As her latest novel, The Lost Dog, is published, Michelle de Kretser is href="http://www.smh.com.au/news/books/my-life-and-a-dog/2007/11/23/1195753287438.html">profiled in "The Sydney Morning Herald" by Fiona Gruber. [This is a reprint of the same profile in "The Age" last week. Seems I missed that one.]
Alongside the exploration of a man's relationship with his dog, a more general animality pervades the novel, from the musky aroma of its main female character, the mysterious artist Nellie Zhang, to the daily confrontation old and arthritic Iris de Souza has with her own excrement. It is, in part, a commentary on the sanitised world in which we live, where the old, the sick and the imperfect are made to feel useless, invisible."We have an obsession with bodies in the West but there is a denial of bodily-ness," de Kretser argues, saying the obsession with fitness and control of appetites is unsensual. Our animality is something we have become disgusted by, she says. Perfect teeth, straight strong limbs and glowing skin form the template that separates the Western physical orthodoxy from a more diverse cast in less affluent countries.
