The eyes of Dr Bob Wood are two
metres high and follow you wherever you walk in the main street of
Dockside.
The Invention of
Everyday Life
is a sparkling novel of observation. There is no central character and
barely any speech or dialogue. It is a group portrait with persons,
locales, fruits, creatures, vegetations and sand. We meet Mrs Caminiti
the only female butcher, the photographer dreaming of a lost Prague,
the six year old prodigy who speaks solely in mathematical formulae,
Zoltan Blum the sad drycleaner, Ivanka a young girl fascinated by the
lives of the saints.
The canvas shifts through the ravages of time in human life and its
environs. The Invention
of Everyday Life
reveals a community: unpretentious, tinged with sadness and
Stasko’s great feel for beauty in the natural world. It
inveigles
us like a Cup-goer’s fascinator. It dazzles because it
floodlights the ordinary.
Her
control, both emotional and poetic, is awesome... a triumph of critical
and creative distance from the autobiographical self.
Don Anderson,
The
Sydney Morning Herald
I
Water Views
Geography
I 3
The
Surgery 4
Water
Views 5
The
Lovers 7
Trawling
9
Mercy
11
The
Eyes of Dr Bob 13
The
Female Butcher 14
Skyline
with Chimneys 16
The
Photographer 18
A
Window 19
Point
of View 21
Monsoon
23
Shoes
25
The
Coming of Artichokes 27
Portrait
of Vincenzo d’Orti
28
Lives
of the Saints 29
Rosettas
31
Like
Many 33
Eggshells
35
Such
is the Weather 36
II Interior With Eggplants
The Catch
39
Shells
40
The
Jacaranda Bird 42
Interior
with Eggplants 44
Things
46
The
Wardrobe 48
Meat
Carriers 50
The
Blue Bucket 51
Umbrellas
53
Weaving
54
A
Little Piece 56
Those
Shining Knives 57
Heat
59
Flotsam,
or Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder
61
Roses
of Saint Alban’s 62
The
End of Summer 63
At
the Greengrocers 64
The
Story So Far 66
III New Wine
Fig Trees at Sunset
69
Afternoon
71
The
Worm Diggers 73
Diary
75
New
Wine 76
Still
Life with Jars 78
Letters
79
Sincere
Dry Cleaning 81
Light
83
Full
Moon in Autumn 84
Toes
86
Flowers
87
Stepping
into a Crowd 88
A
Greater Place 89
A
Plot 91
Construction
93
Pesto
94
Glasses
of Water 96
IV The Language of Birds
Confession
99
Blind
Faith 100
Chairs
Not Talking to Each Other 101
Knitting
102
Soap
104
Dreaming
106
Inheritance
108
Waiting
110
Street
Scene 112
The
Language of Birds 113
Numbers
115
Handkerchiefs
117
The
Poet 118
Insomnia
120
The
Death of Ivanka Rizzo 121
Rain
122
Geography
II 123
Sophia
125
Construction
II 127
Abundance
129
Waiting
II 130
V Swept Away
Swept Away
133
Man
with Sunflowers 135
The
Wedding 136
With
Love all Things are Possible
137
The
Crystal Palace 139
Asparagus
141
The
Watcher 143
Deconstruction
145
The
Wardrobe II 147
Council
Work 149
Red
Poinsettias 150
Unknown
Man in a Crowd 153
Shifting
154
An
Ordinary Sunset 156
The
Schoolyard 158
Tomatoes
159
The
Sermon 161
An
Ending? 163
Epilogue 167
Back to top
Reviews
Between Virtue and Innocence (excerpt)
On prose poetry, tableau and imagistic fictionAdam Geczy (artist and poet)
Cordite, No. 6 and No. 7, 2000
“Its
art is not only in what is observed but the skill with which the entire
book is assembled, like installing a large photographic suite in a
difficult, demanding, at times inhospitable exhibition space.”
On The Invention of Everyday Life
...Why
there is such a dearth of support for prose poems, poetic fragments and
tableau fiction in Australia is perhaps best approached with a
statement about the beginnings of visual art in this country. Bernard
Smith opens the first major study of Australian art, Place, Taste and Tradition,
with ‘In older countries art has usually been, at its beginnings, the
handmaiden of religion, but in Australia it first waited upon science’.
An analogous observation might be made of Australian writing. It is
remarkable that our earliest poetry is dominated by narrative verse
with a strong leaning toward quickly cultivating a folkloric tradition.
