'In the ghost hours of a Monday morning a man feels a dull thud against the side of his car near the entrance to Redfern Station. He doesn’t stop immediately. By the time he returns to the scene, the road is empty, but there is a dent in the car, high up on the passenger door, and what looks like blood. Only a man could have made such a dent, he thinks. For some reason he looks up, though he knows no one is there. Has he hit someone, and if so, where is the victim?
'So begins a story that takes us to the heart of contemporary Australia’s festering relationship to its indigenous past. A story about guilt for acts which precede us, crimes we are not sure we have committed, crimes gone on so long they now seem criminal-less.
'Part crime novel, part road movie, part love story, No One takes its protagonist to the very heart of a nation where non-existence is the true existence, where crimes cannot be resolved and guilt cannot be redeemed, and no one knows what to do with ghosts that are real.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Stories of trauma — personal, communal and national — dominate the Miles Franklin Award, Australia's most prestigious literary prize, in its 63rd year.'
'‘The novella has a fundamental relation to secrecy’, write Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. ‘Not with a secret matter or object to be discovered, but with the form of the secret, which remains impenetrable.’ A little later in A Thousand Plateaus, they clarify what they mean by linking ‘the form of the secret’ to a moment of perceptual disturbance: ‘You enter a room and perceive something as already there, as just having happened, even though it has not yet been done. Or you know what is in the process of happening is happening for the last time, it’s already over with.’ From this scenario, it’s easy to extrapolate that, for Deleuze and Guattari, the novella is principled on a particular experience of time, one that is marked by a feeling of belatedness – of finding ourselves in the position of having to ask, ‘What happened? Whatever could have happened?’' (Introduction)
'‘The novella has a fundamental relation to secrecy’, write Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. ‘Not with a secret matter or object to be discovered, but with the form of the secret, which remains impenetrable.’ A little later in A Thousand Plateaus, they clarify what they mean by linking ‘the form of the secret’ to a moment of perceptual disturbance: ‘You enter a room and perceive something as already there, as just having happened, even though it has not yet been done. Or you know what is in the process of happening is happening for the last time, it’s already over with.’ From this scenario, it’s easy to extrapolate that, for Deleuze and Guattari, the novella is principled on a particular experience of time, one that is marked by a feeling of belatedness – of finding ourselves in the position of having to ask, ‘What happened? Whatever could have happened?’' (Introduction)
'Stories of trauma — personal, communal and national — dominate the Miles Franklin Award, Australia's most prestigious literary prize, in its 63rd year.'
