Maniac</a> is a barely fictionalised account of scientific developments in the century since Weber issued his warning. And, in a strange way, it is about how wrong Weber proved to be.</p>
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<p>The science that has spawned everything from nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence to Silicon Valley and neoliberal economics is anything but practical and mundane. It takes shape on a level of mathematical abstraction and philosophical speculation that only a tiny handful of humans can claim to understand. It operates by breaking all rules of common sense and everything that might seem useful in the workaday world, thriving on its inconsistencies and irrationalities. </p>
<p>In fact, and as Labatut’s title hints, it exists on the thin boundary between the rational and the irrational – that place where thinking tips over into madness, where the world does not lose all meaning, as Weber imagined, but becomes replete with infinite meanings, teeming with messages that only a paranoid mind could ever discern.</p>
<p>If science shuts the gates of heaven, we might say, it throws open the gates of hell.</p>
<h2>The limits of logic</h2>
<p>Labatut’s novel invites us to consider a number of figures in the history of 20th-century science whose personal lives mirrored the madness of the truths they were uncovering.</p>
<p>The Austrian physicist <a href="https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/paul-ehrenfest-forgotten-physicist/">Paul Ehrenfest</a> could not help but compare the irrationality of the new science with the irrationality of the emerging Nazi regime. His descent into insanity led him, in 1933, to murder his disabled son before killing himself.</p>
<p>In 1931, the mathematician and logician <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_G%C3%B6del">Kurt Gödel</a> developed incompleteness theorems that installed an inconsistency at the foundation of all mathematics. His debilitating psychosis is sometimes said to be not the effect but the cause of his insight.</p>
<p>The self-taught engineer and computer scientist <a href="https://discover.lanl.gov/news/0323-von-neumanns-letters/">Klára Dan</a> was behind some of the most important technological advances of the 20th century. In 1963, at the age of 52, she drove from her home in La Jolla, California, to the beach, where she walked into the surf and drowned.</p>
<p>But for Labatut, by far the most compelling of these figures (so much so that most of The Maniac consists of an elaborate character sketch of him) is the Hungarian mathematical genius Neumann János Lajos, or, as he came to be called after moving to the United States, <a href="https://www.ias.edu/von-neumann">John von Neumann</a>.</p>
<p>Labatut introduces von Neumann as “the smartest human being of the twentieth century”. And his evidence for this assertion follows not far behind. </p>
<p>Von Neumann <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MANIAC_I">invented the modern computer</a>, provided the mathematical foundations for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics">quantum mechanics</a>, and completed <a href="https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/profile/john-von-neumann/#:%7E:text=Von%20Neumann's%20principal%20contribution%20to,targets%20for%20the%20atomic%20bomb.">equations required for the atomic bomb</a>. </p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">John von Neumann (1903-57).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://about.lanl.gov/lanl-resources/">Los Alamos National Library, via Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>He was also the father of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory">Game Theory</a>, which is key to neoliberal economics, but which he initially used to justify the Cold War strategy of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction">Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD</a>. This proposed that the only way to prevent the annihilation of all human existence was to arm two superpowers with the capacity to do so many times over.</p>
<p>Von Neumann both predicted and helped advance the arrival of the digital age. He foresaw self-reproducing machines, artificial intelligence, and what he was the first to call the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity">Singularity</a> – that mythical moment when technology finally absorbs and subordinates humanity.</p>
<p>It is hard to imagine that an individual human mind could be behind so much of the world in which we all now live. As Labatut tells the story, almost everyone who met von Neumann immediately thought of him as a different species, a higher stage of human evolution, an alien being, even a god.</p>
<p>“There are two kinds of people in this world,” Labatut has von Neumann’s collaborator <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Wigner">Eugene Wigner</a> say early on in the novel: “Jansci von Neumann and the rest of us.”</p>
<p>“Most mathematicians prove what they can,” Wigner declares a little later. “Von Neumann proves what he wants.”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/kurt-godel-from-loopholes-and-dictators-to-the-incompleteness-theorems-72376">Kurt Gödel: from loopholes and dictators to the incompleteness theorems</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>An Inhuman Mind</h2>
<p>As if to reinforce this image of von Neumann as a god, Labatut never writes from von Neumann’s perspective or pretends to have access to the inner workings of his mind. Instead, he structures his novel as a series of almost breathless first-person accounts of those who knew or encountered him, like the testimony of witnesses to a miracle – or a catastrophe.</p>
<p>Thus, along with Wigner, we hear from von Neumann’s mother Margit Kann von Neumann, his brother Nicholas Augustus von Neumann, his first wife Mariette Kövesi, his early teacher <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_P%C3%B3lya">George Pólya</a>, the mathematician and engineer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_von_K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n">Theodore von Kármán</a>, the US physicist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman">Richard Feynman</a>, the economist <a href="https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Morgenstern">Oskar Morgenstern</a>, and many more.</p>
