White, Patrick

The Complete Mission: Impossible Dossier

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Inside Information On The Greatest Television Series Of All
Mission: Impossible Review
A very thorough, detailed, entertaining book!
Excellent reference book for the popular TV series

The Complete Mission: Impossible Dossier
Patrick J. White
Manufacturer: Avon Books (P)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0380758776

Customer Reviews:

Inside Information On The Greatest Television Series Of All.......2007-03-06

In my humble opinion, Mission: Impossible is the most imaginative television series of all time. This book is the perfect companion, giving
much information on the gestation of the series, the creator, Bruce Geller, the actors, directors, writers, producers and a list of every episode made, including the 1980's revival of the series. What is not apparent to the viewer but comes out in this history of the series, is that the series underwent a number of major crises, any one of which could have finished it off, yet it survived to last for seven seasons, while generally maintaining its quality. For example, not many know that creator Geller actually only wrote one episode, the pilot (the story of the nuclear bombs stored in the vault of a hotel in a Latin American country). Although he rode herd on the show for several seasons, he was finally forcibly ejected from the studio. Original star of the series, Steven Hill was forced to leave the show due to matters of concience.
During season three, when the finest episodes of the series were being
produced, the top writers got into a fiery dispute with Geller and quit in the middle of the season leaving no scripts ready to be filmed. Fortunately, Paul Playdon, possibly the best writer of all to work on the series was recruited at this crucial moment and saved the show. At the end of this same third season, stars Martin Landau and Barbara Bain both quit the show. In spite of all this, the show survived and more or less maintained its quality.
One of the best things in the book is that it lists the stuntmen-doubles who appeared in the show. In the first-season episode called "The Confession", there is one of the most amazing stunts I have ever seen on television....Rollin Hand (played by Martin Landau) and bad-guy Andreas Soloweichek (David Sheiner) are hand-cuffed together and jump out of a moving vehicle. According to this book, the stunt was performed by Buzz Henry and Chuck Wilcox. It is about time these two heroes got credit for doing one of the most dangerous stunts I have ever seen...as you see them rolling around on the road, it is amazing that they didn't break every bone in their bodies and have their arms dislocated. And for all this, they weren't even mentioned in the credits! Kudos to Mr White for giving them and their colleagues their due.

Now that Mission: Impossible is being brought out in DVD, it might be time
to bring this book out as a reprint.

Mission: Impossible Review.......2002-06-19

This book is a perfect companion for any MI fan. Includes plot details and breakdowns and actor bio's and series reviews. Everything is here. Definetly worth buying and now all i want is for Paramount to release series on DVD. Life would be perfect then.

A very thorough, detailed, entertaining book!.......1999-02-10

This book is outstanding! I own 4 copies myself. If you like entertainment, or research, this is the book for you. It's full of pictures, details, information, and synopsises. I love it! A classy, intelligent book, for a classy, intelligent show!

Excellent reference book for the popular TV series.......1997-03-30

The book delivers as promised. Filled with interesting facts about the actors, plots, creators and devices of the series. Comments critically on each show. I wish there was a multimedia CD ROM available

Frontiers in Antimicrobial Resistance: A Tribute to Stuart B. Levy

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Frontiers in Antimicrobial Resistance: A Tribute to Stuart B. Levy

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ASIN: 1555813291

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Voss: journeys of exploration
Cardboard Characters Set In The Australian Frontier, But Excellent Prose
Voss - powerful Australian epic
Tragic and unforgettable
One of the great novels

Voss
Patrick White
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Customer Reviews:

Voss: journeys of exploration.......2007-01-26

This novel opens in Sydney, 1845, with the German explorer Voss preparing to cross the Australian continent. This physical aspect of the novel is loosely based on the ill-fated expedition of Ludwig Leichhardt.

Prior to leaving Sydney, Voss meets Laura Trevelyan. Laura is the niece of one of Voss's patrons and is perhaps the only person apart from Voss himself who perceives that his journey is a challenge of will as much as a geographical journey of discovery. Voss and Laura, despite only meeting four times before he departs, form a spiritual bond which strengthens during the course of the novel.

The novel is about discovery, about triumph and about failure. The physical elements of the journey describe many of the challenges facing explorers within central Australia at the time and combines elements of human suffering and religious metaphor.

The intense relationship between Laura and Voss develops during the course of the journey, and is conducted both through letter and telepathy.

This novel can be read as a simple story of an ill-fated expedition. Alternatively, it can be read as one man's challenge to the physical world, and of the good and evil in each of us.

By the end of the novel, the discovery seems clear, the triumphs and the failures are obvious. Or are they? Perhaps it depends on which viewpoint you choose to adopt.

I recommend this novel to anyone who wants to read well written literature which, under the guise of telling a story, invites the readers to confront their own thinking. The choice is yours.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Cardboard Characters Set In The Australian Frontier, But Excellent Prose.......2007-01-21

Patrick White gained fame as the Australian Nobel prize winner in literature, and as a person with a prickly or what some call a difficult personality. He was educated at Cambridge but then settled and wrote in Australia after World War II. He has about a dozen novels and I have read two of them, the other being The Tree of Man which is set in rural but agricultural Australia, not in the Outback as is Voss.

