Shannon Burns

Shannon Burns reviews 'The Last Days of Jeanne d’Arc' by Ali Alizadeh

October 2017, no. 395 • 27 September 2017

The many gaps in the verifiable history of Jeanne d’Arc’s early years in rural France, as well as her improbable rise to prominence and martyrdom, have left room for a considerable amount of speculation and projection over the centuries. There is no shortage of fictional or historical accounts of her life, or ways of characterising the Maid’s struggle, but with The Last Days of Jeanne d’Ar ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'The Town' by Shaun Prescott

September 2017, no. 394 • 25 August 2017

Shaun Prescott’s début novel shares obvious conceptual territory with the fiction of Franz Kafka and Gerald Murnane, both of whom are mentioned in its promotional material. As with The Castle (1926) and The Plains (1982), The Town recounts the dreamlike experiences and observations of an enigmatic narrator–protagonist after he arrives in an unnamed town. But unlike Kafka’s surveyor or Murna ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'The Lost Pages' by Marija Peričić

August 2017, no. 393 • 25 July 2017

Alan Bennett once wrote of Franz Kafka: ‘One is nervous about presuming even to write his name, wanting to beg pardon for doing so, if only because Kafka was so reluctant to write his name himself.’ Even so, Bennett gave us Kafka’s Dick (1986), which – alongside a sputtering stream of demythologising critical interventions into Kafka studies – partially undermined the sainted version of ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'Edge of Irony: Modernism in the shadow of the Habsburg Empire' by Marjorie Perloff

May 2017, no. 391 • 30 April 2017

In her introduction to Edge of Irony, Marjorie Perloff claims that in order to ‘understand Modernism ... we have to read, more closely than we have, the deeply ironic war literature of the defunct, multicultural, and polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire’. To that end, she compiles a series of essays that focus on writers who lived through and were lastingly influenced by, the final throes of the H ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'Autumn' by Ali Smith

January–February 2017, no. 388 • 20 December 2016

Ali Smith is a formally and thematically exuberant writer who takes obvious pleasure in the art of storytelling, the mutability of language, and slippages in representation and perception. Her novels are typically embedded in the contemporary world, and take account of social and technological developments, as well as political conflicts and crises. They also tend to give equal space to suffering ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'The Life of D.H. Lawrence' by Andrew Harrison

December 2016, no. 387 • 30 November 2016

Readers who expect to be treated with gentlemanly courtesy have always found D. H. Lawrence rough going. His explicit fictional representations of sex and his anti-war diatribes were widely condemned in his lifetime, and his novels were duly censored or withdrawn from sale in Britain and beyond. Lawrence’s prose style – lyrical and sensuous one moment, brusque and coarse the next – can be as ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'Dying in the First Person' by Nike Sulway

September 2016, no. 384 • 23 August 2016

During boyhood, Samuel and his twin brother, Morgan, invent and in a sense inhabit a world and language called 'Nahum'. Years later – after a family tragedy and long separation – Morgan is a celebrated novelist, while Samuel makes a living translating his brother's fiction from Nahum into English. The greater part of Dying in the First Person's force is figured in its language. It begins with ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'Something for the Pain' by Gerald Murnane

October 2015, no. 375 • 25 September 2015

Narrators in Gerald Murnane’s novels and stories have occasionally scorned autobiography. Near the beginning of A Million Windows (2014), for example, we find: ‘Today, I understand that so-called autobiography is only one of the least worthy varieties of fiction extant.’ Murnane is even more direct in Philip Tyndall’s 1990 documentary Words and Silk, which explores the author’s fictional ... (read more)

ABR Patrons’ Fellowship: 'The scientist of his own experience: A Profile of Gerald Murnane' by Shannon Burns

August 2015, no. 373 • 28 July 2015

The town of Goroke (population six hundred) stands almost exactly between Melbourne and Adelaide, in the Wimmera region of Victoria. It is, in many ways, a typical small country town. If you drive there in the morning during late spring or early summer, you’ll need to slow the car to avoid kangaroos on the road. Magpies are everywhere. Horses and other livestock mope and sway in front and backya ... (read more)

Letter from Adelaide | Shannon Burns on the Coetzee Colloquium

December 2014, no. 367 • 01 December 2014

Few authors summon the various modes of irony to better purpose than J.M. Coetzee. Typically, before Coetzee gives a reading, the audience can safely suppose that they are in for a good laugh, the odd squirm and cringe, and at least one moment of bewilderment. But there are exceptions to this general rule, and the several hundred people who gathered to hear Coetzee read last week, on a balmy Tuesd ... (read more)