Vrasidas Karales

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.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/05/18/the-glebe-point-road-blues-by-vrasidas-karal...… (more)