Amanda Lohrey
Auteur de The Labyrinth
A propos de l'auteur
Amanda Lohrey is the author of A Short History of Richard Kline which made the Queensland Literary Awards 2015 shortlist in the fiction category. This same title was shortlisted for the Margaret Scott Prize for best book by a Tasmanian writer 2015. (Bowker Author Biography)
Crédit image: Black Inc.
Œuvres de Amanda Lohrey
Island: Issues 60-61, spring/summer 1994 1 exemplaire
Oeuvres associées
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Date de naissance
- 1947-04-13
- Sexe
- female
- Nationalité
- Australia
- Lieu de naissance
- Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
- Lieux de résidence
- Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
- Études
- University of Tasmania
University of Cambridge - Professions
- novelist
short-story writer
essayist - Prix et distinctions
- Patrick White Award (2012)
Miles Franklin Award (2021)
Membres
Critiques
Ah, I do love a clever title. A conversion can refer to a religious conversion, a change of heart about something or someone, or property conversion where a building is repurposed into something else. Amanda Lohrey's sparkling new novel The Conversion plays with all of these, but begins with the repurposing of a church.
As the novel starts Zoe and her husband Nick have been sideswiped by the financial crash. It bleeds money out of their assets, and they are going to have to sell their handsome Federation villa they had worked on with such loving care. Nick, ever the optimist, turns this disaster into an opportunity to reinvent themselves. They have become stale and complacent, he says, an established middle-class couple trundling along in their comfortable cocoon, tut-tutting at the television and taking expensive holidays. But they can start over, he says. He can set up a part-time practice as a psychologist, and she won't need to return to her work as a solicitor.
As Nick bombards Zoe with his proposal to sell up in Sydney and move to one of those charming little towns that in recent years were being revitalised, the power dynamic in this marriage is revealed. He's sixty-three but she still fancies him, and over the course of a long marriage she has learned to expect that his enthusiasms would wane, soon to be replaced by something else. For his part, he can count on her inertia and her inability to come up with an alternative solution to their straitened circumstances, to get his own way despite her doubts.
Nick is not only oh-so-persuasive, he is also sly. Something that Zoe has yet to learn about him. When they make their way to the countryside to view a church as a potential home, it takes a while for her to realise that this trip is not just the impulse he had implied.
The setting is recognisable as the Hunter Valley, home to coal mines and vineyards and tourism. Not too far from Sydney, it's gentrifying as the nation's economy de-carbonises and the coal industry has to adjust.
And then, before anything has been resolved, Nick dies — in circumstances that reveal his feet of clay.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/11/22/the-conversion-2023-by-amanda-lohrey/… (plus d'informations)
As the novel starts Zoe and her husband Nick have been sideswiped by the financial crash. It bleeds money out of their assets, and they are going to have to sell their handsome Federation villa they had worked on with such loving care. Nick, ever the optimist, turns this disaster into an opportunity to reinvent themselves. They have become stale and complacent, he says, an established middle-class couple trundling along in their comfortable cocoon, tut-tutting at the television and taking expensive holidays. But they can start over, he says. He can set up a part-time practice as a psychologist, and she won't need to return to her work as a solicitor.
Nick has always been about the possibility of the new. The world was there to be remade, over and over, and anything less was stagnation. If friends began to talk earnestly about their family tree, as they seemed increasingly to do as they aged, he would look at Zoe and roll his eyes. He had little interest in history and above all he despised nostalgia: nostalgia was a form of weakness, emotional and spiritual laziness. The secret of life was to live in a dynamic present illuminated by the light of the possible. (p.11)
As Nick bombards Zoe with his proposal to sell up in Sydney and move to one of those charming little towns that in recent years were being revitalised, the power dynamic in this marriage is revealed. He's sixty-three but she still fancies him, and over the course of a long marriage she has learned to expect that his enthusiasms would wane, soon to be replaced by something else. For his part, he can count on her inertia and her inability to come up with an alternative solution to their straitened circumstances, to get his own way despite her doubts.
Nick is not only oh-so-persuasive, he is also sly. Something that Zoe has yet to learn about him. When they make their way to the countryside to view a church as a potential home, it takes a while for her to realise that this trip is not just the impulse he had implied.
The setting is recognisable as the Hunter Valley, home to coal mines and vineyards and tourism. Not too far from Sydney, it's gentrifying as the nation's economy de-carbonises and the coal industry has to adjust.
And then, before anything has been resolved, Nick dies — in circumstances that reveal his feet of clay.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/11/22/the-conversion-2023-by-amanda-lohrey/… (plus d'informations)
“Good to do this” but I'm unsure if he means good to do this or good for you to do this.”
And I think, as the son of Eastern Europeans who were not native speakers of English, it seemed obvious. Who is this person who is puzzled?
The person is Erica Marsden, in Amanda Lohrey’s The Labyrinth.
How would you live your life as the parent of your son after he is imprisoned for committing a heinous crime? The labyrinth is a metaphor for living that life, and for other’s lives - for a way into its depths and back out.
I enjoyed its language, its uncertainties, it’s ambiguities, and it’s immensely satisfying closing sentence that pointed to an opening.… (plus d'informations)
And I think, as the son of Eastern Europeans who were not native speakers of English, it seemed obvious. Who is this person who is puzzled?
The person is Erica Marsden, in Amanda Lohrey’s The Labyrinth.
