John Hughes (1) (1961–)
Autore di No One
Per altri autori con il nome John Hughes, vedi la pagina di disambiguazione.
Opere di John Hughes
Etichette
Informazioni generali
Utenti
Recensioni
I read The Dogs after John Hughes had been outed by journalists as 'one of the most prolific literary plagiarists in history'. (Anna Verney and Richard Cooke in The Monthly') I was aware of his reputation as a plagiarist when I read and enjoyed his earlier book 'No-One' which also incorporates texts written by others without acknowledgement. The borderland between acceptable and unacceptable use of other's work is increasingly contested. After initial prevarication Hughes adopted the defiant line that the novelist can be a variety of anthologist of others creative work: 'You take and make something else out of it, you make it your own'.
The judges who had shortlisted The Dogs for the Miles Franklin were not won over by his defence and the novel was removed from the list of contenders. More significant in human terms however, was Hughes' failure to inform his publisher, Terri White of Upswell Press of the his plagiarism. The furore that followed his outing was predictable and hurtful as a betrayal of trust. The novel has been withdrawn from sale in both its cellulose and online versions though, curiously, an audiobook version still seems to be available. An online version is available from some public libraries.
Hughes' betrayal of his publisher is probable unforgivable. But merit and morality don't always run on parallel tracks. Is the novel any good? I can 't say that I was conscious of other hands at work as I read The Dogs. I don't think my judgement would have been different if I had read the book before I knew its dubious provenance. It is at best interesting with some fancy prose. But it seemed to me over crafted and disengaging. The narrator, Michael Shamanov, visits his mother in her nursing home after two years absence and finds her dying and demented. He decides to recover the story of her life and… (altro)
The judges who had shortlisted The Dogs for the Miles Franklin were not won over by his defence and the novel was removed from the list of contenders. More significant in human terms however, was Hughes' failure to inform his publisher, Terri White of Upswell Press of the his plagiarism. The furore that followed his outing was predictable and hurtful as a betrayal of trust. The novel has been withdrawn from sale in both its cellulose and online versions though, curiously, an audiobook version still seems to be available. An online version is available from some public libraries.
Hughes' betrayal of his publisher is probable unforgivable. But merit and morality don't always run on parallel tracks. Is the novel any good? I can 't say that I was conscious of other hands at work as I read The Dogs. I don't think my judgement would have been different if I had read the book before I knew its dubious provenance. It is at best interesting with some fancy prose. But it seemed to me over crafted and disengaging. The narrator, Michael Shamanov, visits his mother in her nursing home after two years absence and finds her dying and demented. He decides to recover the story of her life and… (altro)
I should begin with a warning. John Hughes has been outed as a serial plagiarist by Anna Verney and Richard Cooke in the March 2023 issue of ‘The Monthly’ periodical: they aver that ‘the volume and nature of his copying seems to have no known precedent in published literature.’ (‘Being John Hughes’: https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2023/march/anna-verney-richard-cooke/being-j...
In ‘No One’ (2019) Hughes has appropriated passages without acknowledgement from Patrick Modiano, W G Sebald, Les Murray and testimonies from the ‘Bringing Them Home’ report into the Stolen Generations. This revelation of the ‘patchwriting’ character of ‘No One’ and his other novels has done incalculable harm to Hughes’ once substantial literary reputation.
I read ‘No One’ after Hughes was outed, curious to see what I could make of it. The passages from Modiano and others passed me by; I had read few of the books that Hughes had plagiarized and recognised none of the passages taken from others as disguised in ‘No-One’. But my knowledge of the patchwork character of book made the relationship between the first person narrator, who is never named, and Hughes his creator even more disconnected and discordant.
