Antigone Kefala Late Journals
Antigone Kefala, 86, is both a poet and prose writer. She was born in Romania and relocated to Australia in 1959 after living in Greece and New Zealand. Late Journals is the final in a trilogy that began with Summer Visit (2003), followed by Sydney Journals (2008), all three published by Giramondo Publishing.
Fourteen years on, Late Journals resumes the discerning immersion into this author’s world, an intellectual and cultural milieu set in Sydney that is shaped by Kefala’s experience as a migrant. She remembers “the actual places we had left in Romania. Constanta, the Black Sea and the street, that I still remember, going upwards before it falls into the sea.”
And she grapples with the experience of living on stolen land: “From when we left Romania, and even before that, I was aware that I was trespassing on someone else’s territory.”
Rich with quotes from books Kefala has read or conversations she hears on the radio, the fragmented journals show a considering mind turning things over – literature, film, opera, two kookaburras sitting on the fence. Occasionally small eruptions of poetic observation – injections of life as it is seen and experienced – emerge from the surrounding prose. “Raining constantly and cold. The crows calling out from the trees like people suffering,” Kefala observes, after jumping from a Kandinsky quote to Pliny the Younger writing to Emperor Trajan AD112. This might imply a disjointed reading experience, but Kefala moves fluidly between poetic observation and philosophical inquiry.
The diary form has received attention recently in the hands of other Australian writers, most notably Helen Garner. Kefala’s journals demand something different of the reader. There’s no plot or, at least, no sense of a series of events within a person’s life.
Late Journals reflects something deeper, a writer’s spirit – if we can use that term to suggest a particular nature and attitude to language. Kefala’s voice turns inward, at times melancholic, at others sharply critical.
Discreet nods to months as they pass – January, February, March and onwards over six volumes of journals – is all the reader has to navigate any precise passage of time, and there are no dramatic interludes or endings. What you’re left with instead is the sense of life growing and changing.
As Kefala writes: “life, a continuous process, one moves with it, changes with it.” It describes both her attitude to writing and the
Journals.• experience of reading Late
Giramondo, 176pp, $26.95
Great literature is properly immune to spoilers, having at its core an ambiguity of truth sourced directly from the complex and often contradictory essences of life itself. It isn’t enough that something dramatic, or even beautiful, happens in a story: what matters is that whatever happens resonates in an unprescribed way with our emotions and physical sensations.
In describing Claire Keegan’s new work of fiction, Small Things Like These – her first offering since Foster (2010) – I must go to the book’s final picture, of a man approaching his own front door on a bitterly cold Christmas Eve in the small Irish village of New Ross, a box with new shoes for his wife under one arm and a barefoot young mother, a brutalised victim of the town’s Magdalene laundry, supported on his other.
Keegan is an intensely visual writer for whom the particulars of place and precise circumstance work to authenticate the inner lives of her protagonists. The man in the Christmas snow is the novella’s central character, Bill Furlong, a middle-aged coal purveyor, upon whose good character the tension of the narrative hinges. When Furlong, who as a child was raised on the charity of a rich family, chances upon the violence perpetrated on pregnant young women in the local convent laundry, his thirst for light forces him to act.
The novella is a portrait of this nondrinking Irish man, father and husband, as he struggles to align the moral obligation he owes to the gift of his redeemed destiny with his search for a clarified identity. Through the lens of Bill Furlong’s struggle, Keegan presents us with a midwintered cultural landscape ranging from sky grey to soot black. The book’s allusiveness and brevity of form serve only to intensify the sharpness of its idiomatic realism.
Small Things Like These is written in a diamond-cut prose. With Dickens’ A Christmas Carol as its conscious antecedent, Keegan’s new work establishes a palpable sense of state-sanctioned violence and of how fine the line can be between compassion and control, altruism and personal breakdown. Though the book is set specifically in the depressed rural southern Ireland of 1985, its portraiture of family, work and community ritual could well be from the pages of Mary Lavin, John Mcgahern or John Synge. This sense of local inheritance, both literary and tragic, really clinches the book’s power.
Faber, 128pp, $22.99