ANTIPODES - Hardcover

Widely admired as one of Australia's finest novelists, David Malouf is also a short story writer of rare distinction and originality; and in this, his first collection, he evokes with compassion and exactitude the emotions and the excitement of adolescence, the melancholy threads that tie Australian immigrants to the Europe they'd left behind, and the sad, nostalgic power with which, as time passes, we endow the ordinary objects of daily life. The Antipodes of the title refer not simply to the contrast between Europe and Australia, of new world certainties and doubts against the denseness of the old, but to those fundamental opposites with which these remarkable stories are concerned: darkness and light, life and death, youth and age, men and women, intimate affections and random, imminent violence. Gazing through a telescope at the Southern skies, a teenage boy becomes 'aware for the first time of the grainy reality of my own life, and then, a fact of no large significance, of the certainty of my death'; in a remote, sub-tropical village, a woman recalls her bizarre European childhood as the daughter of a famous prima donna; the love of an elderly woman's life, killed in the trenches in 1917, lingers on, a touching, skeletal ghost, in a set of old X-ray photographs. David Malouf combines a vivid, passionate delight in the bright actuality of life with a bleak yet oddly consoling awareness of the nearness of death, and the darkness all around; the result is a moving, humane and wonderfully vital collection of stories that will surely establish his reputation as one of the most remarkable practitioners at work today.