Showing posts with label Australian writer. Show all posts

Thursday, October 2, 2025

Gerald Murnane / The Reclusive Giant of Australian Letters

Murnane’s novels are preoccupied with what happens in our minds when we read.Photograph by Morganna Magee

The Reclusive Giant of Australian Letters

Gerald Murnane’s new book, billed as his last, surveys the rest of his output.

By Merve Emre
July 25, 2022

On most evenings this past spring, the man who lives across the street sat at his small desk, turned on the lamp, and began to write as the light faded. The white curtains in his room were seldom drawn. From where I sat, I had a clear view of him, and he, were he to look up from his writing, would have had a clear view of a house across the street, where a woman with dark hair and a faintly olive complexion was seated by a window, watching him write. At the moment he glanced up from his page, the woman supposed him to be contemplating the look, or perhaps the sound, of the sentence he had just written. The sentence was this: “Since then I have tried to avoid those rooms that grow steadily more crowded with works to explain away Time.”

Watch Shirley Hazzard's brilliance in action / Goodbye to one of our greatest novelist

WATCH SHIRLEY HAZZARD’S BRILLIANCE IN ACTION

GOODBYE TO ONE OF OUR GREATEST NOVELISTS

by Emily Temple
December 4, 2016

Shirley Hazzard, much acclaimed Australian-American author—her novel The Transit of Venus won the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, The Great Fire was awarded the 2003 National Book Award for fiction, The Bay of Noon was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker prize—has died at 85.

Shirley Hazzard, much acclaimed Australian-American author—her novel The Transit of Venus won the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, The Great Fire was awarded the 2003 National Book Award for fiction, The Bay of Noon was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker prize—has died at 85.

Famously, at the very same National Book Awards ceremony where Hazzard was to be recognized for The Great Fire, Stephen King was given a lifetime achievement award, and in accepting it, gave a fairly aggressive speech about the divide between “popular” and “literary” fiction, championing the former and listing great writers he felt were continually ignored by the people in the room. “What do you think? You get social or academic brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture?” King asked. “Never in life, as Capt. Lucky Jack Aubrey would say. And if your only point of reference for Jack Aubrey is the Australian actor, Russell Crowe, shame on you.”

When it came her turn to speak, Hazzard deviated from whatever acceptance speech she had planned to address him:

“I want to say in response to Stephen King that I do not—as I think he a little bit seems to do—I don’t regard literature (which he spoke of perhaps in a slightly pejorative way), I don’t regard the novel, poetry, language as written, I don’t regard it as a competition. It is so vast. We have this marvelous language. We are so lucky that we have a huge audience for that language. If we were writing in high Norwegian, we would be writing in a great ancient language but we would have mostly reindeer for our readers. I’m not sure that that is the ideal outcome. We have this huge language so diverse around the earth that I don’t think giving us a reading list of those who are most read at this moment is much of a satisfaction because we are reading in all the ages, which have been an immense inspiration and love to me and are such an excitement.

I can take one of the ancient poems of our language and feel so excited and moved and even sometimes terrified by it that it seems very immediate to me. I don’t see this as “we should read this or we should read that.” We have mysterious inclinations. We have our own intuitions, our individuality toward what we want to read, and we developed that from childhood. We don’t know why. Nobody can explain it to us.

I think America especially is drowning in explanations and what we need is more questions, not explanations, perhaps, because the explanations are not leading us into good places, at least the official ones that I hear.”

Which is only to say that this woman was brilliant, and dignified, and pretty wonderful. In further celebrating her life, I now present two clips—one of Hazzard reading her own work, and one of her in conversation with Richard Ford. Both are worth your time this week.

Shirley Hazzard in conversation with Richard Ford at the 92nd Street Y on April 30, 2010, punctuated by readings of Hazzard’s work by Annabel Davis-Goff.

In one nice moment, Ford asks her about poetry: “I know it’s horrible to have things that you say be held up to you again after you’ve said them, as though you really meant them—but you said once that you didn’t know how people could live without poetry. … It made me wonder: how do you think people who don’t have poetry actually do live?”

“Well I think about this too. It can’t be forced on people. Now you’ve got to listen to poetry, grabbing them by the lapels or something. Poetry comes in different forms, it can come in mere feeling, I think, people realize within themselves that they have deeper feelings than language always allows them to express. And poetry can save very much the souls of people who feel that way—who feel cut off from a deeper thing within themselves, and having to fit in with much more daily forms of expression.

Also for your viewing pleasure, here is Hazzard reading from her own work—the National Book Award-winning novel The Great Fire—at the 92nd Street Y in November of 2003.

Emily Temple is a senior editor at Lit Hub. Her first novel, The Lightness, will be published by William Morrow in 2020.

