Panthers and the Museum of Fire by Jen Craig, with photographs by Bettina Kaiser
First published in Australia in 2015 by Spineless Wonders; published in the US and elsewhere by Zerogram Press in 2020.
In October, we’ll be discussing Jen Craig’s Panthers and the Museum of Fire, an amazing book that takes the reader on a walk through Sydney on a Saturday morning, through the narrator’s life, through the city’s history, and through threads of literature both actual and fictional (Panthers and the Museum of Fire is the title of a manuscript the narrator is returning to its late author’s sister).
We are extremely fortunate to have the author (the actual one) of Panthers and the Museum of Fire joining this month’s discussion on Monday, 28 October (Tuesday, 29 October in Australia).
From reviews and commentaries:
• Bronwyn Meehan, “Talking and Walking with Jen Craig,” on the Spineless Wonders website, December 9, 2016:
Panthers follows the narrator, Jen, on a journey through Glebe in Sydney’s inner west towards Surry Hills as she carries with her the manuscript of a childhood friend who has recently died. Her thoughts surge between past and present as she strives to understand the effect her friend’s manuscript Panthers and the Museum of Fire, has had on her. The journey is a backdrop to the filtered thoughts and emotional journey of Jen, which scratches the descriptive surface of the visual cityscape between two relatively obscure points within Sydney.panthers_draincovers
Rebecca Solnit, author of Wanderlust: A History of Walking points out that “most modern writers are deskbound, indoor creatures when they write, and nothing more than outline and ideas can be achieved elsewhere.” (Solnit, 2000: 113). Craig’s method for writing Panthers seems to me to hark back to Indigenous Australian oral traditions and their strong connection with walking and the land. This may in part explain why her work has the casualness of a conversation. You feel the forward momentum in the book, the inner monologue of the narrator, much like Jen Craig is reading it aloud to you, over your shoulder.
• Kiran Bhat, The Newtown Review of Books, June 10, 2021:
Superficially, Jen Craig’s novella Panthers and the Museum of Fire is the narrator Jen’s response to the draft of a recently completed novel, Panthers and the Museum of Fire. Nothing more, and nothing less. There are certain key details to note. In the novella, the writer of Panthers and the Museum of Fire is a dead woman named Sarah. Jen is supposed to meet Sarah’s sister Pamela somewhere in the Sydney suburb of Glebe to return the manuscript, and the entire action of the novel is framed by the walk between Jen’s home and the café where this meeting will take place….
…Panthers and the Museum of Fire is just as vast as the manuscript meta-reflected upon in her novella. While the juxtaposition of photographs with intense reflections draws unavoidable comparisons to Austerlitz or The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, Jen’s meandering mind has much more in common with the equally manic narrator of Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann. That being said, Panthers and the Museum of Fire relies much less on intellect and more on pathos than Sebald or Ellman. Because of her neuroticism as well as her insecurity, Jen comes off as an immensely likeable character. One feels not so much trapped in her mind as nestled inside of it, and because of that softness, is more likely to relate to her than feel overwhelmed by the deluge of her thoughts.
It is therefore likely that Panthers and the Museum of Fire will provoke not only contemplation in the minds of its readers, but also sympathy. While constructed as a stand-alone response to a friend’s literary work, Panthers and the Museum of Fire employs its premise to deconstruct what can or cannot be said, experienced, or felt in the context of a story. It is the ideal book for those who are interested not in the destination of a plot but in the interior journey of a character, just as it is the ideal work of art for anyone interested in the experience of being trapped within one mind, but gently so.
• Kirkus Reviews, October 6, 2020:
The distinct scenes of this book…weave in and out of Jen’s progress across the meticulously rendered landscape of the city proper as her thoughts spiral, double-back, wallow, and soar. Sarah’s book, which is named for a road sign on the outskirts of Sydney, is simultaneously “nothing at all” and the instigating event for Jen’s own literary awakening—a book that gets to the “quick” of things and is, in fact, nothing but quick. It frees Jen from her own foundering attempts to write and shows her a new way forward. The result is the book the reader now holds in their hands four years after the day that Jen, the character, first set off on her book-length walk.
• Greg Gerke, Vol.1 Brooklyn, November 9, 2020:
Craig’s book transported me to the words of Wallace Stevens in an autumnal mood: “Children…will guess that with our bones/We left much more, left what still is/The look of things, left what we felt/At what we saw.” The air of death hangs about the Sydney landscapes in this jewel of feeling, written in a time when so much fiction is rancorous in delivering a satiety of “relevance,” when all the relevance required is to know we are born and then we will die.
• Chris Via, The Arts Fuse, October 12, 2020:
The 2015 Australian novella Panthers and the Museum of Fire has been characterized in a number of ways: stream of consciousness, autofiction, and Künstlerroman chief among them. Knausgård’s autobiographical mode and Woolf’s “moments of being” have been noted as influences, though the digressive tendencies of Nicholson Baker (cf. The Mezzanine) and the daring catalogue of Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait have also been referenced. In other words, this is one of those books powered by a paradox: nothing much happens, yet, for the protagonist, everything happens. For the reader, “the whole time you were reading you were waiting for the story…to start for real.” For the writer, the story will “start for real” only after the narrative ends.
• Garrett Zecker, The Collidescope, October 16, 2022:
The written word, relationships, the difficulty of communication, and the concept of what space we occupy and leave behind are central to Craig’s beautifully brief novel. As the book’s titular novel is in fact Sarah’s, Craig’s work is a reflection on the act of taking up space in the written word and what it means to carry the weight of one’s own stories around, hidden from those around us. I was mesmerized by Craig’s use of sentences that tumbled around the narrator’s head without losing momentum. Additionally, Craig presents an adept and captivating portrait of the effects and impact of suffering from an eating disorder in a way that I have not seen in writing before. While most of us have not experienced it, I have found myself caring about and understanding the condition of the narrator more here than in any other written or real-life engagement with the topic.
We will be talking about Panthers and the Museum of Fire on:
US: Monday, 28 October
8-9PM Eastern
7-8PM Central
6-7PM Mountain
5-6PM Pacific
Australia: Tuesday, 29 October (note change to Summer Time)
11AM-12 Noon Australian Eastern
10:30-11:30AM Australian Central
Sign up for the Wafer-Thin Books mailing list for the Zoom invitation.
