Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%
Skip to main content
Absolutely Revolting

September 1999, no. 214

Welcome to the September 1999 issue of Australian Book Review.

Subscribe
Buy this issue
Read the facsimile edition
Katharine England reviews Firehead by Venero Armanno
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Fiction
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Custom Highlight Text:

Publicists obviously rack their brains for innovative ways to promote their books: new novels have come equipped with bookmarks, balloons, and boxes of matches (Rosie Scott’s Lives on Fire), and six pages of variegated hype is not uncommon for a book targeted as a future best-seller. Random House, however, have recently come up with a format that is genuinely useful to reviewers: a neat, double-sided fold that incorporates – instead of the insistent ‘marketing points’ and the publicist’s puff picking out all the best quotes and rendering them instantly second-hand – a summary of the plot, a couple of style-bytes, and an interview in which the author discusses the genesis of the novel.
Book 1 Title: Firehead
Book Author: Venero Armanno
Book 1 Biblio: Random House, $22.95 pb, 402pp, 0 0918 3992
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Display Review Rating: No

Publicists obviously rack their brains for innovative ways to promote their books: new novels have come equipped with bookmarks, balloons, and boxes of matches (Rosie Scott’s Lives on Fire), and six pages of variegated hype is not uncommon for a book targeted as a future best-seller. Random House, however, have recently come up with a format that is genuinely useful to reviewers: a neat, double-sided fold that incorporates – instead of the insistent ‘marketing points’ and the publicist’s puff picking out all the best quotes and rendering them instantly second-hand – a summary of the plot, a couple of style-bytes, and an interview in which the author discusses the genesis of the novel.

Read more: Katharine England reviews 'Firehead' by Venero Armanno

Write comment (0 Comments)
Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews Drylands by Thea Astley
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Fiction
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

Do not attempt to judge this book by its amazingly beautiful but iconographically confusing cover. A close-up photograph of a single leaf shows its veins and pores in tiny detail. The colours are the most pastel and tender of creamy greens. Superimposed over this lush and suggestively fertile image is the book’s one-word title: Drylands ...
Book 1 Title: Drylands
Book Author: Thea Astley
Book 1 Biblio: Viking, $29.95 hb, 294 pp, 0 670 88619 X
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Display Review Rating: No

Do not attempt to judge this book by its amazingly beautiful but iconographically confusing cover. A close-up photograph of a single leaf shows its veins and pores in tiny detail. The colours are the most pastel and tender of creamy greens. Superimposed over this lush and suggestively fertile image is the book’s one-word title: Drylands.

I love Thea Astley’s writing and always have. I love its densely woven grammar, its ingrained humour, its uncompromising politics, its demented metaphors, and its undimmed outrage at human folly, stupidity, and greed. I love the way that even at its most savage and despairing it has always had a suggestion of redemptive energy working away somewhere in the plot, no matter how subterranean, outmanoeuvred, or comprehensively beaten down.

Read more: Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'Drylands' by Thea Astley

Write comment (0 Comments)
Brenda Niall reviews Foreign Correspondence by Geraldine Brooks
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Memoir
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

When Geraldine Brooks went through her father’s possessions after his death, she found the bundles of letters which prompted her to write Foreign Correspondence. Lawrie Brooks had been in the habit of writing to politicians and intellectuals with ideas and questions, and he had kept all their replies. Each letter, Brooks reflects, is ‘a small piece of the mosaic of his restless mind’. Because her father hoarded his past in photographs and newspaper clippings as well as letters, she had the makings of an intimate portrait of a reserved and unhappy man.
Book 1 Title: Foreign Correspondence
Book Author: Geraldine Brooks
Book 1 Biblio: Anchor, $17.95 pb, 244 pp, 1 86359 132X
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Display Review Rating: No

When Geraldine Brooks went through her father’s possessions after his death, she found the bundles of letters which prompted her to write Foreign Correspondence. Lawrie Brooks had been in the habit of writing to politicians and intellectuals with ideas and questions, and he had kept all their replies. Each letter, Brooks reflects, is ‘a small piece of the mosaic of his restless mind’. Because her father hoarded his past in photographs and newspaper clippings as well as letters, she had the makings of an intimate portrait of a reserved and unhappy man.

Brooks also found an unexpected way into her own past. Her father had kept the letters from the penfriends of her teenage years. Haphazardly acquired in the 1960s, these penfriends wrote from affluent North Sydney (a world away from her own inner west suburb of Concord), from America, Israel, Jordan, and France. Re-reading their letters, she reconstructed the younger self to whom they were sent.

Read more: Brenda Niall reviews 'Foreign Correspondence' by Geraldine Brooks

Write comment (0 Comments)
Robyn Annear reviews Inside the Rocks: The archaeology of a neighbourhood by Grace Karskens
Free Article: No
Contents Category: History
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

On getting hold of Grace Karskens’s new book, I went straight to the colour plates of artefacts resurrected from the neighbourhood of the title, part of the historic Rocks area of inner Sydney. I love to look at salvage: pieced-together dinner plates, dolls’ heads, and brass buckles and buttons whose verdigris defies any amount of elbow grease. But the photo that really grabbed me was of a dug-up gold wedding ring, modelled on one finger of a hand neatly manicured but for a crescent of black dirt embedded deep under the thumbnail. To me, that minute trace of the Rocks neighbourhood spoke vividly – more so, somehow, than any of the scrubbed-up artefacts – of the peculiar joys of dabbling in other people’s cesspits and of the adventure into history that underlies Inside the Rocks.
Book 1 Title: Inside the Rocks
Book 1 Subtitle: The archaeology of a neighbourhood
Book Author: Grace Karskens
Book 1 Biblio: Hale & Iremonger, $34.95, 240 pp, 0 868806 666 4
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Display Review Rating: No

On getting hold of Grace Karskens’s new book, I went straight to the colour plates of artefacts resurrected from the neighbourhood of the title, part of the historic Rocks area of inner Sydney. I love to look at salvage: pieced-together dinner plates, dolls’ heads, and brass buckles and buttons whose verdigris defies any amount of elbow grease. But the photo that really grabbed me was of a dug-up gold wedding ring, modelled on one finger of a hand neatly manicured but for a crescent of black dirt embedded deep under the thumbnail. To me, that minute trace of the Rocks neighbourhood spoke vividly – more so, somehow, than any of the scrubbed-up artefacts – of the peculiar joys of dabbling in other people’s cesspits and of the adventure into history that underlies Inside the Rocks.

Read more: Robyn Annear reviews 'Inside the Rocks: The archaeology of a neighbourhood' by Grace Karskens

Write comment (0 Comments)
John McLaren reviews The Salt of Broken Tears by Michael Meehan
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Fiction
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

In one sense, the publisher’s blurb on this novel says it all.
Book 1 Title: The Salt of Broken Tears
Book Author: Michael Meehan
Book 1 Biblio: Vintage, $17.95 pb, 297 pp, 0091839130
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Display Review Rating: No

In one sense, the publisher’s blurb on this novel says it all.

On the edges of the salt lakes, in the harsh Mallee country of north-west Victoria in the 1920s, isolated soldier settler farms struggle to survive the dust and despair. There are few travellers: just the Debt Adjuster, or the Indian hawker Cabel Singh. Or a girl who turns up out of nowhere. Eileen. When Eileen disappears, a young boy sets out with his horse and pup to find her …

Subscribe to ABR

Read more: John McLaren reviews 'The Salt of Broken Tears' by Michael Meehan

Write comment (0 Comments)

More Articles ...