Voss

Fülszöveg

Book Society Choice
¦I am happy to join in the chorus of praise for Mr White. Voss is very fine indeed, by far the most impressive new novel I have read this year. At the least, it is a work of brilliant virtuosity, and I suggest that it is much more than that He has seen the whole of life, its shallows and depths alike, in the one vision.'
WALTER ALLEN Ncw Statesman
The plot of this book is of epic simplicity. In the year 1845 Johann Ulrieh Voss sets out to cross the Australian continent for the first time. He collects around himself a small party and pushes inland from the coast. The expedition encounters every kind of obstacle. At one time the men have to pass through a waterless desert: at another, torrential rains fall unceasingly and they are driven to shelter in a cave where they lie up, week after week, sick, almost dying, waiting for the rain to stop. The tragic story of their journey and its inevitable end is told with all the strength and subtlety of which... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Book Society Choice
¦I am happy to join in the chorus of praise for Mr White. Voss is very fine indeed, by far the most impressive new novel I have read this year. At the least, it is a work of brilliant virtuosity, and I suggest that it is much more than that He has seen the whole of life, its shallows and depths alike, in the one vision.'
WALTER ALLEN Ncw Statesman
The plot of this book is of epic simplicity. In the year 1845 Johann Ulrieh Voss sets out to cross the Australian continent for the first time. He collects around himself a small party and pushes inland from the coast. The expedition encounters every kind of obstacle. At one time the men have to pass through a waterless desert: at another, torrential rains fall unceasingly and they are driven to shelter in a cave where they lie up, week after week, sick, almost dying, waiting for the rain to stop. The tragic story of their journey and its inevitable end is told with all the strength and subtlety of which Patrick White is a master.
But the most important thing in this book is not the external world through which the characters.pass. It is the world of their passions and their moments of insight; and in this world the figure of Voss looms larger and larger until it assumes more than the normal dimensions of a man. Strange, proud, inscrutable, driven on by some daemon within himself, he appears to the people around him ambiguously as deliverer and destroyer. Only one thing is constant: each man sees in him the figure of his own destiny.
To one woman in particular his coming is decisive. The expedition is being backed by a number of prosperous Sydney citizens, one of whom has a niece, Laura Trevelyan, as different from the respectable, unimaginative merchants of the town as Voss himself. She possesses the latter's integrity but not his fatal pride, and a strange and deep-seated love grows up between them. Although they meet only a few times before Voss's departure, and then never again, somewhere within them, on a level at which reality and illusion are not to be held apart, their love is consummated.
This is, in all its parts, a most distinguished book. It is written with the subtle, penetrating knowledge of motive and character for which Patrick White is known. It tells the story of the
{continued on back flap
continued from front flap]
expedition witla a great power of narrative and it creates in Voss iiimself an epic figure who is both the symbol and the forerunner of a people's destiny. Above all it carries that stamp of authority and that sense of scale and seriousness to which only a few writers in any generation can lay claim.
-•-T^vrPjr i ¦! 11 i „'
I ¦ •- r J-
1, ri!':'^
ALSO BY PATRICK WHITE Riders in the Chariot
'An unmistakably major writer who commands a scope, power and sheer technical skill which put even our more ambitious novelists in the shade I can think of very little as subtle and concentrated as this' that is being written in either form, prose or poetry it is an image of great beauty.'
A. ALVAREZ Ncw Statesman
The Tree of Man
'A grandly simple novel that stands out above most contemporary fiction with the fine clean lines of a beech against scrub. It is like life, not unadulterated tragedy: laughter bursts in in great peals.'
JOHN DAVENPORT Observer
The Aunt's Story
"Mr White's technique is quite brilliant. He has wit and touches of wild poetic insight and many striking words and phrases which gave me great aesthetic pleasure.'
K. w. GRANSDEN Encounter Vissza