The Beauties and the Furies, Christina Stead

wadholloway Australian, Literature , , ,

This is the cover of the edition I read. The only other cover I could bring up with a search was Virago’s. I wonder what the original covers were – Peter Davies, London and D Appleton Century in the US – in 1936.

Ok, I found the original American cover. Boring (but it was the Depression). On with the review …

The Beauties and the Furies (1936) was Stead’s third published work. It is beautifully written; shows Stead fully immersed in the Modernism of James Joyce and DH Lawrence; but as with her previous two, still lacks fully realised central characters.

My developing hypothesis is that until her fifth and sixth, The Man Who Loved Children (1940) and For Love Alone (1945), which are largely autobiographical, Stead was focussing on speech – what her characters say, rather than what they think – but not achieving the insight that Joyce and Woolf were conveying with ‘stream of consciousness‘. However, in those two, she knows the characters so intimately, and she herself as Louie and Teresa is so central, that she finally gives her fiction the psychological depth she was always aiming for, and which reaches perfection in her following novel, Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946) .

The first novel she wrote, Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), is based on times and locations she knew well. It jumps around between main characters who are based on herself and people she knew without any one of them being preeminent. When she finally found a publisher willing to take her on in 1930 or 31, Peter Davies, he wanted something more conventional to bring out first, to introduce her to readers, and she promised him, and began, another novel. But when that ran into a block, she came up with the technically excellent and equally unconventional The Salzburg Tales (1934), tying together short stories she had been working on for a while with some new ones, and in a startlingly confident take on The Canterbury Tales, framing them as being told by travellers in Salzburg which she had recently visited. Davies, a bit reluctantly, released them both in 1934, in conjunction with Appleton in the US, to some critical acclaim.

Stead and her partner, later husband (when he finally got his divorce), William Blake, had moved from London where they had met, to Paris in 1930 where he was an executive in a small merchant bank, and where they were able to move on the edges of Paris’s Modernist arts community.

It was [Samuel] Putnam who introduced Stead to Louis Guilloux, whose proletarian novel, Le Sang Noir influenced her early writing. A page of notes survives, in which Stead forms comparisons between Guilloux and Joyce: both write cinematic scenes; both see their role as active, explanatory and sometimes philosophical (as opposed to Flaubert, who believed the writer should be entirely off-stage); both use two characters as mirror or shadow selves – all techniques Stead was to try out in her early writing.
Hazel Rowley, 1993, p.110

The Beauties and the Furies (1936), her next work, reflects this time living in Paris. But she’s not in it and I think because of that it struggles to develop any force. She fails to make you care about the characters.

“I’m a fool.” [Oliver] said to himself pleasantly. “Coromandel’s unattached, and she likes me: she’d make a good wife. Poor Elvira! I won’t read her my essay tonight, at any rate: I’ll have that much self-control.
“When he got home Blanche had just put Elvira to bed. Oliver could not resist saying to Elvira: “You are always lovelier at night than in the daytime: Your great underbrush eyes – when I make money I’m going to buy coloured sheets and pillow-slips for you to lie on, black, cream, damask.
“Blanche watched them eagerly, and then left, saying: “Now, look after her; amuse her!”
“Oh, I will.”
He read her the scene in the lying-in hospital in James Joyce’s Ulysses, then some of his poems ..

The story, briefly, is that, Elvira, 30-ish and childless, leaves her husband, Paul, a reasonably well off doctor in London to join Oliver, a not well-off doctoral student in his twenties, in Paris, where they live in various hotels and rooms. On the train over, Elvira meets Marpurgo, who works with a firm buying and selling fine hand-made lace. Marpurgo attaches himself to the couple as an older friend and advisor. Elvira meets a ‘dancer’, Blanche, in a bar. When Elvira finds she is pregnant (to Oliver) it is Blanche who finds a solution, though Elvira shilly-shallies about taking her up on it. Eventually Paul, accompanied by Elvira’s brother, comes over to take her back. They all meet in various combinations over and over as Elvira struggles to come to any decision.

We learn a lot about Marpurgo, his absent wife, his relationship with the two brothers who employ him, and through him see a lot of Paris. Paul gets his country cousin, Sara, who has always had a crush on him, to join him in Paris. Through Oliver, who is at least notionally a Marxist, we are engaged in the workers struggle of that time. Oliver meets a young woman, Coromandel, who Marpurgo also knows indirectly. Oliver falls into an affair with Coromandel while Elvira is laid up in bed.

The problem for Stead is that she spreads herself a bit thin over all these people, and, more importantly, we never get to care about any of them. Coromandel is easily the most attractive (personality) and the one who understands herself best, but she is in the story for a while and then she is gone.

So, great writing, and an important step along the way for a developing writer. But not one of my favourites.

.

Christina Stead, The Beauties and the Furies, first pub. 1936. My edition, with Introduction by Margaret Harris, Text Classics, 2016. 347pp
Hazel Rowley, Christina Stead: A Biography, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1993

Saltcrop, Yume Kitasei

wadholloway Science Fiction, USA , ,

UKLG Prize 2026

Marcie/Buried in Print and I are trying to read ahead of the Ursula K le Guin Prize 2026 shortlist (for innovative SF published in the US in 2025). I chose this one thinking that it looked a bit exotic and liking the synopsis. It’s not exotic. Yume Kitasei (1987- ) is Japanese American and says on her website that her stories reside in the space between the two cultures. But there’s no evidence of that here. Saltcrop (2025) is stock standard American post-eco-apocalypse SF.

In Earth’s not too distant future, seas consume coastal cities, highways disintegrate underwater, and mutant fish lurk in pirate-controlled depths. Skipper, a skilled sailor and the youngest of three sisters, earns money skimming and reselling plastic from the ocean to care for her ailing grandmother.

But then her eldest sister, Nora, goes missing. Nora left home a decade ago in pursuit of a cure for failing crops all over the world. When Skipper and her other sister, Carmen, receive a cryptic plea for help, they must put aside their differences and set out across the sea to find—and save—her.
(The author says this is an excerpt. From what? The back cover?)

I’m not saying that it is not a good adventure novel, with believable, likable characters, nor that the author doesn’t have interesting things to say about corporations – looking at you Monsanto – putting profits, specifically from sales of chemicals, and seeds genetically altered to live only with those chemicals, ahead of research for the common good. Just that it travels a well-worn path.

