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The Fighter

The Fighter 1

A True Story

by Arnold Zable
Paperback
Publication Date: 27/04/2016
4/5 Rating 1 Review

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Henry Nissen was a champion boxer, the boy from Amess Street in working-class Carlton who fought his way up to beat some of the world's best in the 1970s.

Now, he works on the Melbourne docks, loading and unloading, taking shifts as they come up. But his real work is on the streets. He's in and out of police stations and courts giving character statements and providing support, working to give the disaffected another chance.

And all the while, in the background is the memory of another fighter, his mother—and her devastating decline into madness.

The Fighter is a moving and poetic portrait of a compassionate man, but also a window onto the unnoticed recesses of Melbourne.

'Arnold Zable is a writer who turns the unnoticed and the overlooked into something fine and lustrous.' - Courier-Mail

'Arnold Zable is a long-distance athlete among novelists, and his command of his material is superb...Years of reflection and his own life experiences have contributed to the mastery with which Zable explores the themes of displacement, loss, nostalgia and homecoming in all of his books.' - Canberra Times

This book features in our Best Books of 2016 (so far)

About the Author
Arnold Zable was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and grew up in the inner Melbourne suburb of Carlton. He has travelled and lived in the USA, India, Papua New Guinea, Europe, Southeast Asia and China, and now lives in Melbourne with his wife and son. His books include Jewels and Ashes, Café Scheherazade, The Fig Tree, Scraps of Heaven and Sea of Many Returns. Arnold is president of the International PEN, Melbourne, and is a human rights advocate.

ISBN:
9781925355062
9781925355062
Category:
Biography: general
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
27-04-2016
Publisher:
The Text Publishing Company
Country of origin:
Australia
Pages:
208
Dimensions (mm):
233x154x15mm
Weight:
0.28kg
Arnold Zable

Arnold Zable is a highly acclaimed novelist, storyteller and human rights advocate. His works include Scraps of Heaven, Violin Lessons, The Fighter, which was shortlisted for a Victorian Premier's Literary Award and a New South Wales Premier's Literary Award and his most recent work The Watermill. Zable lives in Melbourne.

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“All you need to do is call and he’ll be in your corner, tending your wounds with affection, sponging you down, administering advice, urging you to keep going. Then propelling you back into the ring, back into life, and yet another chance at redemption”

The Fighter is a non-fiction book by Australian novelist, Arnold Zable. Amongst the boxing fraternity, the name Henry Nissen is well known. Nissen is an Australian Jewish amateur flyweight and professional fly/bantam/featherweight boxer of the 1960s and '70s. But in his seventh decade, Nissen is known in Melbourne for his youth social work.

He may be a dock worker, but he is also a founder of the Emerald Hill Mission. He is “the boy from the block who has remained on the block, friend to the down-and-out, the bewildered and unwanted, who would do anything for a mate, or a stranger. Who would lift you out of the gutter, no questions asked, no reward expected”

Zable uses a number of different sources to relate the story of Nissen’s life: Nissen himself provided much information; his twin brother Leon (also a well-known boxer) and his younger siblings; Nissen’s colleagues in the boxing fraternity; his social work contacts; childhood neighbours and friends; and, of course, media reports and historical documents.

Anecdotes about Nissen’s present day life alternate with stories from his past: his childhood and his boxing career. Nissen’s mother, Sonia, (“Mum, poor girl. She taught us compassion. She made us grow up quickly. And made us able to take on the world”) looms large in his life: her children were always vigilant for signs of her mental illness.

“She wears a floral dress, evoking summer, and she looks directly at the camera. She is beautiful… There are no inklings of the demons that would come to possess her. There is no hint of the pale tormented being she would become. No indication of the voices that would hold her hostage in a distant continent”

As a novelist, Zable treats the reader to some lovely descriptive prose: “The house at 212 is cast in afternoon sunlight. The west-facing bay window glints, and the tiles glow orange. Patches of moss shade the bricks with jade and silver. The breeze has dropped. The clouds are motionless. Time is temporarily halted. The past slips in like a sidling huntsman”

Also “Henry pauses on the way and glances at the weed-flowers and thistles on the embankment above a ribbon of water. A cormorant alights on a wooden pylon. Mosses and shrubs and swathes of long grass disappear in the falling darkness. A patch of daisies grows beneath the creek bridge, beside a row of lights switching on at nightfall” Zable’s portrait of this amazing and compassionate man is an interesting and uplifting read.

Contains Spoilers No
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