Dream Stuff: Stories - Softcover

Malouf, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375724494 ISBN 13: 9780375724497

Publisher: Vintage, 2001

Synopsis

Here are nine haunting stories from the award-winning author of Remembering Babylon, in which history and geography, as well as the past and the present, combine and often collide, illuminating the landscape and revealing the character of Australia.

An eleven-year-old boy sees his father in his own elongated shadow only to realize that he will not return from the war. In a parting moment, a young woman hired to “marry” vacationing soldiers, grasps the weight of the word “woe.” When a failing farmer senselessly murders a wandering aborigine, he imperils his son but discovers in the spring of sympathy that follows the power to influence others. Wise and moving, startling and lyrical, Dream Stuff reverberates with the unpredictability of human experience, revealing people who are shaped by the mysterious rhythms of nature as well as the ghosts of their own pasts.

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:

“Confirm[s] Malouf’s stature as a writer of the very first order.”–The Boston Book Review

“Recalls the best work of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf.... Carefully crafted.”–Los Angeles Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0375724494
• ISBN 13: 9780375724497
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208