Long before Australia was discovered by Europeans, it was imagined in the hearts and souls and minds of rulers, explorers and romantics on the other side of the world. Martin Edmond is a modern day romantic who embarked on a journey to discover the mystery around Luca Antara, now known as Australia. This is not a standard historical text, nor strictly a memoir. Edmond has written a magical tale about himself and his obsession with the past ....
Mary Philip in the Brisbane Courier Mail, 16.12.06
19.12.06
16.12.06
beautiful lie or elaborate joke?
This seems like an altogether more reasonable - and generous - account of what the book is, and is about. Apropos the SMH review, my publisher wrote yesterday and said: The best books generate a range of responses. Have no idea if this is true or not but it was sweet of her to say so. As to the question, it's perhaps a case of both/and not either/or.
12.12.06
peccable?
My agent told me on the phone this morning that there's another Luca review in the Australian Book Review. It's not available online & so haven't read it yet. But Fran said it describes the writing as 'impeccable'. This goes someway towards mollifying my outrage at the SMH's 'pedestrian' slur, even though I've always been a walker & believe, in fact, that prose writing at its best does have a peripatetic dimension. Or should that be ambulatory? Anyway ... I've been extremely well treated by NZ reviewers in recent years so perhaps the violence of my reaction to a bad review is partly due to a false sense of entitlement? Don't know. Interesting that the ABR also reviewed Luca as a work of fiction. Which, I repeat, though some of it is 'made up', in totality, it isn't. If that makes any sense.
PS Actually the word she uses is flawless as in flawlessly written. And closes with the adjectives beautiful and overwhelming although this second is not meant in an absolutely complimentary way but rather to suggest that there's just too much in the book. That's okay - I can live with that.
PS Actually the word she uses is flawless as in flawlessly written. And closes with the adjectives beautiful and overwhelming although this second is not meant in an absolutely complimentary way but rather to suggest that there's just too much in the book. That's okay - I can live with that.
10.12.06
Stopped buying & reading the Sydney Morning Herald on a regular basis about a month ago because I was sick of their increasingly shallow & sensational approach to news & current affairs. Switched to The Australian which, while deeply conservative in many respects, does give a wider & less parochial consideration both to what is happening & what it might mean. So I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at the miserable review of Luca Antara the SMH published this weekend. Must be a piece of attempted cleverness on someone's part to have it reviewed as a work of fiction, which it isn't, & this smart-arsedness is echoed in the review itself, which says, on the one hand, that the book exorcises the spectre of fiction and on the other that Luca Antara is yet to be written - huh? I think what the guy is saying is that I wrote a book like this because I wasn't able to write a novel. Echoing, it's true, something I - or 'the narrator' - also says at one point. The earnest often fail to recognise irony & thereby take seriously what is meant in jest, in the same way that the mean-spirited sometimes resent generosity in others. Everyone who writes knows that there is a shadow side to their work, a possible view or assessment of it that condemns it as negligible or nugatory; just as there is an alternative view that overstates its claims or reckons all that is attempted, achieved. Guess you hope reviewers see both possibilities & negotiate some kind of accord between them. What you don't ever want to read is a response that seems to arise out of anger or dismay at your temerity in writing the book at all. Unfortunately, that's what seems to have happened here. It's galling, particularly since the review focuses on formal matters, which aren't of particular interest to me, at the expense of content, which is, but what can you do? Something about the fiction of non-fiction was perhaps always going to end up in the Herald's too hard basket.
8.12.06
cherchez la femme
One of my neighbours the other day told me she saw a woman on a train reading Luca Antara - & she was a long way into it. A local Summer Hiller perhaps? Someone who was at the launch? Or - tantalising thought - a complete stranger? Guess I'll never know ...
29.11.06
a capital review
For reading, as this book demonstrates, is a journey of myriad possibilities ... in its profuse network of associations - some fleeting, some enduring - Luca Antara maps not merely the maze ... that reading can become, but the formation of our deeper selves. For as the hero of the Portuguese expedition to Luca Antara, Antonio da Nova, comes to realise, every journey is, inevitably, a search for our own souls. Edmond may not have the mastery of Sebald with this hybrid form, but this is nevertheless a book rich in ideas, at once erudite and eclectic, and full of beautifully unexpected and evocative descriptions ...
from Fact or fiction, a remarkable journey; Diane Stubbings, The Canberra Times, 11.11.06
PS Was reading yesterday Randolph Stow, in the preface to To The Islands, complaining that some people thought his book was influenced by Patrick White's Voss, when it had in fact been written before Voss was even published. I feel a bit the same way about the (inevitable) W. G. Sebald comparison. It's an affinity, not an influence - I discovered my 'style', such as it is, before I'd read a word of Sebald.
from Fact or fiction, a remarkable journey; Diane Stubbings, The Canberra Times, 11.11.06
PS Was reading yesterday Randolph Stow, in the preface to To The Islands, complaining that some people thought his book was influenced by Patrick White's Voss, when it had in fact been written before Voss was even published. I feel a bit the same way about the (inevitable) W. G. Sebald comparison. It's an affinity, not an influence - I discovered my 'style', such as it is, before I'd read a word of Sebald.
20.11.06
18.11.06
Caught the train at about 4.30 from Summer Hill Station. There was a guy on the platform wearing a top hat & tails, a purple shirt & a gold bow tie. He was going up The Rocks to do some spruiking. Another bloke complimented him on his get-up & then started ear-bashing a pregnant Englishwoman, with child asleep in pram. It was about the tragedy of growing up in this world. She humoured him for a while and then lost it: I'm not going to go home & kill myself because some stranger on a train tells me his troubles! she snapped. He barely missed a beat but later, walking down the platform at Central, admitted to me that She got me there. I was early, I dawdled down Broadway, past where Antiquarian Books used to be, thinking I might stop in at the Broadway Hotel for a glass canoe ... but it's now a boutique cafe serving only bottled, boutique beer, so I turned off into Shepherd Street and walked up past where Pergamon Press used to be to the pub on the corner & had a beer there instead, among the scruffy, pre-rock 'n' roll crowd, with the dusty sunlight slanting down through the windows & the traffic roaring outside. Although I've been in there often before - once even to hear The Drifters play - I couldn't remember the name of the pub until I was leaving it. The Lansdowne. The great cloudy glass balls on the Grace Bros. Buildings are held in place by griffins, I realised, for the first time, & regretted not including that detail in the book. Ah, well. Past the shop where I bought this computer, noticing a screen / monitor almost twice the size of my one & wishing I could buy it. I'm dreamy & vague now because of the beer so I nearly don't recognize Jane Macduff sitting with Lesley McFadyean at a small table outside Badde Manors. I go with Jane to look at the venue & also to drop off the 2 cds I've brought along, Mariza's Transparente & Tinariwen's Radio Tisdas Sessions. Fado before & Tuareg desert music after seems like a good idea. Then we go back to join Lesley for a coffee before returning to Gleebooks where we stand around outside as the first few people start to arrive. By half past six the room upstairs is filling up nicely, the fado sounds great, the Turkish pizzas & the wine & the beer are going down but I don't want to start because my kids haven't arrived yet ... just then they show up at the top of the stairs, Liamh without one of his front teeth, which fell out this morning. I ask Jesse if he wants me to say anything about The Evil Chicken, his book, but he says no. They dim the lights, turn the music off, close the bar. Jane gets up & introduces Roger, with praises. We're sitting either side of the podium on the stage. I haven't seen Roger for a few years, he looks both more handsome and more gaunt than he used to. His launch speech is nicely meandering, he wanders happily here and there through the book, which he extols in almost embarrassingly fulsome terms. I see Jesse signing to me from the very front row, he means that I can say something about The Evil Chicken after all. I've tuned out momentarily during our dumb show & when I tune back in, Roger is talking about something he found on the Net, how he didn't realise I'd been living in a town in Queensland where he has relatives & visits often, which is a pity, because we could have caught up ... what on earth is he saying, I wonder, I've never lived in Queensland, I've only been there twice, once to the airport on the way back from Fiji - we didn't even get off the plane - and the other time to a National Park, a bat cave just over the NSW border? Then comes the punchline, he's been reading the Q & A I did with Mark Young as if I were Mark ... not realising I was the one asking the questions. This is quite funny although also a bit disconcerting. Then it's my turn, I say a few things & then read the bit about seeing the convict ghosts in the street outside the old Darlinghurst jail that time. My last remark is about Katherine spilling wine over her copy ... & as soon as I sit down at the signing table, that's what I do, spill my wine, all over the table. Fortunately there are no books on it at that point, but the cloth is soaked & they whip it away, leaving behind a surface that reminds me of an old school desk from the 1950s. The kids all crowd around while I'm signing, Liamh jigging my elbow & grinning like a pirate with his gat tooth, Jesse taking e-orders for The Evil Chicken, which I've described as both shorter & funnier than my book. That it is. His mate Monty is there too. It gets a bit blurred then, people saying goodbye & leaving with their books, some crashing bore who was at my last launch telling me Luca Antara is really Antarctica & then we're all being shooed out. Last person I see is my ex who calls across the street & comes running over, to say what I can't remember, but she hadn't bought a book & it was a great pleasure to give her one from my stash, though whether it will be a pleasure for her to read is another question, since she's in it, albeit under another name. Fran, Jane, Morgan & I go up to the Toxteth where I remember I sent, in all innocence, Anthony off to the Friend in Hand, since that's where I thought we were going then. I call them up, hear his name being shouted through the bar, but no answer. We drink 2 bottles of Oomoo & eat meaty dishes with many toasts & lots of laughs. Later still, the cabbie who takes me home is a negro Buddhist from Sri Lanka who says, when he's not working, he plays with his five year old son. I love my son, he says. And, of his religion, that acts have consequences. You do something bad, it will come back on you. Even so, we can't be good all the time. After I pay him, we shake hands, which is nice. Then I come back up here feeling ... beached or launched, I can't decide which. Perhaps I'm beached while the book is launched? If so, it must be time to do some more beachcombing ... happy days.
14.11.06
Luca X London
Heard this morning from my sister, who's been honeymooning in Europe, that she acquired a copy of Luca Antara in London last week ... ! Felt obscurely envious of the alleged author of such a far-travelled work. She, Katherine, has a friend, Belinda, who runs the NZ Bookshop in Lundinium, & Belinda had ordered in a few copies. This one, over what ocean I do not know, was accidently annointed with a few drops of (red?) wine on the trip back. Surely a good sign ...
Especially since the looming launch is causing me slight anxiety, if only because the invite did not include an RSVP address, so the Events Manager at Gleebooks (thank you, Morgan) does not know how many to cater for. She wanted me to re-call all those on my launch list to suggest that, if they're coming, they confirm, but I just can't do that. Figure that, you send out the invites & people come or not as they see fit. Turkish pide / pizza for 40 should do it, surely? And enough wine to spill over a few more copies.
Especially since the looming launch is causing me slight anxiety, if only because the invite did not include an RSVP address, so the Events Manager at Gleebooks (thank you, Morgan) does not know how many to cater for. She wanted me to re-call all those on my launch list to suggest that, if they're coming, they confirm, but I just can't do that. Figure that, you send out the invites & people come or not as they see fit. Turkish pide / pizza for 40 should do it, surely? And enough wine to spill over a few more copies.
9.11.06
Fernando Pessoa speaks ...
I’m nothing .
I’ll always be nothing.
I can’t even wish to be something.
