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Informationen zum Autor PATRICK WHITE (1912-1990)! an Australian novelist and playwright! won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973. His novel The Vivisector was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010. 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 of the greatest influences on his life. He was the recipient of the only fan letter that Salman Rushdie has written (after finishing Voss); as well, of an impromptu speech from the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, for whom reading Voss was a searing experience. ‘It is like using an iron crow-bar at minus sixty-five degrees centigrade in Siberia: when you let go, part of the skin adheres to it. Part of me went to Voss and blood too.’ White, he was saying, does more than get under your skin; in his best work, he flays the reader bare. * ‘I am never altogether happy if I do not know about past stages in the lives of my characters.’ White might have introduced ‘a new continent into literature’, to quote from his Nobel citation, yet his friend Barry Humphries called him ‘more Kensington than any man I know in Australia’. He was conceived in England, on Bisley plain, where his parents had gone to watch the shooting, and born at 11 a.m. on 28 May 1912 in their flat overlooking Hyde Park. He was baptised Patrick – a name he hated as much as his appearance, which has been compared to an Zusammenfassung ...
