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Letter to Pessoa By Michelle Cahill Giramondo, 256pp, $24.95
The Love of a Bad Man By Laura Elizabeth Woollett Scribe, 232pp, $27.99
Michelle Cahill's collection of short stories Letter to Pessoa has been many years in the works, and its intricacies and its subtle incisiveness are exceptional. Savouring each carefully constructed sentence of each reworked piece is a reminder that a writer's talent lies not in an ability to string sentences together, but almost wholly in the choices of what to write about, and how. Cahill is an Indian-Australian writer: a Goan-Anglo-Indian poet and essayist who was born in Kenya, lived in Britain and has long resided in Sydney.
"I spent my formative years in three countries, not one of which was the country of my origin," she has said. "I guess my writing reflects a sense of fragmentation caused by the movement between countries and cultures." This multifaceted identity is explored throughout these stories. They are terrifically varied in place, voice and time. Cahill is being regularly compared with Nam Le, and the comparison is apt: like Le, she allows us small glimpses into the lives of people from everywhere and anywhere.
These small intimacies, these vignettes without beginnings or endings or much in the way of plots at all, allow us inside rooms, inside lives, inside the minds of her characters.
The decision to title the collection after the story Letter to Pessoa is telling: each fiction here represents a heteronym of Cahill, a global citizen and an artist interested in existence. She isn't afraid to both pay homage to and sneer at canonical writers -- and understands you can...