Aside from that, I’ve got all the world’s dreams inside me.
in the person of Alvaro de Campos, The Tobacco Shop, opening lines
I’ll always be nothing.
I can’t even wish to be something.
Aside from that, I’ve got all the world’s dreams inside me.
in the person of Alvaro de Campos, The Tobacco Shop, opening lines
2.11.06
Alas
The first town we passed through was called Alas. It was the night of 1 November in that part of the world, the night before the US election. Everyone was awake; all the lights were on—greeny-blue low-wattage bulbs which give hardly any illumination. Every house had a TV set on too, brighter than the lights in the room, showing soap operas, dreamy laid-back music videos, advertisements for things the people watching would never be able to buy, interspersed with Muslim hymns, sermons, prayers and rants.
The people were awake because it was Ramadan and they had spent the day fasting, and were now spending the night eating and talking. All the young men with nowhere to go and nothing to do sat outside watching the traffic, playing guitars or chess, talking and not talking, waiting. For what? Alas, like every other town we passed through on that strange hot night under the gibbous yellow moon, was a town of hovels with, every now and then, a resplendent mosque in which the light was bright white, a tiled, clean, well-lighted place where white-robed men and women sat and talked or sang or prayed. The hovels explained the mosques or the mosques explained the hovels, I couldn't decide which, but in Indonesia it is the case that a mosque will be made available if there are ten believers who want one and some towns, the larger ones, really do seem to have a mosque for every ten hovels.
But not Alas. Alas was just a small town, a few hovels, one mosque, and still that crowd of young men sitting outside on the stoops in the hot night with or without guitars, waiting. Small children dressed in rags ran after the bus as we passed down the dusty single main street, yelling out in shrill high voices, dropping behind as we turned the corner and changed down and headed further east, where the road ran out of town and along a low shore with palms and the shadows of islands further out, behind which the swollen yellow moon rose higher in the brown sky.
from: Luca Antara
The people were awake because it was Ramadan and they had spent the day fasting, and were now spending the night eating and talking. All the young men with nowhere to go and nothing to do sat outside watching the traffic, playing guitars or chess, talking and not talking, waiting. For what? Alas, like every other town we passed through on that strange hot night under the gibbous yellow moon, was a town of hovels with, every now and then, a resplendent mosque in which the light was bright white, a tiled, clean, well-lighted place where white-robed men and women sat and talked or sang or prayed. The hovels explained the mosques or the mosques explained the hovels, I couldn't decide which, but in Indonesia it is the case that a mosque will be made available if there are ten believers who want one and some towns, the larger ones, really do seem to have a mosque for every ten hovels.
But not Alas. Alas was just a small town, a few hovels, one mosque, and still that crowd of young men sitting outside on the stoops in the hot night with or without guitars, waiting. Small children dressed in rags ran after the bus as we passed down the dusty single main street, yelling out in shrill high voices, dropping behind as we turned the corner and changed down and headed further east, where the road ran out of town and along a low shore with palms and the shadows of islands further out, behind which the swollen yellow moon rose higher in the brown sky.
from: Luca Antara
26.10.06
crux
The first three advance copies of Luca Antara, the book, arrived on Monday, 23rd October, coincidentally the birthday of my younger son & my maternal grandmother. Looks good. Course, I can't actually read it anymore, having been through it so many times before, looking for errors. I pick it up, open it at random, read a few paras, put it down again. It's funny when you see a book for the first time. Apart from the glaring imperfections in the writing - which perhaps others won't see - there's also the anxious scanning for New Things. Except there are no New Things, just what you put in it ... but the production is fine & it is a nice object. I like the paper it's on. Booksellers & Publishers reviewed it & gave it 4 stars, but haven't seen the review yet & don't know if it's 4/5 or 4/10 or 4/100 ...
