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The emotional context of “Alone” is particularly moving.
novel
Solitary
Beverly Farmer
Globetrotter, $29.95
This reprint of the novel, set in the 1950s, reminds readers how difficult it was to be gay in Australia at the time, and makes us reflect not only on how writing has changed, but how the world has changed.
Giramondo has been republished Beverly Farms Her first novel was published six years after her death. The award-winning author is the author of four short story collections – she is known for milkHer last work of short fiction was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. This is waterIn 2018, he was awarded the Patrick White Award Her contribution to Australian literature.
Her links to modern writers include the sharp-eyed poet and novelist Josephine Rowe, who wrote that “Farmer’s wide-ranging curiosity and attention to microscopic significance make the reader pay closer attention to everything she lives, dreams, and observes”. This evident focus is a recurring feature of Farmer’s work, and her descriptions of places and characters are exquisitely detailed. A description of a Melbourne tram is of “the brick fortress of the brewery, with the tumbling stream hissing through the gratings of the street gutter. The red city baths. The doomed library, closed to-day, its porch blackened with ruins, squatting on the dark lawn.”
Beverley Farmer in 1995.Credit:
Farmer’s novels give a strong sense of place and emotion. The emotional context of Farmer’s 1980 novel is particularly moving. The story is about a young woman who lives alone in a rented apartment and wants to be a writer, but the plot takes a modern turn when the story develops that the woman is heartbroken by another young woman who has left her but is in love with her. It is similar to Patricia Highsmith’s novel ” The cost of salt As the young woman mourns her lost love, dejectedly reads modernist classics, and tragically engages in sex work to support herself, the oppressive notion that homosexuality is a vice hangs over the novel.
The poignancy of the emotional experience makes it a meaningful objection to the view that homosexuality is a crime or a disease, interpretations that were popular when Farmer wrote the novel. Solitary Its role is to critique societies that isolate queer people and pathologize selective sexual urges.
A moving exchange between two lovers, in which they vow to marry if it were legal, is a rebuke to outdated social mores that are oppressive and closed. Why, the novel asks us, is it more acceptable to pay for sex than to be forced to hide one’s love?
The most striking moment in the novel is when the heroine carves the word “love” on her chest, and it appears in the text as an illustration, along with a reproduction of a copperplate engraving, which was very advanced at a time when novels did not yet combine graphics with text.
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