'Old friendships are expected to maintain their shape despite distance, lovers, careers, new friends. But twenty years is a long time.
'Ava is an internationally acclaimed novelist who carries with her a lifetime of secrets. Helen, a brilliant and dedicated molecular biologist, is faced with unexpected moral dilemmas as she finds herself drawn into bioterrorism research. Conrad is a philosopher with a popular media profile and a desire for a much younger woman. And Jack, whose career has stalled in the light of his long unrequited love for Ava, is a scholar of the history and culture of Islam.
'It is Ava's husband, Harry, a man for whom the others can barely conceal their disdain, who has drawn them back to Melbourne where they first met at university. As they deal with the reality of their present lives and their memories of the past, none will be unchanged by the reunion. And not everyone will survive.' (Publisher's blurb)
Epigraph: The good want power
The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.
The wise want love, and those that love want wisdom;
And all the best things are thus confused to ill.
Shelly, Prometheus Unbound
All my life I have loved in vain
the things I didn't learn
Yehuda Amichai, Open Closed Open
In her 2015 Ray Mathew Lecture, novelist and essayist Andrea Goldsmith refers to W. H. Auden’s poem, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’. The poem entered Goldsmith’s consciousness ‘in the very early days of the novel that would become, Reunion’ and she decided, ‘for reasons unrelated to the nascent work’, to memorise Auden’s poem. Once she had memorised it, she ‘would lie awake at night, silently reciting it over and over, thereby thwarting other more disturbing and anarchic thoughts’.
It was not until long after Goldsmith had finished Reunion that she became aware of the way Auden’s poem had ‘fed into’ her novel—the main characters of her narrative, a quartet of friends, had each turned away ‘quite leisurely’ from the various disasters of their lives.
This column reflects on Goldsmith's experience and the now, largely out-of-fashion, practice of memorising poetry.
(Note: the quotes above are from Goldsmith's lecture. The lecture, 'Private Passions, Public Exposure', is available on the website of the National Library of Australia.)
In her 2015 Ray Mathew Lecture, novelist and essayist Andrea Goldsmith refers to W. H. Auden’s poem, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’. The poem entered Goldsmith’s consciousness ‘in the very early days of the novel that would become, Reunion’ and she decided, ‘for reasons unrelated to the nascent work’, to memorise Auden’s poem. Once she had memorised it, she ‘would lie awake at night, silently reciting it over and over, thereby thwarting other more disturbing and anarchic thoughts’.
It was not until long after Goldsmith had finished Reunion that she became aware of the way Auden’s poem had ‘fed into’ her novel—the main characters of her narrative, a quartet of friends, had each turned away ‘quite leisurely’ from the various disasters of their lives.
This column reflects on Goldsmith's experience and the now, largely out-of-fashion, practice of memorising poetry.
(Note: the quotes above are from Goldsmith's lecture. The lecture, 'Private Passions, Public Exposure', is available on the website of the National Library of Australia.)
