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souris_de_bibliotheque's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence and Sexual violence
jordont's review against another edition
5.0
A truly moving epic. You can't tell sometimes whether it's dreamtime or real time and it all doesn't matter as the story overwhelms and takes you in.
One of my favourite books ever. A massive task to read, though well worth it.
One of my favourite books ever. A massive task to read, though well worth it.
pavel_nedelcu's review against another edition
5.0
Delighted I've been reading this story 'til the end. No joke, Alexis Wright has become my new favorite author. No joke, this book deserves the Nobel Prize!
The description of the Aboriginal world living around the Golf of Carpentaria is so precise, smooth, ironical, fairytalelike, perfect! The parallel with the Western society so harsh, powerful and real. Time and Space are differently conceived, and so are the environment, the Nature and dreams' dimension in opposition to reality.
Two totally different cultures and societies excluding each other because too proud, too confident in their own beliefs, too greedy and racist. Is there any Hope left for Australians (white and black fella) to coexist and respect each other and the environment? To live according to commonly shared laws and comply with their own identities? The answer to that question is not to be found in this book either, wich closely and brilliantly deals with the problem, but in ourselves, in every each of us. So that the role of the book becomes actually that of presenting the problem in order to touch that inner part of us responsable of comprehension and compassion. In a nutshell, of humanity!
The description of the Aboriginal world living around the Golf of Carpentaria is so precise, smooth, ironical, fairytalelike, perfect! The parallel with the Western society so harsh, powerful and real. Time and Space are differently conceived, and so are the environment, the Nature and dreams' dimension in opposition to reality.
Two totally different cultures and societies excluding each other because too proud, too confident in their own beliefs, too greedy and racist. Is there any Hope left for Australians (white and black fella) to coexist and respect each other and the environment? To live according to commonly shared laws and comply with their own identities? The answer to that question is not to be found in this book either, wich closely and brilliantly deals with the problem, but in ourselves, in every each of us. So that the role of the book becomes actually that of presenting the problem in order to touch that inner part of us responsable of comprehension and compassion. In a nutshell, of humanity!
boyblue's review against another edition
5.0
Carpentaria is the story of the Pricklebush mob living on the outskirts of the town of Desperance in the Gulf of Carpentaria. It's the story of Norm Phantom, his wife Angel Day and their progeny, particularly Will Phantom. Norm has a deep understanding of his country and the sea, and that gives him what appears to be supernatural powers. His communication and interpretation of the dreamtime allows him to navigate and thrive off his country like no other. His ability to use star maps, currents, stories, weather, animals, spirits and all other features of his country make him not just a traditional owner of the land but a guardian and true custodian. His deep understanding leaves all the white folk in town in complete awe of his gifts yet also afraid.
Alongside Norm's journeys and stories are those of his son Will Phantom. A man who seems to have inherited many of Norm's gifts but also a fiery passion to protect his land from the multi-national mining company that is destroying their country. The strange tension created when Norm exiles and disowns his son even though they are philosophically aligned in their love for country and in many ways both commit actions to destroy all foreign intruders is in many ways the central part of the story. It drives both characters willingly or not and Will's actions make him just as much a guardian of the land as his father's perceived inaction does. Although it will later surface in Will's memories that his father has created something even bigger than all of his actions to cleanse the country, wipe out the mining company and indeed the whole town.
The last major character is the prophet and mystic Mozzie Fishman. A man leading an eternal pilgrimage in the form of a roaring Holden Commodore convoy around Australia. Mozzie becomes Will's father figure in many ways and is also ultimately a guardian of the land and its stories. He has a deep mutual respect with Norm, such that when Angel Day takes up with him they still remain strong friends. Mozzie takes in waifs and strays around Australia and dispenses his wisdom to them freely, he is the man of the land, where Norm is the man of the sea.
