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FICTION
Kind of Sort of Maybe … But Probably Not
Imbi Neeme
Viking, $34.99
Kind of, Sort of, Maybe … But Probably Not sounds like the ambivalent response from a typical aimless twenty-something living in an Australian metropolis. But what is the question they are answering?
Imbi Neeme’s second novel is a story of strangers colliding through the actions of those in the past.Credit: Justin McManus
As the title of Imbi Neeme’s second novel, the phrase foreshadows the wobbly emotional journey undertaken by two young women in inner-city Melbourne in 1995. Phoebe Cotton is a gentle, dedicated librarian, living alone in her grandmother’s house in West Footscray, passing her days working in a job that celebrates her bibliomania, while struggling to hide her other, more oppressive condition.
Phoebe is a misophonic, who cannot stand the sound of people eating. Slurping, crunching, munching, chomping, or smacking of lips can send her raging like Hulk. These sounds elicit in her a visceral, violent reaction. She sees “red mist…that threatened to consume her.”
The only people she can share a meal with are her parents, who are also the only people who know about her condition. Every Tuesday night, when Phoebe has dinner with them, they blast Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus so Phoebe doesn’t descend into a fit of uncontrollable anger.
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Her misophonia has made her a reluctant misanthrope. But all of this changes when she begins receiving mysterious postcards that had been sent in the 1960s to a woman whom she does not know, from a sender who only signs off as “T”. The postcards, of various European attractions including St Peter’s Basilica in Rome and the Louvre in Paris, are yearning love letters, exposing the writer as an upstanding married citizen lusting after someone they cannot have.
At the post office, a young, Keanu Reeves-look-a-like named Monty tells Phoebe it’s a federal offence to destroy mail. Phoebe’s grandmother, Dorothy, isn’t much help. Visiting her at her new home in a posh retirement village, Phoebe cannot extract anything from her about her past.
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Suze is trying to stop her uncommitted boyfriend J from sending those postcards to Phoebe. She had found the cards in an old suitcase bought from an op shop, and J, an experimental performance artist with little respect for her, insisted on sending them. This is a guy whose idea of art is nailing offal to the wall – something he calls “an act of Supreme Art”.