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Carpentaria
Hailed as a "literary sensation" by The New York Times Book Review, Carpentaria is the luminous award-winning novel by Australian Aboriginal writer and activist Alexis Wright.
Alexis Wright employs mysticism, stark reality, and pointed imagination to re-create the land and the Aboriginal people of Carpentaria.
In the sparsely populated northern Queensland town of Desperance, loyalties run deep and battle lines have been drawn between the powerful Phantom family, leaders of the Westend Pricklebush people, and Joseph Midnight's renegade Eastend mob, and their disputes with the white officials of neighboring towns. Steeped in myth and magical realism, Wright's hypnotic storytelling exposes the heartbreaking realities of Aboriginal life.
By turns operatic and everyday, surreal and sensational, the novel teems with extraordinary, larger-than-life characters. From the outcast savior Elias Smith, religious zealot Mossie Fishman, and murderous mayor Bruiser to activist Will Phantom and Normal Phantom, ruler of the family, these unforgettable characters transcend their circumstances and challenge assumptions about the downtrodden "other." Trapped between politics and principle, past and present, the indigenous tribes fight to protect their natural resources, sacred sites, and above all, their people.
Already an international bestseller, Carpentaria has garnered praise from around the world.
Alexis Wright employs mysticism, stark reality, and pointed imagination to re-create the land and the Aboriginal people of Carpentaria.
In the sparsely populated northern Queensland town of Desperance, loyalties run deep and battle lines have been drawn between the powerful Phantom family, leaders of the Westend Pricklebush people, and Joseph Midnight's renegade Eastend mob, and their disputes with the white officials of neighboring towns. Steeped in myth and magical realism, Wright's hypnotic storytelling exposes the heartbreaking realities of Aboriginal life.
By turns operatic and everyday, surreal and sensational, the novel teems with extraordinary, larger-than-life characters. From the outcast savior Elias Smith, religious zealot Mossie Fishman, and murderous mayor Bruiser to activist Will Phantom and Normal Phantom, ruler of the family, these unforgettable characters transcend their circumstances and challenge assumptions about the downtrodden "other." Trapped between politics and principle, past and present, the indigenous tribes fight to protect their natural resources, sacred sites, and above all, their people.
Already an international bestseller, Carpentaria has garnered praise from around the world.
520 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
About the author
Alexis Wright
37 books287 followersAlexis Wright is from the Waanji people from the highlands of the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. Her acclaimed first novel Plains of Promise was published in 1997 by University of Queensland Press and was shortlisted in the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, The Age Book of the Year, and the NSW Premier's Awards. The novel has been translated into French.
Alexis has published award-winning short stories and her other books are the anthology Take Power (Jukurrpa Books, l998), celebrating 20 years of land rights in Central Australia; and Grog War (Magabala,1997), an examination of the alcohol restrictions in Tennant Creek.
Her latest novel, Carpentaria was published by Giramondo in 2006. An epic set in the Gulf country of north-western Queensland, from where her people come, the novel tells of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance. In 2007 Carpentaria won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, Queensland Premier's Literary Awards, Best Fiction Book, and the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA), Australian Literary Fiction Book of the Year.
Biographical information from the Australia Council website.
Alexis has published award-winning short stories and her other books are the anthology Take Power (Jukurrpa Books, l998), celebrating 20 years of land rights in Central Australia; and Grog War (Magabala,1997), an examination of the alcohol restrictions in Tennant Creek.
Her latest novel, Carpentaria was published by Giramondo in 2006. An epic set in the Gulf country of north-western Queensland, from where her people come, the novel tells of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance. In 2007 Carpentaria won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, Queensland Premier's Literary Awards, Best Fiction Book, and the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA), Australian Literary Fiction Book of the Year.
Biographical information from the Australia Council website.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 277 reviews
February 6, 2018
Carpentaria is an aboriginal epic; it’s a soaring story full of imagination that gives voice to Australia’s Indigenous population, though it is also horribly uncomfortable to read and even harder to enjoy.
Alexis Wright works directly with oral tradition, with folktale and myth, to interpose her narrative with as much authenticity as possible; she brings tribal legends into the modern space, asserting how important such things are to the remaining members of the civilisations that were almost destroyed. It’s an angry narrative, one oozing with frustration. The Aboriginals have lost their home and are forced to live in the most undesirable of locations in a nation that is rightfully theirs. Their birth-right has been usurped: their land stolen.
And the land is of such vital importance in understanding this novel; the Aboriginals are connected to it on a spiritual level. They understand it and care for it in ways the colonisers are completely dumb to. They speak to it, and it speaks back to them. They use it thwart the efforts of the white man and eventually attempt to destroy him with it. Magic is combined with faith and belief making it very hard to determine what is actually real within the story and what is a mere matter of an alternative understanding of reality.
This forms the crux of my conflicting opinion of the novel: I just don’t know quite what to take from it. Perhaps if I was an Australian I would understand it more and even more so if I was an Indigenous Australian: it may speak to certain readers on a stronger level, though I do think it of vital importance that we should read the writing of many authors on a wide global scale (not just the popular white western Eurocentric volumes that bombard the shelves and dominate the literary cannon.) It just so happens that this one is rather difficult. I feel like I need to read it again to conceptualise it, but I enjoyed the reading process so little that I will never bring myself to do so.
It’s a novel that really needed to be written, and it’s a novel that ought to be better known. At times it reminded me of modernist fiction in the vain of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s nonlinear and extremely confusing at times. I would not recommend this to readers who have not read similar fiction before, fiction that spirals in circles and messes with your mind as you try to put the pieces together and form an interpretation of what is actually happening.
Overall it’s an important piece of writing, but not one I, or many other readers, will engage with.
Alexis Wright works directly with oral tradition, with folktale and myth, to interpose her narrative with as much authenticity as possible; she brings tribal legends into the modern space, asserting how important such things are to the remaining members of the civilisations that were almost destroyed. It’s an angry narrative, one oozing with frustration. The Aboriginals have lost their home and are forced to live in the most undesirable of locations in a nation that is rightfully theirs. Their birth-right has been usurped: their land stolen.
And the land is of such vital importance in understanding this novel; the Aboriginals are connected to it on a spiritual level. They understand it and care for it in ways the colonisers are completely dumb to. They speak to it, and it speaks back to them. They use it thwart the efforts of the white man and eventually attempt to destroy him with it. Magic is combined with faith and belief making it very hard to determine what is actually real within the story and what is a mere matter of an alternative understanding of reality.
This forms the crux of my conflicting opinion of the novel: I just don’t know quite what to take from it. Perhaps if I was an Australian I would understand it more and even more so if I was an Indigenous Australian: it may speak to certain readers on a stronger level, though I do think it of vital importance that we should read the writing of many authors on a wide global scale (not just the popular white western Eurocentric volumes that bombard the shelves and dominate the literary cannon.) It just so happens that this one is rather difficult. I feel like I need to read it again to conceptualise it, but I enjoyed the reading process so little that I will never bring myself to do so.
