American Fiction, Oceanian & Australasians Peoples - Fiction & Literature, Historical Fiction

Natives and Exotics

Name: Natives and Exotics
Author: Jane Alison
ISBN: 9780156032476

by Jane Alison

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Overview

In the manner of W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants, Natives and Exotics follows three characters, linked by blood and legacy, as they wander a world scarred by colonialism.

Transplanted halfway around the globe in 1970, nine-year-old Alice, the child of diplomats, is ravished by the beauty of Ecuador, a country her parents are helping to despoil. Forty years earlier, Alice's newlywed grandmother Violet confronts troubling traces of her country's past as she makes a home in the wilds of Australia. And before that, in early nineteenth-century Scotland, Violet's great-great-grandfather George flees the violence of the Clearances for the Portuguese Azores, unaware that he will have a hand in destroying the earthly paradise there.
The third novel by the author of the critically acclaimed The Marriage of the Sea and The Love-Artist, Natives and Exotics is a hypnotic meditation on our passionate, uneasy affair with nature, in which we restlessly search for home.

Synopsis

In the manner of W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants, Natives and Exotics follows three characters, linked by blood and legacy, as they wander a world scarred by colonialism.

Publishers Weekly

Generations of an Australian family are linked across time and space by their relationships to a changing world and a common search for a true home in a tender, lyrical novel that explores the consequences of so-called "progress." Nine-year-old Alice is brought to Ecuador by her mother and U.S. diplomat stepfather. Alison (The Marriage of the Sea) richly, precisely describes how the beautiful landscape entrances Alice, even as the sterile, rootless diplomatic life keeps the heart of her host country du jour at bay. The political unrest of 1970s Ecuador and hostility toward the oil-hungry U.S. further alienate Alice as she struggles to determine where she belongs. The novel's next section tells how, some 40 years earlier, Alice's grandmother Violet leaves the comforts of Adelaide for a life with her new husband in the Australian bush. Pregnant with Alice's mother, Violet struggles to hack tree stumps from the ground as she ponders her own roots: those who came before her to Australia, and the elusive nature of home for those born with wanderlust. The story of Violet's great-great-grandfather George is one of a people ravaging a land in the name of "Civilization, [and] the Empire's advance upon the globe." More impressionistic than narrative, Alison's third novel is a lush evocation of the way people love and alter (and are altered by) the environments they inhabit. Agent, Geri Thoma. (May) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

About the Author, Jane Alison

JANE ALISON is the author of three novels: The Love-Artist , The Marriage of the S ea, and Natives and Exotics . She teaches in the MFA programs at the University of Miami and Queens University in Charlotte.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

Library Journal

A Scottish gardener flees to the Azores, his great-great-granddaughter to Australia, and her granddaughter to South America. Yet wherever they go, nature is being destroyed. More distinctive work from the author of The Love-Artist. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-Humankind's attempts to subdue nature are at the heart of this story about one family's experiences with "civilizing" the world. Alice, nine, travels to Ecuador with her mother and stepfather, one of a slew of families who congregate there in the 1970s to help American oil companies reap the benefits of oil exports. Largely undeveloped, the country is thrown into political and social upheaval as the U.S. holds out the carrot of progress through industrialization. The story then flashes back to 1929 Australia, where Alice's grandmother Violet is attempting to make a life for herself and her family in rough and uncultivated Adelaide. Alison includes marvelous details about running a home, from the Coolgardie Safe that keeps milk and butter cool to the hoarding of water. Pregnant with Alice's uncle-to-be, Violet ponders the question of whether humans can ever consider themselves native to an area. In the final flashback, her great-great-grandfather sails in 1822 from Scotland to the Portuguese Azores to begin a life in the citrus business. He is troubled by the prevailing European mentality that calls for clearing off "natives" and anything else that stands in the way of progress. However, he finds himself an unwitting participant in the game of reshaping the world to Western standards. Although the author's ambitious undertaking makes the flow disjointed at times, the theme is thought-provoking, and the language is spare and beautiful. Those curious about the history of European exploration and colonization will enjoy Alison's perspective.-Kim Dare, Fairfax County Public Library System, VA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The complexity of story-delivery that worked so well in Alison's The Marriage of the Sea (2003) tends toward the reductive here, causing message to intrude on telling. Alison divides a long saga of family and science into five parts, then arranges those in an approximately reverse chronological order. Thus, during the Nixon years we first meet Alice Forder, nine, as she comes to live for a year in Quito, Ecuador, where her utter-stereotype American stepfather, Hal, will swagger, drive a Cadillac, smoke a lot, talk big and work in the embassy as a backer of big oil and the Pan-American Highway. The Australian-descended Alice, meanwhile, will find herself growing increasingly sensitive to the beauties and natural grandeur of Quito, including its great volcano, Pinchincha-while her also-sensitive mother, Rosalind, will fret over the U.S. policy of economic-political bullying ("Do we really have any right?" she said. . . "Do we really belong here?"). Part two sweeps us back to Australia, 1929, where we meet Rosalind's young mother, Violet (newly pregnant with Rosalind), as she labors to clear stumps and roots from the soil for farming. From there, its 1822 and Scotland, where the English are driving the Scots from their land, in this case to clear it for sheep. A boy named George-mute since witnessing his mother slain-and his mentor, Mr. Clarence, will leave Scotland to seek their fortunes in the Portuguese Azores as citrus growers, finding success until war isolates them, the fruit trees sicken from contamination and, in consequence, the islands are ruthlessly denuded. Thus it is, in 1836, that the pair set sail for a new start in South Australia, where George will start the family'sAustralian line. In closing, Violet, as widow, will take a world tour, and we'll glimpse Alice Forder, in 1981, on Scotland's shore. Intricate, ambitious, often beautiful. But Alison's people remain small, smothered under the great theme of "Civilization, the Empire's advance upon the globe."