David Francis (1)
Auteur de Stray Dog Winter
Pour les autres auteurs qui s'appellent David Francis, voyez la page de désambigüisation.
A propos de l'auteur
Crédit image: Courtesy of Allen and Unwin
Œuvres de David Francis
Oeuvres associées
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Sexe
- male
- Nationalité
- Australia
- Professions
- showjumping
lawyer - Agent
- Elaine Markson Literary Agency
Membres
Critiques
Listes
A Novel Cure (1)
Prix et récompenses
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Auteurs associés
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 4
- Aussi par
- 1
- Membres
- 104
- Popularité
- #184,481
- Évaluation
- 3.5
- Critiques
- 3
- ISBN
- 67
- Langues
- 3
Daniel is planning a romantic Christmas getaway with his potential fiance when his mother rings.
"My mother told me she thought she was dying. 'Dead as Dickens by the end of the year' , she forecast, pretending not to be scared."
“I’ll be back by New Year’s,” I say. Eight thousand miles and two days lost to the blazing Australian summer, when I’d promised myself I’d ask her to marry me before year’s end. A promise eclipsed by last week’s telephone call. “Family’s first,” said Isabel. But why is that? Why not this?
Why indeed. Daniel is torn right from the beginning, stay or go, take Isabel or go alone. After ten years he thought he had escaped his family, become a different person in the US.
"If it was just me on my own so I could see life clearly, maybe even be someone new. But how do you shed the skin of a family, really? These arms already peeling from this angry sun. The gay Beverly Hills dermatologist told me, as he froze off eleven moles, that most of the damage was already done, growing up here as a boy on a farm. No hat, no screen, no nothing."
I loved the spare, clean prose Francis uses. Nothing flowery or unnecessary, similar in some aspects to another Australian author, Rodney Hall.
"This time my mother said she dialed the CFA even though she doesn’t approve of involving outsiders. “A fire at the cottage on Wedding Bush Road.” I imagine her moving through the paddocks in the dark, the way she knows the land by heart, the shapes of the concrete water troughs, the shadows of the rabbit warrens, the cattle as they balk.
The distant flicker and a hint of smoke, a far-off siren wailing. I imagined it from above, the fire truck already on the highway and my mother breathless down by the windmill. I asked if she’d been okay before the fire but she ignored me, wanted me to hear the story. She didn’t seem to know her speech was strange.
“It wasn’t the cottage but a car in the back paddock up in flames.” She talked about the shadows of the heavy horses circling, arched up with fear."
Francis uses several different POV to help explain the why and the how of Daniel's predicament. Daniel is both an outsider, the one who got away, and a lynch pin to the lives and destinies of those he has come back to. Every decision he makes seems to make things more complicated. His relationship with Isabel is further complicated by the tenuous phone connection to the States. Some of Daniels actions and decisions seem to me to be so out of character, they jar and jolt, your never sure where the narrative will go. That is where I had trouble with the book. I couldn't grasp why he would behave in this way, so soon after arriving. How coming home seemed to have stripped all sensibilities from him, reducing him to a cliche. It did follow a story arc of "like father , like son' but I could not bridge the gap and just go with it it, hence the three star rating.… (plus d'informations)