Romanticism had made of folklore artistic content as the Graeco-Roman
myths; by appealing to local lore, the poet was able to stress his tie
with his immediate place, and the continuity of his voice to that of
the many, which folklore, as an inheritance of illiterate groups,
enshrined. Hence, with the aim of fostering a language which could be
shared, epic and lyric on one hand, the radicality of prosodic poetry
on the other hand, had no place. And it is only in the last twenty or
so years that the greater urbanised reading public do not feel the same
urgency as before in having to read about the country which it does not
and is indeed disinclined to inhabit. Nevertheless the comfort of
reading about one’s place - instating a history and making up for lost
time, has left a vast hole in Australia’s artistic habits which are
loath to nurture this form except in literary journals and quarterlies.
For the genre of the fragment is not necessarily experimental in the
use of the term to mean opaque writing for specialists, though it is
branded as such, despite the continental tradition of this approach and
continued use of this form by eminent exponents such as Deguy and
Ashbery, and by many younger poets in Germany where formal lines are
increasingly, as Baudelaire had wished, suppler.
I will end with
a recent work by Nicolette Stasko who, with David Brooks and Gail
Jones, is among the leaders of this form in Australia. In all three
writers the debt to Continental Romanticism leading up to Symbolism is
well evident. All have a strong tendency toward the visual and in some
cases, the oneiric, yet there is a notable development in the visual
referent for all three writers in that, while all three appear to be
deeply moved and influenced by all forms of painting as well as the
decorative arts, there is now the overwhelming presence of photography,
as if they had kept the form and genre up-to-date since the end of the
nineteenth century. It is a presence ubiquitous not exclusive to this
form: John Ashbery’s extraordinary Three Poems
are more like poetico-philosophic ruminations, fluctuating between
declamation and mellifluous inner mumbling, and Deguy works more with
the tension between the concrete force of words and sounds and their
meaning as the successor to the examples of Mallarme, Jacob and
Apollinaire.
Contrastingly, once the cover of Stasko’s most recent book, The Invention of Everyday Life is closed, and one looks up from the words, one feels as if one has just ‘read’ a photo-essay. It is a Spleen de Paris
but anonymously suburban and without the spleen. It is a prose
composition of a female flaneur (though her protagonist is in fact
male) in what could be any Australian city, and her mundane - prosaic -
observations are about whatever one goes about in living; living at its
most elementary: walking, shopping, staring out the window, passing
people on a bench; what occurs when one passes someone more than once,
and so on. Its art is not only in what is observed but the skill with
which the entire book is assembled, like installing a large
photographic suite in a difficult, demanding, at times inhospitable
exhibition space.
The preface bears this out. It tells of a
mildly strange and solitary woman photographer. It is as if the
author’s verbal visions are what is lasting of what the author herself
saw as lasting, the eccentric photographer’s pictures, plastered
randomly in the dusty window of her ‘modest studio’. The
author/narrator is ‘intrigued’ and follows her, first unobtrusively
then to encounter friendship. He is given a keepsake before her death.
Shortly afterward the narrator convinces the photographer’s sister,
arguing to her that they will only sit around and deteriorate, to
surrender the copious, disordered remainder of the photographs - ‘It
was difficult to believe that anyone could have produced an enormous
quantity of work that, from what I could tell, nobody had ever seen.’
The reader of course never sees them and the author professes to
inhabit them, colonising them verbally, travelling through them as a
guide and the fragmentary character of the rest is revealed to any
sensitive reader:
The narrative, if it can be called that,
better a constellation or archipelago, describes a double search. The
first, the narrator’s self-assertion within a sphere of existence which
is largely inconsequential; the other a hypothetical tracery of hunches
and suppositions based on a medium which is of her own; to make
relevant, to consummate perhaps, the images which would have been
discarded or would have moulded away, or if preserved, whose meanings
would have dissipated as all precise meanings do. Stasko’s narrator’s
effort of twofold restitution does not, she/he knows, restore anything.
The success of the book is, paradoxically, to register the opposite.
Exploring the small moments through and between these photographs, as
he jitters between a morass of partial records, petrified moments, the
minor and paltry deaths which are photographs, the narrator
intercalates into them his own transient (verbal) records only to
confirm - despite this twofold gesture of preservation - that there is
still alienating chaos in the midst of order-making art. Art may be
order prized from chaos - maybe. The terse and nimble violence of the
fragment is a concession to the order which art must have but, by
ripping it slightly apart, it leaves room for instability and with it,
a dangerous liveliness.
