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Writers on Writers #5
On David Malouf
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.
- GenresNonfiction21st Century
58 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 6, 2019
4 people are currently reading
39 people want to read
About the author
Nam Le
27 books138 followersNam Le 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".
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".
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July 2, 2019The nauseating sycophancy of the conservative postcolonial
In Australia recently I found a brilliant series of small books, "Writers on Writers," which asks Australian writers to write short books on compatriots of their choice. Others are Alice Pung on John Marsden and Michelle de Kretser on Shirley Hazzard.
I couldn't finish this. Nam Le begins by conjuring his high school in Melbourne in 1991-96.
"Strange, that I remember only the mornings. Or maybe it was all a single morning, all those high school years -- dark, chill runny-nosed morning, shock of school uniform starch against the skin."
This instantly conjures any number of 20th c. English writers (not Americans): I thought of Waugh, Greene, Barnes, and especially of Ishiguro. The carefully and yet apparently effortlessly chosen adjectives and images speak to a certain ideal of writing from a colonial past. I didn't think of Patrick White, for example, or any number of mid-century American writers.
Yet in the next few pages Nam Le tells us he and his high school friend argued about Rilke, Rimbaud, Tennyson, Blake, and Hopkins. Aside from a bit of the last nothing of them remains, and more to the point there's no mention of any number of other people who were argued about in the early 1990s, including in high schools -- Acker, Perec, Roubaud, Wallace, so many others. It seems as if Nam Le grew up from an adolescence thinking of romantics into an adulthood thinking of conservative modernists.
He makes a case early on for Malouf's difference, how he doesn't fit the transparently nationalist agenda of the authors who were then set as required texts. But then that shifts to an impassioned defense of the canon, as a way of introducing Malouf.
"Like Malouf, I'm a student of Western philosophy. I honor the Western approaches of intrinsic skepticism, self-critical inquiry, uncertainty. I hew, as hard as I can, to epistemic humility."
Fair enough, I might have thought as I read those first two sentences, because they could mean, or lead to, practically anything. But that third sentence is not humble. It's a literary brag. And who, exactly, hews? Waugh, Greene, Barnes, and Ishiguro, for example.
Then he mentions Shakespeare and Socrates, and remarks "Is it not possible to acknowledge their worth, critique the context that begat them, and then go out of our way -- out of our skin -- to find, encourage, and value works by and about all those people who all this time have been systematically 'othered'?"
The seriousness of his defense of Shakespeare and Socrates (made of straw here, or something even flimsier) may have made him a bit self-conscious, because the word "begat" is weirdly imported from the King James Bible to help make the case -- and then just afterward the sentence veers into the hortatory and formal with "and then go iout of our way..."
The next sentences are:
"All this feels rudimentary. Unremarkable. But in our shared, splintering moment, nothing can be said to go without saying. Basic things beg belaboring."
The one-word sentence is suddenly chummy, vernacular. And the Gertrude Stein echo in "nothing can be said to go without saying," as well as the alliterative last sentence, are bids for modernist syntactical profundity.
I think this is horrible writing. It's sycophantic to the former colonial power, and it vamps, not only for Malouf but for the famous British dead. I would have written "fairly horrible," but then I would have fallen into the same temptation to ascend to literature by carelessly revealing signs of my educated poise, my ability to move effortlessly from the biblical to the chummy.
I'll apologize in advance to the Goodreads and other readers who may have found this. If you are looking for an excellent book introducing some Australian modernists, may I recommend "The Burning Library" by Geordie Williamson, a really excellent newspaper critic (turned publisher)? I realize I'm writing in an exasperated tone, but it's mainly the old familiar feeling of having wasted my time, venting about an author many people love, in an online forum that is scarcely read.
In Australia recently I found a brilliant series of small books, "Writers on Writers," which asks Australian writers to write short books on compatriots of their choice. Others are Alice Pung on John Marsden and Michelle de Kretser on Shirley Hazzard.
I couldn't finish this. Nam Le begins by conjuring his high school in Melbourne in 1991-96.
"Strange, that I remember only the mornings. Or maybe it was all a single morning, all those high school years -- dark, chill runny-nosed morning, shock of school uniform starch against the skin."
This instantly conjures any number of 20th c. English writers (not Americans): I thought of Waugh, Greene, Barnes, and especially of Ishiguro. The carefully and yet apparently effortlessly chosen adjectives and images speak to a certain ideal of writing from a colonial past. I didn't think of Patrick White, for example, or any number of mid-century American writers.
Yet in the next few pages Nam Le tells us he and his high school friend argued about Rilke, Rimbaud, Tennyson, Blake, and Hopkins. Aside from a bit of the last nothing of them remains, and more to the point there's no mention of any number of other people who were argued about in the early 1990s, including in high schools -- Acker, Perec, Roubaud, Wallace, so many others. It seems as if Nam Le grew up from an adolescence thinking of romantics into an adulthood thinking of conservative modernists.
He makes a case early on for Malouf's difference, how he doesn't fit the transparently nationalist agenda of the authors who were then set as required texts. But then that shifts to an impassioned defense of the canon, as a way of introducing Malouf.
"Like Malouf, I'm a student of Western philosophy. I honor the Western approaches of intrinsic skepticism, self-critical inquiry, uncertainty. I hew, as hard as I can, to epistemic humility."
Fair enough, I might have thought as I read those first two sentences, because they could mean, or lead to, practically anything. But that third sentence is not humble. It's a literary brag. And who, exactly, hews? Waugh, Greene, Barnes, and Ishiguro, for example.
Then he mentions Shakespeare and Socrates, and remarks "Is it not possible to acknowledge their worth, critique the context that begat them, and then go out of our way -- out of our skin -- to find, encourage, and value works by and about all those people who all this time have been systematically 'othered'?"
The seriousness of his defense of Shakespeare and Socrates (made of straw here, or something even flimsier) may have made him a bit self-conscious, because the word "begat" is weirdly imported from the King James Bible to help make the case -- and then just afterward the sentence veers into the hortatory and formal with "and then go iout of our way..."
The next sentences are:
"All this feels rudimentary. Unremarkable. But in our shared, splintering moment, nothing can be said to go without saying. Basic things beg belaboring."
The one-word sentence is suddenly chummy, vernacular. And the Gertrude Stein echo in "nothing can be said to go without saying," as well as the alliterative last sentence, are bids for modernist syntactical profundity.
I think this is horrible writing. It's sycophantic to the former colonial power, and it vamps, not only for Malouf but for the famous British dead. I would have written "fairly horrible," but then I would have fallen into the same temptation to ascend to literature by carelessly revealing signs of my educated poise, my ability to move effortlessly from the biblical to the chummy.
I'll apologize in advance to the Goodreads and other readers who may have found this. If you are looking for an excellent book introducing some Australian modernists, may I recommend "The Burning Library" by Geordie Williamson, a really excellent newspaper critic (turned publisher)? I realize I'm writing in an exasperated tone, but it's mainly the old familiar feeling of having wasted my time, venting about an author many people love, in an online forum that is scarcely read.
October 22, 2019
An autobiographical essay in part about identity politics, Western civ, and Australian-ness, focused on David Malouf, who I haven’t yet read but will soon. I benefited from the Kindle dictionary function throughout, thumbing immediately accessible reminders of meanings. The essay seemed erudite almost to an extreme. There's an interesting bit about writing about, or on, or over another writer. In a way Nam seems to intentionally overwrite but not to the point of farce. It's in part a reflection of Malouf's attentive, poetic style but it also reflects on the writer's respect for and facility with the language. Wonderfully sides with particularity and complexity over reductions of all stripes, like the state of being "cruciated" by the hyphen between Vietnamese and Australian. “If literature has a nemesis, it is instrumentalism — the approach that treats it as a tool, values it not for its own sake but as a means to an extrinsic end.” Overall, a pleasure to read Nam’s words for the first time in more than a decade since The Boat collection.
May 5, 2019
Writers on Writers. Nam Le on David Malouf, a fresh new voice in Australian writing, who has provided a memorable essay on Malouf and Australian society as a whole. Interestingly, Le seems to use Malouf as a point of reference for his own identity and nationalistic sentiment, his own perceptions of 'Australianness'. His critiques of refugee policies and even the very notion of the Westphalian nation-state were particularly apt.
To me, what was most memorable was lamentations of being representative, as an author, like Malouf himself states:
"As soon as a writer can be said to be what others label them (from whatever intention), they're no longer - no longer allowed to be - entirely themselves"
It's an interesting thought, Le highlighting his label as Vietnamese-Australian, and that Malouf was never labelled Lebanese-Australian, like British migrants are not labelled as English-Australian. Do such labels create normative circumstances in which we suspect someone to think or act in a certain way?
To me, what was most memorable was lamentations of being representative, as an author, like Malouf himself states:
"As soon as a writer can be said to be what others label them (from whatever intention), they're no longer - no longer allowed to be - entirely themselves"
It's an interesting thought, Le highlighting his label as Vietnamese-Australian, and that Malouf was never labelled Lebanese-Australian, like British migrants are not labelled as English-Australian. Do such labels create normative circumstances in which we suspect someone to think or act in a certain way?
December 18, 2020
This is a strange combination of autobiographical essay and critical evaluation of David Malouf as a writer. The register swerves between high academic (I was constantly reaching for online definitions) and the vernacular. Drawing on his Vietnamese background, Nam Le claims the position of outsider in Australian writing. He admires the quality of Malouf's prose but criticises him for negating his Lebanese heritage. Like Malouf, whose writing I have always cherished, I like to see commonality rather than difference - in ideas, culture and people themselves. Nam Le, who champions the value of difference, sees Malouf differently. I suppose I was hoping for something different.
March 16, 2021
Such a beautiful piece. Explores malouf's work in such a subtle yet expansive way. Le writes the essay style piece in a way that encapsulats both writers' practices framed by the post colonial Australia in which they write.
So many interesting points brought up about identity , what is sacrificed as a migrant writer, and the concept of nationalism which is tied to the idea of "Australian lit". I really enjoyed the provocations on the ways in which writers can position themselves and the final chapter really creates a sense of complexity within contemporary Australian lit I had never seen before, speaking to race and the focus on the Australian landscape from anglo-writers.
So many interesting points brought up about identity , what is sacrificed as a migrant writer, and the concept of nationalism which is tied to the idea of "Australian lit". I really enjoyed the provocations on the ways in which writers can position themselves and the final chapter really creates a sense of complexity within contemporary Australian lit I had never seen before, speaking to race and the focus on the Australian landscape from anglo-writers.
April 22, 2024
It's more 'On Nam Le AND David Malouf' than just David Malouf, but Nam Le fucks it upppp
I did have to look up a word like every other page but it's an excellent and intriguing look at identity politics and what it means to be Asian-Australian (and thus translatable to Asian-American).
I did have to look up a word like every other page but it's an excellent and intriguing look at identity politics and what it means to be Asian-Australian (and thus translatable to Asian-American).
June 15, 2023
Some good quotes and analysis of the White Australia policy and racism
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews