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3.9 AVERAGE
3.9 AVERAGE
73rd book of 2021. Artist for this review is Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira (1902-1959).
3.5. I haven't deliberated so much over a rating in a while and I'm not the only one, it seems many people in the review section deliberated greatly over what to rate this novel. For starters: Winton's prose is glorious and some of the best prose I've read from a contemporary novel in a long while. Simply, this is a novel about two families under the same roof (No.1 Cloud Street) from the years of 1945-1965, roughly. The blurb gives perhaps the strangest quotes I've ever read concerning a novel, namely this one: "Imagine Neighbours being taken over by the writing team of John Steinbeck and Gabriel García Márquez and you'll be close to the heart of Winton's impressive tale." Steinbeck for the stunning prose regarding nature and the setting and Márquez for the strange glimpses into magical realism.
It started with great promise and I was foreseeing 5-stars. The middle of the novel sags a little and the ending is strong. Generally, the novel felt more than just 400 pages long; this is probably down to the wide cast of characters and short chapters that are constantly flipping between them. A great amount of "stuff" happens, but also nothing happens. People get married, people have arguments, people lose money, people get pregnant, it's all fairly mundane happenings. Then, subtly, in the background, a boy glows like a lightbulb, the pig in the garden can talk, (there are Aborigine ghosts haunting one of the characters?), the "slow boy" is slightly clairvoyant. Naturally with such a large cast of characters, Winton barely develops some. Both families have numerous kids and many of them were mentioned here and there and had short chapters to themselves but were mostly forgettable. Fish is one of the best characters. Quick also takes most of the spotlight. I didn't care much for either set of parents or any of their troubles. In a way it portrays quite a lot of issues: money, identity, disability, ambition, family, conflict, addiction, etc., but there's almost so much going on that it all becomes too much. As my professor used to say about writing essays, "Don't go water-skiing, go deep-sea-diving." Meaning: Don't talk about every point you have under the sun and call it a day, pick a few and go deep.
That being said, 3-stars looks too poor for what is really a good novel. Some bits lost my interest and generally in the middle of the book I was wondering if it would ever pick up again. It did. Maybe if it was shorter it would be better? I don't know. Winton's prose is a reason to read though. There are funny bits, sad bits, creepy bits. It's a smorgasbord. I'll be reading more Winton though. Here's one of my favourite bits to finish, one of the said creepy bits.
3.5. I haven't deliberated so much over a rating in a while and I'm not the only one, it seems many people in the review section deliberated greatly over what to rate this novel. For starters: Winton's prose is glorious and some of the best prose I've read from a contemporary novel in a long while. Simply, this is a novel about two families under the same roof (No.1 Cloud Street) from the years of 1945-1965, roughly. The blurb gives perhaps the strangest quotes I've ever read concerning a novel, namely this one: "Imagine Neighbours being taken over by the writing team of John Steinbeck and Gabriel García Márquez and you'll be close to the heart of Winton's impressive tale." Steinbeck for the stunning prose regarding nature and the setting and Márquez for the strange glimpses into magical realism.
It started with great promise and I was foreseeing 5-stars. The middle of the novel sags a little and the ending is strong. Generally, the novel felt more than just 400 pages long; this is probably down to the wide cast of characters and short chapters that are constantly flipping between them. A great amount of "stuff" happens, but also nothing happens. People get married, people have arguments, people lose money, people get pregnant, it's all fairly mundane happenings. Then, subtly, in the background, a boy glows like a lightbulb, the pig in the garden can talk, (there are Aborigine ghosts haunting one of the characters?), the "slow boy" is slightly clairvoyant. Naturally with such a large cast of characters, Winton barely develops some. Both families have numerous kids and many of them were mentioned here and there and had short chapters to themselves but were mostly forgettable. Fish is one of the best characters. Quick also takes most of the spotlight. I didn't care much for either set of parents or any of their troubles. In a way it portrays quite a lot of issues: money, identity, disability, ambition, family, conflict, addiction, etc., but there's almost so much going on that it all becomes too much. As my professor used to say about writing essays, "Don't go water-skiing, go deep-sea-diving." Meaning: Don't talk about every point you have under the sun and call it a day, pick a few and go deep.
That being said, 3-stars looks too poor for what is really a good novel. Some bits lost my interest and generally in the middle of the book I was wondering if it would ever pick up again. It did. Maybe if it was shorter it would be better? I don't know. Winton's prose is a reason to read though. There are funny bits, sad bits, creepy bits. It's a smorgasbord. I'll be reading more Winton though. Here's one of my favourite bits to finish, one of the said creepy bits.
In the dawn the sky was clearing and summery steam rose off the jetty piles, and out of the steam came the black man looking completely unsurprised.
Geez, said Quick, recognising him fearfully. Haven't you got a home to go to?
Not this side.
Quick looked across the river. Through the steam he thought he saw moving figures, dark outlines on the far bank.
Are you real?
The black fella laughed. Are you?
Quick kicked the muddy grass before him.
You've got a home to go to. Quick. Go there.
