Launch speech for Six Days by Richard Rossiter

Launch speech for Six Days, a novel by Amanda Curtin  

 By Richard Rossiter

Pigface Bookshop Perth, Saturday 22 August 2026

Two comments from the inside cover: ‘To walk these streets of Paris with a man stripped of all but compassion is to grapple with endurance…Exquisite.  Aching.  Real.’  Says Robyn Mundy. 

‘A beautifully entwined story of love, loss and fortitude…Amanda Curtin reveals both the beauty and the cruelties of life in Paris in this incredibly vivid and tender novel,’ says Mirandi Riwoe.

  And, to be somewhat egotistical, eighteen years ago at the launch of Amanda’s first novel, The Sinkings, I observed, ‘We are there at the well in Northern Ireland when we are introduced to the character who will later become known as Little Jock.’

Two observations.  One, it is nice to know that there are some fixed points in this chaotic world where there are good things that do not change. Like Amanda Curtin’s extraordinary writing.

Secondly, what these comments have in common, I think, is that the quality of the writing is such that as a reader, on page after page you are not a bystander, not an observer.  You are present to such a degree that you are participating in the moment, in the experience.  The physical world is there, beautifully rendered in all its specificity, and, along with that presence, the reader is so often asking questions.  What is the significance of this character?  This location?  This event? So you, as reader, are positioned, close to the character, identifying with the very issues that they are facing.  And so often the answers are not immediately clear.  The world is insecure, uncertain, provisional.  

I have jumped straight in here to an aspect of the novel that I find deeply engaging.  To pull back a little, but staying with the notion of questions that the reader may pose:  The novel is titled, obviously, Six Days and these days function more or less as chapter headings. Beginning on the 7 February 2012 and ending on the 12 February 2012.   How neat. How tidy. 

The setting is—for the most part—the streets of Paris and in particular the apartment block where the main character, Daniel Despard, is the concierge. Daniel is French Australian who earlier in his life was a partner in Despard Fine Wines that exported to Australia. Now he is a jittery recovering alcoholic with one stable figure in his life: his dog, Jack, the mongrel Jack Russel.  (I didn’t realise at first that the street level cover photo was in fact, taken by Amanda.  It is very much a Daniel point of view.) The image of Jack appears throughout the book on each of the sections concerning Daniel.  (He is arguably the most reliable, constant figure in the entire novel!)  

Immediately following the introduction of Daniel we move to a new heading: Claudine, 1940, Paris. A short introduction, and then back to Daniel.  Almost immediately, the simplicity of Six Days as a structuring device is blown out of the water.  Who is this young girl, Claudine, born in 1934, and left at a convent as a baby?  What role does she play in the story? At the end of the section introducing her we discover that the Germans have entered Paris. The war is a reality.  

I have laboured this point about the opening sections because this structure is what operates throughout the novel.  On the surface, there is the brevity and focus of six days in 2012—and the presence of Daniel—and yet beneath that simplicity is a complicated history of characters and events that draw the reader in and pose questions that do not have easy answers.  Again and again.  

Perhaps the sharpest focus for this process of engaging the reader lies in the very first page titled 8 February 1991, Montparnasse Cemetery Paris.

The opening sentence is:

On a freezing night, one of the coldest Paris has seen in years, a girl with stone white skin slips unnoticed through the cemetery gate.

The closing paragraph at the bottom of the page is:

Enfin, she murmurs.  At last. Scrambling into the alcove of a mausoleum, burrowing her body into the soft, into the warm, nuzzling her cheek into the gentle.  Safe in phantom arms of stone that wrap themselves around her. 

What a wonderful piece of writing! I think you can see what I mean by saying, ‘You are there.’ The intimate detail places the reader far more in the role of participant rather than an observer.  But what precisely is the event?  Who is this character?  What is going on?  Only towards the end do we discover the answers to these questions and the mystery that dominates Daniel’s life: the apartment that has been empty for a year. 

Speaking more generally, the blurb on the back cover is excellent.  I will read a section:  The novel’s six-day narrative, set in the Latin Quarter of Paris in the winter of 2012, expands into lifetimes, histories, as interconnecting stories weave through Daniel’s. Stories of abandonment and fractured families, rape and coercion, addiction, loss and grief are told in moments and set within the context of war and occupation, the revolutionary sixties….  The personal stitched into, and inseparable from, the political.  

There is a lot of suffering in this novel, especially on the part of women.

I know I’m repeating myself, but within this grand narrative, there is the insistence on the quotidian. Neatly illustrated, I think, by the fact that Daniel’s brother, Philippe, remembers the two of them swimming together ‘in the Swan River at Crawley as children, hoisting briny brown jelly fish on sticks and chucking them at each other.’ As you do.

When I finished reading the novel for the first time, I needed to think about it. What is this story that I’ve just completed?  And then I wondered, Am I overreading, over interpreting?  And then I read the first page again and then turned to the page close to the end of the novel which explains who this character is.  I won’t reveal her name except to say she is a 20 year-old known to have been living on the streets and the cause of death is hypothermia.

 And so the pursuit of meaning continues throughout the novel, in some ways like reading a work of crime fiction.

I think the yoking together of the ‘little’ stories with the Six-Day narrative is quite bold, unconventional.  Frequently, as noted, there is no obvious, immediate, cause-effect relationship.  So, the world is experienced as unpredictable, constituted by random events.  I don’t think it’s too big a stretch to suggest that this is very much the world we live in.  Various madmen running the show—and the very existence of planet earth under threat. In other words, chaos and unpredictability. 

In a calm and measured fashion—which is a characteristic of the author— Six Days is quite radical in its insistence on randomness and disarray where the reader is required to participate in the meaning-making process.  In fact, to be a co-creator of the text—which, of course, is always true of the reading process to some degree.  There would seem to be a message here: If you don’t engage, then there is little or no meaning in our everyday lives. It’s this element that makes me think the novel is quite radical in what it sets out to do—and achieves wonderfully well.  It’s an excellent fit, I believe, with the ambitions for the press, and I’m quoting: ‘books with the potential to still be noticed, and noted, after decades and thus be ripe to influence new literary histories.’

A final comment.  I did wonder about the ending—or the lack of—and whether we should, however faintly, anticipate ‘Daniel Despard, Part 2’?

Congratulations to Amanda and Terri-ann—and everyone else at Upswell associated with this excellent publication—and so, let the celebrations begin/continue!

Richard Rossiter has published three books: Refuge (2019), Arryhthmia: Stories of Desire (2009) and Thicker Than Water (2014).