Word: malouf
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...David Malouf's prose has been called many things in the three decades since his first novel, Johnno, was published: poetic, prize-winning and pearl-like in its polish. But rarely sexy. In work such as Remembering Babylon and Dream Stuff, as much action seems to take place inside the mind as in the body. Which makes the love scene in the title story of his latest collection of short fiction, Every Move You Make (Chatto & Windus; 244 pages), something of a breakthrough. Here the writerly restraint-as book editor Jo conjoins with the ultimately unknowable Sydney house-builder Mitchell...
...Even in the throes of passion, Malouf's characters have a tendency to sublimate their feelings. Like Jo, who "wanted a love that would be overwhelming, that would make a wind-blown leaf of her, a runaway wheel," the acclaimed Australian writer, now 72, prefers to explore more spiritual intimacies. This is the theme of his seven new short stories, each in its own way a memento mori. In War Baby, an abandoned son wears his late father's R.A.A.F. greatcoat in preparation for fighting in Vietnam; in Elsewhere, a Blue Mountains father grieves for his lost daughter by reading...
...short stories with a Roald Dahl-ish twist, Every Move You Make could be a form of Chinese water torture. As the title character of Mrs Porter and the Rock, about a widowed suburbanite dragged by her son to Uluru, complains: "Nothing had happened." But those who relax into Malouf's dreamy prose, the rewards are pleasurable and profound. In The Valley of Lagoons, we enter the stillness of the Gulf country through the consciousness of a 16-year-old boy to discover "an interweaving of close but distant voices so dense that they become one." The sensual motion...
...much so that the collection could have been subtitled Seven Short Stories to Read Before You Die. But Malouf's writing is too subtle for that. With his characters carrying the flickering flame of belief, these stories are beautifully crafted articles of faith. Comparing man's plight to that of the indestructible cockroach, Dulcie Porter muses: "The cockie statistics were impressive, but when it came to survival you couldn't beat people, that was her view." Such robust inner lives are alone worth celebrating in these miraculous short stories...
...Remembering Babylon by David Malouf. A celebrated Australian novelist reimagines his country's pioneer past with a haunting tale of a white man raised by Aborigines. It is the mid-19th century, and the struggling Queensland settlers are homesick for Britain and afraid of the natives. Malouf works the themes of culture clash and racial fears into a seamless narrative that amounts to a national contraepic...