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Félix Calvino’s short novel tells
the story of a young man who moves to Australia to escape Franco’s Spain. The
strange thing about the book (given that its author has spent so long in
Australia) is how unlike contemporary Australian literature it is. David
Malouf has championed Calvino, but then there has always been something
essentially Mediterranean about the author of Ransom. Flaubert was
uncompromising in his belief that the author’s opinions and even ideas should
remain absent from a work of literary art. If the French master thought the
novel of ideas was a degraded thing, what would he have thought of the
Australian ‘novel of issues’, the books (we all know them) that might have
been written off the back of an episode of Q&A. Alfonso bolsters no
Australian cultural myths, nor does it succumb to the equally tiresome genre
that is ‘myth debunking’.
Calvino never reveals himself to
be so much a writer of foreign sensibilities as in his concern with Australia
rather than Australianness. Alfonso is a work of art rather than of ideology.
Its subjects are homelessness and belonging, love and estrangement. The lines
with which Calvino sketches his habitually, even wilfully lonely immigrant
man and his Australian romantic interest, Nancy, are as broad and hard as
those in Goya’s etchings, yet there is a quiet quality about the book, and in
the spaces between the words you feel the presence of deep running waters.
Says the principal character, ‘Beyond the plane was the universe itself,
nicely lit by uncountable stars for which, like his feelings, he had no
names.’
Calvino’s book paints rather than
explains. It has nothing to instruct you in. Like all true art, it invites
you into an experience, one well worthwhile.
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