Yumna Kassab is a writer from Western Sydney. Her work has been featured in Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin and the Sydney Morning Herald amongst. Yumna’s debut book is the critically acclaimed and much prize listed, The House of Youssef.
The subject of today’s book club is Yumna’s debut novel Australiana.
Australiana takes us to the north-eastern New South Wales region around Tamworth, an area Yumna lived for many years as a teacher.
Across diverse and interwoven sections Yumna weaves a tale of a region overwhelmed by drought and struggling to reconcile itself to the threat of oblivion that the lack of rain brings.
The book travels across literary styles and moves through time to evoke the region and the people who live there.
The opening section entitled The Town moves in tightly narrated vignettes that link each other via small details, almost talismans. Yumna describes her inspiration as the tales of the One Thousand and One Nights, where every evening the story dangles linking to the next to ensure the continued telling and life of Scheherazade.
In the interlinking tales I felt the kinds of bonds of community that bring people together. Whether near or far everyone knows a little something of each other and these links forge the greater whole.
In the telling of the stories in Australiana we become privy to the minds of the town, riding alongside them as they face the increasingly dry landscape. In these perspectives we see something of what keeps each person on the land and the extremes that may yet drive them off it.
In the section entitled The Blind Side we sit and listen as the narrator tells the story of Barry to Barry’s son. Now missing, the narrator weaves a tale that encompasses a group of young friends moving to the city and their various fates away from the town.
As the only one to return to the town they grew up in, the narrator has some suspicion and disdain for his old friends but remains steadfast even as Barry finds himself with the town turning against him. Through the changing fortunes of Barry and the struggle of the narrator to stay true to his friend we learn a little more of how the land pulls at people in a way that perhaps we can never know in the city.
Australiana is a unique and fascinating novel, both for its subject and its ever shifting style. The name Australiana seems to evoke a kind of nationalistic kitsch. I imagined Henry Lawson and Dorothea McKellar kicking the footy while Banjo Patterson burns sausages on the barbie. But the result is a work that challenges the sacred cows of white Australian ruggedness whilst also asking us to look closer at environments that we often take for granted or see as only regional jaunts.
In describing the book, Yuman Kassab told me she shys away from the term ‘novel’ in favour of an ecosystem. The book seeks to encompass the human and non-human, living and organically inert to more fully encompass place and life.
The book is at turns serious and absurd, challenging and evocative and offers a unique perspective on our world.
Yumna Kassab’s Australiana is out now from Ultimo Press.
Book Club is produced and presented by Andrew Pople
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