Samples from The Invention of Everyday Life by Nicolette Stasko
“A Plot
The
novelist is feeling pleased. Having altered somewhat its original
emphasis, his novel is going well for a change. It is now mainly about
a young woman who becomes a recluse after her lover kills himself in
her beauty salon because she wants to break off their seven-year
relationship.
In fact
the young man is only seriously wounded and in critical condition for a
while, but eventually recovers. It is the well-known heart surgeon who
is going to operate who is the one actually shot and killed, in a
suburb not far away. A different surgeon, soon to be equally famous,
performs the successful operation.
The young man’s family,
having never liked his girlfriend, have ‘a change of heart’, so to
speak, and relent in their opposition to the marriage. Long, emotional
discussions follow between the mothers, apologies, gifts are exchanged.
The engagement is announced and a trousseau planned. The Castel d’Oro
is booked for the reception. Soon a little van with tablecloths and bed
linen piled in the back begins to appear weekly in front of the young
woman’s mother’s house. There is an engagement party with truckloads of
food and drink and a bazoukia band so loud that the police are called by a distant neighbour who must not know the situation.
At
the wedding the bridesmaids will all wear pale blue and the groom will
wear a red carnation like a bullet hole over his heart.”
“Portrait of Vincenzo d’Orti
Vincenzo
d’Orti is a man who smells. Day in, day out, waking or sleeping his
nostrils register the world and convey it to his simple brain. Like
many, Vincenzo moves between thinking his life a torment and thinking
it a joy.
Outside his house grows a mean, gnarled lemon
tree—unusual, because lemons grow well in Half Moon Bay. The fruit is a
dirty yellow colour, not much larger than golf balls and just as hard.
There are almost no leaves. While Vincenzo’s wife complains bitterly
about the lemons, he is grateful that there is one less smell to
torment or gladden him.
Spring is always the worst. The first
delivery of mangoes, as the truck rolls down the highway from
Queensland—the smell reaching him from as far away as Werris Creek—soon
mingles with the tomatoes and flowers and onions in the huge produce
market in the centre of the city, a terrible cacophony of odours!
Rotten fruit, rat filth, chickens.
Vincenzo often joins his
neighbours on the surgery porch hoping for some relief, not unlike that
prescribed for hay fever. But aside from breathing continually through
his mouth, which of course cannot be healthy, swathing his nostrils in
scented cloths, or wearing an oxygen mask, there is nothing that can be
done for him. And he suffers.”
Back to top
Mundane Ascends to
Poetic Perfection
The Invention of Everyday Life
Stella Clarke
The Australian,
19 July 2008
Despite appearances, poets have scored from Sydney writer Nicolette
Stasko’s defection into prose fiction. So have readers.
Stasko
has published several critically acclaimed volumes of poems since her
1992 award-winning collection, Abundance.
Contemporary poets often feel relegated to a struggling niche market:
their works languish in an arcane zone, the haunt of small publishers
and literary magazines, excess to the concerns of the common reader.
This is a pity for Stasko’s beautiful writing, since she
celebrates precisely what is common; she finds ecstasy in the familiar.
In The Invention of
Everyday Life,
she shifts her perceptions into prose and manages to achieve an even
more candid celebration of the prosaic. She also pulls prose back
towards poetry, covers the rift between them and extends the
possibilities of prose.
Stasko is a poet of the mundane in the same way as Jan Vermeer was a
painter of domesticity. She meets 19th-century painter Jean-Francois
Millet’s definition of art, imbuing the commonplace with the
feeling of the sublime.
Though her sensibility is often redolent of artistic tradition, her
stylistic achievements are contemporary. The refreshing of perception
was a founding tenet of modernist art, and this is also a mark of her
success.
Yet Stasko’s revelations are managed with subtlety; she
startles
without strain or affectation. Hers is a calm intervention in the
quotidian, a strangely peaceful awakening.
The contents of the book read like a volume of poetry, but The Invention of Everyday Life
is an inventory of prose fragments. It seems to turn on meanings from
the root word, invent, asserting the artist’s impulse not
only to
create but also, more humbly, to record. It is a collage of
observations made from a flaneur-like perspective. Small, evanescent
pieces of lives gesture at the submerged complexity of existence in the
fictional town of Dockside, and at the water’s edge of Half
Moon
Bay.
The novella opens by mapping the geography of Dockside, a peninsula
split by a busy road, an axis of noise and pounding onrush. The highway
is briefly intersected by the flight of a spur-winged plover, which
models Stasko’s informing inspiration. Everyday life is
reinvented in the idea that every country, city and suburb is laced
with unmapped, domestic, human, non-human and elemental geographies and
topographies. The poet invites us to note the most transient signs of
life, of unseen tracks and working.
