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y separately published work icon The Solemn Lantern Maker single work   novel  
Issue Details: First known date: 2008... 2008 The Solemn Lantern Maker
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'It is the cosmic reduced to the simplest terms. Ten-year-old Noland, a mute lantern maker, imagines an angel falling from the sky to the slums where he lives. But it's only an American tourist who is caught in a drive-by shooting of a political journalist. At a busy intersection in Manila, the magical and the seedy collide: shimmering lanterns and poverty, Christmas carols and child prostitution, dreams of friendship and the global "war on terror".' (Publisher's blurb)

Notes

  • Dedication: For the Nolands and Eugenes of this world. I wish you wings.
  • Epigraph: They stretched their willing wings,
    and gladly sped from their bright seats above,
    to tell the shepherds on the hillside at night,
    the marvellous story...

    Not with the stammering tongue of him that tells a story in which he has no interest;
    nor even with the feigned interest of a man that would move the passions of others,
    when he feels no emotion himself; but with joy and gladness, such as angels only can know.
    The 'sang' the song out...
    The First Christmas Carol, Charles H. Spurgeon (1834-92)

Affiliation Notes

  • Writing Disability in Australia:

    Type of disability Mutism.
    Type of character Primary.
    Point of view Third person.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Milsons Point, North Sydney - Lane Cove area, Sydney Northern Suburbs, Sydney, New South Wales,: Pier 9 , 2008 .
      image of person or book cover 3466549276951629629.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 207p.
      Description: illus. (b & w)
      Note/s:
      • Published: 1st March 2008
      ISBN: 9781741960785 (pbk.)
    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,      :       Delta Books ,       2008 .
      image of person or book cover 6520233369647815717.jpg
      This image has been sourced from Goodreads.
      Extent: 255p.
      Description: illus.
      Note/s:
      • Published October 27th 2009
      ISBN: 9780385341134
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Related Works

VIEW ALL RELATED WORKS (1)

Works about this Work

Writing, Women and the Australian Novel Tanya Dalziell , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel 2023;
“The Root of All Evil”? Transnational Cosmopolitanism in the Fiction of Dewi Anggraeni, Simone Lazaroo and Merlinda Bobis Paul Giffard-Foret , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Postcolonial Writing , December vol. 52 no. 5 2016; (p. 595-609) Mediating Literary Borders : Asian Australian Writing 2018; (p. 69-83) This article exposes the contradictions of cosmopolitan citizenship and world peace in novels by three Southeast Asian Australian women authors. Their fiction questions the viability of transnational sisterhood in an age of humanitarian intervention where women and children have become pawns for renewed western imperialist ventures. This article asks in turn whether the incommensurable space opened up by the failures of various forms of what Stuart Hall calls cosmopolitanism “from above” can be reinvested through “reading up the ladder of privilege”, as proposed by Chandra T. Mohanty. Simone Lazaroo’s Sustenance (2010) and Merlinda Bobis’s The Solemn Lantern Maker (2008) build “grass-roots” forms of cosmopolitanism and touristic hospitality designed to redress the many evils of contemporary postcolonial societies. The Root of all Evil (1987) by Dewi Anggraeni objects to the Spivakian native informant and upwardly mobile migrant woman’s imperious desire to help her homeland’s subaltern female underclass, in light of the latter’s lack of agency and the harm such intervention may cause. (Publication abstract)
Merlinda Bobis’s The Solemn Lantern Maker: The Ethics of Traumatic Cross-Cultural Encounters M. Dolores Herrero , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: Coolabah , no. 10 2013; 'Merlinda Bobis's second novel is an interesting combination of opposites: of the powerless and the powerful, the holy and the profane, the magical and the seedy, Third-World Asian poverty and white Western affluence. The Solemn Lantern Maker is a traumatized mute 10-year-old boy who lives with his crippled mother in the slums of Manila. One day, when trying to sell his colourful wares, he becomes involved in the life of a grieved American tourist who is caught up in a murder of a controversial journalist. In this post-9/11 climate, this event will soon be wrongly interpreted as a terrorist conspiracy. My paper will rely on some of the most relevant assumptions put forward by ethical criticism and trauma studies to show that Bobis's novel succeeds in illustrating how the powerful world of international politics can inadvertently impinge on the small world of an insignificant Third-World child, and how the love and care that this child offers to an unknown distressed westerner eventually manages to play the miracle of transforming the latter's life, thus making it clear that Bobis's allegory of traumatic cross-cultural encounters testifies to the power of the (un)common to render the invisible visible, and of the unselfish circulation of affect to effect unexpected changes in an apparently indifferent globalized world.' (Author's abstract)
The Asian Conspiracy : Deploying Voice/Deploying Story Merlinda Bobis , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , October vol. 25 no. 3 2010; (p. 1-19) 'This essay develops on the premise of imagining, which is the heart of story-making: imagine the physicality of story. Imagine the deployment strategies, the covert 'translations' of difference' that facilitate the entry of the Other story through the gate.
And once inside, imagine how this Otherness is legitimised, packaged and consumed within the Australian nation.' (p. 3)
'Hush, I Know a Story You Don't Know' Merlinda Bobis , 2008 single work criticism
— Appears in: Wet Ink , Summer no. 13 2008; (p. 10-15)
Untitled Angela Meyer , 2008 single work review
— Appears in: Bookseller + Publisher Magazine , February vol. 87 no. 6 2008; (p. 38)
— Review of The Solemn Lantern Maker Merlinda Bobis , 2008 single work novel
Ambitious Novel of New Century Poor Rachel Cunneen , 2008 single work review
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 29 March 2008; (p. 13)
— Review of The Solemn Lantern Maker Merlinda Bobis , 2008 single work novel
In Short : Fiction Kerryn Goldsworthy , 2008 single work review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 29-30 March 2008; (p. 31)
— Review of The Solemn Lantern Maker Merlinda Bobis , 2008 single work novel ; Life Training : Short Stories To Be Read on Trains John Power , 2008 selected work short story
Lantern Dazzles Like a Kaleidoscpoe Thuy On , 2008 single work review
— Appears in: The Age , 12 April 2008; (p. 30)
— Review of The Solemn Lantern Maker Merlinda Bobis , 2008 single work novel
An Anthropological Turn? Nathan Hollier , 2008 single work review
— Appears in: Overland , Spring no. 192 2008; (p. 88-92)
— Review of On a Wing and a Prayer Peter Bensley , 2006 single work novel ; The Lost Dog Michelle De Kretser , 2007 single work novel ; Musk and Byrne Fiona Capp , 2008 single work novel ; The Solemn Lantern Maker Merlinda Bobis , 2008 single work novel ; The Biographer Virginia Patricia Duigan , 2008 single work novel ; The Spare Room Helen Garner , 2008 single work novel ; They Called Me the Wildman : The Prison Diary of Henricke Nelson Robert Hollingworth , 2008 single work novel ; Many Years a Thief David Hutchison , 2007 single work novel ; Jamaica : A Novel Malcolm Knox , 2007 single work novel ; The Good Parents Joan London , 2008 single work novel ; Black Sheep : A Dystopian Novel Ben Peek , 2007 single work novel ; Misconceptions Sophie Townsend , 2008 single work novel
Author Discovers Novel Hero in Manila Bar Jodie Minus , 2008 single work criticism
— Appears in: Illawarra Mercury , 14 March 2008;
The Bracing View from Shantytown Emma-Kate Symons , 2008 single work column
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 10-11 May 2008; (p. 10-11)
'Voice-Niche-Brand' : Marketing Asian-Australianness Merlinda Bobis , 2008 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , November no. 45 2008;
'Hush, I Know a Story You Don't Know' Merlinda Bobis , 2008 single work criticism
— Appears in: Wet Ink , Summer no. 13 2008; (p. 10-15)
Painting with Words, Writing with the Body : Genre-Hopping with Merlinda Bobis Renee Macalino Rutledge , 1992- single work criticism
— Appears in: Filipinas 1992-;
VIEW ALL WORKS ABOUT (15)
Last amended 28 Jul 2021 09:50:45
Subjects:
Settings:
  • Manila,
    c
    Philippines,
    c
    Southeast Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,
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