Alcheringa
The Eternal Dreamtime
Betty Villeminot
Translated from the French by Eric Baker
Betty Villeminot’s prize-winning novel, in Eric Baker’s sensitive English translation, is the first work of fiction to open the complex world of Aboriginal spirituality to lay readers. With her anthropologist husband, Jacques, she lived for many months with a tribe in the Northern Territory, still untouched by European settlement. They learnt the language and were accepted into the tribe, she into the ‘women’s business’, he into the men’s. They continued to visit the tribe for several decades afterwards and witnessed the gradual disintegration of its traditional life as Europeans encroached upon its territory. In the person of the central character, the tribal Elder, Nari – the Grand Sage, the Great Man of Wisdom – Mme Villeminot gives us a unique insight, from the other side of the fence, into the intricate system of beliefs and relationships of one of the oldest of the world’s civilizations, particularly into its mystic attachment to the land and all its natural phenomena. The book should be compulsory reading in Australian schools so that coming generations of Australians, unlike their forefathers, may come to realize the enormity of the task that confronts them as they pursue the urgent imperative of reconciliation, so that a great historical injustice may be set right: to the extent that this is still at all possible.
For the Defence
R.P.St. Leon
John Miller(Johannes Müller), gifted musician and naturalized German immigrant, is on trial in the Sydney Central Criminal Court for the murder of his sister-in-law. In his final address to the jury, Defence counsel, Richard Harper KC, traces a story of racial prejudice and the calculated exploitation of frustrated ambition and asks: Do circumstances indeed alter cases? A searching scrutiny of the judicial system, and an important social document.
Chicken Street
Amanda Sthers. Translated from the French by Eric Baker.
Set in Kabul, after the fall of the Taliban, the novel depicts the pitiless application of Sharia Law to Naema, an innocent Afghani girl, and Alfred, her Jewish protector. The scene extends to New York and Los Angeles, and the fate of the family of Peter Shub, Naema´s casual wartime lover. A clash of cultures, and a moving account of private lives at the mercy of fanaticism and social prejudice by the brightest young star on the French fiction and dramatic horizon.
Kafka's The Metamorphosis
--A Myth of Jewry
R.P.St. Leon
The first Book in the series ´Franz Kafka and Jewish Mysticism´. This startling book gives an entirely new direction to Kafka research. Though written for the layman, it ranges over the whole gamut of philological and aesthetic problems posed by study of the author´s work, and orders him into a long tradition of Jewish myth–making, largely by–passing the bewildering jungle of academic secondary literature and finding its sources in the documents and preoccupations of Kafka´s own time and place. In the Pan-Babylonian Movement of the early 20th Century and the Kabbalistic revival, it finds the key to the ´mythical style´.