bibliotechied's review
5.0
Such a clever take on Lawson’s story. Everything from paint chips to scripts to Year 8 essays. More ways than you could possibly believe of retelling The Drover’s Wife. Absolutely hilarious and very witty.
have_you_read_this's review
3.0
"Ironically, given that it’s the same story 101 times, the book never felt overly repetitive [...]" - Full review on Have You Read This
stephbookshine's review
4.0
*I received a free copy of this book, with thanks to the author and Eye and Lightning Books. The decision to review and my opinions are my own.*
This is an incredibly clever book – telling the same story in 101 very different ways, from poetry to prose, puzzles to memes.
The book starts by presenting the Henry Lawson short story ‘The Drover’s Wife’. Ryan O’Neill then explores the story, turning it inside out and upside down, twisting it and shaping it into entirely new perspectives.
On the surface this is an incredibly witty and entertaining satire – exceedingly well executed and very creative. Dig a little deeper and you realise that, in simply reading this book casually, you gain such an intimate insight into the original story that you could write your own essay on it quite easily. I imagine Ryan O’Neill can recite the thing verbatim in his sleep!
Some of my personal favourite re-tellings were ‘A Self-Published Novel Cover’, ‘A 1980’s Computer Game’, ‘Backwards’, ‘A Reality TV Show’ and ‘An RSPCA Report’, so as you can see, there really is something here for everyone. Definitely worth a look if you want a read that is both entertaining and (kind of) educational!
A snake approaches.
The women and children run
And hide in the house.
Through the long night she watches –
Shedding memories like scales
And the snake burns with the dawn.
– Ryan O’Neill, ‘Tanka’ in The Drover’s Wives
Review by Steph Warren of Bookshine and Readbows blog
https://bookshineandreadbows.wordpress.com/2019/08/27/the-drovers-wives-ryan-oneill/
This is an incredibly clever book – telling the same story in 101 very different ways, from poetry to prose, puzzles to memes.
The book starts by presenting the Henry Lawson short story ‘The Drover’s Wife’. Ryan O’Neill then explores the story, turning it inside out and upside down, twisting it and shaping it into entirely new perspectives.
On the surface this is an incredibly witty and entertaining satire – exceedingly well executed and very creative. Dig a little deeper and you realise that, in simply reading this book casually, you gain such an intimate insight into the original story that you could write your own essay on it quite easily. I imagine Ryan O’Neill can recite the thing verbatim in his sleep!
Some of my personal favourite re-tellings were ‘A Self-Published Novel Cover’, ‘A 1980’s Computer Game’, ‘Backwards’, ‘A Reality TV Show’ and ‘An RSPCA Report’, so as you can see, there really is something here for everyone. Definitely worth a look if you want a read that is both entertaining and (kind of) educational!
A snake approaches.
The women and children run
And hide in the house.
Through the long night she watches –
Shedding memories like scales
And the snake burns with the dawn.
– Ryan O’Neill, ‘Tanka’ in The Drover’s Wives
Review by Steph Warren of Bookshine and Readbows blog
https://bookshineandreadbows.wordpress.com/2019/08/27/the-drovers-wives-ryan-oneill/
brona's review
4.0
99 Interpretations of the Drover's Wives was a LOT of fun. Starting with a reprint of the original Henry Lawson story to refresh our memories, O'Neill then went on to retell the story in various literary styles.
I'd love to share all 99 with you, but that would just get tedious. Which is how I also felt if I tried to read more than 4 or 5 in one sitting.
The Drover's Wives was best read in small doses so that one could enjoy each version for what it was.
My personal favourites were the Hemingwayesque, the Year 8 English Essay (which had me laughing out loud and reading parts out to a bemused Mr Books), Editorial Comments, A Gossip Column, A 1980's Computer Game, Tweets, A Question Asked by an Audience Member at a Writer's Festival and Biographical. I also enjoyed the Cryptic Crossword and Wordsearch.
Some of the interpretations left me scrambling around on google trying to understand the reference. For instance, I have never read any Cormac McCarthy, so the McCarthyesque version went over my head until I found a vocab list of McCarthy's books that explained everything!
