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Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan Books

Novelist

First Person

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Question 7

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“Though we didn't know it they were the good years. So much that was unknown to us lay in the future, so much unbelievable and bad, and we didn't worry about any of it. We were broke, without prospects and with no possessions of worth, and yet we were right to think life was sweet. We had so little we didn't even know how little we had. We didn't care. All that we didn't have was uninteresting and irrelevant. The future was an infinite horizon over which the sun still glimmered its early morning promise. Everything had a smell and every smell was fresh ⁠— the morning air, the sun on the bitumen, the evening rain. There was just today and that felt like more than enough.”

YoungYouthLivingNostalgiaGood LifeThe FutureGood Days
Book:First Person
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“Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate & shocking, some so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete & horrifying that at the end of his life a man may search his memory in vain for a moment of correspondence between his self in his dotage & him in his youth.”

LifeGrowthChangeAgeing
Book:Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish
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“Starvation stalked the Australians. It hid in each man's every act and every thought. Against it they could proffer only their Australian wisdom which was really no more than opinions emptier than their bellies. They tried to hold together with their Australian dryness and their Australian curses, their Australian memories and their Australian mateship. But suddenly Australia meant little against lice and hunger and beri-beri, against thieving and beatings and yet ever more slave labour. Australia was shrinking and shrivelling, a grain of rice was so much bigger now than a continent, and the only things that grew daily larger were the men's battered, drooping slouch hats, which now loomed like sombreros over their emaciated faces and their empty dark eyes, eyes that already seemed to be little more than black-shadowed sockets waiting for worms.”

WarWwiiPrisoner Of War
Book:The Narrow Road to the Deep North
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“The tourists had money and we needed it; they only asked in return to be lied to and deceived and told that single most important thing, that they were safe, that their sense of security—national, individual, spiritual—wasn’t a bad joke being played on them by a bored and capricious destiny. To be told that there was no connection between then and now, that they didn't need to wear a black armband or have a bad conscience about their power and their wealth and everybody else’s lack of it; to feel rotten that no-one could or would explain why the wealth of a few seemed so curiously dependent on the misery of the many. We kindly pretended that it was about buying and selling chairs, about them asking questions about price and heritage, and us replying in like manner. But it wasn’t about price and heritage, it wasn’t about that at all. The tourists had insistent, unspoken questions and we just had to answer as best we could, with forged furniture. They were really asking, 'Are we safe?' and we were really replying, 'No, but a barricade of useless goods may help block the view.' And because hubris is not just an ancient Greek word but a human sense so deep-seated we might better regard it as an unerring instinct, they were also wanting to know, 'If it is our fault, then will we suffer?' and we were really replying, 'Yes, and slowly, but a fake chair may make us both feel better about it.”

PsychologyCapitalismSocial JusticeInequalityColonialismConsumptionRich And PoorTourism
Book:Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish
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“Why at the beginning of things is there always light? Dorrigo Evans' earliest memories were of sun flooding a church hall in which he sat with his mother and grandmother. A wooden church hall. Blinding light and him toddling back and forth, in and out of its transcendent welcome, into the arms of women. Women who loved him. Like entering the sea and returning to the beach. Over and over.”

LightChurchChildhoodWelcome
Book:The Narrow Road to the Deep North
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“Tracker Marks was of a different opinion. Though he seemed more white than a white man, he had no time for their ways. For him his dress, his deportment was no different than staying downwind in the shadows of trees when hunting, blending into the world of those he hunted, rather than standing out from it. Once he had excelled at the emu dance & the kangaroo dance; then his talent led him to the whitefella dance, only now no-one was left of his tribe to stand around the fire & laugh & praise his talent for observation & stealthy imitation. The whites have no law, he told Capois Death, no dreaming. Their way of life made no sense whatsoever. Still, he did not hate them or despise them. They were stupid beyond belief, but they had a power, & somehow their stupidity & their power were, in Tracker Marks’s mind, inextricably connected. But how? he asked Capois Death. How can power & ignorance sleep together? Questions to which Capois Death had no answer.”

RacePowerIgnoranceCivilizationStupidityAustraliaColonialismWhite ManImperialismRace RelationsWestern CivilizationAboriginalAboriginal CultureAboriginalsTasmania
Author:Richard Flanagan
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“La nostra excusa per seure al darrere era que el fervor dels qui seien al davant ens semblava poc digne, inapropiat i irracional, la seva fe massa total i absoluta. Al davant, sempre hi seien els conversos —o això deien a casa—, i es veu que els conversos tenien una fe ferotge. Quan ara, més a prop del final de la vida, m’adono que he tornat a seure a les files del darrere als actes literaris i artístics, que tant s’assemblen a les esglésies d’abans —antics rituals amb una disfressa nova—, amb la seva servitud acrítica a noves ortodòxies i el seu menyspreu per la diferència, reconfortant per a molts, plens de condemnes ferotges i consensos lànguids que la majoria troben necessaris, el pensament se m’envola. Un món d’ortodòxia sacrosanta és un món on la novella i el novellista no tenen lloc. Un escriptor, si fa bé la seva feina, és sempre un heretge. I mentre seu en silenci suportant l’avorriment ranci, la hipocresia solemne i les homilies feixugues, la seva ment fuig un altre cop cap als somnis de mar i de sol que hi ha a fora.”

Cultura
Book:Question 7
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