A few weeks ago, Alice Grundy, one of Australia’s top literary editors (may she forgive me for name-dropping her here), recommended the work of Kate Jennings to me. Although it is perhaps true to describe Jennings as an author who had, until lately, fallen into obscurity, it seems to me that a resurgence of her work is currently underway amongst certain opinion makers in our local scene. Whether this spring of new attention will right the wrong of her dropping out of selective notice remains to be seen, but whatever fate has in store, I can add my own voice to the chorus that is so recently claiming obscurity to be unfit for a writer of such subtle power. The semi-auto-bio-vignette-structured novel, ‘Snake’ (an early work) was one of the books Alice Grundy recommended to me, and on its basis alone, I say that Jennings can rightly be considered to have eternally earned the scant attention of serious readers of Australian fiction.
All that aside, this audio-visual tribute to Jennings’ work, wherein I pair a chapter of ‘Snake’ to some primitive images and sounds, is in no way an attempt to do justice to the author and her arresting evocations. As always, my posts here, to the extent that they involve other authors, should be best considered an admiring gesture of monstrously amateur proportions. One of these days, perhaps, a lightning bolt of increased capacities will empower me to do justice to the writing that moves me most. Until then, here are the scraps of admiration, moving.