<p>They all seem to have the same basic impression of the man: a bafflingly great genius, whose singular intellectual powers appeared to place him beyond good and evil, and led him to look down on mere human morality with callous indifference.</p>
<p>That explains the glee with which von Neumann threw himself into the military applications of his ideas, and the shamelessness with which he became, as Labatut puts it, “a mind for hire”, willing to “charge exorbitant fees to sit with people from IBM, RCA, the CIA, or the RAND Corporation, sometimes for no longer than a couple of minutes”. </p>
<p>If von Neumann was a god, then, he was by no means a benevolent Christian one. He was more like the Greek gods of Mount Olympus or the angry Yahweh of the Old Testament. Or perhaps he was simply a demon – wilful, arbitrary and capable of horrific acts of destruction.</p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Richard Feynman.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Richard_Feynman_1959.png">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Mechanical gods</h2>
<p>On the other hand, and unlike most gods, von Neumann was not immortal. Like so many of those around him, he died tragically young, a victim of a virulent cancer that infiltrated his otherwise insuperable brain shortly after his 53rd birthday.</p>
<p>But towards the end of The Maniac, Labatut seems to suggest that the algorithms that now dominate so much of our lives could be seen as von Neumann’s offspring. They are mechanical gods not subject to the limits of flesh and blood.</p>
<p>The novel thus has a kind of second act, in which Labatut leaves von Neumann behind and considers instead the history of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)">the ancient game Go</a>, and the moment when machines became capable of beating the best human players in the world, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo_versus_Lee_Sedol">Lee Sedol</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo_versus_Ke_Jie">Ke Jie</a>.</p>
<p>The idea here is that playing games is the most discretely human activity we can imagine, for it involves not simply the application of rules or the calculation of probabilities, but a kind of creativity and prevarication, cunning and intimidation that a machine should not be able to replicate.</p>
<p>That machines now consistently beat humans at the most complex games we can dream up appears to Labatut as a fundamental tipping point. We can only tremble before these new gods the same way our ancestors did before the old ones – in fear and awe.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/economic-theories-that-have-changed-us-game-theory-43633">Economic theories that have changed us: game theory</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The gift of fiction</h2>
<p>Such apocalyptic fantasies notwithstanding, I would like to suggest that something else is going on here as well, just beneath the surface.</p>
<p>The Maniac is deceptively presented as a collection of facts and an account of events that really happened. But that is not at all what it is. It is a novel: the invention of another great mind, namely that of Labatut. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555209/original/file-20231023-15-i9mwwx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555209/original/file-20231023-15-i9mwwx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555209/original/file-20231023-15-i9mwwx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1083&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555209/original/file-20231023-15-i9mwwx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1083&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555209/original/file-20231023-15-i9mwwx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1083&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555209/original/file-20231023-15-i9mwwx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1361&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555209/original/file-20231023-15-i9mwwx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1361&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555209/original/file-20231023-15-i9mwwx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1361&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Benjamin Labatut.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Julieta-Labatut_COLOR.jpg">AloysusAcker, via Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>It places the facts of human experience within a fictional container. Profound scientific and technological discoveries are encompassed by something more profound: a story.</p>
<p>In that sense, the fictional form of The Maniac belies its apocalyptic content. Machines might be able to dominate the real world, but as Labatut’s novel attests, humans can invent the fiction that dominates that domination.</p>
<p>To put the same point differently, I have been writing here as if The Maniac tells us something about what the author takes to be true. But precisely because it is a novel and not a series of articles or a doctoral dissertation, there is no reason to make that assumption. What Labatut really believes is something I cannot know. The same will never be true of <a href="https://theconversation.com/irony-machine-why-are-ai-researchers-teaching-computers-to-recognise-irony-185904">the productions of a computer or an algorithm</a>.</p>
<p>“You insist that there is something that a machine cannot do,” von Neumann once declared, with characteristic arrogance. “If you tell me precisely what it is that a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that.”</p>
<p>“Well,” we might have retorted, “what it cannot do is anything without being told what to do.” What it cannot do is what Labatut’s novel, indeed all novels, all fictions, all stories do – tell us things that can never be verified, create truths that have no stable foundation, or weave entire worlds out of nothing at all.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214459/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Charles Barbour does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In The Manic, Benjamin Labatut tells the story of the ‘smartest man of the 20th century’.Charles Barbour, Associate Professor, Philosophy, Western Sydney UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.