Book Reviews: Stella Prize Shortlistee 1
I decided to have a tilt this year at the shortlist of Australia's Stella Prize, a literary award for books written by women in any genre. Past Stella shortlists have included some outstanding books that I never would have encountered but for the prize nomination, so it's clearly working as intended to elevate womens' writing.
This year's shortlist is:
- Translations by Jumaana Abdu (Novel)
- Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser (Fictionalised Memoir)
- Cactus Pear for My Beloved: A Family Story from Gaza by Samah Sabawi (Memoir / Family History)
- Black Witness: The Power of Indigenous Media by Amy McQuire (Non-Fiction)
- The Burrow by Melanie Cheng (Novel)
- Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia by Santilla Chingaipe (History)
I started with Melanie Cheng's novel, because the premise interested me. I'm going to tackle Theory and Practice next, and listen to the audiobook of Cactus Pear for My Beloved. I have also put paperbacks of both Black Witness and Translations on hold at the library. (Still need to source Black Convicts). The prize is announced on 23 May, and I think I can do the whole shortlist by then if I focus - let's see!
Located in time during the grim days of the Melbourne pandemic long lockdowns, it's one of the few texts I have read that makes effective, non-cliched use of the strangeness and disjunction of that time to strengthen its central themes.
Cheng perfectly evokes the suffocation and the anxiety, the reflectiveness, the unexpected small joys, the unspeaking blanketing sadness, and, for some people, the revelation, that we all went through here in Melbourne. It remains my opinion that people who didn't go through the same exigencies don't quite get it, and it's strangely validating to see some of the emotional beats of that time on the page. Like this, describing Jin's urgent desire to see his western suburbs family:
the pandemic had made small distances seem long, and long distances all but infinite. That was why Jin had been so adamant about visiting his parents when the restrictions had lifted. It was only once he was banned from seeing them that he realised it was what he wanted.
That said, while the pandemic is the setting, it is not the meat of this story. It is a four-handed POV tale of four members of a family dealing in different ways (but all suboptimally) with their profound grief at the death, 4 years before the book starts, of Ruby, their 6 month old baby girl. (This is not a spoiler, it is mentioned first on page 7). Amy, the mother, is a blocked writer, existing in a fog of detachment and low-grade misery. Jin, the father, an emergency room doctor, is so full of anxiety and angst that he practically vibrates off the page. Pauline, the grandmother and a stroke survivor, is beset with a guilt so profound that she struggles to function, despite her deep bond with the fourth character - Lucie, the family's surviving child, now 10, who has a morbid imagination and social dislocation.
I found all the characters compelling, but, possibly unsurprisingly given who I am, I felt the most desperately for Amy. Her gouging pain was both raw and complicated, and all the more real for it. And some of the text that explored her relationship with motherhood were arrows straight to the heart for me:
When Amy was pregnant with Lucie, Pauline had said, repeatedly (which had irked Amy) that she had no idea what motherhood would be like. This was, of course, true, but it was said with such happy superiority that Amy couldn't help but feel annoyed. Lots of people have children, she would think, angrily, in the hours after such encounters, lots of people less smart and less capable than I am.But it was not a matter of being smart or capable; Amy saw that now. It was a matter of being torn into multiple parts and then standing by as those rogue parts walked the earth, unsupervised and unchaperoned, taunting destiny.
Early in the story (not a spoiler, given the cover!), Jin and Amy agree to get a baby rabbit to be a pet for Lucie. The bunny is eventually named by Pauline, after reading part of Watership Down to Lucie - Fiver, named for the small, psychic future-telling rabbit whose visions save his warren in the end. Yes, yes, the symbolism is a touch obvious, but in the end, it is only partially Fiver, and more a combination of circumstances and convergences, that leads each member of the family to some tentative breakthroughs.
And while Cheng is not so gauche as to suggest that everything is sunshine and rainbows at the end - how could it be? the baby is still gone - there is a delicate, lingering hopefulness that perhaps this family will now be able to come together in their grief, rather than keep flying further apart.
I really loved this book. I would recommend it to anyone except possibly those struggling with child loss trauma themselves (although this is a gentle treatment, the themes are still really hard). 9/10.
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