David Ireland (1) (1927–2022)
Autore di A Woman of the Future
Per altri autori con il nome David Ireland, vedi la pagina di disambiguazione.
Opere di David Ireland
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Data di nascita
- 1927-08-24
- Data di morte
- 2022-07
- Sesso
- male
- Nazionalità
- Australia
- Luogo di nascita
- Lakemba, New South Wales, Australia
- Luogo di residenza
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Attività lavorative
- novelist
playwright
greenkeeper
oil refinery worker
Utenti
Recensioni
Clever. Lots of stories, some familiar, some not. Where is the narrator heading with his life? More of the same. Surprisingly enjoyable.
I'm too old for this s***. Maybe when I was younger I would have had some empathy to spare for reading about a teenaged Australian sociopath who climbs into girls' windows and rapes them just because he is bored, but I have run out of time and patience.
Oh, words fail me when I try to describe the experience of reading this book. With no disrespect intended, I have to say that words failed the judges when they shortlisted it for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards too. This is what they said:
The publication of David Ireland’s The World Repair Video Game, his first novel to appear in almost 20 years, is something of a literary event. It confirms, above all, that the imaginative powers of this three-time Miles Franklin Award winner remain undiminished. The novel is framed in the form of a journal or diary written by 42-year old Kennard Stirling. Though born to a wealthy Sydney family, Stirling now chooses to spend his days living a modest and solitary existence, with his dog Jim, in a small coastal town in NSW. The novel covers just a few brief months in his life, recording his largely uneventful days spent planting trees, and helping out the town’s elderly residents—mowing their lawns, delivering meals, or ferrying them to medical appointments.
Occasionally, the darker side of Stirling’s character surfaces, as he pursues his unconventional scheme to regenerate the landscape of his bushland property on Big Hill. Then there is the voice of Pym, which habitually interjects itself into Stirling’s narrative, and which may be an element of Stirling’s consciousness, or may be something else entirely. David Ireland’s novel, shot through with philosophical asides, irony and dark humour, ultimately presents a bleak vision of our modern world. While Stirling’s response to the realities of economic rationalism, community breakdown and environmental degradation, is blatantly absurd, his strategies to repair the world ultimately present themselves as beyond good and evil. In a novel largely devoid of conventional character and storytelling, David Ireland has given us a complex, challenging and deeply committed work.
The judges wanted to avoid spoilers. But in doing so, they have failed to convey just how enthralling this book is. So I’m going to reveal the spoiler you will recognise for yourself by the time you get to page 2. You have been warned!
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/12/01/the-world-repair-video-game-by-david-ireland...… (altro)
The publication of David Ireland’s The World Repair Video Game, his first novel to appear in almost 20 years, is something of a literary event. It confirms, above all, that the imaginative powers of this three-time Miles Franklin Award winner remain undiminished. The novel is framed in the form of a journal or diary written by 42-year old Kennard Stirling. Though born to a wealthy Sydney family, Stirling now chooses to spend his days living a modest and solitary existence, with his dog Jim, in a small coastal town in NSW. The novel covers just a few brief months in his life, recording his largely uneventful days spent planting trees, and helping out the town’s elderly residents—mowing their lawns, delivering meals, or ferrying them to medical appointments.
Occasionally, the darker side of Stirling’s character surfaces, as he pursues his unconventional scheme to regenerate the landscape of his bushland property on Big Hill. Then there is the voice of Pym, which habitually interjects itself into Stirling’s narrative, and which may be an element of Stirling’s consciousness, or may be something else entirely. David Ireland’s novel, shot through with philosophical asides, irony and dark humour, ultimately presents a bleak vision of our modern world. While Stirling’s response to the realities of economic rationalism, community breakdown and environmental degradation, is blatantly absurd, his strategies to repair the world ultimately present themselves as beyond good and evil. In a novel largely devoid of conventional character and storytelling, David Ireland has given us a complex, challenging and deeply committed work.
The judges wanted to avoid spoilers. But in doing so, they have failed to convey just how enthralling this book is. So I’m going to reveal the spoiler you will recognise for yourself by the time you get to page 2. You have been warned!
