https://shawjonathan.com/2022/10/07/antigone-kefalas-late-journals/ ( )

How should one review a published version of a writer's journal?

I've been pondering this since I started reading the Late Journals of Antigone Kefala, an Australian writer of Greek-Romanian heritage who writes in both Greek and English. Born in 1935 in Romania to Greek parents, she and her family lived in Greece and New Zealand before migrating to Australia in 1960. Over her lifetime she has published poetry, fiction, non-fiction, essays and journals. This journal is said to be her last.

But how to review it?

It's a journal, and even though it may have been written with an eye to publication and edited so that we read a polished product, it's still Kefala's personal reflections, in fragments. How can we 'judge well', as Angela Bennie says a reviewer should? There is artistry in the prose, and there are insights that are memorable, but I can't capture this in the form of reviews that I usually write.

Late Journals includes interesting fragments about Kefala's rich cultural life in Sydney, her musings on mortality and the loss of friends, and commentary on current affairs (though not the banality of politics). A scholarly reader would probably draw on themes and issues from previous works, and identify continuities and departures in this one. But I am not a scholarly reader, and I've never read Kefala before. It seems to me that the flavour of this work is best captured by sharing some of the fragments that resonated with me...

The fragments that most often meant more to me, were those that referred to what I found familiar (e.g. about Beethoven's music or Anna Akhmatova's poetry), or were opinions that I found intriguing, whether I agreed with them or not.

After a dance performance at the Sydney Opera House:

A clean, muscular performance, interesting dissonant music, the woman dancer very beautiful. More like acrobats. (p.3)

On reading an unnamed new book:

The poems, as if constantly saying something, yet an empty sort of phenomenon, like an artificial essence they put into drinks to make people want to drink more, but which leaves them empty. (p.5)

On reading an unnamed magazine featuring an unnamed writer describing difficulties with writing.

He was describing his efforts to become part of the Australian scene after he migrated here with his parents, by trying to mirror Aboriginal writing and approaches, to be told off by an Aboriginal writer with whom he shared a platform at a reading.

I thought last night — a deeper alienation than mine.

In my case neither mirroring nor mimesis, from when we left Romania, and even before that, I was aware that I was trespassing on someone else's territory. Constantly trying not to venture on their patch, appropriate, trying to define my limits, my territory, mostly inwardly, my experience, finding a language for it.

In spite of the intellectual gloss of the paper, nothing but inner desperation. (p.7)

To read more of the rest of my thoughts about this book, please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/08/09/sensational-snippets-late-journals-by-antigo... ( )