It’s a novel that really needed to be written, and it’s a novel that ought to be better known. At times it reminded me of modernist fiction in the vain of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s nonlinear and extremely confusing at times. I would not recommend this to readers who have not read similar fiction before, fiction that spirals in circles and messes with your mind as you try to put the pieces together and form an interpretation of what is actually happening.
Overall it’s an important piece of writing, but not one I, or many other readers, will engage with.
May 13, 2019
This baffling, dreamlike epic rushes you up in a semi-conscious swirl of language into the wild tropical north of Australia, where Queensland sweeps round to cradle an armful of the Pacific in the form of the Gulf of Carpentaria – a land of savannas and tropical cyclones, of eucalypts and estuary streams, melaleucas, songlines, unscrupulous mining corporations, and back-country bogan settlements.
The Gulf country is also the homeland of the Waanyi people, from whom Alexis Wright is descended on her mother's side, and what Carpentaria is most obviously and essentially is a hymn to her people and to her home. It seems necessary to establish this, because it can be difficult to work out what else it might be. Postcolonial epic? Magic-realist fantasy? Indigenous polemic?
The book doesn't present itself as a simple proposition. At more than 500 pages, it feels, just from heaving the thing up in front of your face, like something that will require some work. And the language is constantly wrong-footing you as a reader – like something that's been run through Google Translate and back twice, full of not-quite-right constructions (‘for no good rhyme or reason’), redundancies (‘it fell down, descended down’), misused verbs (‘the thought abhorred him’), even apparent spelling mistakes (‘the mother load’) which might just be editorial slips but which nevertheless contribute to a general sense that language here is unstable, not always to be trusted.
When you read Wright's sentences, you do it gingerly, feeling ahead with your toes, not wanting to put your full weight on a phrase until you're sure it will hold. It reminded me a bit of reading Steve Aylett, though the tone couldn't be more different. Here the method is a kind of Aboriginal English that dares you to think of it as ‘broken’, mixing myth, jokes, and natural history. And then – every now and again – it will suddenly explode into some long, flawlessly poetic excursion positively drenched in the local landscape:
The nearest thing we have to a hero is the patriarch Normal Phantom, who lives in an indigenous settlement outside the town of Desperance. Norm's community is in a long-running feud with another Aboriginal group on the other side of the village; and between them are the whitefellas of Uptown, run by the violent Mayor Bruiser, policed by the corrupt Officer Truthful, and inhabited by a roster of colourful characters like Lloydie, who runs the pub and is in love with a mermaid trapped in the wood of his bar. Meanwhile Norm's partner, Angel Day, has run off with the religious zealot Mozzie Fishman, who leads a convoy endlessly following the Dreaming tracks, while his son Will Phantom is mounting a violent resistance against the local mining corporation…
These are figures that at times seem like characters in a joke (‘An Englishman, and Irishman and an Australian walked into a bar…’), and at other times assume the epic quality of mythic archetypes. Their stories blur into one another, with narratives that follow multiple timelines simultaneously, or loop back on themselves without warning. This is not a case of ‘magic realism’ (an unsatisfactory term), performed for metaphorical effect; rather, it deliberately reflects, I think, a completely different view of the world, one in which time and individuals are not especially important, and where the events of distant myth play an active role in current relationships and causalities.
The language of the novel is richly localised, busy with snappy gums, spearwood, eskies, myalls, skerricks, whirly-winds, gibber stones, sooty grunters, min min lights, big bikkies and a host of other Australianisms that pushed my Australian National Dictionary to the limits. Not to mention the many Aboriginal terms. The last time the Waanyi language was surveyed, in the early 80s, researchers found ‘about ten’ native speakers, so it's doubtless extinct by now; Carpentaria is, in this as in other things, an act of preservation as well as of modernisation.
I just don't know who to recommend it to. After a hundred pages I didn't understand it at all. After two hundred pages I thought I understood it, and didn't like it. I might easily have ditched it there, but the Goodreads review hanging over my head induced me to carry on – fortunately. After three hundred pages I was gripped, and by the time I finished I was deeply moved. Since then it's only kept expanding in my head, so that I now feel it's one of the most extraordinary books I've read in a long time. Lyrical, passionate, and seemingly detached from all the usual artistic traditions, it feels like you're hearing the genuine voice of a strange and distant land that has not been shown in literature before.
The Gulf country is also the homeland of the Waanyi people, from whom Alexis Wright is descended on her mother's side, and what Carpentaria is most obviously and essentially is a hymn to her people and to her home. It seems necessary to establish this, because it can be difficult to work out what else it might be. Postcolonial epic? Magic-realist fantasy? Indigenous polemic?
The book doesn't present itself as a simple proposition. At more than 500 pages, it feels, just from heaving the thing up in front of your face, like something that will require some work. And the language is constantly wrong-footing you as a reader – like something that's been run through Google Translate and back twice, full of not-quite-right constructions (‘for no good rhyme or reason’), redundancies (‘it fell down, descended down’), misused verbs (‘the thought abhorred him’), even apparent spelling mistakes (‘the mother load’) which might just be editorial slips but which nevertheless contribute to a general sense that language here is unstable, not always to be trusted.
When you read Wright's sentences, you do it gingerly, feeling ahead with your toes, not wanting to put your full weight on a phrase until you're sure it will hold. It reminded me a bit of reading Steve Aylett, though the tone couldn't be more different. Here the method is a kind of Aboriginal English that dares you to think of it as ‘broken’, mixing myth, jokes, and natural history. And then – every now and again – it will suddenly explode into some long, flawlessly poetic excursion positively drenched in the local landscape:
Thousands of dry balls of lemon-coloured spinifex, uprooted by the storm, rolled into town and were swept out to sea. From the termite mounds dotting the old country the dust storm gathered up untold swarms of flying ants dizzy with the smell of rain and sent them flying with the wind. Dead birds flew past. Animals racing in frightened droves were left behind in full flight, impaled on barbed-wire spikes along the boundary fences. In the sheddings of the earth's waste, plastic shopping bags from the rubbish dump rose up like ghosts into the troposphere of red skies to be taken for a ride, far away. Way out above the ocean, the pollution of dust and wind-ripped pieces of plastic gathered, then dropped with the salty humidity and sank in the waters far below, to become the unsightly decoration of a groper's highway deep in the sea.