One of the best comparisons I've read is that this is in many ways Australia's 100 Years of Solitude; it's an accurate comparison. Although, the magic-realism of Marquez is largely fabricated out of imagination, while Wright's magic-realism is grounded firmly in Aboriginal stories and belief. So this is a history of country and culture as much as it is a magic-realist text. It's also a story of trans-generational trauma and how the scars white colonialists have left on the land and the people are passed down in ways they not only can't understand but can't even see or imagine. It's a deeply sad and moving tale. But also a triumphant one and a beautiful journey of discovery. Wright also has a phenomenal ear for the Australian vernacular, putting her up there with Tim Winton and Ruth Park for being the most gifted dialogue writer in Australian story telling. This is a story every Australian should read but not one you would force on people. They need to come to it willingly, ready to learn of the original and best way to look at their great country; a country that lives and breathes. This is the greatest Australian novel I've read.
Alongside Norm's journeys and stories are those of his son Will Phantom. A man who seems to have inherited many of Norm's gifts but also a fiery passion to protect his land from the multi-national mining company that is destroying their country. The strange tension created when Norm exiles and disowns his son even though they are philosophically aligned in their love for country and in many ways both commit actions to destroy all foreign intruders is in many ways the central part of the story. It drives both characters willingly or not and Will's actions make him just as much a guardian of the land as his father's perceived inaction does. Although it will later surface in Will's memories that his father has created something even bigger than all of his actions to cleanse the country, wipe out the mining company and indeed the whole town.
The last major character is the prophet and mystic Mozzie Fishman. A man leading an eternal pilgrimage in the form of a roaring Holden Commodore convoy around Australia. Mozzie becomes Will's father figure in many ways and is also ultimately a guardian of the land and its stories. He has a deep mutual respect with Norm, such that when Angel Day takes up with him they still remain strong friends. Mozzie takes in waifs and strays around Australia and dispenses his wisdom to them freely, he is the man of the land, where Norm is the man of the sea.
One of the best comparisons I've read is that this is in many ways Australia's 100 Years of Solitude; it's an accurate comparison. Although, the magic-realism of Marquez is largely fabricated out of imagination, while Wright's magic-realism is grounded firmly in Aboriginal stories and belief. So this is a history of country and culture as much as it is a magic-realist text. It's also a story of trans-generational trauma and how the scars white colonialists have left on the land and the people are passed down in ways they not only can't understand but can't even see or imagine. It's a deeply sad and moving tale. But also a triumphant one and a beautiful journey of discovery. Wright also has a phenomenal ear for the Australian vernacular, putting her up there with Tim Winton and Ruth Park for being the most gifted dialogue writer in Australian story telling. This is a story every Australian should read but not one you would force on people. They need to come to it willingly, ready to learn of the original and best way to look at their great country; a country that lives and breathes. This is the greatest Australian novel I've read.
madeline_the_terrible's review against another edition
4.0
This is a book by and for indigenous Australians. I did not always understand it (nor did I finish it) but it is epic and magical and needed to be written.
emilyclairem's review against another edition
1.0
God, I hate this book. I can see how others might enjoy it and it's not an Objectively Bad book, but it was basically just everything I don't like in a book, and lacked everything that I personally look for in good novels.
The biggest turn-off for me was the characters and their relationships. I don't mind not liking characters, as long as it's fun and rewarding to hate them. These characters were just...nothing. I spent 500 pages with them but I still feel like I don't know them at all. And the relationships are just atrocious and really upsetting to read about. There is definitely merit in writing about abusive relationships, but only if it seems like there is point to them or literally just any attention called to them. Nearly every relationship is seemingly arbitrarily toxic and, as I'm sensitive to these things, the casual throwing in of Angel Day's abuse towards her children made me feel sick. It's never dealt with in literally any way and it upset me a lot.
The narrative style also left me feeling very distant from the text and thus I didn't care at all about the plot or feel like it had any urgency or meaning. Again, I'm aware this is a specific technique, but it's just not my taste. The writing style is very non-descript, which is okay if the plot stands out, but this work didn't succeed at either in my opinion.
