FICTION
Chinese Postman
Brian Castro
Giramondo, $32.95

“I’d rather be known posthumously,” Brian Castro remarked on stage in Melbourne earlier this year. The crowd chuckled, but Castro seemed perfectly serious.

The same melancholic wit drapes over Chinese Postman, Castro’s latest novel. It is narrated by Abraham or “Abe” Quin, whose life traces the loose shape of Castro’s own: he, too, is an author of 13 books, a retired professor, and one-time postman. The book is sold as “fiction”, though I would lean towards “autofiction” – the doppelgänger has haunted Castro’s work since his first novel, Birds of Passage (1983) – though Castro himself dismisses genre as “imprison[ing] every situation within the expected”.

Regardless of classification, Chinese Postman is a tour de force.
Abe lives an unobtrusive life in the Adelaide Hills, sifting through desires met and unmet, letters read or discarded. He rescues German shepherds; befriends his gruff, grieving neighbour; spends not an insignificant time speculating on ablutions. He rarely leaves the house.

Instead, Abe dreams of “an impossible staircase like Escher’s, from which I could have thrown myself and then find that I am ascending it again and again, with hope”. He scrawls secret notes to an unrequited love, hoping she will discover his feelings; she throws them out unwittingly. He writes to his dear friend Ginnie that he has “lived most of his life backwards, without discovering happiness”. She sends back a single sentence: “Anhedonia is not without pleasure.”

Yet Abe is not so much cursed with the apparent pleasures of anhedonia but the inevitable rigours of ageing. His body has begun to betray him – “acting fast is beyond an old man, and now he realises he is uselessly meditative” – so most of the novel’s movement occurs through memory, evoking the work of Annie Ernaux, Elizabeth Hardwick or Virginia Woolf. The latter appears overtly; Abe admits that reading Woolf “was the first time a book disturbed, took the ‘I’ out of him. So ‘I’ became ‘he’.” The novel mirrors this disturbance, and Abe becomes both the narrator and the narrated.

This oscillation between “I” and “he” – sometimes occurring mid-thought – might be read as an enactment of “double-consciousness”, conceptualised by W.E.B. Du Bois as the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity”.

Castro continues to grapple with the idea of home, the absurdity of borders, and the trappings of nation. As Abe notes, “In Australia, being Asian is a physical effort. During natural disasters and pandemics, the illusion of being the same is no longer the same.” Abe’s memories sometimes betray him, too; he claims he is “anti-Proustian”, someone who has “become very good at forgetting”. While this runs against the novel’s insistent reminiscence, the texture of forgetting dictates the novel’s shape, composed as it is of fragmented paragraphs, a life assembling and disassembling (perhaps dissembling, too): “he couldn’t tell stories. Fragments were what fired him.”