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readingvonnie's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
Such an important read. Wright really gets inside the mindsets of characters and the nuisances and complications for Aboriginal people living with integrity to Aboriginal culture within white mainstream Australian culture. Wrights exploration of the spiritual world is exceptional and I am so grateful for that window.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism, Murder, and Colonisation
asililydying's review against another edition
3.75
very mythical and grandiose, an ever unraveling fable of a peoples and their colonial oppressors. structurally sort of nomadic, free-floating, and the influence of the oral tradition is immediately apparent. better than I am giving it credit for, I just had a tough time working through it from my place of intense aborigine cultural ignorance - this calls for more studying, including Praiseworthy.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Gore, Hate crime, and Racism
Moderate: Rape
vithelovers's review
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death, Hate crime, Racial slurs, Racism, Xenophobia, Cultural appropriation, and Colonisation
ashleymae_'s review against another edition
challenging
informative
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
Carpentaria is fascinating, it’s about many things but largely about land rights, environmental concerns (the mining industry), and Aboriginal spirituality. The spiritual / mythical / legendary elements were interesting and would be a great tool for a foreign reader to learn since the author intended for it to go global and so it was translated into French. For me because there was a sort of push and pull between getting to know the characters intimately and the spiritual elements & destruction of land that drive the story means it put me to sleep for half the book. There were many protagonists with their stories interlaced which also added to the disconnect, the quantity of characters. I feel the women could be developed more. The characters are heavily flawed but also very redeemable so that drove me to keep reading apart from it being a required reading for university
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death, Racism, Suicide, and Violence
kateybellew's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
I honestly am struggling to rate, let alone review this book. It took me almost two weeks to read (at least twice as long as I’d expect to read 500 pages) and I can’t say I enjoyed the reading experience. I ended up both reading the physical book and listening to the audiobook at the same time as I was finding it challenging to get through.
Having said all that, this book is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. It’s dense in a foggy, dreamlike way, and unconventional at every level. It’s non-linear, reading as more of an oral myth than a traditional novel. These characters are harsh and hard, inflicting pain on one another in cycles of collective and intergenerational trauma, intensified by poverty and a new mine bringing both jobs and damage to the town of Desperance.
There are really difficult scenes to read, including abuse of a disabled person, deaths in custody, and racial hate crime. And yet there is some of the most beautiful writing I’ve ever read. The magical animistic description on the landscape, the alive ancestors, and the spirit of these larger than life characters… it all results in an undeniably epic tale of devastation, grief, masculinity, family and resilience.
Although it’s so big it almost feels like fantasy, the haunting feeling I’m left with is of the tension that runs throughout the book, and an awareness that it is the same tension that underpins the entirety of ‘Australian’ society. The white fragility, the violence, the fear of retribution for the past, the destruction of land… will we reckon with it willingly?
“If you are someone who visits old cemeteries, wait awhile if you visit the water people. The old Gulf country men and women who took our besieged memories to the grave might just climb out of the mud and tell you the real story of what happened here.” p. 11
“In this country, where legends and ghosts live side by side in the very air, inside the Pricklebush family no man, love-forlorn or not, sets to sea while the morning star shines above the fishing boats waiting for them… Norm dispelled such morbid thoughts, though he remained fatalistic in his realisation that once his friend followed the star, she would pull him away forever. And that was the truth.” p. 94
“He talked and talked... When the wind returned at half past ten at night, it was surprised to find him still talking after six hours… Sand flew up from the beach like little dust storms and wrapped around his fallen words as though it was picking up the rubbish. On and on he continued, talking to the Gods, who had stopped ordering fate just to listen about the strange town called Desperance.” p. 272
“In his dreams, he began sorting out the star patterns, viewing one then the next, after which he jumbled them up and waited, while some tumbled back into place, others slightly realigned themselves, and he tracked along the new settings, memorising his route, then way into the heart of his sleep, the way home.” p. 286
“Uptown was a world apart, like the spiritual world, which could be imagined by children to have living there white-man spirits like fairies, goblins, elves imps or leprechauns, or something else more sinister. What else could be true, if they had come from out of nowhere?” p. 321
“No time at all before the soul has sped from the body onto a breeze where a moth was flickering by in a day darkened by low passing, kidney-coloured clouds. Time goes on, and one thinks, What of the living? You do no want to believe in death. You do not want to feel the strangeness so peculiar when death has occurred suddenly. There is a terrible shock when what was ends.” p. 390
Having said all that, this book is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. It’s dense in a foggy, dreamlike way, and unconventional at every level. It’s non-linear, reading as more of an oral myth than a traditional novel. These characters are harsh and hard, inflicting pain on one another in cycles of collective and intergenerational trauma, intensified by poverty and a new mine bringing both jobs and damage to the town of Desperance.
There are really difficult scenes to read, including abuse of a disabled person, deaths in custody, and racial hate crime. And yet there is some of the most beautiful writing I’ve ever read. The magical animistic description on the landscape, the alive ancestors, and the spirit of these larger than life characters… it all results in an undeniably epic tale of devastation, grief, masculinity, family and resilience.
Although it’s so big it almost feels like fantasy, the haunting feeling I’m left with is of the tension that runs throughout the book, and an awareness that it is the same tension that underpins the entirety of ‘Australian’ society. The white fragility, the violence, the fear of retribution for the past, the destruction of land… will we reckon with it willingly?
“If you are someone who visits old cemeteries, wait awhile if you visit the water people. The old Gulf country men and women who took our besieged memories to the grave might just climb out of the mud and tell you the real story of what happened here.” p. 11
“In this country, where legends and ghosts live side by side in the very air, inside the Pricklebush family no man, love-forlorn or not, sets to sea while the morning star shines above the fishing boats waiting for them… Norm dispelled such morbid thoughts, though he remained fatalistic in his realisation that once his friend followed the star, she would pull him away forever. And that was the truth.” p. 94
“He talked and talked... When the wind returned at half past ten at night, it was surprised to find him still talking after six hours… Sand flew up from the beach like little dust storms and wrapped around his fallen words as though it was picking up the rubbish. On and on he continued, talking to the Gods, who had stopped ordering fate just to listen about the strange town called Desperance.” p. 272
“In his dreams, he began sorting out the star patterns, viewing one then the next, after which he jumbled them up and waited, while some tumbled back into place, others slightly realigned themselves, and he tracked along the new settings, memorising his route, then way into the heart of his sleep, the way home.” p. 286
“Uptown was a world apart, like the spiritual world, which could be imagined by children to have living there white-man spirits like fairies, goblins, elves imps or leprechauns, or something else more sinister. What else could be true, if they had come from out of nowhere?” p. 321
“No time at all before the soul has sped from the body onto a breeze where a moth was flickering by in a day darkened by low passing, kidney-coloured clouds. Time goes on, and one thinks, What of the living? You do no want to believe in death. You do not want to feel the strangeness so peculiar when death has occurred suddenly. There is a terrible shock when what was ends.” p. 390
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Child abuse, Hate crime, Physical abuse, Racism, and Police brutality