The nearest thing we have to a hero is the patriarch Normal Phantom, who lives in an indigenous settlement outside the town of Desperance. Norm's community is in a long-running feud with another Aboriginal group on the other side of the village; and between them are the whitefellas of Uptown, run by the violent Mayor Bruiser, policed by the corrupt Officer Truthful, and inhabited by a roster of colourful characters like Lloydie, who runs the pub and is in love with a mermaid trapped in the wood of his bar. Meanwhile Norm's partner, Angel Day, has run off with the religious zealot Mozzie Fishman, who leads a convoy endlessly following the Dreaming tracks, while his son Will Phantom is mounting a violent resistance against the local mining corporation…
These are figures that at times seem like characters in a joke (‘An Englishman, and Irishman and an Australian walked into a bar…’), and at other times assume the epic quality of mythic archetypes. Their stories blur into one another, with narratives that follow multiple timelines simultaneously, or loop back on themselves without warning. This is not a case of ‘magic realism’ (an unsatisfactory term), performed for metaphorical effect; rather, it deliberately reflects, I think, a completely different view of the world, one in which time and individuals are not especially important, and where the events of distant myth play an active role in current relationships and causalities.
The language of the novel is richly localised, busy with snappy gums, spearwood, eskies, myalls, skerricks, whirly-winds, gibber stones, sooty grunters, min min lights, big bikkies and a host of other Australianisms that pushed my Australian National Dictionary to the limits. Not to mention the many Aboriginal terms. The last time the Waanyi language was surveyed, in the early 80s, researchers found ‘about ten’ native speakers, so it's doubtless extinct by now; Carpentaria is, in this as in other things, an act of preservation as well as of modernisation.
I just don't know who to recommend it to. After a hundred pages I didn't understand it at all. After two hundred pages I thought I understood it, and didn't like it. I might easily have ditched it there, but the Goodreads review hanging over my head induced me to carry on – fortunately. After three hundred pages I was gripped, and by the time I finished I was deeply moved. Since then it's only kept expanding in my head, so that I now feel it's one of the most extraordinary books I've read in a long time. Lyrical, passionate, and seemingly detached from all the usual artistic traditions, it feels like you're hearing the genuine voice of a strange and distant land that has not been shown in literature before.
September 10, 2022
OUR HUMANITY PUT TO THE TEST
The description of the Aboriginals living around the Golf of Carpentaria is so precise, smooth, ironical, fairytalelike, perfect! The parallel with Western society so harsh, powerful and real.
Time and Space are differently conceived, and so are the environment, Nature and dreams' dimension in opposition to reality.
Two totally different cultures and societies excluding each other because too proud, too confident in their own beliefs, too greedy and racist. Is there any Hope left for Australians (white and black fella) to coexist and respect each other - and the environment? To live according to commonly shared laws and comply with their own identities?
The answer to that question is not to be found in this book either, wich closely and brilliantly deals with the problem, but in ourselves, in every each of us. So that the role of the book becomes actually that of presenting the problem in order to touch that inner part of us responsable of comprehension and compassion. In a nutshell, of humanity!
The description of the Aboriginals living around the Golf of Carpentaria is so precise, smooth, ironical, fairytalelike, perfect! The parallel with Western society so harsh, powerful and real.
Time and Space are differently conceived, and so are the environment, Nature and dreams' dimension in opposition to reality.
Two totally different cultures and societies excluding each other because too proud, too confident in their own beliefs, too greedy and racist. Is there any Hope left for Australians (white and black fella) to coexist and respect each other - and the environment? To live according to commonly shared laws and comply with their own identities?
The answer to that question is not to be found in this book either, wich closely and brilliantly deals with the problem, but in ourselves, in every each of us. So that the role of the book becomes actually that of presenting the problem in order to touch that inner part of us responsable of comprehension and compassion. In a nutshell, of humanity!
June 28, 2013
I urge everybody to read this staggering book which is IMHO a work of immortal genius.
Seriously, it’s huge. When I think of authors whose books can barely contain the hugeness of what is inside them, I think of Dostoyevsky, Mishima and Ihimaera. And now we in Australia have the precious gift of Alexis Wright.
This is it. Forget about Baz Luhrmann. “Carpentaria” is the Great Australian Novel; the epic of our time. It isn’t a small book, or an easy read. You can’t get through it, for example, while a small child is holding a piece of popcorn an inch from your eye and asking if it looks more like a cloud or a flower, and that’s why it took me a couple of weeks to get through. “Carpentaria” is not “When The Snake Bites The Sun”. It is layered like bedrock and sharp as shark's teeth.
Read this if you are Australian. Read it if you like literary fiction. Maybe even read it if you’re neither but enjoy weighty fantasy tomes. While the journeys of some of Wright’s unforgettable characters could be seen as purely spiritual or allegorical, there’s a way to read it as supernatural, too, and such passages are as powerful and immersive as storytelling gets.
Incredibly, it looks like I’m only the second of my Goodreads friends to have read “Carpentaria” (and Rivqa only just beat me to the punch!) This 2007 winner of the Miles Franklin Award is overwhelmingly worthy, and I know I won’t be able to set foot in the far north of this country again without the legendary Norm Phantom, Angel Day, Will Phantom, Joseph Midnight, Girlie, Bala and all the others leaping to life in my imagination.
Seriously, it’s huge. When I think of authors whose books can barely contain the hugeness of what is inside them, I think of Dostoyevsky, Mishima and Ihimaera. And now we in Australia have the precious gift of Alexis Wright.
This is it. Forget about Baz Luhrmann. “Carpentaria” is the Great Australian Novel; the epic of our time. It isn’t a small book, or an easy read. You can’t get through it, for example, while a small child is holding a piece of popcorn an inch from your eye and asking if it looks more like a cloud or a flower, and that’s why it took me a couple of weeks to get through. “Carpentaria” is not “When The Snake Bites The Sun”. It is layered like bedrock and sharp as shark's teeth.
Read this if you are Australian. Read it if you like literary fiction. Maybe even read it if you’re neither but enjoy weighty fantasy tomes. While the journeys of some of Wright’s unforgettable characters could be seen as purely spiritual or allegorical, there’s a way to read it as supernatural, too, and such passages are as powerful and immersive as storytelling gets.
Incredibly, it looks like I’m only the second of my Goodreads friends to have read “Carpentaria” (and Rivqa only just beat me to the punch!) This 2007 winner of the Miles Franklin Award is overwhelmingly worthy, and I know I won’t be able to set foot in the far north of this country again without the legendary Norm Phantom, Angel Day, Will Phantom, Joseph Midnight, Girlie, Bala and all the others leaping to life in my imagination.
January 14, 2012
I can see why Carpentaria won a Miles Franklin Award. It is a big book which tells an important story in a manner likely to be novel to many readers.
On its face, Carpentaria is the story of a town, Desperance, on the Gulf of Carpentaria, giving the reader an insight into tensions within the Aboriginal communities on the outskirts of the town and between them and the white people who live in the town itself. Underneath that, and far more importantly, it is a story about family, Country and Culture.
It was at first difficult for me to follow, as the first few chapters take an entirely non-linear path and at times appear somewhat unrelated. However, if the reader simply reads and accepts these chapters as separate stories, it soon becomes clear that they set the scene for the main events of the novel, as well as introducing many of the characters. Nothing is there by accident and no reading is wasted. The book is never entirely linear, but does become easier to follow, and the story easier to comprehend, as the reader learns more.
