The Age from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia • Page 110

8 Extra books THE AGE SATURDAY 1 AUGUST 1998 VAPERbaeks This posthumous publication confirms John Forbes's enduring place in Australian poetry A pure poet of impurities By FIONA CAPP Love of Fat Men Helen Dunmore Penguin $17.95 Picture: SANDY SCHELTEMA Bv John Forbes Brand! and Schlesinger, $17.95 KILX PORTER WHILE the title promises a provocative or outlandish style, this is a collection of rather slight, low-key short stories, set in Scandanavia, about the search for love. In the title story, a woman called Ulli is attracted to the lusciousness of fat men. She has a friend who loves macaroons and pastries. The problem Is, he is not her type. They go to a party where Ulli hopes to meet someone, but doesn't.

End of story. While there is a long tradition of stories in which nothing much happens, Helen Dunmore gives her reader too little to go on. The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright Nell Levlne Princeton University Press $95 FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT remains the most popular and celebrated architect of the century. Yet, within architectural circles, the creator of Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum in New York has long been regarded as a self-aggrandising folk hero, a rugged individualist who believed himself superior to all other mortals. To architects of the 1950s, who had embraced the "machine Wright's romanticism and attachment to the values of rural America made him seem out of step.

In this 500-page reassessment of Wright's oeuvre from the 1880s to the 1950s, Levine goes beyond the stereotypes to i analyse Wright's complex relationship to modernism and the deeply autobiographical nature of his work. RAISE of this posthumously published book is not a case of De Mortuis etcetera but rather of literary Justice being seen to be uuiici A arc oiiuiiK ui ivim i ui ubo a early death could have had us all scrambling to reassess his poetry favorably: instead, in Damaged into the brains beneath? death by stellar allure or lack of oxygen might follow, unless this prayer can save me, the way damaged glamour seeks out its opposite number and we move together, draped in the planets tingling aurora, thanks to our huge electric shoes. Indeed, the book is pervaded by apprehension of and withdrawal from love, always a condition likely to conjure up lyrical poetry. But love lives in nil the rooms of the house, not just the bedroom and the library, and Forbes finds it gets to him when he's listening to music, watching 'IV or picking up extra cash in Cultural Studies. Wordsworth's worry that the world is too much with us, getting and spending, must have seemed as strange to Forbes as it would have done to Alexander Pope.

I lis love lyrics are often as terse as anything in The Greek Anthology, that losers' manual. This is the way Humidity ends: But I'd prefer to be a beetle, the speed of my wings to keep me cool a million bright things to bash my head agnimt. Politics concerns him and he relishes its opportunities for stylish failure. A visit to the unreformed communist party of Italy was the high point of his stay in Rome, but he took in San 'Carlinn in Quattro Fontane and Santa Sabina as well. Tiepolo's Banquet of Cleopatra provides him with one of his most thoughtful poems about love's openness to envy.

It is a fine example of how something lives for him not in its description or its bar code but in the train of thought it arouses. This admirably pure poet of impurities will be badly missed. In his lifetime, he occupied a special position in Australian letters, the dite jokester in a world of threatening seriousness. Damaged Glamour is tragic at heart, but, as the Viennese say, not yet serious. Peter Porter is an Australian poet and critic based in London.

The Soccer War Ryszard Kapuscinski Granta $19.95 Glamour, we can hail his brilliance outright. Since poets, as Auden suggested, "dash forward like leaving other literary types floundering, it's doubly valuable to discover that some of the best of them improve as they go on. Forbes's early work had a brittle energy and panache that was almost free-floating. What many people noticed about it was the poet's familiarity with signs of the times, a world not so much hedonistic as compulsive. The pop and drug culture, the mythologies of friendship, the only half ironical summoning of Surfers Paradise glossiness, the right American models that very "damaged glamor" now brandished as a title all this the sensation-seeking public liked in his work.

Less often noticed was Forbes's shaping sense, his quest for that fugitive quality, a personal style. If his first enthusiastists marked him "low life, high he could also lapse into "high life, low A reviewer ought to declare his bias I thniiehr him ton resnectful of the minimalist Lyrical legacy: John Forbes's early work had brittle endergy and panache. DR1VF.N by an insatiable need to be where the action is, Ryszard Kapuscinski is the archetypal foreign correspondent. Inspired by his time as the Polish Press Agency's only correspondent in Africa and later South America, The Soccer War is a series of bizarre and chilling snapshots of a correspondent's hazardous life in a war zone. Implicitly, Kapuscinski casts himself as a kind of lunatic hero prepared to risk all for the sake of a story, whether he is venturing into the Congo's "heart of darkness" or sending dispatches from the "front line" of the soccer war between Honduras and El Salvador.

