Book description
Hurtle Duffield is incapable of loving anything except what he paints.
The men and women who court him during his long life are, above all, the
victims of his art. He is the vivisector, dissecting their weaknesses
with cruel precision: his sister's deformity, a grocer's moonlight
indiscretion and the passionate illusions of his mistress, Hero
Pavloussi. It is only when Hurtle meets an egocentric adolescent whom he
sees as his spiritual child does he experience a deeper, more
treacherous emotion.
Patrick White was born in England in 1912 and taken to Australia,
where his father owned a sheep farm, when he was six months old. He
was educated in England at Cheltenham college and King's College,
Cambridge. He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished
novels, then served in the RAF during the war. He returned to
Australia after the war.
He became the most considerable figure in modern Australian
literature, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The great
poet of Australian landscape, he turned its vast empty spaces into
great mythic landscapes of the soul. His position as a man of letters
was controversial, provoked by his acerbic, unpredictable public
statements and his belief that it is eccentric individuals who offer
the only hope of salvation. He died in September 1990.