Overall, it was painful to get through the book and I absolutely would've dropped it had it not been required reading.
The biggest turn-off for me was the characters and their relationships. I don't mind not liking characters, as long as it's fun and rewarding to hate them. These characters were just...nothing. I spent 500 pages with them but I still feel like I don't know them at all. And the relationships are just atrocious and really upsetting to read about. There is definitely merit in writing about abusive relationships, but only if it seems like there is point to them or literally just any attention called to them. Nearly every relationship is seemingly arbitrarily toxic and, as I'm sensitive to these things, the casual throwing in of Angel Day's abuse towards her children made me feel sick. It's never dealt with in literally any way and it upset me a lot.
The narrative style also left me feeling very distant from the text and thus I didn't care at all about the plot or feel like it had any urgency or meaning. Again, I'm aware this is a specific technique, but it's just not my taste. The writing style is very non-descript, which is okay if the plot stands out, but this work didn't succeed at either in my opinion.
Overall, it was painful to get through the book and I absolutely would've dropped it had it not been required reading.
katmarlowe's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
skadinova's review
5.0
What a book! This novel takes you on such a journey. I felt like I was close and intimate with the town of Desperance, it's characters and special kind of madness born of trying to maintain a colonial sense of order among the wide and languid country of Carpentaria and the dreaming of both land and sea. At the same time I felt like I was soaring with the stories of Norm and Will Phantom, Elias the stranger who walked out of the sea, Angel Day and the rest of the mob from West and East of Uptown. This was an epic read that, like the river and sea so central to it, can not be pinned down but flows and weaves and paints a landscape of stories that continues to move me after closing the book. It took me a while to get hooked but once I clicked into the voice of the story I was hooked. I love Alexis Wright's writing for that reason. She is unique.
archytas's review against another edition
5.0
To be brutally honest, halfway through this book, it was still mostly a chore to read, so I'm a little surprised that I just unhesitatingly selected 5 stars to rate it, but that accurately reflects my journey in reading it. By the last few chapters, I was so thoroughly hooked I couldn't bear the thought of it ending.
It is hard to tell how much of that is that I simply enjoyed the much faster pace, clear stakes and emotional punchiness of the second half, and how much it is that Wright's style takes a long time to get comfortable with, so is less work later in the book. In either case, I not only found myself enjoying the book a lot more, but reassessing the assumptions I'd made about that style.
A few chapters in, I'd mentally pegged the style of Carpentaria as somewhere between Garrison Keilor-style small town character tales & the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez & Isobelle Allende. I kinda love the former, and loath the latter, so the mystical slipping in and out jarred me at first, and I was hopeful for more of the small town material.
By the second half, I realised the novel really wasn't either of these things - and instead of trying to fit it into a literary canon, it was far more - liberating - to let go and just let Wright take you into *her* world. Nevertheless, since I am nowhere near the writer she is, I'm going to use some comparisons to try to explain.
The thing with the whole small-town-characters genre is that it tends to rest on a sense of continuity - things change in the lives of the characters, but not generally in the town itself. Carpentaria encompasses huge change, and well as huge continuity. Part of the tension that drives the novel is the balance between the world of country, which is, if definitely not unchanging, then resilient and enduring, and the world of the townies and the people, which is much more fragile and subject to upheaval than they expect. It is our central group of POV protagonists - Norm Phantom and his son Will and mentor religious leader Mozzie Fishman - who live in both worlds, adn as a consequence, are able to shape and impact on events. That all of these characters are blackfellas is a given - this understanding of country is timeless, and inexplicable without tradition, experience and connection.
Similarly, the magical realism comparison imposes a different kind of worldview on the novel. Even my sense of shifting in and out of mystic elements more clearly becomes a misassumption as the book progressed. This is a landscape with varied dimensions and shifting perspectives. The dizzying sense of moving between time periods - which honestly I found a headache to sort out while reading - and possibly the oft-ambiguous-and-sometimes-just-off grammar is also part of this sense of dislocated viewpoints on the same thing.
