‘The Noble Salvidge’ in conversation with Will Yeoman at York Writers’ Festival

On April 13th I will be attending the York Writers’ Festival and appearing in conversation with WritingWA’s Will Yeoman. It looks like a really interesting program across the whole weekend and I am looking forward to meeting all who attend. The winners of the Wheatbelt Short Story Competition will also be announced on the 13th. I’m intrigued by the thought of finding out about York’s Dark Corners too! 

‘The Off-Site Program’ in Teacher, Teacher anthology

My non-fiction piece ‘The Off-Site Program’ will shortly appear in this anthology from Affirm Press – see blurb below.

An anthology about the power of teachers and their capacity to shape lives, edited by award-winning teacher-librarian Megan Daley of Children’s Book Daily and the Your Kid’s Next Read podcast. Featuring contributions from Jessie Tu, Tony Birch, Rick Morton, Jacqueline Harvey + many more. The power of an exceptional teacher cannot be overestimated. Sometimes it is not about what they taught you, but about how they made you feel as a person. Teacher, Teacher is an anthology of stories showcasing those brilliant educators who have nurtured, inspired, championed or created change – in one student or in a community.

You can preorder the Teacher, Teacher anthology here.

Book Review – T by Alan Fyfe

Alan Fyfe’s debut novel T is an endearing, off-beat, and ultimately moving caper. Set in and around Mandurah, Western Australia, the narrative punctures numerous stereotypes associated with the ‘drug hijinx’ genre, presenting T for the selfish fuck-up he is. Fyfe offers us an eclectic grab-bag of humorous characters and situations such as the ghost of dead Gulp, crank-addled Cardo and his obeisance to a certain notorious West Australian football player (“Jim Levy”), dead men falling from the sky, and yes, a Shetland pony. In this regard T recalls that zany masterwork A Confederacy of Dunces.

But there’s more to T than this. It’s also a hard-nosed drug narrative that shows us again and again the nature of addiction and the way it warps people’s ability to make sensible decisions. Any thought of a romantic (and redemptive) ending for T and his some-time girlfriend Lori-Bird is thus flushed down the toilet. T manages to avoid romanticizing drug use while humanising drug addicts in a manner not dissimilar to Junky.

And more: weaved into T is the story of the Binjareb people, of Thomas Peel and the misdeeds (and massacre) perpetrated by the British invaders. Fyfe tells this story obliquely and in fragments that work as a counterpoint to the main narrative. There’s a character, Old Stone, who meets T for a drug deal but becomes uneasy at the choice of meeting place. He says to T: “Thought you were a local, you should know, you should own up.” T replies: “Own up to what?” (p164).

This is a powerful book and, just as importantly, an original one.

Published by Transit Lounge, T is available in bookstores and from worthy online retailers.

Book Review – The Last Asbestos Town by Helen Hagemann

Helen Hagemann’s debut novel The Last Asbestos Town is set in a near future where Western Australia is being terrorised by the Asbestos Task Force or ATF, an aggressive and unfeeling government entity intent on demolishing any building thought to contain this notoriously dangerous building material. May and Isaac are twenty-somethings who have recently moved to the country town of Farmbridge to take up residence in an old Girl Guides building. It isn’t long before they’re being harassed by the ATF and the threat of demolition provides one of the major narrative thrusts of the novel.

The relationship between May and Isaac is developed over the course of chapters told from alternating points of view. Isaac is a bit of a dropkick who can’t seem to hang onto a job for long and his drug habit doesn’t help, but he’s intent on saving their house and he isn’t shy of employing some unorthodox methods in achieving this. May has her own business sewing clothes as well as looking after Isaac and she’s definitely the stable influence in their relationship. As the story develops it becomes clear that, for all his faults, Isaac is the driving force in the narrative, however.

May and Isaac don’t just have the ATF to worry about – their home is also haunted by the ghost of a dead woman, Cheryl, who was murdered years before. A lot of effort goes into investigating the origin of what is basically a poltergeist inhabiting the house, and a major plot point hinges on turning Cheryl’s haunting to their advantage. Isaac makes friends with members of the local Aboriginal community and he eventually gets the idea of using their traditional magic to ward off the ATF as well as a pesky drug dealer.

