Patrick White Books

Patrick White is of course Australia's most famous novelist. He lived for some time in exile but returned to Australia and lived there for some years before dying some years ago. He was a somewhat prickly character but his winning of the Nobel Prize for literature helped solidify his reputation.

This book is unusual in is clarity and sheer joy. A number of White's books are heavy going, densely written and pretentious. This book however was simply sheer delight. It concerns two old men who live together and are brothers. One is reasonably intelligent and has worked in a library. The other is what might be described as intellectually simple. The book consists of both of these characters speaking and talking about their lives and their past.

White was a gay man who lived most of his life with a companion who he was deeply attached to. One suspects that the book is loosely based on their later life, but of course this is only speculation. The character who is most hardly done by is the librarian who clearly is White.

It is hard really to describe the delight and joy of the book, however once I picked it up I could not stop reading it.

In his autobiography, Patrick White calls this one of his three best books.

(The other two: The Aunt's Story and The Solid Mandala.)

I agree.

It shimmers with his usual lustrous prose. And the journey of his main character through various incarnations--drag queen in Greece, WWI soldier in France, jackaroo (ranch hand) in Australia, and finally expatriate again in England--is little short of amazing.

It is also eye-opening about White himself, and his parents.

Brilliant stuff.

As always with White, while reading it you have the sense that you are not reading but listening to your own mind. Or listening to God's mind.

Wonderful.

In his longest novel, written in 1970, Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick White examines the question of an artist's creativity, where it comes from, whether it can be controlled, and what obligations, if any, accompany it. As he traces the life of Hurtle Duffield from the age of four until his death as an elderly (and successful) avant-garde artist, we see Duffield always as somehow different from his peers. The son of a laundress and a bottle collector, Hurtle is from birth inspired, painting large images on walls as a toddler, but he recognizes at an early age that "people look down at their plates if you said something was 'beautiful.'" To provide him with opportunities which will allow his genius to flourish, his parents sell him to the wealthy family for which his mother works when he is four years old.

As a member of the Courtney family, Hurtle travels and becomes educated, though he continues to see rather than think. For him, the usual emotional traumas of adolescence are accompanied by unique questions of his identity, both because of his two families and also because of his view of the world. Not religious, he sees God as the Great Vivisector, and men treating each other as animals, slaughtering each other in war. When he himself goes off to war and returns to find that the family has gone in separate directions, he devotes himself, once again, to his art, using women who love him as vehicles for his own self-expression and behaving as a vivisector himself. About his painting of one model, White says "[Hurtle] disemboweled her while she was still alive." As time passes, Hurtle continues to search for love, inspiration, self-expression, and some sort of balance in his life between his immense need to paint, his desire for personal connection, and his simultaneous need to be alone.

White's prose style is direct and concise, elegantly simple, and easy to understand. He uses colloquial speech--words like "smoodge," "sook," "slommacky," and "mumped," which must be understood from context--and reveals character and action through dialogue. The novel is old-fashioned, using a straight chronological narrative with no complex flashbacks, and it is somewhat romantic in its plot elements, despite its serious thematic development. The biggest problem for the reader is that the main character is not very likable, nor does he inspire a great deal of empathy--a difficult character to live with for approximately six hundred pages--and I'm not sure how typical he is of the artists he is supposed to represent. Mary Whipple

This is an excellent first collection: it is surprising and dark and compelling. Many of the stories resonate with a film-noir humor, my favorite of which is the title story. If you're thinking about buying this collection, do it. A number of tales are filled with surprisingly complex effects and masterfully paced plots.

I really enjoyed this story of the lives of two youths, one black and one white, born in poverty in Mississippi. Their basketball prowess brought them instant fame. They were the most sought after high school basketball players in the nation which led to corruption. Love affairs, blackmail, racism, murder, Wall Street and the actions of the Mob make the story of the basketball duo a soul searching and exciting adventure. If you're a sport or basketball fan, it's a must.

The book that I am reviewing is called, "The Journal of Patrick Seamus Flaherty". This is a journal of a United States Marine that served at Khe Sahn, Vietnam in 1968. The main conflict in this book is that the main person in this book is fighting in Vietnam and that all of his friends are getting killed. The main thing that I liked about this book was when they were in battle against the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). I really liked the battle that started on page 69 when the Marines were ambushed while on patrol. I did not like the parts of the book when they were just sitting around in camp doing nothing and enemy snipers were picking them off. I also did not like the parts where his friends were killed. One was blown up by a buried mortar and another was blown up by a rocket. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes to read books on the Vietnam War.
This book takes place between December 25, 1967 and April 22, 1968. It is mainly about the fighting that took place in South Vietnam in the areas of Hills 881 North and 881 South. It also covers the siege of the Marine base of Khe Sahn. The main person in the book is a member Golf Company, 3rd Battalion, 26th Marine Regiment. The main person, Patrick, was a high school football player who could have played football at any of the nearby collages, but decided to join the Marines instead. His father was also a firefighter for the Boston Fire Department

Not only did my 13 year old son love this book, but so did his father and I. My father was a Marine in the Vietnam War the same year that this is written about. It gave my family an insight into what my father went through and how proud we should all be of our soldiers. I'll be ordering more from this series.

The name of the book I read is My Name Is America the (Journal of Patrick Seamus Flaherty) . This book is about this man who is a round his late 20's. His name is Patrick Seamus. He is in the United States Marine Corps . This young man is fighting in the Khe Sanh ,Vietnam war ,in 1968. This book talks about how life was in the war of 1968. This book also talks about what they had to sacerfics for us. It also talks about how hard it is to leave there family. I can relate to how hard it must have been for him to be away from his family because my Dad is in the Navy and we have had separations like that. In his journal he also talks about the living conditions. They had to sleep in tents, hammocks, it was pretty unsanitary, they had little privacy , and the food was so awful . If it is as awful as they describe it I would be sick to my stomach. But out there I guess you learn to adapt.
I thought this book was very exciting ,and for all the people who like a good book that gives you a good cry .Or if your thinking about joining the U.S Marins I would say you should read this book . Most of the books I like are very detailed. I could swear that I was their I could see every detail .

I think part of the reason why I could picture it so well is the main character talks to you like your one of the guys .That helps a lot .plus during some of the book I felt like I was his best friend or his therapists. You can all ways tell how he feels. I really like that because I could sort of picture his face expressions.

Rating this book between 1 star and 5stars I give it 5 stars . The reasons I gave it this score is because the descriptions in the book paint a picture in your mind, the story itself is exiting, the characters are funny in the story ,and it was a perfect book to curl up with on a rainy day.

So if you like excitement , action, humor, mixed in with some sadness but happy at the same time this book is the book for you .So don't put reading this book at the bottom of your to do list, put it at the top of it .


Emily L.

I bought this book for my son who is 10 and interested in history. He has had a hard time finding books that will keep his interest. This book was not only interesting but informative and gave us a first hand look at what the Vietnam war was really like from this young soldiers perspective. I read much of the book and was touched by Patrick Seamus' story. It was hard to put down.

What could be worse than being stuck in Vietnam during Christmas? In The Journal of Patrick Seamus Flaherty, Patrick is an eighteen year old Marine in Vietnam during 1968. He unfortunately, arrives in Vietnam on Christmas. Patrick (nicknamed Mighty Mouse by his squad) finds the war is not as easy as he thought it would be. Death is around every corner, and it's coming from not just the enemy, the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), but also the dangerous terrain and wildlife.

One of the parts of this book I greatly enjoyed was the action and the suspense. In every chapter there is always action. An example of the action is, Patrick is out on patrol and sees movement off to his side. He quickly turns around and sees an object launch itself from a thick grove of bamboo. Thinking fast, as the object comes shooting out of the trees, he shoots it. As it turns out, the object was a huge cobra with its neck puffed out, its fangs extended, and the cobra had been aiming at one of Patrick's friends, Apollo. One example of the suspense is when Patrick is on another patrol. His squad stumbles upon an enemy fort, deep in the jungle. Fortunately, there is no enemy there, but Patrick does finds a pan of rice that is still hot.

