'It has been six months since Tess Müller stopped speaking. Her silence is baffling to her parents, her teachers and her younger sister Meg, but the more urgent mystery for both girls is where their mother, Evangeline, goes each day, pushing an empty pram and returning home wet, muddy and dishevelled.
'Their father, Stefan, struggling with his own losses, tends to his apiary and tries to understand why his bees are disappearing. But after he discovers a car wreck and human remains on their farm, old secrets emerge to threaten the fragile family.
'One day Tess's teacher Jim encounters Evangeline by the wild Repentance River. Jim is in flight from his own troubles in Sydney, and Evangeline, raised in a mountain commune and bearing the scars of the fire that destroyed it, is a puzzle he longs to solve.
'As the rainforest trees are felled and the lakes fill with run-off from the expanding mines, Tess watches the landscape of her family undergo shifts of its own. A storm is coming and the Müllers are in its path.
'Sometimes we must confront what has been lost so that we can know the solace of being found.
'The World Without Us is a beautifully told story of secrets and survival, family and community, loss and renewal.' (Publication summary)
'This article investigates notions of femininity in light of contemporary debates around anthropogenic climate change in literature. Climate change fiction (cli-fi) specifically considers life in the Anthropocene and the consequence of changing climatological realities for human and nonhuman actors in ecosystems. Seemingly straight-forward dichotomies between human and nonhuman, wild and domesticated, useful and harmful subjectivities are being contested, and literary texts increasingly pick up on and reflect the instabilities of previously undisputed dualisms. Mireille Juchau's novel The World Without Us (2015) explores the intertwined relationships between climate, the animal world, and human subjectivity as it slowly uncovers the multifaceted narration around the Müller family's grief at the loss of their child. As the family's life is repeatedly underscored with symbolism of bees, the narration draws parallels between human life and the lives of bees. The text's elaborate play with multiperspectivity is reminiscent of insect eyes' compound nature and undulates between fragmentation and complexity. This article explores how Juchau's novel offers new ways of exploring femininity within notions of grief and suffering on the one hand and the effects of anthropogenic climate change on the other.'
Source: ProQuest.
'The stories we tell about bushfire are changing. Our writers have been grappling with its link to climate crisis for years'
'Mireille Juchau is the author of 2016 Stella Prize shortlisted book, The World Without Us. We chatted to Mireille about her mentors, favourite authors and the spaces in which she works.'(Introduction)
The World Without Us by Mireille Juchau
Melbourne
:
CAE Book Group
,
2016
12215143
2016
single work
criticism
'Mireille Juchau is the author of 2016 Stella Prize shortlisted book, The World Without Us. We chatted to Mireille about her mentors, favourite authors and the spaces in which she works.'(Introduction)
