AustLit

'Andrew McGahan’s first novel Praise (1992) was one of those books that captured the mood of its time and place. More than any other Australian novel of the early 1990s, it found a way to express the peculiar sense of disaffection and uncertainty inherited by those of us who just happened to come of age at the tail end of two decades of social and economic transformation, at the very moment an exhausted nation slumped into a recession. Its depiction of the seedy urban existence of its narrator Gordon Buchanan was greeted with a fusillade of clichéd adjectives (gritty, unflinching, confronting, and so forth) and hailed as a contribution to a confected genre that an especially witless hack decided to call ‘grunge’ — a literary movement notable for the fact that no one wanted to belong to it, least of all McGahan. But the significant aspect of all the sex and drinking and drug-taking described in the pages of Praise was that they were so ordinary. There was nothing edgy or rebellious or liberating or hedonistic about them; they were simply part of the texture of reality, commonplace activities that lacked even the residual glamour of decadence. They evoked a drab world of foreclosed possibilities, a world in which both the tattered countercultural ethos of the 1960s and the fluorescent crapulence of the 1980s had been exposed as empty promises. The passive cycle of drinking and drugging was presented as a numbing routine, a mundane way to pass the time while surveying a prospectless horizon. Sex was depicted with an emphasis on its unerotic complications: premature ejaculation, venereal disease, unwanted pregnancy, mismatched desires, a general sense of awkwardness and embarrassment.' (Introduction)

'Late one afternoon in May 1920 a French steamship, the Pacifique, pulled in at Circular Quay and discharged its passengers after a four-day passage across the Coral Sea from Nouméa. Among the usual contingents of businessmen and carefully-dressed women returning from holiday in the Pacific, one passenger stood out: an old Frenchman by the name of Marius Adolphe Jullien (also known as Julien de Sanary). Though nobody on the ship or at the port would have had reason to know it, the 60-year-old had arrived in Sydney after spending almost forty years of his life incarcerated in France’s penal colony (bagne) in New Caledonia.' (Introduction)

'Invented Lives, Andrea Goldsmith’s eighth novel, explores how and why people construct the lives they live. The novel’s four protagonists come to understand how they have formed the identities they project and how these differ from how they perceive themselves. To invent is derived from the Latin invenire: to find out or discover. By discovering how they have created their identities, Goldsmith’s characters can decide how best to understand themselves.' (Introduction)

'The car helped enable the suburb to become a widespread landscape format, thereby blurring the previously discrete conceptions of the town and the country. Portable computing technology is having comparable, if yet-to-crystallise effects on the places people live, play and work. Particularly those of us engaged in the so called knowledge economy. We already have the neologism ‘coffice’, a designation that names the practice of people adapting cafes for the purpose of work. But this is just one example of a place—or really two places—being remade through the affordances of mobile computing. The home/office binary is a relatively crude rendering in comparison.' (Introduction)

Semi-autobiographical: includes the author's account of his life in Australia and his sense of being understood via people's memories of reading accounts of the Middle East.