The Book Depository Voss by Patrick White
221 ratings
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Price: £9.99
Brand: The Book Depository
Description: Voss : Paperback : Vintage Publishing : 9780099324713 : 0099324717 : 21 Jul 1994 : WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT MACFARLANE Set in nineteenth-century Australia, Voss is the story of the secret passion between an explorer and a naive young woman. Voss sets out to cross the continent, and as hardships, mutiny and betrayal whittle away his power to endure and to lead, his attachment to Laura gradually increases. The Book Depository Voss by Patrick White - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: The Book Depository
Product ID: 9780099324713
MPN: 0099324717
GTIN: 9780099324713
Author: jklm
Rating: 5
Review: The story starts a little slowly, and it's not a page turner, but the quality of the writing makes up for all that. His characters are flawed, very varied and very true to life. The observations on social mores are exquisitely acute. The unexplored continent of Australia is evoked with words as sparse as the continent itself. The descriptions of the drive of the new European explorers and of the indigenous people are equally weighted with no value judgements. I just love White's power with words. A few sentences were so arresting that I stopped, re-read and savoured them. It's a good meaty read.
Author: Martin Grundy
Rating: 1
Review: The only redeeming feature I found in this book is that it gives an insight into the Australian aborigine psyche and life style, but that is only a very minor part of the plot. On the whole, the novel is depressing, pretentious and badly written. It is depressing because none of the characters is very pleasant. They do not like each other much and the author does not seem to like them either. Nothing good or admirable happens - there is no one to root for and no satisfactory outcome. The text is pretentious with incomplete sentences, inappropriate adjectives and confusing sentence structure. This causes the reader to imagine that they must have misread the text and so one is for ever backtracking and re-reading to try and make sense of it. There are short sections in German with no translation and I do not speak German, so I just had to skip over these. This level of pretension is unnecessary and irritating. It means that the author gets in the way of the story. In principle, the words should be transparent so that the reader sees though them and is able to picture the events being depicted. Instead, the literary style interrupts, comes to the foreground and is an annoying distraction. Technically, the novel is badly written. It switches from fiction to fantasy and back again without warning and with no orthographical signal. To me, the areas of fantasy were simply irrelevant padding. From time to time the reader does not know who is speaking, nor which character is referred to by "he". There are so many better novels, that I recommend avoiding this one. I was certainly not inspired to tackle anything else by the same author.
