The Cook is a gobsmacker of a book.

Written by the much-lauded Australian writer Wayne Macauley, The Cook’s themes of capitalism-gone-mad, excessive consumption, untrammelled growth and rampant exploitation of humans, animals and natural resources is timely.

Macauley explores a number of issues recently highlighted by the Occupy Movement, animal welfare groups and the GFC through his main protagonist Zac, one of a number of young offenders sent to Cook School to learn a trade and become decent, upstanding and productive citizens.

The story, told from Zac’s point of view, pays no heed to commas or quotation marks so that sentences tumble and flow. It is an inspired choice that takes us along for a hypnotising ride and immerses us fully in Zac’s macabre world, which, we learn along the way, is our world too.

Zac, unlike most of the ne’er-do-wells who end up at Cook School, is not only determined to make a new start, he has his heart set on becoming one of the world’s great chefs. A lad to be applauded, he embodies the qualities we most admire: hard work, ambition and a belief in the individual. Zac, who is happy to work long hours for a pittance, is the equivalent of every free marketeer’s wet dream. And like most in the western world and beyond, he’s swallowed the ideology of laissez-faire capitalism hook, line and sinker:

Cook School was my university and I was learning things I never learned while I was pissing my future up against the wall. What else are rich and successful people except those who’ve learnt how to manipulate what’s around them a guy dealing win the money market architects designing fancy buildings TV guys making TV shows selling dreams to losers writers and their happy endings. That’s what civilisation is I reckon manipulating nature.

Zac takes on Head Chef’s (Head Chef didn’t have to wear a cravat for me to channel Matt Preston) dictum that power is achieved through service. Maybe that’s what the contestants on MasterChef and its huge audiences believe too, persuaded by a popular culture that depicts working your arse off in the kitchen as somehow glamorous.

But unlike MasterChef, which spares the salivating audience the suffering of the animal, the recipes in The Cook start with the slaughter of the beast. Macauley seems to have had a lot of fun contrasting the brutality of the kill with what ends up on the plate:

… I put them on the bench and got a cleaver and with a sharp whack I cracked open the skulls and wrenched them apart with my fingers. The brains inside were still warm and slippery. I put them on the bench … We plated up I garnished mine with warm baby onions caramelised in balsamic and some sprigs of fresh Italian parsley.

A vegetarian troubled by the ethics of eating meat, I’m probably not the right person to judge the mouth-watering appeal or otherwise of Zac’s recipes. But appetite’s a funny thing. Head Chef again:

To public taste. To whim. To folly. To whatever looks and smells new. We bow to the fickle and frivolous we are servants of all that is decadent excessive unnecessary.

Still, I’d be surprised if carnivores didn’t struggle with the mess of blood and guts that precedes the plating up of body parts even when they’ve been simmered and dressed up with nasturtiums.

The glorification of food and the adulation of celebrity chefs also act as barometers of social decay. As Shelley Gare points out in her must-read The triumph of the airheads and the retreat from common sense, all that it takes for a kind of amoral airheadism to thrive is for people to be distracted by money or power or both.

When halfway through the novel, Zac is whisked from Cook School to serve as cook to a wealthy family, I was grateful to be transported from the killing fields to gentility no matter how superficial or dysfunctional:

My husband she said is a very rich man we are a very rich family we can have whatever we want when we want it but you know I’m going to tell you a secret all I really want is for us to sit down together once a day five days a week as a family and talk.

The end when it comes shouldn’t have been a surprise – like a good crime novel all the clues were there – but be warned: don’t read the last chapter just before you turn out the light. The sickening dénouement is not one of the happy endings Zac decries in an earlier passage. It is, however, an antidote to fiction that too often massages misplaced beliefs in our selves, our society and our humanity.

It is impossible to read The Cook and not examine your own conscience: the status we seek by virtue of the food we serve and eat, the bars we seek out, the indulgences we permit and excuse because we are, for some reason or another, deserving. No matter how we critique late-capitalism, we are all seduced by its temptations and we are all complicit in its endurance and its legacy.

The Cook is not without its faults. The wealthy but dislocated family was a little too clichéd, Zac’s transformation from bad boy to brilliant chef in just a few months stretched credibility, and Zac’s shift to the family had it come earlier – slaughter and its metaphors were wearing a bit thin – would have better served the themes of the narrative. But these are minor quibbles. For my money, The Cook does a better and more nuanced job of showing the excesses of late-capitalism, its gluttony, its ambition and its class relations, than The Slap. And it has a sense of humour, albeit a dark one.

The Cook is one of the most disturbing novels I’ve read in a long time. I hope it ends up, as did Macauley’s debut novel Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe, on the VCE reading list.

The work begins with the line, ‘You’re a good neighbour’, from ‘The Art of Courting’. The second-person point of view is notoriously difficult and I am impressed by the way you handle it, and by the shifts in point of view through the stories. In ‘Your Project’ you ask the reader to walk around in a pair of very difficult shoes. Can you tell us a little about working from the different conventions of point of view?

Second person can be tricky but there’s something I find quite freeing about it. It has a particular quality that allows me to experiment with language. ‘The Art of Courting’ is about a single woman in her forties who engages in a series of flirtatious games with a new neighbour. So the story itself has a sense of play and the language does too. There’s also an element of voyeurism about this story and the use of second person to place the reader in this woman’s shoes magnifies that. Different points of view work for different stories and I don’t have a particular favourite. I find that the characters and what the story needs dictate which point of view I use.

‘Kicking Dirt’ is a rich story: there really is a novel’s worth of back-story and presence here, skilfully managed. This ‘sense of the whole’ of the larger story indicated by the short form is something I’m very interested in. Is there a novel in the wings? A screen play? Why the short story form?

That’s what I love about the short form; the way it’s a slice of a larger world, a glimpse of something bigger. For me, the characters are fully-rounded people, with their own lifetime of history and quirks and experiences, and I always hope that translates to the page. I want my reader to be able to imagine a life beyond the brevity of the story.

I love short stories – both reading and writing them. There’s this idea that gets put about that they are a training ground for writing a novel. I completely disagree. The novel and the short story are two completely different beasts. And speaking of novels, yes there is one in the wings. I’ve been working on it in a very part-time way for the last five years in between editing and child wrangling. It’s frustratingly, tantalisingly close to being finished. I had a residency at the Varuna Writers Centre earlier this year where I cracked a problem that I’d had with it for months. But then it got sidelined. I became immersed in the editing process for Two Steps Forward, then various major editing projects took over, and now there’s all the publicity work for this and another book I’ve edited. I’m itching to stop talking about writing and actually do some! I have some time set aside in January when I’ve promised myself I’ll do nothing but focus on the novel. I’m sure the long break will actually prove beneficial, allowing me to come to it fresh, but I’m craving being in that space again with those characters.

‘The Third Child’ also deals with the almost ‘underground’ reality of women and pregnancy, in particular, women in miscarriage and ‘mothering’ is one of the themes of the collection. I know from your work at Overland that this is a deeply personal realm for you. Can you talk to us about the process of writing painful subject matter, and also on having that work edited and then published in the public domain?

I haven’t heard it put like that before – ‘underground’ – but it’s such an accurate description. Miscarriage is so common – women experience 55,000 miscarriages each year in Australia alone – but it doesn’t get talked about openly at either a private or public level. And yes, this is very personal subject matter because I experienced a miscarriage myself, which I wrote about for Overland, but I also wanted to deal with miscarriage through fiction because it’s rarely represented in anything other than clichés. I wanted to write about characters that were authentic, and really draw the reader into the complexity of the experience. Having this story go out into the public domain has been quite challenging because it is linked closely with my own experience, but it seems to have struck a chord with so many people. It’s the story that has been singled out the most – by both men and women – so readers have obviously connected with it. That’s been very gratifying.

‘Tangerine’ is also a poignant slice of the ‘difficult life’ that is not much talked about and, in my opinion, would make an excellent short film, as would many of the stories in Two Steps Forward. Are you purposefully ‘cinematic’ in your approach?

It’s interesting that you should say that. I don’t set out with the intention to be cinematic and yet the opening scene of ‘Tangerine’ arrived in my imagination much like a complete movie scene. I saw a man and a young girl standing together on a platform in the middle of the night. They were ill-at-ease with each other, and I wanted to know why this was, and what they were doing on that platform. The story unravelled from there. I’d love to see ‘Tangerine’ as a short film (any interested filmmakers out there?!).

I was lucky enough to have a filmmaker make a book trailer for Two Steps Forward using snatches of text from ‘The Art of Courting’. It really is a piece of art in its own right. The footage is stunning, but he also really captured the style and essence of that story, and of the collection as a whole. It’s quite something seeing your words come alive in a different medium.

How did you get involved with Affirm Press and the SHORTS initiative?

I saw Affirm’s press release calling for submissions to their Long Story Shorts series of six collections by newer writers. Given that it’s so difficult to get a collection published unless you’re already a well-established author the initiative was perfect for me. As it was for 450 other writers. Affirm Press were inundated with manuscripts and spent months wading through them. Fortunately for me Two Steps Forward was chosen as the series’ swansong. And it’s been a brilliant ride.