Many and various citizens of Dockside, with their private concerns,
move temporarily into and out of focus: a butcher, a dry-cleaner, a
photographer, an old Greek housewife, a man with no memory, a mother, a
dying girl. Not far away tiny, diaphanous sea creatures drift, ants
travel through dirt and birds make journeys.
People cook, rest, love, hope, wait, dream, breastfeed, grow old, or
fill their homes with shells from the bay. In ‘Interior with
Eggplants,’ there is a tableau that recalls Henri
Matisse’s
Still Life with Sleeping
Woman: a woman slumps on her kitchen table, saddened and
exhausted by the vegetables’ perfection.
Small things are cherished, seeds are planted. Stasko records such
things as light and shade on eggshell or wood, the texture of wrapped
soap.
Tellingly, a solitary novelist wonders how he might escape the
constraints of plot and write about happiness and ordinary things.
These fragments are not poems. Words are stilled into units of logic,
into sentences, rather than allowed to float and turn in space,
shooting out semiotic impulses like slivers of light. They are not
corralled into narrative, however, but work like poems, inviting
contemplation, generating their own significance.
Stasko’s Dockside is like the central London of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs
Dalloway,
a net holding myriad private moments. At one point in Woolf’s
novel, an aeroplane unites the attentions of unconnected characters
when it bursts from clouds above the metropolis. Consciously or not,
this is echoed in Stasko’s Half Moon Bay. Here, however, few
stop
to look up when a plane passes overhead, though the saw and roar of the
engines is deafening. For Stasko, it seems, it is not social convention
that weighs oppressively on the delicate webbing of private experience
(as it was for Woolf), but the relentless, blunting mechanical clamour
of urban existence.
Stasko demonstrates an ego-shucking shift. Readers can do more than
survive without story and character; they can thrive. As a poet, she
makes a refreshingly unconventional novelist. Hers is not an
anthropocentric vision and, goodness knows, ecologically speaking,
it’s time to get away from that.
She once wrote a nonfiction study of lives of oysters; here, jellyfish
multiply and drift amid pollution and plastic bags, water-birds
continue their delicate choreography. Exquisite natural miracles emerge
despite the barrage of commerce and brutal roar of traffic on
Dockside’s central highway that bookends the novella.
Vegetation and fecundity adorn Stasko’s inventory. She was
born
in the US, the daughter of Polish and Hungarian immigrants. She
migrated to Australia, settling for a while in different cities. She is
familiar with displacement. Her treatment of garden food feels like an
extension of roots. Her vision is civilised and culturally rhizomic.
The growing of zucchini and asparagus in Dockside serves an almost
atavistic purpose. There is a bottling of sun-fed fruits.
Preparations for winter include making salsa pomodoro, salting chillies
and covering artichokes. Basil makes a meticulous transit from garden
to pesto; all this in the shadow of massive semitrailers pulling into
petrol stations.
Her melodic focus on herbs, preserves and shaded, sacred interiors
feels like an archaic European idyll, smuggled in as an antidote to
asphalt and cacophonous trucking.
The music of The
Invention of Everyday Life lies in this perverse retrieval
of numinous domestic minutiae from the indifferent, rapacious jaws of
today.
Despite our mania for more and faster cars and roads, in this respect
we may have peaked. We possibly face a fuel-starved future, where we
may be forced to pull over and watch the tumbleweed. Viewed within that
frame, Stasko’s slow poetics are an early liberation and a
preparation. In any case, her invention of everyday life is as graceful
and compelling as Woolf’s early 20th-century experiment with
consciousness.
Back to top
The Invention of Everyday Life
Dominique Wilson
Wet Ink,
Issue 10, Autumn 2008
In New notes on E. Poe [1859], Baudelaire wrote: ‘An artist
is an
artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which
shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies
and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all
disproportions! Baudelaire could have been writing about Stasko.
Set in the township of Dockside on Half Moon Bay, The Invention of Everyday Life
transcends the geographical, creating instead distinct canvases where
the ordinary becomes extraordinary.
There are no central characters, no plot as such, and only minimal
dialogue. Rather there are scenes - sketches - as if the reader has
meandered, at random and unseen, into houses, shops, along the seawall
and through streets and alleys:
Six
pelicans fly slowly in circles high above Half Moon
Bay. On Garfield Street a barber in his tiny
shop carefully sweeps up the hair of his last
customer in anticipation of the next. Three blocks away
a large ginger cat cleans itself on the sunny ledge
of a brick wall, wary of the dog sleeping next
door. On the shelves of the supermarket, packets
of flour wait to become new bread.
