Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Volume 12 (Image 2025)
Saga, with words by Brian K. Vaughan and images by Fiona Staples, is a space opera that has been running for nearly 15 years. Seventy-two individual comics have come out on a monthly basis, with a couple of substantial hiatuses. Volume 12 collects comics number 27 to 72.
In the middle of a forever war between a winged species and a horned one, a bi-racial child is born, and this is her story. Many forces are out to destroy the girl and her family. Hazel is her name, and she’s now 12, working in a circus and worried about the hair growing in unexpected places. Oh, and the galaxy-wide war continues.
There’s a lot going on.
I’ve blogged about the previous 11 volumes: volume 1, 2 & 3 here, 4 here, 5 here, 6 here, volume 7 here, 8 & 9 here, 10 here and 11 here. For volume 12, I’ll stick to page 78*.
Sadly, I don’t get to show you Hazel as a 12 year old, or her bad-ass mother Alana (that’s her in the cover illustration in her role of head of security for the circus), or her television-monitor headed brother. There’s no sex on this page, no violence, no cute aliens, and none of Hazel’s deliciously multivalent narrative. But you can get an idea of Fiona Staples’s visual style.
The three characters here are an obnoxious clown; Whist, the circus manager who belongs to some kind of rodent species; and Feld, a stunningly good looking circus employee.
The top two frames are a bit of silliness, a glimpse of the way the circus – a huge tent-shaped space station – is always on the edge of chaos, though the broken-down clown car is nothing compared to the land-based dolphin on earlier pages who has diarrhoea when he has to perform. The mention of the ‘strong-women’ is a set-up for an image on the very next page where two musclebound women stuff clowns into the car and push it off through the curtains into the bright lights of the circus ring. But while the reader’s attention is on this comedic dimension, grounds are being laid for a later dramatic moment featuring Whist and the clown, about which I’ll say no more.
The bottom two frames are rich with irony. Someone at the circus has been seeking a bounty from people who are hunting Hazel and her family, and Whist, we learn here, knows some skulduggery is going on. The reader has reason to believe that sweet-talking Feld is the informant, so this moment is full of tension. There are, of course, a few twists to this part of the story before the volume ends. It’s not really a spoiler to say that Hazel Alana and family manage to escape – and that the war continues.
I used to wonder where it was all leading, but now I think it might just go on forever, and continue to be engrossing fun until Hazel dies of old age as a grand matriarch in volume 90. Anyhow, it looks as if we may have entered another ‘hiatus’ and it will be some time before the next episode hits this blog.
I wrote this blog post on the land of Bidjigal and Gadigal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* That’s my age. When blogging about a book, I focus on page 78 to see what it shows about the book as a whole.
Esther Anatolitis (editor), Meanjin Vol 84 Nº 1 (Autumn 2025) (links are to the Meanjin website: I believe that they are now all accessible to non-subscribers)
Unless Melbourne University Publishing’s recent decision to shut Meanjin down ‘on purely financial grounds’ is reversed, this is the fourth-last issue of Australia’s third-longest-lived literary magazine. (The New South Wales School Magazine, a literary magazine for children, is the longest lived. Southerly comes second.) The two part-time employees responsible for the journal have lost their jobs. Even given the long list of other people whose work goes into each issue, it’s astonishing that this extraordinary publication has been produced by so few paid workers.
The cover design is weirdly prophetic. It represents the predictive results for a web search for “the work of”. Early this year, readers would hardly have noticed the battery icon in the top right showing a dangerously low charge, a speck of red on a mostly black page. Now, thanks to what has been correctly described as outrageous cultural vandalism, the battery is dead flat. But that’s the only sign of imminent demise. The rest of the issue – more than 200 pages of text and image – is as lively, varied and thought-provoking as you could wish.
There are the regular features:
Even before the contents page, there’s The Meanjin Paper, an essay by a First Nations writer: ‘Different Plants for Different Meanings‘ by Anyume John Kemarre Cavanagh with Gabriel Curtin reads like poetry
State of the Nation: topical essays, this time it’s Sisonke Msimang, Andrew Lemon and Rachel Withers on the Voice referendum, gambling and the housing crisis respectively, each with a twist
Australia in three books‘: Sarah Walker writes about Ethel Turner’s classic children’s book Seven Little Australians, Jessie Cole’s Desire (2022) and Helen Garner’s Yellow Notebook (the first volume of her published diaries), all of them dealing with girls or women who ‘are trapped in the great looping flood’ of their feelings
Interview: It’s Winnie Dunn, author of the novel Dirt Poor Islanders and mover and shaker in the Western Sydney’s rich literary scene, and it makes very interesting reading
The Year In … : The year in Yellowface. Jacqueline Lo focuses on the web trailer for a ballet production at the 2024 Adelaide Festival, which she argues represents a persistence in Australian culture of attitudes to Asian characters and actors that are no longer tolerated where Blackness/Blakness is the issue.
