Brian Castro is one of the most innovative and challenging
novelists writing in English today. By virtue of his childhood
migration from Hong Kong to Australia, he is an Australian writer,
but he writes from the margins of what might be termed mainstream
Australian literature. In an Australian context, Castro has been
linked with Patrick White because like White he is an intellectual,
deeply ironic, modernist writer. His writing can also be
comfortably situated within a wider circle of (largely European)
modernist works by Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin,
Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Gustav Flaubert, Vladimir
Nabokov, W. G. Sebald, and the list goes on. Castro s writing
conducts richly intertextual conversations with these writers and
their work. Castro s writing is linguistically and structurally
adventurous. He revels in the ability of good experimental writing
to open up imaginative possibilities for the reader. He strives
always to encourage his reader s imagination to embrace
heterogeneity and uncertainty. His extensive engagement with the
great modernist writers of the 20th century, combined with his
Australian-Chinese cross-cultural concerns make his work unique
amongst Australian writers. Castro s fiction is becoming
increasingly recognized for its brilliance around the world.
Readers and scholars, particularly from France, Germany and China,
are discovering the delightful challenges and rewards his writing
offers. In Australia, however, Castro s writing has often been
dismissed by academics and major publishing houses as being too
cerebral or too literary. He has been labeled a writers writer
because of the literariness of his concerns and the vast sweep of
intertextual references that inform his narratives. Castro s
writing demands a committed, intelligent and passionate reader. He
constructs narratives of absences, gaps, and multiple perspectives
in the expectation that his reader will make the necessary
imaginative connections and, in a sense, become the writer of his
text. Castro has stated that the kind of novel he most enjoys
reading is one he does not understand immediately, one that
requires him to search out references and make discoveries. This is
the kind of novel he writes. Perhaps, for this reason he has not
attracted the large readership his work deserves. This study of
Castro s fiction has two major objectives: to open up multiple
points of entry into Castro s texts as a means of encouraging
readers to make their own imaginative connections and to explore
diverse ways of reading, as well as to initiate further published
scholarly discussions and readings of Castro s work. In this first
critical study of Brian Castro s work, Bernadette Brennan offers
original and creative readings of Castro s eight published novels.
Brennan guides the reader through Castro s elaborate semantics and
at times dizzying language games to elucidate clearly Castro s
imaginative concerns and strategies. She opens up the many
rhizomatic connections between Castro s work and the multitude of
texts and theorists that influence it and with whom it converses.
And through all of this, she stays true to Castro s imaginative
project: to remain always open ended, always gesturing towards
possibility rather than certainty and closure. Brian Castro s
Fiction is an important book for all literature and Australasian
collections throughout the world.
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