'He is a failed writer turned diplomat, an anarchist learning the value of discipline. He moves in a world which takes him from the Australian wilderness to the conference rooms of Vienna and Geneva; from the whore-house to warzone he feels the pull of the genetic spiral of his ancestry. At the sharp axis of his mid-life he scans the memorabilia of his feelings in the hope of giving answers. In his first full-length novel Moorhouse presents a roving, dissatisfied man entering middle age in a house-of-mirrors portrait: fragmentary and multifaceted. Sean, a hard-drinking, hard-living Australian, has just turned 40; the other half of the title refers to a precocious schoolgirl who is one of his many liaisons. The most important of the other women who drift into and out of his life include his ex-wife Robyn, now unflinching in the face of cancer; Belle, Sean's fellow sexual adventurer; and Edith Campbell Berry, an aging iconoclast whom Sean encounters in Vienna and Israel. Forty-Seventeen is told with characteristic Moorhouse style — candid, wryly insightful and morbidly comic— and, in this resonant and acclaimed book, achieves a new virtuosity.' (Publication summary)
'This chapter focuses on the period from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, a watershed period in Australia-US literary relations, which saw the publication in the US of Australian novelists Peter Carey, David Malouf, Jessica Anderson, Thea Astley, Elizabeth Jolley, Helen Garner, Tim Winton and Beverley Farmer among others, but which was also crossed by tensions and contradictions which led to confusion, disappointment, lost opportunities, and sometimes the outright rejection of important Australian authors and their books. Among these tensions, we look at three in particular: the promising but limited role played by the multinational publisher (in this case Penguin Books) offering Australian titles through its US affiliate (Viking Penguin); the intervention by literary agents in Australia - US literary publishing relations; and the difference in values between the two cultures, which served to hinder the appreciation of important works of Australian writing.' (p. 309)
'All serious art breaks the rules-there can be no innovation without some form of transgression. Yet the breaking of rules is not enough to produce serious art, and while the very focus of erotic writing seems to invite transgressions, these are not necessarily liberating or creative. When transgressions lie for the most part in the subject-matter, their translation into literary break-throughs is problematic, and they can in fact be undermined by writing that is bland, conventional and predictable. Literature, it bears perhaps repeating, is not the thing itself but a representation and thus a re-creation of it. Modes of representations are always ideologically loaded and, while the contemporary period has invented very little in terms of sexual practices, it has been able to innovate significantly in terms of representational practices. It remains to be seen what kind of articulation can be found between the two.' (p 39)
Martini : A Memoir
Milsons Point
:
Knopf
,
2005
Z1222009
2005
single work
prose
Moorhouse 'muses on the aesthetics of martini lore ... and the nature of drinking.' He also 'reflects on the role of the martini in his own life in prose as dry and intoxicating as the martini itself.'
Source: Random House website, http://www.randomhouse.com.au/WEB_ASP/ttle_detail.asp?isbn=1740513126
Sighted: 31/10/2005
'All serious art breaks the rules-there can be no innovation without some form of transgression. Yet the breaking of rules is not enough to produce serious art, and while the very focus of erotic writing seems to invite transgressions, these are not necessarily liberating or creative. When transgressions lie for the most part in the subject-matter, their translation into literary break-throughs is problematic, and they can in fact be undermined by writing that is bland, conventional and predictable. Literature, it bears perhaps repeating, is not the thing itself but a representation and thus a re-creation of it. Modes of representations are always ideologically loaded and, while the contemporary period has invented very little in terms of sexual practices, it has been able to innovate significantly in terms of representational practices. It remains to be seen what kind of articulation can be found between the two.' (p 39)
