Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition covers of four Patrick White titles. Bought these way back in 2003. Now the bookstores I got them from have long closed and have been replaced by other establishments. ************ Still not finished with the Vivisector, with the newer Penguin Classics edition introduced by none other than JM Coetzee, who I didn't know had transferred from South Africa to Australia. ************ "Rhoda said, and now they were neither brother and sister, young nor old, male or female, they were not the dolls parents play with, or rats reared for experiment...Whatever their souls were, and he was inclined to see them as paper kites, they soared for a brief moment, twinning and twanging together, in the pure joy of recognition." ************ The main protagonist, Hurtle, is a painter, and White uses descriptive narrative with the imagination of a twisted visual artist. The language is an early version of what he utilized for the much better written Riders in the Chariot. But it's still too early to really tell. ************ Right now, one of the epigraphs used to open the book should suffice: "He becomes beyond all others the great Invalid, the great Criminal, the great Accursed One—and the Supreme knower. For he reaches the unknown." (Arthur Rimbaud) In other words, the artist is the vivisector. ************ #books #fiction #PatrickWhite #Australia #literature #NobelPrize #NobelPrizeInLiterature #igreads #igbooks #instabooks #instareads #bookstagram #bookstagtamph #booklove #booknerd #bookporn #bookgram #bibliophile