Journey Home Research Articles

What We Understand

What We Understand Gloria L. Huang (bio) When the rooms were empty and the halls were dark, the lights on the machines still flickered like silent Morse codes communicating together. She was present when the noise transformed from loud chatter to muffled quiet, she was there when bags were slung over shoulders and phones were picked up for the long journey home. Unseen and invisible, she was the sentinel who watched over the change from day to night. During work hours, the offices were alive with color and purpose. Posters plastered across the walls encouraged the reader to take risks, move fast, break things. She could never understand this urge to stir the water, to cause waves. This craving to break things and start anew. The vast office spaces were filled with chairs that existed in different shapes, some of them soft amorphous blobs, others upside-down tops that rotated dizzily. The people who came to work reminded her of children playing dress-up. Arriving on bicycles and scooters, backpacks strapped over both shoulders, they were young and fresh-faced. They spoke to computer screens while walking nowhere on treadmills, holding expensive cups of coffees in their hands. One time, she unlocked a door to discover that the floor was a pit filled with plastic balls. On her good days, the place reminded her of the night markets from her youth. The same bustle and color, the same business frenzy unfolding around her. Yet the vendors at the night markets had a hunger in their eyes they couldn't hide, no matter how casually they pretended they didn't need the sale. The children in these offices – they were well-fed and soft, had known nothing of true hardship or struggle. Every evening, Rose – the name she placed on her job applications in brackets to appear more "American" – arrived to clean up after these working children. She would swipe through the turnstile with the identity card attached to her waistband. Though her identity card was meant to provide proof of her membership, she couldn't help feeling that it repeatedly failed at its task. She did not belong to this place, this life. Pushing her janitorial cart from space to space, Rose's mind would wander as she emptied plastic trash containers tucked under desks. Sometimes she would marvel at how much food was thrown away as she wiped counters in kitchens dotted around the offices, her mouth watering at the selection of organic snacks but knowing the treats were not for her. Sometimes she would glance at the computer screens, the ones that hadn't turned black. The screens were often filled with letters and numbers that made no sense to her, as though a child had mashed the buttons on the keyboard until the screen filled up. The fact that these combinations of symbols meant something, created something – it astonished her. Most of the time, she thought about Julia. Rose would move silently between the desks, leaving a trail of cleanliness in her wake like a tornado in reverse. Occasionally someone would look up from [End Page 44] packing away their belongings and flash a smile in Rose's direction. She would nod silently, avoiding direct eye contact unless they looked like Julia. So many of these young girls looked like Julia, with their silky black hair tied into ponytails, their tilted eyes magnified behind thick glasses. She often thought of Julia's childhood, when she was round-cheeked and still adoring of everything Rose did. "Mommy, look at me!" "Mommy, watch this!" Her childish voice repeated requests for attention until the sweetness became grating, a sugary treat that became sickly. Rose regretted her feelings of annoyance now, wished she could go back and kneel before Julia, giving her all the attention she craved. Sometimes she remembered Julia as a teenager, and the cold feeling that descended between them as Julia grew distant and scornful. Rose could never figure out how to reach her, didn't know how to traverse the choppy seas of age and language to bring her sarcastic American daughter back to shore. So she did the only thing she could think of to keep...

The Wound of Time

The Wound of Time

Pratnja mađarskog kralja nakon bitke kod Nikopolja - dunavska sekcija puta

In the past decades, or even during the last hundred years, many books and articles were published on the Crusade in 1396 and the Battle of Nicopolis. It is no wonder that the Crusade of 1396 still intrigues many people, being one of the emblematic events of the Christian undertakings in the Middle Ages. The topic is huge, so the study presents a slice of the Crusade. The aim of the study is to provide new data and information about the Hungarian King's journey home after the Battle of Nicopolis, including the Danube section, which has not been included in the literature so far.

Comment retourner à Ithaque ? Le voyage d’Ulysse selon les platoniciens, gnostiques et chrétiens

The Homeric theme of Odysseus’ journey home to Ithaca received many readings among the Platonists: Odysseus represented for them a soul that travels through the sensible world on its way back to its intelligible and divine “homeland”. This exegesis was also popular among the Gnostics (Perates, Sethians and Naassenes) and Christians (in Rome and in Alexandria). The article reviews these readings, sometimes little known, highlighting their particularities: the biblical and doctrinal themes that are added to the Platonic reading of Homer. We thus highlight the acquittance with the Platonism and its transformations outside the Platonic school.

Dublin à la Noir: Dermot Bolger’s "The Journey Home"

The article discusses the presentation of Dublin in the novel The Journey Home by Dermot Bolger (1990) with reference to both the novel’s historical and socio-economic setting in the 1980s and the literary tradition of urban representations, particularly Charles Dickens and the conventions of noir fiction. Drawing on the theoretical concepts of nonplace (Marc Augé) and site (Edward S. Casey), it argues that the modernization of the city centre and the sprawling of Dublin’s suburbs lead to the transformation of places, understood as locations of history, identity and community, into non-places/sites, i.e. non-differentiated, uniform spaces destructive of a sense of community and political responsibility. An analysis of the descriptions of the city centre and suburbs demonstrates that in the novel the urban setting becomes at once a cause and a reflection of the psychological and social problems of the protagonists. In this way, far from being a passive location of the action, the city becomes an active force, which shapes the lives of the protagonists with the inevitability characteristic of literary noir.

An Odyssey at the Interface – A Study in the Stream of Consciousness

Experimental science should be experimental in every aspect of it, from the life and career path of the experimenter to how its results and thoughts are being written up. In this paper, the author experiments with the stream of consciousness style of writing. To conform to this literary style, the text follows a natural train of thought that abounds with analogies and associations and deliberate typographic and syntactic omissions at times. Paying an homage to Joyce’s Ulysses as the hallmark of the stream of consciousness writings, the author demonstrates empirically and through a bibliographic meta-analysis that a nanoparticle protected against biodegradation in lysosomal compartments of the cell, like Odysseus, takes significantly more time to return to its point of origin than to reach its intracellular destination. Thus, getting across the biological barrier and into the living system is less laborious and tardy than escaping from it. From here on, the corollaries of this finding relevant for the field of targeted drug delivery using nanoparticles are elaborated. This discussion is entwined with the storyline of the paper, which reflects Homer’s epic poem about Odysseus and his long journey home. This experiment in scientific writing is motivated by the hope that rejuvenation of the literary style of technical papers in natural sciences might revitalize the rusty creativity and ill social relations underlying them. By experimenting with literary novelties and eventually adopting them as a common practice, science would be brought closer to the world of arts, at the interface of which it could rediscover its renaissance identity and flourish anew.

Time in Exile: In Conversation with Heidegger, Blanchot, and Lispector by Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback

Reviewed by: Time in Exile: In Conversation with Heidegger, Blanchot, and Lispector by Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback Jason M. Wirth SCHUBACK, Marcia Sá Cavalcante. Time in Exile: In Conversation with Heidegger, Blanchot, and Lispector. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020. x + 172 pp. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $31.95 Although there has been a profusion of studies on exile, of the loss of home and the hunger for return, this beautiful and highly original work investigates the experience of exile from within. How does exile as such reorient our experience of time? Exile is typically construed as exile from a place, from one’s proper home. The exile is consequently nostalgic, longing for the nostos or journey back home. We seek to return to a lost past. But the internal constitution of exile suspends this scheme. Exile is no longer ecstatic, no longer the loss of what one was and consequently standing out, exposed to the future. Rather, the ecstatic constitution of time itself comes to a standstill and becomes static, “a movement without where-from and where-to, the movement of a meanwhile.” It is now the disclosure that there is no home to which to return, that time itself is not on the way from an origin to something new. Exile consequently “is not conceived from the ecstatic scheme of movement as change from-to” but, rather, the “suspended existence in the between and in the meanwhile.” It is no longer movement “as change from one place to another, from one time to another, from one state to another.” Schuback calls the time within exile “gerundive,” that is, neither a “tense” or “voice” but, rather, “a verbal tension,” which expresses “the on-going and whiling in the between.” It is an ongoing home in homelessness. “Existence in exile is, above all, existence exposed to the uncanny is-being, to the bare ‘is-existing.’” The “uncanny” translates unheimlich, which Heidegger so memorably analyzed in Being and Time. This term speaks to the loss of familiarity and the disclosure of strangeness as being no longer at home (Heim). This was not a temporary loss of one’s own but, rather, the disclosure that one has no home, that one is at home in such homelessness. “In exile homelessness without end.” This is the critical but difficult thought: “The uncanniness of home, of the homeland, of the homely came to light and in which home became homeless.” Schuback seeks to articulate this unending exile, that is, “to unfold the experience of gerundive time, of being while being, existing while existing, insofar as this gerundive experience of time corresponds most intimately and intensively to the experience of time within exilic existence.” She does so by engaging three interlocutors, one struggling with the limits of philosophy, another with the limits of writing as such, and the third with a new form of writing that directly confronts gerundive exile. Her first interlocutor is Heidegger, the master of the phenomenological analysis of ecstatic time. In Being and Time, Dasein is disclosed as ecstatic, but as Heidegger’s thought developed, it releases this anthropocentric starting point of an “experience of outsideness” and becomes increasingly aware “of nearness, of presencing, that grows from the insight into the whiling and abiding of being.” Heidegger realized that [End Page 154] “within exile time does not really pass, time remains in the meanwhile, moving without moving the whole past and the whole future.” Schuback’s second interlocutor, Maurice Blanchot, is the thinker par excellence of exile and withdrawal. Blanchot’s writing attempts to write without writing, expansively reiterating the X without X structure, as in to “live without living” or “to die without dying” or a “name without name.” Writing is a “continuous entrance into where one already is.” His fragmentary writing guards the absence of meaning neither because an original meaning has come and gone nor as a placeholder for a meaning still to come. Rather, “this meaning is the withdrawing itself,” an “immobile becoming.” As Michel Foucault presciently realized, Blanchot’s practice of writing finally severs time from the stranglehold of subjectivity, beyond either absence or presence but, rather, in the neutral time, the neither-nor...

Therapeutic virtual reality in prison: Participatory design with incarcerated women

Upon release from prison, women face barriers in every step of their journey home, with most reentry services designed for men. With virtual reality (VR) headsets increasingly affordable and normalized as a mental health treatment modality, VR is being adopted by prisons around the United States. We argue that the risks and affordances of VR in this political context necessitate centering those with lived experience as creative agents to avoid designing media that re-traumatizes, reduces the complexities of reentry, and reproduces oppressive prisoner–guard dynamics. This article documents and analyzes the design process of a VR reentry program for a state prison to help incarcerated women practice responding to high-stress reentry situations, prior to their release. The resulting VR prototype draws on therapeutic VR work but takes a community-based participatory design approach. We conclude by discussing the institutional and cultural tensions of implementing a participatory design process in a US state prison system.

Complexities of Displaced Indigenous Identities: A Fifty Year Journey Home, to Two Homes

In colonised territories all over the world, place-based identity has been interrupted by invading displacement cultures. Indigenous identities have become more complex in response to and because of racist and genocidal government policies that have displaced Indigenous peoples. This paper is a personal account of the identity journey of the author, that demonstrates how macrocosmic colonial themes of racism, protectionism, truth suppression, settler control of Indigenous relationships, and Indigenous resistance and survivance responses can play out through an individual’s journey. The brown skinned author started life being told that she was (a white) Australian; she was told of her father’s Aboriginality in her 20s, only to learn at age 50 of her mother’s affair and that her biological father is Māori. The author’s journey demonstrates the way in which Indigenous identities in the colonial era are context driven, and subject to affect by infinite relational variables such as who has the power to control narrative, and other colonial interventions that occur when a displacement culture invades place-based cultures.

A Regretful Journey Home: Albanian Return Migration in the Wake of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008

Despite occurring almost a decade ago, the effects of the 2008 global financial crisis continue to influence the lives of many people today. Intra-European migration literature, for example, suggests that migration patterns were reshaped in its aftermath and emerging literature details mobilities and experiences of migrants in destination societies post-crisis. To date, less research documents the experiences of individuals who, in the wake of the crisis, were forced to abandon their migratory endeavours and had to navigate returning to their country of origin in a particularly challenging socio-economic context. Utilising in-depth interviews and family case studies with purposively recruited Albanian return migrants who had lived in Greece and Italy pre-crisis, the current study highlights how conditions in both destination and origin countries impacted return experiences. Findings illustrate an adverse interplay of circumstances that led to the unsettled return and portray a perturbing fluidity in the lives of return migrants who appear overcome by a sense of ‘double failure’ with regard to both outward migration and subsequent return to their country of origin.

Audit of flumazenil use in special care and oral surgery sedation services.

Background The National Patient Safety Agency (2008) has advised against routine reliance on flumazenil for reversal of sedation and encourages regular audit to help identify issues with excessive dosing of midazolam. This multi-centre audit of flumazenil use across both community-based special care and dental hospital oral surgery specialist services was conducted to compare practice against that reported from other UK sedation services.Methods A six-year retrospective audit was conducted using controlled drug records and patient case notes.Results Both services used flumazenil at very infrequent levels and far below the agreed standard. The dose of flumazenil and justification for its use was recorded in all records. There was variability in the nature of the justifications between the two services, which likely relates to the differing patient groups seen by the specialties. The majority of cases related to supporting the patient's escort for their journey home; however, this was not always pre-planned.Conclusions There was a low level of flumazenil use over an extended period of time, supporting the concept of a culture of safe sedation provision in both services. The audit highlighted variation in record-keeping and need for improved communication with patients about escort requirements.

The Journey Home: Violence, Anchoring, and Refugee Decisions to Return

While the UNHCR promotes voluntary repatriation as the preferred solution to refugee situations, there is little understanding of variation in refugees’ preferences regarding return. We develop a theoretical framework suggesting two mechanisms influencing refugees’ preferences. First, refugees’ lived experiences in their country of origin prior to displacement and in their new host country create a trade-off in feelings of being anchored to their origin or host country. Second, firsthand exposure to traumas of war provides some refugees with a sense of competency and self-efficacy, leading them to prefer to return home. We test these relationships with data from a survey among Syrian refugees hosted in Lebanon. We find refugees exposed to violence during the war have a sense of attachment to Syria and are most likely to prefer return. Refugees who have developed a detachment from Syria or an attachment to Lebanon are less likely to prefer return.

Weaving a Way to Nostos: Odysseus and Feminine Mêtis in the Odyssey

My paper examines the gendered nature of Odysseus’ mêtis, a Greek word describing characteristics of cleverness and intelligence, in Homer’s Odyssey. While Odysseus’ mêtis has been discussed in terms of his storytelling, disguise, and craftsmanship, I contend that in order to fully understand his cleverness, we must place Odysseus’ mêtis in conversation with the mêtis of the crafty women who populate the epic. I discuss weaving as a stereotypically feminine manifestation of mêtis, arguing that Odysseus’ reintegration into his home serves as a metaphorical form of weaving—one that he adapts from the clever women he encounters on his journey home from Troy. Athena serves as the starting point for my discussion of mêtis, and I then turn to Calypso and Circe—two crafty weavers who attempt to ensnare Odysseus on their islands. I also examine Helen, whom Odysseus himself does not meet, but whose weaving is importantly witnessed by Odysseus’ son Telemachus, who later draws upon the craft of weaving in his efforts to help Odysseus restore order in his home. The last woman I present is Penelope, whose clever and prolonged weaving scheme helps her evade marriage as she awaits Odysseus’ return, and whose lead Odysseus follows in his own prolonged reentry into his home. I finally demonstrate the way that Odysseus reintegrates himself into his household through a calculated and metaphorical act of weaving, arguing that it is Odysseus’ willingness to embrace a more feminine model of mêtis embodied by the women he encounters that sets him apart from his fellow male warriors and enables his successful homecoming.

Pax, Journey Home by Sara Pennypacker

Pax, Journey Home by Sara Pennypacker

Children Are Not Small Adults

Playing a game of Candy Land with a tearful 12-year-old girl who lives in a pediatric long-term care facility (pLTCF) and has been isolated from her family at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I consider the fact that protecting my patient from COVID-19 infection requires isolating her from her loved ones. An epic poem comes to mind. Homer’s Odyssey describes the plight of Odysseus and his perilous journey returning to his home kingdom of Ithaca. Due to uncontrollable circumstances including war and captivity, Odysseus is kept from his beloved homeland for years. On his eventual sea journey home he must sail between two sea monsters found on opposite sides of a narrow straight: the perilous whirlpool Charybdis and the six headed monster Scylla. As there is no escape without cost, Odysseus is forced to choose the lesser of the two evils; passing by Scylla, losing only a few sailors rather than risking the loss of his entire ship in the whirlpool. As a medical student rotating in a pLTCF at the onset of the pandemic, I recall many instances where physicians and facility leaders were forced to choose between the lesser of two evils while creating policies and best practices for resident children. Balancing the creation of an effective infection control policy with the negative effects of social isolation on resident children demonstrates one example: My patient was sad during the initial weeks of isolation from her family. Now, a year later and still isolated, I wonder if she and her family think that facility policies implemented to prevent COVID-19 infection have been worth the sacrifice.

Primo Levi's Chernobyl: Ecology and Trauma in The Reawakening

This essay follows Primo Levi's journey home to Italy after the liberation of Auschwitz, as narrated in his 1963 memoir The Reawakening [La tregua]. Levi's repatriation convoy bound for Italy under Soviet guard traveled inexplicably east instead of south, traversing and being detained within the landscape of the Pripet Marshes. As Europe's largest wetlands, the nearly impassible Pripet Marshes had stalled a Nazi advance into Russia and saw partisan fighting in both World Wars. This essay examines Levi's journey into the Pripet Marshes through two temporal frames--both its haunted legacy of genocidal pogroms, as well as its near future: the site of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Traumatic overlays resonate across Levi's memoir of the cease-fire interval after the war, an uneasy peace Levi terms a "parenthesis of unlimited availability" (p. 206). Thinking through Levi's writing on the afterlife of trauma, Freud's concept of the "uncanny" is employed alongside trauma theory to illuminate a traumatic anamorphosis emerging from Levi's text. This essay pursues an ecological reading of trauma to gather traces strewn across human, nonhuman, and inhuman landscapes of annihilation.

Return of Crimean Tatars to the Crimea before 1989 as a Research Problem

The article examines an under-researched issue of the return of deported Crimean Tatars to their Homeland in 1967–1989 using new sources obtained by methods of oral history. According to the analysis of the existing historiography made in this article, there is a lack of research dealing with issues of the return of Crimean Tatars in 1967–1989. Indeed, the studies of forced migration, including those in the Soviet Union, concentrate usually on the issue of moving in one direction, leaving aside the motion in the opposite direction. Absence of research on this issue can be explained not only by the lack of sources but also by the methodological complexity of studying the phenomenon of ‘return’. In accordance with the historical context and push-pull factors of migration, the article addresses differentiation between the return (before 1989) and repatriation (after 1989) phenomena. To ensure adequate disclosure of the research hypothesis, the article provides an overview of the existing research approaches to the concept of returning in studies on Migration and Refugee. It is concluded that there is no coherent approach to the return. The article argues that the Crimean Tatars’ return to their homeland was a process of overcoming the myth of return. In addition, an idea of claiming the homeland based on memories of the Crimea and family narratives emerged among Crimean Tatars during the period of exile. The article addresses the return not as an event but as a long process of the journey to restoration of normality which was lost as a result of deportation in 1944. The end of the return is not always an arrival; moreover, the return includes an emplacement process. Actually, the journey home, the so-called route to root, significantly influenced on reimagining the home and reforging of identity. Therefore, studying the Crimean Tatars’ return contributes significantly not only to the history of Crimean Tatars, moreover, it is important for the understanding of the reverse migration process in migration studies.Manuscript received 17.03.2020

