Praiseworthy

January 7, 2025 4:06 PM

Miles Franklin-winning Wiradjuri author Tara June Winch says it’s a book you feel “in all your nerve endings and your blood and your soul when reading it … It’s staggering in its scope and its themes.”

Hmm, after mention of Absolution in another post from today, I thought I might mention Praiseworthy, by Alexis Wright, as there might be some overlap in interest between the two. I was lured into Praiseworthy by this article, from which the front page text is pulled.

I've just finished the first section of it, and don't have more to say yet. I'm very intrigued to see how different the next section is (or is not?).

posted by neuromodulator (1 comment total)

It's a long Australian novel. FTFA, for non-clickers:

Unfolding over 10 parts, each narrated by a different Oracle, Praiseworthy takes place in and around a lapsed “best Aboriginal Tidy Town” of the same name, overshadowed by a mysterious ochre-coloured “old grief haze”. Its residents, already ground down by more than 200 years of colonisation and aggressive assimilation policies, have been branded by the “Australian Government for Aboriginal People” (and a shrill national media) as paedophiles, alcoholics and neglectful parents. (Australia readers will easily recognise Wright’s target as the controversial Northern Territory Emergency Response, AKA the intervention, launched in 2007). Our hero is staunchly sovereign “culture dreamer” Cause Man Steel, who has a plan to get his people “through the century on the back of the burning planet” – with a little help from Australia’s five million feral donkeys.

The world of the novel is richly drawn, but the plot is light; rather than a linear narrative, the book follows a looping structure described by one reviewer as “relentlessly repetitive”.

posted by wenestvedt at 9:58 AM on January 8