ashley_mrose530's review against another edition
4.0
This was a really great story all in all. I loved the characters, all of them had life even if I didn't like their personalities. The only thing I did not like about this book was how predictable I found it to be. I guessed the killer on the first page and the whole book only proved my point rather than making me second guess myself. I have never fallen in love with books that I could predict. I found them to be good stories nonetheless, but not my favorites. Don't let this in any way diminish the book itself though, this is all me. The story is great and feels very real. I believe anyone who likes murder mysteries would like this book.
tasmanian_bibliophile's review against another edition
4.0
‘Sorry’ is set in remote Western Australia, with World War II casting its shadow over the landscape. Perdita, the unwanted daughter of Nicholas and Stella, is the central character and the story is told from her perspective. Nicholas is an anthropologist who appears to have little respect for the Aborigines he is studying. Stella is obsessed with Shakespeare and not a particularly effective mother or companion. Perdita’s companions are also outcasts: Billy who is deaf and Mary, an Aboriginal girl.
The circumstances surrounding the murder of Nicholas cause Mary to be removed from the household. Perdita withdraws and becomes effectively mute. She has access to a rich inner world through her eclectic accretion of Shakespeare and Aboriginal learning.
‘Sorry’ is about cultural displacement, communication, and alternate forms of reality. The stories of Billy, Perdita and Mary convey some uncomfortable truths as well as reinforcing that values are relative rather than absolute.
I read this novel about 12 months ago and, while the Australian political landscape has changed a little since then, many will view the use of the word ‘Sorry’ as being a political statement. It is more than that, though, and you need to read the story to appreciate why. ‘Sorry’ isn’t only about the cultural divide and relative disadvantage between races of people: it is about strength, communication and human spirit. This novel has a number of different themes and readers can choose, to some extent, which themes resonate with them. Most stories have at least one hero: in this story your choice may well depend on which of the various stories have resonated with you the most.
The circumstances surrounding the murder of Nicholas cause Mary to be removed from the household. Perdita withdraws and becomes effectively mute. She has access to a rich inner world through her eclectic accretion of Shakespeare and Aboriginal learning.
‘Sorry’ is about cultural displacement, communication, and alternate forms of reality. The stories of Billy, Perdita and Mary convey some uncomfortable truths as well as reinforcing that values are relative rather than absolute.
I read this novel about 12 months ago and, while the Australian political landscape has changed a little since then, many will view the use of the word ‘Sorry’ as being a political statement. It is more than that, though, and you need to read the story to appreciate why. ‘Sorry’ isn’t only about the cultural divide and relative disadvantage between races of people: it is about strength, communication and human spirit. This novel has a number of different themes and readers can choose, to some extent, which themes resonate with them. Most stories have at least one hero: in this story your choice may well depend on which of the various stories have resonated with you the most.
leslie_d's review against another edition
5.0
" “I have thought about it all my life, this moment of eclipse. It is perhaps because departures are complex, not simple, that we are tempted to cast them reductively, as if they were episodes in a novel, neat and emblematic. There is a relish which people speak of their childhoods, but also a shrewd suppression of moments of inversion, when what is deducted begins to define the experience. In the deepest folds of memory, the heaviest sediments, paradoxically, are those produced by loss. The convolutions of what we are include unrecongnised wanderings, pilgrimages, perhaps, back to these disappeared spaces, these obscurely, intangibly attractive sites. I wanted a “last glimpse” memory so that I could seal the shack, and the death, and my life with Mary, into an immured and sequestered past. To guard against what? To guard against haunting.” (129)
Gail Jones’ Sorry begins with a child of 10, Perdita, caught in whispers and held hands with her sister friend Mary. Perdita’s father lying in a pool of blood on the floor. Perdita remembering. The page is turned and the narrator begins again and the story of Perdita’s childhood begins again with the introduction of her parents: who they are, how they meet, and how they come to be the way they are with one another. Perdita is then born, an unwanted intrusion into already private and individually driven non-lives.
Perdita’s Englishman father Nicholas is an anthropologist who has visions of grandeur which shift circumstantially. Coming into this career late, a veteran of the first World War, looking for something adventurous and meaningful and away, he finds a job in Australia and is posted at a rural cattle station. By this time he is married to Perdita’s mother (who is not all that young either), a woman as quickly and equally disappointed with her marital choice as her husband. Stella moves inwardly, isolated from familiarity and family (sisters with whom she was close). She clings, as she always has, to Shakespeare. She is prone to mental breaks and general madness and is completely self-absorbed.