Quick regarded the man. He was naked, naked enough to arrest.
Go there.
Orright, said PC Quick, already on his way. When he turned back, high on the hill, he saw more than one black man. He saw dozens of them beneath the trees, hundreds like a necklace at the throat of the city.
Loved this book. Great story of the Lambs and Pickles and the journey of over 20 years in the house on Cloudstreet. Very very good!
The mystery of the missing plot…
Having been left a rambling, dilapidated old house on Cloud Street and being badly in need of money, Sam Pickles divides the house and rents the other half to the Lamb family. So the two families live side by side and…
And what? They simply live side by side. And Winton drifts through the dividing walls, dipping into the lives of one family and then into the lives of the other family. There is no plot, no story arc, no real character development. In fact, at least half of the characters have no character at all to develop – they are simply names. I’m afraid I found it empty, as if the blank paper underneath had seeped up through the words printed on it.
Clearly I’m missing something. The book is an Australian classic, admired by hordes of people. Maybe you have to be Australian to “get” it? I know I sometimes feel a book is too Scottish to easily recommend to non-Scots. Maybe recognition of the places or the slang gives enough pleasure to make up for the lack of a story? I admit there were whole passages where I wasn’t sure what was happening because some of the words conveyed no meaning to me, and weren’t in the Kindle dictionary. I could have googled each time, but I learned how tedious that was with another book full of dialect and slang, and swore I’d never do it again. So my laziness as a reader is definitely a part of the reason this didn’t work for me.
Oddly the first couple of chapters, where we’re introduced first to the Pickles and then to the Lambs, are wonderful – a lot conveyed in very few words, and I actually felt the characters were more clearly evoked then than later – they seemed to fade or recede as the book went on. Also, each family had the beginnings of an interesting story – Sam Pickles being injured in an accident at work that left him a ‘crip’ with a ‘crook’ hand; Fish Lamb nearly drowning in a different accident and his return to life being seen by his family as some kind of miracle. But then it all collapses into the mundane details of daily life.
Reviews rave about the descriptions of the Australian landscape. That must come later (I’m abandoning it at 21%) because we haven’t moved out of the house since the moment the families moved in. All the conversations take place round one or another of the tables of the families, where they talk, without quotation marks obviously because that would be too easy, about nothing. We hear about Sam’s new job because he tells us about it – we don’t get to go with him. Same applies to Lester Lamb and his band practice – we’re left at home as he leaves the house to go out for a bit of fun. I began to feel as if I were imprisoned in the house, desperate just to go for a simple walk round the neighbourhood or a bus-ride into town.
So I’ve given up. I’m reluctant to one-star it as I usually do with abandoned books because I suspect it’s mostly a case of mismatch between reader and book, and I did enjoy those first couple of chapters. But it took me three weeks to read as far as I did, and it was inducing a major reading slump since increasingly I couldn’t face picking it up.
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Having been left a rambling, dilapidated old house on Cloud Street and being badly in need of money, Sam Pickles divides the house and rents the other half to the Lamb family. So the two families live side by side and…
And what? They simply live side by side. And Winton drifts through the dividing walls, dipping into the lives of one family and then into the lives of the other family. There is no plot, no story arc, no real character development. In fact, at least half of the characters have no character at all to develop – they are simply names. I’m afraid I found it empty, as if the blank paper underneath had seeped up through the words printed on it.
Clearly I’m missing something. The book is an Australian classic, admired by hordes of people. Maybe you have to be Australian to “get” it? I know I sometimes feel a book is too Scottish to easily recommend to non-Scots. Maybe recognition of the places or the slang gives enough pleasure to make up for the lack of a story? I admit there were whole passages where I wasn’t sure what was happening because some of the words conveyed no meaning to me, and weren’t in the Kindle dictionary. I could have googled each time, but I learned how tedious that was with another book full of dialect and slang, and swore I’d never do it again. So my laziness as a reader is definitely a part of the reason this didn’t work for me.
Oddly the first couple of chapters, where we’re introduced first to the Pickles and then to the Lambs, are wonderful – a lot conveyed in very few words, and I actually felt the characters were more clearly evoked then than later – they seemed to fade or recede as the book went on. Also, each family had the beginnings of an interesting story – Sam Pickles being injured in an accident at work that left him a ‘crip’ with a ‘crook’ hand; Fish Lamb nearly drowning in a different accident and his return to life being seen by his family as some kind of miracle. But then it all collapses into the mundane details of daily life.
Reviews rave about the descriptions of the Australian landscape. That must come later (I’m abandoning it at 21%) because we haven’t moved out of the house since the moment the families moved in. All the conversations take place round one or another of the tables of the families, where they talk, without quotation marks obviously because that would be too easy, about nothing. We hear about Sam’s new job because he tells us about it – we don’t get to go with him. Same applies to Lester Lamb and his band practice – we’re left at home as he leaves the house to go out for a bit of fun. I began to feel as if I were imprisoned in the house, desperate just to go for a simple walk round the neighbourhood or a bus-ride into town.
