Stalking David Malouf

I realised yesterday that I've been more or less stalking David Malouf my whole life - although usually at a gap of 30 or 40 years. I went to the girls' highschool across the road from where he says he went to school in Johnno . When I went to uni (the same one he went to and the same department but NOT the same building), I often drove past the site of what he described as his childhood home in 12 Edmonstone St (a weatherboard Queenslander in his day but a nondescript medium rise office building in mine). At highschool, I spent days and days in the old State Library perched on the edge of the city next to the river where he talked about struggling with his Latin translations in at least one of his memoirs. (A new library was built shortly afterwards). I've even followed him on some of his travels he's written about through Belgium, Greece and Italy.

But I've only knowingly shared the same place as him simultaneously yesterday and a few times a decade ago, when I went out with someone who lived in the same inner-city Sydney street as he did. Occasionally, I'd see a dapper gentleman in his middle years crossing the road in the distance. I'd be quietly glad that he was still around and hoped that when he went inside his terrace he'd write something I could read in a year or so.*

Because I think he's quite delightful. Three or four of his books have stayed in the back of my mind ever since reading them. These memories are of gentle, beautifully written books with powerful images even though they don't have the pyrotechnic displays of say Patrick White. (This in itself is odd because Malouf's plots aren't that gentle. Johnno is about coming of age in the 1950s, the cultural cringe and existential angst leading to suicide - even though what I remember about it is the nostalgic visions of Brisbane before I was born. An Imaginary Life is about Ovid dying in the wilderness. Fly Away Peter (I think vaguely) is about a guy coming back from the Great War dealing with demons by birdwatching(??) and The Great World is about a successful businessman who wasn't much good at life.)

Malouf's really good at describing the edges of things and people on the boundaries between one state and another. For instance An Imaginary Life describes the ultracivilised Roman poet coping with exile in the back of beyond and then befriending a feral child who was apparently raised by wolves. Even though that all sounds a bit postcolonial and academic, he was doing it before it was trendy and in a completely accessible way. And readers love him if the crowd of people at the library yesterday is any indication.

Curiously, Random House seems to think he wrote Jane Eyre in 2000. Can't wait to read this. I mean, he is good at historical fiction but he probably would have made it a bit shorter than Charlotte Bronte's version.

*I thought actually going up and saying "love your work" might be too distracting.