This is a good novel, and it deserves 5 stars. After a dozen pages or so it becomes clear to the reader that White has an unusual style and he is a gifted writer. There is no question about his writing ability.

This particular story starts off in Sydney in the mid-19th century, and White uses real street names and locations in central Sydney, just east of Darling Harbour. Since the same streets still exist today, his setting and references to the city bring a high degree of realism to the story.

The plot is about a man and a woman who become engaged by mail after meeting. Voss is the man, and he leads a voyage of discovery into the Outback, north and west of Sydney. The plot involves the hardships of the trip, the interaction among the characters travelling with Voss, the natives, and what takes place in Sydney with his fiancee while Voss is away on the trip.

The discouraging feature of White's writing is that the characters seem stiff or cardboard, a bit lifeless. Voss is not a man to show much emotion or talk. So, there are many passages where White simply describes the activities. That gives the book - especially in the middle - a dry feel. This was reinforced for me when I read The Tree of Man where White has a similar strong male protagonist, the farmer; but there, White goes into much more depth with the man's personality in the novel.

The tale has a strong and a surprise ending, and the novel picks up as the story closes.

Overall, I enjoyed the read and would recommend the book. It is not a quick read nor is it compelling stuff to digest, but it is an interesting and well written novel.

Voss - powerful Australian epic.......2005-04-20

Big, powerful novel by a skilled storyteller, a master of the Australian landscape and peoples. In the 1800's the German settler Voss meets Laura Trevelyan in Sydney once or twice, then together with an ill-assorted ragtag of followers he sets off on an ill-fated expedition from Sydney westwards through the Australian desert.

Voss's purpose seems to be to get to 'love the land'. Laura waits in Sydney; she's a thoughtful person, different from the others, aware that Australian white society in those days could be shallow and not in tune with deeper things. When Voss and Laura are not together, the relationship takes place in the mind, with some sort of sixth sense resulting in a synchronisation of feelings. The is cleverly done and works well.

Aboriginals figure strongly - they are part of the land, timeless, noble. But, in the period set in this novel, there is a dark side; through and through they come across as bestial savages. They could help and save Voss, who reaches out to them, but instead they thwart and eventually kill him.

Patrick White won the 1973 Nobel prize for literature, and it's not surprising. But his style in Voss is not always easy; he's always invading his characters' minds and trying too hard to explain every nuance of their thinking. This slows it down. Ideas about 'point of view' have to be put on hold in this novel.

Ultimately though it's an indelible experience, and one is left with haunting images of Australia.

Tragic and unforgettable.......2004-10-07

This is a deeply sad story of tragic love in Australia's colonial times. Voss, "The German" and Laura, a young Sydney woman, are societal misfits who meet quite awkwardly in drawing room one day. Soon after this meeting, Voss begins his epic journey into the unknown Australian outback. As the journey progresses he realizes his love for Laura and writes her a letter asking for her hand in marriage. She accepts his proposal and a love affair of the minds begins. More letters are written but never received by either party. Amazingly, their love blossoms for each other in a small minded, petty, and class driven society. Sadly, in the end their love is tragically never to be.
I found this book to be extremely well written and deeply moving. I believe that this novel is on par with Bronte's Jane Eyre and I do not understand why it is not on any classical reading lists. There are parts of the book that move somewhat slowly, but each part has its purpose in bringing you deeper into the story. The insights into the human soul are incredibly poignant. If you do decide to give Voss a chance read it slowly and in quite spaces. Soak up the meanings within the writing and enjoy this sad, sad tale.

One of the great novels.......2004-05-11

This epic about a man's journey into the heart of the Australian desert and into his own heart and mind is a classic of modern literature. Johann Ulrich Voss, though he remains always just beyond the reader's grasp as a character, is as memorable as any great figure in modern literature. If Marlow and Kurtz in Heart of Darkness were one man, this would be him.

The novel is also a love story about two people who go beyond the mediocrity of their surroundings to embark on interior journeys where they learn to know themselves and unite with each other in spirit.

For 80% of the novel I was gripped, running home from college to read more and more. My only qualm would be the ending, as the tension dissipates and the last 80 pages or so peter out under the excessive Christian symbolism. But there is no way that a potential reader should be put off by this assessment

Amazon.com

Patrick White (1912-1990), author of The Living and the Dead, 1973 Nobel Laureate in Literature, officially Australian but also partly upper-crust Englishman by education, rejected alike English stuffiness and Australian philistinism. These letters, edited by his biographer David Marr, chronicle White's gradual reluctant engagement with the world: his interest in Jewish culture after an early ignorant anti-Semitism; his idyllic wartime period in West Africa; his passionate and rancorous anti-royalism, sparked by the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis when the British Queen's representative sacked the Prime Minister; his deep held belief in the validity of homosexual unions, based on his own life-long relationship. These letters give an inner glimpse of a mostly private life.

