Dream Stuff: David Malouf (engl.) 234 S.

Nine haunting stories from the award winning author of Remembering Babylon, in which history and geography, as well as the past and the present, combine and often collide, illuminating the landscape and revealing the character of Australia.

 

An eleven-year-old boy sees his father in his own elongated shadow only to realize that he will not return from the war. In a parting moment, a young woman hired to “marry” vacationing soldiers, grasps the weight of the word “woe.” When a failing farmer senselessly murders a wandering aborigine, he imperils his son but discovers in the spring of sympathy that follows the power to influence others. Wise and moving, startling and lyrical, Dream Stuff reverberates with the unpredictability of human experience, revealing people who are shaped by the mysterious rhythms of nature as well as the ghosts of their own pasts.

 

From the image of a small boy entranced by his mother's GI Escort, yet still hoping for the return of a father 'missing in action', to the portrait of an adult writer trying to piece together a defining image of his late father, these outstanding stories conjure up with sharp intensity the memories and events that make a man.

 

Powerfully vivid stories by a great writer, they range over more than a century of Australian life, from green tropical lushness to 'blacksoil country', from scrub and outback to city streets-evoking dark shadows beneath a bright sun, and lives shaped by the ghosts of history and the rhythms of unruly nature.