Two Steps Forward can be purchased at all good book stores.

When Hitler came to power I was in the bath. The wireless in the living room was turned up loud, but all that drifted down to me were waves of happy cheering, like a football match …

Overland’s Boris Kelly corresponded with Anna Funder.

BK: Both of your books deal with the politics and, to some extent, the logistics of covert surveillance. What is it about spying that fascinates you?

AF: To secretly gain information about people and use it against them is a form of power, often illicit. It is done everywhere – by political parties, by secret services, by news organisations, by internet giants, by corporations trying to sell us something. I think it is a kind of voyeurism and theft combined and I think we need to be wary. Of course that is also what writers do, so the ethical entanglements of it are personal, not theoretical, to me.

BK: The central characters in All That I Am are German émigrés forced out of the country after the burning of the Reichstag and Hitler’s ascent to power. Although they are Jewish, their persecution by the National Socialists is primarily a consequence of their political activities, not their religion or ethnicity. What was it about this particular moment in history and the lives of these characters, most of whom are based on real people, that drew your attention?

AF: I like the dramatic tension of telling a story about prescience and courage. These people were the bell-ringers in a world that would not listen. The action takes place between 1933 and 1935, which is a long time before the war, and the better-known stories from that time. In the beginning – though, of course, the Nazis were by nature anti-Semitic – their first priority was to eliminate or expel the educated, the outspoken, and the cultural elite. Hence, the expulsions as soon as they came to power. Later came the extraordinary and little-known extra-territorial assassination squads that were sent out. But I never saw myself as drawn to a period. I was drawn to write about the characters themselves. I am interested in courage and its flipside, terror. I am interested in how we can be braver than is good for us, or, on the other side, we can let ourselves and everyone else around us down.

AF: I don’t think this is a historical novel – it does not set out to represent an era for its own sake. It is, however, one that makes the past firmly present. The situations the characters find themselves in – speaking out against unjust and outrageous governmental power – are utterly contemporary. I could have written the same book about characters in China, or Libya, or Burma or Russia and set it in the present. The idea that things can be known as facts, and yet not fully apprehended in the hearts and minds of people or the body politic, is something that fascinates me because it speaks to the fact that humans are only in the second instance rational beings – we apprehend things by emotion first, and hence the force of the novel form in our culture.

As for specifics, well there are many resonances. For instance Clara’s brother is on a ship of Jews fleeing Hitler that is off the coast of Florida, but it is turned away by both the US and Canadian and Cuban administrations, and sent back to Europe. That is the kind of thing happening off the Australian coast now.

More importantly, I think that the relationships between the characters in the novel are ones I see all around – mistaken loves that are nevertheless permanent and passionate; true loves that don’t turn into practical, everyday lives lived together; the difference between what we want and what we need and how, try as we might, we just can’t see it.

BK: There are moments in the novel that contain highly significant but very subtle plot and character details which, on a first reading, are likely to be missed. On a second reading their weight is more apparent. How important are such fine details to the craft and technique of the writer?

AF: I think they are hugely important. Underneath the suspense story there are several others. The book is in one way about what we don’t see – what an individual can miss; what a society can miss – the rise of Hitler, the boats off the coast … The details need to be there for the story, but also for the reader to experience the missing, and then the satisfaction of, finally, ‘seeing’.

BK: To take that point further: The novel is narrated in part by Ruth Becker, a ninety-four year-old woman living in Bondi Junction in 2001. Ruth reflects on years spent in Germany and then London with her cousin Dora, her own journalist husband Hans Wesemann and the celebrated, revolutionary playwright, Ernst Toller. At one point Ruth says:

It is an observation that reflects on both her personal life, especially her marriage, but also to wider social and political circumstances. How do you regard this tension between the personal and political? Was this a challenge in writing the novel?

AF: I loved writing about what we see and what we don’t. I’m interested in blindness of all kinds – the necessary ones in marriage, in life – and the devastating ones, in politics and in the limits of public compassion. For instance, I think some marriages, perhaps many, survive by selective blindness to foibles that would otherwise drive us crazy. And yet this too can lead to serious consequences. On the political plane, the blindness of appeasement, in the case of the British government – and of course the Menzies government in Australia, too, though that wasn’t my subject in All That I Am – while understandable in some ways was also devastating, in the first instance for some of my characters, and then later for everyone. I don’t draw any glib equivalence between individual human souls and the shifting movements of public consciousness but I think one thing a novel can and should do is explore both.

BK: Dora is the pivotal character in the book. Your characterisation is drawn from accounts of the life of Dora Fabian, a pacifist, leftist political exile active in London, who was hunted by the Nazis. She is the most politically driven character in the novel. If she had lived on, do you think Dora would have returned to East or West Germany after the war?

AF: I think she would have gone to West Germany. She’d left the Socialist Workers Party a long time before. Or, she might have gone to the US, like Hannah Arendt did. Her ex-husband Walter went back West Germany.

BK: Do you write by hand at any point in the process of drafting?

AF: I have a notebook that I write things in – scraps, observations, ideas, pre-sleep insights. I never draft longhand, though sometimes the notes in the notebook are sentences, or paragraphs that come out of nowhere, and that I need to get down. When I look at the long-ago Stasiland notebooks – and there are ten of them – I can see the beginnings of paragraphs that were then fixed and honed for the book. Some come pristine though. For Stasiland I had the final paragraph of the book – ‘children on swings and roundabouts I never noticed were there’ – long before it was written. For All That I Am I had the last scene with Bev, and the last line where she ‘starts to clean’ also for a long, long time before I was done. These things are strange. It is as if I have an ending to write to, a point of hiatus or upswing or unfinished business that I nevertheless know is the final note of the book.

BK: Are you a meticulous note taker during the research phase?

AF: I don’t know that meticulous is the right word. It implies too much straight diligence. I do take lots of notes that I carry around with me. But they are bowerbird notes – bits of bright things that strike my mind.

BK: I’m interested to know if you might at some point write something closer to home, something with an explicitly Australian theme. Would you mind telling me what you are currently working on?

AF: I’m working on a novel. It’s sent in contemporary times and it’s not very political. Or not at the moment, at any rate.

BK: Given the acceleration of social and political volatility in the world today and the reactivation of the Left, do you think there is a place for the overtly political novel?

AF: I think there is always room for good novels. If they deal with political issues, so much the better. But to be good, they have to be about what it is that makes us human, and not, in the first instance, about prescriptions for living.

BK: Why the title, All That I Am?

AF: When Toller first sees Dora she’s holding an audience entranced with a speech. She extends her hand and he sees she is someone who holds their own life in their palm, to do with as she wishes. My characters are people who, like many activists, have to assess the value of their lives when powerful, possibly fatal forces are arrayed against them. Is it worth it to them to give up their lives? And on the other hand, for instance for Hans, he falls short of his ideas of himself. We all do this. When we do, we comfort ourselves with the idea that ‘we’re only human’. I wanted in the title to encompass the extraordinariness, the hugeness, the miracle of a single human being, and at the same time the smallness of a single soul.

So why bother? Because The Courier’s New Bicycle is a hybrid creature – a genre amalgam, but who would know from the bookshop shelf arrangement by genre, as if being in one category denies the possibility of the others?

My book rep tells me my real problem is that my surname begins with ‘W’. Chastened, I scuff my boot against her bag hung on the café chair. If only I’d had the perspicacity of Jim Grant, who, with a clear and canny eye to his future as an author, carefully gathered together the correct letters and syllables to make his nom de plume, and turned himself into Lee Child.

About labelling, I remember the first short story competition I sent a story to. Its requirements were that the writing be ‘speculative’. I thought, well, my stuff’s that. At the time, I didn’t realise how the term was part of a highly structured system of categorisation: one that a writer and their writing could become permanently ententacled in, despite the term itself being a superfluity, all fiction surely speculative. Anyway, this first story won that competition, then one called an Aurealis, and my trajectory as a writer of speculative fiction was set.

My first novel, The Daughters of Moab, was published in 2008 by HarperVoyager, and so it came out with a science fiction label. I preferred to call it poetic apocalyptic, a descriptor I’d come up with in an effort to flag to readers something of the style and substance of its interior, which was a conglomerate of SF, mythology and the supernatural, all with a literary bent, its bedrock being the land – a post-apocalyptic Terra Australis – and its preoccupations being with humanity’s capacity for destruction and equal instinct to survive.

Fiction that crosses genre lines runs the risk of not being judged on its own terms, but according to the label it comes with, preconceptions firmly attached. The Daughters of Moab, viewed through the lens of science fiction, was critiqued accordingly – and more often than not it vexed expectations, the prose deemed too obfuscatory for the genre. And while I maintained that a broader readership might get something out of a dose of the poetic mixed with the apocalyptic, apparently the story’s SF label made it too lowbrow for literary inspection.

I remember how my first-time novelist’s ego plunged like a bungy jumper into a bucket when (I shan’t say a close family member) saw the book cover’s shout line, Assassin. Protector. Blood Sister… and said, ‘If you write something like that, you have to expect a lot of people won’t want to read it’. Sadly, my close family member wasn’t wrong – labelling and shelf allocation all but killing a broader interest; and alas, the novel fell through the genre cracks.

