My name is Favel. A strange name I know, one that I hated when I was young but have come to like very much. I was always told there was an old English legend about a horse called Favel that you could brush and ask for favours. I do not know if it is exactly true, but in the way stories wrap around us, it has become part of my story
Luděk longs to know where his mother is and if she will return, not knowing that the authorities are holding her to ransom while she travels the world with a theatre group. They know that she will have to return from the West for as long as she wants to see her child. He is the ransom, and it is his grandmother Eva who has the burden of holding him there. On her last night in Prague, Máňa tells him a bedtime story which becomes a metaphor for courage and self-sacrifice: Atlas, with the world on his shoulders, briefly abandons his burden, but only to save the life of a child. Curious to see this statue in which Atlas sits on top of an arched gateway, down a narrow lane, and he watches over a secret garden ...
There Was Still Love is a delicate homage to the self-sacrifice of families everywhere
Luděk longs to know where his mother is and if she will return, not knowing that the authorities are holding her to ransom while she travels the world with a theatre group. They know that she will have to return from the West for as long as she wants to see her child. He is the ransom, and it is his grandmother Eva who has the burden of holding him there. On her last night in Prague, Máňa tells him a bedtime story which becomes a metaphor for courage and self-sacrifice: Atlas, with the world on his shoulders, briefly abandons his burden, but only to save the life of a child. Curious to see this statue in which Atlas sits on top of an arched gateway, down a narrow lane, and he watches over a secret garden ...
There Was Still Love is a delicate homage to the self-sacrifice of families everywhere
There Was Still Love, by Favel Parrett
Favel Parrett is an Australian writer.
Born: 18 May 1974 (age 45 years), Victoria
Out past the shallows, past the sandy-bottomed bays, comes the dark water – black and cold and roaring. Rolling out the invisible paths. The ancient paths to Bruny, or down south along the silent cliffs, the paths out deep to the bird islands that stand tall between nothing but water and sky. Wherever rock comes out of the deep water, wherever reef rises up, there is abalone. Black-lipped soft bodies protected by shell. Treasure.”
Favel Parrett site:anzlitlovers.com
In 2011, Favel Parrett's career was launched with her critically acclaimed debut PAST THE SHALLOWS. A heart-breaking novel, it was sold internationally, shortlisted in the prestigious Miles Franklin Award
Mal - Little Fox - a young red-headed girl, is the other main protagonist. Through her, we see the difficulties and challenges of her grandparents' immigrant life in Australia: poverty, unemployment, racism, isolation, separation from home, fear for family members living behind the Iron Curtain.
Leaving home and family, and trying to establish in a new country isn't easy, but the adults never complain.
A tender picture of love and hope
Favel Parrett's new novel, There Was Still Love, is beautifully ...
Favel Parrett's new novel, There Was Still Love, is beautifully ...
Underlying Past the Shallows is the primal fear of a loss of a sibling and it doesn't take a psychologist to sense that Parrett and her brother James, a noted Melbourne sculptor, are close. The siblings held fiercely together through their parents' troubled marriage and their relocation from Victoria to Tasmania. Shy country kids alone and friendless in Hobart, they used to go roller skating together at Woody's Roller World. They went there most Saturdays for six months. Favel was eight and James was six.
For the seven years that the young Favel Parrett lived in Hobart, the ocean was never far away. Strolling stretches of sandy beach, she'd invariably dip a toe to test the icy water, only to ...
There was life! Babies being born, cakes being made ... There was still love that even Russian tanks couldn’t crush says @FavelParrett on #ThereWasStillLovepic.twitter.com/APn9kxDnKc
Victorian artist James Parrett has scooped the $70,000 first prize in this year's Sculpture by the Sea.
Parrett, the brother of novelist Favel Parrett, won the prestigious Aqualand Sculpture Award for his work M-fortysix.
AAPS is delighted to announce Martin Shaw‘s latest signing to the agency: acclaimed Melbourne novelist Favel Parrett!
Martin writes: “I remember so well when I first met Favel. Her publisher, Hachette, put on a little event one evening for booksellers at the North Fitzroy Bowls Club in Melbourne to introduce us to some of their forthcoming authors. In particular, I remember the sorely-missed Matt Richell (their sales & marketing director at the time) saying to me: “I reckon we’ve got (in Favel) something really special on our hands here”.
And how right he was! Many of you would doubtless have been dazzled by the book he was talking about: her wondrous 2011 debut, Past the Shallows, which went on to be shortlisted for the Miles Franklin prize, amongst several other gongs. She followed that with her paean to the little red ship the Nella Dan and its Antarctic voyages in When the Night Comes in 2014. Both books went on to be published in the UK, the US and several European countries.
So now we’re thrilled to share that forthcoming in September 2019 is her extraordinarily beautiful and moving new novel, There Was Still Love. We adore this book, & can’t wait to share it with you and readers all over the world. On the one hand, a tale of a young boy living with his grandmother behind the Iron Curtain in 1980’s Prague, on the other the story of his cousin in Melbourne, who grows up fascinated by such things as the culture and food of her Central European heritage, but also becomes ever more aware of the trials and burden that emigration has involved for her wider family. For love might sometimes mean the greatest of compromises and sacrifices. But, there is still love…
You can follow Favel then on Twitter @FavelParrett (but be warned, as a keen surfer she posts lots of envy-inducing early morning photos from Victoria’s surf beaches!) – or visit her website: http://www.favelparrett.com.au . Of course we’ll be sharing updates as publication draws closer as well.”