The novel starts off from Skipper’s POV – and when it switches to Carmen’s and then Nora’s later on, it feels like a break, like starting over.

The sailboat, with a small electric auxiliary motor, which the sisters had built between them, is Skipper’s passion. She lives with her invalid grandmother. Carmen, who lives with her girlfriend, has a factory job, and is training to be a nurse, provides much of their support. Nora who is a laboratory technician testing plant varieties has gone to the City and, recently, dropped out of touch.

The author quickly, seamlessly provides the background of a society which is collapsing. Coastal towns are inundated; crops are subject to blight which can only be held off by massive amounts of harmful chemicals; wild animals and fish are mutating; people are subject to new illnesses – Carmen has an invasive fungus under the skin of her chest and shoulder which she can’t afford to have removed.

Places are not named but the geography is relatively clear. Skipper and Carmen live south of the City – presumably NY – to which Skipper proposes sailing to find Nora. Carmen, not a sailor, insists on going with her. In the City they find that Nora has gone to a town further north, hopeful of finding a naturally blight-resistant soy bean. There they hook up with a guy who’s in the story for a while. Nora appears to have moved on to a seed repository in the Arctic Circle run by the evil seed and chemical company – presumably based on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault located on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen.

They sail there – in their home-made sailboat, across the North Atlantic – losing the guy along the way when he gets too obnoxious; fighting off pirates who live on giant rafts; arriving at the beginning of winter; losing their boat; but getting accommodation and jobs, and joining up with the local rebels. They are hot on Nora’s trail …

A gripping adventure story in which the heroes are young women; but, as I said, stock standard eco-SF, even down to everyone speaking American. So much for Kitsei’s “space between two cultures”. If that’s really where you’d like to be I suggest Minae Mizumura’s wonderful An I-Novel (1995).

In relation to UKLG2026 I have previously read
Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva (Argentina) review
The Dream Hotel by Laila lalami (US/Morocco)
both of which I rate ahead of Saltcrop for innovation both in ideas and, to some extent, in writing.

I mentioned The Dream Hotel in an earlier post but did not review it which I now regret. An academic in an all too believable near future returns home from an overseas conference and is detained at the airport and subsequently imprisoned – ‘retained’ in a privately run retainment centre. It turns out that she has had a device fitted in her head to produce dreams; that the company providing the device evaluates her dreams and provides information to the government about the likelihood of the dreamer committing crimes. The prison company of course has no incentive to release her, or even to allow her to contact her husband, so every time she protests, or has an off dream, her retention period is increased. She slowly comes to realise that she might never get out.

.

Yume Kitasei, Saltcrop, Flatiron, 2025. Audible version read by Eunice Wong. 11 hr 35 min.

Ogadinma, Ukamaka Olisakwe

wadholloway Africa, Literature , , , , , , ,

Ogadinma:: or Everything Will Be All Right (2020) begins in the 1980s, when the army takes over the government of Nigeria. Ogadinma, the eponymous heroine is at the time 17 and she remains just 17, 18, 19 throughout the novel, through rapes, marriage, childbirth and divorce.

The author Ukamaka Olisakwe was born in 1982 of Igbo (Christian, Eastern Nigeria) parents living in the mostly Muslim north. Ogadinma’s situation is similar but her mother has left and her father has brought her up alone. They go back to their home village in the Eastern Region each year for Christmas and that way stay in touch with extended family.

A very brief timeline of Nigerian post-colonial history:
1960. Independence from Britain, democratic government.
1963. Becomes a republic
1966. Military coup. Igbo seen as having too much influence. Massacres of Igbo living in the (Hausa/Muslim) north
1967. Eastern Region (Biafra), home of the Igbo, secedes. Biafra and Nigeria at war
1970. Biafra loses war, is reincorporated into Nigeria
1970s. Unstable civilian governments
1983 Military takes over government promising elections at some future date
1993 Presidential elections held. The winner, Abiola, is jailed until he dies.
and so, on we go with authoritarian governments backed by the military.
I’d just like to mention Pres. Umaru Yar’Adua, too ill to govern effectively, who in 2009 travels to Saudi Arabia for heart surgery which was the situation in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon. He dies soon after and is succeeded by his deputy, Goodluck Jonathon.

I found it interesting that the novel depicts no racial (inter-tribal) tension, neither in the north, nor for the bulk of the novel when Ogadinma is living in the capital, Lagos (which is in Yoruba country). Maybe there was none. The military are mentioned in passing, mostly when Ogadinma sees soldiers beating people up in the street, but also when her husband is jailed for spurious financial crimes committed against the previous government. It is never clear whether this is just straight out extortion or maybe also racial.

Ogadinma’s passivity in the face of older men constantly leads her into trouble, for which she then wears the blame. It is very well written (and read) and Milly and I who listened together while travelling down south last week, both enjoyed it were gripped by the evolution of Ogadinma’s situation.

Ukamaka Olisakwe, Ogadinma: or, Everything Will Be All Right, 2020. Audiobook read by Adjoa Andoh. 9 hours.

Idu (1970) was the second novel – after Efuru – of pioneer Nigerian writer Flora Nwapa. I won’t/can’t say much about it as I read it some time ago but I wanted to include it here in this review of books by/about African women I’ve read in the last few months. Like Efuru, it is a story of village life (in the Niger delta probably, where Nwapa grew up) and of one woman’s struggles in an otherwise happy marriage where she is unable to get pregnant.

I absolutely love Nwapa’s language and the way she renders traditional (presumably Igbo) speech into English.

“Our Uzoechi did you come to the stream?” “Yes, our Nwasobi, I came to the stream. Are you well?” … “Look, there’s Idu. Idu, our Idu, are you well?” “I am very well,” replied Idu, “I have come to fetch some water. My husband is not very well today.”… “Let not our Adiewere be ill. God forbid that our Adiewere be ill, ” Uzoechi said ..

from page 1, and on it goes, slowly, gently building our picture of Idu, her family, her friends and fellow villagers.

Flora Nwapa, Idu, Heinemann African Writers Series, 1970. 218pp.

We move to Tanzania, on the other coast and south of the Equator where Nigeria is north. Rosa Mistika (1971) is said to be the first-ever Swahili novel to address issues of domestic violence, sexual coercion, and abortion. It was translated into English, by JB Rubin, last year, which is how I came to hear about it. The author Euphrase Kezilahabi (1944-2020) is a guy, and his protagonist, Rosa, is a promiscuous woman – which is too often the case, in my opinion.

