From Publishers Weekly
Malouf's is a name not widely known here, although he is regarded as a major writer in his native Australia and has a growing reputation in Britain. The Great World is a smashing performance, a novel of intense perception and formidable power. It follows two men who first come to know each other when, after the collapse of Singapore, they are war prisoners of the Japanese, working like coolies to build a railroad in remote Thailand. Digger Kean is a quiet, thoughtful man with a phenomenal memory, content with his quiet existence at a tiny rural river crossing named for his family. Vic Curran is impulsive, instinctive, aggressive, a man who rose from a desperately poor childhood to become a wheeler-dealer in the Sydney money markets. Their relationship is an uneasy one, but central to both lives. Malouf traces those lives and their interrelationship from the Depression, through the apocalyptic horror of the war and then to the expansive peace years that follow and make Curran wealthy. The author moves smoothly back and forth in time, creating in the process vivid characters observed with keen understanding: Ma and Pa Warrender, who adopt orphaned Vic and become his surrogate family; Iris, the sister-in-law of a buddy killed by the Japanese, whom Digger first knows through her letters and later comes to cherish in a lifetime of weekly visits; Digger's mother, who in an unforgettable scene walks away from her uncomplaining, patient life into madness. For someone who writes so acutely of men in war--and some of the wartime passages are as eloquent and truly horrific as any ever penned--Malouf has an astonishing, almost Lawrentian grasp of the subtle currents of feeling between the sexes. His prose is never less than quietly sure, and when he rises to a major scene--as when Vic heals Digger's disease-ravaged legs in a Thai river, or Digger has a vision of the sweet sanctity of everyday civilian life--he rises to poetic heights. The Great World is that rarity, a novel of genuinely epic scope.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
From Library Journal
Will American readers be interested in slices of Australian life over the last 70 years? Will they be enthralled by two Aussies who meet in a Japanese POW camp? Will they be at all taken by a novel of an old war while a new one rages? Probably not, though they should be. Malouf, who is being touted as the successor to the great Patrick White, has written a wonderfully constructed, beautifully phrased novel that transcends its geography and its time to give us the dramatic interactions between human beings and history. The plot hangs on the friendship between Digger Keen and Vic Curran, representatives of the working class who are altered by war and their country's development. The writing is powerful, engaging, dynamic. This should not be missed.
- Vincent D. Balitas, Allentown Coll., Center Valley, Pa.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
- Vincent D. Balitas, Allentown Coll., Center Valley, Pa.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