The other part of this book I greatly enjoyed was the book was very realistic. Many sad things happen such as friends dying, and these were all real people and they all really did die. Also the way the book was written it makes you feel as if you're there.

During the tine I read this book, I could hardly put it down. I always wanted to know what was going to happen to Patrick and his friends. I loved this book and I know you will to.

This is a very useful book that enriches the art of black and white photography in a digital age.

I learned a few things reading this book, about infared photography and such, but a lot of what he writes about is more technical, I wanted some tips, ideas and maybe inspiration. I recommend it to anyone looking to go professional. He covers portraiture a lot, which is helpful since people can sometimes be very hard to photograph well! I love the mini photoshop tutorials placed randomly throughout the book, also. Pick this up! Look me up on on flickr, (lovedecember) =]

This book is great for teaching you about black & white photography. Gives you all the info you need to take the picture and how to manipulate in photoshop.

Black & White photography is really hot right now. But there is a right and wrong way of doing it. In this book Patrick Rice walks you through all that you need to know to produce AWESOME black & white images that your clients will LOVE.

I found this book to have really great pictures and lots of useful information. In addition to the author's fine photography, the senior portrait work by Leonard Hill and the wedding work by Dennis Orchard weas just incredible.

The information on making a quality black and white digital photograph was well written and easy to understand. The extensive explanation of digital infrared photography was very informative as well.

I would highly recommend this book for anyone looking to become better at digital black and white photography.

It is worth the money if only to use the pictures as inspiration when photographing your next portrait or wedding client.

This book lacked information on most of the things one would expect given the title, such as exposure response of digital cameras, contrast control, grain control, lighting, and digital manipulation. It contained a lot of images which often were not tied at all to the text, lacked captions, and were boring. Some of the images seemed to be examples of what not to do, but were not labeled as such, given one the impression that the author was proud of these crummy pictures he took. Two things that were covered in some detail were making ragged looking borders and infrared b/w photography - both gimmicks. In all, there wasn't a great amount of text and little to help the reader improve his photography.

The writing style was super and the characters believable. You can't help but be involved with them. It's funny and sad all at the same time.

A surprisingly intriguing story line brings forth a select grouping of trailer park residents and their emotional stews. Humorous, sensitive and a quick read, this is delightful fiction for those craving diversion.

I had my doubts about this book at first, but I was pleasantly surprised. Coming from a small rual town in Arkansas, some of the characters actions are things I've witnessed from local residents. I think anyone would enjoy this book regardless of your background.

A surprisingly intriguing story line brings forth a select grouping of trailer park residents and their emotional stews. Humorous, sensitive and a quick read, this is delightful fiction for those craving diversion.

I knew people like this growing up. And I grew up in South Dakota. It's a story of poor people who could be anywhere. Characters are great -- I like a book where I don't necessarily like the characters -- they're just real. This is a "must read" just for the exposure to the Trailer Trash side of life.

I must admit that I didn't' choose to read this book myself, it was placed on our reading list for Literature so it was with slight apprehension and curiousity that I approached White's nobel prize winning novel. Reading the first few chapters made me realize why it was a nobel prize worthy, White's style was so different and at times confusing - it had never been done, it was strange, so it won. Of course as i slowly ploughed my way through the eccentric shadows of Xanadu which was Ms. Hare's home I gradually grew to appreciate the novel.
The novel centres around four main protaganists in post WWII Australia: Ms. Hare, Alf Dubbo, Himmelfarb and Mrs. Godbold. All of whom in some way are seeking redemption as outsiders. His novel is strongly critical of our society and it's one of those novels that makes you ask rather than answer questions that it poses. It highlights the cruel abuse of Aborigines and Jews within our world, showing the perhaps inevitable traits of humanity, that any country at any time must inexplicably have a scapegoat to fall back on.
It's a powerful novel and although slightly relieved when I was finished I was glad that I had read it. Raising many questions about human nature, White is a skilled writer that doesn't reach the finish line in the biggest, most obvious path but takes his time, weaving subtly and skillfully through metaphors and symbols to take you by surprise, emotionally and mentally to the finish line.
However it is not for those without patience, but give it a go and I can guarantee you will be hooked after the first 70 pages.

