Voss (Penguin Classics)
Book Information
- Publisher
- Penguin Publishing Group
- Published
- 2009-01-27
- Pages
- 464 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 12.9 x 2.5 x 19.6 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780143105688
- ISBN-10
- 014310568X
- Price
- 5184 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Genre Fiction/Biographical
Join J. M. Coetzee and Thomas Keneally in rediscovering Nobel Laureate Patrick White In 1973, Australian writer Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature." Set in nineteenth-century Australia, Voss is White's best-known book, a sweeping novel about a secret passion between the explorer Voss and the young orphan Laura. As Voss is tested by hardship, mutiny, and betrayal during his crossing of the brutal Australian desert, Laura awaits his return in Sydney, where she endures their months of separation as if her life were a dream and Voss the only reality. Marrying a sensitive rendering of hidden love with a stark adventure narrative, Voss is a novel of extraordinary power and virtuosity from a twentieth-century master. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Patrick White (1912-1990) was born in England in 1912, when his parents were in Europe for two years; at six months he was taken back to Australia, where his father owned a sheep station. When he was thirteen, he went to school in England, to Cheltenham, “where it was understood, the climate would be temperate and a colonial acceptable.” Neither proved true, and after four rather miserable years there he went to King’s College, Cambridge, where he specialized in languages. After leaving the university he settled in London, determined to become a writer. His first novel, Happy Valley, was published in 1939 and his second, The Living and the Dead , in 1941. During the war he was an RAF Intelligence Officer in the Middle East and Greece. After the war he returned to Australia. His novels include The Aunt’s Story (1946), The Tree of Man (1956), Voss (1957), Riders in the Chariot (1961), The Solid Mandala (1966), The Eye of the Storm (1973), A Fringe of Leaves (1976), and The Twyborn Affair (1979). He also published two collections of short stories, The Burnt Ones (1964) and The Cockatoos (1974), which incorporates several short novels, a collection of novellas, Three Uneasy Pieces (1987), and his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass (1981). He also edited Memoirs of Many in One (1986). In 1973 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Upon his death, The Times wrote, “Patrick White did more than any other writer to put Australian literature on the international map.… His tormented oeuvre is that of a great and essentially modern writer.” Thomas Keneally has won international acclaim for his novels Schindler's Ark , Confederates , Gossip from the Forest , Playmaker , Woman of the Inner Sea , and A River Town . He is most recently the author of the biography American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles .
Reviews
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The characters and the wild come alive
With verbal magic, White creates an entire world, with living memorable characters and events that you experience with all your senses. Consider Voss himself, a would-be explorer of the interior of Australia in the mid-19th century -- "All that was external to himself he mistrusted, and was happiest in silence which is immeasurable, like distance, and the potentialities of self. p. 25 "'Mr. Voss,' he said, with no suggestion of criticism, 'you have a contempt for God, because He is not in your own image.'" p. 42 "... he never allowed himself the luxury of other people's strength, preferring the illusion of his own." p. 63 "Alone, he and the blacks would have communicated with one another by skin and silence, just as dust is not impenetrable and the message of sticks can be interpreted after hours of intimacy." p. 163 Here are examples of how he can vividly evoke a scene -- "Distantly already the barking of strange dogs ws going off like pop-guns, and the dogs of Jildra had begun to whine and to bite at one another's shoulders, to express their joy and solidarity. ... The bullocks groaned to a stop and were turning up their eyes, dilating their nostrils, and, to the last, resisting the heavy yokes with their necks. p. 177 "... Voss did break the seal of Miss Trevelyan's letter, and was hunching himself, and spreading and smoothing the paper, as if it had been so crumpled, he must induce it physically to deliver up its text." p. 178 "Dew was clogging the landscape. Spiders had sewn the bushes together. And then there were those last, intolerably melancholy stars, that cling to a white sky, and will not b put out except by force." p. 187 "Prospective saints, he decided, would have fought over such an opportunity, for green and brown, of muck, and slime, and uncontrolled feces, and the bottomless stomach of nausea, are the true colors of hell." p. 263 He also sprinkles the text with well-stated insights into human nature -- "The prospect of a return to sanity had brought out the streak of madness that is hidden in all men." p. 338 "'Dying is creation. The body creates fresh forms, the soul inspires by its manner of leaving the body and passes into other souls.'" p. 353 "...the soul is elliptical in shape." p. 379 "... if you live and suffer long enough in a place, you do not leave it altogether. Your spirit is still there." p. 434 "'Come, come. If we are not certain of the fact, how is it possible to give the answers?' "'The air will tell us,' Miss Trevelyan said." p. 440
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Top ten fiction reads
The iridescence of his writing bowls you over. Some of Patrick White’s other books are a bit hit and miss as his flowing prose sometimes gets stuck or is ‘a bit off’. But in this book he hit a rich vein. It is beautiful, funny and painful. A masterpiece.
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Five Stars
Good
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truly the great Australian novel
I let my foolish prejudice against White, his overblown phrases in short stories, his persona of magnificence, his wealth and inability to write with either love or compassion of the poor (as I then believed) and refused to read him. Finally I read The Vivisector earlier this year, and now Voss. The scope, the style, the merciless ways that Voss and his mean are eaten by the Australian landscape, the simpering and vapid lives of Sydney’s merchant class, are all beautifully drawn. Many characters feel realistic but it is the drawing of Laura Trevalyan that is a masterpiece. An extraordinary achievement.
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En quête d'absolu
Etrange et fascinant texte qui décrit la quête d'un Allemand fou parti explorer le désert australien et qui trouve l'amour et la mort. Ce n'est ni un roman d'aventure ni un roman d'amour mais une sorte de rumination obsessive sur les thèmes de l'absolu, de la bonté humaine, du courage, de la fidélité, de l'amour, de Dieu peut-être, avec en arrière-plan une société coloniale futile, des aborigènes fantomatiques et le quotidien désespérant d'une expédition tragique. Ce texte est écrit dans une langue ardue, recherchée, pleine de mystère, souvent abstruse mais qui recèle des trésors de sagesse et de poésie si on prend le temps de multiples relectures. Le Joyce australien quoi. A recommander seulement aux fous de littérature qui n'ont pas peur de se heurter à une langue pleine d'embûches, semée d'archaïsmes, en constant décalage avec le cours normal des choses, mais qui seront récompensés par une belle aventure littéraire. Patrick White n'a pas reçu le Prix Nobel pour rien.