To try to explain more would give too much away. Let it suffice to say that Ms Wright's work is meticulous, and I suspect each word was placed with care. The reader is in safe hands.
On its face, Carpentaria is the story of a town, Desperance, on the Gulf of Carpentaria, giving the reader an insight into tensions within the Aboriginal communities on the outskirts of the town and between them and the white people who live in the town itself. Underneath that, and far more importantly, it is a story about family, Country and Culture.
It was at first difficult for me to follow, as the first few chapters take an entirely non-linear path and at times appear somewhat unrelated. However, if the reader simply reads and accepts these chapters as separate stories, it soon becomes clear that they set the scene for the main events of the novel, as well as introducing many of the characters. Nothing is there by accident and no reading is wasted. The book is never entirely linear, but does become easier to follow, and the story easier to comprehend, as the reader learns more.
To try to explain more would give too much away. Let it suffice to say that Ms Wright's work is meticulous, and I suspect each word was placed with care. The reader is in safe hands.
February 7, 2015
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 7, 2021
The unrelentless, often depressing story of an aborigines community told in a beautiful, mesmerizing style alternating between witty, sometimes naive seeming vernacular and lyrical, deeply soulful prose. Dreamtime and reality are interwoven in such an intimate way that the reader never really can draw a line between those two. The land and the spirtuality are one.
I was deeply impressed by this work that manages to depict the bleak existence of the aborigines under the racist government of the whites in a way that elevates the pain into something transcendent.
I would highly recommend this work of beauty to readers who have no problems with non-linear, surrealistic narration of magical realism.
I was deeply impressed by this work that manages to depict the bleak existence of the aborigines under the racist government of the whites in a way that elevates the pain into something transcendent.
I would highly recommend this work of beauty to readers who have no problems with non-linear, surrealistic narration of magical realism.
October 25, 2009
I didn't understand much of what I read in this book - so my 'two star' rating isn't really a judgment on the quality of the novel, but on how much I enjoyed it, and how much I, personally, could piece together. I imagine if you're a literary sort, you could mine this deliciously for all kinds of repeated metaphor and thematics and meaning. I mostly spent the read going, "what is going on?"
In the largest terms, this is a book about the Aboriginal spirits of Australia being mightier than the workings of the interloper whites. All that the whites have created on the northern coast in a town called Desperance - segregation, poverty, racism, environmental damage - will be destroyed piece by piece, the spirits of land and sea ultimately taking back what's theirs by rights. Amid that are Aboriginal characters who act as witness, who sometimes have a hand in reading what the spirits are up to, and who occasionally act to help things along. Mostly, however, they're onlookers, aware of a world that the whites aren't, exactly, and both grateful and fearful of it in turn.
This is overwhelmingly a book about men. It's white men who commit the worst crimes toward land and other people in the novel; it's Aboriginal men who protest, undermine, and survive what goes on. Women are always problems - they're unfaithful, a disappointment to their fathers, nags, and most of all, they're stupid, judged so by the central male protagonists, or by their rejection of Aboriginal wisdom, and truthfully, they're written so by the author too. There are moments where the author suggests yes, these women are trapped by bad choices and economics and culture and waste, but overall there's less pen-time spent even hinting at that than sketching the broad, obvious strokes of white men's fight against black. Women are secondary characters, at best, and their existence is always meant to demonstrate something about a man's trials, a man's development, a man's fortune.
There are beautiful moments in the book, written with a clarity I didn't always find throughout - the death of Gordie and the ensuing ramifications for three Aboriginal boys, the police chief, and the mayor of the town was one of my favorite parts of the book. Still, my overall sense is that I just didn't get why some things were described at such length, or how and why things were included in the novel. Again, I think that probably says more about me than about Wright.
In the largest terms, this is a book about the Aboriginal spirits of Australia being mightier than the workings of the interloper whites. All that the whites have created on the northern coast in a town called Desperance - segregation, poverty, racism, environmental damage - will be destroyed piece by piece, the spirits of land and sea ultimately taking back what's theirs by rights. Amid that are Aboriginal characters who act as witness, who sometimes have a hand in reading what the spirits are up to, and who occasionally act to help things along. Mostly, however, they're onlookers, aware of a world that the whites aren't, exactly, and both grateful and fearful of it in turn.
This is overwhelmingly a book about men. It's white men who commit the worst crimes toward land and other people in the novel; it's Aboriginal men who protest, undermine, and survive what goes on. Women are always problems - they're unfaithful, a disappointment to their fathers, nags, and most of all, they're stupid, judged so by the central male protagonists, or by their rejection of Aboriginal wisdom, and truthfully, they're written so by the author too. There are moments where the author suggests yes, these women are trapped by bad choices and economics and culture and waste, but overall there's less pen-time spent even hinting at that than sketching the broad, obvious strokes of white men's fight against black. Women are secondary characters, at best, and their existence is always meant to demonstrate something about a man's trials, a man's development, a man's fortune.
There are beautiful moments in the book, written with a clarity I didn't always find throughout - the death of Gordie and the ensuing ramifications for three Aboriginal boys, the police chief, and the mayor of the town was one of my favorite parts of the book. Still, my overall sense is that I just didn't get why some things were described at such length, or how and why things were included in the novel. Again, I think that probably says more about me than about Wright.
June 18, 2016
To be brutally honest, halfway through this book, it was still mostly a chore to read, so I'm a little surprised that I just unhesitatingly selected 5 stars to rate it, but that accurately reflects my journey in reading it. By the last few chapters, I was so thoroughly hooked I couldn't bear the thought of it ending.
It is hard to tell how much of that is that I simply enjoyed the much faster pace, clear stakes and emotional punchiness of the second half, and how much it is that Wright's style takes a long time to get comfortable with, so is less work later in the book. In either case, I not only found myself enjoying the book a lot more, but reassessing the assumptions I'd made about that style.
A few chapters in, I'd mentally pegged the style of Carpentaria as somewhere between Garrison Keilor-style small town character tales & the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez & Isobelle Allende. I kinda love the former, and loath the latter, so the mystical slipping in and out jarred me at first, and I was hopeful for more of the small town material.
By the second half, I realised the novel really wasn't either of these things - and instead of trying to fit it into a literary canon, it was far more - liberating - to let go and just let Wright take you into *her* world. Nevertheless, since I am nowhere near the writer she is, I'm going to use some comparisons to try to explain.
The thing with the whole small-town-characters genre is that it tends to rest on a sense of continuity - things change in the lives of the characters, but not generally in the town itself. Carpentaria encompasses huge change, and well as huge continuity. Part of the tension that drives the novel is the balance between the world of country, which is, if definitely not unchanging, then resilient and enduring, and the world of the townies and the people, which is much more fragile and subject to upheaval than they expect. It is our central group of POV protagonists - Norm Phantom and his son Will and mentor religious leader Mozzie Fishman - who live in both worlds, adn as a consequence, are able to shape and impact on events. That all of these characters are blackfellas is a given - this understanding of country is timeless, and inexplicable without tradition, experience and connection.
