Readings.com.au: David Malouf

The Happy Life: The Search For Contentment In The Modern World

In this elegant treatise, David Malouf returns to one of the most fundamental questions and gives it a modern twist: what makes for a happy life?

With grace and profundity, Malouf discusses new and old ways to talk about contentment and the self. In considering the happy life – what it is, and what makes it possible – Malouf returns to the “highest wisdom” of the classics, looks at how, thanks to Thomas Jefferson’s way with words, happiness became a “right”, and examines joy in the flesh as depicted by Rubens and Rembrandt. In a world become ever larger and impersonal, he finds happiness in an unlikely place. The Happy Life is writing to savour and reflect upon by one of Australia’s greatest novelists.

This edition includes responses to The Happy Life by leading commentators, including Robert Dessaix, Anne Manne, Elizabeth Farrelly and Tim Soutphommasane.

Quarterly Essay 41: The Good Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World

In the first Quarterly Essay for 2011, David Malouf returns to one of the most fundamental questions and gives it a modern twist: what makes for a happy life?

With grace and profundity, Malouf discusses new and old ways to talk about contentment and the self. In considering the happy life – what it is, and what makes it possible – David Malouf returns to the “highest wisdom” of the classics, looks at how, thanks to Thomas Jefferson’s way with words, happiness became a “right”, and examines joy in the flesh as depicted by Rubens and Rembrandt. In a world become ever larger and impersonal, he finds happiness in an unlikely place. This is an essay to savour and reflect upon by one of Australia’s greatest novelists.

“How is it, when the chief sources of human unhappiness, of misery and wretchedness, have largely been removed from our lives … that happiness still eludes so many of us? … What is it in us, or in the world we have created, that continues to hold us back?” —David Malouf, The Happy Life

This issue also contains correspondence relating to the previous issue QE40 Trivial Pursuit by George Megalogenis. Correspondence relating to QE41 The Happy Life will appear in the next issue.

David Malouf is one of Australia’s most celebrated writers. He is the author of poems, fiction, libretti and essays. In 1996, his novel Remembering Babylon was awarded the first International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His 1998 Boyer Lectures were published as A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness. In 2000 he was selected as the sixteenth Neustadt Laureate. His most recent novel is Ransom.

Ransom

David Malouf shines new light on Homer’s ILIAD, adding twists and reflections, as well as flashes of earthy humour, to surprise and enchant.

Description of book

In this exquisite gem of a novel, Achilles is maddened by grief at the death of his friend Patroclus. From the walls of Troy, King Priam watches the body of his son, Hector, being dragged behind Achilles’ chariot. There must be a way, he thinks, of reclaiming the body - of pitting compromise against heroics, new ways against the old, and of forcing the hand of fate. Dressed simply and in a cart pulled by a mule, an old man sets off for the Greek camp ...

Lyrical, immediate and heartbreaking Malouf’s fable engraves the epic themes of the Trojan war onto a perfect miniature - themes of war and heroics, hubris and humanity, chance and fate, the bonds between soldiers, fathers and sons, all newly burnished and brilliantly recast for our times.

Revolving Days: Selected Poems

From the groundbreaking Bicycle and Other Poems to the best-selling Typewriter Music, Revolving Days is a resplendent, up-to-the-minute selection by one of Australia's most distinguished poets. Malouf's best poems, with their grace and intelligence, remain among the finest examples of the Australian lyric. This is an essential compendium for all lovers of literature.

