In this stunning collection, internationally acclaimed writer David Malouf gives us bookish boys and taciturn men, strong women and wayward sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and husbands, a composer and his muse. These are their stories, whole lives brought dramatically into focus and powerfully rooted in the vividly rendered landscape of the vast Australian continent. Malouf writes about men and women looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on, puzzling over not only their own lives but also the place they have come to occupy in the lives of others. This single volume gathers both a new collection of Malouf’s short fiction, Every Move You Make, and all of his previously published stories.
Source: Penguin Random House
(http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/106744/the-complete-stories-by-david-malouf/9780307386038/)
Unit Suitable For
AC: Year 11 (Literature Unit 1). This unit could also be used selectively in AC: Years 9–10.
Themes
Aboriginality, belonging, change, coming of age, connection to place, death, fear, identity, image, individuality, isolation, Language, memory, relationships, silence, thresholds, war
General Capabilities
Critical and creative thinking, Ethical understanding, Intercultural understanding, Literacy
Cross-curriculum Priorities
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures
Interviews with 10 Australian Authors
Tom Tilley
(interviewer),
Melbourne
:
ABC Splash
,
2018
16600399
2018
website
interview
film/TV
'Meet ten of Australia's literary greats. Tom Tilley speaks with writers such as David Malouf, Nadia Wheatley and Michael Gow about their works, their inspirations and their lives as writers.'
Source: Introduction.
'There are always two landscapes in a Malouf story. The one you can touch with your hands, and the one that is dreamed – discoverable by language, always on the verge of disappearing. In medieval Japanese art and letters, this quality was known as yūgen (幽玄),which might be translated as ‘shadow-filled’ or ‘beyond words’ or ‘that which resists being clearly seen’. Arthur Waley, translating fifteenth century playwright and pioneer of Noh, Zeami Motokiyo, said that wandering in a great forest without thought of return is a path to yūgen, as is standing on a shore and gazing after a fishing boat that disappears behind an island, or seeing wild geese disappearing into white clouds. Kamo-no-Chomei (1155–1216) wrote in his Mumyō-sho (Treatise Without a Name), that yūgen occurs, ‘when an unseen world hovers in the atmosphere’.' (Introduction)
