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Informationen zum Autor Patrick White Klappentext Join J. M. Coetzee and Thomas Keneally in rediscovering Nobel Laureate Patrick White In 1973, Australian writer Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature." Set in nineteenth-century Australia, Voss is White's best-known book, a sweeping novel about a secret passion between the explorer Voss and the young orphan Laura. As Voss is tested by hardship, mutiny, and betrayal during his crossing of the brutal Australian desert, Laura awaits his return in Sydney, where she endures their months of separation as if her life were a dream and Voss the only reality. Marrying a sensitive rendering of hidden love with a stark adventure narrative, Voss is a novel of extraordinary power and virtuosity from a twentieth-century master. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. From the introduction Introduction Out on the wastes of the Never-Never, That’s where the dead men lie! That’s where the heat-waves dance for ever – That’s where the dead men lie! Barcroft Boake, Where the Dead Men Lie Human relationships are vast as deserts Patrick White, Voss Patrick White is one of the great novelists of the twentieth century, on a par with his fellow Nobel Laureates William Faulkner, Halldór Laxness and Thomas Mann; and yet, one hundred years after his birth, his name seems temporarily and inexplicably lost in the immense desert spaces to which he introduced a new generation of readers, buried like one of those legions of Herodotus, beneath the glare and flies and red Australian sand. Unsentimental, White predicted as much for himself. In 1981 after yet another project to film Voss had aborted, he wrote to the director Joseph Losey: ‘I’m a dated novelist, whom hardly anyone reads, or if they do, most of them don’t understand what I am on about. Certainly I wish I’d never written Voss , which is going to be everybody’s albatross. You could have died of him, somewhere in an Australian desert, so it’s fortunate you were frustrated.’ To those who believe in the replenishing powers of fiction to lead you into a region different from any that you have been capable of imagining hitherto, and then to leave you, if for a flicker, with an uplifting sense that you are yourself a slightly different person (while paradoxically someone who understands themselves a little better), the fading of White’s reputation is a stain. It was through works like Voss and his other ‘historical’ masterpiece A Fringe of Leaves – plus novels like The Tree of Man , Riders in the Chariot and The Vivisector – that White pioneered a new and absolutely necessary fictional landscape. ‘I don’t think I could have survived without Patrick White,’ said one of his friends in Sydney, Joan Masterman, ‘because he wrote in a way no one else did about Australia. He was the first white author to express through his characters the huge connection the Australian bush has on one’s psyche.’ His best material might be drawn from local watering holes and billabongs, from Faulkner’s native postage stamp of soil as it were; his reach is anything but local. To the singer Van Morrison, in Ireland, White was one o...
