ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

The Glebe Point Road Blues took me right out of my comfort zone in more ways than one.  It’s a book of combined prose and poetry which recreates the experience of being on Glebe Point Road in Sydney, but it’s a very particular view of that world.

For those of us not familiar with the area, Wikipedia tells us that it’s the main road through the inner city suburb of Sydney, and (unsurprisingly, since it looks a lot like Brunswick in Melbourne) it’s a boutique shopping strip with numerous restaurants and cafés.  We would, therefore, expect it to be populated by moneyed people whose spending habits can support such a plethora of eating options.   We could identify them by their ‘ironic’ clothing, i.e. shapeless, torn or ill-fitting, perhaps with a vintage item from an Opshop, but always worn with something expensive to indicate that the outfit is put together with irony, not thrift.   And we would expect that the cafés would sport one or two or lots more Helen Garner wannabees, writing their PhD-turned memoirs or novels over long slow lattes, probably on an Apple laptop (though perhaps a vintage fountain pen might suit the ambience better.)

Ok, I know, I know, I’m stereotyping in just the same way that city journalists stereotype suburbs as a wasteland full of conformists who tolerate bad coffee.  These journalists never venture out of their own postcode, but they imagine that suburbanites would happily sell their children in order to satisfy ambitions to squeeze into a microscopic inner-city terrace…   I’m afraid I can’t resist poking a bit of fun at these pretensions…

But still, Wikipedia’s image of a road full of boutique cafés and restaurants seems at odds with the people who populate The Glebe Point Blues. You’ve only got to look at the bleak cover design to recognise that.

The author, in an ‘Epilogue on Style’ calls these vignettes of lonely people narrative fragments which are exercises in intuitive realism. 

They don’t intend to present with fidelity, the factual world around us.  Realism can be a misleading concept: often it reduces events or individuals to the particulars which constitute them.  Reality however generates fiction because itself is the most blended form of human activity. (p.149)

Nevertheless, it seems to me, that a writer makes choices when he creates ‘intuitive realism’.  The focus of this work is on melancholy people transiting through, linked most of the time by only the road and the exchanges between an unidentified and oddly-detached narrator who seems to be the only stable person in the book.  He seems a little lofty.  There, but apart.  Interested in his subjects as subjects, not as people in need.  OTOH many of the people he encounters are drunk, or high, or spouting random bits of esoteric mysticism and philosophy that nobody else understands (including me).  Perhaps this breeds a sense of alienation or detachment.

The Glebe Point Blues is not like the fiction of Philip Salom, which introduces the reader to characters who are distinctive and yet familiar; they are every person you’ve ever met who doesn’t quite ‘fit in’, but you don’t care because you like them anyway. (The Returns, BTW, has been longlisted for the Miles Franklin, and rightly so.  I liked it even more than Waiting.)  Karalis’s people act in bizarre ways, but what is even more odd and somewhat distasteful is that no one seems to connect with anyone else.  Kieran, who has mental health problems, for example, reveals that he was searching for a guru, but Sydney’s cult of now and its timeless present moments means he can only remain a broken image.

In ‘The Moment’, the observer reports on a Hungarian Jew expelled from Iraq standing alone under the arches of Sydney University…

Aged seventy or more.  Grey hair, old-fashioned clothes, leather handbag.  He looks around in distress.  Tears are running down his face.
‘Memories.  Memories,’ he whispers.
A thick accent.  Middle Eastern.  Iraqi.  Gentle eyes full of dreams.
‘Nineteen fifty-three or four,’ he continues.  ‘When we fled Iraq.  All Jews were expelled then.  We had to travel through desert, mountains and marshlands to reach Israel.  For months imprisoned in our homes in Baghdad we waited for an escape to anywhere.  But even Zion was not destined for us.  We fled to Australia.’  (p.65)

Like everyone else in this collection he is lonely and melancholic and abandoned to his fate, vanishing forever in the realm of shadows, fleeting impressions and faded graffiti. 

Another Jewish refugee is from Hungary, whose hundreds of books are the only reminder of his presence after he committed suicide.  This motif of books, marginalia, poems and pages left behind after death or disappearance, hints at the hidden person who remains forever unknowable.

Second-hand books are important for the notes of their owners.  The notes and their names.  Especially the Ex Libris.  Their artwork is startling.  From another era, when the book followed the fate and the trajectory of its owner. (p.68)

Karalis is a professor at Sydney University, so it wasn’t surprising to find an academic’s critique of managerialism’s corrupting influence on the life of the mind:

‘You know,’ he replies passionately, ‘during my years here, I came up with my most significant contribution to pure mathematics.  But unfortunately, I never wrote it down, or found the opportunity to share it, let alone to put it forward as an academic paper.
‘Why not?’
‘How could I do it with so many strategic plans and development models dominating the function of this institution?  I was seduced.  I succumbed.  Intellectual sloth numbed my mind. (p.71)

The tragedy of The Glebe Point Road Blues, is that these are the very people most in need of care and support during the pandemic, and it shows that they’re not very likely to get it, even from people who know them.

BTW to revert to the subject of stereotyping, British people come in for a bit of it in this book.  A professor is cautious, indirect — as befits her British upbringing. A drunk has an annoying British accent, an affected voice distinct over the inspiring cacophony of the pub. I’ll just note here that some of us have British accents that are not an affectation but rather a legacy of childhood and a signifier of a family that we love.  It is just as racist to insult us about it, as it is to insult someone with an accent from anywhere else.  In the circles I move in, people can speak English any way they like, in whatever accent they have, and be treated with respect. So I was surprised to see this kind of unnecessary unpleasantness in print.

Tom Lee (author of the highly amusing Coach Fitz) reviewed it for the SMH.

PS, the next day: I forgot to mention a pleasing bit of synchronicity… I was reading the poems, when I came across this, and made a note of it because I liked the image, if not the sentiment that happiness is often only fleeting:

Often happiness comes as fine needlework
on silk fabric, silver, sleek and slippery.  (p.163)

That very day, on her blog The Bookbinder’s Daughter, Melissa Beck (whose day job is teaching Latin and Ancient Greek) posted about the Three Fates and illuminated the allusion which I had otherwise missed:

In Roman myth the three Fates— Parcae in Latin Moirai in Ancient Greek— are referred to as sisters: Clotho, the youngest, is the spinner of a person’s life thread, Lachesis measures the final thread of life, and the dreaded Atropos cuts the thread of life.  Because of their absolute and unpredictable authority over all life—even Jupiter is subjected to their decisions—they are feared and rarely spoken about except in passing references.

Thanks, Melissa!

Image credit: Glebe Point Road, Wikiedia, by Adam.J.W.C. – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9654301

Author: Vrasidas Karalis
Title: The Glebe Point Road Blues
Cover and book design by Andras Berkes-Brandl
Publisher: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2020
ISBN: 9780648523215
Review copy courtesy of Brandl & Schlesigner