Issue Details: First known date: 2020... 2020 Seeing the Pattern : Amanda Lohrey's Bracing New Novel
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'In a 1954 letter to his niece Pippa, artist-nomad Ian Fairweather lamented that he could not write with sufficient analytic detachment to look back at his life and ‘see a pattern in it’. (Ian Fairweather: A life in letters, Text Publishing, 2019). The irony – that one of Australian art’s most profound, intuitive pattern-makers should be ruefully unable to ‘see’ the formative structures and repetitions of his fraught life – would not be lost on Amanda Lohrey. Labyrinth, her haunting new novel, is a meditation on fundamental patterns in nature and in familial relations, and our experience of them in time. But this is a novel, not a treatise, its narrative so bracing – like salt spray stinging your face – that one is borne forward inexorably, as if caught in the coastal rip that is one of the novel’s darker motifs. It is a work to read slowly, and reread, so that its metaphorical patterns can come into focus, and the intricate knots of structure loosen and unwind.'  (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Australian Book Review no. 424 September 2020 20050114 2020 periodical issue

    'Welcome to the September issue of ABR! Our cover story, written by well-known musician and musicologist Peter Tregear, concerns the plight of classical music in the age of Covid-19. Music – like theatre and opera and film – has been devastated (silenced almost) by new restrictions and social isolation. When the lockdown is over, what will be retrievable, and will the repertoire be fundamentally reshaped? Peter Rose, in a diary piece, worries about the new era of conformism and prohibition and asks, ‘What personal freedoms are being sacrificed along the way?’ Megan Clement is underwhelmed by Julia Gillard and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s new book on women and leadership. We publish Kate Middleton’s poignant essay ‘The Dolorimeter’, runner-up in the 2020 Calibre Essay Prize. And Don Anderson, Morag Fraser, and James Bradley review new novels by Kate Grenville, Amanda Lohrey, and David Mitchell, respectively.' (Publication abstract)

    2020
    pg. 32
Last amended 7 Sep 2020 08:14:10
32 https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2020/september-2020-no-424/852-september-2020-no-424/6744-morag-fraser-reviews-the-labyrinth-by-amanda-lohrey Seeing the Pattern : Amanda Lohrey's Bracing New Novelsmall AustLit logo Australian Book Review
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