Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
The book is set in a place called Carpentaria on the coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria, which is still largely inhabited by Aboriginal people. Alexis Wright is a one-off. I love her voice, which is very colloquial and crackles with humour and with slang, but is also very high and lyrical, almost operatic, almost biblical at times.
Your final choice, Carpentaria, is by an Aboriginal woman, Alexis Wright.
This is the most recent novel on my list. Alexis Wright is from Northern Australia and the book is set in a place called Carpentaria on the coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria, which is still largely inhabited by Aboriginal people. So it is a place where ancient myth is still alive and also a lot of contemporary politics. Geographically, it has these huge tidal flows of the wet season and the dry, and the great wild rivers, and the novel works like that too, with a flow of language which is very funny and very eloquent. The characters in her story are larger than life and act out their dramas on this big, big stage.
Alexis Wright is a one-off. I love her voice, which is very colloquial and crackles with humour and with slang, but is also rich and lyrical, almost operatic, almost biblical at times. She just talks to you throughout the novel. As she is telling these stories and bringing these characters to life, she comments on them and jokes about them.
It sounds like oral history on paper.
Yes, it is. It is oral history but also contemporary history, which makes it fascinating and politically charged. Part of the story is about sabotaging a big multinational mine, and the people who do that are listening to music and travelling around in their cars, living in popular culture. So it really does have a contemporary feel about it.
You have edited an anthology of Australia literature. What stands out for you about Australian writers?
As you will have heard with my choices it is very hard to separate the literature from the sense of the place. And that is just as true for the past as for its contemporary energy. You get this weird thing in Australia. It’s a highly urban place and yet the imagination of the writers so often goes to remote places and remote times. The landscape is so vast and unwritten that it is appealing to writers and I think that is something distinctive to Australia. And the way people deal with that, through irony, through humour, through exaggeration, which all of these books I have mentioned have in different ways.
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Nicholas Jose has published short stories, essays, several acclaimed novels, and a memoir. He is Chair in Writing at the University of Western Sydney and Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University for 2009-2010. He is general editor of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature which is published internationally as The Literature of Australia. ‘You get this weird thing in Australia,’ he says. ‘It’s a highly urban place and yet the imagination of the writers so often goes to remote places and remote times. The landscape is so vast and unwritten that it is appealing to writers and I think that is something distinctive to Australia.’
