Chinese Postman

Special offer: three books by Brian Castro

One of Australia’s most important novelists writes about the experience of old age.

Abraham Quin is in his mid-seventies, a migrant, thrice-divorced, a one-time postman and professor, a writer now living alone in the Adelaide Hills. In Chinese Postman he reflects on his life with what he calls ‘the mannered and meditative inaction of age’, offering up memories and anxieties, obsessions and opinions, his thoughts on solitude, writing, friendship and time. He ranges widely, with curiosity and feeling, digressing and changing direction as suits his experience, and his role as a collector of fragments and a surveyor of ruins. He becomes increasingly engaged in an epistolary correspondence with Iryna Zarebina, a woman seeking refuge from the war in Ukraine.

As the correspondence opens him to others, the elaboration of his memories tempers his melancholy with a playful enjoyment in the richness of language, and a renewed appreciation of the small events in nature. This understanding of the experience of old age is something new and important in our literature. As Quin comments, ‘In Australia, the old made way for the young. It guaranteed a juvenile legacy.’

Brilliant. Hilarious. Defiant. Risky. Brian Castro at his epistolary, intoxicating best. Chinese Postman, a virtuoso of late style, is a masterpiece.
Bernadette Brennan

Stylish, deeply intelligent and full of pathos and bathos… Castro is among the best contemporary English-language novelists in the world.
Shannon Burns

A tour de force… There is a quiet, demanding depth to this work that feels exquisitely rare…Chinese Postman is a secret worth sharing.
Leah Jing McIntosh, Sydney Morning Herald

In a period where flat, declarative prose predominates, Castro provides caffeinating playfulness, accretion of rhizomic detail, butt-joining of rarified fragments, and uncanny interiority at no extra cost… There is grit beneath the shimmer: the financial precarity of dedicated artists; the unbleachable stains of anti-Semitism and sinophobia; the brute realities of war. And, bracketing all, candid admissions of deep melancholy: the indignities of ageing; the timpani-tap of impending death; the fruitless fretting on whether contemporary publication will confer a posthumous foothold in an amnesiac culture.
Michael Winkler, Australian Book Review

Under [Castro’s] pen, the mess of old age is elevated into a meditative, almost hallucinatory, experience. Chinese Postman is a master wordsmith pulling apart, to delightful effect, the promise and disappointments of literature. The result is a constantly astounding, often hilarious, and thoroughly subversive work that expands what language can do.
Rhoda Kwan, The Saturday Paper

Castro’s fiction is cerebral, and Chinese Postman is no exception. Yet there is an emotional frankness here, by turns droll and fond — not exactly self-mocking but by no means immune to the possibility… a strange, bewitching novel, full of saudade.
Declan Fry, ABC Arts

A quietly riveting book… One gets the feeling that if Hamlet had lived into his 70s, he might look and sound a little like [Abe Quin].
Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, The Conversation