Word: carpentaria
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...Dreams of Speaking looms as a literary dark horse for next month's Miles Franklin Award (favorites include Peter Carey's Theft and Alexis Wright's Carpentaria), comes the Perth-based writer's Sorry (Vintage; 218 pages). Just as Sixty Lights segued seamlessly into Dreams, this pained, poetic tale of a young girl wracked by dreams of speaking seems to have been born from its predecessor. "We take it for granted, don't we?" muses 12-year-old Perdita Keene, a free spirit made mute by the violent death of her English anthropologist father near Broome, Western Australia, in World...
...life away from its fecund waterways, working in Aboriginal research and advocacy in Alice Springs and Melbourne, where she now lives. But in spirit she's still there?"It's clear," she says, "clear water, full of water lilies and turtles and fish." To read the magisterial Carpentaria (Giramondo; 519 pages) is to enter Wright's world. What's evoked is not just a physical place, where "you could swear you heard the daydreams of lazy lizards sunning themselves on the branches," but a spiritual realm painted on an operatic scale, where the ancestral rainbow serpent forges the land...
...high and dry, Desperance embodies the roots of its name: despair and hope (espérance in French). Wright says Desperance could stand for any Australian town, or Australia itself. And it's her uncanny ear for the particularities of local language and eye for striking symbolism that could carry Carpentaria into the classics sections of bookshelves in years to come. There it would sit comfortably alongside Xavier Herbert's fictional study of Australia's Top End, Capricornia. But where Herbert looked at race relations with colonial distance in 1938, Wright mucks in with postcolonial glee. "Well, I went to town...
...Carpentaria nearly went nowhere. With its unwieldy size and unconventional voice, it was rejected by most mainstream publishers, and Wright was almost resigned to seeing it languish "archived in the Carpentaria Land Council office forever." Another laugh. "It was a brave publisher who took it up." Others might say clever. Established in 1995 as a bridge between commercial houses and academia, Giramondo's output has been small but sagacious. Peter Castro's novel The Garden Book and John Hughes' memoir The Idea of Home are but two literary hybrids that have monopolized Australia's recent prize lists. Says publisher...
...connect when people come from other countries?" It's a question she'll explore in her next novel, Rara Avis (In the Swan's Nest). Meanwhile, Wright wants to take her writing back to its roots. "I thought it could be a grand idea," she says, "if one day Carpentaria could be read in one sitting in the Gulf, or in the schools, just like James Joyce's Ulysses is read aloud every year on Bloomsday." Australia, get ready for Desperance...