Book Description

"Letters are the devil, and I always hope that any I have written have been destroyed."--Patrick White

Patrick White spent his whole life writing letters. He wanted them all burnt, but thousands survive to reveal him as one of the greatest letter-writers of his time. Patrick White: Letters is an unexpected and final volume of prose by Australia's most acclaimed novelist. Only a few scraps of White's letters have been published before.

From the aftermath of the First World War until his death in 1990, letters poured from White's pen: they are shrewd, funny, dramatic, pigheaded, camp, and above all, hauntingly beautiful. He wrote novels to sway a hostile world, but letters were for friends.

The culmination of ten years' work and reflection by David Marr, author of the well-received biography Patrick White: A Life, the volume tells the story of White's life in his own words. These are the letters of a great writer, a profound critic, a gossip with the sharpest eyes and tongue, a man who loved and hated ferociously, a keen cook, an angry patriot, and a believer never free of doubt.

"A literary milestone."--Kirkus Reviews

"Mean-spirited and brilliant, the 600 letters collected here offer real insight into the life of the Nobel-Prize winning Australian author. White's venom is matched by his torment, and the whole volume is redeemed by outstanding writing."--Publisher's Weekly ("Best Books 96")

"[T]hose who come to these letters after having read Marr's biography will expect more than shop talk from the master novelist. They will expect the bracing bitchiness of a master curmudgeon. And they will not be disappointed."--Frank Wilson, Philadelphia Inquirer

Patrick White (1912-1990), Australian novelist and playwright, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973. His many novels include Voss, The Twyborn Affair, and Riders in the Chariot.

Customer Reviews:

An opportunity to enter the private world of Patrick White .......2004-12-08

I read 2 negative reader reviews of this book on the day I bought it and thought I had thrown my money down the drain. Luckily we all come at books from a different perspective and I am very pleased I stumbled on this 677 page volume of letters written from 1919 to 1990. Reading this is like sitting in someones living room unseen and hearing all from the everyday to the important being discussed. It gives us a strong human connection to this hugely talented, crotchety, driven, private, argumentative man of strong opinions and unpredictably diverse views of the world. Rather than writing him off as a typical Australian as previous reviewers have, I found his letters fascinating, surprising, and a damn good read and his life and thought are very un-typical of Australians of his era in my view. The fact that my house is in walking distance of Dogwoods made their Castle Hill life doubly pertinent to me but in any event I would have enjoyed the book immensely. White's comment about wishing to spend his time on his acreage at Dogwoods rather than 'watching a landscape slowly destroyed by a race whose most pronounced gift is that of creating ugliness' was prescient, a McDonalds now stands nearby opposite a shopping centre carpark. Certainly worth a read.

Boring and bitter is right!.......2003-07-08

What an awful life! As an Australian this dreadful, wizened old cockroach of a man makes me ashamed. Nothing but boring twisted hatred and ingratitude. Why publish such a book at all?

what a boring bitter old man!.......1998-07-05

patrick white is one of the 20th century's finest novelists - his thick tome of letters compiled by david marr was given to me by someone who knew of patrick white only as a writer from my country- I was living in TX at the time feeling acute homesickness of which, upon reading the book, was immediately cured by page 2 when the reasons why I left australia in the first place came vividly galloping towards me with a loud yawn. The scratchy nib of discontentment mark 400 pages of this old sod's rather boring snippy life with his companion manoly. His mandarin mouthed mug scowling at u courtesy of the brush strokes of Brett on the cover really tell u the whole sad story .. dinner parties, gossip, gardening, writing, gossip, travelling, bitching, writing etc go on and on -- most telling aspect is that patrick wanted all his correspondence destroyed after being read - obviously not enough of his friends took him seriously - so why should we ...

Flaws in the Glass (Twentieth Century Classics)

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Flaws in the Glass (Twentieth Century Classics)
Patrick White
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Australia Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0140185747

Riders in the Chariot (New York Review Books Classics)

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Down And Out Down Under
perserverance is key.
The richest novel in the world
The amazing richness of literature and mysticism
Worth the Effort

Riders in the Chariot (New York Review Books Classics)
Patrick White
Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 1590170024
Release Date: 2002-04-30

Book Description

Patrick White's brilliant 1961 novel, set in an Australian suburb, intertwines four deeply different lives. An Aborigine artist, a Holocaust survivor, a beatific washerwoman, and a childlike heiress are each blessed—and stricken—with visionary experiences that may or may not allow them to transcend the machinations of their fellow men. Tender and lacerating, pure and profane, subtle and sweeping, Riders in the Chariot is one of the Nobel Prize winner's boldest books.

