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Articles by Mireille Juchau
Triage
A two-seater couch scorched black. A satin lounge bisected with a seam of concrete. A tufted beige sofa tied in a knot. This inhospitable furniture, sculpted by Kaari Upson, Rodney McMillian and Michael Beitz, punctuates Claudia Rankine’s hybrid non-fiction Triage. Each work carries and amplifies the book’s preoccupations.
Nearly 200 prints the focus of Max Dupain retrospective
Why a Max Dupain exhibition and why now? The State Library of New South Wales offers a broad Max Dupain retrospective from its vast archive that doesn’t quite answer the question. Max Dupain’s photograph Meat Queue, from 1946. “They look pretty tense,” says a friend as we stand before a dynamic frieze of women lining up in a butcher shop. It’s Max Dupain’s photograph Meat Queue, from 1946. With their pearls, dark hats and coats, their taut string mouths, the women give off a funereal aura.
Repetition
Repetition begins and ends in the obliterating gloom of a Norway November. Dark in the morning, the unnamed narrator tells us, and dark again at 4pm. So dim she can’t see her own hand in front of her face. This is how Vigdis Hjorth sets up her coming-of-age novel in which a young woman is repeatedly exposed but never fully seen. Repetition is also about the potent mix of childhood shame, punishment and silence that can produce a future writer. When we meet our protagonist, she’s 64.
Transcription
American poet and novelist Ben Lerner has long been preoccupied with the uncanny links between technology, memory, the intellect and language. In his latest novel, Transcription, the digital device is a repository of embodied memory, a sustaining tool and an archive. Mobiles fail to record an essential encounter, an iPad transmits a son’s words to a father intubated due to Covid, a handheld tablet feeds a daughter who refuses other nourishment.
Dead and Alive
“Essays are easy. Fiction is hard,” says British writer Zadie Smith in an interview reproduced in Dead and Alive, her fourth essay collection. “Essays are about your opinions,” she replies to a Spanish journalist from El Cultural. “Everyone has opinions and everyone loves to air them.” It’s a surprisingly narrow definition of an infinitely flexible form, in which opinions are just as often muted to elevate more urgent or compelling materials.
Sad Tiger
When Neige Sinno read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita at 20, she was unnerved. Though drawn to its subversive content – a literary portrait of a paedophile – she wasn’t expecting to find so much overlap with her own grim history. In her award-winning memoir, Sad Tiger, Sinno analyses Lolita to better understand her experience of being sexually abused as a child.
We Do Not Part
A landscape of blackened trees that resemble thousands of huddled people. Nearby, burial mounds inundated by the sea. In her dreams of this haunted place, Kyungha, the narrator of We Do Not Part, struggles to rescue the flooded remains of the dead. As she opens her 11th novel with this scene, the Korean writer Han Kang restages a recurring preoccupation: what do the living owe the dead?
‘Anya, Wake Up! They Started a War!’ — The Dial
In the weeks after Russia launched its full-scale war on Ukraine in February 2022, Dana, a student in Kyiv, dreamed that an artillery shell shot through her apartment window and landed on the bed.
Creation Lake
Rachel Kushner, an audacious, freewheeling writer, adds a brainy twist to the classic spy novel in her sixth work of fiction, Creation Lake. How much can we trust the rogue spy narrator, pseudonymous Sadie Smith? By documenting the toll of maintaining the spy persona and withholding Sadie’s backstory, Creation Lake asks what constitutes the self and how self-presentation is linked to survival.
Book Review: Rachel Cusk's Parade
Louise Bourgeois’ sculptures of mothers shoot out breastmilk or trail newborns by umbilical cords. One tiny figure is pierced all over the head with pins. No wonder Rachel Cusk is drawn to the French–American artist, who’s fictionalised in Cusk’s latest novel Parade. Both artist and writer restore in their work the creatureliness and complexity of motherhood.
Monument
Years ago, in a local medical pathology museum, I saw a large human bone with the remains of the spear that pierced it. Ever since I’ve wondered about that specimen’s history, and the label that failed to describe it. Bonny Cassidy’s Monument reminds me that such omissions are emblematic of what W. E. H. Stanner called Australia’s “cult of forgetfulness” in 1968.
Sheila Heti’s ‘Alphabetical Diaries’
“I was sure that when people saw my book they would say, ‘It’s even worse than I expected. Now one can really tell what she is like.’” A thousand years ago, Sei Shōnagon recounted her dread of exposure in The Pillow Book. I thought of Shōnagon’s modern voice, her lists and anecdotes that follow no detectable order, when reading Sheila Heti’s fearless Alphabetical Diaries ( Fitzcarraldo).
Mireille Juchau reviews ‘The Vulnerables’ by Sigrid Nunez
What does it mean to narrate the humiliations of ageing, loneliness, and death in the first person when your background is working class? For such a writer, saying ‘I’ is political too, said Annie Ernaux in her Nobel Prize lecture, because it involves claiming an authority rarely granted in other parts of life. Ernaux uses her incendiary, affectless ‘I’ not just to recount one individual experience, but to transcend it. For ‘I’ to speak to the reader it must become, she says, ‘transpersonal’.
Moving towards grief: ‘Ordinary Notes’
Black American scholar Christina Sharpe interrogates the different demands made by guilt and grief when addressing a violent national history Kaleidoscopic, collagelike, pointillist, book-length lyric essay... When reaching to describe Christina Sharpe’s formally and politically radical Ordinary Notes, some reviewers pass right over its title. “Notes” says everything you need to know about how to read and think with this blistering book.