By now you’re thinking I’m dark on labels. In fact I like labels, and sorting things. Some (family members) would say it’s my anally retentive Virgo nature coming to the fore, but I think labelling was invented to help everybody, not just me, organise a confusing world.

One of my favourite activities as a kid was to put all the animals from my big bag of plastic creatures into groups. Sometimes it was according to kind – farm animal, wild animal, mythological animal, etc; other times it was by biggest to littlest or best to worst; and other times it was according to the new alliances and friendships each had made with the others while I was off eating my breakfast. Eventually abandoning my bag of animals, I went on to list making and room tidying, my clothes drawers organised by colour and my files alphabetically. This, I said to myself, was so I could find things. Little did I know that this entirely sensible rationale would return later in life to bite me in the bum.

Back to the genre amalgam that is The Courier’s New Bicycle. I’m happy to report Australian Bookseller+Publisher has described it as ‘a disturbingly credible and darkly noir post-cyberpunk tale’. This quote-worthy phrase opens up the field of interest: the ‘noir’ a nod to crime fiction, the ‘cyberpunk’ to SF, and the ‘credible’ to current societal aptness. Hopefully, it will spur a variety of readers into wanting to know more about a bike courier and accidental sleuth who has a mystery to solve in the alleyways of a dystopian Melbourne just around the socio-political corner from now, despite the book’s despatch solely to the SF shelves steering it too towards the genre cracks. Which brings me to Venn diagrams.

Unlike fractions (those sharp-edged and unyielding divisions that caused me no end of pain), the circles that I learnt about in primary school geometry class, their intersections alluringly shaded, hinted at a world with grey areas, ambiguities. These days I wonder if my fascination for Venn diagrams was because I knew from quite young that I was attracted to girls as well as boys, desire floating in an as yet unnamed place, and those grey areas speaking to me of the possibilities that might live inside me and at the interstices of things. This might explain, in part, the gravitational pull cross-genre writing has always had on me, and maybe now’s the time to mention that Salisbury Forth, the primary protagonist in The Courier’s New Bicycle, is happily gender androgynous.

I don’t remember when I stopped believing in the binary labelling system currently used to decide sex and divide gender, and began to see both as continuums with any number of identity positions along them; but a non-intersecting binary now seems as blunt and flawed an instrument of categorising as the labelling system used, say, to keep literary and genre content apart.

An either/or world is a brittle, lifeless creature. The pleasure that sorting animals gave me as a kid was also the pleasure of re-sorting; that is, the freedom to change perspective and make endless rearrangements in the order of things. In my fiction I go to the grey areas and in-between places because they hold the most promise. And for those willing to read a novel that slips between the genre cracks, there’s always the possibility of finding wonderland.

Read more from Kim Westwood at her website.

Is the idea of simile and metaphor as powers that can ‘destroy and remake the very language’ of which the protagonist ‘is a piece’, itself a metaphor for the role of ‘writer’ as destroyer and creator of the world of ideas and ‘realities’ that shape society?

That’s certainly one aspect of the allegory that is suggested by the story. The scenes between Avice and the alien she teaches to speak (or to ‘unspeak’ as Miéville might say, since she makes it wreck its own sense of language in order to speak her own) dramatise very strongly what a struggle it can be to begin to see the world differently, though another’s eyes. It’s easy to read that as a metaphor for the writer’s own project, to present the reader with a new way of seeing things, encoded in language, and to ask the reader to join with that way of seeing things, even if it means abandoning, destroying or revising old ways, old traditions.

The political component in Miéville’s fiction-making is very clear, here. I think he’s saying, in order to remake the material world towards a more just and ethical vision of society, we need to also remake the language we have to describe it, and the stories through which we narrate it. He’s very interested in producing a sense of estrangement in his readers – you can see that in the way he’s so fond of neologisms and, somewhat paradoxically, in using obsolete, arcane words – he not only presents us with worlds that are unfamiliar but he also de-familiarises our own language and is always making us think about how words work.

You write: ‘But we are left wondering what might be possible if we called [violence, suffering, sacrifice] by their names, whatever those names might be in a new language that tried to account for the experience of Others …’ Is leaving the reader with this kind of wondering, writing that hasn’t quite reached its potential – or do you think Mieville has managed to achieve the ‘transformative’ power of language he, perhaps, was after?

This is a tough question, because I very much would have liked to have an ending to Embassytown that consciously invoked the kind of provisional sense of the possibilities and potentials of language that you’ve suggested. I don’t know whether the novel exactly elicits that ‘wondering’. Those questions about what might be possible are ones I’ve brought to it because of my own interest in sexual politics and they way they inhere in structures of representation – and because I’m used to seeing Miéville write about sexual politics in such different ways than he does in Embassytown.

I don’t want to detract from Miéville’s achievements as a writer who explores the transformative possibilities of language in more interesting ways than any just about any one else I can think of. His work is so rich in imagination, so allegorically dense, and I think he succeeds in crafting political fictions of extraordinary narrative and symbolic complexity, playfulness and artistic depth. I especially like the way in Embassytown he gestures so directly towards both the expressive limits and possibilities of language – the scene where Avice and Scile argue in bed over ‘the tragedy of language’, the way it can’t ever fully communicate experience, is perhaps my favourite moment in the novel. I like the idea very much that it is stories that acknowledge the limits of expressive possibility that allow us to appreciate just how much language can actually do.

But the novel asks the reader to join in with, to believe in and go along with, a resolution that is achieved at what I consider to be great cost. The ending is predicated on the unacknowledged suffering and exploitation of a powerless girl. This is surprising to me because Miéville is certainly a writer who cares very deeply about exploitation and suffering, and usually wants to call to account in some way those who inflict and profit from the abuse of power. No doubt other readers will disagree with this interpretation of what happens to Avice. But I found it very troubling. Of course what happens to Avice is not mindless cruelty – it happens for a reason, and it is very much a kind of sacrifice for the greater good in the end. So why can’t it be named?

It’s interesting to me that Miéville’s so obsessed with finding words for everything – he delights in crafting new words to describe things we’ve never imagined before, or calling back into use words we’ve forgotten: he has what you might call a mania for elaborate description. But what happens to Avice is remarkable in the way it remains unspoken, undescribed, a lacuna. She tries and fails to find words and forms of narration that do justice to her own experience. I think it’s worth asking why that is the case. Why is this particular experience unspeakable and unnameable? I tend to think that to call it what it seems to be – violence, abuse, possibly rape – would undermine the resolution and harmony of the ending.

What was the catalyst for writing Refiguring fiction?

The essay emerges from my academic interests in Renaissance literature and feminist rhetorical criticism. My PhD research focused on figurative language in Renaissance poetry, with a special interest in sexual politics and how they play out in figures like metaphor and simile. Again and again you see this trope at work in poetry and literature more generally, from Ovid through Dante, Donne, Marvell and Shakespeare, where the construction of metaphor is narrated as a story of rape or some kind of sexual sacrifice, a story that involves the violent transfer (to use the Latin word for metaphor) of one thing – an abstract idea – into the place of another.

The feminist critic Patricia Parker calls this ‘the metaphorical plot’. So when I read a story like Embassytown, where a woman is actually made into a Simile through an unnameable process of violent trauma, it’s very fascinating because it’s dramatising and making literal in a way what a lot of other literature only implies.

Gordon Teskey’s essay ‘Allegory, Materialism, Violence’ examines moments in allegorical literature – which he says is ‘concerned more than any other [genre] with the metaphorical implications of gender’ – when the symbolically violent process of making abstract meaning from matter is exposed, highlighting the usually-concealed conflict between form and meaning. ‘It is more broadly characteristic of allegory – though by no means more true of it – for this violence to be concealed so that the feminine figure embodies, with her whole body, the meaning that is imprinted in her without visible resistance,’ he argues. This is what we see in the figure of personification, for instance.

The violence of making meaning is very clear in Embassytown; this is, perhaps, the novel’s primary obsession – although the Hosts don’t recognize it as violence because they don’t see humans as thinking, feeling subjects. And then when they do come around to seeing humans differently, there seemed to me to be an opportunity to recognize that what they put Avice through, the meaning-making process, was in fact violence – this felt to me like a missed opportunity that could have deepened what the novel has to say about meaning, language, and the possibility of ethical communication. But I still value the novel very highly as a story that deals with these issues in such a fascinating way.

Where are you now, with your writing practice? What are you working on at the moment?

I’ve just finished my second novel, titled A Common Loss. It’s coming out in January 2012. The story is set in a strange world but one that will be familiar to many readers, Las Vegas. It’s about friendship, primarily, and different kinds of betrayal. I’m starting work on another novel that probably also has an American setting. I lived there for a long time and I find that I imagine the place more strongly now that I’m away from it.

