Alexis Wright Carpentaria review and information of the content of the 2006 novel by the Aboriginal Australian writer. Here you can read information about the content of the famous novel by Alexis Wright, the author and the publication.
Alexis Wright Carpentaria reviews
- “Wright breaks all the rules of grammar and syntax to sweep us along on a great torrent of language that thrills and amazes with its inventiveness and humor and with the sheer power of its storytelling… Like the Gulf Country itself, this is big enough to lose yourself in. Once in, you may never want to be found.” (Sydney Morning Herald)
- “The writing is the best in the country, some of the best in the world; we call to mind Alexis Wright when they talk about our country’s great literary voice.” (Tara June Winch, The Guardian)
- “By the end of the book you’ll be seduced by its Dreamtime logic, and probably persuaded by its passionate political and ecological message. It’s not an easy read, but if you want to know the real Australia, persevere.” (The Daily Telegraph)
- “Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria is a masterpiece of the art form, a novel of immense accomplishment that combines local storytelling with national history, interweaving themes of conquest and subjugation with the struggle between indigenous and foreign civilizations. Most importantly, this work of art is composed in the most exquisite literary style, making someone like me who writes novels as a profession feel absolute awe and admiration.” (Mo Yan, Winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize)
Carpentaria
- Author: Alexis Wright (Australia)
- Book type: Aboriginal novel, Australian novel
- First Edition: 2006
- Publisher reissue: New Directions
- Released: February 6, 2024
- Length: 480 pages
- Format: paperback / ebook
- Prize: $ 18.95
- Winner of the Miles Franklin Award 2007
- Order book from: Amazon / Bol
Blurb of the 2006 novel by Alexis Wright the Aboriginal author
Carpentaria is an epic of the Gulf Country of northwestern Queensland, Australia. Its portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centers on the powerful Phantom family, leader of the Westend Pricklebush people, and its battles with old Joseph Midnight’s renegade Eastend mob, on the one hand, and with the white officials of Uptown and the nearby rapacious, ecologically disastrous Gurfurrit mine on the other.
Wright’s masterful novel teems with extraordinary characters—the outcast savior Elias Smith, the religious zealot Mozzie Fishman, the murderous mayor Bruiser, the moth-ridden Captain Nicoli Finn, the activist Will Phantom, and above all, the rulers of the family, the queen of the garbage dump and the fish-embalming king of time: Angel Day and Normal Phantom—who stand like giants in a storm-swept world.
Wright’s storytelling is operatic and surreal: a blend of myth and scripture, politics and farce. She has a narrative gift of remaking reality itself, altering along her way, as if casually, the perception of what a novel can do with the inside of the reader’s mind.
Alexis Wright was born November 25, 1950 in Cloncurry, 
Queensland, Australia. She is a prize-winning novelist and nonfiction Aboriginal Australian writer, and a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. She has written novels and non-fiction books. She was a Distinguished Research Fellow at Western Sydney University and named the Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne in 2017.