≫ [PDF] Gratis The Great World David Malouf 9780099273868 Books

The Great World David Malouf 9780099273868 Books

Download As PDF : The Great World David Malouf 9780099273868 Books

The Great World David Malouf 9780099273868 Books

THE GREAT WORLD, by David Malouf.
This is the first Malouf book I have read, and I have to say it simply blew me away. It is a deep and absorbing look at an unlikely friendship between two men, Digger Keen and Vic Curran, who met in the Australian army during WWII, and then spent more than three years together under the most brutal and inhumane conditions as POWs of the Japanese, laboring to build a rail line in the jungles of Burma. (A setting which brought to mind a fine WWII memoir I read a few years back, Eric Lomax's The Railway Man: A POW's Searing Account of War, Brutality and Forgiveness.) In a narrative which spans both World Wars (as well as Korea and Vietnam, if only tangentially)and a couple of generations, and closely follows the fortunes of the two men's families, THE GREAT WORLD could easily be written off as one of those blockbuster generational 'sagas' (think, say, The Thorn Birds), a description which usually sends me running in the opposite direction. But because Malouf delves so deeply into the minds and souls of his characters, particularly Digger, the novel takes on multiple layers of meaning and experience, which forces its readers to reflect on their own lives, and their own places in 'the great world' of the title.

Both of the central characters spring from extremely humble origins, but Vic, through a series of serendipitous breaks and his own cunning, manages to become wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. Digger, the more thoughtful of the two, lives a much more modest life, working with his hands and also living a rich life of the mind.

On second thought, okay, maybe this is a generational saga, but the characters here are so fully realized and completely human that they grab you from the story's beginning and won't let go 'til you've read the last page. And then you keep on thinking about them. I was continually struck by various passages, turns of phrase, descriptions, etc. For example, Digger's wonder at how Vic's previously inept and socially awkward father-in-law became moderately successful as a poet -

"In the small world of writers, reviewers, university lecturers and other people who cared for these things, he had begun to be well known, but it was a very small world of course; most people didn't even know it existed."

Poets. Indeed. Or Vic's sorrow at the sudden death of that same father-in-law, who had been like a real father to him. Unable to voice what he is feeling, he finally tries, unsuccessfully, to read and understand the man's poetry, and in the process begins to get an inkling of his own mortality -

"It is a sobering thing, even when you are a father yourself and have some force in the world, to find, in the childish part of yourself that goes on existing despite the years, that there is no hand you can reach out for ... Now, for the first time, he felt orphaned."

And more than once in the novel, repeatedly in fact, Malouf touches on what he calls "this difficult business of fathers and sons," with Digger and his father, and also with Vic's tortured feelings about his brutal drunk of a father, and, years later, the estrangement with his own son, Greg.

I have only just discovered David Malouf, who is "internationally renowned as one of Australia's finest contemporary writers." It is easy to see why. I loved this book and hated to come to the end of it. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER


Tags : The Great World [David Malouf] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. For the two men in this novel, war was supposed to be a testing ground. But it proved to be an ordeal of a different kind. Spanning 70 years of Australian life,David Malouf,The Great World,Vintage Books,0099273861,Fiction - General,General & Literary Fiction,Literary,Fiction

The Great World David Malouf 9780099273868 Books Reviews

The Great World engaged me in the beginning and through the war, then seemed to drag on to a slow, boring end. Perhaps that's the point of the book, how war dries up life from life in those who survive it.
good item
Beautiful writing; each page worthy of pondering again and again. a very special book. rush out to get a copy of this wonderful read.
I found the author's writing profound and in-depth. An exceptional writer. The book is disturbing and I can not explain why..perhaps it is so human. The feel of the Australian world. The episodes of POW march powerful. I had heard of the death marches executed by the Japanese. The reality of the war and what it does to men in the military. I am anxious to read more books from this Author. He is on the top of my list.
A raft of life experiences are shown by David Malouf to have molded the many and varied characters who make up the intertwining lives in their world understanding. 'It was a kind of madness but there was a sense of sanity in it, there had to be...' The amateur historian and/or psychologist will be satisfied with the writer's enquiring analysis of when, where, how and why.
'He was determined to hang on to it and sometimes he could'...methods used in dreaming of home and for others an attempt to remain in that sense of sanity wherein friendship and loyalties are sorely tested.
Life is never fair nor is it a level playing field.
Towards the end of David Malouf's epic novel spanning most of 20th-century history in Australia, an unnamed character speaks in a eulogy of "all those unique and repeatable events, the little sacraments of daily existence, movements of the heart and intimations of the close but inexpressible grandeur and terror of things, that is our other history, the one that goes on, in a quiet way, under the noise and chatter." In telling the stories of two men who meet in a Japanese prison camp in WW2 then go their mostly separate ways, one achieving riches, the other remaining obscure, Malouf comes as close to capturing that other history as any writer could.

I have not yet read much of the literature of Australia, only Malouf's own FLY AWAY PETER and Patrick White's incandescent RIDERS IN THE CHARIOT, but I do begin to catch glimpses of the national myth. Part has to do with the land itself, a vast wild beauty lost to urbanization and neglect. Part has to do with people the rough Australian spirit and the ease of passage from poverty to a sort of gentility and back again. Common to both (as the book jacket so accurately puts it) is the loss of innocence. And yet the quality that so caught me up in the White book and both surprised and delighted me in this one, is a visionary penetration that looks beneath surfaces and finds wonder. Most of the big events happen in the first half of this book, yet in the fifty-year span of the second half, as lives settle into patterns, the depth of meaning keeps increasing until the final pages are as rich as anything I can think of.

True, the novel does not begin promisingly. The paperback edition has an ugly cover and sharp-edged pages that cut the fingers. The opening chapter, much of it in dialect, is set outside a broken-down country store and features a simple-minded woman watching two old geezers fishing. The woman soon fades from the picture, but the book takes us back through the lives of these two men, Digger Keen and Vic Curran. Both begin in similar rural poverty. Both enlist at the outbreak of war, both are captured in the fall of Singapore (an event also narrated in JG Farrell's magnificent THE SINGAPORE GRIP), and both endure over three years of terrible captivity. Yet they are different in personality and start more as enemies than friends, attracted as much by their differences as their similarities. After the war, Vic becomes a successful entrepreneur, while Digger returns to his country outpost; the contrast between them allows Malouf a subtle examination of what is truly important in individual lives. Vic's story is the more familiar one of outward success masking an inner emptiness, but Malouf gives him unexpected pockets of sympathy. Even more remarkable is Digger, who comes to embody a depth of philosophical, even poetic, understanding that for me is the greatest joy of this wonderful book.
THE GREAT WORLD, by David Malouf.
This is the first Malouf book I have read, and I have to say it simply blew me away. It is a deep and absorbing look at an unlikely friendship between two men, Digger Keen and Vic Curran, who met in the Australian army during WWII, and then spent more than three years together under the most brutal and inhumane conditions as POWs of the Japanese, laboring to build a rail line in the jungles of Burma. (A setting which brought to mind a fine WWII memoir I read a few years back, Eric Lomax's The Railway Man A POW's Searing Account of War, Brutality and Forgiveness.) In a narrative which spans both World Wars (as well as Korea and Vietnam, if only tangentially)and a couple of generations, and closely follows the fortunes of the two men's families, THE GREAT WORLD could easily be written off as one of those blockbuster generational 'sagas' (think, say, The Thorn Birds), a description which usually sends me running in the opposite direction. But because Malouf delves so deeply into the minds and souls of his characters, particularly Digger, the novel takes on multiple layers of meaning and experience, which forces its readers to reflect on their own lives, and their own places in 'the great world' of the title.

Both of the central characters spring from extremely humble origins, but Vic, through a series of serendipitous breaks and his own cunning, manages to become wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. Digger, the more thoughtful of the two, lives a much more modest life, working with his hands and also living a rich life of the mind.

On second thought, okay, maybe this is a generational saga, but the characters here are so fully realized and completely human that they grab you from the story's beginning and won't let go 'til you've read the last page. And then you keep on thinking about them. I was continually struck by various passages, turns of phrase, descriptions, etc. For example, Digger's wonder at how Vic's previously inept and socially awkward father-in-law became moderately successful as a poet -

"In the small world of writers, reviewers, university lecturers and other people who cared for these things, he had begun to be well known, but it was a very small world of course; most people didn't even know it existed."

Poets. Indeed. Or Vic's sorrow at the sudden death of that same father-in-law, who had been like a real father to him. Unable to voice what he is feeling, he finally tries, unsuccessfully, to read and understand the man's poetry, and in the process begins to get an inkling of his own mortality -

"It is a sobering thing, even when you are a father yourself and have some force in the world, to find, in the childish part of yourself that goes on existing despite the years, that there is no hand you can reach out for ... Now, for the first time, he felt orphaned."

And more than once in the novel, repeatedly in fact, Malouf touches on what he calls "this difficult business of fathers and sons," with Digger and his father, and also with Vic's tortured feelings about his brutal drunk of a father, and, years later, the estrangement with his own son, Greg.

I have only just discovered David Malouf, who is "internationally renowned as one of Australia's finest contemporary writers." It is easy to see why. I loved this book and hated to come to the end of it. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER