The Thousand Nights and a Night (Karmashastra, 1885)(cover) (Wikipedia) There are still images from an old Frankenstein film too, and James Joyce’s famous palindrome ‘Tattarrattat’ gets a mention as the answer to a cryptic crossword clue. Then there’s Perec’s Oulipo novel A Void, Pliny’s encyclopaedic Naturalis Historia catalogues of artworks like Elizabeth Durack’s Seeing-through the Philippines and Jennifer Dickerson’s Chiaroscuro Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding and Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus.
#SEAN HAY GOOGLE SCHOLAR TRNSYS ARCHITECTURE TRIAL#
The novel begins in Cameron Raybould’s antiquarian bookshop and a quick look at some of the texts referenced gives some idea of the playfulness that weaves its way through the novel: the Big Issue’s cryptic crossword page Kafka’s The Trial a special order for The Opium Wars (but which one?) a customer after some modernists like Zora Neale Hurston, Futabatei Shimei, Osip Mandelstam, and Clarice Lispector. It’s a wily, intriguing mystery that plays with parallels, doubles, mirrors, word games, languages and history. The novel, however, is not a polemic, far from it. In Bryer’s novel, modern Australia is a land of monsters and strange creatures - not bunyips and platypuses, but people who have ‘excised their hearts’ so that they can no longer see the harm they are doing. Today, it is where monstrous denials of reality have sapped our compassion and integrity.
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‘ Terra Australis, the Great South Land’ was where Australia balances the landmasses of the rest of the globe. (See Wikipedia, where you can see an example of such a map). It meant dangerous or unexplored territories, in imitation of a medieval practice of putting illustrations of dragons, sea monsters and other mythological creatures on uncharted areas of maps where potential dangers were thought to exist.
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‘From Here on, Monsters’ is derived from very early maps of the globe, when medieval mapmakers depicted the great empty space beyond the known world with the Latin hic sunt dracones: here be dragons. In From Here On, Monsters, Bryer shows us how language is integral to our humanity.’ Saturday Paper.įirstly, the title. Words can damage humans of flesh and blood. Words have an impact on how we understand reality. ‘This strange and wonderful novel delights with its language games, but it also understands that such shenanigans are never just games.
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It’s a modern Australian novel about modern Australia that, refreshingly, doesn’t read at all like a modern Australian novel.’ Shaun Prescott ‘Traverses the chasm between truth and history, and challenges our faith in the liberatory potential of art. It is more than you could imagine.’ Tara June Winch, author of The Yield this is more than a book of secrets, codes, geniuses, history and language. ‘A novel that places the reader into the abyss of storytelling. But these crude summations of a very fine book are so grossly unfair that I want to cauterise them with some of the well-deserved praise on the publisher’s website: I would be the last person to suggest that there are IQ or academic requirements to read a book: this blog is a celebration of an ordinary reader’s adventures in fiction and the journey. Presumably the whole thing is allegorical, or not? The Tragically Hip said it best, “It’s so deep it’s meaningless.”‘. Not my style of book at all‘ to ‘Lol, what?’ and ‘ What began as strangely compelling ended as just strange. It has copped remarks ranging from ‘ That was weird and went a bit over my head. And this is what has happened to Elizabeth Bryer’s debut novel From Here on, Monsters. But sometimes, a book which is genuinely impressive but challenging in its execution, receives grudging two- or three-star reviews from readers ‘ not usually huge on intensely ‘cerebral’ fiction‘.
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Often, of course, readers respond with the expected five-star review ‘for an honest opinion’ which leaves us none the wiser about the book. Sometimes I wonder about the wisdom of publicists who hand out new books willy-nilly at Goodreads.