Customer Reviews:

Down And Out Down Under.......2005-10-30

This is not a particularly cheery book. It deals with the lives of outcasts and what we today would, callously, call freaks. The book, while it does go into meticulous detail of the biographical material of the main characters' respective lives, is not primarily concerned with these elements. The book is centred around the visionary, otherworldly qualities of each, particularly a shared vision each of the four main characters has of a chariot mentioned in the book of Ezekiel.-This quality separates them from the world and people around them, which are clearly meant to be disparaged.-As Miss Hare cogitates in regard to the danger one of these normal people, Mrs Jolley: "But she did sense some danger to the incorporeal, the more significant part of her."-That significant part in all the four characters is the essential matter of the book.

Other people in the book are given to insubstantial matters, cruelty, and obliviousness, frequently rendered comically by White:

The other ladies glanced at her skin, which was white and almost unprotected, whereas they themselves had shaded their faces, with orange, with mauve, even with green, not so much to impress one another, as to give them the courage to confront themselves (p.323)

All very well. But it is this Manichean dualism between the saintly four characters and, well, everybody else which leads me to refrain from giving it five stars. Anyone who has encountered the world in its chaos of identities, acts of kindness, visionary aspects, thuggish and sadistic aspects knows that we all carry in us both the visionary, sensitive private individualism of the main characters, on the one hand, and the thuggish herd instinct of----everyone else in this book.

Still, it's well worth the read. White is a remarkable writer, and the work, despite my misgivings, is one every thoughtful person should not merely have on his or her bookshelf, but have read, from beginning to end. Its insights into prelinguistics subconscious perception are not to be surpassed---anywhere.

perserverance is key........2005-10-07

I must admit that I didn't' choose to read this book myself, it was placed on our reading list for Literature so it was with slight apprehension and curiousity that I approached White's nobel prize winning novel. Reading the first few chapters made me realize why it was a nobel prize worthy, White's style was so different and at times confusing - it had never been done, it was strange, so it won. Of course as i slowly ploughed my way through the eccentric shadows of Xanadu which was Ms. Hare's home I gradually grew to appreciate the novel.
The novel centres around four main protaganists in post WWII Australia: Ms. Hare, Alf Dubbo, Himmelfarb and Mrs. Godbold. All of whom in some way are seeking redemption as outsiders. His novel is strongly critical of our society and it's one of those novels that makes you ask rather than answer questions that it poses. It highlights the cruel abuse of Aborigines and Jews within our world, showing the perhaps inevitable traits of humanity, that any country at any time must inexplicably have a scapegoat to fall back on.
It's a powerful novel and although slightly relieved when I was finished I was glad that I had read it. Raising many questions about human nature, White is a skilled writer that doesn't reach the finish line in the biggest, most obvious path but takes his time, weaving subtly and skillfully through metaphors and symbols to take you by surprise, emotionally and mentally to the finish line.
However it is not for those without patience, but give it a go and I can guarantee you will be hooked after the first 70 pages.

The richest novel in the world.......2005-06-07

Riders in the Chariot, Patrick White's international superseller at the time, was born from an incident in the late 40s, when a taxi driver, demanding the full fare of the journey from Sydney's Central Station to Petty's Hotel, was refused by White and began screaming "Go back to Germany!" White later confessed: "I think it was this more than anything which persuaded me to write the novel Riders". Fortunately, such germ was the foundation of one, perhaps the greatest, of the 20th century literary monuments, dense as the greatest novels are, but fleshy in the end, too much indeed. It is a plotless novel-as are most works by White, and if there's a plot, its one of living and surviving. The novel traces the lives of the 4 characters from their origin to their ends (something White is an undoubtful master doing, and White puts his hand on marvellous devices of narration as stream of conscioussness, epiphanies and of course, the wonderful and hillarious use of adjectives, though sometimes the image, nearer to incongruency but finally well put, is difficult to convey.
The chariot, itself, was familiar to Blake, Ovid, the apocalyptic writers of the Bible and to Redon. In White's chariot, as David Marr reported, "the riders are those who have known illumination as he had experienced it in mystical ecsatsy, in creation, music", etc. White wrote, according to his letters (to his Viking editor Ben Huebsch in February 1959): "What I want to emphasise through my four "Riders" - an orthodox refugee intellectual Jew, a mad Erdgeist of an Australian spinster, an evangelical laundress, and a half-caste Aboriginal painter- is that all faiths, whether religious, humanistic, instinctive, or the creative artist's act of praise, are in fact one". And for example, is a brilliant detail that in general, the novel is a study of GOOD people pitted against EVIL; nowadays... how nice!
Riders in the Chariot is not a novel easy to read, neither meant to be read to relax. As one of the 40 best Australian books ever, it's a work of pleasure for the deep and restless mind. A novel written to music, something important to the writer and the reader, and like a baroque piece exhibiting a down-to-earth accumulation of detail, this work is a must for anyone interested in the best literature of the past century and an innovative psychological narrative art that, in the hands of this Australian Nobel Prize winner, soars to the highest ranks.