There are short fictions, memoir, essays, book reviews and poetry. I’ll name just one or two of each.
In the short story ‘The farmer‘ by Suzanne McCourt, the title character is a woman of a certain age searching for a calf that has gone missing, presumed stolen by her neighbour. There’s a lot there for any reader to like, but because I spent a lot of time with cattle when I was young, I particularly loved the way the story captured the intimate bond between human and cows and their calves, including the delicate process of adoption.
Of the four pieces labelled ‘Memoir’, Jess Lilley’s ‘My pregnant life‘ stands out. It begins with the author’s first pregnancy when she was nineteen and dealing with the legal and social hurdles to abortion. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to quote the essay’s last words:
When I lay with his tiny body in my arms, I knew this signalled the end of my pregnant life. Nine pregnancies across 25 years. A quarter of a century of having my world rocked over and over and over by my own bodily forces.
‘minganydhu ngindhumubang / What am I without you?’ by Tracy Ryan is a generous bilingual essay in a class of its own that challenges readers to deconstruct our assumptions and practices around language – much of it is written in Wiradyuri language, first transliterated then translated: ‘my soul wants to decolonise language but that would make this work nearly incomprehensible to an English-dominant culture.’
Architect Naomi Stead’s essay ‘Wheatscape with Cathedral‘ deals with the extraordinary Stick Shed in Murtoa, rural Victoria. The author’s full-page photo of the shed’s interior cries out for an explanation of the extraordinary vision, and the article more than satisfies.
Of poetry, I’ll mention just ‘Sacrificed on Altar of Vice’ an erasure poem by Brittany Bentley. If you click on the link, you’ll see the image of two columns of newspaper copy most of which has been redacted in red. The words that are still legible constitute the poem. The hard-copy Meanjin includes a link to the unredacted article. The poem stands on its own feet but read in conjunction with the original article its power is greatly amplified. Most of the poem’s title comes from the redacted text.
The three book reviews tend to be in rarefied scholarly language. Here’s a sentence from ‘Queer perforations‘, a review by Dylan Rowen of Blackouts, an experimental work of fiction by Justin Torres:
Determined to free the queer subject from the realm of the symbolic and to give voice to those erased from history, this text critically fabulates – to borrow Saidiya Hartman’s term – a history gleaned from the redacted bits of what little was left in the records.
Mercifully, this kind of insider language is mainly restricted to the book reviews.
With any luck, by the time I’ve read the final issue, in who knows how many months’ time, Meanjin, like Heat before it, will manage some kind of resurrection, in spite of Melbourne University’s reported refusal to entertain many offers of financial support from other institutions.
I finished this blog post on the land of Bidjigal and Gadigal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.
To all my readers: I wish happiness in this festive season, a brilliant start to 2026, and meaningful productivity through the coming year.
I want to share a non-musical ear-worm that has been plaguing me for the last couple of weeks. It’s not obviously Christmassy or New Yearish, but here it is.
It’s ‘I know a man’, a poem by US poet Robert Creeley.
You can read the whole poem – there are only 12 short lines – here. (You can read about Creeley at his Wikipedia post.)
When I first read ‘I Know a Man’, I didn’t think much of it, but after I’ve heard a number of enthusiasts discussing it in the online Modern and Contemporary American Poetry course (ModPo) it seems to have taken root in my mind.
As I was trying to absorb the news of the horrors of Hanukkah at Bondi Beach earlier this month, a phrase from the poem kept insisting its way into my attention:
name, the darkness sur- rounds us
I don’t know what 29-year-old Creeley had in mind in 1955, but the phrase embodied for me the combined effect of the destruction of democracy around the world especially in the USA, the rise of terrorism in the name of Islam, the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the failure of the Voice referendum here, and now this devastating attack on Sydney’s Jews, and its Melbourne firebombing footnote. The darkness surrounds us, and it’s pressing in.
I went back to the whole poem, to see what Creeley did with that surrounding darkness.
