Book description
With the death of her mother, middle-aged Theodora Goodman
contemplates the desert of her life. Freed from the trammels of
convention she leaves Australia for a European tour and becomes
involved with the residents of a small French hotel. But creating
other people's lives, even in love and pity, can lead to madness.
Her ability to reconcile joy and sorrow is an unbearable torture to
her. On the journey home, Theodora finds there is little to choose
between the reality of illusion and the illusion of reality. She looks
for peace, even if it is beyond the borders of insanity...
Patrick White was born in England in 1912. He was taken to
Australia (where his father owned a sheep farm) when he was six months
old, but 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unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war; he returned
after the war to Australia.
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 has turned its vast empty spaces into
great mythic landscapes of the soul. His position as 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. Technically brilliant, he is one modern
novelist to whom the oft-abused epithet 'visionary' can be safely be
applied. He died in September 1990.