The amazing richness of literature and mysticism.......2005-04-21

About a quarter of the way into this book I realized I was reading a brilliant treatise on mystical theology written in the form of a novel. This is a magnificent piece of work that brings together several realms of meaning, various settings, and divergent attitudes and dispositions about what it means to be truly human and live among other humans. There are four major protagonists of widely differing backgrounds. Each represents a peculiar moral stance that makes them capable of some unexpected actions and disables them with regard to others. Most of the action takes place in and around Sydney, Australia, but there are "lead up" sections in England and Germany. Mary Hare is ugly, less than intelligent, and stark raving mad. She lives in a crumbling mansion and experiences difficulty in trying to communicate with other people. For her, words are fragile and sometimes breakable and people use them in cruel ways. Yet she is an attractive personality whom we come to like because she is described from the inside. That is, we know what she feels, suffers and, most of all, remembers. Himmelfarb is a German Jew, a brilliant professor of philosophy whose father inexplicably converts to Christianity, thereby causing his mother to fade slowly away from sadness and a sense of being betrayed and victimized. He escapes the "final solution" by immigrating to Australia and taking a meaningless job in a factory owned by another German Jew who has also "converted." Ruth Godbold, a saintly laundress who lives in a shed with four daughters and an abusive husband, communicates mainly through acts of kindness. She nurses Mary Hare during a long illness and takes care of Himmelfarb in his last agony when some redneck thugs at the factory try to crucify him. Alf Dubbo, a native Australian brought up by religious people whose religiosity is questionable, develops his talent at painting and communicates through art. His ability to make moral decisions is confounded by his early experience with the preacher who kept sticking his hand into Alf's trousers.

These four have little contact and less communication with each other. None of them understands what the others are saying, except in a pre-linguistic sense. At a certain level, they already know what the others are saying, but they know it on a non-conscious level, like the prophets of the Hebrew Bible (whence the book's title is derived).

These four major personages suffer physically and morally and profoundly. This book zeroes in on the reality of human suffering and shows that we suffer or cause others to suffer because of some flaw in our own characters, in the sense of Sophocles. This is not, of course, the "message" of the novel (novels don't have messages; we all know that). More importantly, we see throughout the book the collective and communitarian dimension of suffering and its intellectual connections to some prophetic books of the Old Testament that emphasize the unitary nature of humankind and the need for a "suffering servant" to atone and expiate for the sins of others.

As a prose stylist, Patrick White is impressive, maybe supreme. This is the most well written book I have read in many years. His sentences are beautifully fragmented and fractured. His language (use of adjectives, etc.) is extraordinarily rich. In fact, it is gorgeous. Words and ideas have colors and smells. He omits unnecessary direct-object pronouns and even definite articles. Even the sound of his prose is amazingly satisfying: he makes liberal use of alliteration, especially in initial consonants, but in other contexts as well. Figures and tropes abound, even zeugma. And finally, if anyone wants an example of a memorable sentence, let me offer this one from page 26:

Mrs. Hare had soon taken refuge from Mary in a rational kindness, with which she continued to deal her a series of savage blows during what passed for childhood.

Worth the Effort.......2004-04-22

Yeah, he's Australian, and a Nobel Laureate to boot, two immediate strikes against any serious literary interest. His prose is so thick it could be used to reinforce concrete. His characters run the gamut from the Symbolic to the Deeply Symbolic, and have a tendency to climb onto soapboxes at the drop of a digger hat (often to ludicrous effect, as at the end of "Voss", where the 19th-century characters turn their backs on the business at hand--the death of a noted explorer--to spend the final pages on a 20th-century-style debate concerning the Status of Australian Literature). It often seems as if he went out of his way to adapt only the worst traits of his master, Dostoevsky, while tossing all the worthwhile ones.

But there's something to Patrick White, and this novel is where it all came together for him. Anthony Burgess, unlike the Nobel committee, didn't select this as one of his 99 great novels simply to shoehorn an Aussie onto the list, and there's a touch of the Burgessian in this novel's sprawl and reach. The characters, especially Alf Dubbo and Mrs. Godbold, stand well apart from whatever it is they're supposed to Represent. Although it occasionally falls to the level of a morality play, the story gains power as it progresses--one of the chief benefits of writing at this length. And though the climax, embodied in the murder of the Holocaust survivor Mordecai Himmelfarb, has its flaws (the author of "Days of Cain" can tell you that subtlety is the chief requirement for dealing with the Holocaust--the subject is simply too vast to handle otherwise), the conclusion is satisfying on all levels, with no (well, very little) last-minute thumping of the lectern on the author's part. In fact, the final pages are rapier-sharp examples of a writer hitting exactly what he was aiming at--the final fate of the vicious Miss Hare and Mrs. Jolley is as harrowing a portrayal of damnation as anything this side of Charles Williams.

In the end we're left with a pure rendering of the quiet power of human decency, and the lovely image of that chariot in which we all wish to ride--the one that leaves its tracks in the salmon clouds of sunset.