Rather than talk about the poem, here’s a verse response – crude, hasty but I hope it communicates:
I know a poem
As I rd from a poem, because I am always reading, – Bob, I
rd, which was almost the poet's name, the darkness sur- rounds us, the dark-
ness surrounds us, the darkness surrounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we & why not, why not pass a goddamn big Act,
legislate, I rd, for f*ck's sake, look out who yr doing.
I don’t know if that can even count as a little candle, but it’s what I can do just now.
Most poetry anthologies are implicitly made up of poems that are ‘the best’ in some way or at least the editors’ favourites chosen from a much bigger field of lesser or less loved work. Though the editors of 100 Poets have necessarily been selective, the point here is not that these hundred poems are Winners. Instead, the book is offered as an introduction to a poetic community.
Flying Islands, the brainchild of Kit Kelen, is a non-profit publisher, and a community of poets and readers of poetry. Over the last decade and a half, they have published 100 pocket-sized books of poetry (I’ve read an enjouyed about 20). They have features award-winning poets, grumpy old poets who complain about the lack of recognition elsewhere, and brand new poets flexing their wings. They have included translation, mostly from Chinese to English or vice versa – Kit Kelen is an emeritus professor at Macao University, and Flying Islands has partnered with Macao-based community publisher ASM (the Association of Stories in Macao). They have had a wonderful variety of style, form, tone and subject matter. All of that is represented in 100 Poets.
This book, pocket-sized like the rest, is the hundredth in the series. Each of 100 poets previously published in the series has a single page – a couple of them fit two short poems onto their page, but none take more than a page. Not every notable Australian poet is represented here – there’s no David Malouf, Eileen Chong or John Kinsella, for instance, and not very much from the world of Spoken Word – but it’s hard to imagine a better introduction to the basic ecology of contemporary Australian poetry.
I was going to list the poets from the book who have appeared in this blog. It’s a long list, and not all of them are there because I read their Flying Islands publications. But it would just be a list of names with links. Instead, here is my favourite title, from Tricia Dearborn:
Perimenopause as a pitched battle between the iron supplements and the flooding
And, in keeping with the blog’s tradition, here’s the poem that appears on page 78, ‘The Sleepover’ by Gillian Swain, whose Flying Islands book is My Skin Its Own Sky (2019):
The first nine lines evoke a pleasant childhood memory. Even if, like me, you never slept over at a friend’s place when you were young, the details – the barbies, the giggling friends brushing their teeth together, the child bodies in adult-sized sleeping bags, the model aeroplanes on the friend’s ceiling – capture brilliantly thrilling combination of intimacy and strangeness that is a sleepover.
Lines 10 and 11 form a finely judged transition from that memory to the very different current situation. They move from the past to the present tense, and the child’s perspective carries over to the different reality – the bed that moves up and down already suggests a hospital, but is presented as a novelty:
like the way your bed moves up and down like all the colours the flowers bring
And line 12 lands us firmly in the grim present.
to this grey room.
The person addressed in the first lines is now in a hospital bed.
The interplay of benign memory and grim present continues in the rest of the poem: the three friends once again enjoying each other’s presence long into the night. There is giggling again, and stories. The friendship is as alive as ever, but one of the three friends is dying.
The final lines hold this complex emotional reality in a neat paradox. The imminent death of a friend is not trivialised – but nor is the joy of friendship.
the wrong reasons and tonight your deathbed is joyous.
The person I have known longest apart from my two sisters died early this year. Our childhood friendhsip wasn’t of the giggling, sleepover variety, but the last time I saw him we did pay more attention to what we enjoyed with and about each other than to what we all knew was coming. The poem resonates strongly for me.
Multiply that by 100 – or to be honest by maybe 75, because not every poem in the book sings to me – and you have quite an experience. I look forward to Flying Islands’ Second 100.
I finished this blog post on the land of Wandandian of the Yuin Nation, whose beaches are said to have the whitest sand on the planet. I acknowledge their Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.
Before the meeting:The Land in Winter was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. The judges described it like this:
In the depths of Britain’s coldest winter, two neighbouring women forge a friendship in the countryside. It’s 1962 and they have both just become pregnant. Around them, the men are struggling <snip>. As a winter storm wreaks havoc on their lives, these characters become pivotal figures in a community precariously balanced between history and future <snip>. In beautifully atmospheric prose, Andrew Miller brings suspense and mystery to this seemingly inconsequential chapter in British history.
