David Malouf: AN IMAGINARY LIFE (1978)
It is often said that poets write the best prose, but few have done the switch as successfully as David Malouf. An Imaginary Life was Malouf's second novel, and it is less identifiably "Australian" (in setting, at least) than Johnno. In it Malouf imagines the life of the Roman poet Ovid (43 B.C.-18 A D.), author of the Metamorphoses. Little is known about Ovid, except that the allegedly offensive, avant-garde nature of his writings led Emperor Augustus to banish him from Rome in 8 A.D. Although he was allowed to retain his Roman citizenship, Ovid spent the rest of his life in the semi-barbarian village of Tomis near the Black Sea.
The scarce historical information about Ovid allows free reign to Malouf's imagination, who uses the poet's situation as a metaphor for the predicament of civilization. Tomis is recreated as a mystical, timeless realm, frozen over for most of the year and bound by seemingly infinite sea, sky and wilderness. The central event of the narrative is Ovid's encounter with a savage boy who was raised by wolves. The Child becomes a reflection of himself, a lonely, unwanted and speechless outcast. Malouf anchors the dynamics of the novel on this elegant dialectic: As Ovid tries to educate the Child--to inculcate in him manners and speech--it is he, Ovid, who undertakes the real education. The Child reveals to the poet a new order of being beyond speech and civilization. Their relationship becomes a journey of self-knowledge.
The novel is an ambitious, yet humble, poetic flight. It grapples with gigantic themes: The nature of reason, the relationship between language and the world. But its greatest strength is the way it treats these themes so effortlessly, economically and in such a deceivingly simple, beautiful language
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Mudrooroo (Colin Johnson): WILD CAT FALLING(1965)
As a half-caste brought up in mainstream Australian culture, Colin Johnson in his writing turned to explore his Aboriginal roots, and later changed his name to Mudrooroo. Wild Cat was the first published novel by an Aboriginal writer, and begins Mudrooroo's efforts to establish a dialogue between Aboriginal and European culture, later brought to full fantastic expression in the recent Master of the Dreaming series. As such, the novel prompted many Aboriginal writers to approach "white" narrative forms with significantly less suspicion.
In style and structure Wild Cat resembles Albert Camus' The Outsider, an European classic that Mudrooroo acknowledged as a major influence. Immersed in defeatism and alienation, the nameless, half-caste narrator turns to petty crime and a life in and out of prison. He then murders someone as an absurd gesture, a last and self-destructive act of undoing. At the climax of the narrative, a tribal elder shows Mudrooroo's narrator a way out, a place where he can belong, in tradition and the ancient ways of his people. But this glimpse of salvation comes too late.
A honest, posed and hauntingly written tale of doomed redemption, Wild Cat still also holds as a stark portrait of Aboriginal marginalisation in country Australia. Borrowing white forms he may be, yet Mudrooroo remains true to the indigenous storytelling tradition as a custodian of a larger story, the chronicler of the plight of a people.
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Peter Carey: THE UNUSUAL LIFE OF TRISTAN SMITH (1994)
Whoever declared the Death of the Novel was obviously not counting on Peter Carey. Carey's fiction excels in the use of all the elements usually associated with the traditional narrative. It contains plausible and colorful characters, great dialogue, intricate and well-developed plots, and an accomplished literary style. Yet Carey brings to these a modern awareness, and he is largely responsible for bringing the novel up to date, confirming its status as a relevant tool to meditate on the contemporary world.
As the title indicates, The Unusual Life... is about Tristan Smith, the grotesquely deformed child of a theatre performer. Tristan grows among actors in the theatre owned by his mother, but knows that his physical deformities and his speech impediment will never allow him to be on the stage. The action takes place in the imaginary country of Effica, and large part of the plot revolves around the cultural tensions between Effica and Voorstand, a powerful and wealthy superpower who likes to influence the political destinies of smaller nations. At the centre of Voorstand lies the Sirkus, a cultural institution that is used (Disney-style) as a weapon of imperialism. After Tristan's mother gets involved in politics and is murdered by agents of Voorstand, it becomes Tristan's tragic and ironic fate to travel to the much-hated country and assume the identity of Bruder Mouse, one of the pivotal icons of the Sirkus and of Voorstand's culture.
Carey treats his characters with cruelty and affection, and weaves the micro-cosmoses of their lives into the vast and mad currents of history.
The masterful plot and Carey's verbal intensity make this an engrossing and unforgettable reading experience. The Unusual Life... is simply the most accomplished science fiction novel ever written by an Australian.
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Charles Bukowski: POST OFFICE (1972)
A few years before his death, suffering from liver damage and rescued once more from the brink of oblivion, the doctors told Charles Bukowski that he couldn't drink any more. After a prolonged stay in hospital, Bukowski was released and headed straight for the nearest bar for another bender.