Is Mother Dead
“I was ashamed to have called Mum.” Johanna, a successful painter, relays this to her friend Pax on the first page of Is Mother Dead. “It was against the rules and yet I’d done it.” The laws that govern this relationship between a woman of nearly 60 and her mother is at the heart of this vertiginous novel by Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth. It’s been 30 years since Johanna fled Norway and her first marriage for another man and a “truer” life as an artist, 8000 kilometres away in Utah.
“The Cut Is Tangible”: A Conversation with Anwen Crawford
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HEAT Series 3 Number 1
Even as I uncover materials that suggest Renate’s appearance – a portrait of her sister on an East Berlin balcony in 1961, prisoner records from age sixteen till liberation, a Hollerith card that catalogues her physical features – she remains stubbornly abstract, a dream that can’t be retrieved. I scan the women photographed at the Mauthausen subcamp and the summer women displaced in southern Italy though I can’t possibly recognise the one I’m looking for – Renate Grau.
Grand designs: ‘Real Estate’
Deborah Levy’s latest ‘living autobiography’ finds her travelling and contemplating home, family and art’s revolutionary potential Deborah Levy is dreaming of a grand house with a circular staircase, mosaic floors, an egg-shaped fireplace and a pomegranate tree. This home, somewhere by the water, is a place to live, write and swim, with room for guests who’ll become a substitute family now Levy’s daughters are grown.
In our nature: ‘Vesper Flights’
Helen Macdonald explores how the study of animals reveals unknown aspects of ourselves Between reading Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights, I’m checking in on a peregrine falcon in central Melbourne. She’s in a box on a ledge, 33 floors above Collins Street, where the wind through buildings and the throbbing trams below sound subaquatic. Her backdrop is grey brick, matt-white bird shit, a crowded skyline. Beneath her are three mottled eggs.
‘Minor Detail’ by Adania Shibli (trans. Elisabeth Jaquette)
July 2020 Noted by Mireille Juchau ‘Minor Detail’ by Adania Shibli (trans. Elisabeth Jaquette) The Palestinian author’s haunting novel about an atrocity committed by Israeli soldiers in 1949 Mireille Juchau Mireille Juchau is a writer and critic. Her most recent novel is The World Without Us. Nothing without context. Politics, society, culture. Subscribe for full access. Subscribe Subscriber Login July 2020 In This Issue Read on × Are you enjoying the Monthly?
These strange days
Newsflashes Newsflash: The Library's reading rooms are open. Before you visit, please read Visiting the Library. These strange days
Twilight knowing: Jenny Offill’s ‘Weather’
The American novelist brings literary fiction’s focus on the interior life to climate-change cataclysm “Every biological mother on the planet has DDT in her breastmilk,” wrote Meehan Crist in a recent piece on whether to have children in a warming world. Reading this, I recalled a poster shown at a conference, one of the few times I’ve felt reproached by a piece of bad graphic design.
Dreaming under Hitler
After Hitler came to power in 1933, Jewish journalist Charlotte Beradt had a recurring nightmare of being shot at, tortured and scalped. One morning she awoke with a revelation: What if the things that appeared in her night terrors were also being visited upon other people living under the Nazi dictatorship? Thus began a six-year research project in which Beradt documented 300 dreams, 75 of which became the basis for her 1968 book The Third Reich of Dreams.
How Dreams Change Under Authoritarianism
These are two of about seventy-five dreams collected in “The Third Reich of Dreams,” a strange, enthralling book by the writer Charlotte Beradt. Neither scientific study nor psychoanalytic text, “The Third Reich of Dreams” is a collective diary, a witness account hauled out of a nation’s shadows and into forensic light. The book was released, in Germany, in 1966; an English translation, by Adriane Gottwald, was published two years later but has since fallen out of print.
It Won’t Love You Back: An Interview with Maria Tumarkin
SEPTEMBER 3, 2019 MARIA TUMARKIN’s fourth book, Axiomatic (Transit Books, 2019), is an urgent and formally daring work of nonfiction about criminal injustice, war trauma, exile, youth suicide, migration, friendship, and institutional memory.
What Should We Send Into Space as a New Record of Humanity?
When the Golden Records were shot into space aboard the Voyager missions in 1977, the vision they carried of planet earth was hokily upbeat. There would be no images of war in this time capsule, insisted project leader Carl Sagan—these might appear threatening to extra-terrestrials, the Records’ intended recipients. Instead, Sagan and his team assembled the sounds of wind, volcanoes, waves, thunder, birds, frogs and wild dogs.
Missing witnesses: Valeria Luiselli’s ‘Lost Children Archive’
When Valeria Luiselli volunteered as an interpreter for unaccompanied child migrants at New York City’s federal immigration court, she noticed that the children’s stories were “always shattered beyond the repair of narrative order”. As each child answered the intake questionnaire, the novelist heard accounts with no beginning, middle or end. A writer of Mexican descent, Luiselli detailed this experience in Tell Me How It Ends (2017).
What My Grandmother Brought With Her When She Fled Nazi Germany
During her weeks in Concord Hospital with kidney disease and cardiac problems, my grandmother often complained that staff members were refusing to give her butter. It was her final stay in the renal ward. Soon there would be weeks at home struggling with dialysis and anemia, and finally a risky surgery from which she would not recover. On the day she was released from the hospital, she waited in her slip-on shoes and cardigan, breathing heavily as I packed her bags.
Christian Boltanski’s chance at life
“At home I have 6000 Polish babies,” says Christian Boltanski at the Sydney opening of his new installation, Chance. “Very quiet.” The internationally renowned French artist is referring to his vast collection of photographs, some of which feature in the work at Redfern’s Carriageworks (until 23 March). Boltanski, dapper in a pale jacket, dark shirt and silk cravat, has a special interest in vernacular and found photographs.
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