Brian Castro’s Choices

Helen Garner, 2019

There is no getting around the idea that Helen Garner’s writing is honestly tough, both hard on herself and on the world. Critics have argued that her journal-writing is the backbone of all her fiction and non-fiction. I love the fact that she utilizes short-cuts, apothegms, sound-bytes of gravitas and a pervasive self-irony melting into air. She doesn’t philosophize, but you can feel a vast sea of reading informing and buoying up a deep melancholy. Once you start you will want to read all three volumes.

Helen Garner, 2020

Helen Garner, 2021

Andrey Kurkov, 2023

My new novel involves in part, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Therefore, I needed to read the diaries, letters, memos of someone on the ground. Andrey Kurkov takes you into his world of bombings and flight, of stubborn returns to ordinary absurdities and deep cultural practices which will never transform Ukraine into another Russian satellite. There is a gentle humour behind near tragedies and his writerly eye never misses the ordinary hardships suffered by the civilian population, the queues for food, the importance of toilet paper. He is someone you would want around in a crisis.

Michelle Cahill, 2022

Michelle Cahill is no stranger to letter-writing. Her story collection Letter To Pessoa addresses big literary names and takes them to task over cultural gate-keeping. As a woman of colour (born in Kenya of Indian ancestry, brought up in England, runs a medical practice in Sydney), Cahill’s multi-lingual background endows her writing with a poetic grace not often seen these days in rushed emails and truncated texts. Daisy & Woolf re-writes a character erased from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway as the former mistress of a British colonial. As an epistolary and diaristic novel, it sweeps across histories, cultures, races and genders, taking to task all the assumptions of colonial adventures, which are still very much with us. This takes its toll, which Cahill explores uniquely, underlining the stresses of the writing life and the losses incurred through a devotion to art.

Albert Camus, 2023

Camus is never dead to me. This new translation of his travel diaries to North and South America by Ryan Bloom reveals a Camus before and after fame came to him. In the United States he is hardly known and struggles with huge anxiety, homesickness and bitter irony. This translation captures the sketchy notes he took while encountering some of the greatest absurdities the commercial world had to offer. By the time he toured South America in 1949, he had become a celebrity. Never an ideas-driven writer nor a philosophical systematizer, his diaries float on a poetic sea, his style both observational and lyrical. His frail health enhanced his vulnerability, enjoining the reader in confidences and close-ups of his life. These unfiltered notes disclose a Camus still fraught with his pied-noir origins, his unconscious discomfort with the complications of race. The entries are brisk and like everything Camus wrote, tinged with trepidation. Travel, he said, ‘frightened’ him.