LITMIR.BIZ

When I listen to Bach, I seem to turn into a fish'. – Bach (Pau) in Love.<br /> <br />'We forget because we want to live. We forget because we live in hope for a better life. It's this wretched hope that demands that we forget the unforgettable'. – The Last Smile of Graf Tolstoy.<br /> <br />These stories explore the nature of love, loss and memory: central to them is the uneasiness the narrators feel about their place in the world. A critical moment in the life of each narrator illuminates these themes in remarkable ways. For instance, in the story 'Walter Benjamin's Pipe' the narrator wants to comprehend that critical moment when Walter Benjamin, the famous Jewish-German philosopher and literary critic, decided to end his life. In the story 'Bach (Pau) in Love,' the famous Catalan cellist Pablo Casals imagines the situation which would have inspired Bach to compose his six suites for cello. In the story 'Anna and Fyodor in Basel,' Anna, Fyodor Dostoevsky's wife waits for that moment when Holbein's famous painting about the dead Christ makes its appearance in the novel The Idiot. In 'The Quartz Hill,' a Cantonese photographer looks at the prints of Paddy Bedford's paintings about the Bedford Downs massacre and decides to visit Halls Creek in search for her Gija grandmother's roots.

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Don't be deceived by this tardis of a book, its three small monologues contain multitudes. Through the gently detailed lives of its subjects whole civilisations emerge: the fifteenth-century India of the dying and illiterate poet, Kabir; the Stalinist Russia of Chekhov's younger sister, Maria; and the early seventeenth-century, Inquisition-ravaged Italy of the Calabrian theologian and poet, Tommaso Campanella. The characters, at the end of their lives, are haunted by their pasts, and in prose of simple, meditative, elegiac beauty, Jaireth suggests that this nostalgia is neither a longing for a lost place or a lost time, but is, rather, a homelessness in time – his own included – an uneasiness that has driven all that they have and have not done. The book is ultimately about the mystery of creation itself, the silence from which all things come and to which they inevitably return.<br />– John Hughes<br /> <br />Subhash Jaireth lives in Canberra. Between 1969 and 1978 he spent nine years in Moscow. He has published three books of poetry: Yashodhara: Six Seasons without You (Wild Peony, 2003), Unfinished Poems for Your Violin (Penguin Australia, 1996) and Before the Bullet Hit Me (Vani Prakashan, 1994, in Hindi).

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