At the end of All That I Am the protagonist Ruth muses: ‘It is the hardest thing, to work out one’s weight and heft in the world, to whittle down all that I am and give it a value.’ This now seems remarkably apt for a work given a dazzling array of literary value. Anna [...]
READ MORELiticism’s Miles Franklin Countdown: Favel Parrett’s Past The Shallows
*Spoiler alert: this is not intended as a straight review and I do refer to key plot points in this analysis. It’s strange the way works read in succession can speak to each other, the way the mind finds connections in works never written to be compared. In Tony Birch’s Blood the protagonists see a matinee [...]
READ MORELiticism’s Miles Franklin Countdown: Tony Birch’s Blood
*Spoiler alert: this is not intended as a straight review and I do refer to key plot points in this analysis. In one of the most vividly memorable moments of the novel, our young protagonists Jesse and Rachel wander like giants among miniature versions of the Eiffel Tower, the Great Pyramids, Dutch windmills, and the Leaning [...]
READ MOREMiles Franklin 2012 shortlist announced
The shortlist for the 2012 Miles Franklin Award has just been announced, and it appears to be decidedly free from the controversy that plagued it last year — we are neither in ‘sausage-fest’ nor ‘cock-forest’ territory. There are five works in the shortlist, down from a longlist of thirteen, and with three female writers [...]
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Liticism’s Miles Franklin Countdown: Anna Funder’s All That I Am
*Spoiler alert: this is not intended as a straight review and I do refer to key plot points in this analysis. In the context of the Miles Franklin and its criteria of presenting ‘Australian life in any of its phases’ Funder’s work seems, initially, difficult to advocate. Though the ‘now’ of the novel is the primary [...]
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Liticism’s Miles Franklin Countdown
As I wrote last week, the Miles Franklin longlist has been announced, and I’ve decided to do a Miles Franklin Countdown on Liticism, reading a book a week from the list until the winners are announced on June 20th. At the start of this year I wrote about the difficulties of being a lit lover, [...]
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