Francesca Sasnaitis

Francesca Sasnaitis reviews 'Invented Lives' by Andrea Goldsmith

April 2019, no. 410 • 25 March 2019

John Berger describes emigration as ‘the quintessential experience of our time’ (And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, 1984), and gives credence to the concept that geographic and psychological exile is pervasive to the human condition. ‘No one willingly chooses exile – exile is the option when choice has run out,’ says the protagonist of Invented Lives, Russian-Jewish émigré Galin ... (read more)

Francesca Sasnaitis reviews 'Lucida Intervalla' by John Kinsella

March 2019, no. 409 • 17 January 2019

According to the online resource Climate Action Tracker, Australia’s emissions from fossil fuels and industry continue to rise and are heading for an increase of nine per cent above 2005 levels by 2030, rather than the fifteen to seventeen per cent decrease in emissions required to meet Australia’s Paris Agreement target. What this means for our environment and how the changes will manifest is ... (read more)

Francesca Sasnaitis reviews 'The Man on the Mantelpiece: A memoir' by Marion May Campbell

December 2018, no. 407 • 26 November 2018

In 1952, Marion May Campbell’s father was killed in an apocalyptic accident when his World War II RAAF Dakota was knocked out of control by contact with a waterspout and was ‘unable to effect recovery’. There were no survivors and little wreckage. The outmoded Dakota was on loan to the CSIRO to conduct experiments in artificial rainmaking that required flying into turbulent cumulonimbus clou ... (read more)

Francesca Sasnaitis reviews 'The World Was Whole' by Fiona Wright

October 2018, no. 405 • 24 September 2018

For a homeless person, home is the street and the moveable blanket or bedroll. Ultimately, the only home remaining is the body. Fiona Wright is not homeless, she has been un-homed by her body’s betrayal. Whether she can ever feel that she fits again is the primary theme of her second collection of essays, The World Was Whole. That her body was once fitting and knowable, that the world was once w ... (read more)

The Insult (Palace Films)

ABR Arts • 27 August 2018

‘No one has a monopoly on suffering,’ says Wajdi Wehbe (Camille Salamé), the barrister representing Lebanese Christian mechanic Toni Hanna (Adel Karam) in his law suit against Palestinian Muslim refugee Yasser Abdallah Salameh (Kamel El Basha). Wehbe’s statement is intended to address what he perceives as an imbalance in the level of sympathy and support offered to the (minority) Lebanese C ... (read more)

Francesca Sasnaitis reviews 'Meanjin A–Z: Fine fiction 1980 to now' edited by Jonathan Green

August 2018, no. 403 • 26 July 2018

The narrator of David Malouf’s virtuosic ‘A Traveller’s Tale’ (1982) describes Queensland’s far north as ‘a place of transformations’ and unwittingly provides us with an epigraph for this collection. Without doubt, every story selected from Meanjin’s cache of the last thirty-eight years deserves this second airing, but if, as editor Jonathan Green attests, short fiction hardly sel ... (read more)

In Cahoots: artists collaborate across Country (Fremantle Arts Centre)

ABR Arts • 05 December 2017

The map of In Cahoots is a tracery of journeys made by road and air, like songlines traversing the continent, speaking to points of departure, conjunction, and communion, and to the central theme of the project: communication. Involving six Aboriginal art centres partnered with five individual artists and one collaborative duo, each artist and community presents a singular set of issues, not mere ... (read more)

Francesca Sasnaitis reviews 'Beautiful Balts: From displaced persons to new Australians' by Jayne Persian

January–February 2018, no. 398 • 30 November 2017

I grew up in a New Australian household, and admit at the outset to a biased view. My Lithuanian-born parents were actual Baltic immigrants among the other nationalities referred to by the blanket designation ‘Balt’. Much of the anecdotal material of Jayne Persian’s Beautiful Balts was deeply familiar to me from childhood: stories of the shock of a new culture and country so at odds with the ... (read more)

On Chesil Beach

ABR Arts • 31 October 2017

On Chesil Beach is not Ian McEwan’s first screenplay, nor his only adaptation for the screen. The Children Act (2017), directed by Richard Eyre and based on McEwan’s 2014 novel, is also due for release in 2018. In an interview he gave at the Toronto International Film Festival, where both films premièred, McEwan said that his challenge was to find cinematic equivalents for literary devices, w ... (read more)

Song to Song

ABR Arts • 02 October 2017

Song to Song is writer and director Terrence Malick’s cinematic version of the modernist literary experiment: multiple internalised viewpoints, stream-of-consciousness narrative, chronological fragmentation, and a reality apprehended through symbolic or metaphoric conjunction. He is abetted in this project by Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, whose muted palette of gauzy, twilit pa ... (read more)