Brian Castro: book bundle #1

Street to Street is one of Brian Castro’s best books yet, a comic-tragic enactment of the anxieties of the writing life, in which the early twentieth-century Sydney poet Christopher Brennan plays a major role. Castro’s double portrait of the poet and his biographer, the writer-academic Brendan Costa, plays on the disappointment, the guilt, the lack of recognition, which troubles those who live by their imaginations. The novella is the perfect form for Castro’s purpose, its compression heightening the wit and energy of his prose, and his remarkable feel for the embarrassments of character.

Suffering from a fatal disease, Lucien Gracq travels to Paris to complete the epic poem he is writing and live out his last days. There he joins a secret writers’ society that guarantees to publish the work of its members anonymously, relieving them of the burdens of life and the disappointments of authorship. Blindness and Rage recalls Virgil and Dante in its descent into the underworld of writing. Always an innovator, in Blindness and Rage Castro again throws down a challenge to the limits of the novel form.

In the character of Abraham Quin – a thrice-divorced migrant and writer, and one-time postman and professor – one of Australia’s most important novelists writes about the experience of old age. ‘A masterpiece’, writes Bernadette Brennan. ‘Brian Castro at his epistolary, intoxicating best.’