Hurtle Duffield is incapable of loving anything except his art. The people who court him are, above all, the victims of his art. He dissects their weaknesses with cruel precision - his sister's deformity and the passionate illusions of such women as the heiress Boo Davenport.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The life of the artist, laid bare.,
By
This review is from: The Vivisector (20th Century Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)
In his longest novel, written in 1970, Nobel Prize-winning author White examines the question of an artist's creativity, where it comes from, whether it can be controlled, and what obligations, if any, accompany it. As he traces the life of Hurtle Duffield from the age of four until his death as an elderly (and successful) avant-garde artist, we see Duffield always as somehow different from his peers.The son of a laundress and a bottle collector, Hurtle is from birth inspired, painting large images on walls as a toddler, but he recognizes at an early age that "people look down at their plates if you said something was 'beautiful.'" To provide him with opportunities which will allow his genius to flourish, his parents sell him, when he is four years old, to the wealthy family for which his mother works. As a member of the Courtney family, Hurtle travels and becomes educated, though he continues to see rather than think. For him, the usual emotional traumas of adolescence are accompanied by unique questions of his identity, both because of his two families and also because of his view of the world. Not religious, he sees God as the Great Vivisector, and men treating each other as animals, slaughtering each other in war. When he himself goes off to war and returns to find that the family has gone in separate directions, he devotes himself, once again, to his art, using women who love him as vehicles for his own self-expression and behaving as a vivisector himself. About his painting of one model, White says "[Hurtle] disemboweled her while she was still alive." As time passes, Hurtle continues to search for love, inspiration, self-expression, and some sort of balance in his life between his immense need to paint, his desire for personal connection, and his simultaneous need to be alone. White's prose style is direct and concise, elegantly simple, and easy to understand. He uses colloquial speech-words like "smoodge," "sook," "slommacky," and "mumped," which must be understood from context-and reveals character and action through dialogue. The novel is old-fashioned, using a straight chronological narrative with no complex flashbacks, and it is quite romantic in its plot elements, despite its serious theme development. The biggest problem for the reader is that the main character is not very likable, nor does he inspire a great deal of empathy--a difficult character to live with for approximately six hundred pages--and I'm not sure how typical he is of the artists he is supposed to represent. Mary Whipple
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
all is unfair in love and art,
By declan "eraserhead" (Western Australia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Vivisector (Modern Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)
"The Vivisector" is a document of the life of an artist, Hurtle Duffield, a painter who can only ever communicate through his art-the problem being his art is cruel and painfully honest. The book portrays the artist as the "vivisector", and is often brilliant in doing so-chapters one and five are pure, crystalline beauty, and it is here that the artist and White are closest in what they communicate-one often wonders just how much of Hurtle is based on White himself. If you are reading White for the fist time, I would recommend starting with "Voss", arguably his definitive work. In comparsison to other works by Patrick White "The Vivisector" is certainly not going to dissapoint, though I do not think it to be in the same rank as some of his other works, such as "Voss", "Riders in the Chariot" or "Eye of the Storm", all highly recommended. Start with those three and see if you develop a taste for his writing.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
articulate, original and awesome,
By Shelley (Australia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Vivisector (20th Century Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)
The Vivisector is a novel which commands some effort on the part of the reader because it is not fast paced. White portrays the essence of the artist with brilliance. It is compelling and revealing if you have the concentration to continue past the opening few chapters. While not giving us the fairytale ending, White provides such insight into the workings of a complex individual through his relationships with others and art that a resolution is secondary to the resonance that this novel evokes.
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