I wrote about the history of Tanzania in my review of After Lives by Abdulrazak Gurnah, but basically colonial ‘administration’ of Tanzania ended in 1961, so this novel is set in the first years of independence.

Rosa grows up in a rural village on an island in Lake Victoria, as did the author. The story is how she breaks away from poverty, from a drunken, violent father – with the support of her mother, Regina, who is the first character we meet – to get the schooling she needs. She’s accepted into a Catholic girls school, boys write her letters, but she concentrates on her schoolwork. Until Year 12, when it all starts to go awry.

One of the criticisms of this book, which led to it being banned, is that the author presents Rosa’s immorality without comment or judgement. My own opinion is that the calamitous ending is evidence enough that the author intended a moral. I didn’t find Rosa a particularly engaging character, but as always, it’s interesting ‘living’ for a few hours or days in another world.

Euphrase Kezilahabi, Rosa Mistika, 1971 and 1981, trans JB Rubin 2025. 157pp
Interview with Rubin in Chicago Review of Books

Sukoluhle “Sue” Nyathi (1978- ) is a Ndebele (which the British called Matebele) woman from Zimbabwe, currently working in South Africa. The Golddiggers (2018), her second novel, begins with a car in Bulawayo which is to transport a group of Zimbabweans illegally across the border to South Africa where they might find work (or in the case of a young child, their mother).

Poverty is widespread in Zimbabwe – at one stage inflation reached “89.7 sextillion percent” – and there are large numbers of Zimbabweans in South Africa as illegal migrants doing menial jobs.

We are introduced to the travellers one or two at a time, and are told first their backstories, then the adventure of the trip across the border, the Limpopo, then their, separate, experiences in South Africa. I imagine the experiences are authentic, though Nyathi herself is a financial analyst, but the telling is clumsy – in that way of people who do well at English in school and are told they should write a book, a task for which they demonstrably have no natural ability.

Sue Nyathi, The Golddiggers, 2020. Audiobook read by Malika Ndlovu. 8 hours

Not Working, Walking

wadholloway Journal , ,

Journal: 134

Anthony, the guy I work for these days (Dragan of distant memory now, did ring a week or so ago but I missed his call) has a contract carting turbine sections for a new wind farm 350 km north. I got a few trips out of it towing sections like this, and am booked for another next week.

We leave the wharf after midnight – heavily escorted – and make our way over the course of about three hours to the northern edge of town (Perth). Then at daybreak, set off for the remaining 300 kms. To get round sharp corners and roundabouts, the rear pilot has remote control of the rear wheels and steers them while I edge forward at 10 kph or so.

Just when I was settling into two loads a week the head contractor decided to use one of his own trucks for my job and so the remaining six weeks for which I was booked were cancelled. I did a road train load to Port Hedland and then took two weeks holiday (to this Friday), as my brother (B4) was bringing my mother over.

And then the Israelis persuade the idiot in the White House to commence bombing Iran and the price of diesel goes up from around $1.70/litre in Perth to nearly $3.00. That’s ok, I can afford to not work, though my experience during Covid was that freight rates went up very quickly. The surcharge I need just to cover my costs is equivalent to a rate increase of 25%.

Having mum here means I not only don’t work but I struggle to blog. And every day with mum is a walking day – and she’s 94 and uses a walking frame! – we’ve walked around Fremantle, walked around the zoo, walked along the river around my place, walked down to the coffee shop in the next suburb (in 30+ deg heat). I accept I need to walk if I’m not going to die of overweight, but all this, all at once! At least we’re eating well, 10 days of pub and restaurant meals. Tapas Bar/Olive Farm winery on the upper Swan River today (Tues). Highly recommended.

On Saturday we had an extended afternoon lunch at the Guildford pub with five generations of family again – mum; me and Milly and B4 and Mrs B4; Gee and her kids; and Lovely and our lovely great granddaughter (no photo this time, though of course we took a few).

Mum leaves in the morning (Weds) and I’m going down to Denmark for a few days, taking the EV rather than the ute in case I can’t source diesel for the trip back, though the car’s short range makes long trips difficult. The book I’m currently listening to, Saltcrop by Yume Kitasei, is standard post-eco-apocalypse SF – two sisters coping with rising sea levels and the collapse of civilization. I’m only halfway through but I’ll chose something else tomorrow as I’ll have Milly with me. Maybe Ogadinma: Or Everything will be All Right by (Nigerian) Ukamaka Olisakwe which at 8+ hours is just the right length.

It’s not normal, but Marcie/Buried in Print likes to readalong more than one book at a time. At the moment we’re reading Proust – that might take all year, but I’m towards the end of Swann’s Way; and Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian. I’m also reading Stead’s The Beauties and the Furies before we readalong Lettie Fox (for July, I think); and I have The Heart of Cherry McBain by Douglas Durkin on Kindle, for when I’m stuck with just my phone, though so far I’m only a few pages in.

I am trying to keep in mind that I have promised to review by ‘mid-year’ Literary Geographies and the Work of David Ireland: An Australian Atlas by Australian academic, Brett Heino. It’s on my laptop and I have made a start. Then there’s 1961 Club for which I have undertaken to read Time of Conflict by Judah Waten. Not working is starting to look like a very good idea! And I have The Female Quixote on my calendar for the end of March, though I forget why.

Thursday

Drove down yesterday, the EV did better than I hoped – averaged a maximum range with the cruise control set on 100 kph of 315km. Now it’s over at the machinery shed, plugged into 240v, which takes 24 hours to top up charge from 50 to 100%.

Ogadnama is good – I think I bought it because one of you reviewed it – it was published in 2020 but where I’m up to, at least, seems to be set in the 1990s, in northern Nigeria and Lagos, though Ogadinma’s family are Igbo (from eastern Nigeria). O is a teenage girl whose passivity in the face of assertive older men gets her into trouble. Tomorrow we drive home and I’ll see how it all ends.

Ogadinma is the opposite of Jeannie Deans, the heroine of The Heart of Midlothian, who is religious, chaste, and truthfull to a fault. But also, when the situation requires, shows the heroism to walk unaccompanied from Edinburgh to London to seek a pardon from the King (George II) for her unwed sister who has committed the crime of concealing a pregnancy – based on a true story apparently.

