A superb collection of stories that are quiet, assured, lyrical, aching.
A gathering of the short fiction—some of it not so short—of Australia’s poet of loneliness.
In any given story by Malouf (Dream Stuff, 2000, etc.), someone is talking past someone else; think Cheever, or possibly Kafka, in the outback, the hills echoing not with screams but silences—to say nothing of a lot of crocodile thrashing, bird squawking, joey thumping and the splashing of “the big, rain-swollen streams that begin in a thousand threadlike runnels and falls in the rainforests of the Great Divide.” Often his protagonists are children, as in the boy of “At Schindler’s,” who must accept the fact that his father is missing in action in World War II, or the kid of “The Valley of Lagoons,” forced to intercede between a would-be pal and a sister who can think of nothing but escaping the backcountry and getting to some congenial city. Malouf’s adults are scarcely more able to comprehend the complexities of the world, but they try. In “War Baby,” a valuable contribution to Australia’s surprisingly small literature on the Vietnam War—in which many thousands of Australians fought—the central character is transformed from unsure boy to combat-grizzled veteran. Even though he is still very young, he is now experienced enough to understand the anonymity of death and “how small the pressures might be that determine the sum of what is and what we feel, the fugitive deflections and instinctive blind gestures that might be the motor of change.” Change drives many of these fictions: changes of venue as lovers drift apart, changes as the once-remote scrubland spits up “a new shopping mall, with a skateboard ramp for young daredevils, two floodlit courts for night tennis and, on the river side, a Heritage Walk laid out with native hybrids”—minus, of course, aborigines, cowboys, loggers and other characters from Australia’s history.
A superb collection of stories that are quiet, assured, lyrical, aching.Pub Date: July 24, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-42497-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.
A novelist tries to adapt to her ever changing reality as her world slowly disappears.
Renowned Japanese author Ogawa (Revenge, 2013, etc.) opens her latest novel with what at first sounds like a sinister fairy tale told by a nameless mother to a nameless daughter: “Long ago, before you were born, there were many more things here…transparent things, fragrant things…fluttery ones, bright ones….It’s a shame that the people who live here haven’t been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that’s just the way it is on this island.” But rather than a twisted bedtime story, this depiction captures the realities of life on the narrator's unnamed island. The small population awakens some mornings with all knowledge of objects as mundane as stamps, valuable as emeralds, omnipresent as birds, or delightful as roses missing from their minds. They then proceed to discard all physical traces of the idea that has disappeared—often burning the lifeless ones and releasing the natural ones to the elements. The authoritarian Memory Police oversee this process of loss and elimination. Viewing “anything that fails to vanish when they say it should [as] inconceivable,” they drop into homes for inspections, seizing objects and rounding up anyone who refuses—or is simply unable—to follow the rules. Although, at the outset, the plot feels quite Orwellian, Ogawa employs a quiet, poetic prose to capture the diverse (and often unexpected) emotions of the people left behind rather than of those tormented and imprisoned by brutal authorities. Small acts of rebellion—as modest as a birthday party—do not come out of a commitment to a greater cause but instead originate from her characters’ kinship with one another. Technical details about the disappearances remain intentionally vague. The author instead stays close to her protagonist’s emotions and the disorientation she and her neighbors struggle with each day. Passages from the narrator’s developing novel also offer fascinating glimpses into the way the changing world affects her unconscious mind.
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-87060-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Certain to create interest, comment, and consideration.
The Book-of-the-Month Club dual selection, with John Gunther's Behind the Curtain (1949), for July, this projects life under perfected state controls.
It presages with no uncertainty the horrors and sterility, the policing of every thought, action and word, the extinction of truth and history, the condensation of speech and writing, the utter subjection of every member of the Party. The story concerns itself with Winston, a worker in the Records Department, who is tormented by tenuous memories, who is unable to identify himself wholly with Big Brother and The Party. It follows his love for Julia, who also outwardly conforms, inwardly rebels, his hopefulness in joining the Brotherhood, a secret organization reported to be sabotaging The Party, his faith in O'Brien, as a fellow disbeliever, his trust in the proles (the cockney element not under the organization) as the basis for an overall uprising. But The Party is omniscient, and it is O'Brien who puts him through the torture to cleanse him of all traitorous opinions, a terrible, terrifying torture whose climax, keyed to Winston's most secret nightmare, forces him to betray even Julia. He emerges, broken, beaten, a drivelling member of The Party. Composed, logically derived, this grim forecasting blueprints the means and methods of mass control, the techniques of maintaining power, the fundamentals of political duplicity, and offers as arousing a picture as the author's previous Animal Farm.
Certain to create interest, comment, and consideration.Pub Date: June 13, 1949
ISBN: 0452284236
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1949
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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