CARPENTARIA [Paperback]

ALEXIS WRIGHT (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 2006

Carpentaria is Alexis Wright's second novel, an epic set in the Gulf country of north-western Queensland. The novel's portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centres on the powerful Phantom family, leader of the Westend Pricklebush people, and its battles with old Joseph Midnight's renegade Eastend mob on the one hand, and the white officials of Uptown and the neighbouring Gurfurrit mine on the other.

--This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This 2007 Miles Franklin award–winning novel is the latest masterpiece from Wright, an indigenous Australian author and land rights activist. In the town of Desperance, in northern Queensland, Australia, the question of land ownership is complicated, and every family stakes a claim. There's Normal Phantom's family, Mozzie Fishman's gang and the white settlers who control the region, but can't quite figure out how to get the native Pricklebush people to assimilate to the white man's ways. The drama unfolds with all the poetry and eclecticism of a Bob Dylan song: a drunken white mayor dismisses a murder case, a lying deaf policeman named Truthful has his way with Aboriginal women, and a brave young activist sabotages the town's mining industry. When the mythical Elias Smith, who appears in Desperance one day after walking out of the sea, is found murdered, a series of tragedies follows, awakening latent feuds and underlining the injustice of colonialism. Rarely does an author have such control of her words and her story: Wright's prose soars between the mythical and the colloquial. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"* 'Wright's gift to Australian literature is Desperance... it's her uncanny ear for the particularities of local language and eye for striking symbolism that could carry Carpentaria into the classics sections of bookshelves in years to come.' - Michael Fitzgerald, Time Magazine * 'Wright's is the authentic aboriginal voice. With humour and occasional farce, but always with an underlying truthfulness, she delivers a brutal portrait of the physical and psychological violence between the white newcomers and the original inhabitants.' - The Economist * 'So comprehensive is Wright's vision that reading it is like looking at her world from the inside. It's an unashamedly big book - big in scope, ambition and physical size - and well-suited to the Gulf country it sings. It is also an important book.' - Liam Davison, Sydney Morning Herald * 'This is the kind of writing in which a reader can put their entire trust in the narrator, put the weight of their doubt in the narrator's hands. It is like being spoken to by someone with a voice you can trust, someone standing close by. It is as if you could hear their intake of breath, the compassion in their voice, their amusement at the foolishness of mortals.' - Alison Ravescroft, The Age" --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 519 pages
• Publisher: Giramondo Publishing Co. (2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1920882170
• ISBN-13: 978-1920882310
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,812,176 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pricklebush Tales, April 12, 2009

By 

Roger Brunyate "reader/writer/musician" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Carpentaria: A Novel (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

How to rate this book? Five stars for the unusual quality of the writing and its unique voice? Or three, to reflect the difficulty I had getting into it? I am going with five, because the quality is indisputable while my reading problems may well be my own; a compromise would neither do justice to this extraordinary book, nor be an adequate warning to the unsuspecting reader.

The setting is the fictional town of Desperance, by the Gulf of Carpentaria on the North coast of Australia. A small citizenry of self-satisfied whites live Uptown, surrounded on three sides by shanty communities of aborigines, who refer to themselves as Pricklebush people. These are their stories: families and splinters of families, living together, splitting, fighting, and coming together again. They are a people living on the outskirts, among the debris of the modern world, yet tied in often-inexplicable ways to the land or the sea. They are a religious people who look for marvels in the most unlikely places: Normal Phantom's oil-matted cockatoo who "went with the pilgrimage to Alice Springs in the 1980s to be blessed by the Pope"; golden-skinned Elias Smith who had simply walked out of the sea one day like the coming of a prophet; or Mozzie Fishman, a second Moses, leading convoys of battered cars from one end of the country to another, following the ancient Dreamways.

And the writing! Here are Mozzie's followers starting out on another morning of their journey: "The men would rise from the face of the world where they slept like lizards, dreaming the essence of a spiritual renewal rotating around the earth, perhaps in clouds of stars like the Milky Way, or fog hugging the ground as it moved across every watercourse in the continent before sunrise. The convoy journeys were a slower orbit of petrol-driven vehicles travelling those thousands of kilometres. The pilgrims drove the roads knowing they had one aim in life. They were totally responsible for keeping the one Law strong by performing this one ceremony for the guardians of Gondwanaland." This is one of Alexis Wright's simpler passages, but it shows her extraordinary combination of literary sophistication with the aboriginal spirit that is her birthright. When she really gets going, she has a jazzy language that is part Salman Rushdie, part Nashville, and entirely her own: "Over time, the whirly-whirly local winds composed much of the new music for the modern times. The winds squeezed through every crack and hole to loosen sheets of corrugated iron for the salt in the air to rust nails that went pop, until all those old pieces of tin whined, whistled, banged, and clapped. Every day, all day and all night sometimes, the town jammed jazz with bits of loose tin slapping around on top of the mud-stained fibro walls to pummel the crumbling, white-ant-ridden, honeycombed timber frames, until one day, only paint held up those buildings."

So what's not to like? CARPENTARIA is a novel in much the same sense that Steinbeck's CANNERY ROW is one -- a series of tales about oddball characters that only gradually coalesce around a single narrative line. But Wright's chapters are longer and her situations stranger, with much less of the familiar to anchor the floundering reader. I found myself thoroughly enjoying the book while it was in my hands, but curiously reluctant to pick it up again once it had left them. For a long time, the book lacks sufficient forward momentum to truly qualify as a novel. However, somewhere in the middle of its 500+ pages, a compelling story does begin to emerge, involving Normal Phantom and his youngest son Will, brain-damaged in a mining accident but gifted in other ways. And when the threads come together at the end in a tremendous cyclone that all but destroys the town, the novel becomes very moving indeed.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderfully Ambitious., March 26, 2009

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A* (New York, N.Y. United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Carpentaria: A Novel (Hardcover)

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Carpentaria is a book that is barely able to contain itself. The pacing is off, the narration at times veers into the absurd and the characters seem to wander in and out, but just like some of the best books, it all culminates in a beautiful way. This is one of those books where the pieces are only minor but when placed together - there is a sprawling work of art laid out in front of you that encapsulates all of your senses through the sheer will, and brilliance, of Wright's mastery.

The plot revolves around a town, Desperance, and the lives of its inhabitants that are being destroyed by a mining company and the white people it brings with them to the Aboriginal lands. Of course, I'm over simplifying, this book is 500 pages. It is near impossible to say how entrancing this book truly is.

Wright's Carpentaria is truly a work of art and deserves to be read. It carries its own life and mood. There is a depth of beauty and pain to it that sets it apart from what comes along as fiction these days. Interwoven into the pages is an honest truth that we can all understand.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful but complicated., May 6, 2009

By 

S. Rogers (Boston, MA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Carpentaria: A Novel (Hardcover)

Knowing how much I love to read (and blog!), the good people at Atria Books/Simon & Schuster sent me an advance copy of Alexis Wright's second novel, Carpentaria.

Wright is one of Australia's most celebrated writers, and an Aboriginal activist. Her book depicts life of these indigenous Australians via the story of a community of people in the coastal town of Desperance in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Specifically, she introduces us to Norm Phantom & family of the Westend, his rival Joseph Midnight of the Eastend, and the vague "white men" from the neighboring Uptown who threaten the land, traditions, and heritage of the Aboriginal people.

It's a lengthy tome - clocking in a 516 pages - and although I received my copy in mid-March, I just finished it last week after taking it with my on our trip to Puerto Rico.

Carpentaria book Truth be told, I had trouble getting into the story. It's a mystical narrative, starting with the creation of the rivers and flow of the tides explained by an ancient serpent that slithered over the land, creating the serpent-shaped water flows and taking huge breaths that cause the tides.

The writing is beautiful, with rich descriptors, like this passage about one of the main characters:

"He possessed such an enormous voice, the pitch of it could reverberate up and down the spinal cord, damage the central nervous system, and afterwards vibrate straight up the road to the town and hit the bell so hard, it would start ringing its ear piercing peal." (p. 97)

But I found the early pages confusing, with odd characters whose stories seemed truncated and disconnected.It wasn't until the second third of the book that a central narrative really presented itself, and it was at this point that I got pulled into this complicated community where legends and ghosts live side-by-side, including fisherman Norm Phantom who straddles life between his family and the sea, and the mysterious Elias Smith, who seemingly straddles life between Heaven and Earth (or, the spiritual and physical realms).

There is a constant juxtaposition of traditional Aboriginal life in Desperance with the modern "conveniences" of Uptown: Norm has a taxidermy shop where he preserves fish (and legends) for all time (yet loves his transistor radio that brings news of changes to the ozone layer). His wife Angel preserves things as well: found objects from the town dump. Son Will protests the land grab and business practices of the neighboring mine. The entire family seems intent on resisting advancement and maintaining life as they know it.

Elias is the one character who seeks change, and he suffers a dark fate. Norm continued to fish, while "Elias had become misguided like a fool into the politics of Uptown. He was far too busy to go fishing, too busy for the sea. He abandoned the lot, everything he knew, just for Uptown."

In all, it's an interesting, thought-provoking story if you can stick with it. And Wright does have a unique - at times beautiful, at times complicated - writing style. But maybe not a light, quick beach read :)