Next Thursday is International Women's day and author Kirsten Tranter, a supporter of
The Stella Prize, will be speaking at numerous venues around Sydney, including on a panel at Katoomba with authors Tara Moss and Claire Corbett. The topic for the day, inspired by VS Naipaul's famous dismissal of women's writing as instantly recognisable and inferior to his own, is: "Do women write differently from men?" Details of the various Stella events scheduled around the country can be found on the
Stella events webpage; details for the Katoomba event
here.
Tranter's second novel, A Common Loss, has been received to wide acclaim. Two guest authors have
chosen to review Tranter's book for the AWW challenge, poet Phillip A Ellis and novelist Lisa
Walker. Lisa today posted the full review on her website and provided AWW with the following extract.
Lisa writes:
A Common Loss is Australian author Kirsten Tranter’s
second novel. Her first, The Legacy,
was an assured, fresh retelling of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady.
A Common Loss tells the
story of five friends who meet at university and keep in touch over the next
ten years. Following the death of one of their number, Dylan, the friends
re-group for their annual visit to Las Vegas.
The
story starts with the narrator, Elliot, remembering a car accident the five had
together. The driver, Cameron, swerves to avoid a deer and they crash. Cameron
has been drinking, so Dylan claims to be the driver. As the years go by, whenever
Elliot remembers the crash, it is Dylan who he sees at the wheel. This trick of
the memory becomes a motif for the story.
Elliot,
a professor of literature, sees himself as a bit of an outsider in the group.
With Dylan, who Elliot idealised, removed, tensions rise and relationships
buckle under strain. Elliot discovers that not all of his friends viewed Dylan
the same way he did. Dylan’s death sets events in train where each friend is
forced to reveal long-hidden secrets...
The full review appears on Lisa's blog here.
Lisa describes her own novel,
Liar Bird, as "possibly the first romantic comedy about feral pigs". Her next novel, about a timid erotic writer, comes out in January 2013. She writes, works and surfs on the far north coast of New South Wales and is studying towards a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Queensland."
The second review is by poet Phillip A Ellis.
Phillip writes:
It is true that I do not read as much women's writing as I should,
with a tiny amount of that being by Australians. Hence my involvement
in the
Australian Women Writers Reading and Reviewing Challenge of2012. Because I want to remedy that lack, and because I want to
demonstrate my support for my fellow writers, and because I especially
want to support writers whose work I appreciate and love, it is with
delight that I have been given the chance to review
A Common
Loss by Kirsten Tranter; her two novels have become favourites of
mine for a number of reasons that I will be discussing in this review.
This chance, the chance to support a writer whose work I admire, fits
in with the challenge, and it fits in with my love of good writing.
Five friends--Elliott, Brian, Tallis, Cameron and Dylan--have been
friends since college, and since college have held annual vacations in
Las Vegas. This year, things are different: Dylan the peacemaker, the
glue that keeps the friends together, has died in an accident, and the
remaining four are left facing the secrets that bound them to him.
Secrets which threaten them in turn, seeming to promise the
dissolution, not only of the friendships, but of their careers and
reputations.
A Common Loss deals with these, being set in Las
Vegas, a place where artifice and reality intermingle, and where moral
certainties can be set adrift, and it deals with the relationships
between friendship and secrets, grief and betrayal, all while the
spectre of Tennyson's
In Memoriam weaves through the narrative
as a form of parallel text.
There are a number of ways that two texts may parallel each other. For
example, two narratives may directly parallel each other, incident for
incident, or they may counterpoint each other. There may be a shared
language, a shared worldview or shared mood or voice. And there may
also be a shared setting or set of characters. While it may be common
to expect the texts to be narratives, such as two novels or other
forms of fiction, it is rarer for the texts to differ in the way that
they do here.
In Memoriam is a lyric elegy, whereas
A Common
Loss is less of an elegy and more a narrative whose inciting act
is the death of Dylan, and the losses that arise out of his death.
There are, however, many ways in which the two texts parallel each
other.
Given that
In Memoriam encodes the obsessive nature of grief
and mourning, so that the text itself returns repeatedly to the image
of the dead man mourned, so to is
A Common Loss haunted by
Dylan. As a way of understanding this, if we consider that
Julius
CaesarIn
Memoriam also serves as a thematic thread in the narrative. I
won't say exactly how, save that it has relevance for the narrator,
Elliott, and his relationship with Dylan.
