C.K. Stead: The Secret History of Modernism

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Lazlo Winter is a writer in search of a story. He is struggling with writer's block, depressed by it, yet ever so slightly seduced by the idea of accepting that he may have written his last story. "Why should there be another? Why not settle now for silence and anonymity?"

Out of that silence comes a phone call from a man whose face Winter can't remember and whose invitation to meet for a drink, he thinks, might usually have counted as an invasion. Except that Laszlo is a man "still casting about for a story", and he is willing to take his chances that he might find it in odd, little remembered places.

From this telephone call comes a memory. From a drink with a near stranger comes an e-mail approach to a woman well remembered but whose memory has long been tucked away for safe-keeping so the present might be kept safe.

Laszlo contacts Sammy, the sexy Australian woman he was in love with half a world and half a life ago. They were students together in the late 1950s, in England, a place awash with young colonials in love with the magic of bed-sits with shared loos and gas geysers, and with the joy of academic learning in the Old Country.

Laszlo's question to Sammy is this: is she of a mind to stir ancient memories? She responds with Nabokov's evocation (and instruction): "Speak, Memory!"

We are on familiar ground. Stead's fascination with the unfolding (and refolding, reshaping) of memory echoes Laszlo's mode of telling stories within stories. His "narrative habits tending to the structural character of a Russian doll".

Sammy is writing a strange thesis which records details of the lives of great writers, and is called "The Secret History of Modernism". Their mutual friend, Rajiv, is working on a study of Yeats. Laszlo is obsessed (or is trying to be) with the idea of investigating every practical detail of Shakespeare's life to show how his choices of plot, theme and character were influenced by the everyday.

They are all in love with literature - and are all to be betrayed by, to greater or lesser degrees - the subjects of their studies.

Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Christina Stead become real characters, brought to life in Stead's fiction with a casual brilliance.

We meet Eliot. Sammy, who has been near enough to stalking Eliot so that she might confront him with the anti-Semitism she has discovered in his work, finally spots him on the street. She gets his autograph. Reveal another Russian doll: Sammy is in love with the married Jewish New Zealander Freddy Goldstein.

Freddy's story begins with the Nazi persecution of the Jews, takes us to Palestine and deep inside the complexities of concepts of loyalty and betrayal.

Stead's novel is wide in its sweep, and as tightly and cleverly contained as a set of those Russian dolls.

It reads like a dream. Or perhaps a series of perfectly captured memories with their attendant shifts in the recollection of time, tenderness, humour and rancour.

If it is not the best novel I've read this year, it has banished the memory of anything that came close.

Harvill Press

$29.95

* Michele Hewitson is a Herald feature-writer.