Perdita is raised (in part) by the Aborigine people assigned the cattle station run by the Trevors, the Mrs Flora Trevor taking the lonely girl somewhat in hand. The Trevors’ youngest son, Billy, a deaf-mute, becomes one of Perdita’s only friends. Mary comes into the story a little later. Where the three will become one skin of a family : Perdita, Mary’s sister. Billy, Perdita’s brother. Their friendship means everything to Perdita, and the story.
The Reader begins to notice how the narrator is working her way around remembering the event with which the novel begins. She sets up the characters and the circumstances in as linear a fashion as the setting down of memory can be, sometimes nervously darting around a particular age–10–and moving forward. The narrator admits to flights of fancy, of concrete imaginings to events to which she couldn’t possibly be present, and with some melodrama, but I never felt a necessity to question her reliability on the whole. She is an adult, looking back. She is thoughtful in her expressions, particular in story, working her way around and toward an important revelation.
Perdita doesn’t mean to forget. The Listener of her Story understands that what happened must have been horrible. There are bright and beautiful moments of Perdita’s childhood to bask in, but much of her life was lonely, abusive, scary, and in need of some form of restitution.'
[...]
"It is a painful part of the story of Perdita’s childhood where Perdita would find moments where she felt love and affection for a mother who less frequently found moments in which she was affectionate with her daughter. The feelings were in some way a reassurance, because she should have some love for her mother, shouldn’t she? But the blood stain could only reach so far before dilution and dissolution; but how far?
As Stella had found true familial love with her sisters, so too does Perdita find it with her sister Mary, the Aboriginal girl who comes to help care for Perdita while Stella is hospitalized. Their connection is swift and deeply held. It is important to understand how deeply held Perdita and Mary’s sisterhood is. It is important to understand the people from which Mary was wrought, the Aborigine. The native cultural traditions are portrayed in stark contrast to the colonizing forces. They are intelligent, graceful, hospitable, wise, merciful.
What Sorry shares about the Aboriginal culture is relevant to the story, even as it is informative. No thing about Sorry feels inconsequential. The frequent and effortless dispensing of large words is not to propel the novel into high flying literary circles or to showcase the author’s lexical intellect. The narrator is intent on the most precise image, the most illustrative word to carry the complex weight of her meaning. Stella would apply the right quote from a Shakespearean story in the right moment. The setting would enhance and project the right amount of gravity. The novel’s title deceptively simple–in light of ignorance–is incredibly complex, heavily-weighted in meaning and context.
In considering the title, it is remarkable how infrequently the word itself appears in the novel. Nicholas’ sense of entitlement would never consider the word. Stella is too self-absorbed and in needing of the word herself to use it with any sincerity; is there a Shakespearean form to suit the occasion? Perdita comes to learn what “sorry” means to the native culture in a peripheral sense; she doesn’t register in childhood what she would come to register in adulthood.
“That was the point, Perdita would realise much later, at which, in humility, she should have said “sorry.” She should have imagined what kind of imprisonment this was, to be closed against the rustle of leaves and the feel of wind and of rain, to be taken from her place, her own place, where her mother had died, to be sealed in the forgetfulness of someone else’s crime. Perdita should have been otherwise. She should have said “sorry.” (216)
The revelation that Perdita comes to at the end of Chapter 22 is incredibly poignant and heart-wrenching. It is a perfect ending to the story. But there is Chapter 23. I was surprised to find that it was there."
[...]
"It is of interest to me how Sorry reads like a memoir, though somewhat self-consciously, and admittedly fictive; the narrative shifting in and out of remembering and remembered sequences, in and out of contemplations on the reliability of memory, the seeing/knowing child, the effects of fear and grief, on forgetting. I think that lovers of memoir and explorers into the ideas of memory and grief would enjoy Gail Jones’ novel."
[...]
"Gail Jones’ way with language, her threaded images, metaphors, the extending whisps of established scenes, the emotion and intelligence in the craftsmanship of the form and story of Sorry is remarkable.The novel is placed in four parts, each with an epigraph, a quote from Shakespeare, not to be ignored. The four parts seem to function as good psychological breathers and to introduce a faint contemplative shift in memory/story; with the aforementioned quotes as tone-setting. And there is “A Note on “Sorry”” after the novel; which I read before. The “Note” is enlightening for those as ignorant as I am in regards to Australia-anything. My knowledge is hazily collected from a few films, novels, and travel narratives. Sorry is quite powerful on its own, but the “Note” creates a greater poignancy; and the characters as representations take on a greater clarity. Oh, the essays Sorry provokes. Oh, the Activism it incites…"
L @ omphaloskepsis
http://contemplatrix.wordpress.com/2011/07/29/sorry-by-gail-jones/
Gail Jones’ Sorry begins with a child of 10, Perdita, caught in whispers and held hands with her sister friend Mary. Perdita’s father lying in a pool of blood on the floor. Perdita remembering. The page is turned and the narrator begins again and the story of Perdita’s childhood begins again with the introduction of her parents: who they are, how they meet, and how they come to be the way they are with one another. Perdita is then born, an unwanted intrusion into already private and individually driven non-lives.
