Australian Women Writers’ Challenge
02.26.2014
I love doing the Australian Women Writers’ Challenge!
Verity La
12.11.2013My story ‘The Expatriate’ is in the latest edition of Verity La. Read it here
Review
11.11.2013Read James Tierney’s lovely review of Holiday in Cambodia in The Australian.
Conversations tinged with memories of Cambodia’s catastrophic past
JAMES TIERNEY THE AUSTRALIAN NOVEMBER 09, 2013 12:00AM
IF the long drink of a novel is a bottle of wine, a shortstory collection is a line of shot glasses. Brimmed with a different liquor, each nip encourages the reader to the next but risks masking the flavour of the last.
As perhaps a response to the imperative of the turning page, recent collections such as Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge or Karl Taro Greenfeld’s Triburbia test the line with stories that both stand alone and function as a fragment in a single resonate read.
In her debut collection, Holiday in Cambodia, Melbourne writer Laura Jean McKay plays this trick in a subtly encompassing way. All set in the titular country, these unostentatiously wrought stories look at the residual effects on their characters of the low, persistent fallout of catastrophe.
Holiday in Cambodia’s 17 tales swing
from the perspectives of Cambodians to
those of outsiders (mostly Australians) in
almost equal measure. The back and forth in this cannily sequenced collection creates an impression of dialogue, reminding us that one of the functions of fiction is to be an empathetic part of the present conversation about the past.
The buzzing necessity of money informs more than one of these interchanges. In Taxi, Adam’s naive mistake turns to sulky offence once Sopea, the sex worker he’s taken to a hotel, asks to be paid.
Kim, a roadside bookseller in Tell Me Where to Run, is marooned from school by the changing focus of international charity and then by more than one type of theft.
Exploitations past and present often indirectly bookend these stories.
From the selfsatisfied lassitude of the French Indochine period, to the suck towards disaster of the neighbouring Vietnam War, to globalisation’s vanguards of clothing factories and the tourist trade, McKay has a keen eye for the personal effect of large events:
Out in the night the water coming into the country met the great force of the water going out.
McKay looks sideways at Cambodia’s often sorry history. Only in one story, Congratulations on Your Happy Day, is the Khmer Rouge genocide considered directly.
Ravi, once a wedding singer, is taken from the mud of a collective farm to perform at a forced mass wedding (in which she is also one of the brides).
When she sings, “You will always stick together, like grass seeds made wet by the rain”, it’s a reminder that grace is found only after survival.
Otherwise, the consequences of that dark time eddy out. All the Gold in Phnom Penh uses the folklore that family savings were secreted away in house walls before the Khmer Rouge emptied the capital to point out the persistence of fear.
In A Thousand Cobs of Corn landmines are described as shifting about “like worms” in the muddy fields during the rainy season.
It’s a mark of McKay’s considerable skill that the detritus of large events doesn’t ever threaten to overwhelm her vivid, wellrealised characters from the clueless tourists travelling on a train line under threat from the Khmer Rouge, to a hotel maid singing, with hesitant joy, Hey Jude in Khmer with rolled rs and flattened vowels, to the numb recognition of a wife’s waning interest in her marriage.
The range of perspectives offered across these stories works like word of mouth, building a picture of a country on trust.
Only in Vampires from Cambodia, Susan from Australia are the parallels of addiction too obviously drawn.
There’s a quietness to McKay’s prose that recalls Anne Carson’s advice that “reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it”. The stultifying heat in a factory is described as “though someone had packed the sky into a box”; the coming wet season presaged as “a rumour about to be true”.
Holiday in Cambodia ends with a remarkably assured Graham Greenelike colonial tale, The Deep Ambition of Rossi.
It’s set during a 1951 bathing suit competition, and the blight of entitlement whether of the colonial bureaucrats or the royal patronage system pricks on the tongue like sour gin.
Holiday in Cambodia
By Laura Jean McKay Black Inc, 224pp, $24.99
James Tierney is a Sydneybased writer.
Holiday in Cambodia in Cambodia
10.18.2013I am delighted and excited to be launching Holiday in Cambodia IN CAMBODIA at the wonderful Monument Books and Toys Cambodia on Saturday 19th October, 5.30pm for a 6pm start. I will be doing readings from the book and special guests Chakriya Phou and Sok Chanphal will be reading from their work. If you are in Phnom Penh, please come along.
Women of Letters tour Indonesia
09.12.2013I am extra specially excited to be joining Women of Letters on a tour of Indonesia in October to present workshops in Jakarta and Yogyakarta. Marieke Hardy and Michaela McGuire will be running shows in both cities, showcasing the letters of some incredibly talented women, before we all head off to the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival.
You can read more about the tour here.
I was in Bali earlier this year for the wonderful Bali Emerging Writers’ Festival.
Holiday at Avid Reader, Brisbane
09.03.2013Brisbane writers and readers, I’ll be in conversation with Kári Gíslason on 10 September at Avid Reader. EXCITING!
To book go to: Avid Reader
Melbourne Writers’ Festival
08.15.2013Goodness me I’m looking forward so much to MWF this year! Especially to being a part of some of the kickarse events, like MADE in Ballarat, ‘global voices’ with Tao Lin and Ali Alizadeh and the closing night party where I’ll be revisiting a naked past on stage with Tom Doig. To find out more go to the MWF website.
Holiday in Cambodia book launch
07.25.2013A few pics of the wonderful people who came to the Readings Carlton launch of Holiday in Cambodia, including the brilliant official book launcher, Anna Krien.
Photos by Robert Harding.
The expatriate podcast
07.23.2013Listen to a reading of my short story ‘The Expatriate’ from Holiday in Cambodia. You can hear this online or download it as a podcast by right clicking and selecting ‘save video as’. Enjoy!
LISTEN TO The Expatriate
Debut Monday – 22 July
07.12.2013In which Vanessa Russell, Terry Jaensch and I read from our books at the Wheeler Centre! More details here.
