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saiha's review
adventurous
challenging
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
littleseven's review
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
2.5
pvrplewoo's review against another edition
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.75
zoenosis's review against another edition
4.0
There is so much to say about this book, because there is so much going on. Deaths of kids in custody, family feuds, mining conglomerates, spirits, the land and sea as characters themselves with their own quasi-personalities and motivations. I don't think I necessarily understood everything that went on in this book, but I was awe-struck. This book really challenged the way I think about engaging with literature, it challenged all my conceptions of what story-telling is and how to 'do' it. Truly amazing.
Listening to this as an audiobook instead fo reading it was a GAME CHANGER for me - as the pace of the novel is quite slow, I think I probably would have given up or spent most of the time flicking back and forth to figure out what point in the timeline we were in and who everyone was. Instead, I sat back and let the story unfold without trying to constantly "figure it out" and that really worked for me.
Listening to this as an audiobook instead fo reading it was a GAME CHANGER for me - as the pace of the novel is quite slow, I think I probably would have given up or spent most of the time flicking back and forth to figure out what point in the timeline we were in and who everyone was. Instead, I sat back and let the story unfold without trying to constantly "figure it out" and that really worked for me.
artisticauthor's review
4.0
"Even if I don't get through, don't survive this, the story has to go on. Nothing must stop our stories, understand?"
Carpentaria is an epic of a book. The issues covered in it range from the corruption of the mining industry, racism, small town close-mindedness and even the unfair treatment of mentally ill people. The overarching theme is that of not letting go of culture and truth, to please white folks.
Wright utilises Aboriginal spirituality in a way that transforms the every day into individual stories that weave together to form a fascinating reality. The language is often confusing and difficult to understand, but reading over it again reveals an intricately detailed picture of what's happening.
This book was difficult to get through as there are many distressing issues including rape and murder of small children, but I'm so glad I picked it up. It covers so many contemporary problems in Australian society that I believe every non-Aboriginal person needs to know about in order to enact change.
A brilliant book that I have recommended and will continue to recommend to others.
Carpentaria is an epic of a book. The issues covered in it range from the corruption of the mining industry, racism, small town close-mindedness and even the unfair treatment of mentally ill people. The overarching theme is that of not letting go of culture and truth, to please white folks.
Wright utilises Aboriginal spirituality in a way that transforms the every day into individual stories that weave together to form a fascinating reality. The language is often confusing and difficult to understand, but reading over it again reveals an intricately detailed picture of what's happening.
This book was difficult to get through as there are many distressing issues including rape and murder of small children, but I'm so glad I picked it up. It covers so many contemporary problems in Australian society that I believe every non-Aboriginal person needs to know about in order to enact change.
A brilliant book that I have recommended and will continue to recommend to others.
gitli57's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
funny
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
There are some books and some writers that are beyond any superlatives I can find. They are working on a different plane and are simply necessary. Alexis Wright's Carpentaria goes straight to my short list of necessary books.
It is an Aboriginal Australian story of family, cleansing, return, place, home and survival in the face of merciless white settler colonialism, represented by a mining corporation. This will resonate for many Native American people, of course, because our experiences have often been so similar. So are the multi-generational family dysfunctions that often result from these cultural stresses and displacements. And still, Indig folks world over continue the struggle with a stubborn hope and even a sense of humor, which Wright captures perfectly.
There are a lot of well written novels and memoirs out now dealing with these things, but in Carpentaria, Alexis Wright does so with an ancient and powerful voice. Reading her is like sitting around a fire listening to a master Indigenous story teller.
Which means the story rules are different here. Heads up - modern dominant culture writers did not invent discontinuity or non-linear time sense. And as I have said in other reviews, if something happens that seems outside the norm, that doesn't make it "magical realism". It's how the world works if you are really connected to it. It's not supernatural or magic just because western science hasn't figured out how to measure it.
It is an Aboriginal Australian story of family, cleansing, return, place, home and survival in the face of merciless white settler colonialism, represented by a mining corporation. This will resonate for many Native American people, of course, because our experiences have often been so similar. So are the multi-generational family dysfunctions that often result from these cultural stresses and displacements. And still, Indig folks world over continue the struggle with a stubborn hope and even a sense of humor, which Wright captures perfectly.
There are a lot of well written novels and memoirs out now dealing with these things, but in Carpentaria, Alexis Wright does so with an ancient and powerful voice. Reading her is like sitting around a fire listening to a master Indigenous story teller.
Which means the story rules are different here. Heads up - modern dominant culture writers did not invent discontinuity or non-linear time sense. And as I have said in other reviews, if something happens that seems outside the norm, that doesn't make it "magical realism". It's how the world works if you are really connected to it. It's not supernatural or magic just because western science hasn't figured out how to measure it.
rivqa's review
4.0
Lush, evocative writing and larger-than-life characters made this a wonderful read.
kateybellew's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
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? Yes
5.0
I honestly am struggling to rate, let alone review this book. It took me almost two weeks to read (at least twice as long as I’d expect to read 500 pages) and I can’t say I enjoyed the reading experience. I ended up both reading the physical book and listening to the audiobook at the same time as I was finding it challenging to get through.