Since getting down here I’ve had a phone call saying my wind turbine job has fallen through – again – but would I go to Karratha on Saturday. I’ve put off last year’s tax to the last possible moment and now I have to spend a week away. Serves me right! Can’t see you getting even a scraped-together Journal next week.

Plains of Promise, Alexis Wright

wadholloway Aboriginal, Australian, Literature , ,

Alexis Wright (1950 – ) a Waanyi* woman, is Australia’s greatest living writer. Like many readers it seems, I came to her work via her second novel, Carpentaria (2006) which took two years to find a publisher (Giramondo) before going on to win the Miles Franklin. The implication being that this novel, her first, Plains of Promise (1997) didn’t receive much attention. Luckily for us, Wright’s rise to prominence led to it being republished in 2022 (There is a long list of reprints prior to 2022, so perhaps the truth is I just failed to notice).

Mykela Saunders in her Introduction points out that 1997 was the year of Bringing Them Home, ‘The Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families’; the year we ‘discovered the Stolen Generations – the taking, over the previous century, of maybe a third of all Aboriginal children from their parents; the year Prime Minister John Howard made it clear he would not be apologising, the first recommendation of the Report, nor would he ever implement any of the others.

Saunders makes the interesting point that over the course of her fiction Wright deals with the Stolen Generations (Plains of Promise); with land rights and mining on Aboriginal land (Carpentaria); and with the Federal Government’s ‘Intervention‘ in Aboriginal communities (The Swan Book and Praiseworthy), echoing the change in focus of Aboriginal activism over the course of her adult life.

Plains of Promise begins with St Dominic’s Mission for Aborigines; a dormitory for “three generations of black girls laughing in their innocence”; a crow, a harbinger of death, in a tree; a (presumably Waanyi) community. The girls dormitory sounds like a shearing shed: “The corrugated iron windows, held out with long sticks, always stayed open before the Wet.” Later, the community’s housing is described as rows of “corrugated iron, one-room huts that looked like slight enlargements of outdoor dunnies”, plus communal sheds and shanties for the less ‘privileged’, with one water tap for every 200 people.

A woman originally from another people further south kills herself.

Errol Jipp, the missionary in charge of St Dominic’s, with full powers for the protection of its eight hundred or so Aboriginal inmates under state laws … stood directly in front of Ivy ‘Koopundi’ Andrews, aged about seven. She had just acquired the name Andrews .. “Your mother died this morning, Ivy,” Jipp announced, looking around the dormitory.

We learn more from the chatter of nameless others. That the dead woman had taken a shack down by the creek, was distraught when her daughter, her only company, was removed, had borrowed some kerosene and set herself on fire. Then we get a little of her back story. How she grew up in the homestead of a remote sheep station, separated from her own people to be a companion to white children; had lived for a while with a shearer, got pregnant, found herself unwanted by the whites, unwanted by her own people and sent away to the mission by a magistrate.

We’re in the 1950s, Ivy’s timeline roughly matching Wright’s own. One of my great grandfathers, 60 or 70 years earlier, at the end of the nineteenth century, was a magistrate and gold warden further east, at Charters Towers. Gold history always predominates, but I wonder now how many Aboriginal ‘problems’ he had to deal with in the course of his work. Not that most of them were not dealt with by shooting (eg. the extinction of the Waanyi’s neighbours, the Injilarija)

Jipp begins taking Ivy out of the dormitory at night, to the vestry or to the banana plantation/cemetery, and raping her. Ivy is ostracised, blamed. A rash of suicides by fire breaks out. The Mission of course covers it up, but the elders have their own laws and, eventually, send a young man, Elliot, to go down to Ivy’s mother’s country to determine the source of the evil she has brought on them.

Some years pass. People in the community continue to die. Elliot makes a second quest into Ivy’s country, getting caught up in the flooding of Channel Country (when it rains in north and central Queensland the usually dry rivers drain inland towards Lake Eyre in northern South Australia, a great salt lake which is below sea level. As it happens, this is occurring right now (Feb, Mar 2026)).

At age 14, marriage and a child, Mary, come to Ivy. Life goes on, not happily. Ivy moves into a country town, on the fringes as always. Mary gets an education, begins working with an Aboriginal Rights organisation, ends up back at St Dominic’s.

This is not quite a saga, though there is a huge range of often colourful supplementary characters, but rather, I think, Wright’s fictionalisation of what it was to be Aboriginal over the four or five decades of her life to 1997 and of the changes that occurred over that time.

It is astonishing that such a great writer took so long, if not to begin writing, I can’t imagine she didn’t always write, then to make her work public. In Plains of Promise you can see her gathering her material – the colonisation of her people; marshalling her rage; and beginning on the dream-like quests which are a feature of her later work.

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Alexis Wright, Plains of Promise, UQP, Brisbane, 1997. 384pp

* Waanyi country( in centre of map). A largish area in north Queensland, south of the Gulf of Carpentaria, including Cloncurry where Wright grew up and Mt Isa. (extract from map of Pama–Nyungan languages)

Alexis Wright, works:
Grog War (19977) NF. I own a copy. I’ll read it soon
Plains of Promise (1997) BIP review
Carpentaria (2006) my review
The Swan Book (2013) my review
Tracker (2017) NF my review
Praiseworthy (2023) my review 1/2, my review 2/2

Andrew Blackman attended Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Alexis Wright in conversation at Southbank Centre (London, UK, I guess) in 2008. (Here)

King Arthur

wadholloway English, Literature , , ,

The Novel pre-Jane Austen

Tapestry c.1385 (‘Nine Heroes’)

Over the last few weeks looking into the earliest days not so much of the novel as of the earliest written accounts of story-telling in Britain. I ran into a Welsh connection for Karen/Booker Talk’s Reading Wales Month 2026 which ties in, astoundingly, to my earlier post on Virgil’s Aeneid.

The Welsh connection begins with Geoffrey of Monmouth (1095-1155), a Welsh priest who was probably a member of the French speaking aristocracy, and his Historia regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain) which is a fictitious history of Britain, covering two millenia, from Brutus of Troy to the Saxons of eastern Britain in the 7th century AD.

The connection to the Aeneid is that Brutus of Troy, “first king of Britain”, was Aeneas’ great grandson.

The connection to my heading, ‘King Arthur’, is that Monmouth’s Historia contains also the story of King Arthur, derived from earlier accounts, in particular Historia Brittonum (History of the Britons), stories collected by and sometimes attributed to, the 9th century Welsh monk, Nennius, who added a Prologue. As it happens, Monmouth in South Wales is near Caerleon, the supposed site of Camelot, King Arthur’s court.

My actual entry point into this whole area was a suggestion by Marcie/BIP that we read The Mabinogion, eleven Welsh folk stories committed to writing in Welsh, by one or more authors around 1100 AD, with the first complete English translation being by Charlotte Guest in 1845.

Book I, Monmouth’s History

I was able to locate online only excerpts from Monmouth (see Pressbooks), but here is a brief precis of Brutus’s story:

Aeneas, having escaped from Troy to the west coast of Italy, defeated Turnus, married Lavinia daughter of king Latinus and became ruler. He was succeeded by his son Ascinius who “built Alba upon the Tiber, and begat a son named Sylvius”. Sylvius in turn lay with a niece of Lavinia who bore him a son, Brutus, and died.

At age 15 Brutus killed his father in a hunting accident and was expelled from Italy. He wandered around Europe, collecting followers from the Trojan diaspora, ending up in ‘Albion’, an island “inhabited by none but a few giants”. There Brutus and his followers settled. “At last Brutus called the island after his own name Britain, and his companions Britons.”

The Mabinogion

Guest points out in her Introduction to The Mabinogion, and indeed she was the one who gave it that name, that the stories she had collected were common all across Europe as “a body of ‘Romance’, which in various forms retained its popularity till the Reformation. In it the plot, the incidents, the characters, were almost wholly those of Chivalry, that bond which united the warriors of France, Spain, and Italy, with those of pure Teutonic descent, and embraced more or less firmly all the nations of Europe, excepting only the Slavonic races, not yet risen to power, and the Celts, who had fallen from it.”

Yet, despite the “fierce, and not causeless, hatred” of the Celts for the others “it is remarkable that when the chief romances are examined, the name of many of the heroes and their scenes of action are found to be Celtic … of persons and places famous in the traditions of Wales and Brittany [such as] Ywaine and Gawaine, Sir Perceval de Galles, Eric and Enide, Mort d’Arthur, Sir Lancelot, Sir Tristan, the Graal, &c.”

Kilhwch and Olwen [in the Mabinogion]

In this story Kilhwch is told by his stepmother to seek out Olwen,”the daughter of Yspaddaden Penkawr” to be his wife. His father, a chieftan, advises him to seek assistance from his cousin Arthur.”Sovereign Ruler of this Island”. Kilhwch journeys to Arthur’s court, where Arthur first, unsuccessfully sends out messengers to find Olwen, and then gives Kilhwch his best men to go an a quest with him: Kai, who could last nine days and nine nights underwater; Bedwyr, who always went with Kai, and whose sword did more damage than the swords of any three other men; Kynddelig the Guide; Gwrhyr Gwalstawt Ieithoedd, because he knew all tongues; Gwalchmai the son of Gwyar, who never failed in a quest; and Menw the son of Teirgwaedd who could cast spells.

Their journey takes them to a fine castle, the home of Yspaddaden Penkaw. His daughter comes out to the waiting men

The maiden was clothed in a robe of flame-coloured silk, and about her neck was a collar of ruddy gold, on which were precious emeralds and rubies. More yellow was her head than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountain. The eye of the trained hawk, the glance of the three-mewed falcon was not brighter than hers. Her bosom was more snowy than the breast of the white swan, her cheek was redder than the reddest roses. Whoso beheld her was filled with her love. Four white trefoils sprung up wherever she trod. And therefore was she called Olwen.

And Kilhwch said unto her, “Ah! maiden, thou art she whom I have loved; come away with me

Of course he must first ask her father. Three times they go in to Yspaddaden Penkaw, three times does he attempt to harm them, and each time it is he who is harmed. On the fourth time he sets Kilhwch a series of tasks – to level a hill, to plough and seed the land, and on and on, to Get the sword of Gwrnach the Giant; and each time Kilhwch responds, “It will be easy for me to compass this.”

Kilhwch’s band journey to the castle of Gwrnach the Giant where Kai tricks him into giving up his sword, and with it removes his head. They sack the castle and return to Arthur’s court where Arthur immediately commits to undertaking the tasks. “Then Arthur rose up, and the warriors of the Islands of Britain with him.”

The tasks are accomplished. Yspaddaden Penkaw gives up his daughter and his life.

“And that night Olwen became Kilhwch’s bride, and she continued to be his wife as long as she lived. And the hosts of Arthur dispersed themselves, each man to his own country.”

I am not sure how many of the stories in The Mabinogion involve the legends of Arthur’s court, but glancing through it, at least a number of them do. Monmouth is said to be the source for written accounts of the Arthurian legends, in Britain at least – though I’m not sure when his work made it from Latin to English. Both Monmouth’s History and The Mabinogion clearly rely on the same early Welsh (Celtic) sources, first collected two centuries earlier by Nennius.

These works mark the beginnings of the Chivalric stream in English literature, which stream persisted throughout Europe for half a millenium, mostly in French, I think, in England at least, until at last descending into the satire that is Don Quixote.

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Charlotte Guest translator and editor, The Mabinogion, complete collection first pub.1845. Available Project Gutenberg.
Geofrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain), original title De gestis Britonum (On the Deeds of the Britons), first pub. 1136

My list of early works in Latin and the Chivalric stream continues to grow. It now looks like this:

Gildas, De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain) c.540 AD
Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (An Ecclesiastical History of the English People) 731 AD
Unknown, Historia Brittonum (History of the Britons) Latin, C9th. Prologue added by Welsh monk, Nennius
William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum (Chronicle of the Kings of England) 1125
Arthurian legends:
Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain), originally De gestis Britonum (On the Deeds of the Britons), Latin 1136.
Unknown, The Mabinogion (Welsh, c.1100) trans. Charlotte Guest 1845
Jean Bodel, Chanson des Saisnes (“Song of the Saxons”), French, C12th – referring to The Matter of Britain (King Arthur), The Matter of France (Charlemagne), The Matter of Rome, cycles of verse and prose myths
Marie de France (court of Henry II) c. 1200
‘Pearl Poet’, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Middle English) c.1375 [also Cleanness, Pearl, Patience]
Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur (trans from French, Caxton, 1485)
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene 1590
Philip Sidney, Mary Herbert née Sidney, Mary Wroth, Arcadia, Urania c. 1600
reference: Mothers of the Novel, Dale Spender (my review)

Anna, Angus Gaunt

wadholloway Australian, Literature , ,

ReadIndies Month

Anna by Angus Gaunt was the co-winner of the 2025 “20/40” Prize – for works between 20,000 and 40,000 words – from Finlay Lloyd publishing. I don’t know how many words it is, but it’s 110pp. The other co-winner was Kim Kelly with Touched.

