5/27/2023 0 Comments Devolution bigfoot![]() ![]() ![]() It is difficult not to have your soul wrenched along with the torments of the text. ![]() It is simultaneously lucid and dreamlike, fantastic and magical and cruel and harsh as the desert. The prose is perfect―White deserves a place at James Joyce’s right hand for his mastery of the art. “And stood breathing.” That floating sentence fragment, the likes of which he peppers throughout the text. “There is a man here, miss, asking for your uncle,” said Rose. If you don’t have a copy handy, I’ll enlighten you: The first words of the novel should suffice to convince anybody that White was an absolutely astounding wordsmith. So Voss was sought out from the public library shortly after returning home. I happened to catch The Eye of the Storm, a recent film adaptation of one of White’s later novels,, on the flight back home and was further piqued. Patrick White―a long-term Sidneysider―figures strongly in Falconer’s book, and her allusions to him piqued my interest. The name came up in a book I picked up in Sydney called, appropriately, Sydney, by Delia Falconer―an instalment in the brilliant “City Series” from New South Press, which has a local author paint an impressionistic portrait of the city combining memoir, legend, and local history. I find it hard to believe I only recently caught wind of one of Australia’s most renowned authors (Peter Carey does not have a Nobel Prize, and likely gets more play in North America because he is published and lives in New York). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |