Hamish Hamilton

Friday essay: ‘mourning cannot be an endpoint’ – James Bradley on living in an Age of Emergency

Retrieved on:

Friday, April 5, 2024

Although it is early, the day is already unseasonably warm, the sky hazy with smoke from hazard-reduction burns to the south and north of the city.

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Although it is early, the day is already unseasonably warm, the sky hazy with smoke from hazard-reduction burns to the south and north of the city.
Walking to the water’s edge I wade out and dive, then stroke outwards until my breath gives out and I surface with a gasp.
There is something very particular about looking back towards the shore from deeper water.
Amid the convulsions of COVID, a hastening wave of calamity has made it clear that the first stages of climate breakdown are upon us.
Food production will decline markedly, especially in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and Central and South America.
Warming and acidifying waters will severely impact the fisheries that provide one-third of the world with their principal source of protein.

A shift

Attempting to comprehend its immensity and fluid multiplicity alters us, making it possible to glimpse new continuities and connections.
As the late Sven Lindqvist observes in his interrogation of the racist and genocidal foundations of European imperialism, “It is not knowledge we lack.
It is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.” In other words, the path through involves more than just a shift in energy sources.
It begins in a reckoning with the past, and demands a far more fundamental reorganisation of the global economy, a shift to a model that operates within planetary boundaries and shares resources for the benefit of all.
Such a shift is not impossible.

Beauty and astonishment

How do we make sense of the disappearance of coral reefs, of dying kelp and collapsing ecosystems?
How do we imagine a world in which the massing life that once inhabited not just the oceans but the earth and the sky is largely gone?
More than that, however, the act of openness creates the possibility of love and joy and – improbably – wonder.
However much has been lost, the world still hums with beauty and astonishment.

No less importantly, it is to recognise that despair is also a form of turning away.
Yet, like the scientists working to save coral reefs, he said he did not know what else he could do.

Instead, grief must be part of a larger recognition that there is no longer any way back, that the only route now is forward.
Surviving it demands we build a world that treats everybody – human and non-human – as worthy of life and possibility.
I turn to look out to the horizon, its fading margin between sea and sky a space of grief, but also possibility.
This is an edited extract from Deep Water: the world in the ocean by James Bradley (Hamish Hamilton).

James Bradley was the recipient of the Copyright Agency Non-Fiction Fellowship for 2020.

'I had a sadomasochistic fascination with English': a vivid, playful debut disrupts clichés of docile Asian womanhood

Retrieved on:

Wednesday, August 2, 2023

Mercifully, Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s debut novel, But The Girl, is effervescent on the page.

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Mercifully, Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s debut novel, But The Girl, is effervescent on the page.
As the narrator says,
I had a sadomasochistic fascination with English: it hurt me, and it gave me acute pleasure.
I had a sadomasochistic fascination with English: it hurt me, and it gave me acute pleasure.

Telling it slant

This self-awareness of movement against expectations infuses the book’s unapologetic over-sharing through the chatty, first-person narration with a sense of doubt and uncertainty.
It’s a refreshing commitment to self-critique and a refusal of foreclosure.
Read more:
In Daisy & Woolf, Michelle Cahill revisits a modernist classic to write a story of her own

Homage to Sylvia Plath

This theme of tribute, disappointment, critique and conversation – of holding Plath close – continues as verse and refrain throughout the novel.
For instance, Clementine, a fellow artist in residence in Scotland, attempts to paint a portrait of the narrator over a portrait of Plath.
This probing of Plath’s work continues, as the narrator retrospectively charts her growth towards a less hagiographic and more open-eyed apprehension of Plath.
Read more:
Sylvia Plath's famous collection Ariel is far darker than she envisaged

Cultural cringe and unstable ‘home’

There are the expected responses of shame and cultural cringe at Australia’s provincialism.
But they are complicated by the unstable category of “home”, where “home” is not just Australia, but also Malaysia.
Sometimes I wished my parents had immigrated somewhere else; being a child of immigrants always made your birth country feel so random and unnecessary.
This particular positioning of the self also plays out in the way the female Asian body is perceived and possessed.
Read more:
André Dao's brilliant debut novel explores his grandfather's ten-year detention without trial by the Vietnamese government

A love letter

This novel is also ultimately a love letter, especially to the narrator’s formidable Ah Ma, a former maid, now “a matriarch demanding the best of the best for her and for her alone”.
It is also a love letter to the narrator’s parents, Ma and Ikanyu – an exploration of all that is inherited, all that is suffered and all that is owed.
“To hit you is to love you,” the narrator is told after being smacked by her father when she calls her mother “a grouch”.

Anna Funder rescues George Orwell's wife Eileen from being 'cancelled by the patriarchy' – and reminds us he's a sexual predator

Retrieved on:

Sunday, July 2, 2023

Review: Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life – Anna Funder (Hamish Hamilton) A few months later, disappointment struck in the form of a derogatory diary entry about his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy.

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Review: Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life – Anna Funder (Hamish Hamilton) A few months later, disappointment struck in the form of a derogatory diary entry about his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy.
The accusations about women’s sexuality are somewhat confounding when they come from a man who, as Funder reveals, was himself a sexual predator.
In her anger, Funder births another project, moving “from the work to the life, and the man to the wife”.

Motherhood and #MeToo

It is composed of two narrative strands: the first, set in the present, is in Funder’s voice as she investigates Eileen’s life while also navigating the pressures of motherhood and the revelations of the #MeToo movement.
The second is written in the third person and reconstructs scenes from Eileen’s life.
Funder reads between the lines of Orwell’s work and the biographies of him to get the measure of Eileen’s contribution to his success.