A Fringe of Leaves (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
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Do Not Read About The Plot Until Later: One of White's Better Novels

Timeless Portrait of Humanity and Cross-Culturalism

Upon unknown shores cast

A Fringe of Leaves (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
Patrick White
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0140186107

Customer Reviews:

Do Not Read About The Plot Until Later: One of White's Better Novels.......2007-02-28

There is a touch of the chaos in Fringe of Leaves. It is not boring and it is one of White's better novels. It has a good story and I will not reveal the plot beyond what the publisher reveals on the book jacket.

I have read three of White's novels: the present work, the Tree of Man, and Voss. The present novel, is more complex than Voss, and unlike Voss here the author manages to breath some life into the characters. It has a good plot that reminds one a bit of Jane Eyre, but with quite a different setting. It is set in England in the middle of the 19th century. It is about a young woman from Cornwall who marries a wealthy gentleman. They go to Australia and are caught in a ship wreck off the coast of Queensland after visiting the husband's brother in Tasmania.

White uses stream of consciousness in a mild form which seems a bit novel after reading Voss. But the thing that grabs your attention is his use of structure. He introduces the protagonist, Ellen, by having two ladies describe her for about 20 pages. The two women ride in a horse drawn carriage chatting about Ellen. You, as the reader, realize that White will be creative in what will follow in the story.

After that we move the present scene in the story. But Ellen has these flashbacks to fill in the story of her life over most of the first half.

Patrick White gained fame as the Australian Nobel prize winner in literature and as a person with a prickly or difficult personality. He was educated at Cambridge but settled and wrote in Australia after World War II. He wrote about a dozen novels and a biography.

This is a good novel and it deserves 5 stars. After a dozen pages or so it becomes clear to the reader why White is famous: he has an unusual style and he is a gifted writer. There is no question about his writing ability. We see great writing ability in Voss and that skill is present in The Tree of Man and in the present novel.

Overall, I thought it was a good book and an interesting read and an interesting book to read if you are interested in the works of Patrick White.

Timeless Portrait of Humanity and Cross-Culturalism.......2003-04-24

Read any review of Patrick Whiteýs A Fringe of Leaves and you will expect it to be an exciting tale. One that includes adventures on the sea, a frightening shipwreck, and deaths of important characters; a tale of enslavement by the wild and savage Australian aborigines, sex, and cannibalism; a tale of the heroic rescue of a damsel in distress by an escaped convict. But if you are expecting this adventurous and daring plot, you may turn away disappointed. You may read halfway through the book and not encounter more than one or two of the events mentioned in the reviews.
What is it, then, that makes A Fringe a five-star read? Why do many readers across the globe claim it to be one of Patrick Whiteýs most brilliant works?
This is not, in fact, merely a story of adventure and excitement. Itýs a mission of humanity. Ellen Roxburgh is the image of any individual with conflicting views of life within herself. This is not a story of rescue, but one of survival. It reminds us all of our own personal inner struggles and how much we have been able to overcome. It is a reminder that the loss of innocence in every child is the first step in that childýs becoming an adult.
A Fringe is also an anthem of cross-culturalism that sings true today in America, though it was set in 19th century Australia. Living here, we have all acquired or developed a certain social standard unfamiliar to our infant natures. From living among many legions of immigrants, or even from traveling abroad, we know what it is to subscribe to other social standards. A Fringe explores the effects of such an initiation in Ellen Roxburghýs character. This initiation is exhibited as the cause of her internal conflict of social behaviors. She began as a Cornish farmerýs daughter, and then developed a façade of proper civilized mannerisms when she married her aristocratic husband. She initiated another set of social standards when she was forced to live among the aborigines. Whiteýs moving depiction of this struggle will inspire and comfort the patient reader.
Patrick Whiteýs A Fringe of Leaves may not satisfy an impatient adventurer. But it surpasses its acclaim of literary merit in its brilliant demonstration of timeless humanity and cross-cultural issues.

Upon unknown shores cast.......2001-09-19

Patrick White writes like a castaway from the Victorian era. His novels are long and full of real characters and the society and civilization of which they are a part and from which they come is equally real. Each character possesses a fully developed history, and the story as a whole progress from one point to another. And in the process people are changed by the experience. If that sounds old fashioned to you, well, it is old fashioned but those are values that some readers miss and for those readers these novels. I don't want to make White sound too antiquated though for his themes are very contemporary ,or timeless, as his themes are those that don't go out of style. This is my favorite of his novels. In A Fringe of Leaves(c.1973) White tells a shipwreck story upon the shores of an as yet uncolonised Australia. The characters who survive the shipwreck are then captured by Aborigines and must adapt to a lifestyle quite unlike the one left behind in fair old England. White uses this tale to examine civilization first by showing his characters in it and then by showing his characters as they appear stripped of it.....in only a fringe of leaves. The examination is quite a thorough and engaging one. The novel feels Victorian partly because it is set in that time (or before) but it only retains the best of that periods use of the form. White himself is Australian(and one who has won many awards, Nobel included, and to many he is the best they have so far produced) and so his study of England is tinged with an insight reserved for the ousider or in his case the postcolonial. The shipwreck portion of the book is only about 150 pages or so near the end of a 500 page plus novel. It takes patience to get to the exciting part of the story but once you are there you will want to read that section more than once. In those blindingly intense pages the characters cling to but a few delicate and sacred strands of belief to keep the savage world from totally adopting them. The aftermath portion of the book is equally interesting.