I suspect that ‘No-One’ will continue to stretch its wings in my memory. On first reading it is a bleak tale of two damaged people and their sexual relationship casually begun and casually ended after an incidental murder and their flight from arrest. These events began 19 years ago when the nameless narrator, driving his battered Volvo late at night in Sydney in the dying years of the 20th century, heard the sound of an impact on the passenger side. Perhaps he felt the thump of it, he isn’t sure. He stops and drives back to look to the point of impact; there is a dent in the side panel, perhaps new, too high for a dog, but no one seems to have been injured. He feels he is being watched and looks up ‘though I knew there was no one there’. As the narrative progresses, ‘no-one’ will become an impalpable but obtrusive presence in the novel, appearing first of all in the epigraph from Homer’s Odyssey after the title page: Polyphemus’ unanswered cry for help, ‘No One is killing me’. The man goes to the nearby Rachel Forster Hospital in search of his possible victim but no one is there who could have been hit by the Volvo. Over ensuing days he returns to the scene of impact and watches the crowds of pedestrians, as if the victim might suddenly materialize from the mass. He follows a young Aboriginal woman, emaciated with a lacework of scars on her face, who recognises him from his visit to the hospital and tells him that he looks lost. They return to her flat in Redfern, in one of the upper floors of a building called Poets Corner. Like the narrator the young woman has no name of her own in the novel: he refers to her only as the Poetess, lending her a name from the place where she lives. The lacework of scars was inflicted by her boyfriend, one of her father’s friends, an older man who had glassed her face a couple of times. During their brief sexual relationship she joins the man in his search for his unknown and probably imaginary victim. Their handbill advertisements for the victim only attract impostors intent on fraud. After several of these encounters the man realises that his guilt is without end. The Poetess tries to reason with him, calling him a ‘guilt addict’ and warning him, without effect, that ‘Guilt’s a fucking vampire’. Her boyfriend returns, glasses her face again and when he attempts to strangle the man she kills him with a kitchen knife. The man wants to go to the police but the girl dissuades him, secure in the knowledge that their identities are unknown and untraceable. They flee to the place of her best memories, the Aboriginal reserve near Taree where she lived as a child, but it is now a deserted ruin. Afterwards, at a roadside milkbar he asks her, ‘What were they called, your people?’ She responds with furious resentment, ‘How the fuck should I know’. Those are her last words to the man. She leaves him to go to the lavatory and does not return.
Nineteen years have passed and the man narrating this bleak tale is now near sixty and in no better shape than he was in the beginning. He searched for the girl after she left him but never found her. He returns at last to the Rachel Morton Hospital which is now just another deserted ruin. His life seems to have been running in reverse since they parted, ‘waiting for things that did not exist’.
It becomes apparent on re-reading that Hughes has written a disenchanted epilogue to the romantic idyll of Lieutenant William Dawes, an astronomer on the First Fleet (1788) and Patyegrang an Aboriginal girl of about 15 who taught him her Eora language. Their fragmentary conversations, taken from Dawes’ Notebooks which are readily available on the internet, are beguiling in their intimacy and intelligence. The man finds the story of Dawes and Pateygrang early in the novel while killing time in the Mitchell Library and relates their conversations verbatim. Hughes is not the first to appropriate the Patyegarang conversations from Dawes' Notebooks. Kate Grenville’s metafiction ‘The Lieutenant’ (2010) tells the story at length. There is no plagiarism on this occasion; Hughes acknowledges his appropriation in preface.
Dawes established his observatory some distance from the main settlement in Sydney Cove, made friends with the local Eora people and began to record their language. Pateygarang was one of his most significant informants. The Notebooks, beginning in late 1790, provide an extensive and sophisticated account of Eora vocabulary and grammar without which the language would have been lost. The conversations between Dawes and Patyegarang seem to have occurred over a period of three months in the following year. Their relationship was intimate and probably sexual. Dawes was compelled to leave the colony at the end of 1791, disgraced by his refusal to participate in reprisal raids against the Eora. His subsequent career, in most accounts of his life, was equally exemplary for his participation in the anti-slavery campaign. Patyegarang disappears from recorded history after her brief sojourn in Dawes’ observatory.