Similarly, the magical realism comparison imposes a different kind of worldview on the novel. Even my sense of shifting in and out of mystic elements more clearly becomes a misassumption as the book progressed. This is a landscape with varied dimensions and shifting perspectives. The dizzying sense of moving between time periods - which honestly I found a headache to sort out while reading - and possibly the oft-ambiguous-and-sometimes-just-off grammar is also part of this sense of dislocated viewpoints on the same thing.
That our powerful, understanding characters are all men is a little disconcerting. The women who appear in the narrative - Angel Day, Girlie Phantom, Hope Phantom/Midnight - are all seen through the eyes of men, and appear absorbed by the immediate in a way male characters can transcend. Angel in particular is left ambiguous, stranded by the narrative in a place that feels vaguely hellish with her motivations still blurry and her character blurred by the hate and love of our POV characters.
It seems strange to me to describe this as a political book - as if any take on the Gulf world could not involve racism, institutional and otherwise, and the impact of mining. The themes are not artificial, and the book is about so much more than a town and a mine, these are simply starting points for an epic - an epic from a uniquely Australian viewpoint that sucks you in and throws you around and makes you long to return in the way only the best of novels do.
It is hard to tell how much of that is that I simply enjoyed the much faster pace, clear stakes and emotional punchiness of the second half, and how much it is that Wright's style takes a long time to get comfortable with, so is less work later in the book. In either case, I not only found myself enjoying the book a lot more, but reassessing the assumptions I'd made about that style.
A few chapters in, I'd mentally pegged the style of Carpentaria as somewhere between Garrison Keilor-style small town character tales & the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez & Isobelle Allende. I kinda love the former, and loath the latter, so the mystical slipping in and out jarred me at first, and I was hopeful for more of the small town material.
By the second half, I realised the novel really wasn't either of these things - and instead of trying to fit it into a literary canon, it was far more - liberating - to let go and just let Wright take you into *her* world. Nevertheless, since I am nowhere near the writer she is, I'm going to use some comparisons to try to explain.
The thing with the whole small-town-characters genre is that it tends to rest on a sense of continuity - things change in the lives of the characters, but not generally in the town itself. Carpentaria encompasses huge change, and well as huge continuity. Part of the tension that drives the novel is the balance between the world of country, which is, if definitely not unchanging, then resilient and enduring, and the world of the townies and the people, which is much more fragile and subject to upheaval than they expect. It is our central group of POV protagonists - Norm Phantom and his son Will and mentor religious leader Mozzie Fishman - who live in both worlds, adn as a consequence, are able to shape and impact on events. That all of these characters are blackfellas is a given - this understanding of country is timeless, and inexplicable without tradition, experience and connection.
Similarly, the magical realism comparison imposes a different kind of worldview on the novel. Even my sense of shifting in and out of mystic elements more clearly becomes a misassumption as the book progressed. This is a landscape with varied dimensions and shifting perspectives. The dizzying sense of moving between time periods - which honestly I found a headache to sort out while reading - and possibly the oft-ambiguous-and-sometimes-just-off grammar is also part of this sense of dislocated viewpoints on the same thing.
That our powerful, understanding characters are all men is a little disconcerting. The women who appear in the narrative - Angel Day, Girlie Phantom, Hope Phantom/Midnight - are all seen through the eyes of men, and appear absorbed by the immediate in a way male characters can transcend. Angel in particular is left ambiguous, stranded by the narrative in a place that feels vaguely hellish with her motivations still blurry and her character blurred by the hate and love of our POV characters.
It seems strange to me to describe this as a political book - as if any take on the Gulf world could not involve racism, institutional and otherwise, and the impact of mining. The themes are not artificial, and the book is about so much more than a town and a mine, these are simply starting points for an epic - an epic from a uniquely Australian viewpoint that sucks you in and throws you around and makes you long to return in the way only the best of novels do.
June 19, 2009
"One evening in the driest grasses in the world, a child who was no stranger to her people, asked if anyone could find hope. The people of parable and prophecy pondered what was hopeless and finally declared they no longer knew what hope was. The clocks, tick-a-ty tock, looked as though they might run out of time. Luckily, the ghosts in the memories of the old folk were listening, and said anyone can find hope in the stories: the big stories and the little ones in between."
Carpentaria is a stunning novel in all senses of the word: astounding in the complexity and concentrated energy of its prose, and at times almost overwhelmingly challenging to read, given the originality of her prose style. Wright is an Aboriginal Australian, a member of the Waanyi nation, and she draws on the history and the oral tradition of her people to create a novel which is an incredible evocation of their way of life and which is written almost defiantly outside of the conventions of the Western literary canon. This tale of Normal Phantom and Joseph Midnight and their families is terrifying and sad and funny and surreal all at once, embracing everything from the Aboriginal conception of the world around them to the appalling effects of colonialism. Wright's torrent of language demands a lot of the reader, but if you're willing to invest your time in Carpentaria, it's well worth the read.
May 29, 2015
This book requires a lot of a reader, especially a non-indigenous reader. Being able to understand time as something other than linear is an important example.
I will say that I almost switched books after I wasn't really "grabbed" in the first two hundred or so pages. I would find my mind wandering while reading, and when I came back I would discover myself in a scene which was either a flashback, a fever dream, a legend, or an actual current event - it was hard to recognize which if you weren't paying attention to the signs. And sometimes even then it was hard. I think that's why I wouldn't categorize this as "magical realism" (a genre I adore). I think magical realism describes something "unnatural" superimposed on real time and place. But once you delve deep into this story, you start to understand that everything, from psychic visions to helicopter raids to enchanted sea journeys, are all equally "real." And time and place are not just flat surfaces.
I've read a little about Aboriginal worldviews, so I can perceive the sense here. I don't think I've read anything that described Australia (past and present, white and black, desert and sea) as richly as this novel. I'm so glad I stuck with it.
I will say that I almost switched books after I wasn't really "grabbed" in the first two hundred or so pages. I would find my mind wandering while reading, and when I came back I would discover myself in a scene which was either a flashback, a fever dream, a legend, or an actual current event - it was hard to recognize which if you weren't paying attention to the signs. And sometimes even then it was hard. I think that's why I wouldn't categorize this as "magical realism" (a genre I adore). I think magical realism describes something "unnatural" superimposed on real time and place. But once you delve deep into this story, you start to understand that everything, from psychic visions to helicopter raids to enchanted sea journeys, are all equally "real." And time and place are not just flat surfaces.
I've read a little about Aboriginal worldviews, so I can perceive the sense here. I don't think I've read anything that described Australia (past and present, white and black, desert and sea) as richly as this novel. I'm so glad I stuck with it.