Hagemann’s background is in poetry and this shines through in some excellent descriptive writing throughout, particularly the descriptions of natural settings. Her writing is visceral and the countryside and rivers of Farmbridge burst to life over the course of the story. Between Cheryl’s hauntings and the magic of the Aboriginal shaman, there’s definitely a supernatural cast to The Last Asbestos Town, which offers a nice contrast to the bureaucratic machinations of the ATF. The author’s environmental concerns are present throughout in asides on the polluting of riverways, but this is also tempered by the human cost of arbitrarily bulldozing houses thought to contain asbestos.

The Last Asbestos Town is a fine debut and promises even better to come. A second novel, The Ozone Cafe, is slated for release this October from Adelaide Books in New York.

‘Travel Derangements’ published in Van Diemen Decameron

I have a travel piece about Covid-19 and Tasmania, ‘Travel Derangements’, published online and free to read as part of the Van Diemen Decameron.

‘Mr Agoo’ published in Not keeping mum

 

 

I’m very pleased to announce that my short story, ‘Mr Agoo’, has found a home in Not keeping mum: Australian writers tell the truth about perintatal anxiety and depression in poetry, fiction & essay. All proceeds from the sale of the book will go to  Perinatal Anxiety and Depression Australia. I’m especially chuffed to be the only male author in the book. You can check it out here:

https://au.blurb.com/b/10013951-not-keeping-mum-australian-writers-tell-the-truth

 

Invisible Books: Sergei Dovlatov

I hadn’t heard of late Soviet-era satirist Sergei Dovlatov until I saw the biopic on Netflix about him last year. Intrigued, I ordered copies of the three of his books in print in English. My favourite of these is probably Pushkin Hills, a semi-autobiographical account of a struggling writer’s angst at the thought of his ex-wife and child leaving for the West while he fritters away his time providing tours of the Pushkin Estate to bored Eastern-bloc tourists in the 1970s. Dovlatov has a light touch, reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut, and his stories are always amusing. The Suitcase is a collection of short tales about items supposedly contained in the protagonist’s suitcase when he finally follows ex-wife and child to America. Finally, The Zone is an account of the author’s time as a prison-camp guard in Brezhnev’s USSR. All three of these titles are well-worth reading and readily available from Alma Classics. 

Dovlatov died of cancer in his mid-forties, but he lived long enough to produce plenty of books and even publish a number of stories in The New Yorker. The only other title of his I’ve been able to track down cheaply secondhand is Ours: A Russian Family Album which, like The Suitcase, is a loose but very enjoyable collection of tales.  Overlook Press supposedly re-published Dovlatov’s The Invisible Book a few years back, but I can find no copies of it for sale either new or secondhand, and so I can only presume it was never released.

 

Lastly, there are two other books published in English, A Foreign Woman and The Compromise, but these are long out of print and horrendously expensive secondhand. I’m hoping that Alma Classics may consider expanding their Dovlatov collection in the near future, perhaps in part due to the increased attention Dovlatov has received due to the biopic. I certainly hope so, because I think the author may be among the very best of the chroniclers of the absurdities of the late-Soviet period.

A Primer to Russian (and Ukrainian) Literature

If you ask someone to name a work of Russian literature they will probably give you War and Peace, and if you ask for a second the answer will likely be Crime and Punishment, but there’s more to Russian Literature than the works of the giants of the nineteenth century in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. This year I read more than 40 books by Russian and Ukrainian writers (the latter of which are often labelled as Russian anyway), discovering a number of well-known writers and a few who are somewhat more obscure.  What follows is a brief primer to these authors and some of their most accessible works in English translation. My focus here is on shorter works and those that are in print. I’m aware of the paucity of women writers on this list, so I’m eager for recommendations.

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) is one of the greatest Russian authors of the twentieth century and he is best known for his opus The Master and Margarita. My favourite work of his, however, is the delightful A Country Doctor’s Notebook (also translated as A Young Doctor’s Notebook). This is a series of semi-autobiographical stories based on Bulgakov’s experiences in the medical profession in Russian backwaters around the time of the Revolution. The book is also the subject of an equally wonderful BBC mini-series starring Daniel Radcliffe. Another accessible work is the novella Heart of a Dog.

Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) is best remembered for his satirical novel Dead Souls and his story ‘The Overcoat’, the latter of which is included here in Petersburg Tales. I loved not only ‘The Overcoat’ but ‘Nevsky Prospekt’ and the hilarious ‘The Nose’. I would definitely start here with Gogol, before moving onto Dead Souls and his most famous play, The Government Inspector.

Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) is the author of the essential Life and Fate, a hefty tome that deserves close attention, but the first book I read of his happened to be his last, and probably his shortest, An Armenian Sketchbook. Penned as a result of the author’s travels to Armenia shortly before his death in 1964, this is a delightful meditation on life by one of the twentieth century’s most important writers.

Andrei Platonov (1899-1951) may be my favourite Russian writer of them all. Suppressed by the authorities and mostly obscure during his life and long after his death, Platonov is the author of The Foundation Pit, Happy Moscow and a number of beautifully sad and elegiac stories. My absolute favourite of them is ‘Among Animals and Plants’, which you can read for free here at The New Yorker, and the best collection of his shorter work can be found in Soul and Other Stories.

 

Robert Chandler is one of the main English translators of Platonov’s work and he’s also the editor of this truly essential collection from Penguin Classics. Here you’ll find not only the established greats of Russian literature and some of their most famous works (Pushkin’s ‘The Queen of Spades’, for example) but also a smattering of equally delightful pieces by much less well known authors like Mikhail Zoshchenko, Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal and Sergei Dovlatov. (Note: this is $11 currently on Book Depository, so get in quick!)

I could go on, but this is supposed to be a primer and thus I suppose five books is enough. Some honourable mentions to finish though:

Kolyma Stories by Varlam Shalamov

Recently released by New York Review of Books Classics, this is an amazing work of literature – 600+ pages of stories from the gulags of deepest Siberia.

The Suitcase by Sergei Dovlatov

This is an endearing and amusing collection from the ‘Russian Kurt Vonnegut’. There’s also a Netflix film about the author (titled, predictably, Dovlatov).

The Beauties by Anton Chekkov

Pushkin Press produce some beautiful books and this is certainly one of the finest.

Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks by Osip Mandelstam

I haven’t read much Russian poetry as yet, but Mandelstam is very impressive.

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

If you’ve ever played the first person shooter game STALKER, you were playing an adaptation of Roadside Picnic. 

Book Review – Amethysts and Emeralds by Daniel King

Daniel King is the author of award-winning prose fiction, some of which is collected in Memento Mori from Interactive Press, but he’s a critically-acclaimed poet too. His latest collection, Amethysts and Emeralds, features “58+1” poems, some of which first appeared internationally in the likes of The London Magazine, Pennsylvania Literary Journal and Poetry Salzburg Review. Domestically, King’s poem “King Henry X” won the 2017 FourW Award for Best Poem. The poems range in form from free verse to villanelle and sonnet, and cover a vast intellectual and spiritual territory. Fourteen of the poems concern Kalki, “the tenth and final avatar of the Hindu God Vishnu (the Preserver), incarnating this time and forever together with Shiva (the Destroyer)” (ix), and others address Christian and Ancient Greek mythology.

King’s work is dense with allusions and will reward careful reading and re-reading, but a number of poems and images caught my eye during my first foray. In “Io”, I enjoyed images such as of “The Ionian Sea!/The dark night cliffs, the lines of waves/Like sentences in some mysterious calligraphy,/Delimited by distant future Italy” (14) whereas, in “Narcissus”, “My tears, a line of tiny spheres, are like an ellipsis,/Pointing to my omissions;/Their ripples form the circles of a target/At which I never aimed” (19). In “Cadmium”, the spectre of WWII is invoked alongside Greek mythology: “Ensnared by Ares — but what was not, in Fascist 1941?/The regents with their razor-wire regalia;/The salinelle of stinking plasma:/The fount of propaganda my protective coating could not reach,/Nor my poison” (23).

Of the poems concerning Hinduism, “Sonnet for Kalki” is among my favourites, and begins: “A rider of the white-horse waves, I came/To surf. My wild blond hair is matted like Shiva’s./I wander continents for men to tame/And men to love” (p 49). In “Sonnet for the Watchers”, an astronomical perspective is provided: “The galaxies now asterisks, footnotes,/The stratosphere’s long lockstep learned by rote” (22). Amethysts and Emeralds closes with “Hymn to Kalki”: “Spirit and Christ, Great Kalki, we hail you as one born of/the Ocean/And we worship you our way, Lord:/Your infinite time-line, crafted by Kalra, and your three-/circled crown, your journey from the stars” (71).