As such, the diversity of our languages, literatures and the different ways they offer to see the world vastly enriches our cultural life. Communications technology and trade have brought the farthest places of the world within reach of each other, but in doing so, erode difference. Erich Auerbach, writing in 1952 (translated into English in 1969 by Edward Said), sees the writing on the wall:

Our earth, the domain of Weltliteratur [world literature], is growing smaller and losing diversity…. The process of imposed uniformity, which originally derived from Europe, continues its work, and hence serves to undermine all individual traditions…man will have to accustom himself to existence in a standardised world, to a single literary culture, only a few literary languages, and perhaps even a single literary language. And herewith the notion of Weltliteratur would be at once realized and destroyed.

As those globalising, centripetal forces subsume the variety of the periphery of the world in favour of the core – whether that is Washington or Beijing – the number of different ways we have to think, decreases. That may be of vital practical importance in the future. Much as the reduced biodiversity in crop production leaves our food supply vulnerable, rapidly and recklessly divesting ourselves of cultural diversity is reducing humanity’s ability to adapt to new circumstances. ‘Must that part of their cultural habit that internalises the techniques of ecological sanity,’ Gayatri Spivak asks, referring to certain Indian Aboriginals, ‘be irretrievably lost in the urgently needed process of integration, as a minority, into the nation state?’

Scarcity, or the prospect of scarcity, creates value (no-one was rhapsodising about the tactile pleasures of printed books fifty years ago), and as English spreads from one horizon to the other like a swarm of locusts, gobbling up minor languages in a few generations, we have begun to recognise that our linguistic ecosystem is a precious and vanishing resource. The international reach of today’s markets offer unprecedented access to the many literatures of the world, yet the choices we make as consumers of literature are dismally conservative. Native speakers of English are notorious monoglots; that’s almost inevitable, given the prestige and utility of the English language for business, trade and diplomacy – the pressure is on speakers of other languages to learn English, not the other way around. But we do have the advantage of being part of a vast readership, probably the most obvious one into which to translate. Even if we are reluctant to leave our linguistic comfort zone, at least we have the opportunity to sample a huge variety of literature, albeit in translation.

So do we read a lot of translated works? In 2007, PEN International commissioned a study among its local affiliates around the world to study the state of literary translation. The situation in the Anglophone world was abysmal:

The proportion of translated works as a percentage of the whole varies considerably among countries. As noted in the first chapter, there are very few translated works in the United States. In the UK, the most optimistic statistics indicate 6% of books are translations but this includes technical and non-fiction translations. Literary translation only makes up 2% of total output. In Australia, things are even worse. Barbara McGilvray and collaborators in Sydney indicate that fewer than half a dozen books are translated each year. The President of the New Zealand PEN Center noted that readers and even literary critics are often unaware that they are reading a translation, given that the fact is not highlighted.

In short, we Anglophone readers are a lazy and insular bunch. With an enormous range of literary variety at our fingertips, we opt in overwhelming numbers for the familiar – Jonathan Franzen, say, or Ian McEwan (that’s assuming we can be bothered to read anything more demanding than Stephen King or John Grisham, and that we are actually reading books, not just watching TV). The readership for translated fiction is tiny. Given the purview of this blog, it’s likely that you (Gentle Reader) are of a more cosmopolitan and adventurous inclination than the average reader. I will presume, then, that you can sympathise with my hunger to read literature from elsewhere: to get one’s teeth into something disconcertingly different, to encounter in the text resistance to one’s expectations, and by grappling with it, to expand as a reader. (Best of all, if you have recommendations, please get involved in the comments section and help me feed my hunger.)

Confronted with such abundance, the problem is, simply, how does one choose? Those translated books that are readily available and widely advertised have been pre-selected by the market on criteria that are tangential, if not opposed, to literary merit. Today publishers are risk-averse, and the books they push are likely to offer a tourist-friendly oeuvre that confirms, rather than challenges, our preconceived view of a given literature and the culture from which it arises. Sites like Words Without Borders help, but the range can be bewildering. Ultimately, since there are many times more books worthy of reading than a lifetime will permit, methodically working through national canons is impossible, and one’s own idiosyncratic path, criss-crossing centuries and continents, will have to do.

But an intelligent selection would help to kick things off, to give some bases from which to start foraging and rummaging. Three Percent, an international literature blog based in Rochester University (named, ruefully, after the proportion of literature sold in the US that has been translated), runs an annual award for the best translated novel of the year; this year I’m going to read my way through the shortlist (feel free to join me on the LibraryThing group I’ve set up for that purpose, if you have the time and inclination). There’s also the Book Trust’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, whose shortlist was recently also announced. While all prizes necessarily reflect agenda and ideologies, these ones at least seem to be making a serious effort at extending their range across the world. If anyone can suggest other or better paths through the vast body of the translated literature, I’d love to hear them in the comments.

Elizabeth Kadetsky’s short stories have been chosen for a Puschart Prize, Best New American Voices and Best American Short Stories notable stories of 2009, and her personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, Santa Monica Review, Antioch Review and elsewhere. She has been a fellow at MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation, Djerassi Resident Artists Program and the St. James Centre for Creativity in Malta. A 25-year practitioner of Iyengar and Ashtanga yoga, she lived in India as a Fulbright scholar and wrote a memoir about her studies with the yogi BKS Iyengar, First There Is a Mountain, published in 2004 by Little, Brown. She is visiting assistant professor of creative writing in the MFA program at Penn State.

Naked City: A viewer reflects, and re-flects

At the climax of the classic noir Naked City (1948), a frenetic handheld captures the sweep and rise of the Williamsburg Bridge in high-contrast black and white. Villain Willie the Harmonica gives frenzied chase from his Lower East Side crime lair, careering past rows of pickle and schmata vendors. The pushcarts erupt in a rain of knish, kugel, and women’s underwear as Harmonica ascends the bridge ramp and begins climbing. Up high now, he is dizzied by a moiré of bridge cables. The cinematography is stunning. He halts. His revolver catches a glint of daylight. Shots ring out. Poor Willie tumbles to the street below, and there meets his fateful end.

Whenever I watch this scene, a feeling comes over me at just that moment of moiré – a wash of exhilaration and longing.

‘There are eight million stories in the naked city,’ sounds a baritone voiceover. ‘This has been one of them.’ It turns out the famous line, however, is less remembered for this movie than as the tagline for the television show created in its memory, the Naked City TV series (1958–1963). There’s something about that gap between the immortal memory of a thing and a thing itself that this post-hence TV series captures for me, a nostalgia turned in on itself. The original re-created becomes a fetish object to be remembered and re-remembered so many times it accrues one layer of memory atop another, so many overlays the image begins to warp and to dizzy the watcher, like sad Willie beneath the spell of those bridge cables.

Beginning a decade after the release of its namesake and running through four seasons, the Naked City TV series was arguably America’s first cop show. Its top writer, Sterling Silliphant, went on to become one of the wealthiest script men in Hollywood. And, like Twilight Zone, it gave a first run to many actors (and writers) who later went platinum: Robert Duvall; Christopher Walken, who was then Chris Walker; Jon Voight; Gene Hackman; Tuesday Weld; Jack Klugman; Dustin Hoffman; Martin Sheen; Walter Matthau; Vince Gardenia; William Shatner; Ed Asner; Peter Falk; Peter Fonda; Alan Alda. Paula Fox wrote an episode, and even Rocky Graziano made a cameo.

Naked City isn’t often talked about today, because, unlike Twilight Zone and other black-and-white contemporaries, it didn’t get picked up much in reruns. It gets mention from time to time alongside Dragnet and The Untouchables as a precursor to The Wire – gritty, urban, and hardboiled, with humanizing if mordant treatment of underworld lowlifes. Its Jimmy McNulty aka Dominic West is Adam Flint aka Paul Burke, a deeply flawed man in blue with eyes like perfect diamonds. Broken by a corrupt system, idealistic and sentimental, he performs his duty with full knowledge of the contingencies: a shattered legal apparatus, an existential emptiness in the notion of justice.

Flint ponders ‘the need to keep busy’ in one episode told almost entirely in interior monologue, in which he must stand witness to an execution. ‘[L]ike this reporter next to me, making a detailed sketch of the chair, piling facts between himself and what he feels. Need in the other reporters, racing their pencils through their notebooks, trying to hold on to facts. How many doors are there in this room? How many feet from where we sit to where the warden stands? What have I to hold on to? What do I love?’

Like The Wire, the series traffics in noir staples – the ‘ambiguous protagonists’ and ‘inglorious victims’ codified in the famous 1955 French definition by theorists Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton. Its writing features the gum-cracking whimsy of Chandler: ‘It’s two o’clock,’ says a Vegas showgirl, upon waking to a Manhattan afternoon. ‘They get up so early here.’ Roddy McDowall, playing a rep actor, is threatened with the line, ‘Keep away from his wife, or after I’m done with you the only thing your face will be able to play is the role of Frankenstein.’ Also featured in this series is the kind of mesmerizing, chiaroscuro location shooting of the silver-screen precursors – in this case in New York City, age-old receptacle for melancholia and memory. The show certainly lays groundwork for neo-noir. Could we call it proto-neo-noir?

I discovered the Naked City series after I’d watched the eponymous movie, along with every great noir, and then all the Bs. I began suffering through Cs – for instance Detour, a story about a cross-country road trip in which the California line is crossed twice, and a corpse’s silken eyelashes can be seen to flutter. In one sequence cars drive on the left and the steering wheel rides shotgun, since the negative was flipped. Wretched cinematography nearly cured me of noir. The next refuge was television. I have since watched every episode available on DVD.