18.10.06
14.10.06
13.10.06
11.10.06
the uncertainty principle
Came back from New Zealand a few weeks ago with two novels. My sister lent me her copy of Carry Me Down by Irish/Australian M J Hyland and my friend Pete, New Zealander Craig Marriner's Southern Style. Two novels by (notional) antipodeans, one set in rural Ireland, the other in London. Both second books by relatively young writers. That's just about all they have in common. I started reading them in tandem, something I hardly ever do with fiction books. I'd read a bit of one, then a bit of the other. But then Southern Style, which is a kind of thriller, took over and I raced through to the end before returning to Carry Me Down.
It's told entirely from the point of view of an eccentric eleven year old boy, an only child, and as such is a remarkable achievement. The tone never falters, you never once doubt the veracity of John Egan's voice, you share his confusions, his agonies, his increasing alienation, as he attempts to understand what is happening to him and to his parents, to find a place in the world. It's also one of the grimmest books I've read, and affected me so strongly that at times I had to put it aside for a while. And yet ...
Southern Style is about a group of twenty-something antips in contemporary London. They mostly work in a warehouse where electronic games and the machines that play them are disbursed to the masses. When they aren't partying, that is. The plot, which is intricate and for the most part deftly handled, deals with an attempt by some crims to organise a heist from the warehouse, though you don't really find this out until about two thirds of the way through. The point of view shifts from character to character, with an authorial voice drifting in to tell connecting parts of the story. It's as virtuostic in its way as Hyland's performance. And yet ...
Endings are hard things to pull off. Both books essay an upbeat end and neither is really convincing. You feel the intervention of some other intelligence, which is of course the intelligence that has crafted the book in the first place, but that moment when it becomes, as it were, visible, and visibly manipulative, is disconcerting. Suddenly the schematics start to show, as if bones protruded through flesh. Suddenly what should be reassuring, even comforting - the happy ending - starts to look contrived. You feel as you often do after a movie has ended, as if the sensibility of film has somehow infiltrated the world of books.
I'm reminded of something W G Sebald, who never hid his distaste for the traditional novel, said of his own writing: It's the opposite of suspending disbelief and being swept along by the action, which is perhaps not the highest form of mental activity; it's to constantly ask, 'What happened to these people, what might they have felt like?' You can generate a similar state of mind in the reader by making them uncertain.
It's told entirely from the point of view of an eccentric eleven year old boy, an only child, and as such is a remarkable achievement. The tone never falters, you never once doubt the veracity of John Egan's voice, you share his confusions, his agonies, his increasing alienation, as he attempts to understand what is happening to him and to his parents, to find a place in the world. It's also one of the grimmest books I've read, and affected me so strongly that at times I had to put it aside for a while. And yet ...
Southern Style is about a group of twenty-something antips in contemporary London. They mostly work in a warehouse where electronic games and the machines that play them are disbursed to the masses. When they aren't partying, that is. The plot, which is intricate and for the most part deftly handled, deals with an attempt by some crims to organise a heist from the warehouse, though you don't really find this out until about two thirds of the way through. The point of view shifts from character to character, with an authorial voice drifting in to tell connecting parts of the story. It's as virtuostic in its way as Hyland's performance. And yet ...
Endings are hard things to pull off. Both books essay an upbeat end and neither is really convincing. You feel the intervention of some other intelligence, which is of course the intelligence that has crafted the book in the first place, but that moment when it becomes, as it were, visible, and visibly manipulative, is disconcerting. Suddenly the schematics start to show, as if bones protruded through flesh. Suddenly what should be reassuring, even comforting - the happy ending - starts to look contrived. You feel as you often do after a movie has ended, as if the sensibility of film has somehow infiltrated the world of books.
I'm reminded of something W G Sebald, who never hid his distaste for the traditional novel, said of his own writing: It's the opposite of suspending disbelief and being swept along by the action, which is perhaps not the highest form of mental activity; it's to constantly ask, 'What happened to these people, what might they have felt like?' You can generate a similar state of mind in the reader by making them uncertain.
8.10.06
southerly change
Why did you leave without saying goodbye? A redundant question - it has happened before. Before what? This latest occasion. The skies are grey, the moon is full, unseen behind those cloudy clouds. The palms bend in the wind that blew down the street some eight hours ago, and blows still. Still blows. Tremendously. Why did you leave without? We went swimming anyway, the pool was full of leaves, there was someone sunbathing in a pink bikini who reminded me so strongly of you I felt momentarily insane. Her husband, solicitously, covered her with a towel, later their son got out and then couldn't undo the knot on the plastic bag full of fruit drinks. We, my sons and I, came back here and sat on the couch while I read half a chapter of Treasure Island out loud. They don't really get the antiquated language, though every word speaks. Yet they're interested too, how could they not be? Treasure? Island? I want that map, it's not about money, doubloons or pieces of eight, nickels and dimes, those shiny bits you throw me now and again. It's a map of the future I want, I can dig, where to dig? I can search, where to search? I can ... endure. What for? A girl pauses out front and picks from the garden a hot pink geranium to add to her bouquet. I can see the sudden explosion in her eyes of the colour of the flower she has to bend and pluck. Can feel her happiness in the change in her walk as she goes on to her assignation. Why did you? I want not to wait and will wait. I want to go and will stay. I want not to want. Why?
27.9.06
3 Basque proverbs & 2 words
Gaua, gogapenen ama: Night is the mother of thought.
Jentalik are/were a race of giants in Basque legend. The word comes from the same Latin root as Gentile, foreigner, with the Basque plural attached, but some think it also attests to a folk memory of the ancient people we now call Neanderthals. In this version, the Basques are descended directly from Cro-Magnon humans who co-existed with Neanderthals on the Iberian Peninsula - and perhaps elsewhere as well - for many thousands of years.
Izena duen guztiak izatea ere badauje: Everything with a name exists.
Our word Centaur may be of Basque origin. Zalzaval = horse-man. Basques say they are descended from Zalvazal. One of the oldest Basque festivals, the Rigodon dance (from erri-goi-doi, meaning City of Heaven), features a man in a horse costume (the Zamalzain, the horse-man) dancing around a cup, variously referred to as the Grail or the entrance to the spirit world. Today, this is a glass of wine.
Nola soinu, hala dautza: Each kind of music calls forth its own kind of dance.
Jentalik are/were a race of giants in Basque legend. The word comes from the same Latin root as Gentile, foreigner, with the Basque plural attached, but some think it also attests to a folk memory of the ancient people we now call Neanderthals. In this version, the Basques are descended directly from Cro-Magnon humans who co-existed with Neanderthals on the Iberian Peninsula - and perhaps elsewhere as well - for many thousands of years.
Izena duen guztiak izatea ere badauje: Everything with a name exists.
Our word Centaur may be of Basque origin. Zalzaval = horse-man. Basques say they are descended from Zalvazal. One of the oldest Basque festivals, the Rigodon dance (from erri-goi-doi, meaning City of Heaven), features a man in a horse costume (the Zamalzain, the horse-man) dancing around a cup, variously referred to as the Grail or the entrance to the spirit world. Today, this is a glass of wine.
Nola soinu, hala dautza: Each kind of music calls forth its own kind of dance.
26.9.06
E Pluribus Unum
Walking back down Parnell Street in Strathfield to my car the other evening, I saw a coin glinting on the pavement and picked it up. Not so very far along the same street, I picked up another. The light wasn't good enough for me to see what they were, and even when I came home I had to look at them through a magnifying glass. The first is a small golden 1977 Hong Kong twenty cent piece, with crenallated edges and Queen Bess II on the back. Lot of Chinese live in Strathfield so I guess that explains that. The other turned out to be a 1907 US nickel, with a big Roman V, flanked by wreaths, on one side and Liberty, her face almost effaced, on the reverse. How on earth did that get there, I wonder?
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