Wild Gestures

The authorial voice keens, its intelligent and moody existential angst offers no answers as it articulates important questions about love, art and feminism, some of them 'conjured in therapy', but, nevertheless, the stories are full of hope - Um beijo - 'two feelings at once, of being cast away, and longing; a feeling of being shipwrecked and also sighting land' (133). (83) Hospitals and places of palliative care, bars and rooms in colonial places with Old Towns, and iconic writerly places (Buenos Aires, Paris, Berlin Zoo), especially beside the sea (old Goa, Tangiers, The Flaming Sword Hotel, Eden) offer moody settings. (187) Some of the best black humour appears in 'It Wasn't Stockhausen's' in which Bill Hare and his palliative care nurse Ivy struggle to create the narrative of his death: for instance, 'Even in the rainforest they still get cancer' (139); 'gastronomy bag exploding' (146); 'the sedative coursing through his system like a canoe flying over rapids' (151). Durneen has a thing about birds, referencing them indirectly - 'tipping her head as if to drink from her' (66), 'I came at the world from the shadows, hooded and shackled' (190) and 'smoke leaves my mouth like a bird ascending' (188) - and directly - a Festival of Birds and 'a cloud of birds ascend into an almost perfect arrow before forging ahead on some unseen thermal' (34, 76).