George Orwell’s Elephant & Other Essays
In his new collection of essays Subhash Jaireth traverses the globe in an exploration of the personal and collective memory held within natural and built landscapes.
His roving curiosity takes us from his early life in Delhi to his years as a student in Soviet-era Moscow. We travel to Burma with George Orwell and battle windmills in Spain with Don Quixote. Jaireth walks us through the landscapes around Uluru, Canberra and Sydney with the sharp gaze of a geologist and the imagination of a poet. We follow the roots of an old banksia tree in his garden, the traces left by ancient rivers and seas, and stories passed down from time immemorial.
In George Orwell’s Elephant & Other Essays, Jaireth draws his life’s emotional map right on the soil under his feet, and in the process unearths narratives, characters and places that leave us aware of the layers of memory and meaning that shimmer all around us.
Subhash Jaireth was born in Punjab, India. Between 1969 and 1978 he lived in Russia studying geology and Russian literature. In 1986 he migrated to Australia. He has published poetry in Hindi, English and Russian.
His published works include three books of poems: Golee Lagne se Pahle (Before the Bullet Hit Me) (Vani Prakashan, 1994); Unfinished Poems for Your Violin (Penguin Australia, 1996); Yashodhara: Six Seasons Without You (Wild Peony, 2003); and five books of prose fiction and non-fiction: To Silence: Three Autobiographies (Puncher & Wattmann, 2011); After Love (Transit Lounge, 2012); Moments (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014); Incantations (Recent Work Press, 2016).
His most recent books include a collection of essays titled Spinoza’s Overcoat: Travels with Writers and Poets (Transit Lounge, 2020), which won the 2021 ACT Book of the Year, a book of translation from Hindi, Rain Clouds: Love Songs of Meerabai (Recent Work Press, 2020), and Aflame (Gazebo Books/Life Before Man, 2021).
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