AustLit

'The ‘Raymond’ who sends his tender thoughts is Raymond Roussel, the French poet, playwright and novelist. And ‘little Charlotte’ is Charlotte Dufrène, Roussel’s housekeeper and closest friend (after his mother, Mme. Marguerite Roussel, who had died some years before the postcard was penned). Based on the colour photograph, ‘showing a street of an extremely modern town, with fine buildings and a tramline’, Roussel’s biographer François Caradec has imagined that his hotel room overlooked Collins Street, its northern windows faced away from Melbourne’s city centre (Caradec 175). Yet this is a double fabrication, not only because little was known about the poet’s visit to Australia in 1920 – where he went, where he stayed, what he saw – but also because the postcard itself exists only in reproduction, described and transcribed by the writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris, with Dufrène’s permission, in an essay titled ‘Le Voyageur et son Ombre’ (‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’) published in 1935, two years after Roussel’s death.' (Introduction)

'The blindness presented here is metaphorical, if not phantasmagorical, for Castro calls his verse novel a ‘Phantasmagoria […] in thirty-four cantos’. For me, actual blindness in Paris is a curse. That said, the beauty of Paris belies the misery and grief of war, colonialism and slavery.' (Introduction)

'Christmas Eve on the unit. The nurses’ station is in the middle of a long corridor, consisting of a low counter about ten feet long. A couple of psychiatric nurses are seated at laptops on wheeled stands, looking through medication orders, writing notes. A psych tech does rounds, checking each of the 22 single rooms every 15 minutes with a flashlight to the ground and signing their initials on a sheet to indicate that the patient is in their room and either awake or asleep. Many are awake.' (Introduction)