WG sent me Anna last year to get my opinion (I’m sorry, I’ve misplaced the card she sent with it) and I’ve saved it up to participate in Kaggsy’s ReadIndies Month. Finlay Lloyd, based in Braidwood, NSW, are definitely ‘indies’ “without the commercial imperative of most publishers,” well, half their luck! “we are able to champion ideas and authors for their intrinsic interest and quality.”

The author’s bio says “Angus Gaunt was born and educated in England and came to Australia in 1987.” I put that in because for all that Gaunt has been here for the best part of 4 decades, this is a totally European story.

Anna, a young woman, is a detainee – I’ve just read a near future dystopia, set in the US, where women are held on suspicion that they might commit crimes and so are ‘retainees’, theoretically still holding rights that detainees don’t (The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami). We have all sorts of weasel words for holding people we don’t like in concentration camps – in a camp in an endless forest of mostly birch and aspen (I’ve been reading the words ‘birch’ and ‘aspen’ all my life without knowing, or even wondering particularly what they are. Well, trees obviously, confined to the northern hemisphere, and I think to colder climates, and apparently aspen mostly coexist with conifers).

The story is an old one. There has been a war. Families on the losing side are displaced, herded into remote camps where they are poorly fed and made to work. Anna, having the care of her own younger siblings, has been given the care of others as well. On this day, it seems the war is over, the gates are open, Anna ventures out into the surrounding forest, bumps into a guard, a boy her own age

She was not used to the back and forth he seemed to want. He knew little of Anna’s language, beyond greetings and thanks, but she had picked up enough of his to grasp most of his words. It was odd hearing the language used like this. Her experience of it had mostly been words that could be barked – commands and threats and insults.”

Anna wanders off into the bush. By the time she gets back to the camp it is deserted. Trucks have come for the guards and the detainees have followed them on foot to the railhead, some days walk away. Anna sets out to follow them, encounters the boy guard who with a lucky shot with one of his last bullets has killed a hare. They share it and she warily allows him to accompany her.

When they finally reach the rail head, the last train has been and gone. An old couple living in one of the few remaining cottages of a derelict railway village takes them in. Temporarily. Anna will press on.

It is hard to say what this story is , or even why it was written. Certainly it maintains our interest – will Anna ever make her way out of the forest? Is the boy guard anything other than a necessary, though barely trusted, ally in a difficult situation?

But what does it say about the many, many Anna’s of this world making their way on foot from impossible situations to slightly less impossible situations? Not a lot, certainly nothing about the causes of their situation. Nor is it a particularly deep character study. And – I’m sure Sue is waiting for this – what does a sixtyish man, safe in middle-Australia, bring to our understanding of a not yet adult girl, coping with isolation and starvation, a long way from home, a home that probably no longer exists? Not much.

I mentioned above The Dream Hotel in which Lalami explores undeserved internment, effectively a critique of the mindset that produced ICE; in The Left Hand of Darkness the great Ursula le Guin uses two people on a long, difficult trek to explore all sorts of things, but especially our understanding of gender; and if you want a male author envisaging how a young Australian woman might deal with war, you have John Marsden’s Tomorrow series.

Anna is none of these. WG, in her review, sees the story as succeeding as a character study. She writes, “Anna is beautiful to read, from the first sentence. The language is tight but expressive. The necessary tension is off-set by moments of tenderness and hope ..”.

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Angus Gaunt, Anna, Finlay Lloyd, Sydney, 2025. 110pp

Finlay Lloyd are proud that their books are printed in Australia. Anna was printed by IVE Print Victoria. Not a name I recognised, but a search turned up that IVE’s printing operations in Melbourne were the former Franklin Web where I worked for many years off and on developing software (when I went out on my own around 1987 my intention was to write software for the transport industry, but Franklin Web kept giving me so much work that I ended up an expert on printing operations).

Two more Canadian women in the Bush

wadholloway Literature , , , ,
A typical Canadian Bush scene, but where’s the snow?

It has surprised me that Canadians seem to use ‘the Bush’ as we do, as that great outdoors where man struggles against hostile nature, where women, to the extent that they are allowed in, must stand by their man.

Of course – I hope you see it as ‘of course’ – I have spent a great deal of my blog documenting how Australian women writers developed a counter myth, the myth of the Independent Woman equally at home in the Bush as the men. From a theory point of view, this seemed to me to be an Australian take on the New Woman movement and first wave feminism, combined with a genuine love of Bush living.

Marcie/Buried in Print keeps introducing me to new (to me) Canadian women and Indigenous authors and I hope I am making my way towards an overview. So, Nellie McClung might be Canada’s Miles Franklin; Susanna Moodie, the hard done by wife in a Barbara Baynton story (a comparison Moodie would hate); but it is harder to name a Canadian Catherine Helen Spence or Eve Langley.

The two women I consider here, Sheila Watson and Aritha van Herk, the former is a contemporary of Langley, and similarly ‘poetic’; van Herk we could compare maybe with Nikki Gemmell and Shiver.

Sheila Watson, The Double Hook (1959)

Sheila Watson (1909-1998) was raised, educated and taught for some years in British Columbia. Two years spent teaching at relatively remote Dog Creek BC gave her the idea for The Double Hook, her first published novel, which came out in 1959 while she was doing a PhD under Marshall McLuhan at University of Toronto, although it had been written some years earlier and struggled to find a publisher.

Yet when it came out, it was to immediate acclaim. My guess is that it was recognised as the first literary work to engage with the Canadian backwoods, the first intersection of Modernism and the Bush. The novel (novella) begins:

In the folds of the hills
under Coyote’s eye
lived
the old lady, mother of William
of James and Greta

James and Greta live with the ‘old lady’ in the family home, one of a number of farming properties spread along a creek. By the end of the first page, the old lady is dead, pushed down by James. “You’ll not fish today”, he says. Yet for the remaining 130 odd pages, the old lady is seen on farms up and down the valley, fishing as she had for years, irrespective of property rights.