This incident may or may not sum up the life of Charles Bukowski, underdog poet of the American scene. Condemned by feminists as a misogynist and revered by the counterculture as a great poet, Bukowski centred his writing around his alcoholism, poverty, gambling and womanising. Renowned mainly for his poetry and short stories, with Post-Office Bukowski tried his luck at the novel and won. Post Office follows the life of Bukowki's autobiographical alter-ego Henry Chinaski through his employment as a mailman and post-office clerk. Chinaski does all the things Bukowski's characters do: he drinks, chases women, gambles at the races and suffers hilarious misadventures. But permeating all this, a denuding eye is at work, trying to come to terms with the absurdities of human life. The post office becomes a microcosmos for the bureaucratic and surrealist world of working-ethic normality that Chinaski so desperately tries to escape with his careless and self-destructive lifestyle.
Post Office was Bukowski's first novel and remains his most entertaining and accomplished. In the end, it seems that Bukowski began to believe the hype and his writing lost the incisiveness that characterised earlier works like this. Although he often glorifies the macho myth, Bukowski's presents himself honestly and seeks no moral approval from the reader. Unlike millions of other drunkards, Charles Bukowski was very talented, and no poet has ever written so beautifully about hangovers, mornings in bed and life on the other side. Through these themes, Bukowski wove a vivid picture of life in the underbelly of America, a picture illuminated with an uncommon humour, compassion and sense of the absurd.
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Jack Kerouac: ON THE ROAD(1957)
Although legend has it that Kerouac wrote On the Road on a continuous ream of paper in a few weeks, the style is suspiciously polished and well-structured, the result (one would believe) of copious rewrites. Even its most feverish and self-searching passages are manned by a clear and tight musical ear and a classic sense of composition. But this is merely one of many of Kerouac's contradictions. Although a spiritual child of a culture in revolt, in later years Kerouac kept returning to his roots, to his mother and his Catholicism, mostly to escape the increasing pressure of his fame. In the end, Kerouac couldn't handle his own myth, and died of alcohol-related causes at the age of forty-six, leaving us a meandering oeuvre composed of a few great novels and a great deal of minor ones. Dean Cassady (upon whom Dear Moriarty, the hero of On the Road, was based) had suffered a similar fate a year before, collapsing in Mexico by the rail tracks from an amphetamine overdose.
"Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me," writes Kerouac in On the Road. And forty years later, what does this legendary novel hold for us, we children of AIDS and Ivan Milat? And how do we tell the difference between true spiritual quest and mere sensory indulgence?
Kerouac encapsulates a bohemian and mythical America who rose as a defiant alternative to the growing restlessness, alienation and dissatisfaction of a stalling American Dream. And to escape the dark side of this hypocritical dream, Kerouac and friends went in search of another America, an America that may also have been a dream.
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Marguerite Duras: THE LOVER (1984)
Writers find sex the most difficult subject to write about. And this slim but powerful novel by Marguerite Duras makes it seem so easy. That is the trick of great writers: they make writing look such an effortless affair, whereas in reality a whole week might be spent on a single sentence.
It may have taken a whole life to write The Lover. Allegedly based on Duras' own childhood in Indochina, it tells the story of the love affair between a young girl and an officer. No film version (and The Lover has had a couple) has managed to successfully translate the potent eroticism and poetic momentum of Duras' prose, proving that the pen is often mightier than the celluloid.
Until The Lover became an international hit, success and recognition seemed elusive for Duras. Regardless of the allure of the central story, the language is the star of the novel. The prose flows and ebbs, whispers and chants, infusing Duras' transmogrified memories with life. Unlike most so-called innovators and stylists who dress language with difficulty and convolution, Duras searched for simple and bare style. Some of the passages of The Lover seem almost childlike in composition, and this childlike-ness disarms the prose of all pretension and let the story speak itself.
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David Lynch: ERASERHEAD (1976)
In his posthumous American Notebooks, Nathaniel Hawthorne confessed a frustrated desire of his: "To write a dream, which shall resemble the real course of a dream, with all its inconsistencies, its eccentricities and aimlessness--with nevertheless a leading idea running through the whole. Up to this old age of the world, no such a thing has been written."
Sigmund Freud maintained that dreams are essentially visual. Assuming he was right, he may have pinpointed the source of the peculiar power of cinema, and the reason why Hawthorne's project would have to wait a few decades to see its fulfilment. Spanish surrealist heroes Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali tried to render a dream in Un Chien Andaloux, but it would take David Lynch's talent to come closer to the mark.
The plot of Eraserhead consists of a series of nightmarish episodes loosely tied around a central character and his girl-friend. Halfway through, Lynch gets a lot of stomach-churning mileage out of the birth of their monstrous baby. The rest is impossible to recount. Eraserhead inspires in the viewer a series of extreme emotions, most of them negative: disgust, amusement, fascination, uneasiness, boredom, claustrophobia. This is true of virtually all of Lynch's films, which present the most unsavoury and violent aspects of human nature with no shade of glamour or moral reprobation. Although Oliver Stone and Abel Ferrara have to try very hard to be controversial, David Lynch does it effortlessly, and few contemporary film-makers have managed to elicit such polarised responses from viewers and critics. Eraserhead has been called a piece of mindless schlock and hailed as a modern masterpiece, but the truth may lie somewhere in between. On one hand, it is good to see an artist taking such risks and shaking us out of our complacency. On the other, as in dreams, one yearns for some resolution and truth. The horror that Lynch pushes into our face is too contingent and strange, and it is not clear what we are to make of it.
posted by Andres Vaccari @ 10:42 PM