![]() ![]() Bail proposes (and we've heard this before, of course) that Australians regard any serious intellectual tradition with craven suspicion: "At the very word ‘philosophy' people in Sydney run away in droves, reach for the revolver. The book is a slippery coalescence of fictional biography, love story, Continental thought and psychoanalysis, as well as an attempt to address the vexed question of Australian identity. After Wesley's death a morose academic, Erica Hazelhurst, arrives at the family homestead to assess whether the bucolic metaphysician's unpublished writings are indeed the work of a genius.īail has packed a lot into this slim novel. ![]() At the heart of this convoluted tale is Wesley Antill, an improbable philosophical genius who lived on a sheep farm in New South Wales, silently cogitating in a rusting woolshed while his brother and sister managed the property around him. The Pages, Murray Bail's latest novel and his first in a decade, is an intermittently engaging satire on the conceits of philosophy and the extremes to which some people will go to gain clarity. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |