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Absolutely Revolting

June 2007, no. 292

Welcome to the June 2007 issue of Australian Book Review.

Geordie Williamson reviews Meanjin Vol. 66, no. 1 and Overland 186
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Contents Category: Journals
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Article Title: Eros and politics
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Roland Barthes called language our second skin: ‘I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.’ Which should make the latest Meanjin, ‘On love, sex and desire’, a veritable Kama Sutra of literary massage. Yet it opens, perversely enough, with a denunciation of the erotic. John Armstrong’s honest, elegant and sharply self-critical essay recounts an early sexual experience during a brief trip to Paris. Giving his father the slip one morning, the teenager snuck off and spent his money on a prostitute. Afterwards he wandered the streets, full of loathing: ‘I was wicked, stupid, naïve, vile, corrupt, irresponsible, thick, wasteful, out of control, nasty, brutish.’
Book 1 Title: Meanjin Vol. 66, No. 1
Book 1 Subtitle: On love, sex and desire
Book Author: Ian Britain
Book 1 Biblio: Melbourne University Publishing, $22.95 pb, 234 pp,
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
Book 2 Title: Overland 186
Book 2 Subtitle: The frightened country
Book 2 Author: Nathan Hollier
Book 2 Biblio: $12.50 pb, 96 pp
Book 2 Author Type: Editor
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Roland Barthes called language our second skin: ‘I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.’ Which should make the latest Meanjin, ‘On love, sex and desire’, a veritable Kama Sutra of literary massage. Yet it opens, perversely enough, with a denunciation of the erotic. John Armstrong’s honest, elegant and sharply self-critical essay recounts an early sexual experience during a brief trip to Paris. Giving his father the slip one morning, the teenager snuck off and spent his money on a prostitute. Afterwards he wandered the streets, full of loathing: ‘I was wicked, stupid, naïve, vile, corrupt, irresponsible, thick, wasteful, out of control, nasty, brutish.’

Read more: Geordie Williamson reviews 'Meanjin Vol. 66, no. 1' and 'Overland 186'

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Alison Broinowski reviews Dreaming of East: Western women and the exotic allure of the Orient by Barbara Hodgson and Women of the Gobi: Journeys on the Silk Road by Kate James
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Contents Category: Travel
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Article Title: Intrepid or intrusive?
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Jane Austen’s latest biographer, Jon Spence, observes that by deciding to support herself by writing rather than live on a husband’s income, Austen was spared the likelihood of annual pregnancies, exhaustion, infection and early death, fates that confronted many married women of her day. Another means of avoidance was travel abroad. That was not the only motive, of course, of the many European women who, from the early eighteenth century, attracted admiration, censure and curiosity by combining writing and travel. Nor did it always work.
Book 1 Title: Dreaming of East
Book 1 Subtitle: Western women and the exotic allure of the Orient
Book Author: Barbara Hodgson
Book 1 Biblio: Hardie Grant Books, $29.95 pb, 184 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Title: Women of the Gobi
Book 2 Subtitle: Journeys on the Silk Road
Book 2 Author: Kate James
Book 2 Biblio: Pluto Press Australia, $29.95 pb, 262 pp
Book 2 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Cover Small (400 x 600):
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Jane Austen’s latest biographer, Jon Spence, observes that by deciding to support herself by writing rather than live on a husband’s income, Austen was spared the likelihood of annual pregnancies, exhaustion, infection and early death, fates that confronted many married women of her day. Another means of avoidance was travel abroad. That was not the only motive, of course, of the many European women who, from the early eighteenth century, attracted admiration, censure and curiosity by combining writing and travel. Nor did it always work.

Read more: Alison Broinowski reviews 'Dreaming of East: Western women and the exotic allure of the Orient' by...

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Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews Island 107 and Griffith Review 15
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Contents Category: Journals
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Article Title: How we're travelling
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It may be the global unease of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that is causing Australian writers and thinkers to focus more and more on ‘place’: on the fractures and fissures between the homogenising impulse of the nationalist project, on the one hand, and on the other, the impossibility of constructing Australia as a sociological monolith. The current issues of these two journals explore the profound differences between one ‘place’ and another: between Australia and Elsewhere, mainland and island, the mansions of the haves and the degraded housing estates of the have-nots; between state and state, city and city, city and bush, inner-city homelessness and outer-suburban sprawl. And if you expand the concept of ‘place’ into its metaphorical dimensions, there’s almost nothing you can’t discuss, from the buzz-phrase ‘the space of memory’ through the class-bound notion of ‘knowing one’s place’ to L.P. Hartley’s classic ‘The past is another country; they do things differently there’.
Book 1 Title: Griffith Review 15
Book 1 Subtitle: Divided Nation
Book Author: Julianne Schultz
Book 1 Biblio: ABC Books, $19.95, 280 pp, 9780733320569
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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It may be the global unease of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that is causing Australian writers and thinkers to focus more and more on ‘place’: on the fractures and fissures between the homogenising impulse of the nationalist project, on the one hand, and on the other, the impossibility of constructing Australia as a sociological monolith. The current issues of these two journals explore the profound differences between one ‘place’ and another: between Australia and Elsewhere, mainland and island, the mansions of the haves and the degraded housing estates of the have-nots; between state and state, city and city, city and bush, inner-city homelessness and outer-suburban sprawl. And if you expand the concept of ‘place’ into its metaphorical dimensions, there’s almost nothing you can’t discuss, from the buzz-phrase ‘the space of memory’ through the class-bound notion of ‘knowing one’s place’ to L.P. Hartley’s classic ‘The past is another country; they do things differently there’.

Read more: Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'Island 107' and 'Griffith Review 15'

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Brian McFarlane reviews A Little Rain on Thursday by Matt Rubinstein
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Contents Category: Fiction
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Article Title: Alchemical wonder
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I realise it is a stretch, but imagine The Da Vinci Code with brains. No, that’s not fair: it obviously takes brains of a kind to top best-seller lists for several years. So try thinking of how a serious intellect, as distinct from a facility for page-turning compulsiveness, might have gone to work on it. Such effort won’t tell you all you need to know about Matt Rubinstein’s new novel, but A Little Rain on Thursday is inter alia about old manuscripts, church history, subterranean chambers, Templars and libraries – and it is compulsive reading.
Book 1 Title: A Little Rain on Thursday
Book Author: Matt Rubinstein
Book 1 Biblio: Text, $32.95 pb, 305 pp, 9781921145728
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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I realise it is a stretch, but imagine The Da Vinci Code with brains. No, that’s not fair: it obviously takes brains of a kind to top best-seller lists for several years. So try thinking of how a serious intellect, as distinct from a facility for page-turning compulsiveness, might have gone to work on it. Such effort won’t tell you all you need to know about Matt Rubinstein’s new novel, but A Little Rain on Thursday is inter alia about old manuscripts, church history, subterranean chambers, Templars and libraries – and it is compulsive reading.

Read more: Brian McFarlane reviews 'A Little Rain on Thursday' by Matt Rubinstein

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