viragohaus's reviews
237 reviews

A very impressive collection. Highlights include:

- the reproduced correspondence between Gerard Murnane and Teju Cole
- Will Heyward's interview with Murnane, usefully boxing in the inevitably discursive author
- Tristan Foster's look at Murnane's first two novels, where the author's '...sentences that read as if, after writing them, the author has run the heel of his palm over them to smooth out the creases.'
- Matthew Jakubowski's consideration of the prison-like escape of within and broad confinement of without.
- Emmett Stinson's elegant, critical exercise in mimicry, later echoed partially by Scott Esposito.
- K. Thomas Kahn's carefully precise look at the influence Proust has over Murnane.

The quietness of Munro's prose holds the melodrama of her plots in still relief and are all the more effecting for that.

It's hard to know what to make of this.
'A Story of Grief' reads as a magazine colour piece when the questions it asks about performative grief and public safety are large and profound.
Set in large type across a generously spaced forty-four pages, 'A Story of Grief' (2012)' perhaps inevitably feels like it is too close to the events it describes (2012) to be any more than a re-telling. Even so, its generalised phrasing fails to add much insight into the generalised grief felt for a stranger.
These events await greater perspective and a better book.

An extraordinary expatriation of voice. The only absence is silence

An interesting premise let down by a TV mini-series plot and a gabby narration.

As some of the best poetry outpaces explicitness, The Unstable Self defies definition. A paper chain of loosely grouped paragraphs, Gabbert reflexively admonishes the aphorism with a baseball bat. It gets up but she knocks it down again.

Meaning is a messy act. Its fusing of memory, testimony and narrative is a selective one that shapes cadence and line out of life’s awkward arrhythmia. Melissa Lucashenko’s fifth novel, Mullumbimby, works at the guts of meaning: how we belong to each other and how we might belong to a place.

Read the rest of the review here: http://newtownreviewofbooks.com/2013/03/07/melissa-lucashenko-mullumbimby-reviewed-by-james-tierney/

A book of blinking, then clear-sighted, arrivals.
Quietly extraordinary.

A swinging attack on the moral lassitude of one of our key 'spiritual leaders'. Devastating.

This quiet, almost modest collection is like the annual environmental hour with which it shares it's name.
It possesses a common stillness made fine by the deliberateness of its boundaries.