Cirrus@Austlit

'Once a fêted literary figure, the former lover of B-list movie star Lucida, but now derelict, incontinent, asexual, ageing poet Harold Lime turns his back on material modernity, withdrawing to a basement in the university town of Cambridge, England. But human connections will prove difficult to sever completely, and he is drawn out of himself by a fox hunt saboteur ('the sab woman'), with whom he forms a poignant, uneasy relationship and who acts as his mutual confessor. In the isolation of his basement, Harold Lime obsessively listens to Mahler, whose nine symphonies, unfinished tenth and Earth Songs, each corresponding to a separate chapter of this innovative poetic novel, will reawaken the sensitivities he has tried to erase, taking him back to his Australian childhood and youth, fostering a growing awareness of intertwined body and soul, of commitment and connectedness, of the ecology of rootedness and unrootedness in an unjust world.' (Publication summary)

'A lucida intervalla is a Latin phrase describing one of those startling ‘lucid intervals’ experienced by the insane. Lucida Intervalla, as imagined by John Kinsella―the Australian poet and novelist―is an art journalist, artist, and social media sensation whose brilliant presence beguiles every one around her.

'Set in a post-apocalyptic world scarcely distinguishable from our own, Kinsella’s new novel follows her exploits and thoughts about art, political protest, eternity, and the absolute. At once a bildungsroman and a novel of ideas whose prose echoes everything from Søren Kierkegaard to Twitter, Lucida Intervalla may well be Kinsella’s masterpiece.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Eliza travels to Sydney to deal with the estate of her Aunt Dodge, and finds Maxine, a hitherto unknown cousin, occupying Dodge's apartment. When legal complications derail plans to live it up on their inheritance, the women's lives become consumed by absurd attempts to deal with Australian tax law, as well their own mounting boredom and squalor. The most astonishing debut novel of the decade, Dodge Rose calls to mind Henry Green in its skewed use of colloquial speech, Joyce in its love of inventories, and William Gaddis in its virtuoso lampooning of law, high finance, and national myth.' (Publication summary)