While his frenetic, impressionistic style is effective in capturing the mood of the moment, Kapuscinski's lack of reflection makes the book as a whole less satisfying than the individual pieces that comprise it. The Icon Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought Ed Stuart Sim To Do Them, A Floating Life, Speed, A Pastoral, Death, an Ode, and Europe, a Guide for Ken Searle. What seemed to prevent more of his output from reaching its potential was the poet's sheer intelligence, the fact that his brain wouldn't get out of the way of his drive for weightlessness. Damaged Glamour has corrected this: intelligence is on equal terms with sprightliness. The free flow of his lyrics carries a full kit of aphorisms and is not overwhelmed by them.

He writes, "Brackets excite me, a cross betweenmaths and sentiment, I guess" this in a poem generally about the layers of thought brought into play by radio and TV. Poets will applaud this observation of how brackets work. It's a flick of a back-pass by a premier-league player. Then there is its opposite, full-throated elegiacs with Keatsian additives, as in Satellite of Love. Oh tent of dreams! Where is your tailored lightsail guiding us? through what used to be the empyrean, but now is just where satellites go, to stamp like a giant foot, infotainment and game shows Icon $29.95 chic of Frank O'Hara.

What O'Hara awakened in him was the possibility of modern sprezza-turn, a lightness and courtliness with no need of any core faith. If too often the throw-away charm had its Kleenex aspects, nevertheless the best poems of Forbes's earlier days did achieve a spectral stylishness Four Heads and How TO LIVE in a postmodern world is one thing: -to understand what this means is quite another. Recognising there is no simple definition of postmodernism, this excellent critical guide takes a prismatic approach. It explores postmodernism in relation to a range of cultural and social disciplines including philosophy, politics, feminism, science and technology, architecture, television, literature and music. The second half of the guide is a dictionary of terms.

What emerges from a book like this is that we cannot understand postmodernism without a good grasp (if modernism. Perhaps this is why the term has provoked such hostility. It demands that we recognise, question, and even reject many of the concepts that have shaped who we are. Coming out tonight? PKX OF HE WEEK Pandora By Anne Rice Chatto and Windus, $24.95 KIMW1LKINS and stimulated. These moments "of "mingled and inexplicable beauty and horror" are Rice's trademark: "I twisted to see his face.

It was like that of a long-dead corpse dried in the desert, burnt black with a spine of a nose, and arched lips that seemed quite unable to close over white teeth and the two fangs he bared now as he looked at me." In plares, the shortness of the novel works against the potential scope of the story. It's a little rushed, hut still satisfying. Pandora is a complex and appealing character, and it's nice to have a female vampire to bond with for a change. (Some of us were getting a little tired of Lestat.) Pandora is recommended reading for all lovers of the strange and beautiful. It's a gorgeous adventure.

Kim Wilkins is a writer and student based in Brisabne. She is the author of The Infernal, Random House, $16.95. and getting involved in public debates about Ovid, Lucretius and Epicurus. But all is not well. Pandora is haunted by glastly dreams of blood thirst and an ancient Egyptian goddess.

It seems a charred and dying blood-drinker known simply as "the burnt one" is preying on the citizens of Antioch. The local cult of Isis has already called in an expert, a tall, hooded man, to help. Pandora meets this man and discovers it is Marius, her childhood love. But Marius is changed: his skin gleams, he has not aged in IS years, and he only comes out at night. And we all know what that means.

Rice has often been criticised for writing overblown, repetitive, purple prose. But her baroque style is perfect for the Gothic tales she tells. Layers of color, of sound and smell, are folded one on top of another lovingly. It's an invitation to indulge. Reading an Anne Rice book is like eating chocolate-dipped cherries in a candlelit bubble-bath, and washing them down with a glass of good red while a Debussy CD plays in the background.

It might make you feel a bit sick and headachy, but you love every moment of it. Pandora's initiation into immortality is accompanied by a similar kind of heightened sense experience to the one which Rice so expertly imparts to her readers: "(A) veil was lifted that had all my life hung between me and all things I heard water dropping from the flowers. Tiny drops striking the marble floor, the fall of a single leaf I heard the breeze move under the golden canopied ceiling. And the lamps and tongues of flame to sing." Her prose makes vampires of us all. In among the lush and beautiful descriptions, however, lurk moments of violence and revulsion, all the more potent because they come when the reader's senses are open background histories of some secondary characters.

