Review in Spectrum of My
Hearts Are Your Hearts and Fair Game.
Written by Peter
Craven
22November 2015
Stories and memoir
My Hearts Are Your Hearts
CARMEL BIRD
SPINELESS WONDERS, $27.99
Fair Game: A Tasmanian Memoir
CARMEL BIRD
FINLAY LLOYD, $10
Fair Game by Carmel Bird.
Carmel Bird is a literary artist to
her fingertips. She is a writer who believes – and they are rarer than they
should be – in composition in the musical phrase. She is a maker of fiction in
the tradition of Joyce and of his master Flaubert who writes prose that
has the precision of poetry and that uncanny quality poetry has of making the
inner life speak. That is because she knows how to make it sound. For Bird, as
for Ezra Pound, the emotion is in the cadence and so is the high and mighty
moral vindication of art.
These two books – one miniature, the
other medium length – contain most of what we know and need to know about the
telling and shaping of stories. Fair Game is a long essay about
butterflies and Tasmania, where Bird hails from and which her fiction circles
and returns to. In it her voice apparently weaves the wind but with touches of
a different order of bewitchment. For all its conversational air, there is a
swooping audacity in it.
And so it is for the marvellous
stories in My Hearts Are Your Hearts, which defy paraphrase because
their musicality is so integral and so intricate yet they consistently stun the
mind and touch the heart.
We get an old English mistress in Her
Voice Was Full of Money and They Were Careless People – how's that for the title of a story
that would enchant – discoursing from the shallow well we imagine of her
experience about the phenomenon of the hit and run driver. Literary education
alerts us to something about Gatsby and, OK, Daisy, Tom Buchanan and his
girlfriend.
Before we know where we are, we are
off – fleetingly, dazzlingly – on a kind of re-enactment and revision, the
young, the beautiful. The death and the dazzle and events – that essence of the
plotline – in a story that staggers the mind.
Just before we get the story of two
sisters, one who dies terribly in defiance of all moral convention, and the
other who cannot tell the terrible truth of what has occurred. The Legacy of
Rita Marquand is a story is full of incidental Catholic charity and
whatever its quality of mercy was and yet it is full of the marbled coldness of
a lost world that is well lost though Bird's art gives it a marvellous
remembrance.
Her stories have a grace and an
inevitability that make you want to retell them or allude to them because they
waste nothing. They are as light as air, as rapid as anecdote, but with
an extraordinary grace of music. In one way they are like those Borgesian
equations of storytelling that seem to contain multitudes and sagas yet leave
nothing but the outline. In Bird's case the economy seems so exactly paced that
we believe in the absolute reality, at once mundane and musical, in a world
that is exactly adjusted to the grain of the storyteller's voice. Nor does she
have Borges' particular penchant for fiction as the algebraic reduction of a
yarn that is told.
My Beloved Is Mine and I Am His is the longest story in
this book at 26 pages. In a shorter one, Perhaps That Bird Was Wise, a
girl sits at her mother's deathbed, there is a watch of fool's gold that goes
tick tock and time is fast. In T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets the bird says
humankind cannot bear very much reality. The mother says everything happens to
everyone. She likes the story of the chairs of the seven dwarfs but what does
happily ever after mean? Later, after the mother dies, Allegra, the heroine,
finds those chairs in a country antique shop. The little watch tick tocks on.
Happily ever after. The bird was right.
Carmel Bird reduces the critic to
repeating notes taken as he tries to hold onto these fugitive breathtaking
stories. Read them. Read them aloud. They have the ring of truth.
My Hearts Are Your Hearts, by Carmel Bird.
Stories and memoir
My Hearts Are Your Hearts
CARMEL BIRD
SPINELESS WONDERS, $27.99
Fair Game: A Tasmanian Memoir
CARMEL BIRD
FINLAY LLOYD, $10
Fair Game by Carmel Bird.
Carmel Bird is a literary artist to
her fingertips. She is a writer who believes – and they are rarer than they
should be – in composition in the musical phrase. She is a maker of fiction in
the tradition of Joyce and of his master Flaubert who writes prose that
has the precision of poetry and that uncanny quality poetry has of making the
inner life speak. That is because she knows how to make it sound. For Bird, as
for Ezra Pound, the emotion is in the cadence and so is the high and mighty
moral vindication of art.
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These two books – one miniature, the
other medium length – contain most of what we know and need to know about the
telling and shaping of stories. Fair Game is a long essay about butterflies
and Tasmania, where Bird hails from and which her fiction circles and returns
to. In it her voice apparently weaves the wind but with touches of a different
order of bewitchment. For all its conversational air, there is a swooping
audacity in it.
And so it is for the marvellous
stories in My Hearts Are Your Hearts, which defy paraphrase because
their musicality is so integral and so intricate yet they consistently stun the
mind and touch the heart.
We get an old English mistress in Her
Voice Was Full of Money and They Were – how's that for the title of a story
that would enchant – discoursing from the shallow well we imagine of her
experience about the phenomenon of the hit and run driver. Literary education
alerts us to something about Gatsby and, OK, Daisy, Tom Buchanan and his
girlfriend.
Before we know where we are, we are
off – fleetingly, dazzlingly – on a kind of re-enactment and revision, the
young, the beautiful. The death and the dazzle and events – that essence of the
plotline – in a story that staggers the mind.
Just before we get the story of two
sisters, one who dies terribly in defiance of all moral convention, and the
other who cannot tell the terrible truth of what has occurred. The Legacy of
Rita Marquand is a story is full of incidental Catholic charity and
whatever its quality of mercy was and yet it is full of the marbled coldness of
a lost world that is well lost though Bird's art gives it a marvellous
remembrance.
Her stories have a grace and an
inevitability that make you want to retell them or allude to them because they
waste nothing. They are as light as air, as rapid as anecdote, but with
an extraordinary grace of music. In one way they are like those Borgesian
equations of storytelling that seem to contain multitudes and sagas yet leave
nothing but the outline. In Bird's case the economy seems so exactly paced that
we believe in the absolute reality, at once mundane and musical, in a world
that is exactly adjusted to the grain of the storyteller's voice. Nor does she
have Borges' particular penchant for fiction as the algebraic reduction of a
yarn that is told.
My Beloved Is Mine and I Am His is the longest story in
this book at 26 pages. In a shorter one, Perhaps That Bird Was Wise, a
girl sits at her mother's deathbed, there is a watch of fool's gold that goes
tick tock and time is fast. In T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets the bird says
humankind cannot bear very much reality. The mother says everything happens to
everyone. She likes the story of the chairs of the seven dwarfs but what does
happily ever after mean? Later, after the mother dies, Allegra, the heroine,
finds those chairs in a country antique shop. The little watch tick tocks on.
Happily ever after. The bird was right.
Carmel Bird reduces the critic to
repeating notes taken as he tries to hold onto these fugitive breathtaking
stories. Read them. Read them aloud. They have the ring of truth.
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