The editors of three literary journals tell us what they're reading
Throughout winter, we are celebrating Melbourne literary journals with a new event series, Journal Assembly. In June, we’ll hear from editors Brigid Mullane, Katia Pase and Samuel Rutter. Here, they share their current reading lists.
Samuel Rutter, Higher Arc:
The majority of the reading I do these days is for my thesis, which means a lot of narrative theory but also a lot of excellent novels.
I’m currently reading La grande by Juan José Saer, who in some ways was a kind of Proust from provincial Argentina. I recently read Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book which is unlike anything else I’ve ever come across and I enjoyed Gerald Murnane’s new book A Million Windows. I finally ceded to Higher Arc editor Mieke Chew’s rave reviews of Hungarian author Laszlo Krasznahorkai and read Satantango. That was incredibly grim but in an edifying way - there’s also a 7-hour cinematic adaption by Bela Tarr that I’m maybe a quarter of the way through watching.
A recent trip to Sydney reawoke my enthusiasm for Brett Whitely so I’ve been dipping in and out of a biography on him. In terms of journals, I really like Music & Literature. Their latest number has a special on Clarice Lispector whose first novel Near to the Wild Heart is definitely one of my favourites.
Brigid Mullane, Kill Your Darlings:
The first instalment of the Galbraith series, The Cuckoo’s Calling, rescued me from a fairly serious reading funk. The second outing of curmudgeonly ex-army-turned-private-detective Cormoran Strike, The Silkworm, is set in the London literary scene, so I was sold from page one. Rowling’s/Galbraith’s writing is assured, her characters charming, her plots galloping. You get the feeling that she is having a lot of fun with this series and, consequently, I am having a lot of fun reading it.
Having purchased Melbourne Writers Festival tickets in a flurry of excitement, I’m also in a rush to finish all the books on my to-read pile before I reach Federation Square including We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulowayo. This book was recommended to me by a friend (and bookseller) who has impeccable taste and hasn’t led my in the wrong direction yet. Bulowayo’s debut is an engaging coming-of-age story that, while sometimes troubling, is ultimately buoyed by Bulowayo’s sense of humour and skilful use of language.
Finally, I’m also reading This House of Grief. Garner returns to the courtroom to witness the trial of Robert Farquharson, a father accused of driving his car into a dam and drowning his three sons. Joe Cinque’s Consolation is one of my favourite of Garner’s books and there are echoes of that here. Always insightful, Garner’s writing is deft and subtle. This book is compelling and very difficult to put down, or forget.
Katia Pase, Stilts:
Couple weeks ago I returned home, broke, from a seven-month trip across South America to the bedroom at the ass-end of my parents’ house in Box Hill. And while I don’t plan on being here long, just long enough to save a little money, it’s the first space in seven months I’ve been able to call mine.
Before I left for South America I lived in a crumbling terrace with my friend Oliver, but he left before I did in a taxi one freezing morning, moved to Sydney, leaving me our combined book collections. And so that first weekend home I cleared my bookshelf of all the trophies from my days as an overachieving teenager (a reminder perhaps that I peaked early) and filled the shelves with our books that had been stored in Dad’s garage.
I didn’t arrange them on the shelves alphabetically, or thematically, or by nationality, generation, or genre. I don’t have that kind of discipline. They went wherever they would fit, with the exception of half the length of the top shelf, which I reserved for those books I had lugged round in a backpack for the past seven months. And it’s one or other of these I open every night when I lay down in a room with no one else in it. When I read from Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives I’m back in a huge light-filled loft perched high above a train station in Santiago; The Heights of Macchhu Picchu and I’m there, behind the window of Neruda’s Valparaíso house overlooking the port; Borges’ Labyrinths and I’m coming down on an overcast Buenos Aires arvo; anything Garcia Marquez and I’m either falling in love in the west of Colombia, or there’s rain hammering the roof of an old shack off the coast of Chile, and I’m crouched over my laptop learning of the author’s death; or Alejandro Zambra’s Formas de Volver a Casa, in Spanish this time, and there it is, the reason I left for that part of the world in the first place.
