Novel
Monkey Grip
Helen Garner · 1977
Synopsis
In the mid-seventies, Nora, a single mother in her thirties, lives with her little daughter Grace in the shared houses of central Melbourne, among artists and actors. She falls for Javo, a young actor addicted to heroin, who comes and goes in her life. With him and Grace, she goes to Hobart and to Sydney; Javo, who had been arrested in Bangkok on a drug charge, steals from the house and disappears for weeks at a time. Nora tells the story day by day, like a diary.
Context
The first book by its author, the novel appeared in 1977 from McPhee Gribble, an independent Melbourne publisher; it draws extensively on her diaries and on life in shared houses. In 1978 it received the National Book Council's Book of the Year award, a first for a woman in Australia. Critics were divided, and Galen Strawson found in it neither plot nor resolution. Ken Cameron made a film from it, with Noni Hazlehurst and Colin Friels, and the book had by then passed a hundred thousand copies. Jean-Jacques Portail's translation appeared in France in 1987.
Who it is for
A novel in English, in the first person, in the form of a diary, translated into French under its original title.
Prizes and reception
Ranked in 2018 by the BBC among the hundred stories that shaped the world, the only Australian novel on the list.