Cloudstreet in Read a book from each country

Jan 09, 2009 Bonnie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: world-lit-oceania, historical-fiction-post-wwii

This is the most self-consciously literary book I’ve read in a long, long time. At first it was really enjoyable – Winton is truly a talented writer and there were so many sentences that were just spot-on perfect descriptions. That’s amazingly hard to do – find exactly the right word or image. And Winton has that talent.

BUT this is like The Great Gatsby, where Fitzgerald labored over every idea and word to produce a book instead of a novel. Characters are used in the service of the book or them This is the most self-consciously literary book I’ve read in a long, long time. At first it was really enjoyable – Winton is truly a talented writer and there were so many sentences that were just spot-on perfect descriptions. That’s amazingly hard to do – find exactly the right word or image. And Winton has that talent.

BUT this is like The Great Gatsby, where Fitzgerald labored over every idea and word to produce a book instead of a novel. Characters are used in the service of the book or theme, rather than to serve themselves. Everyone is fleshed out, but no one seems whole. This is a perfect English class book – but I feel it’s a little...much. By the halfway point I was like, “this story is still going on!?!?? Is the plot ever going to kick in? Are the characters ever going to evolve?” Ummm…nope.

The Lambs and the Pickles are two sides of the same coin. The Lambs are (ex)-religious folk, who believe in family and hardwork. They run a successful corner shop and have a rambunctious family of (mostly) happy children – although Fish became developmentally disabled after drowning and Quick lives the life of the guilt-ridden. The other children are some barely remembered gaggle of girls and a younger brother. The landlords are the Pickles, who are a deeply unhappy, barely functional family that believes in luck and personal pleasure – Sam is a charming gambler (horse races are his drug of choice) who is generous when he is flush, but usually he's lost everything. Dolly is a beautiful alcoholic who uses beer and strange men to make herself feel better. Both parents pretty much neglect their children. The boys are nonentities, but Rose Pickles is a priggish girl who reacts to the chaos of her home with a craving for order. She hates her mother and becomes anorexic just to spite her. Rose Pickles and Quick Lamb are essentially assigned to represent their generation in their respective families, since none of their siblings really have anything besides one-word personality traits (except the brain-damaged Fish, who gets a weird magical-realism place in this book). Rose and Quick are the only two characters that I think actually developed - the parents essentially stay who they were throughout the book, except softened a bit by age and tragedy.

Winton is a beautiful writer, but he needed to end the book a good hundred pages earlier and actually develop his characters instead of using them as props. ...more

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Dec 16, 2020 Jo Reason rated it it was ok

Shelves: read-the-world

This is book 9 of the Read The World challenge and at some point I knew this would happen, that I just wouldn’t be able to get in to a book and this is that book. I started off fine, I was even enjoying the book, but later on I found it got repetitive, the two families live together and there is a day to day, month to month, year to year adventures, misadventures and just sometimes nothing. At the beginning I understood them, I felt for them and their problems, but later on I lost interest. Ther ...more

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Jan 03, 2023 Dee Eliza Pea rated it it was amazing

One of the best books I have ever read and reminiscent of John Steinback (which is probably why I liked it so much). It is a bit of an investment to get started as there are a lot of characters to keep track of and you may not love many of them at first. However, the investment pays off as this is an epic saga of two families, the specific trials, tribulations, successes and aspirations of the many family members, and how they come out the other side. It is a story of individuality, community an ...more

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