An Absence of Noise: Stephanie Buckle’s Habits of Silence and
Félix Calvino’s So Much Smoke
Review by Kathryn Hummel
Edited by Robyn Cadwallader
A land as
vast as Australia is well-suited to capturing through snapshots, for viewing
separately or stitched together in a panorama. In many ways the snapshots’
literary equivalent, works of Australian short fiction, are created regularly
and convincingly: idiosyncratic of frame but requiring no great effort to
locate them in the landscape from which they derive. Recent collections, Habits
of Silence by Stephanie Buckle and So Much Smoke by Félix
Calvino, have been put together with a similar assuredness and piercing eye for
capture, particularly concerning narratives marginal to the mainstream.
An
overwhelming weight could lie upon the whole mechanism
of speech,from the thoughts of what you would say, which
one by one are relentlessly rejected; to the courage
to speak them, which is consumed by the bile swilling
in your stomach; to the cringing, self-defeating apathy of
the tongue that would have to form the words. Silence is safe.
Silence commits to nothing.
Far easier to be silent than to speak.
of speech,from the thoughts of what you would say, which
one by one are relentlessly rejected; to the courage
to speak them, which is consumed by the bile swilling
in your stomach; to the cringing, self-defeating apathy of
the tongue that would have to form the words. Silence is safe.
Silence commits to nothing.
Far easier to be silent than to speak.
(‘The Silence’
p64)
Throughout Habits of Silence,
Stephanie Buckle
shows skill in examining the absence of noise from various angles, as if it
were a clear rather than cloudy proposition. In ‘Material Remains’, silence
becomes a Millennial tragedy, observed as texting and social media browsing and
distilled as isolation, a lack of intimacy and trust between a grieving
teenager and his mother: ‘I’m sorry I’m upsetting her but she’ll get over it,
like she’s got over Scott. I can’t deal with her. I can’t help her. I just want
to be left alone’ (p33).
Buckle’s
tone, bending through various characters and their narratives, is sharply
contemporary and as bleakly recognisable as any suburban backyard. ‘Lillian and
Meredith’ charts the romantic fascination Lillian, in residence at an aged care
community, develops for newcomer Meredith. Their separation isn’t as surprising
as sadly inevitable, initiated by carers and their institutional discourse:
‘Anyway, this is just the icing on the cake. She’s very inappropriate and
disinhibited around Meredith, it’s a really unhealthy relationship and it’s
upsetting the other residents’.(p15) Under the cover of silence, Buckle
articulates the act of feeling as primary and the consequences of reality as
secondary, although the stories she tells are far from fantasy. Frequently
addressing the politics, economics and ethics of aged and mental health care
facilities and the truncated emotional and erotic experiences of their
residents, Buckle erects a black mirror to reflect the socio-political climate
of their composition. Her writing evokes elements of Sonya Hartnett’s work,
without the gothic tones: even with occasional lapses into self-consciousness,
Buckle’s exploration is very real and just as frightening. In ‘Us and Them’, a
mental health facility doesn’t have the resources for intensive counselling
required by a resident; in ‘Frederick’, the need for psychiatric attention does
not come from patient to carer but from one carer to another.
With such
adherence to reality beyond the page, Buckle’s careful language often drops
below pared-down. In some stories, as in ‘The Silence’, which dwells on the
relationship between two elderly brothers, the understatement becomes almost
abstract, lessening the emotional draw. The final image of George looking ‘down
at his beer, turning the can slowly in his hand’ as silence ‘settle[s] around
them’ (p79) could perhaps indicate the futility of trying to break longstanding
silences, but doesn’t break through the surface of the characters’ suspension.
At other times, Buckle supplies some excellent visual sketches: ‘…another
glance, almost too quick to spot, slides off me’ (‘A Lovely Afternoon’ p83).
The dialogue between Buckle’s characters is at times uneven — unexciting
between Steve and Emma in ‘Choices’ and the hikers in ‘The Man on the Path’,
but well-observed and paced between allies Jeannie and Zoe in ‘A Lovely
Afternoon’:
‘Shelley’s
always getting me into trouble,’ Zoe says. ‘It’s not fair.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ I say.
‘My friend Lauren gave me a book, and Shelley can’t even read yet but she said we had to share it.’
‘Perhaps she’s jealous because she didn’t get anything,’ I offer.
‘Even if she had, she still would’ve wanted my book.’
When some people think you’ve got something you shouldn’t have, I want to say, they’ve just got to try and spoil it for you. (p84)
‘No, it isn’t,’ I say.
‘My friend Lauren gave me a book, and Shelley can’t even read yet but she said we had to share it.’
‘Perhaps she’s jealous because she didn’t get anything,’ I offer.
‘Even if she had, she still would’ve wanted my book.’
When some people think you’ve got something you shouldn’t have, I want to say, they’ve just got to try and spoil it for you. (p84)
The effect
created by the stories in Habits of Silence is cumulative, its
richness coming across in the details of dogged attempts to find value in
desolation and loneliness (‘Sex and Money’); the longing for intimacy in any
form (‘Us and Them’), and the silent tragedy of human beings going about their
rigidly patterned lives (‘Fifty Years’).
Félix Calvino’s So Much
Smoke is crisply
blurbed, setting up readers to expect semi-autobiographical stories from the
Galicia region of Spain and migration to Australia around the 1970–80s. While
the influence of journeys pulses evenly through the collection, Calvino is
expressively concerned with ritual, some of which bind his characters to their
origins, others signifying their physical and mental advancement in the world.