Full review here - http://bronasbooks.blogspot.com/2019/11/99-interpretations-of-drovers-wives-by.html
I'd love to share all 99 with you, but that would just get tedious. Which is how I also felt if I tried to read more than 4 or 5 in one sitting.
The Drover's Wives was best read in small doses so that one could enjoy each version for what it was.
My personal favourites were the Hemingwayesque, the Year 8 English Essay (which had me laughing out loud and reading parts out to a bemused Mr Books), Editorial Comments, A Gossip Column, A 1980's Computer Game, Tweets, A Question Asked by an Audience Member at a Writer's Festival and Biographical. I also enjoyed the Cryptic Crossword and Wordsearch.
Some of the interpretations left me scrambling around on google trying to understand the reference. For instance, I have never read any Cormac McCarthy, so the McCarthyesque version went over my head until I found a vocab list of McCarthy's books that explained everything!
Full review here - http://bronasbooks.blogspot.com/2019/11/99-interpretations-of-drovers-wives-by.html
arirang's review
4.0
The Drovers Wives is another wonderful book by Ryan O'Neill and, in the UK, Eye & Lightning Books, to follow Their Brilliant Careers.
Like that book, this takes on an icon of Australian literature, and more than delivers both on literary humour but also criticism.
In a similar vein (and with an acknowledged debt) to Raymond Queneau's famous Exercices de style, O'Neill provides us 99 (*) variations of one story in a variety of styles.
While Queneau riffed on a simple story written for his novel, O'Neill uses as a basis the classical Australian late 19th century short story The Drover's Wife by Henry Lawson (included in the book but also available here), a story which ends:
‘Mother, I won’t never go drovin’; blarst me if I do!’ And she hugs him to her worn-out breast and kisses him; and they sit thus together while the sickly daylight breaks over the bush.
* actually the UK version has 101 variations, due. I'm told, to the restoration of two rather risque tales - one in the style of A Letter to Penthouse and the other A Sex Manual - which were apparently not included in the Australian original so that the book could be used in schools, given the ubiquity of Lawson's tale in literary syllabuses there, although in practice there is some adult humour elsewhere.
O'Neill's own explanation for his choice of project:
There are so many highlights it is pointless to try and list them all as I'd end up reproducing the table of contents, but I did particularly enjoy the tale rewritten as a 1980s computer adventure game, with all the frustration of finding the accepted exact formulation of a command, as well as that annoying character who "sits down and starts singing about gold."
Others include Cento, assembled Felix Culpa style entirely from lines of well-known Australian poems, and the very well-observed A Question Asked by an Audience Member at a Writers' Festival, which, inevitably, after a couple of pages of rambling and self-promotion ends 'I guess this is more of a comment.'
The fun and rewrites extend to the Index (albeit not quite as vital to the book as was the one in Their Brilliant Careers), the Bibliography, even the Note on The Type, and ends with a Colour Swatch on the back-cover.
Any fuzziness in this swatch is down to my poor photography skills, but there were a couple of places the printing in this edition was a little blurry, although given the rest of the book is reproduced to a high standard, this may have been deliberate:
- the Scratch and Sniff version - perhaps the smudging is due to excessive scratching (and thereby explains the resulting lack of any scent to actually sniff!);
- the Cryptic Crossword, designed with help from a professional and with very useful solutions explaining the language of crosswords for the uninitiated. The numbers on the crossword grid can't be read, although they can be inferred using the usual convention, which does lead to deferred discovery of a clever hidden joke (I was a little surprised at the missed opportunity to make a similar joke in the Word Search)
Not every tale is perfect - the Cosmo Quiz was fun but the scores (are you mostly A's etc) seemed misallocated on some questions, and O'Neill could usefully take some lessons from the Oulipan Queneau on writing Maths Problems - but there is a very high success rate. While some pay prefer to dip-in and sample, the book is actually pure pleasure to read cover to cover, and indeed may be best appreciated that way given some of the recurrent themes both serious (Lawson's troubling treatment of the aboriginal characters) and fun (the 'sickly-coloured sunset' comes up a lot).
Not quite as original as O'Neill's Their Brilliant Careers, which was a bizarre omission from last year's Republic of Consciousness Prize, but highly recommended. 4.5 stars.
Like that book, this takes on an icon of Australian literature, and more than delivers both on literary humour but also criticism.