How would you live your life as the parent of your son after he is imprisoned for committing a heinous crime? The labyrinth is a metaphor for living that life, and for other’s lives - for a way into its depths and back out.
I enjoyed its language, its uncertainties, it’s ambiguities, and it’s immensely satisfying closing sentence that pointed to an opening.… (plus d'informations)
My reading of Amanda Lohrey's debut novel The Morality of Gentlemen (1984) was prompted by the arrival of another book chez moi: Julieanne Lamond's Lohrey, published under the prestigious Miegunyah Press imprint from Melbourne University Press, is the first in a series called Contemporary Australian Writers, and is a 'guide to the world of Amanda Lohrey's fiction. I was up to page 4 when an intriguing reference to The Morality of Gentlemen sent me to retrieve it from the TBR...
Lohrey's novel is, as Ian Syson says in the Introduction, a bit of a rarity in contemporary Australian fiction. It is a working class novel: a political/industrial novel about the lives of a group of workers during a long lockout.
#StayWithMeHere... this is a most enjoyable novel. There are lots of reasons why it is such a pleasure to read...
The Morality of Gentleman purports in part to be research notes of a lofty academic who is writing a history of the waterfront dispute in Hobart. His narration is in italics. The rest of the novel consists of fragments: interviews, recollections, fly-on-the-wall observations, transcripts, press articles, letters, (hilarious) letters to the editor and court transcripts. The narrator is looking for reliable witnesses to make sense of these conflicting accounts, but the novel teaches him a lesson that he ought to have known anyway. Historical objectivity isn't possible.
There are witty juxtapositions of the characters' expectations and behaviour. Some of them are laugh-out-loud. Here is the unionist Plunkett taken aback by the appearance of the Chief Justice, George Cosgrave:
There are perceptive descriptions of the places where the paths of the characters cross, especially interesting when a character is out of his comfort zone. These include the drinking holes of the rival factions; homes both working class and petty-bourgeois; barristers' chambers; and the court room. Here we see the narrator on his quest to interview the State President of the union, Eyenon, a tall, thin man with a long scimitar nose.
*Alas, there are a fair few typos in this edition, and I have a suspicion that this word should be stripe/s.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/07/23/the-morality-of-gentlemen-by-amanda-lohrey/… (plus d'informations)
Lohrey's novel is, as Ian Syson says in the Introduction, a bit of a rarity in contemporary Australian fiction. It is a working class novel: a political/industrial novel about the lives of a group of workers during a long lockout.
#StayWithMeHere... this is a most enjoyable novel. There are lots of reasons why it is such a pleasure to read...
The Morality of Gentleman purports in part to be research notes of a lofty academic who is writing a history of the waterfront dispute in Hobart. His narration is in italics. The rest of the novel consists of fragments: interviews, recollections, fly-on-the-wall observations, transcripts, press articles, letters, (hilarious) letters to the editor and court transcripts. The narrator is looking for reliable witnesses to make sense of these conflicting accounts, but the novel teaches him a lesson that he ought to have known anyway. Historical objectivity isn't possible.
There are witty juxtapositions of the characters' expectations and behaviour. Some of them are laugh-out-loud. Here is the unionist Plunkett taken aback by the appearance of the Chief Justice, George Cosgrave:
Plunkett had pictured him as a tall man who would preside poker-faced and with an air of immaculate decorum, his magisterial features an impressive portrait of total, unobtrusive concentration. Instead he is a man of barely medium height with broad shoulders who moves restlessly on his grand chair and fidgets with a pen on the bench. From time to time he scratches his nose, managing to look like a banker who has wandered into his scarlet, white and black judicial robes by mistake, presiding with the impatient and patronising air of a man filling in for a friend and anxious to get back to his stocks and bonds. (p.250)
There are perceptive descriptions of the places where the paths of the characters cross, especially interesting when a character is out of his comfort zone. These include the drinking holes of the rival factions; homes both working class and petty-bourgeois; barristers' chambers; and the court room. Here we see the narrator on his quest to interview the State President of the union, Eyenon, a tall, thin man with a long scimitar nose.
I seek him out in the Marquess of Queensberry where he drinks after work. The Customs House around the corner is a proletarian pub, bare and shabby with green walls and scratched brown chairs. The Marquess has more character: brown furry wallpaper, sporting trophies over the mantel; pictures on the walls of old whaling boats, the local slipways in 1900, the colonial docks with sailing ships; and framed photographs of local sporting heroes, including one of Jaz [Eyenon's son] in his blue and white football strip [sic*]. Ten minutes after the five o'clock siren the bar is strong with booze and smoke and thronged with wharfies, seamen, bookmakers, politicians and lawyers who are slumming it. (p.92)
*Alas, there are a fair few typos in this edition, and I have a suspicion that this word should be stripe/s.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/07/23/the-morality-of-gentlemen-by-amanda-lohrey/… (plus d'informations)
Prix et récompenses
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Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 16
- Aussi par
- 5
- Membres
- 479
- Popularité
- #51,492
- Évaluation
- 3.6
- Critiques
- 18
- ISBN
- 63
- Langues
- 1
- Favoris
- 1
It’s not that much happens in the book or that there are revelations. The big actions happen outside the book. Perhaps that’s why it’s subtitled ‘A Pastoral’.
It brings to mind Eliot’s line,
Which is perhaps another way of stating the epigraph
… (plus d'informations)