Many of the stories in Australian
writer Felicity Castagna’s first collection, Small Indiscretions, occupy
a tantalising space, one imagines, between fantasy and autobiography. In almost
every case the protagonist is, like Castagna herself, a slight and quiet young
woman. In all cases she is wandering through Asia, white and normally alone,
variously hitched to men who likewise find themselves at odds with their
current landscape.
The renaissance of the short story
as a popular literary form is producing a great deal of very interesting work,
and it’s also providing young writers with a much more accessible platform from
which to launch their talents. Castagna’s own talent emerges in this
tantalising book, slowly but quite markedly, rising up by the fifth story,
‘Learning Indonesian’, and striking the reader with a subtle despair and a
palpable anxiety about the way a white Australian engages with her Asian
neighbours.
Each story in the collection is set
in a different Asian country, and the reader is normally plunged immediately
into the torment and psychological drama of that story’s heroine. In the
collection’s eponymous story, for example, an elderly Australian woman and her
husband feel forced by the cultural restrictions of Brunei to behave badly and
childishly, and in the story ‘Transition’ a feckless young teacher escapes to
Hong Kong only to meet one of her old students, who manages to seduce her in an
offhand and mysterious fashion.
Part of the pleasure, of course, in
reading such a book is that almost every writer has, at some inspired point
along an extended journey, decided that they too are capable of producing just
such a wonderfully Maugham-esque collection. And part of Castagna’s cleverness
is in acknowledging this writerly envy, placing her heroines at cafes in
Vietnam or Laos where they write stories and tell lies about themselves, making
the decision to fictionalise their encounters rather than simply record the
facts in a journal.
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