In conception the show is retro, late fifties and sixties pretending to be forties. It echoes and embraces the lost innocence of noir. And yet for Naked City’s time, noir might suddenly have looked naïve to these producers, a genre of happy endings and redeemed losers. Noir idealized criminals. In real life, there were traffic and road rage, city infrastructures unsuited for the growing metropolis, ethnic enclaves and the younger generation’s struggle to live between worlds, mixed-race communities and the assault on old-world values, deeper knowledge about the horrors of World War II, veterans and the prolonged social costs of war, geopolitical fallout from the bloody Indian Partition and the fraught start-up of Israel, Mayor John Lindsay’s war on peepshows and President Johnson’s war on porn, the Puerto Ricans versus the Italians, the blacks versus the Jews, the Poles versus everyone, beatniks, hippies, language poets.

To embrace the past was to willfully blot out the grittiness and modern irreconcilability of the postwar age, a mood better captured by the hysteria of Catch 22 or the apocalyptic confusion of Crying of Lot 49. There is something deeply unsettling in the way Naked City treads that slender line between noir and postmodern. It settles in for a cozy detour through the past, and then, in spite of itself, thrusts the viewer headlong into social realism, chaotic with the background noise of New York City. We see Jack Warden, for instance, as a war vet in the grip of bloody hallucinations, Alan Alda dressed in black turtleneck reading ear-damaging poetry at a club in the Village, Rip Torn going postal in a traffic jam.

* * *

For the viewer today, to become enchanted by this show is to indulge in a fantasy of return to several different time periods at once. There is its nostalgia fixed in its moment, a backward view that better reveals the maker than the thing made – a kind of inverse retro-futurism. Then, the nostalgia factors outwards. I watch a TV series memorializing a past-life movie that itself memorialized an even deeper past – an urban America of old-world immigrants. I wind up feeling longing for the era of the TV series, and also for each era echoed within it. The quintuple-vision creates an inversion, in which the subject winds up becoming nostalgia itself, more so than the thing for which it’s nostalgic.

Is this what André Aciman was getting at when he made that coinage ‘palintropic,’ a nostalgia that is always looping back on itself? Or is the condition of Naked City and those of us under its spell better explained by Samuel Delany’s ‘nostalgia schema,’ the idea that the first look is always the youthful look is always the best look? ‘Nostalgia,’ he writes, ‘presupposes an uncritical confusion between the first, the best and the youthful gaze (through which we view the first and the best) with which we create origins.’

My own nostalgia is for a childhood of black-and-white reruns, for the first time I watched each great noir – with my father, with my aunt, now passed on – firsts I can’t get back to. Already I looked through many lenses. The movies meant something different for my relatives, who were children of World War II, and so, even then, had to be viewed in double or triple focus. When I watch Naked City I join a larger, more public nostalgia, one folded into the layers of the show’s own several pasts. If noir was an expression of Hemingway Modernism, what does that same vision look like when further refracted through the fragmentary gaze of post-moderns?

* * *

Where the show hits me deep is its New York City streetscapes, so irrevocably altered now. The show is a love note to New York. There is the Chrysler Building. There is the beautiful déco Cooper Station, where I keep my P.O. box. There is the St. Mark’s in the Bowery Church. Walking by that yesterday I noticed a statue in its courtyard featured in an episode dealing with alcoholism, its woeful protagonist pathetic and in a heap, crying at its feet. Aspiration, I see, is the name on the statue. There is that same street beneath the Williamsburg Bridge where Harmonica met his end. I see that streetscape every night outside my window. And my great-great-grandparents settled there exactly, in 1873. We have the address on their citizenship papers, Delancey and Allen, before there was even a bridge.

Why is New York so often the setting for this sort of twisted remembering, this nostalgia that fluxes inward and outward, forward and backward, somehow endlessly circling the present, a moving target itself? It lures us, New Yorkers, or those of us whom Aciman recognizes as fellow ‘temporizers.’ The temporizer, he writes, ‘accesses time – life, if you wish – so obliquely and in such roundabout ways and gives the present so provisional and tenuous a status that the present, insofar as such a thing is conceivable, ceases to exist, or, to be more accurate, does not count. It is unavailable.’ For this temporizer, even the present actually exists in a prefigured past: ‘He moves from the present to the future, from the present to the past … firm[ing] up the present by experiencing it from the future as a moment in the past.’

Of course the sentimental journey through Gotham lures the outlier also, that person who left, or whose parents or grandparents did, or whose great-grandparents came through Ellis. This might explain why Naked City was allowed its inconsistencies. In that bridge episode – in which Diahann Carroll plays a teacher for the blind whose young pupil, trying to prove himself, gets lost on his way to Brooklyn – the bridge is in one shot the Williamsburg, in another the Brooklyn. Who’s really watching? The producers are taunting us. The New York bridges are iconic, speaking the words New York bridge. No need to limit the location scouts. For the non-native, New York is not about the details. We insiders, so greedy for a fix, put up with anything.

I think of Lynne Tillman asking, ‘What is history for? What is remembering for?’ She asks this of a New York art scene she was once a part of. ‘Being in the present entails having a past that is never completely dead and also never again alive.’

Naked City asks us to consider the ways we view our pasts as well, and the places real and imagined those pasts took place. One episode tells a story of a murderer who is so traumatized by the event, he has lost all memory of his deed. ‘Without memory you can’t have a conscience,’ says the villain. ‘Without a conscience how can you feel guilty?’ Naked City keeps New York, as much as it is ever-changing, fixed in a moment of flux. It is offered as a place of memory, that memory the idea itself. Rather than crime, or character, or whodunit, its subject becomes the fluid and uncertain quality of memory itself.

Cross-posted from Defunct.

Over the last few years, the Overland blog has built a small but flourishing community of writers debating politics and culture from a largely Australian perspective. The new cross-posts aim to build on those discussions, and forge some links with likeminded people overseas.

Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist (2002), Transmission (2004) and My Revolutions (2007), as well as a short story collection, Noise (2006). His work has been translated into twenty-one languages and won him prizes including the Somerset Maugham award, the Betty Trask prize of the Society of Authors and a British Book Award. In 2003 Granta named him one of its twenty best young British novelists. Lire magazine named him one of its 50 ‘écrivains pour demain’. He is Deputy President of English PEN, a patron of the Refugee Council and a member of the editorial board of Mute magazine. His short stories and journalism have appeared in diverse publications including The New York Times, Guardian, New Yorker, Washington Post, Times of India, Wired and New Statesman. His fourth novel, Gods Without Men, will be published in August 2011. He lives in New York City.

25 November 2010

What are we doing here?

I’ve been imagining other parliaments, parallel to this one – parliaments of doctors firemen and painters – dedicated to discussing the European problems proper to their professions. Perhaps I’m missing the point. If such events aren’t being organised then it is because we, as writers, are expected to fulfil a function that doctors and firemen and painters cannot.

You have accepted this invitation, presumably because like me, and you have a particular sense of the role of the writer. I don’t believe the writer is merely an entertainer, though we certainly shouldn’t be above entertainment, above giving pleasure. Nor are we just journalists, recorders of the doings of the world, or apolitical bohemians, dedicated to aesthetic shock. We may be any of these things, but this is not all we are. As lovers of language, as people who are dedicated to it and who value it very highly, we are – whether we like it or not – always already engaged in the political struggles of our day, many of which take place on the terrain of language – its use to produce social and national identity, its use to frame laws and norms, its use to define what it means to be a human, to lead a good or just or valuable life.

There’s a saying that culture is something that is done to us, but art is something we do to culture. We’re here in the 2010 City of Culture – an accolade it seems slightly superfluous to bestow on Istanbul, which is so visibly the product of millennia of European civilization. But we should be here to do something to culture, to set some terms for the future. There are many things we could spend the next few days discussing but I’d like to propose three areas where I think we can do useful work.

The first is in what I would call the space of literature. New technologies of communication and distribution of information have already changed the space in which we, as writers, live and work. The transnational networks are now the place in which we make our writing, where we research, where our work is archived and where we reach our readers. They are not, it goes without saying, a natural space, but one whose protocols and conventions are set – by engineers, by administrators, and by the companies who own the infrastructure and make the equipment we use to access it. It’s already the case that without access to the internet, people are denied participation in much of world culture. I think the production of this new space is too important to be left to engineers, administrators and corporate executives. We, as writers ought to help set the terms. Of those three groups, our natural allies are the engineers. We should be talking to them. What kind of information space do we, as writers, want to occupy? Where do we want to live and work? What values should be embedded in that space, what protections, what sanctions?

Issues such as net neutrality (the equality of all information traffic), censorship, data collection, personal privacy, and the lack of a persistent archive are of great importance to us. But there are two major tendencies emerging, both of which are having a profound impact.

