FICTION
The Age
Saturday September 12, 2009
The Portrait Willem Jan Otten Scribe, $27.95 BY RIGHTS, Willem Jan Otten's The Portrait shouldn't work. It is narrated by a canvas. At first this seems a contrived, almost gimmicky perspective, but once you stretch your imagination around the conceit, the novella €” an elegant and absorbing meditation on art and life, deception and revelation €” quickly wins you over. Felix Vincent is a youngish portrait painter. His reputation is on the rise. He only paints from life €” until he meets Valery Specht, a wealthy art collector and critic, who convinces him to paint a portrait of his dead son, from videotapes and photographs of the boy. Vincent takes the commission, but as he works on the portrait, the mystery behind its subject deepens. How did Specht's son die? Both the artist and the critic hold secrets that are revealed with a talent for suspense you would normally find only in the best psychological thrillers.Jetty Road Cath Kenneally Wakefield Press, $24.95 PAULA and Evie Haggerty are middle-aged sisters living in Adelaide. Though they are in many respects chalk and cheese, their bond is closer than many siblings'. Life hasn't always been easy. Paula, a matron at a nursing home, puts on a brave face juggling work and raising her kids after the disintegration of her long-term relationship. Evie has strayed from the straight and narrow, surviving a youth of drug dependency and prostitution to start afresh. Each has become the other's rock, but will it be enough to face down life's challenges? When Evie's past rears its ugly head, and a family argument breaks out, their friendship is sorely tested. Cath Kenneally €” poet, novelist and producer of the nationally broadcast Writers Radio €” has written an urbane and insightful domestic drama filled with humour, pathos and acutely drawn characters.Spiel David Sornig UWA Press, $26.95 LOCAL author David Sornig has created a disorienting and densely woven novel. The narrator is a Melbourne architect who leaves the burning streets of a Melbourne summer for Berlin, spurred by the death of a relative to plumb the secrets of his heritage. As soon as he arrives, he meets a blind woman, Rosa Stumm, who invites him to play a game, the rules of which remain a mystery. A bomb blast at a theatre, and she disappears. Two strands of the novel unspool: one full of vivid and realistic episodes about being young in Melbourne in the '80s; the other a metaphysical thriller involving Nazis and the Stasi and the fall of the Berlin Wall, that drifts between freedom fighters and porn lords, Kafka-like epistles and grotesque hallucinations. The Melbourne scenes are delivered with clear-eyed nostalgia and authenticity; the Berlin stuff is at once over-theatrical and meandering. Sornig could use a ruthless editor, but his talent is such that I'm sure we'll hear more from him.Pick of the weekThe Wrong Grave Kelly Link Text, $22.95 KELLY Link's short stories have developed a cult following in the US. No wonder. The Wrong Grave contains five wicked tales that are as much fun for adults as they are for younger readers. Link invests fantasy and fairytale with literary kinks (you'll find sneaky references to everything from Rossetti to Julian of Norwich), giving her stories twists that are always quirky and sometimes postmodern. Her work glitters with dark intelligence and a distinctive brand of magic that reminded me of Neil Gaiman at his best. In The Wrong Grave, a teenage boy digs up his dead girlfriend's coffin to retrieve some poetry he had buried with her, only to find himself haunted by a strange ghost. The Wizards of Perfil is set in a richly evoked, war-torn fantasy world, where two refugee cousins discover they have strange powers that may help them survive. It's a wonderful collection that will attract fans, young and old, of imaginative fiction.
© 2009 The Age