March 7, 2022
Much more conventional than what I’ve been reading lately, I’m nonetheless glad I read it. More like 3.5 stars. I’m rounding up because of the alien world this conjures. The world is palpable. The world building and the voice were quite enjoyable. When realism lapses, fabulism reigns—still some of the coincidences took me out a bit.
October 14, 2023
Fascinating.
November 26, 2017
God, I hate this book. I can see how others might enjoy it and it's not an Objectively Bad book, but it was basically just everything I don't like in a book, and lacked everything that I personally look for in good novels.
The biggest turn-off for me was the characters and their relationships. I don't mind not liking characters, as long as it's fun and rewarding to hate them. These characters were just...nothing. I spent 500 pages with them but I still feel like I don't know them at all. And the relationships are just atrocious and really upsetting to read about. There is definitely merit in writing about abusive relationships, but only if it seems like there is point to them or literally just any attention called to them. Nearly every relationship is seemingly arbitrarily toxic and, as I'm sensitive to these things, the casual throwing in of Angel Day's abuse towards her children made me feel sick. It's never dealt with in literally any way and it upset me a lot.
The narrative style also left me feeling very distant from the text and thus I didn't care at all about the plot or feel like it had any urgency or meaning. Again, I'm aware this is a specific technique, but it's just not my taste. The writing style is very non-descript, which is okay if the plot stands out, but this work didn't succeed at either in my opinion.
Overall, it was painful to get through the book and I absolutely would've dropped it had it not been required reading.
The biggest turn-off for me was the characters and their relationships. I don't mind not liking characters, as long as it's fun and rewarding to hate them. These characters were just...nothing. I spent 500 pages with them but I still feel like I don't know them at all. And the relationships are just atrocious and really upsetting to read about. There is definitely merit in writing about abusive relationships, but only if it seems like there is point to them or literally just any attention called to them. Nearly every relationship is seemingly arbitrarily toxic and, as I'm sensitive to these things, the casual throwing in of Angel Day's abuse towards her children made me feel sick. It's never dealt with in literally any way and it upset me a lot.
The narrative style also left me feeling very distant from the text and thus I didn't care at all about the plot or feel like it had any urgency or meaning. Again, I'm aware this is a specific technique, but it's just not my taste. The writing style is very non-descript, which is okay if the plot stands out, but this work didn't succeed at either in my opinion.
Overall, it was painful to get through the book and I absolutely would've dropped it had it not been required reading.
February 7, 2023
Been mulling on this for a couple of days, and while reading. There’s so much I loved about this book - particularly the way the plot was passed effortlessly between characters, to the point that there is no real main character but an ensemble of characters guiding us through. I also really loved the collective narrator voice - something that is hard to pull off, but works seamlessly here.
I really wanted to love love love this book, particularly because I love The Swan Book so much, but I think Carpentaria ultimately suffers from a lack of close editing. There were a number of places where it felt like the writing could be tightened a little, even on a line-by-line basis. There were also errors that took me out of the story.
But ultimately I am grateful to have experienced the world of Carpentaria, and for Wright’s fearlessness in reflecting the world/s around us.
I really wanted to love love love this book, particularly because I love The Swan Book so much, but I think Carpentaria ultimately suffers from a lack of close editing. There were a number of places where it felt like the writing could be tightened a little, even on a line-by-line basis. There were also errors that took me out of the story.
But ultimately I am grateful to have experienced the world of Carpentaria, and for Wright’s fearlessness in reflecting the world/s around us.
March 1, 2014
I need way more time to digest but this book is extraordinary. I've never before read anything that so effectively conveys an experience of living across two cultures. A lot of it was hard for me to follow, but I felt like that was part of the point; I was immersed in experiences that were strange and foreign even when they were familiar. It's not an easy read, but it's magnificent.
November 22, 2019
An utterly fantastical, mythical tale that never fails to convince, because of the power of the story-telling, the originality of the voice, the undeniable truths that are told. Shades of the Tempest, Lot's wife, the Odyssey, King Lear, the Prodigal Son … This book NEEDS to be better known!
July 29, 2015
Subject Terms, from my library's database:
Carpentaria is kind of One Hundred Years of Solitude for people who hated One Hundred Years of Solitude (so: me, I hated it, come at me). I mean, people who like Marquez will also probably like this book, although it's not totally boring so maybe they won't. (Sorry, sorry.)
I know less about Australia than I ought to, probably. Mostly, I know it's terrifying and that Aboriginal Australians have a raw deal. (I have watched some of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, but I don't think those are particularly relevant to Australia generally? Definitely not to this book, although there is some murder.) And so I was out of my depth here, in a few places, forgive the pun. (There's a lot of fishing in this book.) I'm usually pretty good at just going with a book and picking up "context clues" - I think because of an adolescence reading fantasy novels out of order - but there are a couple of times where you wonder "is this a racial slur with which I'm unfamiliar? I feel weird Googling it?" Anyway. I wondered, too, if the experience of the book might be better if you were listening to someone reading it aloud. Someone with an Australian accent, I mean. I could tell there were rhythms to the writing that I just wasn't able to access, and I suspect some of that is because of my flat American vowels and internalized uptalk.
Anyway, this is a really difficult book, and that's not a claim I make lightly. And it's not a complaint, either, because I think it's also a really great book, and the difficulty is part of the greatness. But it's still difficult, and not just because of the language. It's very sad. Wright starts it off and you think you know the kind of sad you'll be dealing with, and then you find out you were wrong, it's worse. It's actually more like Deadwood than most of the books on my not-deadwood shelf.
Other stuff it's like: Toni Morrison, The God of Small Things, Thomas Hardy.
Aboriginal Australians -- Fiction.
Indigenous peoples -- Queensland -- Fiction.
Race relations -- Fiction.
Eccentrics and eccentricities -- Fiction.
Mines and mineral resources -- Fiction.
Carpentaria is kind of One Hundred Years of Solitude for people who hated One Hundred Years of Solitude (so: me, I hated it, come at me). I mean, people who like Marquez will also probably like this book, although it's not totally boring so maybe they won't. (Sorry, sorry.)
I know less about Australia than I ought to, probably. Mostly, I know it's terrifying and that Aboriginal Australians have a raw deal. (I have watched some of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, but I don't think those are particularly relevant to Australia generally? Definitely not to this book, although there is some murder.) And so I was out of my depth here, in a few places, forgive the pun. (There's a lot of fishing in this book.) I'm usually pretty good at just going with a book and picking up "context clues" - I think because of an adolescence reading fantasy novels out of order - but there are a couple of times where you wonder "is this a racial slur with which I'm unfamiliar? I feel weird Googling it?" Anyway. I wondered, too, if the experience of the book might be better if you were listening to someone reading it aloud. Someone with an Australian accent, I mean. I could tell there were rhythms to the writing that I just wasn't able to access, and I suspect some of that is because of my flat American vowels and internalized uptalk.
