Panthers and the Museum of Fire by Jen Craig

There was a never a moment when you thought you had started on the section of the manuscript where the real part began.

This feeling, you have to realise, kept up the whole time. You kept flicking pages and reading and flicking – not skipping any pages, but flicking them all the same – and the whole time you were reading you were waiting for the story in the manuscript to start for real. This passage, only a short way in, is a good example of how it plays with your mind, because what you read is exactly what you are thinking at the time:Īs soon as you started the manuscript, you would find yourself waiting for it to start, to really start. Reading it is very much an immersive “experience” and - if you’ll excuse the language - a bit of a “mind fuck”. And it’s quite unlike any other Australian novel I’ve ever read.īut it’s also a reviewer’s nightmare, because this is not the kind of story that is easy to summarise or to write about. This brilliantly original novel feels like something Paul Auster might have cooked up if he was high on amphetamines. There are echoes of Italo Calvino, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, too. It’s fresh and bold and startling. And then I picked up Jen Craig’s Panthers & The Museum of Fire and was completely wowed by it. I didn’t expect to read another book quite as surprising or as unique as Gerald Murnane’s The Plains during my my project to read exclusively Australian literature for a year. Fiction – Kindle edition Spineless Wonders Publishing 140 pages 2015.

Panthers and the Museum of Fire by Jen Craig