Book description
'Edited' by Patrick White, these memoirs are a stage upon which the
Nobel Prize winner himself appears, a supporting actor and anxious
director of his many-faceted, spell-binding leading lady, Alex
Xenophon Demirjian Gray.
Enter Alex: quick-change artist of many personae - re-enacting all
that she has experienced in her various lives. We see her as Cassiani,
the nun with unexpectedly blue eyes, sweeper of mouse droppings, lover
of Onouphrios the monk, who is rejected by the 'Christians' of Nisos
as an evil-eyed sorceress; as Sister Benedict, who on the Feast of the
Kippers leads the frailest member of her order into the bush, there to
learn the source of goodness; as Dolly Formosa, star-turn of 'Alex
Gray's Theatrical Tour of Outback Australia', dispensing culture to a
reluctant audience. These are just a sampling of a host of guises. We
also see Alex in her suburban Sydney home, exasperating her daughter
Hilda, who cannot imagine the great flights her mother's temperament
requires and which the state of her mind allows.
Patrick White, who was born in 1912, was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1973. In making the award, the Royal Swedish Academy cited
his writings as "an epic and psychological narrative art which has
introduced a new continent into literature." Mr. White is the
author of fourteen books, including - the memoir
Flaws in the Glass
and the novel
The Twyborn Affair.
