AustLit

'"Life in Italy is seldom simple. One does not go there for simplicity but for interest: to make the adventure of existence more vivid, more poignant." Such a life is what Shirley Hazzard found when she first landed on the shore of Naples as a young woman in the early 1950s: underneath the devastation caused by World War II, the city that had bewitched such literary visitors as Byron and Goethe remained intact, ready to charm the patient and attentive traveler.

'That sojourn was the first step in a lifelong love affair with Naples. Along with her late husband, Francis Steegmuller, Hazzard made Naples a second home for decades, and The Ancient Shore collects the best of her writings on the city, its people, and its literary heritage. While acknowledging that Naples can be off-putting to the casual tourist, Hazzard takes readers behind the city's rebarbative face, showing the underlying beauty and unrivaled hospitality that await those who take the time to truly understand its rhythms and its history. A much-loved New Yorker essay by Steegmuller telling the harrowing story of his mugging - and the attentive care he received in its aftermath - rounds out a collection that memorably limns the inherent contradictions of contemporary Naples: prickly but passionate, violent but giving, and always breathtakingly unforgettable.

'Beautifully illustrated by photographs from such masters as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert List, The Ancient Shore is a lyrical letter to a lifelong love: honest and clear-eyed, yet still fervently, endlessly enchanted.' (Publisher's blurb)

'In a time rich in unlikely characters, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794-1847) was one of the strangest of all. A painter, writer, well-known London dandy and friend of most of the major figures of the Romantic era (from Blake to Byron, from John Clare to John Keats, Lamb, De Quincey and Hazlitt), he was also almost certainly a murderer, possibly several times over. Arrested and convicted of forgery - evidence was lacking to prove the murders - he was transported for life to the barbarous penal colony of Tasmania, where, years later, he died in obscurity. Behind him he left only rumors and fragments of documents, and a legend of evil that fascinated such writers as Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde.

'With a brilliant blend of creative imagination and scholarly sleuthing, Andrew Motion evokes Wainewright's double life in a tour de force of the biographer's art. Cast in the form of a partly fictional "confession" written by the subject himself, buttressed (and sometimes contradicted) by the notes, background essays and other commentary setting out the known facts, it reveals the man as no straightforward history could do - his distinctive voice, his wit and charm, his callousness and unreliability, his pathos and, perhaps, his capacity for murder.' (Source: Publisher Description from LibrariesAustralia)

'The Smoking Book is a dreamlike structure built on the solid foundation of two questions: how does it feel to smoke, and what does smoking mean? Lesley Stern, in an innovative, hybrid form of writing, muses on these questions through interesting stories and essays that connect, expand, and contract like smoke rings floating through the air.' 'Stern writes of addictions and passionate attachments, of the body and bodily pleasure, of autobiography and cultural history. Stern has written a book, at once intensely personal and kaleidoscopically international, that weaves the intimate act of a solitary person smoking a cigarette into a broad cultural picture of desire, exchange, fulfillment, and the acts that bind people together, either in lasting ways or through ephemeral encounters.'- Book jacket.

In Giving Offense, South African writer J. M. Coetzee presents a coherent, unorthodox analysis of censorship from the perspective of a writer who has lived and worked under its shadow. Widely acclaimed for his many novels, Coetzee is also a brilliant literary critic and essayist. The essays collected here attempt to understand the passion that plays itself out in acts of silencing and censoring. Subscribing neither to the myth of the writer as a moral giant nor to that of the writer as persecuted innocent, Coetzee argues that a destructive dynamic of belligerence and escalation tends to overtake the rivals in any field ruled by censorship.

From Osip Mandelstam commanded to compose an ode in praise of Stalin, to Breyten Breytenbach writing poems under and for the eyes of his prison guards, to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn engaging in a trial of wits with the organs of the Soviet state, Giving Offense focuses on the ways authors have historically responded to censorship. It also analyzes the arguments of Catharine MacKinnon for the suppression of pornography and traces the operations of the old South African censorship system. Finally, Coetzee delves into the early history of apartheid and critizes the blankness of contemporary political science in its efforts to address the deeper motives behind apartheid. (Source: Libraries Australia).

Such is Life: Being Certain Extracts from the Diary of Tom Collins. Joseph Furphy's title gives an indication of the complexity of the narrative that will unravel before a persistent reader. In chapter one, the narrator, Tom Collins, joins a group of bullockies to camp for the night a few miles from Runnymede Station. Their conversations reveal many of the issues that arise throughout the rest of the novel: the ownership of, or control of access to, pasture; ideas of providence, fate and superstition; and a concern for federation that flows into descriptions of the coming Australian in later chapters. Each of the characters provides a portrait of bush types that Furphy uses to measure the qualities of squatters and others against popular ideas of the 'gentleman'. Furphy's choice of a narrative structure to create a 'loosely federated' series of yarns is itself a critique of popular narratives populated by stock characters who are driven by action that leads to predictable and uncomplicated conclusions. Tom Collins, the unreliable narrator, adds further complications by claiming to 'read men like signboards' while all the time being unknowingly contradicted by circumstances that become obvious to the reader.

In each subsequent chapter Tom Collins leads the reader through a series of experiences chosen from his diaries. In chapter two, Collins meets the boundary rider Rory O'Halloran and his daughter, Mary, a symbol of the coming Australian whose devotion to her father will have tragic consequences in chapter five. There are many links between chapters like this one that remain invisible to Collins, despite his attempts to understand the 'controlling alternatives' that affect our lives. In chapter three Tom loses his clothes crossing the Murray River and spends the night wandering naked until he is able to steal a pair of pants after diverting attention by setting fire to a haystack. In chapter four Collins helps an ailing Warrigal Alf by deceiving several boundary riders who have impounded Alf's bullocks. In chapter five, among other yarns of lost children, Thompson completes the tragic tale of Mary O'Halloran, connecting with the events of chapter two. Chapters six and seven take Tom Collins back to Runnymede Station where he attempts to avoid an unwelcome union with Maud Beaudesart. He also meets the disfigured boundary rider, Nosey Alf, whose life story Furphy has threaded throughout the narrative, signs not perceived by Tom Collins. When Collins returns to Runnymede at the end of the novel, Furphy ties up more loose narrative threads, but Tom Collins, the narrator, remains oblivious to the end.

In short, Such Is Life 'reflects the preoccupations of [the 1890s]: contemporary capitalism, ardent Australian nationalism, the difficulties of pioneering pastoralism, and speculation about a future Australian civilization. It was instantly seen as a major example of the "radical nationalism" of the time and praised for its realistic representation of life on the frontier in the 1880s. But it was forty years before many readers realized that the novel was also a subtle comment on fiction itself and that within it were hidden stories that revealed a world of "romance" within its "realist" representation of life. Such Is Life can be read as the first experimental novel in Australian literature and the first Australian literary expression of a twentieth-century sensibility of the provisionality of life and reality.' (Julian Croft, 'Joseph Furphy.' in Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 230.)

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