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Overview
Here are nine haunting stories from the award-winning author of Remembering Babylon, in which history and geography, as well as the past and the present, combine and often collide, illuminating the landscape and revealing the character of Australia.An eleven-year-old boy sees his father in his own elongated shadow only to realize that he will not return from the war. In a parting moment, a young woman hired to “marry” vacationing soldiers, grasps the weight of the word “woe.” When a failing farmer senselessly murders a wandering aborigine, he imperils his son but discovers in the spring of sympathy that follows the power to influence others. Wise and moving, startling and lyrical, Dream Stuff reverberates with the unpredictability of human experience, revealing people who are shaped by the mysterious rhythms of nature as well as the ghosts of their own pasts.
Winner of the 2000 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
Synopsis
Here are nine haunting stories from the award-winning author of Remembering Babylon, in which history and geography, as well as the past and the present, combine and often collide, illuminating the landscape and revealing the character of Australia.
An eleven-year-old boy sees his father in his own elongated shadow only to realize that he will not return from the war. In a parting moment, a young woman hired to “marry” vacationing soldiers, grasps the weight of the word “woe.” When a failing farmer senselessly murders a wandering aborigine, he imperils his son but discovers in the spring of sympathy that follows the power to influence others. Wise and moving, startling and lyrical, Dream Stuff reverberates with the unpredictability of human experience, revealing people who are shaped by the mysterious rhythms of nature as well as the ghosts of their own pasts.
Publishers Weekly
Of the nine stories gathered in Malouf's latest collection, most are excellent, and one--"Great Day," the final entry--is outstanding. Elegantly structured and perfectly pitched, this is a long account of Audley Tyler's 72nd birthday, which happens to coincide with Australia's national holiday. Audley is a retired minence grise, the kind of man who has advised six governments. The focus, however, is not just on Audley. Like Christina Stead, Malouf (Remembering Babylon) has a peculiarly Australian sensitivity to the mechanics of large families. "The Tylers were what people called a clan," he writes. The clan includes Audley's wife, Madge, who alternately presides over the family's disorder and withdraws from it; Clem, a son who has been mentally affected by a car wreck; and Clem's ex-wife, Fran, who is frustrated by the way the Tylers are "hedged against intruders." But this insularity proves to be their refuge and their strength. In "At Schindlers," set at a seaside boarding house during WWII, preadolescent Jack waits fruitlessly for news about his father, missing in action. He knows that his mother secretly believes her husband has been killed by the Japanese, but he fights that knowledge. When Jack discovers his mother in bed with an American GI, his loss of innocence also signals his acceptance of adult realities. In the title story, Colin, a 48-year-old writer, returns from self-imposed exile in England to visit Brisbane. Colin's father, like Jack's, died in WWII. His cousin Coralie is his tie now to Brisbane. After an unsatisfactory visit with her, Colin gets into a fracas with a man with a knife and is thrown into jail. Later, he comes to understand the inescapable hold of the past and his need to reconnect with it. Malouf's stories show his feeling for the intense grip of the continent's space upon its people. Transcending regionalism by his instinct for that odd, modulated empathy victims and outsiders can feel for their assailants, he shows a rare, exploratory intelligence coupled with a compassionate view of human conduct. (June) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Of the nine stories gathered in Malouf's latest collection, most are excellent, and one--"Great Day," the final entry--is outstanding. Elegantly structured and perfectly pitched, this is a long account of Audley Tyler's 72nd birthday, which happens to coincide with Australia's national holiday. Audley is a retired minence grise, the kind of man who has advised six governments. The focus, however, is not just on Audley. Like Christina Stead, Malouf (Remembering Babylon) has a peculiarly Australian sensitivity to the mechanics of large families. "The Tylers were what people called a clan," he writes. The clan includes Audley's wife, Madge, who alternately presides over the family's disorder and withdraws from it; Clem, a son who has been mentally affected by a car wreck; and Clem's ex-wife, Fran, who is frustrated by the way the Tylers are "hedged against intruders." But this insularity proves to be their refuge and their strength. In "At Schindlers," set at a seaside boarding house during WWII, preadolescent Jack waits fruitlessly for news about his father, missing in action. He knows that his mother secretly believes her husband has been killed by the Japanese, but he fights that knowledge. When Jack discovers his mother in bed with an American GI, his loss of innocence also signals his acceptance of adult realities. In the title story, Colin, a 48-year-old writer, returns from self-imposed exile in England to visit Brisbane. Colin's father, like Jack's, died in WWII. His cousin Coralie is his tie now to Brisbane. After an unsatisfactory visit with her, Colin gets into a fracas with a man with a knife and is thrown into jail. Later, he comes to understand the inescapable hold of the past and his need to reconnect with it. Malouf's stories show his feeling for the intense grip of the continent's space upon its people. Transcending regionalism by his instinct for that odd, modulated empathy victims and outsiders can feel for their assailants, he shows a rare, exploratory intelligence coupled with a compassionate view of human conduct. (June) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|Library Journal
In these nine beautiful and often brutal stories set in his native Australia, Malouf (Remembering Babylon; The Great World, and more) describes a precarious world in which the imagination, through dreams, is the only thing that can face down the losses of life. Almost all of the stories here are superb, evocative creations. Several portray early life lessons, but the majority of the tales take complex adult perspectives on how we handle life's cruelty. In "Sally's Story," a young woman, who learns the meaning of woe when she "marries" Vietnam G.I.s as a prostitute, returns home to rekindle her hope for a future; and in "Great Day," the collection's final and most deeply crafted work, the charismatic Tyler family celebrates their stoic patriarch's 72nd birthday. As a whole, the collection is like a tumultuous life: it reels through surprising turns of plot, alternating between moments on the brink of death in one story and loss of innocence in another, then presses on, redeemed only by the warmth of human feeling and a glimpse of the possible. Highly recommended for all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/00.]--Rebecca Miller, "Library Journal" Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\Dan Koening
The title of Malouf's short-story collection is apt. The author combines the subtly distorted poetics and insight of dream-consciousness with the candor and earthiness of the very stuff that makes life an everyday phenomenon. All the stories are set in Australia either in contemporary times or around the World War II era. Themes of intergenerational family relationships and moods of reflection and yearning unify the book, and children figure prominently as narrators and lead characters throughout. In "At Schindler's" and "Great Day," the book's first and last stories, Malouf draws the drama of modern family life against timeless seaside backdrops. "Jacko's Reach" and "Black Soil Country" are strong evocations of place and history, newcomers and old-timers, and the dirty business of civilization. Malouf expresses the infinite moral and social complexities of his land with an astonishing clarity similar to that of his South African counterpart, J.M. Coetzee. Three remarkable tales of unusual but by no means fantastic situations round out the collection. Despite a cliched scene or two and a few epiphanies that fall a little flat, Malouf writes with grace, insight and a perfection of craft that often transcends his subjects.Daniel Mendelsohn
In the best of Malouf's stories, the schematic structure disappears behind carefully observed psychological details and vividly painted landscapes...It's curious, given the seriousness of Malouf's concerns, to say nothing of the consistently hight quality of his output and the almost transparent beauty of his prose, that he seems to be on so few people's radar's...Dream Stuff is a beguiling introduction to the work of a writer whose refusal to offer easu answers will wake serious readers from their reveries and keep them thinking for many nights to come.—New York Magazine
Kerrigan
An important and illuminating advance in Malouf's investigation of the Australian psyche, Dream Stuff is a fit successor to the superb novels of the 1990's.—Times Literary Supplement
Los Angeles Times
A wise and magical novel. . . . Malouf is at once powerful and tender.Michael Wood
These nine haunting stories show us a continent full of darkness . . . What's exhilarating, in the ambitious concluding story and all the others, is the endless liveliness, the clear conviction that the last resort is both ancient history and just a beginning.—The New York Times Book Review
New York Times Book Review
Breathtaking. . . . To read this remarkable book is to remember Babylon well, whether you think you've been there or not.Richard Eder
[Mr. Malouf is] the finest and most expansive of [Australian] writers . . . In his best and most recent work . . . he goes beyond the stranger-in-a-strange-land theme to suggest with a few of his characters a beginning of wisdom . . .—The New York Times Book Review