Editor's Introduction

It is now commonplace to observe that we live in “unprecedented times.” The cliché isn't without merit. The Covid-19 pandemic has ruthlessly revealed and exacerbated deep fissures—epistemic, racial, epidemiological, economic—in American society. The murder of George Floyd, recorded on video in Minneapolis this May, has inspired renewed agitation across the country for racial justice and against police brutality. Such protests demand of us to consider our assumptions and convictions regarding whiteness, state violence, and political identity.We hope, therefore, that this issue of the JJE may aid in reflection, research, and political action beyond the commonplace. In his essay, JJE coeditor Jonathan Crane offers extended reflections on the difficulties of ethical reasoning within a pandemic, noting that while “[b]ioethical deliberations most frequently occur outside of the situation of concern,” in the current pandemic and other comparable crises, ethicists do not have the luxury of distance. Crane argues, “Asking a question like ‘How can Jewish ethics solve the problem of the COVID-19 pandemic?’ is unhelpful. The pandemic is not a problem in search of a solution. It is many things but not a singular problem. It is wiser to wonder, ‘What can Jewish ethics be in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic? What might a Jewish ethic look like from within a pandemic?’”Joshua Moise-Silverman's essay, “Jewish Ethical Reflections on the Promises and Challenges of Mitochondria Replacement Therapy,” takes up the bioethical and halakhic considerations of MRT. This replacement technology in the context of human reproduction can, as Moise-Silverman explains, “prevent a child from inheriting mitochondrial disease from their mother,” but may also raise significant questions about the child's Jewish status in some Orthodox Jewish communities. Moise-Silverman traces the history of rabbinic debate around this technology and the ongoing communal questions the therapy presents.Amanda Mbuvi's essay, though based in entirely different sources, also raises provocative questions about children in Jewish communities. Her text is a children's book, Rebecca's Journey Home, which tells the story of a white American Jewish family's adoption of a baby girl from Vietnam. Mbuvi turns her analytic eye to the language and pictures of this short book, arguing persuasively that the book illustrates—literally—some significant assumptions and conflicts in American Jewish racial and identity discourses. Mbuvi concludes, “Viewing the baby through a gaze both loving and steeped in stereotype, Rebecca's Journey Home demonstrates the pitfalls that the American context presents for conceptualizing Jewish identity across racial lines. However, the book also illustrates the potential of Jewish tradition to serve as a basis for thinking beyond the American rules of race and even for transforming them.”Geoffrey Claussen's essay, “Teaching Modern Jewish Ethics through Role-Play,” invites readers into his classroom, where he provides a detailed account of a recent course in Jewish ethics. In Claussen's class, students represent modern Jewish thinkers in verbal dialogue, holding fast to these thinkers' points of view in order to engage one another in sustained conversation and dispute over a body of contemporary Jewish ethical questions. Claussen notes, “Some students were more reluctant to take on perspectives with which they strongly disagreed, but even students who took on such perspectives once or twice during the semester reported that they found great value in the experience.”Jason Weiner's article, “Are There Limits to How Far One Must Go for Others? Toward a Theoretical Model for Healthcare Providers,” engages contemporary bioethical principles alongside classical Jewish texts, and probes difficult questions about the limits of healthcare providers' responsibilities to their patients and profession. He argues that “[w]ithin both traditions, even as limits on the duties of healthcare providers are articulated, the societal importance of the role of healthcare providers to care for the sick is maintained. The perspectives examined do not see healthcare providers merely as mechanics of the body, but as individuals who have taken upon themselves social and even Divine expectations of responsibility to go out of their way for others.”Finally, we are very proud to feature Aryeh Cohen's translation of Rabbi Chaim David Halevi's responsa on incarceration in Jewish law. It is the first time that these extended selections from Halevi's work have been published in English; we will feature another set of newly translated material on incarceration in the next edition of this journal. Cohen's contribution reminds us that translation or curation of sources is also an ethical endeavor, even if we do not know all the “work” that these sources will do. To that end, we continue to invite scholars to submit curated compilations of Jewish source texts (from any language) in order that these texts may be accessible to broader communities of readers.

Seeing Ourselves in Books: A Children's Book about Transracial Adoption and the Common Sense of Jewish Family and Identity in the United States

AbstractIn the children's book Rebecca's Journey Home, an American family's experience adopting a baby from Vietnam and navigating issues of race, religion, and nationality illuminates each of those modes of identity, as well as Jewish identity's distinctive relationship to them. Highlighting the parent-child dialogues within the book and among its readers, this article foregrounds the social processes involved in identity construction that are obscured by the view of identity as simply inhering in bodies. Although the book's portrayal of Jewish identity remains within the confines of American racial logic, it also points to the potential of Jewish tradition as a basis for reimagining belonging in ways that transcend the limitations of that approach to communal identity so that any body can be seen, without qualification, as a Jewish body.

Nothing remains...

Nothing remains... Richard Carr He. Murray Bail. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2021. 164 pp. A$27.99. ISBN 9781922330949 Murray Bail has broken his eight-year silence with a new book, a memoir (?) titled He. The question mark arises because "memoir" conjures up a range of familiar possibilities: a narrative of foundational events in the memoirist's life or depictions of influential figures in that life or a behind-the-curtain account of the writer's world, revealing truths and dispelling myths. But this is Murray Bail, a writer of idiosyncratic, often dazzling fictions, a man who early on rejected the "duncoloured realism" endemic to Australian writing in favor of the experimental. Now [End Page 392] eighty years old, Murray Bail has much to recall and on which to reflect. How will he do that? Bail closes the first extended section of the memoir with a conventional-sounding statement: "I began writing out of dissatisfaction" (45). Yet this sentence is the sole nod to a central feature of the memoir: it is the lone instance of the first-person singular in the book. Rather than "I," we have "he." Take the opening: "And in the middle in khaki shorts, dusty knees, is he. Aged twelve he already has a certain earnestness" (1). The occasion is a photograph of a family gathering; the "he" is Bail. Surveying the photo, he speaks of his parents, his brothers, his sister, then expands to the world outside their door—the grocer, the milkman and his horse, the watchmaker. Once defining figures in Bail's Adelaide childhood, "they no longer exist. Even in memory they become insubstantial" (2). And so, we have a theme here identified, one that hovers throughout. Life is full and detailed, substantial and rich in variety and potential, and then it is gone; "he," despite all he has thought and sought and achieved, will soon become "insubstantial" as well. He continues to unsettle. Bail delivers a mélange of remembered individuals, recalled observations, moments of personal discovery, even snatches from once-popular songs. Amid a seemingly random arrangement, however, we do grasp a general trajectory of the writer's life: childhood in Adelaide, marriage in Melbourne, escape from "the ordinary" to India, the necessary journey Home to England. Somewhere along the way the first marriage ends, and later there is a second (to fellow writer Helen Garner, named as a writer but not identified as a spouse). But by that time (and actual time and sequencing are left in doubt), Bail has resettled in Australia, in Sydney. This apparent randomness, however, links to Bail's larger purpose. For rather than follow the memory of lived experience, Bail ponders the puzzle of memory. He shares big events from childhood: the fire that destroyed a local department store, the sighting of a drowned man, the classmate felled fatally when "Mr Trainer, a popular teacher, … batting in the nets in the lunch hour" (30), hit the boy's head. He also gives snippets of social history, especially from his youth—the silence of Adelaide Sundays, the prevalence of tea drinking, the influence of America's Saturday Evening Post on hairstyles and tooth care. But his memory throws up other images, ones appearing without warning and holding little intrinsic meaning. Bail recalls the child "he" noticing a man sitting on a kitchen chair in the yard adjoining a milk bar, a man displaying a hook where his arm should be. "Have others remembered him seated on a chair in the footpath?" (16) he asks, later asserting, "Memories are unequal. Some don't need searching for. … Others need a concentrated effort to recall" (30). At eighty, Bail can look back on a successful career. His stories can claim classic status. My favorite is "The Drover's Wife," in which a man comes upon the Drysdale painting, decides that the woman placed in the foreground is the wife who deserted him, and then assesses her current status using the painting as guide. Among his novels, Eucalyptus (1998) was both a Miles Franklin winner and an international hit, an ingenious mixture of fairy tale, quest, and exploration of the power of story to change lives. Those who are looking...