| Description |
1 online resource |
| Contents |
Cover -- Praise -- About the author -- Also by the author -- Title page -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Book One -- 1 Death of the Father -- 2 Only Children -- 3 The Lotus and the Phoenix -- 4 The Winter Visitor -- 5 No Ordinary Child -- 6 Portraits -- 7 The Mother -- Homecoming -- Men -- The Campaign -- Signs -- 8 An Interlude in the Garden -- 9 A Memoir of Displacement -- Book Two -- 10 The Entrance to the Other-World -- 11 Reflections From the Gazebo -- Thirty-Four Days -- War -- Present Reality -- The Gift of Death -- Victoria -- Into Regions of Uncertainty |
|
12 The Lovers -- 13 The Little Red Doorway |
| Summary |
ASteven Muir, August Spiess and his daughter Gertrude, and Lang Tzu all acknowledge a restless sense of cultural displacement, an ambivalence in their relations with the culture of European Australia. Steven left England for Australia as a young man and his one attempt at returning is unsuccessful. August Spiess, although he speaks frequently of returning to his native Hamburg, fails to make the journey, as does his daughter Gertrude. Lang Tzu's very name defines his fate: 'two characters which in Mandarin signify the son who goes away.' The 'game', however, does have winners. For despite their yearnings for the home of their ancestral dreams, a desire to belong somewhere that is truly their own, none of Miller's characters leaves Australia, and each in their own way comes to see that to be at home in exile may be a defining paradox of the European Australian condition: the paradox of belonging and estrangement that perhaps lies uneasily at the heart of all European cultures. -- New York Times Book Review 'A major new novel of grand design and rich texture, a vast canvas of time and space, its gaze outward yet its vision intimate and intellectually abundant.' - The Age |
| Notes |
Originally published: St. Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 1993 |
|
Print version record |
| SUBJECT |
Australia -- Fiction
|
| Subject |
Australia
|
| Genre/Form |
Fiction
|
|
Psychological fiction
|
|
Psychological fiction.
|
| Form |
Electronic book
|
| ISBN |
9781742697222 |
|
1742697224 |
|