For me the one word that stands out from that is ‘inconsequential’. I never got on the book’s wavelength. I couldn’t find any reason to be interested in the characters, and couldn’t tell why the author was interested in them. Adultery, mental illness, patriarchy, the lingering effects of World War Two, the shady world of strip clubs and escort agencies, organised crime lurking in the background, a nuanced play of class, a solid evocation of a snowbound English countryside: there’s plenty there, but I mostly failed to care or be amused. Nobody is happy, everybody has a complicated past, terrible things happen to each of the main characters, some expected, some self-inflicted, some as arbitrary as a car accident. The prose is fine, but I would describe it as functional rather than atmospheric. The book doesn’t sing.
Page 78* occurs in chapter 7. The ‘two neighbouring women’, Rita and Irene, have met for the first time when Rita has brought eggs from her farm as a gift to Irene, the doctor’s wife.
As the women converse, they fill each other in on their husbands’ backgrounds. That is to say, this is mainly a page of exposition. But then, a lot of the book feels to me like exposition.
‘Bill was at Oxford,’ said Rita, as if that explained the naming of cows after queens of the Nile. ‘He was studying law but dropped out. It was his father who wanted him to do it. Wanted a lawyer for the family business, one he could trust.’ Irene nodded. She had heard things about the father. What had Eric called him? Anyway, he had rubbed finger and thumb together to make the money sign. <snip> ‘Bill can’t mention his [father] without making a face like he’s sucking a lemon.’ ‘They don’t get along?’ ‘Nothing would make Bill happier than to find out he’s adopted.’
In the midst of that background briefing, one detail stands out. Irene’s doctor husband ‘had rubbed finger and thumb together to make a money sign’. So Bill’s father, we understand, is a Jew. There’s more about that later when we meet Bill’s family, but the antisemitism of Eric’s remembered gesture never leads to anything. This did make me wonder if the narrative was seeded with many such signals that I missed. A character will see an unexplained light in the distance, and there are moments of surreal weirdness, but the narrative closes over them and it’s as if they were never there.
After their expository chat, the two women – both newly pregnant – move on.
‘Would you like some Guinness?’ asked Irene. ‘I usually have a glass about now. Eric bought a whole crate of it. It’s full of iron.’ From the larder she fetched two slim dark bottles. She took two glasses from the dresser. She bent the tops off the bottles with an opener that had a handle of some kind of horn. Each woman carefully poured the black beer into her glass. ‘Here’s how!’ said Rita, holding out her glass across the table. They tapped glasses and sipped the beer, then each carefully wiped away the foam moustache from her upper lip.
Ah, thinks the reader, Andrew Miller has done his research. Way back then in 1962, not only did women drink alcohol when they were pregnant, but doctors as likely as not recommended that they drink stout as an iron supplement. It may be that the horn handle of the bottle opener and the slim bottles are period details. That would explain the slightly laboured feel of the writing, detail apparently for detail’s sake.
You might think that page 78 is unrepresentative of the book as a whole. Or it might whet your appetite for more. But to my mind it’s dull, expository, laboured, and as such typical of the whole book.
For Andrew Miller’s sake, I’m glad that my view seems to be in the minority.
After the meeting: My view was broadly shared by the entire Book Group. After exchanging end-of-year book gifts (I scored Clear by Carys Davies), and enjoying the first parts of an excellent meal in a Manly restaurant, we had a generally unenthusiastic conversation about the book. The most memorable contribution came from someone who said she hadn’t reached the good bits. “What?’ someone said, ‘you didn’t read the whole thing?’ ‘Yes, I did,’ she said, ‘but when I said how boring it was S– told me it got better, and I was still waiting for tht to happen when I reached the end.’
We all agreed that the bitter winter was brillintly evoked. Someone thought the quality of the prose was a kind of correlative of that confining weather. We hunted around for why it has been so well received by critics. Maybe you had to be English, someone said. Maybe there’s a lot of subtlety, especially about class, that went right over our collective head.
There was so much else to talk about. So we did, and enjoyed the rest of our meal.
The Book Group met on Gayamagal land, and I have written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.
Marian Wilkinson has a formidable CV as an investigative reporter. This substantial survey of the politics around the activities of Woodside Energy adds one more jewel to her crown.
The essay’s title and subtitle provide an excellent summary. Expanding it slightly: Woodside is expanding its gas extraction and export activities in a way that will contribute to global warming to an alarmingly dangerous extent, and they have gained the wholehearted support for this from successive Western Australian governments and Australian federal governments.
Three things aren’t included in that summary: first, the well organised, courageous and well informed opposition movement; second, the potentially disastrous impact of Woodside’s current and expanding activity on ancient petroglyphs on the Burrup Peninsula in Western Australia; third, the fact that fossil fuel industries have a limited life ahead of them.
A couple of years ago I visited the standing stones near Évora in Portugal. Our guide said that if the stones were in Spain they would be treated as a national treasure, but in Portugal they remained virtually unprotected in someone’s field. Well, if they were in Australia, and tens of thousands of years older, with infinitely more to tell us about human history, they would be left exposed to whatever pollution fallout might be created by a major industrial site nearby while scientists employed by the responsible corporation argued that there isn’t sufficient evidence of harm.
Marian Wilkinson is a journalist, not an advocate. But she is not in thrall to that concept of balance where you present any situation as a debate between two points of view, with no fact-checking or conclusion. Among the many people she interviewed for the essay is Meg O’Neill, CEO of Woodside, whom she quotes as saying that gas produces less greenhouse effect than coal, and that some gas is necessary as the world transitions to renewable sources of energy. But she doesn’t leave that as one equal side of an argument for and against. What emerges is an understanding that yes, gas will play a role in the transition to renewables, but Woodside and its supporters (or possibly dupes) in government and the media massively overstate how much gas will be needed. The profit motive overrides any concern for the common good.
I came to the essay with a heavy heart. In my mind Woodside was already a climate villain, Western Australia was a state that had been captured by the fossil fuel industry (or was even a virtual branch of it), and Woodside’s impact on the petroglyphs of the Burrup Peninsula was a slow-motion version of the blowing up of the Juukan Gorge by Rio Tinto. Nothing in the essay made me change my mind. Instead, it put paid to my lingering hope that the Albanese Labor government would make use of its large majority to face down the mining companies and their allies in the press. And it gave me a much greater understanding of what Wilkinson calls ‘the disruptors’: Disrupt Burrup Hub activists, some Indigenous traditional owners, and more.
Page 78* is in the eighth and final section of the essay. Earlier sections have dealt with Meg O’Neill’s career, the growth of Woodside, the way Woodside has come to have such tremendous influence on government policy, the disruptors, the struggle over the petroglyphs, and the vision of ‘gas-fired futures’ shared by Woodside and governments. This final section – ‘Woodside in the Age of Accountability’ – introduces an element of hope, and urgency. It lists the tangible results of global warming so far, and quotes eminent scientists as saying that ‘the next three years will be crucial in stopping this seemingly inexorable rising of emissions’. On page 78, the full absurdity of Woodside’s favoured activities come to light:
[Alex Hillman, former Woodside climate adviser turned shareholder activist] said Woodside needs to think about shrinking its gas business, not expanding it. ‘We think it’s a pretty compelling financial case that Woodside should just admit that this fossil-fuel business is going to get smaller and actually celebrate that, because it’s a more valuable strategy.’ Right now, this may sound farfetched, but gas companies like Woodside are under threat. Hillman argues that, globally, oil and gas businesses have made below-market returns and not come close to earning their cost of capital for the past fifteen years. ‘To me that makes it pretty clear that what these companies have been doing isn’t working for investors.’
So even from a purely capitalist perspective, Woodside’s expansion makes no sense. The fact that now the Trump administration is backing a huge Woodside project in mainland USA, as the essay mentions, only underlines that point. Short term gain, long term disaster all round.
Woodside is being hit on two fronts. Not only is more LNG [liquefied natural gas] coming onto the market, but it’s also facing competition from a rising tide of renewables. This year, global investment in the energy transition is set to increase twice as much as investments in oil, gas and coal. This investment is being shaped by what the IEA [International Energy Agency] is calling the ‘Age of Electricity’. The ‘Golden Age of Gas’ that began well over a decade ago is drawing to an end. China was the world’s biggest LNG importer and Australia’s second-biggest LNG customer in 2023. But China’s prospects as a long-term lucrative coal-to-gas switching customer are in doubt. Instead, its massive investment in renewable energy is disrupting fossil-fuel markets around the world. You can get a striking insight into the scale of China’s renewables revolution by looking at satellite images from NASA’s Earth Observatory of the ‘Solar Great Wall’ in the Kubuqi Desert.
But CEO Meg O’Nell sticks to her guns.
Correspondence in Quarterly Essay 100 (The Good Fight by Sean Kelly) mostly reinforces Wilkinson’s argument. The world is not decarbonising fast enough to avoid dire consequences. Woodside’ activities aren’t helping. Peter Garrett discusses the politics. David Ritter focuses on Scott Reef, an extraordinary marine habitat that is under threat. Shane Watson and Kate Wylie from Doctors for the Environmental Australia describe the difficulties of appealing to existing laws to defend the environment.
Wilkinson says in her response to correspondents that ‘the gulf in thinking between the fossil-fuel industry and the climate movement in Australia was as wide as ever’. I had a brief moment of hope for a robust debate between these two perspectives when I saw that there was a contribution from Glen Gill whose bio says he ‘has over forty years of global experience in the petroleum and electricity industries, including in technical, commercial, regulatory and pubic policy areas’. Sadly, Gill manages to shout a lot. His first paragraphs refer to ‘wild, uninformed statements from activists’, describe the essay as ‘ridiculous’, ‘misleading’ and full of ‘fear, ignorance and hatred’. Marian Wilkinson doesn’t really bother to engage, except to say that the science he claims to rely on is ‘alas not climate science’.
Things are crook, but I’m glad there are people like Marian Wilkinson who are willing to look steadily around them and communicate what they see in clear, uncompromising prose.
I wrote the blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.
Since reading À le recherche du temps perdu over a couple of years starting in September 2019, I’ve done a similar slow read of a number of classics: Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, and so on.
The Letters of Seamus Heaney doesn’t quite fit the original concept – paradoxically, give that Heaney is such a fine poet, it’s too prosaic. But the book was a gift, I want to read it because I love Heaney’s poetry, and I’m pretty sure I’d have trouble staying awake if I approached it like a novel. So here goes, starting out at 7 or 8 pages a day. I’ll keep my copy of Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 beside me as I read the pages, so I may be able to look up poems as they are mentioned.
The first letters collected here were written when Heaney was in his mid 20s, on the verge of publication of his first book of poems, Death of Naturalist. He marries, becomes a father, worries about money and employment …
I’ll report on progress in a month or so.
I have written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.
László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance (1989, translated by George Szirtes, published by Tuskar Rocks Press 2000)
Before the meeting: László Krasznahorkai won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Melancholy of Resistance (Hungarian title Az ellenállás melankóliája) was his second novel. Written as the Communist regime was collapsing in Hungary in 1989, it centres around an outbreak of senseless mass violence in a small Hungarian town. In real life, happily, the transition from Communism to a version of democracy was peaceful, but the book’s nightmarish vision and weird allegorical tale resonate far beyond its immediate political context.
One thing was clear to me as I read: this book, with its absence of paragraph breaks, long internal monologues about, for example, esoteric musicology, a key character who remains unseen and unheard except for weird chirping sounds, and many story lines that peter out or are resolved with a throwaway comment in the middle of something else, could never be made into a film. I was wrong. In 2000 (the year this translation was published), Béla Tarr adapted it in Werckmeister Harmonies, which has been called ‘one of the major achievements of twenty-first-century cinema’ (an impressive accolade, even if it was written in the YouTube comments section).
I haven’t seen the film, but I can’t think of a better way to convey the feel of the book than to show you its trailer:
There you have it: the young, naive idealist who may well be the idiot people think he is; the old, disillusioned musicologist; the corpse of a huge whale wheeled into town; the ominously silent crowds of men; the awful mob violence; the invading military (though I don’t remember a helicopter in the book). Some elements are missing, though I expect they’re in the movie itself: a mysterious character known as the Prince, two children caught in the crossfire, and the key roles of two women. Nor do the streets of the movie seem quite as covered in frozen garbage as those of the novel.
The book’s most striking feature is absence of paragraph breaks and the predominance of long sentences. The sight of page after page of uninterrupted text is intimidating at first, and it’s annoying having to hunt around if you lose your place, but the effect on the page, as I imagine it is on the screen, is a dreamlike flow. And George Szirtes’ has translated the Hungarian into extraordinarily smooth English that enhances that effect. This isn’t Proust, where the sentences turn in on themselves, clauses nesting within clauses, with a hypnotic, introspective effect. Here the effect is more propulsive – the long sentences sweep you on. And they work brilliantly in a book where characters are always in motion (even if sometimes the motion is mental). They walk, stumble, run errands, occasionally waddle, stalk, pursue, flee, but always move.
It’s as if the characters can’t stop for breath, so the text has to hold out for as long as it can without a full stop, and even longer for a bit of white space.
Page 78* occurs partway through the third paragraph/section, which unfolds from the point of view of Valuska, a kind of holy idiot and easily the book’s most sympathetic character. Valuska has been introduced doing his nightly routine at closing time in the Peafeffer tavern, in which he demonstrates the mechanics of a solar eclipse, deploying three paralytic drunks to represent the sun, the moon and the earth. His attempt to communicate the awe-inspiring order of the cosmos is tolerated by the drinkers as a way to delay closing time. At the top of this page, the evening is over and they walk out into the cold night:
The first thing to note about this page is that, counting the sentence that started on the previous page, there are just three sentences. The middle one is quite short: at 20 words it may be the shortest in the book, but is otherwise unremarkable. The others are typical of the book.
It would please my inner 11-year old Queenslander to analyse one of them – identify the main clause and the subsidiary clauses, and the nature of the subsidiary clauses. It probably wouldn’t be very entertaining for my readers, so I’ll limit myself to noting that the basic structure of this:
So they filed out in silence, and while the majority showed no particular desire for further entertainment, there was a couple here and there who, when Valuska bade them a warm good night at the door (it wasn’t possible to bid farewell to everyone, for some, particularly those who had been woken too suddenly and shoved out into the icy cold, were too busy throwing up against the outside wall), gazed after him as they had done the previous night and who knows how many nights before watching as he, still under the spell of his vision, proceeded on his way with that characteristically cramped gait of his, leaning forward, head bowed, puttering on tiny feet, almost breaking into a run (‘as if he had something important to do’) down the deserted street, and they sniggered behind their hands, and then, as he turned of by the water-tower, burst into loud and healthy laughter, for there wasn’t much else to laugh about – particularly these days, when driver, warehouseman, house-painter and baker all felt as if ‘time had somehow stopped’ – except Valuska, who, as they used to say, provided ‘free ’ntertainment’, not only with his act, but with his whole appearance, with those mild fawn-like eyes ever shining, that nose, so like a carrot in both colour and length, that postbag which never left his side, and that impossibly baggy coat thrown over that skinny body of his – all this was, in some strange fashion, invariably amusing and proved an eternal fount of rare good spirits
is five linked principal clauses:
So they filed out, and a couple gazed after him, and they sniggered, and then burst into laughter, for there wasn’t much else to laugh about.
That skeleton is adorned with images of the bitter cold, vaguely comic drinkers throwing up, descriptions of Valuska, an explanation of what they found amusing about him, and a reminder of the drinkers’ wider context – ‘driver, warehouseman, house painter and baker’.
Valuska stands out: time has ‘somehow stopped’ for the town in general, but he is fascinated by the continuous movement of the heavenly bodies and is himself always on the move. That stopped-ness comes into focus in chilling scenes in which the town square is full of motionless men, all as if waiting for something. And when they move, the effect is shocking, violent.
I don’t know that I’d recommend the book, but I enjoyed it, and it has stayed hauntingly in my mind. It makes many other books feel like plodding reportage.
After the meeting: This was one of the best meetings of the book group ever. We exchanged gifts – everyone was supposed to bring a book from their shelves, though the book I received (a Gary Disher title) is in suspiciously mint condition. Some of us read poems – by Adrian Mitchell, Mary Oliver, Simon Armitage and Robert Gray. We reminisced about the group’s history and argued about how firmly fixed our list of dates for the year should be. We shared stories of courage and shame. We ate well. We enjoyed the early summer evening. And we had a wonderfully animated discussion of the book.
Three out of eight of us had read the whole thing. A number of others were well under way and intend to finish it. Everyone had something to say. Here are some of my highlights.
I was reading Mrs Dalloway a couple of pages a day alongside of The Melancholy of Resistance, and felt strongly that the books spoke to each other but couldn’t say how. When someone mentioned the way the narrative focus transfers from one character to the next at the end of each section, I realised this is one of the similarities: where Virginia Woolf’s narrator slips from one character’s mind to another sometimes several times on a single page, Krasznahorkai’s narrator does a similar thing, but on a much wider arc.
One man read the book not realising it was more than 30 years old, and the political dimensions of it seemed right up to date. I don’t know if he mentioned the MAGA riots in January 2020, but they certainly seemed relevant.
Someone said it was hard to resist a book where a character spends four pages trying to work out the physics of hammering a nail while repeatedly hitting himself on the thumb. And then, having solved the problem by acting without thinking about it, he is told by his cleaning lady that he’s done it all wrong. Our group member who has been studying philosophy told us that this is even funnier when you know that one of Heidegger’s most famous passages involves a hammer. (That person’s favourite moment is Mr Eszter’s seemingly interminable rumination about the pointlessness of the diatonic scale (at least that’s what I think it’s about) – which was my second least favourite moment.)
Contrary to my own response, one man felt the book was intensely cinematic. And as we talked it was clear that it’s full of memorable scenes. We reminded each other of the scene where Valuska demonstrates the mechanics of an eclipse, the interrogation scene, the force with which Mrs Eszter’s hand comes down on Valuska’s shoulder to stop him from speaking, the horriific scene where the mob runs riot in the hospital, the brilliantly evoked streets full of frozen garbage, and more.
At heart, one man said, it’s a love story between Mr Eszter, an intellectual who has given up any hope that thinking could be of value, and naive, well-meaning Valuska.
And that’s a wrap for the Book Group for 2025.
The Book Group met on Gadigal land, and I have written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925, Penguin Classics 2020) from page 103 to end
As I expected, it took me just two months to read Mrs Dalloway three pages a day. If you haven’t read it, I recommend doing it slowly in just this way: three pages at a time seems to be just about perfect.
The book looks for the person behind the public-facing name Mrs Dalloway, to create a kind of literary cubist portrait: beneath the skin of the upper-crust English lady whose life centres on giving parties for the right people are the remains of a glorious, multi-faceted creature who once lived with grace and passion. We see her from many angles, through the eyes of her husband (who barely sees her), her daughter, a resentful working class history teacher, a maid, a man whose proposal of marriage she rejected in spite of their mutual passion, a woman who was also drawn to her when young, an older aristocratic woman of the type played so splendidly by Maggie Smith, and more
In one way the book is about the disappointment of youthful hopes and expectations. For example, Sally Seton, who once ran naked down the corridors of an country mansion, is now Lady something or other with six sons and insists that she is completely happy. Clarissa herself is married to Richard who is at best a mediocre politician. Peter Walsh, her former suitor, has spent most of his life in India, unhappily married and now caught up in an awkward affair. And quite unconnected to Clarissa until the final pages is Septimus Smith, a soldier returned from the trenches of the ‘Great War’ with what we would now call PTSD. He is haunted by the image of a friend who was killed in the War, and in the end (spoiler alert, but the book is a hundred years old after all) kills himself in desperation. When Clarissa learns of his death, she is playing hostess at her party, to which the whole book has been building. Suddenly she is alone and grapples with thoughts of her own mortality.
I came to the book expecting it to be difficult and a bit airy-fairy. Maybe it is both. The English class system is rock solid in its pages, and though Clarissa is criticised as a snob, the basic viewpoint of the novel can’t be entirely absolved of that charge. But I wasn’t prepared for how much pleasure there is in the way the narrative glides among different points of view, for the almost Whitmanesque celebration of city life, for its laugh-out-loud moments, or, in the end, for the pervading sense pathos in a society and individual souls who have survived the momentous events of a World War and a pandemic. I wasn’t prepared for just how much, sentence by sentence and page by page, I enjoyed it.
it’s hard to pluck a passage out of context, but here is a bit I love. Peter Walsh is watching Clarissa as she escorts the Prime Minister from the party:
And now Clarissa escorted her Prime Minister down the room, prancing, sparkling, with the stateliness of her grey hair. She wore ear-rings, and a silver-green mermaid’s dress. Lolloping on the waves and braiding her tresses she seemed, having that gift still; to be; to exist; to sum it all up in the moment as she passed; turned, caught her scarf in some other woman’s dress, unhitched it, laughed, all with the most perfect ease and air of a creature floating in its element. But age had brushed her; even as a mermaid might behold in her glass the setting sun on some very clear evening over the waves. There was a breath of tenderness; her severity, her prudery, her woodenness were all warmed through now, and she had about her as she said goodbye to the thick gold-laced man who was doing his best, and good luck to him, to look important, an inexpressible dignity; an exquisite cordiality; as if she wished the whole world well, and must now, being on the very verge and rim of things, take her leave. So she made him think. (But he was not in love.)
Yeah, right! He wasn’t in love!
Maybe I should give To the Lighthouse a go.
I have written this blog post in Gadigal and Wangal country. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.
This morning we managed to get to the beach. We got there before the Nippers.
November verse 14: A swim at Clovelly
Seven thirty, from Clovelly Road, the sea's a silver sheet. Once there, rub sunscreen on the belly, back and shoulders, then the sweet and icy plunge. Today no gropers show themselves to interlopers such as us, but one bold gull dive-bomb swoops us, for the thrill. And now the beach is full of nippers, energetic, pink-clad, young, reminding us that we belong to boundless life. Ah, flat-white sippers, once more dry and clothed, we sing our farewell to another spring.
I have written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation, after visiting Bidjigal land and water. I acknowledge Elders past and present of all those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.
Me fail? I fly! 