Anyway, this is a really difficult book, and that's not a claim I make lightly. And it's not a complaint, either, because I think it's also a really great book, and the difficulty is part of the greatness. But it's still difficult, and not just because of the language. It's very sad. Wright starts it off and you think you know the kind of sad you'll be dealing with, and then you find out you were wrong, it's worse. It's actually more like Deadwood than most of the books on my not-deadwood shelf.
Other stuff it's like: Toni Morrison, The God of Small Things, Thomas Hardy.
May 31, 2009
“Carpentaria” is an incredible novel. The second fictional work from Alexis Wright, it deals with sweeping issues such as the clash of cultures in Australia, the different goals and focuses of whites vs. those of the native Aboriginals; and does so by looking at just one small imaginary town which the author calls Desperance which is located on the very real Gulf of Carpentaria in Queensland. The relations between black and white Australia play out on the small stage of Desperance, often in a violent way. The main characters in the novel are from the Phantom family, headed by Norm Phantom, though certainly his son Will is also a key character.
The characters are vivid and believable, the events are at times a bit fantastic, though as the story moves between Dreamtime and reality with a bit of legend and biblical epic mixed in it is sometimes impossible to know just how real the events are supposed to be.
The story is epic in length at over 500 pages, and though takes place in such a remote and small location, it is epic also in the scope as it deals with society on many levels, including business, politics, religion, culture, and law. It is also a book which begs to be read and re-read over and over, as there is so much to take in one can hardly absorb everything it has to say in a single reading.
This book was awarded the Miles Franklin Award in 2007, which is Australia’s most prestigious award which is given to a “published novel or play which portrays Australian life in any of its phases.” Alexis Wright is only the second Aboriginal writer to receive the award. Alexis Wright also received the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction as a result of this novel. That being said, some readers may find difficulty in reading this book. It is not written in a traditional style as characters come and go and side stories seemingly take the reader on journeys which can sometimes leave the reader scratching their head. For myself, I enjoyed this ride, and I believe it is done purposefully to help the reader not focus too much on any particular character, but the larger issues being represented in the story.
The characters are vivid and believable, the events are at times a bit fantastic, though as the story moves between Dreamtime and reality with a bit of legend and biblical epic mixed in it is sometimes impossible to know just how real the events are supposed to be.
The story is epic in length at over 500 pages, and though takes place in such a remote and small location, it is epic also in the scope as it deals with society on many levels, including business, politics, religion, culture, and law. It is also a book which begs to be read and re-read over and over, as there is so much to take in one can hardly absorb everything it has to say in a single reading.
This book was awarded the Miles Franklin Award in 2007, which is Australia’s most prestigious award which is given to a “published novel or play which portrays Australian life in any of its phases.” Alexis Wright is only the second Aboriginal writer to receive the award. Alexis Wright also received the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction as a result of this novel. That being said, some readers may find difficulty in reading this book. It is not written in a traditional style as characters come and go and side stories seemingly take the reader on journeys which can sometimes leave the reader scratching their head. For myself, I enjoyed this ride, and I believe it is done purposefully to help the reader not focus too much on any particular character, but the larger issues being represented in the story.
June 6, 2022
Alexis Wright's text is expansive and flowing, like the wet season that visits the town once a year. It opens in strange, sometimes frustrating ways and travels in slow/fast/slow rhythmic patterns, leading the reader astray. At the end of this book, I felt I'd viscerally experienced the Gulf of Carpentaria in all its weathers, seas, and inland pulses through time.
Reading Carpentaria often reminded me a little of Helene Cixous' notion of feminine ecriture. I thought of where I would like to cite a sentence from a brilliant section I was engaged with but the difficulty was in knowing where to 'cut' or where to unwind the spool. I know of the inappropriateness in referring to a European feminist philosophy of writing as a touch point - - let this say more about me than Wright's extraordinary Aboriginal literary intervention.
As mythic and meandering as her text is, it bursts with moments of realism and layers of plot, which ambiguously resolve towards the end.
Wright also features a rich vocabulary of sound and music entangled with the natural and spiritual. I didn't always understand everything, but I really enjoyed the book.
Reading Carpentaria often reminded me a little of Helene Cixous' notion of feminine ecriture. I thought of where I would like to cite a sentence from a brilliant section I was engaged with but the difficulty was in knowing where to 'cut' or where to unwind the spool. I know of the inappropriateness in referring to a European feminist philosophy of writing as a touch point - - let this say more about me than Wright's extraordinary Aboriginal literary intervention.
As mythic and meandering as her text is, it bursts with moments of realism and layers of plot, which ambiguously resolve towards the end.
Wright also features a rich vocabulary of sound and music entangled with the natural and spiritual. I didn't always understand everything, but I really enjoyed the book.
Read
December 12, 2022p.14 pure, undiluted quintessential essence
I can't add much more
I can't add much more
October 30, 2017
Carpentaria is the story of the Pricklebush mob living on the outskirts of the town of Desperance in the Gulf of Carpentaria. It's the story of Norm Phantom, his wife Angel Day and their progeny, particularly Will Phantom. Norm has a deep understanding of his country and the sea, and that gives him what appears to be supernatural powers. His communication and interpretation of the dreamtime allows him to navigate and thrive off his country like no other. His ability to use star maps, currents, stories, weather, animals, spirits and all other features of his country make him not just a traditional owner of the land but a guardian and true custodian. His deep understanding leaves all the white folk in town in complete awe of his gifts yet also afraid.
Alongside Norm's journeys and stories are those of his son Will Phantom. A man who seems to have inherited many of Norm's gifts but also a fiery passion to protect his land from the multi-national mining company that is destroying their country. The strange tension created when Norm exiles and disowns his son even though they are philosophically aligned in their love for country and in many ways both commit actions to destroy all foreign intruders is in many ways the central part of the story. It drives both characters willingly or not and Will's actions make him just as much a guardian of the land as his father's perceived inaction does. Although it will later surface in Will's memories that his father has created something even bigger than all of his actions to cleanse the country, wipe out the mining company and indeed the whole town.
The last major character is the prophet and mystic Mozzie Fishman. A man leading an eternal pilgrimage in the form of a roaring Holden Commodore convoy around Australia. Mozzie becomes Will's father figure in many ways and is also ultimately a guardian of the land and its stories. He has a deep mutual respect with Norm, such that when Angel Day takes up with him they still remain strong friends. Mozzie takes in waifs and strays around Australia and dispenses his wisdom to them freely, he is the man of the land, where Norm is the man of the sea.
One of the best comparisons I've read is that this is in many ways Australia's 100 Years of Solitude; it's an accurate comparison. Although, the magic-realism of Marquez is largely fabricated out of imagination, while Wright's magic-realism is grounded firmly in Aboriginal stories and belief. So this is a history of country and culture as much as it is a magic-realist text. It's also a story of trans-generational trauma and how the scars white colonialists have left on the land and the people are passed down in ways they not only can't understand but can't even see or imagine. It's a deeply sad and moving tale. But also a triumphant one and a beautiful journey of discovery. Wright also has a phenomenal ear for the Australian vernacular, putting her up there with Tim Winton and Ruth Park for being the most gifted dialogue writer in Australian story telling. This is a story every Australian should read but not one you would force on people. They need to come to it willingly, ready to learn of the original and best way to look at their great country; a country that lives and breathes. This is the greatest Australian novel I've read.
