No Friend but the Mountains: How Should I Read This?

Abstract:This essay turns to the paratexts of No Friend but the Mountains, and the question of how this book should be read in these margins of the text. Focusing on both peritexts and epitexts—Richard Flanagan’s “Foreword,” Omid Tofighian’s “Translator’s Tale” and “Reflections,” and a review of the novel by J. M. Coetzee, “Australia’s Shame”—it examines the ethical challenge to Australian readers at this threshold of interpretation, and asks what responses we might make as beneficiaries and implicated subjects, and as Southern readers.