Dream Stuff: Stories - Hardcover

Malouf, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375420533 ISBN 13: 9780375420535

Publisher: Pantheon, 2000

Synopsis

From the internationally acclaimed author of Remembering Babylon, here is a collection of powerfully evocative stories that encompass a half-century of Australian life.

A young boy yearning for the return of his father, away at war, is nonetheless entranced by his mother's G.I. escort. A writer struggles to piece together a defining image of his late father. A military recruit is scarred by his imagined complicity in a bizarre nightly ritual. A "comfort girl" searches for comfort of her own. From settings of tropical lushness to blacksoil country, from the aboriginal outback to city streets, these superbstories conjure the complexity of memory and the stuff of dreams, both real and imagined.

Here are men and women in search of connection, or wary of it, remembering earlier, more vulnerable selves in moments of innocence or shame--moments illuminated by flashes of unpredictable violence and pain, or by glimmers of sly humor. Here are people shaped, as we all are, by the mysterious rhythms of nature and the ghosts of their own pasts.

Wise and moving, startling and lyrical, the stories in Dream Stuff confirm David Malouf's reputation as one the greatest novelists at work in English today.

About this title

Review

The Australian writer David Malouf, best noted for An Imaginary Life and Remembering Babylon, is a master of restraint. In Dream Stuff, he gives us a cast of lost Antipodeans. "Sally's Story" features a kind of homey prostitute to American GIs during the Vietnam War. She offers soldiers not just sex but "an illusion of domestic felicity in the form of a soft-mouthed girl and the sort of walk-up city-style living that is represented by an intercom and a prohibition against the playing of loud music after eleven o'clock." Sally does not think this arrangement "would be damaging," but, the author tells us, "she was wrong." No further commentary is granted us, nor is this woman allowed much more interiority. Malouf falls firmly into the show-don't-tell camp. In the end, what he shows us is Sally doing just what her GIs do: she seeks refuge in a strange man's domestic arrangements.

Another refugee is Colin, the novelist protagonist of the title story. Upon his mother's death, this Londoner returns to his native Brisbane. In "half a dozen fictions," he has recalled the Brisbane of his youth, "the density of tropical vegetation, timber soft to the thumb, the drumming of rain on corrugated-iron roofs." Alas, what he finds instead, is a "new addiction to metal and glass." The home he has plundered for his writing is gone, except, of course, in his writing. He is further displaced by circumstance: he lands, improbably, in jail. Malouf writes again and again of the way adult life necessarily distances us from the dream stuff of childhood. His characters ping back and forth between past and present, unable to rest. Maybe this is a theme especially haunting in Australia, with its literal watery distance from everywhere else. At any rate, Malouf's Australians demand careful reading. When we pay attention, we start to feel unsettled too. --Claire Dederer

From the Back Cover

In Praise of David Malouf

Winner of the 2000 Neustadt International Prize for Literature

The Conversations at Curlow Creek

"A wise and magical novel. . . . Malouf is at once powerful and tender."
--Los Angeles Times

"Malouf is a master of narrative technique. He is one of our finest writers, a poet with an ear for language that transforms an interesting concept into a classic meditation on the role of chance in each of our lives."
--San Francisco Chronicle
Remembering Babylon

"Thrilling in its style and in its adventurousness."
--Michael Ondaatje

"Breathtaking. . . . To read this remarkable book is to remember Babylon well, whether you think you've been there or not."
--New York Times Book Review
An Imaginary Life

"A brilliantly inventive novel. . . . Malouf puts on a dazzling literary display
in this arresting, original, lyrical work."
--Wall Street Journal

"A daring novel. . . . Malouf has a gift for phrases and an eye for the evocation of murky and mystical places."
--The New Republic

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0375420533
• ISBN 13: 9780375420535
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192