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SCARY MONSTERS By Michelle de Kretser
An unusual quandary faces the reader of “Scary Monsters,” the Australian novelist Michelle de Kretser’s eighth book. In a formally experimental conceit that tips its hat to B. S. Johnson and Ali Smith , this is a novel of two halves printed back to back and upside down. De Kretser sets 126 pages of the book in France in the early 1980s; turn the book the other way up and 126 pages take place in a dystopian Australia some decades in the future. Where you begin — with the story of Lili in France or Lyle in Australia — is up to you.
I’m horribly conventional and so I approached “Scary Monsters” in chronological order, starting with the 22-year-old Lili in Montpellier. Lili is spending a year teaching at a local lycée before going to graduate school. She is of unspecified Asian heritage, but has spent her adolescence in Australia. (De Kretser herself was born in Sri Lanka before emigrating to Australia at 14; she also taught for a year in Montpellier.)
Lili’s best friend in Montpelier is Minna, a complicated character: English, with German Jewish heritage, she has arrived in France with only a smattering of French and the faux sophistication that a few years at art school bestows. Her boyfriend, Nick, an aspiring novelist, trails in her wake. Minna is creating artworks inspired by John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing”; at one point she drags Lili to Sardinia to interview Berger’s mistress, who isn’t at home. Minna creates for Lili an alter ego, “Daring Audrey,” who carries a (prop) pistol and is reckless and impulsive (although only as directed by Minna).
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