'The past shapes the present – they teach us that in schools and universities. (Shapes? Infiltrates, more like; imbues, infuses.) This past cannot be visited like an ageing aunt. It doesn’t live in little zoo enclosures. Half the time, this past is nothing less than the beating heart of the present. So, how to speak of the searing, unpindownable power that the past – ours, our family’s, our culture’s – wields in the present?
'Stories are not enough, even though they are essential. And books about history, books of psychology – the best of them take us closer, but still not close enough.
'Maria Tumarkin's Axiomatic is a boundary-shifting fusion of thinking, storytelling, reportage and meditation. It takes as its starting point five axioms:
'These beliefs—or intuitions—about the role the past plays in our present are often evoked as if they are timeless and self-evident truths. It is precisely because they are neither, yet still we are persuaded by them, that they tell us a great deal about the forces that shape our culture and the way we live.
'Axiomatic is Tumarkin's fourth book of non-fiction, and her most pioneering. Her three previous books, Otherland (2010), Courage (2007), and Traumascapes (2005), have each and all been critically acclaimed and shortlisted for major prizes.
'More than seven full and long years in the making, and utilising her time as a Sidney Myer Creative Fellow, Axiomatic actively seeks to reset the non-fiction form in Australia.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'MARIA TUMARKIN’s fourth book, Axiomatic (Transit Books, 2019), is an urgent and formally daring work of nonfiction about criminal injustice, war trauma, exile, youth suicide, migration, friendship, and institutional memory. Her previous works — on the “morally ambivalent” nature of courage (Courage, 2007), on the aftermath of violence and war (Traumascapes, 2005), and on returning to the Ukraine of her birth (Otherland, 2010) — are each characterized by a burning attention to suffering and resilience and a potent, elastic narrative voice. As with any writer of note, Tumarkin’s distinctive style is hard to quantify — she writes with academic rigor but eschews theory and jargon; she’s neither a dispassionate observer nor confidante, but her tone has heat and intimacy; she’s unafraid of emotion, and her writing is animated with the same generosity and enthusiasm she brings to friendship, which also happens to be a recurring subject in her work. I interviewed Maria as she prepared to travel for Axiomatic’s American launch.' (Introduction)
'Brow Books has sold North American and Spanish-language rights to Axiomatic (Maria Tumarkin).'
'Axiomatic is the fourth work of nonfiction by Maria Tumarkin, one of Australia’s most urgent and necessary writers, but it is the first to keep her accent – the first to fully register the impolitic intensity of her prose and breadth of her world view. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is also her best.' (Introduction)
'In Otherland (2010), Maria Tumarkin writes: ‘Humility is a big deal to me…’, and her first three nonfiction books – all of which delve deeply, unapologetically and revealingly into ‘serious’ territories – carry the imprint of that Big Deal, in their conception and tone. Tumarkin has previously approached trauma, genocide, war, loss, guilt, systematic oppression, and survival with exploratory urgency. Her newest book, Axiomatic, is written in the same spirit. Here, Tumarkin has taken Australian society and culture as her chief subject for the first time, attending to very real but not obviously historical crises, while expanding on thematic concerns that run through her body of work. It is her most vital, compressed and compelling book to date.' (Introduction)
'Brow Books has sold North American and Spanish-language rights to Axiomatic (Maria Tumarkin).'