The first is the emergence of open and collaborative ways of producing and sharing information. The highest profile example of this is Wikipedia. We should support an ethic of openness. However, in this world of sharing and infinite reproducibility, the value of our labor is being driven down. People want us to work for free. How are we to live, as writers? Should we even expect to live ‘from writing’?
The second is the privatisation of public space. We live in a period of enclosures unparalleled since the sixteenth century. All around, resources are being privatised, and cultural resources are chief among them. We communicate using private services which own the content we create. Send a message on a social network like facebook, post a picture or write a text and you do not own your words. You are adding value to the company, and you have little control over how your data is used. This is just the tip of the iceberg. When social and cultural life takes place on privately-owned networks, the values of the owners inevitably dominate. At the moment the internet is held open for us by international protocols and conventions. We need to recognise, as writers, how important they are, and to participate in their maintenance and formulation. It is my hope that this meeting recognises the importance of information as a commons, a good that should be freely accessible and shared by all, while also recognising that the production of information is labour, and has value.

The second area of concern is the so-called war on terror, a phrase which has, of late, been retired by those who originated it, now it has come to indicate something quixotic and sinister, instead of the noble enterprise it was once claimed to be.

Nearly a decade after it was inaugurated, this is the conceptual frame under which we are forced to live and speak and write. Ordinary laws, and ordinary canons of decency and civility have been suspended. We are in a perpetual state of emergency, with no end in sight. It seems clear that this state of exception is very useful in organizing and controlling the citizenry. But what should concern us as writers is the way the war on terror has degraded language. It is not only the brutal neologisms, the jargon and the corrosive euphemisms which have become part of our linguistic currency – extraordinary rendition, harsh interrogation techniques, enemy combatant – a list of words whose intention is to deceive – to which one might also usefully add words like ‘martyr’ and ‘crusader’, for the deception is not merely one-sided.

Above all the degradation is a degradation of our thought by crude oppositions, talk of a ‘clash of civilisations’, or any number of other binary formulations which serve to harden the lines between ordinary people who have no stake in this so-called global war. The cynics on both sides who are manipulating this situation accuse anyone who questions the absoluteness of their oppositions of a kind of moral relativism. In fact, just the opposite is true. As writers, as lovers of language, we should work to preserve the truth of our words, to call things like torture by their proper names, or if those names are worn out to find new ones. We should cherish debate, and use the full power of language to overcome crude binarisms

The third area of concern for us as writers is the use of language to produce identity. In the European context this is particularly crucial, as the economic crisis is immiserating large numbers of people, who are – as always in European history – turning towards xenophobia and atavistic nationalism in the hope of identifying an enemy more tangible than global capital.

It seems to me that multiculturalism, once a useful and progressive kind of politics, is no longer functioning as well as it did. The limits of identity politics are becoming clear. Instead of a playful, creative blending of the best of host and migrant cultures, the terms of multiculturalism are increasingly used by cultural conservatives of all stripes to police cultural boundaries. A liberal politics of absolute inclusivity, while presenting itself as pragmatic, has the disadvantage of obscuring genuine differences and antagonisms. Identity politics, which privileges categories like race and religion, is wilfully silent about class. Culture is, self-evidently, at the heart of this, and so we as writers have a central role to play. It sickens me to watch European bigots puffing up their chests about the values of the Enlightenment, as a badge of their superiority against poor and marginalised immigrant populations. Again, I say that opposition to this Enlightenment fundamentalism, isn’t moral relativism, but an ethical imperative. At this point, respecting difference is important, but so is asserting our common life across borders of race, class and religion. The fake pageantry of respect is no substitute for a genuine internationalism.

There are many weapons in the culture war, but chief among the techniques of policing thought and writing is that of offence. We are familiar with the use of the notion of offense by religious and ethnic minorities to gain identity-political purchase – from the Rushdie fatwa to the Mohammed cartoons, the martialling of sentiments of shame and abused honor have generated a lot of heat and not much light.

I believe that the right to freedom of speech trumps any right to protection from offense, and that it underlies all the other issues I’ve been speaking about. Without freedom of speech, we, as writers, can have very little impact on culture. In saying this, I’m aware that this is a prime example of a concept which has been degraded by the war on terror – that many European muslims misidentify it as a tool of Anglo-Saxon interests, a license to insult them, rather than the sole guarantee of their right to be heard.

It is in this context that we must deal with the absence of VS Naipaul from this meeting, which I find regrettable. I feel we would be stronger and more credible if we were to deal wih divergent views within this meeting rather than a priori excluding someone because of fear that offence might be given.

Our kind Turkish hosts have invited us here, as an international group, to air our views, and so it is my belief that we must not shy away from recognising the situation here, where we are speaking. I know by doing so, as a guest, I risk giving offence, but it would be absurd to assert freedom of speech in the abstract without exercising it in concrete terms. I want to name two writers who are not present, the nobel-prize winning novelist Orhan Pamuk and the editor Hrant Dink.

Both these writers, and many others, had cases brought against them under article 301 of the Turkish penal code which makes it illegal to insult Turkey, Turkish ethnicity or Turkish government institutions. In its initial formulation, when it was promulgated in 2005, it was a crime to insult ‘Turkishness’. Pamuk faced trial for giving the following statement to a Swiss magazine ‘thirty thousand Kurds have been killed here and a million Armenians. And almost nobody dares mention that. So I do.’ Dink, one of Turkey’s most prominent Armenian voices was convicted under article 301 for then murdered by a young nationalist, who was subsequently photographed in a police station, surrounded by smiling officers, against the backdrop of the national flag.

There are many other examples in Turkey of the weapons of offence and insult being used to silence dissent. Turkey is obviously not alone in this, but since we are here, it is important that we acknowledge it. I believe that one of the most tangible and immediate results of this meeting would be to call for the repeal of section 301 and a declaration that no European writer should have to operate under the threat of similar laws.

I offer these remarks as a way of opening discussion. I look forward to debating all these issues with you over the next few days.

Originally published at Hari Kunzru.

A writer with a diverse oeuvre, Finn is a well-known poet and her first novel, Fine Salt, was published in 2002. Finn’s short stories have been produced for radio and published in such notables as Going Down Swinging and Sleepers Almanac and in 2010 her short story ‘Angus’s Playground’ was a runner-up in the Australian Book Review short story competition. Last, but certainly not least, Finn writes commentary and review here at Overland.

On the opening page of This Too Shall Pass, Finn writes:

After all, my insides have become similarly nebulous and ill-defined, held together by an equally teetering outline.

And I find my thoughts ‘similarly nebulous and ill-defined’ when it comes to articulating how SJ Finn’s novel has affected me.

The novel is, on the surface, the story of a woman coming to terms with the breakdown of her marriage, with relinquishing primary custody of her son, and negotiating the impact of this situation on her relationship with her new partner – who brings the added ‘complication’ of being another woman. The backdrop against which this personal journey is played out is the workplace to which the protagonist, Monty, flees from her personal impasse. The workplace undergoes that scourge of all institutions grounded in social welfare: economic rationalism, and Monty is caught up in the machinations and ethical dilemmas of the reorganisation.

This Too Shall Pass reads like a very personal account, told intimately, between friends. Some of the detail about the reshuffling at work reminded me very much of actual conversations I have had with a ‘real-life’ friend who works in the healthcare sector. Woven into the account are the personal and professional consequences of all-too-common incidents of bigotry and homophobia and the helplessness victims feel in the face of a kind of blanket ignorance, and worse: tolerance of intolerance in the workplace and in the community.

At the outset of the novel, Monty has already left her husband, Dave, and is living with her former neighbour and new partner, Renny. However, This Too Shall Pass is no soap opera. The reader is not given an emotional account of the internal revelations and conflicts that propel a woman to leave a heterosexual partnership and begin a new life in a same-sex one; a relationship-shift remarkable, some might say, only in the light of our egregious attitudes to heterosexual supremacy. The closest we come to feeling the agony of Monty’s decision is:

I was trampling, not so much over myself as inside myself, up and down on beliefs I’d steadfastly held.
The trampling.
The dreadful trampling.

Finn paints an understated but very clear picture of the impact of homophobia on the life of her protagonist. The ensuing bigotry and gossip engendered by a loving kiss at a local pub is (as Dave, lover of homilies, might like to say) the straw that broke the camel’s back. Monty and Renny feel driven away from the country to St Kilda, where diversity is less of a problem.

The stakes are raised for Monty by her decision to leave her son, Marcus, in the primary care of his father. Marcus then appears as a minor character, a pawn in the games Dave and Monty play as they painfully unravel from each other’s lives yet remain tied by their shared parenthood. The dysfunction of these divorced parents is beautifully drawn – we all know, or have been, or are, these people.

And here we come to one of the great things about Finn’s novel for me: it challenged my gender preconceptions. At first, I found Monty’s relationship with Marcus to be told a little coldly. I was unsatisfied. Then I thought about it and wondered, if Monty had been a man who had left his son in the primary care of his ex-wife, would I have even noticed the prominence (or not) of his relationship with his child as a peripheral rather than all-consuming or determining factor in the story? Truth is, probably not. So it was a slap for me and a thumbs up for SJ Finn.

