Back Burning Redux

A friend once gave me a small, shallow container made of pink glass, telling me I could use it to hold bonbons at house parties. It was gratefully used for that purpose over the years, and I am happy to say that the many and varied bonbons people picked from it pleased the party guests. Now it is author, Sylvia Petter, whose book of short stories also delights like that tray of bonbons. Just open any page in Back Burning Redux and you’ll find a treat worth chewing on. Sylvia Petter, now living in Sydney, is the daughter of Austrian immigrants who brought her to Australia when she was about three years old. Since then, her life has been spent in Australia, Austria, and plenty of other places, including Helsinki, Brussels and Geneva. She married her Austrian-born husband in Las Vegas and their daughter was born in Geneva. Some of these places serve as backdrops for her stories. Take your pick, like the offerings from a party pack of bonbons. Each of them a surprise. Like ‘Back Burning’, which starts with the narrator on a plane flying out of Sydney bound for London after burying her mother’s husband. In ‘Matthew’, a mother gives birth to a premature son and lives through the worry of fearing he will not survive. We share the fear. In ‘Bul’, a tourist bonds with a street shoeshine boy in Istanbul, but finally realises there never was a bond. She was the itinerant tourist. One thing that strikes me is that many of the characters in this book take planes or trains to other places and that in doing so they stir memories of incidents and people experienced in pasts which continue to resonate with present and future. Savour them, think about them and relish the memory of them. Read the flash fiction in the final pages of the book and share some of the author’s rich and varied life. That will give you some understanding of where the short stories which precede that section found their inspiration. Like orange cream, chocolate fudge, truffle or caramel. Varied, with that lingering feeling of wanting to go back for more. A bit like the rhetorical questions which close some of the stories. – Ian McArthur lives in Sydney and writes historical fiction Loading...