So I’ve given up. I’m reluctant to one-star it as I usually do with abandoned books because I suspect it’s mostly a case of mismatch between reader and book, and I did enjoy those first couple of chapters. But it took me three weeks to read as far as I did, and it was inducing a major reading slump since increasingly I couldn’t face picking it up.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
Aside from the lack of quotation marks, this epic family saga was original, fun and very quirky. The wedding was brilliant.
slow-paced
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
It has taken me a long time to get around to reading the heights of the Australian literary canon. Cloudstreet has topped several “Australia’s Favourite Book” surveys over the years, so it was only a matter of time before I gave it a go.
Reminiscent of Steinbeck in the fashion of a rambling shaggy dog tale, the novel largely sidesteps sentimentalisation. Winton isn’t afraid to touch upon the bleaker times of two families who find themselves thrown together by the “hairy hand of fate” in a rambling, decaying mansion on Perth’s Cloud Street.
Of the two families, the Pickles are aimless and live sedentary lives. As his damaged family slowly disintegrates, Sam rails against luck (generally failing). Conversely, while the Lambs have had some bad luck, they maintain faith in the virtues of hard graft. We then spend the next few decades – from the 1940s through to the mid-1960s – following the fortunes of each family.
There’s a lot of energy here, and the novel explores some deep themes despite being populated by a cast of plain-speaking characters largely without much use for talking. I find it an odd book so beloved by readers holds its key protagonists at arm's length. Winton seems to have a coolness to everyone, bar perhaps ‘Fish’.
We follow the fortunes of young Quick Lamb and Rose Pickles and peek inside the mind of Fish Lamb, disabled after an accident that happens right at the beginning of the book. There’s plenty of sex and violence and an absence of parental competence (if not love). We hear a lot about the parents Sam, Dolly, Lester and Oriel. Yet Ted and Chub Pickles, along with Hat, Elaine, Red and Lon Lamb, are only vaguely sketched as if their lives are somehow lesser than the characters in the foreground.
If Winton intends to give emotional depth and resonance to those in the foreground, I found the contraction of everyone else into shallow caricatures disquieting.
The recurrence of destiny, fate (the "shifty shadow") brings an oddly fatalistic air to the novel. Still, the paired themes of endurance, acceptance and forgiveness won the day.
⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
It has taken me a long time to get around to reading the heights of the Australian literary canon. Cloudstreet has topped several “Australia’s Favourite Book” surveys over the years, so it was only a matter of time before I gave it a go.
Reminiscent of Steinbeck in the fashion of a rambling shaggy dog tale, the novel largely sidesteps sentimentalisation. Winton isn’t afraid to touch upon the bleaker times of two families who find themselves thrown together by the “hairy hand of fate” in a rambling, decaying mansion on Perth’s Cloud Street.
Of the two families, the Pickles are aimless and live sedentary lives. As his damaged family slowly disintegrates, Sam rails against luck (generally failing). Conversely, while the Lambs have had some bad luck, they maintain faith in the virtues of hard graft. We then spend the next few decades – from the 1940s through to the mid-1960s – following the fortunes of each family.
There’s a lot of energy here, and the novel explores some deep themes despite being populated by a cast of plain-speaking characters largely without much use for talking. I find it an odd book so beloved by readers holds its key protagonists at arm's length. Winton seems to have a coolness to everyone, bar perhaps ‘Fish’.
We follow the fortunes of young Quick Lamb and Rose Pickles and peek inside the mind of Fish Lamb, disabled after an accident that happens right at the beginning of the book. There’s plenty of sex and violence and an absence of parental competence (if not love). We hear a lot about the parents Sam, Dolly, Lester and Oriel. Yet Ted and Chub Pickles, along with Hat, Elaine, Red and Lon Lamb, are only vaguely sketched as if their lives are somehow lesser than the characters in the foreground.
If Winton intends to give emotional depth and resonance to those in the foreground, I found the contraction of everyone else into shallow caricatures disquieting.
The recurrence of destiny, fate (the "shifty shadow") brings an oddly fatalistic air to the novel. Still, the paired themes of endurance, acceptance and forgiveness won the day.
⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
So great to read, I knew all the settings, I felt myself there.
My first introduction to Tim Winton was through recommendations for his latest novel The Shepherd's Hut. I enjoyed his style so much, and had a trip to Australia coming up, so I bought Cloudstreet. Wow! Just wow. I cannot even begin to say how much I enjoyed this book.
A story about two families thrown together in the strangest of circumstances is rich with unforgettable and fascinating characters through the span of 20 years. Creatively captured and straight-forwardly told, with a touch of laugh-out-loud humor, I had a difficult time putting this book down. Highly recommend, but only if you like rich, but highly flawed characters. Every single one.
A story about two families thrown together in the strangest of circumstances is rich with unforgettable and fascinating characters through the span of 20 years. Creatively captured and straight-forwardly told, with a touch of laugh-out-loud humor, I had a difficult time putting this book down. Highly recommend, but only if you like rich, but highly flawed characters. Every single one.