Mireille is a talented, up and coming Australian novelist and The World Without Us is her third novel. Her first, Machines for Feeling was shortlisted for the 1999 Vogel/Australian Literary Award and the second, Burning In, was published by Giramondo Publishing in 2007. It was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award 2008, Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2008, the Age Book of the Year Award 2008 and the Nita B. Kibble Award 2008. Mireille joins us today to select her five most influential books. You can buy her latest book here.
Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich
I’m amazed that this extraordinary work is not more widely known, and I’m constantly lending my copy to friends. Voices from Chernobyl is a profoundly moving oral history of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. With a poet’s ear and a journalist’s zeal, Svetlana Alexievich captures the unique sensibility and philosophical character of the Russian people through conversations with firemen, evacuees and officials. Her inventive narrative structure lifts this oral history into another realm. Alexievich intersperses the testimonies of bravery, disbelief and resilience with “choruses”—voices of soldiers or settlers who returned to the devastated town of Pripyat. In its scope and passionate intelligence this work resembles a Tolstoy novel. I’m awed by her talent, innovation and humility. Buy the book here.
Nox by Anne Carson
I have all of Anne Carson’s brilliant, innovative work which I reread constantly, from the austere force of “The Glass Essay” in Glass, Irony and God: “a strange young April light is filling the moor with gold milk”, to her novel in verse The Autobiography of Red. Nox is an extended elegy for the poet’s brother Michael, who died in mysterious circumstances. It’s a beguiling object—a sturdy box from which you pull the accordion-folded contents. The work reproduces the notebook Carson kept after Michael’s death and includes poetry, collage, photographs, a letter and typed fragments. Though Nox is Latin for night, this spare, poignant work illuminates Michael’s shadowy past and childhood, which Carson scours for signs and portents. Her experiments with form and her lucid economy reinvigorates my sense of what the word on the page can do. Buy the book here.
The Frost and the Fire by Ruth Park
It’s not her strongest novel, but I was spellbound by Ruth Park’s tumultuous story of life in the New Zealand goldfields. I actually read it in New Zealand during a difficult phase in my teenage life and Park’s affection for her characters and interest in intense emotion was a warm infusion in a cold place. I distinctly recall my tension as I followed the fates of Currency and her washerwoman mother, who worked in the Otago goldfields. Like many social-realist novels of its time (1957), its story now sounds overblown—young Currency falls in love with a rebel priest called Shannadore! But Park captured the tumult of longing and forbidden love; a timeless subject for any adolescent and the book was my gateway to her fine Harp in the South series. Park was a journalist; her writing taught me how to find the ecstatic fire in the everyday when later I became one. Buy the book here.
The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O’Connor
Flannery O’Connor’s sublime melodic language and insight into the complexities of human nature had a huge impact on my early writing life. O’Connor hailed from the American south, and her work steers toward gothic strangeness. Her fiction is biblical in it scope and themes and each story hinges on a moment of profound “irreversible magnitude” as Joyce Carol Oates observed. In The Violent Bear it Away we follow the tribulations of the orphan Francis, who struggles against his uncle’s prophecy—that he will become a prophet. The plot is dramatic and studded with symbolic imagery, but it’s O’Connor’s insight into how epic events reveal hidden aspects of our selves that has stayed with me. Though O’Connor was deeply religious, her prose is never dogmatic. Like her contemporary Marilynne Robinson, she’s fascinated by our struggle with events that threaten what we believe. Her stories are full of anti-epiphanies, but her rhythmic, dynamic prose makes every page a secular revelation.Buy the book here.
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
When I read I’m sometimes aware of the writerly machinations behind the story. But though I’ve reread Austerlitz several times, I’m still mystified by Sebald’s technique. This is perhaps due to the novel’s hypnotic tone, but also because I’m susceptible to how this story evokes my own family’s Holocaust history. We first meet Austerlitz at a railway station, a place that will gain symbolic power as we slowly uncover the details of his broken childhood. After the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia his Jewish father fled. Austerlitz was sent to London on the Kindertransport then adopted by a Welsh family. Now he is trying to assemble his obliterated past by revisiting the places that might offer clues—the street where he was born, the camp at Terezin where his mother was interned. I too had searched this camp for signs of my great grandparents, and the same spool of film that Austerlitz scans for a final image of his mother. The novel’s elusive narrator and use of uncaptioned photographs replicates the fragmented way that Holocaust survivors reassemble their pasts—through memory, photos and testimony. Buy the book here.
