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Absolutely Revolting

August 2021, no. 434

The August issue offers readers a feast of fiction, along with the magazine’s usual probing commentary and criticism. The issue features all three stories shortlisted for the Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, as well as reviews of new books by Rachel Cusk, Tony Birch, Bill Birtles and ABR Rising Star Sarah Walker. In non-fiction, Stephen Bennetts highlights one of the overlooked contexts for the debate over Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, while Michael Dwyer recounts Australian journalists’ enduring fascination with China. The risks of border crossing are also weighed by Elisabeth Holdsworth and Seumas Spark in their reviews of recent books on the history of transportation. Brenda Walker and Jim Davidson pay tributes to the achievements of Hazel Rowley and Robin Boyd, respectively, and there are poems by Joan Fleming, John Kinsella, and Laurie Duggan – as well as plenty more!

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Kári Gíslason reviews In the Land of the Cyclops by Karl Ove Knausgaard
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Article Title: Shades and nuances
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Once, during a teaching exchange in Germany, I found myself learning as much from my students as I was trying to teaching them. This is not unusual. Delivering my thoughts to others, and then having them modified during discussions, helps me to understand what I want to say. By the end of the class, I begin to see what I probably should have known from the start.
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Article Hero Image Caption: Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard at the Edinburgh International Book Festival (photograph by GL Portrait/Alamy)
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Book 1 Title: In the Land of the Cyclops
Book Author: Karl Ove Knausgaard
Book 1 Biblio: Harvill Secker, $39.99 hb, 304 pp
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/qnAr9n
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Once, during a teaching exchange in Germany, I found myself learning as much from my students as I was trying to teach them. This is not unusual. Delivering my thoughts to others, and then having them modified during discussions, helps me to understand what I want to say. By the end of the class, I begin to see what I probably should have known from the start.

On this particular occasion, I was teaching essay writing. My students kept insisting that the German tradition was different from mine, an Anglo-American one that says you should assert all your main points early on, and then support them through a careful staging of the argument. In contrast, they had been taught to allow the argument to evolve in the piece itself – to be discovered by the very act of writing. Wasn’t it rather crude to pretend you knew it all at the beginning?

Read more: Kári Gíslason reviews 'In the Land of the Cyclops' by Karl Ove Knausgaard

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Sean Pryor reviews The Poets of Rapallo: How Mussolini’s Italy shaped British, Irish, and US writers by Lauren Arrington
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Article Title: An outward turn
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How best to tell the history of literature? – a long, chronological survey tracing broad arcs of development, or as a tight focus on a single, transformative year? The dedicated study of a single writer’s life, or the story of a movement, of several writers brought together for a time by some common cause? In recent years, the history of modernist literature has enjoyed these and other treatments. In Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The literary history of a meal (2014), Lucy McDiarmid takes as her subject a single evening: a dinner, held in West Sussex on 18 January 1914, in honour of the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and attended by six other poets, including W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. That famous evening serves to focus a wide-ranging discussion of literary friendship and romance, collaboration and rivalry.
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Book 1 Title: The Poets of Rapallo
Book 1 Subtitle: How Mussolini’s Italy shaped British, Irish, and US writers
Book Author: Lauren Arrington
Book 1 Biblio: Oxford University Press, US$35 hb, 248 pp
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Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/ORnGQW
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How best to tell the history of literature? – a long, chronological survey tracing broad arcs of development, or as a tight focus on a single, transformative year? The dedicated study of a single writer’s life, or the story of a movement, of several writers brought together for a time by some common cause? In recent years, the history of modernist literature has enjoyed these and other treatments. In Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The literary history of a meal (2014), Lucy McDiarmid takes as her subject a single evening: a dinner, held in West Sussex on 18 January 1914, in honour of the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and attended by six other poets, including W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. That famous evening serves to focus a wide-ranging discussion of literary friendship and romance, collaboration and rivalry.

In her new book, The Poets of Rapallo, Lauren Arrington instead chooses a place: the picturesque Italian seaside town of Rapallo, ‘nestled in a placid bay on the Ligurian coast’, where in the late 1920s and early 1930s several British, Irish, and American writers and artists lived and holidayed.

Read more: Sean Pryor reviews 'The Poets of Rapallo: How Mussolini’s Italy shaped British, Irish, and US...

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Open Page with Laura Elizabeth Woollett
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Laura Elizabeth Woollett is the author of The Love of a Bad Man (Scribe, 2016) and Beautiful Revolutionary (Scribe, 2018). She was the City of Melbourne’s 2020 Boyd Garret writer-in-residence and is a 2020–22 Marten Bequest Scholar for Prose. The Newcomer (Scribe, 2021) is her latest novel.
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Laura Elizabeth Woollett is the author of The Love of a Bad Man (Scribe, 2016) and Beautiful Revolutionary (Scribe, 2018). She was the City of Melbourne’s 2020 Boyd Garret writer-in-residence and is a 2020–22 Marten Bequest Scholar for Prose. The Newcomer (Scribe, 2021) is her latest novel.

 

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why?

Malta. My mum’s side of the family is Maltese, and I’ve been wanting to return as an adult after visiting as a child. I’d like to set a novel there, someday.

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John Arnold reviews Pride of Place: Exploring the Grimwade Collection edited by Alisa Bunbury
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Pride of Place describes in detail a selection of the outstanding collection of Australian books, paintings, photographs, and prints that Russell and Mabel Grimwade donated to the University of Melbourne. The main focus is on Russell, but they were clearly a team with shared interests in Australian native trees and plants and the European history of Australia.
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Book 1 Title: Pride of Place
Book 1 Subtitle: Exploring the Grimwade Collection
Book Author: Alisa Bunbury
Book 1 Biblio: The Miegunyah Press/Potter Museum of Art, $59.95 hb, 282 pp
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Pride of Place describes in detail a selection of the outstanding collection of Australian books, paintings, photographs, and prints that Russell and Mabel Grimwade donated to the University of Melbourne. The main focus is on Russell, but they were clearly a team with shared interests in Australian native trees and plants and the European history of Australia.

Russell Grimwade was born in 1879, less than fifty years after Europeans first settled in what was to become Victoria. His father was one half of the highly successful chemical and drug company Felton and Grimwade, formed in 1867. (The other half was the donor of the bequest that bears his name and which has so enriched the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria.)

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Words, a poem by Laurie Duggan
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a poem is a house into which / words are inserted // permeable, vapour or rain / altering the light outside ...
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a poem is a house into which
words are inserted

permeable, vapour or rain
altering the light outside

a movement before the movement of trees
a lens on those branches

words drop into the street
onto the floor of imagination

a sky contains all this,
the jigsaw

of a baroque painting
things tending outward at angles

held together for a moment
space between the leaves

vivid, darkness
cast down on the earth

a row of books lit up
in shifting reflections

it might be calligraphy
or it might be somebody,

a figure deciphered
from advancing ground

absorbed back into it
a kind of writing

it might be a mud wall
or a window

a day to move into
as the lines advance

carrying the writer along,
shapes of buildings behind trees,

part yellow, part drab green,
denote a suburb

one autumn in another city
where I gathered random notes

to rescue a poem from
the weight of import

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