Word: kretser
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Michelle De Kretser's first novel, The Rose Grower, was set in revolutionary France; her second, The Hamilton Case, which won a Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Encore Award, in colonial Ceylon. With her latest, The Lost Dog, she visits contemporary Australia and mid-20th century India. The span of globetrotting mirrors de Kretser's own life. Born in Sri Lanka, she migrated to Australia as a teenager. De Kretser took her first degree in French at Melbourne University, then moved to Paris for her M.A. before returning to Australia where she worked, perhaps aptly, as a travel editor...
...types of art or mimetic representation that the book brings into contact with each other: Tom's, in language; Nelly's, in images. They also mark the lives and memories of the characters and, crucially, the narrator's own discourse, for one of the things that de Kretser has undertaken is a kind of psychogeography of contemporary Australia - a study of strata of memory, supernatural presences, and the accreted traces the past leaves behind on landscapes, places, objects and individual and collective lives...
...relentless transitions to flashback are not always smoothly effected, and de Kretser's appropriation of the discourse of literary critical theory can occasionally bring a jarring register to the domain of fiction, but even these jagged edges are spellbinding because they are so intelligent, constantly forcing us to look under the skin of things. There are all kinds of terrors lurking within the heart of the book - these are for the reader to discover - but the one that is most palpable is the undeniable fact that this book is touched, like Rilke's "terrible angel," by the terror of greatness...
Obeysekere fancies himself a Holmesian observer in his own right and an instrument of English justice, but he can't see the treacherousness--as a Ceylonese prosecuting a case involving white men--of the territory he's treading. De Kretser's prose is stunning and subtle in depicting his downfall, evoking the glittering excesses of colonial life--after a party "you could have strolled across the lagoon on the champagne corks"--and the tropical fecundity of Ceylon with equally irresistible power. Who could stop reading a chapter that begins, "Her father, a bony, vivid man with a taste for women...
...confined to stormy nights and remote houses and crime scenes. It is the condition in which we live, and sometimes the all-knowing detective arrives too late to wrap up the loose ends or not at all. "Time never simplifies--it unravels and complicates," De Kretser writes. "Guilty parties show up everywhere. The plot does nothing but thicken...