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Better Than White's Voss
an important novel
The sadness of time

The Tree of Man
Patrick White
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Historical | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0099324512

Customer Reviews:

Better Than White's Voss.......2007-01-21

I have read two of White's novels: the present work and Voss. The present novel, The Tree of Man, is more complex than Voss, and unlike Voss here the author manages to breath some life into the characters.

Patrick White gained fame as the Australian Nobel prize winner in literature, and as a person with a prickly or difficult personality. He was educated at Cambridge but settled and wrote in Australia after World War II. He wrote about a dozen novels and a biography.

This is a good novel and it deserves 5 stars. After a dozen pages or so it becomes clear to the reader why White is famous: he has an unusual style and he is a gifted writer. There is no question about his writing ability. We see great writing ability in Voss and that skill is present in The Tree of Man.

The story is set in rural farm country in Australia and it follows the life of a young couple through to their deaths at old age. The male protagonist is a bit like the Voss character. In any case, we follow their lives, and the births and lives of their two children, and the lives of a few of their neighbours. The story describes the day to day life of a typical farming couple, along with the problems and challenges of raising children on a small rural farm. The story of the two children are followed into the marriage of the daughter and we follow the troubles of the adult son with the law.

I liked the way White handled the four family members. The lives of the four are realistic and interesting; they are human and one can relate to their actions. The discouraging feature of some of White's writing is that the characters seem stiff or cardboard like. His Voss character was not a man to show much emotion or talk. There are any passages that simply describe Voss's activities in that slightly dry book. The present book is much more complicated and White does a much better job with his characters. They are human and give way to temptations. Each character shows a wide range of human emotions.

Overall, I thought it was a good book and an interesting read and an interesting book to read if you are interested in the works of Patrick White.

an important novel.......2004-02-03

This is a truly extraordinary novel. It demands a certain amount of quiet to be read well. I found myself reading it more like poetry. Because of White's compelling storytelling and writing style, it held my attention despite the fact that very litte happens. Perfect to take on trains, airplanes, or to the beach.

The sadness of time.......2002-10-24

In the tradition of DH Lawrence, Thomas Mann and Halldor Laxness, Patrick White has written a story that teases out the secrets of a family's existence and, in so doing, explores, without ever mentioning them expressly, the issues and mysteries universal to humanity.

The plot could barely be simpler. In the early days of Australia's nationhood a young man and his wife set off into the bush to begin their lives together. They find some land, build a house, have a family, grow old and finally die. Around them the dramas of life unfold: friendships, disasters, disappointments and infidelities. The book is less about them, though, than about the unremarkable moments in between. These times of quietness are White's triumphs. His unhurried prose admits us to the intimacies of the characters, their griefs, their dreams and their successes. We share in the man's unarticulated affinity with the land, the woman's chronic loneliness. We notice how many words are never spoken, how many uncertainties never resolved.

By the end, one sees that the characters' struggles are his struggles. Briefly, perhaps, one's view of life becomes wider than his self, and a larger landscape, if not a plan, crystallises in the world. You finish the last page, close the book and sit still and speechless for a second, as if someone real has died.

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"You can only do. Or be, sort of."

It rains on you.

The vivisector is a rare whole-life journey of a fine artist

The Vivisector
Patrick White
Manufacturer: Jonathan Cape
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0224619152

Customer Reviews:

"You can only do. Or be, sort of.".......2004-01-05

In his longest novel, written in 1970, Nobel Prize-winning author White examines the question of an artist's creativity, where it comes from, whether it can be controlled, and what obligations, if any, accompany it. As he traces the life of Hurtle Duffield from the age of four until his death as an elderly (and successful) avant-garde artist, we see Duffield always as somehow different from his peers. The son of a laundress and a bottle collector, Hurtle is from birth inspired, painting large images on walls as a toddler, but he recognizes at an early age that "people look down at their plates if you said something was 'beautiful.'" To provide him with opportunities which will allow his genius to flourish, his parents sell him to the wealthy family for which his mother works when he is four years old.

As a member of the Courtney family, Hurtle travels and becomes educated, though he continues to see rather than think. For him, the usual emotional traumas of adolescence are accompanied by unique questions of his identity, both because of his two families and also because of his view of the world. Not religious, he sees God as the Great Vivisector, and men treating each other as animals, slaughtering each other in war. When he himself goes off to war and returns to find that the family has gone in separate directions, he devotes himself, once again, to his art, using women who love him as vehicles for his own self-expression and behaving as a vivisector himself. About his painting of one model, White says "[Hurtle] disemboweled her while she was still alive." As time passes, Hurtle continues to search for love, inspiration, self-expression, and some sort of balance in his life between his immense need to paint, his desire for personal connection, and his simultaneous need to be alone.

