It’s not real until it happens on the internet
With the new year, a new idea.
I was startled at the end of 2010 by the lovely Ange, of Literary Minded inclination, listing her favourite book of the year. Casting back over the madness that was 2010, I knew I’d read alot, read constantly, read strange and wonderful beasts and been moved in so many directions. I’d moved in with another editor and gained a whole new bookcase of treasures to troll through. But I couldn’t remember exactly which books had coloured my year, and which of them could have been my favourite.
And so we have a new project: this year, I’m keeping track of every book I finish. And am going to write here about the ones that set me firing.
The first cab of the rank: Kristell Thornell’s Night Street (Allen and Unwin, 2009). In late 2009, I heard Thornell give a paper at UWS about this book, the Vogel, the things she had to leave aside as she developed it. The idea of another book, absent from the final text, but haunting it somehow in traces, in the book’s spaces, in its gaps and ellisions fascinated me – it hints at something at the core of any writing, or of any work, that the idea of the work is always more perfect, more whole, than anything that its actual creation can approach. And it would seem to be even more pertinent to what this, the story of an artist and her art.
Night Street is loosely based on the life of the Australian artist Clarice Beckett, a landscape painter from the 1920s and 30s. But it’s a loose base, and the Clarice of the novel is an imaginative one. What does it mean to be an artist, and what does it mean to be a woman? How do you preserve an inner space for creation, for contemplation, imagination and craft, and is solitude a necessary precondition for any art? Thornell’s Clarice is a prism for her questioning of this work that we do, and the strange lives that we live, both in the world and making something from it.
But the most striking thing about this novel is the way in which it writes about paintings, and images. Beckett’s art is constantly described as ‘difficult’, unladylike and unfashionable, because it’s nebulous. The paintings are fog-ridden, misty and difficult to pin down. And it’s just these qualities that Thornell brings into her prose. This isn’t just writing about the surface of art, it’s writing that works with the same aesthetic as the art, that attempts to portray the art from within. It’s refreshing, and beautifully done. And it also brings a something new to the well-laden table that is Australian writing about landscape.
And I’m haunted still by an image of Clarice on art camp by the coast, falling asleep on a clifftop, naked with her lover, and waking up hours later, with an entirely sunburnt skin. The afterburn of love, the very physical marking of flesh-memory, the trace that lingers for days later. There’s something startling and painfully lovely about it. And makes for one very even suntan.
