It is commonly supposed that the more one knows about a major writer the better, and that therefore his every written word must be gathered, published, and read by those who would truly appreciate his work. I am not sure that this is so. Great letter-writer though Dickens was, I do not think it necessary to wade through the ten gargantuan volumes of his correspondence in order to enjoy at their true value Mr. Micawber’s or Mrs. Gummidge’s wonderful utterances.
Kafka is especially interesting to many of us, perhaps, because he is, par excellence, the writer of neurosis—and to be neurotic these days is to be in a state of grace, for persons who are not neurotic must be complacent and therefore insensitive to the world’s woes. Of course, Kafka was born in 1883 in a harlequin empire with no ideological justification beyond dynastic continuity, and he belonged to a recently and uncertainly liberated minority, the Jews. As the succeeding century was to demonstrate, there were ample grounds for anxiety (Kafka’s three sisters were murdered in the Holocaust), but the world into which he was born was also that of the halcyon days of Stefan Zweig’s memoir, The World of Yesterday. Setting aside his chronic ill health and the condition of Central Europe in the days before the First World War, one suspects that Kafka would have been highly neurotic in any circumstances, a prophet and exemplar of a psychological tendency, so powerfully stimulated by Freud, to make mountains out of molehills. Do events such as the Great War cause neurosis, or does neurosis cause events? Was the Great War the result of the spiritual sickness that preceded it, Kafka having suffered from it very acutely?
If Doomsday Book and Passage and To Say Nothing of the Dog loom over Willis’s other fare, they’re nonetheless built on the same joys and exasperations that elevate nearly all her stories. This consistency might be the most important way in which Willis resembles her old Hollywood favorites. Not every Fred Astaire picture can match Top Hat, but the line of his glide remains the same.
“I’m petrified of growing old with a disability,” she says. If her husband dies before her, she may have no way to access financial support. She’ll lose her biggest advocate and support system—and her home. She’s worked in long-term care facilities and never wants to live in one. Applying for disability support programs, such as home care, can be cumbersome. There’s no one-stop shop for disability services; they’re spread across government agencies and ministries. Wait lists are long. Paperwork can be complicated. Carlson doesn’t think she’ll be able to understand how to navigate social assistance programs without her husband to explain them to her. But if she dies first, she reckons, she won’t have to.
If time travel was possible, medieval carpenters would surely be amazed to see how woodworking techniques they pioneered while building Notre Dame Cathedral more than 800 years ago are being used again today to rebuild the world-famous monument's fire-ravaged roof.
Certainly the reverse is true for the modern-day carpenters using medieval-era skills.
That the novel invokes a glorious past, hints at a utopian future and contradicts reality could be the author’s way to protest an authoritarian government skilled in just that. Deb seems to set his sights on other issues, too: When artificial intelligence can make our speech, text, appearance and existence better than it really is, then who are we? Meanwhile, the planet we have poisoned turns on us. Whatever the author’s intent, I felt privileged to have been on an odyssey quite unlike any other.
Dark, eerie and unsettling, Jacqueline Ross’ debut novel Blackwater taps into the horror of Tasmania’s colonial past. Blackwater explores the legacy of so-called ‘female factories’ – the workhouses to which female convicts were sent during the early 19th century – putting a contemporary spin on this uncomfortable chapter in Australia’s history.
Written through a female lens of empowerment, at its heart House of Longing is about accepting who you are and finding ways to live while working to support the changes you can make.