Finn points a firm but subtle finger at the bigotry of gender politics in the workplace and uses the stupidity of anti-gay religious evangelism to do it. In the early stages of the book, Monty declares:

But there it is: I have a tendency to belly-on about prejudices and inequalities, oppression and unfairness – all the negative ‘isms’ that circulate our human world. And who knows, there may never have been enough of us pushing for social justice.

And perhaps this justifies the heavy-handed way This Too Shall Pass ultimately addresses the use of ‘God’ as an excuse for harassment and intolerance; in sharp contrast to the more subtle ‘show don’t tell’ way the novel deals with community and workplace bigotry.

This Too Shall Pass is easy to read – I ate it up in three or four bites. An articulate, intelligent account, it is not bogged down in one skerrick of sentimentality. Monty observes:

My feelings, I realised, were stalking about on their own and, as such, felt too ruthless.

Carefully crafted and honed, Finn keeps the story and the emotions of her protagonist under tight control.

This Too Shall Pass is available from all good bookstores, and http://web.overland.org.au/?p=13160 So this is life
Anne Manne
Melbourne University Press

the revolution thanks you for choosing itself

the revolution is downloading onto your ipad
& being transferred onto your iphone
it is an irevolution
the revolution is i
i is the revolution

the revolution is available in e-book form
the revolution/s full text is available for 99c on amazon
the revolution comes in 4 short podcasts
that can be worn as a USB bracelet
the revolution hz been turned on
you must follow the revolution
it will be abbreviated to fit its own twitter feed:
the revolution will drop all vowels / capital letters & apostrophes
& present itself in short profundities of 140 characters or less
join @the revolution as it LOLs and WTFs
the revolution will have a GSOH / as
the mo fo moves in
& takes over cyberspace

dig the revolution

take out a sub:
the revolution’s RSS feed will bitch-slap your inbox
every night at around about 12 o/clock
do not reply to the revolution
do not trash the revolution
the revolution is not spam
you cannot click here to unsubscribe to the revolution
do not drag the revolution into your junk mail can
you cannot RTS the revolution:
the revolution is anonymous
the revolution lives nowhere
the revolution is every return address
forward the revolution to everyone you know:
the revolution is a virus no norton has an anti for
infection is the revolution/s cure

befriend the revolution
graffiti the revolution/s wall
the revolution invites all 500 million fans
to the facebook event of itself
rsvp to the revolution/s event
it is the revolution / show yourself attending
the revolution will remind you of itself by SMS
the revolution has a silent number
bt you can forward the revolution on by text

to find the revolution
type: revolution
into your GPS

give the revolution it/s own ringtone
do not turn the revolution off
the revolution must be able to reach you at all times
& at full volume

the revolution is here
the revolution is real
the revolution is now
the revolution has just been wiki-leaked
the revolution does not exist in second life

download the revolution/s soundtrack from myspace

you have just read the revolution
i is the revolution
i is the revolution
i is the revolution
the revolution has just been blogged

The first task of an editor of a volume of essays is to arrive at a working definition of the form. Accepting that an essay is a ‘shortish piece of non fiction on a focused subject, often written from a personal point of view’, Robert Drewe then proceeds to declare his editorial objective:

I wanted to showcase those subjects which thoughtful and talented Australian writers were absorbed by in this particular year; indeed (I thought), wouldn’t it be good to show what this country, and its culture, was about in 2010.

In judging the success of this collection it is impossible to lay aside Drewe’s views on what Australia was about in 2010. As a summer read, it stacks up. As a snapshot of contemporary Australia, I’m not so sure. Let’s begin with some simple statistics: 33 essays; 19 male and 14 female writers – a spread of journalists, academics, novelists, scientists, poets and commentators; six essays republished from The Monthly; six from Fairfax; ten (!) from literary journals; two from News Ltd and the remainder from lectures, reviews, online sources and catalogues. No surprises here. A good representation of sources and writers.

The content is equally varied. Musings on marriage and art; reportage from Gaza, Marysville, Mullumbimby and Kalgoorlie; Patrick White; reflections on ethnicity and culture; the Minogues; the body and the gaze; animal psychology; language and class; vegetarians who smoke; plant provenance; crime; Rudd’s demise; addiction; federalism; menstruation; witch doctors; and burial plots. Enough angles and issues for him or her not to be disappointed when the Christmas wrapping comes off and for the book to collect a bucket of sand over the break.

Social worker and theologian Lorna Hallahan collected the 2009 Calibre prize for her essay on the ‘stareable body’, ‘On Being Odd’. Following Michel de Montaigne, Hallahan vows: ‘Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.’

I claim a wonderful profile because my body is mutilated and odd, and I get around unconventionally…

Mutual wonderment relies on suspending my own repressive rationality and entering the social intensity of a staring moment, of recognising in my starer a person of wonderful profile, I can govern my own reactions, stay with the gaze, not look away in shame, but seek a mutual recognition – poignant and potent.

Hallahan has some fun with Montaigne’s view that women with crooked bodies often make excellent lovers; and like the French master of correspondence, whom she obviously admires as an essayist, Hallahan’s voice remains clear and intimate throughout, as if talking to a friend. Intensely personal, the essay never strays into mawkishness, preferring wit and cold insight to make the point.

Sunil Badami, when asked ‘Where you from, mate?’, cannot convince new acquaintances that he was born in Blacktown and grew up in Greystanes in Sydney’s western suburbs. His essay’s lightness of tone does not conceal the seriousness of the writer’s intent.

Just as I cannot disavow my Indianess, how can I deny the role my Westieness has played in my own history, my own personal journey, in my life and writing? … After all, a culture’s artists aren’t its privileged informants but its outsiders, always on the margins looking in, not offering new certainties but new ways of questioning accepted ones – like Westie Asians, accidental Orientals, from Blacktown to Chinatown, all of us double-outsiders, looking in from the edge of elsewhere…

Crime fiction writer Shane Maloney found himself an accidental insider when he visited his mate Lindsay Tanner at Parliament House on the day Kevin Rudd was deposed by Julia Gillard. He swears Tanner gave nothing away and that no-one saw the knife coming. As Rudd braved his way through that excruciating post-coup press conference, Maloney, along with most of the nation, struggled to understand what he was witnessing. His essay is anecdotal and airy enough for summer reading, eschewing any attempts at serious analysis in favour of the relish of a crime writer’s good fortune. I suppose Drewe and his publisher thought we’d all had enough of federal politics by Christmas and that a bit of bemused head scratching would suffice. Fair enough.

Drewe calls on heavier hitters to deliver intellectual substance on the state of the nation.

As for what Australia is and has always been about, one could do no better than the clear cultural analysis of Guy Rundle and David Malouf.

In his essay ‘The States of the Nation’, Malouf has a go at federalism, place and national identity, beginning by arguing that during the 2000 centenary of federation did not strike deeply:

[in] the hearts of those who, without hesitation or doubt, call ourselves Australian, and have a vivid sense of what the country itself is, but in our daily lives, and in the place where our feelings are most touched, have little interest in the idea of nation.

Malouf observes that Australians are comfortable with notions of nationhood when applied to competitive sport but that most of us are more concerned with local issues than with those writ large by lofty notions of state and nation. Assiduously avoiding the word ‘republic’, Malouf argues that states are:

not only redundant and wasteful but also obstructive, and should go. The federal government alone would be left to govern, with a system of regional bodies beneath it.

The essay, published in August 2010, the month of the federal election, was clearly intended as a barometric reading of a nation under pressure but one which refrains from the spotty business of partisan politics. Malouf draws on cricket, Anzac Day, racism and reconciliation in a rather too predictable account of what Australia is about. His perfect compound sentences fail to dig very deep into the mechanics of power in Australia and yet political, economic and social power structures are the key determinants of national identity. And how can the rising tide of ‘southern cross’ jingoism swirling around Australia Day be ignored in this discussion? What of its class origins, political dynamics and influence on the character of the nation now and into the future?

Guy Rundle turns in an interesting piece on avant-gardism and state subsidy of the arts, a matter which Drewe obviously feels goes to the heart of contemporary Australian culture. Rundle argues that there is an unhealthy contradiction in the practice of radical art accepting state funding.

My point is … that the entire role of the modernist, avant garde or difficult artist in contemporary society is transformed when the decades of bipartisan political commitment effectively render support of it permanent and ongoing … Avant gardism lives off the sense that it is challenging existing understandings, relations, assumptions – including those marshalled by the state as ideology. State support and encouragement bring a contradiction into the heart of that practice.

However, in his defence of an authentic (and dead) avant-garde Rundle falls short of a useful analysis of state power over cultural production.

So the practice of high or avant-garde culture can’t be made meaningful on the grounds that it is outside, resistant, disordering, liberating. It’s now another aesthetic in the mix, its state funding defensible on various grounds…

It is where state power facilitates cultural production, with no explicit control over content yet for its own broader formal purposes, that artists often fail to critically assess what is involved. It is my argument that they should, and that this is part of a wider process of reflecting on the role of the avant-garde, modernist and high art practices in contemporary society.

I’m left wondering how effective Rundle’s implicit calls for the artistic underclass to send back their grant cheques will be. Perhaps another way of approaching a cultural revolution of the kind Rundle implies would be to unpick the power relations at work in public subsidy of the art forms that suck up most of the taxpayers’ cultural dollar. Clearly, these are not community and experimental arts or literary journals.

A number of the contributions in this volume are excellent pieces of journalism but, to my mind, do not satisfy as essays simply because they lack the meandering subjectivity I find essential to the form. Examples include Kathy Marks on mining, Paul McGeogh on the Israeli raid on the Mavi Marmara’s humanitarian aid journey to Gaza, Melissa Lucashenko on the playground death of high school student Jai Morcom, Anne Manne’s chilling account of the death by starvation and neglect of a young child, and Nicholas Rothwell’s account of tribal medicine and power relations on Elcho Island. In ‘Tears of the Sun’, Marks poses two important questions: ‘How sustainable is mining, with its colossal environmental footprint? And just who is reaping the rewards?’ But the essay shies away from substantive answers. Marks is largely content to draw vivid pictures of mining communities and their colourful characters and to point at big holes in the ground without ever skewering, for example, the distribution of wealth accrued from mining. The essay amounts to a flyover of a pivotal issue.

I found many of these journalistic contributions to be very accomplished exercises in providing publishers with product, the implication being that there is a certain kind of journalism readers prefer. I don’t mean to be unkind here because there is some great writing from some of our leading exponents of the form but, it seems to me, there is a timidity at the heart of Australian journalism that is in itself symptomatic of what contemporary Australia is about.

There are some lovely moments of whimsy in the collection, which is not at all to suggest the essays are without substance. Tim Flannery on elephant psychology, Amanda Hooton’s backstage account of the Miss Universe competition, and Gerard Windsor’s search for a decent place to lay his bones to rest all stand out, as does poet Les Murray’s account of his contributions to the Australian lexicon. Having studied under the editors of the Macquarie Dictionary as an undergraduate, I appreciated Murray’s affection for the project of collecting and classifying the Australian idiom. ‘To me,’ he writes, ‘from the very start, words were poor people’s treasures, infinite in variety and potential at no cost.’ Interestingly, Murray’s essay contains one of the very few references to social class in Best Australian Essays 2010, when he comments on the dictionary editors’ rejection of some of his suggestions for inclusion.

My earlier contributions were perennially invalidated by lack of a printed source. I was sometimes to provide one by writing a poem in which the word appeared, but that was too transparent. My problem was one of class: I drew typically from a level of vocabulary seen as lower even than that used in urban Broad speech. The real oral language of country folk had had few literary outings since the late-nineteenth century.

Murray’s affection for what might be called a rural underclass stems from his direct experience growing up in those communities and, therefore, experiencing their living language as part of a rich cultural repository.

Every essay in the collection is worthy of mention, most, but not all, for good reasons. Overall, the volume seems to me to exemplify not so much what Australia in 2010 was about, an all too ambitious enterprise for any editor, but, rather, is a collection of stories, insights, facts and opinions that the publisher and editor deemed saleable to a clearly defined readership in the pre-Christmas rush.

Surely, Australia is about the two unwinnable, protracted wars we are fighting and the political chicanery behind them. But there is no mention of these wars. And wasn’t Australia in 2010 about the largely hidden effects of what has become known as The Intervention in indigenous communities? And as much as I am sympathetic to the editor’s decision not to include John Birmingham’s article on WikiLeaks, wasn’t Australia just a little bit about one of our citizens changing the game of journalism and opening up a global debate on free speech, even before the current tranche of cables was leaked? As for questions of class and power, well, it is understandable that these are not raised in Drewe’s collection because so few writers tackle them even when given the chance, as were many of the writers in this volume. Perhaps, as a nation, we have outgrown class to such an extent that it is not even on the radar of public consciousness. Or perhaps, like the mechanics of social, economic and political power, we would prefer not to read about it on the beach.

I am a sheltered sort of person in the great scheme of avant-garde literature and do not doubt that there is a great swathe of writers experimenting with language and the digital age, with stream of consciousness and pithy, well-crafted satire and with self-publishing in the professionally designed-yet-home-created zine. It is, however, this work particularly that I have, blessedly, been introduced to and, at present, is my only reference point.

What is this writing of which I speak?moving things around AKA twisted bathers straps and HEART RENDERING IMAGE by Holly Childs.

Childs experiments with such practices as the deconstruction of text and such ideas as art and writing and communication and relationships and:

- travel (through internet + planes, sometimes also walking)

But the really exciting thing is she does it well.

moving things around AKA twisted bathers straps is a collection of ‘Little tiny discrete stories…’ that seem to be ‘hoping for the best, and expecting the worst’. The zine manages a sense of the whole, which makes it satisfying. It is, among other things:

An exhortation to sanity:

NOW is NOT the time to stop DREAMING. In fact, NOW is the time to CONTINUE DREAMING

A warning:

Expect the music to get WEIRDER, HARDER, AND MORE NINTH EYE.
Starting off with our half-hour classical music session when the clubs reopen.

A message of hope:

Using my keyboard is one of the only things I can do when I’ve painted my nails. Maybe using the keyboard isn’t even a real thing. When the collapse happens, there might not be computers. I think it’s funny that the right hand paints onto the left nails and vice versa. The hand with no skills gets the better nailpolish. When the collapse happens, maybe we won’t have nailplates anymore.

Funny:

Angelina Jolie is working at Valleygirl and wearing an orange crepe dress, complaining about the fishnets in her head that leave nothing to the imagination, and everyone was clapping her because she’d got a regular job.

HEART RENDERING IMAGE is a ‘TOTAL READ’ and kinda summed up by the following excerpt:

words that define how things are seen
words as lens filters, not words that define
follow characters on twitter as strings
a film as a blob
surf the movie on strings
paste the way people dream
accent and body-language
desktop, files, analogies
the sun just set
facial expression and body language and accent as
language
read words emotionally and abstractly
read
ALWAYS
EVER WHERE
ALL WAYS
read lots of different ways

Childs experiments with conventions of layout and form. Throughout the journey there is a questioning, a commentary and a critique of the ‘digital age’ and its impact on art, life and dreams. Childs also takes a hefty swipe at materialism and capitalism – music to my eyes.

At heart, both zines seem to me to be confident of the end of the world as we know it, while shouting out the shock of the new. There’s something both youthful and quirky represented here – but it’s powerful quirk and should we ignore it, perhaps we ignore it at our peril.

Child’s work is available at Sticky and from the author. (Zine design: Oliver of the sky.)

I was keen to read these stories by Amanda Lohrey after admiring her novella Vertigo (2008). Better known for her novels and essays, Lohrey has put together nine stories, five of them previously unpublished, for the collection Reading Madame Bovary.

Lohrey has a remarkable ability to be lyrical and profound while keeping both feet in the here and now of Australian life. For a ‘literary’ writer, she is refreshingly comfortable with the mundane minutiae of modern life (to-do lists and washing up) and, from there, teases out the themes and issues that lie beneath the surface of contemporary consciousness.

In the first of these stories, ‘Primates’, shopping and domestic slavery sit side-by-side with sexual fantasies and dream sequences, as we follow a frustrated Sydney woman in her attempts to keep love alive. Even more than the other stories, ‘Primates’ lends itself to re-reading, to allow oneself to drift with the author through the flotsam into deeper mysterious waters. Don’t miss the fine eulogy for a doctor who helps her through an illness.

Illness and hospitals are recurring themes for Lohrey, ones that bring out some of her finest writing. In ‘The Art of Convalescence’ we watch the change of attitude as a patient in a public hospital moves from frustration and a sense of helplessness, when sick, to acceptance and empathy, when recovered. Alongside this familiar change of attitude runs an awareness of the healing power of music, ‘a coincidence of personal dilemma and lyrical power’, to use Lohrey’s own words.

The stories range widely in their settings from the English canals of ‘Reading Madame Bovary’ to the hippie commune in a remote Australian valley of ‘John Lennon’s Gardener’. Every story comes to life through its characters and the vernacular of their distinctive voices: the husband who feels inexplicable rage; the young woman who resents sleeping in ‘the bat cave’ on the canal boat; the brain surgeon toying with the idea of career change!

Each story hinges on an experience that acts as a catalyst for a change in a character. In the title story it is reading the novel Madame Bovary that causes the shift. In ‘Primates’ it is watching monkeys in the zoo. In ‘Ground Zero’ it is hearing one’s heartbeat on an echocardiogram. Around these central experiences, Lohrey uses imagery, dialogue and point of view to create rich and distinctive stories.

The final two stories are good examples of the weaker and stronger elements of Lohrey’s writing. ‘John Lennon’s Gardener’ is a nostalgic look at the hippie days and recreates the preoccupations and conversations of a 1979 commune, but the story is ultimately unsatisfying. In contrast, ‘Letter to the Romans’ is oddly convincing in its narrative of a widowed lecturer’s affair with a student’s mother, who reads to him from the Bible. There is a bold juxtaposition here of ideas and imagery that work wonderfully to free up the imagination of the reader and allow through the sense of loneliness that lies in wait, when two lives have briefly touched.

This is assured writing that does not set out to impress, but is full of insight and beauty – a book to keep, with stories that yield more each time you read them.