Every Move You Make

Bookish boys and taciturn men, strong women and wayward sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and husbands, a composer and his muse, a builder-architect and his legacy - here are their stories, whole lives brought vividly into focus and so powerfully rooted in the landscape that you can almost feel the heat and the dust. His canvas is the vast Australian continent from the mysterious, glittering Valley of Lagoons behind the Great Divide in Far North Queensland, to bohemian Balmain and the Centre at Uluru, but always there are enticing glimpses of a world beyond, and the stories are tender, subtle, unsettlingly intimate. A young man going off to war tries to make sense of his place in the world he is leaving; a composer's life plays itself out as a complex domestic cantata; an accident on a hunting trip speaks volumes, which its inarticulate victim never could; and, in the funniest, most surprising story of all, a down-to-earth woman stubbornly tries to keep her feet on the ground at Ayers Rock. Malouf'smen and women are together but curiously alone, looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on, in life, puzzling over the space they'll leave behind when the waters close over them. This is a heartbreakingly beautiful, richly satisfying collection by a master storyteller, one of the great writers of our time.

Johnno

Dante and Johnno are unlikely childhood friends, growing up in the bustle of steamy, wartime Brisbane. Later, as teenagers, they learn about love and life amidst the city's pubs and public libraries, backyards and brothels, Moreton Bay figs and tennis parties. As adults, they make the great pilgrimage overseas and maintain an uneasy friendship as they seek to build their lives.

An affectionate and bittersweet portrait, Johnno brilliantly recreates the sleazy, tropical half-city that was Brisbane and captures a generation locked in combat with the elusive Australian dream.

Remembering Babylon

In the 1840s, a ship's boy cast ashore in northern Australia is taken in by Aborigines. Sixteen years later he steps out of the bush and inadvertently confronts the new white settlers with their unspoken terrors. A picture of Australia at the time of its foundation, focused on the hostility between early British settlers and native Aboriginals. It is essentially the story of a boy caught between both worlds - the "civilised" and the "primitive".

Antipodes

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Child's Play

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The Complete Stories

David Malouf's imagination inhabits shocking violence, quick humor, appealing warmth and harsh cruelty with equal intensity. He shares tales of bookish boys, taciturn men and intimate stories of men and women looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on. This is a comprehensive compilation of David's shorter work. Stories are set in the stark and challenging Australian interior and the more lush and mysterious coastal enclaves; others are set in Australia's past. The youthful dreams, physical desires and mental despair of Malouf's richly varied characters as they explore their place in the world are always moving and universal. Readers won't want to skim a single page of the 31 stories in this epic collection, a few of which are novella length. Together, they represent a quarter-century of a formidable craftsman's career.

An Imaginary Life

In the first century A. D. , Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverant poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, one of out most distinguished novelists has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving work of fiction. Marooned on the edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends on the kindness of barbarians who impate their dead and converse with the spirit world. But then he becomes the guardian of a still more savage creature, a feral child who has grown up among deer. What ensues is a luminous encounter between civilization and nature, as enacted by a poet who once cataloged the treacheries of love and a boy who slowly learns how to give it.

Fly Away Peter

For three very different people brought together by their love for birds, life on the Queensland coast in 1914 is the timeless and idyllic world of sandpipers, ibises and kingfishers. In another hemisphere civilization rushes headlong into a brutal conflict. Life there is lived from moment to moment. Inevitably, the two young men -sanctuary owner and employee - are drawn to the war, and into the mud and horror of the trenches of Armentieres. Alone on the beach, their friend Imogen, the middle-aged wildlife photographer, must acknowledge for all three of them that the past cannot be held.

Dream Stuff

From the image of a small boy entranced by his mother's GI Escort, yet still hoping for the return of a father 'missing in action', to the portrait of an adult writer trying to piece together a defining image of his late father, these outstanding stories conjure up with sharp intensity the memories and events that make a man. These powerfully vivid stories by a great writer range over more than a century of Australian life, from green tropical lushness to 'blacksoil country', from scrub and outback to city streets-evoking dark shadows beneath a bright sun, and lives shaped by the ghosts of history and the rhythms of unruly nature.