James and Greta must, separately, work out how they can bring the death of their mother to a conclusion that is not ‘James killed his mother’, and to do that in the midst of the ordinary dramas of the other households along the valley: William and his wife Ara who live in their own house nearby; Felix whose wife and children have gone off with another man; the Widow whose young daughter, James’ lover, is missing; and so on.

Episodes in the lives of these people flicker in and out, until resolved by a fire, a death, a birth; while in the background, there is Coyote, a nod, the only nod, to the valley’s original inhabitants.

Aritha van Herk, The Tent Peg (1981)

Aritha van Herk (1954- ) grew up in Alberta, where it appears, she still lives, though the setting for The Tent Peg, her second novel, is the Yukon, the Canadian territory adjacent to Alaska. Van Herk’s marital status shouldn’t matter, but as it happens her husband is an exploration geologist.

The story is that an androgynously shaped young woman, JL, is taken on as cook for a crew of nine geologists, all guys, who will be camping out for the three relatively snow-free months of summer in the mountains where the corporation they work for believes they might find uranium. The narration is carried forward, a few pages at a time, by whoever has something to say. Mackenzie, the team leader, who’s getting too old for field work, initially believes JL is a boy:

The toilet flushes and he [JL] comes out of the cubicle and stands beside me and stares at my cock singing piss against the enamel … I’m beginning to think that his problem is he’s queer, when he says flat out and still staring at my member, “Mackenzie, I’m a girl.”

Mackenzie takes her on anyway. JL is a Sociology student, but also an experienced camp cook, so that’s not a problem; and the rest of the novel is about how she is able to assert her independence in the face of the men who assume they can fuck her, and interestingly, of the men who would treat her as mother confessor. And of course there’s the scenery – flying in to a lake in a valley in the little seaplane which keeps them in supplies; swooping up and down the mountains in the helicopter which carries the men to site; hiking in the forest. Having read about van Herk’s geologist husband only as I was writing this up, I imagine he has taken her up there at least once.

All the men think about, quite a number of them obsess about, JL’s body. The summer ends with JL owning her woman’s body, saying as Eve Langley says, yes, look, I’m a woman, not a man, but there is a place for me here too, an equal place, not a subsidiary place.

February is ReadIndies month.

I have an ‘Indies’ post in mind for next week, but thought to check out the publisher of both these works, McClelland & Stewart, and discovered that, while now subsumed into PenguinRandomHouse, they were over most of the previous century an important, independent outlet for Canadian work (Wiki), publishing Kilmeny of the Orchard by L. M. Montgomery in 1910; and later, writers including Leonard Cohen, Margaret Lawrence and Michael Ondaatje, to list just the ones whose names I recognise.

Their New Canadian Library imprint, under which both these books were published, was a line of ‘quality’ paperbacks intended for the college and university market. I think of ‘Indie’ publishers as doing small print runs of works too far off mainstream for the big guys to want to handle. M&S, as with Angus & Robertson in Australia, were big in their home markets. The most ‘indie’ thing you can say about them, and it’s not nothing, is that they weren’t owned by the oligarchs in London and New York.

Luckily I checked Kaggsy’s page before posting and I see that with M&S now a subsidiary of PRH these books are no longer eligible for listing.

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Sheila Watson, The Double Hook, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1959. 134pp
Aritha van Herk, The Tent Peg, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1981. 228pp

Christine Brooke-Rose

wadholloway English, Literature , ,

I forget now exactly how it happened, but a few months ago Marcie (Buried in Print) and I came across mention of an experimental, post-modern writer of whom I at least had never previously heard. Chasing information about her, I found another blogger describing her as “criminally neglected” (here), going on: “Her work is enlightening and entertaining, posing some extremely interesting questions regarding the British approach to the development of literary theory in the twentieth century.”

Christine Brooke-Rose (1923-2012) was English, born in Switzerland, grew up in Belgium, served in the WAAF at Bletchley Park during WWII, before completing a BA and an MA at Oxford and a PhD at University College London. She went on to work as a literary academic and author, both in England and overseas.

“But don’t you think, Miss Grampion,” said the professor beyond the long, wide table, “that palatal dipthongisation in fourteenth century Kentish may have been optional?” Opening paragraph of The Languages of Love, Brooke-Rose’s first novel.

Marcie and I were intrigued enough to read a novel each by Brooke-Rose to see for ourselves. The one I manged to get hold of was Thru (1975) which is one of four – Out, Such, Between, Thru – which can be read together; and was number 8 of her 16 novels (Wiki Bibliography).

Thru goes on like this for 165 pages. I found each page interesting to read, but very little connection between one page and the next. Sometimes a character, Larissa in particular, would come up for a while. And often the subject, to the extent I could make sense of it, was language itself, with lots of tortured puns.

Brooke-Rose would I’m sure have been a very interesting lecturer, extremely knowledgeable about the beginnings of the English novel – which after all is my project for the next year or two – if only I could follow what she is saying:

Take Homer for instance through to the civilization of the sign with its dualistic binary structure and its vertical hierarchy which coincides roughly though not by chance with the Renaissance … Thru p.33

Interestingly, Goodreads contains no synopsis of Thru but one reviewer (MJ Nicholls) says “The final novel of the quartet is her most typographically ambitious work, bearing all manner of acrostic and spirally puzzles, many inscrutable to those not immersed up to their eyeballs in literary theory ..” which I think pretty well sums it up.

We might have left it there but I came across this: “After publishing four well-reviewed, conventional novels, Brooke-Rose survived a difficult illness and moved to France, where she began writing experimental fiction.” (Poetry Foundation). And so I ordered her first, The Languages of Love (1957) to see what she was like before her works turned into concrete poetry.

The novel commences – as per the quote with which I began this post – with Julia Grampion being examined on her PhD thesis. After the ordeal is over, one of the examiners, Dr Reeves takes her for drinks, on his Lambretta. He’s married but he soon makes it clear he wants to get in Julia’s pants. After Thru, The Languages of Love is an ordinary campus autofiction, just the sort of novel I favour.

Another of the examiners offers Julia a lecturer’s position in a regional university. Reeves scores a book deal on medieval adultery or somesuch. He holds out to Julia the opportunity to contribute.

