![]() “It was the beginning for me of thinking about why some people had history, and other people had lives,” Lili explains. Lili watches as north African immigrants are rounded up and removed from the city centre – the precious le centre historique – while French schoolchildren proudly read about Camus’s L’Étranger killing an Arab, and treat it all as existential metaphor. It’s a red world of lipstick stains, blood clots and ripe-swollen cherries of horror-movie jitters. ![]() The European papers are full of blood-spattered tales of the Yorkshire Ripper, and Lili’s downstairs neighbour is creepily attentive. Lili’s tale promises nostalgia – dappled light and hopeful youth – but her memories are laced with menace. But is it a bond of mutual affection, or just another costume in wealthy Minna’s moral wardrobe, a friendship she wears for show? When she meets the flamboyant, punkish Minna – a girl alive with subversive art projects and grand aesthetic theories – a friendship flares into life. She’s tired of living tentatively, cowed by that unspoken Australian pressure “to creep and pass unnoticed” – to be a model immigrant. “In those days I believed the past could be left behind like a country,” she remembers.Īlone in her student rental, with its rationed heat, Lili yearns for some kind of kindred recognition, to be seen. It’s the closing months of 1980 and the French election looms, with the possibility of an era-defining progressive swerve. She’s young and clever and “streaked with unfocused ambition”. Lili is teaching English to high-schoolers in the south of France, waiting to hear if she has been accepted to postgraduate study at Oxford. This novel reminds that memory is a kind of poltergeist – its own scary monster.Īnd so we begin with Lili (past) or Lyle (future): two immigrant Australians, both of Asian heritage. Is there a question lurking in the first story that the second might answer? Is it the same question that would emerge if they were reversed? We cannot truly know, for what we encounter in the first half of Scary Monsters will haunt the second. And knowing that we’re responsible for the shape this book takes makes us all the more attentive – alert to wormholes and echoes, and de Kretser’s briar wit. Continued abuse of our services will cause your IP address to be blocked indefinitely.There’s a whiff of gimmick about it, but also that rarest of high-literary delights: play. Please fill out the CAPTCHA below and then click the button to indicate that you agree to these terms. If you wish to be unblocked, you must agree that you will take immediate steps to rectify this issue. If you do not understand what is causing this behavior, please contact us here. If you promise to stop (by clicking the Agree button below), we'll unblock your connection for now, but we will immediately re-block it if we detect additional bad behavior. Overusing our search engine with a very large number of searches in a very short amount of time. ![]()
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