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kikiandarrowsfishshelf 's review for:
Voss
by Patrick White
Why wasn't this in my World Lit courses?
I hit the spoiler button because I will warn would be readers the book does have animal death issues, such as with dogs and horses.
You know how some food is seemingly plain, but isn’t. Like a real good risotto. Rice, cheese, stock, maybe mushrooms and onions and yet it is really good. Patrick White reminds me of that. Chabon has a rich dark use of langue. White’s use of language, his ability to take your breath away when you are reading a passage is more powerful simply because it isn’t rich chocolate and wine.
Voss is a novel about exploration, both physical and emotionally, mental. It is interesting to note that White’s sympathy seems to lie with those characters who grow emotionally or mentally while those who change due to simply physical characteristic or job changes nothing. And unlike many other books, it is the women who do this change, not the men (with certain key exceptions). It is also a story about how stories and legends develop and perhaps give way to romance as opposed to reality.
And like all great novels, it is really about life.
Perhaps the most gripping passages are not the ones about Voss and his company as they make their way on their quest but on those ordinary people who are important to history but who history seems to forget or more accurately, historians seem to forget. Look at these lines, “Incidental failure did not rob the Sandersons of success. It was perhaps the source of their perfection”.
And there is humor in the novel, sly humor, but humor nevertheless – “. . . with some young anonymous Lieutenant of sterling origins and pinks skin, that apologized at every pore”.
You can see why White won the Nobel Prize.
Thank you Paul!
I hit the spoiler button because I will warn would be readers the book does have animal death issues, such as with dogs and horses.
You know how some food is seemingly plain, but isn’t. Like a real good risotto. Rice, cheese, stock, maybe mushrooms and onions and yet it is really good. Patrick White reminds me of that. Chabon has a rich dark use of langue. White’s use of language, his ability to take your breath away when you are reading a passage is more powerful simply because it isn’t rich chocolate and wine.
Voss is a novel about exploration, both physical and emotionally, mental. It is interesting to note that White’s sympathy seems to lie with those characters who grow emotionally or mentally while those who change due to simply physical characteristic or job changes nothing. And unlike many other books, it is the women who do this change, not the men (with certain key exceptions). It is also a story about how stories and legends develop and perhaps give way to romance as opposed to reality.
And like all great novels, it is really about life.
Perhaps the most gripping passages are not the ones about Voss and his company as they make their way on their quest but on those ordinary people who are important to history but who history seems to forget or more accurately, historians seem to forget. Look at these lines, “Incidental failure did not rob the Sandersons of success. It was perhaps the source of their perfection”.
And there is humor in the novel, sly humor, but humor nevertheless – “. . . with some young anonymous Lieutenant of sterling origins and pinks skin, that apologized at every pore”.
You can see why White won the Nobel Prize.
Thank you Paul!