Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Carmel Bird, Transit Lounge, $32.99.
“I was confined, locked into my library, tracing my heartbeats from way, way back.” Winner of the Patrick White Literary Award, and three times short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award, Carmel Bird grabs onto the imposed isolation of the pandemic to re-read a rich array of books from her past.
It does not avoid the horrors of world history, the treatment of First Nations People or the literary misrepresentations of the past.
Her approach to her memoir, of sorts, is original and is the most personal of accounts.
From her father’s bomb shelter to her mother’s raspberry jam, from a lost Georgian public library with ‘narrow little streets of books’ to the memory of crossing by bridge the turbulent waters of the Tamar River, to a revelatory picnic at Tasmania’s Cataract Gorge in 1945.
Mid-paragraph there are fanciful leaps from one topic to another. Slipped towards the end of the book is the author’s small oval portrait as a little girl in 1947. As a writer, Carmel been seriously interested in book design and paper quality and fonts and so forth.
“It is clear to me now, having written so far about the books of my early childhood, that the Second World War had a powerful effect not only on my everyday life, my psyche too, but also on my experience of books. It could be unusual for a writer to include so much detail on the nature and design of books written within a memoir, but those elements of books were, I believe, significant in the overall business of reading, and I checked them out from a fairly early age. They seemed to me to be important — mysterious messages from somewhere far away. From a place called Publishing. And of course there were fewer books to look at, so maybe I used to check out every word from beginning to end, for something to do.”