In a similar vein (and with an acknowledged debt) to Raymond Queneau's famous Exercices de style, O'Neill provides us 99 (*) variations of one story in a variety of styles.
While Queneau riffed on a simple story written for his novel, O'Neill uses as a basis the classical Australian late 19th century short story The Drover's Wife by Henry Lawson (included in the book but also available here), a story which ends:
‘Mother, I won’t never go drovin’; blarst me if I do!’ And she hugs him to her worn-out breast and kisses him; and they sit thus together while the sickly daylight breaks over the bush.
* actually the UK version has 101 variations, due. I'm told, to the restoration of two rather risque tales - one in the style of A Letter to Penthouse and the other A Sex Manual - which were apparently not included in the Australian original so that the book could be used in schools, given the ubiquity of Lawson's tale in literary syllabuses there, although in practice there is some adult humour elsewhere.
O'Neill's own explanation for his choice of project:
With Lawson inaugurating a tradition of writing which Patrick White criticised as being 'the dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism,' it is easy to forget that, for his time, Lawson was an experimental writer. Before Lawson, most Australian short-story writers remained wedded to the conventions of the English novel; their characters were robbers, pirates, noble milkmaids – not real people – and their style was florid, stuffy and over-elaborate. Lawson swept all this away to create something new and distinctively Australian; but he was so successful that within a few years Lawson's conventions had replaced the English ones. The experimental became the traditional.See also this longer SMH interview which explains how this book follows on from Frank Moorhouse's The Drover's Wife: A Collection.
With 'The Drover's Wives' I wanted to experiment with this iconic Australian short story by retelling it in as many different ways as I could find. I hope that each version of 'The Drover's Wives' finds something new in Lawson's short story, and while celebrating Lawson's great contribution to Australian literature, it will also serve as a reminder that literary realism is not the only way to tell Australian stories.
There are so many highlights it is pointless to try and list them all as I'd end up reproducing the table of contents, but I did particularly enjoy the tale rewritten as a 1980s computer adventure game, with all the frustration of finding the accepted exact formulation of a command, as well as that annoying character who "sits down and starts singing about gold."
Others include Cento, assembled Felix Culpa style entirely from lines of well-known Australian poems, and the very well-observed A Question Asked by an Audience Member at a Writers' Festival, which, inevitably, after a couple of pages of rambling and self-promotion ends 'I guess this is more of a comment.'
The fun and rewrites extend to the Index (albeit not quite as vital to the book as was the one in Their Brilliant Careers), the Bibliography, even the Note on The Type, and ends with a Colour Swatch on the back-cover.
Any fuzziness in this swatch is down to my poor photography skills, but there were a couple of places the printing in this edition was a little blurry, although given the rest of the book is reproduced to a high standard, this may have been deliberate:
- the Scratch and Sniff version - perhaps the smudging is due to excessive scratching (and thereby explains the resulting lack of any scent to actually sniff!);
- the Cryptic Crossword, designed with help from a professional and with very useful solutions explaining the language of crosswords for the uninitiated. The numbers on the crossword grid can't be read, although they can be inferred using the usual convention, which does lead to deferred discovery of a clever hidden joke (I was a little surprised at the missed opportunity to make a similar joke in the Word Search)
Not every tale is perfect - the Cosmo Quiz was fun but the scores (are you mostly A's etc) seemed misallocated on some questions, and O'Neill could usefully take some lessons from the Oulipan Queneau on writing Maths Problems - but there is a very high success rate. While some pay prefer to dip-in and sample, the book is actually pure pleasure to read cover to cover, and indeed may be best appreciated that way given some of the recurrent themes both serious (Lawson's troubling treatment of the aboriginal characters) and fun (the 'sickly-coloured sunset' comes up a lot).
Not quite as original as O'Neill's Their Brilliant Careers, which was a bizarre omission from last year's Republic of Consciousness Prize, but highly recommended. 4.5 stars.
muninnherself's review
4.0
I really loved O'Neill's previous book and this is pretty great too. I expect if I'd read the short story that inspired it before - I guess Australians read it at school - it would have got five stars. (The book does include the original so don't panic.) It's clever and funny. I look forward to reading the next one!
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