What makes a great novel? Many things, but among them I would certainly list Scale, Characters, and Moral Vision. All three of these qualities are to be found in this towering novel by Patrick White. It is the first book by the Nobel laureate that I have encountered; it will certainly not be the last.

This is a long book (640 pages), but a very easy one to read. In any case, when speaking of scale, physical length is less important than breadth of implication. White concentrates on a small group of people living on the outskirts of Sydney after WW2, but makes them seem emblematic of the entire continent. There is also a wide range of origin and social class; the characters include the last survivor of a once-rich aristocratic family, a German Jewish professor fleeing the Holocaust, a poor washerwoman who emigrated from England as a child, and a half-aboriginal painter. Since each character is given almost 100 pages of back-story, the novel is by no means confined in place or period either; the section set in Germany between the wars can hold its own with the best Holocaust writing anywhere, with particular insights into Jewish social, intellectual, and spiritual life. But the most important aspect of the book's scale is the feeling held by each of the four major characters that the universe is an immensely greater place than anything they may see around them.

White has the great gift of loving his characters. Each of the four is something of an outcast. Miss Hare, the faded aristocrat, is clearly mad; Himmelfarb, the professor, now chooses to work in a menial job, without possessions or other signs of status; Mrs. Godbold, the washerwoman, lives with her many daughters in a tumble-down shack; Alf Dubbo, the half-caste painter, works by day as a janitor and is given to fits of drunkenness. And yet White writes so convincingly through the eyes of each that we do more than feel sympathy for them; we begin to see the others around them as impoverished of spirit, living only partial lives. White is brilliant in creating a gallery of semi-comic secondary characters -- some bad, some well-meaning, some merely lacking in imagination -- to set off the qualities of his principal quartet, but even these have dimension and are far from caricatures.

One of the curious aspects of the book is that the four characters hardly ever meet, although they recognize an immediate kinship when they do. For all four are religious visionaries. Their visions may occur only once or twice in their lives, but the image is the same for each: the approach of Ezekiel's fiery chariot, both wonderful and terrible. I can think of few books that are so successful at portraying the mystical dimension while being so firmly rooted in the mundane. This is clearly a religious book, but not at all a sectarian one. It is White's strength that he endows his visionaries with everyday failings, and gives each a very different religious background. Miss Hare's religion, if she has one, is a pantheism rooted in the plants and animals on her moldering estate. Himmelfarb has returned to Judaism only after years of secular life, and considers himself morally unworthy. Mrs. Godbold is a staunch evangelical, but her religion shows more in her practical kindnesses to others than in any doctrinal fundamentalism. And Alf Dubbo, though raised by a preacher and especially inspired by religious subjects, is dissolute and virtually autistic in his day to day life.

A fourth quality that I might have mentioned is Style. White's writing, as I say, is easy to read, but very varied and always appropriate to the tone of the moment. While he can neatly skewer the social pretensions of the Rosetrees (the employers of Himmelfarb and Alf), he can also shift to the kind of description that portrays everyday things as symbolic of eternal conflicts or reflections of the infinite. His descriptions of Alf Dubbo's paintings, for example, are equaled by no author I can think of except perhaps Chaim Potok in MY NAME IS ASHER LEV, in their ability to convey a truly incandescent artistic vision. Such mastery of style is essential because, as loners, his characters cannot interact much together in terms of everyday plot, and in narrative terms the concluding section of the book is less compelling than the long set-up. But where the characters do meet is in their common vision, their unspoken sense of rightness, and it is precisely in White's evocative language that this sounds, resonates, and resounds.

