Sophie Cunningham
Author of Melbourne
About the Author
Sophie Cunningham is an author who won the ninth Australian Book Review Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay. Her essay was entitled, Staying with the Trouble. It is about the epic walk up Broadway in New York. The Calibre Prize is worth $5000 and is intended to `encourage brilliant new essays show more and to foster new insights into Australian culture and society. Cunningham's winning essay is published in the April 2015 edition of ABR. she also made the shortlist for the 2015 Chief Minister's Northern Territory History Book Award with her title Warning: The Story of Cyclone Tracy. This same title made the shortlist for the Nita B Kibble Literary Award 2015 and the Waverly Library Award 2015 shortlist. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Works by Sophie Cunningham
Tippy and Jellybean : the true story of a brave koala who saved her baby from a bushfire (2021) 12 copies
Writing a Novel Anthology, 2013 — Editor — 1 copy
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1963-12-26
- Gender
- female
- Nationality
- Australia
- Places of residence
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Occupations
- novelist
editor
non-fiction author
adjunct professor - Relationships
- Nicholls, Peter (1) (father)
- Organizations
- Meanjin
RMIT University
Members
Reviews
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 18
- Also by
- 2
- Members
- 255
- Popularity
- #89,877
- Rating
- 3.6
- Reviews
- 7
- ISBNs
- 48
- Favorited
- 1
It seems almost inevitable that a book which follows something as brilliant as Calvino's masterpiece, will be a disappointment. And yet This Devastating Fever held me captivated from beginning to end. I could not have chosen a better book to follow Invisible Cities. It is that good.
This Devastating Fever has two storylines which blur into each other. There is an author called Alice in the 21st century, who shares some personal and professional history with Cunningham herself; and there is Leonard Woolf in the 20th century, about whom Alice has been trying to write a book for twenty years.
Interspersed with other things, of course, because she has to earn a living. But she is also distractible. It is lockdown in Melbourne which makes her get on with it.
Leonard Woolf (1880-1969), is of course the husband of the eminent modernist author Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). Long ago I read her books but not his, and I have on the TBR a bio of Leonard (by Victoria Glendinning) but not of Virginia. Well, we all know about her, don't we? Or we think we do. Cunningham's extensively researched novel shows us otherwise.
Virginia Woolf was among the innovative women writers who pioneered the use of stream of consciousness as a literary device in the early 20th century. Wikipedia says that her first novel The Voyage Out was published in the same year as Dorothy Richardson's Pointed Roofs (1915, Pilgrimage #1, see my unenthusiastic review) and that Woolf showed in this early novel, techniques used in later novels, including the gap between preceding thought and the spoken word that follows, and the lack of concordance between expression and underlying intention, together with how these reveal to us aspects of the nature of love.
Did I know that Cunningham was, in such a sophisticated way, channelling Woolf with that same technique when I shared the excerpt that depicted self-censoring in my Sensational Snippet? No, I did not. This Devastating Fever is a book that will bear re-reading, for sure. There is much to explore in a second reading: through the prism of Alice's fraught efforts to finish her stalled novel during the pandemic, Cunningham interrogates the past and the present. Through Leonard's time in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), she casts her perceptive eye over colonialism and its aftermath. She expresses her characters' fears about the world order during tumultuous geo-political times and what feels like the end of days in a looming catastrophe.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/07/30/this-devastating-fever-2022-by-sophie-cunnin...… (more)