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The Pages (2008)

by Murray Bail(Favorite Author)

2.9 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1846552168 (ISBN13: 9781846552168)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Harvill Secker

review 1: An increasingly prominent Australian writer. The problem with this book is a problem it shares with many others: it just isn't ambitious enough. It's about a psychoanalyst and a philosopher, both women, who go into the Centre to look at the papers of a self-styled philosopher who had lived on a sheep ranch. The theme has potential as a dialogue among women friends (this is the best-developed part), as a meditation on nation and landscape, as a philosophic contrast between psychoanalysis and literature, and as a novel of letters. It just doesn't do very much with any of those themes. When the dead philosopher's papers are finally sampled at the end of the book, they reveal Bail's idea of philosophy -- at least in this instance -- as a mixture of Wittgenstein, popular psycho... morebiography, and undigested Nietzsche. I wouldn't trust Bail to write about philosophy, or the idea of philosophy, and I have no evidence he knows anything about psychotherapy. The book is strong when it's about imagining the inner lives of the two women, but there is no much more that could have been done here. The moral, for me, is this: if you're going to write a novel of ideas, put in the ideas. If the novel has big ideas in it -- here, the entire history of Western philosophy -- then the prose should work to include those ideas in their full difficulty. The aspiring philosopher in the novel who has died has left sheets of aphorisms hanging on a clothesline. What if those had been real aphorisms? What if they had been Ludwig Hohl's sheets? Elias Canetti's? Wittgenstein's?
review 2: Story about two friends, Erica Hazelhurst, a philosopher, and Sophie Perloff, a psychologist, who travel to the outback of Australia to visit the ancestral home of another philosopher, Wesley Antill, to determine whether his writings were valuable and could be published. The book is about ½ reviewing Wesley’s life and travels and the incident that resulted in the death of a woman he loved, which is probably what really pushed him into a life of seclusion, not his stated desire to be a philosopher. He is just another wounded person seeking meaning in his life. The other ½ of the book deals with the lives of Erica, Sophie and Wesley’s brother and sister. less

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