5 Questions with Brian Castro
Brian Castro was born in Hong Kong of Portuguese, Chinese and English parentage. He is an award-winning author of eleven novels and in 2014 received the Patrick White Award in recognition of his significant contribution to Australian literature.
He speaks to Liminal about his latest novel, Chinese Postman.
No.1
Brian, to many of us in the Liminal community, you are considered a respected Asian Australian elder who has never dared to limit himself even within a harsh racialised Australian publishing landscape. You inspire us to continue troubling the idea of borders and nationality. Do you ever think of a legacy? How does that word make you feel?
Thank you for compliment and title! I think Chinese Postman is circling around the idea of being an ‘elder’. There is great respect for elders in Indigenous culture. In Western cultures one is seen as doddery and past the used-by date. This is another kind of border to cross. I don’t think so much of a legacy, as much as having pioneered a conscious moment in Australian letters, when Birds of Passage insinuated itself into the scene. I believe it was, at the time, the only instance of a Chinese narrator grappling with goldfields racism and its legacy in the form of White Australia. As for me, I only hope readers will stay the course when I disappear.
No.2
Knowing your bibliography, you have had fecund periods particularly in the 1990s and 2000s. Your last book was 2017’s Blindness and Rage, which curiously mirrors the time between the publication of Birds of Passage (1983) and Pomeroy (1990), your first and second books. This might be an annoying question, but do you think there will be more to publish post-Chinese Postman?
At the moment I’m going through a hiatus … call it what you will … post-natal anxiety-depression, perhaps. The thing with age is that it takes longer and longer for water to seep into the well. And, as Hemingway said, don’t write if there’s nothing in the well. Far be it for me to travel to a war-zone now, but even a small adventure of the interior kind would require much energy for an explosion of subjectivity to the point at which linear forms no longer work. I’ve always had a dispute with narration, since it traps the reader in immersion, like a drowning dragonfly. (Are writers part of the entertainment industry? Are books pastimes?) I try to hold to a truth (yes, let’s bring back the power of that word) faintly brushed by emotion. There should be time set aside for thinking, for focused thinking, rather than just reading or writing.
No.3
What does your editing process look like?
If you mean the process of self-editing, then it’s always at the level of the sentence. I write mini-pieces, then expand them into flowers. The process is very rigorous. ‘Creative’ writing, which is almost an oxymoron (perhaps only distinguishable from form-filling), something which is already generated by AI, must strive to use different muscles honed out of intense interior experiences. It’s a poetics of brevity and stringency.
No.4
At one point in Chinese Postman, your protagonist Abe thinks to himself: “how frivolous are books without the engagement of the writer in total desperation?” What desperate books endure in your memory?
Yes, writers are composed of all kinds of desperadoes critiquing their world, in flight from society. From the stuffy dining-room of Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters:
They saw that I was the observer, the repulsive person who had made himself comfortable in the wing chair and was playing his disgusting observation game in the semidarkness of the anteroom, more or less taking the guests apart, as they say…
to Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, leaning on grim irony, absurdity, and wordplay and leaving stains from the mess of a life.
No.5
What has writing taught you about yourself over the decades?
Don’t expect much. Build as much as you can. I think that in most of my novels, perhaps in every single one, there is an element of architecture, of trying to build or create a home, flawed as it is. You only know yourself by reflecting the self back into fiction; it’s like one mirror set against another; there’s an infinite corridor. Perhaps that’s what the self is: a never-ending tunnel hoping to find a non-existent home. And behind you the train of time is coming.
Find out more
Abraham Quin is in his mid-seventies, a migrant, thrice-divorced, a one-time postman and professor, a writer now living alone in the Adelaide Hills. In Chinese Postman he reflects on his life with what he calls ‘the mannered and meditative inaction of age’, offering up memories and anxieties, obsessions and opinions, his thoughts on solitude, writing, friendship and time. He ranges widely, with curiosity and feeling, digressing and changing direction as suits his experience, and his role as a collector of fragments and a surveyor of ruins. He becomes increasingly engaged in an epistolary correspondence with Iryna Zarebina, a woman seeking refuge from the war in Ukraine.
As the correspondence opens him to others, the elaboration of his memories tempers his melancholy with a playful enjoyment in the richness of language, and a renewed appreciation of the small events in nature. This understanding of the experience of old age is something new and important in our literature. As Quin comments, ‘In Australia, the old made way for the young. It guaranteed a juvenile legacy.’