Stasko’s images border on the mundane, yet display an acute
understanding of human condition - in their very simplicity,
the
inhabitants of Dockside become intriguing: Elini, who sleeps naked on
hot afternoons dreaming of her death, old Gladys Johnson, who considers
encroaching blindness almost a blessing, and Ivanka, whose death brings
a wave of fanaticism sweeping over the parish. Some characters appear
but once, others reappear, interact, or simply themselves become the
observers.
Although this is Stasko’s first fiction, she has published a
number of collections of poetry, winning the Anne Elder Award, and
being short-listed for the New South Wales Premier’s Prize,
the
Dame Mary Gilmore Award and the National Book Awards. Her understanding
of the form is revealed in her controlled, unpretentious prose, which
nevertheless reflects a keen eye and finely tuned sense of beauty:
‘Slowly turning as if alive, bottles idle in the shallows -
fat
green or brown blowfish dancing on their tails’.
You don’t read The
Invention of Everyday Life - you experience it, one
exquisite moment at a time.
Back to top
Ebb and flow of
everday life made new
Emily Maguire (author)
The Canberra Times,
8 December 2007
Reading
a metafictional novel can be like working at a cryptic crossword. The
cheeky winks and word play are good fun but in the end it’s
all
just so much diversion. At their best, however, such
novels work
to expand our understanding...
Acclaimed poet Nicolette Stasko’s The Invention of Everyday Life
could be read as an answer to Macauley’s questions [see
review of Wayne Macauley’s Caravan Story,
Canberra Times,
8 December 2007]. The point of literature, one feels after reading this
hypnotically lovely book, is not to impart information - something of
which we already have so much - but to discover new truths about
familiar things.
Billed by the publisher as a novel, The Invention of Everyday Life
is so different in form and content to most of its category that it
could reasonably be called an anti-novel. There are characters but no
protagonist. Things happen but there is no plot. The setting is vividly
described, but this is not a book about a specific place. What we have
are glimpses of lives and experiences presented without an authorial or
narrative filter to tell us what to think of it all.
There is one small, classically metafictional touch: a novelist
‘wonders why it is so difficult to write about happiness, the
ordinary things’. He wishes there was a way to fit into his
novel
‘the people who pass by - the dogwalkers and runners, old men
and
children, benchsitters and birdfeeders’ but, tellingly,
‘the plot will not let him’.
Stasko, unlike her fictional novelist, chooses the passers-by and the
ordinary things over the plot. The book is made up of scores of
vignettes and sketches, each lasting fewer than two pages, many focused
on the natural or man-made features of the town rather than human
action. All describe the stuff of everyday life in an extraordinary
way.
‘Shoes’, for example, is a contemplation of the
origin and
meaning of ‘two bags full of men’s shoes - hot old
or
throwaway but quite respectably heeled and soled’ found on a
park
bench. ‘Knitting’ shows us an old disabled woman
who thinks
of how her ‘feet, horny and gristled as salt. meat, rubbed
together in clean starched sheets with a papery sound, are still
capable of making her sigh in the bed at night’.
The many small moments of wonder and beauty, the glancing portraits of
individuals, the haunting moments of lonely contemplation, have an
accumulative effect on the reader. Rather than following
one or two
characters on a specific journey, as in more traditionally structured
fictions, the reader is drawn into the ebb and flow of an ordinary,
community. We may think this town and its inhabitants are familiar, but
Stasko’s tiny, perfect revelations make us view them - and
therefore ourselves - anew.
Back to top
The Invention of Everyday Life
PICK
OF THE WEEK
Cameron Woodhead
The Age, 20
October 2007
Not far into her debut novel, you can
tell Nicolette Stasko is a poet of some calibre. The Invention of Everyday Life
has none of the characteristics of a traditional novel.
There’s
no central character, the dialogue is sparse. Rather, like the sea that
frames it, this is an immersing fiction that ebbs and surges through a
community of characters. Stasko has a gift for imbuing ordinary lives
with compelling strangeness: there’s a female butcher, a
young
maths prodigy, a girl fascinated by the lives of the saints. The novel,
if that’s what it is, flits between them at tangents, held
together by arresting natural imagery and, more generally, prose that
is cadenced and lyrical, yet flensed of the pretension that sometimes
accompanies those qualities. For all its dream-like fluidity, there are
islands in Stasko’s book that create a starkly familiar sense
of
place.
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