I enjoyed those poems that were on astronomical themes, such as “Ixion”: “Borne on the gusts of planetary rust,/We surely can engender life among the dark brass-/coloured stars,/Semi-bestial though its early stages may be,/If we seduce the air and rape the rocks./It’s not too late to leave a sewer world:” (26). “Alpha Crucis” (the brightest star in the Southern Cross) contains stanzas of beauty and wisdom such as “The Logos is regained as a bright flux,/A still, white diamond that never dies./With the Diamond the sky instructs/The Greeks with tropes, with semiotic conduct” (37). In a different mode again is the award-winning “King Henry X”, which ends: “For Roland Barthes to the White Tower came/To write Morte D’Author, explorer-entwined/So home rule’s peacock-coloured skies proclaim/The Word, and King and INRI X the same” (61).

As perceptive readers will no doubt appreciate, Daniel King is a poet of great intelligence and spiritual feeling. Amethysts and Emeralds is a formidable and insightful collection and well worth your close attention.

Little Russia

Over the past month or so, I’ve been gorging myself on nineteenth and twentieth century ‘Russian’ literature – the inverted commas are because many of these authors are Ukrainian. I first encountered the term ‘Little Russia’ in the work of Nikolai Gogol, an amazing and amusing writer who needs little introduction. Gogol was born in a village in central Ukraine in 1809, but made his name in St Petersburg. I’ve read his short stories – the less famous Ukrainian Tales and more famous Petersburg Tales – as well as his novel Dead Souls, surmising that Gogol considered the ‘Little Russia’ of that time (present day Ukraine) to be part of the wider Russian Empire of the Tsars.

Nikolai Gogol

I’m a fan of Gogol, but my favourite ‘Russian’ of all was born about eighty years later, in 1891. I first read Mikhail Bulgakov’s superlative The Master and Margarita in 2014, and thereafter practically all of his work (novels, stories, plays, letters and a couple of biographies). Born in Kiev, Bulgakov’s novel The White Guard powerfully illustrates the tug of war between Germany and Russia during the First World War, with Kiev as ground zero. Ironically, the play Bulgakov wrote based on this (“The Day of the Turbins”) proved immensely popular with Russian theatre-goers, famously including Stalin himself, in the early Soviet period. Bulgakov never returned to Kiev and died in 1940, a year before the Germans invaded again.

Mikhail Bulgakov

Another great ‘Russian’ writer, possibly the most important of them all, is Vasily Grossman. Born in the town of Berdichev in Central Ukraine in 1905, and of Jewish ancestry, Grossman made a name for himself during the Second World War as a journalist with the Red Army. Present at Stalingrad, Kursk and the ruins of Treblinka, Grossman’s war correspondence is of immense historical as well as literary significance. His great novel, Life and Fate, was ‘arrested’ by the Soviet authorities in 1961 and only published long after his death, and his other late novel Everything Flows casts its gaze over another holocaust, the Soviet-engineered ‘Holodomor’ or Great Famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s. This topic is also covered extremely movingly in Andrey Platonov’s play “Fourteen Little Red Huts”.

Vasily Grossman

Soviet repression and the Holodomor seems to offer some explanation as to why the Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis to a greater extent than other occupied peoples post-1941, a topic which is discussed extensively in the biography of Grossman I’m currently reading, The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman. This was a point of contention for the Soviet authorities, seeking to downplay both the Jewish Holocaust and the Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis, which led to hundreds of thousands of Jews being murdered in the Ukraine alone, including Grossman’s mother. Fast forward to the present day and the Ukraine is subject to yet another tug of war, this time between Russia and the West. It’s a topic discussed in the works of ‘Ukrainian’ writer Andrey Kurkov, born in St Petersburg in 1961 but a longtime resident of Kiev and a Ukrainian citizen. I’d read Kurkov’s Death and the Penguin previously but not his account of the recent ructions in this region, Ukraine Diaries, which covers a period of unrest in 2013-14 and Russia’s subsequent annexation of the Crimea region.

Andrey Kurkov

Here in Australia, far from the region in question, our media offers a very simplistic analysis of the struggle (basically, pro-Westerners = good, Putin = bad), but I’m left wondering: is there such a thing as an independent Ukraine, and will there be one in the future? Am I interested in Russian literature, or Ukrainian? I’m aware that the phrase ‘Little Russia’ is considered an outmoded and even pejorative term nowadays, but it does offer outsiders a historical context. Will the Ukraine eventually fragment into a pro-Russian east and pro-Western West, with Kiev as the geopolitical point of fracture, as Kurkov seems to prophesy? Bulgakov depicted Kiev in 1918 being constantly captured and re-captured by opposing forces. A hundred years later, how much has changed?