Books
Josephine Rowe
Little World
Josephine Rowe’s brief and wonderfully elliptical new novel begins with the arrival of the body of a saint in the Kimberley in the years after World War II. A bequest from Norwegian scientist Kaspar Isaksen to his friend, Orrin, the saint is a young girl from Panama. Although she is not yet officially canonised, she already has a series of supposed miracles under her belt: magic tears that can cure disease and a “heady, floral aroma” among them. But her real claim to sanctity is the fact her body remains incorruptible, refusing to decay.
As will become apparent, the saint is not really quite dead. Instead, she exists in a different structure of time, unmoving but aware of the world around her. She also does not feel especially beatific about her situation. Instead she is enraged: furious about the cruelty and sexual violence that led to her death, and about the cruel joke of being transformed into something incorruptible and holy when all she desires is revenge upon the men who did this to her and other girls like her.
This fury about the ways in which women and women’s bodies are abused and then sentimentalised jolts like a dark electricity through Little World. Rowe connects these structures of violence to questions of extraction and colonialism. As it traces the glancing trajectories of its characters, the book draws a line from Panama to Nauru to Australia, finding in each a microcosm of the larger violence of colonial rapacity. These connections are never forced and land with real power. In Panama, where the saint grows up, her childhood takes place adjacent to the unremittingly savage and largely ignored exploitation of the mostly Black labourers from the Caribbean – themselves the descendants of slaves – who constructed the canal. Similarly in Nauru, where Isaksen works in the lazaret and Orrin in the phosphate mines, the people and landscape are brutalised and murdered.
These complexities are unravelled with marvellous precision. As previous books such as Here Until August and A Loving, Faithful Animal make clear, Rowe is an incredibly gifted stylist. A Little World shares the Latinate headiness and the delight in the texture of language that makes her earlier work so striking, but as befits its oblique narrative structure and pared-back storytelling, the writing in A Little World is sparer and more focused.
While its conceit might sound cloying, there is nothing saccharine or sentimental about A Little World. Instead, like the South American novelists from which it takes its cues, it turns to the magical to give voice to the often-unspoken histories and webs of connection that move beneath the surface of the world we inhabit. The result is a book that, despite its brevity, contains multitudes.
Black Inc, 144pp, $27.99
Black Inc is a Schwartz company
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 17, 2025 as "Little World".
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