That our powerful, understanding characters are all men is a little disconcerting. The women who appear in the narrative - Angel Day, Girlie Phantom, Hope Phantom/Midnight - are all seen through the eyes of men, and appear absorbed by the immediate in a way male characters can transcend. Angel in particular is left ambiguous, stranded by the narrative in a place that feels vaguely hellish with her motivations still blurry and her character blurred by the hate and love of our POV characters.
It seems strange to me to describe this as a political book - as if any take on the Gulf world could not involve racism, institutional and otherwise, and the impact of mining. The themes are not artificial, and the book is about so much more than a town and a mine, these are simply starting points for an epic - an epic from a uniquely Australian viewpoint that sucks you in and throws you around and makes you long to return in the way only the best of novels do.
It is hard to tell how much of that is that I simply enjoyed the much faster pace, clear stakes and emotional punchiness of the second half, and how much it is that Wright's style takes a long time to get comfortable with, so is less work later in the book. In either case, I not only found myself enjoying the book a lot more, but reassessing the assumptions I'd made about that style.
A few chapters in, I'd mentally pegged the style of Carpentaria as somewhere between Garrison Keilor-style small town character tales & the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez & Isobelle Allende. I kinda love the former, and loath the latter, so the mystical slipping in and out jarred me at first, and I was hopeful for more of the small town material.
By the second half, I realised the novel really wasn't either of these things - and instead of trying to fit it into a literary canon, it was far more - liberating - to let go and just let Wright take you into *her* world. Nevertheless, since I am nowhere near the writer she is, I'm going to use some comparisons to try to explain.
The thing with the whole small-town-characters genre is that it tends to rest on a sense of continuity - things change in the lives of the characters, but not generally in the town itself. Carpentaria encompasses huge change, and well as huge continuity. Part of the tension that drives the novel is the balance between the world of country, which is, if definitely not unchanging, then resilient and enduring, and the world of the townies and the people, which is much more fragile and subject to upheaval than they expect. It is our central group of POV protagonists - Norm Phantom and his son Will and mentor religious leader Mozzie Fishman - who live in both worlds, adn as a consequence, are able to shape and impact on events. That all of these characters are blackfellas is a given - this understanding of country is timeless, and inexplicable without tradition, experience and connection.
Similarly, the magical realism comparison imposes a different kind of worldview on the novel. Even my sense of shifting in and out of mystic elements more clearly becomes a misassumption as the book progressed. This is a landscape with varied dimensions and shifting perspectives. The dizzying sense of moving between time periods - which honestly I found a headache to sort out while reading - and possibly the oft-ambiguous-and-sometimes-just-off grammar is also part of this sense of dislocated viewpoints on the same thing.
That our powerful, understanding characters are all men is a little disconcerting. The women who appear in the narrative - Angel Day, Girlie Phantom, Hope Phantom/Midnight - are all seen through the eyes of men, and appear absorbed by the immediate in a way male characters can transcend. Angel in particular is left ambiguous, stranded by the narrative in a place that feels vaguely hellish with her motivations still blurry and her character blurred by the hate and love of our POV characters.
It seems strange to me to describe this as a political book - as if any take on the Gulf world could not involve racism, institutional and otherwise, and the impact of mining. The themes are not artificial, and the book is about so much more than a town and a mine, these are simply starting points for an epic - an epic from a uniquely Australian viewpoint that sucks you in and throws you around and makes you long to return in the way only the best of novels do.
meganori's review
4.0
Like Carpentaria itself, this book is distant and inaccessible. Trying to rate it makes me ask the philosophical question of what makes a book 'good.' In some ways this book was amazing - the characters, the quirky stories - but in other ways it was very difficult to read. It always held you at a distance so you could never really get involved in the book.