#alexis wright

[whilereadingandwalking]

Currently reading…

[pianostrings]

'So you ask me is this what a man gets? This was the question. A holding pattern of things planted square in the head, instead of thinking general, such as whether there was remotely a hopeful possibility of a great morning-haze lifting, and thinking luxury, hoping something was in the fridge for breakfast.'

- Praiseworthy, Alexis Wright

[left-handlibrary]

Congratulations to Alexis Wright for winning the Stella Prize on Thursday! I’ll be hopefully getting to this massive biography soon. So far, I’m just over halfway through The Female Persuasion and I’ll be having to start a collection of some of Poe’s short stories this weekend for uni.

[rootsinyourdreamland]

Gypsy is so fucked up, but Naomi Watts SELLS IT

[mimosaeyes]

Everyone wished to escape paradise from time to time. Wished to slide away in the middle of the night out to the storms, throwing their fate to the sea . . . Nobody found it easy to leave their life: home, friends, parents, grandchildren. A known place to be buried in when they died.

Carpentaria by Alexis Wright

[whilereadingandwalking]

Carpentaria by Alexis Wright is a gorgeous, epic tale about the remote town of Desperance, with Uptown in the center and ringed by the Aboriginal Pricklebush people, all on the Gulf of Carpentaria in Australia. The world of aboriginal community, oral storytelling, the Dreamtime, the landscape of Queensland, all come alive in this vivid story about Norm Phantom, his son Will, and the mine that threatens Desperance and its land.

In the middle, I got a little lost as Wright settled out of the storytelling of the Phantom family and into the main chronology of the novel. But it quickly fell into place, and the novel regained its ground. Wright's writing is lyrical and lovely. I see why her name has begun to come up for the Nobel; I'm tempted to recommend it for her just for this novel. I could feel that thick Australian humidity, hear the waves as the Phantom and Midnight family's long-standing feud goes on and Elias Smith blows in on the wake of a storm. It's just the kind of visceral, multigenerational saga I live for, with a magical realist touch and a rush of feeling. I'm obsessed. Hundreds of pages and they absolutely flew by. Will have to get to the rest of her work asap.

Content warnings for r-slur, death, substance abuse, racism & racial slurs, suicide, and mentions of sexual assault.

[mimosaeyes]

Living next to the sea was like having tragedy for a neighbour.

Carpentaria by Alexis Wright

[ofsilentseas]

Picture the creative serpent, scoring deep into – scouring down through – the slippery underground of the mudflats, leaving in its wake the thunder of tunnels collapsing to form deep sunken valleys. The sea water following in the serpent’s wake, swarming in a frenzy of tidal waves, soon changed colour from ocean blue to the yellow of mud. The water filled the swirling tracks to form the mighty bending rivers spread across the vast plains of the Gulf country. The serpent traveled over the marine plains, over the salt flats, through the salt dunes, past the mangrove forests and crawled inland. Then it went back to the sea. And it came out at another spot along the coastline … When it finished creating the many rivers in its wake, it created one last river, no larger or smaller than the others, a river which offers no apologies for its discontent with people who do not know it. This is where the giant serpent continues to live deep down under the ground in a vast network of limestone aquifers. They say its being is porous; it permeates everything. It is all around in the atmosphere and is attached to the lives of the river people like skin.

Alexis Wright, Carpentaria, 2006