|
REVIEWS “This is yet another of the year’s finest works overlooked by the Man Booker judges. Regardless of which novel wins next week, none stands equal to the compelling artistry of this subtly impressionistic narrative woven from passion, yearning and despair.” The Irish Times, 3 October 2009 Read full review “The result is a beautifully constructed fugue on desire and it’s denial, on the protean forms assumed by passionate natures wrestling with 19th century dictates of reason and duty.” The Times Literary Supplement, 2 October 2009 “In his latest novel, one of the many threads of history Flanagan weaves into a complex and wide-ranging design hooks back to the previous title, in so far as Gould painted one of the characters who appears in WANTING.” The Guardian, 26 September 2009 Read full review “Flanagan brilliantly excavates historical truth with the light touch of an irresistibly good story, humour, and the wry observance that much of European civilisation depends on not dancing naked in polite drawing rooms.” The Times, 12 September 2009. Read full review “Richard Flanagan is an exemplary case in point. Through his fiction, flat, conformist portraits of individuals become rich and three-dimensional, new witnesses provide fresh testimony about the past, and Tasmania’s silences resound with voices.” New York Times Book Review, 26 June 2009. Read full review “As usual, Flanagan is brilliant at re-creating this "weird land predating time, with its vulgar rainbow colours, its vile, huge forests and bizarre animals that seemed to have been lost since Adam's exile." The Washington Post, 26 May 2009. Read the full review. “Flanagan sets his novel in the wilds of nineteenth-century Tasmania and evokes its inhabitants with exquisite precision . . .” The New Yorker. 1 June 2009. Read full review. “Flanagan is a novelist of such gifts that a recitation of his plot is only a hint of the layered pleasures of his prose, in which action and voices and dreams and hints all swirl in a blunt yet lyrical style utterly his own.” The Oregonian, 15 May 2009. Read the full review “In "Wanting," Richard Flanagan has written an exquisite, profoundly moving, intricately structured meditation about the desire for human connection in its many forms -- that commingling of compassion, curiosity, care, lust, attraction, intrigue, selfishness and selflessness that is clumsily grouped under that most perilous of all abstract nouns: love.” Los Angeles Times, 10 May 2009. Read the full review "Moving seamlessly through time, across two continents and between three storylines, Wanting is a marvel of precision and cohesion." The Sun-Herald, 21 December 2008. Read the full review “This is the best novel I have read
this year or expect to read for several more.” “Flanagan is a beautiful writer and
Wanting is a beautiful and
considered addition to his oeuvre.” “Wanting is a novel you never want to end.
As a reader, I can offer no greater accolade.” “Wanting is powerfully and poetically
evocative, particularly of place and character. It is often confronting, full of
provocative asides and intensely imagined scenes of which the deaths of
Franklin,
gangrenous and sinking in his ice-crushed coffin of a ship, and ruined discarded
teenager Mathinna are the most haunting.” "This is in short a stunning book. It is the best book I have read this year and I can't think readily of a better novel in 2007 either." The Sunday Tasmanian, 23 November 2008. Read the full review "The novel boasts many symmetries and ironies, which are the stuff of poetry rather than history." The Australian, 8 November 2008 Read the full review
Profiles |
