Asymptotic, hypnotic, mythic, YILKARI, co-written by the prize-winning author Nicolas Rothwell and his wife, the acclaimed artist Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson, captivatingly defies classification.
YILKARI reads like a rodeo – the dust, the light, the tension, the undercurrents, the constant moving, the shifting sounds, a history soaked in blood.
Before the journey begins, there is a note to the reader. “This book, the product two minds, has been long in the making and long in our thoughts. The Western Desert is our field and our subject; what can be known of it and what can be told of it. The country writes its words in us, and through time we, too, become each other’s authors.”
And so this desert suite starts with a Siberian composer named Valentin comes to a remote roadhouse in the Western Desert to find the narrator of Yilkari, whom he first met the night the Berlin Wall fell. They travel on together, leading the reader deeper into the desert, a stimulating conversation driving the narrative.
Indeed it is conversation, a duelling dialogue that fuels a fair tract of this yarn. Carved up into four chapters bearing the name of four characters – Valentin, Dylan, Captain and Master – YILKARI reveals its secrets, such secrets as it can reveal, through the conversations of its characters and their journeys into landscapes in which space and time are aspects of each other. Their exchanges range from short sharp chit chat to declamatory screed.
No place for pigeon-holing in this kite flying, chrono-bending desert suite, full of automotive theatre featuring Mazdas and Mad Max motors, magic mountains, off beaten tracks, landscapes and dreamscapes merging in a cultural cauldron of the possessed and dispossessed.
YILKARI is a yarn with threads knitted in surprising interlockings and loops. Shades of Graham Greene on his dismissal of Switzerland, when a sage and wise character muses about the alpine state- “As if peace and changelessness were some kind of answer to the chaos of modernity.”
If Greene is evoked, then other authors directly invoked, the likes of Albert Camus, H.P. Lovecraft and the writer attributed to one of the Gospels of the New Testament, Saint Matthew. When one accuses an apostle of hearsay, is that heresy?
Enigmatic, elusive, esoteric, euphonious, engaging, YILKARI is a book of strange coincidences, of chance encounters, of place and displacement, of longing and belonging, of reverie, regret and regeneration. Recommended reading.
YILKARI by Nicolas Rothwell & Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson is published by Text.
