The new novel from the internationally acclaimed, best-selling writer Richard Flanagan.
A young Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, is adopted by the most celebrated explorer of the age, Sir John Franklin, and his wife, Lady Jane, to show that the savage can be civilized. When Sir John disappears while looking for the fabled Northwest Passage, Lady Jane turns to the great novelist Charles Dickens for help.
Inspired by historical events, Wanting is a haunting meditation about love, loss, and the way life is finally determined never by reason, but only ever by wanting.
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"The single finest book I have read so far, bar none. Richard Flanagan, a Tasmanian export who has written a few other fabulous novels (including The Death of a River Guide and The Sound of One Hand Clapping), will never get the attention or acclaim he deserves. He is, as a teacher of mine used to say, an old soul, with the intellectual sophistication of Melville but the simplicity of Ernest Hemingway; usually, his writing is pure prose poetry, and it is so beautifully written that the plot is not something you recall until later. He turns language in on itself, reflecting a deep mechanical understanding of it (this is a bit geeky of me, but one of his most impressive skills is that of chiasmus--repeating syntactical elements in reverse order for effect, a kind of stylistic reverse parallelism--in lines like "What saved the child from being a child was that she was a savage, and what saved her from being a savage was that she was a child"). Another gorgeous example of Flanagan's prose that makes the book seem so damn important that it feels like iron in your hands: he describes Charles Dickens looking in the mirror and seeing, in his reflection, "a face that could have been any man and no man, somebody who in his relentless mimicry of everybody had become nobody."
The plot pivots around Charles Dickens and the occupation of exotic, uncontrollable land by European colonizers, but missing is the pretense you would expect from an idea like that. The epigraph reads:
"You see, reason, gentlemen, is a fine thing, that is unquestionable, but reason is only reason and satisfies only man's reasoning capacity, while wanting is a manifestation of the whole of life." - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The theme of desire and the desire of the unattainable is what makes the prose profound and gut-wrenching, but also impressive for not sinking into the quicksand of pretension when considering an idea so philosophically weighty.
Richard Flanagan is our greatest living prose stylist. Read Wanting and figure that out before the rest of the world does."
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Paige (5 out of 5 stars)