After his exposure as a serial plagiarist Hughes sought to excuse his theft of others’ literary works as instances of ‘literary palimpsest’. The metaphor has no sensible application to his unacknowledged appropriations which no-one noticed until quite some time after his novels achieved local acclaim. The essence of palimpsest is that what was written earlier is not invisible but decipherable beneath a later overwritten text. But the metaphor does have a strangely appropriate application to Hughes’ superimposition of his bleak modern narrative on the colonial idyll of William Dawes and Patyegarang.… (altro)
In ‘No One’ (2019) Hughes has appropriated passages without acknowledgement from Patrick Modiano, W G Sebald, Les Murray and testimonies from the ‘Bringing Them Home’ report into the Stolen Generations. This revelation of the ‘patchwriting’ character of ‘No One’ and his other novels has done incalculable harm to Hughes’ once substantial literary reputation.
I read ‘No One’ after Hughes was outed, curious to see what I could make of it. The passages from Modiano and others passed me by; I had read few of the books that Hughes had plagiarized and recognised none of the passages taken from others as disguised in ‘No-One’. But my knowledge of the patchwork character of book made the relationship between the first person narrator, who is never named, and Hughes his creator even more disconnected and discordant.
I suspect that ‘No-One’ will continue to stretch its wings in my memory. On first reading it is a bleak tale of two damaged people and their sexual relationship casually begun and casually ended after an incidental murder and their flight from arrest. These events began 19 years ago when the nameless narrator, driving his battered Volvo late at night in Sydney in the dying years of the 20th century, heard the sound of an impact on the passenger side. Perhaps he felt the thump of it, he isn’t sure. He stops and drives back to look to the point of impact; there is a dent in the side panel, perhaps new, too high for a dog, but no one seems to have been injured. He feels he is being watched and looks up ‘though I knew there was no one there’. As the narrative progresses, ‘no-one’ will become an impalpable but obtrusive presence in the novel, appearing first of all in the epigraph from Homer’s Odyssey after the title page: Polyphemus’ unanswered cry for help, ‘No One is killing me’. The man goes to the nearby Rachel Forster Hospital in search of his possible victim but no one is there who could have been hit by the Volvo. Over ensuing days he returns to the scene of impact and watches the crowds of pedestrians, as if the victim might suddenly materialize from the mass. He follows a young Aboriginal woman, emaciated with a lacework of scars on her face, who recognises him from his visit to the hospital and tells him that he looks lost. They return to her flat in Redfern, in one of the upper floors of a building called Poets Corner. Like the narrator the young woman has no name of her own in the novel: he refers to her only as the Poetess, lending her a name from the place where she lives. The lacework of scars was inflicted by her boyfriend, one of her father’s friends, an older man who had glassed her face a couple of times. During their brief sexual relationship she joins the man in his search for his unknown and probably imaginary victim. Their handbill advertisements for the victim only attract impostors intent on fraud. After several of these encounters the man realises that his guilt is without end. The Poetess tries to reason with him, calling him a ‘guilt addict’ and warning him, without effect, that ‘Guilt’s a fucking vampire’. Her boyfriend returns, glasses her face again and when he attempts to strangle the man she kills him with a kitchen knife. The man wants to go to the police but the girl dissuades him, secure in the knowledge that their identities are unknown and untraceable. They flee to the place of her best memories, the Aboriginal reserve near Taree where she lived as a child, but it is now a deserted ruin. Afterwards, at a roadside milkbar he asks her, ‘What were they called, your people?’ She responds with furious resentment, ‘How the fuck should I know’. Those are her last words to the man. She leaves him to go to the lavatory and does not return.
Nineteen years have passed and the man narrating this bleak tale is now near sixty and in no better shape than he was in the beginning. He searched for the girl after she left him but never found her. He returns at last to the Rachel Morton Hospital which is now just another deserted ruin. His life seems to have been running in reverse since they parted, ‘waiting for things that did not exist’.
