“The twentieth century was best represented by an unwilling traveler. “I mean, think of the millions of soldiers mobilized by wars. And all the people made homeless because of them. Now the world is full of people who don’t belong where they end up and long for the places where they did.”

Gull on the beach. Rheban Beach, Tasmania. February 2021.

Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser

I found this an odd little book. While I do understand that the essence of the work was to explore how "life is what happens when you're making other plans", 528 pages is an awful lot to spend meandering about with little focus on what it is that they are wandering towards (or away from, which may be closer to the point).

There is an immense sadness that permeates throughout. While I am generally quite comfortable with ragged narrative arcs, multiple narrators or the complex weaving of interlinked stories, I must confess to not quite seeing the point of choosing these two characters.

Ravi - while less fully realised - was the more compelling of the two. Perhaps due to the more immediately wrenching of the personal narrative, I found myself much more forgiving of his aimlessness and seeming indifference to the currents moving around him.

In Laura, I found her aimlessness annoying. While she has her own traumas (as with the rest of us), they remained closeted in a web of privilege, and despite ample opportunity to recognise and grasp her potential and pull herself out of the miasma.

Again, perhaps the tepid petering out of things is the point that de Kretser is trying to make, and meaningless is the very meaning she wants to convey. If this is the case, one narrative arc would have achieved this is well as two, and at half the length, it may not have felt so tiresome.

⭐ ⭐ 1/2

Comments

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

Hold me now, oh hold me now, until this hour has gone around. And I'm gone on the rising tide, to face Van Dieman's Land

Theme Thursday again, and this one is rather easy. I am Tasmanian, you see, and aside from being all around general geniuses - as I have amply described previously - we are also very familiar with the concept of WATER. Tasmania is the ONLY island state of an ISLAND continent. That means, we're surrounded by WATER. That should help explain why I take so many photographs of water . Tasmania was for a long time the place where the British (an island race terrified of water) sent their poor people most vile and horrid criminals. The sort of folk who would face the stark choice of a death sentence , or transportation to the other end of the world. Their catalogue of crimes is horrifying : stealing bread assault stealing gentlemen's handkerchiefs drunken assault being poor affray ladies being overly friendly with gentlemen for money hitting people having a drink and a laugh public drunkenness being Irish Fenian terrorist activities being Catholic religious subversion. ...

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...

This will hurt me...

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