Reviews

This is one of the most challenging books I have read. Hard to say that I really enjoyed it, but I really appreciated it. Stylistically, it was outside my typical comfort zone.

I will be spending some time reading more about it to better understand the narrative style, which strikes me is more oral based. Reading some of the other reviews here, I agree that the narrative is not just circular but continues to circle back on itself and refine the story and the details.

doddyaboutbooks's review

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challenging dark emotional sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

5.0

stanro's review

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challenging dark mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

For this mainly audio reader, my selected first-to-start book for 2024 provides the additional challenge of being a 736-page physical book. How could they have not released an audio version?! But this is Praiseworthy, the latest novel by Alexis Wright, and I am devoted.

The book is a deep, sustained dive into the madness of a place where Australian Aboriginal culture is shattered and malleable whilst eternal, and the Government’s legislation — phrased in caring language though it is — is deeply destructive.

I start the book and am captured immediately by Wright’s writing. The cadences. The way a sentence stops, then flows at length, doubling back on itself as it interrogates its initial proposition, refining and developing it as if it has a life of its own. Yet often, Wright starts a new thought with a brief exclamation like “Well!” or “So!” or “Listen good now!”

The book is a difficult, thoughtful, prod-me-in-the-ribs and punch-me-in-the-face challenge to my understanding and sensitivity.

We are engaged with damaged individuals striving to live in this damaged cultural environment called Praiseworthy, with its perpetually present dust haze — creation of the Anthropocene — multiplying life’s difficulties. There are donkeys and butterflies and places and characters who are somewhat Dickensianly named as objects and concepts (Praiseworrhy itself, of course, and Cause Man Steel (alternatively called Widespread), his wife Dance, their sons Aboriginal Sovreignty and Tommyhawk and Praiseworthy’s mayor, Ice Pick).

There is great sadness and madness in all this. Heartbreaking sadness. Mind-bending madness. And if Australia’s great shame is its denial of the dispossession and genocide of its native people, its other great shame is its treatment by way of de facto criminalisation of the “boat people” — refugees arriving by boat and being incarcerated off-shore. In a somewhat surprising turn of events, Wright brings these two shames together.

Wright’s writing rolls over me like a flooding river, endlessly, in large slabs of lengthy sentences punctuated with the flotsam of shorter sentences. Her writing contains vocabulary-stretching words and Latin words and French words and Italian musical notation. I went to a dictionary so many times! And there is occasional dark humour.

Wright’s imagination and use of language and form is arresting and very challenging, expanding my understanding. Here is one I particularly liked.

“When he breathed, it was not to take the air from the atmosphere, but to inhale ancestry, the mighty creation spirits journeying through him, coursing their way in a regular pattern, slowly travelling to his lungs and returning through the moist air released back into the atmosphere.”

For most of this reading journey, I could barely read 10 pages on any day, often less.

Nearing the end, in a section about Ice Pick’s broadcasts to Praiseworthy, I think I detect references to Dylan songs. The dim shadow of his All Along the Watchtower is one that reappears more than once to me in this brief section. And this is possibly intended, as Wright peppers her work with more explicit western cultural references. Though like a good cook, she uses such heady spices sparingly.

Metaphorically battered, bruised, challenged and tired, I got to the end, satisfied with my epic reading journey.

This is a book where I would have appreciated an audio version to let a professional do some of that hard work. Though audio has been available since mid-March, that was well after I’d commenced my physical edition. When I read this again, and I will, it will be in audio.

Despite the difficulties in reading which meant it took me about 4 months, I savoured it and was enveloped within it. And I was enlarged by it. It’s an extraordinary book. Though I’ve not attempted the challenges of Joyce’s Ulysses, the ghost of my unread audio of that preeminent work haunted me as I read this, and I wondered how they compare.

As for Praiseworthy, the most difficult reading experience of a novel I’ve ever had, for all that and perhaps because, ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

#areadersjourney

rouge_red's review against another edition

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Pretty quick turnaround, but I can't stand books where the narrator talks to the audience the whole time. It's ok if there's an occasional 4th-wall break, but not the whole damn time. And in a sassy way too! Just no.

caitlinmhp's review

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challenging reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

lancakes's review against another edition

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Pulled me into a slump

laura_reads_'s review

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Amazingly well written and intelligent! My brain just can’t process it at the moment.

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