" whatever".
Monday memoirs (in brief) -
When I was a little girl I had to suffer a sister who was one year older, smarter, slimmer and all together rather boring (so I thought at the time). My sister always got away with absolutely everything. I often was blamed (and punished) for things that she had done, One day I'd had enough of her high and mighty ways so I gave her a big push. Thing is she was standing right in front of our half size tin tub (filled with water). Like I said I was pretty heated up and so I just pushed her and left the room. I knew she would land in the bath tub. I knew she would get her pretty little dress wet. I didn't care. She deserved it and that was that.
Unfortunately, I did not realize that her shoulders had jammed up against the side of the tub. So, with her feet kicking frantically out the water her head was secured under water. Mum heard the commotion and pulled her out. I got the belt for my part - I deserved it!
My sister is coming for a visit in a couple of weeks. I guess I had better stay away from all bathtubs.
Text Tuesday -
I have just finished reading the book 'Ghost's Child' by Sonya Hartnett. If you can get your hands on it you should read it.
The novel is a fable-like tale but without a moral resonance. It is a dark novel, a serious novel, a novel about loss and pain wrought from the promise of love.
We are thrust into the world of Matilda and a strange boy discovered in her lounge room. This is a deft authorial construct where we are immediately engaged with a sense of the ethereal. We want to know who he is and why he's there.
But just when we are becoming comfortably ensconced, Hartnett shifts the focus to Matilda's girlhood as Maddy. Her life is told in a largely unbroken monologue, with the boy interrupting from time to time to exclaim and question. We soon discover that Maddy "was easily hurt, deceived and dispirited".
Besides the establishment of Maddy's early family life, Hartnett is quick to present the central conundrum of the book. This is the question Maddy's father poses: "What is the most beautiful thing in the world?" In pursuit of this, Maddy is taken, by her father, across the world to find it. What she discovers is gently, lovingly and sensitively presented to her by him.
Where the fable-like qualities of the story are undeniably present is in Maddy meeting Feather, a youth "whom she had been waiting for and she had not even known". It is the relationship Maddy has with Feather that provides Hartnett with the scope to explore the nature of human love. (Christopher Bantick, Review. )
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