Peter Craven gives high praise to Sonya Hartnett's new book in today's Review ( Weekend Australian) - not easy to see from here however, so here's a slice:
I don't think any of the feasible interpretative systems - Laingian or Jungian, Christian or gnostic - can contain this luminous nightmare that Hartnett has thrown in our faces like a revelation. The only thing that remotely reminds me of Surrender is the verse novel by the great Canadian poet Anne Carson, The Autobiography of Red, a long poem of contemporary life and one of the greatest poems of the past 50 years, in which the young hero is also the monster Geryon, red and winged.
Hartnett is a writer of vast ambitions and singular gifts. Her imagination is as savage as Dostoevsky's or Emily Bronte's and as gothic as a death's head. She has as keening a sense of the tears in things and the doom that falls like rains as any latter-day tragedian from the American south. It's fortunate that she also has the humour and the poetry to make the art she creates wonderful and bright... [Surrender] is full of beauty and terror and unearthly poetry and it traces with something like love the beauty of youthful faces that must fade and die.
Sonya Hartnett is 36 and has been a published writer of fiction since schooldays at our alma mater, Siena College in Camberwell ( a pretty bland space for such a talent to mature in - our other famous past student is Magda Szubanski, Mrs. Hoggett from the Babe films.). Other novels include Sleeping Dogs, Of A Boy, Wilful Blue and Forest. I can thoroughly recommend Sleeping Dogs and Wilful Blue, and am yet to read the others. She does have a spare, dark touch as Craven notes that is easy on the ear but not gentle on the imagination.
No comments:
Post a Comment