SOURCE: "The Tower of Babble," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 13, 1994, p. B.

[An educator, Smith was one of the judges responsible for awarding Malouf the 1994 Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction. In the essay below, she discusses Malouf's focus on language, boundaries, and the human condition in Remembering Babylon.]

One day, in the middle of the last century, when white settlement was crawling, tentatively, up the coast of Queensland, three children were stopped in their games by the sight of a strange "thing" in the nearby swamps: perhaps "a human that in the manner of the tales they told one another … had been changed into a bird, but only halfway, and now, neither one thing nor the other, was hopping and flapping towards them out of a world … that was the abode of everything savage and fearsome … and of all that belonged to the Absolute...