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Navigatio
Part memoir, part fiction, part meditation on perception, reality and writing, Navigatio is a journey into the hidden regions of the self. This novella, first published in 1996, is Alison Croggon's first prose work. In 1n 1995, it was highly commended in The Australian/Vogel Literary Award.
Alison Croggon is a novelist and award-winning poet.
Australian Book Review
Find a comfy chair and a quiet room before you embark on Navigatio. Though slim, Alison Croggon’s first novel is not light. Prose narrative overlaps poetry to produce a work densely packed with images and voices. The past, the present and the imagination are all invoked, making the reader constantly reassess and reconsider what has gone before.
Croggon, widely known as a poet, mixes her own story of migrating with others. One of these others is a young mother who is travelling to Australia over a hundred years ago, and her feelings of melancholy, loss and looking are strikingly similar to the author’s own.
What is to be trusted? Doubting God, Croggon and the characters ponder on the life of language, the nature of beauty and the cruelty of man. Who is to be known they ask, and how? Is a person’s fate wholly tied up in what has gone before? The awesome helplessness of just being borne along by life is wonderfully evoked in the final chapter, the logbook of a sea captain, dated 1869.
A thoughtful journey.
November 1996
Alison Croggon is a novelist and award-winning poet.
Australian Book Review
Find a comfy chair and a quiet room before you embark on Navigatio. Though slim, Alison Croggon’s first novel is not light. Prose narrative overlaps poetry to produce a work densely packed with images and voices. The past, the present and the imagination are all invoked, making the reader constantly reassess and reconsider what has gone before.
Croggon, widely known as a poet, mixes her own story of migrating with others. One of these others is a young mother who is travelling to Australia over a hundred years ago, and her feelings of melancholy, loss and looking are strikingly similar to the author’s own.
What is to be trusted? Doubting God, Croggon and the characters ponder on the life of language, the nature of beauty and the cruelty of man. Who is to be known they ask, and how? Is a person’s fate wholly tied up in what has gone before? The awesome helplessness of just being borne along by life is wonderfully evoked in the final chapter, the logbook of a sea captain, dated 1869.
A thoughtful journey.
November 1996
- GenresAustralia
111 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
45 people want to read
About the author
Alison Croggon
53 books1,729 followersAlison Croggon is the award winning author of the acclaimed fantasy series The Books of Pellinor. You can sign up to her monthly newsletter and receive a free Pellinor story at alisoncroggon.com
Her most recent book is Fleshers, the first in a dazzling new SF series co-written with her husband, acclaimed playwright Daniel Keene. Her latest Pellinor book, The Bone Queen, was a 2016 Aurealis Awards Best Young Adult Book finalist. Other fantasy titles include Black Spring (shortlisted for the Young People's Writing Award in the 2014 NSW Premier's Literary Awards) and The River and the Book, winner of the Wilderness Society's prize for Environmental Writing for Children.
She is a prize-winning poet and theatre critic,, and has released seven collections of poems. As a critic she was named Geraldine Pascall Critic of the Year in 2009. She also writes opera libretti, and the opera she co-wrote with Iain Grandage was Vocal/Choral Work of the Year in the 2015 Art Music Awards. Her libretto for Mayakovsky, score by Michael Smetanin, was shortlisted in the Drama Prize for the 2015 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. She lives in Melbourne..
Her most recent book is Fleshers, the first in a dazzling new SF series co-written with her husband, acclaimed playwright Daniel Keene. Her latest Pellinor book, The Bone Queen, was a 2016 Aurealis Awards Best Young Adult Book finalist. Other fantasy titles include Black Spring (shortlisted for the Young People's Writing Award in the 2014 NSW Premier's Literary Awards) and The River and the Book, winner of the Wilderness Society's prize for Environmental Writing for Children.
She is a prize-winning poet and theatre critic,, and has released seven collections of poems. As a critic she was named Geraldine Pascall Critic of the Year in 2009. She also writes opera libretti, and the opera she co-wrote with Iain Grandage was Vocal/Choral Work of the Year in the 2015 Art Music Awards. Her libretto for Mayakovsky, score by Michael Smetanin, was shortlisted in the Drama Prize for the 2015 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. She lives in Melbourne..
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 3, 2015
Serendipidity – it’s a wonderful thing! I discovered Navigatio purely by chance via a Twitter trail, and it turns out that I read it during Read a Novella month too. (Apologies to whoever was running that, I can’t remember who it is that I should mention here).
Alert readers will remember that it’s not so long ago that I read Patrick Holland’s novella Navigatio, a glorious meditation that retells the legendary voyage of St Brendan of Clonfert in an exquisite edition published by Transit Lounge. (See my review). Reading Croggon’s book of the same name was not quite the same sensual experience – I had to read it on the Kindle. But on the plus side, it only cost $5.43, which is less than the price of coffee and cake at my favourite café – which is where I read most of Navigatio. (It’s only 111 pages).
The Croggon Navigatio is entirely different in focus too. Written in deliberately disconcerting fragments, it tells a story of two migrations centuries apart, in almost alternating chapters. Its hero is not a man in search of a Promised Land; it is women making their way to Australia, their perils magnified by their personal circumstances. There is the narrator telling the story of a migration in modern times, a migration much like mine: three sisters on a journey from Cornwall to South Africa to Australia. This voice is acutely perceptive, noting the fragile marriage of her parents, the mother’s disappointed expectations, the golden memories severed with a wrench by the decision to leave. This biographical (autobiographical?) strand is a journey of the self, exploring the transformations that take place when a new geography intersects with personal history. It’s very beautiful to read because Croggon is a poet.
To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2015/12/03/na...
Alert readers will remember that it’s not so long ago that I read Patrick Holland’s novella Navigatio, a glorious meditation that retells the legendary voyage of St Brendan of Clonfert in an exquisite edition published by Transit Lounge. (See my review). Reading Croggon’s book of the same name was not quite the same sensual experience – I had to read it on the Kindle. But on the plus side, it only cost $5.43, which is less than the price of coffee and cake at my favourite café – which is where I read most of Navigatio. (It’s only 111 pages).
The Croggon Navigatio is entirely different in focus too. Written in deliberately disconcerting fragments, it tells a story of two migrations centuries apart, in almost alternating chapters. Its hero is not a man in search of a Promised Land; it is women making their way to Australia, their perils magnified by their personal circumstances. There is the narrator telling the story of a migration in modern times, a migration much like mine: three sisters on a journey from Cornwall to South Africa to Australia. This voice is acutely perceptive, noting the fragile marriage of her parents, the mother’s disappointed expectations, the golden memories severed with a wrench by the decision to leave. This biographical (autobiographical?) strand is a journey of the self, exploring the transformations that take place when a new geography intersects with personal history. It’s very beautiful to read because Croggon is a poet.
To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2015/12/03/na...
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October 31, 2015Bewitching, difficult and strange. Worth it for the last chapter - almost a short story unto itself - alone.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews