In praise of Paddy
Over at Sorrow at Sills Bend they're talking about setting up a Patrick White reading circle. This is in response to the brouhaha in a newspaper I've refused to read since their raha all the way with doulbleya coverage of the invasion of Iraq (which I was only reading in the first place because my boss made me) where someone submitted a chapter of a Patrick White book to publishers for consideration and none of them bought it. This made some point about the stupidity of publishers or something.
It did make me think about when I read his books and I've read almost everything except the ending of Voss and maybe The Tree of Man. This was entirely voluntary apart from A Fringe of Leaves which was on the reading list for ENG101 and I hated it (because I wasn't convinced by the cannibalism and couldn't understand why Mrs Fraser didn't seem happy to be rescued and there was a really gross bit about trying to make a poultice to draw out boils which made my 18 year old self go EWWWWWW!).
I read most of them when I was school, probably initially attracted by "Australia's only Nobel Prize winning author". That would have explained the first one one anyway (The Solid Mandala?) but not why I kept coming back. And I did because I found him fascinating. People in his books were not very nice at all; when they loved each other they were still mean. Nothing was straightforward. I remember the shivers of discomfort I would get when he described a particularly uncomfortable series of emotions or interactions. I'm thinking of in The Vivisectionist where the central character is such an utterly selfish prick that he destroys the life of his girlfriend. I have a vague recollection of her falling off a cliff in the bush and him painting a picture. This is probably muddled. And Mrs Fraser and her husband are described back in England in the distant past as fighting with invisible knives leaving scars that don't show. Or something.
And his writing is so very physical. I remember in The Solid Mandala how the simple brother loves driving the cart and delights in the sight and the smell of the horses pooing. And he describes landscape really well. The south of France felt as real in The Twyborn Affair as the Australian rural landscape did in everything else.
They're good books. Not easy books, not comfortable books, like those by David Malouf are a lot of the time. We should treasure them.
It did make me think about when I read his books and I've read almost everything except the ending of Voss and maybe The Tree of Man. This was entirely voluntary apart from A Fringe of Leaves which was on the reading list for ENG101 and I hated it (because I wasn't convinced by the cannibalism and couldn't understand why Mrs Fraser didn't seem happy to be rescued and there was a really gross bit about trying to make a poultice to draw out boils which made my 18 year old self go EWWWWWW!).
I read most of them when I was school, probably initially attracted by "Australia's only Nobel Prize winning author". That would have explained the first one one anyway (The Solid Mandala?) but not why I kept coming back. And I did because I found him fascinating. People in his books were not very nice at all; when they loved each other they were still mean. Nothing was straightforward. I remember the shivers of discomfort I would get when he described a particularly uncomfortable series of emotions or interactions. I'm thinking of in The Vivisectionist where the central character is such an utterly selfish prick that he destroys the life of his girlfriend. I have a vague recollection of her falling off a cliff in the bush and him painting a picture. This is probably muddled. And Mrs Fraser and her husband are described back in England in the distant past as fighting with invisible knives leaving scars that don't show. Or something.
And his writing is so very physical. I remember in The Solid Mandala how the simple brother loves driving the cart and delights in the sight and the smell of the horses pooing. And he describes landscape really well. The south of France felt as real in The Twyborn Affair as the Australian rural landscape did in everything else.
They're good books. Not easy books, not comfortable books, like those by David Malouf are a lot of the time. We should treasure them.
posted by Mary Bennet | 11:06 am
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