Julia is engaged to Paul who is working on East African languages with Hussein. Paul is Catholic. Julia married and divorced (in the Church of England) as a teenager during the War, is willing to convert, but the Catholic Church will not allow Paul to marry a divorcee. All very reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh’s tortuous Catholicism around the same time. Hussein is the lover of Georgina who has a Japanese fetish.

Julia agrees she and Paul have no future. Goes home to cry. Reeves comes round and does the older man you just cry on my shoulder thing. He’s persistent. They all mill around each other for weeks.

Bernard [Reeves] changed his tactics. “Darling, I was only teasing.” You look so stunning in that dress, I can’t bear anyone else even talking to you.” She said nothing. She liked him to be jealous, but she had always been annoyed by the premature and proprietary way he called her ‘darling’, almost from the first. She reserved the word for intimacy, which she had no intention of allowing.

Which she thought she had no intention of allowing. Soon they get to the old: ‘She lay half undressed on the bed, comforting him. He was sobbing without tears … “I was frightened … that you would find me middle aged and inadequate, and I am.”’

Of course, Paul chooses that moment to knock on the door ..

Things go on from there. There’s drama with Hussein, returning to Africa, not returning. A declaration of love involving a camel. There’s drama with Bernard’s wife. It’s all very surfacey. And say what you like about Sally Rooney, she gets deep inside her protagonists.

The novel ends with Julia having learnt things about herself; and as it begins, with “the problem of dipthongisation in fourteenth century Kentish.”

Julia’s first conversation with Reeves is about whether she might have to become an ordinary novelist. The Languages of Love is an enjoyable enough read, but in the end it is just another ‘ordinary’ campus novel. I don’t think though that Brooke-Rose was happy to be ordinary, hence Out, Such, Between, Thru.

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Christine Brooke-Rose, The Languages of Love, first pub. 1957. 173pp.
Christine Brooke-Rose, Thru, first pub. 1975. 165pp.

WomanTheory, Anon on Christine Brooke-Rose (here)
Poetry Foundation, Christine Brooke-Rose (here)

Of Ashes and Rivers that Run to the Sea, Marie Munkara

wadholloway Aboriginal, Biography , ,

It is a matter of great disappointment – to me and no doubt to many others – that Marie Munkara (1960- ), a woman of Rembarranga (Arnhem Land) and Tiwi descent, has written only two adult novels: the fierce satires Every Secret Thing (2009) and A Most Peculiar Act (2014).

I guess in this account of her life I was hoping for a writer’s memoir, an insight into how she came to write two such wonderful works, but Of Ashes and Rivers that Run to the Sea (2016) is a memoir not so much of her own life, but of her relationship with her mother from whom she was stolen at age 3 and only returned to in adulthood.

The style of the writing is conversational, largely (but not entirely) without the bite of her novels. In my review of Every Secret Thing I wrote that “it would be sad if [Munkara] were the Marigold in these stories, stolen from loving parents, sent away as a baby to be bought up Catholic and trained for service, constantly beaten and raped by her employers, who finally returns to her family only to find she doesn’t fit in.” What can I say – she wasn’t “trained for service”.

Munkara tells her story in four parts. Part 1 is a prologue where she discovers her origins at age 28, locates her mother, flies unannounced from Melbourne to Darwin to Nguiu on Bathurst Island, and is there immediately recognised:

“I’m your mummy,” she says. “Come in and have a cup of tea.” I am flabbergasted and stand there staring at her. My mother! I glare at this impertinent woman. My mum can’t be possibly be shoe-polish black like this and my mum hasn’t laid eyes on me for twenty five years …

The squalor, the crowded living conditions, the food, are too much, she stays a short while, fortified by lots of wine, then flies back home.

Part 2 is her childhood as the foster daughter of white middle class Catholic parents in suburban Adelaide, from whom, by adulthood, she was largely estranged. She has very little good to say about her mother, and nothing at all about her father, who molested her almost from the get-go.

Munkara is not entirely clear, but the assumption is that for most of these years she ‘passed’. Although, for a while at least, her parents belonged to a support group for foster parents of Aboriginal children, they never spoke to her about her origins.

Part 3. Almost as soon as she gets home (Melbourne) from that initial visit, Munkara is determined to go back to her mother and her family and make a real go of it.

My family don’t even bat an eyelid when I arrive back on Bathurst Island and on their doorstep with my belongings, It’s like I hadn’t even left the place. But I can handle that because there are no routines here, people eat when they’re hungry and go to sleep when they’re tired, and after a lifetime of rules and being told what to do I know I am going to love the freedom.

This is the bulk of Munkara’s story, almost exactly half the 274 pages. It starts where you or I would – appalled at the living conditions, avoiding the local shop “because it looks scary with the hordes of black people hanging around it.” But she gets used to it, makes accommodations, but also manages to set some limits. Over time she learns to dress appropriately – no shorts, no midriff tops; to find her place as aunty, sister, daughter to everyone in a community of two or three thousand people; to take part in community life – fishing, wading in mangrove swamps, drinking (I’m not sure she ever warms to killing and eating turtles); speaking Tiwi.

Then, having lived as an ordinary member of her family, as an Aboriginal woman in her own community, she returns to ‘white’ life, but on new terms, living in Darwin, just across the water from the Tiwi Islands, rather than down South.

Part 4. There in Darwin, working in the Centre for Communicable Diseases at Royal Darwin Hospital, she is immediately taken in by the other half of her family, the Remburranga side, “spread out across the Top End”, centred on Maningrida in Arnhem Land (map), east of Darwin, hearing about her first 3 years, things her reticent mother hadn’t and couldn’t tell her.

In December 2000, so 12 years after their reunion, her mother dies and her funeral marks the end of this memoir.

I sometimes think of how I was taken from the loving arms of my mum … and given into the ‘care’ of a paedophile and a violent abusive woman and I feel great big holes in my heart for what was lost. And then I tell myself to look on the bright side of things because I wouldn’t be who I am if I hadn’t lived the life I have.

As it happens, while thinking over Munkara’s account of her life, I was listening to Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me, read by Roy, her account of her life as it revolved around her mother. And I had the same thought, that I was hoping for a literary memoir. But perhaps both women are saying the same thing, that for all the problems, their mothers were absolutely central to their lives and if you don’t understand that, then you don’t understand their writing.

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Marie Munkara, Of Ashes and Rivers that Run to the Sea, Vintage Books, Sydney, 2016. 274pp.