Having said all that, this book is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. It’s dense in a foggy, dreamlike way, and unconventional at every level. It’s non-linear, reading as more of an oral myth than a traditional novel. These characters are harsh and hard, inflicting pain on one another in cycles of collective and intergenerational trauma, intensified by poverty and a new mine bringing both jobs and damage to the town of Desperance.
There are really difficult scenes to read, including abuse of a disabled person, deaths in custody, and racial hate crime. And yet there is some of the most beautiful writing I’ve ever read. The magical animistic description on the landscape, the alive ancestors, and the spirit of these larger than life characters… it all results in an undeniably epic tale of devastation, grief, masculinity, family and resilience.
Although it’s so big it almost feels like fantasy, the haunting feeling I’m left with is of the tension that runs throughout the book, and an awareness that it is the same tension that underpins the entirety of ‘Australian’ society. The white fragility, the violence, the fear of retribution for the past, the destruction of land… will we reckon with it willingly?
“If you are someone who visits old cemeteries, wait awhile if you visit the water people. The old Gulf country men and women who took our besieged memories to the grave might just climb out of the mud and tell you the real story of what happened here.” p. 11
“In this country, where legends and ghosts live side by side in the very air, inside the Pricklebush family no man, love-forlorn or not, sets to sea while the morning star shines above the fishing boats waiting for them… Norm dispelled such morbid thoughts, though he remained fatalistic in his realisation that once his friend followed the star, she would pull him away forever. And that was the truth.” p. 94
“He talked and talked... When the wind returned at half past ten at night, it was surprised to find him still talking after six hours… Sand flew up from the beach like little dust storms and wrapped around his fallen words as though it was picking up the rubbish. On and on he continued, talking to the Gods, who had stopped ordering fate just to listen about the strange town called Desperance.” p. 272
“In his dreams, he began sorting out the star patterns, viewing one then the next, after which he jumbled them up and waited, while some tumbled back into place, others slightly realigned themselves, and he tracked along the new settings, memorising his route, then way into the heart of his sleep, the way home.” p. 286
“Uptown was a world apart, like the spiritual world, which could be imagined by children to have living there white-man spirits like fairies, goblins, elves imps or leprechauns, or something else more sinister. What else could be true, if they had come from out of nowhere?” p. 321
“No time at all before the soul has sped from the body onto a breeze where a moth was flickering by in a day darkened by low passing, kidney-coloured clouds. Time goes on, and one thinks, What of the living? You do no want to believe in death. You do not want to feel the strangeness so peculiar when death has occurred suddenly. There is a terrible shock when what was ends.” p. 390
Having said all that, this book is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. It’s dense in a foggy, dreamlike way, and unconventional at every level. It’s non-linear, reading as more of an oral myth than a traditional novel. These characters are harsh and hard, inflicting pain on one another in cycles of collective and intergenerational trauma, intensified by poverty and a new mine bringing both jobs and damage to the town of Desperance.
There are really difficult scenes to read, including abuse of a disabled person, deaths in custody, and racial hate crime. And yet there is some of the most beautiful writing I’ve ever read. The magical animistic description on the landscape, the alive ancestors, and the spirit of these larger than life characters… it all results in an undeniably epic tale of devastation, grief, masculinity, family and resilience.
Although it’s so big it almost feels like fantasy, the haunting feeling I’m left with is of the tension that runs throughout the book, and an awareness that it is the same tension that underpins the entirety of ‘Australian’ society. The white fragility, the violence, the fear of retribution for the past, the destruction of land… will we reckon with it willingly?
“If you are someone who visits old cemeteries, wait awhile if you visit the water people. The old Gulf country men and women who took our besieged memories to the grave might just climb out of the mud and tell you the real story of what happened here.” p. 11
“In this country, where legends and ghosts live side by side in the very air, inside the Pricklebush family no man, love-forlorn or not, sets to sea while the morning star shines above the fishing boats waiting for them… Norm dispelled such morbid thoughts, though he remained fatalistic in his realisation that once his friend followed the star, she would pull him away forever. And that was the truth.” p. 94
“He talked and talked... When the wind returned at half past ten at night, it was surprised to find him still talking after six hours… Sand flew up from the beach like little dust storms and wrapped around his fallen words as though it was picking up the rubbish. On and on he continued, talking to the Gods, who had stopped ordering fate just to listen about the strange town called Desperance.” p. 272
“In his dreams, he began sorting out the star patterns, viewing one then the next, after which he jumbled them up and waited, while some tumbled back into place, others slightly realigned themselves, and he tracked along the new settings, memorising his route, then way into the heart of his sleep, the way home.” p. 286
“Uptown was a world apart, like the spiritual world, which could be imagined by children to have living there white-man spirits like fairies, goblins, elves imps or leprechauns, or something else more sinister. What else could be true, if they had come from out of nowhere?” p. 321
“No time at all before the soul has sped from the body onto a breeze where a moth was flickering by in a day darkened by low passing, kidney-coloured clouds. Time goes on, and one thinks, What of the living? You do no want to believe in death. You do not want to feel the strangeness so peculiar when death has occurred suddenly. There is a terrible shock when what was ends.” p. 390
Content Warnings
Graphic: Physical abuse, Ableism, Racism, Hate crime, Child abuse, and Police brutality
seasofclouds's review
adventurous
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
5.0