'Abraham Quin is in his mid-seventies, a migrant, thrice-divorced, a one-time postman and professor, a writer now living alone in the Adelaide Hills. In The Chinese Postman he reflects on his life with what he calls ‘the mannered and meditative inaction of age’, offering up memories and anxieties, obsessions and opinions, his thoughts on solitude, writing, friendship and time. He ranges widely, with curiosity and feeling, digressing and changing direction as suits his experience, and his role as a collector of fragments and a surveyor of ruins. He becomes increasingly engaged in an epistolary correspondence with Iryna Zarebina, a woman seeking refuge from the war in Ukraine. As the correspondence opens him to others, the elaboration of his memories tempers his melancholy with a playful enjoyment in the richness of language, and a renewed appreciation of the small events in nature. This understanding of the experience of old age is something new and important in our literature. As Quin comments, ‘In Australia, the old made way for the young. It guaranteed a juvenile legacy.’' (Publication summary)
'There was a point in the 1990s where it became fashionable to emphasise that autobiography was fiction. This proposition sprang up to complement an earlier stricture that emerged with the New Criticism of the mid-20th century – namely, that the author of a work of fiction was never the narrator. So, autobiography was always fiction and fiction was never autobiography.' (Introduction)
'“Aging is a mess,” declares the protagonist of Brian Castro’s 10th novel, Chinese Postman. Abraham Quin is a 74-year-old literary professor who lives on his property in the Adelaide Hills with his dogs, his memories, the ghosts of three failed marriages and nightmares of shitting himself in public. He talks, he muses in the novel’s opening pages, mostly to himself.' (Introduction)
'In Street to Street (2012), Brian Castro wrote, ‘It was important that he was making the gesture, running in the opposite direction from a national literature.’ In Chinese Postman, Castro’s protagonist Abraham Quin is ‘through with all that novel-writing; it’s summer reading for bourgeois ladies’. Quin is a Jewish-Chinese former professor, bearing sufficient similarities to the author to function as an avatar. Quin and Castro are the same age, have written the same number of books, and live in the same place (the Adelaide Hills). Sometimes Quin speaks as Quin, sometimes the author chooses to make his ventriloquism evident, and sometimes the identity of the narrator is unclear, but the voice is always raffish, erudite, mercurial.' (Introduction)
'In Street to Street (2012), Brian Castro wrote, ‘It was important that he was making the gesture, running in the opposite direction from a national literature.’ In Chinese Postman, Castro’s protagonist Abraham Quin is ‘through with all that novel-writing; it’s summer reading for bourgeois ladies’. Quin is a Jewish-Chinese former professor, bearing sufficient similarities to the author to function as an avatar. Quin and Castro are the same age, have written the same number of books, and live in the same place (the Adelaide Hills). Sometimes Quin speaks as Quin, sometimes the author chooses to make his ventriloquism evident, and sometimes the identity of the narrator is unclear, but the voice is always raffish, erudite, mercurial.' (Introduction)
'“Aging is a mess,” declares the protagonist of Brian Castro’s 10th novel, Chinese Postman. Abraham Quin is a 74-year-old literary professor who lives on his property in the Adelaide Hills with his dogs, his memories, the ghosts of three failed marriages and nightmares of shitting himself in public. He talks, he muses in the novel’s opening pages, mostly to himself.' (Introduction)
'There was a point in the 1990s where it became fashionable to emphasise that autobiography was fiction. This proposition sprang up to complement an earlier stricture that emerged with the New Criticism of the mid-20th century – namely, that the author of a work of fiction was never the narrator. So, autobiography was always fiction and fiction was never autobiography.' (Introduction)