Patriarchy: then and now

Funder draws productive parallels between her own time and Eileen’s – without sacrificing the historical specificity of either.
This observation captures Eileen’s fate; a talented writer with a masters degree in psychology, she becomes a taken-for-granted helpmeet when she marries Orwell.
She types his manuscripts in between looking after their chickens, unblocking the toilet and preparing all their meals.
Read more:
Friday essay: 'the problem is that my success seems to get in his way' – the fraught terrain of literary marriages

Orwell as predator

She documents his numerous attempted rapes of female acquaintances, as well as his manipulation of Eileen throughout his infidelities.
In 1940, as Eileen was grieving the death of her brother, Orwell penned a letter to an old crush, a teacher named Brenda who had refused his advances on multiple previous occasions.
In Wifedom, Funder mounts a similar argument against Orwell, shedding new light on his work: though he is renowned for his examinations of power, his writing never considers power relations between the sexes.
Read more:
Friday essay: George Orwell is everywhere, but Nineteen Eighty-Four is not a reliable guide to contemporary politics

Interrogating Orwell’s legacy

While this descriptor is often used in inaccurate and contradictory ways, arguably Orwell’s stature as a political commentator has increased with the ascendancy of Trump and his imitators.
Funder is the perfect writer to integrate Orwell’s legacy.
Then, in her Miles Franklin award-winning novel All That I Am, which centred on the strained loyalties of a group of Nazi dissidents.

How do we remake ourselves after unravelling? Plunge into life and pay attention, suggests Deborah Levy's mesmerising new work

Retrieved on:

Wednesday, May 10, 2023

Swimming Home, Autobiography, Hamish Hamilton, Freedom, Life, Face, Outline, Horse, Levy, Parent, Teaching, Woman, Human, Trilby, Attention, Element, Language, Statuesque, Volcanic explosivity index, Movement, Female, Mother, August Blue, Student, Man, Rupture, Love, Water, Diamond, Ageing, Trauma, Book, Real estate, Nightclub, Clothing, Jewellery, Entertainment, Toy

In this book, as compact and artfully worked as a sonnet, all these questions are answered.

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In this book, as compact and artfully worked as a sonnet, all these questions are answered.
Or, more accurately – because Levy prefers questions to answers – they are played with, teased out, turned over.
Review: August Blue – Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton)

Reality remade

The world is a now-familiar present, with surgical masks, cancellations, lost jobs, parents working from home and intruding on their children’s lives.
Life is slowly opening up in the aftermath of the pandemic; it seems as protean and up for grabs as the protagonist herself.
I had once heard him say to a journalist, No, Elsa M. Anderson is not in a trance when she plays, she is in flight.
It’s this whole professional self, with its enigmatic M-full-stop, and the soaring persona it denotes, that is up for grabs in August Blue.
Reality is slowly being remade and Elsa, too, is being remade after apparently losing her nerve on stage just before a performance of her signature piece, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.

‘Upwards and outwards’

“Upward” is a word and movement – a direction – that gathers psychological and symbolic meaning through the novel.
Elsa is haunted by the past, including the men who have shaped her, Goldstein and Rachmaninoff.
But there’s also something beyond them, more distant and yet more present, that’s haunting her, or erupting within her.
August Blue is as condensed and multifaceted as a diamond – and like a diamond, it’s the embodiment of metamorphosis.

A high horse of her own

In Real Estate, Levy’s narrator-self wonders why she is
still searching for a missing female character.
If I could not find her in real life, why not invent her on the page?
There she is, steering her high horse with flair, making sure she does not run over girls and women struggling to find a horse of their own.
If I could not find her in real life, why not invent her on the page?
There she is, steering her high horse with flair, making sure she does not run over girls and women struggling to find a horse of their own.
I read it like a thriller, often feeling the urge to weigh its slender size against the great magnitude of its reach.

André Dao's brilliant debut novel explores his grandfather's ten-year detention without trial by the Vietnamese government

Retrieved on:

Monday, May 1, 2023

André Dao’s remarkable debut novel began as an investigation into his paternal grandfather’s ten-year detention without trial by the Vietnamese government, from 1978, three years after the war ended.

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André Dao’s remarkable debut novel began as an investigation into his paternal grandfather’s ten-year detention without trial by the Vietnamese government, from 1978, three years after the war ended.
From Hanoi to Saigon, Laon to Boissy-Saint-Léger, and Melbourne to Cambridge, this richly layered novel invites the reader to join Dao in disentangling different narrative threads.

Forgetting and remembering

It’s a homonym of “Annam” (Pacified South), a name imposed on Vietnam by the Chinese imperialists in the seventh century and perpetuated by the French colonialists.
It refers in fact to “anamnesis”: that is, forgetting and remembering.
He connects the reader with his story, which resonates beyond the Vietnamese diaspora to touch all diasporic peoples haunted by dispossession and unbelonging.
Read more:
Model minorities and murder: Tracey Lien investigates the Vietnamese Cabramatta of the 1990s

Generational journeys

It convincingly demonstrates how, by blending facts and fiction, the narrator comes to an understanding of his grandfather’s decisions.
Their fight and willingness to sacrifice for their cause shed light on the narrator’s enigmatic grandfather.
Dao’s creation of a fictional Vietcong ghost in Chí Hòa Prison serves the same purpose.
With these letters, the narrator’s daughter becomes custodian of her great-grandparents’ memories – and the full story of Anam has been told and transmitted.
Read more:
War's physical toll can last for generations, as it has for the children of the Vietnam War

A fine example of a global novel

He raises moral questions of doubt, complicity and guilt, while showing compassion and generosity towards all choices.
But Dao handles these themes in an original and convincing way, appealing emotionally and intellectually to his reader.
In terms of thematic, linguistic, and cultural scope, Anam is a fine example of what a global novel should be like.
And it inspires us to think of a way to create our own houses, from which to tell the stories of our past.