Harland's Half Acre

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Johnno

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Typewriter Music

I came to David Malouf ’s poetry though his novels. After reading An Imaginary Life as a very young man I jumped on my bike and headed for the local library determined to take home every book I could find, because that’s what great writers do - they make you obsessed. I vividly remember finding his first book Bicycles and Other Poems on the shelf (it wasn’t easy – pre-microfiche). I was so enthralled I began reading it on the spot. Tearing myself away to borrow it and that ride home took forever and that craving has never really diminished. Reading Typewriter Music is a reminder for me of that excitement that burns white hot. It’s difficult to dissect; there’s seamlessness in style and language across a broad ranging collection. Simplicity and complexity at the same time. It’s music, it sings. It’s what David Malouf does.

Chris Grierson is a former manager of Readings Port Melbourne

Every Move You Make

Untold Tales

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Little Books On Big Themes Gift Box Set

Gift Box contains:

Great World

For the two men in this novel, war was supposed to be a testing ground. But it proved to be an ordeal of a different kind. Spanning 70 years of Australian life, from Sydney's Cross to the backwaters of the Hawkesbury River, this is a novel of lost innocence and witness.

The Complete Stories

In this stunning collection, internationally acclaimed writer David Malouf gives us bookish boys and taciturn men, strong women and wayward sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and husbands, a composer and his muse. These are their stories, whole lives brought dramatically into focus and powerfully rooted in the vividly rendered landscape of the vast Australian continent. Malouf writes about men and women looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on, puzzling over not only their own lives but also the place they have come to occupy in the lives of others. This single volume gathers both a new collection of Malouf's short fiction, "Every Move You Make," and all of his previously published stories.

On Experience

In this beautifully written, eloquent piece, David Malouf explores the connections between writing and the imagination and offers wonderful insights into his own experiences of the writer's life.

MUP's new series Little Books on Big Themes pairs leading Australian thinkers and cultural figures with some of the big themes in life: rage, experience, longing and ecstasy. Each author's 10,000-word take on a chosen theme is presented as an eminently collectable hardback.

Twelve Edmondstone Street

This remarkable book combines autobiography with a subtle, almost painterly sense of the ways in which the objects which we surround ourselves, and the places in which we live, build up our private maps of reality and shape our personal mythologies. David Malouf begins by describing in love, evocative detail, the house in Brisbane where he was born and grew up, moving from room to room, always relating the smallest items in it to the life he remembers and his widening perception of the world at large. He moves on to describe life in the Tuscan village where he lived, and the arrival of an Australian Television crew; reflecting on his first visit to India, he touches on the problems of interpreting and evaluating unfamiliar places; back in Australia, he recalls a traumatic wartime journey with his father from Brisbane to Sydney. Funny, humane and beautifully written, this is a unique and extraordinary essay in autobiography.

Remembering Babylon

A picture of Australia at the time of its foundation, focused on the hostility between early British settlers and native Aboriginals. It is essentially the story of a boy caught between both worlds. David Malouf, himself an Australian, is the prize-winning author of The Great World.

The Conversations At Curlow Creek

In 1827, in a hut on the plains of New South Wales, two strangers spend the night in talk. Carney, an illiterate Irishman, is to be hanged at dawn. Adair, also Irish, has been sent to supervise the hanging. The novel moves between Australia and Ireland to explore questions of nature and justice.

Quarterly Essay 12: Made In England: Australia's British Inheritance

Australia's British inheritance is a paradox that has preoccupied much of Malouf's fiction, and now it gives rise to a brilliant essay exploring Australia's connection with our one-time 'mother country'. In this remarkable essay Malouf ponders the strengths and weaknesses, the values and illusions, of Australia's complex relationship with England. Known as a poet and librettist as well as a novelist, David Malouf is the author of 14 books, including An Imaginary Life, Fly Away Peter, Johnno and the international bestseller The Great World. His work has been awarded the Pascall Prize, the Miles Franklin Award, the Age Book of the Year Award, the New South Wales and Victorian Premier's Award in Australia, along with the Commonwealth Prize and France's Prix Femina Etranger. Remembering Babylon was nominated for the 1993 Booker Prize.