The marionettist or puppeteer motif

In "Whatever Happened to Coppelius? Antecedents and Design in Christina Stead's The Salzburg Tales," Michael Ackland writes about "the puppet motif" in the first of Salzburg Tales' short stories, The Marionettist. This is a pdf file.

He writes:

In recasting the marionettist or puppeteer motif, Stead could draw on an extensive tradition that used the puppet theatre as a metaphor for commenting on human existence and authorship.

She mates the mythic with the actual

The Pykk blog glances at the first lines of The Salzburg Tales.

The blogger writes:

... as in the first lines of Seven Poor Men of Sydney, she mates the mythic with the actual. In this book the mythic is to the fore.

Only ordinary character in the book is Joseph

Time reviews Seven Poor Men of Sydney, very briefly.

The reviewer writes:

Only ordinary character in the book is Joseph, whose very ordinariness lights up the grotesque genius of his companions

The café so famous that it even appeared in Christina Stead's novel Seven Poor Men of Sydney

A 2011 article in SX magazine identifies one of the locations from Seven Poor Men of Sydney. (The arcade that housed the café was demolished in the mid-seventies, but here's a picture.)

The journalist writes:

In the 1930s, the Latin Cafe, run by Madam Helen Pura, was a very cosmopolitan venue, serving excellent European cuisine ... Celebrities and some high-powered elites were also fond of the venue, with the café so famous that it even appeared in Christina Stead's novel Seven Poor Men of Sydney, lightly disguised as the 'Roman Cafe'.

She whips the reader through the landscape

The Pykk blog glances at the first lines of Seven Poor Men of Sydney.

She whips the reader through the landscape with the same certainty that Ann Radcliff shows in The Mysteries of Udolpho - that consuming, roaming eye, searching for contrasts.

The realistic but poetically envisaged background of yesterday's Paris

Time reviews The Beauties and Furies.

The reviewer writes:

Against the realistic but poetically envisaged background of yesterday's Paris, in a political climate heavy with the Stavisky scandals and the riots of Feb. 6, 1934, swarms a crowd of fantastic figures in a kind of Lutetian Lupercalia.

More urgent, less leisurely

The Pykk blog glances at the first lines of The Beauties and Furies.

The blogger writes:

For the first time Stead has decided to lead the reader into the landscape of the book through the eyes of a single character ... which makes this opening, I think, more urgent, less leisurely, than the openings of the two books that came before.