Question 7 (Vintage International)
THE WASHINGTON POST'S TOP TEN NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR • WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE • SHORTLISTED FOR PRIX FÉMINA ETRANGER • LONGLISTED FOR PRIX MÉDICIS • An exquisite, genre-defying new book from the Booker Prize–winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a reckoning with the author’s life and family, and the role of fiction in our times
"A spectacular mixture of fierce energy and then control, care. It is a kind of reckoning, Richard Flanagan with his father and his mother, Tasmania with its past, Japan with its past, the author with himself. It seems to me a book that will have an overwhelming effect on readers.” —Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island
Sometimes I wonder why we keep returning to beginnings—why we seek the single thread we might pull to unravel the tapestry we call our life...
By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave laborer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die.
At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, place and memory is about how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.
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Community Reviews
Chekov’s Question 7 is a short story incorporating misdirection as a parody of children's mental arithmetic puzzles: “Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3am in order to reach station B at 11pm; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?” Flanagan uses the concept of this non-sequitur to write about his past, his father, nuclear fusion, the affair between H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, science fiction, Tasmanian tigers, half-life, extinction, ur-texts, Hiroshima, near death experiences, and other chain reactions. There is a lot to consider, and some of it feels like the unedited ramblings of a man who has won many literary prizes. Some of the aphorisms feel like homilies – “The past is always most clearly seen by those who never saw it”; “Experience is but a moment. Making sense of that moment is a life”; “Sometimes we discover that we live in the dreams and nightmares of others and we dream anew.” He strings these together in a way which initially seems profound but may equally not be. Trent Dalton and Tim Winton write in the same manner of short apparently punchy sentences – it is the way of the male Australian literati, but it leaves me largely unmoved.