Perdita’s Englishman father Nicholas is an anthropologist who has visions of grandeur which shift circumstantially. Coming into this career late, a veteran of the first World War, looking for something adventurous and meaningful and away, he finds a job in Australia and is posted at a rural cattle station. By this time he is married to Perdita’s mother (who is not all that young either), a woman as quickly and equally disappointed with her marital choice as her husband. Stella moves inwardly, isolated from familiarity and family (sisters with whom she was close). She clings, as she always has, to Shakespeare. She is prone to mental breaks and general madness and is completely self-absorbed.
Perdita is raised (in part) by the Aborigine people assigned the cattle station run by the Trevors, the Mrs Flora Trevor taking the lonely girl somewhat in hand. The Trevors’ youngest son, Billy, a deaf-mute, becomes one of Perdita’s only friends. Mary comes into the story a little later. Where the three will become one skin of a family : Perdita, Mary’s sister. Billy, Perdita’s brother. Their friendship means everything to Perdita, and the story.
The Reader begins to notice how the narrator is working her way around remembering the event with which the novel begins. She sets up the characters and the circumstances in as linear a fashion as the setting down of memory can be, sometimes nervously darting around a particular age–10–and moving forward. The narrator admits to flights of fancy, of concrete imaginings to events to which she couldn’t possibly be present, and with some melodrama, but I never felt a necessity to question her reliability on the whole. She is an adult, looking back. She is thoughtful in her expressions, particular in story, working her way around and toward an important revelation.
Perdita doesn’t mean to forget. The Listener of her Story understands that what happened must have been horrible. There are bright and beautiful moments of Perdita’s childhood to bask in, but much of her life was lonely, abusive, scary, and in need of some form of restitution.'
[...]
"It is a painful part of the story of Perdita’s childhood where Perdita would find moments where she felt love and affection for a mother who less frequently found moments in which she was affectionate with her daughter. The feelings were in some way a reassurance, because she should have some love for her mother, shouldn’t she? But the blood stain could only reach so far before dilution and dissolution; but how far?
As Stella had found true familial love with her sisters, so too does Perdita find it with her sister Mary, the Aboriginal girl who comes to help care for Perdita while Stella is hospitalized. Their connection is swift and deeply held. It is important to understand how deeply held Perdita and Mary’s sisterhood is. It is important to understand the people from which Mary was wrought, the Aborigine. The native cultural traditions are portrayed in stark contrast to the colonizing forces. They are intelligent, graceful, hospitable, wise, merciful.
What Sorry shares about the Aboriginal culture is relevant to the story, even as it is informative. No thing about Sorry feels inconsequential. The frequent and effortless dispensing of large words is not to propel the novel into high flying literary circles or to showcase the author’s lexical intellect. The narrator is intent on the most precise image, the most illustrative word to carry the complex weight of her meaning. Stella would apply the right quote from a Shakespearean story in the right moment. The setting would enhance and project the right amount of gravity. The novel’s title deceptively simple–in light of ignorance–is incredibly complex, heavily-weighted in meaning and context.
In considering the title, it is remarkable how infrequently the word itself appears in the novel. Nicholas’ sense of entitlement would never consider the word. Stella is too self-absorbed and in needing of the word herself to use it with any sincerity; is there a Shakespearean form to suit the occasion? Perdita comes to learn what “sorry” means to the native culture in a peripheral sense; she doesn’t register in childhood what she would come to register in adulthood.
“That was the point, Perdita would realise much later, at which, in humility, she should have said “sorry.” She should have imagined what kind of imprisonment this was, to be closed against the rustle of leaves and the feel of wind and of rain, to be taken from her place, her own place, where her mother had died, to be sealed in the forgetfulness of someone else’s crime. Perdita should have been otherwise. She should have said “sorry.” (216)
The revelation that Perdita comes to at the end of Chapter 22 is incredibly poignant and heart-wrenching. It is a perfect ending to the story. But there is Chapter 23. I was surprised to find that it was there."
[...]