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/12/01/the-world-repair-video-game-by-david-ireland...… (altro)
Liste
Premi e riconoscimenti
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Autori correlati
Statistiche
- Opere
- 12
- Utenti
- 443
- Popolarità
- #55,291
- Voto
- 3.3
- Recensioni
- 11
- ISBN
- 85
All of us who were young women in the seventies had a series of unforgettable moments when we broke a gender-based psychological, social or legal barrier. For me, these moments ranged from the trivial to the momentous: when I wore a 'pantsuit' for the first time; when I refused to make tea for the boss at work; when I asked The Ex for 'his' car keys after I'd got my licence; when I rejected the purdah of the Ladies Lounge and had a much cheaper drink in the public bar; when I demanded to know why I couldn't apply for a job that I'd been acting in for months; and when my boss negotiated with the Premier and his Deputy to allow me to continue working in the public service after I'd got married despite the regulations... He was white with exhaustion when he came back and told me the news.
Me? I took it for granted. My newly minted sense of self had assumed that approval was a foregone conclusion since it was none of their business whether I was married or not and the justice of women's rights was inalienable.
Only much later did I realise that he could have just as easily have waved his uppity young clerk goodbye... and I wouldn't have been able to do a thing about it.
The thing is, as David Ireland shows so brilliantly in A Woman of the Future, in the 60s and 70s nobody knew what the outcome of the women's movement might be. We were all making leaps of faith, large and small, one after the other.
(One great leap of faith for women was in 1901, when men voted to give women the vote in the newly federated Australian parliament. No one knew then how that would work out either. But as historian Clare Wright concludes in You Daughters of Freedom (2018, see my review) women used their vote to make Australia the most progressive nation on the planet in the era before WW1. It's a pity that's not the case any more.)
A Woman of the Future has some confronting aspects, and Bill's dismissive 2015 review at The Australian Legend prompted a riposte from Bonny Cassidy in 2018 at The Sydney Review of Books. But I see A Woman of the Future as a book that lends itself to all kinds of readings, all of which may be equally valid.
Or not:
A Woman of the Future is a very slippery novel. I read it through the lens that interested me most, i.e. as an exploration of the issue signalled by its title: what might a woman of the future be? What might happen when parenting adapts to new ideas about gender roles and expectations? How will the children — boys and girls — behave? What will they be like as adults? How will men react to the challenge to their authority? Do sexual relationships adapt? Or not...
Alethea Hunt is the subject of a parenting experiment in a partly recognisable world. Her mother has withdrawn from her expected role entirely and has abandoned all domestic responsibilities to her husband who thrives at domesticity. Alethea claims in this purportedly posthumous collection of her writings to be able to remember her life in the womb and very early childhood when her mother's love was overt, but now in this inversion of roles Mother is more like the stereotypical father who is absent at work. She spends most of her time in her room writing, recording minute day to day observations. A diarist of her times? It's not clear: I kept thinking of Casaubon labouring away on his meaningless magnus opus... and yet, such momentous change was worthy of documentation, surely?
(The brains behind the Mass-Observation Archive during WW2 thought so, and so did those behind the persistent requests for us to record our pandemic experiences for posterity. Which I ignored, for reasons explained in my review of Blitz Spirit (2020), compiled by Becky Brown.)
In a sustained metaphor for the metamorphosis of society, Ireland introduces Alethea's school companions and neighbours in a social hierarchy of Frees and Servers. In an ironic inversion of the usual dystopias, the Frees are mutants who engage in meaningless work to keep them busy while the Servers are the professional class, selected at the conclusion of school to qualify for tertiary education and real work. The mutants grow peculiar changes in their bodies: a plank emerges from a man's body and becomes a coffin; a boy who is gradually solidifying into a sculpture takes care to arrange his all-important appendage to be impressive; a child whose feet adhere to any surface is allowed to roam the classroom at will and becomes a competitive runner.
It is Alethea's metamorphosis, however, that is the main subject of the book. Raised not to be a 'girl' but as an equal, she explores her world with enthusiasm. In class, she confounds the stereotype of the disruptive boy student, and her curiosity extends to sex. In multiple discomfiting episodes, she inverts the notion that 'girls play at sex to get love and boys play at love to get sex'. She and the other girls don't care at all about love...
With the advent of The Pill, anything else was flushed away.
Alethea cannot be bothered with pandering to the male idea of what an attractive girl looks like.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/12/14/a-woman-of-the-future-1979-by-david-ireland/… (altro)