I read quite a lot of books - about one per week. This is probably more than some people read but I dare say less than plenty of others. I have always loved reading. I keep a list of books that I have read but I don’t usually blog about them unless they really stand out for me. Recently someone recommended Tim Winton’s “Cloudstreet” to me and so I read it last week. I absolutely loved it.
It is an Australian novel, written in 1991 but set from the 1940s to the early 1960s, and it tells the story of two families who live in poverty in a big ramshackle house in Perth, Western Australia. Although they are very different their lives become entwined over the years. World events go on in the background, but the book is mainly a chronicle and celebration of the two families and of community and of Perth itself as it changes and grows.
“Dogs get howling all down the way. Somewhere a bicycle bell rings. Somewhere else there's a war on. Somewhere else people turn to shadows and powder in an instant and the streets turn to funnels and light in the sky with their burning. Somewhere a war is over.”
There is also a strong element of magical realism; there are ghosts in the house, an Aboriginal mystic appears and reappears, there is even a pig that speaks in tongues. The central figure of Fish lives half in reality and half on a spiritual plane, (one of my favourite and chilling lines near the beginning of the book is “Not all of Fish had come back”), while the other characters change and evolve.
It is an amazing book.
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