Riders in the Chariot, Patrick White's international superseller at the time, was born from an incident in the late 40s, when a taxi driver, demanding the full fare of the journey from Sydney's Central Station to Petty's Hotel, was refused by White and began screaming "Go back to Germany!" White later confessed: "I think it was this more than anything which persuaded me to write the novel Riders". Fortunately, such germ was the foundation of one, perhaps the greatest, of the 20th century literary monuments, dense as the greatest novels are, but fleshy in the end, too much indeed. It is a plotless novel-as are most works by White, and if there's a plot, its one of living and surviving. The novel traces the lives of the 4 characters from their origin to their ends (something White is an undoubtful master doing, and White puts his hand on marvellous devices of narration as stream of conscioussness, epiphanies and of course, the wonderful and hillarious use of adjectives, though sometimes the image, nearer to incongruency but finally well put, is difficult to convey.
The chariot, itself, was familiar to Blake, Ovid, the apocalyptic writers of the Bible and to Redon. In White's chariot, as David Marr reported, "the riders are those who have known illumination as he had experienced it in mystical ecsatsy, in creation, music", etc. White wrote, according to his letters (to his Viking editor Ben Huebsch in February 1959): "What I want to emphasise through my four "Riders" - an orthodox refugee intellectual Jew, a mad Erdgeist of an Australian spinster, an evangelical laundress, and a half-caste Aboriginal painter- is that all faiths, whether religious, humanistic, instinctive, or the creative artist's act of praise, are in fact one". And for example, is a brilliant detail that in general, the novel is a study of GOOD people pitted against EVIL; nowadays... how nice!
Riders in the Chariot is not a novel easy to read, neither meant to be read to relax. As one of the 40 best Australian books ever, it's a work of pleasure for the deep and restless mind. A novel written to music, something important to the writer and the reader, and like a baroque piece exhibiting a down-to-earth accumulation of detail, this work is a must for anyone interested in the best literature of the past century and an innovative psychological narrative art that, in the hands of this Australian Nobel Prize winner, soars to the highest ranks.

About a quarter of the way into this book I realized I was reading a brilliant treatise on mystical theology written in the form of a novel. This is a magnificent piece of work that brings together several realms of meaning, various settings, and divergent attitudes and dispositions about what it means to be truly human and live among other humans. There are four major protagonists of widely differing backgrounds. Each represents a peculiar moral stance that makes them capable of some unexpected actions and disables them with regard to others. Most of the action takes place in and around Sydney, Australia, but there are "lead up" sections in England and Germany. Mary Hare is ugly, less than intelligent, and stark raving mad. She lives in a crumbling mansion and experiences difficulty in trying to communicate with other people. For her, words are fragile and sometimes breakable and people use them in cruel ways. Yet she is an attractive personality whom we come to like because she is described from the inside. That is, we know what she feels, suffers and, most of all, remembers. Himmelfarb is a German Jew, a brilliant professor of philosophy whose father inexplicably converts to Christianity, thereby causing his mother to fade slowly away from sadness and a sense of being betrayed and victimized. He escapes the "final solution" by immigrating to Australia and taking a meaningless job in a factory owned by another German Jew who has also "converted." Ruth Godbold, a saintly laundress who lives in a shed with four daughters and an abusive husband, communicates mainly through acts of kindness. She nurses Mary Hare during a long illness and takes care of Himmelfarb in his last agony when some redneck thugs at the factory try to crucify him. Alf Dubbo, a native Australian brought up by religious people whose religiosity is questionable, develops his talent at painting and communicates through art. His ability to make moral decisions is confounded by his early experience with the preacher who kept sticking his hand into Alf's trousers.

These four have little contact and less communication with each other. None of them understands what the others are saying, except in a pre-linguistic sense. At a certain level, they already know what the others are saying, but they know it on a non-conscious level, like the prophets of the Hebrew Bible (whence the book's title is derived).

These four major personages suffer physically and morally and profoundly. This book zeroes in on the reality of human suffering and shows that we suffer or cause others to suffer because of some flaw in our own characters, in the sense of Sophocles. This is not, of course, the "message" of the novel (novels don't have messages; we all know that). More importantly, we see throughout the book the collective and communitarian dimension of suffering and its intellectual connections to some prophetic books of the Old Testament that emphasize the unitary nature of humankind and the need for a "suffering servant" to atone and expiate for the sins of others.

As a prose stylist, Patrick White is impressive, maybe supreme. This is the most well written book I have read in many years. His sentences are beautifully fragmented and fractured. His language (use of adjectives, etc.) is extraordinarily rich. In fact, it is gorgeous. Words and ideas have colors and smells. He omits unnecessary direct-object pronouns and even definite articles. Even the sound of his prose is amazingly satisfying: he makes liberal use of alliteration, especially in initial consonants, but in other contexts as well. Figures and tropes abound, even zeugma. And finally, if anyone wants an example of a memorable sentence, let me offer this one from page 26:

Mrs. Hare had soon taken refuge from Mary in a rational kindness, with which she continued to deal her a series of savage blows during what passed for childhood.

This is not a particularly cheery book. It deals with the lives of outcasts and what we today would, callously, call freaks. The book, while it does go into meticulous detail of the biographical material of the main characters' respective lives, is not primarily concerned with these elements. The book is centred around the visionary, otherworldly qualities of each, particularly a shared vision each of the four main characters has of a chariot mentioned in the book of Ezekiel.-This quality separates them from the world and people around them, which are clearly meant to be disparaged.-As Miss Hare cogitates in regard to the danger one of these normal people, Mrs Jolley: "But she did sense some danger to the incorporeal, the more significant part of her."-That significant part in all the four characters is the essential matter of the book.

Other people in the book are given to insubstantial matters, cruelty, and obliviousness, frequently rendered comically by White:

The other ladies glanced at her skin, which was white and almost unprotected, whereas they themselves had shaded their faces, with orange, with mauve, even with green, not so much to impress one another, as to give them the courage to confront themselves (p.323)

All very well. But it is this Manichean dualism between the saintly four characters and, well, everybody else which leads me to refrain from giving it five stars. Anyone who has encountered the world in its chaos of identities, acts of kindness, visionary aspects, thuggish and sadistic aspects knows that we all carry in us both the visionary, sensitive private individualism of the main characters, on the one hand, and the thuggish herd instinct of----everyone else in this book.

Still, it's well worth the read. White is a remarkable writer, and the work, despite my misgivings, is one every thoughtful person should not merely have on his or her bookshelf, but have read, from beginning to end. Its insights into prelinguistics subconscious perception are not to be surpassed---anywhere.

This book gave great ideas on technique, however the authors style and poor writing take a lot away from his over all validity. This isn't the first Patrick Rice book that I have read that has great technical input, but just lacked a steady flow. I recommend that he should look into a better editor if he continues to write more books, which I hope he does. He is very talented, just not a strong writer.

Many examples of infrared images and a thorough explanation of each one that includes both technical and artistic qualities applied. From cover 2 cover it is great!!!!

I have read several of Patrick Rice's books. He is awesome. His books are very educational, and well writen. The way he writes it makes it easy to understand.

His work is the best. I personally love his infrared work best. He is truly inspiring to the rest of us Professional Photographers.

I have had the great pleasure of sitting in on one of his classes. GREAT!!!

I highly suggest you read this book if you are interested in infrared and wedding photography. Then I suggest you read several of his other books.
Especially his new book, Master Guide. You will learn ALOT.

This is by far the best book on infrared photography for the wedding photographer. Although some other wedding books I have touch on the topic, this one is complete. In great detail, every photo included is described with both technical information and the photographer's thoughts when creating the picture. This is a great book.

As one of the authors, I wanted to create a text that covered the art of infrared photography from the wedding photographer's point of view.

The images are from real weddings with real Brides and Grooms. Infrared photography provides a "dream-like" look to your images that can not be achieved any other way. I have found infrared wedding photography to be rewarding both artistically and financially. I hope it can do the same for you.