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The Victoria Principle
Book launch (VIC): 6 May at Visual Diary
Book launch (NSW): 5 June at Better Read Than Dead
An award-winning poet turns storyteller.
In The Victoria Principle, Michael Farrell extends the humour and narrative drive demonstrated in recent collections such as I Love Poetry and Googlecholia to the short story. The collection begins with a writer character trying to do literary justice to the fear of birds; other stories feature creative activity, such as the conceptual artist who deliberately boils an egg to Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, or the would-be writers who attend a nude retreat in Nova Scotia. There is pathos, too, in a storyteller’s relationship with his sister, and in that of a gay doctor with a straight Italian waiter, who is trying to make ends meet while supporting two children with two different women. The stories also revisit classical and popular myths, such as the judgement of Paris, and the life of Andy Gibb. The associations brought into play can be unexpected or absurd, but the process has its own logic: we may think of these fictions as meta-fictions, as ‘thought stories’ rather than short stories, offering inflections and reflections on queer Catholicism and mental breakdown, amidst the ongoing contradictions and ironies of contemporary Australian life.
Praise for Michael Farrell:
Farrell recombines Australian ecology, history, and mythology into glorious, and very funky, new forms.
Judges’ citation, Judith Calanthe Wright Award
The playfulness is thoughtful, intellectually serious and absolute… Farrell’s fractured narratives seem to settle in the reader’s mind where they become a form of pure lyricism.
Judges’ citation, Barrett Reid Prize
Farrell brilliantly deforms Australian (literary) history into surreal comedy.
Australian Book Review
Endless, rascally contortions. Read them boldly as an archaeologist…but stay quietly aware that the texts are already affecting your cognitive frame, turning you into their accomplice in the renewing of language.
Sydney Review of Books