Alongside Norm's journeys and stories are those of his son Will Phantom. A man who seems to have inherited many of Norm's gifts but also a fiery passion to protect his land from the multi-national mining company that is destroying their country. The strange tension created when Norm exiles and disowns his son even though they are philosophically aligned in their love for country and in many ways both commit actions to destroy all foreign intruders is in many ways the central part of the story. It drives both characters willingly or not and Will's actions make him just as much a guardian of the land as his father's perceived inaction does. Although it will later surface in Will's memories that his father has created something even bigger than all of his actions to cleanse the country, wipe out the mining company and indeed the whole town.
The last major character is the prophet and mystic Mozzie Fishman. A man leading an eternal pilgrimage in the form of a roaring Holden Commodore convoy around Australia. Mozzie becomes Will's father figure in many ways and is also ultimately a guardian of the land and its stories. He has a deep mutual respect with Norm, such that when Angel Day takes up with him they still remain strong friends. Mozzie takes in waifs and strays around Australia and dispenses his wisdom to them freely, he is the man of the land, where Norm is the man of the sea.
One of the best comparisons I've read is that this is in many ways Australia's 100 Years of Solitude; it's an accurate comparison. Although, the magic-realism of Marquez is largely fabricated out of imagination, while Wright's magic-realism is grounded firmly in Aboriginal stories and belief. So this is a history of country and culture as much as it is a magic-realist text. It's also a story of trans-generational trauma and how the scars white colonialists have left on the land and the people are passed down in ways they not only can't understand but can't even see or imagine. It's a deeply sad and moving tale. But also a triumphant one and a beautiful journey of discovery. Wright also has a phenomenal ear for the Australian vernacular, putting her up there with Tim Winton and Ruth Park for being the most gifted dialogue writer in Australian story telling. This is a story every Australian should read but not one you would force on people. They need to come to it willingly, ready to learn of the original and best way to look at their great country; a country that lives and breathes. This is the greatest Australian novel I've read.
August 12, 2021
I honestly am struggling to rate, let alone review this book. It took me almost two weeks to read (at least twice as long as I’d expect to read 500 pages) and I can’t say I enjoyed the reading experience. I ended up both reading the physical book and listening to the audiobook at the same time as I was finding it challenging to get through.
Having said all that, this book is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. It’s dense in a foggy, dreamlike way, and unconventional at every level. It’s non-linear, reading as more of an oral myth than a traditional novel. These characters are harsh and hard, inflicting pain on one another in cycles of collective and intergenerational trauma, intensified by poverty and a new mine bringing both jobs and damage to the town of Desperance.
There are really difficult scenes to read, including abuse of a disabled person, deaths in custody, and racial hate crime. And yet there is some of the most beautiful writing I’ve ever read. The magical animistic description on the landscape, the alive ancestors, and the spirit of these larger than life characters… it all results in an undeniably epic tale of devastation, grief, masculinity, family and resilience.
Although it’s so big it almost feels like fantasy, the haunting feeling I’m left with is of the tension that runs throughout the book, and an awareness that it is the same tension that underpins the entirety of ‘Australian’ society. The white fragility, the violence, the fear of retribution for the past, the destruction of land… will we reckon with it willingly?
Having said all that, this book is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. It’s dense in a foggy, dreamlike way, and unconventional at every level. It’s non-linear, reading as more of an oral myth than a traditional novel. These characters are harsh and hard, inflicting pain on one another in cycles of collective and intergenerational trauma, intensified by poverty and a new mine bringing both jobs and damage to the town of Desperance.
There are really difficult scenes to read, including abuse of a disabled person, deaths in custody, and racial hate crime. And yet there is some of the most beautiful writing I’ve ever read. The magical animistic description on the landscape, the alive ancestors, and the spirit of these larger than life characters… it all results in an undeniably epic tale of devastation, grief, masculinity, family and resilience.
Although it’s so big it almost feels like fantasy, the haunting feeling I’m left with is of the tension that runs throughout the book, and an awareness that it is the same tension that underpins the entirety of ‘Australian’ society. The white fragility, the violence, the fear of retribution for the past, the destruction of land… will we reckon with it willingly?
November 17, 2021
This is a novel set in the fictional town of Desperance in northwestern Queensland, at the edge of the Gulf of Carpentaria – hence its name. I’d been wanting to read a book featuring Aboriginal Australians and their cultural myths for many years, but now that I’ve finished its 500 pages, I still can’t identify the narrative thread. After the first couple of chapters, I thought it was more like a collection of short stories, since there is a cast of colourful, potentially memorable characters introduced in a series of discrete, distantly related episodes. Unfortunately, they become lost in a mass of excessive description presented in long, chunky paragraphs packed with ideas that would be delightful if they’d been pared down with the help of an attentive editor to create a better sense of story and pacing. In addition, the author often commits the new writer’s mistake of telling rather than showing, with frequent generalisations about key figures, a habit which makes large parts of the text more banal than engaging, and I had to push myself to work my way through it. After all that, I really don’t think it deserved the 2007 Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s most prestigious literature prize. As her second novel, Ms Wright is here still finding her literary feet, and the book shows promise for the future – such accolades could certainly be appropriate later in her career. I might give some of her other work a try and see how her style has developed.
January 6, 2011
I enjoyed parts of this book but overall I found it was trying a little too hard (or maybe not hard enough in some areas). The language was quite evocative, however the unstructured plot was annoying at times. I feel like there could have been more editing as the book was too long and I found several errors. I did engage with the characters, setting and the overall idea/theme. This is between 3 and 4 stars.
July 5, 2021
There were some nuggets of truth in this book, but they were hidden underneath a winding, circuitous narrative. I was confused for most of the book. There were moments when the prose would clear and there was a straightforward plot again. But it wouldn’t last long. “Anyone had to be plain stupid to call his life lonely just because he did not have a white life.” Not for me. 2 stars
March 17, 2024
I think this book is written well, but my experience with this book as one i was required to rush, read and analyse made it a slog to get through. I dont think this type of book is one i would traditionally pick up, but i’m glad that i have read it, and while i dont think i understand the way Alexis Wright writes, i dont think that the way she writes is at all bad.
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November 14, 2022Finished for the time being. Not ready for another epic novel just yet.
January 18, 2023
Although a long book, it took a while to get into the main story. Overall a good novel and some great Australian storytelling!
January 4, 2022
A very unique and thought-provoking book. I really lived the book's writing style and the way it fleshed out the backstory of Desperance. Admittedly, it was hard to keep track of all characters and lore, although that is a fairly common problem with epic literature (or at least my memory.
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