In ‘They Are Only Dreams’ and ‘The Hen’, the rites are of passage, with
children coming into, or attempting to come into, their identities as mature
beings; while ‘Valley of the Butterflies’ charts Julián’s entry into a darker adulthood
suggestive of manipulation and conscious harm. The unexpected confidence
between Pascual and the narrator in ‘What Do You Know About Your Friends?’ is
prompted by a ritual formed in a new setting:
Half a dozen of us, all in our
mid-twenties and all with no more than three years in Australia, were in the
habit of dropping into the pub late on Saturday afternoon for a few beers and a
chat on the way to our girlfriends, dinner, or just a night on the town. (p11)
The
preparation and sharing of meals is described as an integral part of domestic
life regardless of the degree of happiness within the home: ‘The Smile’ depicts
a lunch gathering where guests are lulled into silence by Consuelo’s
nostalgia-inducing home cooking, as well as a comfort meal of chicken and
potatoes following her death. Within Calvino’s wide exploration of ritual,
silence occasionally features: in stories of migration, where present dwelling
on past lives is regarded as a dangerous pastime, silence is a rite of
survival. Silence is also politicised through Gabriel in ‘The Dream Girl’, who
reflects on the choice of language as an expression of cultural freedom:
What right has a government to
subordinate—in the long run to murder—one language that is the property of
all to replace it with another language in the quest for personal and
nationalistic glory? (p120)
With So
Much Smoke, as with Habits of Silence, it is worthwhile to ask whose voice
is, in general, quietened — similarly to Buckle, Calvino articulates the
narratives of the lesser-heard. The characters he identifies as migrants are
shown dealing with implications of difference and the tension between their
origins and present locations. Pascual’s sharing of a family tragedy with a
fellow migrant is seen as ‘a flaw in the armour of his carefree mask’ behind
which, in the narrator’s opinion, painful secrets should remain (p15);
elsewhere, a group of friends reflects on ‘the life they had left behind and
what they missed most as migrants’ (p52), thereby reducing their feelings of
isolation. Told in implicit retrospect and with a sincere lack of ironic
reference to contemporary immigration policy, Calvino’s stories of migration to
Australia depict a Golden Age of this iconically hospitable and tolerant land:
Fidel remarks that ‘in Sydney, we had discovered peace and joy and
self-reliance. We were living our lives. The living like wounded animals
searching for a place to hide was over’ (p104). With the same lack of irony,
Calvino emphasises the fabled virtues of family, education, hard work and
fidelity when, for example, the uncomplaining José is rewarded with riches at
the conclusion of ‘The Road’. Given a non-laying chicken to slaughter, the boy
in ‘The Hen’ is told by his mother, ‘Make it quickly so she does not suffer…’
(p5); while the remembered recognition of his parents’ ‘rituals of love across
the kitchen table’ partially redeem the seedy John Benson of the eponymous
story (p33).These details, sanguine and unsentimental, have the effect of
illuminating a world beyond this variegated, rarely meritorious reality:
within So Much Smoke, as it should be outside the text, migrants retain
their humanity, education is a dignified goal, and culture and memories are
treasured and preserved.
Keeping the
reader engaged can be challenging for short fiction collections with multiple
narrative trajectories and emotional pitches. Calvino’s collection could
benefit from greater tautness, particularly in the lengthy central narrative
‘The Smile’, which includes an extended, dreamlike account of Fidel and
Consuelo’s backstory. At other times, the dialogue is blurred by a similarly
surreal tone that’s often formal, rather like a stilted translation:
‘Where does that broadcast come from?’
José asked.
‘The radio is Fidel’s baby,’ Consuelo replied. ‘Hasn’t he shown it to you yet?’
‘The radio is Fidel’s baby,’ Consuelo replied. ‘Hasn’t he shown it to you yet?’
(‘The Smile’ p83)
In the
dialogue-driven ‘They Are Only Dreams’, the same technique sets a portentous
tone, highlighting the threat that the anonymous girl’s augury poses to
peaceful village life. ‘So Much Smoke’ is murky in emotion and writing — ‘an
incestuous relationship between lantana and passionfruit vines’ (p29) — and
strewn with language (‘porch’, ‘mailbox’ and ‘apartments’) that seems too
modern to be a deliberate contrast against the story’s implied retro setting.
Quite possibly it is the nostalgic tint in Calvino’s writing that provokes a
comparison to bygone writers like Ernest Hemingway. Calvino is similarly lean,
and frequently elegant, in his powers of description: ‘After the leaves turned
gold, they tended to the corn and the potatoes and the wood for winter’
(p17). So Much Smoke is noticeably male-focused, with attention given
to inter-generational relationships and friendships between men; female
characters are present but lacking somewhat in dimension.
While Buckle
engages with and minutely examines reality to the edgy benefit of her work,
Calvino is more mellow and reserved without being detached from reality: both
occupy places of instantaneous belonging in the current literary landscape,
fulfilling a need to have short fiction emit starker and softer lights by
turns. Habits of Silence and So Much Smoke attest to the
valiance of short fiction of and in contemporary Australia, and to the intrigue
of the images captured by their authors.
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Kathryn Hummel is
a writer, researcher and poet: the author of Poems from Here, The
Bangalore Setand The Body That Holds. Her new media/poetry, non-fiction,
fiction, photography and scholarly research has been published and presented
worldwide (Meanjin, Cordite, Rabbit, The Letters Page, Prelude, PopMatters, Gulf
Times, Himal Southasian), and recognised with a Pushcart Prize nomination
and the Dorothy Porter Prize at the Melbourne Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing
Awards. Kathryn holds a PhD for studies in narrative ethnography and lives
intermittently in South Asia. Her activities can be tracked @ kathrynhummel.com.
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