“If I should use a metaphor for the action of writing, it has to be that of listening,” the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse once said. “Thus, it almost goes without saying, that writing is reminiscent of music.” To take that idea further again, writing is sometimes the vain yet necessary attempt – ever ambitious, like chasing the speed of light – to say the unsayable.
The Degenerates, the impressive debut novel of the Indian Australian author Raeden Richardson (a graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop), inhabits this tension. It considers our ever-turbulent relationship with change and, with assured control, contends with how to truly express a life in language.
The Haunted Wood brilliantly celebrates what we have gained from our unrivalled storytelling tradition. If, like me, you find that it glows with nostalgia and remembered joys, then be grateful. But also ask yourself if we are going to give our children and grandchildren something less.
In prose that is graceful and often as melancholy as its theme, Eichler explores music’s capacity to commemorate historical trauma and to translate collective suffering into sound without permitting horrific events to take on the allure of facile beauty.