It becomes apparent on re-reading that Hughes has written a disenchanted epilogue to the romantic idyll of Lieutenant William Dawes, an astronomer on the First Fleet (1788) and Patyegrang an Aboriginal girl of about 15 who taught him her Eora language. Their fragmentary conversations, taken from Dawes’ Notebooks which are readily available on the internet, are beguiling in their intimacy and intelligence. The man finds the story of Dawes and Pateygrang early in the novel while killing time in the Mitchell Library and relates their conversations verbatim. Hughes is not the first to appropriate the Patyegarang conversations from Dawes' Notebooks. Kate Grenville’s metafiction ‘The Lieutenant’ (2010) tells the story at length. There is no plagiarism on this occasion; Hughes acknowledges his appropriation in preface.
Dawes established his observatory some distance from the main settlement in Sydney Cove, made friends with the local Eora people and began to record their language. Pateygarang was one of his most significant informants. The Notebooks, beginning in late 1790, provide an extensive and sophisticated account of Eora vocabulary and grammar without which the language would have been lost. The conversations between Dawes and Patyegarang seem to have occurred over a period of three months in the following year. Their relationship was intimate and probably sexual. Dawes was compelled to leave the colony at the end of 1791, disgraced by his refusal to participate in reprisal raids against the Eora. His subsequent career, in most accounts of his life, was equally exemplary for his participation in the anti-slavery campaign. Patyegarang disappears from recorded history after her brief sojourn in Dawes’ observatory.
After his exposure as a serial plagiarist Hughes sought to excuse his theft of others’ literary works as instances of ‘literary palimpsest’. The metaphor has no sensible application to his unacknowledged appropriations which no-one noticed until quite some time after his novels achieved local acclaim. The essence of palimpsest is that what was written earlier is not invisible but decipherable beneath a later overwritten text. But the metaphor does have a strangely appropriate application to Hughes’ superimposition of his bleak modern narrative on the colonial idyll of William Dawes and Patyegarang.… (altro)
How well he writes! State of mind. Memory. And the most evocative description of a watery funeral in Venice.
Here’s a quote that struck me:
“In an hour my mother will be dead. She will be much easier to love.”
As for why the book is called “The Dogs,” I remain puzzled.
Interested in the plot? I’ll let the official blurb fill you in.
“Michael Shamanov is a man running away from life's responsibilities. His marriage is over, he barely sees his son and he hasn't seen his mother since banishing her to a nursing home two years earlier. A successful screen writer, Michael's encounter with his mother's nurse leads him to
discover that the greatest story he's never heard may lie with his dying mother. And perhaps it's her life he's been running away from and not his own. Is the past ever finished? Should we respect another's silence? And if so, is it ever possible to understand and put to rest the strange idea of family that travels through the flesh?”
The Dogs by John Hughes. Yes. Read it.… (altro)
Here’s a quote that struck me:
“In an hour my mother will be dead. She will be much easier to love.”
As for why the book is called “The Dogs,” I remain puzzled.
Interested in the plot? I’ll let the official blurb fill you in.
“Michael Shamanov is a man running away from life's responsibilities. His marriage is over, he barely sees his son and he hasn't seen his mother since banishing her to a nursing home two years earlier. A successful screen writer, Michael's encounter with his mother's nurse leads him to
discover that the greatest story he's never heard may lie with his dying mother. And perhaps it's her life he's been running away from and not his own. Is the past ever finished? Should we respect another's silence? And if so, is it ever possible to understand and put to rest the strange idea of family that travels through the flesh?”
The Dogs by John Hughes. Yes. Read it.… (altro)
Premi e riconoscimenti
Potrebbero anche piacerti
Autori correlati
Statistiche
- Opere
- 8
- Utenti
- 74
- Popolarità
- #238,154
- Voto
- 3.8
- Recensioni
- 7
- ISBN
- 312
- Lingue
- 7
Shortlisted, with good reason, for the 2020 Miles Franklin Award, Hughes' short novel is a meditation on trauma, loss, identity, and memory. His prose is never difficult, never dense, but one feels a conscious emptiness in the spaces between, in the words unspoken. It is rare to feel both broken and wiser after reading a novel, but this was such an experience for me.… (altro)