LITERARY HUB

Thursday, July 12, 2018

Lost Man Booker Prize / The Vivisector by Patrick White

LOST MAN BOOKER PRIZE

Looking back at the Lost Booker: The Vivisector by Patrick White

It's ugly, loaded with implausible love affairs and often plays out in the toilet, but Patrick White's depiction of the life of fictional Australian artist Hurtle Duffield does credit to the Lost Booker shortlist

Sam Jordison
Thu 18 May 2010

It is a good general rule that any novel which discusses "urgent matters of the spirit" should be treated with caution. Patrick White's The Vivisector does so at length, "in a chaste slit of a room overlooking the luminous sea". It is not for the faint-hearted.

Shirley Hazzard / Love Story Electrifies Beneath The Silhouette 'Of Venus'

Shirley Hazzard

Love Story Electrifies Beneath The Silhouette 'Of Venus'

Roxana Robinson's latest book is Sparta.

I fell in love with Shirley Hazzard in 1980, when her great book Transit of Venus came out. I was completely dazzled by the beauty and authority of her writing, and by the effortless way she created this world.

AMERICANS

by Shirley Hazzard

Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.

Monday, July 9, 2018

Shirley Hazzard / The Tragedy / Quote

THE TRAGEDY

by Shirley Hazzard

The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.

Obituaries / Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard obituary

Acclaimed novelist, close friend of Graham Greene and critic of the UN

James Campbell
Wed 14 Dec 2016

Shirley Hazzard, who has died aged 85, was a writer of fiction, not poetry, but she had a copious memory for verse, and it is fair to say that a line of Browning, plucked from memory in an Italian cafe in the late 1960s, led to one of the most important friendships of her life. Hazzard was completing the Times crossword while sipping coffee in the piazzetta, the central square on the isle of Capri, one morning, when she recognised a man at the neighbouring table as Graham Greene. In the course of conversation, he began to quote a poem by Browning, but stalled at the last line. Hazzard supplied it (the poem was The Lost Mistress; the line, “Or so very little longer”) and left the cafe.

Man Booker Prize 1988 / Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey

MAN BROOKER PRIZE 1988

Booker club: Oscar and Lucinda

Looking back at the Booker: Peter Carey

There is no doubt that Oscar and Lucinda has won over readers and critics alike, but could their love of the novel have blinded them to its lack of subtlety and implausible storyline?

Sam Jordison
Wed 28 May 2008

It's with some trepidation that I approach Peter Carey's Best of Booker shortlisted novel Oscar And Lucinda. A quick google search reveals it to be "a transforming experience... my ultimate favourite romantic book". One that someone called Sarah "fell in love with", which "won over" someone called Harriet "completely" and that "will change your life".

Meanwhile, the back cover of my edition features no less than Angela Carter proclaiming it to be a "novel of extraordinary richness, complexity and strength" which filled her with "wild, savage envy". My own girlfriend warned me of relationship reassessment if I didn't like it. This isn't just a successful and critically acclaimed novel, it's a book people love. Any perception of unfair judgment or misinterpretation will undoubtedly land me in hot water.

Fortunately, I can see the appeal. Most notably, there's the simple pleasure of Carey's storytelling. We follow the adorably unusual romantic lead Oscar (all gangling limbs, "long-stretched neck", religious obsession and compulsive gambling) on a gloriously picaresque journey. He progresses by confused and shambling steps from a strict Plymouth Brethren upbringing in rural Devon to obsessive gambling in London and Oxford and on to Australia, where a bet inspired by his desperation to impress a certain Lucinda has him transporting a glass church through the outback and up the Bellinger river on a mission even more futile than that of Marlow in Heart Of Darkness.

So, a strange yarn, but undoubtedly a ripping one too. As well as the Conrad, there's a heady mix of Edmund Gosse's Father and Son and Fitzcarraldo. A potent brew of religious fanaticism, naturalism, strange conversions, bizarre water-themed activity, determination in the face of insuperable odds and triumphs of madness over reason.

It's absurd. Its insistence on chance and the arbitrary nature of human decisions repeatedly confounds expectations and lurches the plot in strange directions. Each character's thinking and personal motivation is alien (few people nowadays emigrate to Australia because of the opportunities it presents for self-mortifying missionary work, after all). But all those potential pitfalls become virtues in Carey's skilful hands, and his great gift is not only to make us believe in this very foreign vision of the past, but also to care about it deeply.

All the same, while the passion Oscar and Lucinda elicit makes it magical in ways that drier Best of Booker contenders like Nadime Gordimer's The Conservationist just don't even approach, it also creates its own problems. Certainly, as I read over the ecstatic web reviews, not to mention the glowing notices the book received when it first came out and accounts of the book being given the 1988 Booker after just 30 minutes deliberation among the judges, I couldn't help thinking that love had maybe blinded those critics to the book's faults.

