Friday, July 5, 2013

"a gleeful, glorious savaging"

 
 
'Feeding on the Fellow' by Jane Sullivan is an excellent, perceptive review of Janet Frame's In the Memorial Room for Australian Book Review (July-August 2013).
 
"This novel comes to us some forty years after it was written. Janet Frame (1924–2004) did not allow it to be published during her lifetime. Very probably she was anxious not to be seen as savaging the hands that had fed her: and it is indeed a gleeful, glorious savaging."
 
"In the Memorial Room is a welcome if belated discovery, a delightfully absurd and creepy exploration of a certain kind of writer's plight. Its satire on the literary industry is also chillingly contemporary. Go to any writer's festival and take a look at the people pontificating onstage. You will see a lot of Michael Watercresses: they belong to a tribe that goes forth and multiplies. But you will have to look very hard to find a single Harry Gill."
 
The review is available online for subscribers only.

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