Mark Rossiter

Wikipedia image entitled “The Congo River near Mossaka”

I happen to be writing a collection of stories based on a trip I made across Africa some eighteen years ago. One of the stories, ‘The River’, is about a pirogue trip up the then Zaire River (before and since, the River Congo). This is one of the world’s great rivers, flowing from the mountain ranges in the east all the way through equatorial Congo and down to the sea. And from its mouth, the river is navigable past the capital, Kinshasa, back up to Kisangani, where traffic is stopped by the Stanley Falls.

I was part of a group of young people travelling by truck across Africa and a number of us hired a pirogue, a canoe, to take us four days up-river from the town of Bumba to Kisangani. This was no ordinary canoe: two hollowed-out tree trunks roped together made a stable sleek boat, powered by one small outboard petrol engine, our home on the water and under the stars for three nights. Continue Reading »

When does a short story become a novel? I’m not looking for an answer like “when it’s a novella” or one that involves numbers of pages or words. Rather, I’m interested in process: how an idea for a story, a story that could fill say five or ten thousand words (well within the classic definition of a short story), might be “stretched” into novel-length. Can we tell when this has happened? Can we point at a place in the text and say “there, that’s where it happened”?

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I think I am reading this because it is going to be discussed in the First Tuesday Book Club, Jennifer Byrnes’ entertaining literary discussion program on ABC 1. But I am also reading Fowles’ book because I am fascinated by the premise. Like Sebastian Faulks’ Engleby, it features the voice of obsession: a lonely misfit stalker.

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There are some books, not many, that you want to carry on reading, long after the final page. It might be the setting or the theme that you love. Perhaps it’s the main character, someone you admire and long to travel further alongside. It might be the quality of the language. Usually, in a good book, all of these are present in some form, but when you reach the end, you’re glad. It’s been a great journey, but it’s time to move on.

What on earth could be the reasons to want to carry on reading The Kindly Ones, the grim and very long first-person fictional account of a senior German officer from the Second World War? Continue Reading »

Recently saw the most excellent and award-winning film Slumdog Millionaire, enjoying its tight plotting and gorgeous Mumbai travelogue cinematography (albeit underbelly-Bombay).

The film is based on the 2005 novel Q and A by Vikas Swarup which went on to win several international awards.

Vikas Swarup

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Murakami’s writing is always delicate, deft and intriguing. In After Dark, his eleventh novel, all the usual elements are there: the closely observed city, the odd characters, the strange timing, the surreal events. But in this one there’s a new development — the explicit use of point of view as a character in the story.

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Set in a post-apocalypse world, still smouldering, ash-strewn, cluttered with junk remains of human civilisation, a man and his son travel along a road, heading south and west, away from winter and towards the ocean.

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I’ve been reading, as part of my research, a most wonderful book that is now over fifty years old. The Go-Between, by LP Hartley, contains a great deal more than its very famous opening line, part-quoted above: this is a majestic piece of writing.

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First published in 1605, with the second part in 1612, Don Quixote is considered to be the first modern novel and by many to be the finest novel ever written. This puts it in the company of the likes of James Joyce’s Ulysses. But relax because Don Quixote is an altogether different beast. Continue Reading »

Austerlitz is an enigmatic figure who the narrator of this extraordinary novel by W.G. Sebald encounters in the salle des pas perdus, or waiting room, in Antwerp’s Centraal Station. We never find out our narrator’s name, and the story he relates to us, ostensibly that of his travels around Europe in the late 20th century, is really just a framing device for the haunting story of Austerlitz himself.

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