The Swan Book Audiobook By Alexis Wright cover art

The Swan Book

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The Swan Book

By: Alexis Wright
Narrated by: Jacqui Katona
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The new novel by Alexis Wright, whose previous novel, Carpentaria, won the Miles Franklin Award and four other major prizes including the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year Award.

The Swan Book is set in the future, with Aboriginals still living under the Intervention in the north, in an environment fundamentally altered by climate change. It follows the life of a mute teenager called Oblivia, the victim of gang rape by petrol-sniffing youths, from the displaced community where she lives in a hulk, in a swamp filled with rusting boats and thousands of black swans driven from other parts of the country, to her marriage to Warren Finch, the first Aboriginal president of Australia, and her elevation to the position of first lady, confined to a tower in a flooded and lawless southern city.

The Swan Book has all the qualities which made Wright's previous novel, Carpentaria, a prize-winning best seller. It offers an intimate awareness of the realities facing Aboriginal people; the wild energy and humour in her writing finds hope in the bleakest situations; and the remarkable combination of storytelling elements drawn from myth and legend and fairy tale.

©2013 Alexis Wright (P)2016 Bolinda Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction

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I'm going to put aside the audio performance which was lovely and focus this review on the book itself. I do not pretend to have a lot of knowledge about Australia's First Peoples and their plight, outside of what I have gleaned from pop-culture and a screening of "Rabbit Proof Fence". That being said this book is dense with purple prose — symbolism, and what I am sure is allegory. If it is allegory, I don't have the historical context. There is mostly caricature — not character. People talking at each with little to no conversation. It's a lot of telling and not showing. I won't downplay the visuals the book evokes — I would love to see a talent make this into a 30 minute animated short. Not a novel. This was a slog. Not for me.

Symbolism with a Big S

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