And it is the relationships that define the narrative and the ethos of
the book. As a result, while
A Common Loss is literary, it does
not smell of lamp oil, precisely as a result of its narrative emphasis
on the shifting relationships. There is the relationship between Brian
and Cynthia, and between Cynthia and Elliott, as well as Elliott and
Natasha; while each does not dominate the narrative, they form part of
the shifting play of attraction and allegiances, the attraction
between the men and women, and the allegiances between the friends, so
that the novel is dominated by their fluid interweavings and
interactions. There is a skill to this writing, and this skill is
evident in the way the characters shift and react towards and against
each other.
This skill also extends to the writing. It is literate, eschewing the
easy attraction of generic simplicity for ambiguous complexity, and
the characters details are deftly handled in such a manner as to
sustain narrative tension and believability. It is also, as a result,
compassionate. The onstensible antagonist is revealed as equally
believable as the others, all of whom are united by an emphasis on
their relationships with each other and the absent Dylan. Furthermore,
the characters are believable: there is a sense that these are people
who could exist, who could live and breathe, and meet our
understanding of what a real person is.
And the compassion of the writing extends to the characters
themselves. There are, that is, no black-and-white characters, no
heroes or villains, only the protagonists, their primary antagonist,
and the more shadowy, elusive figures that mainly appear for a moment
then fade. By concentrating so centrally on the friends and Cynthia,
A Common Loss reinforces its focus on their relationships with
Dylan. So that, while there is scope for a much wider cast of
characters, the focus on the central group is integral to the novel
and its concerns. This focus works with the characters' believability,
so that their roundedness works with us to create a sense of
engagement. We believe in them, that is, and we are concerned with the
outcome of their shared dilemma.
A Common Loss is only Kirsten Tranter's second published novel.
Yet it is a skilled novel, one that uses
In Memoriam both as a
parallel text and thematic concern. It is also literate; and it does
not smell of lamp oil. Its writing is compassionate, its characters
also believable and treated in a compassionate manner, and, as a
result of these, I can only admit that
A Common Loss is a major
contribution to contemporary Australian literary fiction. While it is
a quibble to consider the use of the American characters and setting
as somehow unAustralian, it is a false quibble.
A Common Loss
is Australian precisely because it is develops an Australian
sensibility, an Australian worldview, even as it deals with the wider
world. And it is these two that really make Australian writing, and
Australian women's writing, as distinctive and worthy of serious
consideration as it is, despite our cultures' wider neglect.
Phillip A. Ellis is a freelance critic, poet and scholar, and his
poetry collection,
The Flayed Man, has been published by Gothic
Press; Gothic Press will also edit a collection of essays on Ramsey
Campbell, that he is editing with Gary William Crawford. He is working
on another collection, to appear through Diminuendo Press. Another
collection has been accepted by Hippocampus Press, which has also
published his concordance to the poetry of Donald Wandrei. He is the
editor of
Melaleuca. He has recently had
Symptoms Positive
and Negative, a chapbook of poetry about his experiences with
schizophrenia, published by Picaro Press.
A Common Loss / Kirsten Tranter (Sydney : Fourth Estate, 2012)
ISBN: 978-0-7322-9082-5
Available from participating AWW booksellers:
Print copy:
Abbeys Bookshop, Sydney
Shearers Bookshop, Leichhardt, NSW
Better Read Than Dead, Newtown, NSW
Ebook:
PNP Booksellers Mosman, NSW
Avid Reader, Brisbane
The Book Shuttle
Readings
Australian Online Bookshop
Have you read or reviewed either of Kirsten Tranter's books? What did you think? Feel free to add your link.
So here’s my proposition. Don’t try reading reading short
stories because they fit into a busy lifestyle or you catch the tram to work or
you can only concentrate for twenty minutes (!). Try reading short stories
because beautifully written ones are astounding. A short story is designed to
be read in a sitting and I urge you to get up after that reading and leave the
story inside you to do its work. When you read a collection of stories, try to
resist the urge to read one straight after another. Think of how you feel after
gorging on a whole box of chocolates. 
