Dirt Music: A Novel - Softcover

Winton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743228480 ISBN 13: 9780743228480

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2003

Synopsis

Winner of The Miles Franklin Literary Award, The Christina Stead Award, WA Premier's Book of the Year, Book Data/ABA Book of the Year Award, Goodreading Award-Readers Choice Book of the Year Set in the dramatic landscape of Western Australia, Dirt Music tells the story of Luther Fox, a broken man who makes his living as an illegal fisherman--a shamateur. Before everyone in his family was killed in a freak rollover, Fox grew melons and counted stars and loved playing his guitar. Now, his life has become a "project of forgetting." Not until he meets Georgie Jutland, the wife of White Point's most prosperous fisherman, does Fox begin to dream again and hear the dirt music--"anything you can play on a verandah or porch," he tells Georgie, "without electricity." Like the beat of a barren heart, nature is never silent. Ambitious and perfectly calibrated, Dirt Music resonates with suspense, emotion, and timeless truths.

About this title

Review:

Arguably one of the finest of all Australian novelists, Tim Winton shows that he remains on top mid-season form with Dirt Music, a wistful, charged, ardent novel of female loss and amatory redemption. The setting is Winton’s favourite: the thorn-bushed, sheep-farmed, sun-punished boondocks of Western Australia. The cast is limited but spirited: the two chief protagonists are a fortysomething adoptive mother with a vodka problem called Georgie Jutland, and a brooding, feral, bushwhacking poacher, Luther Fox.

The plot is something else altogether: an elegantly wearied, cleverly finessed mutual odyssey, that opts to follow the sometimes intertwining, sometimes diverging lives of poor Georgie and Luther, as they try to deal with the odd alliance they comprise, as well as the complex and fractured lives they want to leave behind. The way Georgie deals with her unwitting inheritance of two dissatisfied adopted kids is particularly touching, poignant, and well written.

Best of all, though, is the prose. Somehow it manages to be simultaneously juicy and dry, like a desert cactus. This is especially true when Winton touches on the scented harshness of the Down Under outback: "the music is jagged and pushy and he for one just doesn’t want to bloody hear it, but the outbursts of strings and piano are as austere and unconsoling as the pindan plain out there with its spindly acacia and red soil". This is a wise and accomplished novel. --Sean Thomas

Review:

Dan Cryer Chicago Tribune [Dirt Music] is awe-inspiring....Tim Winton makes words into sounds into music into art. Against so persuasive a literary seduction, no resistance is possible.

Todd Pruzan The Washington Post Beautiful...compelling...Dirt Music's quiet intensity tightens as the story evolves from a domestic drama into an epic quest.

Karen Valby Entertainment Weekly [A]n intense read, raw and beautiful, studded with shards of rage.

Adam Woog The Seattle Times Dirt Music is an...astonishing blend of pell-mell sensation: unreasoning love, grief, the need to escape, desire, fulfillment.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0743228480
• ISBN 13: 9780743228480
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416