Favel Parrett is a one of the new generation of Australian writers. Her debut novel, Past the Shallows was published last year to critical acclaim and has just been longlisted for the 2012 Miles Franklin Literary Award. (See my review).
Favel was a recipient of an Australian Society of Authors Mentorship in 2009 and has had a number of short stories published in journals including Island and Wet Ink. She is currently working on her second novel.
Resident in Victoria, she loves to surf in the Southern Ocean. She has a passion for travel, especially to Africa and Bhutan, and in her spare time she volunteers at an animal rescue shelter.
ANZ LitLovers is pleased to introduce this fine young author in the Meet an Aussie Authorseries.
1. I was born… on Election Day in Victoria – 1974. My mum got a fine for not voting.
2. When I was a child I wrote…
a letter to Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser asking for land rights for Indigenous Australians. I wrote the letter in pencil on a piece of butcher paper. Six weeks later, a very long typed ‘official’ response arrived. It made little sense and addressed none of my concerns. I became very disillusioned with politicians that day.
3. The person who encouraged/inspired/mentored me to write is/was… My friend Linda. My partner David. My teacher Janey Runci.
4. I write in a small room overlooking Swanston Street in Melbourne. I like watching the window cleaners abseiling down the walls of the hotel across the road.
5. I write best in the morning after a coffee.
6. Research is unexpected. I got to go to Macquarie Island in October 2011 on an expedition vessel – part research/ part long time dream come true.
7. I keep my published work shoved in a very full bookcase in the spare room.
8. On the day my first book was published, I had many beers.
9. At the moment, I’m writing my next book. It’s about the sea, about Hobart and a beautiful Danish Ice Breaker called the Nella Dan.
10. When I’m stuck for an idea/word/phrase – I go for a surf to clear my head.
That new novel sounds most interesting … Hobart is one of my favourite Australian cities!
With my times away from home, my blogging pattern tends to be feast or famine. This week sees no nutritional lack. Despite spotty attendance I feel great personal reward in the interactions ...
'You're Going to Be Sad Without Books'
“We are so spoiled,” a reader writes. He means when it comes to books, though in other ways as well. He read something I wrote a long time ago about Williams James and his Principles of Psychology (1890), and has resolved to read it. It’s a grand grab bag of a book that Jacques Barzun likened to Moby Dick. It moved him to write in A Stroll with William James (1983): “[I]t ought to be read from beginning to end at least once by every person professing to be educated.” My reader writes:
“It’s amazing. We can find any book we hear about. I went to Amazon and bought a used copy that was pretty cheap. It took a couple of minutes.”
I’m averse to even the idea of utopias, which quickly devolve into mass murder, but it’s not entirely ridiculous to think of our age as a book utopia. Not what’s being written and published today, certainly. That’s in an unhappy state. I mean availability. In the past, even the very rich would have had some difficulty finding what you and I find at the library or in our mailbox in less than a day.
I’m reminded of readers so deprived of reading matter they celebrate the arrival of a book or even the memory of a book. The Poles seem especially given to such gratitude – aided, of course, by their country’s tortured history. Józef Czapski reanimated Proust’s masterpiece for his fellow inmates of a Soviet prison (see Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp, 2018). In My Century, Aleksander Wat revels in another Soviet prison when he finds the first volume of Proust’s novel. Less well known is Jerzy Stempowski’s experience as described in his 1948 essay “The Smuggler’s Library” (Four Decades of Polish Essays, 1990).
It’s four months after the Nazi invasion of Poland. Stempowski (1894-1969) is a patient in a makeshift hospital in the Carpathian Mountains, sick with pneumonia and a kidney disorder. When discharged, he’s befriended by smugglers who provide him with a hideout. One says to him:
“`You must have been reading your whole life, and now you’re going to be sad without books. I’ll try to get you something to read.’
“On the next day a young smuggler, Andrijko, appeared with a sack on his shoulder. He put it on the floor. When the room warmed up I untied the bag and started to take out the books. The first to appear was a good edition of Horace, then the Metamorphoses, Virgil’s Bucolics and Georgics, and some Latin poets of the Renaissance. Next there came some Spanish publications, mostly from the time of the Civil War, although they included Gracián y Morales. At the very bottom of the sack I found the English romantics – Southey, Coleridge – and also several volumes of Walter Scott, Pride and Prejudice, and a slightly worn copy of Spenser’s Faerie Queene.
“It was the best kind of reading for the long winter.”
Stempowski devotes much of the rest of the essay to piecing together the histories of the volumes, how they came into his possession in wartime Poland. Basically, good fortune – for him; ill fortune for previous owners -- delivered them:
“During wars and upheaval a reader leaves his library at home. He takes only his favorite book, but even this book is soon abandoned in a roadside inn or at a forest crossroads. The smugglers’ library was a vivid testimony and a warning. A wartime reader must rely first and foremost on his memory. At the end of the road he will be left only with what he remembers.”