"It is of interest to me how Sorry reads like a memoir, though somewhat self-consciously, and admittedly fictive; the narrative shifting in and out of remembering and remembered sequences, in and out of contemplations on the reliability of memory, the seeing/knowing child, the effects of fear and grief, on forgetting. I think that lovers of memoir and explorers into the ideas of memory and grief would enjoy Gail Jones’ novel."
[...]
"Gail Jones’ way with language, her threaded images, metaphors, the extending whisps of established scenes, the emotion and intelligence in the craftsmanship of the form and story of Sorry is remarkable.The novel is placed in four parts, each with an epigraph, a quote from Shakespeare, not to be ignored. The four parts seem to function as good psychological breathers and to introduce a faint contemplative shift in memory/story; with the aforementioned quotes as tone-setting. And there is “A Note on “Sorry”” after the novel; which I read before. The “Note” is enlightening for those as ignorant as I am in regards to Australia-anything. My knowledge is hazily collected from a few films, novels, and travel narratives. Sorry is quite powerful on its own, but the “Note” creates a greater poignancy; and the characters as representations take on a greater clarity. Oh, the essays Sorry provokes. Oh, the Activism it incites…"
L @ omphaloskepsis
http://contemplatrix.wordpress.com/2011/07/29/sorry-by-gail-jones/
izzyslittlelibrary's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
suvata's review against another edition
3.0
Reading for Litsy Markup Postal Book Club (#LMPBC) Round 3 - Group P.
http://www.SignUpGenius.com/go/5080444AEAD2CA0FF2-litsy3
To you be perfectly honest, I did not like this book when I started it. To quote one of my fellow #LMPBC Group P readers, it was “raw“. It wasn’t until well into the book (maybe 50% in) that I became fascinated with the story itself and with learning about the indigenous people of Australia. There is a lot going on in the story — snakes, Shakespeare, religion/spirituality, abuse, mental illness, murder, dysfunctional families, and so much more. I now think it was well worth the read but I think I would hesitate to recommend it to anyone because it was so sad and, yes “raw”.
http://www.SignUpGenius.com/go/5080444AEAD2CA0FF2-litsy3
To you be perfectly honest, I did not like this book when I started it. To quote one of my fellow #LMPBC Group P readers, it was “raw“. It wasn’t until well into the book (maybe 50% in) that I became fascinated with the story itself and with learning about the indigenous people of Australia. There is a lot going on in the story — snakes, Shakespeare, religion/spirituality, abuse, mental illness, murder, dysfunctional families, and so much more. I now think it was well worth the read but I think I would hesitate to recommend it to anyone because it was so sad and, yes “raw”.
saraaaa's review against another edition
dark
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.5
This book was... too much.
Too wordy, too graphic, too disturbing, too packed – so that I couldn't focus on the story, and on the true meaning behind all those superfluous words and explicit descriptions of sexual assaults and emotional abuse and violence.
It didn't grab me at all, despite reading it from start to finish – I had to, as it was part of an English Literature university course, but I would have stopped after 10 pages if only I had the chance to.
The intent – raising awarenesson the Aboriginal Stolen Generatios in Australia – is noble. But the actual nods to the problem were too few, and got lost along the way, submerged by:
- the story of the protagonist's broken and anaffective family, from their arrival to Australia from the very last days of her parents;
- all the emotional neglect and abuse the protagonist, Perdita, had to endure as a child;
- the deafness of one of her best friends, Billy, and the way he got into the world;
- her mother's mental health's disastrous decline;
- WWII as seen from the eyes of an Australian child;
compared to all of this, Perdita's interactions with the Aboriginal community and the life-changing events she shared with her Aboriginal "sister" Mary were, well, just another complicated issue in the firmament of Perdita's pitiful life.
These kinds of narrative wanderings, you can usually excuse in an autobiography, in a memoir, in which the story is unfolded before it's put down on paper, not in fiction, where it's the other way around. I feel like three books could easily have come out of this one, plot wise.
And the abundance and redundancy of the words Jones to use just made the reading of this book even more slow, turning even the most striking moments into never-ending poetic descriptions — ironically, the novel itself highlights how Perdita's mother, Stella, uses Shakespeare's poetry to somehow sugarcoat and dim reality.
There might have been some good parts in this book (I really enjoyed the bits about Billy, probably because of their directness), some that even made me smile, but were, at the end, way less than those that made me physically grimace. Nothing of what the author wanted to spark in the reader really reached me, the uncomfortable disgust mostly being directed at the novel per se, rather than at the issues it tried to denounce.
Too wordy, too graphic, too disturbing, too packed – so that I couldn't focus on the story, and on the true meaning behind all those superfluous words and explicit descriptions of sexual assaults and emotional abuse and violence.