White's prose style is direct and concise, elegantly simple, and easy to understand. He uses colloquial speech-words like "smoodge," "sook," "slommacky," and "mumped," which must be understood from context-and reveals character and action through dialogue. The novel is old-fashioned, using a straight chronological narrative with no complex flashbacks, and it is quite romantic in its plot elements, despite its serious theme development. The biggest problem for the reader is that the main character is not very likable, nor does he inspire a great deal of empathy--a difficult character to live with for approximately six hundred pages--and I'm not sure how typical he is of the artists he is supposed to represent. Mary Whipple

It rains on you........2002-10-01

I find it difficult to assign an exact number of stars to my assessment of this book. My "enjoyment" of the book is at about a three star level, but White's ability to achieve what he set out to do is worthy of five stars... so I am rounding off to four. What did he set out to do? To show the lifelong inner workings, to lay bare the soul of this particular artist, the painter Hurtle Duffield. White achieved his goal, we're left with a brilliant portrait, his depiction of the artist is itself a work of art, the work of a genius.
But the book is difficult, slow-moving and dark. It will not appeal to those who want a quick-paced storyline... and forget the word "action" all ye that dare to enter herein. These pages will rain on you. And, like all walking in the rain, you will have to remain fairly determined to reach your destination.
But the book is not without its merits. Artists are not normal. They are eccentric. Hurtle Duffield is a born artist, and as such, from childhood onwards he is not normal. He is consistently, and increasingly, eccentric. As a child, he is keenly observant... in a sense, vivisecting everything he sees and experiences. His adoption into a wealthy family allows for the opportunity to expand his horizons, to experience the world... yet even this good fortune is no panacea, it is clouded with difficulties, with dysfunction. The fertile ground for the artistic mind to germinate.
Hurtle (as perhaps all great artists) becomes the sort of person who influences those who come in contact with him, but is unable to influence himself. His relationships are tragic and self-destructive for everyone involved. He becomes a recluse, spending the latter portion of his life living with his equally eccentric sister, the kind of guy that neighborhood kids invent legends about!
In his mansion he continues to paint his masterpieces, which are internationally recognized.
The only way that Hurtle can REALLY communicate with the outside world is through his art, and White does a superb job of showing us how detrimental this type of obsession can be for the personal life of the artist himself. It's a world few of us ever see. And it's gloomy.
At one point the narrator says that Hurtle's "repeated downfall was his longing to share truth with somebody specific who didn't want to receive it." This is a significant theme of the novel, Hurtle searching for the Ideal. And Hurtle himself cries out at one point, "I'm an artist. I can't afford exorcism."
Brilliant stuff.
Of course, White's choice of title for his book is significant. So, as I read the book, I kept asking myself... "Who IS the vivisector?" Is it "God" as Hurtle concludes in chapter 8? Or is it Hurtle himself?
How easy it is to blame God for our temperament, or for the choices we have made in life... famous artist or not!
The title is significant. White is asking something here, not giving us the answer. If Hurtle dies alone, and unfulfilled, is this God's fault? Hurtle's?
Who is the Vivisector in this novel? God? If so... who does he vivisect? Everyone? (If so, I can think of many people I know who do not seem very vivisected at all)! Does God arbitrarily pick and choose then?
Does God even exist?
If it's Hurtle, who does Hurtle vivisect? Himself? His original parents? His sister? Every woman in his life? Page 458 says "there were days when he himself was operated on." And the inference is that he (Hurtle) was the vivisector!
White leaves these questions unanswered, and to me, it was an eerie feeling, like one of those paintings with the eyes that follow you no matter where you walk in the room.
The book is worth reading, but keep an eye to the title of my review...

The vivisector is a rare whole-life journey of a fine artist.......1998-01-14

Although it is out of print and difficult to find, the Vivisector is a rare opportunity to journey through the life of a fine artist, from birth to death. It is redolent with the imagery that drives the main character's development as a painter, from the moment he is sold into a wealthy family, through the recognition of his talent as a very young boy, and the efforts made by his adoptive parents to fully develop his obvious gifts, until world recognition enables an ongoing career marked by greatness. Peter White's gentle, sculpting prose builds not only the image of the artist, but of what he sees and what he paints, and therein is the author's brilliance. With an economy of language that is at once enviable and surprising, White provides a life-portrait that invades the mind of the reader with images of what it means to give one's life to art, and to be a great artist, and live that artist's life. Parallel themes of the book follow his original and adoptive families, and particularly a sister, who, mad and confused, roams the streets with her pets, as lost in her mind as the artist is able to explore his own. The panoply of emotions is so powerful at times that the reader must take a moment to pull images and feelings together before moving on. I highly recommend this book to anyone thinking of building a life in art.

Berets and Beaujolais: 40 French Stereotypes Explored (Chambers Mini Guides)

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Berets and Beaujolais: 40 French Stereotypes Explored (Chambers Mini Guides)
Dougal Campbell , Patrick White , and Georges Pilard
Manufacturer: Larousse Kingfisher Chambers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Authors:

Authors

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