The novel opens in typically glamorous Rice style. In a Paris cafe sits a vampire, with long brown hair and skin like marble, writing the story of her life and how she came by the ''dark gift" that made her immortal. Pandora starts life as the accom- plished and bold Lydia, only daughter of a rich Roman senator during the time of Augustus Caesar. Twice she meets the snowy-haired Celt named Marius, but her father forbids her from marrying him. After falling out of favor with the new emperor Tiberius, her family are slaughtered for suspected treason and she flees with the family's riches and the dying wish of her father echoing in her ears: "Live, Lydia." Lydia does, indeed, live.

She sails for Antioch, where she adopts the Greek name Pandora, so she won't be recognised, and goes about setting up a life for herself, purchasing slaves The Fragrance of Guava Conversations with Gabriel Garcia Marquez Plinlo Apuleyo Mendoza Penguin $17.95 INSTEAD bf fairytales, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's grandfather' would tell him gory stories from Colombia's civil war, while his grandmother kept him in a state of fear with tales of dead relatives who wandered the house. It is not surprising, given these memories, that Marquez dismisses the term "magical realism and insists that "there is not a single line in my novels which is not based on As he talks about his family, education, work, reading and influences, politics and superstition, Marquez emerges as an immensely likeable and large-spirited man. These conversations are colored by Plinio Mendoza's obsession with sex and fame. He is amazed Marquez remains faithful to his wife despite "opportunties Marquez deals with this harping about his fidelity with great aplomb. THERE was a time when vampires weren't charismatic, beautiful yet angsty young philosophers with fantastic dress sense.

But then came Anne Rice's 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire. Rice has written five novels in the Vampire Chronicles: the irresistible Lestat has replaced Bela Lu-gosi in our collective psyche as the archetypal bloodsucker, and countless wannabes have churned out adjective-drenched vampire stories. Pandora is the first in a series of short novels that supplements the tyampire Chronicles by providing I Xi Jttttll vJl.il I I "35 ROBERT GRIEVE! 30 July 16 August if August 5th -21st AUCTION Paintings exploring the lives of significant women. 2ND AUGUST NOON MAJOR ABORIGINAL ART GEORGIAN AND VICTORIAN ANTKXJTS DOULTON TORY UG COLLECTION 8 Uamr tan ol karat tadudina 26th Annual Mt Waverlcy Art Show Saturday 8th August till Monday 10th August Holy Family Hall, 236 Stephenson Rd, Mt Waverley Viewing times Saturday to Monday 10am to 9pm Over 1,000 paintings in Oil, Watercolour Pastel on display all for Sale, Many of Australia's Leading artists represented For details Contact Kris Figiel 9087-4 1 04 Proudly sponsored by Stockdale Leggo Mt Waverley Ph 9087-901 1 thliwaAtali. dottonne.

bd4 an dn and ait no Vtoitng TOOWIJ nooa i pa. Wome (for notation only norinrtns ft ANTIQUE AND MOOERN JEWELLERY 9 AUCTION 3RD AUGUST 7PM Viewing obon.ond Monday 3rd 3 Catalogue AvoHoMe Assistant Victorian Manager Musica Viva Australia, the national presenter of fine ensemble music, seeks a full-time assistant to work with our Melbourne Branch Manager. Musica Viva presents two annual Subscription Series at the Victorian Arts Centre, the Sun Microsystems Yarra Valley Festival at Domaine Chandon and non-subscription concerts. We also present Musica Viva In Schools performances and Countrywide concerts throughout Victoria. This is an ideal entry-point into arts administration for the successful candidate.

Responsibilities indude general clerical duties, assistance with concert presentation, sponsor and media liaison. We seek an energetic, versatile and highly motivated person with excellent telephone manner and computer skills, who can work evenings and weekends as necessitated by concert schedules. Salary: $30,000 Inquiries: (03) 9645 5088 Written applications with a recent photograph and names of three personal and professional referees by Friday 14 August 1998 Pttr Burch, Victorian Manager Muska Viva Australia of History PORTRAYALS Janet Goodchild-Cuffley wit knoQinQfy LondkKsape GLEN El A CITY GALLERY Recent Paintings EASTGATE GALLERY I 158 BURWOOD ROAD HAWTHORN 3122 TO: 9818 1656 I TH t5H127 I TH t5H 1M7 Cur Gtan EM HlwtfKHn Ml CiuHteM City MELBOURNE an exnifcufcm afpamtmgs by JFss ci Qp 5 QD CD 1AM1E Ted May PO Box 27. South Yarra VK 3141 Invitation to Submit an Expression of Interest OUR LATEST SHIPMENT Antiques from the South of France Inc. Architectural Antiques, Mrmrs, Desks, Dining Furniture 11th July -11th August Open Dally 10-1 (doMd Sunday) EDWARD CLARK ANTIQUES 08 Suttwtand Rd.

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