Category: Literary Review
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From Here To Eternity: An Intimate Death
Several weeks ago I attended a presentation that my sister had given at the National Gallery of Australia. She had participated in the ArtMed program in 2016 whilst studying medicine. For the program, she had conducted a research project into how death is presented in the artwork of the Sumatran culture and compared it to…
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J R: A Humble Cello Piece
None of William Gaddis’s books continue to be published in Australia. I had to order my copies of J R and The Recognitions from the US, ironically paying a premium for these pieces of art because, I suppose, that’s what America’s all about. It is truly tragic that Gaddis, arguably the person responsible for kickstarting…
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My first Murakami: Sputnik Sweetheart
There is simply no way for sex and love not to be messy. After all, have you ever seen somebody get shot without bleeding?
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Siddhartha and the Quest for Subjective Experience
Recently I have found myself embroiled in the concept of subjective experience and its importance in generating true understanding about particular concepts. The human experience is a particularly challenging idea to convey to another person; it is often challenging to the point of being impossible, a limit which we can asymptotically approach but have no…
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William Stoner and the act of loving
“Love was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a matter of both as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or poem, it says simply, ‘Look! I am alive.'”
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The Outsider (The Stranger) by Albert Camus
My close friend, Arend, gave me a copy of this novella for my 20th birthday. It was the Penguin Classics translation by Sandra Smith. It’s a very short read with a succinct, dense story told from a first person perspective of a man by the name of Mersault. Every thought within the novella is as…
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Out of Ireland; getting to know Robert Devereux
Out of Ireland is a novel by Christopher Koch; it is a diary of an Irish political prisoner, Robert Devereux, and the story of his exile in 1849 to Van Diemen’s Land penal colony for the incitement of violent revolution in Ireland. I chose to read this book purely for the reason that it was on…
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Infinite Jest, my thoughts
Just last week, I finished reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Infinite Jest is a book whose reputation preceded it, at least for me. As year 11 double major English students, my teacher, Mr. Bibbens, assigned us the novel to study for a whole semester, under the expectation that we didn’t have to finish it. This is an…
The Queanbeyan Review 