On David Malouf Pdf Summary Reviews By Nam Le

Quick Navigation

On David Malouf Pdf Summary

Here was a very-much-alive half-Lebanese writer (from provincial Brisbane, no less) producing English-language writing of the very first order … The poetry was in the prose; it stayed and sprung its rhythms, chorded its ideas, concentrated its images. Every other novel claims to be written in “poetic prose”; the real thing, when you come across it, is actually shocking.

Nam Le takes the reader on a thrilling intellectual ride in this sharp, bold essay. Encompassing identity politics, metaphysics, the relationship between life and art, and the ‘Australianness’ of Malouf’s work, it is unlike anything else written about one of Australia’s most acclaimed writers.

In the Writers on Writers series, leading writers reflect on another Australian writer who has inspired and fascinated them. Provocative and crisp, these books start a fresh conversation between past and present, shed new light on the craft of writing, and introduce some intriguing and talented authors and their work.

Published by Black Inc. in association with the University of Melbourne and State Library Victoria.

READ

On David Malouf Review

David Bradford

5.0 out of 5 stars An extraordinary tour de force
Reviewed in the United States on November 26, 2019

I found this essay on David Malouf, a writer I have long admired and of whom Australians are justly proud, challenging, thoughtful, highly instructive – I read it three times to make sure I had not missed anything; indeed I confess I resorted to a dictionary on a few occasions when Nam Le’s meaning eluded me – and overall appropriately honouring its subject.
I say challenging advisedly, because Mr Le’s essay is disquieting for an old white Australian man like me – and I suspect he means it to be so. I knew about the White Australia Policy of course, (it was in effect throughout my childhood and into my twenties), but his selected quotes from Barton in 1901 to Menzies in 1955, came as a great shock to me. They are so appallingly racist. The dreadful legacy of the thinking behind those words perhaps helps to explain the cruelty and inhumanity of current mandatory detention policies towards our refugees by successive Australian governments and compliant oppositions. No wonder Nam Le thinks so little of nationalism. So do I these days, even though I served fifty- three years ago in the Australian Army in the country of Mr Le’s birth.
It is true what another reviewer has said – this essay is as much about Nam Le as it is about David Malouf, but to my mind that is all to the good. This is not an essay series we should go to for hagiography! What is clear is that throughout this essay the writer’s appreciation of and respect for his subject shines through brightly and unmistakeably. I learned more from it about David Malouf and his writing than I did before, and the essay has spurred me to go back to reread him. Well done Nam Le I say. You have done due justice to our iconic Australian writer, and I doubt he would have any complaints about the treatment he’s received from your kind pen.

About Nam Le Author Of On David Malouf pdf Book

Nam Le Author Of On David Malouf pdf Book, He came to Australia from Vietnam with his parents, when he was less than a year old, as a boat refugee. He went to Melbourne Grammar School and the University of Melbourne, from where he graduated with a BA (Hons) and LLB (Hons). His Arts thesis supervisor was the Australian poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe. He worked as a corporate lawyer and was admitted to the Supreme Court of Victoria in 2003/2004.
However, he decided to turn to writing, and in 2004 attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the United States of America where he completed a Masters in Creative Writing. He became fiction editor at the Harvard Review. His first short story was published in Zoetrope in 2006. Nam Le also held fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in 2006, and at the Phillips Exeter Academy, in 2007.
In an interview on Australian ABC radio, he said he turned from law to writing due to his love of reading: “I loved reading, and if you asked me why I decided to become a writer, that’s the answer right there, because I was a reader and I was just so enthralled and thrilled by the stuff that I’d read that I just thought; what could be better? How could you possibly better spend your time than trying to recreate that feeling for other people”. In the same interview he said that his first writing was poetry.
He returned to Australia in 2008, but is moving to Great Britain to take up a writing fellowship at the University of East Anglia.
When asked about his source of inspiration, Nam Le said in 2008 that “I’d say I’m most inspired by my parents for the choices and sacrifices they’ve made. It still boggles me”.