Panthers and the Museum of Fire (Jen Craig, Spineless Wonders)

The year 2015 is only in its early days, but already I know that Sydney writer Jen Craig’s novella, Panthers and the Museum of Fire, will be among my top reads for the year. Bold, original and urgent, Panthers is told in a modernist, stream-of-consciousness style by a narrator who is either literally the author, Jen Craig, or a projection constructed for the purposes of the text—something like James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in a contemporary Ulysses. Craig blurs memoir and fiction as the reader follows Jen, walking from Glebe to Surry Hills to return a manuscript to a deceased friend’s relations. On the way, Jen reflects on the text, crediting it with invigorating her sagging enthusiasm for her writing career. As she reflects, however, she also undertakes an excavation of her own psyche, her past and its implications for her future. Panthers is a complex work of fictionalised-memoir in the style of writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard and Sheila Heti. Fans of Joyce and Virginia Woolf may also be interested, as will many writers, I think. It is an experimental novella but surprisingly easy to read, and brilliant for the very ordinariness of its subject, the everyday reflections of a very human mind throughout the progress of a day.

Angie Andrewes is a bookseller and reviewer