AXIOMATIC

A book of extended annotations of familiar axioms that challenges readers to connect a lot of dots.

Born and raised in Ukraine when it was then part of the Soviet Union, Tumarkin (Otherland: A Journey With My Daughter, 2010, etc.) immigrated to Australia as a teenager and has continued to live and work there as a cultural historian and writer. She has maintained that the five parts of her latest book—the winner of the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Best Writing Award—should not be considered as separate pieces. However, most of them could stand on their own as well-reported literary journalism, with the author very present in her own work in a manner occasionally reminiscent of Joan Didion. Tumarkin explores the fragility of adolescence, the generational perpetuation of poverty and addiction, the manner in which suicide defies easy explication or rationalization, and, throughout, “the nature of human nature” and the failures of Australia’s culture and legal system to accommodate the vagaries and nuances of human behavior. The most powerful—and perhaps most straightforward—section, titled, “Those who forget the past are condemned to re—,” concerns a grandmother imprisoned for hiding her grandson from his estranged mother, who has regained custody after her husband’s death and will subject her children to the mistreatment of her thuggish soon-to-be husband. “I came to this country thinking it was a civilised society,” said the grandmother,” a Holocaust survivor who had expected so much better of Australia. “How wrong I was. It’s a wild, wild West. A modern country filled with barbarians.” While this passage isn’t the only indictment of the author’s adopted country, her work is more of an illumination of the human condition. Tumarkin asks deep, difficult questions and refuses to settle for easy answers.

Provocative reading for those willing to put in the effort.