It didn't grab me at all, despite reading it from start to finish – I had to, as it was part of an English Literature university course, but I would have stopped after 10 pages if only I had the chance to.
The intent – raising awarenesson the Aboriginal Stolen Generatios in Australia – is noble. But the actual nods to the problem were too few, and got lost along the way, submerged by:
- the story of the protagonist's broken and anaffective family, from their arrival to Australia from the very last days of her parents;
- all the emotional neglect and abuse the protagonist, Perdita, had to endure as a child;
- the deafness of one of her best friends, Billy, and the way he got into the world;
- her mother's mental health's disastrous decline;
- WWII as seen from the eyes of an Australian child;
compared to all of this, Perdita's interactions with the Aboriginal community and the life-changing events she shared with her Aboriginal "sister" Mary were, well, just another complicated issue in the firmament of Perdita's pitiful life.
These kinds of narrative wanderings, you can usually excuse in an autobiography, in a memoir, in which the story is unfolded before it's put down on paper, not in fiction, where it's the other way around. I feel like three books could easily have come out of this one, plot wise.
And the abundance and redundancy of the words Jones to use just made the reading of this book even more slow, turning even the most striking moments into never-ending poetic descriptions — ironically, the novel itself highlights how Perdita's mother, Stella, uses Shakespeare's poetry to somehow sugarcoat and dim reality.
There might have been some good parts in this book (I really enjoyed the bits about Billy, probably because of their directness), some that even made me smile, but were, at the end, way less than those that made me physically grimace. Nothing of what the author wanted to spark in the reader really reached me, the uncomfortable disgust mostly being directed at the novel per se, rather than at the issues it tried to denounce.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Abandonment, Blood, Child abuse, Death, Death of parent, Dementia, Domestic abuse, Gore, Grief, Mental illness, Murder, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Pregnancy, Rape, Sexual assault, Toxic relationship, and Violence
Moderate: Colonisation, Racism, and War
Minor: Alcohol, Injury/Injury detail, and Religious bigotry
booksaremyjam's review against another edition
3.0
"Sorry" attempts to be both political and beautiful as it follows the stuttering life of Perdita. Jones may love "Macbeth" a tad too much for me, and the switches from 1st to 3rd person are maddening; but I see Jones' effort through the pages of "Sorry." She is outraged with the Aboriginie/Australian relations and personifies it through Perdita; the white girl with no voice and no future.
I do struggle with my feelings about Perdita; by the end of the novel I rather dislike the unfortunate girl, but I leave that for you to decide for yourself.
I do struggle with my feelings about Perdita; by the end of the novel I rather dislike the unfortunate girl, but I leave that for you to decide for yourself.
bookcrazylady45's review against another edition
3.0
Novelette. X-Files fan fiction found online. Slash. Skinner retired, Mulder heading a think tank and insane, Scully working in Africa, Alex writing novels in Canada. Alex's agent is a hoot. RCMP are sweet. Skinner/Krycek pairing and rescuing Scully from a war zone.
yeahdeadslow's review against another edition
3.0
Hm.
Hmm.
I don't know.
This was a sad book and it made me feel even sadder than I've already been. Not the good kind of sadness, but the unhappy kind. The writing was beautiful. Gail Jones was able to describe things exquisitely with an economy of words. But that also backfired, as her brief descriptions of unpleasant things were incisive. (The placenta, ack!)
I actually liked the ending. Though I still didn't love them, I feel that was when we truly got to know the characters. Till then, they'd been little more than strangers.
I've been in a funk, I don't know what I really thought about this. I read it, and read it slowly; but I don't feel like I really read it. It didn't grab me. There were elements I could've loved, but I just didn't at all.
(Sarah - I would not advise using my silly review to determine whether or not you read this. So much for me saving you time. :P)
Hmm.
I don't know.
This was a sad book and it made me feel even sadder than I've already been. Not the good kind of sadness, but the unhappy kind. The writing was beautiful. Gail Jones was able to describe things exquisitely with an economy of words. But that also backfired, as her brief descriptions of unpleasant things were incisive. (The placenta, ack!)
I actually liked the ending. Though I still didn't love them, I feel that was when we truly got to know the characters. Till then, they'd been little more than strangers.
I've been in a funk, I don't know what I really thought about this. I read it, and read it slowly; but I don't feel like I really read it. It didn't grab me. There were elements I could've loved, but I just didn't at all.
(Sarah - I would not advise using my silly review to determine whether or not you read this. So much for me saving you time. :P)