![]() ![]() When Lyle demurs about the cost of an American college, Mel tells him she’ll get a better job in Australia with an American degree and it’s really patriarchal of him to destroy her career before it’s even begun. Mel is studying architecture in Chicago, but her YouTube channel is about the ‘architecture of the face’ and her speech is loaded with farcical Millennial jargon. Migrants Lyle and his wife Chanel keep their heads down in the outer suburbs while their adult children Sydney and Mel bully them. Sydney has been abandoned because of coastal erosion and bushfires, and the government monitors communications to identify troublesome migrants for repatriation. It is set in a surreal dystopian Melbourne where Islam is illegal and there are heavy penalties for mentioning climate change. Lyle’s story is a rather heavy-handed satire. Reading this novella first without the brief allusion to it in Lyle’s story makes it end somewhat inconclusively in 1983 two years after the election of the socialist president François Mitterand. (This reminded me of Kim Mahood’s Position Doubtfulin which Mahood’s friend the photo-artist Pamela Lofts posed her in all kinds of ironic feminist critiques out in the Tanami Desert.) But despite having the courage to set off alone across the world for adventures in a different culture, Lili is more often hyper-alert for serial killers and she suspects that her creepy neighbour is plotting to attack her. ![]() like Simone de Beauvoir, and she enjoys posing for Minna’s series of photos called ‘Daring Audrey’. However, because Lili is a person of colour, she thinks that she can never be quite ‘enough’. They have a lot of fun together, but Lili privately thinks that she would be a better soulmate for Nick because she knows more about French literature and culture than Minna does. She also encourages her to dress with the individuality of mismatched clothes because ‘uglification’ is a way of mocking the French preoccupation with appearance. Minna teaches Lili to be more assertive with the landlord who takes advantage of her inexperience to deny her heating in winter. Through Nick, who teaches at the same school, she develops an intense friendship with his girlfriend, a young English artist called Minna. She’s a twenty-something teacher from Australia, settling into Montpellier in the south of France. As a migrant myself I consider it a privilege to have been accepted as a migrant when there are millions of people around the world fruitlessly seeking a new homeland. It’s hard - of course migration is hard, change is always hard. FWIW The ‘migrant as victim’ is an offshoot of identity politics that I reject. Well, I’ll leave that to others to judge, but I will comment on her idea that migrants are viewed as gimmicky citizens whose worth is constantly questioned. her belief that migration turns lives upside-down, and she expresses her anxiety that publishing the book this way might be seen as gimmicky. I can’t see that this experiment in format makes much difference whichever one is read first, though perhaps Lili’s story might put you in a better mood…ĭe Kretser explains the reasoning behind this upside-down format at the Guardian, i.e. It’s packaged in an upside-down format so that the reader can choose whether to read ‘cherry-side-up’ first: the coming-of-age story of Lili in France or alternatively cherry-blossom-side-up: the satirical story of Lyle in the future. One, ‘the past’ is set in 1980s Montpellier, France, and the other, ‘the future’ in a dystopian Melbourne. Secondly, the ‘novel’ is actually two novellas, tenuously linked. So, firstly, the title is apparently a reference to a song by David Bowie? Well, I Googled the lyrics… and am none the wiser.
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