I couldn't find a pic of the book but this is the author.

So the inside jacket blurb of this book describes the narrator as “a pitiless gormandizer” and says that “at one level Memoirs of an Old Bastard is a Rabelaisian satire of a New World city…”

Now how the hell could I possibly improve on this summary? I’m not even going to try.

The ‘New World city’ referred to is Melbourne, but this is not the Melbourne we are used to reading about. It’s twisted, and gothic, and filled to the brim with ridiculous-yet-not-entirely-inaccurate caricatures of the city’s cultural elite. There are flaring tempers, the physical ramifications of said flaring tempers, characters who wear a pince-nez, a nurse who goes by the nickname Booze Bus, and truly awful poets. Threading through the narrative are fragments of a letter from the millionaire narrator to his lost mystery daughter.  It could be sweet if it weren’t for the fleeting references to Nabokov and waifs. It’s not as wrong as it sounds. But then, it is.

Literary name puns and overbearing satire aside, Hibberd’s novel is sharply funny. One has the impression, when wading through the elaborately adorned sentences, that the author intentionally wanted to sound as wanky as humanely possible. You could get annoyed by this, or you could sit back, pause, and just revel in the utter, utter absurdity of it all. What better way to take the piss out of the cultural capital of Australia than to truly embody the aspects of it that you’re targeting?

Hibberd is an Australian playwright whose work I was unfamiliar with, being the theatre noob that I am (plays include the Brain Rot series [1967-68], Dimboola [1969], and The Les Darcy Show [1974] to name a few). While I’m not going to be tearing down the mountainous stacks of books at Gould’s Second-hand Bookshop to find the sequels to Memoirs (The Life of Riley and Perdita), this man is one serious Australian theatre veteran so his plays are on my TBR list.