After the first throes of passion have died down, there's still plenty about Oscar and Lucinda that keeps the relationship interesting. Behind the entrancing story there are some meaty ideas about the nature of storytelling, chance, the achievements and cruelties of Empire, the way what we term "progress" is so often destructive and the fragility of dreams. Most of these are vividly symbolised in repeated references to glass and water, culminating in that splendid image of a glass church floating up a river. The trouble is that these references are repeated so often that it starts to seem laboured. It's as if Carey is worried we might have missed the references the first, second and third times and it all starts to get a bit York Notes. Worse still, some episodes seem to be there only for the sake of these themes, particularly a contrived series of episodes about Prince Rupert's drops that all but scream Carey's ideas about how things can be both strong but fragile. About the marvel and folly of technology. How the beautiful can be destructive. It's not subtle.

I had further problems with a rather cumbersome narrative framing device. This comes courtesy of someone who explains that Oscar is his great-grandfather and occasionally pops up to remind us that he is piecing together the story from photos, reminiscences, letters and similar. The trouble is that his knowledge seems highly unlikely since so much of the book is written from the perspective of an omniscient voice. How, for instance, could this descendant know the intricacies of Lucinda's night out in a Chinese betting shop? Perhaps one could detect clever meta-fictional commentary here, but really it seems that this narrator from Oscar and Lucinda's future is there just to spring one big surprise about his parentage towards the end of the book. Okay, it's a good surprise and neatly fits in with Carey's ideas about the expectations we have of stories but it comes with a heavy cost in terms of the suspension of disbelief.

In other words, I think there are less flawed books on the Best of Booker shortlist. Whether there are more lovable ones, however, is a different question - and one that may make Oscar And Lucinda a serious contender.

Next time, in a frankly embarrassing contradiction of my earlier claim that I was going to deal with these Best of Bookers "in authorial alphabetical order", Pat Barker's The Ghost Road.

THE GUARDIAN

Man Booker Prize

1978 The sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch

1980 Rites of Passage by William Golding

1987 Moon Tiger by Penelope Livery

1988 Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey

1992 The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

1996 Last Orders by Graham Swift

Monday, March 9, 2015

The 100 best novels / No 77 / Voss by Patrick White (1957)

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 77
Voss
by Patrick White (1957)

A love story set against the disappearance of an explorer in the outback, Voss paved the way for a generation of Australian writers to shrug off the colonial past

Robert McCrum
Monday 9 March 2015 05.45 GMT

he lone rider on his journey to self-realisation, the plot of many westerns, is perfectly suited to the Australian outback, and it gives Patrick White’s monumental novel an archetypal power that still dominates the Australian literary landscape. Only Christina Stead (The Man Who Loved Children) rivals White’s achievement.

Voss is based on the story of Ludwig Leichhardt, the Prussian naturalist who made several explorations of the Australian interior in the mid-1840s. Leichhardt aimed to pioneer an overland route from Brisbane to Perth but he vanished without trace in the infinite vastness of the interior.

White focuses on two characters: Voss, the German explorer, and Laura, a naive and lovely orphan recently arrived in New South Wales, who meet for the first time in the house of Laura’s uncle, the patron of Voss’s expedition. Their complex and passionate relationship, a mutual obsession based on separation, is set against the merciless landscape of Voss’s trek towards oblivion.

White, who in 1973 became the first Australian to win the Nobel prize for literature, was a difficult man, notorious for his abrasive relationship with a society that, high and low, did its best to alienate him. Much of White’s prickly rage went into Voss, who is misanthropic, wilful and doomed. “The map?” says the explorer, when asked about navigation. “I will first make it.”

White was a literary map-maker, too. He is both of his time (sharing many preoccupations with Saul Bellow and William Golding, 73 and 74 in this series), and a cultural pioneer, asserting the need for a richer and more complex understanding of a great country. Until the 1950s Australian poetry and fiction, like American literature in the 19th century, was in thrall to dusty English models. Angry and often obscure, deeply intellectual and gay, Patrick White liberated his readers from a cultural prison. Parts of Voss, notably the treatment of Indigenous Australians – “black swine” to the explorer – remain contentious but White is a founding father of the literary independence movement that followed in the 1970s and 80s. His work paved the way for David Malouf, Murray Bail, Peter Carey, Tim Winton, Christos Tsiolkas, Julia Leigh and many more. He is also a pioneer in “Commonwealth Literature”, a genre that’s now virtually redundant, having been overtaken by the influence of global media and global English.

A note on the text

Voss was published by Eyre & Spottiswoode, a London-based imprint with strong Australian connections, in 1957. The first edition had jacket art by Sidney Nolan, and although it was the novel that established White’s profound originality, not everyone was convinced. One hostile newspaper review declared White to be “Australia’s most unreadable novelist”. The distinguished Australian poet AD Hope once said of White that, although he “shows on every page some touch of the born writer”, he nevertheless lacked style, choosing “as his medium this pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge”. To the end of his life, White would never quite shake off a reputation for “difficulty”.

The indispensable study of Patrick White and his work comes from David Marr inPatrick White: A Life (1991). Voss has also been adapted into an opera with a David Malouf libretto. White himself wanted Voss to be produced for the cinema, directed by Ken Russell and, later, Joseph Losey, but the film was never made.