David Malouf

Tonight's university class was the second of two on David Malouf's An Imaginary Life. I read it for the first time about two year's ago (which is the last time I thought about preparing to return to university). I have to admit that before then I had never read anything by Australia great Romantic; never even heard of his imagined life of Ovid. Well, now I have.

It's an impressive read. I've no idea if the text takes me inside the head of the exiled Roman poet. Who could know such a thing? But the short novel certainly did take me inside the head of some imaginary other. I believed I was with someone crossing the frozen land of a hostile Black Sea hinterland. I could picture the Shaman drifting into a trance. I felt the scorn and suspicion of hard-working woman who felt the arrival of the wild child posed some kind of threat.

That seems even more impressive to me (as a late reader) given that so much of the novel evokes the tensions of post-colonial Australia. In some senses only an Australian could have conceived and written the text. Good stuff. Well worth the read.

I let loose my worse nature in tonight's class (although I doubt that anyone noticed). I struck a pose; made an observation about sentence construction in the novel and asked a question that was too clever by half (about what constitutes good or bad writing ... as if I didn't already know what ideologically loaded terms those are). It would have been better for me and more interesting for everyone else if I'd used this brain of mine (size of a small planet in a far off galaxy) to real effect. There is no need or benefit to underplay one's interest, intellect or perception. Why bother Dougie? You'd still have much to learn by asking questions that you don't actually know the kind of answer a tutor is likely to give (which she did).
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